Archive | December 2016
Get-Away
This story follows Ty, a character from Addergoole, the boarding school for fae teenagers, who happens to have a gender-swapping ability as part of their magical heritage.
💰
Ty would never be one to dun the old alma mater, no matter what criticisms other alumni raised. For one, as an early student and one of the few that had grown up surrounded by fae, Ty had always had an advantage over other Addergoolians. For another, even if the school had discouraged the use of Ty’s innate power in the field — field in this case being the halls and bedrooms of Addergoole’s dormitory floor — there’d been plenty of classroom practice in that and all of the magic Ty’s fae ancestry provided.
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Lady Taisiya’s 4th Husband, Chapter 13: Preparing – a fantasy/romance fdomme story
Find Chapter 1 here
Chapter 2 is here
Chapter 3 is here
Chapter 4 is here
Chapter 5 is here
Chapter 6 is here
Chapter 7 is here.
Chapter 8: here
Chapter 9: here
Chapter 10: here
Chapter 11 (R-Rated) here
Chapter 12: here
You can skip Chapter 11 without losing the plot.
Hothyan was pacing. Sefton would have told him to sit down, except he was pacing as well. Jaco was not; Jaco had three of the youngest children in a corner and was reading two of them a book while he fed the other one a bottle. Jaco had his weapons near at hand, but none on him. That didn’t matter: Sefton and Hothyan were near the door. If anyone came through, they would delay the attacker long enough for Jaco to swap out bottle for sword.
One of the younger children meandered into Sefton’s walking path and then started pacing him. “Tell me a story?”
It was in his mind to tell her no, can’t you see, we’re busy? but they weren’t, actually, very busy; they were nervous, that was all. And their nerves were making the children nervous as well.
“All right. I’ll tell you a story. But the moment you hear anything loud, you grab everyone you can and you go under your beds, right? You’ve drilled in that, I know you have.”
“Under bed.” She nodded solemnly. She was a daughter; he ought to be wrapping her up in batting and not letting her anywhere near the door. But she wanted a story, and he was not going to tell her no if it would help to calm her.
Except that suddenly he couldn’t remember a single tale. He cleared his throat – twice – and tried to remember something, anything.
“Have you ever heard the story of the house in the sea?” he finally offered. That had been one of his father’s stories,
“On the sea?” she asked. “Like this house?”
“Not on the sea, like this house, like the landed houses so often are.” The words came back to him, and he settled into the big chair, pulled a blanket into his lap, and pulled her up there to sit next to him. “But in the sea. You see, it floats there, away from anything, protected from the storms by the strangest break-wall, and it has sat there from the time of our grandmothers’ grandmothers’ grandmothers.”
“Why is it in the sea? Why is it floating? What do they farm, there?”
“That, and many other questions, have been asked time and again, time and again.” He’d asked the same questions, or his sister had, and his father had smiled benevolently. Sefton tried his father’s soothing, pleased smile. “And the answers that we have are only more riddles, or are rumors, or are lies.”
“But why would they be lies?” she whispered.
That was a new one. Sefton kept the smile on. He noticed he had two other children sitting near him now, too. Well, the better to keep them calm.
He thought back to other stories, to classes in school, to things he’d heard behind the schoolhouse, and then he sorted through for the things he could tell a small child – a small girl child.
“There are three reasons for the histories to be lies,” he told her, still smiling. You had to smile when you said things like this. “First. Because the truth is unknown, and people make up the truth that seems to suit the situation.” He waited a moment for that to sink in, and saw her nod. “Second, because the truth is dangerous. If you know where the sharpest knife is, you do not tell your littlest brother. You wait until he is big enough to handle it before you tell him, right? Some truths are like that. We have to be bigger before we can handle them. And third, some things are lies because the truth would hurt someone, someone who can tell us lies.” He held her eyes. She was little, but she might already understand that there were power differentials. His sisters had, by that age.
She nodded, so solemn, taking it all in. Sefton hoped he wasn’t teaching her bad lessons. These were stories for boys, stories for the ones who would need to know how to lie while smiling, lie while bowing, lie and never, ever get caught.
“So,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear thoughts. “The house in the sea. Nobody knows where it came from? Or why it’s there? But the rumors?”
“Nobody knows why it was built, or if it was built at all, or merely formed. Some rumors say it was here when we came here to this land, and some say that the first people, the people Before, constructed it to show the furthest it was safe to sail. It is not a big house — one woman and one or two husbands, three or four egglings, maybe, might live there, but beyond that they would be sitting upon each other like bricks in a wall. And so far out, who would they talk to? Who would they trade with?” He was getting back into his pace now. “But the house is there. And, once in every generation, someone will get into a big enough boat that they can sail out, out to the edge of the safe seas where the monsters and the Rejects live, and——”
A pounding on the door cut him off. Sefton lifted the girl off his lap and set her carefully on the floor. “You know where to go. Go on, go on, hurry.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jaco doing the same. His chains were gone — when had that happened? Situations like this were exactly what those chains were for.
