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“Go on.” Ripley gestured sharply with the gun in her hand, pointing from Percy’s forehead to the black, glossy glass at his feet – and then back up again, aiming right between the eyes. “On your knees, de Rolo. Now. You might be my favourite toy, but I don’t have all day to play around.”
It was an elementary mistake, shifting aim away from a target a handful of feet in front of you, but Percy was hardly going to correct her on that right now. She didn’t need to worry about elementary mistakes, not with him weaponless and struggling to breathe through the panic, not with the rest of Vox Machina disarmed and with blades at their throats. Not with enough black powder to ruin a city packed into the ground beneath their feet, just a spark away from igniting into instant death.
Around the two of them, the world had frozen, gone numb and silent.
Percy could hear his own breath rasping in his lungs, his blood rushing through his veins, his heartbeat thrumming in his ears. It was too loud, everything was so loud, too close and too much and pressing in closer, closer. He couldn’t think, not with her this close – not with a gun pointed at his head, and the rest of Vox Machina waiting, watching, stripped of their weapons and surrounded.
“You know what to do,” murmured Anna, quieter this time. Intimate, almost. Meant for just the two of them, just him and her and their little ball of awful, awful silence. The words were so soft he could barely hear it over the roaring, so soft he could barely see her lips moving. “Don’t you, Percival? You know what I want.”
Yes, he wanted to say, but something had gagged him, crushed his throat and stapled his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Yes. I know what you want.
It was a familiar movement, easy as breathing, to lower himself to the ground. To kneel at her feet. His knees bent without his permission, almost, dropped him in slow motion to the glass. They’d had little more than a week together, him and her, downstairs in the dungeons as the Briarwoods slaughtered his family above them one by one. Just eight days – eight precious, eternal days. Eight days, though, had been more than enough time for her to train him well.
And by god had she trained him, he thought, as he curled into himself on instinct, kept his head lowered, kept his shoulders hunched up to his ears and his arms around his stomach. Even after all this time, after years, after all the work he’d done at scrubbing her out of every crack in his skin and every whisper in his brain – still, there she was, just waiting to pick up the trailing end of his leash she’d tied around his throat again and haul.
“Closer,” she breathed, from somewhere above him. He didn’t need to look up to see the faint tremble of her lips as she stared down at him, to see the dark of her eyes blown wide with the power of it all. The image was burnt into the back of his eyelids – her face lit by flickering torchlight, his blood glossy and dark enough to be near-black on her hands, the white of her teeth so bright when she’d smiled. “Come closer, boy.”
He could see her, he could see her, the way her thighs clenched and her lips half-parted and her hand moved, seeking his hair. He wasn’t looking, he wasn’t looking, he didn’t want to look, but he could see her-
Hands down on the glass, pale white against black, shaking, he started to crawl. He didn’t want to, but he was crawling, hands and knees and head down. Still not looking. It was easier like this, he told himself, easier not to look. Easier not to see.
His head nudged her knees, and her fingers found his hair, and now there was no way to avoid seeing her – the dark charcoal of her long skirt, the worn grey-brown of her boots. The hazy mirage-reflection of her face in the glass by her feet pressed right up against the reflection of his own. “There,” she said, pleased, satisfied, and the relief he felt at her clipped approval made him sick to his stomach. “There. You know what to do.”
Though he loathed himself for it, he did. He knew what to do.
Her boot tasted the same as it had the first time he’d pressed his lips and tongue to it. Polish, dust and dirt, the warm, buttery bitterness of the leather beneath it all… and blood, sharp and coppery on the back of his tongue, impossible to scrub away entirely once the leather had been soaked in it. It would be barely noticeable if he weren’t so intimately familiar with it, the way it set his teeth on edge and left him nearly gagging.
This was something she’d trained into him well, though, so he didn’t stop. He swallowed, swallowed again, throat tightening against the lurch of his stomach – don’t throw up, don’t even retch, she’ll hit you, she’ll hurt you, she’ll put you back in the dark with the rats all alone – and dragged his tongue across her boot once more. Each lick left a shiny streak behind, the wet of his saliva drying slowly in the high, thin sun, and it was only when the whole boot glistened that he dared to stop.
He pressed a kiss to the toe of it, then, careful and reverent. A silent prayer for mercy from the blood-soaked goddess who stood before him. Moved onto the next one, obedient as always.
“Good boy,” whispered Anna, her voice trembling a little, laced through with unsteady excitement. The warmth in it, the weight of her approval, made him want to cry.
Percy thought of the miles he’d put between them, the years he’d put between them, the blood and sweat and tears – so, so many tears – he’d shed to tear himself free of her grip inch by agonising inch. Of how easy it was, to get down on his knees for her, to crawl and cry and cower for her in the hopes of the slightest shred of mercy. Of his new family, stood behind him, watching. Of Anna’s boots, beneath his tongue, the taste of them as though he’d never left that dark, blood-soaked cell.
He thought of her gun, pointed unsteady at the top of his head, and wondered if even a bullet through the skull would be enough to scrub her out of cracks she’d shattered into him.