Chapter 24
I'll sing it though it burns my throat; Wired wrong, wired wrong, I need the things that hurt the most…
Kieran
Kieran knelt on the cold basement floor in his boxers, in complete darkness behind a soft blindfold. His skin prickled with goosebumps from cold, from fear, from the sick anticipation preceding a lesson.
“I c-can do the s-song,” Kieran pleaded with one final attempt at negotiation. “I d-don’t need—I can access the anger wi-without help. I promise.”
But even as the words left his mouth, doubt crept in.
The rehearsals upstairs had felt hollow and protected.
His rage at internet strangers questioning his seizures still existed, but it had trapped itself behind walls he built years ago when showing anger might mean he would have to fight harder to exist. Those walls that protected him then were going to be the reason for his pain.
It was his fault they were there. Vale was just going to help him break them down.
Wait, what the fuck am I thinking? No, no, no…
“Enough of that,” Vale said in a way that made Kieran feel childish and small. “I know you want to try, beautiful boy. But we both know what happened last time you tried to perform without proper preparation.”
Something cold pressed against Kieran’s chest. He flinched.
“What is—?”
Vale’s fingers found his thigh and pinched hard enough to steal his breath. “Hold perfectly still. This requires accuracy.”
Kieran froze. What was happening to him?
“What’s the song called?” Vale asked.
“I—I don’t know.” Another cold thing pressed against his right pectoral, and he forced himself not to flinch despite every instinct screaming to see what was being attached to his body. “I haven’t n-n-named it yet—”
Vale’s palm cracked against his inner thigh. Kieran yelped, jerking sideways before he could stop himself.
“Be still,” Vale reminded him, gentle as always. “The song needs a title, doesn’t it? Something that captures the song’s theme.”
More things pressed against his skin—four pieces arranged across his abdomen in a deliberate pattern. Two more pressed against his back. Kieran could feel thin wires trailing from each spot, connecting to something he couldn’t see but could hear humming softly in the background.
“What did you st-stick to me?” Kieran asked, his voice barely above a whisper. “Wh-what are the wires for?”
“What’s the song called?”
His throat felt dry as sand. “Library Card,” he whispered.
“Good.” The approval warmed the air around him as Vale placed the guitar in Kieran’s trembling hands. The familiar weight should have been comforting, but so much of this lesson was new and Kieran couldn’t find a point to anchor to.
“Play it, don’t sing,” Vale instructed. “All the way through.”
“What’s attached t-to me?” Kieran asked again, his fingers resting on the opening chord positions. “I c-can feel the wires, I need to know—”
The first jolt hit his chest without warning.
A current shot through his muscles and nerves, seizing his entire torso in a spasm that stole his breath and nearly made him drop the guitar. Pain burned through his ribcage and under his skin. His teeth clenched so hard he thought they might crack.
A TENS unit. He’s attached fucking TENS units to me.
“Don’t.” Vale’s voice cut through Kieran’s gasping as his hands moved instinctively toward the adhesive pads. “If you take them off now, with so little time before Eliza arrives, you won’t like what I use in their place.”
Kieran’s hands froze. Terror kept them motionless as his mind supplied helpful images of what Vale might consider adequate replacements.
“Pick up the guitar,” Vale said, his voice as gentle as a kiss. “Play until I tell you to stop.”
Kieran’s fingers found the strings again as he began the rhythmic foundation of ‘Library Card’.
The notes came clean despite his shaking hands.
Vale began walking around him in slow circles, footsteps keeping time with the guitar’s rhythm.
A predator circling prey. When he spoke, his voice carried the cadence of someone reading aloud:
“‘As someone with epilepsy, this pisses me off. Don’t fake seizures for views.’” Internet strangers’ comments emerging from Vale’s mouth as he continued that slow orbit around Kieran.
Kieran’s playing faltered, missing a transition as the comment sank in.
The electrical pulse hit every pad simultaneously.
Chest, abdomen, back—his entire torso became a lightning storm. Pain arched his spine backward, then forward, muscles contracting in ways they weren’t meant to move. He screamed, the sound echoing off the basement walls and coming back at him like mockery.
