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A Serg makes an ill-advised deal for power
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"It is seriously completely fine. Buy whatever you want. Buy six of whatever you want in case you lose the first five. I am too rich to care."

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"Thank you," she says. "That's... good to know. I think I'll be fine with this for now, though I suppose if you wanted to give me some emergency cash when we get back that would probably be helpful."

She lets him purchase the items, puts them in a plastic bag, and picks them up to take back to the apartment. 

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He shrugs. Since she mentioned emergency cash, he stops at an ATM on the way out.

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Dani blushes a little when she sees how much he takes out, but she's certainly going to accept it anyways. Right now she's not entirely sure what's going on, and cash will give her a good way to get elsewhere in case things go sideways. She hopes they don't go sideways though. 

She lets him lead her back to the apartment. Once inside, she puts the cold-cuts in the fridge, and finally tears open the notebooks and pens. She clicks a pen a couple of times and immediately relaxes, feeling the mental equivalent of finally scratching an itch, one she didn't even realize she had. 

She sits down in one of the comfy chairs, with a notebook, clicks the pen a few more times, and looks up at Sean. "Alright," she tells him. "I'd like to know what's going on. Tell me what you think is important, in whatever order you choose -- I'll ask clarifying questions as I need to." 

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He starts pacing.

"Okay, I fucking hate how much shit I have had to hide and talk around and lie about this week, so I'm just gonna tell you everything and see what happens. Last weekend I moved here to start college, and two minutes after I walked in the door of this apartment, some weird guy showed up and offered me literal magical powers. He said if I took them I'd owe him a favour—actually he just said he'd ask for one, didn't actually say I'd have to do it—anyway, the power is complete control of anything I own. It works on things and people that are on my territory—and all the territory I have right now is my car—but all he said about it working on people otherwise is that they have to like, 'consider themselves' mine? He did not mention that for some fucking reason I also have to fuck them—anyway. I took it. And I figured out how to make that little room in the back of my car, and went out for a drive, and waited until I found somebody who looked like she needed a ride, and offered her one, and while she was in my car I took her into the back and raped her and then wiped her memory so she'd have no idea it ever happened. She still doesn't, I've got a date with her tonight. She's really cute."

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His story sounds rather unbelievable, of course, but she's seen the magic with her very own two eyes, so she has no particular reason to disbelieve him. She takes quick notes about what he's sayings, (in shorthand, which she apparently knows, no wonder the pen feels so good in her hand like this), circling things she wants to ask clarifying questions about. Especially whatever is going on with how owning people works. Everything more or less seems reasonable (even if magical) until he gets to the part about the girl. And the rape. And date. The part about the date makes her angry, and frown.

She clicks the pen a few times. There isn't anything she can do to stop him, not overtly anyways. There's no reason to not act cordial around him, especially given that she's reliant on him for everything at the moment. But it's suddenly much more important to her to get an emergency stash of money. And perhaps he needs to be in her proximity to control her? Perhaps if she considers herself not to be his anymore, hard enough, she won't be under his control? She does her best to suppress a shudder. Not something to test when that could make her turn back into what she was before. These were things to test later, for now she still needs to find out details of the current situation. But, still, the girl...

"I... see," she says. "That's... I can see why you might not have wanted to talk about that outside in public. Are you planning to hurt her again? Are you planning to hurt anyone else? Did you not 'claim' her, like you did me?" 

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"No, I didn't claim her—I can only claim people who agree to it, and I didn't even have half a clue how it worked at that point—I'll get to that. Anyway, I hunted some more that night and raped somebody else, then the next day I went to orientation and met some more cute girls and one incredibly annoying girl, and the incredibly annoying girl asked me out, so when I picked her up for our date I took her into the back and told her I'd torture her until she swore to be mine—that's when I learned I could read minds—and that's when I found out about the tattoo and the slave feelings, and I gave her back her normal mind for a bit because mind control I didn't ask for pisses me off, and she turned out to have a huge kink for being owned anyway, so I put her back like she'd just gotten into the car and wiped her memory back to there and grabbed her and fucked her face and turned the slave feelings back on, and she just thought she felt that way because it was so hot how I took what I wanted without asking, and—"

He's pacing a little faster now.

"She's so much less annoying when she realizes that sometimes people want things other than the exact same things that she wants, and I really like owning her, it's great, but it's—I went out hunting again afterward, caught someone else, and... I still raped her and I still enjoyed it but I wanted to own her and I couldn't, I couldn't get her to agree, and—I think I'm done hunting like that, because I want to own people so much more than I want to just hurt them, and because I fucking hate lying and I have to do so much lying to rape someone and then send them off not remembering it ever happened."

