Tag Archive | perk: donor
The RoundTree Siblings Prepare for Thanksgiving – Stranded World – Donor Perk
This takes place at least a year after the nano-book, and a bit after most of the other stories of this family. Each of the dates, except Gregor, have appeared before.
Winter:
“If it’s too much, I’ll understand.” Encountering his family for the first time was certainly something to be ready for, entirely aside from the cultural connotations of “bringing a girl home to meet his mother.” “But I would love to have your company, and my mother would love to meet Mila and Henry.” He gave Marina his best charming smile. “For all of our oddities, we’re a family of very good cooks.”
“As long as you’re certain it’s no imposition, and as long as I can bring something,” Marina decided, helped, he was sure, by the way her children were bouncing up and down and making puppy eyes at her.
“I’ll be sure to find out what we’re lacking this time. Thank you, Marina. I’m so glad you said yes.”
Summer:
“So,” Bishop said, moving chess pieces around on the back of his notebook. “We’re doing Christmas with Mellie’s family. Spring Break, we’ll spend a couple days with my family. And that leaves Thanksgiving for Summer’s family, right?”
“It’s the only holiday my family really gets together for anyway,” she nodded. “So it’s the best bet for meeting the most of them, and the most fun dates. It’s almost a contest,” she grinned. “Winter usually defaults, and Spring usually wins.”
“Are we your ace in the hole?” Bishop looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be happy about that, or mildly offended. Summer was hoping on happy; it would make everything else easier.
“Yep.” She kissed them both on the cheeks. “My beautiful aces.”
Spring:
“Do both of us a favor, okay, and don’t try to map my family.” She loosened her lover’s tie and deftly traded out his expensive-and-showy cufflinks for another pair, less showy but equally nice. Winter would notice, and her mother would appreciate them.
“It’ll upset them?” He tightened his tie again. He was overdressed for Thanksgiving, so she’d gone a little further out there to complement him.
“It will give you a headache, and amuse them at your expense.”
“Don’t tell me your entire family are tanglers?” He pulled out one of her mis-matched earrings and replaced it with the matching hoop.
“No, no, but they all work with the strands in one way or another, and getting us all together can be… messy.”
“Messy.”
“Yup.”
Autumn:
She stared at the letter for a few minutes longer than required. She’d been fairly certain her Tattercoat lover would say no, but that hadn’t stopped her from asking. Either he’d give in eventually, or get tired of her asking and leave her. Inasmuch as they were together enough for him to leave.
She picked up her phone, then, and dialed. Not Tattercoats. She knew better.
“What is it, my lovely Autumn flower? No, don’t tell me, I can read the calendar. Has that knave you call a lover let you down once again?”
“Gregor….” she protested weakly.
“You know I’m right, lovely girl. And no, I don’t have any other plans for the holiday.”
“Thank you,” she sighed.
“You know I’m always there for you, beautiful.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/169737.html. You can comment here or there.
Protected: Donor Perk discussion
9 Things I Hate About…
From rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt.
A continuation Three-Way, Preferences.
3-Way originally posted here and on LJ, continued here (LJ) and then here (LJ and then
Here (Duet) and Here on LJ – and then here: Preferences (LJ)
She felt as if she’d kicked him, which made her feel bad, made her want to curl up in his lap and tell him everything was okay. She sat on her hands instead, shifting until she was sitting cross-legged, straight-backed and looking him in the eye. “Is this really about what I want, Thorburn?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?
“Because, up until now, you haven’t shown much interest in what I wanted.”
“I told you I wanted your honest assessment.” The hunched-unhappy expression was vanishing, replaced with growing irritation. “If you don’t want to tell me, you can just say that instead of bitching at me.”
“I’m not bitching,” she answered, as calmly as she could through her growing tempest of mixed emotions. “I’m…” She struggled against the urge t make him feel better and lost. “I’m just confused, Thorburn. Why now?”
“You’ve never said it wasn’t what you wanted before.”
She blinked at him. “I told you I hated you. I told you I didn’t…” She shouldn’t there. Something was wrong with him and sex. “…didn’t like the collar. Wanted clothes for sleeping. Wanted…” Well, if he took many more of her things away for complaining, she’d be left going to class naked. “That I wanted my stuff.”
His expression was a bit puzzled. “There’s a level of complaining that goes along with being Kept. I could have stopped you from complaining, or punished you more for doing it, but I thought it was better to let you get it off your chest. But you’ve never come out and said you weren’t happy with me… so I thought you were just uncomfortable being Kept.”
“Is…” Yes, there was a difference, wasn’t there? “So… ‘stop treating me like a possession’ doesn’t help, because the stupid Law says I am a possession.”
He nodded. “Exactly. And it takes a little while to get used to that. I didn’t want to overwhelm you, but you need to understand that, or you’ll cause trouble for both of us.”
“I don’t want to cause you trouble.” She was already in enough trouble herself.
