Fiscal Responsibility (Patreon)

A multi-picture caption from an anonymous Patron to do one of the losing entries into last month's Community Caption contest. Pictures property of UKDiaperGirls.

"Are you kidding me?!" Honour rolled her eyes, crossing her arms over her chest with a mighty pout. "I am an adult, I don't do chores!"

"Well, don't think of them as chores, then," her mother suggested. "Think of them as you helping us out, since we're helping you out."

Honour heaved a sigh. "Fine," she rolled her eyes. "I knew you were going to hold this over my head."

"Honey, that's not what this is," her mother tried to tell her. "But if you're going to be staying here..."

It wasn't that Honour wanted to be there; if it were up to her, she'd be back at her own place, like the adult she was. But things had gotten out of hand, as they so often did for her, and now... Well, she didn't really have her own place anymore. She'd really thought she'd been doing better, paying more attention to her budget, and how much she had left in her bank account, and on her credit cards, only to get the rude awakening that she hadn't been quite as on top of things as she should have been.

It was hard not to feel disappointed with the way things had gone, with the fact that her first time, truly out on her own, had ended so abruptly after not even a full five years, and she was back with her parents, but she was going to make this work. Somehow, she was going to pull it off, and get things back to the way they were meant to be.

The one thing that made her feel better about her situation was the necklace. It really was gorgeous... When she'd seen it online, she'd known that she had to have it, even if she didn't really have the money for it. She reached up, tracing the pattern on the pendant with her finger, smiling despite it all. She'd probably wind up losing her Ebay account once it was all over, once the seller was done disputing her fake dispute, since they could probably prove she had, indeed, received a package from them, but that was for the best, honestly - if she didn't have an account, she couldn't buy anything from there! At least, not until she made another.

And it might work out in her favor anyway. She was getting the sense, from the messages she was getting from the seller, that this was some little old lady with no real idea of how the site, or likely the Internet at large, worked. Honour felt bad about it, but, in a way, she was teaching the woman a valuable lesson.

'Please,' the message Honour got that day, as she lounged on the couch, trying to distract herself from scrolling through online stores - her favorite past-time - with some dumb reality TV, definitely not doing any of the vacuuming or dusting her mom had requested. 'I ask one more time. Stop acting like a child and give back money. I work hard on necklace and I know you have it.'

Any other time, Honour would have done what she'd been doing, and ignored it. Today, however, she was bored, and annoyed to be back at home, and frustrated with her mother from treating her like a little girl again, and the use of the word 'child' just triggered her enough to want to fire back. 'I am not a kid,' she typed. 'I am an adult, and guess what? You're not getting your money. Even if I had it to give to you, I wouldn't. Do what you want, I don't care about this account.'

As if to prove it to herself, she logged out, cleared the site's password out of her password manager, set her e-mail to automatically send messages from eBay to the spam folder. She had another e-mail address she kept for websites that gave first time customers a discount, so she could sign up with that one, too, and get it twice... When she wanted to use eBay again, she'd sign up from there. She was already going to be using a different address, whether it was here, or from her new place, wherever that wound up being... Nobody was going to be the wiser.

Feeling very proud of herself, she decided to celebrate her victory with her favorite past-time, and, as usual, she couldn't quite stop herself from buying the first thing she saw that she really liked. She still had a little money on one of her credit cards... She wasn't positive how she was going to pay it off at the end of the month, but she could cross that bridge when she came to it. This was on sale, after all... If she was going to get it, it would be silly not to get it now...

"Honour!" 

She sat straight up, the tone of her mother's voice enough to make her snap to attention, despite her desire to show she wasn't some child who could be ordered around and made to do whatever the woman desired.

"What are you doing?"

"I-I'll get around to it," she said, her resolve slipping slightly. Maybe it wasn't a bad idea to help out a little, now and then... "Just because I'm here..."