Then again, the bandits didn’t play by the rules, either. “Come on,” he coaxed the children, and they slipped under their bunks, pulling the projectile-proof curtains down over them. The older children cuddled the younger ones, and the littlest ones were kept at the back of the room with the oldest ones, in the most muffled shelters.
Sefton remembered curling up there with his older brother, when he was very little, and then, when he was older, holding his younger sister, shielding her with his own body in case something awful happened. It was the same arrangement. The same way of putting the girls and the babies as far away from the bandits as possible.
And the one time the bandits had gotten in, they’d gone straight for those back bunks, the thicker ones.
After this, maybe he ought to talk to Onter about changing the arrangement. All of the bunks were projectile-proof, or, at least, they were all supposed to be. Maybe if you put the girls and the egglings in the middle, they’d be in less danger should the awful happen.
The door banged one more time, and then silence. Sefton held still, weapon at the ready. Jaco was holding still.
The vault-like lock began to click. No, no, that was not supposed to happen. They weren’t supposed to get that far; Tasiya and the senior husbands were supposed to have stopped them long before that point. Sefton swallowed around a lump in his throat. It was never good, when the bandits got all the way to husbands’ territory. None of those stories ended in anything better than a Heroic Last Stand for the husbands, and many of those didn’t end that well at all.
He glanced over at Jaco. He was pale, too, frowning, his shoulders rolled back and his feet braced. He was holding tightly to his weapon, his knuckles white.
“You know what to do.” He made it a statement, but Sefton could hear the question in it.
“Of course. We train on this at home.” He grinned, although the expression felt forced and fake. “Come on, you don’t think they’d sell Lady Taisiya an inferior husband, do you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jaco joked. “Someone sold me to her.”
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Weekend with Merit & Merit Badges
I just snaked a kitchen drain, outside, in the snow, after opening a manhole cover. While baking bread. Where's my merit badge?
— Lyn Thorne-Alder (@lynthornealder) December 11, 2016
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsYep.
That was Sunday.
Our kitchen sink leads out – via at least 2, maybe 3 right turns – to a dry well (covered by, I shit you not, a Bell Telephone manhole cover (rather like this)), which means that when it clogs (which it does, on average, about once/year), it’s easiest to snake it from the outside (less turns).
So there I was. In the snow. Snaking a drain.
There really ought to be merit badges for things like that.
“While baking bread” is a little disingenuous; the bread was rising at the time. My first time without a recipe, and I think the only real fail was that the molasses I used to sweeten it overwhelmed the amaranth I added in as a test flavor. It’s a hearty, half-wheat-flour loaf with little amaranth crunchies, quite nice.
This was one of those weekends: haul firewood, wash dishes, snake the sink, bake some bread. T made a pressure-cooker (InstantPot) ham-hock soup with yellow lentils and black/white Urad Dal, which was super tasty with the bread. The house smelled of bread and soup all day Sunday, which is just about the most awesome way for the house to smell.
It’s nice, sometimes, just hunkering down and staying inside – or, at least, at home. You come in, you stand in front of the fire for ten minutes, and you’re all warm again.
And Merit – our feral cat, or at least the one who started that way – clearly agrees. Sometimes in the winter, you can see her look outside and remember what the outside was like when it snowed or rained. Then she curls up by the fire, too, everything in her body language saying It’s good to be inside.
It’s good to be inside. With the bread baking and the sink draining properly. It’s that sort of winter.
*purrs*
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Sweater Set – A repost story for the holidays
This story was originally posted Dec. 19th, 2011. It is part of the Aunt Family setting, albeit with characters who don’t otherwise show up often, if at all.
Everyone, Nelia had decided, had to have one relative they dreaded visiting, especially during the holidays.
In a family as wide, varied, and spread-out as Nelia’s, she wasn’t surprised that she had more than one – two aunts and an uncle, to be specific – that she really wanted nothing to do with. And she wasn’t surprised that Fate dictated she see all of them at least fourteen times a year.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1213053.html. You can comment here or there.
Climbing
First: Slaves, School
Previous: Testing
The stairs kept going. Desmond had already climbed more stairs than existed in any other building he’d ever been in, and he was pretty sure the Central Office wasn’t all that much taller. Then again, he was pretty sure magic wasn’t real, either, and he’d been using it – and having conversations with a collar – all day.
