Chapter Text
Hunter isn’t nervous, per se. It would be stupid to be nervous. The better word would be…annoyed, maybe? Or stressed, if he’s honest—which he tries not to be, every time his mom puts her hand on the back of his head and asks him what’s wrong. Each time, he grins up at her and tells her a half-truth: he just has a lot going on with the new school year just starting. It’s not a lie. The growing homework load isn’t exactly relaxing, especially since it’s hard to focus on essays and lectures when everything else in his life is falling down around his ears.
Ironically, the thing that should be causing him the least amount of stress is what’s dogging him the most. Most kids are excited to take their kink orientation test, but not Hunter. To Hunter, each day that brings him closer to the orientation test is just another shovel of dirt dug from his grave.
Perhaps even more ironically, the thing that should be causing him the most stress, his new apprenticeship, is the only thing he’s been able to find true solace in these last few weeks since the date of his dawning appointment was set.
Under his grandfather’s guidance, Hunter slices the impossibly sharp knife through the rough palistrom wood as if it’s butter. It doesn’t look much like a palisman yet, still just a jagged block of wood, but he can already see the shape of the toad forming in his mind. Only a few cuts into the wood and he’s already thinking of where to put the warts.
“There you are,” Del says warmly, his low, rumbling voice like a crackling fireplace. The firepit nearby is unlit, letting the cool breeze kiss their faces as they work. “Good work, Hunter. I can’t believe you thought you’d make a poor apprentice. You’re a natural, just like your father.”
At that, Hunter smiles. Not much has made him smile lately, but his grandfather’s knee is warm against his, even if it’s a little awkward to carve with their elbows so close to each other. It’s nice.
Hunter wishes it could last forever.
“Thanks.” Then he bites his lip, chewing it thoughtfully while he wonders how to word his next question.
Del waits patiently, that knowing sparkle in his eye. There’s an easy smile hiding under his beard.
“Uh, Grandad?”
“Yes, songbird?”
Hunter kicks at the ground, dirt sticking to his black shoes. He knocks his toes against the wood shavings bucket before looking down at the wood in his hand. He focuses on the palisman’s face, planning out the intricate details carefully and with love. His eyes, a little closer together than the last toad. A wart here, a wart there. He cuts and cuts away until the toad really begins to take shape. When he can no longer focus, he finally stops and drops his hands into his lap, still clutching the wood and the knife.
“Grandad,” he says. “Were you ever tested?”
Del smiles in amusement. “My patience, sometimes. Your mother and her sisters were quite the handful…”
Shaking his head, Hunter laughs—though it’s really more of an uneven exhale. Maybe I am nervous. He doesn’t want to admit it, but the rising horror in his chest doesn’t care what he wants. “I mean, for your orientation. How did you know you’re a sub and—w-was it…?” He doesn’t know how to finish his thought. He doesn’t really know what he wants to ask, other than, Will you still love me?
Hunter has already accepted the answer to that question. There’s no point in asking. It would be wasteful to voice such a stupid question.
…Still. The words hang on his tongue, heavy and bitter. Hopeful. Pleading.
Del puts his shaky hand on Hunter’s shoulder and squeezes it to the best of his ability. “You’re getting older,” he teases. There’s pride and grief both in those words, but he mostly keeps it light. “Finally too old to avoid the test?”
A hefty sigh leaves Hunter. “There’s no keeping secrets from you, huh?” He looks up, meeting Del’s eyes. Then he smiles, fighting to keep his mouth from falling into a grimace. “I guess so… I’m honestly just lucky my parents let me hold off this long. Bump says it’s a requirement if I want to do the special classes this year, though. Something about protecting students’ mental health or whatever.” He was going to just drop the classes, even the consent class he was so excited for, but for some reason, he doesn’t have the strength to run anymore.
What’s the point?
He doesn’t know. Maybe he’s just tired of keeping secrets. Tired of living this lie. Tired of the white-hot acidic guilt that lives in his middle. The burn of that self-loathing is at constant war with the burn of his twisted desire. In the end, both have won—and Hunter will lose. The acceptance, cold and still in his chest, feels like relief.
Pensive, Del nods. “It was mostly a family affair, when I was young,” he admits. “There were government aspects, of course, with contracts and all, but it was only in your mother’s generation that they first began to address orientations in schools, let alone make testing mandatory.” He laughs a small laugh. “Eve was scared too, when the day came. We all already knew what she was, of course—a sub, same as me.” The warm nostalgia leaves his voice and is replaced by something careful. “Most people have a good idea of what they are before the test. The test just makes it easier to find compatible partners. Although, there are always surprises to be had, aren’t there?”
Hunter looks down at the unfinished palisman in his hands with furrowed eyebrows. He wonders if the commissioner knows what they’ll be getting. He wonders if they’ll love their palisman, even if it is a warty, mean-faced little toad. He wonders what happens to palismen that are made wrong.
“I don’t see why it has to be this way,” he whispers. He clears his throat, speaking louder, “It should be private.” I should take this secret to the grave.
“Before it became mandatory, not everyone could provide the safety and education necessary to their children. Sometimes people got hurt—or hurt each other because they didn’t know any better.” Del shrugs. “Things weren’t as good then as they are now. It’s for the best, it seems. Though, there are always trade-offs to these sorts of things.”
Sighing, Hunter leans his head against his grandfather’s shoulder. The familiar wood-and-herbs scent makes him close his eyes. “I guess it would be the same either way, in the end.” It’s not like he can hide what’s wrong with him forever. “I just don’t want to be a disappointment.”
