Giantess World
The moment Lexi’s sneaker was unlaced inside the Cade family foyer, as her bare sole peeled away from that sticky basin puddled with her fluidic effort, the Alpha had flexed her toes across her unbound desperately-compressed sister to separate her from the malleable raw-pink undersides. Once the sweat-spattered blonde was divorced from the effort-swollen shafts of those digits, then, the Omega was gently fished out and dangled between Lexi’s fingers to be brought back into the light, whereupon she was laid face-down on the floor beside the athletic vessel’s scuffed rim. And then in a dazed patter, Lexi kept right on hobbling exhaustively down the wall-mounted walkway with one probably-blistered foot still in a shoe. Meanwhile, Bridget only listened to her departure, not daring to look up. The little Omega flinched only to catch her breath in air not tainted by vinegary acridity, not to mention the cooler sturdier texture of surroundings less claustrophobic and soggy than she’d experienced during the precisely three hours she’d spent in that tortuous hot box.
Of course, the tearful shrunken being still felt she deserved every instant in that squelchy prison, if not many more: perhaps until the precise moment Kayla’s gift to her wore off, and her body unfortunately expanded to rip through the meshy siding of the shoe. No, she decided, even that wouldn’t have sufficed. But based upon her subtle reading of Lexi’s body language, which vibrated like a secret subconscious code through that brawny perspiration-drenched underfoot sky resting with the equivalent burden of a collapsed rockslide atop Bridget’s three-inch form for most of an afternoon, she sensed that the Alpha’s reluctant catharsis for today’s wholly justified sisterhood-reforging ritual was undergoing a shift. Even independent of the vigorous exercise she’d endured for those long hours, purging ill will and saltwater by the gallon, Lexi’s sole-thumping pulse had plainly changed pace following that midway-point pause outside of Aegis, her heartbeat growing disproportionately intense, and Bridget had spent the whole concussing return journey willing herself to see their way forward and through this. Would today be enough, for either of them? Even if, hypothetically, Kayla had agreed to leave Bridget shrunken for weeks, months, or years of this treatment, day in and day out, would that eye-for-an-eye repetition ever remotely chip away at the mountainous injustice still imposed between them?
Was this still the “right” thing? Because if it wasn’t, Bridget angrily asked of herself, what else could possibly be? Somehow it hurt even worse to wonder at this now than it did last night.
Though she hadn’t been given formal permission, after remaining motionless on the walkway for close to an hour in silence, and hearing no returning footsteps nor feeling Lexi’s fingers at her back again, Bridget took it upon herself to rise slowly onto her haunches. With head bowed and her toeprint-matted golden tresses enveloping her features, she massaged her cord-reddened joints and stretched out some of the stiffness that inevitably came of serving as someone’s pithy living sole-cushion for three hours of relentless high-impact cardio, no matter how durable her Omega constitution made her at any size. Still, as though there was a witch’s chalk circle drawn around this spot on the floor, Bridget didn’t give allow herself to fully rise and take a step outside where she’d been placed. Instead, on her knees, she stared down the hall, uncertain even where Lexi had gone, and waited for her to come back, all while self-furiously clawing at the mental Rubik’s cube of this impossibly cruel favor she’d asked of her sibling.
Where was the end going to be? She thought she’d known the answer when she’d asked the all-powerful Omega scientist and ruler to do this for her, and yet the solution felt cloudier than ever for Bridget, even though she was able to “see” better in now than she had for most of this day spent blindfolded, hogtied, tongue-smothered, and toe-grappled. Lexi had gone through so much in the time before, and now again put herself in an unwanted and uncomfortable position, at Bridget’s request. It was simply unacceptable to the Omega to think that her vision here wouldn’t succeed.
