Dirty Little Secret - 9 (Patreon)

A blast door slammed shut behind them, the local head of the White Fist gang holding up a remote in his hand.

“Well, now. Glad we found you three. Don’t want anyone running off and calling the rest of the city’s supers,” the gang leader said.

Ethan heard both the ‘girls’ swear under their breath, though he was personally too panicked to manage anything as complex as that. He was cornered. And by a group that included his mother. It was his worst nightmare come true.

“Now, be good little ‘girlies’ and drop the stun batons,” the gang leader said, no doubt sneering under his cloth mask.

“Not a girl!” Ethan found himself blurting.

It seemed his mother’s presence was making his fear of all things feminine flare up worse than it had in some time.

“Mhm, well, at least one of you recognises his reality,” Ethan’s mother said, her cold voice cutting to his very core.

“We all recognise we’re not women,” ‘Mia’ said, carefully placing a stun baton on the ground. “Unlike your poison.”

“Mhm. A minor shortcoming of the filtration effort,” Dr. Fairbanks replied. “But nothing in life is perfect. Especially not in biology… having to rely on men to escape prison, for instance…”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ve all got to make compromises,” the White Fist leader said, before the compound shook slightly. “Is everything packed up so we can leave before they pick this fight up on seismometres and come looking?”

“Everything is packed up, yes,” Dr. Fairbanks replied, “but…”

On the other side of the group another blast door began to close. A few gang members hurried over, rapidly pressing buttons on a control panel, but having no luck.

“What the—” the gang leader started to ask, before a hissing noise drew everyone’s attention up to the ceiling.

What looked like it was originally the fire suppression nozzles were spraying a pink gas. A gas that seemed heavier than air with how it was falling. Ethan found himself inhaling the deepest breath he could, realising what was happening as the White Fist gang stared up in confusion still.

“You men aren’t going anywhere,” Ethan’s mother said as the various gang members began to cough.

“What. You bi—” the head member hissed, before a crack of a stun baton caused him to drop to the ground.

Dr. Fairbanks shook her head slowly. “Pathetic. But what else did I expect from a male.”

Ethan scrambled into a corner, staring at her with fear as he fought his body’s cries to breathe. He hoped against hope that rising CO2 in his veins was better for him than whatever this gas was.

The other men in the room had largely collapsed on the ground, hacking their lungs out by this point, so he suspected he was correct. Well, the other men besides the two collar ‘girls’, whom Dr. Fairbanks pointed her stun baton towards.

“A stun baton to the neck would short circuit those collars of yours, so do be good boys and stay over in the corner with your friend,” she said, her voice dripping with an icy cold. “And advise him to breath it in. It’s less painful that way.”

With that she turned, walking towards the far door, she raised her hand, revealing a small fob in it that caused the door to open. However, it seemed the fire suppression system in the entire compound was spraying gas and no fresh air flooded in the opened door to save them.

Ethan felt his mind growing hazy as he watched his mother leave, almost glad she wasn’t staying to watch him succumb.

“Ethan,” ‘Mia’ hissed in a soft voice, crouching beside him. “You’ve got ‘Julie’ ‘s collar. Put it on.”

His eyes drifted down to see that he was, indeed, still holding the change collar. Another source of stress he hadn’t wanted to process in all this.

“No!” he yelped, before realising he let air out of his lungs.

And worse, gas into them.

He began to cough, lungs feeling like they were burning.

“Please. Ethan,” the blonde asked, steadying his hands and trying to push the collar towards his neck.

He tried to fight it. Every part of the terror his mother had filled him with said that closeness to women was horror. There was no greater closeness than he, himself, and so becoming one was surely the greatest horror of all.

However, despite the trauma, there existed a deeper instinct that didn’t care for terror or fear. Only for life.

That most primal of instincts pushed through the conditioning, shoving the collar onto his neck.

His mind was too foggy from lack of oxygen to work out much else, but ‘Mia’ ’s hands had followed the collar. As soon as it was around his neck it was clasped, and the next moment the blonde’s finger activated it.

Then the change hit, and with it a scream from his terrors. From his conditioning.

Years of memories flooded through his mind. His mother’s efforts to strike terror into his heart. Pain and hunger and sleep deprivation and all the rest. All the things that had been so bad he’d buried them too deep to remember.

Then, however, something else poked through. A memory without pain.

Ethan was a young child running forward with calls of ‘mommy! mommy!’.

The figure of a much younger Dr. Fairbanks turned around, raising an eyebrow as she looked at the child. “Hello, dear. What has you so excited?”

“Ms. Shifter let me borrow her powers!” the child announced, beaming away. “And I got to turn into a girl too! Isn’t that so cool!”

