- alonimi
- Out of Character
- The Repository
- Storytime [Read Only]
Using Our Words
Ren - That Steampunk AU - Possibly Non-Canon but who even knows at this point? Are you looking for stability out of this wonky AU? Don't.
Ren - That Steampunk AU - Possibly Non-Canon but who even knows at this point? Are you looking for stability out of this wonky AU? Don't.
This is also kinda long so SPOILER TAGS WOO.
Spoiler:
“You know,” Ren said casually, through a mouthful of reuben. “I always figured yer dad was like some big ogre demon that raped yer mom and that was why you were such a stickler for rules ‘n’ order, ‘cause you were scared of turnin' out like him.”
She was speaking to her boss, a giant asshole--or perhaps, more accurately, a giant dick. When he got angry with her, he sodomized her. She admittedly enjoyed this a bit, which was only part of why she was speaking to him in such a rude manner. The other part being that ‘rude’ was her default factory setting and no one had figured out how to get into the options yet.
He was clearly trying to ignore her, so she continued. “Turns out actually, yer mom was just a pervert professionally, which means yer a pervert, an’ you were such a stickler for rules ‘n’ order ‘cause you didn't want to turn out like her, but then you added fuckin' to it anyway cause the apple don't fall far from the tree.”
She didn’t not consider this to be an insult to his mother. It was treading the line, though, because that was what she did. It was enough to finally get a reaction out of him, however, a dour glare and a sharp admonition.
“I love my mother, and I am not ashamed of what she is. And what I do with my dick when I am not working is none of your business.”
Ren snorted, loudly, because nothing she did was ever quiet. “Right, cause it's working, what you do with me,” she said with a dark little laugh. “Part o' the job, right, that's why you do it.” Part of her actually suspected it was, despite her sarcasm. Obviously he enjoyed it, sadistic bastard, on a purely physical level. It was probably pretty emotionally satisfying for him to tan the hide of someone who caused him so much stress, too, but she personally thought that it probably didn’t go any deeper than that.
“If there's another way to make you behave, I have not found it yet,” he replied simply.
There was, of course. She could be given access to what she needed and allowed to do what she wanted. Then she would have behaved perfectly. But that sort of defeated the entire purpose, she was fairly sure.
“I'm like a wild animal,” she said blithely, taking another bite of reuben. “I wasn't designed to live in a cage. S’not my fault, it's in my nature. Just like how it's not yer fault yer solution to problems is to put your dick in it.” This was, as far as Ren could tell, his first solution to everything. She was often informed how she’d driven him to the end of his rope and left him without any other options but violent sodomy, but that certainly wasn’t how she remembered it.
“Like a rat, your natural state is pushing the boundaries of polite society until someone kills you for it, or possibly getting stolen by an owl,” Gareth replied snippily, and she bristled. As much for the insult towards rats as the insult to her. She was hypersensitive to accusations that she was some sort of beast, not fit for society, too dangerous to be allowed around normal people. This was unfortunate, because that very much was her boss’ opinion of her, so far as she could tell. He certainly told her often enough. It never stung any less. If anything, it stung more as time went by.
She kept thinking maybe he thought higher of her than when she’d started.
He never did.
“You the owl in this scenario?” she asked sourly, instead of cursing at him and/or insulting his mother, her two go-to methods for stress relief when she was angry with him. Not because he had anything against his mother, mind. She was a succubus and therefore more fun than him by definition. But it was the easiest way to get under his skin.
“No, I'm the man with the cage that feeds you and keeps the owls out,” he said pointedly. She rolled her eyes. Oh yeah, he was soooooo selfless.
“An’ puts his dick in me randomly, don’t forget that part.”
“If you don’t want my dick, I can keep it myself.”
She snorted again. “No, you can’t. It’s the,” she mimicked his voice mockingly, lowering hers as much as it could go and speaking in a stodgy sort of voice. “‘Only way you've found to make me behave.’” She glared over at him. “Plus everytime I bend over in this stupid skirt yer starin' at my ass and I dunno who you think yer kiddin'.” This was one of many reasons she hated the dress part of her uniform. It had taken him weeks of carrot-and-stick-ing her--his dick was both--to get her to wear it in its entirety even some of the time, and she hated every single second of it.
“Behave without dick and I will gladly stick it elsewhere.”
She scoffed, both because she didn’t believe him and because she didn’t want to. The implications were hurtful. “You got the ladies all linin' up to be spanked 'n' reamed, huh?”
“Yes,” he replied simply. She paused, squinting at him. Hard to believe. Who’d find that attractive? Or maybe he was less of a stuffy asshole outside of work? She couldn’t even imagine what he looked like in his downtime. He left every day at five PM, and presumably he went somewhere, but she had no idea where, or what he did. He seemed to live for work. Hell, they had sex on a pretty regular basis, and she’d yet to see him out of his uniform, even partially. Half the time she didn’t even see his dick.
“I gotta wonder what kinda ladies,” she said, trying to imagine the hypothetical person that would find an eight-foot-tall workaholic half-demon with a to-scale tree lodged up his ass attractive.
“A couple of very nice elves and a dwarf,” he responded, which didn’t even begin to answer her question, but did distract her.
“A dwarf?!” she exclaimed. “How she ain’t dead?!” Ren was hardly a giant herself, coming in a few inches past five feet, but she was no dwarf, and she struggled, quite literally, to contain his girth. Every inch was a practice in anticipation, fear, and stretching.
“Dwarves are extremely hardy,” he replied. It, too, did not answer her question, but she was imagining things now. They seemed painful. Or deadly.
“I’ll be...” she said, awestruck. “You sell tickets?”
“No,” said Gareth bluntly. “She’s very nice and sometimes she makes me dinner.” Ren felt something shift inside her, impressive mental images shoved aside to make room for the pressure on her gut. “It's not great because she's vegan, but it's the thought that counts.”
She was very nice and made him dinner. She was someone he enjoyed spending time with, put his dick in recreationally instead of as a form of punishment, or because it was the only thing he’d found she was good for. Her fingers tightened on her sandwich, which she was no longer eating.
“Hmph! Well, I see yer problem now, I'm keepin' you from all the real nice ladies in yer life!” she snapped, unclear on why she was suddenly so angry.
“Yes, exactly,” he said, a pleased little barely-there smirk on his lips.
She glared. She could feel a pressure building, one that could only be alleviated by yelling, violence, acting out, or rat-related shenanigans. She was trying to decide which one of them to go for.
“Anyway,” he continued. “Like I said. If you don't want me to fuck you just say so and I'll try something else.” She knew damn well he was full of it, because he’d repeatedly said that fucking her was his last ditch effort--though he may have been lying about that--and because he’d threatened to just let her hang on several occasions when fucking didn’t appear to be subduing her enough on its own. It was a terrifying, infuriating threat... because he could. Her keepers could, at any time, declare her a ‘lost cause’ and it would be back to the gallows for her. She knew her after-hours keeper would absolutely love to, which meant it was, at all times, just Gareth standing between her and a long fall from a short rope.
“Awright yeah!” she snarled, opting for yelling in an attempt to get the pressure out. “Let's try it with me fuckin' you instead; we'll just have to find somethin' bigger than the fuckin tree trunk you're used to havin' jammed up yer ass!” She felt better, slightly.
“See, now you're being belligerent again. And knowing you, you won't stop until you're full of dick.”
“I'm always belligerent!” she snapped. “It’s my natural state o' bein', like yers is a ginormous fuckwad!”
He fixed her with a look, one she was coming to recognize. It wasn’t bedroom eyes, because that would imply there had ever been a bedroom involved. It wasn’t quite a threatening look, but she felt threatened by it nonetheless. “You weren't belligerent when I was bouncing you in my lap by the neck,” he reminded her.
She fought a full body shudder and only half-succeeded. She did, in fact, remember. Vividly. She’d been facing him--a rarity in and of itself, as he normally preferred to rail her from behind, for whatever reason--straddling his lap as he sat sprawled out on chair designed to fit someone eight feet or taller. Straddling was perhaps not the right word, as it implied she had anything to do with her positioning. One hand on her hips, intermittently, sometimes thumbing her clit instead. The other hand wrapped entirely around her neck, a remarkable thing that he could do, thanks to how huge his hands were. And it was by that hand around her neck that he was forcing her up and down on his cock, using her whole body like a masturbatory aid.
