Crossing Boundaries Pt. 11

Siderva wriggled uncomfortably, the chair too large and too plush for her. She could not have said that she very much liked her hands being bound too, though it was not for her to say. She didn't exactly have all that much say in the matter after sneaking into his abode at night, though she had come too far to feel all that foolish about it. What was done was done. All she could do was go forward from there.

"Now..." Kael said, leaning over with his elbows on his knees, still only in his robe. "Can you tell me why you have come here, Siderva? Did someone send you? Why... Why are you here?"

Best to keep his questions short and simple, straight to the point, for the moment, he decided, though he had so many brimming over, darting to the tip of his tongue and poising there, ready to leap. He wanted to know everything about her, from an anthro perspective as well as an intruder perspective, though he could not honestly see her as a threat. She just didn't seem to have that about her, her clothes tattered and dirtied, though her scales were as clean as it seemed washing in rivers and the like could do. There was no air of soap about her, at least, though he could help her fix that, surely, before she had to be on her way. If she was even going on her way -- who knew, at that point?

He sighed, leaning back, the serpent-woman taking her time to contemplate things. It probably wasn't for any good reason that she was there, though he still wanted to know her story. Giselle, of course, kept a watchful eye over everything, her tail stiff, standing with a slight bend in her legs. As always, she would be able to lunge at danger at a moment's notice. His heart warmed a little for her.

"I..." She shook her head, tail twitching back and forth where it hung, not loosely, against the armchair. "I am Siderva, though I have already introduced myself... I... Hm..."

What could she tell him? What should she tell him? There was so much of her story to tell, but, really, did he want to know all that about her? Her history was dark and the war, truthfully, was not all that long ago, not in her mind. It was long enough that those that were victorious had moved past it, clearly, but those that had been caught up in the thick of it, not understanding the fight or that it was a losing battle back then...

Siderva shuddered, Kael taking note of her discomfort. Yet it was something that he had to press into, at the very least to find out what she had been doing in his room so late at night. Not everything could be simply set aside, he was learning...

"I..." She gathered herself, taking a deep breath. Her chest was narrow and just taking the breath expanded her ribcage. "I... I was captured, in the war. I lived with a human for some time. Before that, I'd been a mage."

Of course, she was going out of order, but things didn't always work in a decipherable order in her mind, to be fair. Things were just like that, one thing stumbling over the other, always wanting precedence. All Siderva could do was go forward, word by word and step by step.

"When I was captured, he had me do things for him, in exchange for pleasure. In here." Siderva tried to be as discreet as possible, tapping her head to indicate her mind. "It made me trainable, like a slave. I was a slave, yes, for a long time. Eventually, the man had no further use for me. I don't know if they were ordered to release mage slaves captured in the war, but it does not matter. I was let go and then...I had to work for a living."

The serpent sighed and shook her head. Why must she go over her past? It was better to let it slip by and to gloss over the worst of it. There was no reason that the man there wanted to hear all of it. She couldn't even meet his eyes, her tongue flickering in and out of her mouth nervously, a tic that she couldn't at all control.

"I worked for a living, in inns and brothels," she said bluntly, rushing her words into a hiss in her haste to get them all out at once. "It was hard work, but it was all I could. No one there, at least, knew who I was, that I had been a war mage and that I had fallen. I would have been killed otherwise, I am confident of it. I worked and I drank... There were illegal substances too, though that should not come as any surprise... And I heard about you. I wanted to see you, to see if you were like the human that had kept me before, though..."

She trailed off, shaking her head. He wasn't like that, clearly not. Kael was so much younger than the man who had kept her, trained her, infiltrated her mind and done things to her. He was not someone who could use her like that and treat her as that man did, as her master had treated her. Even then, her mind longed for it, to kneel at his side, to do any manner of degrading, humiliating, belittling acts, all for the chance of that thrill of pleasure, touching that place inside her mind that no one else and no other body ever could. Sex and fucking in the brothels and back rooms of inns, selling her body, had given her a lower dose, much lower, hit of what she needed, yet it was not enough. It had always left her yearning, hungering, wanting something that was always out of reach, stretching out her fingertips to their greatest extent and yet never managing to get there.

Maybe it was her fate. She closed her eyes, slumping in her chair. Maybe it was all her due for failing in the war, for falling so easily. It was all a blur, back then, but she could not even remember, once the war had begun, what part she had played in it. She'd been high-powered, she knew that much, though it was all so fuzzy, a mess of explosions and burning buildings, searing, simmering skin as flesh and fur burned.

And the screams. Siderva tried not to remember the screams, hunkering in on herself, her breathing short and shallow, ragged as it clawed its way in and out of her chest. She didn't want to remember the screams, not the cries of all the anthros she had failed.

If she had been better, maybe she would have been able to protect them. If she had done more, maybe things would have been different. That was what her mind tried to tell her, the broken, twisted part of it, logic also too far out of reach, where the serpent instinctively knew that there was also nothing that could be done against a human with psychic abilities. And that was all of them. It was humiliating how she had been toyed with and ordered about -- in a non-sexual manner, just treated as a slave -- by a child in the dwelling too, though she could not recall their face. It was not important for her to be able to recall things like that, after all, only for her to obey. And, when she had resisted the most basic of chores, unwilling to bend her knee to the whim of a child that had no right to speak over her, the human had forced their way into her mind, twisting her to do their bidding as if they had any right in the world to do it.

