A Jewel in the Dirt - 5. Working with the enemy

It is said that the Great Mother has many daughters. One of them, Hella, was known above all for her quick-tempered character and for getting her sisters into trouble. So one day she persuaded Eden, whose only weakness was her curiosity, to travel with her to the afterlife- the Great Mother had forbidden it, and that made it all the more appealing.
But when the sisters arrived there, they found the afterlife to be a dreary gray place, lifeless, dusty, filled with souls of all kinds who were not lucky enough to sit beside the Great Mother in Heaven. The much greater problem, however, was that they couldn't return. After they had loudly lamented their suffering, the Great Mother turned to them and shook her head.
"My blood has brought you here, the blood of your human fathers lets you stay. It is your own fault for defying my ban."
The good-hearted Eden saw her mistake and sacrificed herself and her divine blood to change a spot of the afterlife into a paradise for the souls of good people.
Hella, however, ranted and raved, seized another spot of the afterlife and called all sinners to herself to punish them there forever, for her own frustration lasted eternally.

~

Dante's nose had stopped dripping when he entered Mistress Alice's room.

"Apparently there's a good reason you've been sold so often. You haven't been here a week and you've already gotten into trouble," Mistress Alice hissed at him and slammed the door shut behind her. To his amazement, however, her expression didn't match what she had just said so angrily. "Great Mother, Dante... is this really necessary?" She looked at him with a frown.

"Tom provoked me," he said cautiously and she sighed.

"I thought you had enough manners to stand over it."

"I may only be a slave, but I still have my pride. Just because I'm the new one here doesn't mean I have to put up with everything." Dante clenched his hands into fists and then pressed his lips together before he could say anything more.

Mistress Alice shook her head - but seemed more disappointed than angry. "Don't delude yourself that you are something better. Tom is Pa's favorite and Frank likes him. Two damn strong reasons to at least try to make peace with Tom. Right?" Very telling, she raised an eyebrow.

Dante had not missed the pun, and he nodded. "Yes, mistress."

"Good. Pants down." She turned away, and with a stifled sigh, he complied. With the horrible pink cage in her hand, she stepped before him and then paused. "One week of work duty," she said quietly. "And the cage. But I only said that you must wear it, not for how long."

Stunned, he looked at her and a strange, almost gloating smile appeared on her face before she knelt down. A whiff of cherry scent remained in the air before him and he got goose bumps as her breath brushed against his privates.

"Three days."

"Thank you, Mistress," he replied slowly. She confused him and he flinched as she almost gently patted his bottom while she rose.

"Fortune in misfortune: your ordered things were delivered earlier. I congratulate myself on having bought you work things. There, in the bags." She pointed to them, and while he was still adjusting his shorts, he nodded. "There's a blue jar with red flames on it in the bathroom cabinet. Put that on where Tom hit you, on your nose as well. And then go to bed."

"Yes, mistress. Thank you, mistress."

~

Frank only appeared in the kitchen when Dante had already put his coffee on the table. He seemed unhappy and spoke more with the fridge than with Dante when he said: "Can't you be friends with Tom?"

Dante, already the pan for the omelet in his hand, sighed. "I can try."

Frank nodded and then they remained silent until they had taken the first bites.

"What exactly are we doing today?" Dante wanted to know carefully. Strangely enough, it touched him deeply to see Frank so depressed.

"We'll get the wood that's lying by the Braddocks," Frank replied seriously and Dante nodded.

"And... um... how can I help?"

"I don't know. We'll see." This seemed to unsettle Frank and Dante tried to smile - although he was actually the one who needed cheering up. His nose was not broken, but it hurt like hell and was so swollen that breathing was only possible through his mouth. He had two fat bruises on his ribs and on his thigh, and the hand with which he had punched was hurting when he stretched his fingers.

What then gave him a little inner satisfaction was Tom's face. His eye was almost completely swollen and a swelling on his chin had spread so far that it reached his mouth and distorted it. Yet he grinned crookedly and reached out his hand to Dante.

"Here's to good cooperation," he said mockingly, and Dante returned both grin and handshake.