That had been for repeatedly refusing to do the boring task he’d given her. He’d declared that if she was going to be wasting time, he had a better use for her. Then he’d done that. She hadn’t worked the rest of the day, but the next day she’d come right back and finished her work in a daze similar to the one threatening to overtake her now, if she spent any longer thinking about his cock and how it felt inside her, and how attractive he was when he was scary instead of just annoying and foppish.
“........Those were extenuatin’ circumstances,” she managed finally.
“Maybe I’ll try that again,” he mused, and she could feel the flush creeping along her neck, and lower. He smirked, just a little, probably at the look on her face. “C’mere.”
A small, traitorous part of her really wanted to. She’d often wondered what it would be like if she actually cooperated in having sex with him more. She couldn’t really imagine it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“No,” she said, crossing her arms. “I’m still mad at you.”
She was never not mad at him.
“But why?” he said, an obviously fake expression of surprise on his face. He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Could you be... jealous?”
That was it. She chucked the uneaten portion of her sandwich at him. He tilted his head to the side, and it missed him entirely, hitting the wall thanks to all the force she’d thrown it with. A rat scurried towards it, out of his line of sight. He was still smirking, a bit broader now. “Are you jealous of the girls who admit that they like my dick?” he mocked. “Because I have an easy solution.”
“Is it easier than fillin' yer closet with rats again, cause that's what I'm leanin' towards right now,” she snapped.
“Yes, because when I put them in cages you get distraught.”
“RATS DON'T BELONG IN CAGES, we been over this!” she yelled.
“Rats not in cages get eaten,” he reminded her. “And we let them out to play.”
Comparing her to rats was less dicey than most of his animal-related metaphors, but she still chafed a bit. She knew he didn’t think as highly of rats as she did.
“They're safer with me than in cages anyhow,” she grumbled. It was very true; she knew how to handle rats without the need for such ridiculous, inhumane treatment as cages, traps, and poison. If anything, the problem was that, much as with rats, no one had bothered to look at her as anything other than something that needed to be contained, controlled, or exterminated.
“Not if you put them in dangerous situations. Like my closet.”
“It'sa job hazard,” she said snidely. “Like yer dick.”
“Would you say that you're their boss?” he asked her, and she crossed her arms, frowning.
“I prefer to say we run a socio-anarchist hive of like-minded individuals,” she said, as rudely as she could. Some people didn’t need a strict and brutal class-based hierarchy to get things accomplished.
“Would you say that the rats listen to you when you tell them what to do?”
She shrugged. “I mean mostly. They're rats. They're kinda.” She waved her hand vaguely, before remembering that wasn’t technically a form of communication. “Finicky,” she said finally.
“Would you be pretty mad if a rat ignored everything you said to go eat some poison?” he asked, and she glared, seeing where he was going with this.
"That metaphor don't hold true, cause you think any time I break a rule it's eatin' poison.”
“You’ve exploded twice.”
“Just me, though!” she protested. That was within the acceptable explosion limits. She had been learning to mitigate explosion risks, mostly through relocating them to her person, because that way he couldn’t complain about her damaging equipment.
“The rat probably thinks you're being a drama queen about the delicious, delicious poison.”
She regretted having already thrown her sandwich. The only other things she had to throw were too large, too fragile, or too important. “Well if it wasn't poison, but delicious cheese, the rat would have a point!”
“The cheese is poisoned and you know it,” he said with a scoff. She glared. “But the rat won’t listen! The rat is tired of your rules!”
Okay, that actually happened sometimes, when she got too heavy-handed, but her reaction wasn’t to stick the rat in a cage! She didn’t even spank them, because who the fuck spanked rats.
“Well they'd be stupid rules if I went and outlawed all the cheese just cause they're poisoned like 78% of the time!” she snapped. Not that... that was a precise number she’d calculated for the cheese within the compound... or anything.
Look, when rats bring you cheese more than people, you have to learn to recognize which of it has probably been poisoned. If she got sick eating poisoned cheese left out for rats, she would never hear the end of it.
“That’s a lot of dead rats,” he pointed out, and she scowled, because he was misinterpreting her data. Rats were smart, they didn’t just eat all the cheese. And also! This was not about rats and cheese, it was a shitty metaphor for her and why she should submit to his iron-clad rules and not just his iron-hard dick. And as a metaphor it failed terribly!
“Maybe if I let the rat eat some cheese sometimes the rat wouldn't be so eager to jump on whatever poisoned cheese it could get!” she snapped, stamping her foot on the ground, an action which caused her ass to hurt, because sometimes it seemed like her ass would always hurt.
“I think I care about my rat more than you do,” he said, and she snorted. He didn’t care jack for her, except in all the ways he did, more than other people, but that wasn’t hard. Just by wanting her to not be dead, he managed to care more than other people, because pretty much everyone else, just, really wanted her dead. “I will continue to give my rat the safest muffins and hams.” She snorted again, but this time because that sounded just like him. If he could actually be persuaded to care about rats as individuals and stop seeing them as a vast, pooping hive-mind, he probably would feed them muffins and big, juicy hams.
He wouldn’t even feed her muffins and hams. He probably fed them to his girlfriends. Maybe if he gave her literal entire hams, she wouldn’t have to eat the questionable cheese her friends brought her--hey wait this was supposed to be a metaphor. And also that was the point of his metaphor. Why did his metaphor work better as reality than a metaphor.
She was not going to ask him for muffins.
There was a small chance he would actually give them to her, but an unacceptable risk that he would laugh at her. She would rather be muffinless then muffinless and mocked. If that happened, she would have to know, every minute of every day, that she could have been eating muffins if he didn’t hate her.
Also they were in the middle of a heated argument, or something.
“I think I trust my rat's judgement more 'n' you do,” she said, because it was true both of rats in general and of her in specific, and this was supposed to be a metaphor about her. “I think you treat yer rat like an idiot who can't be trusted around cheese.”
“That's because it keeps trying to shovel poison cheese into its mouth whenever I'm not looking.”
Well obviously. She grabbed desperately for any little freedoms she could get, no matter how small, whenever she got the chance to do so without being spanked--or punished by someone else in worse ways, because he wasn’t her only keeper. Only her other keeper saw to a number of people who were like prisoners only with varying levels of freedom, and their idea of hands-on interaction with an individual was instructing someone else to have her whipped.
She tried to articulate this within the metaphor of rats and cheese. “Because it's not bein' allowed any cheese! It's losin' it's mind! Rats can't live on muffins alone! Some cheese is necessary.”
“I think I tried to give my rat a safe cheese, and it responded by trying to take all of the cheese and some gratuitous cyanide. I think my rat is going to have to earn back limited cheese privileges.”
So people kept saying, but even when she was good--like with him, because she couldn’t stomach being good with anyone else--she had yet to earn back even a smidgen of precious “cheese.”
She gave up on the metaphor altogether, voice breaking into a frustrated whine. “But I ain't blown anything else up in weeks, just me.” Twelve days could technically be considered weeks. “I ain't even damaged a worktable cause everytime I do you declare it a 'fucktable' and we gotta fuckin' christen that shit.” There were worse things than being belted to a table and fucked, but it was a time sink and those worktables weren’t always in convenient locations.
“Don't blow up anything. Including you. Especially not when you're supposed to be helping assemble non-explosive equipment.”
She crossed her arms. He was speaking of her most recent explosion, which had happened yesterday. She still technically had burns from it, but they were hidden under her clothes so no one was fussing at her about it. She somehow imagined he’d be even more insufferable if he had tangible proof of the consequences of her actions. “It could be better,” she said instead, stubbornly.
“Your definition of better is explosive.”
“Nu-uh! That was just a side effect!”
“It was a parachute,” he said, sounding a bit strained.
“If I was allowed proper time t' experiment, like a civilized person, I could absolutely figure out the parachute improvements I'm workin' on with zero explosion risk.” She paused, doing some mental calculations in her head. “...Point five percent explosion risk. ...It’s a work in progress, is what I’m sayin’.”
“Then ask. Tell me what you’re trying to accomplish, and we will find time and work on it in a safe environment.” He sounded exasperated at this point.
“I tried askin’!” she protested. “They won’t let me in at the lab equipment unless you’re there.” They wouldn’t even just let him sign off on it. If it was just a signature, she might have risked asking. “An’ you keep goin’ home at five.” To his girlfriends. “I live here,” she grumbled. “I can’t just go home at five.”
She would kill another half-dozen people, on purpose this time, to be able to leave and go home at five.
