You’ve offended Lady Genevieve. She expects you to make it right.
tags: fan fic, ffxiv, nsfw
You don’t see her. It’s your fault, really—you’re distracted, reading the gladiatorial flyer you’re posting around the Coliseum instead of watching where you’re going—and you start to say as much. Her rebuke lances through your apology like a knife through gossamer. “What have you done!? Your kind has no business to even look at a lady such as I.”
Your head snaps up from the spilled flyers, fully focused on the woman in front of you. She’s of middling height for a hyur—not short, but short enough that you have to dip your head down to look her in the eye. A shudder passes through you as mistakenly do just that. Her eyes are as hard as they are captivating, a blue so pale that it is almost silver. In the dim light of the Coliseum’s upper walkway, they glimmer with the nightshine of a predator, or like cold ice under an unforgiving sun.
You, unfortunately, recognize her.
“Lady Genevieve,” you begin your apology again. “I didn’t—”
“Such shocking, unbelievable insolence!” she continues, oblivious to your words, and you feel the first flicker of anger in your chest. Yes, you ran into her, yes, you are sorry, but this haughty overreaction is beginning to border on obscene. You open your mouth to say as much, but for how implacably she grinds over your words, you might as well be talking back to a glacier.
“And now look.” Her fury burns cold. “Look at how my gil is scattered across the ground!”
A crowd is beginning to form, and the anger in your chest becomes a hot flush of embarrassment on your cheeks. You are new to Ul’dah—not new enough that you are ignorant of Lady Genevieve, but new enough that you’re acutely aware of being an outsider, of not knowing the social mores that govern this situation. Have you grievously offended her? Is this likely to escalate further?
“I-I didn’t—” you stammer, again failing to express yourself with anything approaching a complete thought. What is wrong with you?
“Pick it up. Right this instant,” she states, and the command is so uncompromising, so unequivocal, that your knees begin to buckle, instinctively. But you stop yourself, if only just, to steal a glance at the murmuring onlookers. Uncertainty has gripped you, undercutting your sense of what is normal. Surely this is disproportionate? But… but someone must pick up the coins, and you were already willing to accept fault. It’s only a little more effort to rectify this situation… right?
Slowly, very slowly, you sink to your knees. And then, to better get at one of the wayward coins, you lean forward, pressing both hands against the cobblestones. And in that instant—the instant you realize you have dropped to all fours in front of this woman, at the request of this woman, as if you are not just an animal but a trained animal—your embarrassment blossoms into true humiliation, and the heat on your cheeks becomes a full body blush, a fire that penetrates deep into your core.
The pounding in your ears has mercifully drowned out the derision of the crowd, but you can feel their eyes on you, pinpricks along your flesh that your clothes cannot guard against. And then, above the din of your own thoughts, you hear her voice again, a cutting breeze that seems to shrink the world to just you and her. “Do you know why I find your kind, you adventurers and heroes, so despicable?”
You freeze before the last coin, uncertain about how you should respond—if you are even supposed to respond, or allowed to respond. And then she laughs, the most condescending and derisive noise you have ever heard, and you know then that your stillness was also a response.
You stay on all fours, eyes focused on the last coin, silent and waiting.
“You come across the desert, so certain. So certain in yourself, in your abilities, in your future. Certain that you are forging your own destiny. Each of you, the same in your individual sense of entitlement. And then you arrive here, caked in dust, and you… do the first thing you are told to do. You throw yourself into the service of a guild master. You help a wife confront her hen-pecked husband. You threaten a debtor because a stranger asks you to. You test a potion on the poor. Each step of the way, it’s as if you are begging someone to tell you what to do.” She pauses, and you can feel her merciless gaze on you, like ice ripping your flesh raw. “So beg me.”
Your mouth flaps, uncertain, your efforts to speak indistinguishable from panting—as if you were a dog, regulating your body temperature with shuddering, gasping breaths, drool slipping past your fangs. “I—” you whine. “I—”
She lifts her boot, and with an excruciating deliberateness, brings it down on the last coin. You flinch at the sight, as if physically struck. But why? None of this should matter. You should be able to stand and leave this woman, this entire Nine-forsaken city, behind. And yet… and yet the only thing that seems to make sense is the inevitability of it all.
