12 Hours Ago…

            Alison Hunt pushed on the door of the apartment guest room, letting it swing fully open to the tune of the creaking hinges before entering. She padded slowly across the carpet, trying not to slam her bare heels against the ground and risk shaking the contents of the small room, specifically the table that leaned against the wall in the corner.

            Her eyes fell to the spacious cardboard box that once housed an old microwave but now represented the abode of far more volatile residents, and taking a deep breath, she ran her fingers through her silky golden locks to brush them back from her face.

            Even before the eighteen-year-old had taken more than a few steps, she heard the frantic whispering coming from the makeshift habitat with walls far too high for its occupants to have a prayer of escaping.

            “Hey, guys,” Alison greeted as warmly as she could. She flashed a winning smile as she peered over the edge of the box and into the little habitat below. Though she raised a hand to wave lithely with the tips of her fingers, the gesture was not returned with the same enthusiasm.

            “Hi, Alison,” Tony mumbled dumbly, lifting a hand to wave once out of perceived duty. The four-inch-tall young man was only able to look up and hold eye contact with the towering normal-sized girl for a few seconds before his gaze fell back to his shoes. Alison never tired of seeing this sheepish display of intimidation mingled with respect, and would probably have giggled at him, if not for her desire to get off on the right foot today with her two live-ins.

            “Ashley?” Alison murmured, looking over to her equally tiny cousin where she remained lying on her side atop the makeshift cushion the two miniscule young lovers used as a bed. Normally the orphaned blonde bombshell would at least rise to her haunches when Alison came to greet them so she could wrap her arms around Tony in a show of loyalty, but today there was no movement.

            “Ashley?” Alison repeated more gently. “Are you okay?”

            “Yes,” Ashley groaned. “I’m perfect. Fucking amazing.”

            “Okay,” her cousin said with a nod, having learned to mostly disregard her embittered family member’s angry outbursts during the last year and a half she’d been in the custody of Alison and her mother Anna.

            And frankly, considering the hardships the miniaturized eighteen-year-old had been through ever since that serendipitous night when she, her parents, and boyfriend had mysteriously been reduced down to four inches in height beyond the explanation of known science or religion, Alison couldn’t begrudge her the negative attitude.

            “Do either of you want anything to eat?” Alison asked, resting her hands on the lip of the box and gripping it, though she refrained from rattling it. “I think Mom’s gonna make pancakes. Got a new skillet and everything. I’ll bring you some of the drips cooked on the edges, or-”

            “Fuck off,” Ashley scowled meekly, shuffling onto her haunches and crawling forward across the little bed.

            “I guess a “no” from Ashley on the pancakes,” Alison said as pleasantly as she could, turning her gaze to Tony. “How about you, hunky?”

            “Yes. Sure,” he answered awkwardly as he scratched at the stubbled nape of his neck, looking over his shoulder at his sneering girlfriend. “And… maybe some for her too? She might want some later, and-”

            “I said fuck off with your fucking pancakes,” Ashley grunted. “I don’t want any later.”

            “But-” Tony protested.

            “I guarantee you, I don’t,” the girl added before curling up under the miniscule blankets and covering herself in them, as though they would offer protection from her massive cousin above if such sanctity was required. “I think I’ll just starve today.”

            “Okay,” Alison mumbled amicably. Tapping the box a few times with her thumb, the monumental blonde lowered her arm into the box and opened her fingers as they neared Tony, who instinctively raised his arms and straightened his legs, knowing it would be easier to just comply with her. Once she had her palm pressed against his back, she squeezed her fingers gently back together and gave Tony an easy ascension from the box in her warm fist.

            “S-Sorry,” Tony uttered as the girl held him up to her face, blinking more times than necessary.

            Alison observed him for a moment, appreciating the feeling of his little chest rising and falling beneath the pad of her index finger. She brushed the fleshy curve of her thumb against the underside of his chin, stroking up to his cheek, then let her fingers ease their way down to his thighs. He seemed to squirm lightly at her touch, but didn’t flinch.

            “It’s okay. I get it,” Alison whispered truthfully. She eyed the tiny Ashley below bundled up in her blankets, half-expecting a screamed rebellion about her boyfriend being snatched away for the umpteenth time, but the girl was apparently already too resigned to a bad mood today, or simply at a state of painful peace with it. “I know it’s been really hard on her.”

            “Yeah.”

            “On you, too.”

            “Oh,” Tony sputtered, struggling in the space between fear and startled comfort. “Y-Yeah. It has.”