A child. A child had been able to break into her mind. And the man, perhaps his father, had spent more than enough time in her mind, setting her walls to crumble, training her for his use and pleasure, his passing fancy, for her to know that there was nowhere to hide from that penetrating force.

That meant nothing to her and everything at the same time. Logically, she knew that could not be so, but the words that had once been so familiar to her no longer made sense in the broken span of her mind, no longer her own mind. Maybe it had never been her mind and she had spent too much time telling a stranger, a human nonetheless, her life story without considering that he could use it against her. Just because he was younger than the man who had owned her and claimed her did not mean that he was not capable of controlling her, which had already been shown.

She looked up at him, his serious expression, even the canine sitting beside him still and quiet, her tail softer and looser than before. Siderva did not truthfully know or understand all that much about canine behaviour and what their tails meant -- it was different between different anthro species -- but she did wonder at her closeness. She was still nude, but she didn't seem to realise it, the faint buds of nipples showing through her fur, her coat gleaming, in the light of the lantern that the man had lit, with good health. She looked well cared for -- but to what extent did dogs look after themselves? She didn't want to undermine their intelligence; wolves, for example, were such a proud race that it was considered highly unbecoming to speak badly of them and dogs looked somewhat the same in presentation. But it was not something that the serpent-woman had ever seen a rulebook for, nothing in her guides and nothing in their anthro histories about dogs.

Her curiosity may have been perked about the one that Kael had called Giselle, but her eyes, of course, wandered back to him. He had a strong line to his jaw, a brief haze of stubble around his chin, though his eyes looked tired. She couldn't remember seeing a human that looked like that before, assuming that they lived such lives that tiredness wasn't really something that entered their daily lives, raising her interest further. His hair perhaps needed a trim, though she did not know what styles humans went for those days, whether they strove for a neater look or long and wild, like some anthros.

Silence. It stretched out, allowing her mind to wander, shifting her weight uncomfortably, conscious of how her hands were bound. Her tail, however, was not, curling back and forth, though it pressed against the armchair that she was sitting in as if it too craved some sense of stability and solidness.

She'd left out any mention of her daughter, of course, in retelling her shorter story to Kael, though there was still a part of Siderva that felt as if she had said to much. She didn't know him and she couldn't imagine repeating any part of that story aloud without a good dose of alcohol working its way through her system, her stomach panging, even then, with the longing for a drink. It was all she needed and, still, she needed so much more than that, her body as broken as her mind was, though no one had ever expected good of her.

Siderva pressed her fingers, hands bound together, to her forehead, rubbing back to one side of her temples.

"When I found a human attending the university..." She said, her voice weak, failing as if the words would not spill from her tongue anymore. "I knew I had to meet you. I know that all of that most likely does not make any sense at all to you and I understand that. This must seem...insane. But I am not insane. Or, if I am, I do not know that I am."

Kael shifted his weight, matching Siderva's attitude without even realising it, mirroring her. It was...uncomfortable, to say the least, and he could only assume the horrors that she had gone through, owned by a human. Slavery was still something that happened in both human and anthro lands -- the dogs were a prime example -- but that did not mean that he agreed with it. It was just not something that had ever come into his life all that strongly, to be honest, only something that had lingered in the background the whole time, a lurking presence that hinted at something darker.

He could not blame Siderva for defending her home and her lands in the war, though he ached to ask her about her role in it, to see if there were any secrets of magic that he could bring into his own learning, as untried and as untested as he was. But the whole thing, even in his realm of hindsight, was not something that had to have happened. The war did not have to have happened. But, of course, no one in the human lands said that it was so. They laughed at the ridiculous audacity of the anthros for invading and thinking that they could take any kind of foothold in the human lands, boasting of how easily they had swept the anthros back and pushed away their resistance as easily as one may swat away a bug.

Was it becoming of a man or any human to boast like that? To brag about lives taken and to boast of lands stolen, when no blood ever had to be shed? He knew how easily he had disabled Oshun, even if he had been clumsy about it, in the training session, but wouldn't it have been possible too for humans to merely freeze the anthros fighting back or even attacking on the shore that first time until they could talk? It would have been the outmatched power of the humans that came out on top, of course, based on his experience with it and magic so far, but there were other ways to do things, better ways.

And it left a foul taste in his mouth, sour and bitter, clinging to the back of his throat where he could not simply swallow it away. He could not ignore what humans, his people, had done, even though there was a big part of him that quite honestly did not and could not see them as his people, not after all that. But humankind was his tribe and he could never separate himself from them, even if he might well have been in ever so slightly a better position to do better and, maybe as the son of the ambassador, do something about changing it.

Not many would have thought like that, but Kael did. Because that was simply who he was, even if he still was a young man with his hand clenched into a fist on the arm of the small sofa, the dog at his side, wondering at how on earth a man like him with only a few years on him was meant to do anything to change the world? Still, he knew that he had to try, had to do something, had to look, perhaps, more into the world of politics that his father had been trying to force him into for years. Kael might surprise him on that count.

