voidtreckernet | Orchestra 31

I had a suspicion you had something to do with that. [His voice is gently appreciative as he says that.] I'll see you there. Or in the one to the right.

[Sure enough, he hurries right there-- well, via a detour through the kitchen, first. The room with the flowers is vacant, at least until he plants himself in there, placing a tray with a kettle and fixings for tea on the table. He drops some herbal tea in to steep before sitting down to wait.]

[Persephone takes a little while to get there, trying to avoid certain people on the way and spending an amount of time just standing in front of the door. Opening the door means being in person. Which means actually talking about it--or at least having to mention what it's kind of about. Which sounds awful. It sounds like the last thing she wants to do.

She's not sure why she still opens the door, but the smell of steeping herbs is comforting. She quickly closes and locks the door behind her, glancing up at the light to part the flowers a little and brighten the room up.]

Um--hi. [She sits down, then fidgets with one of the cups laid out.] You didn't have to go to all this trouble.

Maybe not, but I wanted to. I can tell this is really hard for you. [He glances at her and offers a faint, knowing smile.] Talking about painful stuff usually is, yeah?

Yeah...yeah--some of it is way easier than others. Like some things hurt but in a way that you can share. And some. Some aren't.

[Her hair has been growing through this whole call and all and now it's creeping down her back and over her shoulders.] Um. I guess I should ask if you're comfortable talking about like. Like. I don't know what to call it. I know what my friend called it but I'm sure there's some professional term that I don't know. [Persephone pokes at the cup]

[His eyes keep flickering to her hair. This is the first time he's ever seen it do anything like that, and it's hard not to be fascinated. Hard-- but not impossible. He was a real good first responder in the Guard before he got moved into the combat division.

As soon as the discrete timer ticking down in his Interface goes off, he picks up the teapot and pours into his cup. He holds it out to her.] Can you give me just a hint what it is?

[Persephone accepts the pot, pouring a cup and holding it in her hands. It takes a great deal of concentration not to awaken those herbs in the pot, to not send the flowers around them into overdrive. Her power itches as her emotions heighten and it's all she can do to hold it back.]

Um. Um--[She dips her head, her longer hair falling in her face] Sex. It's okay if you don't feel comfortable--I can go.

Edited 2021-12-31 06:01 (UTC)

[He-- laughs, a harsh, humorless laugh. He can't help it. He puts down his cup with a click and slaps a hand over his mouth to stifle it, because he knows that's probably the last thing she needs to hear right now.] Fuck-- sorry-- you have no idea--

He forces a deep breath and looks right at her.] You can talk to me about sex. What happened?

[A shock of hurt and betrayal splashes over her face as he laughs. She starts to stand as he speaks, apologizes, and very slowly, she sits back down. Without thinking, she pulls a big hank of hair over her shoulder, holding it like it'll bring her some kind of comfort]

I...Eros, the friend who told me to talk to someone, he said...[She breathes in like it hurts, like she forgot to breath and lets it out slowly] He said I was raped. He--I let him see what Apollo did in my mind, with his powers, and he said it was rape. [It's so much easier to phrase it that way. She's not claiming it was anything. Eros did. He saw what happened and said it, not her.]

[He listens, quiet and attentive, and only prompts gently:] What did Apollo do?

[She doesn't look up from the cup of tea now]

Well. He--we'd just met that day and he had been really invested in me liking him, I guess. And I was trying, he was my roommate's twin. And he was--I guess touchy feely. I like hugs and touching and all that--but it was just.

[Deep breath] We were watching a movie. And I went to bed before everyone else and he was supposed to leave, I think, when my roommate went to work. But instead he came and woke me up. And he acted like I was...like I'd been flirting with him, like this was an inevitable conclusion to the day. I keep thinking about it, you know. Like what did I do to make him think that. He kept thinking it too, that I was into him, long after this night.

[She barely stops for a breath now, speaking quickly. Almost like if she stops, he'll break in and tell her she's crazy. Her words are thick with tears, though he probably can't actually see her crying with her hair in her face.]

He kept bugging me, kissing me, and I told him no, I was supposed to be this--this sacred virgin and he kept pushing. And I--I just gave in. I said okay. I--you probably don't even know what this is supposed to be, a sacred virgin. I wasn't supposed to have sex ever or relationships or any of that. I wasn't even supposed to be in the same room as men unchaperoned. And I realized I didn't want that and he was there and he acted like I had been leading him on, so I just let him. I didn't do anything, I stopped pushing him away. And by the time I realized I wanted it to stop, I couldn't make myself do anything.

A-And then he just left. And now--and now I freeze all the time. I want things now, I really do, but I keep freezing and it's--it's infuriating.