            “Don’t be nervous, cutie,” Alison said. She slowly backed away from the table that held the box, pivoting on her heel, and began making her way back toward the door. She had difficulty hiding the smirk spreading back over her lips, but it didn’t bother her, especially since Ashley hadn’t complained yet. Grasping the doorknob in her free hand, she shut the door behind her.

            “Where… um, where are we-” Tony managed.

            “Just my room. There’s a little problem I’m hoping you can help me with,” Alison explained as she gently thumbed Tony’s head again, ruffling his hair. She kneaded her pinky finger against his shins, careful not to cause discomfort, and actually felt him relax more in her grip.

            “A problem?”

            “Yeah. See, I’ve been feeling really guilty about something,” Ashley continued as she turned the corner in the hallway and approached her bedroom. “And I thought I could use some advice from you.”

            “G-Guilty?” Tony repeated back, a knot forming in his stomach as the girl’s fingers got progressively more exploratory around the nooks and crannies of his body. He bit his lip as her finger pulled back the fabric of his shirt and slid up against his abdomen.

            “Yeah, silly,” she sighed as she nudged her way into the room with her elbow. “It’s been weighing on my conscience, and I think I just need to get it off my chest for you. You know?”

            Her words, chewed delicately on every syllable, certainly didn’t suggest she was feeling the keen bite of morality. Still, Tony held a small hope in his heart, no matter how easily it had been extinguished time and time again.

            Maybe she was about to do it. Maybe this was the conversation where she’d admit that the pressure of keeping two tiny people as prisoners had caught up to her and she was going to grant them their freedom.

            “Um. Okay. Sure,” Tony said as nonchalantly as possible. Alison crawled onto her bed as smoothly as possible, careful not to jostle her passenger-occupied fist, and laid on her stomach. From her, she was able to easily cradle Tony in her palm and give him some room to move, while keeping the impossibility of his escape from this precarious position completely known. Her adorable grinning face loomed over him, making it all the clearer as her tongue batted out at the corner of her lips.

            “So here’s the thing…” Alison drawled, letting the pause sink in for full effect. Her eyes, unblinking, bore through the little man lying in the cushy center of her hand, and it took all her willpower not to close her fingers back around him for another squeeze, if only to feel his precious heartbeat against her skin again. “You turned twenty, what, like a month ago?”

            “Y-Yes…” he answered, no longer out of anxiety, but primarily because Alison’s finger, still burrowed comfortably up his puny shirt, had begun caressing his skin just enough to send some involuntary goose bumps to every inch of his appendages.

            She definitely knew how to push his buttons, even if she and her mother had virtually robbed him and his girlfriend of their lives, and then done the same thing to Ashley’s parents, but more in the literal sense.

            “And in that whole time, I realized, I still haven’t given you your birthday present!” Alison concluded, squelching the hope for good that this chat would lead to anything other than one of her games.

            Tony didn’t begrudge himself the letdown, though. As she’d said, he’d just begun his third decade of life, which didn’t appear to be changing from this semi-twisted imprisonment any time soon. The foolish hope of liberty was the closest thing he ever got to a vacation unless it was one of the days Alison and her mother were in the mood to go on a city walkabout without stowing their wards inside compromising articles of clothing.

            “Oh,” Tony said, wringing his hands together as he leaned his head back against the plush terrain of Alison’s fingers. “It’s um, it’s fine.”

            “Are you kidding? Of course it’s not,” Alison corrected, raising an accusing eyebrow. “Birthdays are special.”

            “You made a cupcake for me and Ashley,” he pointed out.

            “Yeah, but cake’s not a present. That’s just food,” she responded. “Plus, it’s the big two-oh. I figured you deserve something a little better, especially because of how good you’ve been the last year and a half, and your last birthday probably wasn’t as fun.”

            “Yeah,” he agreed, unable to contest such a reminder.

            His nineteenth birthday had been spent hanging onto Ashley’s hand as she cried her eyes dry, hopped up on as much anesthesia as could be safely allowed for a four-inch teenager, and under the scythe-sized knife of a woman who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a butcher shop.

            After Anna’s ultimatum at the Yeager house, she’d made her final argument by breaking all of Ashley’s limbs in one swift flick of her fingers. The poor girl, collateral of her parents’ mad greed, had spent a lot of that time afterward being carried around by Tony until arrangements could be made.

            As it had turned out, the best arrangement Anna could make for her niece involved a retired army medic-turned-veterinary surgeon who’d fallen on hard times. Several resetting procedures, plenty of painkillers, and more than a year later saw Ashley’s mobility returned to her, if only in small dosages, though it was anyone’s guess how much of this had to do with her abused body and how much had to do with a general lack of motivation for life now that she was her cousin’s pet.

