Lexi’s finger was paralyzed in midair between the doorbell and her pre-hyperventilating self. This was a much tougher gesture to make than the one she’d embarked on a couple weeks earlier, arriving back in the city and crossing the threshold of her home for the first time in so long. That reunion with Evelyn, while clumsy and painful at first, had swiftly turned joyous, in stark contrast to the meeting she had planned for this afternoon. Less than two years had passed since Lexi saw her surrogate Omega mother upon her return, and already that pent-up time made the transition hard. Today, she was breaking a nearly twelve-year drought of visits.
And her blood-mother Alma was, famously, a bit less warm than the loving titaness she’d now spent the majority of her life calling her parent instead.
Exhaling, Lexi’s clenched lungs giving way to a shiver that split her spine. She squinted at the Reynolds’ household bell, just a simple coin-sized button made for Alpha use, so easily pressed, but one that she couldn’t unpress after she stuck her fingertip against it. Keenly aware that she still had the choice of backing off now and nonchalantly power-walking back to the Cade house down the block, avoiding the need to see her incarcerated mother at all as she was transferred from Enforcer custody back to a traditional super-max, Lexi heard the thunderous latch-turn of the Omega entryway before she could make up her mind to flee or not.
Jenna’s gigantic freckled countenance peeked around the side of the frame over the Alpha walkway. The petite colossus opened the enormous swinging barricade and fully emerged onto the stoop before saying a word or even making a readable expression, though her green irises fixated on the visitor the whole time. She crossed one arm over her chest, the other propped up to support her cheek against an upturned fist, and studied Lexi below with a Mona Lisa smile while contemplatively thumbing the corner of her lip.
“Hello, Alexandra,” Jenna said. “Welcome. I’m glad you decided to come after all.”
Lexi didn’t recall mentioning the fact that she almost didn’t come when she, with Evelyn’s support, rang up the Junior Enforcer to request visitation with her terrorist mom. But then again, the fragility of her attitude was likely implied, and by the way Jenna’s eyes were picking Lexi apart, friendly though her face was otherwise, the Alpha knew the sharp young Omega could probably smell her fear, even standing so much higher.
“Jenna. Hi,” Lexi said, feeling the words already stunted in her throat. Nerves made her repeatedly comb the same tuft of hair over her ear. “I, um… I appreciate you, you know, making an exception for me like this, letting me come see her. I know it’s… kind of unusual to do this for people serving time with an Aegis… person, especially considering, well, who she is, but-”
“Nonsense. Alma falls under my jurisdiction until the next stage of her sentencing, which means all her activities, recreation, and rehabilitation are at my discretion. And I think it’s fair to say you’ve earned the right to dictate when, where, and how you see her from now on,” Jenna answered with a professional curtness that Lexi had learned from her brief interactions with the Enforcer was just her own personal form of kindness.
Lexi noticed something else too about Jenna that unnerved her at first, but in the intervening moments since the door had opened, soothed her anew. In the last couple weeks, most of the looming Omega eyes gazing down on her did so with pity, not always necessarily remorse, but still a cloud of murky sadness that made the Alpha want to vanish out of their sight. There was none of that in Jenna’s imperious stare now. She was genuine in her belief that Lexi deserved to see her mother, yes, but there was no lamenting, no heart-bleeding. In fact, Lexi was pretty sure she saw anticipation in the Omega’s pale sphinx of a face. Like she’d been waiting for this moment, and was doing her very best to maintain a cool, righteous façade.
“Thanks,” Lexi said, not quite certain she was grateful or not, but either way was strangely calmed by an Omega not treating her like a teacup with a hairline fracture.
“Well. We don’t have to stand out here making small talk all day, unless you want to,” Jenna said, ever to-the-point. “You’re here for a reason. Are you ready to see her?”
“Oh. Y-Yes. I mean. Yes.” Indeed Lexi was prepared for some dawdling before the main event, but knew full-well that delaying would only make it harder to rip off the bandage.
“All right, then. Can I give you a lift?” Jenna’s hand flattened on the Alpha path, her fingers unfurling into a gangplank toward her creamy palm. “Not that I doubt you can walk there yourself, but I plan to make this as smooth as possible for you.”