Maybe all the collar meant was that you’d gone mad, and he was ensconced in some nice sanatorium, happily climbing up the same five stairs, like a toddler. If so, there was no consequence to falling, but, if so, there was no consequence to anything. He supposed he might as well live as if this were real, right up until some nice nurse came to lock him in a cell.
He skidded to the top of a flight of stairs which had been slick and greasy and found the stairs splitting in front of him. One stairway went left, the other right.
Neither direction ought to be possible, the way the tower was built – or, at least, the way the tower had appeared to be built from the outside. The window he was looking at — frosted glass, but a wider window again — showed no shadow of the stairway, either.
“Well?” Eventually he might get used to talking out loud to his collar, but he definitely wasn’t there yet.
::Well. This isn’t a communication-with-your-collar test, so I do not have this part of the map in my memory. Perhaps it is testing your special sense?::
“Or maybe it’s just trying to figure out how willing I am to take an imaginary staircase that can’t exist. Okay.” Desmond looked at the window, at the sun coming in with no shadow. He looked at the other staircase, which was wider, flatter, and safer-looking.
There were a lot of things they could be testing here, but, so far, they — the amorphous [they] — looked like they rewarded risk-taking. “Okay, let’s do that force thing again but, uh, I want it to ride around my chest so it can pull me up.”
::You know what to do::
As he drew a corset with his hands, it occurred to Desmond that he was doing magic. Really, truly, doing magic. The sanitarium theory was beginning to seem more and more sound. He twisted the lines of force around his waist, over and over again.
::What do you think is going to happen?::
“I think there’s a chance that the stairway is fake, and I really don’t want to fall to my doom. I have some idea of how far I’ve climbed —” Sort of. He wasn’t really sure he’d climbed it all, since it was impossible “ — and it’s further than I ever, ever want to fall.”
::You think the stairway is fake and you’re going to climb it anyway?::
“I think the nice, easy stairway is the trap here.”
::Interesting. You may have a point. Let’s hope the other one isn’t a cleverly-concealed pit.::
“We’re already higher up than the towers of the Central Office are. We’re already moving in dimensions that don’t exist from the outside. For all I know, the pit – if there is one – could drop me in a lake.”
::I would not mind a lake.::
“Me, neither, except that it would mean we’d failed. I don’t like failing. Ready?”
::As ready as I’ll ever be.::
“Then let’s go.” He moved more carefully up this flight of stairs, checking each stair carefully before he shifted his weight. They were uneven, tilted, cracked, and pitted, but he was nearly to the landing without any problems.
And then he stepped up onto a stair and it vanished under his foot. He stumbled, fell forward and downwards at the same time, and the corset of force caught him just as he was about to crack his skull on the landing.
He crawled up to the landing, carefully. “So. Maybe we’re just about done?”
::You were clever. You knew there would be a threat and you didn’t get hurt.::
“But we said. We said — well, I said — if I fell, that’s where I would stop.”
::But we could always go further. We could always do better.:: In as much as a voice in his head could be said to have a tone of voice, the collar seemed to sound a bit urgent.
“Have you done this before? This climb?”
::Not.. No. Not exactly.:: The collar hesitated, or, at least, there was silence in Desmond’s mind for a bit. ::Memories are not the same for, for a collar, as they are for you. But I do not think I have done this before.::
“So you want me to go higher…” He crawled the last few steps to the landing.
::Because I want you to succeed. Because I want us to succeed.::
Desmond pulled himself up to his feet. “Fourth floor, you said. If we got to the fourth floor, If I got to the fourth floor, then I got in. That was, oh, I don’t know, ten floors ago.”
::Twenty. You have been climbing quite some time.::
“So, twenty-four floors. I don’t want to plummet to my death, okay? I don’t want…” He trailed off, because the landing held only a doorway. He was arguing with a piece of jewelry. “I want to be good. But I’m just a kid from Lesser Hunstsworth and Red Aisle. I think there’s such a thing as climbing above your station.”
He looked at the door. It was big, it was white, and it looked like someone’s front door on their house. Someone rich’s front door on their house. “Looks like the stairs agree.”
::Oh. Well, then:: The collar gave the impression of being put out.
Desmond turned to look down the stairs. Most of them were gone, and several others were fading away. There was no return. And there was only the door in front of him.
He took a breath and opened the door.
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Growth Spurt
Two-plus generations after the end of the world. Probably Canon.
“Very good. Now, let’s find Leia, daughter of Pavarti.”
“You’re stunting his growth, you know.” Cya strode into the conference room as if she belonged there. The three people around the conference table looked up at her with variations on surprise and annoyance.
“How do you keep getting past the wards?” Regine fussed. The Director looked as if she was half-curious, half-irritated.
