The New Narnia- Chapter 60: Finale (Patreon)

Chapter 60- Finale
And now the end is here

And so I face that final curtain

My friend I'll make it clear

I'll state my case, of which I'm certain

I've lived a life that's full

I traveled each and every highway

And more, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Regrets, I've had a few

But then again too few to mention

I did what I had to do

I saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course

Each careful step along the byway

And more, much, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Yes, there were times I'm sure you knew

When I bit off more than I could chew

But through it all, when there was doubt

I ate it up and spit it out

I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way

For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself then he has naught

Not to say the things that he truly feels

And not the words of someone who kneels

Let the record shows I took all the blows and did it my way

(Presently…)

Tommy felt like hell.  Everything ached and the world outside his Mom’s van seemed detached and oversaturated. Every sound was an echo. Every sight was a mirage. It didn’t fully hit him that he’d had his diaper changed that morning until he was being fed cut up waffles in his high chair and the fresh dusting of baby powder mingled with the scent of butter and syrup.  That’s what happens when one doesn’t sleep for close to forty-eight hours.

Charlie and him had been planning. Katy too.  Actually, his dear twin hadn’t planned as much as was a vital part of the plan.  She’d helped. She’d had a particular set of skills necessary for all of this to go down and only her willing participation had gotten them this far.

“We’re here,” Mommy yawned, as they pulled into the Scrumpton High parking lot. “Bright and early.”

“Yaaaaay!” Katy bounced in her seat, and clapped her hands like a toddler, with her arms outstretched, elbows locked and her fingers splayed out and left and right hands mirroring each other as they collided.   Whether by bluff or legitimate regression, Katy hadn’t reached that point this morning.  “School! School! School! School!”  

That earned her a glare from Mommy. “Young lady, I don’t want to hear it from you right now.”

“Am I in trouble?”

Mommy’s nostrils flared and she closed her eyes.  “We are going to have a long discussion after school today, about why it’s wrong to play with Mommy’s things, and why it’s wrong to take off your Goodnites in bed, and why you shouldn’t go pee-pee in your pants right before the school bus comes to pick you up.”

Katy repeated the question. “Am I in trouble?” Was she baiting Mommy or did she really not understand things anymore beyond actions and consequences.

“That depends,” Mommy said.

“On what?” Katy asked.

“On whether or not you need to be in trouble to stop doing it or whether I need to change things around the house so that you don’t have a choice.”

Katy’s face was a blank slate. “Am I in trouble?”

“You need to spend part of today wondering whether or not you want me to trust you, young lady.”

His sister slouched down in her seat, shrinking, trying to appear smaller.

“Come on,” Mommy snipped as she cut the engine and walked around to Tommy’s baby seat.  “Let’s go.” It was the closest thing to a genuine rebuke and lapse in patience that Mary Dean had shown since her life history, financial assets, and personality had been effectively retconned. One would have to develop a whole lot of patience and nuance if their children weren’t going to develop past toddlerhood and very early elementary school respectively but you still wanted to treat them like people.

His very thoughts feeling detached and bleary, Tommy briefly wondered if Mommy’s personality alteration had been a direct result of Malacus babying him or just a side effect.  Had Mary Dean’s nature been changed or was this newer, more nuanced, more patient Mommy the result of a woman whose needs had been met to the point where having two perpetual children was not a physical or financial strain?

One way or another, Tommy supposed, he’d find out. Or not.  It was very likely that after today the answer wouldn’t matter.   

Katy got out of her booster seat, but was smart enough not to point out how she’d done it all by herself.  She’d done a lot all by herself this morning, most of it wasn’t pleasant. Mommy got Tommy out and put him on her hip.   Heart pounding, Tommy leaned in and gave her a hug, just in case he wasn’t able to later.

“Someone’s affectionate,” Mommy cooed.  “I love you too, Tommy.”  She side eyed her daughter, who seemed absolutely devastated.  “I love you too, Katy. But that doesn’t mean I’m not upset with your behavior. A person can feel more than one way.”

His sister seemed to understand that.  “I know…”  She froze and let out a gasp.

Mommy’s face fell.  “You didn’t again, did you?”

“Where’s the diaper bag?”  Katy asked. Tommy’s pulse picked up and started hammering in his neck.  He needed that diaper bag!  

Mommy opened the front passenger door and gestured to the pastel bag sitting in a lump.  “Right there,” she said. “Tommy’s daycare has enough diapers and snacks for him.  So I’m leaving it here.”

Fuck. No sleeping for that long and the plan was going to come undone because Tommy had suggested a stupid hiding spot. Hypothetically, they could do the plan later, but could he last that long with Malacus’s ruler continually taking an unhealthy interest in them?  Or would he slip up and break before then?

Katy bolted and dug into the bag.  Mommy tried to let out a question or a warning or something, but the girl was out before she had a chance.  “I wanted to give Tommy this,” she said. From out of the bag she produced a plastic purple duo tang folder. It was anything but brand new, and covered in surface scratches from pens and pencils, and pockmarked with splotches of paint or stray crayon and markers.  “I wanted to give Tommy this,” she said, “Here you go, baby brother.”

Mommy took the folder instead, and thumbed through it. As expected the folder pockets were crammed with coloring pages, blank pieces of printer paper, and if Katy could be counted on, two or three vital pieces of hardware. “Why do you want him to have this?” Mommy asked. She then thought to add, “It’s very sweet.”

“I have worksheets that I have to do in school,” Katy said. “I wanted to give Tommy some to play with.”

That woke Tommy right up to the point where he almost bit a hole in his tongue.  Mommy too, unfortunately.  She riffled through the papers again and Tommy felt his mouth go dryer than a fresh Pampers.  “You didn’t put any of your real homework in here did you?”