“I know you don’t.” He smiled sadly at her. “You’re a good Kept.”
The praise sent an uncomfortably nice shiver through her. He thought she was good. He thought she was a good… slave. Well. “Thanks?”
He studied her. “You were saying,” he said, more gently than his norm and clearly a bit uncomfortably, “that I didn’t treat you the way you’d prefer.”
She nodded, nervous all over again. “I was. That… is not something a good Kept would say, is it?” She frowned at him, a spike of anger pushing through her desire to make him happy. “But it’s true.”
“But you think I’m nice to you?”
She sighed. They were sort of going in circles. “I do. You said you didn’t think I had context, but I’ve been watching. I’ve been listening. Talking to people, when they’ll talk to me.” Penny, mostly, and a couple other Sixth and Seventh Cohorts who were un-worried about Thorburn’s ire. “I watched Ahouva with Kendon… she’s my friend, you know. Or she was starting to be, before he got her.” She took a deep breath. This part was harder. “You’re gentle with me. You hold doors, and carry my tray in the lunchroom. You don’t yell at me, even when you’re obviously angry, and you’ve never hit me. No matter what Curry says, you’ve never let one of your friends… touch me… and you’ve protected me when someone’s gotten too close before. You take good care of me… and I know that not everyone does.” And she was beginning to believe, whoever had Kept him before, they hadn’t been nearly as kind.
He nodded, agreeing with all of her points, watching her carefully. “But it’s not what you’d prefer.”
She flinched. He was being very nice, but she still worried that there was a trap beneath the surface. “That part’s fine. I don’t mind being taken care of… I mean, it’s a little old-fashioned, but I can live with that. And I know that there really are jerks and monsters here, and that being protected isn’t a bad thing.” She trailed off, studying his expression nervously. “It’s not an either or sort of thing, is it? I mean… does the nice stuff go along with the stuff I don’t like?”
“What?” he frowned at her. “Well, that would be stupid. ‘Here, have a cookie and hold still while I beat you?’ No. I’m not that sort of asshole, Ceinwen.”
She relaxed. “Sometimes it seems like everything around here is a trap,” she explained and apologized all at once.
He seemed about to argue, and then nodded, with a rueful smile that she was fairly certain had nothing to do with her. “Okay, that’s fair.” He took her hands. “No more hedging. I promise I won’t punish you for it – now tell me what you don’t like about the way I Keep you.”
The air-twist of the promise slammed hard into the direct order, and Ceinwen spent a second trying to catch her breath, as the urge to answer pressed harder and harder on her. “The orders,” she spat out, just to make the pressure stop, and then flapped both hands at him, hurriedly. “No, no, I know that’s stupid but sometimes they make my head hurt, that’s all. I, Thorburn, sir, it’s really hard to be polite when you make me say things, I don’t like that you took all my stuff away. I don’t like sleeping naked. I feel helpless that way and you said I’d have to earn my nightgown back and then you never told me how to, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
She took a long breath, but the order was still pushing her on, despite the stunned expression on Thorburn’s face. “And my stuff. And this collar, which I suppose goes with the stuff, because it’s very pretty and only matches the clothes you bought for me or picked out of my clothes.” She shook her head. “That’s kind of petty, but it’s there, anyway and Thorburn could I please stop now before this gets really, really uncomfortable?”
He already looked pretty uncomfortable. He nodded, and squeezed her hands. “You can stop. But, tell me this – there’s more?”
She nodded mutely. Please don’t ask…
“You didn’t complain about the curfew, or not having time with your friends.”
She bit her lip. “Most of my friends are Kept anyway. I’d like to see them, I mean… but there’s classes? And I guess… isn’t that part of being Kept?”
He nodded, thoughtfully. “And there’s something that’s really bothering you, more than anything, that you were talking around the whole time.”
She gulped. Oh, no… She was nodding, though.
“Something you think will be even more uncomfortable?”
Another nod, her lips pressed as tightly as she could. Tears were already falling, but she couldn’t wipe them away. He was holding her hands too tightly. His face was doing something she couldn’t quite read, but it didn’t look good.
He took a deep breath of his own, looking more than a little worried. “All right.” He released her hands and tugged her against his chest in a massive bear hug. “I won’t ask. And when you’re ready, you can tell me. But for now – well. I think we have some room for negotiation.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/164703.html. You can comment here or there.
Protected: Preferences (#Addergoole Yr9) – Donor Perk
Donor Perk Story: Slave School – a Vignette without a name
Tir na Cali Slave School – needs a name.
The tall, lanky kid from Ohio had had it out from Steve from their first day in class. He didn’t know why… all right, he did know why, but it seemed kind of petty. So he’d made the guy move at lunch. He was taking up a whole big table by himself, and Steve wanted to sit with his friends. And, okay, he’d snickered at him once or twice – but the guy was such a suck-up, seeming to buy into the shit they wanted to force-feed them.