The woman’s eye twitched as she looked down at her child. The sound of footsteps drew both the child and mother’s eyes towards the door and a figure with feminine body language, but otherwise appeared to be a young man barely out of teenage awkwardness.

“I thought they’d just change their hair or something, but… seems little Ry had more substantial motives,” they said with a shy grin.

“Well, when I overheard how you were born a boy I wanted to try too, Ms. Shifter,” the young child replied, before turning back to her mother. “Isn’t it so cool, though, mum? I just need to find a way to do it without borrowing Ms. Shifter’s powers.”

Her mother, however, did not look pleased. Not in the least.

“What’s wrong, mummy?” she asked. “D-do I need to give Ms. Shifter her powers back? I… I asked permission this time…”

Her mother gave a very slow nod. “Give them back right now, Ryan.”

Scared by her mother’s tone, the young girl hurried over, reaching up and grabbing Shifter’s hand to give her her powers back. The older girl transformed back to her feminine form immediately, while looking up at Dr. Fairbanks.

“I swear, I didn’t try to talk Ry into it or anything, if that’s what—”

“Please, just give me and my son a bit of time alone,” Dr. Fairbanks asked, her voice cold.

“S-sorry. If y-you want to talk about things I’m… well, around, obviously,” Shifter said, before hurrying off.

Her mother walked over, closing the door before kneeling down to look her young child in the eyes.

“Ryan, tell me the truth… did Shifter talk you into this?”

What was strange, viewed from the present, was that there was some slight love in Dr. Fairbanks’ eyes then.

That was something that the young child never saw again. Not after replying ‘no, no, no’ until her throat was raw that day.

The crash of everything that happened after hit once more, though this time it made more sense. Why it hadn’t just been torture, but started off as directed torture. An effort at reprogramming to undo her realisation of girlhood, though gradually turning sloppier and messier as her mother went off the rails. Going from a deeply misguided attempt at parenting to a hatred of a wider and wider chunk of humanity.

Building and building until her mother had been caught stockpiling efforts and research to build her virus.

The memories of her childhood, and the powers she’d long suppressed, also explained what her mother had called her so often.

All of it was so much.

Memories buried too deep. A confidence of identity so long forgotten. Yet, now remembering it, how could she deny it? Masculinity had always felt acceptable, but nothing more. It was simply that the alternative was too terrifying to think about.

But now she knew why. Her mother had done it to her. Had built a wall around the deepest part of her heart, having attempted to leave her nothing more than a husk.

It had worked for all those years, but now… now she remembered the joy it had brought and how hard she’d fought her mother’s efforts to pry it away from her. How many years of abuse it had taken to bury.

She wasn’t giving it up again.

“Ethan… Ethan… were we too late?” a soft voice asked.

‘Mia’. Right.

She opened her eyes, pushing herself into a position halfway to sitting. “I’m alive.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” the small blonde said, hugging her.

Had ‘Mia’ shrank?

Or… no. Her own arms had definitely gotten thicker. An amount of muscle she’d never felt comfortable with before.

Dr. Xiang’s explanation about how the collar gave users the body they wanted floated in her mind, though she was surprised to see that this was what she’d been after.

“It’s quite the change,” the other ‘girl’ said. “Most guys don’t change much… or get smaller.”

She nodded, before getting to her feet. “Well, it turns out I’m not a guy…”

“Wait… I—pardon?” ‘Mia’ asked, looking up at her.

“I’d forgotten, but… I’ll explain after I stop my mother,” she replied, rushing off in the direction she’d seen her mother leave.

Oh, sure, she was terrified to see the woman who had tried to—who had broken her as a child. But she also knew more than anyone how evil her mother was, and had to stop her. Somehow.

As she ran, the air was still pink with gas, but it did seem the ventilation system was beginning to clear it out. She was thankful she was less likely to stumble blindly into her mother now that visibility was improving.

Luckily she didn’t have a hard time following the route her mother had taken. With everyone else in the compound slumped on the floor the few open doors were obviously her mother’s work. She found a room that seemed to be a lab of some sort. No doubt where her mother had grabbed everything she needed to start her work somewhere else.

Rushing further down the hallway, she found a large door that led to an elevator shaft. Leaning in, she saw the elevator was still moving at the top, no doubt slow for the sake for protecting delicate lab equipment.

There was also a ladder built into the side of the shaft, tucked away to allow somehow to climb past the elevator. With hope for the abilities of her new form, she hurried to the ladder and began climbing. She doubted she’d reach the top before the elevator did, but it was at least faster than waiting for the elevator to come back.

Climbing felt a bit clumsy as she wasn’t quite adjusted to the new length of her limbs (and perhaps a bit shaky from adrenaline), but she still made steady progress, hurrying as much as felt safe. The elevator has stopped while she was about halfway up, and she tried to hurry faster upon realising that.

