This video is fierce. Lion was an era.

==========

Yuqi tries to make it a habit to forget each previous day. She’s not always successful, but over the months, she thinks her mind finally starts to get why she should erase the past. It’s enough for her body to remember what it needs to do. She doesn’t need to suffer along with it.

So, when her shift leader hands her a new assignment and cracks the whip over her head, she holds onto the slip of paper and lets her thoughts dissolve.  

“You two,” he points at a pair of gormless lower guards, “take her away.” As the men shuffle forward in their overlarge boots, the shift leader snaps the whip again, so close to one of the guards’ faces that he shies away like a frightened horse. The leader sneers and crosses his arms over his muscular chest. “If you touch one hair on her head, I will personally skin you alive.”

The guards mumble obediently and together, hoist Yuqi to her feet. She lets them half carry, half drag her out of the pen where the cries of the other girls echo softly through the air. Her friend Soyeon—no, she didn’t have friends. The last thing Yuqi sees before the door to the pen closes is a pair of small hands reaching for her through the iron bars of a cage.

Three winding staircases and one hallway later, Yuqi finds herself standing in front of a metal door. One of the guards holding onto the manacles around her wrists sticks his hand into his pocket and pulls out a ring of keys. He selects the biggest, most ornate one and inserts it into the startling bare lock. The door creaks open and the other guard prods Yuqi between her shoulder blades.

“You know the drill.”

Yuqi numbly paces forward until she’s sitting on the bed standing in the middle of the circular room. The chamber is devoid of any other furniture, save for a large wooden chest tucked away to the side. A lone lantern gutters next to the bed. It’s freezing in here. Yuqi can see the white puffs of her breath hanging in the air. The downsides of shacking up in a stone castle during midwinter. Like countless times before, she lifts her arms and the guards wrap the chain hanging from her manacles around one of the bed posts, securing her to the bed with another padlock.

“Sweet dreams,” the taller of the guards snickers at her as he struts out of the room. He pauses before closing the door. “If there’s anything of you left after the captain’s finished, maybe I’ll get a taste before you go back to the pen.” Yuqi dully watches his bloated pink tongue flick in and out of his mouth as he swings the door shut. It slams with a clap like thunder but Yuqi doesn’t even flinch. It’s working, her strategy. She barely feels anything anymore. Certainly not the cold, although she watches her fingertips turn blue.  

There’s nothing to do but wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Until finally, the sound of a key in the lock breaks the torpor.

Yuqi tilts her head slightly to the right in an effort to catch a glimpse of her new master. She spies a dark felt boot encasing a slender leg up to the knee, a richly embroidered tunic falling down the thigh. Her gaze travels up and she notices electric blue hair framing a lithe body, black fringe contrasting sharply with the flashing grey eyes underneath. For the first time in a very long time, Yuqi feels surprise.

Her new master was a woman. And a beautiful one no less.

When their eyes meet, Yuqi’s new master freezes in her tracks. Yuqi tries to empty her face of any remaining emotion. Even though she wouldn’t have to endure the revolting touches of a man, perhaps those of a woman would be just as bad, if not worse. Her master drinks in Yuqi’s sorry appearance. Her nose wrinkles as if she doesn’t like what she sees. Yuqi bristles a little under her stare. She had bathed, indeed was forced to by the pen keeper, in preparation for this tryst. They’d even combed her hair and put her in a new dress. Sure, she was probably unhealthily skinny, but nothing like the skin and bones the rest of the girls were. Being a favorite pet of the colonel’s had its advantages. That is, until he was killed in battle. Then she’d been unceremoniously thrown back into the pen to await a new assignment.

“I didn’t ask for you.” The woman drops her gaze to the handcuffs chaining Yuqi to the bed. “They know I don’t take pets.”

Despite herself, Yuqi starts to feel the first glimmerings of fear. This can’t happen. She just got out of the pen, if this captain sent her back, there would be no telling when she’d get out again. She can’t go back, she can’t go—

“Hey, hey, calm down, will you?” All of a sudden, her master is standing right in front of her, hands fluttering nervously. They land on Yuqi’s shoulders and she can’t help the hiss that escapes as streaks of fire shoot down her arms. Her master immediately releases her and takes a jerky step back. “Ah, sorry, you probably don’t like being touched.”

It’s not that. Yuqi’s had so many vicious hands on her that gentle caresses don’t even register anymore. Rather, the lashes she’d gotten last night are swollen after the salt the pen keeper rubbed into them as further punishment. Some of the skin might be broken now. She thinks she can feel the blood dripping gently down her back, continuing down her buttocks and onto the sheets—oh god no, she mustn’t dirty the sheets of an officer!

“Please, my back, your sheets will be bloody—” and Yuqi curses to herself when she violates the cardinal rule of pets and masters, but it’s been a while since she’s had a master and she is forgetful, “I mean, M-Master, your sheets will be bloodied if your pet stays on the bed.”

Her master merely bites her lip, but she doesn’t shove Yuqi to the floor. Yuqi arches her spine in a desperate effort to pool the blood in the hollow of her lower back. She knows she’s going to be sent back, she just knows it. The familiar panic she’s tried so hard to destroy starts to creep up and she feels a crushing weight caving in her chest.

“That’s all right.” Yuqi’s so disconcerted that the panic recedes for a moment. She looks up at her master and sees her looking down with an unfathomable expression on her face. The grey eyes, previously suspicious and hooded, now a