A Portrait in Refractions, a General fanfic

Title: A Portrait in Refractions
Chain: the Water Chain
Author: newtypeshadow
Summary: Nixie's adoption by the Castle begins her journey to becoming a Chain: a glorified bed slave trapped in a gilded cage.
Notes: Written for the Elemental Chain game at the Castle of the Chains. The link is on my profile page, if you want to check it out.

In the surreal calm after screams tore from her ravaged throat, she saw the bright lights fade the ceiling into the walls, fade the green of hospital scrubs into the white gloves of reaching hands and grasping fingers.

Another pain tore through her and she roared, tried to rise, to push, breathe through the sensation of her whole body cracking open. And then emptiness, as darkness seeped into her vision from the outside. She heard a pinched wail and a shout—losing her!—a soft, “girl.” Saw tiny eyes scrunched shut, a tiny open mouth wailing.

Sakiya.

She smiled into death.

The adopted girls sat in a circle on the blue carpeted floor. One by one, they stood and introduced themselves in halting English. They were told to forget their names—they would be given new ones soon.

But why must we forget our names, the children asked.

The men said, Because someday your name could be Chain.

Why would we want to be named Chain, the children asked.

You shall see.

The Chains are beautiful, the men said, and put out pictures of them in their private rooms. They were like fashion shots in magazines: beautiful and aloof, beautiful and sad, beautiful and seductive, beautiful and wild.

The Chains live in luxury, the men said, and showed the children a Chain room being prepared. There were pictures, too, of lavish rooms, gardens, pools, all for the Chain who bore their name.

The Chains are like royalty, the men said, and showed the children jewels left them by clients, the names of famous people who had courted them, the clothes they had in their closets.

Don’t you want to be a Chain, the men asked, and the children nodded yes. Then try your hardest and do your best. Be good, and you will someday be called Chain.

The l’s and r’s were hard. The shape of the mouth was slightly easier than manipulating the tongue, but it was still too wide. F’s were too hard, and w’s. Sh’s were spoken too far forward. Everything sounded wrong when it came out of her mouth, but it was never wrong enough: the teacher’s accent was out of reach, and she sounded “too Japanese.”

“Speak English,” the teacher would sneer when she raised her hands.

“I am,” she would say, and the teacher would laugh.

“No, this is English.”

Sakiya learned to speak softly. Then her accent couldn’t be heard.

She learned bits of German from the German girl. She practiced the Mandarin she had spoken fluently in the orphanage with the Chinese girl. She learned to say bad words in French and Spanish, and a Yoruba blessing from the girl with the black cornrows. She did all of this in her English Second Language class, but every language she learned, she spoke with a Japanese accent. It made the other girls giggle. “You sound so cute!” they would say when not trying to correct her. She wanted to reply, “I sound Japanese,” but didn’t—they could hear it in her voice.

A week after a dildo first appeared on the English language teacher’s desk, each girl was given one and encouraged to play with it during class. Their play was carefully watched, though none of them knew anything but that the teacher frowned fiercely when they giggled at the toys’ shape. The week after that, English language class was replaced with the sexual education of a Chain. They learned how not to get pregnant. How the human body worked. What the dildo was commonly used for. The joys of lube.

Then the class became small. From twenty-four to eight girls in one day.

And what one did to please a man began in earnest.

The couple said, to work in sex is to have stamina, flexibility, beauty, and imagination. We will teach you the first three.

Then the girls were running. They ran for what felt like hours, then jogged, then were allowed to walk. The next week, no walking. The next week, timed jogging.

The girls were thrown into a pool. This is how you swim. Go until you cannot go anymore, and then go farther.

The girls were thrown on the mats. This is how you stretch, this is how you somersault, this is how you jump.

The girls were thrown in beds. This is how you please a master. A mistress. Do not fail us, or you fail yourselves.

They were placed in front of vanities. This is how you look beautiful after a workout. This is how you look good with sweat-soaked hair and when you can barely move.