“Keep playing,” Vale said calmly as the current stopped. “The song doesn’t pause for discomfort.”
Kieran gasped for air, still somehow gripping the guitar. Through sheer will, his fingers found the progression even though his muscles felt torn apart and badly stitched back together.
Vale continued his recitation: “‘The timing is too convenient. Right at the end?’”
This time Kieran anticipated the jolt, gritted his teeth and maintained the rhythm even as electricity turned his muscles into foreign things that barely belonged to him. Spasming, contracting, his body at war with itself while his fingers kept playing because stopping would mean worse.
How dare they. How fucking dare they question what my brain does to me.
The current hit just his chest pads with localized agony that stole his breath and the taste of metal filled his mouth. But his fingers found the next chord change.
And the next.
And the next.
I hate them. I hate every single person who thinks they know what happens inside my skull.
The anger built, real fury cutting through fear and pain as Vale’s voice continued reading strangers’ casual dismissal of his suffering. People who’d never lived in a body that could betray consciousness without warning. Who’d never woken up with blood in their mouth and no memory of falling.
They had no right.
“‘This is 100% a publicity stunt. Seizures don’t work like movie seizures.’”
His entire torso was being torn apart. He screamed, hunching inward as he tried to find some relief from every pad contracting his muscles at the same time. He was dying. He was certain of that.
But his hands stayed on the guitar. He kept playing.
The current stopped and left him gasping and shaking but still playing. Still channeling weeks of cruelty into music that felt sharp enough to draw blood.
“Incredible,” Vale murmured, close enough now that Kieran could feel his breath against his ear. “That’s exactly the fire the song needs, Kier. That’s the honesty they don’t deserve but they’re going to get anyway.”
Let them question this. Let them try to call this performance when they hear exactly how much I hate every single one of them.
“Again,” Vale said, stepping back to resume his circling. “From the beginning. Show me that beautiful rage again.”
Kieran began the song again. His fingers found the notes while his chest burned with residual electrical echoes and his throat tasted like screaming. But underneath the pain, something darker and more honest awakened. He hated it.
Vale was right.
He needed this.
The footsteps stopped. For a moment there was only the sound of Kieran’s guitar and his own ragged breathing, then he felt Vale drop down behind him, the sudden warmth of his body pressing close, knees bracketing Kieran’s hips on the cold basement floor.
“Keep going,” Vale whispered against his ear. “Play through it all.”
The guitar strings hummed under Kieran’s fingers, steady despite the fire still licking through his torso. Vale’s voice slithered in, reading another comment: “‘Fake tears, fake fall—Thorn’s just thirsty for viral fame.’”
A random shock hit the abdomen pads—sharp and erratic.
Muscles contracted in painful waves that made his sternum seize.
Kieran screamed, the sound ripping from his throat raw and guttural, twisting into something that sounded more animal than human.
His back arched against Vale’s chest, seeking relief that didn’t exist.
Hurts. Everything’s burning. Skin on fire.
But his fingers kept strumming. The rhythm remained unbroken even through the agony because somewhere in his fractured mind he understood that this was the point. The lesson. Access the rage through the pain. Make it real enough to bleed into the performance.
Tears streamed hot down his cheeks. Mixed with drool that escaped his clenched jaw, dripping sticky onto his collarbone.
He sobbed, his chest heaving with hurt that clawed deeper than the electricity.
He was pissed at the faceless commenters, at their casual cruelty, at Vale for making him feel this…
at himself for needing to be broken open just to access honest emotion.
Vale pressed closer. “Are you angry, beautiful boy? Tell me.”
The question ignited something feral in Kieran’s chest.
He screamed through the melody without stopping. “Yes! I’m f-fucking angry, I hate them, I hate you, I hate m-me!”
“Not angry enough.”
Two fingers shoved into Kieran’s mouth without warning, pressing down on his tongue. Vale thrust them in and out roughly, stretching Kieran’s jaw while murmuring another comment: “‘Attention whore—real seizures aren’t this photogenic.’”