Meanwhile, Lexi had been asking herself much the same sorts of things earlier in the day, during those more-uncertain hours of initiation into the rhythm of punishing a supposedly deserving three-inch target, but the Alpha’s mind had since fogged over, forgetting such specific questions. Instead, Lexi only heard her mother’s theoretical blessing still, which spurred her to take that determined one-shoed stumble down the walkway and around the nearest corner of the Omega home’s comparatively cavernous main hall, going nowhere in particular at first. Her every muscle ached down to the bone worse, via her own choices, than they ever had during those physically tame sessions she’d endured under Bridget a year and a half before, and she could barely stay standing now. But she had to. Alma’s influence had followed her all the way home from Aegis, just as the woman had sprinted after Lexi on that fateful night so many years ago when she’d decided to reject the madwoman’s homicidal inheritance. Only this time, Lexi hadn’t managed to outrun her parent’s voice. Yes, Alma was locked up somewhere, whether in Aegis or some cold super-max cell far away from here that would probably treat her infinitely kindlier than Jenna did. But given the throbbing of that joyful imagined voice in her daughter’s ears now, Alma might as well have been pouncing at Lexi’s heels now like a mangy cat, cleaving on and singing her bloodthirsty approval all the way.
No more instructions. No more sessions. No more feeding wrongs with wrongs, and guilt with more guilt. Done. They were done. Yet even as Lexi silently promised these things to herself, knowing there was no way she could possibly perform anymore pseudo-disciplinary action over her miniaturized sister now or ever again, there was a pestling at her core, a feeling which told her that it was too late. She’d done the deed. She’d made Alma Warren proud.
Instinct had at first pulled Lexi toward Bridget’s bedroom, which had served as her home base during this surreal day of unconventional corrections, but then she walked straight past it. She knew if she got anywhere near that Enforcer guidebook in the closet, or the bed where she’d discovered Bridget shrunken this morning, she’d only feel her mother’s spiritual endorsement again. Still wandering, yet moving with a strange purpose, Lexi desperately wished to stop moving: to ease her fatigued body, while somehow shutting out Alma’s damning voice in her head, and then think of whatever the hell she was supposed to do next. In time, she knew already, she’d have to go back to Bridget by the front door, and tell her she could handle no more of this, but for now, the beleaguered one-shoed Alpha was drawn insistently toward somewhere, as though by gravity down a steep hill.
The place she was going, it turned out, was her dollhouse apartment, resting on the living room side table beside that ceramic life-size elephant. The irony wasn’t lost on Lexi that she was inexplicably lured toward the one place in their whole Omega-scaled habitat which, once she was inside, would remind her more fervently of Alpha-specific homelife instead of the cozy yet palatial space she shared with Evelyn and Bridget, and thus somehow reaffirm the sensation of Alma pursuing her. But Lexi was past questioning why she wanted or needed certain things, and just acted, taking the quickest route along the walkway and then down a ladder which descended onto the furniture. Foraging past some of the jungle-thick houseplants, the Alpha emerged on the other side out of breath, her body still damp with sweat and her face with stinging tears, and burst through the front door of her home-inside-the-home.
Staggering to the kitchen table, Lexi realized she was utterly sapped, too tired to keep moving even by sheer distraught will, and slumped into the nearest chair. Her panged limbs were thankful for the relief after so long on her feet, but that conflicted knot inside her was only going noose-tight now, making her nauseous on the verge of puking, and simultaneously too desolate to believe anything would even come out if she went and wretched over the sink. So, folding her arms on the tabletop, Lexi buried her face between them, skipping the sobs, and fell into a rasping choke as though she was being slowly deflated by a tube stuck into her lungs by her noncorporeal birth mother’s own hand. Was all this just destined to be the great cosmic joke of her life? To finally have pleased her real parent in such a roundabout way as to successfully reject her evil, escape it, and find the place she thought she belonged for a decade of deceptive peace, only to be framed for the very thing Alma had always wanted for her, then horribly punished for it, distanced from everything she cared about, and finally today made again to performatively live out an approximation of the awful practices her mother had named her birthright, in mad hopes that it might heal someone who’d clearly taken on just as much pain as herself throughout their shared travesty? Even with her watering eyes pressed so hard against her forearm that they came close to numbing, at once, Lexi was “seeing” the room take shape around her again. A kitchen, only not the one inside her Omega dollhouse.