I don’t want to be a monster.
“Oh, Hun…” Del gives Hunter’s forehead a whiskery kiss. Hunter is already mourning all the kisses like this that he’ll never receive again. Even Grandad’s warm, dry lips will disappear. “You could never disappoint us. Your family loves you, no matter what.”
Hunter glances up through his eyelashes, swallowing down the strange lump in his throat that’s been living there for so long. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He wishes he could believe it. “Thanks, Grandad. I love you too.”
No matter what. Those words follow Hunter back home and to bed and then to school the next day. The words sit in his mind, rolled over and over on his tongue behind clenched teeth until they turn into a bright, shining pearl—or a hard pill to swallow.
He can’t imagine those words are true. He wants to—Titan, he wants to. But everyone has a limit. Everyone. Even his loving, accepting, compassionate family. Even Grandad. Hunter has known for many years that this is coming; the people who have cared for him all his life will realize that there’s something wrong in him that isn’t worth loving.
Yes, Hunter has known it for a very long time. He sees no reason to trick himself into believing otherwise. It will only make it harder to bear when he has nothing.
His mom says that borrowing grief from later in life stops people from living in the present. And Hunter has been trying so, so hard to listen, even as the grief weighs him down like a boulder, constantly rolling downhill. For her, he tried. He rolled that boulder up the mountain and held it there at the peak for as long as he could.
It made a difference. It did.
But now the time is up. The boulder falls, as it was always going to do, and crushes everything in its path. It leaves Hunter standing alone at the mountain’s peak, fighting for air in the cold.
Bump knocks on the door to his classroom early in the morning and that’s it: the beginning of the end. At least he saved Hunter the humiliation of saying his name over the intercom. He follows Bump out and through Hexside’s halls to the testing room, where there are a few other students in his grade sitting alone at the two-person desks customary at their school. They’re all 14 or 15, the usual age for this sort of thing—so no Gus or Mattholomule. Skara is here though and she grins at Hunter, waving cutely. He doesn’t have it in him to smile back, but he nods and waves almost unconsciously. He’s so pumped full of adrenaline and misery that he can barely see the blurry outline of her smile falling.
She’ll hate him soon anyways, and not just in the stupid, impersonal way that her shitty friend group hates people. She’ll despise him for what he is. Same as everyone else.
Hunter sits at an empty desk near the window and is handed the thick stack of papers that makes up the test.
“Remember, students,” Bump tells them. “Be honest. Even if you think it’s embarrassing, we need you to be as thorough as possible! We can’t help you otherwise.”
He could lie. He could mark all the multiple choice questions as if he’s totally and completely sex-repulsed and hates every kink. He could lie on every single essay question and just say that he doesn’t like anything at all. He’d still be a bit of a freak in the Isles—even Aunt Lilith likes to kneel with all her clothes on now and again—but not nearly as much as honest answers will prove him to be. To claim asexuality would make him lonely, maybe, but he’d have his family. He’d have his friends. He’d have something left.
But Hunter has already accepted his fate. He answers honestly.
What level of power imbalance appeals to you? Why?
Hunter writes, “All the power is mine. If they don’t want to give it, then I will take it by force, even if it leaves them bleeding and screaming. I prefer taking it. There is nothing more attractive than someone unwillingly being completely under My control.”
Is sex an important part of kink for you? Why or why not?
Hunter writes, “Yes and no. Sex is just another way to hurt them. A submissive’s pain is the most important part of kink for Me. Fear too. I could be with a nonsexual sub happily, but My dominance is often very sexual, so that’s something they’d have to get used to.”
What is your most desired fetish fantasy, sexual or otherwise?
Hunter writes, “Beating someone’s pussy with a thin wooden paddle until they’re begging to be raped just to escape that specific pain, promising that I’ll stop if they do something degrading for Me, and then beating their pussy again when they’re done. (‘Pussy’ does not refer only to vagina in this instance. Any hole can be made into a pussy.)”
Do you have a fantasy that would be unethical to act on?
Hunter writes, “Pretty much all of them. Hanging someone and then raping their corpse. Forcing someone’s head underwater until all they can do is scream even though they know it will only hurt them more. Trussing someone up by a meat hook and raping them for days and not letting them sleep or eat.”
…And so on.
Even as Hunter grows more and more ashamed of his answers, he can’t deny that he is aroused by them as well. He hates himself for it. He hates what he is. And he knows that, when his kink orientation is learned, everyone he knows and loves will hate him too. He writes about his thirst for blood, his hunger for abuse, how much he loves the sound of crying—not timid, pain-filled, submissive crying like after a funishment, but real, genuine sobs of terror and hopelessness. And what comes after, too… There is nothing better than that moment when someone truly gives up and lets themselves be ruined and Hunter writes as much, because this is where his life ends, so why bother holding back? This is not only him giving in, but him giving up too.
He wishes he could get off on it. Instead, even with the low heat in his gut, he’s just terrified.
Maybe that’s just him getting what he deserves. Justice for being born broken and wrong.
He finishes the test and hands it over to Principal Bump. Although he loves school, he calls home sick instead and spends the rest of his day curled up beside his mom, watching light-hearted dramas on the crystal ball while she pets his hair. He knows this will be the last time he’ll ever have this, so he bites down on that stupid pearl and savors the final taste of unconditional love.