Post by Raul Adalwulf on Dec 1, 2020 16:58:35 GMT -5
Something was wrong. Raul couldn’t say exactly what, and probably lacked the words to entirely convey the sense of creeping dread that had suddenly stolen over him, and that was before the grass started to move and surround him like a living and faintly threatening carpet. He had a deep and intense sense that there was something “wrong” with Holly. Her tone of voice was entirely at odds with what she had been saying, and her scent fluctuated wildly between that of joy and sadness, as if he were able to smell two different people occupying the same space. It was distracting and alarming to the point that it made it difficult to pay attention to what she’d been saying. Then there was the grass. Sure, it felt nice the way it tickled him, but…
Something about being surrounded by a power he didn’t understand, under the control of a person he didn’t understand, just as he’d been debating whether or not to sever the intimate contact between them, struck as vaguely, if not deliberately, threatening. All of a sudden, the dynamic seemed less consensual and more like a form of domination, like Holly was somehow holding him captive, and well aware of the fact. In a word, it was kind of scary, and Raul was suddenly enjoying her attention a lot less than he had been. It seemed less like he was making her happy of his own volition, and more like Holly was taking happiness from him whether he liked it or not.
Raul had never experienced anything like it, in large part because he was used to being bigger and stronger than everyone around him, and affection and whom to provided it to, which often meant anyone who would accept it, had always been his choice to make. He’d never been dominated in any way in all his life, at least not in a way he could perceive, the institutional injustice of faunus prejudice being much too large and complicated for him to see or understand. This felt different somehow, and that difference was new and frightening to him. For a reason he could not understand, it reminded him sharply of being in the slaver’s camp with Bianca, and looking into the cages and seeing the sad, frightened eyes of the occupants.
But it was more insidious than that still, because it came in such an appealing form that Raul distrusted the alarms of his instincts. If he’d been even slightly less inclined to trust his own instincts implicitly, looking at the smile on Holly’s face and feeling her hands playing with his ears would have been enough to make him doubt the strong warnings bells that were ringing in his head. Somehow he’d always thought that mistreatment had to come with intention, with cruelty. This was his first time encountering something like it wrapped in finery, veiled behind good intentions, perhaps even ignorant of it’s own toxicity.
It made him question. Was Holly aware of what she was doing? Was she aware that she was hurting and frightening him? She couldn’t be, because she was a kind friendly person…Or was she?
Needless to be said, this was a very troubling line of thought to be having now that he had come too close to easily escape.
Near where Raul had grown up on the coast, there were large reptiles that lived in the swamps, who could hold their breaths for a long time, and would wait beneath the cloudy water of a pond and snatch up animals who came to try and drink. Raul had a sense that he knew the kind of panic those creatures must have felt, to have approached a placid scene only to discover far too late that a predator lurked beneath it.
More disturbing, it made him wonder about himself, if this was why people smelled like fear and anxiety whenever he tried to hug them. The sadness and regret that this possibility filled him with was magnitudes worse than the anxiety he felt for Holly’s strangeness.
He would have to think hard about that later, if he remembered… For now, there were more immediate concerns. The problem was, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He didn’t want to hurt Holly’s feelings, but he also didn’t want to let her continue to hurt his, regardless of how aware she was of whether or not she was doing it. He wanted her to continue to pet him and he wanted to cuddle her, but he also wanted it to be consensual, not something he felt obliged or worse, compelled. He wanted Holly to be happy, but not at his own expense. Altogether that left precious little for options, and perhaps it didn’t leave any at all…
It was clear however that he would need to say something. Continuing in silence would only allow the problem to persist, and severing the encounter was only likely to make things worse. Just his luck. Raul didn’t like talking. He did his best, most concise communication through non-verbal cues, and his vocabulary was quite limited, and his ability to convey complex emotions and concepts even more so.
“What if someone isn’t happy with what they are? What if they are sad? Or lonely? Should they keep being sad and lonely?” He asked, without even knowing where the question had come from, as he looked back up at Holly with fresh eyes, and paid attention to how her expression changed, to how she reacted to the question.
Her reaction would tell him a lot about her. If she paused, it meant that a person’s happiness was more important to her than fitting some arbitrary expectation. If she persisted, then it meant she didn’t really care what made people happy, and expected them to just do as they were told. In short, either she was like he thought she was when he first approached her, or she was like the slavers at the camp.
“You know a stick is only a stick, which is good for some things, you can poke bugs with it, can burn it to make a fire, but only ever a stick. Flint is just a rock, which is good for some things. You can smash shells to get at nuts, and can make a spark to make fire, but still just a rock. But if you tie some flint to the stick, then it’s a spear, and it’s good for other things, you can catch fish, or fight a grimm.” He continued, as he shifted his mass about a bit, discomforted by the grass, “I think people are like that too. A person by themselves can only ever be who they are, but if someone helps them, then they can be something else, they can be lots of things. Maybe Qui’li, and Solomon, and Ferric, needed help. Maybe… they didn’t get it.”
He trailed off, stunned by the coherency of his own words, at first baffled that he had the ability to put together such a complicated hypothesis at all, but as what he’d said sunk in, he realized another reason why he’d said it.
He shifted and rose up, his body suddenly surrounding Holly as he repositioned, dwarfing her with his mass, and peering down at her as if for the first time, seeing her for the sad strange, troubling girl who had cremated a banana in the woods for no apparent reason. His expression was blank, his almost human features turned to stone as he seemed to reach some sort of conclusion.
“I think…”He said in that thick, deep, bestial voice as he wrapped his arms around her and squeezed gently, ready for her to struggle or reject him, but prepared to accept the consequences of the attempt, “Maybe you need some help too…”
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