5
"Thank you, mother."
Instantly, he knows he has done wrong. The moment the words pass his lips, hanging in the sudden silence between them, he knows that it's not a matter of if, but how she will punish him.
Calmly, she takes back the plate of food she'd been mere seconds from handing him, which is painful enough in itself in the light of the last three meals Ragnarok has devoured from beneath his very nose.
He manages to stutter out half of an apology before her hand is around the back of his neck.
A great surge, a jolt, a flash of toxic light jumps from her palm into his body, finding its way instantaneously to his veins. Suddenly, the very blood in its system begins to writhe like a living thing being tortured with a red-hot bodkin, pushing at the arteries and tiny capillaries in a violent search for escape. When his vision fades to dark and the pain does not, an instinctual fear for the eyes flares to life, driving him to grope desperately at his face.
His head fills with the sound of someone howling, an inhuman, dying cry, but he can't be sure if it comes from Ragnarok or himself.
The day they met. Medusa's knee, lavender, mother, it isn't stopping...
But everything eventually does, even when it seems to encompass an eternity.
Medusa stands over him with arms folded judiciously, staring down. So unimpressed as she speaks over his piteous whimpering. "From now on, I'll only resort to this punishment if you use that word. Are we understood?" He summons just enough strength to nod. She frowns. "I asked you, are we understood?"
His throat catches on his own affirmative. "Y-yes ma'm, la...Lady Medusa!"
"Good." She gives him back the plate, food growing cold, and lets it clatter on the floor near him. "Now eat your dinner."