So he’d been a little shitty to – Fred, that was his name – the Ohio kid, and then it turned out that Fred had a temper that just had a really, really long fuse. And Steve had made one comment after Religion class – all right, one comment after comments pretty steadily over the last three weeks, but they weren’t big comments or anything. It was just that he couldn’t say anything to the teachers without getting hit, or, once, when he’d been really mouthy, gagged, and Fred seemed so much like everything the teachers wanted. So he mouthed off to Fred for selling out.
This time, they’d been studying the ways one could honor the Goddess, and the way service to a Mistress should echo one’s service to the Goddess. Sickening pagan shit. Steve had turned to Fred as they left class and muttered, too quiet for the proctors to hear, “you’re gonna love it, aren’t you? Praying to your goddess-mistress, down on your knees?”
He hadn’t seen the punch coming, at least the first one. The second one he saw, but not in time to do anything about it, and after that, it was a bit of a blur. Steve thought he was a pretty tough guy – but even soccer didn’t prepare him for the pummeling he was getting, and the kid was all fists and elbows, no way to get away from him. He thought he got in one good punch. Two, maybe. He was going for a third when the proctors showed up and pulled them apart.
It took, as far as Steve could see through vision gone blurry and a bit red, four people to pull Fred off of him, and a fifth to keep Steve from kicking the lanky kid back once he had room to breathe. They dragged them to the infirmary, where Steve found himself restrained to a cot.
The nurse worked over him patiently, her gloved hands cool but gentle, though the antiseptics stung. Steve closed his eyes and tried to think of anything else. He’d gotten his ass handed to him. That was pretty humiliating. But more than that, the kid – he hadn’t been going to stop. He had been trying to kill Steve. That… that was something else altogether.
“Frederick claims you provoked him.” The voice was not the nurse’s; he opened his eyes to see their Civics teacher sitting next to him.
Steve opened his mouth to say something snide, and then closed it again. Even though she wore a slave collar, Miss Svetlana had been harder on them than any of the other teachers. Why would she be any better after he’d started a fight?
She pursed her lips unhappily anyway. “Was Frederick correct, Steven?”
Was he? “I might have said a few things,” he admitted, hastily adding on, “Miss. Okay, I said a few things.”
“That will mitigate his punishment, then,” she nodded. “Would you mind telling me what sort of things?”
“I’d kinda mind, yeah.” He squirmed against his bonds. “I mean, come on, I already got my ass handed to me, miss. I’d rather not get beaten on again just yet.”
She frowned faintly at him. “Is that your concern?” Seeing him pause, she gestured imperiously with one hand. “You may feel free to speak freely for the duration of this meeting, and will be punished for nothing you say here. Immunity.”
She really wanted him to talk? If she was going to open herself up for it, he was certainly going to let her have it. “Well, come on, every time I open my mouth around here,” he said, twitching again against his restraints as he tried to gesture, “I get hit or beat or, if someone’s feeling really generous, sent to go sit in the corner like a five-year-old. So yeah. I figure I’m going to get punished for this somehow.” He yanked hard on the cuffs. “Why else would I be tied down to a bed?” He might be the dumb one of the group, but Steve could think of some “why else’s,” and was trying hard to ignore those options. He hadn’t been that mouthy, had he?
“Aah.” Miss Svetlana’s frown deepened, and he began to think he really had gone too far. “And it wouldn’t occur to you that we were worried about your well-being?”
“Well, I guess you have to protect your investment. I’ve got to be worth a couple grand to you, don’t want me getting all banged up, right? But what’s that got to do with tying me to a bed?”
The teacher stood, pacing rapidly around the small room, her heels beating an angry staccato on the tile floor. When she turned to him, finally, she was glaring, and her voice was sharp and high.
“How could you think that was all you are to us? A number, a product? I know being captured has been hard on you, but do you really think I’m the sort of monster that cares only for the numbers?” She tugged roughly on her own collar. “Do you really think I’m that crass and inhuman?”
“You sure as hell act like you only care about obedience.” He wanted to shout it, but she was nearly crying, and it took the heat out of his anger. “Every time any of us fuck up, you come down like a ton of bricks.”
“And that’s half as hard as an owner would come down on you,” she snapped back, the tears flowing for real now. “Do you think we want to see you sold into service unprepared, whipped or beaten because you didn’t know how to behave?”
He gaped at her, not sure what to say. “Why not just tell us?” he asked sullenly, his whole body aching.
“We do!” She sat down on the edge of his narrow bed. “We tell you, over and over again, but some of you are so hung up on how it’s ‘wrong,’ how you’re better than born-slaves, that you won’t listen unless we pound it home. And some of you don’t listen even then.” She glared at him through tear filled eyes.
“What?” he sputtered, although, guiltily, he knew she had a point. “Aw, come on, I don’t think I’m better than you.” Crying was cheating, but she was sniffling on his bed, and he’d made her cry. “Come on, miss…” He patted awkwardly in her direction. “I don’t…”
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