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Breaking someone is a science. Any fool with a whip can make someone submit, but it takes much more than that to make someone realize, gradually but irreversibly, that they really do belong to you.
You set your inventors to work tirelessly on new methods to open a troll's mind and divide it into neat little pieces and put them back together anew. Conquering, you tell them, has to be practiced on an individual. How can you make whole galaxies your own if you can't do the same to a person? There are countless practised technicians who work by this philosophy -- you've made sure of it. But for a certain few special cases, your personal touch is required.
Even hanging there as helpless as meat on a hook, your helmsman is an ongoing project. He's stubbornly resistant to learning, that one, refusing your lessons out of the shreds of misguided principle that still seem to cling on to the inside of his skull. You take special care with him because of this. You spoonfeed him these essential pieces of knowledge (he belongs to you, irrevocably, you can do everything you desire to him and this is a privilege he should be glad about) delicately, piecemeal.
You toy with his mind, with his perceptions, show him how easy it is to alter the contents of his head. You play scales on his brain chemistry, ordering this increased or that withheld, and he shakes and sobs, careens between depression and mania and hallucinations. Progress is slow, but it's oh, so satisfying to see his resolute self-delusion slowly break apart. When you think of the moment the very concept of freedom will become an incomprehensible falsehood to him, you have to lick your lips and squirm a little. It certainly doesn't help that he has such a nice classic lowblood physique -- all burnt-out and gaunt from his powers, which do demand such a lot of him, but still wiry enough to have been an excellent attack dog for this entire silly rebellion business.
And so it's really no surprise that you take a certain pleasure in showing him that his body, too, belongs to no one but you.
He's so enduring, so good at withdrawing into the shell of his body and leaving nothing but a hollow staring engine piece behind, but you wouldn't be the conqueror you are if you didn't take that as a challenge to make him react. Already you can feel muscles tense under the palm of your hand. He hasn't been here long enough for to atrophy really set in, so there's some nice bulk on the ectomorph yellowblood frame. You keep these lessons few and far between, and so his touch-starved body is sensitive, almost pitifully so, to whatever you choose to do with it.
You're running your nails up and down his chest, retracing the lines of his flightsuit and deliberating what would be the most effective to show him that his body has never belonged to himself (a few more alterations, perhaps, to crack his fragile sense of self further) and your hands pass over his ribs (which you can feel) and he seizes up, suddenly, enough to jerk in the wires, and produces something like a cough. You look up, and his jagged teeth are caught on his bottom lip, and you realize that that's a terribly distorted grin on his face.
Bless his soul, your helmsman is ticklish. Well, that is just adorable.
You curl your fingers inward, ready your nails like precision instruments, and run them over his ribs, deliberately this time. He twitches a little and lets out a little huff of breath. It's more controlled, this time, he's obviously holding back, and you won't have any of that.
The fabric of his suit is slick under your fingers as you skitter them up and down and down again and dig them in, harshly, just below his prominent ribs. He's still fighting to stay limp and unresponsive but you note with a certain amount of glee that it's useless, when you focus on that particular spot where his waist is narrowest, lightly scratching in circles until he's shuddering with the effort of suppressed laughter. It comes out as wheezing, helpless gasps for breath.
He can't help it, and you know that he will always remember this loss of selfcontrol, and you press your thighs together a bit. This is just too good. You crawl your fingers up his sides and squeeze the muscle there appreciatively, and then you dig them into his armpits, nails first.
He writhes ineffectually as if he's trying to get away, and when you curl and uncurl your fingers rapidly the desperately-contained laughter starts escaping him through clenched teeth, little sobs of hnn-hnn-hnnn! that you think are absolutely precious. His pitifully crooked teeth are set into a pained grin, and he huffs in each breath through his nose only to let it out as a spate of raspy, agonized giggles, and he's such a cute, wretched thing that you find your bulge stirring a little between your thighs. You'll take care of it later, thinking about the way he fought to hold it back.
This is why it's a good thing that his suit is panelled: it makes maintenance easy, and it makes it easy, too, to pull down the zippers at the front and sides and expose his chest to your fingers, so you can itch at his ribs a little more.
His chest expands and contracts under your hands, he's panting, all skin and bones and you imagine you can almost see the fast flutter of his heart and lungs through his frail ribcage. You clutch your hands around his waist and dig your thumbs in at that spot just below his ribcage and he thrashes in the wires like a caught fish and nearly chokes on his wretched laughter, trembles and gasps, and you have enough experience to see that he's on the verge of begging for mercy. To get a better grip, ou lean forward a little, and some of your hair spills over your shoulders, drifts like seaweed and curls and clings to him.
His breath hitches, just stops entirely for a few long moments and then he slumps and shakes with now silent laughter. Your hair crawls over his hips and ribs and stomach, wisping and tickling over the skin, and there are tears escaping from below the glass of his headpiece now, trickles of watery yellow running down his cheeks and dripping from his chin. He whines (he's scared of you and your body, of what you can do, the poor grubling) and the strands of your hair just wind tighter around him, lick at his waist. You squirm your fingers up his sides and skitter them, lightly, over the bared skin below his arms, and this time he shudders so violently you think he's going to break something. He barely gets the words out through the seizing, wracking laughter, and his teeth and tongue mangle them further.
“Merthy! Mercy, please, red, pleathe stop!”
At that, you toss your head back (though your hands stay just where they are) and start laughing yourself. Did he really think that was going to stop you? He's still so very silly, but slowly, you're getting somewhere.
You have to pull your hands away completely for the space of a moment and make him think you're good and finished, only to dive right back in and drag your nails down his vulnerable skin to get him to gasp brokenly and say, as per instructions, “Mistreth, please,” and his voice hitches on the words as if something inside of him had snapped.
Of course you don't stop, not just yet. You rake your nails up and down his sides and trace your fingertips up underneath his arms, just barely touching him, and your hair clings in feathery strands to his body, and only when he's a sobbing, yellow-faced wreck do you pull away.
God damn, but he's a work of art. His cheeks are stained with tears and his chest glistens with sweat and he's still heaving with weary, whistling laughter even after you stop. He's slumped, now, with relief it looks like, putting all of his weight on his arms. He looks like he's been pailed hard and put away wet, and it makes you smile. You pat his head.
“This is not your body, boy. It's the empire's body, and I am the empire. Remember that.”
Later, with your hands between your legs, you'll think of his near-screams, and of the how utterly grateful, how relieved he looked when you decided to stop.