La Ajira

Author's Note: At some point, I realized this story required an apology right from the start and if you're using the mobile version, you've probably already realized why with that nifty little word count feature.

The content warning for this one is that it's not a short story and I didn't have the heart to break it into parts. To give you an idea, though, it's a Master/slave romance with Gorean themes. You don't have to know Gor to read it, so long as I've done my job right. As another forewarning, there is a decent bit of build up. Once it starts, it's a 24/7, total power exchange story, with how two people reach that level of exchange in their particular way.

As one last note, whenever I reference books in stories, it's not particularly to condone or demonize those books in one way or another. I'm just someone who reads a lot and sometimes it's easy to forget how desensitizing that can be. I'm also sorry for when I upset anyone by referencing those books, as has happened, and it wasn't intentional, for what it's worth. Anyway, enjoy and have fun, like always :). In the words of Eminem, "This is my love song."

La Kajira

"I may well be a wood and a night of dark trees, yet whoever does not shrink from my darkness will also find rose slopes under my cypresses."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

————

Nathan's Journal

I asked Christopher Love to be his slave.

Don't get overly excited, though, as it isn't a sexual kind of slavery. I can't claim to be anything other than straight, truth be told, which may sound odd, that I would ask the forerunner for one of Sulfur's BDSM club branches to wear his collar when it didn't have to do with sex. Ah... Damn it, the journaling was Christopher's idea - command, rather - and my thoughts are not in order at the moment. Seeing their disorganized state is almost painful when order is my drug, but Christopher was insistent that these things not be erased once written. This isn't easy, to be honest. Every email, message, and part of my life is edited twice. I suppose this will force me to consider my words carefully.

Alright, the best way to explain is that my asking for his collar started because I finished the renovations on my penthouse. The dungeon was only one of the rooms I finished, even if I am not in a serious relationship and even if what I wish for would be difficult to find. It didn't matter. I felt this pride when the rooms were done, painted, and cleaned, when I got to look around at a rather wild fantasy turned into reality. The Gorean style was something gorgeous, with that cool touch of barbarism that felt just right. The Tarn's room in particular is like something out of my perfect dreams and its mural is... Jesus, I love it. I go in there sometimes to lay down and look at the ceiling when my thoughts are too much, as a confession.

Of course, Christopher was supportive and just as excited for me as I was, although he might not count. Ever since Ash, the owner of the Sulfur's chain, introduced us, Christopher has been something like my big brother. I'll never forget it. Ash learned of how I found my way into Sulfur's after following an odd chain that started with Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, which led to John Norman's Gorean Saga. And it went from there, where I found kinky social media and that ended with my saying a rather reserved, "Hello," to Asher Lavrov. It took him all of two conversations before he gave me this wry smile. "I have someone I'd like you to meet. Let's just say I think you'll get along."

That someone was Christopher Love. Meeting him was like looking in a creepy mirror of what my future self might look like. He has this shoulder length, very dark hair, though, which I don't think is a look I can pull off anyway, and it's darker than mine. His eyes are brown where mine are blue, but otherwise, the similarities are there, right down to his sense of romantic indulgences, which is something wildly obvious in his version of Sulfur's. He showed me a dungeon called the Pleasure Garden first, with a shallow pool and fake flowers decorating it. The Gorean hints of style had been something to make me excited and Ash had laughed at the look Christopher got while watching me.

The story only got better too, when Christopher found his own slave, Deirdre, over the past year. They're something special to see and, of course, with my own interests in being a Master - of a specific kind, too - I love the image they make together. It wasn't long after meeting before we spoke of things outside of Sulfur's, where he learned who my father was and my own endeavors in life. He watched me through the end of my Yale years, teaching me things like how to use the whips I was so interested in, things like the art of pleasure, and I sometimes contend that Christopher is French at heart in some of these ideas.

He was the first person I showed the pictures of the renovations to and he was beside himself.