"To good cooperation."

Frank looked pleased while Tom crushed Dante's damaged hand. "I'll get the wood truck," Frank said. "Tom, can you show Dante everything and then come after me with the crane? That thing's faster than the tractor."

"Sure." Tom nodded and Dante swallowed hard. Maybe Frank just wanted to give them a chance to get to know each other in peace, but nothing in Tom's behavior indicated that there could actually be peace.

Not while Frank was not in sight.

How right he was, became apparent seconds after they parted ways - Frank walked on, while Dante and Tom entered one of the large barns. And immediately Dante was grabbed by the collar and pressed against the front of the large vehicle standing just behind the huge rolling gates. Last night he had managed to surprise Tom with his training in close combat, but Tom was definitely strong and hardened from daily hard work.

"You listen to me now, sweetie," he hissed in Dante's ear as he tried to free himself from his grip - Tom knew what he was doing. "You are at the bottom of the food chain here, no matter what you used to be. Nobody here is interested in that. I, on the other hand, have lived here for 10 years and know how things work."

Dante growled wordlessly; Tom smelled intensely of tomatoes and vinegar and his breath made Dante's skin tingle.

"So... if you don't want to mess up with Blaise... and you don't want to disappoint Frank... and you want to keep all your fingers... then you'll do as I say."

"Kiss my ass!" Dante growled angrily and to his surprise, Tom began to laugh and let him go.

"That's exactly what I intend to do."

An icy cold uneasy feeling took hold of Dante, but Tom calmly showed and explained to him the inside of the barn, where all sorts of equipment and tools and whatever else was standing, lying and hanging.

"The farms here have more or less joined together and established a kind of division of labor," Tom explained, as if nothing had ever happened. "We Mitchells take care of the lumber."

"And the other farms?" Dante asked tense.

"The Braddocks take care of the wool. The Washingtons handle the grain or corn. The Stones handle the meat and fish. There are still the Abbermills, who make moonshine, the Parkers and the Horners. The Horners do the repair stuff."

Dante nodded; he had no idea about such things, but it was certainly a good strategy because such equipment and machinery was guaranteed to be expensive.

"Well, sweetie..." With Tom's lovely tone of voice, Dante tensed up even more. "You wanted me to kiss your ass. Drop your pants."

Dante snorted. "Absolutely not." He saw Tom's hand coming and dodged, but the exchange of blows hadn't really started yet when he stumbled over something. Tom took the opportunity to grab him and seconds later Dante slammed into a work table, his face inches away from a saw blade.

"So, sweetie... ready to cooperate?"

"Do it yourself," Dante returned grimly, because the edge of the table pressed against his hurt ribs with extreme pain.

"I like that..." Tom grinned audibly and rubbed himself against Dante - it was amazing how relieved he was at the feeling of Tom's cage - before yanking down Dante's pants. "Don't move," he hissed and gave Dante a sharp and painful slap on the butt before he took a few steps away.

Since Dante really didn't want to find out in the first twenty minutes with Tom to what extent he was going to make his threats come true, he kept still and on top of that his mouth shut.

With a contemptuous snort, Tom finally held something in front of his face. "You like that, sweetie?"

Dante blinked confused before he recognized the thing as a wooden butt plug with a gel-like substance stuck to it. Oh, no, please no... "Are you-"

"Psh! Nice and quiet!" Tom grabbed one of Dante's butt cheeks tighter than necessary and before Dante could protest any further, he gasped in pain because Tom was anything but gentle or slow. The feeling was unpleasant, disgusting and wrong, and that Tom afterwards kneaded his butt with both hands did not make it any better. "I made this pretty little thing with my own hands and you will do me the honor of wearing it every day you spend with me," he whispered.

"And what do you dream of at night?" Dante hissed, whose pride was howling in pain.

"Maybe you," Tom hissed back, and then hit the table with his fist, so that the saw blades hopped in front of Dante's nose. "I'm gonna go check, you know..."

~

Dante sat very tense on a box in the cab of the crane truck, which Tom steered completely relaxed across the Mitchell farm, along the main road for a bit and then to a new farm.

