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Last posted about a year ago~

Reynard was swaying. He wasn’t sure when it had started, but he realized, as the woman’s — Elle’s — his owner’s hand landed on his shoulder that he had been leaning to one side, muttering.

“When’s the last time you ate?” She sounded angry. Reynard didn’t look up at her; if he had, he was pretty sure he’d have fallen over.

Don’t call her mistress. “I, uh. Sometime before the beatdown, I think. I don’t really remember much of it clearly.”

“Right. So we’ll clean you, and then we’ll feed you, and then we’ll worry about the rest. Can you stand?”

She seemed to ask him that a lot. Reynard considered the question. “Yes?” He levered himself slowly to his feet, surprised to find her arms under his shoulders pulling him up.

And holding him up, and pulling off what remained of his clothes. “Normally,” he offered, before he noticed his words were slurring, “Norm-uh-luh-lee, I’m very ex.. Happy to have a pretty woman taking my clothes off. Norm. Ally.”

“And now?” She slapped his hands away as he tried to help.

“Now, I think you’re taking ad. Taking advan…” He could not come up with a shorter form of the word.

He didn’t need to. She leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “You Belong to me.”

“Ah. Ah, well… yes. You have a very good point.” Reynard swallowed. “Yes, ma’am Elle. You can take ad — take me any way you want to, can’t you?”

“I can,” she agreed. “I don’t have to wait until you’re slurring your words and swaying on your feet, if what I want is you. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“Inter’sing?” That wasn’t the word he’d have normally used. “Terfy’ing?”

She chuckled. He was naked now — when had that happened? And she was moving him, nearly carrying him, towards the tub. “Interesting. I was never all that interested in having Kept, back in school. And I don’t recall you having any, either. But here we are, because you raided the wrong henhouse. Keep your head above water.”

“Keep my…” for a second, Reynard thought she was speaking metaphorically, and then her hands were off of him and he was slipping into the water.

Head above. Head above. He grabbed on to the sides of the tub and forced his shaking arms to hold him there. Head above water. RIght. He could do that.

A moment later, a warm presence slipped in behind him and arms wrapped around his shoulders. “There you go. There. Just relax against me, if you can.”

Reynard was following her order before he realized she was naked. Of course, he thought, it’s a tub. But that was a lot of wet, slick, naked skin — naked Keeper — pressed against him. The Bond liked contact. He remembered that from school. It liked touch. It liked praise. It hated screwing up, running into orders, disappointing your Keeper. He leaned against Elle and let her hold him up.

“I’m Kept,” he muttered groggily. “Shit.”

“Quite astute,” she murmured in his ear. “Stay awake for me, foxboy. Just until we get you clean, at least. Come on.”

The order pricked him into consciousness. “S’hard,” he complained. “There was a lot of, uh…”

“Yes. I think you were staying awake on adrenaline. Now that you’ve decided i’m not going to torture or kill you immediately, you’re crashing. That’s fine.” She lathered a washcloth and ran it over his chest. “Just stay awake long enough to not drown and we’ll be fine. I just want to make sure this is mostly dirt and not blood.”

“Some blood, probably. That big guy was big.” The orders were warring against Reynard’s body’s urges, but he knew about that. He pinched himself surreptitiously on his inner thigh and ran through a few complicated math problems in his head. Her hands were all over him, scrubbing at the dirt covering him, gentle when she found a wound under the filth. He was dirtier than he remembered – and less wounded, too. His memories were fuzzy, but he had clear images of the big guy swinging a broadsword at him.

Reynard was good at ducking – preternaturally good at it, even – but there wasn’t all that much one could do about a big block of muscle and rock swinging a giant blade at you at superman-like speeds. Dodge once of twice, sure, but eventually you were going to get hit. And hit again. And… “Ow.”

her fingers had found bruises he didn’t remember getting. “Oh, hrrm.” She craned her neck over his shoulder to look at his chest. Cleaned of all the dirt, the bruise was clear. “You must have really, really annoyed him.”

Reynard blinked his eyes until they would focus on the bruise. Across his chest, someone had left a mark in the exact shape of a hand.

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