Obedience

4x4

She, that damn Senshi, stands in the mouth of the cave he hides in, all but a silhouette in the dim purplish light, and the mist moves around her, and her eyes are colder than Beryl's, harder than Kunzite's, and he's a broken and crawling thing with crinkled red silk in his hand.

"Oh, come on," she says. "You know why I gave it back to you."

For kindness, he wants to say, only she's Kunzite's beast, she probably doesn't know the meaning of the word--and why should he, either? He's Beryl's. Beryl's lame hound, Beryl's untamed and unwanted pet. Never housebroken.

He jacks off angrily with it, at first crouched and staring at the ground like an animal, but in the end--and it's interminable, it's hard, he's so humiliated he can barely keep himself erect--he can't keep his eyes off hers. Empty. Metallia's.

It's only later, when those same dark eyes look at him soft and warm over a bag of cookies, that he recognizes them. No, he thinks, it was for kindness, then. Metallia was slipping, then. And he's free from Beryl, but he doesn't want to be, but he loves her, but he loves that Senshi, but she would flee from him.

He wonders if she remembers standing over him, that time, and that. And he wonders if she knows that he'd be almost happy to obey her now. But...

When he goes to sleep that night on his pallet in the back room of the Crown, he dreams of her standing over him, soft pale blue, no darkness at all, and she smiles and says you know why, only he doesn't, but when he wakes up he's still afraid that Motoki will yell at him for the mess on the sheets.