Thinking again about how Ophelia keeps choosing to go back to Remy, even though she knows it would be safer to walk away and build a different life entirely.
Because at some point, it stopped being about escape.
She wants Remy to acknowledge her as an equal, and she knows the only way someone like Remy could ever do that is through hatred, resistance, and conflict.
So instead of disappearing, she keeps returning just to become something unbearable for her.
Remy’s own cow becoming the thing that ruins her.
I wrote down the moment Ophelia first decided this.
It’s just a short little thing written with my non-native English skills and a translator, so I hope it still comes across well.
Stud Horse
#𐂂𐦆
Because she no longer had the strength to resist, Ophelia forced herself upright on trembling legs. Ignoring the dizziness brought on by starvation and exhaustion, she slowly lowered herself to her knees and pressed both palms against the cold floor.
A position on all fours.
The posture of an obedient cow — the kind Remy liked best.
Humiliation seeped into her bones, but Ophelia kept her expression blank. For now, she would perfectly play the role of livestock that followed her master happily. It was too early to free herself through death. She wanted to destroy her first. Remy — arrogant, composed Remy — had to be broken by her own hands.
“Moo…”
The sound slipped from her throat again. Once, every involuntary moo had made her want to claw her own vocal cords apart and force the noise back down her throat. Now she was producing it willingly, drawing in breath and shaping the sound herself.
Ophelia closed her eyes. She remembered the endless cycle of escape and capture at the farm. The terror. The humiliation. And yet, instead of simply running far away and never becoming involved with Remy again, she kept returning to this hellish relationship of her own accord.
Why?
Had the humiliation truly been severe enough to justify this obsession? Severe enough to risk experiencing it all over again, again and again, just for the chance to repay it? Even she could not fully answer that question.
The traces of Remy’s conditioning filled the darkness behind her closed eyelids. The way Remy had viewed her as nothing more than cattle. The rewards. The punishments. Every act of affection and cruelty had been carried out as though tending to a prized dairy cow.
And worst of all—
There had been moments, brief and shameful moments, when Ophelia had almost wavered beneath the warmth of Remy’s approval. When behaving obediently had earned her gentleness, praise, careful hands.
The feeling of Remy’s fingers scratching gently behind her black cow ears still seemed to linger there. The memory came easily to her — juicy apples Remy had carefully turned in her hands to make them easier to eat; the quiet voice that had soothed her while petting her for a few brief minutes in the morning; even the look in Remy's eyes after milking her by hand, as though she were something precious. Ophelia could recall every single one of those moments with humiliating ease.
But that only made it more miserable. The kinder Remy became, the clearer it was that she was not cherishing Ophelia as a person — she was only cherishing her livestock.
'…wanted her acknowledgment? As an equal?'
How absurd. Remy was cruel beyond redemption — a scum of a human being who transformed people into cattle, altering their bodies to harvest milk from them by force. There shouldn't be any reason to care whether a woman like that saw her as human.
And yet she did.
If even these twisted feelings had been planted inside her by Remy, then Ophelia would make sure Remy understood exactly how disastrously effective her conditioning had been.
Finally, Ophelia accepted her warped desire. She wanted Remy to see her as an equal. And she also understood that this could never be achieved through affection or kindness.
'Remy will be broken by her own cow.'
Her own cow.
Ophelia was speaking about herself. She decided to break Remy. Her plans. Her business. Her cult. Everything she built. Ophelia would interfere with all of it and become a constant thorn in her side. She would become something unbearable, ruining and sabotaging, making Remy hate her as deeply as she hated Remy at last.
Because that was the only way Remy could ever see her as an equal. Becoming a constant irritation made just for her master — that was Ophelia's choice. The first choice she had made after admitting that Remy had tamed her, at least a little bit.
Slowly, Ophelia opened her eyes again.
'If I am livestock, then you are a stud horse.'
The thought made her smile to herself in grim satisfaction. The role suited Remy perfectly — with her pride in her bloodlines and her love of horseback riding.
'And if you are human… then so am I.'
Perhaps it was the closest thing to her true feelings.
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