            “Anyway,” Alison continued, tracing a gentle line up from Tony’s navel to his forehead with her pinky finger. “Like I was saying. I thought you should get a little something… extra. Just to show you how much mom and I appreciate you going along with everything so well. Considering how… you know…”

            “Right,” Tony sighed, resisting the urge to turn his face away from Alison’s probing digit, even as his spine tingled pleasurably at her practiced touch. He already knew precisely where this was going, and saw no benefit in trying to resist. “Um, thanks I… guess.”

            “Don’t mention it,” the girl said with a broad smile, and without further verbal teasing tugged Tony’s shirt off his abdomen the rest of the way. It came off easily, particularly with her finger already pressed against his chest under the garb. She followed up immediately with a delicate thumbnail into his waistband, skillfully snapping off the button and letting the slightly baggy fabric slide down his thighs.

            Left in his underwear in Alison’s palm, Tony let himself go limp, by now firmly accustomed to her getting her way with his state of dress or lack thereof. His heart rate actually was able to lower as he settled against her warm skin.

            “Almost,” she breathed calmly, sliding a finger down against his thigh again and hooking the miniature boxers well enough that they could be shorn from his legs. A final flick of Alison’s thumb and index finger left Tony’s doll-sized garments scattered over her bedspread, and his exposed naked body ripe for play in her hand. “Did that feel okay?”

            “Y-Yeah,” he said. This, after all, was the only correct answer.

            “Good,” she murmured. “Happy belated birthday, hunky.”

            Tenderly she compressed her index finger along Tony’s pill-sized dick, not so hard that it gave him cause to cringe, and set about caressing it in one of her games with him she’d been neglecting in the past few months.

            She cradled his junk against the pad of her thumb, savoring the power trip as she watched it grow, entrapping him between her digits. What a little rush. He was already growing firmer. She twiddled him between her fingertips, back and forth. Frankly, the joy of wrestling the powerless Tony into an embarrassed sexual climax had lost some of its luster as time wore on and she could see the weariness in his eyes, but Alison was feeling spontaneous enough today that this just felt right.

            That is, until she cupped Tony closer up to her face. She exhaled, letting the warmth wash over him and tingle on his skin. Already his member was at full mast from the smooth contact with her thumb, but she paused in the rhythmic motion for just long enough to silently demand mutual eye contact, which he granted out of prior knowledge that she could just as easily demand it verbally.

            Beyond his little face, then, and out of her depth of field she saw it.

            The small plastic purple picture frame she kept on the dresser she’d bought for father’s day twelve years prior, back before all of this madness had cost the family insurmountable pain and several casualties. Tucked inside the frame was a fuzzy photograph of her father Tom, Anna embracing him, and the young Alison hoisted up into view of the camera by her dad’s strong arms.

            Instantly she stopped dead in her tracks, leaving a confused and unwillingly aroused Tony sprawled and softly moaning in her hand as she shifted her gaze fully to the family relic.

            Alison couldn’t put her finger on the reason. Certainly her eyes had shifted idly around this bedroom plenty of times before as she had her way with Tony, probably coming to rest on the photographic specter of her late parent too.

            This time was different, though. A rawness was forming in her gut as jumbled memories of his voice began to creep back into her mind. The man whose kindness had indirectly prompted her mother and herself to commit atrocities against their criminal family now felt like poison burning along the walls of her stomach.

            It was a shame as real as anything she’d felt before, almost as gnawing as the grief at his passing. Alison’s eyes steadily began to flood with tears, making the sight of her transfixed expression even more bewildering for Tony, who had settled uncomfortably into a fetal position against her curled fingers. A few salty droplets plunked down onto his chest, which only increased the look of bewilderment in his eyes.

            “That’s… that’s enough,” she sighed. Swinging her legs off the bed, she rose up and set about plucking Tony’s clothes back up from the spread, depositing them back into her palm.

            “Okay,” he answered, hoping his gratification wasn’t too evident.

            “You should probably put these back on so Ashley doesn’t have to see you like…” Alison muttered, lifting up the shirt between pinched fingers.

            “Yeah,” he said. “T-Thanks.”

            “Don’t mention it,” she said sorely, looking away as Tony scrambled to re-cloth himself in her hands. Despite her ability to toy with the lives of two powerless human beings without the threat of consequence, in this moment, the growing hollowness made Alison feel smaller than she had in a long time.