The New Narnia- Chapter 50: Just Before The Fallout... (Patreon)

Chapter 50: Just Before The Fallout...

History and human nature has shown that addiction is a powerful thing.  People have been brought low by it and their lives, connections, and livelihoods destroyed by it.  Family ceases to matter and gets pushed away.  As does bills, maintenance, jobs, and any form of self-care.  Friends cease to matter too.  An addict’s only friends are other addicts, and the relationship is not a real friendship but built entirely around the shared addiction.  When you’re an addict, the only thing that matters is getting that fix and experiencing that high, and only the other addicts understand it like you do. Your addiction is the center of your life- your god- and the closest people to you, the only ones who are close to you at all are those who also worship at the altar of the flame, the pill, the straw, the bottle, or the needle.

Crack houses, opium dens, and the places where the addicted congregate in secret are often filthy, unsanitary shrines of grime and disrepair, yet the worshippers go there anyways.  They don’t mind the stench.  They disregard the monsters guarding the doors and pushing the drugs.  They happily pass out among the rat feces, secretly accepting that waking up hours later covered in bugs or worse is a distinct possibility.  

Their addiction changes their reality.  Granted, it wasn’t in the same way that Tommy’s reality had been changed. Memories get altered but not reconstructed.  People on the outside don’t look at the afflicted and think of them as cute.  If financial change occurs it is a net negative, and the prospects that they’ll stay with their family becomes infinitely lessened, not secure.  

But Tommy’s reality and the reality of your average meth head had a surprising amount of overlap.  To both, there was a distinct before and after the addiction set in.  To both, there was just enough guilt so as to create a tinge of cognitive dissonance but not nearly enough to stop.  To both, there was the intellectual side of their brain that knew full well that no long term good could come from their thrills and the emotional side overpowering it just looking to maintain or elevate.  To both, it wasn’t that their lack of agency, their diminished future prospects, that they looked a combination of disgusting, pitiful, or ridiculous, or that they’d be spending more time wallowing in their own urine and feces than many their age would consider acceptable hadn’t occurred to them.  It was just that their own perception and values had been altered to the point that none of that was a deal breaker.

Tommy was an addict.  Instead of the needle, the flame, or the pill, he worshipped at the altar of the changing table, car seat, and crib.  The bottle he worshipped was a different one than normal but he worshipped all the same, and sometimes he didn’t even need that.  

There was a thrill in being a baby that Tommy never would have anticipated beforehand.  He loved  the feeling of having Mommy dress him first thing in the morning, her voice nothing but happiness. He sighed in contentment at the security and ritual of being strapped into a car seat that held him and cushioned him like a recliner and hugged him and kept him safe.

He exalted in being breastfed; the tenderness and warmth of feeling Mommy’s heartbeat as he filled himself up and she gently hummed or stroked the back of his head and he’d gently doze if not outright fall asleep in her arms.  Bottle feedings in her lap didn’t quite make that cut, but he still had the closeness and tenderness that he thrived on.  Juice bottles and sippy cups hit a different kind of sweet spot in that he was allowed to toss or roll or leave them totally unattended and just waddle or crawl away as soon as his thirst was properly quenched. No putting in the sink or tossing in the trash.  Clean-up and disposal was no longer Tommy’s problem.  He didn’t even have to put away his toys.

Speaking of clean up and disposal, Tommy absolutely reveled in having his diaper changed.  Having Mommy tower over him and undo the tapes on his diaper, leaving him half naked and vulnerable, crossing his ankles and lifting them into the air to gently clean him and caress his newly sensitive skin, then to lovingly throw away his mess and replace it with a new diaper just so he could do it all over again.  Knowing that he’d do it all over again, sooner, not later.  It was an odd sensation, to be so completely vulnerable, and exposed.  It was a kind of strange take on that trope in mobster movies where a powerful person flexes their muscle by letting someone else shave them. That intimacy, that vulnerability where they could expose themselves to getting their throat cut with no fear of it happening because of the amount of control they had over the man or woman holding the straight razor.  The feeling was the same, yet no Sweeney Todd came to slit his throat.

Yet supposedly, Tommy had no power. He was ‘just a baby’.  Just a baby?  Yeah right.  With Great power came great responsibility.  That may have been true, but it certainly wasn’t a one-to-one ratio.  Tommy had had next to no power in his old life, and tons of responsibility. Now, at the cost of giving up what little power he’d felt he had, the weight of all that responsibility was being taken off his shoulders.  He was losing the back brace but he didn’t have to deadlift pianos either.

