Face-Slapping13 min read
I Took Their Scripts and Burned Them
ButterPicks17 views
I remember the moment like a bad song stuck on repeat: a teddy-bear interface blinking at me and a stack of scripts that smelled of fate and mildew. “This is your first assignment,” the assistant squealed, its voice too bright for a government node. “After completion, your placement in the Stability Bureau will be decided.”
“Start when?” I asked. “Group whatever. I only want merit.”
Molly Duffy—my assigned auxiliary, a plush-faced AI in a bureaucratic shell—tilted her head. “You’ll need to accept the world data first. The plot is heavy, Greek-tragedy-heavy.”
I took the thick volume she offered, thumbed through the glossy pages and felt, at once, the gravity of a dozen clichés settle over me like dust.
“This woman,” Molly said, “is the protagonist across five serial volumes. She is a magnet for men who need saving, a conduit for other people’s power. Her wish? To fall nowhere near selfish men again. She wants solitude even more than she wants love.”
I read the lines as if they were a diagnosis. I nodded. “Good wish.”
“You’ll only have mundane power in that world,” Molly warned. “The heavenly road is fractured. No one gets out of the human ceiling.”
No god powers. Fine. I liked a clean playing field.
I blinked and felt the Bureau peel me off my chair with the precise detachment of equipment returning a sample. The room snapped into focus: a drawing-room, the scent of citrus, an old man talking at me as if I were a porcelain doll.
“Your granddaughter will receive the soldier at the airport,” a greedy voice said behind me. “You don’t have to pressure her to marry, but she must show face. If they don’t meet, family shame.”
The old man—who sat like a curse in the corner—had guilt like a cloak. I watched and parsed. He carried literal dark threads of sin across his shoulders like a mantle. A living ledger.
My adopted identity in this world was supposed to be polite, compliant, a woman bred for alliance. I tasted the script and found a different appetite.
“Take the card,” the man said to me with a smile that had a scale of currency behind it. “A billion is a small thing. Go to the charity auction. No harm.”
I accepted the billionaire card like a token, an instrument to move pieces. I closed my mouth around a grin that said I would rearrange their chess set.
Molly chirped. “We’re dropping you on a hot table. Player level: celebrity daughter. Expect complications.”
“Bring them,” I said.
We had to find a replacement, because that was the easiest way through the first knot. The original protagonist’s wish—no men—was a wish I could honor, but it would take theater.
In a private club where champagne whispered against glass, I staged a casting call. “Find me someone who can act like me,” I told a manager named small-talk and smiles. “Open, warm, polite toward a suitor. If the person looks like me, fine. If they don’t, makeup and a small surgical adjustment will do. Pay well. Keep it clean. I want the man to test himself.”
“You want who?” the manager asked.
“A mirror for the man he presents himself to be.”
I threw a million into a tray. “Each of you who helps, eighty thousand. The actress gets fifty thousand for one day, and a million if she can carry it for six months.”
They blinked in the way money makes people obedient.
The woman they found—Belen Mitchell—sat like she had a world behind her eyes. “I can play your part,” she told me. “I’ll do what you want. I have debts and pride.”
I bought her face a little bit of extra time: a minor cosmetic tweak, new clothes, a familiar blue dress I had worn myself. We practiced, practiced, practiced the gentleness a woman of privilege must sometimes fake.
“You'll refuse him at first,” I told Belen. “Be politely distant. If he proves himself decent you can allow warmth. If he cheats, drag him out under the light.”
She nodded and left with the keys to a villa that smelled like sleep and money.
Days later, the soldier arrived in a uniform of cheap polish and the smell of deference. Mason Romano—thick-fisted, soldier-sure, eyes that imagined devotion as due. He stood rigid in the parking area, waiting for the pretty heiress to run to him with glim and glow.
Belen walked out in my blue dress like she was made of sunlight. Mason blinked and licked his lips. He bowed as if etiquette were the only battlefield he’d ever known.
“Hello,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t meet you at the gate. I—”
“We’ll get to that,” Belen said, soft as a silk curtain. She kept her reserve. The meal went like clockwork: laughter at the right moment, small protests about spending at the right decibel. Mason preened himself into the role of devoted soldier.
Three nights later, Belen sent me a text: “He’s testing boundaries. He’s got another woman. He thinks he can angle his needs.”
I closed my eyes. I thought about the protagonist in that thick book—the one who was passed from suitor to suitor like a prize. The entire series threaded her life through other men’s arcs. I tasted bile.
“Do your job,” I told Belen. “Bring him to the family dinner. Keep him polite—the moment he collapses into condescension, we’ll begin the exposure.”