“Alexandra,” Alma echoed, while seated across the table from her daughter in their dark cramped living space: no longer that compressed unfrightening permutation of her from the glass box, but back to natural stature again. The woman shook her head and tsked under her breath, not quite smiling, but exhilaration palpably radiated from her. As the shadows crossed Alma’s face, she appeared at the same time as her younger more put-together visage, like Lexi had last seen her birth parent as an unjustly free woman all those years ago, as well as the gnarlier, dourer, prison-hardened version to whom she’d said goodbye forever in that transparent cage on Jenna’s bedroom shelf. “You remember how proud I was of you that day, when you helped me play the game and find my special little friends? Well, that’s nothing next to what I feel for you today.”
“I don’t want to play that game again,” Lexi whispered back, frailly. She was afraid to stand up from the table, or try blinking away her runaway imagination’s vantage.
“That’s all right too,” Alma smarmed. “Because you’re not a little girl anymore. And none of this is really a game, anyhow. It’s war, just like I told you. You’ve been old enough for a while now to understand the way things are. To help me in my work. I can’t tell you how much sweeter it would’ve been, to have you by my side in that place, when we came so fucking close to frying the next generation of little Beta germs. Maybe we’d have even snuffed them out for good, when the rest all just gave up and keeled over. Something tells me if I’d had you there with me, that day just might’ve gone different. We might’ve won.”
“I would never help you. With anything,” Lexi snarled back at her mother, still audibly soft-asphyxiating on her own gasps. “I wouldn’t have run this time, either. I… would have stopped you.”
“And all this time, I thought you were a lost cause,” Alma blithely continued, as though her daughter hadn’t spoken at all. “I thought those overgrown freaks turned you. Still, here we are, because you’re finally starting to understand. No matter how much time you spend with those people, no matter how much you try to prove yourself, no matter how much you let them tell you they “love” you, you’ll still never be anything more to them than a time bomb. A little ol’ ME in training.”
“That’s not true,” Lexi spat, even while unconvincingly wiping her eyes. “I figured that out for myself a while ago. They… know… I’m not like you, and I’d never be like you.”
“Then why did you agree to spend a whole DAY kicking the SHIT out of one of them?” Alma guffawed, slapping the table hard. Her wheezing laughter quickly ascended into repetitive cackles. “You can’t have it both ways, my darling Alexandra.”
“She… asked me,” Lexi strained through more tears, wishing she had the strength or presence of mind to flip this table right on top of her mother, the un-realness notwithstanding. “She told she’d… find someone else to do it… if I didn’t. I didn’t… have a choice.”
“That’s exactly RIGHT!” Alma victoriously cheered, with every tooth seemingly displayed while her uvula visibly danced above her throat. She rested her fist atop the table with a hard thump, holding it in the center of the surface as if to offer something to her offspring, but kept her fingers clenched closed. “You didn’t have a choice. NONE of us do. So we do what has to be done, even if everyone else is slow to understand why we’re doing the right thing. You gave that bitch back just the smallest taste of everything she’s owed, and every monster like her, too. Not even a whole mouthful. Those freaks can’t feel anything, after all, no matter how small you make ‘em, and I’m not just talking about when you got to step on one. They’re a big circle-jerk of false gods, Alexandra. When they punish one of us, no matter who we are, they feel… nothing. Just empty. And maybe sometimes a smug streak that tells them they deserve to keep all of us down here at their feet, in chains.”
Lexi continued reluctantly processing her distant mother’s imagined venom-words, but now couldn’t take her gaze off that fist. The last time they shared a table at the same size, Alma’s hand forcibly contained the soon-to-be-broken father of a boy who would one day set events in motion that temporarily shattered Lexi’s adoptive family bonds. She saw no slight movements shuddering beneath her birth mother’s unforgiving fingers, no shoes or tufts of Beta-scale hair poking through, but that still didn’t mean there was no one in there. Certainly Lexi herself had done a suitable job of containing a miniaturized Omega in her own hand earlier today, holding so firm that, given the right pressure and stuffing technique, Bridget might’ve disappeared altogether.