Cya didn’t blame her, but she wasn’t going to explain, either. Not that I Found a teleporter who can sneak past your wards without a whisper would have been that helpful an explanation, either, since Cya had not intent of letting Regine anywhere near her teleporter.
“I Found a way,” she said, instead. “Luke.” She nodded respectfully at the smirking-and-trying-not-to Mara. “And you must be their pet Finder.”
The boy — man, he had a beard and everything — shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not anyone’s pet. And what was that crack about my height?”
He actually was stunted, Cya noted, or, at least, he’d barely made it past five foot. He was handsome, too, in a sort Cya tended to prefer. “You must have kept him behind some pretty intense wards when I came to visit, his graduation year,” she commented to Regine.
“You were busy with John-Wayne that year.” Luke’s answer did nothing to cover the small but telling reaction Regine’d had. “That boy actually needed you.”
“I know he did. But I might have made an exception to several rules for that one, and I’m fairly certain she,” she nodded at Regine, “knew it.”
“Hello,” the Finder complained. “Right here. Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Find my closest relative on that list, why don’t you?”
“How do you know there will be one?” Regine asked, too calmly. There was one, then.
“Because my father sent at least 2 other children to this school and my mother sent at least one other. THe odds say that even if I don’t have a grandchild coming next year –” she didn’t, unless one of her sons had lied to her, and she was fairly certain neither son would send any child to Addergoole that they didn’t have to “—I probably have a grand-niece or grand-nephew. Or, knowing both of my parents, maybe a brother or sister.”
The Finder had a pinched look on his face. He was working hard at her challenge, but it was a new concept to him. “Who are you?”
Cya flopped down in a chair and grinned at him. “I’m Cya. The Finder. I knew they had to have one, you see; they’ve gotten much more targeted and they can’t rely on computerized records the way they could back in my day. But they really are stunting your growth.”
His finger landed triumphantly on a name. Cya glanced at it, considered it.
“Ah, that’s Orlaith’s son Hunter-Hale’s child. Good luck,” she shot to Luke. “Going to their Manor can’t be fun.”
“Like going to the Ranch?”
“We like you at the Ranch, remember?” She grinned at Luke, then just as quickly wiped the expression off her face to aim a solemn look at Regine. “He’s how old? If he’s John-Wayne’s age, you’ve had him here for a while. Doing this? ‘Find the kid on a map?’ That’s kindergarten stuff.”
“It’s a necessary task.”
“Thing is, kid — sorry — the man doesn’t look like an idiot. He doesn’t look like he needs remedial Finding or even needs your help finding a job. So… “ Cya steepled her fingers and looked over them at the Finder, who, by this point, was glowering at her. “Creche kid? She offered you a job, and it made sense, since you didn’t have a family to back you up. Not a bad choice, and if I hadn’t had Boom, I might’ve done the same. Problem is… you’re stagnating. It’s factory work, but with your power.”
“I Find people.” He’d moved on to puzzled now. Good. Puzzled meant he might listen.
“Good. You can Find an abstract — you found my grand-nephew there. So how about find the nearest Addergoole-descended person who could really use Addergoole’s help ASAP?”
Hie forehead pinched again. He stared at the map and, after a moment, his finger settled on a place about a hundred miles out.
Cya had already come to that conclusion, but she still nodded at him. “Good. See? You can stretch your power. Luke, I brought a teleporter who can site off of Finds. Give me three minutes and I’ll take you there.”
She turned to Regine. “Hoard the Finders if you want. The ‘Porters are harder to pin down, for you or for me. But if I find out you’re keeping them in kindergarten, I’m going to start offering them all better jobs at higher pay. You’re a school Director. Challenge them.” She stood up.
“Wait. Better job. Higher pay? Pay?”
“You swore an oath,” Regine hissed.
“Yeah, well, so did you. And the oath has an escape clause, remember?” The kid looked almost ready to leave with her.
“Come on, Luke.” Cya was grinning and not bothering to hide it. “Let’s help out that Addergoolian-in-distress.” If Regine still had a Finder by the end of the year, she’d eat her hat. “Kid… you know how to Find me.”
John-Wayne can be found at his own tag; he’s Pellinore’s son.
Orlaith (Cya’s half-sister) can be found here; her son Hunter-Hale can be found here.
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Shifting, a continuation (finish-ation) of Addergoole yr17
After Shades, for my Third Finish It Bingo Card. Addergoole Year 17.
“Why don’t you ever get angry?”
It had been three days since Abrelle’s hair had started tinging blue, three days where both she and Kevin had tried to pretend that nothing had changed, three days where she desperately wished that his Change involved changing colors, or that she had any skill with Hugr, emotions. She knew what she was feeling. He knew what she was feeling; he could read it in her hair. But he hadn’t given her any clue what he was feeling, and that was driving her a little bonkers (which, it appeared, was a weird shade of chartreuse, in small stripes).