Belen agreed and let a hair of her determination show.
At the banquet, the room shimmered with the kind of guests who come to be seen. Mason sat like a man at the center of a small storm, refusing to look at anything that wasn’t himself. He had charm like armor. He had choices like armor plating.
I signaled to the servers for something charming: a presentation. The family chattered, the old man goose-stepped in self-satisfaction. Then, as Mason gave a little speech about vows he would keep, the lights went to the screen.
“Sir!” Mason barked. “What’s with—”
On the screen—giant, merciless, unmistakable—rolled the feed: images, exchanges, a recorded voice, proofs of a man who had more than one signature on his successes.
“Why is that—” Mason began. He went from taunt to worry in two beats. “Who made this—?”
The footage showed messages. The messages showed flippant lines. “Wife is nothing but a vault.” “After the wedding I’ll move on.” Photographs of the soldier kissing another woman wrapped the room like a noose.
“I don’t—” he spat. “This is—this is—fabrication!”
Someone in the front row let out a laugh that became contempt. Phones came up; the glow of surveillance lit more faces. “Record him!” someone cried. “Record the liar!”
He ran for the control board, his polished shoes scrabbling against carpet. “Turn that off! That’s a crime—” He lunged, but his hands met a wall of people who were not his allies.
I walked on like a woman who found a pebble on her shoe and removed it. “You thought you could treat me as a billboard, Mason?” I said in a voice that belonged to someone who’d lived many lives. “You thought you could parade honesty like a badge while bribing tenderness?”
Mason’s face went from cocky to green—then pale.
“Turn it down!” he shouted. “This is—this is private.”
A chorus of murmurs rose, heat and judgment. Someone behind me reached for a champagne flute and set it clinking. “So he called a woman ‘a vault’?” a guest hissed. “He counts her money and not her life?”
“He’s a coward,” another whispered. “He'd commodify a daughter's face for a dowry.”
Mason faltered. He looked around and found, to his horror, that the people whose air he’d been breathing had gone thin and sharp as blades. “It’s not like that,” he croaked. “You—”
A boy near the dessert table pulled out his phone, recording everything—the flashing screen, Mason’s hands, the shaking of a man who had never thought the light would turn on him. “Everyone, post!” someone cried, and they did. Cameras bloomed from pockets like insect wings.
“Get out,” someone shouted—an older cousin who had enjoyed Mason’s company only until his lies were shown. “Leave our house. Your kind of man is not welcome here.”
Mason staggered as if shoved. He went through the whole arc: denial at first, then slurred accusations. “You framed me!” he hissed. “You two-faced—”
“Stop,” Belen said. She had been sitting like a patient animal, and then stood—calm as a guillotine. She had the air of someone who had been rehearsing truth for this moment.
“You lied to me,” she said. “You wanted my body as a name. You called me the thing you could trade away.” She told the room about the ways he’d sneered—how he’d whispered that marriage would be an investment. “You wanted her money. You wanted me to be a stand-in so you would have the freedom to practice deception.”
He bent his head and denied until his voice broke and no one was buying.
Then the crushing moment we all needed came: the old man from the family—Mason had expected the patriarch to sweep in and pronounce mercy. Instead the patriarch’s mouth worked, and he said, “You will leave and never return. You have no future with anyone who measures someone by their balance.”
Mason’s face contorted, then shrank into a ball of petty fear. He tried bargaining. “I can explain! I will—” He looked for sympathy but found a thousand cameras.
“You can go live your bargains now,” someone laughed.
He dropped to his knees as if someone pulled the ground out from under him. “Please,” he begged, voice thin with survival instinct. “Please—”
If you ever needed to watch a man change into nothing, watch someone beg in a room where his betrayed companion refuses to turn. The guests shifted like a flock of birds. Phones hummed. A woman who hated being photographed took a seat and filmed. Children clapped—crudely celebrating the spectacle, because sometimes people need to feel justice.
No one helped him up.
He reached for a hand and found none. People whispered and some wept at the betrayal. “She deserves someone better,” a voice said. “He’s been exposed.”
His suit crease opened. The knees wore his shame like an exposed seam. Around him, the room’s light had turned into a stadium. Someone began to clap slowly, then others joined in—a chorus of scorn that burned like salt.
He dissolved into pleading and shrieks. “I’ll return everything! I’ll—” He collapsed face-first on opulent carpet. A young man walked past and took a picture with his phone. “For evidence,” he said when someone glared.
When the door closed behind him, there was silence the size of an ocean. Someone laughed—long, relieved. “That was a good show,” they said. “A public correction.”
