Content Warning: Sexual Assault, Child Abuse
000
My body was covered in and filled with Daud's semen. He had finished satisfying himself with me.
Daud's alternate universe was gone, and he and I had returned to the aquarium, reappearing in a closet full of inactive cleaning robots. As my body was lying naked on the floor, limbs broken and red with blood, Daud hovered over me.
"Don't bother telling anybody about this. Nobody will believe you." My lack of glasses meant I couldn't read Daud's expression, but his voice was deep and gravely.
Threads of silver and platinum formed clothes on Daud, along with recreating his disguise. He exited the closet while grumbling.
Instead of getting up, I stayed on the floor. I was tired and frustrated. The temptation to fall asleep in the closet was great, but I didn't want to get found by the aquarium's staff.
I controlled the water in the semen and blood to pull them all off me before freezing them to absolute zero, reducing the fluids to atoms. Next, I threaded ice to create casts around my limbs and reform my burqa of ice. Lifting my body with oxygen, I left the closet and hovered my way out of the aquarium.
As I took to the sky, I texted Hussain. I regretted not bringing him with me to talk with Daud this time. Daud probably wouldn't have tried to kiss me, let alone assault me if Hussain was present. He also might have concluded I wasn't 'teasing him' if I didn't meet with him alone.
"Hey, Hussain. Did you find Morgiana?"
"Not yet. We're still looking. Are you still talking with Daud?"
"No."
"How'd the conversation go? Was your theory right?"
"I was right. Daud's a reincarnated guy from Earth."
"I knew you nailed it! How'd he react?"
"He took it well. We talked about our experiences in our old lives versus our new ones. I told him you're also from Earth. I hope you're okay with that, I forgot to ask."
"I'm cool with it. What else did you talk with Daud about? Is he willing to hang out again? Will he hang out with me?"
I exhaled out of my nose as I arrived at an infirmary. As I ate a regeneration pill that restored my limbs, I thought about how to tell Hussain what happened.
"Scheherazade, are you busy? If you can't talk now, I understand," Hussain texted.
"I can talk." I sighed again. "Daud thought I was attracted to him."
"Aren't you gay?"
"I am. Daud got the wrong idea. He kissed me. When I told him I wasn't interested, he got pissed. It turns out he's obsessed with living out his fantasy of being an overpowered anime protagonist with a harem of sluts."
"That's crazy! He didn't come off that way at all!"
"His behavior's all an act to get people to like him."
"Insane. What did you do after Daud got angry?"
"It's not about what I did. Daud raped me." I just said it.
"What? Are you okay?" Despite only being text, I could feel Hussain's shock in his response.
"As fine as I can be."
"Are you sure? We gotta report this!"
"There's no point. Nobody would believe I was raped, especially not by someone as beloved as Daud. Everyone would assume I was lying for attention or to get people to like me. I'd probably get harassed even more than I already do."
"We can't do nothing!"
"But there's nothing we could do that wouldn't make things worse."
"Do you have any evidence of what happened?"
"I could probably have a doctor check my privates for Daud's semen, but that would only prove he and I had sex. He'd probably claim that the sex was consensual, or maybe even that I seduced him or something. Everyone would believe him over me."
"There has to be something we can do!"
"Let it go."
"But you got raped!"
"It is what it is. Let's get back to looking for Morgiana. I'm gonna stop by the Salt dorm first. I need clothes."
"Okay. I'll talk to you later."
"Talk to you later."
I returned to my, or rather Morgiana's room in the Salt dorm.
Sitting on the bottom bed was Morgiana and Badroulbadour, the latter woman wrapping her arm around the former. Pan Hu was snoozing on his doggy bed.
My head tilted to the side and I removed the veil covering my head.
"Hey." Badroulbadour smiled. Morgiana gazed at my feet, her jaw clenching.
"Hi," I texted. "Morgiana, are you okay?"
"Yeah." Morgiana's voice was so quiet I could barely hear it.
"Hussain said you were still missing."
"I found Morgiana pretty soon after she ran off." Badroulbadour was a master spy, so it made sense that she'd be good at tracking people down. "We talked in private for, like, a long time, and Morgiana opened up a bit. We decided to wait until she felt she was ready before we came back to talk to you and Hussain. We also decided that it would be best if Morgiana talked to each of you one-on-one."