He’d picked another fight, and she was in the process of buckling him up in a series of straps, mummifying him with leather. She’d done it so many times already (and it was only November!) that she hardly had to think about it: grab collar, hook the apparatus into position, grab arms, start buckling. She hadn’t even been focusing on him; she was still halfway in the book she’d been reading for VanderLinden’s Lit class.
She blinked at him, finished the next strap, and considered the the question. “Thinking,” she told him, so he didn’t think she was ignoring him. She moved down him, smoothing his fingers against his sides with a gentle petting motion before buckling the strap around his upper thighs.
He usually took until she got to his knees to settle down, but this time he was calm already. “Take your time.”
“My Keeper,” she said slowly, as she buckled the strap above his knees… “Sit down, here, that’s good, thank you. My Keeper, he liked to bait me. And then he would tell me things like ‘no, a good ladylike Kept doesn’t lose her temper.'”
“Didn’t know you very well, did he?” He pressed his ankles together while she got the last strap buckled.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She swung his legs up onto the bed and straightened him out, making sure everything was laying smoothly.
“I mean…” He wriggled against the straps, now that they were all in place. “You’re not exactly ladylike. That sounds like someone who drinks tea with their pinkie up and doesn’t want to break a nail. I’ve seen you in combat training. If you really wanted to, you wouldn’t need orders to hold me still. Or straps.” He wriggled a little more. “But, I mean, he’s gone. And you still don’t get mad, no matter what I do.”
“That’s… not exactly right.”
“Your hair doesn’t ever change, well, it does now, but still, you don’t ever really express anything, you just take it all and then you tie me up and… I calm down and you don’t do anything.” He paused. “Wait. Wait, are you saying you are mad at me? Shit, shit-shit, shit!” He started pulling more intently against the restraints, actually trying to get out.
He couldn’t. But Abrelle sat down and pulled him until his head was on her lap anyway. She stroked his hair and petted him until he stopped swearing.
He looked up at her, frowning, lip-bitten. “I don’t know what to think. If you’re mad and you don’t show it, how am I supposed to know anything you’re thinking. How’m I supposed to know if I do something wrong?”
Rather than answering the difficult question, Abrelle raised her eyebrows at him and smirked. “I think I’ve been pretty clear when you do something wrong.”
“Well, yeah, but if you showed anything, then I’d know before I hit the “go sit in the corner and be quiet” spot. Or, you know, know if you were angry instead of just wondering if you thought something was a bad habit you ought to nip in the bud.”
“Is there a – no, you’re right, of course there’s a difference.” She’d been Kept, after all.
“Yeah. See? So… why don’t you get angry? I mean, why don’t you show anything? Your hair doesn’t even flicker.”
“I…” Abrelle stroked his hair for a little while. “You cannot tell anyone. You cannot even hint at it, you can’t whisper about it, I’d rather you didn’t think about it much while you were out in classes but I won’t make that an order unless you want me to.” Thought orders had messed her up more than anything her Keeper had done to her; she tried very hard not to do those to Kevin. “Okay?”
He stilled and looked up at her, forehead furrowed. “It’s serious. And you don’t want – what, no, not other students. The staff to know.” He chewed on his lip. “Is it okay? Is it hurting you? If you’re in pain somehow or damaging yourself, you can’t tell me not to tell the staff, that’s horrid.”
She pet his hair soothingly. He had the softest hair. He’d changed shampoos a week into being Kept, when it’d started to be clear how much time she’d spend running her hands through his hair. She definitely liked the feel of the new stuff better, and was very pleased that he’d made the change, presumably for her.
She took a minute to find her words. “It’s not something that’s damaging me. It’s not hurting me. But it might cause problems with some of the staff, and I don’t want… I’m not ready to deal with that.”
He looked thoughtful. “How about… you tell me, and if I think it’s something to worry about, then you come up with a time when you’re ready to deal with it and the staff-problems?” He wriggled cutely in her lap and gave her a wide-eyed and innocent expression. “I want to know, I really do. But I don’t want to be stuck not being able to help you.”
“I’m surprised you care.”
“I Belong to you,” he pointed out. “That comes with a bit of caring.”
“Oh.” She thought she might be disappointed. She wasn’t sure what that said.
“Hey. Hey.” He wriggled in her lap until she looked at him. “Hey, your hair’s doing a thing. Come on, I was teasing, or, you know, not being entirely honest. I, uh. We butt heads, but I like you, okay? I mean… really like you.”
“Like you said, you Belong to me.”
