Tales of MU

In Which Mackenzie Bends Without Breaking

My conversation with Kent wrapped up too early to start the day, but there didn’t seem to be enough time to get a decent amount of sleep. Still, coming off of three nights in a row of pretty dismal slumber, I needed to take what I could get.

“Set an alarm for your first class,” Ian suggested after I helped him relieve a sort of debilitating cramp that’s apparently caused by watching your naked girlfriend talk tough to government agents. “Your first class isn’t until like ten, right? You can get way more sleep that way. I’ll tell everyone at breakfast why you aren’t there.”

“Okay, but… everyone?” I said. “I mean, tell Amaranth…”

“Well, Dee might already know,” Ian said.

I waited a few seconds to see if she’d respond from the other room, but she didn’t.

“I think she’s become pretty reflexive about throwing up a wall of silence when you stay over,” I said. “Anyway, if it’s just people from the suite and Steff, yes, tell, but otherwise, just say I didn’t sleep well.”

“Okay, but I can’t always tell when Two’s friend is there.”

“I guess Hazel’s cool,” I said. “But seriously, don’t talk about this stuff in front of Nicki.”

“Not that I think it’s a good idea to spread this around, but you want to start by keeping secrets from her?”

“I don’t want to scare her off,” I said.

Ian headed back to his own room so he wouldn’t wake me up when he got up, and I settled back down for a few more hours of sleep, mercifully dreamless and mercifully alone.

I didn’t like to skip breakfast because it would be an easy habit for me to acquire. Not having my usual plates of sweet and savory goodness at the start of the day wouldn’t leave my stomach grumbling for the rest of the morning or my body crashing later in the day. Breakfast was a treat for my senses and a chance to socialize rather than a physical need. The intermingling of my immortal and mortal heritages meant that I didn’t actually need to eat or perform any of the other functions associated with eating.

But getting up for breakfast gave me one more chance to see my friends during days in which we’d all be off doing our own things. It gave me a chance to start waking up a little bit earlier than I needed to, so I could be sharper and more alert during my morning class. I didn’t have much advantage over the fully mortal in that department. Some diabolists have stated that demons could go longer without sleep than humans could with fewer adverse effects, but that aside the basic need was the same: about eight hours about once a day.

With the sunlight that managed to sneak in around the edge of the curtains and the sounds of life echoing all around the hallway, I didn’t manage to sleep all the way until my alarm. But with the suite all to myself and nowhere else to be, I was able to enjoy a long, hot soak in the tub… my first of the school year.

I’d had a complicated relationship with the shared bathroom in Harlowe Hall. I’d loved hot baths and showers, but the longer my first year went on, the more the bathroom had felt like hostile territory. It wasn’t just that I’d actually been physically attacked in them. Being in them meant I was sharing space with people who hated me, who felt threatened by me and were a threat to me because of that.

That had been a big part of the appeal of a private bathroom for me. But once everyone else got moved in, I’d started deferring to the others’ needs. The fact that Two and Dee both might need to use the bathroom had kept me from staking a claim to it for an hour or more at a time.

I realized as I sat enveloped in hot water and suds and steam that this had been a mistake. It would be a total dick more to take up the bathroom in the morning, but I had spaced out my classes to make sure I had time to myself during the day. A daily soak was probably not in the cards, but I figured I should be able to manage it once or twice a week and be better for it.

A bubble bath wouldn’t make up for lost sleep, but it was definitely a better start to the day than stumbling out of bed, pulling on some clothes, and staggering off in the direction of my local hazards lecture. I’d left the door from the bathroom to our half of the suite open so I’d hear the alarm in my mirror going off which meant I could forget about the passage of time and just relax, something that I badly needed when I reviewed what had happened in the night… when I thought about what I’d done, what I’d said.

By the light of day… or the light of a windowless bathroom, anyway… my actions did not seem half as clever as they had at the time. Standing up to my father had felt good, but it might have been better to not let him know I was going to be working against him.

I felt that it couldn’t have been helped, though. If I hadn’t acted so defiant in my dream, I couldn’t have acted that way awake. There was no way for me to put on a meek front and just pretend to capitulate to him, because it wouldn’t have been a front. Basically I was a recovering capituholic. I had no resistance to the path of least resistance.

Anyway, it was done and there was no way to undo it. If I got back to Kent and told him I’d changed my mind, I had no doubt that I would have to pay dearly for him to consider recalling the arrow I’d loosed. Rather than worrying about where exactly it would land when it came back down, I decided to focus on the present and my immediate future.

