I didn´t know why he left me alone at that time, but I wasn’t really concerned about his disappearance as he already vanished more than once. The timing made me worry a bit, but I couldn’t change it anyway. After I put another dress on, I walked through the house I lived in for so long already. I knew every nook and cranny, every possible way to waste time, but I couldn’t bring myself to chose any of these. Instead, I watched the mess we made all over the house.

The kitchen looked like a bomb exploded in it with sauces and food everywhere. A broken table stood in the middle of the room and bits of my dress were all over the place.

“I´m not going to clean that up.” In all honesty, I didn’t even know where to start. The trash can was too small to fit everything inside and I certainly couldn’t repair the broken table. Without him, I was kind of useless. I couldn’t cook because he provided the ingredients, I couldn’t learn new stuff because he brought the books and I couldn’t have fun with different pets because he gifted them to me.

“I finally have my freedom and I don’t even know what to do with it … wait, I have my freedom!” I ran towards the last door that never opened before. It didn’t look like a prison door, but it certainly functioned the same way. The house door stayed shut for my whole life and imprisoned me inside this house.

The door felt a little bit larger than usual, but that didn’t stop me from gripping the handle and pushing it downwards. Excited, I started pulling as I noticed that it wasn’t locked anymore and smelled fresh air for the first time in my life. Well, there was no difference at all between the air inside the house and outside, but it really felt that way.

Freedom was … meh. I didn’t think that the outside would be this boring. I mean, it was just gravel with a few larger stones. Who in the right mind would actually enjoy doing stuff with this junk? And the lights in the distance? They ran away from me as fast as they could. Even when I managed to catch a slower one of these, it just turned out to be an old human who showed absolutely no emotion. I mean, what was his problem? I was playing with him happily and he showed me no reaction at all. Playing with others was no fun this way.

Utterly bored, I walked back towards the house, wishing that Aska would return sooner than later. It wasn’t always fun with him around, in fact, it was mostly horrible, but at least I had something to do then. I had achieved everything I wanted and yet, I didn’t feel fulfilled at all. Distressed, I tried to clean up the sauce in my hair but failed miserably.

There was a bath in this house as well, but I avoided this room like the plague. A cooking pot full of water was fine but being submerged in water was a bit too much for me to enjoy. From the very beginning, Aska tried to force me to bathe, but that didn’t work out at all as I was constantly trashing around. I rather took the pain he inflicted on me than feeling like I was dying again. And so, he left it as I turned one month old and cleaned me with a flick of his hand after that.

But now, the sauce was kind of getting on my nerves. It could take several days for him to return, so I had to come up with a solution. I was sure that Aska wouldn’t mind that the kitchen was even more of a mess afterwards, so I filled a cooking pot with water. I dumped it over my head and immediately regretted my actions. The feeling of water on my skin was just that horrific. I still proceeded with inspecting my dirty hair, knowing that I could finish this sooner when I hurried up. After repeating the process three times, I approved of my cleaner hair and directly ran towards my wardrobe. I hated how wet my clothes were and couldn’t help but to unclothe me more forceful than usual. My dress tore in one place, but that’s something that happened rather frequently with all the stabbing anyway. Relieved, dry and clean, I jumped onto my favourite place and immediately tucked myself into a blanket.

“Is the water still running? Whatever, what´s the worst that could happen?” The drainage should work perfectly fine, so even when it was still running, I didn’t care. And so, I began to read a book about new cooking recipes I wanted to try out and began to sleep as I was in the middle of the book.

I was glad that I was reading before I began to sleep, otherwise, I would have woken up much later. The sound the book made as it fell to the ground immediately alarmed my subconsciousness and forced me to wake up. If it had been just the sound of a book falling on the ground, I would probably continue to sleep, but it sounded more like the book fell into a puddle of water. Alarmed, I looked over the edge of the bed and noticed that there was indeed a puddle of water not only there, but basically everywhere.