“You haven't asked me to stay. I will stay and work on it with you. Obviously.” He ran a hand over his hair, a surefire indicator that he wanted to bend her over something and do something terrible to her out of sheer frustration. “Why didn’t you just ask?”
She blinked in surprise, wind temporarily taken out of her sails. What, just like that? Didn’t he have much better things to do than stay after work for hours so that she could do something interesting instead of being locked up in her room for 10 hours? Why would he do that?
This had potential.
But now she had to explain her “if you don’t ask they can’t give the humiliation of saying no” rationale.
“...I figured you'd say no to fuck yer vegan girlfriends or whatever,” she grumbled, face flushing slightly. She needed a better reason than that, because that sounded petty, even if it was true. “Also you'll probably stop me from doin' anything useful cause you always do that; I keep tellin' you I have to accept a small explosion risk for progress.”
“I will make time to help you with things that are important to you, and walk you through how to safely manage risk,” he said firmly. “It involves distance and blast shields.”
Her first instinct was to say that sounded very time-consuming. But she was learning--slowly--to consider her options before rejecting something outright. It helped that sometimes he gagged with things so she couldn’t talk right away. Because, the problem was she was made of time, after work. Even doing work slowly and kind of boringly was better than doing nothing at all.
“...Okay,” she said finally, arms still crossed. “...But if you get distracted fuckin' me, that don't count for my useful-shit time, ‘cause you said that counted as work!” She wouldn’t let that go any time soon.
“If we're working on your project, I won't punish you for getting distracted, because it's your time and you can do what you want with it,” he said, which didn’t seem to answer her question. He was the one who might get distracted. Maybe. She could, perhaps, have been flattering herself, but she did catch him staring at her sometimes. Especially when she had a limp due to a “work related injury,” which at this point was essentially just a nickname for his goddamn monster cock.
“We can fuck later, when you admit that you want me to fuck you,” he added, completely unnecessary. She flushed bright red and glared at him, seriously considering throwing something fragile at him.
“We was havin' a moment and you rubbed yer dick on it again,” she accused angrily, pointing a furious finger at him.
“You don't even have to wear your uniform, because it's off-hours,” he continued, completely ignoring her. That made her pause, though, her face losing its fury and turning excited.
“Wot? Really?” she exclaimed.
“Yes. All you have to do is ask me these things. I am right here and capable of being asked for things.”
“You keep sayin' no,” she said, pouting. She realized she was pouting, and attempted to switch it into a scowl. “How'm I supposed to know when yer gonna say yes and not just roll yer eyes like I'm bein' stupid...” Not that he had ever actually done that, but it was a persistent fear.
“I say no when you ask for things that are dangerous, or for things you're not allowed to do at work.”
“But that’s like, all of the things.” She wasn’t allowed to do anything fun. That was the entire problem, or at least a very large piece of it.
“It is not. It’s not, for instance, staying after work to help you with a personal project that you think might be helpful. ...Or even just staying after work so you don't have to stay alone in your room.”
She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth and chewed on it. A nervous habit. She was just self-aware enough to know she did it, and be annoyed by the tendency. “...It’s so borin’ in there,” she admitted miserably. “And then I use rats to steal somethin' interestin' and then they get mad at me like it's my fault there are rats everywhere. I mean, it is, but it's also their fault cause they won't let me do anything.”
“They don't let you do anything because you keep using rats to steal, and that does not engender trust,” Gareth chided.
“Why do I gotta be bored for a month so they'll stop bein' assholes!” she whined in response. “Why do they never do the trust thing first?”
“Because you lost your trust privileges before you even got here.”
“That’s not fair, though! They lost their trust privileges too, by kidnappin’ me!”
“I think they thought it would be kinder than killing you,” he said dryly, and she stiffened again. She’d never see this as a mercy, because they were the only reason she was slated to hang to begin with. Trumped up charges. Not exactly a first-time offender, but all her crimes up to that point had been normal homeless-kid stuff... petty theft, loitering, breaking and entering into sealed buildings and the like.
Her ‘yell and throw things’ instinct was acting up again.
She decided to try her words again, since that had a slightly better success ratio. And for some reason, she kept wanting him to understand her, even when he repeatedly didn’t. “That's not how it works, though!” she protested. “You can't just grab someone off the streets, tell them they're yours now and they have to stay put and do whatever with no reward for an undetermined period of time or you'll kill them and then be surprised when they hate you!”
“That's how it works when you commit deadly crimes that establish that you are unfit to safely function in society, and are a danger to normal people.”
Ah, yes. That was the reason she preferred being a hellion to communicating, in general. Using words led to more words, ones that were inevitably hurtful. Hitting all of her buttons like an obnoxious child in a lift. Unfit for society. A danger to normal people, meaning she was anything but.
“I committed one deadly crime and it was an accident that coulda happened to anyone, this is exactly what I mean!” she said, working her way back up to yelling again. “You all treat me like I'm a fuckin' serial killer!”
“It could not have happened to anyone,” Gareth disagreed, leaning back and raising an eyebrow. “You are literally the only person that has ever done what you did.”
She waved her hand, frustrated. “That’s just ‘cause no one else bothers to talk to rats.”
“We can't. That's just you. And I meant more of the dangerous theft of something that almost always explodes. Why did you think it was illegal?”
“It was not supposed to explode! And I stole tons of stuff that never exploded, you just never heard about those ‘cause it worked.”
“Is telling me that you stole huge amounts of things supposed to make it better?” he asked dryly. She paused, considering.
“......Yes,” she said finally. “Because I'm extendin' you trust that you won't be a dick about it. See.” She gestured between the two of them. “Trust exercise.”
“It has been added to the list of why you are dangerous to normal people, who just want to live their lives without worrying they will lose their stuff or explode.” Her scowl deepened. Normal people again. Must be nice to be normal and get protection instead of abuse. She wouldn’t know. “I don't think it's dickish to observe that.”
“I don’t steal from ’normal people’,” she snapped. “I steal from other thieves and also the government.” And occasionally some ultra-rich nobles, but they pretty much counted as government, in her opinion. They had nobility and more rights than everyone else, and got to hobknob and rub elbows--amongst other things, according to rumor--with the king. They also had more money than anyone really needed. “And if you think about it, isn't the government the biggest thief of all,” she added bitterly. She didn’t mean taxes, not really, although she was a bit bitter about that concept when all the government ever did for her was seek as many ways as possible to make it illegal for her to live. And to make it as difficult as possible for her to improve her station, despite her apparently being so useful she was worth kidnapping into forced labor.
“Other thieves will kill you without mercy if they catch you,” he pointed out. “Please don't try to argue for libertarianism with me. I pay my taxes because I enjoy roads.”
She rolled her eyes. It wasn’t libertarianism she argued for, it was anarcho-communism, which he’d know if he ever listened to her. It was a fine distinction, but one that was important to her, primarily because she’d had a lot of time to think about what she’d do differently when she was huddled up in an alleyway, freezing and starving and knowing full well that somewhere, there was someone, a lot of someones, who had seized the power to help her and then refused to.
“Well if all they did with it was roads, we'd be hunky-dory, wouldn't we?” she said sarcastically.
“Societies need more than roads to function,” Gareth pointed out, but she was already working her way up to a rant.
“If yer tryna tell me King McFuckWeed really needs all that shiny shit to be a proper leader, and nobles have more of a right to some shit than the rest of us... I mean, fer fuck’s sake! You can just grab me and fuck me against a table and even if I didn't like it, no one would care!” She knew this, intimately well.
“I would care, and if you were nicer to the other employees they would also care. They probably care anyway. I don't know if you've talked to them about it.” She paused, looking momentarily guilty, glancing down and to the side. “...Have you?”
“...I talked to Smithers about it,” she admitted. He was the boss’ assistant, and it had been fucking hard enough just to get in to see him. She’d actually just had some rats stalk him and then basically jumped him in order to get a word in edgewise. She couldn’t petition for an appointment without, guess what, going through one of her keepers. “But he said if I made a formal complaint, you might get fired.” Not that legal charges would be brought, mind, or that she would get anything in the form of apology, reimbursement for suffering, et cetera. Just that he might get fired. At the very least, he’d be reassigned.
“Yes. Because there are systems in place here to keep you safe if someone is hurting you. I am not supposed to hurt you.” He paused, this apparently being too much of a truth-stretch for even him. “Much,” he edited.