“Well,” she says, and it is not a question. “Beg.”
Your body quivers again. But this time, the blaze within you has twisted into something darker, the heat forging your humiliation into a sort of perverse delight. “Please,” you hear yourself say, your panting so close to her boot that your breath fogs its black shine. “Please, let me pick up the last coin.”
After a moment, she leans back on her heel, lifting the front of her foot up, as if to give you access to the coin—until the toe of her boot connects with the underside of your chin, tilting your head back and up. You are forced to contort your body into an even more debased position, sinking your chest low so that she can guide you head higher.
Your eyes glide along her lithe body, draped in impeccable Ul’dah finery—a sash of crimson tied accentuating her waist, gold filigree drawing the eye to her breasts. You are certain that she has dressed for this occasion, that you are looking upon her the way that she is meant to be seen. It feels right.
You stop before you reach her eyes, but that provides no reprieve, your gaze instead settling on her hard lips, her cruel mouth that twists into a spiteful smirk.
“You came to Ul’dah so that someone would tell you what to do.” The heat in your body has turned your thoughts into a flickering mirage, but you know that what she has uttered is a statement of fact: you came to Ul’dah so that someone would tell you what to do.
“But not,” she continues, her voice filled with a terrible mirth, “just that. In Eorzea, you are what you do. You did not come to this city to do pugilism or thaumaturgy; you came here to be a pugilist, a thaumaturgist—to become someone, to be created through the act of doing.”
She stops with a sigh, and you feel her disappointment come crushing down upon you. “You marred the polish of my boot with your insipid breath. Clean it.” But Genevieve does not wait for you to respond, because this is no longer about you offering to fix to your transgressions. She steps closer, the motion sliding your chin off her boot and up, along her thigh, even as her leg slips in close, pushing against your chest and forcing you to rock back onto your ass. Your body now rests against the length of her leg, your head still tilted back to watch her cruel smile.
Her foot is between your legs, the tip of her “sullied” boot pushing against your crotch.
You whimper from the touch, a reaction that seems to please the lady for a fleeting moment. But then: “Have you never cleaned a boot before, you worthless cur? It requires a damp cloth and some vigorous rubbing. Get to it.”
You stare at her blankly for a moment—and then, when you realize what she is demanding of you, gasp at the sheer audacity of it. She sees the shocked tremble on your lips, and in her triumph, her smile only grows more vicious.
You should stop. There’s… there’s no reason for any of this. You don’t have to accept this. You could… you could…
But you can’t. If what she says is true—if you become through action, if your identity is what you do—then this is what you are. Her words have brought you a type of clarity, terrible and grotesque and liberating. You have never been in command of your own destiny; you can see this now. There is an empty place inside of you where your will might have been, a gnawing desire to become the thing that others want. You told yourself that this quality made you the selfless hero. But Lady Genevieve has stripped away that pretension, laid bare your real self for all the world to see. And in the eyes of the gathered crowd, you see that truth reflected back at. You are a submissive, mewling pet, a wanton slut, a would-be hero that craves humiliation and domination—a pathetic thing in the shape of a person, wanting only to be used.
It’s so clear now. You have no choice. You never did. You feel a smile on your face, a delirious sort of self-destructive joy. There’s nothing left for you to decide; your mistress has told you what to do.
“Y-Yes, ma’am,” you manage, and begin to grind against Her boot.
Author’s Note: I was one of those hapless fools that kept seeing the meme-worthy comments about Final Fantasy XIV—did you know that the free trial now lets you play through level 60, and includes the base game and the first expansion pack Heavensward for free?!
I installed the trial and, right out of the gate, ran into a remarkably femdom-oriented quest, where a haughty noble woman demands your character grovel on the ground and pick up the gil you “made” her drop. Shocked and appalled, I did what any normal, right-thinking person would do: I read into the quest a sexually charged subtext that was (probably) not there, then doubled down on the perversion and wrote a fic that mixed the quest’s dialogue with some uncut humiliation kink.
(The quest is named “No Lady Is An Island,” a seeming reference to John Donne’s famous work, and for no clear reason; I named the story after another line from the same poem.)
A special shoutout to my supporters on Patreon, whose support allowed me to write this story, and who also got the chance to read it before it went public!