#just acting

Caution for: BBU, pet whump, conditioning and associated tropes, “romantic” pet, noncon

Just Acting - Reflection
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There were chains in the Facility. Gleaming silver things reserved for pets who needed more correction than a brief round of discipline. 651 has hazy memories, somewhere in the white light that swallows early training, of posture correction, a chain linking her hands to the floor, her collar to the wall.

The chains in the Facility were cold and hard and unforgiving, but they were always clean. Bethany imagines a handler scrubbing the shining links with the same meticulous thoroughness that they use to scrub the pets clean.

The chain round her ankle now is black with filth – gritty, sticky, clinging oil that has left stubborn smears all over her skin and her clothes despite her best efforts not to touch it. She hatesit, with a depth of loathing that she hasn’t felt for anything since they took the shock collar away and swapped it for the one that is meant to be safe.

The other end of the chain is locked around the pipe under the sink. Bethany can reach the toilet easily, but not the shower. She can reach the door, but she knows she isn’t allowed to open it. Mostly she sits on the floor, and lets the hours slip away from her.

The decision to keep her in the bathroom wasn’t unanimous. Miss Mosley wanted to keep her in the kitchen, so that she could do the washing up and Miss Mosley wouldn’t have to unlock the pet every time she wants to use the bathroom. Mr Stefan said that she couldn’t be trusted in the kitchen, because of the back door.

Sometimes Bethany cleans the floor or the sink or the pipes – although she only has her hands and the soap, like a naughty pet who has had the cleaning cloth taken away for misusing it – just to give her something to do that isn’t losing herself in memories of training.

Sometimes she peers at her reflection in the mirror. 

Sometimes it makes her cry.

No one has given her makeup since she was bought. She didn’t need it to be Handler Smith, and she didn’t need it at Johann’s place either. His hungry gaze made her feel beautiful without it, just like the handlers told her she was gorgeouslong before they started having her paint her face.

Now, though, for the first time she can remember, she feels ugly, and she wishes she had makeup to try and hide the damage.

Her lip is split and swollen. Her cheeks are always blotchy from tears. Bruising has gathered in the hollows under her eyes and trickled down the side of her nose in hideous shades of blue and green and violet.

She cries when Kyle fucks her, rough and greedy, against the lino floor.

“For fuck’s sakes, Beth, stop snivelling,” he scolds her. “You could be in my bed right now if you hadn’t run off.”

She should be glad to be used. It’s what she’s for. But she’s not glad at all. She hates it. She wants her real owner back. She wants Liv, and Johann, and even Mr. Green. Mr. Green is cold and terrifying but he let her sleep in a real bed and shower with hot water every day and wear clean clothes and feed herself out of the fridge. Here she’s lucky if they remember to bring her a sandwich a day.

“For fuck’s sakes, Beth,” she whispers to the ugly, ungrateful, miserable pet in the mirror. “Stop snivelling.”

The first day that she thinks might be the fourteenth, she is hopeful. She fidgets and paces all day, even though good pets sit still when they’re not needed. Bethany, she is starting to think, might not be a good pet after all.

Liv said two weeks at most. Liv is coming back for her.

But the light outside the grimy frosted window dims and gives way to black, and Miss Mosley drags Bethany out so she can use the bathroom and then drags her back in and locks her ankle back to the filthy, hateful chain, and the house goes quiet, and no one has come for Bethany.

She’s not sure it’s been fourteen days. It might only have been twelve. It could have been fifteen already.

“Stupid pet,” she hisses at her reflection. “Can’t even count to fourteen. Empty-headed slut.”

She doesn’t feel like Bethany, saying those words. She feels like a handler. Angry. Aggressive.

It feels better than crying on the floor.

The second day that might be the fourteenth comes and goes.

So does the third.

Where is Liv? Did she forget about her pet? Did something happen to her? Does she not want Bethany?

Looking at the weepy, ugly, misbehaving pet in the mirror, she can’t see why anyone would want Bethany. Anyone but Kyle, who just wants a warm body to fuck and doesn’t care at all if she’s pretty or well behaved.

On the first day that definitely isn’t the fourteenth any more, the pet doesn’t cry. She washes her face and her tangled, greasy hair in the sink, and she looks herself dead in the eye.

“Stupid pet,” she says. “What are you crying about?”
Her voice is cold and mocking. She watches her lip curl with contempt, and for a shocking second the woman in the mirror doesn’t look like a pet at all.

[Next]

Just Acting - Dress Rehearsal
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Gil’s door clicks softly as he closes it behind himself. He stops with his back to it, folds his arms, and watches.

Cross-legged on the floor with a compact mirror held up to the light, 704 is applying the final touches to her makeup. She bats heavily mascaraed lashes at Gil, and turns her pout in his direction as she paints sealer over sinfully red lips. A thin dust of gold glitter over her cheekbones, and she is done.