“Nuh-uh,” Katy said. She waggled her head and her pigtails brushed her nose. “I mean no ma’am.  Tommy’s just a baby so I thought we could work him up to coloring.”  She reached up and pointed to one of the blank sheets.  “I borrowed some of your printer paper so he could scribble just in case the pictures were too hard for him.” She paused for a second. “Sorry.”

In yet another alternate timeline, one with fewer diapers but more money, Tommy suspected that Katy would have fit completely in with Amanda and the other popular girls at school. Even regressed, Katy was a goddamn genius at reading people.

“Awww,” Mommy said. “That’s incredibly nice of you, big sister.”  She patted Katy on the top of her head.  “Why didn’t you just put this in your backpack and give it to him?”

Katy masterfully avoided eye contact, feigning embarrassment instead of not wanting to be called out on a lie.  “I thought I was gonna take the school bus today but I hadda accident. I wanted it to be a surprise so I hid it in the diaper bag first.”  

Bam!  Perfect!  If nothing else, Tommy was secure in the knowledge that his twin big sister probably wouldn’t be in trouble when she was picked up from school.  Mommy handed Tommy the folder and he gripped the thing to his chest like it was his lifeline.  “You know,” Mommy told her, “you really can be a sweet and thoughtful big sister when you want to be.”  Truer words had not been said that morning.  “What do you say, Tommy?”

It took a second for Tommy to realize he was being talked to. The lag in response time hammered home the idea that he was just a little tyke who still had much to learn, manners included.  “Thank you,” he finally said.   He meant it too.

Tommy felt along the outside of the folder, feeling the slight lump in the bottom pocket, and sighed in relief. So far, so good.

“Can you be a big girl and get the rest of the way to school by yourself?” Mommy asked.  It was a legitimate question.  The daycare’s entrance in Scrumpton was near the very back of the school building.  It was a wonder Tommy had never noticed it previously. Extra-dimensional spaces were funny that way.

 Someone in Katy’s mindset might not make it to the front where the real students congregated before class, especially if there was a little voice in their head urging them to do everything they could to end up in said daycare.  “Yes ma’am,” Katy said. “I’ll be fine.”

Tommy snuck in a nod of approval, and Katy gave both of them a hug and trotted off.

When she was just a fading backpack on the horizon, Mommy bobbed Tommy awake. He’d been asleep with his eyes open and hadn’t realized it.  “Okay, sweetie. That was a rough morning.  Ready to go see Charlie and Amanda and all your other friends?”

Tommy swallowed and nodded his head.  “Yeah. Let’s go.”


************************************************************************************************************
(Much Earlier That Morning...)

WHAM!

Everything seems louder before dawn. There are no birds tweeting or cars driving. Crickets might chirp, but they instantly quiet themselves at the slightest noise, fearing predators.

WHAM!

There’s no sounds of lawn mowers or leaf blowers from old retired people or landscapers who are trying to get in the bulk of their work before the sun gets too hot. Beyond the sounds of raindrops and thunder, there was nothing going on outside the house that could be heard within the house.  It wasn’t raining or thundering that night.

WHAM!

There’s no television on or people talking to one another.  No shuffling footsteps. No dryers or dishwashers rumbling, or microwaves.   There’s even less ambient electric noise than usual, because almost all the lights are off.

WHAM!

It’s so peaceful.  So quiet.  So still. Like a graveyard for the living.  

WHAM!

Tommy wished he lived in New York, or Los Angeles, or Las Vegas: Some crowded city where the lights never turned off and a guaranteed third of the massive population was awake at any given time.

WHAM!

Or somewhere out in the wild where there were bolder, nastier animals to worry about. Things that roared and growled and snarled and the creatures of the night gave zero fucks about.

WHAM!

He would have settled for the shitty apartment complex that he used to live in with the shitty borderline alcoholic mom who could be mistaken for a corpse with how little she stirred or cared to open up her bedroom door.  The constant fritzing of faulty wiring, rattling of pipes, and thin walls that could barely keep out the sound of a breeze would have provided ample distraction to cover up Tommy’s tinkering.

WHAM!

But no. The magic of Malacus had to make everything cushy and not just Tommy’s underwear.  He wasn’t just a baby now.  He was a well-off baby. He was a perpetually privileged rich kid. Only the best for him.  

WHAM!

That was probably another result of Annie’s influence. Let people live like little princes and princesses the way she never got to.  It also made the allure of the land on the other side of the clock seem less dangerous.  Being a baby when your parents literally couldn’t afford you was a downside to anybody with a conscience. Being able to actually afford a literal lifetime supply of diapers made it that much easier to take the bait until you were in too deep.

WHAM!

But goddamn it if Tommy wouldn’t have minded a less quiet place for him to practice amateur skullduggery.  Some place louder, in a house where every little click click click of the screwdriver and tap tap tap of the hammer didn’t resonate like a friggin’ shotgun.

“Tommy,” Katy yawned, rubbing her eyes.  “Whatcha doin’?”

Tommy looked up.  He was on the carpet of his bedroom. Laid out in front of him were two or three diapers he’d opened up and connected together with the velcro tabs, a hammer, scissors and screwdriver he’d snatched from the kitchen junk drawer, a tiny black ink cartridge, blank white labeling stickers, and a certain flower vase.  “Nothing, sis. Go back to bed.”

“You don’t look like you’re doing nothing,” Katy said. She was sounding more and more awake and dangerously curious.  That was not good.  What if Mommy heard them talking?  Surely whatever supermom she’d been turned into would instinctively recognize their voices. The only thing Tommy trusted not to wake anyone was a magical grandfather clock with a wormhole inside it; and the Dean household was fresh out of those.

