The king is smirking. “Oh, Terrible. You have picked yourself a challenge!”
“I have,” Terrible agrees flatly.
“I’m not undisciplined. I’m just out of place,” I keep arguing, but I accidentally pick the wrong words, giving Terrible the kind of opening no man can resist: one for a snappy comeback.
“Allow me to put you back in your place.”
Terrible grabs me in that way he has which makes me feel ultra small. He is so very large. Absolutely monstrous. It is not hard to pretend to be afraid, because I am afraid.
“Let me go! Let me go! Goddamn it! Let me fucking go!” I am screaming at the top of my lungs, my voice reaching what even I’d describe as a hysterical pitch. I don’t want to be punished, even though I know I deserve it. The worst time to be punished is when you deserve it. It hurts more when the physical sensations align with the guilt in your core.
“Stop.”
He says the word firmly, but not unkindly. I stop. I hang in his grasp, a helpless little human at the mercy of a beast beyond my understanding.
“You ran away…”
“You left the door open.”
“I did not realize you needed to be confined like a prisoner. I thought you might possess a modicum of common sense, or failing that, the ability to stay where you were told to stay.”
“You didn’t technically tell me to stay.”
Terrible glances over my head and I know he is looking at the king. He is deciding how much of an example to make of me.
“He didn’t tell me to stay!” I squeal. “I didn’t even technically do anything wrong!”
“You climbed into a cleaning machine and almost turned yourself into a person slurry.”
“Yes, but that was an accident, and punishing me for an accident when I only just got here… that would be cruel. You’re not a cruel species, are you?” I am attempting to appeal to whatever might pass for their better nature.
“We are not cruel,” Tyrant says. “Take her back to her room, Terrible. Make the rules clear to her.”
I think I just got a royal pardon. Fuck yes. Am I out of trouble? Maybe. Though one look at Terrible’s face, and I’m not so sure about that.
He walks me back to my room through the ship’s walls, which shimmer and disappear before him. Even solid matter knows not to fuck with Terrible. Maybe one day I’ll learn that lesson too.
Soon we are back in the room where this all began, and the dragon out the window is not the biggest, meanest, or most dangerous creature here by a long shot. That title would have to go to Terrible, who has locked himself in the room with me, created a place of no escape. He turns to me with an expression which does not bode well.
“You put yourself in danger, and you made me look incompetent before my king.”
“To be fair, you did that to you.”
“I suppose trusting you to make good decisions was my mistake.”
“Listen, buddy, if I had you down on my world, you’d probably end up doing something dangerous by mistake too. Hell. Trying to fly a vacuum cleaner isn’t even on my own top ten stupid things I did on Earth.”
“I have absolutely no problem believing that,” he replies dryly. I don’t know how this guy does it, but he manages to insult me with almost absolutely every sentence which comes out of his shiny alien mouth.
“Now, listen to me, glowstick.”
“Glowstick?”
“Yeah. That’s what you look like. You look like you should be shaken and snapped in half.”
He scowls furiously. “Just because the king allowed for some mercy when it comes to the public nature of your punishment does not mean that you are out of trouble, and it does not mean that disobedience is going to get you anywhere. You will feel justice, human.”
“I doubt that. I bet I’ll feel tyranny wearing justice’s severed head as a hat.”
He stops. “You do have a way with words. If you did not dedicate every moment of existence to rebellion, you might be an enjoyable companion to converse with.”
He seems surprised by that revelation, like I was supposed to be a gibbering moron from the planet of stupid.
“Well, yeah, asshole.”
I know I’m making thing worse, but making things worse is kind of my jam. If you’re looking for someone to make things better, I hope you have someone else on your speed dial, put it that way.
“Call me Terrible.”
“Oh I’ll call you more than terrible. I’ll call you absolutely fucking awful. How’s that?”
“Absolutely, Fucking, and Awful are three of my cousins, so that could be confusing.”
His delivery is so deadpan that I can’t tell if he is joking. What is not confusing is the way he takes hold of me, hurls me down on the bed in a whirl of fancy fabric and proceeds to pin me down and spank me with his palm, swift strokes. His treatment gives me hot flashes of shame and pain simultaneously flashing through my flesh and ego. There is no besting this creature. Even if I win an argument, I lose the physical altercation.