“No, no. I mean, yes. Yours. But come on.” He squirmed demonstratively. “You get me. And, uh. I like it when we just sit around and talk and stuff. And there’s stuff. I like that, too.”
She wanted to say you’re not making any sense but he was. And he was smiling. Oh, her hair must be doing something.
“I’m pretty sure that’s a good color. So… you like me and I like you and if that involves a lot of bondage, well, I’m actually not complaining about that… .but you’re going to tell me your secret now?” He gave her the hopeful wide-eyed look again.
She sighed. “Okay. I need one of my arms back, though.” She slid her left arm out from under him and fished out the necklace living down in her cleavage. “So. My Keeper. He didn’t like displays of emotion, didn’t really like emotion, especially not negative emotions. And I was… very emotional. I was very unhappy in the collar and I really didn’t like him. I still don’t like him.”
“Urgh.” He wrinkled his nose. “Sounds like an asshole.”
Abrelle snorted. “YOu’ll get no argument from me on that point. Except maybe that you’re not using a strong enough word. ANyway… he didn’t like emotions, and, well. You might have noticed the Keeping makes emotions, and… being ‘human’ makes emotions, and being pregnant….” she sighed and waited for him to stop the whole-body nose-wrinkle sort of disgust expression he always made when kids came up. “THat makes emotions, too. And being in trouble for having emotions…”
“Just makes things worse. Is he still here?”
“No. No, he graduated last year. Besides,” she tapped his nose gently, “he’s not your revenge, dear. He’s mine. So… I had, have, a friend who is very good with magical items, and I had her made something — because I wasn’t allowed to do WOrkings, and, even if I was, I’m awful at the Emotions word — something to shift my emotions. Not destroy them, just take the emotions and offe them as a shift to vision, a color, like my hair. THen I could decide if I wanted to feel them or not.”
“Hunh.” He considered. “So… the blue?”
“Well, at first it was supposed to be just negative emotions. But what we did was slide the thing in my bra for a week and have it read everything I was feeling, and then extrapolate from there what it should block and what colors it should show. Love… I wasn’t feeling any love at the time, let’s say that. ” She stroked his hair, waiting for the horror or disgust or confusion.
You are feeling worried, suggested the greenish-blue haze over her vision. Suppress? Allow?
Allow she decided. The trinket would probably not last much longer anyway. She was going to have to get used to her emotions before they all came flooding back.
“Your hair’s a funny… a couple funny colors.” He twitched in his bonds. “So… your friend made you a magical item that, uh, it shuts off your emotions? You get to decide what you’re going to feel and what you’re not?”
“I did.”
“Do you, um. Do you want me to be like that?”
She didn’t need his hair to turn colors to tell her he was worried, too. “Do I look like a giant asshole?” she asked, possibly more sharply than she’d intended. Having the emotions back did strange things to her speaking.
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “No. No, ma’am. It’s just… uh. You haven’t been Kept in ages, years, right?”
“Since my first year,” she agreed.
“And you’re still wearing it. I mean, it looks like you’re starting to let stuff through? But if you’re still wearing it, when you obviously don’t have to care what your Keeper thinks anymore…” He looked away and struggled at the straps a little bit. “I just thought,” he muttered to her knee, “maybe you preferred things that way? Quiet? Calm.”
She stroked his hair and considered his words. “I like you the way you are. I like… well.” She ducked her head and found herself smiling, “the excuse to tie you up.”
“But you’re…” He was flushed but a smile was creeping in at his lips, “you’re still wearing it? So you like me, uh, excitable?”
“I like you the way you are,” she repeated. “And I really do like this.” She tugged on the strap around his arms.
His flush darkened and he looked away. “I like it too,” he muttered, “but I’d like it better if, uh. If you responded.”
“If I respond,” Abrelle picked her way through the words carefully, “it’s going to get loud. And I might say things I don’t mean.”
“I say things I don’t mean all the time! And sometimes I say things I do mean but wouldn’t say if I wasn’t shouting.”
“I know.” She stroked his hair. She could tell from the way he was struggling that tying him up wasn’t going to do it this time, or, at least, it wasn’t going to be enough on its own. “I’m just warning you. It’s going to get pretty shouty in here.”
“Well, then, so I won’t be alone shouting.” He hesitated. “And, uh. So I’ll know I got a reaction, maybe I won’t have to shout quite so much, too.”
“Hrrm.” She smiled crookedly at him and caught his hand, squeezing his fingers. “But I’m still going to tie you up, you know.”
“Well, yeah. I mean. That part’s fun, although…”
“Although?”
“I mean,” He shrugged jerkily against the straps. “You’ve got me all tied up, but, I mean, I…” He shook his head.