Belen turned to me as the guests dispersed. “You did this to save more than me,” she said. “You saved the idea that a woman is not an asset.”
I smiled, small and distant. “He needed to be free of us. He needed himself to be exposed.”
Belen nodded. Her face was wet, not from pain but from the release of having a hand on the rudder of her own life. I thought of the original heroine in that thick book, who had always been ferrying men to their endings and never allowed her own beginning.
I took a long breath and felt a little victory like a coin in my palm.
But the world does not arrange itself with one humiliation alone. The story had other monsters. One was subtle, fanatical, ancient—Flavian Mercier, the man whose hunger for me had become an empire of lies.
He called himself a benefactor, a collector of souls who believed that devotion could be engineered. For a thousand books and a thousand centuries, he had believed himself entitled to a woman’s years. He called it love. I called it coercion.
When Flavian announced fireworks for my birthday—“Step outside,” he said in a voice like velvet drifted in oil—I walked to the terrace and saw the northern sky bloom into a mushroom cloud from a distance. He had detonated a gift: smoke, light, the show of dominance.
“Flavian,” I said later when he came kneeling on my lawn like a man who had a map and lost the route. “You are wrong.”
“I rescued you,” he insisted. “I gathered your soul and stewarded it through the ages.”
“You stalked my past lives,” I said. “You set a ladder where there was none. You stole agency and called it fate.”
He tried the old cycle—blame the inadequacy of time, plead that his long wait made claim on me. He was theatrical; the sky had paid for his theatrics. He had a reasoning that wrapped evil in patience. He believed himself the most tragic person in the room.
“I won’t let you touch anyone else’s life that way,” I told him. The streets filled with patrols. The town guard, who answered to the man whose money he had bought, put him in iron bracelets that night. He fumbled between the one who had been told such lies for a long time and a future where the foxed tale was over.
“I will never—” he blubbered until the guard shoved him under house lights and cameras from clandestine journalists woke up to this story—an immortal man reduced to a mortal plea.
He performed the cycles: arrogance, confusion, denial, then breakdown. He knelt in public, the crowd watching him like a congregational theater. “You’re wrong,” he kept repeating, then pleading. The crowd recorded. People took pictures, some laughed, some cried. He became a lesson in the press—“Immortal? Not in court.” The story lived online for days, and Flavian’s empire creaked and splintered.
If public shame was one knife, then a trial of a different species awaited those who had built lives on cadavers of others. There were worse monsters: localized men who commit worse crimes because their appetite is to devour others literally.
On another shift of history, I found myself inhabiting a girl named Li (they used a different name there; I wore Arabella but they expected a memory). Her father had been a rebel leader—Li South Mountain, a man with warmth and will and a life I would not trade—but her life was stolen by a warlord: a man who killed. He took her family, paraded their deaths, and thought himself above notice. That man—Eliot Luo—had tasted power like wine and wanted the world drunk with his appetite.
I did not arrive to revenge. The original’s wish was ordinary: peace, an end to the fighting, a quiet table with children tucked in under blankets. But when I found that the man who had killed her kin lived like a celebrity, throwing banquets and wearing stolen ribbons, my hands burned with the simplest justice.
“You will face a reckoning,” I told the crowd when I had enough. “You took an entire life.”
They expected an execution. They expected dramatic flaying.
Instead I designed exposure, procedure, and ceremony—because public punishment is not just the fall of a single player; it is the reorientation of a society that had grown numb to cruelty.
I gathered the town in the square. The air was winter-tight. The trophies of Eliot Luo’s banquet days were stacked in the background: satin, a polished desk, a portrait that looked like a man who had eaten too much. He arrived thinking he would grin, wave, bribe, and be left alone.
“You took my family,” I said while the microphone tasted the wind with my voice. “You took their hearths. You sold their land.”
He smiled at first. “This is political hysteria,” he said. “You are a madwoman.”
“Watch,” I said.
I had the ledger—ledgers are ugly friends to men who traded lives for coin. I had those who had suffered line up and speak. The first man told of farms taken—the brushstrokes so mundane, they became sharp: a mother pleading, a promise turned into ash. Then a woman spoke of a house burned, a child carried screaming into the night. They spoke names. They named dates. With each name, Eliot’s face drained a color. He moved from smirk to annoyance, annoyance to indignation, indignation to wide, paper-thin panic.
“You cannot do this!” he shouted. “This is slander!”
A child in the front row held up a charred toy and said, “My mother is dead because of you.” The crowd inhaled. They had come for a spectacle and found something else—truth, a ledger of pain shaped into testimony.