For the first time in his life, Tommy felt like life was all about him.  He was the center of everyone’s world, even Katy.  She let him win when playing a memory match game; actually let him win. Her attention span had been greatly reduced, but it wasn’t reduced enough for her to flip over two frogs then go “I mean…” and then ‘accidentally’ put the second one back and choose the card next to it.  

When Mommy checked his diaper and declared Tommy wet, Katy leapt to her feet, ran up stairs and brought back down a fresh diaper and wipes.  She positively glowed when Mommy had patted her on the head and called her a ‘good big sister.  Tommy got to be the baby of the family, Katy got to feel helpful and smart despite all the remedial classes she was now in, and Mommy took care of them both.

A dirty little thought nagged at Tommy; that he hadn’t saved his sister from going further down the rabbit hole as much as he’d saved the spotlight for himself.  He didn’t want to have to share bedtime or bathtime or bottle time or changing time with his sister.  He’d had to share everything with her his whole life.  If getting regressed was a treat, couldn’t he have it so he wasn’t splitting something fifty-fifty with her just this once?   It was hardly a secret that Katy was still getting diapered at night.  When he’d sneak by, he’d sometimes hear her moaning into her ‘nighttime only’ pacifier while she masturbated.
She was getting enough, right? Right.  This was fair, right? Right.

But Tommy didn’t want fair.  Like any good addict, he wanted more.  He wanted more than the booster seat at the dinner table, he wanted a highchair like he got at the daycare’s lunch.  He craved more than the toddler bed with the single low rail. He wanted a crib like he was put in during the daycare’s scheduled nap time.  Even with a changing mat on top of his bedroom dresser, Tommy was growing to resent the extra steps of Mommy having to constantly open drawers and root around for a new Huggies or Pampers or a pack of wipes like it was a dirty little secret?  Why not just make it a full on changing table with stacks of fresh white diapers at the ready with a wipe warmer on top and an alcove containing powders, creams, and oil?  Why not live the best life that most people couldn’t remember and he was almost certain he never got?

The daycare was Tommy’s own personal crack den, and in less than a week, he’d become completely numb that it’s extra-dimensional door was accessed by going to Scrumpton High.  No shame, embarrassment, or regrets.  His former Alma Mater, for once, actually felt like something of a nurturing mother instead of a place of dread.  For the first time since he could remember, Tommy didn’t dread seeing that old brick building. Once he even waved at a passing Trevor Macintosh, on his way to breakfast and got a smirk and a thumbs up right back.

Logically, Tommy should have been humiliated, kicking and screaming all the way from his toddler bed to the entrance of the daycare.  He should have been hiding his face in the nape of his mother’s neck whenever he saw someone he recognized from his old life.  He should have been trying to hide his diaper and yank down the t-shirt that wouldn’t cover it.  He should have hid in the corner of a room and maintained mental exercises or formulated possible escape scenarios.  He should have been pawing and clutching at the front of his Pampers everytime he wet himself or sat firmly on his heels trying not to poop.  He should have erupted into rage and embarrassed tears when he failed and insisted that he was potty trained or a big boy even as a daycare worker secured him and went for the wipes.  Not even a month ago the most logical thing to do would be to jerk his head if someone tried to spoon or bottle feed them, most likely smearing everything on his shirt and bib and rattled the bars of whatever crib they plopped him down into until he passed out from physical and emotional exhaustion.

But Tommy was an addict.  His memory hadn’t been altered like Mommy.  His perception of who he was and had always been hadn’t been altered like Katy.  But his worldview had inexorably shifted so that none of the things he was experiencing- condescension, lack of agency, lack of privacy, embarrassing wardrobe, incontinence- were dealbreakers.   If anything, they were bonuses.

It’s why he kept waking up in his toddler bed in the middle of the night, hoping he heard the chiming of clock bells. He was a kid waiting for Santa to come but every day was December 24th.  He was an adventurer marking time till his final adventure.  He was a junkie looking for his next big fix.  

Presently, he was passing the time with the only other person in the world who could understand him, (but really did a guy need any more than one?)

“So what do you want to do today, bud?” Charlie asked.

Tommy sat down on the carpet next to his friend.  “I don’t know.  I’m kind of in a mood, you know?”

“Yeah, ruts happen...a lot.”  Charlie looked around. “Sometimes you just gotta grit your teeth and make due.”

“Was that a poop joke?” Tommy asked.

“Not intentionally,” Charlie chuckled.  “Kind of a stretch.  Not funny.”

“But was it?”

“Kinda…” Charlie admitted. “I guess. You wanna play with blocks and knock them down?”