“Tell me,” Abrell ordered. Her vision suggested guilt, and she tolt it she didn’t want to bother with that right now. She could indulge in guilt later, when she’d figured out if something was going wrong with her Kept.
“Urgh,” he complained, and then, quickly, ‘I just wondered why you kept my clothes on all the time? I mean,” he spoke a little more slowly, the pressure of the order clearly off, “you get me all tied up, you could do anything you wanted to me. I Belong to you, you can do anything you want to me. And it’s not like you’re afraid I’m not gonna say if I don’t like something.”
Abrelle shut her mouth. That had been almost exactly what she’d been going to say.
He could tell, too. “Look, you’re not… your Keeper, and I trust you.” He twitched at the straps. “When I ask you — like, okay, the once I asked you to untie me, you, well, you untied me. I trust you,” he repeated. “I wish, you know, I could tell when you were angry, ‘cause then the bond gets all loud in my head making up options, but, uh, really, I wish if you were gonna tie me up so much, maybe you would do something with me once you’d gotten me tied up?” He wriggled in what Abrelle thought was supposed to be an enticing manner but mostly looked adorable.
Abrelle let the affectionate amusement wash through her and chuckled at him. “All right. But I’m going to warn you…”
“It’s going to be wild?” He smirked playfully. “You warned me about that already. Shouting, oh no. However will I survive?”
She rolled him onto his side so that he was off of her lap, catching him before he could roll too far away, and leaned down, very deliberately, and bit his earlobe. “My temper isn’t the only thing that’s gotten repressed over the last couple years,” she murmured into his ear, “and it’s not just going to be shouting that’s going to get wild.”
His cheeks turned pink — and his thin pants did nothing to hide the other signs of his sudden interest. “Oh no,” he repeated, but his voice was shaky and almost eager. “Wild, oh, no. However will I survive?”
Abrelle caught sight of her hair, which was turning deep blue and purple in vivid stripes. She slid the emotion-catcher out of her bra and left it on the nightstand timer. “Let’s find out, hrrm?”
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In Which Amrit Sulks Usefully
First: A beginning of a story which obnoxiously cuts off just before the description,
Previous: In Which Amrit Reaches and Mieve Backs Up.
🐝
Amrit glared after Mieve in frustration. So, fine. She didn’t want to trust him. She didn’t want him to help her.
If you want to go hunt, she’d said. But that was as far as she was willing to let him go. He snarled and slammed the ax down into another piece of wood. What was her problem? He’d been polite – okay, recently. He’d been helpful – the whole time, nobody could say he hadn’t. He’d even been chill about the whole leg-breaking thing. Nothing got through to her. Nothing mattered. She wanted a nice little slavey, and that was that.
He finished the pile of firewood aggressively, knocking it into tiny pieces and throwing it into the wood pile. Fuck her. If she wanted to be a bitch, he could be an asshole right back at her. He worked his mouth, feeling where the gag had been, where the thing the slavers had put in had cut him up. He was healed, now. His leg was pretty much healed, too. He pulled off the splint and tried it. Yep, it held his weight. It was a little tender, still, but he could work with tender.
If you want to go hunt. Of course he wanted to go hunt. Hadn’t he been offering that for days? Was she even listening? He stomped off to the garage and rooted around, looking for the bows.
He found the keys, first. He paused with his hand on them, looking at her car, looking back at the keys. He couldn’t leave without being forsworn, but the temptation was very heavy right now. She didn’t want him here. She didn’t even like him, she just needed a body to boss around.
He picked up the keys, stared at the car, and, with a huffing sigh, put the keys back down. He’d said he’d stay through winter. And this place was nicer than any other options he had for the cold that was coming, anyway.
He found the bow – a very nice one, looking like she’d picked it up from a sports-ware store before everything fell to shit – and the arrows, half of which matched the bow and half of which were Worked or whittled from wood. He slung the quiver over his shoulder, strung the bow, and checked everything out. He hadn’t done all that much bow-hunting, but he’d gone a few times with his uncle when he was a kid, and a few times with whatever came to hand after the world went to shit. He knew he could manage to catch something if he put his mind to it.
Three hours later, as the rain started to come down, he wasn’t so sure. He’d seen a few things; he’d even loosed two arrows. The best he’d been able to catch was a fat squirrel.
He’d thrown a Preserve Working on the squirrel, just to keep the meat fresh, but he’d managed to spook three deer and a turkey without catching anything else.
He was clearly going about this wrong. All wrong, and now it was raining. He needed – well, wanted – shelter, but he didn’t want to go back until he’d caught something big enough to count as a couple meals.
He needed an umbrella, no, that would just get in everyone’s way.
He needed… something. “Fuck,” he muttered, slapping his forehead with his palm. “Idiot.”
