[Free-Novel]Loosing for Free Food, Drinks... and... (Patreon)

[Novel]

Every time.

Every single time.

I tell myself I’m not going to do it. I tell myself I’m the Anemo Archon, Barbatos, the god who tore down a tyrant’s walls and taught an entire nation what the word freedom is supposed to mean. I tell myself a bard of Mondstadt does not get on his knees—figuratively or otherwise—for a plate of food and a few bottles of cider.

Then the wind carries the smell of chicken katsu rolls out of Aether’s little storefront on the plaza, and my resolve evaporates like morning mist over Cider Lake.

Dammit, Traveler.

I stand there in the doorway longer than I should, cloak still on, lyre slung across my back like it still belongs to the person I was a few years ago. The shop is warm. The air is thick with fried batter, sweet sauce, and the faint, expensive perfume he started stocking after I complained the place smelled too much like adventure rations. He knows. He always knows.

“Back again, Venti?” Aether doesn’t even look up from the counter at first. He never needs to. “The usual, or are we negotiating again?”

Negotiating. That’s what he calls it. As if I have any leverage left.

I used to. The first time it was a joke. A stupid, wine-soaked joke I made after he caught me lifting a crate of dandelion wine from the back. “What’s a humble bard got to trade, Traveler? Songs? Stories? Or shall I just look pretty and hope you’re feeling generous?” I laughed. He didn’t. He smiled that quiet, considering smile he gets when he’s already three steps ahead of everyone in the room, and the next thing I knew I was signing something that looked like a tavern tab and felt like a contract written in wind.

The first transformation was supposed to be temporary. A prank. A “see how the other half lives” bit of Traveler mischief. I woke up with hips that didn’t belong to me, a chest that made my old corset look like a suggestion, and a voice that still sounded like mine if I didn’t listen too closely. The outfit he “provided” was worse. Teal silk cut like a Mondstadt festival souvenir that had been attacked by a tailor with a vendetta and a measuring tape that only knew how to go down. Gold embroidery that followed every new curve. Stockings that stopped mid-thigh and refused to stay there.

I told him I wasn’t in the mood. I told him I’d rather do the gay version if he insisted on being paid in humiliation. I even laughed when I said it—hehe, unless you actually want to deal with that, Traveler~

He dealt with it.

I don’t talk about that night. I especially don’t talk about how my body remembered it anyway, even after I changed back. Some things the wind doesn’t blow away as easily as I’d like.

That was years ago. Years of “just this once,” of “the rolls are extra crispy today,” of “you can keep the room above the shop if you stay for the evening.” Free lodgings. Free meals. Free cider that tastes like the good years before the Cataclysm if I close my eyes. The price is always the same shape even when the details change.

I have become, against every principle I ever sang about, compliant.

Girly-compliant, if I’m being honest with the part of me that still keeps score. The part that used to sleep in trees and steal apples and tell Zhongli to his face that contracts were for people who didn’t trust the wind. That part is quieter now. It still screams sometimes—NONONONONONO—but the scream has started to sound like background music.

Today the price is the inflatable.

Aether had it set up in the enclosed courtyard behind the shop. Green vinyl walls that gleam like wet leaves, windows cut into the sides so the real sky of Mondstadt can watch. In the center sits the thing itself: a massive, glossy pink sphere the size of a small carriage, so perfectly round and taut it looks like it might roll away if the wind decided to be unkind. Printed across its surface—deep, almost three-dimensional, like the vinyl itself had been branded—is an image of me.

Not the me who walks the streets with a lyre. The other one. The one with the ridiculous proportions he keeps insisting on. Long dark hair with the same green-tipped braids, only heavier now, falling over a chest that strains the same teal-and-gold bodice. The printed version is on all fours on a smaller sphere, looking up with that same flushed, faintly annoyed expression I can feel on my own face right now. It’s like being forced to watch myself watch myself.

“The imprint came out well,” Aether says from the doorway, wiping his hands on a towel. “Deep enough you can feel the lines if you press.”

I hate that I already know what he means.

The outfit today is the usual crime against tailoring. The cheongsam-style top barely contains anything. The bottoms are little more than decorated panels and ties. The stockings are teal this time, shiny, clinging to thighs that have no business being this thick. Every time I move, something new becomes visible that I spent two thousand six hundred years not having to think about.