“But we both know what you’ve done today isn’t enough. Not nearly. Not yet,” Alma hissed, while craning her neck at such an unsettling angle to the side that she almost appeared like an owl emerging from the kitchen shadows. “She’ll grow back up to freak-size, because she believes everything gets fixed after one day of living this. Living like the way they make us feel. Beneath them. Just rolling over and accepting their disgusting perversion of the world’s rightful order. She won’t even have a scratch on her, Alexandra, and she’ll get to go back to the way things were, thinking she made the slightest difference. Thinking she made things RIGHT!”
Immediately then, Alma’s fist splayed open. There was no half-crushed Beta lying on her palm, nor anything else, but Lexi flinched nonetheless, slamming her spine hard against the back of the chair and gripping the table’s edge, still wishing desperately to activate her fight or flight, but could do neither. Meanwhile Alma revolved her hand upon the table, curling her fingers hard like claws while dragging her nails noisily along the tabletop toward her daughter, shaving off sawdust en route.
“She wanted you to hurt her, didn’t she, darling? That giant pretender needed you to make her FEEL how YOU felt. How we all feel. Isn’t that right?”
“Y-Yes…” Lexi hushed.
“Then you know what you have to do. You can’t “hurt” her by chewing on her, running on her, or holding her worthless little life in the palm of your hand. Even if the Omegas are more vile than the goddamned Betas, they sure don’t break as easily,” Alma rambled on at a trance-like speed, practically drooling with blood-lusted focus. She stood from her chair now, still nail-grinding the table, while leaning across it, seeming to loom higher above her offspring with every inch she advanced, until she may as well have been ten feet tall. “No, Alexandra, what you have to do is show her what her actions have wrought. If you want to cut her to the heart, and I KNOW deep down that some PART of you does, then you’ve got to go out there in the streets just like I taught you, grab up a handful of Betas, and turn them into fucking juice. Right in front of her.”
Despite feeling the heat of her birth mother’s enraged breath steaming on her neck, the young Alpha felt only frostbite-inducing chill glazing across her skin and insides at once. Though no part of her had ever felt ill will toward a Beta, not even ultimately the one who’d worked so hard to make her suffer, she’d have been lying to herself to believe now that, during her darkest moments over the past twenty-one months (and just a few glimmers today too), she hadn’t occasionally felt the purgative hunger for Bridget to feel something of that once-endless sorrow brought on by her wrongful incarceration. To let her sister take on even a grain of what she’d been made to feel. That deeply-entrenched feeling, hardly knowable now to Lexi herself, may even have been what allowed her to agree to this madcap role-reversal plan in the first place. Maybe, she’d thought, playing Enforcer would at last chisel out that guilty little inkling from her mind for good: that piece which made Lexi want Bridget, even for a useful moment, to comprehend the Alpha’s hurt the only way she could, by experiencing it herself.
Unable to continue looking at this blame-induced apparition of her birth mother stretching toward her across the table like a funhouse mirror reflection, Lexi buried her gaze in her lap, instead watching her hands convulse and sweat against the side of her thigh. They’d gone through with it. Finished the task. And still neither Alpha nor Omega seemed to have found what they wanted. Lexi felt even less desire now for Bridget to commiserate with her in that hypothetical instant of sympathetic suffering for all they’d been through together, and she could only imagine her shrunken sister was feeling no more whole now than she was from the instant Kayla put her down to Beta level.
Indeed, sick as it made her to realize, what this fictional shade of Alma Warren had stated was correct: if Lexi really did want to hurt Bridget in a way that corkscrewed the emotional knife all the way to her core and back out the other side, it wouldn’t be achieved through play-acting the part of an Alpha-correcting peacekeeper. Stomping on an invincible being would’ve been as empty a gesture as offering thoughts and prayers to a stranger. To truly make the Omega sting would require an act cruel and black-hearted, like her mother wanted, that Lexi would sooner die than see it actually have its effect on Bridget.