His uncle had hunted from a deer stand, a little box in the middle of the woods with a supply of beer and, more importantly, walls and a roof. Amrit didn’t have anything like that, but if he nestled down under that pine tree that he’d just passed, he could be almost invisible from the outside and, if he was lucky, maybe a deer or a turkey would wander by.
“Deer stand. Duh.” He made his way back to the tree and snuck underneath. After a minute, he found a position where he was out of the rain and could see clearly, see clearly and aim decently out of his shelter. He was going to need to build something out here.
If she let him. If she even let him go hunting again. She’d only done it because she was mad at him – for whatever reason; he hadn’t figured that out yet and didn’t know if he cared enough to try.
Well, cross that bridge when he came to it. He hunkered into a comfortable position and waited.
And waited.
And waited. It was getting dark. If he didn’t head back soon, she’d think he had run off, despite his oath.
She would panic, wouldn’t she? Someone who she didn’t really like, who, he supposed, didn’t have all that much reason to like her, someone she’d bought as a slave and then gagged and chained up… and he was gone, and he knew where she lived.
How had she handled that with her other Kept? Driven them off all blindfolded like she’d brought him here? Knocked them unconscious and left them in a ditch somewhere?
For a moment, he considered the possibility that she just killed them all when she was “done” with them, but that didn’t strike him as anything like what he knew about her. There probably wasn’t a line of unmarked graves under the carrots or something.
And if there was, well, he wasn’t going to let her kill him. There wasn’t anything about that in his promises, and he’d make sure there wasn’t.
He was so engrossed in his thoughts, he nearly missed the turkeys strolling by. He pulled, took aim, loosed with a very quiet Working.
Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1216765.html
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Slave, a continuation of the Chess (Black Knight) AU
After Flightless
Landing Page: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1202628.html
“You’re having trouble with the concept of Belonging to someone else. I imagine your students often feel the same, don’t you think?” Cya buckled the harness on him, one strap at a time. “It’s not an easy concept. Your will, your actions, your body, all of it is the property of someone else to do with what they want. I was sixteen; I was used to my dad telling me what to do, teachers, other authority figures. Most of us were, at that point, one level or another. You… the only person that’s been telling you what to do for the last century’s been Regine, your crew… and she spent a lot of time pretending she wasn’t, didn’t she?”
“She covered a lot of it it.” He twitched his wings and ran into the straps. “So, yeah. I got used to thinking nobody was telling me what to do. So?”
“So you’ve had what, almost three centuries of being your own man, and now… you’re not. And it’s not an easy concept to internalize and it’s not an easy concept for me to hammer home, unless I want to seriously break you, which I don’t.”
He stared at her. “You put thought into that.”
“Of course I put thought into it! I mean, dead gods, Luke, you’re talking to me.” She glared at him. He spread his wings — tried to spread his wings — and pulled them close as they bounced against the harness. He was going to get worn spots if he didn’t learn to control his wing-twitches. “If you have figured out anything about me in all this time, it’s that I think about things.”
He knew she planned things. It wasn’t the same thing. He frowned at her. “You considered breaking me.”
“Of course I did.” She shook her head at him. “My children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, Luke, all of them went to Addergoole. I watched Leo struggle with insanity for decades. Addergoole tainted everything in our lives. What would you do if you had in your hands the life that had set up the rape of your children? Your own rape?” She frowned at him. “I’d never been able to figure out how you managed, with your own children there. Then I saw what Regine had done to your brain.”
She swept away that conversation with a wide hand gesture before Luke could answer.
“I considered it. But Leo respects you… and so do I. So I’m going to teach you, instead. And maybe, eventually, you’ll figure out what it means to Belong to someone — to me — without me having to break you to get the point home.”
Luke considered, for a moment, asking what breaking him would look like, and if she thought she could really break him. Some small iota of self-preservation kicked in and he didn’t. “You’re the boss,” he said instead.
It may not have been the wisest answer. She smirked at him. “Yes, that’s the whole point. Tell me when you actually believe it.”
“I…” He fell silent. He couldn’t, not with that order.
“All right.” She touched her fingers to his collar and chanted a Working; Luke recognized the words as Transmute and earth, metal: she was changing his collar to steel. The weight seemed immediately more, the collar thicker, wider. “You’re going to try being a slave for a couple days. There’s a place down by the Alpha gate that needs a kitchen boy and you, Luca, are going to be a good boy for them until I come get you.”
“A kitchen boy.” He worked his jaw and clenched his fists. “You want me to be someone’s kitchen boy.”
“Not what I said, Luke. I said you’re going to be a kitchen boy.” She chanted another Working and a chain dripped off her hand, hooked the chain to his collar. “Come on. We don’t want to keep him waiting.”
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