I climb onto the sphere because the alternative is walking out, and walking out means no katsu rolls, no cider, and—worse—the quiet little voice that has started asking what it would be like to stop pretending this is still a transaction.

The vinyl is warm from the afternoon sun coming through the windows. It gives under my weight with a slow, indecent sigh. My knees sink in. My hands find purchase on the printed version of my own shoulders. The real me is sitting on top of the image of me, and the image of me is looking up like she already knows how this ends.

“Comfortable?” Aether asks.

“I am an Archon,” I say, which is not an answer. My voice comes out higher than I want. The new body does that. “This is undignified even by my standards.”

He doesn’t argue. He never does. He just waits.

I try to stay still. I last maybe twenty seconds. The sphere is too round, too yielding. Every small shift of my hips makes it roll a fraction, and the roll makes my weight settle differently, and the different settling makes the printed face beneath me press up between my thighs in a way that is absolutely not accidental. The Traveler designed this. Of course he did.

I rock once, experimentally. The ball answers. The printed me seems to smile wider.

“That’s it,” Aether says, quiet. “You know the rhythm by now.”

I do. That’s the worst part.

I grind because the alternative is thinking about how easy this has become. How my body—this borrowed, exaggerated, humiliating body—has learned the exact angle that makes the vinyl catch against the thin fabric between my legs. How the printed image of my own breasts and face keep sliding under me like a second audience. How the green walls of the bounce house creak and shine and make everything feel smaller and louder at the same time.

My braids swing forward. One of them sticks to my collarbone. I am sweating already. The stockings make a soft, wet sound when my thighs press together around the curve of the sphere. I tell myself I am only doing this for the food. I tell myself the heat building low in my stomach is just friction and embarrassment and the fact that I haven’t had a proper drink yet today.

I tell myself a lot of things.

The ball turns slowly under me. I end up facing the printed version more directly, hands planted on either side of her face, ass lifted because that’s how the weight distributes on something this round. From this angle I can see my own reflection in the glossy pink surface—flushed cheeks, open mouth, the ridiculous swell of a chest I still haven’t gotten used to seeing from above. Behind me I know Aether is watching. He always watches like he’s cataloguing which songs I’ll be too embarrassed to sing in public afterward.

I hate that I’ve started wondering what it would be like if he wasn’t just watching.

Settling down as a spouse—

The thought arrives fully formed and I nearly slip off the sphere.

NONONONONONO.

FUCK NO.

I grind harder instead, as if I can physically outrun the idea. The printed me stares up with that same slightly dazed, slightly annoyed expression I see in every mirror now. The vinyl is starting to feel slick. My breathing has gone ragged in a way that has nothing to do with exertion. I can smell the katsu rolls again, faint through the open courtyard door, and it makes my stomach clench with a hunger that isn’t only for food.

“You’re folding,” Aether observes. Not unkind. Just accurate.

“I am negotiating,” I snap, and the snap comes out as a moan on the last syllable because the sphere chooses that exact moment to roll and press the printed face directly against me. “And when I am done negotiating, you are taking responsibility. Do you hear me? All of it. The lodgings, the meals, the fact that I can’t walk through Mondstadt without wondering if someone is going to recognize this version of me. You wanted a compliant little—whatever this is. Fine. But you don’t get to pretend it’s still a joke when I stop being able to change back on my own.”

He doesn’t look surprised. That’s the part that lands hardest. He just nods, once, like we’ve already had this conversation in some future I haven’t admitted to yet.

“I know,” he says. “I will.”

The promise sits in the air between us, heavier than the sphere.

I keep moving because stopping now would mean looking at him properly, and I am not ready for what my face might do if I do. The bounce house walls flex around us. The sky through the windows is the same blue it’s been for millennia. Somewhere in the city a real bard is probably singing one of my old songs about freedom, and I am here, wearing a body that isn’t mine, riding a giant pink ball printed with my own humiliating likeness, thinking about whether “spouse” is just another word for a contract I was too hungry to read.

The wind moves through the courtyard. It doesn’t judge. It never has. It only carries things—songs, seeds, the smell of fried chicken, the sound of vinyl and skin and a god who used to believe he couldn’t be bought.

I close my eyes.

The rolls will be cold by the time we’re finished. I already know I’m going to eat them anyway.

Hehe.

…Damn you, Traveler.