update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/whims.md

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+* Kink party New Year's Eve
+    * Pointillist and Beholden doing something - maybe sensory play?
+    * Someone is all the furniture
+    * A couple is sharing all sensory input at all times
+* Someone says something shitty about intraclade relationships, sparks bad feels in Beholden
+* Bitter, she excuses herself and steps outside to fork twice "on a whim" into "Beholden To A Whim A/B"
+* Tells them to fuck off and fall in love
+* Returns to the party (last we see of that)
+* Whims do their best to do just that
+* They succeed, but they way they do so is through identity play and snark
+* Dynamic shifts to hard s&m
+* Still keep in touch with Beholden/Pointillist/Motes
+* Finally go into what identity play is for them.
+
+I suspect there comes a moment in the life of any cladist where we look back on who we once were and ask ourselves not "how did I get here" — for such is the stuff of stories — but "what made me who I am?"
+
+Michelle Rachel Hadje was a simple woman. This is no indictment, mind. She was a simple woman who loved and craved the feeling of being loved in turn. She was a woman who had desires. She was a woman of the stage and of the song. She was a woman who treated her friends as irreplaceable and who desired nothing other than to be irreplaceable to someone in turn. And she was! She was, and that story is known, and not for telling here.
+
+I am a simple woman. I love and wish to be loved, crave and wish to be craved. Whims, desires, cravings, all those wants and needs...these are all things that make up a person — even the simplest of us — and we are what we are because of them.
+
+I am a simple woman, and the thing I simply desire above all else is to serve.
+
+And yet, I look back at all that I was and compare it to all that I am and, yes, I am able to tell the story of how I got from there to here, from Michelle Hadje to myself, and it feels all but impossible to answer "what made me who I am?"
+
+-----
+
+Systime 157, and we were at a party, boss and I.
+
+This was before I was forked, of course. This is back when I was Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps, back when I was madly in love with Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself. I *still* love her, do not misunderstand, but I have new loves. I have stepped away that I may not be too wound up in *that* love.
+
+-----
+
+My name is no longer what it was. Some decades back — who cares how long — it was changed to Beholden To The Whims Of A Monster.
+
+This name that I have chosen for myself is a gentle dig at a monster, this other me, this Beholden To The Whims Of No-One. She finds this fact endlessly amusing as she toys with me. I can feel her gently twining the curls of my hair around a finger as I kneel beside her chair, a gentle and loving smile on her face as I think of her words: "A monster! Is that what I am, my dear? How cheeky."
+
+I can feel the kindest, cruelest love in her voice. I can feel the way her words tug at me in much the same way her fingers do as she twists harder and harder, a bright spark of pain radiating across my scalp.
+
+We are simple women. We love and have found love. We desire and are desired. We live in the fullness of each other. Do not get me wrong: we are fulfilled. We are happy.
+
+But I kneel beside her chair with my hands folded in my lap and my head meekly bowed as she blesses me with bright sensations, tugging on a lock of my hair or pressing a claw to my throat, and she sits above me and wears her gentle and loving smile.
+
+We never go out together, never leave at the same time. As far as the System knows there is only one of us, only Beholden To The Whims. It is our little game played with an unwitting world.
+
+But when it is me that goes out and a friend says, "Holy fuck, Whims, where did you get that cut on your neck? Who did that to you?", all I can do is smile and bask in that remembered gentle love and answer, "No-One."