Giselle sat quietly, though her sympathy for the serpent-woman only stretched as far as she knew that her owner and master, Kael, was safe. Of course, he was already so much more than that to her, as his protector, but she knew who he really was, where everyone else would see her place in the world, even though anthros and humans did not see eye to eye. She was still more interested in making sure that Kael was protected than listening to her, though she did sympathise. It did not sound like any kind of life that she, as a dog, would have wanted to lead, and she sent up a quick prayer of thanks to her canine protectors, somewhere in the heavens of the deities, for setting her up for life with Kael. If she never again had to go without her human and her master, she would be a very happy and a very thankful canine indeed.

In the corner of her eye, she took note of Kael taking a deep breath. Whereas she didn't like that there was tension in her master to begin with, she liked that the sigh softened a little of his demeanour, sitting up a little straighter as if to shake off some of the heavy, weighted tension in his shoulders. She didn't want him to be worried or stressed, though even she had to admit that there was something inherently worrying about someone breaking into their accommodation in the middle of the night. In the morning, as soon as Kael would allow it, she would re-visit their security, even though Giselle privately wished that she was threatening security enough for dissuading anyone, whether anthro or human, from trying anything untoward.

Kael rubbed the back of his head, fingers brushing through his short hair, though they naturally came back to rest on either side of his temples.

"Siderva..." He began, trying to find the words even though they most likely would probably never leap to his lips as easily as he wanted them to. "I cannot begin to imagine what you went through, though, after all that, it sounds like you would have been far better placed than many to want to kill me. I'm surprised, honestly, that you do not seem to. Do you want to kill me?"

Giselle growled, her hackles up, though Kael put a hand on her shoulder, rubbing soothingly.

"Easy, Giselle," he breathed, calling her attention back to him. "It's okay, everything's okay... You are keeping me safe."

The German Shepherd's growl, however, did not soften, eyes fixed on the serpent-woman as if the dog thought that she could cross the space between them in a slithering wipe that would see her master laid out and bleeding on the floor without her being able to do anything about it. No! No, she would not allow that to happen, not as long as there was still breath in her lungs and fire in her heart with which to defend her master.

Always. She stood tall and straight, though unconsciously leaned back into his soothing, gentle touch, his hand running down her spine to settle, comfortably, in the small of her back. Once there, he rubbed small, softening circles, encouraging her to relax even when she could not. Giselle did not shrug him off, though a touch of the tension about her jaw and muzzle did soften.

Siderva blinked. Why would a man apologise to her, or even struggle to get there while grappling with what she had said? Maybe she had said too much, it had been a long while since she had talked so openly about things...

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Kael studied her.

"You have a lot on you," he said with surprising gentleness in his tone. "I don't think I can atone for all that has been done, but I think I know, at least in a tiny way, what you have gone through. Not because I've experienced it for myself, but I, of course, know how our abilities work. Though there have not been many cases known of them being used for ill means...it can happen. It clearly has happened, to you and others."

The serpent-woman pulled back, tongue flickering against her lips. He looked at her like she was a person, not a thing, something that she couldn't understand, not when it came from a human, not when he looked as he did. Wasn't Kael the ambassador's son or something? She should really be referring to him by his proper title, if that was the case, something of respect. Who knew what was going to happen to her for having the audacity to break into his home at the university? Unease stirred in her stomach, a beast digging its claws into her, burrowing into the deep, dark pit of her being. She should never have come there. Whereas Siderva did not fear death, being tortured or dragged before a human court for her crimes set her heart racing. If she could sweat she would have been doing so. As it was, her snakeskin itched fiercely as if she was about to shed.

"I want..." He struggled to find the words, Giselle casting him a questioning look. "I want to help you, Siderva. You don't have to go through this forever... Surely not? I don't know if I can help, not really, but...I have to try, right?"

It sounded like he was trying to talk himself into it, even to his own ears, faulting and flummoxed, a groan in the back of his throat. His skills were not as honed as they would become later in life, but there was something in him that urged him and pushed him to do more, to be more, to do good by those that had been wronged. It was probably not a trait that would get him very far in life, but things like that were simply how people were. Or weren't, in most cases.

"Siderva..." He leaned forward, as if to implore her to allow him to assist. "Please. Let me try to help you. I want to use my powers on your mind. I want to see what I can do to reverse this, if I can even try. I don't know..."

He trailed off, shaking his head. He'd tried to keep his words plain to make sure that he was conveying everything clearly to her, wanting consent to be at the forefront of everyone's mind, but he stumbled over his words anyway. It was such a big task, a huge undertaken, a part of her mind quite literally re-written with a craving that had broken her in heart, mind, soul and, most likely, her body too.

Siderva coughed a hoarse laugh, raspy with smoke that had filled the inns over her many, many years of using her body for work, trying to wave a hand but struggling with both bound. A nod from Kael, however, was all that was needed for Giselle, however cautiously, to slit the rope there, freeing her. At the very least, she was of no immediate threat to either of them and that was more than good enough for Kael.