Tommy thought about it. “Naw. No Kaiju today. What about Spider-Man? We get in the bouncers and or the swings and-”

“Everythings’ got bucket seats and harnesses,” Charlie held out the palm of his hand.  “Better to wait for your birthday or see if you can sucker your mom into a trampoline or a bouncy castle or something. Then we can take turns being Peter Parker.”

“Or Miles Morales.”

“Who?”

“Oh yeah...you probably don’t know about Miles. Into the Spider-Verse isn’t G.”  It wasn’t a tease, just a statement of fact. Charlie hadn’t been part of the target audience for non-Disney flicks for a long time. “He’s pretty cool.  Spider-Man from a different dimension. He can turn invisible and shock somebody by touching them.”

“How is that a spider power?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy admitted, “But it’s a good movie.”     A sudden realization  “Wait. How would you get to play on the  trampoline if it I got my mom to buy me one.”

Charlie didn’t seem to be making the connection. “She can still understand you, right?”

“More or less, yeah.”

“So get a trampoline or a bouncy house.  Then invite me over.”

“I don’t even know where you live,” Tommy said. “I don’t even know your mom’s phone number.”

Charlie arched an eyebrow. “Dude. We’re neighbors.”

If Tommy hadn’t already been slightly wet… “What?”

“I live next door to you, dummy.” Charlie laughed good naturedly. “I literally saw your house pop into existence.”

“You’re shitting me!” Tommy gasped.

A passing daycare worker patted him on the shoulder. “Tommy...we don’t say those words here.”

“Sorry,” Tommy didn’t even look up.  “You’re kidding me!” he corrected himself.

“Better.”

Charlie shook his head. “Not unless somebody else got their history rewritten at about the same time as you and made a fancy ass house pop up right next to mine.”

Tommy was slightly jealous that Charlie could still curse freely, but only slightly.  “Whoah!  Then how come I never see you or your mom in the parking lot or whatever?”

Lazily, the more infantilized of the duo rolled over onto his back.  “I don’t know.  Everybody gets picked up and dropped off one at a time, even if it’s just by like...five minutes or something.  Malacus or that lady that runs this place doesn’t want the grown-ups seeing certain things I guess.”

“Like what?”

“We’re the only two people in here that talk more than a two year old,” Charlie explained. “But do you think English is the only language that gets spoken?”

That was enough for Tommy to connect the dots.  As if in confirmation, he strained his ears and thought he heard bits of murmured coos in what sounded like French, Spanish, and bits of German.  Maybe some Chinese or Japanese?  Tommy was far from bilingual, but he knew enough to be able to pick out caretakers cooing in what must have been various afflicted’s mother tongues.

“Ooooh.  Global scale posing as a local operation.”

“Got it in one, my dude.  Can’t let anybody know what’s going on, so it’s a massive game of hide and seek.”

“Oh,” Tommy held his head a little higher. “There’s an idea. Hide and seek.”  He looked out among the piles of toys, nooks and crannies, and general throng of babified zombies (or were they zombified babies), it’d be a regular Where’s Waldo.  

Charlie seemed to sense similar possibilities.  “Okay, but you’re it first.”

Tommy balked. “No way.  It was my idea. You’re it first.”

Charlie rolled over to his knees and very slowly climbed up to his feet.  His knees were locked and even though his feet were more than shoulder length apart, he had to hold his arms out shakily to his sides like he was balancing on a high wire.  “You see this?” Charlie said.  “This is about my lim-” he fell back on his tush before he could finish the sentence.  “-it.  No way am I going to outrun you back to home base.”

“Why not just not have a homebase?” Tommy suggested.  “We’ll do hide and seek without the tag element.  Count to a hundred, I pick a spot and stay hidden until you find me or yell that you give up. Then it’ll be my turn to find you.

Charlie seemed to mull it over with more serious consideration than a two person game of hide and seek normally merited.  He seemed to be waying options and possibilities, like he was searching for a loophole or trying to see a trick that Tommy had laid for him in the wording of the rules.  That kind of paranoia was something that Tommy respected in a way.  

“Okay,” Charlie said. “Deal...but when it’s my turn you count to two-hundred. I’m slower.”

“One-hundred fifty.”

“Done.”  Still sitting with legs splayed, Tommy covered his eyes. “Aaaaand, one-Mississippi; two-Mississippi; three-Mississ-”

Barefoot and crinkling, Tommy trotted away to find a good hiding spot.  “Pile of stuffies?” He muttered to himself. “No. Cardboard brick blocks? Definitely not. Under a crib? No, some adultish thing will drag me out.  The tiny arts and crafts tables? Maybe…” It was possible that a daycare worker construct might humor him and hide him.  It was just as possible that they’d point Charlie in the right direction tinking it was ‘cute.   “What about…?” The idea came to him in a flash.