They were scrubbed in showers and their hair was cut in all manner of ways. This is your new self. Work with it. Become it. Use it.

They were given make-up. This is how you clean your face. This is how you put on foundation. Apply eye-shadow. Eyeliner. Mascara. Lip liner. Lipstick. Gloss. Blush. This is how you know you can be creative. This is when you must be conservative.

A Chain’s training is never done. Maintain, lest you lose all that you have worked for.

They weren’t allowed to use their old names, so the girls called her Ariel sometimes. She didn’t know why. The other girls would sigh with envy as she swam lap after lap, stroke after stroke, knifing through the water like she had gills and fins instead of hands and feet. Playing games, she would disappear in a ripple of blue and reappear in a water-burst on the other side of the pool. “Pass to me,” she would say with a wave of pruned hands.

And her team always won. Racing, ball, synchronized performances, if she was on your side, the game was over. Everyone knew the Japanese girl was the best.

Their competitions were not limited to water. They were many of them trying to learn English. Words in the air, as much as mastery of the water, were a way to gain the other girls’ envy. Who had learned the most new words? Who knew the best phrases?

The German girl learned “you are” one day. “You are swim. You are nixie.”

“Nixie is English? What is nixie?” Her tongue felt like lead in her mouth whenever she spoke English.

“Nixie German. You are.” The German girl nodded with certainty.

Nixie. Water sprite, she learned later. Yes. “I am Nixie.”

She didn’t like looking up at people, especially masters, but never wished she was taller. She was the right height for herself, and did not want to blend in with the gaijin who would pay for her services. She used her height to her advantage in fencing, and her small stature was envied by the gymnasts. She knew smaller arms and legs did not mean anything in the water or the air. She stood taller in her own way than the other girls competing to be Chains, and so 5’1” is as tall as she ever needed to be.

In water, she was brilliant. She was a hot knife through butter, she was Moses with his staff, cutting a path through the sea.

On the track she did the same, splitting the air with her speed, amazing the girls with the rush of wind as she blurred past.

On the mats, bars, horse, her muscles responded to her thoughts and she spun and flipped and arced through the air as if she were sylph and not human.

With a rapier, epee, dagger, she was a flash of light, a touch. Invincible.

She was a natural. She was a threat.

When the yellow-haired girl with the blue eyes and red lips asked Nixie if she wanted her dessert, Nixie gave her the cookie without complaint. “Here—take my grapes. We’ll trade,” the girl said. Nixie loved grapes, and took them gladly.

The trainer was watching them from the teachers’ table. When the other girls filed out of the dining room, he stopped Nixie with a hand on her shoulder.

“Why did you take that girl’s grapes?”

“We traded. She ate my dessert.”

The trainer’s eyes narrowed. “So not only did you eat your grapes and her grapes, you didn’t eat the dessert that was on your tray.”

Nixie nodded hesitantly.

The trainer put his fists on his hips and looked to the side, tongue in his teeth. When he looked back at Nixie’s frozen face, he was smiling.

He was still smiling when Nixie finished the crate of grapes he brought out from the back of the kitchen. The sickly sweet taste of grapes was all over Nixie’s fingers, her tongue. It was in her nose and stung her eyes. Her stomach was roiling and bile teased her throat after every bite.

She would hate grapes from that day on.

“You’re Japanese,” the gaijin said. “You need a tattoo.”

“Why must I have a tattoo if I am Japanese?” Nixie spoke softly. Her hands folded neatly in her lap.

The woman smiled a red smile and blew out a stream of cigarette smoke. “Your Yakuza have tattoos all over their bodies. Besides, tattoos are exotic. Men’ll get a kick out of seeing one on a little thing like you. You’re getting it tomorrow.”

It was to be the kanji for water, but the gaijin wasn’t there the next day. When Nixie left the chair, a water lily protected her heart.