Tommy sighed but his throat was so dry that his uvula rattled and the whole thing came out as half a grunt and half a cough.  He wanted to sleep. His body was begging him. A voice deep inside him, one that sounded almost exactly like him, was ordering him to stop this nonsense, plug the baby monitor back in, climb into his crib and try this again when he wasn’t so fucking exhausted.  He’d heard that voice before.  It was the same one that had told him that everything would get better and better as long as he kept playing silly games and peeing his pants.

‘Better’ didn’t mean good.  ‘Better’ didn’t mean just.  ‘Better’ didn’t mean right. That voice always tended to flare up whenever Tommy felt tempted to just let go of responsibility and give up the fight.  He’d already lost the game of being a teenager and being an adult was going to be worse, so just give up the ghost and go back to a simpler time that never really existed for him.

He didn’t know whether that voice was put there by Annie, or whether it just got louder because of her.  Didn’t matter. Tommy wasn’t listening right now.  Thomas had work to do and he knew that if he didn’t do it tonight he’d trick himself into never doing it.  

“Okay,” Tommy admitted. “I’m not doing nothing. But I can’t talk right now.” He put down the hammer and screwdriver.  “Sorry I woke you up.”

“You didn’t wake me up,” Katy said. “I hadda bad dream.  Miss Annie was in it. Except she was a little girl an’ Mommy’s age and my age all at the same time.”

That woke Tommy up enough.  “It was just a dream, though, right?” He stood up and crinkled over to her, not caring about how his diaper was starting to sag. Nighttime diapers weren’t designed to be toddled around in overmuch.  “You didn’t go through like…a clock or under your bed or in a closet or anything, right?”

Katy rubbed her eyes.  “Just a dream,” she said.

“Do you wear diapers?” Tommy said with far too much intensity.

His sister’s reply was tinged with bitterness. “Not like you get to,” she said. “Member?”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “Maybe it was just a dream.”  Dream or not, Tommy wasn’t going to sleep, now.  Too close to the finish line and yet so so far away.

The lights weren’t on, only the nightlight provided anything to work with, and Tommy expected it provided even less than a candle.  Both siblings’ eyes had adjusted enough.  “Why do you have your diapers like that?” Katy asked.

“In case I make a mess,” Tommy whispered.

“You gotta wear ‘em silly.”

If he weren’t so exhausted and afraid Tommy might have smacked his forehead. “I mean in case I spill something.” He guided her over to his makeshift workstation on the floor.  “See this?” He held up the ink cartridge he’d managed to snag from Mommy’s room.  Her home office was in there, too, including the printer. It was a small mercy that Katy was still so demanding and attention starved.  

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m trying to open it but I don’t want any ink to get on the floor.”  The diapers were the best he could come up with. If anything spilled, Tommy was gambling that he could toss the ruined diapers and they’d go unnoticed.  Better than risking an ink stained towel.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve got…” his voice was getting dangerously loud in his frustration. “I already told you why,” he whispered. “This is something I gotta do.”

“Cuz you wanna be big?”

“Yes!” That didn’t feel right. “Well…no. But…it’s complicated.”

Katy understood. “You wanna, but you can’t.”

“Yes,” Tommy said. Finally their last conversation was catching up to her.

“Cuz being a baby is bad…”

“No. I-”

Katy corrected herself before he had the chance.  “For some people…”

“Yes.  And it’s not fair that some people have to be babies when they don’t want to.”

“Can I help?”

“Yes,” Tommy said again. “You can help by being real quiet and making sure that Mommy doesn’t wake…hey!” Bigger, quicker, more coordinated hands picked up the ink cartridge and layed it on the middle diaper. Tommy tried to stop her, but Katy was too fast. With a few surprisingly delicate clink-clink-clinks she took the screwdriver, wedged it into the top seam of the ink cartridge and used the hammer to drive it inside and pry it up.

“There,” she said. Revealing the contents of an old cartridge. A black spongy cube lay embedded inside.  Hardly impressive, but vital to what Tommy and Charlie had cooked up.  “What next?”

“How did you…?” Tommy stammered…”Just…how?”

Katy shrugged. “Sometimes I like breakin’ stuff.”  Even in the shadows of his nursery, Tommy made out the sly and evil grin that he’d seen more places than just his home and from someone besides his sister.  

“You really need to talk to Charlie,” Tommy said. “I think you two would get along.”

“Charlie can’t talk.”

“Never mind.”

“How else can I help?” Katy asked, now encouraged.

Tommy rubbed the inside ridges of his eyes where crust tended to gather. He was planning to do most of this tomorrow morning but he might as well get it over with now.  “Go get your tablet.”

Katy seemed pleased. “Okies!

“And take off your Goodnites.”

“Why?”

“Because if you do everything I say, you can finish the milk Mommy gave me for bed.”

That was good enough for Tommy.

*****************************************************************************************************
(Back to the present…)

“You look like hell,” Charlie said, crawling up. “Worse.”

“You look like you’re still in your jammies,” Tommy replied.

This was accurate. Charlie was crawling around in footie pajamas made to look like Buzz Lightyear’s uniform. It even had the purple hoodie for his head, though it was pulled back and hanging limply behind him at present.  It looked oddly comfortable, all things considered.  

The older of the two let out a loud yawn. “I am in jammies,” Charlies said. “I couldn’t sleep last night either.  I was up all night practicing, just in case I was rusty.”  He started doodling something in the air with his finger but cut himself off with another yawn.  Tommy was too tired to yawn.