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Dani wants to interrupt several more times, but after the first couple she realizes he just wants to get all of this out, and lets him, scribbling notes in shorthand to keep pace with what he's saying. It's... quite a lot to take in. Sean is pacing there confessing to essentially being a serial rapist with his magic powers, and he's keeping and controlling another girl to do with as he pleases. It doesn't matter that she's annoying (whatever that means), it doesn't matter that she turned out to be into it, what he's doing still feels very wrong to Dani and she does not want to let that happen to anyone else, she wants to stop him and free whoever he's taken if she can. Even though he's telling her he doesn't plan to do it again, his reasoning could change later, she still feels like she has to do something

But she still doesn't presently have much leverage to do anything about this. And he could be reading her mind without telling her anyways. But still, even though this seems to be a better class of monster than the man who did things to her before, he's still clearly a monster. She burns to confront him, to try and stop him. But... right now it's clearly much better to be cautious, gather information, and wait, and figure out what she could do. 

"I'm... glad to hear that," she says, slowly, when he pauses for a moment. "So then what happened?" 

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"I... kept flirting with girls I want to own, and didn't rape anybody else, and—well, then I saw you. I don't even think I was seriously hunting, but you were so fucking weird I had to get you in the car just to figure out what was going on, and, well, you remember what happened—and—dammit I didn't even want to fuck you I just couldn't leave you like that, it's so fucked up, I couldn't—"

He stops pacing abruptly and sits down heavily on the couch, cradling his head in his hands.

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Him feeling guilty and needing comfort was probably a good sign. In a sense. Dani waffles for a moment, debating whether or not she should go comfort him, but decides that it would probably be in her best interest. And being his friend might convince him to be... less horrible, and help him confide in her more. And being a comforting confidant was certainly a role she could continue to play.And he does look pretty despondent there, even if he is a monster.

She gets out of her chair, goes over to where he's sitting, and hugs him, gently, doing her best to ignore the parts of her brain that are flashing danger signals at her now that she knows more about him than she ever expected to. "Thank you," she tells him. "I know it was awkward, and painful, but I'm still very very grateful to you for doing it." She really was, no matter what. Spending the rest of her existence inside that plastic thing would have been... "Thank you for pushing through it, and saving me. You did well."

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He sighs softly, and leans into the hug a little.

"You don't—you don't have to comfort me," he says. "It's not like I have any problems I didn't completely bring on myself. I just—people keep not trusting me and they're fucking right not to, and I can never tell them that, and—it's not worth it. It's not fucking worth it."

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"I don't have to, but I want to," she says. It was more complicated than that, but technically true. "It does seem like you have some, well, unusual problems. If you want to have someone you can tell things to, well, you have me now." She hugs him a little tighter, and then lets him go. "If you want to take a few minutes, or more, feel free. I do have a bunch of further questions I want to ask, if you're ok with that, and I can comfort you some more if you want."

Dani is... well, a bit confused by the change from his description of himself as a rapist to what she has now in front of her. He seems to regret at least some of what he's done, even if in strange ways. There's no particular good way to get him to be punished for his crimes, at this point -- especially since apparently none of the victims remember it. But perhaps she can help make sure he doesn't ever do it again. And convince him to free the poor girl he was keeping as his slave at the moment. She isn't entirely sure how she's going to go about doing that, but she has to try. For everyone else's sake. And, honestly, her own -- making sure he regretted his actions and never did them again was possibly the best way to make sure he never decides to do the same to her. And then wipe her memory of it. (Which, she supposes, he could have done already, though she has no way to know that other than taking him at his word.)  

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He lifts his head and looks up at her.

"Most people who heard all that would want to call the cops on me or something," he says. "It's not—I don't—listen, if you think I'm fucked up just tell me I'm fucked up, okay? I don't want—you shouldn't feel like you have to be nice to me just because I helped you, or just because I could fuck you up if I felt like it, or whatever. I'm not gonna do anything to you. I'd stop you if you tried to go to the police, but I'm not gonna hurt you just because I can or because you told me what you really think of me or whatever."