Tom's smug silence and Dante's reluctance to start a work-related conversation made him all too aware of the strange feeling in his butt. It was awkward and unfamiliar, and most of all unwanted, but the vibration of the crane truck added a very different, warm, feeling, and he wanted that even less.

A mixture of pasture and orchard went left and right and finally, after a turn around a group of birch trees, the farmhouse came into view, which looked quite similar to the Mitchells'. On the front porch stood a red-blonde woman studying some papers with reading glasses on her nose.

"Morning, Miss Braddock," Tom shouted happily, and as Miss Braddock looked up and raised her hand in greeting, Dante asked quietly:

"The Mistress here?"

"No. This is Dawn Braddock Jr. The Mistress here is Dawn Senior, but she is not in the best of health." Tom gave Dante a quick glance. "Mistress Carolyn's brother Carter is married to Delilah Braddock. Their daughter is therefore your mistress' cousin." Something about Tom's tone of voice disturbed Dante, but perhaps it was just his basic dislike that spoke through him.

Slowly they drove across the grounds, between two pastures, and toward the edge of a wooded area where Frank was already waiting with a large lumber truck next to a rather high pile of wood. Just as Dante was about to say something, Tom grabbed him painfully by his knee. Without turning around, he said quietly and coldly:

"Your little gift brings Blaise a nice pocket money. And because Blaise is a grateful man, this stays between us, understand, sweetie?"

"Understood," Dante growled. Still, he wondered how much trouble it would bring him if he told his mistress - or directly Miss Carolyn - the truth.
Probably more than a week's humiliation was worth.

"So... we use the crane to lift the logs onto the truck. This is the remote control." Tom patted the box he had hung around his neck on a padded belt.

"The crane isn't the most sensitive, so we have to give it a little help. Can you balance?" Frank wanted to know and Dante frowned.

"What do you mean?"

Frank pointed to the grab claw, which Tom snapped open and closed fittingly. "We have to make sure that it hits the log really in the middle and then the logs in the transporter can't lie all over the place either."

Dante nodded slowly and watched Frank climb up the high pile of wood with astonishing agility. Tom steered the claw, but when it was time to grab the log, he said with a tense frown:

"If we help too much by hand, we create too much momentum."

Frank gave hand signals, while Tom steered the claw with jerking millimeter work, and Dante sighed.

"Nobody can watch this. Give me that." Demanding, he held out his hand and Tom looked at him irritated, before hesitantly handing the remote control to Dante. An oversized controller, but the principle was the same.

After the third log he already had a feeling for how the weight and the moment of inertia changed the movements and with big eyes Frank looked at him after the fourth log landed in the transporter.

"Where did you learn to do that?"

"Video games, sir, video games." Dante could not wipe off a grin and Tom snorted in annoyance.

"Well, at least you're making yourself useful."

"Obedience and diligence are an adornment for every slave and please the Great Mother," Dante recited slightly mockingly the favorite saying of the nuns who had run the children's home where he had grown up.

It was probably Frank's smile that kept Tom from making another remark.

~

"I'm going to take a shower, Mistress," Dante said quietly, and Mistress Alice hummed in agreement. Frank had sent him into the house to help with the dinner preparations, but before that Dante urgently needed to wash. Despite all the machines, it was still a lot of hard work and he was exhausted and sweaty. And he wanted to finally get rid of that thing sticking up his ass.

He closed the bathroom door and undressed, took a grim look at himself in the mirror and then carefully pulled out the butt plug. He laboriously suppressed a hiss and looked at the piece of wood in disgust; he felt sick at the thought that he would have to wear it tomorrow- and bring it in himself in order not to incur Tom's wrath. That Mistress Alice had given him a bottle of lube- though certainly with other ulterior motives- seemed like bitter irony to him, but nonetheless he was grateful.

Reluctantly he washed the butt plug, dried it carefully and then slipped it between his work clothes- the bathroom door had no key and he didn't want to risk anything. He got into the shower and sighed comfortably as the warm water loosened his muscles. Without that damn cage the shower would have been even better, but for that he had to wait two more days.