“It wouldn't even do me any good, cause I'd still be stuck here. Because there's no policy for 'well you keep gettin' fucked, sorry, our bad, we'll let you go as an apology,” she grumbled.
“No, but they would get you a new supervisor that won't touch you. Would you like me to not touch you?”
Like it even mattered. “They would get me a new supervisor that wasn't supposed to touch me sexually, an' how am I supposed to know if he'd even stick to that?” She waved her hand, frustrated. “Could be even worse. At least when you do it I li-” She managed to catch herself mid-sentence. She flushed, both embarrassed and angry with herself for the almost-admission.
“I'm pretty sure they'd transfer over Trinh, because she is asexual and also physically incompatible, but please continue,” he said, managing not to look too smugly amused, given they were mostly discussing her life, or lack of it.
“...my point,” she managed. “Is that as you keep pointin' out, my supervisor has the ability to declare me a lost cause and suddenly I'm a firm nod away from the end of the rope. Trinh, whoever the fuck that is, might decide I'm not worth keepin' around ‘cause she doesn't wanna stick her dick in me, and then where am I? Dead that's where.”
“You're allowed to argue your side,” he protested, as if any system with death at one end of it and the power all on one end could be fair and balanced. “If you've been working hard and you can find employees to vouch for you, you can defend yourself. It's only a problem if, hypothetically you've been a huge bitch to everyone and haven't managed to get a single thing done.”
She shouldn’t have to work hard and curry favors to not die, was her point. But she was tired, and frustrated, and sore, and it was just, looking so much easier to go back to ‘harassing people with rats and not expecting them to try and understand her.’ “That’s my point,” she said with a sigh, instead, slumping back on her chair. “No one else’s gonna put up with that.”
“If you just did the bare minimum,” he suggested. “You could get rid of me forever, and never be touched by me again.”
Oh, yeah, that sounded grand. A life full of dullery and boredom without the only thing that bothered to try managerial techniques other than corporal punishment and solitary confinement. She didn’t say that, though, because it sounded too much like a compliment. Instead, she just said, “Dun wanna.”
This was not enough to discourage him, it seemed.
“I think... you like me,” he teased, leaning forward slightly. She flushed angrily.
“I think I hate workin’.”
“I think you like it when I fuck your brains out.”
She flushed darker. She liked when he swore, when he was filthy, because it seemed more right, more like how a person who looked like him should be. Or maybe that was racist. Maybe she also just liked someone who was normally so uptight and stodgy dragging himself down on the base level with the rest of them. It was why it was sort of nice to think of him as someone who could lust after her; it made him more... well, human was the word, but that was definitely racist.
“No,” she said shortly. “Cause that'd be stupid because that's just work and no one would be stupid enough to like someone who only fucked them for work.”
“I told you. If you want me to stay after work, all you have to do is ask. And if you want me to fuck you outside of work, then do your job, and then ask me to stay and fuck you, and I will take you on a picnic so that you and the rats can enjoy the weather while I eat you out somewhere nice.”
She was probably bright crimson at this point, and didn’t even know which part was affecting her the most. The idea that she might ask him to fuck her outside of work, the idea of a picnic outdoors, or the turn of phrase and implication he’d be eating her on the picnic. She stumbled mentally, momentarily at a loss for words. It didn’t happen often.
“W-well, you're at least stayin' after work. So I can do stuff,” she mumbled finally.
“Is that asking? Is that what asking sounds like? I am genuinely asking because I can't tell with you and I won't stay if I'm not wanted.”
She glared, but it was a glare full of distress. “You already agreed!” she exclaimed, voice sounding mildly devastated. If talking around in circles had lost her that smallest, most precious of exceptions, she would never try it again.
“Okay!” he exclaimed, either surprised or exasperated by her hurt. “Okay. I will stay and help you with your exploding parachute. Okay?”
Phew. That was way too close.
She leaned onto the table, missing the last few bites of sandwich she’d chucked at him. They never fed her enough. Her secondary keeper had mentioned something about her caloric intake being calculated by her body mass. She took that to mean, she was fuckin’ small, so she didn’t get much food. The problem was, she’d been malnourished her whole life and was fully capable of eating an entire buffalo if allowed. ...Plus, her dinner had been the first thing to get struck down to punishment minimums. The only reason her lunches were so nice was because the work cafeteria was in charge of those. And even then, they weren’t enough.
“I should emphasize,” she said with a sigh. “S’not supposed to explode. It did that ‘cause I used the wrong gear box. Ideally, it’d let out a small downwards thrust upon opening, in order to minimize the jolt to the user.”
“That sounds like a great idea and I will be happy to help you with it.” She didn’t let out a pleased hop, because she did not do that outside the company of rats and rats only. She kept very strict control over her own body language, which was probably part of why she just glared at everything. “Would you like to help me fix this glider now? Will you let me tell you how I want it done instead of trying to do your own thing?” Like that, for instance. She glared at that. “If you think my way is wrong, then you can explain to me why you think it is wrong.”
She considered. “...Awright,” she said finally, grudgingly. “Can my rat that I know I'm not supposed to have but have anyway watch. His name is Timothy and he likes shiny things.” He was in her skirts, because she had to fucking wear skirts, and they didn’t come with pouches or pockets like her pants or belts.
Gareth eyed her, but then relented. “Yes, as long as he stays in a safe zone and not in or on the glider. He sounds nice,” he added, which struck her as probably being intended to be condescending.
“Okay. He’s pretty well behaved, on account o’ how he already lost a leg goin' where I told him not to.” Because she didn’t just lock rats up when they did stuff she didn’t like. “He's kind of an idiot for shiny things,” she admitted. “I'm makin' him a new leg.” Because just because he was kind of an idiot didn’t mean she shouldn’t try to help.
“...I see,” Gareth said. “Will he want some of this muffin?”
Hell, she wanted some of that muffin. She was still hungry. “You know damn well neither of us will ever say no to a muffin.”
“I made it. It's a cheesy corn muffin, with ham bits.”
She snorted, then giggled. She couldn’t help herself. Then she started laughing more in earnest. Gareth fixed her with a puzzled, mildly pre-offended look. Because if she was laughing, it was at him, not with him.
“Th-that's cause....” she attempted between gigglefits. “You insist on.... puttin' yer meat in everything pfffahahahahaha!”
“And you like it,” he said with a smirk, making her blush but not enough indignation to make her stop laughing. “...But don’t make this weird when I’m giving Timothy a muffin.”
“Pfffft.” She reached down towards the hem of her skirt, and Timothy popped out under the table and climbed onto her hand. She brought him up to the top of the worktable, still chuckling. “Can you even imagine? Your head is like bigger than his entire body, how would that even work.” She was not talking about the head on his shoulders. “Timothy is the only one here safe from yer meat,” she said, still giggling wildly.
“Please just eat the muffin,” he said, somewhat desperately.
“Heheh, awright. C’mere, Tim, try his muffin.” She giggled again, bringing her hand towards Gareth’s so Timothy could inspect the muffin. “He likes it when you moan while eatin’ it,” she advised, grinning.
“If you keep making innuendo toward the rat I will change my mind about staying here,” he said dryly. She was fairly certain he was joking. It was very hard to tell with him.
“Awwwwwww,” she whined. He never let her do anything fun.
“There is one living thing in this workshop that I like to hear moan,” he added, and she flushed a bit more.
“...Rats moanin’ would be creepy anyway,” she admitted.
“Yes. Yes it would.”
There was a moment’s silence as they both watched Timothy, perched on Ren’s fingertips and muching on chunk of muffin in Gareth’s palm.
His hands were huge compared to hers.
She kind of liked them, if she was being perfectly honest, which she hated doing. Wrapped around her neck or tangled into her hair or pushing into her, mouth or cunt or anywhere, really.
“So this vegan dwarflady of yers,” she said idly, watching as Timothy cleaned up the remaining crumbs, climbing briefly onto Gareth’s hand to do so. She kept hers raised, so he would have an escape route if he wanted. “If she’s vegan, how can she stomach yer meat?” Ren asked with a wicked little grin.
“She'll only eat animal products from animals that ask her to. It limits her options.”
“Ohhhhh,” Ren said, nodding. This made perfect sense. “So since you ask her to eat yer products...”
“Yes.”
She laughed again. Ridiculous.