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Dani mentally curses at herself -- clearly she wasn't acting like he he expected her to, she was being far too kind to him too soon. And now he's, well, not exactly suspicious, but certainly wary of what she's doing, questioning her reasoning behind her actions. And he was essentially telling her to tell him he was fucked up. Which, well, didn't exactly hurt her plans, such as they were, the way he was going about asking. But they didn't exactly help either. She had to give him something so that she seemed, well, more in line with what he expected. She chose her next few words carefully. 

"I think this situation... I don't think the police could do much, even if they believed me," she tells him. "You don't seem like you're going to do anything to me, at least at the moment, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I wasn't scared of you doing something similar to me, especially since I likely have no way to stop you." She gives him a wan smile. "But given that you did save me, and that you do seem to be going through some things about it, and trying to become better, well, I'm certainly glad to help with that." Well, super clumsy, she supposes -- clearly this sort of thing wasn't her strong suit, before. But hopefully good enough? 

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"I'm not... trying to become better. I just wanna stop lying all the damn time."

It's strategically indefensible that he's not reading her mind right now, but fuck it, he's so tired. And maybe if he explains where he's coming from well enough she'll express a genuine feeling of her own volition. Stranger things have happened.

"And if I'm not going to lie to people, and I can only own them if they agree, then either I force them into it like I did Valerie or—I offer people enough to make it worthwhile. And... man, even Valerie, I didn't feel okay putting the slave feelings back until it was clear her normal self liked them. Anybody else—if I like them enough to want to keep them, I like them too much to mind-control them into wanting to be kept. So, again, if I don't want to lie to people about what I'm doing to them, I have to just... actually not do things they're not okay with."

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Nope she was wrong. It was too clumsy by far. And she was also wrong about the ways in which he felt guilty. And now he's justifying to himself, or to Dani, or to both of them, what he'd done to poor Valerie. "Not doing things people aren't ok with" was a... start, in a way, but it wasn't motivated by guilt, or at least not guilt about anything but lying. Dani tries to keep her emotions under control, but she is very much worried at the moment. He can do anything to her. Dani is pretty certain, at this point, he isn't reading her mind, or he wouldn't be reacting quite like this, but he could probably start at any time. She needed to get him to stop doing what he's currently doing. This meant, at this moment, figuring out how to be on reasonably friendly terms with him, at least for the moment, so he didn't decide to say fuck it and rape her or take her memory away again. (And, thinking about that, she needs to start hiding notebooks, if she manages to get out of this somehow, to make sure he wasn't regularly wiping her. She was in way over her head. Shit.) But she can't figure out the steps for how to do that. Shit. 

"Okay," she says slowly. "I'm glad, at least, that you're not going to do as many bad things, whatever the reason." Yup, that was way too awkward, she was fucked.

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"See, that's a reasonable fucking opinion!"

He flops back against the couch and sighs, rubbing his face with both hands.

"Ugh, I just—I'm not reading your mind right now because I'm trying not to cheat at all my problems with magic for once, but it turns out that apparently when I don't cheat at my problems with magic I still have problems, who'd have thought—"

He takes a deep breath.

"Okay. Let me just... try to explain what's going on here, because I think I've been doing a really shitty job of that. First of all—I fixed you because I wanted to. Not because it was the right thing to do or whatever, not for any reasons that are about wanting to be good, because I don't want to be good, I never have—just because it's really upsetting to me personally that somebody did that to you, and I wanted to fix it, and I could. And to make it permanent I had to make you mine, but—you don't owe me anything for that, I wasn't doing it so you'd thank me, and I don't expect you to be grateful, I don't expect you to feel any particular way about it, you can feel however the fuck you want to. And—I'm serious about taking care of you because you're mine, but you don't owe me anything for that either. I'm not going to hurt you, not on a whim, not if you make me mad, not for any fucking reason, because I—because it's not—because when I made you mine I didn't tell you what kind of person I am, I didn't tell you I might hurt you, and that's—that matters. I'm, I, I know it's not okay to hurt people, and I don't need it to be, when I hurt people it's because I feel like it and I don't need a better reason—but lying about it really fucks me up, it turns out, and if I hurt you after the way we met I'd be making myself a liar. I'd be—it'd just be true, then, that nobody should ever trust me to have power over them again, because no matter what my reasons were or how sincerely I was trying to deal fairly with them at the time, I might just decide to fuck them over later anyway. And I cannot fucking deal with that. I just—fucking—I just want to be able to tell the truth and be believed about it—"

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Dani is really not entirely sure what to say to all of this. He's essentially describing a code of honor that he has, in some sense -- or at least, a sense of honor that he wants to keep because it feels bad to him otherwise. And it doesn't really feel like he's trying to justify himself, anymore, to her -- he's just trying to describe who and what he is. Even if that's a monster. Well, some kind of weirdly principled monster. Who seems to keep telling her that he cares most about various forms of truth. And at this point, well, if he keeps on talking like this, Dani is more or less inclined to believe him. 