Tommy handed his father the duo tang folder Katy had gifted him.  “Here,” he said. “You can stay awake and practice writing your name some more with these.  Just find a good crayon or something.”

Charlie looked like he was expecting a bomb to drop on their heads.  Tommy had said too much of the quiet part out loud on accident.  He quickly recovered.  “It’s like you said, we can’t let the parts of us that are still adults deteriorate.”

“Yeah,” Charlie relaxed. “Yeah. Absolutely.  You get it, kid. You get it.”  Relaxation lapsed into silence.  Silence stretched into uncomfortability.

Tommy was close to zonking out.  “So why are you in jammies, again?” For a second Tommy thought he’d been told and forgot.  Damn.  This did not bode well.

“My mom said I looked tired and put me in clean jammies this morning.  She probably wants me to sleep.”  Charlie sulked.  “Not all of us have parents who are capable of listening.”

“Was she like that before?” Tommy wondered, thinking of his own mother.  “Or do you think the magic is doing something to her?”

Dejectedly, Charlie flatted out onto his belly.  “No clue, kid. No clue.  I’ve known her my whole life, but half of that I’ve been a baby to her. More than half if you count the real years.”

“Fair enough,” Tommy replied. “Fair enough.”

The awkward silence continued while other regressed children played and giggled around them.  Charlie looked distinctly uncomfortable. “So…uh…maybe she’s not here today?”

Tommy closed his eyes. Being in a near delirium for some reason made him feel more alert to certain intangibles.  There was something in the way that the caregivers looked at him when Mommy was signing him in that morning. The automatons were on more than just autopilot. That neither of them were having their pants checked or being beckoned to a morning sing-a-long game was especially telling.  They weren’t being ignored, just given space.

“No. She’s here. She’s just waiting for her moment.”

“So what do we do until then?” Charlie asked. He might be starting to lose his nerve.

Tommy deeply wished that he could say something more substantial or even hug Charlie the way he’d hugged his Mommy.  They were in the hydragon’s den now. Every word was potentially a hint.  “Go do your thing. I don’t think you want to be around when she comes.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Charlie said.  “Uh…play later?”

“Yeah,” Tommy smiled softly.  “I’d like that.  I’d like that a lot, Dad.”

“You just…you just called me…”

“Yeah,” Tommy admitted. “Yeah I did.”  If this didn’t work out, at least his old man had that.  It wasn’t quite forgiveness, or even a hug.  But it was something.

“Alright, Tommy,” Charlie said.  “Alright, son.  I’ll see you later, yeah?”

Suddenly Tommy wasn’t very tired anymore. “You better.”  

He waited and watched his father- the man who had accidentally saved him from regression by setting the stupidest of examples-, crawl away, dragging the duo tang folder with him.  Tommy took comfort by reminding himself that Charlie had lasted here Tommy’s entire life, had made no big secret about his lack of regression, but had been more or less ignored by Annie since his induction. He was a curiosity to the mismatched goddess; Tommy was the obsession.

Speaking of which; it was best not to keep her waiting.

“Annie,” he said.  His voice wasn’t particularly strong, but just like the night before, it felt supernaturally loud. “Please…I wanna make a deal.”  

******************************************************************************************************
(Last night…)

The crayon went right through the piece of scratch paper, the blunted tip of the blue crayola coming down on the crib mattress.   “Damn it,” Charlie cursed  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

It was frustrating. There were no hard surfaces to act as a writing desk and Charlie was well and good out of practice at this. He was not so secretly worried that he’d be unable to do it; that either by atrophy or good old fashioned magic mindfuckery he wouldn’t be able to write his own name anymore.

It wouldn’t have been that surprising.  He didn’t have the balance to walk anymore, or the control to hold his bladder and bowels. With a disproportionate amount of effort he could ascertain the state of his diaper, but that was it.  He didn’t even know how to change a diaper or use the toilet.  He’d seen his mom do it plenty of times in public restrooms, and there was a period when he scrutinized the other prisoners when they were up on the changing table. To this day it was still like watching a magic trick that his brain refused to wrap itself around.

So it was not out of the question that his ability to maneuver something as simple as crayon might have been robbed from him.

Magic, if anything, is far from consistent.  If it were, it might not be magic.  So Charlie was both relieved and unsurprised that night when he found his handwriting more or less intact.  He still knew how to drive a car or make love to a woman, (he might not have been very good at it but he could describe and envision the process).  It was only the most obvious and fundamental skill sets, like potty training, that he was denied.

 Sneaking the practice materials into his crib had been easy. After so long like this, his mom tended to trust him with a degree of freedom largely associated with the Rugrats. It wasn’t neglect; just that houses were baby proofed because on some level parents know they can’t surveil their children twenty four seven.  That and it had been over fifteen years since Charlie had thought to throw a tantrum or break anything.

He’d earned his measure of trust simply by giving up.

“C…H…A…R…L..I-” Charlie said to himself, scribbling his name for the three-or-four-dozenth time.  Something seemed off about it.  He yawned and scratched himself.  This was more than tedious and nerve wracking; it was boring too. He shuffled himself around off his stomach and sat down with his legs in a V.  “This won’t work,” he muttered. He’d have to lean over between his thighs to get to the paper.

Speaking of legs, Charlie looked straight down between them and inspected the tremendous lump between his thighs.  He was probably wet. Soaked.  He reached down and gave himself a squeeze, letting out a low and breathy moan. It was just the right temperature and texture. He must have peed less than five minutes ago for it to be so perfect.  “Mary,” he whispered.