I was kind of freaking out by that sight. I didn’t know that my phobia of water was this excessive, but I really didn’t want to step into this. It was just a few centimetres high, but it was way worse than splashing water over me.

“Alright Lucinda … you basically drown daily, drink water and you even get tortured every second day or so. So why … why am I trembling so much?” Was I, who sold her body for equality scared of a puddle of water? Yes. For me, it was more than that. This puddle of water represented every death I had to live through. I was always powerless in the face of this much water and I seriously didn’t think I could stop the flood that was coming for me.

I was hyperventilating as I thought that the fate of drowning would extend to even here and couldn’t place my foot into the water at all.

“What is wrong with me? It is just water … it is just water…” I couldn’t step into the water at all. I could deal with Aska´s torture partly because it was balanced out by my twisted love, but this? Not a chance.

I wasn’t completely helpless though. I already proved to myself that I could deal with a god, even if it was in a self-destructive way. So while I absolutely didn’t want to touch the water, I wasn’t exactly powerless. I started emptying both nightstands to the side of the bed to make them as light as possible. The socks I made in my free time wandered promptly on the bed, while the rest was swiftly dumped into the water.

And so, I began to make my way to the kitchen while placing one nightstand in front of me, hopping onto it and then repeating the process with the other nightstand. Although it took quite some time, I made it successfully into the kitchen without getting wet at all.

The kitchen was … well it was a mess. The food was spread out in the kitchen, water was basically everywhere and for some reason, the drainage was completely clogged. After some serious acrobatics, I managed to close the faucet and immediately felt better. I wouldn’t be drowning anymore in this place. I just had to make my way back towards the bed and wait for Aska to clean up this mess.

I still checked why the drainage was clogged out of curiosity which was a serious mistake in hindsight. If I knew a bit about magic, I would know that there were some serious issues with our water system. The tap was closed now, but that didn’t solve the original problem at all. The safety mechanisms which should have stopped the creation of this amount of water were simply broken. There was no second drainage system in place because of this exact feature that didn’t work at all.

In fact, the creation of water still continued as I was looking into the clogged drainage pipe which led to a rapid increase in pressure. The piping was solid and dealt with the increased pressure perfectly, but the tap was apparently made out of paper. It burst halfway and sprayed water everywhere with a force that catapulted the rest of the tap towards the ceiling.

I also received quite a surprise as quite a lot of water splashed onto my face and immediately started to panic. I immediately stumbled backwards and tried to get away from the water. The first step worked perfectly fine. I even managed to wipe a bit of water away, but I was still quite distressed.

The second step on the other hand didn’t work at all. I placed my foot on nothing and immediately fell backwards. Luckily, I didn’t hit my head, but rather landed on my butt. The fall into water was honestly better than expected. I still hyperventilated, but the usual stuff that happened when I was around this much water didn’t happen at all. I knew from the beginning that my fears were unfounded, but it was still scary to face them. But still, they were fears that were validated every night, so it was no wonder that I freaked out completely.

At first, I flailed my arms around me wildly and closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see the horror I was in. In all honestly, this was probably the worst thing I could do. Darkness engulfed me and it felt like I was experiencing what I did every night.

I stopped breathing long ago because there was simply no need to as I was a dead vampire. The dead usually didn’t breathe at all, and vampires kind of copied this way of living. But suddenly, I felt so out of breath that I opened my mouth wide. Still, no air entered my lungs as my throat squeezed shut.

Suddenly, I managed to grab onto something and pulled myself towards it. While I was still drenched, I couldn’t feel the water with my legs or my hands anymore and opened my eyes again. It took me a minute to calm down completely after I saved myself on the remains of the table. There was just one slight problem.

Everything was out of reach. The nightstands were too far away for me to reach and the kitchen counter was even more distant. I sat there for quite some time, hugging my knees on a sloped table plate.

