T o x i c

_{There's a new game
We like to play you see
A game with added reality
You treat me like a dog
Get me down on my knees
We call it master and servant
It's a lot like life
This play between the sheets
With you on top and me underneath
Forget all about equality}

T O X I C

The blood welled warm… a toxic joy, voluptuous crimson romance in the form of the beads of red that slid down his skin, dripping to the floor and staining the tile. Those large red drops were everything to him at that moment, and watching them brought him a kind of sick pleasure. They slid slowly, hypnotically.

Who was he to question their movement? Who was he to stop the bleeding?

“This is the last fucking time you will run away, Dimitri!” the heat of the blood and the cold of the floor amplified the sound of the words… it sounded the way voices did in a tunnel; overly-loud and completely surrounding, syllables overlapping each other. “Do I make myself clear?”

The nod he gave was careful, barely even motion, but he knew that Lillia saw it. She perceived everything, and she punished for everything. Forgave everything and held grudges over everything. She did everything at once. Terrifying and simple, but so complex that it was frightening. And this nod was answer enough for her, sending his curtain of dirty black hair swinging slightly, brushing his face and picking up the blood there.

“I don’t think you really understand the gravity of this situation, Dimitri…” her voice was cold and low, and he slowly raised his eyes to look up at her, quivering under her intense stare. Her infinitely cold blue eyes met him from beneath tendrils of long violet hair. She was the only vampire he had ever met without red eyes, and it had always scared him slightly, especially at times like this when they were filled with a cold, vicious light and boring into him as though each iris was the beam of a welding torch. “Disobedience cannot be tolerated, and I think you know that the punishment’s severity increases with the number of offenses. You know this, correct?”

“Y-yes. Of course, Master.”

“And this is the fifteenth time you’ve run off. I think I’ve been more than lenient up until this point, but you’ve left me no choice but to punish you fully this time. I’m sure you understand.” Lillia stared down at him for a moment, those eyes piercing his and leaving him cold, before she moved over to the table nearby where her tools were located.

“Yes, master,” Dimitri said softly, bowing his head. More blood dripped from the cut her ring had left on his cheek and landed on his hand, and he stared at the small droplets that slid across his finger, warm and smooth as milk. That monstrous ring was worn for the sole purpose of cutting flesh when she hit him. Its cutting edge was reserved for him alone, a fact that both prided him and chilled his soul.

Lillia had turned around now, facing him with a gleaming dagger twirling between her slender fingers. Its motion was hypnotic, and he had to pry his eyes away from it to look at her face. “You will be a vampire, Dimitri, when I decide the time is right.” the coldness in her eyes had increased a hundredfold. He shivered as though caught in an ice storm. “And you belong to me… your very existence is held in my hands. I own you. So why is it that you constantly disobey me!?” with the words, the dagger’s blade hit his arm, cutting a trench in the flesh.

Dimitri could feel the skin and muscle beneath separate to create that miniature gorge in the smooth surface of his arm, and the blood came to meet his eyes in a quick surge. The cut was a tiny road carved in across a landscape of purple and green bruises. It always looked this way, and yet every cut she gave him was miraculously different, unique, beautiful in its own way. He whimpered softly at the pain, and Lillia smiled coldly, baring her pointed fangs.

“I’m sorry, master. I… don’t know…” he whispered.

“Perhaps I can help you figure it out…” that cold voice only growing colder, drawing all the warmth from his body and leaving him a shell, able to be filled only with the agony of these frequent punishments. And there he was, in the very center of her wrath, in a pool of his own actions, and he felt as the dagger cut him again; once, twice. New blood for the collection on the floor, on his skin. New smears left across his body by his hands that grasped at the new slits, trying to hold the blood back for a moment at each wound before letting it go, letting it tumble down in endless cascades of crimson and freedom.

The dagger hit his neck… the cut a gift for the flesh there, bleeding out in its gratitude as the air hit the flesh inside and made it sting. The pain… yes, the pain. That pain was all that separated madness and normalcy. If the pain rang out, if he cried out as he did, if those tears slipped down his face, then he could fill the shell. If all was numb, he would be dead as he should be, feel dead as he truly would be as a vampire when that day came. Could he truly go on without the pain?

Of course he could not… and here on the cold floor, as Lillia’s cold voice ordered him to strip, he remembered what pain truly was at the touch of that cold blade against the knobs of his spine after the material of his shirt fell away. She carved the thin flesh over the knobs of the vertebrae down to the bone; he knew because he could feel the tip of the dagger scrape against the hardness of the spine. Slowly, an agonizing process that made him scream in his usual restrained manner, she cut the flesh above every vertebrae, giving him trails of warm blood that dribbled down his back, stained the waistband of his pants. The places she cut were always the worst; she only drove her blade into where it would count the most, produce the most strangle tears and bitter, raw agony that he let loose in ragged gasps and cries that echoed through the chamber.