[Devero doesn't break in, and he definitely doesn't tell her she's crazy. In fact, his expression just gets progressively more and more drawn as she speaks and describes what is perfectly obvious to him as an acquaintance rape. Such things are less common on his world than they used to be, but not unknown.

Certainly not unknown.]

Oh, Persephone. [His deep voice is full of heartbreak for her. His hands fix hard around the cup lest he reach out, which is really kind of what he wants to do right now.]

He violated your consent, love. Repeatedly. Your friend Eros is right about that. And it sounds like he's been gaslighting you about it since, if he's been acting since like you were into that with him.

[He holds out his hands now, palms up.] It sounds like you're having trauma responses now, freezing up. That's natural.

It--it's been almost a year and I'm so... I'm so tired of feeling like I can't get away from him. The moment I left, the moments before I arrived here, he was threatening to force me to marry him and I--I'm terrified to go home.

He--I told him I didn't like it. That it couldn't happen again. And he told me we just--that we needed practice. [There's fury in her voice, the audacity. That he followed her to school and then acted like she'd be grateful for the opportunity to have sex while Artemis was away] And he was always freaking there in Artemis's house. And even when he wasn't there--I worried he would show up any moment. I had to worry about being pregnant or catching something. And I still have to think about him, even here. [Her voice rises as she speaks, louder and higher. Something about the plants around them seems to shimmer, move] I still have to deal with the fallout and I wish--I just--I can't get away from him!

[The vines around them had been an equal mix of leaves and flowers, mostly covering the windows and ceiling. Now it's 90 percent flowers and had crawled down the walls in the space of a few breaths.] Um, sorry.

[The atmosphere in the room changes, and a chill shivers up Devero's spine. Once so blind to magic, he's begun to be able to sense it-- and he can sense it now, in the way the plants rustle and the flowers open like staring eyes as her voice gets louder and sharper in her anger. He can feel it, and it makes him feel small.

But he doesn't look away from her. And what he sees, as her righteous anger spills out of her and into her flowers, is glorious.]

I'm terrified to go home too. [He picks up his cup again, this time exclusively to have something to fiddle with between his big hands. Only now does he look away.] She's waiting for me. A woman who I-- thought-- loved-- well, I loved her, anyway. She was using me. T...terrorizing me, so I would comply with what she wanted, so that I would lay down on my back and let her use my ass, my mouth, my body as a fucking--

[He hesitates, and just a glimmer of anger peeks through. This is another thing he's learned since boarding the train, like he's learned about magic: how to be angry at her instead of himself.] --A fucking bribe!

[His fingers close around his teacup so tightly that there's a tink as the delicate porcelain fractures. He inhales, then looks again at her.] He's terrorizing you. He wants you to be thinking about him all the time; he wants you off-balance and obsessed with him, even if what you're obsessing over is how to avoid him.

[It explains more than it doesn't. The reason he laughed, the person he was just as scared of seeing. Persephone reaches out, takes the cup from his hands before he holds it too tight, before it shatters.]

I'm sorry. [Persephone breathes out] How do you--have a relationship? A marriage? How did you tell him? Did you? I can't even bring myself to give him a reason. When he touched the edge of it once, when he talked about his version of Apollo, I couldn't bring myself to even tell him more than that Apollo had been pushy about a relationship.

Edited (Fixed a reference) 2022-01-12 10:28 (UTC)

[His fingers flex for a moment, as if he can't understand what happened to the cup. He laces them together, for lack of anything better to do, and breathes out himself.]

He knows. He... he understood the truth of what she did to me long before I ever did. When I came here, I just-- thought--

[He shakes his head and laughs bitterly.] I thought we were in a nice, normal kinky relationship. [You know, the kind where he was constantly afraid of breaking some rule she had set him and earning himself a punishment. Nice and normal!

He falls silent for a few moments after that, but it's a thoughtful silence. How does he have a relationship with Koumyou? A marriage? Sex? He looks up at her and answers her question with one of his own:] What's the attitude towards intimacy where you come from?

[For all she's read novels, she doesn't know what kinky means. Nothing about his relationship sounded--normal. Even the worst of the gods merely cheated on their partners, they didn't offer them up to others.

Her eyes dip to the table, squeezing her fingers together and then flexing them wide. Intimacy.]

It's...I mean--I was always intimate with my friends in casual ways and there was never a problem. It was more acceptable in the mortal realm, to casually bathe together with others, to cuddle and sleep. More than that--I guess I wasn't interested. Women are pretty but I--I guess I never had an interest. [Pause. Oh wait does he mean like in general or sex or--] I--when I was 15, I was recruited to become an Eternal Maiden. No sex, no relationships, none of that. So intimacy beyond that of friendship was just--something I read about. I didn't even meet a man until I was a teenager. I kissed a god once but I knew I could never tell anyone about it. So I'm kind of--this is all kind of firsts.

