Page 34 of Discordant Cultivation

“Open your mouth.”

Kieran clenched his jaw.

Vale’s hand forced it open anyway, his thumb and forefinger digging into the hinges of his jaw until Kieran’s mouth opened on reflex. He dropped the pills onto Kieran’s tongue. Kieran tried to spit them out. Vale’s hand clamped over his mouth.

“Swallow it.”

Kieran shook his head frantically, pills dissolving bitter against his tongue, trying to keep his throat closed through sheer force of will.

Vale’s hand slid from his mouth to his throat. Not choking—something worse. Fingers pressing deliberately on either side of his throat with a careful pressure that knew exactly where to touch, how hard, massaging the sides of his throat in a rhythm that forced his swallow reflex to engage.

The touch felt different than the violence. Careful. Knowing. Almost gentle.

Kieran’s body relaxed slightly under that pressure, betrayed him in some fundamental way by recognizing the touch as something other than a threat even while his mind screamed for resistance.

He swallowed.

Vale’s hand stayed on his throat a moment longer than necessary, feeling the movement. When he pulled back, he smiled.

“Good boy.”

He released Kieran, stepped back, and returned to perfect calm as if the violence had never happened.

Kieran sat frozen in the chair, throat still tingling where Vale’s fingers had pressed, hating his body for the way it had responded to that touch. For the way some stupid animal part of his brain had registered those careful fingers as care instead of control.

Kieran took his medication the next day without fighting. Twice daily, morning and evening, pills from Vale’s hand to his mouth to his throat with barely a protest.

He hated himself for it.

He got out of bed when Vale appeared in the doorway and didn’t wait for the command, he just pushed back covers and stood on shaking legs because it was easier than being dragged.

He hated himself for that too.

He walked to the basement on his own feet when Vale said “It’s time.” He didn’t fight at the top of the stairs or grab the doorframe. He just descended into darkness with the resignation of someone who’d learned that fighting only made the violence more intimate.

The anger was still there. Kieran held onto it like a lifeline, repeating “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you” on an endless loop in his mind during his “lesson”, during every bland meal, during every moment Vale’s hands touched him.

But the anger was harder to access now, slipping through his fingers like water every time he tried to grip it tight.

The hood blocked out the world and Vale’s fingers wrapped around his cock, already half hard, and his body betrayed him again. He wanted to reach into his nervous system and rip out whatever broken wiring made him react to Vale’s touch with anything except revulsion.

“You don’t want to fight this.” Vale’s voice came through the darkness, soft and certain. “Fighting only makes it harder. You want to accept what your body already knows.”

Kieran sobbed behind the hood. Not from pain—Vale hadn’t needed to hurt him today. He sobbed from the confusion of his body speaking a language his mind couldn’t translate.

I don’t want this. I don’t. I don’t.

But it felt less true each time.

By the sixth day—or was it the seventh?—Kieran found himself anticipating the sessions. Not wanting it, exactly, but his body responded to the routine, to the predictability. Knowing that in the basement, he didn’t have to make decisions. Vale decided everything—where to touch, how long to wait, when to remove the hood.

It was easier than trying to maintain autonomy he’d already lost.

That realization should have terrified him.

Instead, it just made him tired.

The session lasted longer than usual. Hours of Vale’s hands and voice and that suffocating darkness making Kieran’s body do things his mind still tried to deny.