“And now, off with the rest,” she instructed him, and he realized then that the cutting had stopped and they were moving on. It took a moment to differentiate between the pain of the cuts that were already there and the pain of the one she was making at the time whenever she punished him, and now, as always, he had to separate the pain that had merged into one and encompassed his entire body in its scarlet heat.

Slowly, Dimitri rose to his feet and obediently unfastened his pants, letting them slide down to his ankles before he stepped out of them. And then he raised his eyes pleadingly to his Master, who showed no flicker of sympathy. And so, slowly, his face stained pink from humiliation, he allowed his underwear to follow his pants to the floor. The room was cold, and with his arms wrapped around himself he could barely find a shred of warmth as he watched Lillia moved back to the table for the next stage of his punishment.

Lillia moved slowly, carefully, her eyes gliding over the various instruments on the table as though her choice was of utmost importance. Dimitri watched, biting his lip and attempting to ignore the pain in his back. He could feel the intense, throbbing agony of every spot where the skin was sheared away from the bone, leaving the vertebrae exposed and vulnerable, pulsing through his body in waves. Obedience. Obedience. Obedience. was what each pulse of white-hot pain said to him, whispering in his ears in its thundering rhythm. Obey. Obey. Obey.

His back ached with a ferocity that he had not felt in some weeks. Though nearly every inch of the skin on his body was mottled with a pattern of vicious bruises, the kind of pain bruises elicited was so familiar it was almost past the point of being unpleasant. But this kind of punishment, which was far more rare than the beatings, brought about a different kind of pain… the kind that reminded him of the cruel potency of life and the things that happened to turn him into the good, obedient little vampire that he would someday become.

Lillia turned back toward the naked boy, who stood furiously trying to cover himself. In her hand was a nine-tailed whip, expertly crafted from black leather, with a tiny silver hook at the end of each tail. In its presence Dimitri shivered, his teeth finding his lip again to bite it.

“Scream nice and loud for me, Dimitri, and learn your place.”

“Yes, Master.”

The whip struck out, reaching for him with its tiny metal claws. At first, the leather hit his back, slapping the flesh, and he could feel welt rising before the whip was dragged downward. The hook caught his skin and ripped it as it was dragged brutally downward, and he could feel blood pouring from the new open wounds, hot and wet and bittersweet. He screamed then, and he repeated the sound as loudly as he could, giving voice to the rising climax of agony that seared through his young body. He screamed again and again, each more hollow and full of pleading than the last, making his throat sore and ragged until he swore the blood was coming from there, too. The whipping continued, up on his back, never low enough to hit his kidneys, never in the center to damage his spine. On the sides, o his shoulder blades, and then moving to his shoulders and the backs of his legs. The act was endless, the beginning and middle melding together to form the end that he feared would never come.

Standing was impossible, legs could no longer keep their balance. He collapsed to his knees then, slamming them against the tile hard, but what were more bruises on his knees when they defined the very appearance of his skin, when he couldn’t even remember what it looked like without them? The blows kept coming, tearing more skin, giving more release to blood that struggled desperately toward the tears in the skin and burst forth, giving birth to streams down his body, pools on the floor, smears across his hands and face. And finally, blissfully, the hits stopped coming. The screams in his throat gave way to whimpers and moans as he collapsed to his stomach on the tile, trying to clutch the floor in hopes that it would offer come semblance of comfort.

Lillia was still behind him, and he could hear her make a small noise of approval before she closed in on him, lifting him from the floor and up to her, her tongue roving across the skin of his shoulder, licking up the blood that pooled over his collarbones. The wet muscle was inhumanly cold, the tongue of a vampire, and its clamminess made him shiver as his Master sucked blood from his wounds, poking that horrible tongue inside the deeper ones and invading his very being, his very soul, it seemed.

“You will obey me…” she hissed as she brought his face to face hers, looking into his eyes with those icy blue ones of hers. “You will learn obedience, even if I have to beat you to the point of death. And if you don’t learn obedience, I’ll abandon you…” the words fell bitter against Dimitri’s ears, and his eyes widened as tears welled hot and acrid in their corners. “And there will be no one who will take you.”

“Master…” he whimpered softly, bringing a hand up to grip her shoulder as the tears began to slid down his face, mixing with the ones he had cried during the punishment and the blood from the cut on his cheek. Lilla spoke not a word, simply lowered him back to the floor and turned away, her shoes making a soft click on the tile and she moved toward the door.

“You’re thirteen, Dimitri. I think you’re old enough to care for your own wounds,” she remarked icily as she exited, slamming the door behind her.

Left alone in the room, Dimitri curled into a ball on the cold tile, holding himself for warmth, barely able to move. The only thing that was real was the blood that slid across him, offering the only warmth in the chilly room. And the tears fell from his face to mix with it, to mingle with the puddles of it on the cold gray of the tile. Bitter as acid. Toxic.

_{Let's play master and servant
It's a lot like life
And that's what's appealing
If you despise that throwaway feeling
From disposable fun
Then this is the one}