So then what was the point of it all? What had they gained, or worse, what had they lost? And if this near-lunatic scheme, with the punished playing punisher and vice versa, wasn’t the solution to this whole spider-webbing mess of justice miscarriage and family dysfunction, then what was? If there even was one at all?
“You know what you have to do, Alexandra,” Alma scowled, now perched fully atop the kitchen table, her fingernails seemingly embedded in the surface, while drool strings hung from her chin like a jungle cat preparing to make the final pounce.
“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” Lexi said again, though meekly, looking up once more. The way forward hadn’t seemed so opaque since that day she’d limped out of town almost two years ago, yet still the words came to her pure. “I never was. I never could have. Especially not her.”
“Just reach in your pocket,” her mother spat, her eyes shining yellow even while the darkness of the mirage wrapped tighter around them both. “Like you did for me, when you were still my good little girl. When you still listened.”
“I already told you,” Lexi said. Pressing her soles into the floor, one shoed and one bare, she pushed herself away from the table with the ease she’d longed for in uglier times. When she stood, then, suddenly the shame-phantom of Alma wasn’t distended into so much of a room-filling giantess, though her gaunt age-tricking presence remained hunkered atop the table like a gargoyle. Mother and daughter came eye to eye, then, for the first time ever, since during their last “real” meetings, one Alpha was either still Omega-compressed or an ungrown child, respectively. For a moment Lexi pondered reaching into her pocket, just to confirm for herself that there was nothing weighted there, be it the poor little Beta woman she’d been fooled into capturing years ago, or whatever other remorseful conjuration her own mind could come up with. But instead Lexi stayed her hand, knowing there was nothing there to reach for, and calmer still for the lack of compulsion to find out, before she breathed: “No.”
Standing firm, utterly fragile and powerfully immovable at once, Lexi fully anticipated this dream-projection of her mother to let loose a furious scream and take a swipe at her now with those claws, and perhaps draw blood, despite “this” Alma’s continued make-believe nature. But the trauma-weathered young Alpha didn’t lean away from the table, nor did she blink in the shadowy enclosure of her remembered old home’s kitchen. Though of course this room hadn’t felt like “home” in so very long, and so was just as foreign and sickeningly otherworldly to her as seeing the creature who’d given birth to her existing there at full height. And just like that, the leftover threat of pride and joy, sadism and schadenfreude, that Alma had apparently imprinted in her daughter like a tumor was permanently cleaved out, proven just as removable and replaceable with something better as the crazed Beta-slaughterer was herself. Still feeling like her stomach had been turned inside out, but certain now that she had both seen and thought her last of this woman, Lexi turned from the table and Alma, trudging with tired lethargy up the nearby stairs of her dollhouse.
In her bedroom, the Alpha collapsed in slow motion onto the end of her bed, crawling up toward the pillows and wrapping her face in one. She’d expected to need it to muffle a scream, but as no noise or even tears came gushing out just yet, Lexi simply waited in the limbo, feeling her heart race and insides plumbed. She’d seen the truth, cut Alma out of herself for good, and knew that she could never again attempt to make “amends” with Bridget in the way she’d been beguiled into today. The only thing still devouring her from the center was the thought of her sister, as it had always been since they were split apart. Surely Bridget was able to sense all along that Lexi wasn’t cut out for Enforcer work, nor for making things “right” via the very means that broke her own heart a year and a half before? Which meant that the Omega probably hadn’t gotten what she wanted. In fact, Lexi was certain she hadn’t. What would happen now, then, in the face of the Alpha’s failing? Would Bridget make good on her horrific promise to abuse herself at the hands of a vengeful stranger, in lieu of her sibling’s help, until all was somehow made right with the world again? Was there anything on Earth Lexi could do to stop her?