I guess it's silly, the reason why I asked him for his collar. Petty, even. It was after I showed him that it happened and it wasn't even one event really. It was a few of them, just random things. One was from this girl I had been casually seeing, someone who seemed interested in me and what I liked. It was just someone I met at Sulfur's.

It doesn't really matter, now that I think about it. The short version is I was forced to look at the rooms I'd made, my fantasy worlds, and wonder,

What if I'm taking this too far? Is it crazy to want to live this lifestyle, to want to be a Master 24/7? Is it crazy to hate the thought of calling these things a game?

And that's the basis of the real reason. It's this thought of... disenchantment, maybe? I caught up to him tonight and he's known something has been wrong.

Although, I still think I managed to shock him a little bit. To explain, Christopher has a rather unique style in his taking of play slaves. Everyone interested in him eventually learns a rule. Actually, they learn a few rules, now that he has his own slave. The first is new, that she will always be involved in his slave training now, in some way. He shares her and she is used in his lessons, I think as a form of reciprocation in the fact that he is not fully monogamous but desires some form of exclusive exchange in their relationship. Since he doesn't have sexual exclusion, he chooses an emotional form.

The second rule is the one that has always been in place. His slaves must be the one to request his slavery and they must request it with a purpose in mind. It can be anything. It can be a request for something emotional like being more disciplined (he once had a wild little hedonist ask for that one, to hear the story). It can be something purely sexual and I know he's had a few that merely wanted to know more about the experiences of slavery and he was someone well known, safe, and experienced for them to ask.

For my request, I waited for Sulfur's to close, watching Christopher and his bartender, Jackson, tease each other, while Christopher's slave giggled alongside Jackson's partial slave, Essie. And Christopher sensed something, of course he did. He waved goodbye to Jackson and Essie before turning to me. "What's on your mind? I haven't known you to stay after close for a while now, since you started working at your dad's company as one of his directors."

And I'd thought about this for a week or two by then. I had been so excited over my renovations, but after showing a few friends, it made me sit in the Tarn's Room and wonder about my decisions. Was it too much to say that I knew for sure I didn't wish to date? It limited my dating pool and it took effort. Master and slave relationships were already in the deeper ends of these things and... let's say the relationship I want is the deepest end. I knew there were others like me, like Christopher, who knew they were lifestyle Masters. They obviously were because they had their slaves, but they had been that way even before they met their slaves. How did they know? What if I had doubts? Did that mean I wasn't what I thought?

Round and round. Question after question. What made an author an author? What made a painter a painter?

What made a lifestyle Master a Master? I thought a lot of it was in the heart, but lately my heart seemed doubtful, after a few reactions I'd gotten, after one too many times seeing other people have trite arguments on kinky social media.

"Would you accept a nonsexual slavery request, if their purpose was to be a better Master?"

Christopher paused and he is a very controlled man, so it's not easy to read things like his shock, when he does not wish to show something like that. Even I wouldn't have been able to tell what that pause was, when his expression was as inviting and implacable as always. But I have learned that his slave, Deirdre, can always read him and will react to serve him based on what she has seen. I watched her pause with him and then she smiled, calmly taking down some of the barstools that Jackson had put up, in anticipation for the conversation he would wish to have.

It was something that always made me smile, with the romantic thoughts that Christopher's slave was his face, that he was a man of control and the one person who could read through that was the slave who was under that same control and never left it. It was the type of thing that always made me remember the emotion I had when I first read the Gor books (as they are published thus far and excepting the newest one, which I hadn't gotten to read) and then again when I had first discovered and stepped onto the scene through Sulfur's, when Christopher had shown me some of the other, rare Master and slave relationships. He and Ash had both said the same thing. "It's hard to find that caliber of a relationship, to be honest, when it's hard to find that dedicated of a Master. It's something of a daunting task to take that much responsibility for another person and then, of course, you have to make sure the slave is mentally stable. But we know a few." And he'd shown me when they came to Sulfur's. Male Masters and Female Mistresses alike. Naturally, as a heterosexual male Dom, I took to the first.

