Habitual whumper who always needs the trill of a new whumpee.
Maybe whumper is a wealthy socialite who constantly picks up poor, naive lovers. They wine and dine them, use and abuse them in a thousand ways. Over and over, new types of pleasures and punishments until it's all become routine and whumpee is jaded and used to it. Maybe even loves it. Then they dump whumpee and get a new, fresh one with stars in their eyes.
Maybe whumper is a crime bosses who delights in taking a personal interest in breaking in nee hires low in the organization. Whumpee thinks they're lucky to be chosen by the boss until they find out all the different punishments whumper knows and all the tint excuses they'll make to use them on whumpee. And once whumpee is 'properly trained' they move on to the next nrmew recruit.
Habitual whumper with a string of former whumpees who all have the same kind of scars in the same places. Whip marks, cigarette burns, teeth marks, cuts and bruises. A string of former whumpees who all look almost jealously at the new bait who has taken their place.
Whumpee never wants to be weak again, so they push themself further and further on the training grounds. Seeking out opponents with a reputation for going all out, then for going too far. Goading their sparring partners into attacking them for real. Secretly conjuring up magical constructs who won't hesitate to draw live steel. Training until their callouses tear open, until their muscles scream, until they throw up (and wipe their mouth and get back to it), until they pass out in the dust.
And it doesn't work. They flinch at the sound of a sword unsheathing. They get sloppy and irrational. They get weak.
It's frustrating. They're furious at themself for it, and all they can do is try harder. They just want to improve! They have to get better! Why are they just getting worse?
There’s nothing quite like the terror of waking up and being unable to remember a single thing about yourself, every strained attempt to remember only resulting in you smacking into the steel vault door that’s suddenly right where your cherished childhood memories used to be. Or, where they probably were, anyway. I wouldn’t have known, because I couldn’t fucking remember. All I could feel was this cold pit in my stomach, the sensation that I’d collapsed in on myself like a black hole, that I wasn’t anyone anymore.
Yep, there’s really nothing quite like it. Which is why there’s also the godforsaken sequel: being molded into someone—something—you’re absolutely certain you don’t want to be.
“Your pain is what makes you useful,” the trainer intoned. “Say it.”
“Fuck you—” The cattle prod jabbed into my stomach. My arms yanked at the manacles suspending me, instinct driving me to protect my torso. That was the only thing driving me, I thought numbly, my jaw clenched against the pain. Instinct. I didn’t have much else.
When it stopped, I sagged in my chains with my arms pulling at their sockets, and a bead of sweat ran down my nose and plopped to the tile floor, right in front of the trainer’s boots. The tip of her cattle prod, still warm, pushed up under my chin. I flinched upright. She let out a dry chuckle. “I could do this all day, pet. But I doubt you can.”
“Underestimate me again,” I muttered, “I dare y—”
A short, sharp zap to the sternum shut me up, at least for a second. “Your pain,” she repeated, seizing my chin in her hand, “is what makes you useful. Say it three times, and this session ends, alright? That’s a pretty clear win condition. You’d have to be stupid not to accept it.”
I loosened my jaw, made like I was going slack with defeat. “M … my …”
Her fingers slipped on my sweaty skin as her grip tightened. “Yeah?” she prompted.
I jerked my head to the side, and my teeth closed around flesh and bone. I tasted blood before she screeched, and before she had the presence of mind to electrocute me again. The prod drove deep into my stomach, but I clenched my jaw down harder against the pain, against the screaming in my ear. You’re gonna hurt with me, motherfucker.
Finally I couldn’t stand the electricity anymore. I released her mangled fingers, and her blood dripped down my chin. She reared back and didn’t waste a second in driving the cattle prod into my stomach, zapping me so long it began to burn. “You son of a bitch!” Her boot drove into my leg, and as it buckled, the prod dragged up my chest.