"If you want your allowance, I expect you to do your chores when I ask you to, and not just whenever you 'get around to it,'" her mother informed her sternly.

"My..." Honour's cheeks flushed, hands curling up into fists. Was the woman trying to make her mad?! Just that morning, she'd said they weren't chores, and now she was doubling down on it, like she was trying to humiliate her daughter into doing them. "I don't get an allowance anymore, remember?"

"That's because you haven't been doing your chores," her mother sighed. "I'm not paying you to do nothing."

"What the..?" Honour stomped to her feet, glaring up at her mom. "No, because I'm an adult! This isn't...!"

"I know you feel that way, sweetie, but you haven't graduated and moved out yet. You aren't even..." She frowned, and, to Honour's shock, reached down, unbuttoning the girl's pants and tugging them down. "Where is your diaper, young lady?!"

"Mom!" Honour screeched, not even knowing which part of that to address first, paralyzed in anger and embarrassment at the very idea that she might be wearing a diaper, that her mother had somehow expected her to be in one.

"I know you're afraid your friends will make fun of you," her mom shook her head, "but that's why we got you those trainers for school. Once you get home, you're supposed to go right into a diaper, remember? That was our deal..."

"What the hell are you talking about?!" Honour demanded. This had gone way too far... If her mother was trying to prove a point, the way to do it was not to pretend that Honour was some backwards little schoolgirl, one who hadn't even managed to get fully potty trained yet. And yet, that was exactly what she was doing, grabbing the girl by the ear as she tried to protest further, dragging her back to her bedroom...

Where, at some point, she'd apparently found the time to redecorate it. Honour's parents had turned her room into a guest room once she'd moved out, which she'd been grateful for now, when she had to move back in. Except now, despite having been at work all day, her mother had clearly found the time to get all of Honour's old posters, and her desk, and stuffed animals, and everything out of the attic, moving it back around to the way it had used to be.

Except for one big difference. When her mother yanked open what should have been Honour's underwear drawer on her dresser, it was filled with diapers. "No way!" Honour wrinkled her nose, trying to push past her, out of the room. "I'm not wearing that!"

"Honestly," her mom rolled her eyes. "I don't know what's gotten into you lately... Just you wait until your father gets home."

Honour was no match for her bigger, stronger mother, and, in no time, the formerly independent young woman was reduced to diapers, crinkling loudly under her pants, bulging obviously out from under the waistband. She made Honour go back to the living room and work on her chores while she waited for her dad... She wasn't happy with it, obviously, didn't want anyone else to see her this way, but at least he would be more reasonable. Surely he'd help her out, tell his wife how insane she was acting. 

"You have to talk to her!" Honour blurted out when he walked in the door, turning and tugging at the hem of her shirt anxiously.

"She already told me, young lady," he replied. "I'm sorry... I know you think you're too old to be spanked, but it seems like that's the only thing that gets through to you... Go fetch me the hairbrush, please. Now, or you're just going to make it worse for yourself.

Honour had been positive that was going to be the worst of it, ending up over her father's lap, diaper around her ankles, getting paddled like a naughty child... But it was only beginning. The next morning, her mother woke her up early, made her wear a Pull-Up and one of her old school uniforms, and actually forced her onto the bus. Honour was positive she was going to wind up in the principal's office immediately, where she was going to have to explain what she was doing there, pretending to be a student, and yet, to her shock, everyone acted like it was normal, like she was supposed to be there... Her name was even on the roll call, leaving her looking around, wondering what other girl had her name, until the teacher yelled at her for playing dumb and wasting his time.

What was going on?! Honour knew those years since high school hadn't been a dream, that they'd definitely been real, if only because she still had her necklace... Nobody else was acting like they were, however. And, even without that bit of proof, she would have known better, because she hadn't been in diapers in high school.

This was some kind of incredibly elaborate prank, that had to be it... Her parents thought they were teaching her some kind of lesson... And, if she was being honest, it was working. Spending all day getting treated like a teenager was incredibly mortifying, especially getting home on the bus and finding out her parents had taken all the underwear out of her dresser.