Seeking a sensual, relaxing weekend? Want respite from the busyness of work and life at home? Then these Chains might be to your liking:

The Water Chain
Age acquired: 6
Age Chained: 16
Current age: 16
Height: 5’1”
Hair: Black
Eyes: Dark hazel
Training: beauty, sex.

Named for the German “water sprite,” Nixie’s nymph-like beauty will charm the most refined of hearts. The Water Chain loves to swim and is adept at entertaining in and out of water. Not for your average buyer, this Chain is bilingual, highly educated, intelligent, and able to understand and discuss complex and abstract ideas.

They had given her a pool. They had given her a pool! It was smaller than the exercise pool, but it was her own, blue and clear and clean and hers. She smiled, unable to contain the joy that swept through her. After the door closed, trapping her inside, she threw off her training robes, dashed between two large columns, and dove into the deep water. She surfaced in the shallows and splashed about like a child. Her joy was a perfume in the air. It would not dissolve until she saw her gilded cage for what it truly was.

Every morning she got out of bed and slid into the pool, a sea creature too long separated from its home. The water woke her as it washed over her head, and her limbs pulled her to the surface. She swam.

She practiced sword fighting at least twice a week to keep her form and to work the muscles in her legs, arms, abdomen. She would do gymnastics, but mats and equipment were in the Chain training gym, and now she needed a master to be allowed in there. She must be rusty—she hadn’t been in almost four years.

She walked barefoot on the garden path, though the flowerbeds, and on the bridge. The sun-warmed wood yielded delicious heat, the carefully made path massaged her feet. The grass and dirt beneath reminded her that she was alive, that she was part of the same earth that her mother must be part of, oceans away.

She walked barefoot in her rooms, on the outskirts of the pool, stepping into the water. The floor was cool, the pool warm. The sensation of one foot in the water, one foot out, reminded her she was human, but that she came from water.

She had been taught to please masters. She knew what to expect. She had been told it would hurt and then feel good, that she would feel herself stretching and would be sore in the morning, but must do everything to heighten his pleasure.

She had not been told of the emptiness that would fill her when her master rolled onto his side and slipped into sleep. There was no adequate description for his liquid which pooled between her thighs. She had not been warned of nights she would stay awake, wondering if this was all there was for her.

He had thick, bushy eyebrows and heavy shadowed eyes. They were nearly black, his eyes, and always cold to her. Nose hooked, mouth pinched. He never kissed her mouth, though he bit her nipples with vigor until her knees rose and her lips pulled back in a grimace of pain. His hair was a greasy, muddy brown. It fell in his face, another curtain for his eyes.

His hands were the worst. They grabbed too hard, they pulled and bruised. They left marks on her thighs and red on her hips. They never touched her in gentle repentance—only need.

He took her when and where he wanted: in the bed, in the garden, on the floor, against the wall, in the pool. And then he would close his pants and sit down to write letters, compose music, read, or he would stand and go for a stroll in the garden, the doors shut meaningfully so she could not follow. He had a woman somewhere that he would not marry without a dowry. He loved her with all his heart. But you wouldn’t know about love, he sneered.

He is a tortured artist, the eunuchs said.

No, he is unworthy.

They said, “Your master wants you to have a navel piercing.” She chose a diamond in the shape of a tear that sparkled like sunlight on water. It fit with the Water Chain theme, so the Castle let her have it.

She liked looking down her open robe at the jewel glinting in her navel. As if she had been birthed by the water and still held a precious drop from her mother. Even in the air, where she had less control over her limbs and who they wrapped around, she carried her freedom with her in an unbreakable drop.

Bow to arriving masters. Gaijin like the Japanese-ness and submission of the act.

Be polite. Reported rudeness will be punished with suspension of privileges, solitary confinement, or re-training.

Smile with closed mouth; do not laugh loudly or with an open mouth. Masters do not deserve to see you happy, and nothing they say is actually of interest.