Eliot’s face began its sequence. He started by denying. “No! No, you’re lying. Who told you? Who coached you?” He pointed to men he believed he could browbeat into silence.
Then the truth pressed against him. A neighbor, once terrified, produced a receipt nailed to a post showing a sale that had stripped a family of its land. A former lieutenant recounted a name that only an accomplice would know. Eliot’s voice hit chords of disbelief—his smug armor now riddled by facts.
He shifted—denial to shock: color drained, then disbelief. “This is impossible. I—” He tried bargaining. “I will return the land! I will pay reparations!” He offered to give back silver as if silver was more than ledger and life. People laughed in a cold ring; the laughter became a hollowness.
As the crowd watched, Eliot’s composure crumpled into anger. “You’ll ruin me!” he screamed. “You are a criminal, you’ll take everything!” He stammered for allies and power.
An old woman came forward and spat on the ground between his polished shoes and the crowd. “We lived where you now own your pleasure. You killed my cousin,” she said. “Look at the wound on your hands.”
People started to record on phones. The guards Eliot had once paid were absent; they’d been told to stand down by voces that did not belong to him. Because punishment is not only public degradation—it is the withdrawal of the social currency that makes men untouchable.
He started to plead—“Please, please, I can—” He knelt. He knelt as if crumpled paper could become prayer. He begged for pity and then for mercy. The crowd chewed on the spectacle—some wanted blood, some penance, some a trial.
“You wanted to hold the town like an orchard and eat what you pleased,” I said into the silence like a clock after midnight. “You wanted lives for wine. You think money can bury everything.”
At his pleading, a wave of reactions moved across the square. Some gasped. Children clutched parents. A young woman raised her phone and filmed as if to carry the moment into the cities. Old men stroked their chins like they were weighing scale and justice.
Eliot—who had positioned himself as a man who ate poor men’s lives over breakfast and wrapped himself in silk—collapsed to a new low: the face of a man who had been unmasked. His smile fell into a soundless, wrung-out thing. He shouted, then wept, then begged.
There was no immediate execution. There was no mob. There was instead a ritual: public labor and restitution. He would return land where it existed, he would fund repairs and build a school in the burnt town. He would, every week, stand in the square and clean the pavement, and every month make a public accounting of his finances and handing over titles back to the rightful families. He would be attached to a schedule of service that would last his life.
He reacted the way weak men react to walls: first denial, then rage, then bargaining, then the final, humbled collapse into pleas.
“Please,” he said in a voice that had once been used for orders. “Please do not make me public property.”
“You are public property now,” I replied. “You are a man who used public resources as private weapons.”
Cameras clicked like rain. People recorded, shared, debated. The crowd that had been made to watch became a living archive: witnesses, for years.
Eliot’s humiliation was not a spectacle of cruelty; it was a reweaving of bonds. People who had been starved of justice learned that civic pressure could unmake a predator of power. He learned the stages we demand: exposure, denial, breakdown, bargaining, public penance. He learned the real cost of stolen houses. The old man’s face—Eliot’s face—moved through the arc every villain learns: hubris to fall.
He ended with caving, then pleas. The crowd recorded his apology, and the videos became a library of defeat.
When it was over, someone in the back muttered, “Good. Now the living can bury the dead.”
It was not perfect. It never is. But it was public, measured, and permanent. I had learned that justice need not be blood in the street; it must be a ledger returned to its owners.
Later—many later—the stars changed. The earlier men who used me as a vessel for tested desires faced small, sharp endings in public rooms: a wedding exposed, a banquet with a screen, the shrieking arrest of a man who imagined himself above law. The celestial man—Flavian—fell from myth to pathetic demonstrator. Eliot’s life became a ledger of work and shame. The soldier Mason became an object lesson.
And I—Arabella Faure—walked on.
I had honored the original woman’s wish. She wanted to be away from men who used her. I gave her far more: the chance to be fiction no longer. The heroines across the dog-eared volumes had always been meant to exist on somebody else’s terms. I unstitched those sleeves.
That is what we were sent to do in the Stability Bureau: find corrupted edges of stories and press our palms until a truth came out.
I am a thief of plots. I am an architect of reckoning.
And sometimes, when the light falls right on the old portrait of a man who thought himself immortal and a child plays in a square that is no longer haunted by someone’s memory of violence, I think the bureau is an instrument of small savors.
“Do you want another world?” Molly asked once, blinking politely.
“Yes,” I told her. “But first—” I smiled and looked down at the phone, where a stream of a hundred thousand faces had watched a man fall into the humility of public apology—faces that would not forget.
“First we make them public,” I said. “Then we move on.”
The End
— Thank you for reading —