“Alright,” Sharp says. “You are coming with me, young lady.”
“Sharp…” the barbarian starts to speak.
“Don’t worry about her, Kronos. I’m not going to hurt her.”
Sharp carries me away still in that same grip. He’s so much bigger, so much taller, and I hate it so much because I know I can’t defend myself against one of them, let alone all of them. I am outnumbered and I am outweighed. I start to sob as I squirm and find it absolutely hopeless. I don’t want this. I want to be back where I feel like I have some sense of control over myself, even if I’m in a fucked-up dystopian world where the air isn’t free.
He takes me into a room with much lower lighting. Here, there’s a sort of orange glow emanating from the lower part of the walls, which are soft and rounded and earth tone. It feels like I’m in a cave. Almost immediately, I feel my heart rate slow and my tension start to flow away.
There’s a bed up against a wall at the narrowest part of the room. It has a lot of blankets piled on it, all soft and orange and yellow and brown in hue. It has sheets that are white and soft, and many pillows, enough to bury into.
Sharp releases me naked into this pile of bedding and lets me burrow into it. I dive in, pulling the blankies around me, crying to myself with a great deal of miserable self-pity.
I do that for what feels like quite a while, before I realize I never heard him leave. I poke my head out of my damp fortress and see that he is still there.
“What the fuck do you want?”
He frowns at me, and I feel my ass pulse with the memory of what it feels like to be spanked. I didn’t like that. I don’t know why the barbarian did that to me. I was being nice to him. I hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t fair…
“Quiet,” Sharp says, running his hand over my hair gently. He has scaled markings on the back of his hands and fingers. He also has them around his hairline. They’re blue and green, slightly iridescent in this low light.
“I didn’t do anything to him and he hurt me for no reason.” I start to get annoyed again, but there’s nothing to throw this time. I wish there was. I wish I could break this whole damn ship.
“You need to calm down,” Sharp says to me. “It was not for no reason. We have been searching for you for years. We thought we might never see you again. I know it hurt, but you can’t lash out like that. I thought we trained you out of breaking things.”
“Apparently not,” I say bluntly.
He smiles, just a fraction, and it softens his features and makes him look incredibly handsome for a brief moment.
“Apparently not,” he says. “You say you don’t remember us. Will you tell me what you do remember? Do you remember this room?”
“No. I don’t. This isn’t my room.”
“This is your room. It’s the place you felt the most comfortable. We installed it for you. And, to be honest, a lot of what you just broke are things you bought either for us, or you bought for yourself, or we bought for you. You smashed a lot of sentimental things.”
“Am I supposed to feel guilty about that?” I say, instantly feeling pretty guilty about the whole thing. I’ve been wanting my memories, but I’m apparently destroying them as fast as I can.
“I don’t want you to feel guilty. I’m trying to save you from feeling worse later than you do now,” he says. “Please, pet. Tell me what you do remember.”
“This is a change,” I say bitterly. “Weren’t you the one telling me I was going to pay and you weren’t going to let me get away with it? And then I chose him because I thought he’d be nice, and…” I let out a little sob.
“You really don’t remember much,” Sharp says with just a hint of something like amused pity.
“I don’t remember anything. I woke up three years ago in a hospital in Zeal’s New New York, and I didn’t know anything about myself. That’s it. Since then I’ve just been getting by. Doing work. Selling pills. Then you guys showed up and hit me.”
He frowns at me. “You really don’t recall anything prior to the hospital?”
“No. Somebody melted my mind. They can do that now. They have all kinds of toys. They can fuck with your brain. It’s known. I was trying to get my memories back, but it’s really expensive and I couldn’t sell enough pills.”
“Okay,” he says, running his hand through my hair and scratching my scalp lightly. “It’s okay. We’ve come for you now, and you’re safe again.”
“Am I? I don’t feel safe. He hit me! Really hard! Does he do that often?”
“You used to take a lot more than that,” Sharp says. “We’re used to you needing to be corrected roughly and thoroughly.”
I peer at him from the blankets, scowling quite furiously. “You used to do that to me all the time? No wonder I ran away and blanked my mind.”
“You think you did this to yourself?”