I mean. Except for sex. Because. You know. [Her voice only gets smaller those short brief phrases. It's times like this that she really feels like the naïve dumb village girl. Sheltered and stupid. Giving into someone because they push at her. Taking the first way out. Not even knowing what he means half the time. She rubs at her eyes roughly]

[Holy shit. He'd expected her relationship with intimacy to be more, ahem, conservative than his, but only because most worlds seemed to be more conservative about love and sex and affection than his is. But she's describing a naivete that's almost hard for him to wrap his mind around.

No sex, no relationships, no knowledge except what she's picked up from books. His heart hurts.

He leans forward a little, opening his mouth to say something-- then he sees her scrub at her eyes, and what he says instead is:] Can I come sit next to you?

[Persephone curls in on herself, feeling--something. His incredulity, his surprise, disbelief. Something. When he asks, she visibly hesitates]

I--I guess. Yes. [Then her words spill out again] It's not everyone--most people in my world have normal relationships, some people are open--I think that's the word? Ares and Aphrodite are. It's just--my--It's complicated. [If she mentions that her mother was part of this when she's already complained about her to him, he'll get all the wrong ideas.]

[He probably would. That's a good instinct on her part.

He steps around the table and sits lightly beside her, careful not to crowd. He really, really just wants to gather her up to him, but he doesn't dare now that he knows about what happened.]

Persephone... I suspect he targeted you the way you did because of your complicated situation. He took advantage of-- of what you didn't know, because of your upbringing, and he used it to coerce you.

I don't really know if he...if he knew any of that. We'd just met earlier that day. Unless Artemis told him about me? [She tugs at her hair, staring back at the table] He's her brother, her twin, it wouldn't be...weird. To share.

[And Artemis wouldn't believe her brother would do something with this information. He's the perfect golden Olympian.]

He knew I was a virgin. You have to be, to be an eternal maiden... [She slowly works through what she remembers. Sometimes it's clear and sometimes it's vague.] He said he thought I was more mature than this. Gods--That I was teasing him all day. Flirting. And when I questioned something he did, he just told me to relax. He--and he always acted like it was normal. Like this was just how things worked. And I knew it felt wrong but I could never figure out what parts of it.

We don't have anything like Eternal Maidens where I come from, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but the way you say it makes me think it's a-- a sacred thing to be one, isn't it?

[He feels like it would have to be, to have the significance she seems to be giving it.]

If that's the case, then he would have had to know what he was doing, wouldn't he?

It's--kind of. It's more sacred for the mortal priestesses who follow the same path. They strive to live in our image, as virgins who live only for the service of others. We're supposed to be--an example to strive towards. [She gestures up and out]

I--I know he knew what I was training to be. Artemis is an eternal maiden, he knows I was staying with her because I was joining her in it. I told him--when he was--that I was going to be a sacred virgin. He--I kind of forgot he even said this. [She presses her hands against her eyes now, bent over.] He said I could make an exception for one so grand as he. I said that's not how this even works--

[And that's when she panicked. At the thought of eternity. At the thought of being this same small fragile village nobody virgin goddess for eternity. Living for others. Never for herself, for her wants, for her desires, her dreams. And she said okay.]

[Devero feels like he's going to be sick. He knows he should keep his hands to himself right now but he can't-- he can't help it, big sensitive idiot that he is. He reaches out after she bends over, setting his hand on the curve of her back.]

He knew exactly what he was doing. Oh Persephone, I'm so sorry he did that to you.

[There's still a part of it she's not touching. She's afraid to touch it, to ask about it. It sits there, a quiet deadly question, as she tries not to cry again. She barely feels the hand on her back, all her focus on what she remembers, the bits and pieces]

I-I knew I didn't want it almost immediately. But I couldn't do anything. I have powers, I have--I could have torn him off me. It was like--it was like I was there but I wasn't, stuck inside myself. Or outside myself--or--I don't know. I'm not helpless, so why...

[He starts to rub her back, little movements up and down her spine.]

I think in-- in moments like that, you forget you can fight back. I always did. My Madame-- my-- [He shakes his head and starts again.] Valdana always knew what to say to keep me... off-balance. Questioning myself, distracted, second-guessing how I felt about how she treated me. I outweigh her by a-- a hundred pounds, and she... [There's another one of those brief, humorless laughs of his. It's harder than he expected to admit this, but he makes himself finish for Persephone's sake.] She could drop me at her feet with a look.

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[warning: talk of sexual trauma is imminent in this thread]

[big CW going forward, yep yep yep]

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CW!!

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CW now for sexual objectification and trafficking as well

Re: CW now for sexual objectification and trafficking as well

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