“Awright,” she said with a sigh as Timothy scurried back onto her hand. She set him down on the safest corner of the workbench. She’d be much more careful with someone important nearby, anyway. She cracked her fingers, stretched her back a bit, then tucked her feet underneath the stool and leaned forward on her very soft cushion. “Let's look at this fuckin' glider an' see how bad you fuckwads shitted it up this time.”
She was speaking to her boss, a giant asshole--or perhaps, more accurately, a giant dick. When he got angry with her, he sodomized her. She admittedly enjoyed this a bit, which was only part of why she was speaking to him in such a rude manner. The other part being that ‘rude’ was her default factory setting and no one had figured out how to get into the options yet.
He was clearly trying to ignore her, so she continued. “Turns out actually, yer mom was just a pervert professionally, which means yer a pervert, an’ you were such a stickler for rules ‘n’ order ‘cause you didn't want to turn out like her, but then you added fuckin' to it anyway cause the apple don't fall far from the tree.”
She didn’t not consider this to be an insult to his mother. It was treading the line, though, because that was what she did. It was enough to finally get a reaction out of him, however, a dour glare and a sharp admonition.
“I love my mother, and I am not ashamed of what she is. And what I do with my dick when I am not working is none of your business.”
Ren snorted, loudly, because nothing she did was ever quiet. “Right, cause it's working, what you do with me,” she said with a dark little laugh. “Part o' the job, right, that's why you do it.” Part of her actually suspected it was, despite her sarcasm. Obviously he enjoyed it, sadistic bastard, on a purely physical level. It was probably pretty emotionally satisfying for him to tan the hide of someone who caused him so much stress, too, but she personally thought that it probably didn’t go any deeper than that.
“If there's another way to make you behave, I have not found it yet,” he replied simply.
There was, of course. She could be given access to what she needed and allowed to do what she wanted. Then she would have behaved perfectly. But that sort of defeated the entire purpose, she was fairly sure.
“I'm like a wild animal,” she said blithely, taking another bite of reuben. “I wasn't designed to live in a cage. S’not my fault, it's in my nature. Just like how it's not yer fault yer solution to problems is to put your dick in it.” This was, as far as Ren could tell, his first solution to everything. She was often informed how she’d driven him to the end of his rope and left him without any other options but violent sodomy, but that certainly wasn’t how she remembered it.
“Like a rat, your natural state is pushing the boundaries of polite society until someone kills you for it, or possibly getting stolen by an owl,” Gareth replied snippily, and she bristled. As much for the insult towards rats as the insult to her. She was hypersensitive to accusations that she was some sort of beast, not fit for society, too dangerous to be allowed around normal people. This was unfortunate, because that very much was her boss’ opinion of her, so far as she could tell. He certainly told her often enough. It never stung any less. If anything, it stung more as time went by.
She kept thinking maybe he thought higher of her than when she’d started.
He never did.
“You the owl in this scenario?” she asked sourly, instead of cursing at him and/or insulting his mother, her two go-to methods for stress relief when she was angry with him. Not because he had anything against his mother, mind. She was a succubus and therefore more fun than him by definition. But it was the easiest way to get under his skin.
“No, I'm the man with the cage that feeds you and keeps the owls out,” he said pointedly. She rolled her eyes. Oh yeah, he was soooooo selfless.
“An’ puts his dick in me randomly, don’t forget that part.”
“If you don’t want my dick, I can keep it myself.”
She snorted again. “No, you can’t. It’s the,” she mimicked his voice mockingly, lowering hers as much as it could go and speaking in a stodgy sort of voice. “‘Only way you've found to make me behave.’” She glared over at him. “Plus everytime I bend over in this stupid skirt yer starin' at my ass and I dunno who you think yer kiddin'.” This was one of many reasons she hated the dress part of her uniform. It had taken him weeks of carrot-and-stick-ing her--his dick was both--to get her to wear it in its entirety even some of the time, and she hated every single second of it.
“Behave without dick and I will gladly stick it elsewhere.”
She scoffed, both because she didn’t believe him and because she didn’t want to. The implications were hurtful. “You got the ladies all linin' up to be spanked 'n' reamed, huh?”
“Yes,” he replied simply. She paused, squinting at him. Hard to believe. Who’d find that attractive? Or maybe he was less of a stuffy asshole outside of work? She couldn’t even imagine what he looked like in his downtime. He left every day at five PM, and presumably he went somewhere, but she had no idea where, or what he did. He seemed to live for work. Hell, they had sex on a pretty regular basis, and she’d yet to see him out of his uniform, even partially. Half the time she didn’t even see his dick.
“I gotta wonder what kinda ladies,” she said, trying to imagine the hypothetical person that would find an eight-foot-tall workaholic half-demon with a to-scale tree lodged up his ass attractive.
“A couple of very nice elves and a dwarf,” he responded, which didn’t even begin to answer her question, but did distract her.
“A dwarf?!” she exclaimed. “How she ain’t dead?!” Ren was hardly a giant herself, coming in a few inches past five feet, but she was no dwarf, and she struggled, quite literally, to contain his girth. Every inch was a practice in anticipation, fear, and stretching.
“Dwarves are extremely hardy,” he replied. It, too, did not answer her question, but she was imagining things now. They seemed painful. Or deadly.
“I’ll be...” she said, awestruck. “You sell tickets?”
“No,” said Gareth bluntly. “She’s very nice and sometimes she makes me dinner.” Ren felt something shift inside her, impressive mental images shoved aside to make room for the pressure on her gut. “It's not great because she's vegan, but it's the thought that counts.”
She was very nice and made him dinner. She was someone he enjoyed spending time with, put his dick in recreationally instead of as a form of punishment, or because it was the only thing he’d found she was good for. Her fingers tightened on her sandwich, which she was no longer eating.
“Hmph! Well, I see yer problem now, I'm keepin' you from all the real nice ladies in yer life!” she snapped, unclear on why she was suddenly so angry.
“Yes, exactly,” he said, a pleased little barely-there smirk on his lips.
She glared. She could feel a pressure building, one that could only be alleviated by yelling, violence, acting out, or rat-related shenanigans. She was trying to decide which one of them to go for.
“Anyway,” he continued. “Like I said. If you don't want me to fuck you just say so and I'll try something else.” She knew damn well he was full of it, because he’d repeatedly said that fucking her was his last ditch effort--though he may have been lying about that--and because he’d threatened to just let her hang on several occasions when fucking didn’t appear to be subduing her enough on its own. It was a terrifying, infuriating threat... because he could. Her keepers could, at any time, declare her a ‘lost cause’ and it would be back to the gallows for her. She knew her after-hours keeper would absolutely love to, which meant it was, at all times, just Gareth standing between her and a long fall from a short rope.
“Awright yeah!” she snarled, opting for yelling in an attempt to get the pressure out. “Let's try it with me fuckin' you instead; we'll just have to find somethin' bigger than the fuckin tree trunk you're used to havin' jammed up yer ass!” She felt better, slightly.
“See, now you're being belligerent again. And knowing you, you won't stop until you're full of dick.”
“I'm always belligerent!” she snapped. “It’s my natural state o' bein', like yers is a ginormous fuckwad!”
He fixed her with a look, one she was coming to recognize. It wasn’t bedroom eyes, because that would imply there had ever been a bedroom involved. It wasn’t quite a threatening look, but she felt threatened by it nonetheless. “You weren't belligerent when I was bouncing you in my lap by the neck,” he reminded her.
She fought a full body shudder and only half-succeeded. She did, in fact, remember. Vividly. She’d been facing him--a rarity in and of itself, as he normally preferred to rail her from behind, for whatever reason--straddling his lap as he sat sprawled out on chair designed to fit someone eight feet or taller. Straddling was perhaps not the right word, as it implied she had anything to do with her positioning. One hand on her hips, intermittently, sometimes thumbing her clit instead. The other hand wrapped entirely around her neck, a remarkable thing that he could do, thanks to how huge his hands were. And it was by that hand around her neck that he was forcing her up and down on his cock, using her whole body like a masturbatory aid.
That had been for repeatedly refusing to do the boring task he’d given her. He’d declared that if she was going to be wasting time, he had a better use for her. Then he’d done that. She hadn’t worked the rest of the day, but the next day she’d come right back and finished her work in a daze similar to the one threatening to overtake her now, if she spent any longer thinking about his cock and how it felt inside her, and how attractive he was when he was scary instead of just annoying and foppish.
“........Those were extenuatin’ circumstances,” she managed finally.