Give pleasure. If you’re enjoying yourself, the master will not let you forget that you owe him.

Give your body. Masters will think your heart and mind come with it, but hide these away. You are not required to give pieces of yourself.

“Do you have someone waiting for you at home?” Nixie asked politely. She knew the new master was looking at her breasts, hanging like lilies out of water as she poured him tea.

“My wife,” the man said after a beat. “Her father bought you for me. For the weekend.”

“How lucky for you.” Nixie replaced the teapot on the low table with an enigmatic smile.

“For both of us, really—I’m charmed to have met you, and your advertisement said you’d only had one master. Must’ve wanted a change, eh?’

“Indeed,” Nixie said. A change would be a lucky thing.

They seemed to think she should be happy to see them, these men who came to her on weekends and went back to their families the rest of the week. It was dishonorable to leave one’s wife waiting, to leave a newborn with a tired woman because you couldn’t stand to wake up nights to feed it. Nixie didn’t like this excuse or others, and she didn’t like her clients. Nevertheless, she fixed her face in a neutral expression and greeted them all with false warmth. This was her job. This was her lot in life: to serve dishonorable men.

She was to them like the coats they casually cast aside on their way into her rooms. A casual weekend, a relaxing getaway, an exotic office perk. A legal, legitimate whore to fuck and laugh at and order around. These businessmen would crowd around her, dirtying her pool with their sagging bellies and sperm. They would sit her in their uncomfortable laps and pass her around like caviar.

And yet she could not hate them; like animals driven by lust, they knew no better than their brutish ways. Nixie could not hate them because, to her, they were soulless beasts. They would never understand why she had more dignity than they.

The eunuchs thought they had taught her to tease, to tantalize. True, they had taught her well, but it was not for masters that she left her virginal white robes open. It was not for the Castle peddling its fleshly wares that she let men catch glimpses of her pale gold breasts, curving into the silver embroidery of the coat lining to hide blushing nipples. No, it was for the water that her robe was always open. Because Castle robes were ties that weighed her down, and she wanted to throw them off unhindered. Dive into freedom, weightlessness. A watery embrace.

It had become a game. Two pieces move on the board, though there were sometimes three or four. Each player only controlled one piece. The aim was to control both pieces while only moving one.

It became progressively easier for Nixie to play. She knew the board well—it was her suite, after all—and she was intimately familiar with the pieces: herself, her strengths and weaknesses, her ability to influence; the masters who expected confessors, whores, respite. It became progressively easier to hide that she was playing—that they were mice to her cat, not snakes to her mouse.

It was strange to her that she didn’t remember her birth name. She must have known it in the orphanage, and in foster care, and the adoption agency had to have called her something. Some days she was sure she would recognize it if she heard it. Other days, she was glad it never entered the walls of her suite. For to hear her true name on a master’s lips would be to lose the truth of her identity to him. And if forgetting her true name was what it took to protect it…she would resolve never to remember it again.

There was only one place to be free when even your name was chained to you. Free of weight, of clothing that dragged you down, free of men who slept in your bed because you could not tell them to leave.

Nixie sat at the bottom of the shallows, a cross-legged sea creature, black hair a slow hurricane around her head. Her eyes were closed to the sunlight glancing off the waterline above. Tiny bubbles escaped her nose and zig-zagged to the surface. In the water she was nothing, un-chainable. Like a drowned woman whose soul could soar free at last.

There must be nothing to slow you down. Knifing through the water, she felt this. Water sluiced between her legs, over her shoulder blades, rushed over her head, tickled her feet. Though enveloped, she did not drown.

There must be nothing to drag you down. Disappearing beneath the surface, she knew this. She sliced through water like a katana through bone, and yet she did not sink to the bottom. She pulled herself upward with strong arms. Surfaced. She must stay afloat. Clothes would only drag her down. The Castle would swallow her if she let it have its way.