A Toy Bin!  At not quite Tommy’s ten o’clock, there was a big empty bin plastic bin with dolls and action figures figures scattered around it. It wasn’t a heavy wooden chest, more like giant opaque tupperware; the junk drawer equivalent of toy storage.  The kind of thing that’s purpose was to hold whatever got crammed in it.  It looked empty enough that Tommy could fit in it, light enough that Tommy could tip it over crawl in and tip it back up, and tall enough that might not think to look inside.  “PERFECT!”

Tommy quickly put his plan to action:  Tilt. Climb. Rock. Tiltback. Tommy tucked his knees under him and covered his head like he was doing a tornado drill.  “And now we play the waiting game,” Tommy whispered to himself.

It turned out that the waiting game kind of sucked.  Long after the time when one-hundred-Missisippis should have been counted, Tommy heard nothing coming from outside his open plastic casket save the occasional rattling of hard plastic on hard plastic, the occasional tromping steps at the very edge of his hearing and babbles and coos from other shrunken and regressed people who were otherwise far too old to need a daycare.  There was no sound of Charlie’s calls, either in searching or giving up.

The former highschool senior was nervous at first, then when he realized that since he wasn’t allowed to run away, that there wasn’t much of a point in being nervous.  He’d either be found or he wouldn’t.  To pass the time he started counting to himself.  That got boring at around three-hundred-ninety-one-Mississippi so he switched to singing little songs to himself.  Nothing that would draw attention to himself, he was thinking the rhythms and melodies more than producing them, but it was better than nothing

Sometime around the third rendition of ‘Sincerely Me’, Tommy stopped because of a certain familiar fullness in his bottom.  “Gotta poop,” he heard himself whisper.  He was already pushing before he’d said the last phoneme.  Automatically he shifted his legs and lifted his bottom just enough to let himself go, feeling his bladder tinkle out ahead of the solid mass in the back of him.

Afraid of a kind of echo, Tommy shoved his thumb into his mouth to muffle his own grunting.  Meanwhile muffled farts came out of his backside as a solid load entered into the back of Tommy’s non-pants.

The sucking sensation got another level to it, Tommy decided.  He liked it.  The feeling of sucking with one end and pushing with the other..  He wished he had a bottle so that he could fill his stomach and his diaper at the same time.

The naughty idea of Mommy holding him, breastfeeding him while he messed caused his skin to tingle all over and he closed his eyes and bit his thumb.  He would have promised himself to try that sometime, but the timing involved would have required young master Dean to be potty trained.  And Tommy definitely wasn’t potty trained.  Not anymore.  He’d just have to settle with the fact that with a lifetime ahead of him, it would inevitably occur.


The smell of his mess soon filled the open plastic casket.  Everyone likes their own brand, so they say, but even to Tommy the smell was quickly becoming un pleasant.  The space was cramped enough that it was already less than comfortable to breathe.  The added methane of Tommy’s mess was only making it worse.  To complicate matters, Tommy had gotten himself stuck in his shifting while shitting and now his head was firmly positioned beneath his padded ass.  The odor, it seemed, sank instead of lifted, and to reposition himself would threaten to rock or outright tilt over his once-clever hiding place. A seemingly empty plastic bin rattling around or falling over would give the game away, and Tommy was feeling nothing if not competitive.

Besides, Tommy was an addict.  Having to stew in his own mess was a price he was willing to justify for making hide-and-seek his most strenuous activity.  Diapers just made hide and seek easier.

Not easy enough, though.  Two very grown-up hands grabbed Tommy by the waist and plucked him straight out of his own hiding spot.  “Gotcha!”

“Hey!” Tommy squealed.  “I was hiding ther-!”  He stopped when he saw the green and blue eyes smiling back at him.  “Oh…”

“Did my good little baby develop a naughty streak?” The Nanny asked.  “Trying to hide from me?”

“No,” Tommy said.  “I was just playing a game with Charlie!”  Dangling by the armpits, he was being carried somewhere.

“I wasn’t talking about that,” she laughed.  “Someone came to play the other night, and it wasn’t you.”  She laid Tomy down on a changing table and pulled the strap over him.  “Took me ages to find their Mommy and give them directions.”

Tommy lifted his head up off the padded mat.  “What?!”

“I’m talking.”

“Sorry.”

The god-thing started changing Tommy, and though her tone was every bit as motherly and playful as Mommy’s, what she talked about wasn’t quite.  “So poopy, you made such a mess, yes you did!  But I cleaned it up, don’t worry!  I liked meeting your Amanda.  She’s a real cutie.  Super easy to mold.  She barely had anything left in her.”  She finished wiping Tommy and tossed the old balled up nappy away.  “She was a very yummy snack and I’m going to enjoy taking care of both of you, but don’t think I forgot about our deal.”