“Maybe I’ll try that again,” he mused, and she could feel the flush creeping along her neck, and lower. He smirked, just a little, probably at the look on her face. “C’mere.”
A small, traitorous part of her really wanted to. She’d often wondered what it would be like if she actually cooperated in having sex with him more. She couldn’t really imagine it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“No,” she said, crossing her arms. “I’m still mad at you.”
She was never not mad at him.
“But why?” he said, an obviously fake expression of surprise on his face. He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Could you be... jealous?”
That was it. She chucked the uneaten portion of her sandwich at him. He tilted his head to the side, and it missed him entirely, hitting the wall thanks to all the force she’d thrown it with. A rat scurried towards it, out of his line of sight. He was still smirking, a bit broader now. “Are you jealous of the girls who admit that they like my dick?” he mocked. “Because I have an easy solution.”
“Is it easier than fillin' yer closet with rats again, cause that's what I'm leanin' towards right now,” she snapped.
“Yes, because when I put them in cages you get distraught.”
“RATS DON'T BELONG IN CAGES, we been over this!” she yelled.
“Rats not in cages get eaten,” he reminded her. “And we let them out to play.”
Comparing her to rats was less dicey than most of his animal-related metaphors, but she still chafed a bit. She knew he didn’t think as highly of rats as she did.
“They're safer with me than in cages anyhow,” she grumbled. It was very true; she knew how to handle rats without the need for such ridiculous, inhumane treatment as cages, traps, and poison. If anything, the problem was that, much as with rats, no one had bothered to look at her as anything other than something that needed to be contained, controlled, or exterminated.
“Not if you put them in dangerous situations. Like my closet.”
“It'sa job hazard,” she said snidely. “Like yer dick.”
“Would you say that you're their boss?” he asked her, and she crossed her arms, frowning.
“I prefer to say we run a socio-anarchist hive of like-minded individuals,” she said, as rudely as she could. Some people didn’t need a strict and brutal class-based hierarchy to get things accomplished.
“Would you say that the rats listen to you when you tell them what to do?”
She shrugged. “I mean mostly. They're rats. They're kinda.” She waved her hand vaguely, before remembering that wasn’t technically a form of communication. “Finicky,” she said finally.
“Would you be pretty mad if a rat ignored everything you said to go eat some poison?” he asked, and she glared, seeing where he was going with this.
"That metaphor don't hold true, cause you think any time I break a rule it's eatin' poison.”
“You’ve exploded twice.”
“Just me, though!” she protested. That was within the acceptable explosion limits. She had been learning to mitigate explosion risks, mostly through relocating them to her person, because that way he couldn’t complain about her damaging equipment.
“The rat probably thinks you're being a drama queen about the delicious, delicious poison.”
She regretted having already thrown her sandwich. The only other things she had to throw were too large, too fragile, or too important. “Well if it wasn't poison, but delicious cheese, the rat would have a point!”
“The cheese is poisoned and you know it,” he said with a scoff. She glared. “But the rat won’t listen! The rat is tired of your rules!”
Okay, that actually happened sometimes, when she got too heavy-handed, but her reaction wasn’t to stick the rat in a cage! She didn’t even spank them, because who the fuck spanked rats.
“Well they'd be stupid rules if I went and outlawed all the cheese just cause they're poisoned like 78% of the time!” she snapped. Not that... that was a precise number she’d calculated for the cheese within the compound... or anything.
Look, when rats bring you cheese more than people, you have to learn to recognize which of it has probably been poisoned. If she got sick eating poisoned cheese left out for rats, she would never hear the end of it.
“That’s a lot of dead rats,” he pointed out, and she scowled, because he was misinterpreting her data. Rats were smart, they didn’t just eat all the cheese. And also! This was not about rats and cheese, it was a shitty metaphor for her and why she should submit to his iron-clad rules and not just his iron-hard dick. And as a metaphor it failed terribly!
“Maybe if I let the rat eat some cheese sometimes the rat wouldn't be so eager to jump on whatever poisoned cheese it could get!” she snapped, stamping her foot on the ground, an action which caused her ass to hurt, because sometimes it seemed like her ass would always hurt.
“I think I care about my rat more than you do,” he said, and she snorted. He didn’t care jack for her, except in all the ways he did, more than other people, but that wasn’t hard. Just by wanting her to not be dead, he managed to care more than other people, because pretty much everyone else, just, really wanted her dead. “I will continue to give my rat the safest muffins and hams.” She snorted again, but this time because that sounded just like him. If he could actually be persuaded to care about rats as individuals and stop seeing them as a vast, pooping hive-mind, he probably would feed them muffins and big, juicy hams.
He wouldn’t even feed her muffins and hams. He probably fed them to his girlfriends. Maybe if he gave her literal entire hams, she wouldn’t have to eat the questionable cheese her friends brought her--hey wait this was supposed to be a metaphor. And also that was the point of his metaphor. Why did his metaphor work better as reality than a metaphor.
She was not going to ask him for muffins.
There was a small chance he would actually give them to her, but an unacceptable risk that he would laugh at her. She would rather be muffinless then muffinless and mocked. If that happened, she would have to know, every minute of every day, that she could have been eating muffins if he didn’t hate her.
Also they were in the middle of a heated argument, or something.
“I think I trust my rat's judgement more 'n' you do,” she said, because it was true both of rats in general and of her in specific, and this was supposed to be a metaphor about her. “I think you treat yer rat like an idiot who can't be trusted around cheese.”
“That's because it keeps trying to shovel poison cheese into its mouth whenever I'm not looking.”
Well obviously. She grabbed desperately for any little freedoms she could get, no matter how small, whenever she got the chance to do so without being spanked--or punished by someone else in worse ways, because he wasn’t her only keeper. Only her other keeper saw to a number of people who were like prisoners only with varying levels of freedom, and their idea of hands-on interaction with an individual was instructing someone else to have her whipped.
She tried to articulate this within the metaphor of rats and cheese. “Because it's not bein' allowed any cheese! It's losin' it's mind! Rats can't live on muffins alone! Some cheese is necessary.”
“I think I tried to give my rat a safe cheese, and it responded by trying to take all of the cheese and some gratuitous cyanide. I think my rat is going to have to earn back limited cheese privileges.”
So people kept saying, but even when she was good--like with him, because she couldn’t stomach being good with anyone else--she had yet to earn back even a smidgen of precious “cheese.”
She gave up on the metaphor altogether, voice breaking into a frustrated whine. “But I ain't blown anything else up in weeks, just me.” Twelve days could technically be considered weeks. “I ain't even damaged a worktable cause everytime I do you declare it a 'fucktable' and we gotta fuckin' christen that shit.” There were worse things than being belted to a table and fucked, but it was a time sink and those worktables weren’t always in convenient locations.
“Don't blow up anything. Including you. Especially not when you're supposed to be helping assemble non-explosive equipment.”
She crossed her arms. He was speaking of her most recent explosion, which had happened yesterday. She still technically had burns from it, but they were hidden under her clothes so no one was fussing at her about it. She somehow imagined he’d be even more insufferable if he had tangible proof of the consequences of her actions. “It could be better,” she said instead, stubbornly.
“Your definition of better is explosive.”
“Nu-uh! That was just a side effect!”
“It was a parachute,” he said, sounding a bit strained.
“If I was allowed proper time t' experiment, like a civilized person, I could absolutely figure out the parachute improvements I'm workin' on with zero explosion risk.” She paused, doing some mental calculations in her head. “...Point five percent explosion risk. ...It’s a work in progress, is what I’m sayin’.”
“Then ask. Tell me what you’re trying to accomplish, and we will find time and work on it in a safe environment.” He sounded exasperated at this point.
“I tried askin’!” she protested. “They won’t let me in at the lab equipment unless you’re there.” They wouldn’t even just let him sign off on it. If it was just a signature, she might have risked asking. “An’ you keep goin’ home at five.” To his girlfriends. “I live here,” she grumbled. “I can’t just go home at five.”
She would kill another half-dozen people, on purpose this time, to be able to leave and go home at five.
“You haven't asked me to stay. I will stay and work on it with you. Obviously.” He ran a hand over his hair, a surefire indicator that he wanted to bend her over something and do something terrible to her out of sheer frustration. “Why didn’t you just ask?”
She blinked in surprise, wind temporarily taken out of her sails. What, just like that? Didn’t he have much better things to do than stay after work for hours so that she could do something interesting instead of being locked up in her room for 10 hours? Why would he do that?