"Is now a good time?" Morgiana said.
"Now's good. Let me just get changed real quick. I'm naked under this." I tugged on my veil of ice.
"Why are you naked under your veil?" Badroulbadour hummed. "Did you have a wild time with somebody?"
"You could say that." I headed towards a dresser while Badroulbadour got off the bed, putting a hand on Morgiana's shoulder.
"Are you sure you're ready?"
"Probably not, but I gotta do this."
"You got this." Badroulbadour gave Morgiana a quick hug before walking out of the room, Pan Hu following her.
After I finished putting on a t-shirt and shorts, Morgiana and I moved to the floor couches. We sat across from each other, but Morgiana still avoided looking me in the eye.
We sat in silence for a bit as we searched for what to say.
"I'm sorry for calling you a hypocrite. That was uncalled for," I texted.
There was silence again.
"Don't apologize. You were right. I shouldn't expect people to blindly trust me when I don't put my trust in them. I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I get that you have good reasons for not wanting us to hang around Daud, and that you aren't comfortable talking about those reasons."
Another silence.
"I don't like thinking about my trauma, so I try to run from it, but moving on from my past requires that I confront it." Morgiana finally looked me in the eye. "Daud and I were friends as little kids, and we eventually became boyfriend and girlfriend. Daud seemed so cool and nice, but over time he revealed his true nature."
"And what was his nature?"
"That of a monster. He'd find any reason to insult me. Any little imperfection, even just misspeaking or fumbling with my words for a second would bring on a barrage of insults. And then there were the times he'd get angry at me, sometimes for no reason. He'd scream at me and tell me I was ruining his life, and claim I was using him. I'd be scared and think about leaving him, but then he'd apologize and shower me with affection." Morgiana clasped her shaking hands together.
"He was abusive." I put a hand on Morgiana's.
"He started isolating me from my family. He'd find excuses to keep me with him all the time, and he'd tell me not to trust my parents. He made me paranoid that my parents and grandparents didn't love me and that they might hurt me. He'd help me all the time, but only to insult me by saying he had to do things for me since I was too incompetent to do them myself. He was making me reliant on him."
"I'm so sorry. What changed?"
"One time, when Daud got really mad, he hit me. It was the first and only time, and it was a wakeup call. He tried to win me over again like always would, but it didn't work anymore. He crossed a line. I refused to see him anymore."
"Good."
"But what hurt more than anything was how my family reacted when I told them about how Daud treated me." Morgiana's brow furrowed and she bit her lip. "They didn't believe me. They didn't think a little kid could act the way I said Daud did. They thought that Daud was probably mean to me and hit me, but that was it."
Daud had been grooming Morgiana, molding her so she'd be his perfect, timid, dependent partner by the time they grew up. Such calculated abuse would certainly be beyond the capacity of most children intellectually, but Daud wasn't really a child.
"I believe you."
"Thank you. But the fact my family didn't believe me hurt so fucking much. The more I insisted on what really happened, the less my family seemed to believe me." Morgiana hunched forward. "At one point, my mom said I was being a brat."
"That's terrible." I felt stupid stating the obvious, but I couldn't think of anything else to say.
"The fact that my family keeps trying to push me into being what they want is only a tiny part of why I hate them. The main reason is that they refused to believe me when it mattered most."
It was no wonder why Morgiana was so distant and had trust issues. She was burned after she got close to Daud, and she felt like she couldn't even trust her family to stand by her when she needed them.
"I get why this is a taboo subject for you."
"Compared to some of the shit you went through, I'm sure what happened to me seems like nothing. You're probably thinking about how much of a whiner I am." A lifeless chuckle pushed out from Morgiana's throat.
"Suffering isn't a competition. One person having it worse, however you would even measure that, doesn't make the other person's suffering invalid." I sat up straight. "Could you look me in the eye for a sec."
Morgiana raised her head. Her eyes and mine met.
"Thank you," I texted. "It takes courage to open up, and I'm honored that you chose to do so with me. You're strong, both for opening up and for having endured and overcome what you have."
"You're…welcome." Morgiana's voice cracked and she hunched forward again. "And thank you."
"I also want to thank you for trying to warn Hussain, Badroulbadour, and I about Daud. You were trying to protect us. I should have listened to you." I covered the left side of my face with my hand.