Maybe he could take a break.  Lean back and use both hands for something else. Or grab the crib rails and grind against something.  He’d discovered so many different positions for himself over the years.  So many fantasies and head games and techniques to make the most out of what was a bad situation. It would be so easy to…

“No…” Charlie sneered at himself.  Avoiding the hard stuff was part of what got him stuck like this in the first place. To get himself out of this he’d need to do something besides give up and whine about it.  He picked up the paper and pinned it with his hand against the headboard of his crib.  “C-H-A-R-L-I-E…” Something still didn’t feel right about this.  Something was missing, but he couldn’t figure it out.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember. “Come on, man,” he told himself. “Think. How’d you do it last time? How are you gonna do it this time?”  Man. It had been a long time since he’d actively thought of himself as a man.  

Academically? Sure. But not emotionally.  That’s what eighteen had been like for Charlie. Knowing he was a man, but not being fully ready to stop thinking of himself as a kid. That’s how it was for a lot of people, he supposed.  That or the inverse.  You either had adults who still thought of themselves as children, or children who were extremely confident in just how much of an adult they were.  

The former tended to be the victims and the latter tended to be the assholes.  Ultimately that’s what had pushed Charles Watson through the grandfather clock time and time again.  The world was cruel and he wasn’t ready to embrace himself as an adult; so running away to one where he increasingly wasn’t had seemed like a good deal.  After Tommy told him about the cave, Charles had felt somewhat vindicated.  He’d acted on impulse and drawn his name in that cave wall like a kid playing with wet cement, and that impulse had kept him diapered but an adult all this time.

Charles. Not Charlie.  When had he started thinking of himself as Charlie?  Charlie was just a nickname.  Probably not long after he’d signed his name on the wall. His memory of the incident was fairly blurred, but it was possible he’d started internally referring to himself as Charlie before that and just signed ‘Charles’ because it was what was done.  ‘Charles’ was more formal, or adult seeming- even though paradoxically worrying about such a thing seemed even more childish.

A bit of clarity came to the babied man.  He knew what felt wrong, now.

Charles adjusted himself again so that he was on his knees leaning up against the headboard.  He wrote and whispered to himself:  “C-h-a-r-l-e-s-space-W-a-t-s-o-n.”

Like Michaelangelo looking up at the Sistine Chapel, or Godzilla looking down on a burning and irradiated Tokyo, Chares Watson looked at his handiwork and approved.  “Perfect.”

********************************************************************************************
(Here and now...)

The voice came from behind him because of course it did.  “A deal?” Annie mused.  “What kind of deal?”

Tommy spun around but hid any sign of surprise or shock.  Once again, Annie was posing as an inmate at her own prison. She was short, had a bow in her hair, and wore a dress that failed to conceal her diaper.  Tommy was seeing less and less of the Nanny he’d first met. If anything, the mismatched goddess was skewing younger and younger.  Good.

“Not a deal, exactly,” Tommy said.  “I want to renegotiate.”

“Oh really?” Annie said. She closed the slight gap between them and leaned her head on him.  “Changed your mind about Katy?  You want her to be a happy little diaper baby with you?”  She giggled. “I think I see the appeal. Twins? Used to sharing?  Tired of dealing with her whining? Want her to get her own diapers and pacis instead of taking yours? Frustrated that your Mommy has to keep taking her to the potty and change her dirty big girl panties when she refuses?”

“Not quite…” But Tommy didn’t say it loud enough, evidently.

Flirtatiously, the adult proportioned tot stepped away so that Tommy could gaze upon all of her.  She hiked up her dress so that Tommy could see the whole front of her diaper. “I gotta say,” she admitted. “These things are a lot more comfy than they used to be. They used to be just bunched up rags. Butt bandages. You didn’t get changed until you leaked.  And we tied them in knots or stabbed them with pins.”  A perverse part of Tommy watched as the light yellow line running down the middle turned bright, electric blue, and he had to do his best not to stare, or to remind himself that he was staring for reasons beyond misplaced lust.  

“Uh-huh…”

“Now?” Annie said. “They hold more, are comfy, and easy to swap out. It’s objectively quicker and easier to change a dirty diaper than dirty panties.” She let the hem of her dress fall back down.  “They’re cute, too. I legitimately don’t know why we don’t let kids wear them for as long as they want.”

“Sure…”  Tommy was feeling something come over him, pushing his caution continuously aside.

“It’s gotta be easier to play with Katy if she’s crawling around in one of these.  She won’t be whining.  You won’t have to compete for attention as much and you’ll probably get changed and take baths together.  More time sharing and less time waiting for your Mommy to clean her up separately.  No more sitting through lectures about how she’s supposed to be a big girl.” Annie's eyes brightened, the blue one literally glowing for an instant. “Oooooo! Do you want to be the big brother now? Is that it?”

She was cold. Very cold.  “Sort of,” Tommy lied.  “But no. Not exactly.”

Annie walked around behind him, a shark circling its prey.  “Then what?  I can’t make her bigger.”

That was obviously a lie after yesterday.  “It’s not about her that I want to negotiate.”

Once again, Annie was behind him. “Awwwww,” Annie mocked, “So you want your stupid little mean girl crush to have fun here with us, but not your own sister?”

Tommy didn’t turn around to keep up with her. That wasn’t the objective in this case. “I want to have an argument with you.”

The hand that came down on Tommy’s head was full sized and womanly.  “It’s not very nice to get into arguments with your friends,” Nanny chided. “Little ones should just let grown-ups solve their problems for them and play nice the rest of the time. We have so much fun when you’re a good little boy and do what you’re told.”  It might be magic or just looming sleep psychosis, but for a second he thought he smelled milk.  “Is baby hungry?”

Yes.