Lexi lifted her leg over Jenna’s padded fingertip, but again felt the strings of hesitation pulling her back. She’d also subconsciously expected to have the long stroll along the Reynolds’ home’s well-trodden Alpha footpath to reach her mother’s enclosure, probably in the Enforcer’s bedroom, like where Lexi had been kept under Bridget’s watch. That walk would’ve been lovely for procrastinating seeing the twisted, fury-entrenched portrait of her mother. Again, though, she concluded that the home stretch from here to Alma’s cage could and would make Lexi slow until she eventually considered turning back. Determined now, she set foot on Jenna’s hand, using the Enforcer’s raised thumb as a bannister while the platform lifted gracefully up.
The ride through Jenna’s home was smoother than any automated tram, the Enforcer’s steadiness practiced and talented as the most experienced Omegas that Lexi had ever allowed to hold her. Still, she found herself unconsciously wrapping her arm around the giant’s sturdy finger for support the further inward they traveled, her wobbliness exclusively owing to the sensations bubbling in the Alpha’s stomach rather than the humongous lawwoman’s gait, which was perfect. They passed through the hall, past the kitchen and into the living room, a mirror-image of the layout from the Cades’. The place was clean, almost militantly so, colorful but with little extraneous decoration, though Lexi’s main point of comparison was Evelyn’s plant-and-tchotchke-strewn habitat that made it look more like a multi-tiered jungle than a house. Then again, Lexi knew Jenna had a soldier and a Senior Enforcer for parents, so a certain modicum of order was to be expected. She only hoped the serene, minimalist vibe of Alma’s surroundings for the past year since her lock-up had allowed her to mellow. But she sort of doubted it.
“Here we are,” Jenna announced, probably needlessly as she pressed a hand to her bedroom door, though ironically the sound of her voice did cut through Lexi’s stagnant trance. She didn’t open it right away. “Just so you know. I intend for her to stay in this house until the moment her time with me ends, but aside from that, I’m not going to discourage however you choose to… communicate with her.”
Lexi picked up on the sly curl in Jenna’s voice, but wasn’t sure how to reconcile it with the eagerness she’d seem brimming in those haunting emerald eyes upon arrival. What was the Omega saying, exactly? The Alpha was too preoccupied with her own volcanic anxiety to even think to clarify.
“Okay,” Lexi said. “Will there be, um, a window or something between us?”
“If you want there to be. Or you can be on the same side of the glass.”
“Y-Yeah?” She gulped, feeling stupid to even wonder about her security when she was currently sitting in the palm of the Omega whom she understood to be the iciest, most scrupulous of all the Junior Enforcers in this city, but she still had to ask. “Is it… safe? She won’t, I mean…”
“No, she won’t attack, or do anything to hurt you, Alexandra. I give you my word on that,” the Omega reassured, and though Lexi hardly knew Jenna, the emphasis in her words was all but engraved. She wouldn’t get a better guarantee than that.
Crazy as it seemed, a part of Lexi did desire to close the distance between herself and her estranged maniac parent, for reasons she couldn’t identify now other than a macabre kind of fulfillment. A need to know she wasn’t still the same scared little girl watching Alma carve up victims. Still, Lexi had to remember that this was a woman who broke out of prison and engineered a machine that almost led to the largest Beta casualties since before Aegis took power. It was like asking to be put in a pit with a starved lioness, especially after so long away from her cub. Knowing the things Lexi knew about her mother, it didn’t seem insane to think that the woman might want to put her daughter out of her “misery,” after the system had corrupted Lexi into feeling compassion for three-inch-tall people.
“Are you… going to be in the room, too?” she asked.
“If you want me to be. But I leave that up to you.”
“…oh.”
The Omega was certainly putting a lot of faith in Lexi, willing to place her in the same room with Alma and turn a blind eye to their interaction. Maybe Jenna believed the Alpha was more capable of defending herself than she looked. All things considered, her veins did course with the same life force that drove such a hateful, violence-mongering animal: an animal who just happened to be waiting on the other side of this door, a few Omega-scale paces away, and boxed inside a state-of-the-art cell.
“I think I’m ready now,” Lexi said, and it seemed Jenna was waiting for this, as the towering warden silently pushed the barrier and brought them into her room. Sure enough, perched on a shelf of the opposing wall, was a glass tank exactly like what Lexi lived inside for an excruciating couple of weeks two years ago, though this one appeared to have even fewer furnishings than hers. Still, despite the stripped-down accouterments and asylum-white color that coated every tiny surface of the micro-prison, Lexi couldn’t see her mother inside it anywhere.
