The Coffin

Dinner

In the grand dining hall, a bright room with stained patterned glass walls and warm sparkling chandeliers,  a nearly fifty foot table sat. Multiple fifty foot tables actually, all decked with intricately embroidered silk tablecloths, large decorative bowls filled with rotting fruits, extravagant silverware layered in dust. It was designed to feast dozens yet this night,  it only hosted three. 

Sitting across from one another in big cousioned chairs were Mantha and Sal, the queen between the two on the very end of the table, on her own gigantically tall, lavish seat to triumph the rest. 

The queen was enjoying herself, loudly gorging on an abnormally large turkey leg, spilling gravy on the cloth as she observed the two in front of her. Brows raised, mind rushing with possible reasons for the intensity of there mean glares.

Sal hated himself for it but he couldn't stop glancing at her. She had gotten even bigger since the last time he had seen her, her tall mechanical legs having seemed to grow meters in length, her upper body seeming to be impossibly muscular for a woman. Wide shoulders, huge arms, her abs always pronounced in the tan skin of her stomach. Her hair was longer two, a mess of blonde, hanging just below her massive bosom, though the black mask covering her lower face still remained.

So did that gaze. A threatening looming gaze that could have melted any person who was caught in it with the burning hot hate of it. Sal was caught in it right now, though unlike most, fear wasn't the emotion churning his insides. It was sensual and tingly, but he wouldn't allow those shameful intrusive feelings to change his disposition, so he put on his facade of hatred, scrunching his brows and scowling at her when their eyes happened to meet, often by his lead. 

Though their staring contest was briskly interrupted, the queen snapping herself out of her curiosity and startling the two with a loud snap of her fingers.

"Eat" she demanded, the twos gaze turning immediately to focus on their mostly untouched plates,  both of their meals vastly different. Sal had an almost perfect combination of food, equal amounts of protein, carbs, and fats, all carefully rationed to a specific amount of calories. Mantha had essentially the same thing except she didn't have a plate. She had a chunky, blended together mess of nutritious goop in a cup, that she drank from a straw underneath her mask. Though hers did amount to more food, much greater levels of protein in the dark brown sludge. The queen, of course, in control of both their diets.

"How's it taste" Sal questioned crudely, moaning and licking his lips as he bit his meat pie, chewing slowly, making his meal look orgasmicly good as he stared at her. His mother smacked him on the head playfully as she sucked the meat off a bone, Sal glaring with a mean childish smile at the woman across from him, who simply looked back unfazed as she sipped her muddy meal. Though she did kick him from under the table making him jump in fake agony, over dramatizing her light boot to his shin. 

"Jesus, I was joking" he mumbled as he rubbed his ankle, his mother quickly coming to his aid by rubbing his head, looking at him with grave concern as she smacked on mashed potatoes. She then gave the other woman a look implying disappointment and the other shivered in it. Even despite her being the best assassin in the known world, she shivered. 

She couldn't care less if the queen was proud or saddened by her actions, she would not allow herself to feel judged by a person so terrible but her disappointment was never just disappointment. It signified punishment. 

She gave that same look that night in the lab. Mantha had stumbled in, covered in blood and guilt, in need of some sense of comfort but her hopes were swiftly shot down when all she was gifted was that look. She woke up with her perfectly fine hands replaced with a mechanic ones, her sense of taste taken away, many parts she could feel before now permanently numb, feeling strange and robotic to move. It shook her to her core.