“No,” Tommy said. “That’s not what I mean either.  I want to make a bet with you.  Play a game.”

Still behind him, Nanny’s voice lost twenty to thirty years.  “A game? What kind of game?” Two massive hands wrapped around Tommy’s midsection and pulled him into her lap.  Annie’s legs were criss-crossed so that when Tommy left his feet, he landed all nestled up like a baby bird in his nest.  The smell of the milk had abated, but her perfume was intoxicating.

“A contest,” Tommy trembled, loving and hating himself.  He was so close to going over the edge in more ways than one.  “A…a…a thought experiment. Except real.”

“Go on,” she whispered.  She’d better not kiss him. If she did, he might lose everything right then and there and this entire gamble would be for nothing.

Tommy grit his teeth and mentally sang ‘Shipoopi’, the Family Guy version. It was the cartoon musical equivalent of magical libido killing graham crackers. “You say that deep down everybody wants to be a baby.”

Annie rested her chin on the top of Tommy’s head.  “I don’t know if I’ve used it in those words exactly,” she said, “but more or less, yes.”

Tommy dislodged himself and looked up at her, doing his best to ignore how he was now brushing up against her cleavage. “But if that’s true, why do you have to trick them? Why do you have to force them?  Why do you wait until it’s too late for them to make a decision?”

“When have people ever been good at making decisions as a whole?” Annie replied coolly. “Nobody wants to grow up, but everybody feels they have to. You even refer to yourself as children in relation to whatever god you worship. You want to be children, you just need permission.”

“Then why not just give permission?”

“Because after a certain point, all children get stubborn and need to be told what to do.”  The woman-goddess-child-fairy-thing could justify anything.  Good thing Tommy wasn’t really trying to convince her, even if a part of him wished she could be convinced.

“If being a baby is so great,” Tommy countered, “Why are you bored? Why are we playing truth or dare? Why carnival? Those are all grown-up games.”

Annie’s laughter was like a melody, so much so that several of the other adult children giggled and laughed with her.  “Carnivals are the perfect excuse for adults to act like children.  Truth or Dare is a Game about breaking norms and pushing limits. I didn’t actually like make stickies in my diaper in front of everybody,” she mocked, “I just had to do it because of the game.  It’s seeking permission by proxy.”

Tommy felt his face flush and switched to mentally singing the theme from Annie in his head.  “Yeah, but you’re seeking grown-up games because kiddie games aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

“Children pretend to be grown-ups all the time,” Annie said. “Grown-ups pretend to be grown-ups.  There really isn’t a grown-up that isn’t pretending. It’s just all humans but we give them different names based on size and age.  We all would if we could, but we can’t so we pretend we don’t want it.”

“Prove it.” Tommy was allowed to dislodge himself from the comfortable cuddling position and stand up.  “Prove it to me.”

Annie remained seated and stuck in her teenage babysitter form. She looked content; the cat toying with her mouse.  “How?”

“Give me the choice,” Tommy shrugged. “Let me be an adult again and see the difference. I’m sure you can after yesterday.  Especially if it’s just me.”

“So you want to be an adult?” Annie replied.  “Here?  Now?”  She gestured around the nearly infinite playspace. “I don’t think you’d fit in. Unless you want to work a shift.”

Tommy unconsciously shuddered. That was not what he was aiming for but he accidentally pictured himself changing Charlie’s diaper.  “Take me out,” Tommy said. “In public. Like you did before.”

“You want me to babysit you?” Annie mused. “Is that what this is?” Her voice went up a notch. “Is that what this really is? Does the widdle boy just want his cwush aww to hisself again?’

No amount of show tunes would stop what was happening. Tommy neatly folded his hands in front of him to conceal the inevitable.  “No,” he gulped. “I want…I want you to take me on a date.”

“A play date?”

“A date date,” Tommy clarified. “Take me back out. Take me back to the real world. Scrumpton. Let me be an adult.  Let me compare and contrast. Let me decide for myself.”  She wasn’t interrupting him, but she didn’t seem very excited either.  He took a deep breath.  “Convince me you’re right in a world where you don’t control every last thing.”  Another deep breath. This whole plan working was contingent on her pride.  “I promise not to lie about it. If you can’t convince me, I get to be an adult again. Just me, though. You can finish what you started on my sister to make up the difference.”

A bored smirk adorned Annie’s face. “And what if I win and you see the truth? I already have you.”

Tommy prayed to whatever god besides the one in front of him that might be listening for strength of will.  “If you win, I’ll let you baby me. All the way.  No more walking. No more talking. No more big boy thoughts.  My diaper will be fuller than my head.”

The mismatched goddess frowned and pouted out of her lip.  “But I can’t do that all the way to you.  You’re immune. So’s your father.”

“I lied,” Tommy said. “That’s not the real reason.”  A single azure iris started glowing again.  “You lied, too, remember? You can give back at least some of what you take. I’d say that makes us even.”

Annie’s blue orb stopped shining, but she still seemed off-put.  “Yes. That’s true. How do I know you won’t lie to me again?”

The young man started to say something to fire the question back at her, but thought better of themselves. They weren’t bargaining from equal positions of power.  “You’ll know because when I tell you, it will probably work. I’ll be a baby.”

“What if you’re lying now and really are just immune?” There was part suspicion, but also hunger in her voice. She wanted to believe this. Needed to.

Like a scout or a witness taking the stand on television, Tommy raised his right hand. “It’s like with the flying. I promise not to lie about this, or whether or not you’ve convinced me.”  The back of his brain stem started tingling, and Tommy knew that he was going to be held to that.

“Done,” Annie said.  “But when I convince you that my way is better,” she paused to stand up, “you’re staying here. With me.  Forever.”

