What terrifies you so, Larenti?

No hiss.  Never.  Not once in all your recent ordeals.

Fear?  Yes.  Blatant and brutal, it drips from your eyes like tears in those moments I’ve barely started to predict.

Medication.  I coax you from your box and lure you into a false sense of security, and I feel wretched for it, yet the deed must be done.

As you rest against me purring, a rumble that soars through me for what I’ve accomplished since we met, I finally reach down and take you in my hands.

Then comes the fear.  A horrible fear.  A terror so real I can feel it oozing over my hands where they meet your body.

You look at me.  Eyes are wide.  A depth of fright I care never to see again greets me as I look at you face to face.

Then the tears come.

What I intend is help, not harm.  What I will do brings you no pain, only aid.

Yet I weep.

Somewhere in the past only you know, someone only you would recognize did unspeakable things to you.  It’s written all over your face as I dab a bit of medicine between your shoulders.

Petrified.  You feel like stiffened wood nestled between my knees.  Even when I release you, your breath remains unheard and your essence rigid.  You don’t move.

What unconscionable being did this to you?  What poor excuse for a human forced in you this unbeatable fear of us, of we simple apes?

What did they do to you?

Vision blurred by my own lamentation, I see your still form held close to the ground, held stoically until it seems you no longer live.

It takes my gentle prodding to get you to move.

And then?

You race to your box, cower in its furthest corner despite how uncomfortable it makes you, and your wide eyes look at me with a trembling I dare not speak.

In time you will learn you have nothing to fear from me.

In time I will learn not to hate those who did this to you, learn not to wish for their wicked lives to end horribly, painfully, with much suffering and anguish. . .at my hands.