I was seeing stars by the time it ended, colors swirling in my vision like they were trying to brighten up the plain tile of my cell. The trainer hissed in pain, flexing her injured hand. I couldn’t see how good I’d gotten her, but I could still taste her blood, so I had to assume it was pretty goddamn good. I spit some of it out by her boots.
She just glared at me. “You don’t eat until you say your affirmations, you goddamn brat. Enjoy starving.” She hooked her cattle prod into her belt and left, slamming the door behind her.
I wiped my face on my shoulder and grinned after her. Facility: zero. Me: one.
forgive me if this sounds weird but a while ago you mentioned an AU where Vic’s mentor died and young Vic got passed over to another mentor who treated him actually well but Vic was constantly on high alert and terrified of them. That idea has just stuck in my head…
(Maybe Vic’s new mentor could even be Sahota, like a role swap au…)
well apparently my brain just ran with the idea lol. Realistically Vic would just be on his own if Nichols died, but I like this concept enough that I can and will handwave that skdjrj
cw: implied (past) noncon + abuse
next
•••
He hates the feeling of eyes on him.
They've followed him since his arrival; watching and waiting, analyzing him, marking weakness. His new master is about as quiet as Sir was, and while that should be a familiar comfort, he's still unsettled by it. By the silence, by the unknown.
"You're with Black Kite, right? Afraid I have some bad news."
He'd been with Nichols for close to three years. Missions and training. Making sure he was prepared for anything. Victor had no love for his master, but he needed the experience, the guidance from someone who knew better, even if he hated it sometimes. You have to suffer to get good, don't you? You have to earn it.
Sometimes he's felt like he's earned it, like he's good enough, like he can take on the missions alone, but other times he's struck by how out of his depth he is, how much he has left to learn. It wasn't his choice in any case. Some three-letter agency took over the compound and handed him to a new master.
And now Victor is waiting, and being watched.
How long will it be? They've run through several drills in the week he's been here, testing Vic's speed, agility, accuracy. Gauging where he's at. (Marking weakness). He was with Sir for months before resistance was added to the mix. He's not sure he can wait that long again. By the time Sir started, it felt like it was already too late, like there was no going back to a normal life, like he had no choice. He can't do that again; even if it's still true, he wants to know now.
Is it going to be framed as training? As a discipline? The last time he'd been captured, after his recovery...
"I can see that this is something that bothers you a great deal, so I'm using it as a corrective measure. Do you understand?"
It just felt like an excuse, but Vic knew better than to do anything but endure it.
Sir is dead now, replaced with another. Maybe by the time this one dies he'll be good enough to go alone. Maybe.
"I think we'll cover some sparring drills today," his new master says over breakfast. "If you're up for it."
What kind of a question is that? Training is non-negotiable; whether or not he's 'up for it' shouldn't even factor in. Maybe the tension he's been carrying is unwarranted. Maybe his new master doesn't have Nichols' experience. Or maybe it's a test.
"What time?"
"Hmm... 0800, if you want."
If he wants. It's never supposed to be about what he wants. It's about what he needs to become. Victor responds with a nod. That's been their primary form of communication. An order or a time and a nod. Silence otherwise, but not the same as Sir's silence.
Victor makes sure to be at the mats early. Waiting again. For a trick or a trap, for a sudden test where he shows what he's worth. But the new master only strolls in at eight on the dot. They warm up, run through some movement drills, and then...
"How many more evaluations before I'm back in the field?" Victor asks as they circle each other, fists up to guard. He can tolerate anything if it's all for something.
"Do you think you're ready?"
It sounds like a challenge. Vic lunges.
His last mission was a month ago, last real fight even further back, but Nichols never let a day go by without some form of training, and even with a slow week behind him, Victor is fast.
Somehow, his new master is faster.
He lands exactly one hit before his legs are knocked out from under him in a sweep he didn't anticipate. Can't regain his feet in time to avoid having his arm twisted behind his back, the new Sir straddling him, and he knows ways to break out of this submission.
But he can't.