Tommy almost forgot to breathe. “Forever? With you?”

She reached out and pinched his cheek.  “I love playing with you, my special boy,” she cooed. “You’ve made me work too hard not to want to keep you all to myself. Don’t worry you’ll still get to play with your widdle friends when they come here.  You can even help me sometimes when I’m teaching other boys and girls to let their grown-up illusions go.  I’ll be your new Mommy. It’ll be fun.”

Senses focused, Tommy counted his heartbeats, finding that it was just too fast to keep track of.  If this was necessary to set things right, then so be it.  “Deal.”

“Wonderful!” the teenage bodied immortal said. She stood up and dusted her pants off.  “Let’s get going.”

She picked Tommy up and made a straight line for the doorway leading to the check in station.  Tommy looked nervously around. After all that resistance, she was almost too eager. “Now?”

“Now.”

“No diaper bag or packing?”

“Why would we need a diaper bag?” She asked. “You’re going to be a big boy, remember?”
She walked through the dutch door and to the simple sign-in sheet. “Don’t worry, I’ll be able to make one when you need it.”  She giggled. “Oops. I mean if.”

Tommy didn’t have a comeback for that, but that’s not why he kept his mouth shut. He was too busy staring at the sign-in sheet and the sloppily constructed rows and columns. Child Name. Child’s Parent or Guardian, Sign-In time.  Sign-Out time.  And the ink was in a very familiar hue.

His name, ‘Tommy Dean’ was already filled in from when Mommy had checked him in. Annie wrote in the present time to sign him out. Whether real or just in his mind, Tommy wasn’t able to hear the sounds of the outside world until after Annie had officially signed him out of the daycare.

“One last day as a big boy,” she said.  “Then we’ll be all done pretending. That’ll be nice. It will give us time for new games to play.

“We’ll see…” Tommy said, as defiantly as he could muster.

“I guess we will.” She sounded far more confident than Tommy felt.  He really hoped this worked.

**********************************************************************************************
(Earlier that morning…)

Amanda didn’t cry when she first got up. She screamed and giggled and laughed and squeaked. All of the good sounds. All of the happy ones.  Amanda was a very happy baby. Always had been.  She didn’t know she was a baby, but babies rarely do. Such distinctions don’t occur to people until they’re on the precipice of not being babies anymore.

‘Baby’ was almost another name for Amanda; one of the happy sounds that Mommy and Daddy and the other big people called her.  When they said ‘baby’, Amanda knew they were talking about her.  

The reason why she was making such happy noises was because she couldn’t quite help it.  Amanda always made happy noises when she was humping her stuffed animals. She’d woken up in a good mood and her diaper was exactly the right kind of squishy feeling, instead of the bad kind of squishy feeling where her butt hurt.  

So she yawned, rolled over and started moving up against her stuffed animal friends in her crib.  It tickled, but not in the way Mommy or Daddy tickled when they ran their fingers up and down her tummy or under her arms.

It was a good feeling. A really good feeling. A feeling so good that Amanda giggled and hummed and squealed with each sopping, squishing, squelching thrust.  Unlike the other kind of tickling, this one also had a kind of pressure to it; a tension and release.  

She wasn’t big enough to draw comparisons to anything, but if she were, she might compare it to a burp.  Pressure, tension, and release.  But instead of Mommy or Daddy patting and rubbing her back, Amanda rubbed herself since nobody else would do it.

“Nnnn. Nnnn.. Nnn…” She grunted, feeling the pressure rise.  Just like when she needed burpies, the feeling of the pressure was both good and bad.  Bad because even though it felt really really good, the feeling just made her want to get it out faster, but good because she knew it would end in burping….kind of.  “Nnnnn….Nnnnn…Nnnn…”

“Amanda!” Mommy said. “What are you doing?”  It wasn’t really a question. Mommy didn’t ask Amanda questions.  It was the same happy bubbly speech that big people asked her when they wanted to get her attention.  It was the same tone that came with questions like: ‘Are you hungry?’, ‘Are you sleepy?’, ‘Do you need a change?’, and ‘Are you ready to play?’ The answer was always an implied but enthusiastic ‘yes’.

Amanda stopped and looked over her shoulder, offering her Mommy a big silly smile.  A second later she was back to humping.  Mommy was laughing a little bit, which meant she was doing a good thing.

Mommy made a clicking noise with her tongue. “I’ve got to figure out a way to wake you up so you can get this out of your system before I come in.”  None of those words meant anything to Amanda so she kept rubbing her diaper again and again and again.  

“WEEEEAAAH!” The first notes of annoyed displeasure came out of the girl’s mouth when Mommy interrupted her and picked her up out of her crib.  It was like a burp that wouldn’t come.  It was so annoying and frustrating when the big people wouldn’t let her finish.

“Sorry baby,” Mommy cooed. “But we have to get up for the day and Mommy doesn’t have time.”  She carried Amanda over to the changing table ,the same way she always did.  “I thought you’d grow out of this when you were thirteen,” she said to herself.  “But you never grow out of anything.  Do you?  Do you?”

Amanda didn’t know the words, but she recognized the happy cooing noises, and gave some in return.  Those noises always made Mommy smile.

The scritch-scratch of the diaper tabs coming undone immediately preceded the ice cold wipes being pressed and dragged over her vagina. Within seconds, any thoughts of tickling herself were gone from Amanda’s incredibly short attention span.  

“That’s better,”  Mommy said, giving a few extra wipes to her front and then cleaning up her bottom.  “Baby’s already calming down.” Then in a slightly lower tone, she said, “Mommy’s gonna have to get some more of those crackers.”