She's not entirely sure what to do with this knowledge, though. He's being rather adamant about not wanting to hurt her, to keep from, in some sense, having previously lied to her about who he was. Or at least, how he would act around her. Which... well, she still couldn't know for sure, but given that he seemed really clear about telling the truth, and not wanting to go back on his word, was somewhat relieving. She still wasn't 100% certain if he actually wouldn't get angry enough to do something by accident, later, no matter what he was saying, but it seemed like he'd probably at least regret it. Which, she supposed, probably gave her a little bit more breathing room to work and say things in. 

But if the idea was to get him to stop... well, there wasn't any chance of that happening. But if he valued truth so highly... Dani mentally sighed. She still had so much trouble thinking, with all her memories gone. Even with a pen in her hand (which continued to help a lot), it was hard to put pieces together sometimes. And she wasn't doing a very good job of this. If he wasn't going to go and attack her for saying things... 

"I'm... glad you're not going to hurt me, and I still am grateful you saved me," she says, "it would be rather difficult for me not to be, whatever your reasons. But I'm... not very much a fan of what you've been doing. Before we started this conversation, my goals were to figure out what was going on and see if there was some way I could get my memories back. Or see if there was some way I could find and defeat whoever did... that. To me. And now... well, I am trying to figure out how to get you to stop." She takes a deep breath and winces, waiting for the backlash. 

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The backlash does not arrive. He just sighs with relief and smiles slightly. "Yeah, that's fair," he says. "I mean, I don't especially plan on being stopped, but it's not like I don't get where you're coming from."

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Well, that's... something, at least. He just wants her to be honest. At least for her to be genuine. 

She really wants to take this opportunity to scream at him, and yell at him for everything he's been doing, but she still doesn't know how she can go about convincing him of anything. The only thing he seems to care particularly strongly about so far is truth and honesty, and she doesn't even know where to begin with using that to try and convince him that maybe raping and mindwiping people and reading their minds and keeping them as slaves is... something he shouldn't be doing. She feels wholly unqualified for this job, but it's not like there's anyone else who can do anything about it. He already knows that it's wrong to do what he's doing, but he simply doesn't seem to care. And Dani doesn't know how to make him care. 

Well... fine. As long as things stay stable, as long as he still wants to keep taking care of her and helping her out of whatever strange sense of honor and duty he has, well, she can always pursue her other goals. Like finding out more about magic. And well, if finding out more about magic leads to her finding someone who can stop him, as well as someone who can give her her memories and her life back, well. So much the better. It made her feel sick, a little bit, planning to betray the person who essentially saved her from a much worse fate. But he was still hurting people. And if Dani couldn't figure out some way to stop him herself, well, maybe she could find someone who could. 

"I don't really see how I can get you to stop, though", she says. "That's the problem. But as long as you aren't going to hurt me, well, I can try to figure out how to get my memories back in the meantime." 

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"Works for me," he says. "And, seriously, if you wanna try to talk me out of hurting people, feel free. I don't expect it to work but I'm not gonna blame you for trying. Just—man, I don't know. I guess I already kind of talked myself out of hurting people, so maybe it's easier than I think it is? Fuck, I'm confused."

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"I'll... probably try and do that at some point," says Dani. When she knows him better. Or has some magical way to convince him to stop. Or when it's more urgent, because he does seemed to have talked him out of it, thank goodness. "But for now it seems like you're doing less bad things than you have been, and that will have to do for now. In the meantime..." She picks her notebook back up and goes to sit back down in the chair, looking at him, clicking her pen. "For now, I have, well, a bunch of questions, if you don't mind?" 

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"Go for it."

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Dani quickly reviews her notes. "Well, to start with... you mentioned you got this magic from someone who just showed up after you got to your apartment. Is there... any way to talk to him again? Have you had any other experiences with magic besides, well, me? Or any way to go about finding it?" Her most important most pressing question, the only way she could think of to get her memory back at the moment, even though she had a rather good guess at what the answer was. Unfortunately. 

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"No, no, and no," he admits. "I didn't even know for sure there was magic other than mine until I found you. Like, it might've been obvious if I'd thought about it, but I didn't."

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