Ian wanted to assert more dominance… the thought of that left me tingly in interesting places. Submission might have been a close cousin to capitulation, but it was far more useful and it left me feeling full of direction and purpose rather than adrift and at the mercy of the winds and tides.

What would it mean in practical terms? Right now the answer seemed to be sex more often but with fewer orgasms. Then I thought back to how he’d phrased his suggestion about sleeping in… forcefully and matter-of-factly. It had also been reasonable, though, and definitely the right move.

I could definitely like this.

As long as I was comfortable and alone, I decided to work on my breathing, too. It helped that the air inside the shower curtain was warm and smelled like cinnamon and vanilla. I closed my eyes, slowly pushed a breath out, and then even more slowly drew one back in.

Submission.

I’d always had an easy enough time throwing myself into my schoolwork when it was subjects I cared about and classes I wanted to be in. Other times it was a struggle… a struggle that could be managed, but one that was easier to manage when the rest of my life wasn’t giving me anything else to fight against. That didn’t seem like it would be the case for the next while.

Was it possible that I was overlooking an easier way?

My day would start nicely enough, but the rest of it was made up of classes I didn’t particularly care for, that I had as a result of obligations that were forced on me. Okay, I’d agreed to take this second class with Coach Callahan in order to save my grade point average during my first semester, but the chain of events that had led me there had started with the requirement to take a weapon proficiency class.

But neither her class nor Professor Swain’s was really all bad, and even if they had been completely pointless and terrible, I still had to get through them and I had to do so with a decent grade.

I breathed in and out and thought about how it felt to to be under the palm of Amaranth’s hand, to be under Ian’s control. I thought about how good it felt to be following a process, to be given clear instructions… to have clear lines of authority.

Professor Swain was my teacher. She didn’t want to cross over to the main campus to teach a delving class three times a week any more than I wanted to be taking one, but she did it all the same… she did it, and that meant she was my teacher. She probably didn’t get a lot of respect as a gnome among humans, but she was a professor and she deserved it.

Callahan… as much as she clearly relished what she was doing, something in her seemed to chafe at it, too. Possibly it was the effort it took her not to kill any of her students. Whatever it was… well, she seemed at least mildly squicked out when I acted submissively in response to her, but she’d never complained about the results.

I worked the way that I worked.

By the time the alarm ended my bath, I’d managed to work myself into a state of utter calm and confidence that I didn’t break my concentration or start blushing when Acantha stopped and stared at me as I came into her classroom… later than I normally would have arrived, but still a couple of minutes before class began.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Not a thing that I can discern,” she said. “Did you sleep well last night?”

“Actually, no,” I said.

“Whatever you took for it agrees with you.”

“That would be a bath,” I said, and she laughed.

Somehow she seemed a lot more relaxed than normal, too. That probably had more to do with the fact that some of the more unruly voices were gone from the room and in their absence the rest of the class seemed slightly more willing to treat her more like a knowledgeable professional than a substitute teacher in elementary school.

Twice during class Acantha said something to me about my attentiveness to the safe handling procedures. Attentiveness was not something a teacher had ever specifically recognized me for. It felt good… not just like a compliment, but like praise. I beamed more than I blushed.

I thought it was a good sign, too. She’d given me a perfect score and extra credit on my first assignment for exceeding the bounds of it, but she’d also told me she wanted to see my ability to work within confines… or as she’d put it, to show her I could be prudent.

I was hoping to see Nicki at lunch, but she wasn’t there and Ian told me she hadn’t joined them for breakfast, either. Maybe she wasn’t an early riser, but I had a feeling she’d need a dose of reassurance the next time I saw her. Hazel and her suitemates were with us, and so I didn’t want to get into the whole subject of who knew what about my nocturnal dealings at the table. Amaranth told me that Ian had said I had something to tell her about, and she suggested we wait until the evening when we could do it behind closed doors.

That afternoon I wasn’t moaning in my head about having to go to Local Hazards… I wasn’t even telling myself that Eloise’s geomancy would make it worthwhile, though I was still looking forward to that. I’d say I didn’t have any feeling about the class itself one way or the other, except I did… I felt ready for it. Not happy and not grumbly, just ready. It was coming up and I was prepared for it.

“Hey there!” Eloise said when I walked in. “Looks like someone got up on the right side of the bed this morning.”

“Yeah, and it felt so good I did it again a few hours later,” I said.