“Alright … it is just a puddle of water. I have to be quite unfortunate to drown in this. I only have to fix the water supply somehow and the water will flow outside on its own.” My biggest fear was drowning, not the water itself. I could cook with water, I even washed with water without freaking out completely. It still took me several minutes to place my toe into the water and my throat immediately clenched shut again, but I didn’t give up yet.

I would call myself a pretty logical person and my fear of a puddle made definitely no sense at all. Even as I did the dumbest thing possible and flailed around wildly, I still wasn’t hurt by the water one bit. And so, I placed my whole foot into the water.

I hated how my drenched sock stuck to my foot, I hated how I couldn’t breathe and I hated the darkness when I closed my eyes. I felt like I was drowning again, but I also steeled my resolve to fix the water issue.

“Oh, my old nemesis water, aqua, biQ, amanzi, whatever you may call yourself. Today I will triumph over you!” As soon as I placed my second foot in the water, I was able to speak again and my trembling lessened considerably. “Mankind triumphed over the elements hundreds of years ago and starting from this day onwards, vampirekind will do the same!”

I jumped towards the nightstands and saved myself on them. Vampirekind wouldn't triumph over water that day. Swiftly afterwards, I opened the cabinet door underneath it. Two pipes were leading towards two different cylinders, one for draining, one for creating water. I started pulling on the pipe that still had water in it, fully expecting to get even more drenched when I would finally dislodge it. It didn’t work at all as the pipe was too tightly secured, but I was still completely drenched by the water that flowed down from the kitchen counter.

I was fuming with anger, hated how the dress felt on my skin and was frustrated by my inability to get this pipe out of the cabinet.

“You wrenched, shitty, ugly pipe, get off!” I pulled even harder and suddenly, the pipe broke off from the wall behind it. Water was spewing out of the cracks between the pipe sections which made me even angrier as it mostly spewed on me, but I successfully managed to retrieve the water generator.

I shook it, smashed it onto the ground to break it, but only the piping fell off. The generator itself was still happily creating water. I kicked it, hoping to get a different result out of it and surprisingly, it did. The casing fell apart and revealed a strange-looking crystal which was the source of my problems. It was kind of hard to get a hold of it as it was constantly ejecting water everywhere, but by limiting the points where I touched it, I was able to pick it up and throw it promptly out of the still closed window. I mean, a broken window was in no way worse than having a flooded house. Right? Right?

 “Wow. You are even wetter than last time I saw you.” Aska returned exactly when I managed to fix the issue. I did not think one second that this was a coincidence which also meant that he knew exactly what was going on the whole time.

“Fuck you and your sexist jokes! Fuck you for teaching me how to sew and knit, but not how I can fix this shitty problem. Fuck you for teaching me girly things while I really need to learn how to do boys stuff like plumbing and shit!” I was so fed up with his behaviour that I disregarded the whipping I would definitely receive after talking like this and complete exploded.

He walked from the kitchen door towards me while the water was divided in front of him. It made me even angrier to see him doing that. He could have easily floated above it, but he had to show me that water wasn’t a problem for him at all.

I was so close to hitting him, but I knew that my fist would never reach him in the first place. He didn’t stop a metre away. He didn’t stop half a metre away. He stopped so close to me that I had to look up to glare at him. Our height difference didn’t stop him from kissing me on my forehead at all though.

“Eh?” I was confused by his actions and my emotions were in disarray. Still, I wasn’t so naive to think that he did that out of love. His aim was obviously to muddle my mind again, but this time, I was more prepared. With every bit of strength I could muster, I rammed my knee right into his groins.

He collapsed right in front of me and with satisfaction, I looked down towards him. He wasn’t even wincing that much, but he still held his important place which must have been burning with pain.

“Do not trample on my feelings ever again.” I should have been enraged, but this simple kiss changed my emotions completely. I tried to control him by offering myself to him completely previously and although I failed, I knew of the dangers it posed. I finally succeeded in being viewed as an equal and I would make sure that he wouldn’t try, let alone be able to control me again, through whatever means necessary.