Every one made me smile in a pure sense of joy, in the knowledge of how that was the caliber and level of trust that I wanted for myself. That was the standard I wanted to live for. I didn't want to play games. I wanted it for real, badly enough that I had built my Tarn's Room, my Bath House, and my Dungeon.

Christopher smiled quite easily after that first pause, nothing at all to give away what he had felt, but Deirdre was calmly getting glasses. She looked far more domesticated then, dressed in jeans and a tee rather than her usual soft slave's outfits, like the nighties Christopher dressed her in. Delightfully, she was dressed to match her Master even so. "Would you like a water?" I followed him to the bar, smiling that he knew me well enough to no longer offer me alcohol.

"Yes, please." But I had to laugh at how Deirdre already had the bottle out for me. "Thank you, love."

For Christopher, she mixed a light drink, just the way he liked it and he kissed her hair in gratitude, holding her against his side. "You know, I have actually gotten a request like that before."

I tilted my head. "I was going to say that shocks me, but it really doesn't on a second thought." I had to smile, feeling kind of sheepish. "I got the idea from how many Doms you've shown me that first started these things in kink by being submissives. Well, that and all the religious stories about kings and lessons of humility."

Christopher didn't laugh at me for it, though I expected him to. "That's a logical enough flow, especially for someone with as much interest in Gor as you have. I was one of those, by the way, that started as a submissive. The Dominatrix was the person who first introduced me to my own Gor themed circle. I don't know if I told you that or not."

"You didn't." I had to grin over it, though, when it wasn't overly shocking with his dungeon setups. "So, did it work the other time you did this with someone?"

He nodded, taking a drink while Deirdre watched him, having fallen quiet. She seemed rather content to cuddle against his side while he took comfort in holding her close. "It did, but he was a bit different than you are. I knew what to do with him, what questions he wanted answered specifically. With you... What are you looking for from this, Nathan?" I stared at the water bottle for a moment, considering that, but he took mercy on me. "If you're looking to prove yourself to you, then I can't give that. And you've never sought validation from another person." Yeah, no, that wasn't it. The thought of doing this because I needed to pass some sort of test for someone else was the kind of thing that made me cringe on an internal philosophy level.

"I think I just want to know for sure that it's what I want. It feels like it is, but I haven't had my own slave, you know?"

He smiled, gently. "Is this about Mindy?"

"Not... exactly, no. It wasn't just her."

He fell silent for a moment while I watched him hold Deirdre, wondering again if I wasn't being crazy. But Christopher was smiling when he studied me. "Alright. I'll accept it, while you figure out what the end idea is for."

Ah, a riddle. They were like less enjoyable songs. Christopher laughed at whatever my face must have looked like and I had to smile. "The first thing is control. Don't give me things like that to use against you, Nathan." I wondered what his collar for me would look like, wondered what his rules for this would be when sex wasn't so much involved. But Christopher started things with a different topic. "Have I ever told you about the lily that Deirdre wears in her hair?"

I smiled when Deirdre looked up, a blush on her cheeks, but she had a flirtatious grin, too, one that made Christopher touch her nose and shake his head in a wry way. It was one of those small interactions between them that made me feel like I wasn't crazy, one that made me remember the emotions and desires behind why I wanted a slave as opposed to a traditional relationship, even if I couldn't put those emotions into words. "No."

She giggled and Christopher let her have this moment. "He changed his rules and dress codes to keep allowing the lily." It was all the sweeter with the interplay between them, their day to day routines where Christopher was always her Master and she was always the slave, but those facts seemed to only add to the love they had for each other. "So, there's a story from the Gor books that was always so romantic, one with this slave that Tarl gives to a first mate or something. Forgive the lapse in memory. It's been a while in having read them. It had to do with Port Kar, though, and it seems like it was the slave who was caught stealing and was branded in the street where she was caught. Tarl just so happened to be around and he bought her and she went on to flirt relentlessly with one of his crew."