“Well, you look like a thousand gold,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you walk in with your head like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Up,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Nothing wrong with keeping one’s eyes to the ground,” Professor Swain said. “You can miss a lot of things if you aren’t watching where you put your feet. Of course, you miss a lot covering your feet up, too.”

“I like to go barefoot,” Eloise said. “But human culture frowns on it.”

“Shoes are a conspiracy to sell more carpets,” the professor said. “You’d get years’ more use out of your carpets if you didn’t wear shoes.”

“You won’t hear me arguing with that. I don’t wear shoes inside my own home,” Eloise said. “But the university actually requires them.”

“Mark my words, someone is getting a kickback there.”

By the time it was nearly the end of the day, I was starting to feel a little self-conscious for the first time since I’d woke up… but mostly I was aware of all the things that were missing. I was used to having a certain amount of background anxiety, a nagging doubt that I didn’t belong in whatever place I was or that whatever I was doing, I was doing wrong. A full calendar year at college had diminished my fears and made them recede from the front of my brain, but they’d always been there.

For the first time they’d left me completely alone for the day. As soon as I realized that, I kind of felt like I was due to get completely knocked on my ass by life… but then, I’d already faced my father and a government agent who would probably have no qualms about killing me in my sleep if he had orders to or if he thought it would further his cause. I’d already had my wake-up call, and I’d dealt with it, gone back to sleep, and got on with my life.

Coach Callahan reminded me near the start of her class that she wanted to see me taking more chances… pretty much the opposite of what Acantha wanted from me.

“The point of class is risk mitigation,” she said. “You take the opening that’s in front of you, you end the fight without messing around. But I know you have enough brains in that skull to not lose sight of that for part of a week. What I don’t want is for you to get too comfortable while you’re using your demon strength to blow past defenses. So today, tomorrow… you find other ways to take your classmates out, and you figure out how to do it as fast and hard as the obvious way. Clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said… which got me a raised eyebrow, but Coach Callahan was the queen of doing what needed to be done, and I needed to be in that head space to make doing what she told me to second nature.

I could think on my feet. I could solve problems. But when someone was coming at me with an axe or sword and the problem involved hurting them before they hurt me, I needed to be completely in the submission zone.

By telling me she wouldn’t be counting how well I did for the next two days as long as I pulled out something by Friday, she’d given me the freedom to experiment. I started by trying for less direct victories… making opponents come to me and knocking their legs out from under them and then finishing them while they were down. That was something that would have been completely against my nature if I’d been doing it for myself.

As it was, they went red before the second blow about half of the time that it worked… but I made myself follow through anyway, because stopping to see if the extra blow was needed was not what Coach Callahan wanted to see. It was not the point of the class. If they were red, my phantasmal weapon would pass through them like the phantasm it actually was. No hurt, no foul.

That’s not to say that it worked every time. I hit the floor sometimes, and some of my classmates were agile enough to avoid a low blow without losing momentum. I received my first jump-kick that day. Even though it was real and not phantasmal, I couldn’t complain because it didn’t harm me any more than an illusion would have and I think the girl who did it was probably reacting in the moment. It took me by surprise, though, and gave her enough time to finish me off.

By the half hour mark, my record for the day was four and three and my opponents were less willing to come at me. Since I wasn’t being graded, I tried throwing my staff at one of them. It spun into his sword with enough force to knock it out of his hands and send it flying, but I didn’t have a follow-up and he had my staff. He didn’t have enough strength or skill with it to score a quick victory with it, and so I was able to wrench it back from him after taking a blow to the head and one to my arm.

The arm injury kept me from doing a one-hit kill. I wasn’t coordinated enough to swing the staff in my off-hand very effectively.

I won that fight, anyway… eventually. I might have had a harder time letting go of my feelings about conflict and violence and just getting down to what needed to be done if I hadn’t been deep in my submissive state, but by the time I finished I was way out of it. Battering a guy into submission required me to let go of my own… my altered mental state was able to carry me right up to the door and even knock on it, but it couldn’t carry me through it.

Being purposefully submissive instead of just bending with the most aggressive source of pressure could make my life easier and better, but it seemed submissiveness was not going to be the answer to everything.

---

Tales of MU is now on Patreon! Help keep the story going!

Or if you particularly enjoyed this chapter, leave a tip!

---

Characters: Amaranth, Coach Callahan, Eloise, Hazel, Ian, Mackenzie, Nae, Nicki, Professor Swain, Shiel