She stepped near the edge of Jenna’s hand and narrowed her gaze. Nothing. Not even as the Omega strode closer to the cage did Lexi spy anything remotely Alma-shaped, at least as she knew her. Then, just as the giantess came to a stop at the shelf, her hand leveled in front of the glass, a certain notion occurred to the Alpha that both made her skin crawl and, against the odds, allowed some of her tension to melt away. She hadn’t seen her mother yet, nor received an explanation from Jenna, but she already understood why she couldn’t see her right away.
“What would you like to do?” Jenna asked her passenger. “Inside, or out?”
“I think… inside is fine,” Lexi said, turning up to look the Enforcer in the eye.
“All right. And do you want privacy? I can stand right here, I can sit at my desk, or I can leave the room.”
“Maybe it’s all right if you, um… leave the room. If that’s okay,” Lexi stammered, then added as she felt Jenna’s hand lifting to carry her over the wall of the cage: “But could you leave the door open?”
“Oh, I was already going to,” Jenna replied, just as self-assured. Her palm lowered into the glass arena, her fingernails tapping flush with the floor so Lexi could disembark. The staid reserve of her voice was abruptly tinged with eerie gladness, then, when the Omega addressed her prisoner for the first time since entering the room: “Alma, oh, Alma! That surprise I promised you earlier is here, and it would be a real huge shame if you were rude enough not to come show yourself, when she came all the way over to see you.”
Lexi stood now in the translucent room her mother had called home for a year, her eyes darting around between the few living amenities in search of Alma, but to no avail. If what she thought had happened was true, and it seemed it was, the snarling rail-thin brute she expected to find greeting her with prejudice and animosity had understandably been blunted into a humbler, ashamed, lower version of herself. Literally. Because if there was one thing Lexi knew her mother had to hate more than Betas on Earth, it was the very idea of becoming like one herself.
“Ah, there you are. I see you under the bed. You may be small, but you’re not that small. People can still see you, whether they want to or not. I’d think that would make you happy,” Jenna boomed, hardly bothering to hide her enjoyment now. “You’re going to make a liar of me, Alma, if it looks like I haven’t taught you the importance of respect and obedience to authority in all this time we’ve spent together. Alexandra is here. Come out and see her.”
“It’s okay,” Lexi reassured the Omega, raising a feeble hand. “I… can take it from here. I mean, if that’s-”
“No, you’re right. This is your time now, Alexandra. I’ll be back soon to check on you. Otherwise, just give me a buzz, and I’ll be over before you can let go of your phone,” Jenna said. She shook her head, and true to her word, pivoted almost immediately.
Her fingers brushed the bedroom doorknob, but left the way wide-open, disappearing from sight around the corner and, Lexi was sure, lingering practically right outside the door. Which was fine. In fact, even knowing her mother had been reduced to a relatively harmless fraction of her former self, in body and in soul by an Omega’s mysterious space-compressing powers, Lexi still had to convince herself she wasn’t currently locked in a cage with a dangerous creature. A fire ant could be crushed underfoot, but a few bites from its pincers could still render her helpless.
“M-” Lexi started to speak, but swallowed the word Mom before the single syllable could choke unnaturally out of her lips. Calling Alma by her first name seemed alien, too. There was no name for her birth-parent now, though Lexi had already come to terms with that fact long ago; she’d simply never had to actually address that nameless evil until now. Deciding she didn’t have to worry about such formalities, though, the Alpha crept down to her haunches to peer under the bed. “Hello? Where are you?”
Sure enough, with her cheek pressed to the floor, Lexi could see the woman clearly. There, shrouded in the thin shadow of the white bed and curled into a frightful huddle like so many Betas she’d personally tormented and extinguished through the years, was Alma Warren, shrunken to the size of a doll, maybe ten inches tall at best. Lexi had expected to find her mother miniaturized, of course, maybe down to a foot or two tall, and so was shocked at the pitifully miniscule creature she found hiding under the bed like the monster she was. While the Alpha was used to seeing Betas in her everyday life, the fact that Alma was technically triple the size of one did nothing to lessen the fact that she looked incredibly small at this moment. Smaller than anything Lexi could’ve imagined, at least in the ways that counted toward personhood. She crawled across the floor, and ducked her head under the bed, no longer afraid of her mother, at least physically.
“I’m here,” Lexi awkwardly stated, not sure where else to start. Her fingers drummed on the hard floor as she watched the woman twitch, but remain in a defensive ball. “Are you going to come out?”
Giantess World