This had potential.
But now she had to explain her “if you don’t ask they can’t give the humiliation of saying no” rationale.
“...I figured you'd say no to fuck yer vegan girlfriends or whatever,” she grumbled, face flushing slightly. She needed a better reason than that, because that sounded petty, even if it was true. “Also you'll probably stop me from doin' anything useful cause you always do that; I keep tellin' you I have to accept a small explosion risk for progress.”
“I will make time to help you with things that are important to you, and walk you through how to safely manage risk,” he said firmly. “It involves distance and blast shields.”
Her first instinct was to say that sounded very time-consuming. But she was learning--slowly--to consider her options before rejecting something outright. It helped that sometimes he gagged with things so she couldn’t talk right away. Because, the problem was she was made of time, after work. Even doing work slowly and kind of boringly was better than doing nothing at all.
“...Okay,” she said finally, arms still crossed. “...But if you get distracted fuckin' me, that don't count for my useful-shit time, ‘cause you said that counted as work!” She wouldn’t let that go any time soon.
“If we're working on your project, I won't punish you for getting distracted, because it's your time and you can do what you want with it,” he said, which didn’t seem to answer her question. He was the one who might get distracted. Maybe. She could, perhaps, have been flattering herself, but she did catch him staring at her sometimes. Especially when she had a limp due to a “work related injury,” which at this point was essentially just a nickname for his goddamn monster cock.
“We can fuck later, when you admit that you want me to fuck you,” he added, completely unnecessary. She flushed bright red and glared at him, seriously considering throwing something fragile at him.
“We was havin' a moment and you rubbed yer dick on it again,” she accused angrily, pointing a furious finger at him.
“You don't even have to wear your uniform, because it's off-hours,” he continued, completely ignoring her. That made her pause, though, her face losing its fury and turning excited.
“Wot? Really?” she exclaimed.
“Yes. All you have to do is ask me these things. I am right here and capable of being asked for things.”
“You keep sayin' no,” she said, pouting. She realized she was pouting, and attempted to switch it into a scowl. “How'm I supposed to know when yer gonna say yes and not just roll yer eyes like I'm bein' stupid...” Not that he had ever actually done that, but it was a persistent fear.
“I say no when you ask for things that are dangerous, or for things you're not allowed to do at work.”
“But that’s like, all of the things.” She wasn’t allowed to do anything fun. That was the entire problem, or at least a very large piece of it.
“It is not. It’s not, for instance, staying after work to help you with a personal project that you think might be helpful. ...Or even just staying after work so you don't have to stay alone in your room.”
She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth and chewed on it. A nervous habit. She was just self-aware enough to know she did it, and be annoyed by the tendency. “...It’s so borin’ in there,” she admitted miserably. “And then I use rats to steal somethin' interestin' and then they get mad at me like it's my fault there are rats everywhere. I mean, it is, but it's also their fault cause they won't let me do anything.”
“They don't let you do anything because you keep using rats to steal, and that does not engender trust,” Gareth chided.
“Why do I gotta be bored for a month so they'll stop bein' assholes!” she whined in response. “Why do they never do the trust thing first?”
“Because you lost your trust privileges before you even got here.”
“That’s not fair, though! They lost their trust privileges too, by kidnappin’ me!”
“I think they thought it would be kinder than killing you,” he said dryly, and she stiffened again. She’d never see this as a mercy, because they were the only reason she was slated to hang to begin with. Trumped up charges. Not exactly a first-time offender, but all her crimes up to that point had been normal homeless-kid stuff... petty theft, loitering, breaking and entering into sealed buildings and the like.
Her ‘yell and throw things’ instinct was acting up again.
She decided to try her words again, since that had a slightly better success ratio. And for some reason, she kept wanting him to understand her, even when he repeatedly didn’t. “That's not how it works, though!” she protested. “You can't just grab someone off the streets, tell them they're yours now and they have to stay put and do whatever with no reward for an undetermined period of time or you'll kill them and then be surprised when they hate you!”
“That's how it works when you commit deadly crimes that establish that you are unfit to safely function in society, and are a danger to normal people.”
Ah, yes. That was the reason she preferred being a hellion to communicating, in general. Using words led to more words, ones that were inevitably hurtful. Hitting all of her buttons like an obnoxious child in a lift. Unfit for society. A danger to normal people, meaning she was anything but.
“I committed one deadly crime and it was an accident that coulda happened to anyone, this is exactly what I mean!” she said, working her way back up to yelling again. “You all treat me like I'm a fuckin' serial killer!”
“It could not have happened to anyone,” Gareth disagreed, leaning back and raising an eyebrow. “You are literally the only person that has ever done what you did.”
She waved her hand, frustrated. “That’s just ‘cause no one else bothers to talk to rats.”
“We can't. That's just you. And I meant more of the dangerous theft of something that almost always explodes. Why did you think it was illegal?”
“It was not supposed to explode! And I stole tons of stuff that never exploded, you just never heard about those ‘cause it worked.”
“Is telling me that you stole huge amounts of things supposed to make it better?” he asked dryly. She paused, considering.
“......Yes,” she said finally. “Because I'm extendin' you trust that you won't be a dick about it. See.” She gestured between the two of them. “Trust exercise.”
“It has been added to the list of why you are dangerous to normal people, who just want to live their lives without worrying they will lose their stuff or explode.” Her scowl deepened. Normal people again. Must be nice to be normal and get protection instead of abuse. She wouldn’t know. “I don't think it's dickish to observe that.”
“I don’t steal from ’normal people’,” she snapped. “I steal from other thieves and also the government.” And occasionally some ultra-rich nobles, but they pretty much counted as government, in her opinion. They had nobility and more rights than everyone else, and got to hobknob and rub elbows--amongst other things, according to rumor--with the king. They also had more money than anyone really needed. “And if you think about it, isn't the government the biggest thief of all,” she added bitterly. She didn’t mean taxes, not really, although she was a bit bitter about that concept when all the government ever did for her was seek as many ways as possible to make it illegal for her to live. And to make it as difficult as possible for her to improve her station, despite her apparently being so useful she was worth kidnapping into forced labor.
“Other thieves will kill you without mercy if they catch you,” he pointed out. “Please don't try to argue for libertarianism with me. I pay my taxes because I enjoy roads.”
She rolled her eyes. It wasn’t libertarianism she argued for, it was anarcho-communism, which he’d know if he ever listened to her. It was a fine distinction, but one that was important to her, primarily because she’d had a lot of time to think about what she’d do differently when she was huddled up in an alleyway, freezing and starving and knowing full well that somewhere, there was someone, a lot of someones, who had seized the power to help her and then refused to.
“Well if all they did with it was roads, we'd be hunky-dory, wouldn't we?” she said sarcastically.
“Societies need more than roads to function,” Gareth pointed out, but she was already working her way up to a rant.
“If yer tryna tell me King McFuckWeed really needs all that shiny shit to be a proper leader, and nobles have more of a right to some shit than the rest of us... I mean, fer fuck’s sake! You can just grab me and fuck me against a table and even if I didn't like it, no one would care!” She knew this, intimately well.
“I would care, and if you were nicer to the other employees they would also care. They probably care anyway. I don't know if you've talked to them about it.” She paused, looking momentarily guilty, glancing down and to the side. “...Have you?”
“...I talked to Smithers about it,” she admitted. He was the boss’ assistant, and it had been fucking hard enough just to get in to see him. She’d actually just had some rats stalk him and then basically jumped him in order to get a word in edgewise. She couldn’t petition for an appointment without, guess what, going through one of her keepers. “But he said if I made a formal complaint, you might get fired.” Not that legal charges would be brought, mind, or that she would get anything in the form of apology, reimbursement for suffering, et cetera. Just that he might get fired. At the very least, he’d be reassigned.
“Yes. Because there are systems in place here to keep you safe if someone is hurting you. I am not supposed to hurt you.” He paused, this apparently being too much of a truth-stretch for even him. “Much,” he edited.
“It wouldn't even do me any good, cause I'd still be stuck here. Because there's no policy for 'well you keep gettin' fucked, sorry, our bad, we'll let you go as an apology,” she grumbled.
“No, but they would get you a new supervisor that won't touch you. Would you like me to not touch you?”
Like it even mattered. “They would get me a new supervisor that wasn't supposed to touch me sexually, an' how am I supposed to know if he'd even stick to that?” She waved her hand, frustrated. “Could be even worse. At least when you do it I li-” She managed to catch herself mid-sentence. She flushed, both embarrassed and angry with herself for the almost-admission.