His thoughts all flush out of him as if through an open airlock, his body slack under the weight of the man, no part of him willing to move. Not in the sparring room anymore, but somewhere else, somewhere he's pinned, somewhere he can do nothing.
He can't... He can't...
Suddenly, the weight is off him, new Sir crouching by his head, snapping fingers in front of Vic's face.
"Hey, hey, kid, can you hear me?"
He's back on the mat. Smell of rubber under the bleach it's cleaned with. He bites down on his tongue until he's sure of what he's feeling, trying to hide his face as he pushes himself to his feet, trying to act like that didn't just happen.
It shouldn't have happened. Not against one opponent, not when Vic knows how to fight back. He's better than that, he's trained better than that.
But when new Sir lays a hand on his shoulder he still flinches back violently, breath hissing through clenched teeth.
"Don't fucking touch me." He shouldn't react like this. Shouldn't he be used to it by now? Shouldn't he be able to push through it? Wasn't that the whole damn point of Nichols putting him through this? He can't. He's so fucking tired of waiting for the worst.
A rise to the challenge is what would logically come next. The master asserting his dominance, showing Victor that he's not the one in power, not yet, and he'd do well to learn that, but...
New Sir just takes a step back, palms open at his sides.
"Alright. We can break there."
Just like that. Is he unpracticed? Is he weak?
"I can go again," Vic says. He can. He should. It's the quickest way to put that slip-up behind him.
"Do you think you should?"
"Why wouldn't I?"
A pause, an exhale from his new master that sounds almost disappointed. "Why do you think you need to?"
Why is he asking stupid questions? They're supposed to be operatives, aren't they? Nothing should stand in the way of completing an objective.
"On a mission, the danger doesn't back off just because you falter," Vic responds gruffly.
"You're not on a mission," new Sir says. "This is a training scenario."
He doesn't have an answer for that, at least not a quick one. Practice like you play, he should say, but new Sir speaks before he can.
"We're done sparring today. You can continue movement drills on your own, if you'd like. Or you can hit the gym. Up to you."
It isn't supposed to be up to him! In the last three years, nothing has been up to him. It's training, it's a rite of passage, it's necessary. Black Kite was supposed to be the best of the best, the ones who took on jobs no one else could. That was what Vic was supposed to be, and he's not going to let his time be wasted just because someone else doesn't understand.
"Then I'll be in the gym," he says, turning his back and refusing to look over his shoulder as he storms out, even though it feels like a trap, like he'll be snuck up on, like he's earned a punishment for acting up.
He can feel the eyes on him as he leaves, can feel himself being watched. It's different from Nichols, different from the employers who look down on him and the captors who take.
Whumpee who’s trained not to move. They’re not paralyzed, if Whumper commands they go somewhere, they can. But when whumper tortures them, they’re not allowed to move or make a sound. I mean to the point that their reflexes are completely shut off, if someone pokes their eye they won’t even blink.
They can’t whimper, their breathing can’t change, can’t jerk away or flinch or twitch.
But the long hours of training and punishment don’t just go away once they’ve been rescued. So at first, doctors and even caretaker believe whumpee is fine or can’t feel pain. They perform their operations and procedures without anasthesia because they think whumpee can’t feel any of it.
But then later Whumpee tells Caretaker about one of the procedures and how much it hurt. And Caretaker is horrified!
“Why didn’t you say so? We never wanted to hurt you!”
“I can’t… do anything when it hurts.”
So that becomes Whumpee’s tell. When they’re feeling okay, they talk, they move, but the second something starts hurting they stop everything. Completely shut down.
Author's Notes: Hey, remember Freddie, the cool agent lady who rescues Nyma and looks after her? Yeah, this is about one of her friends, and how one of their missions didn't go so well...
Also, deciding to try out a more neutral, omniscient POV for these streaming fics, so let's see how that goes!
At 12:00 a.m. EST, on the dot, the stream began.