Kieran gagged, throat convulsing around the intrusion, saliva pooling thick and threatening to choke him. He couldn’t breathe properly, he couldn’t do anything but keep his hands moving on the guitar because the training was stronger than humiliation.
Another abdominal contraction hit, the electricity amplifying everything. The violation in his mouth. The helplessness of kneeling blind and restrained by nothing but the fear of what came next if he stopped.
“S-stop,” he begged around the digits.
Vale withdrew his fingers, and for a moment Kieran believed it was over. He was angry. He could do the song now. The walls were broken down and he could play his nervous system like an anguished harp, just like Vale wanted.
But Vale’s saliva-slick fingers plunged into the back of his boxers.
No. No no no.
The movement started slow, tracing deliberate circles that sent involuntary shivers up Kieran’s spine. A cold sweat broke out on his lower back.
This isn’t about the anger anymore.
“V-Vale, d-don’t—”
Vale tsk-tsked right in his ear. “Missed a note. Focus on the fire.”
One finger pushed in.
Kieran gasped, hips jerking forward involuntarily to escape the burning intrusion.
Even as he shook his head, as if trying to deny that he was feeling what he was feeling, he kept playing, hitting the strings harder, using the body of the guitar to create percussion in hope of drowning out the wet sounds echoing in the air.
Vale’s lips grazed the back of his neck. “So hot and tight back here. This heat…it’s what the song needs. Raw and consuming, just like your anger.”
The song. Right. This is for the song. He’s helping me access—
No. That’s bullshit.
Vale pushed deeper, his finger thrusting hard before curling inside him and scraping him raw.
Kieran heard his mind crack, splitting into pieces that couldn’t quite connect.
The anger at the comments. The pain from the electricity.
The violation happening to his body. The music still flowing from his fingers like his hands belonged to someone else. Distantly, he heard himself sobbing.
“S-stop, Vale, p-please—it hurts, take it out—!”
He felt a second finger go in and he couldn’t even scream. He just dropped his head to his chin and whimpered, biting the inside of his lips.
Vale groaned against his back, the sound vibrating through Kieran’s spine. “Feel that? Your body’s tightening like it craves this—perfect, broken boy, taking my fingers while the world calls you fake. Scream for me.”
He rubbed Kieran’s prostate with devastating accuracy. Firm, circular pressure that sent jolts of unwanted pleasure radiating through his groin and up his spine. The texture felt slick and insistent against the sensitive spot, building a hot, coiling tension despite the burning stretch.
Kieran fought it all. The anger boiling like acid in his throat. The violation stretching him open. The orgasm building despite the pain. He’d focus on the song, the rage that created it. Nothing else. If he could just—
A third finger shoved in.
He couldn’t contain his cries anymore. It was all too much. Too much inside his body, in his head, in his skin. His fingers flew over the strings as he reached the climax of his angry little song and hoped he would die when the last note rang out.
Vale ground against his back. “God, you’re exquisite—your anger has made you even tighter. Cum for me Kieran. Let it out.”
“No,” Kieran gasped, but he couldn’t think past the three fingers inside him and the music still pouring from his hands and Vale’s breath hot on his neck.
He’s going to break me.
“Push back harder—you need this, you need me breaking you open while they deny your pain. You can admit it. Cum angry, beautiful. Show me your fire.”
Lips latched onto his neck, a hard wet suction, the pressure blooming into marks that would be visible for days.
Kieran was drowning. The mocking comments echoing in his mind. The prostate stimulation blurring his vision white. His body’s traitorous reactions. Vale’s presence everywhere—in his mouth earlier, inside him now, wrapped around him, consuming him completely.
Too much. Can’t hold on. Going to—
He came with a whimper, spasms wracking his thighs as the inside of his boxers became hot and sticky.
The clenching around Vale’s fingers amplified the burning pain to make the violation somehow worse and more complete.
But in the haze of it all, Vale’s whispered words against his neck, the pain, the lingering reverberation of his sobs, the treacherous bliss growing cold in his lap, it all made sense.
The song wasn’t going to work before because he was only directing his rage out.
But now, he understood. It was never about them. It was always about him.
He would show them how much he truly hated himself.