Only now, upon realization of this possibility, did the eye-burning tears and hoarse moans come: not for herself, but entirely for Bridget. Lexi rocked atop the mattress, still gently smothering herself with the moisture-stained pillow, while the first square of amber evening sunlight just so happened to align with the window panes of the Omega home outside and her personal habitat’s at once, allowing in a twinkling angular spotlight glow just above where the Alpha was curled in quiet stop-loss turmoil on her mussed sheets. There was nothing more she could do for Bridget. She’d done her best and beyond. And still her miniature sister was arranged beside that abandoned running shoe in the foyer, likely just as lost and close to breaking apart as Lexi was now, not to mention physically spent from all the chewing, rampaging, drowning, high-flying torment she’d forced upon herself today.
Nesting herself in the bed, where at least she could rely upon the walls of her Alpha-home as a vault for now to help hold back all her miseries on Bridget’s behalf, Lexi sincerely wasn’t sure how she’d manage to get herself to leave this little house for a while, if not the rest of the day or week. If she stayed in here, and didn’t go find her sister, she wouldn’t have to tell her she was done. She wouldn’t have to admit defeat. She wouldn’t have to hear the Omega reluctantly declare her intention to leave again, whether Bridget meant to find someone who could persecute her shrunken self in a more corrective and potentially injurious manner, or simply to go wandering again out in the cold wild to wallow in her own seemingly incurable disgrace. That would all eventually have to happen, the Alpha was steadily convinced, but not yet. Not until she moved from this spot and made it real.
“Lexi?”
The velveteen-soft all-too-known whisper of her elder sister’s dulcet voice came from so close by that it should’ve startled Lexi, particularly because she’d been counting on her controlled solitude in this tiny house to help stave off the inevitable decompressing conversation with Bridget. So much for getting to cocoon in her denial and fear for a time. When she at last emerged from smushing the pillow over her tear-streaked face again with the difficulty of rising from an earthy grave, though, the Alpha found at least part of her first expectation was happening already. Which was to say that Bridget was, literally, decompressing. The Omega stood now at around twelve inches tall, which meant she still had to look up at Lexi from the floor. With the pillow no longer there to catch the tears or saliva from the Alpha’s full-body sobs, several drops plunged to the ground at the re-enlarging blonde giantess’s feet when the pair could first see one another again from above and below. But Bridget didn’t tear her gaze from her temporarily taller sibling while staring up at her with searing apology and lily-delicate hope in her angelic little face, in spite of her body still showing the filthy toll of today’s sessions.
After a week spent developing lumps in her throat, Lexi truly couldn’t produce another single one, but nevertheless still felt her damp red cheeks turn pale and the wind go out of her chest as though the Alpha dollhouse was caving in on top of them. She wiped her hair out of her eyes, shaking her head while continually envisioning then quickly rejecting whatever statement she could possibly speak aloud now to make things all right. Meanwhile, Bridget seemed in comparable strife. The foot-tall titan shifted from one leg to the other, violently twiddling the same golden strands of hair over her shoulder as if she meant to rip them free, the bigger sister just as exposed but certain as ever. Seeing the growing Omega open her mouth to talk first, no-doubt to declare this whole preposterous experiment an explosive failure before she departed on another possibly-forever walkabout, Lexi too parted her lips, even not quite knowing while doing so what she was going to say to stop her sister from giving up. Sure, she was still big enough to restrain her for now, but in probably less than an hour, judging by Bridget’s progress, Lexi would be powerless. Words were all she had, whatever they were going to be.
“I’m-SORRY!” both sisters choked out together in one raspy syllable as though discharging a cannon, ridding themselves of the sound and the feeling in one swoop. And no sooner did the Omega and Alpha look at one another wide-eyed with strangely liberated absolution upon recognizing their shared release, first in shock then relief, when Bridget lunged urgently up the side of the bed in a single bound and hurled herself into a necessary embrace upon Lexi’s body. Just as quickly, the Alpha’s hands closed around her sibling’s back to scoop her closer, holding the shrunken giantess against her tear-soaked neck. They curled immediately into the blankets as a unit, breathing raggedly and holding one another in a way that again made the vindicated Lexi wish very much to remain right here with the most important person in her life, in this spot, in this moment, for as long as humanly possible. It took only an instant of contact to know without further explanation or glances that her sister was back home at last.