The screen flickered to life, showing a largely blank room with only two occupants. Closer to the camera filming this stream, close enough to see her face in detail, was a woman with a dark bob, wearing a form-fitting tank top and leopard print pants. With a too-wide smile familiar to most viewers of the stream already, this woman was easily recognizable as Sutton Delaney, most famous trainer and seller of mythical pets half the world over.
Further in the background was a figure much less recognizable, for a number of reasons. One, was the fact that she was unconscious, her head slumped over and the rest of her body only held up by the ties holding her to a chair. Two, was the fact that she had been stripped naked, bereft of any identifying features aside from a fresh coating of bruises, cuts, and burns patterned across her body. Third, and much less obvious to the casual viewer, was the fact that this woman had spent most of her adult life living far off the radar of anyone outside her immediate circle.
And unfortunately for her, that anonymity was about to be shattered.
"Hello there!" Sutton said, kicking the stream off with a cheerful wave to the camera. "So happy to have you here! I saw we had a few hundred people already waiting for this to start, but I'm guessing that'll be up by a whole lot by the time this is over.”
The camera followed her as she turned and began to walk closer to the bound figure in the background - right around the time that figure began to stir, her chest beginning to rise and fall more noticeably, her head twitching with signs of life.
"Now, I know what you think you're all here for," Sutton carried on, stopping beside the chair. "I said this livestream series was going to be the first peek behind the curtain about how we process fresh catches into the perfect pets for your needs. But, here's the thing: the pet we'll be using for this series is a very, very special case."
Slowly, shakily, the figure began to raise her head, the camera close enough to catch the details of her face, for what little had been left visible. Beneath a recently and unevenly chopped scruff of black hair was a tan face equally as bruised as the rest of her body, cheeks clearly swollen from beatings, deep incisions in both her bleeding ears.
Her eyes were obscured by a blindfold and her mouth was hidden by a muzzle-like gag, but it could easily be assumed that those areas had not been spared from whatever punishment she had already endured.
The figure had just been starting to move her head about blindly, limbs clenching against their unrelenting bonds, the smallest inquisitive sounds creeping out around her gag, before Sutton grabbed a handful of what was left of her hair, forcing her to face the camera.
"Chat - meet Kitten," Sutton said with a proud grin, tearing a pained noise from the figure as she yanked on her hair. "Now, she wouldn't tell you her name is Kitten, but it's Kitten now in the only way that matters - which is that it's what I want to call her."
Kitten began to mewl more insistently behind her muzzle, things that could have been pleas for mercy, defiant curses, just crying no, no, no. Whatever it was, it only mattered about as much as any other name she might have.
"Kitten here - she's a member of a certain pet-stealing agency that's been a thorn in all our sides for as long as we can remember," Sutton said, giving Kitten's bruised cheek a pinch with her spare hand, digging in her nails. "Or, you know, at least she was until this most recent plot of theirs went wrong."
Looking into the camera with wide-eyed mock surprise, she said with sheer astonishment, "Can you believe - we caught her breaking into my good friend Aubrey's house! Her awful little friends stole Aubrey's pet fish, completely unprovoked! So honestly, I think it's really only fair that we get to keep the friend they left behind, don't you?"
Kitten growled and struggled against her bindings, earning a swift punch to her exposed stomach from Sutton. She tried to double over with a groan but Sutton held her head up high.
"Yeah, it's really just the saddest thing when a family leaves their pet behind - especially if they weren't all that well trained to begin with," Sutton sighed sympathetically. "Really, nearly impossible to get them re-homed at that point. But, not fully impossible - especially not with my patented training methods."
Giving Kitten's head a rough shove aside, Sutton began to stalk away once again - but that did not mean Kitten was spared from other attentions. Seamlessly, two purple jumpsuit wearing men stepped into from behind her and began to undo her restraints, hauling her up onto unsteady legs with their heavy hands clamped on her arms and shoulders.
"What I'm about to demonstrate for you in this and in many, many fun streams to come are the methods I use to get all your pre-trained pets purchase perfect," Sutton explained to the camera.