“How do I look, sir?” Her voice is husky and sweet.
“Like an expensive whore.”
A quick, dazzling smile, straight out of Smith’s playbook, and 704 unfolds gracefully to her feet. She lifts her arms over her head like a ballet dancer and does a little pirouette.

“This is your last chance to come to your senses,” says Gil.
“You’re worried about me.” A sharp smile that’s all Liv accompanies the teasing accusation.
“Because your plan is stupid,” Gil fires back.
“My plan,” she arches a perfectly painted eyebrow, “is going to work. Yours didn’t.”
“There will be other opportunities.” He steps forwards, and puts a hand on Liv’s shoulder to spin her again, slowly this time, inspecting every inch of her. “It’s always better to play it safe.”
“You like to play it safe, old man. I like to live a little dangerously.”
“Playing it safe is how you live to get “old”. Do you think we don’t live dangerously?” One hand tugs the hem of her dress to adjust it by a centimetre.
“It’s going to work, Gil,” Liv reiterates. “And look on the bright side. If I die, you get to claim my share.”
“Assuming you succeed before you die.”
“Of course.”

When he finally steps back, satisfied with her costume, Liv spins again then bends sideways from the waist. She plants her hands on the floor, kicks her legs high and performs a lazy cartwheel, legs scissoring to demonstrate her range of motion.

“I still think you should back out.”
“But you’re still going to help me do it,” Liv smiles, righting herself.
“I’ll come to your funeral.”
“You’d better.”

Caution for: BBU, pet whump, conditioning and associated tropes, “romantic” pet, noncon mention

Just Acting - The Fall
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Bethany is not a good pet.

It started with her failure to fully, willingly participate in fulfilling Kyle’s desires. With ugly tears. With sulking under the countertop. With a dozen small breaks from demeanour and proper behaviour. 

With the recklessly angry thought that her training didn’t prepare her for this.

651 would have been punished so much for any of those mistakes in the facility. 651 was a good pet.

Bethany is not a good pet. She doesn’t obey. She cries too much.

A good pet wouldn’t have snuck out into the garden. A good pet wouldn’t have wanted to sneak out. Why can’t she want to be good?

A good pet would accept the discipline that followed. A good pet wouldn’t sit pressing thumbs into her bruises and seething with resentment. A good pet would wait patiently to be wanted again.

A good pet would be wanted.

Bethany is not a good pet. Bethany isn’t perfectly, passively, prettily desirable. Bethany is messy and useless and stupid. She doesn’t want to be good, and she doesn’t want to face the consequences of being bad. Stupid, stupid pet.

She hates being Bethany.

A good pet wouldn’t slide the sash window open when everyone is sleeping and lean out to breathe the city smell and the rain. The garden below is all shapeless shadows in the darkness. The garage is a dense, black mass. Beyond, just out of sight, street lights glow yellow and amber.

A good pet wouldn’t fiddle with the padlock at her ankle, or try to tug the greasy chain over her foot. Bethany does. She tugs until her ankle is sore and the black grease has climbed right up under her fingernails.

“Stupid pet,” she tells the mirror. “Why did you do that? You knew it wouldn’t work.”

Her reflection, spotty-cheeked and dishevelled, has no answer.

Bethany hasn’t been good to Handler Smith’s button up shirt. She’s sweated into it day after day, she’s slept in it, she’s streaked it with blood and nasty black grime. It’s rumpled and stained and a little torn near the hem and it smells terrible.

A real handler would never be caught dead looking so untidy. So miserable. So used.

Handler Smith was never real, she was only a fiction. But the pet wishes very badly that she wasn’t. Handlers are never hurt or scared. They don’t have to worry about making themselves ugly by crying too much. They don’t have owners to be abandoned by.

She wipes the tears from her eyes, squares her shoulders, and lifts her chin. In the mirror she tries to capture Handler Smith’s cold disapproval. 

She misses Liv so much it hurts.

If Handler Smith was real, she wouldn’t let anyone chain her up in a bathroom or pull her hair or fuck her on the floor. Anger hardens her eyes. 

Smithwouldbe angry, to see herself this way. She lets her lips twist into a crooked, ugly shape – a hard and bitter counterpart to a pet’s soft pout. She tilts her chin down and glowersfrom under her brows. A flush rises in her cheeks. Handler Smith glares back at her, furious and humiliated.

It’s just acting, Liv’s soft, seductive voice soothes her. You’re doing great.

There’s only one thing wrong.

With shaking hands, the pet lifts her hands to her own throat. Numb fingers fumble at the buckle. The familiar, comfortable pressure round her throat tightens for a second. Then it loosens, and goosebumps wash across the pet’s skin. 

She almost can’t go through with it. It’s hard to breathe, suddenly. She meets her reflection’s wide eyes and mouths “do it.”

Leather lifts away from skin.