I had to grin, so that Christopher laughed. "Tina, I think was her name. It's one of the cutest stories."

"It really is! Well, anyway, she puts a flower in her hair-"

I sat up straight. "A talender! You put a talender in your hair for Christopher." It was the kind of thing to make me grin, to make me feel this kind of playful joy, at seeing a story come to life, even in this small way.

Deirdre giggled. "That's it. Because-"

"Because they're for slaves who care for their Master-"

"And to show that they're broken to him!" She was delighted when she finished, at sharing a moment from a book series and feeling romance to her Master, which was all the more obvious with how she hugged him all the tighter, while Christopher watched me, while I remembered the playful fun in that part of the book. Sure, those books definitely had their flaws and they certainly had philosophies I didn't always agree with, but there was a joy in them, too, and that's what made me fall in love with all of this in the first place. At first it was just the fantasy from a science fiction book, but then I had discovered the world of kink and BDSM and realized... maybe some things could be adapted. Fantasy had long since evolved into something more, something that was fueled all the harder by every project I took control over in some way, by every late night at Yale when I couldn't give up on something, when being perfect was not enough, not with the goals I had in life. Somehow everything, all of it, tied together. Renovating my house, walking onto my father's company as a director when my father was an impossible man to work for and there were other job offers that would have been less stress but less challenge, too. That was what I couldn't piece together, my desires for being a Master, the thought of BDSM naming those desires as games when I hated the thought of that, the natures of my fantasies, and making those fantasies into reality. They weren't games to me, not with those emotions.

Christopher broke the silence. "You know, it's been a while since I read those books."

Deirdre squealed and I realized where some of this might be headed.

Of course, he went on to place the collar around my throat, a basic chain choker that locked at the front, the kind of thing that even I could easily get away with wearing during the day. He went through the rest the same way he always does, asking me what nights worked best for me to go to Sulfur's, since his play slaves were mostly free outside of the times spent with him. Or, at least, they had far fewer rules to follow during the days, while they were directly under his control on the nights agreed upon. For me, it ended up being a night during the week and one night during the weekend. I could trade those nights depending on what was happening during my weekdays when he knew my schedule's wild demands. He took out the honorifics entirely, telling me to call him "Christopher" so long as I did so respectfully, with the unspoken threat that if I didn't, he'd damn well stop being so nice if he had to. He went through which forms of touch I was okay with, with the true logic that we were both touch oriented people.

Anyway, the end result for the night is that I started reading again, this time while wearing a very strange choker I wouldn't have expected myself to wear a few months ago.

Bloody hell, I forgot how bad some of the writing could be in these books... To be fair, philosophers, I suppose, are not very well known for their authorial ability. Hell, just look at the state of this journal so far.

----

Nathan

It started with an omen at Dr. Malcolm Hall's prestigious Christmas party, something that someone with a sense of social grace from my father's pharmaceutical company needed to attend. My father himself might have been here, but I didn't count him as qualifying for the first idea, for one basic reason. My father was the type of man who thrived and operated best in an atmosphere of adversity, which was an admirable trait. It truly was, when you considered it objectively, but when you had to work with it, well, let's say I spent a lot of time keeping him away from engineering, accounting, R&D, and pretty much anyone who might have a problem with argumentative confrontation. He didn't mean anything by being a loud asshole with impossible expectations. He just needed someone to fight with in order to come up with a solution to problems and had gotten used to finding someone, now that I worked for the company.

Because it was me. He found me. Sometimes I hated it, to be honest, when it stressed me out, but I understood, too. At any rate, he wasn't the best candidate for social charm.

The second major person at the party was my omen and data scientist, Ryan Garner. The problem with him was that he hated anything to do with confrontation, crowds, people, attention, talking, or... You know what, he just hated social interactions on the whole. He never gave me problems whenever I told him I really needed him to appear at one of these things, especially since he was supposed to be at my marketing meetings and I always sheltered him so that he never had to. The truth was, Ryan made my life easier.