Page 33 of Discordant Cultivation

Vale descended the stairs behind him. Calm, measured steps that didn’t falter or rush. He stepped carefully over Kieran’s sprawled body at the landing like he was debris.

“Get up. We’re not finished.”

Kieran’s vision blurred with tears—pain and rage and helplessness tangling into something that threatened to choke him. He tried to push himself up, but his arms shook, refusing to hold his weight.

“I c-can’t—”

“You can. You will.”

Vale waited. Patient. Immovable. Like he had all the time in the world to watch Kieran’s body fail and fail and finally obey.

Kieran’s hands found the wall. He used it to drag himself upright, every movement a new point of pain: his stomach, shin, hip, tailbone, and shoulder where he’d caught himself wrong.

He took the rest of the stairs on shaking legs, each step its own small agony, while Vale watched from below with something that might have been approval.

At the bottom, Vale guided him to the chair with that same grip on his neck and sat him down with enough force that his bruised tailbone screamed fresh protest.

“Good,” Vale murmured, reaching for the hood. “See how much easier it is when you don’t fight?”

The hood went on.

Darkness swallowed him whole.

Kieran stared at his bruises in the bathroom mirror the next evening, his body still hollow from Vale’s lesson that day: purple fingerprints around the back of his neck where Vale’s hand had controlled him, a dark bloom across his stomach where the punch had landed, his hip and ass a mottled black-green from the fall down the stairs.

Each bruise was proof he’d fought. Proof he was still himself, still human, still capable of resistance even if that resistance earned him nothing but pain.

The anger still burned. Dimmer than yesterday, maybe. Harder to hold onto. But it was there.

He won’t break me.

He heard Vale distantly in the kitchen—the clink of glass, water running. Medication time.

Yesterday morning Kieran had taken his pills without thinking, muscle memory from years of managing his epilepsyoverriding everything else. Yesterday evening and this morning too. But today—

Today he’d realized something.

If he had a seizure bad enough, Vale would have to call an ambulance. Paramedics would see him and ask questions. Someone would see what was happening to him and they would help him.

Kieran left the bathroom to find Vale setting up at the kitchen table: his pills in a small cup, a glass of water, and that patient expression that meant he expected cooperation.

“Sit, sweetheart. Medication time.”

Kieran sat. He picked up the cup of pills, looked at them for a long moment while Vale watched with those too-knowing eyes.

Then he set the cup back down. “I’m n-not taking it.”

Vale’s expression didn’t change. “Yes, you are.”

“No.” The word came out steadier than Kieran expected, edged with desperate hope.

Something shifted in Vale’s face. The gentleness bled away, replaced by something cold and precise and on the edge of anger for the first time since Kieran had woken up here.

“Pick up the pills.”

“No.”

Vale moved faster than Kieran could track—hands on his shoulders, his full body weight pressing down, pinning him to the kitchen chair with nowhere to go. In a heartbeat, their bodies were locked together, Vale’s breath on his face, heat bleeding between them.