“I'm pretty sure they'd transfer over Trinh, because she is asexual and also physically incompatible, but please continue,” he said, managing not to look too smugly amused, given they were mostly discussing her life, or lack of it.
“...my point,” she managed. “Is that as you keep pointin' out, my supervisor has the ability to declare me a lost cause and suddenly I'm a firm nod away from the end of the rope. Trinh, whoever the fuck that is, might decide I'm not worth keepin' around ‘cause she doesn't wanna stick her dick in me, and then where am I? Dead that's where.”
“You're allowed to argue your side,” he protested, as if any system with death at one end of it and the power all on one end could be fair and balanced. “If you've been working hard and you can find employees to vouch for you, you can defend yourself. It's only a problem if, hypothetically you've been a huge bitch to everyone and haven't managed to get a single thing done.”
She shouldn’t have to work hard and curry favors to not die, was her point. But she was tired, and frustrated, and sore, and it was just, looking so much easier to go back to ‘harassing people with rats and not expecting them to try and understand her.’ “That’s my point,” she said with a sigh, instead, slumping back on her chair. “No one else’s gonna put up with that.”
“If you just did the bare minimum,” he suggested. “You could get rid of me forever, and never be touched by me again.”
Oh, yeah, that sounded grand. A life full of dullery and boredom without the only thing that bothered to try managerial techniques other than corporal punishment and solitary confinement. She didn’t say that, though, because it sounded too much like a compliment. Instead, she just said, “Dun wanna.”
This was not enough to discourage him, it seemed.
“I think... you like me,” he teased, leaning forward slightly. She flushed angrily.
“I think I hate workin’.”
“I think you like it when I fuck your brains out.”
She flushed darker. She liked when he swore, when he was filthy, because it seemed more right, more like how a person who looked like him should be. Or maybe that was racist. Maybe she also just liked someone who was normally so uptight and stodgy dragging himself down on the base level with the rest of them. It was why it was sort of nice to think of him as someone who could lust after her; it made him more... well, human was the word, but that was definitely racist.
“No,” she said shortly. “Cause that'd be stupid because that's just work and no one would be stupid enough to like someone who only fucked them for work.”
“I told you. If you want me to stay after work, all you have to do is ask. And if you want me to fuck you outside of work, then do your job, and then ask me to stay and fuck you, and I will take you on a picnic so that you and the rats can enjoy the weather while I eat you out somewhere nice.”
She was probably bright crimson at this point, and didn’t even know which part was affecting her the most. The idea that she might ask him to fuck her outside of work, the idea of a picnic outdoors, or the turn of phrase and implication he’d be eating her on the picnic. She stumbled mentally, momentarily at a loss for words. It didn’t happen often.
“W-well, you're at least stayin' after work. So I can do stuff,” she mumbled finally.
“Is that asking? Is that what asking sounds like? I am genuinely asking because I can't tell with you and I won't stay if I'm not wanted.”
She glared, but it was a glare full of distress. “You already agreed!” she exclaimed, voice sounding mildly devastated. If talking around in circles had lost her that smallest, most precious of exceptions, she would never try it again.
“Okay!” he exclaimed, either surprised or exasperated by her hurt. “Okay. I will stay and help you with your exploding parachute. Okay?”
Phew. That was way too close.
She leaned onto the table, missing the last few bites of sandwich she’d chucked at him. They never fed her enough. Her secondary keeper had mentioned something about her caloric intake being calculated by her body mass. She took that to mean, she was fuckin’ small, so she didn’t get much food. The problem was, she’d been malnourished her whole life and was fully capable of eating an entire buffalo if allowed. ...Plus, her dinner had been the first thing to get struck down to punishment minimums. The only reason her lunches were so nice was because the work cafeteria was in charge of those. And even then, they weren’t enough.
“I should emphasize,” she said with a sigh. “S’not supposed to explode. It did that ‘cause I used the wrong gear box. Ideally, it’d let out a small downwards thrust upon opening, in order to minimize the jolt to the user.”
“That sounds like a great idea and I will be happy to help you with it.” She didn’t let out a pleased hop, because she did not do that outside the company of rats and rats only. She kept very strict control over her own body language, which was probably part of why she just glared at everything. “Would you like to help me fix this glider now? Will you let me tell you how I want it done instead of trying to do your own thing?” Like that, for instance. She glared at that. “If you think my way is wrong, then you can explain to me why you think it is wrong.”
She considered. “...Awright,” she said finally, grudgingly. “Can my rat that I know I'm not supposed to have but have anyway watch. His name is Timothy and he likes shiny things.” He was in her skirts, because she had to fucking wear skirts, and they didn’t come with pouches or pockets like her pants or belts.
Gareth eyed her, but then relented. “Yes, as long as he stays in a safe zone and not in or on the glider. He sounds nice,” he added, which struck her as probably being intended to be condescending.
“Okay. He’s pretty well behaved, on account o’ how he already lost a leg goin' where I told him not to.” Because she didn’t just lock rats up when they did stuff she didn’t like. “He's kind of an idiot for shiny things,” she admitted. “I'm makin' him a new leg.” Because just because he was kind of an idiot didn’t mean she shouldn’t try to help.
“...I see,” Gareth said. “Will he want some of this muffin?”
Hell, she wanted some of that muffin. She was still hungry. “You know damn well neither of us will ever say no to a muffin.”
“I made it. It's a cheesy corn muffin, with ham bits.”
She snorted, then giggled. She couldn’t help herself. Then she started laughing more in earnest. Gareth fixed her with a puzzled, mildly pre-offended look. Because if she was laughing, it was at him, not with him.
“Th-that's cause....” she attempted between gigglefits. “You insist on.... puttin' yer meat in everything pfffahahahahaha!”
“And you like it,” he said with a smirk, making her blush but not enough indignation to make her stop laughing. “...But don’t make this weird when I’m giving Timothy a muffin.”
“Pfffft.” She reached down towards the hem of her skirt, and Timothy popped out under the table and climbed onto her hand. She brought him up to the top of the worktable, still chuckling. “Can you even imagine? Your head is like bigger than his entire body, how would that even work.” She was not talking about the head on his shoulders. “Timothy is the only one here safe from yer meat,” she said, still giggling wildly.
“Please just eat the muffin,” he said, somewhat desperately.
“Heheh, awright. C’mere, Tim, try his muffin.” She giggled again, bringing her hand towards Gareth’s so Timothy could inspect the muffin. “He likes it when you moan while eatin’ it,” she advised, grinning.
“If you keep making innuendo toward the rat I will change my mind about staying here,” he said dryly. She was fairly certain he was joking. It was very hard to tell with him.
“Awwwwwww,” she whined. He never let her do anything fun.
“There is one living thing in this workshop that I like to hear moan,” he added, and she flushed a bit more.
“...Rats moanin’ would be creepy anyway,” she admitted.
“Yes. Yes it would.”
There was a moment’s silence as they both watched Timothy, perched on Ren’s fingertips and muching on chunk of muffin in Gareth’s palm.
His hands were huge compared to hers.
She kind of liked them, if she was being perfectly honest, which she hated doing. Wrapped around her neck or tangled into her hair or pushing into her, mouth or cunt or anywhere, really.
“So this vegan dwarflady of yers,” she said idly, watching as Timothy cleaned up the remaining crumbs, climbing briefly onto Gareth’s hand to do so. She kept hers raised, so he would have an escape route if he wanted. “If she’s vegan, how can she stomach yer meat?” Ren asked with a wicked little grin.
“She'll only eat animal products from animals that ask her to. It limits her options.”
“Ohhhhh,” Ren said, nodding. This made perfect sense. “So since you ask her to eat yer products...”
“Yes.”
She laughed again. Ridiculous.
“Awright,” she said with a sigh as Timothy scurried back onto her hand. She set him down on the safest corner of the workbench. She’d be much more careful with someone important nearby, anyway. She cracked her fingers, stretched her back a bit, then tucked her feet underneath the stool and leaned forward on her very soft cushion. “Let's look at this fuckin' glider an' see how bad you fuckwads shitted it up this time.”
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Storytime [Read Only] - by SolitareLee - 03-27-2017, 08:15 AM
RE: Storytime [Read Only] - by SolitareLee - 03-27-2017, 08:25 AM
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