Its absence aches, a band of nothingness encircling the pet’s naked throat. 

Oh, she’s in somuch trouble if she’s caught. 

But the house is quiet, everyone is asleep.

She watches her own throat bob as she swallows. She could swear she can see her racing pulse in the exposed skin. 

She drags her gaze up to meet her own eyes. 

Without the collar, the woman in the mirror looks like a handler for real. A bruised, scared, dishevelled handler. But a handler.

Smith smiles a tiny, hard smile at herself.

Then she puts her collar back on because without it her heart is trying to break out through her ribs and she can’t take a deep breath. 

She feels hot and cold all over. Her legs are jelly and she sits on the closed toilet seat and braces her hands on her knees and just pants until she isn’t suffocating any more.

Then Smith gets down on the floor and she inspects the hated black chain once again. She can’t slip it off, she’s tried that. The padlock stays stubbornly locked no matter how she wiggles it. So does the one at the other end, under the sink. It seems hopeless. 

But she is not hopeless, she reminds herself, she is angry. No one chains a handler up in a bathroom. She won’t stand for it. She would punish Kyle and Miss – and Jess, and Stefan, if she could. She would shock them until they were sorry. 

She takes the sticky, dirty chain in both hands and pulls hard. The plastic pipe shifts and creaks. Smith freezes. If they catch her she is in so, so much trouble. 

She pulls again. The cracked plaster where the pipe emerges from the wall cracks a little further. Bad pet, she thinks automatically. But Bethany is a bad pet, Smith is not a pet at all. 

Is this what going crazy feels like? 

Frustrated, she slides the loop of chain up and down the pipe. It catches on the joints between the sections. Smith frowns and bites her lip. If she pulls hard enough, will the pipe break? Will it come apart?

Sudden as a camera flash, the world rotates ninety degrees and Smith sees behind the scenes.

Her heart thunders – as hard as when she took her collar off – as she takes a hold of that plastic joint with both hands. She twists. It takes all her strength. Her elbows shake. 

But the pipe begins to unscrew.

It takes more work than she hoped. It makes more noise than she hoped. The right-angle segment won’t come away from the rest of the pipe even once the joints are loosened. There isn’t any room for it to wiggle, it’s pinned from two directions. Smith feels faint. Her pulse sounds strange and heavy and far too loud in her ears. It hasto come apart, someone put it together, didn’t they? It has to come apart again but she can’t see how. 

Despairing, she just pulls. She tugs wildly back and forth. She puts her back into it. She braces her feet against the wall. The plastic creaks noisily and the plaster crumbles and she’s so scared. She’s going to snap something and it’s going to wake everyone up. 

She can’t stop. She’s already made a mess, she’s already taken her collar off, she’s already in so, so, so much trouble.

It gives way all at once. Smith falls back and cracks her head against the toilet. Pieces of pipe clatter to the floor, spilling dribbles of green-black dirty water across the lino.

The pet is frozen, petrified. 

Someone has to have heard.

Kyle beat her so badly just for going in the garden. He might kill her for this.

The pain in her head is so sharp it blots out the light as Smith scrabbles to her feet. She shoves the sash window open with too much force, too much noise. It’s only just big enough to admit her body. 

She freezes again half in, half out, clinging desperately to the sill with one arm and one leg dangling over the dizzying drop. It didn’t seem so far down until she thought about jumping but now the shadowed ground is a hundred miles beneath her. 

Inside the house, someone stirs. A light clicksas they switch it on. 

Smith pushes off the sink with her foot, and rolls out into nothingness. 

Time stands still.

There is nothing to grab onto, nothing but air.

What a terrible mistake she has made. She should have tried to get downstairs to the door. She should have lowered herself over the edge. She should –

The ground slams into her and the world whites out.

For a minute she isn’t Smith, she isn’t Bethany, she isn’t 651, she isn’t even afraid. She is only the pain of impact, there is nothing else.

Then slowly panic filters back in through the gaps between breaths. Is she dying? It hurts worse than even the shock collar. Is Kyle chasing after her? Is she broken? Can she move?

Brambles and nettles catch at her limbs as she tries to push herself up, but she barely feels them. Painpainpain blares the arm that she landed on. Painpainpainscream her ribs with every short, sharp breath she sucks in.

Any pet knows that pain is no excuse to stop moving.

She staggers to her feet, nearly blind in the pitch darkness of the garden. The great black shadow that looms over her must be the house, so she stumbles the other way. The chain round her ankle keeps catching on unseen obstacles. 

Finally, thorny vegetation gives way to the moss-over-concrete of the path. The gate is the same weathered wood as the fence. She has to stop clutching her bad arm to fundle blindly for the handle – a cold metal ring, solid in her grasp.

For a terrified second she wonders what she will do if it’s locked – but it isn’t. 

The gate swings away from her and Smith stumbles – almost falling – out into the night.

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