"Well, fine, then," she told herself, hopping onto her laptop. "I'll just get some more."

She was really stretching her credit limit now, but once she started shopping for new panties, she couldn't help herself. There were so many cute pairs... She had to have them all! As soon as she submitted her order, she knew something was wrong, even before the strange teenager waltzed into the room and asked, "Umm, are you supposed to have that?"

"Hey!" Honour blushed, tugging at the hem of her shirt, as the unfamiliar girl, a good decade or more younger than her, grabbed her computer. "Who are you?! Give that back!"

"Don't play dumb with me, Honour," she rolled her eyes. "You know you're supposed to come get me if you need to use the computer for your homework... Which it doesn't even look like you've started." Honour followed the girl's gaze, down to a bright pink backpack she definitely hadn't taken to high school that day. "Do you want me to tell your Mommy and Daddy you're being naughty?"

"N-No!" Honour blushed, squirming on her still-sore backside.

"And why are you on the couch?" the girl asked. "You know better... No leaking on the grown-up furniture." Honour was banished to the floor, with her homework, which, as she pulled it out of the bag, she saw was more like what an elementary schooler would be doing, rather than what she'd been assigned at school that day. But the girl - her babysitter, she realized with horror - insisted she lie there, on her stomach, and work through it all, checking her diaper every few minutes.

What had happened?! Why had she suddenly been demoted even further back?! She hadn't even done anything that day... But, sure enough, when her parents got back, they treated her like a little girl, too, making her chicken fingers and mac and cheese, giving her a bath, putting her to bed early... Honour had that the previous day, and her time at high school, had been bad; this was absolutely mortifying. She really had no choice... She had to go shopping on her phone to cheer herself up, to buy herself something else to make her feel like the grown-up she knew she was.

"No!" she wailed the next morning, when her mother changed her into a fresh diaper. "What about my Pull-Ups?!" She hated how much she wanted those childish things, after being confronted with a full-blown diaper instead. "I can't wear this to school!"

"Of course you can," her mom chuckled. "Everyone at daycare knows you aren't potty trained yet, silly. They won't mind... You aren't ready for for Pull-Ups, remember? We tried, and decided to wait a few more months."

"Daycare?!" Her room had transformed again after she'd slipped back to grade school... She'd barely noticed that, in the morning, it was even worse, even more juvenile. Did they think she was a toddler now?!

She had a lot of time to think, as she suffered her way through a full day of being around gross little kids, everyone clearly thinking she was one of them... There was nothing else at the daycare that could occupy her adult mind, after all. There was one thing in common with all these regressions - she'd bought something before each. And, before all of this had started, she'd told that woman she didn't have the money to pay for her necklace, which her mother didn't even let her wear anymore, saying she might choke herself.

It was much harder, getting her computer or her phone back... It took a few days, during which she at least couldn't buy anything else, which seemed to prove her hypothesis, since she seemed to stay being seen by the world as the same age. Eventually, she was able to make enough of a fuss that her babysitter handed over her phone to entertain her, and, frantically, she dug through her e-mail, trying to find the messages from that woman.

'I'm sorry,' she wrote, as fast as she could, before her babysitter saw what she was doing and took it away. 'I'll send you the money back.'

Except... She couldn't. She had no more money in any of her accounts, not enough to pay for it. She attempted to do it with every card and account she had saved on her Paypal account, and every one came back denied.

She had no choice, really... It wasn't like she was using it to pay for a bunch of stuff she didn't need, although she was already thinking about saving it to her account, just in case she needed it in the future... She knew exactly where her mother kept her extra credit cards, the ones that were there just for a rainy day. And it couldn't get much rainier than this... 

She felt like such a naughty little girl, sneaking into her parents' room, dressed in just her diaper, everyone around her seeming to think she was so young she didn't need to wear anything else. Carefully, she opened up one of her mother's makeup bags, digging through it, looking for the tiny change purse she knew the woman kept inside...