“Deal?”

“You let me in on your little secret on why you’re brain isn’t regressing as fast as your body,” she chirped.  “If you don’t, Katy will start playing here too, and your free trial will end.  Oops. I see a rash starting to form.”

Tommy hadn’t forgotten about that part of his pact, but he’d wanted to. “Free trial?”

“Walking as good as you do. Grown-ups can understand you.  Keep me waiting much longer and it’s back up to Pull-Ups and a mother who just knows that you’ll be able to use the toilet some day...if only you work a little harder.”   It was impossible to tell, not having eyes down there, and the buttocks is not the most sensitive of body parts, but Tommy almost swore that the Nanny was using the rash cream to write on him.

“Come to me tonight when I call,” she said.  “And be ready to spill your secrets.  If not, we’re back to square one, little boy.  It’ll be all baby or nothing.  No more cherry-picking...this isn’t the Bible.”

The amount of guilt and pressure Tommy felt then, just counterbalanced all the safety and security his brain was feeding him as the front of the diaper was brought up and tucked in. The fact that he had yet to develop a plot or back up plan to this sweet deal left a bitter taste in his brain even as the diaper itself took shape around his hips.

Tommy was an addict.  Addicts were not known for their long-term planning.  Adaptation and ability to improvise and lie? Yes.  Long-term planning? Not so much.

“Just think it over,” Nanny whispered, quite seductively.  “Play and have fun today.  We’ll play later tonight.”  She picked him up, patted the back of his new Pampers and gave him a kiss on the top of his head.  Tommy wasn’t sure what emotion empowered the shiver most: Fear or temptation?

The young man had closed his eyes involuntarily.  When they opened a thirty something year old crawler was smirking. “Found ya!”

The younger of the two pinched himself and blocked the previous two minutes out of his mind.  “Lucky!”

“Luck had nothing to do with it, kid,” Charlie grinned.  “I knew you’d eventually get picked up and brought here.  I’ve been waiting.  He blushed and looked away.  “Got changed twice and checked I don’t know how many times, but the gambit paid off.”

Tommy felt the a blush of frustration rise in his cheeks. “What?! You cheated!”

“You said I had to find you and you couldn’t run away.  Never said I had to find you in your hiding spot.”

“You son of a-...” Tommy slapped his forehead and shook his head, laughing quietly to himself.

“Age and treachery beats youth and zeal every time, my friend. Age and treachery always wins.”

Treachery.  Why did he have to say treachery? It only brought back his current dilemma, his one shining beacon of guilt.  What would he do?  If he told Nanny the secret of the cave within the clock, was there a way she could undo the bit of insulation he and Charlie had stumbled upon?  Would she have a reason to even hold up her end of the deal and spare Katie or give Tommy his toddler-ish upgrade?  If she were somehow bound to Tommy by their agreement, did that agreement also protect Charlie, or could Charlie end up speaking in baby babble by this time tomorrow?

Like morphine wearing off, Tommy very much felt the terrible ache of responsibility settling back onto his fragile frame.  Responsibility for no less than three lives and Tommy felt as powerless as he had back in Math class.

“Um...Charlie.  I need to tell you something.”

Charlie pointed over Tommy’s shoulder “Who’s the new kid?” He asked.  “She looks...familiar.”

Tommy stood up and turned around.  Being carried in by another adult-like automaton, wearing a pure white romper with frills at the ends and her hair in a top knotted ponytail, was Amanda.  She lacked the chubby cheeks of youth, but kept the wide eyed innocence and sense of wonder in her expression.  Her one-piece outfit did not conceal her womanly breasts but it also did nothing to try to hide the bulky padding between her legs.

She was put down close to the changing table, and looked around much like a kid in a candy store.  Her eyes were not quite an addict’s gaze but a more unknowing, hungry gaze.  A babe lost in the woods yet too ignorant and innocent to know the danger it was in.

With big, waddling steps she rotated, the bulk of the diaper and a newfound lack of coordination hindering her.  “Tommm...…?”

“Uh oh,” Charlie grumbled.  “She’s coming right for us.”

“And she remembers my name…”  Tommy gulped.

Amanda wobbled and collapsed onto her knees.  “Yeah...I know that look.” Charlie whispered.

“Tommmmmmmmmeeee?” She said, “Tomm-mee? Tom-Tom-Tom-Tom! MEEEEEEE!”

Tommy sighed.  “Hey Amanda. Good to see you.”