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“Is that it? Are we done?”
“For now,” he says, his tone softening slightly.
I am on my knees on the couch. He remains towering over me, his human suited form looking very imposing. There’s still that one scythkin claw showing, that reminder of what he is really. My mind is swiftly alternating between feeling terribly brutalized and incredibly protected. Sheriff’s not coming through this guy. Nobody is. The others are absolutely out of luck if they think they’re going to claim me now.
“I’m sorry,” I say softly. I know it’s what he wants to hear, though I’m not really sorry.
“I hope you are. Now. Come. You need to be bathed, dressed, and fed.”
I like the sound of that. I don’t like the feeling of walking with my ass covered in tight, hot lines from the cane, but I do like the way my bare feet curl into the long pile of the carpet as I follow the scythkin’s tall, suited form through the interior of his ship that feels like a human home.
I don’t know his name. I’m curious, and I almost want to ask, but I also don’t really want to be on the receiving end of the question. I have no intention of telling him my name. My name is the last thing I have that is actually mine. It’s the one thing I have no intention of turning over to anybody ever again.
He leads me into a bathroom with white ceramic tile on the floor, a mint colored bath, and matching other objects. Toilet, sink, it’s all an interesting green color that gives me nostalgia for a time I never experienced. He removes his jacket, hangs it up on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, and rolls his sleeves up his rippling forearms. I keep almost forgetting what he really is, then that flashing claw keeps reminding me. This creature has me off-balance in so many ways.
The bath is run, hot steaming water filling the interior of the tub in a way that seems very inviting to me — or would if I hadn’t just been caned and left in a very shamefully downcast mood as a result. It is hard to maintain any kind of attitude with those lines reminding me how easily he handled me, how he gave me a punishment that I could not evade.
“Step in,” he says, offering his hand to me to help me get into the bath without slipping. He is obviously very concerned with my wellbeing. He cares. But his care is painful, a lesson I learn yet again as I try to sit down in the bath and discover first that bending is not comfortable, and then that the hot water meeting those cane welts reignites them all over again. A third new pain comes when I have to sit on my caned flesh and be bathed by the alien.
“Ow!” I complain. “This is inhumane. This…”
“Quiet,” he censures me. “The pain is the point.”
A zap of excitement rushes through me. There’s something about his tender mercilessness that makes me feel as though I am in the right kind of danger. Warm water laps around me, foaming bubbles starting to accumulate on the surface as he kneels down next to me and begins lathering a washcloth.
“I have dreamed of doing this with my very own human for longer than I can express,” he says as he starts running it over my shoulders. I push my hands down against the bottom of the bath and levitate as much as I can, or float, I guess, anyway, point being, I am trying to keep pressure off my punished bottom. That becomes impossible when he starts washing me. He presses down, not hard, but hard enough to push me firmly down against the ceramic base of the tub.
He sounds genuinely happy while handling me. I have to admit that it feels nice to be taken care of in this way. It has been a long time since anybody cared about me in any way in particular. I close my eyes and I float up a little higher in the bath as he moves to scrub my back instead.
“This is so good,” I murmur, surprising myself with the sentiment. I thought I would hate this. I should be hating this. I’m being treated as if I have no agency, as if I am an owned thing. I am being petted and cosseted. I start to close my eyes as the heat and ache of the cane’s infernal work starts to come together and be less of something that hurts, and more of something that feels almost good somehow.
My bath is over. I know this, because having washed and rinsed me to his satisfaction, he lifts me out of the bath without warning and begins toweling me dry. Ensconced in a fluffy prison, I surrender to the scythkin’s care. I don’t understand why he’s obsessed with me, but there’s no doubt that he does indeed give a damn. I feel like a stray animal having been taken in by a kind but stern trainer.
“Now,” he says. “Time to dress you.”
He has a dress on hand, a wrap-around garment that fits me because it would likely fit anyone. It also has the dubious advantage, from his perspective, of being easy access in every single way. It is a pale pastel pink in color, and it comes with a pair of matching shoes. Unlike the dress, the shoes don’t quite fit. It is hard to make one size fits all footwear. There’s probably some kind of lesson in that.
Fortunately, they’re on the larger side rather than the smaller side, so I can sort of make them work. I scuff along from the bathroom to the kitchen, which is located through a sliding door that is the only thing that looks like a spaceship so far. A silver sliding door with a middle part opens up to reveal a kitchen with a similar color palette to the bathroom but with more pops of lemon-yellow color along with the mint green.
He dons an apron, giving me a crooked handsome smile as he does. I feel a little pang of sadness that he is trying to hide himself from me. Does it feel odd for him to have to pretend to be something other than what he is?
“Why do you wear the human suits?”
“It is practical. Our kind are feared, and our faces, in our native form, are off-putting.”
He thinks he is ugly. But he’s not. He’s fucking awe-inspiring.
“I will never see anything as incredibly cool as what I saw when you first came out of that suit in the diner,” I say. “You’re incredible. You’re the most impressive creature I have ever seen.”
“Thank you,” he says, smiling. “But I’ll keep the suit on for the moment. I like the way it feels. I get to be contained and to play at civilization. It is rare a scythkin is allowed to enjoy recreational pursuits. I’m making pancakes, with bacon, banana, and maple syrup.”
“That sounds amazing.”
I sit at a Formica table with white and green checks and I wait for him to feed me. There is a little cushion on the chair which makes the whole thing more comfortable than it would otherwise be. I wait to be fed, while feeling very odd. Nothing about this is customary to me.
“You look as though you’ve been hungry for a while,” he notes.
That question is uncomfortably close to something that probes the truth about me, so of course I have to evade it immediately.