"That makes it sound like something bad happened."
"Something bad did happen, earlier today actually."
"Willing to share?" Morgiana looked up at me.
"It's only fair. Hussain's not the only one who's tried getting to know Daud. I spoke with him at the museum once, and he seemed nice, and I spoke to him today at the aquarium where he-" I sent an incomplete text.
"What?"
"Daud raped me."
Morgiana didn't respond in any way initially. It was as if she was frozen in time.
Then she gripped her sleeve, fiddling with it.
Despite her lack of expression on her face, I could taste the building emotion inside Morgiana as her body moved stiffly, swiftly, harshly.
The sleeve tore.
"I'm gonna kill Daud."
Morgiana shot to her feet.
"Stop. You can't hurt him. He's too strong, and even if you could hurt him, it'd only bite you in the ass later."
"That fuck raped you. I'm gonna rip off his dick and shove it in his eye socket." Morgiana spoke as if she was simply reciting obvious facts, like if she was saying that people needed air to breathe.
"Morgiana, please don't get yourself hurt for my sake." I grabbed Morgiana's wrist. "I'm okay. Please, sit back down."
Morgiana was still for a few seconds before sitting back down.
"Thank you," I texted.
"Fuck," Morgiana spat out as she raised a fist that she slammed down onto her thigh. The impact shook the building and caused the both of us to bounce off the ground for a moment. "This is my fault. If I told you what happened between me and Daud from the start, you wouldn't have talked with him and you wouldn't have been raped."
"Don't blame yourself, you could never have known what would happen, and telling me what Daud did to you as a kid earlier might not have changed anything in the long run. Regret and speculation will only leave you miserable, trust me."
"Practice what you preach. So, what do we do now?"
"About what?"
"About Daud. He raped you, we can't do nothing."
"He does seem too dangerous to let walk around unchecked, but what can we do?" My head tilted to the side. "He's too powerful to fight and everybody loves him."
"I could offer to make a Blessed Bet with him, and if he loses, he has to drop out of the Academy. If I lose, I'll have sex with him or something."
"That isn't worth the risk, and even if we won the bet, Daud might react poorly. Given how he acted when I denied his advances, he might go ballistic if he was forced to drop out. A lot of people would get hurt."
"Daud is strong, but he's not invincible. If my grandfather stepped in, he'd kick Daud's ass." Morgiana reclined on her side.
"You don't know how strong Daud really is." I did. Ali Baba was powerful, and could certainly give Daud a good fight up to a certain point, but if Daud used his full power, Ali Baba would have no chance of winning. The Al-Kimiya anime made it clear that Daud was unrivaled when he released all his limiters.
"Daud's stronger than us, I'll give you that, but my grandfather's literally one of the strongest guys to ever live. How could Daud match up to him?"
"I got a glimpse of what Daud was capable of when he assaulted me. He is transcendent of space and time entirely. If he wanted to, he could literally teleport or travel through time, though that would probably collapse the structure of reality and end the universe."
"No way. My grandfather and father are the only people I've ever met that are on that level."
"Please, trust me when I say that defeating him in a fight isn't possible." I put a hand to my chest.
"Okay. I'll trust you. You wouldn't lie about this." Morgiana looked at me with a face that lacked the usual tension in it.
"Thank you."
"If we can't risk pissing Daud off, then how can we stop him from doing whatever he wants?"
"I don't know. I wish I had an answer, but I don't."
"For now we'll have to leave things as they are. We'll keep brainstorming until we eventually come up with a feasible plan."
"That's all we can do." I rubbed the back of my neck. "How about we end our talk here. You still gotta hash things out with Hussain."
"That's true." Morgiana stood up. "I'm gonna go meet up with him."
"And I'm gonna go to bed. Today's been exhausting."
"I can imagine." Morgiana turned to face me, a smile on her face. "Sweet dreams."
"You too." I smiled back before opening the curtain around my bed and crawling in, shutting the cloth barrier behind me.
It took little more than a minute for me to fall asleep.
Given I had no classes the next day, I slept in late. My dreams were initially of Daud and what he did to me, but then they shifted to being on Dunyazade, Tawaddud, and Zumurrud. I imagined playing the three of them as kids again.
Peace washed over me.
I had nary an inkling as to what was happening as I dreamed away.