"Honour!" her father's voice made her jump, and, to her horror, her diaper warm. "What are you doing? You know you're not allowed to play with that... You made a huge mess on the walls last time!" 

The spanking she got this time was much lighter, at least, since he thought she was so much younger, but it didn't do much to make it less embarrassing. The next time she made it into their room, the makeup bag was moved, taking the card with it.

She still had one more chance, though. She couldn't pay for the necklace, but she could ship it back... There might not be enough on her account to pay for the jewelry, though surely she could afford a shipping label. It was a few more long, mortifying days before she could pull that off, get into her dad's office without her babysitter noticing. Thankfully, she'd been right, and she was able to find a card she could use for that.

And luck really was on her side, because that was the day her panties were set to be delivered. It felt like so long ago that she'd ordered them... She knew nobody was going to let her wear them now, until this was reversed, but when the deliveryman dropped them off, she could give him the package with her necklace at the same time. It was fate!

She watched out the window in her parents' room anxiously for the rest of the afternoon, since that was the one closest to the road, waiting, the box tucked away out of sight in case the sitter found her there, discovering she wasn't in bed napping like she was supposed to be. Finally, she saw the truck coming, and frantically picked it up, rushing for the door. 

"Whoa!" the girl chuckled, stopping her in her tracks. "Why aren't you in bed, little lady? I know it's fun to meet new people, sweetie, but you need to stay here, okay? I'll take care of it?"

"No!" Honour shook her head, heart pounding. She had other packages on their way, sure, but the sooner she got this done, the sooner she'd be a grown-up again in the world's eyes, and could get out of these icky diapers. Not to mention that if she couldn't convince the girl to let her answer the door now, there was no guarantee she'd be able to do it in the future. "I-I just need to give him this! You can do it if you want, but..."

"Oh, that looks like a fun toy!" the girl smiled. "Is it a little drum? Why don't you play me a little tune while I answer the door, cutie?"

"No!" Honour whined. "It's a package, you idiot!" But the girl just smiled at her and walked towards the door. Honour hurried after her, blushing as she saw the deliveryman in the open door, having to remind herself that he was seeing her as a toddler, and not the fully grown woman she knew she was, that he probably didn't find it odd at all that she was running around in only a diaper. "Here!" she shoved the box at him.

"No, sweetie," the sitter pushed it away. "That's very good, he does bring boxes... But that one's yours, isn't it? He has plenty of his own."

"This needs to be shipped!" Honour fumed. "Look, the label's already on! Just take it!"

"Talkative little thing, isn't she?" he chuckled, giving no indication he could understand her, paying no more mind to her than he would to any baby. Honour gulped, realizing she'd spent more money, buying that label... It hadn't been much, but from the way they were acting, she had a feeling it had been enough to push her back down to a pre-verbal level in their eyes.

"Look at it!" she whimpered, jabbing a finger at the label. 

"Very good," her sitter cooed. "We'll take it to the imaginary post office in a bit, sweetie, after you finish your nap, and I'm sure they'll get it right to scribble lane." She winked at the deliveryman, who waved and walked away, leaving the stunned Honour, and her one hope for getting out of this, behind. Did they not see the thing she'd worked so hard to get, that had sealed her fate? Or, like everything else, had it changed, too, become some piece of construction paper she'd drawn on with crayons to make it look like a package? 

After all, she was just a baby playing pretend now... And, as she was taken back to her room and saw its new transformation, the changing table, crib, and rocking chair there, she had a feeling she wasn't going to have the chance to be seen as anything else until she got old enough to do chores again, and save up her allowance... She could only hope, by then, she hadn't forgotten the truth about herself, and who she really was, because it felt like it was going to take a very long time for her to get back to that point. When she finally did, though, she was definitely going to be more responsible with her money.