Behind her, as the first two men held Kitten up, another began to work in the background, first removing the chair, then leaving in its place two waist-high pillars with a leather cuff hanging off each one.
"Admittedly, she is the first fully human pet I've trained in a hot minute, so I may have to temper my methods a little, until I've gauged her limits," she admitted with a shrug. "But just to keep it interesting for all of you who paid for access to this training series, that's where the audience participation from our subscribers comes in."
The first two guards gave Kitten a heavy shove, and her legs buckled, immediately slamming down onto her knees. The slightest whimper escaped her gag as they began to secure her hands in the cuffs, while the third guard began to set up another camera pointed at her back.
"Every week, while I'm giving her some badly needed training, you, our lucky viewers - and I'm being told there's a few thousand of you in the chatroom now - can leave suggestions for what you'd like to see happen to our sweet little Kitten," Sutton said. "Which only seems fair, right? A pet should be adapted to its owners, and it is probably one of you who'll be bringing her into your home at the end of this. And until we have enough suggestions - "
A red light flicked on with the camera in the background, and after a moment, the screen of the stream split - one showing Kitten's backside, which was relatively clean and untouched compared to the rest of her body, and the other moving to focus on her front, as Sutton paced around her.
" - I'm going to satisfy a request from my good friend Aubrey, and get some vengeance for this horrid injustice she's suffered."
Both cameras caught some of the movement as a short, wicked whip was placed in Sutton's hand. Kitten struggled against her bonds in vain as the guards stepped away, leaving her arms pulled taut between the pillars, her soft flesh exposed to the world and to the woman who held her life in her hands.
"So, just sit back and relax for this week, chat," Sutton advised her audience. "The real training starts soon enough. Today is just about making this bitch bleed."
She struck with the whip then, angling herself just so the cameras could see both the bloody lash that ripped Kitten's back open and the face and chest that heaved with pain as a muffled scream was torn from her. They could see the next one too - and the next one, and the next one, and the next.
They could see it all as a once clean back was taken down to raw, bloody meat and a once stoic face was reduced to sobs that Kitten nearly choked on. They had an all-access pass as Sutton ended her work by kicking a sharp-toed shoe into the exposed flesh, earning one last scream from her new pet, before leaving her strung up - to reflect on what a bad Kitten she'd been.
If they had subscribed to the stream with a Gold-level membership, they saw the post-training footage as well, in which Kitten sobbed and whimpered alone in her bindings, until her head slumped into tortured unconsciousness.
And if they were Platinum-level, they had their personalized messages hung around her neck, for all the audience to see how much they loved their new Kitten.
Weapon panics whenever it shifts into its armoured form outside of combat.
It’s been trained.
It knows better.
Handlers used different tools for its armoured form: armour piercing beak-sticks and painful sounds and high pressure water. And shocks. Shocks still work when it’s like that, but shocks aren’t enough. The normal tools aren’t enough.
Caretaker has to slowly get it to trust its armoured form again. Gives it permission to shift when it spooks (once it’s already shifted) and rewards it when it does.
Drapes a blanket over it when it curls up behind an armoured shell. Offers it snacks when it comes out.
Makes note of its triggers, especially when they’re weapons or random objects.
Warns it before ey pick up sticklike objects and jump ropes.
In this alternative vision of Teyvat, the kitsune race has dark, terrible secrets. One of them just reached Inazuma's shores, falling right into the lap of none other than Yae Miko...
Equals - The Main Narrative: Chapter I | Chapter II | Chapter III | Chapter IV | Chapter V | Chapter VI
"Paws and Tails: Dog Care for Dummies", or a kitsune guide to male ownership: Good Boy Training - Making the First Step
Extras - Silken White Innocence: Factorial - Character Intro
Commissioned Art - First | Second (soon)
Fan Art - nosleepbelike | nosleepbelike 2 + an interesting request | anonymous author + extra scene