It had been a bit of a climb, but she pulled herself up to the top floor in time to find her mother still there. Dr. Fairbanks was leaning over one of the goons at the front door, seeming to take pleasure in the amount of electricity she was driving into him with the shock baton.

“That’s far enough,” she shouted towards her mother, pulling herself to her full height to stare down at the woman who had attempted to steal her very gender from her.

Her mother looked over, not seeming overly concerned until they locked eye contact. Then her mother stared at her like seeing a ghost.

“Ry—Ryan?” her mother asked, confusion in her voice.

Not fear, despite the height and bulk the collar had given her. Just surprise.

“I think I prefer the other name you gave me… Thief,” she replied, narrowing her eyes and hoping she could seem intimidating.

“W-where did you… well, I see all my hard work failed and you’re wearing one of those… collars,” Dr. Fairbanks said, practically spitting the last word. “I suppose that just goes to show that males are a lost cause no matter how much effort you invest…”

With that, her mother dropped the stun baton she’d been carrying, her hand then moving into her pocket, producing a pistol.

“From what I remember, you aren’t bulletproof, so this shou—”

Whatever she was about to say next was interrupted by the ground exploding in a burst of debris.

Slamming to the ground with the various larger chunks of concrete was Ilya. He was coughing and hacking as he struggled to his feet. Unstoppable leapt up a moment later, anger in his eyes.

“Come on! Don’t tell me a little gas has you this out of it!” the monstrous man shouted, lifting Ilya by the shirt. “I want a proper fight!”

Thief stared for a moment, feeling terrified by both Ilya’s raspy breaths and the rage in the eyes of Unstoppable.

He pulled a bony fist back, and, running on all but forgotten instinct, she charged forward. She found herself stumbling into the path of Unstoppable’s fist, hands reaching out to catch it.

And remembering how her draining ability worked just as his fist hit her palms.

A wave of pain shot through her as his fist connected, but it wasn’t from his punch. It was her body absorbing his powers. Powers that included the osteoderms that gave him such incredible armour, now surging across her body.

Unstoppable, for his part, had his eyes filled with fear as he shrank down, returning to his form from before the experiments. Apparently that a reasonably tall and muscular man, but still smaller than either Ilya or her new female form.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Ilya rasped as his feet touched the ground with Unstoppable’s shrinking.

While he was clearly operating on a fraction of his normal strength, it was more than enough to deal with the now depowered villain.

As such, Thief turned to her mother, fighting against a new feral anger that seemed to exist inside her. Apparently another effect of absorbing Unstoppable’s powers.

“Now, Mother… what were you saying about me not being bulletproof?” she growled.

Her mother stared at her for a moment, nodded, and then turned and ran.

She sprang forward, closing the distance between the two of them in a few short strides. Reaching out, she grabbed her mother’s arm, and heard a shriek of pain as she did so.

It was so very hard not to take joy in that, but it wouldn’t exactly be a good first impression with her new career as a superhero to engage in any excessive brutality.

“You deserve so much worse than I’ll be doing to you, I hope you realise that,” she hissed while holding her mother in the air by one arm.

“How many times are you going to ruin my life, you little slime,” Dr. Fairbanks muttered, face still scrunched in pain.

“Don’t even try that!” she hissed, struggling to hold back tears. “You were my mother. You were supposed to protect me from the world! To care for me! To show me love and kindness! And what happened? I realised I was your daughter and you tortured me for it!”

Dr. Fairbanks let out a gasp of pain, Thief realising she’d tightened her grip. Though she found herself with little impulse to loosen it.

“Why!? Why was that so evil about my being a girl to you!? You were a superhero! You protected people! And then you became a monster!”

“I’m a monster? Look at yourself,” her mother hissed.

She glared at her mother, until she found her eyes softening a little. “You’re… you really are just a miserable and awful human being, aren’t you?”

“Those who can see a better world than the one that exists often are,” Dr. Fairbanks replied.

Thief nodded. “Seeing what you’ve become, without you holding power over me… I don’t fear you anymore, but I do despise you.”

“You… I’m your mother!” Dr. Fairbanks hissed.

“… No. You lost the right to call yourself that,” Thief replied, with a nod.

It was a delightful feeling. She had power over Dr. Fairbanks now. She was in charge. And so, she was finally free. Free of the ever present fear her mother could return. Free of the fear of her own gender. Free to be herself and live her own life at last.

“You… what?” the bitter woman asked. “You can’t deny me that!”

“I think she’s more than allowed to, actually,” a familiar female voice called out.

Turning, Thief saw a number of local supers approaching, specifically noticing the Queen of Blades, Dr. Medic, and, the one who had spoken, Shifter.