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[thegreatestproject]

"This is Eliot. Your High King gives you leave to speak."

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[cobaltsoul]

"I wish it was that simple," Beau muttered, pouring more ale into her tankard. A bit sloshed over the rim as there was an uncharacteristic unsteadiness in the monk's hands that had nothing to do with the booze she'd been drinking.

"It doesn't even bother me that some magic charm effect forced my sex drive through the roof. It's... it's... how I fucked her... w-what I did in the middle of it that's the issue," she said, stumbling through the words, muscled tensing and her eyes once more focused on the blanket instead of Eliot. "I'm not okay with this... not okay with me and this is going to screw with my relationship, with my woman, if I can't figure out how to deal with it. It's already screwing with our-- fuck, Eliot, I'm scared that I might do the same thing to her. I... can't talk to Glinda about it, cause I don't want her to look at me differently."

A shaky breath was taken in and Beau threw back the tankard, literally draining it sloppily in one go. Empty tankard dropped onto the blanket, Beau put her face in her hands and rubbed it a couple times. "I... uh..." Just say it, you fucking asshole. Say it. Fucking say it, she told herself, though putting it to voice was one of the hardest things she'd ever done.

"I... ripped her shirt open and... and then later... in the middle of-- I..." Her shoulders hunched forward as though bracing for an expected blow, a subconcious show of utter shame. "I punched her in the face. In anger. In retaliation. To hurt her." Then Beau's voice broke on her next words. "And it felt good to me."

[thegreatestproject]

Oh.

As Beau had gone on talking, Eliot had slowly transitioned from stretched out on the blanket to sitting upright. Never mind the part about Glinda being, apparently, her woman, he'd deal with absorbing that on his own time.

This was more than a magic question — but Eliot felt equipped to deal with this even more than the magic part. He knew how few limits there were on the twists and turns sex could take. Pummeling someone or being pummeled might not be his thing, but it was hardly unheard of.

It also generally took a lot of negotiation. But that was getting ahead of things.

"Does it still feel good when you think about it?"

First question. Was it something she thought she would want to do again?

[cobaltsoul]

"Gods, no!" Beau hunched forward more, almost curling into herself. "It makes me feel fucking disgusting. In the moment, when it happened it felt good but then when we were done and I, like, dropped her on the ground like a discarded piece of fucking trash... It took a couple seconds, but I freaked out, cause it was wrong, and I ran the fuck away." Literally jumped off the aerial bridges between the lofty buildings and jumped branch to branch straight to the ground. She hadn't talked to Gaila since and quickly disappeared the moment she even glimpsed the green-skinned woman in the castle. Some might call her a coward for that, but Beau tended to run away from things she either couldn't or wouldn't handle. This was chief on her list in the Feywild.

"Like... I'm a violent person. I know that. I like fighting. I like hurting people I don't like... but not like that. All she did was scratch me hard enough to draw blood." Beau gestured to her shoulder where the claw marks were almost healed. Had she bothered to take care of the scratch properly after it happened, she wouldn't even bear the faintest mark at this point. "I've been scratched badly during sex before. I've even been slapped around a bit and I've been fine. Nothing like what I did has happened before."

[thegreatestproject]

"Because you were never under that kind of influence before."

The question she'd asked about responsibility made a hell of a lot more sense now. But that didn't make the answer any simpler.

"It's still a thing you did. You might have to face that with whoever this was, even if she was the one pushing you to it." And that might be unfair — Eliot wasn't in the habit of sugarcoating this type of thing. Luckily, he could also offer her a bit of genuine hope.

"But if it makes you sick to think about doing it again, or to someone else? That can be what matters. You did something you regret..." He shrugged. This was the best way he could sum it up: "...you don't have to hate yourself if you know you didn't really want it."

[cobaltsoul]

The fact that Gaila hadn't come after her afterward or that she apparently hadn't told anyone what happened wasn't lost on Beau. She wasn't sure what to think of it. Did the fucking woman actually like being punched mid-sex or had the monk put a sufficient amount of fear into her that she decided it was better to stay away. Beau wasn't sure doing something like apologizing to her would help; it would just invite shit from the woman, though the monk rightfully deserved it. Mostly, Beau simply didn't want to be in a position where she could be affected by whatever had turned her into the angry hornball she'd been. She was terrified she'd do this again. Period. In any circumstance.

"...except I do. In the heat of the moment, I did want to do it. I might have been influenced, but it was still a choice I made." And that was the real issue here. "She might have made the emotions, but I made the action to express them. I am the one that couldn't hold my fucking temper in the one place it shouldn't ever exist. W-what if I do it again?"

[thegreatestproject]

Eliot had to struggle through a moment of inner self-doubt. Maybe he was less qualified to talk about this than he'd thought. He only had so much of a grip on his own issues...

He was also feeling more than a touch of responsibility. There were dozens of other people in the castle, and Beau had chosen to trust him. He couldn't just back out.

Okay. What if she did do it again? What would happen then?

"Then — you'll feel shitty again. So if you don't do it again, you get to not feel worse than you do right now. You just... gotta remember that the next time you think you might want to. If there ever is a next time."

It wasn't dissimilar to a speech he'd given himself in his own head, a few dozen times before. Usually he'd done it in the middle of a post-cocaine hangover — never over hitting people. Still. Eliot found he could kind of relate.

"If that sounds easier said than done, that's cause it usually is. But it's not impossible."

[cobaltsoul]

Beau fell silent, taking Eliot's words in and turning them over in her mind. Was not doing it again simply a matter of willpower, of just not giving in to the anger? She had such a hard time with her temper and the discipline the monks had tried to teach her never really stuck. She was an impulsive woman of action - stopping and evaluating something in the heat of the moment, to think with her mind and not her fists was something she struggled with. She knew it... but she also knew until this encounter, she'd never had that kind of problem with it.

Maybe the magic had ramped things up so much she would never be able to control it. Maybe without that heightened emotion like that, she wouldn't be out of her own discipline level. On the other hand, maybe she was a horrible person that didn't deserve to have anything resembling happiness for being a fucking brute. Beau sighed; she wasn't getting anywhere with that kind of thinking. Not all of it.

"Yeah, sounds like real fucking hard. I mean... I've already made excuses and shit to either stay away from Glinda or just not get - ah - intimate when I'm even the slightest irritated. Problem is... I get irritated really easy. I feel like I'm... fucking overcompensating - overcorrecting - in my attempt to not be like that again. And it is messing with things, you know... when you wanna and you should but you can't really trust yourself so you don't when you probably should. My witch knows something is wrong and she knows it's a personal thing I'm working through, but that's it. I'm fucking grateful she ain't prying, cause I can't... I just can't, Eliot."