None of that meant anything to Amanda.  She sighed contentedly, forgetting her frustrations while her Mommy balled up her old diaper, tossed it away and then slipped a new one underneath her.  She smiled at the dry coolness of baby powder being liberally dusted everywhere.  She didn’t make a distinction between good smells and bad smells, but she directly associated the smell of the powder with the stiff, crinkly and snug feeling of the new diaper that followed.  This was a much different association than the smells that accompanied the feelings of a warm, heavy, saggy diaper.

After eighteen years, Amanda still hadn’t made the connection between herself and the state of her diapers. Diapers just started out one way, and ended up another, then it was time to change.  And the girl’s mind was so unfocused most of the time that even that simple cause and effect was beyond her.  Wet and dry, clean and messy, fresh and saggy; those were all distinctions that she only made after the fact.  Same with hungry and full.  Late and sleepy. Dirty and itchy.

Her mind was much too busy thinking about other things.  The feelings and thoughts and intensity of purely existing moment to moment, as babies did.  She’d never been potty trained or weaned. No attempt had ever been made.  Same with walking.  Most children would be put into strict physical therapy programs or given assistive technology of some sort when they weren’t walking by age two.

Amanda was allowed to remain perfectly content crawling around on all fours or boosting herself up with the help of a shelf or piece of furniture so that she could awkwardly cruise around the living room.  No demands or expectations had ever been made of her, and the only reason she wasn’t happier for it was because she could think of no other experience to compare it to.

Amanda was special; just like all the others that the place Mommy took her to almost every day. If her personal meat computer had more processing power, she might have thought of them as ‘friends’, but like so many words and concepts she couldn’t quite grasp onto it.  All the while, in the very very back of her mind and at the edge of her consciousness., she kept reliving the most amazing, wild night of her life.  One involving a pretty girl with different color eyes in a happy magical land that did and did not look like the playground she visited. It was very much a dream though; not thoughts as much as feelings.

“I bet that feels so much better,” Mommy’s sweet overtures caught Amanda’s attention.  “Does it? Does it? Does baby like her new diaper?”

Truly, the girl didn’t recognize words as much as tone.  She knew ‘baby’ and ‘diaper’ from hearing it so often. Same with ‘Mommy’, ‘Daddy’, and num nums.  She also knew she was supposed to smile and make happy girl noises, so she did.  

“Yes she does!” Mommy sang. “She most certainly does!”  Mommy left Amanda on the table and sidestepped over to a dresser. “What are we going to wear today?”

Amanda started looking down her breasts to look at Mommy, then became much more fascinated by her toes.  She wondered what they tasted like.  Amanda always felt like she knew things better after putting them in her mouth, and her toes were no different.  She lifted them up and bent them towards her, crunching and cramping her stomach muscles and curling into a ball.

Some deeply buried part of her memory remembered being in a position like this, but for some reason there was somebody else over her, and it wasn’t because they were changing her diaper.  The inside of her diaper felt tingly again, just thinking about it, but the sight of her toes, so close but just out of reach, grabbed her focus again.

Almost….almost…almost…

She reached up and grabbed the back of her calves and pulled her leg the rest of the way towards her mouth.  SUCCESS!  Her lips found purchase on the biggest and most bulbous of her toes.  Interesting yet familiar!  She’d literally forgotten every other time she’d gotten her toes into her mouth and started munching, such was life.   She mewled a bit and spit them out when she bit on them too hard. She hadn’t learned that lesson yet, either.  

Mommy came back with a onesie dress hybrid that looked suspiciously like a cheerleader outfit.  “Here we are, pumpkin!” She said to the otherwise naked teenager on the padded table. “I think this will look really cute after I braid your hair!”

The irony of the outfit choice was lost on both of them.  Amanda had never been a cheerleader or a popular girl.  She’d never been to public school. The only thing that interfered with her breastfeeding was Mommy’s schedule.  


Likewise, Mommy had never been particularly bothered that her daughter was never going to ‘grow-up’ as it were. Her daughter had a special condition, it was true, but it was almost like she had one herself, wherein those happy hormones and elation with having a baby that new mothers have never really went away.  

There was very little drudgery in changing diapers or playing airplane spoon games or in playing cartoons on loop for hours and hours on end. There was no fatigue because there was no end in sight and no expectations.  Cleaning a litter box wasn’t the most fun, but one knew that’s what they signed up for when they bought a cat.  This was just life. Always had been. For both of them.

A simple, well off, but quiet life, between parents caring for perpetual infants and being completely contented by the experience on both ends of the caregiving equation.  Something enjoyable, but in the big scheme of things, ultimately forgettable.

Ironic, considering how the universe had remembered them before a few days ago. This scenario would have likely been a nightmare for both women.  Even more ironic, was that despite the constant sensory distraction and empty mindedness of Amanda’s ‘condition’, that the fate of the entire world could very well rest on her shoulders.

*************************************************************************************************
(Skipping forward…)

Tommy squirmed in his seat. Even with the break yesterday at playing carnival, wearing pants and underwear instead of a diaper felt weird.  No cushion. No padding. No rustle or crinkle.  His legs kept trying to press together all the way, and they kept being successful with zero pushback or resistance from his big boy clothing.  

Blue Jeans. Black boxer briefs. Auburn polo shirt. White socks. White tennis shoes. That’s it.  

Compared to the bright blues and greens and reds he’d grown accustomed to wearing over the last several weeks, he felt like he was dressed in black and white.  Nothing was flashy, or fun, or cute.  It was like his entire purpose in life was to blend in and hide, and a tiny part of his psyche found that both depressing and obscene.

His bladder was screaming at him too. Milliseconds after Annie carried him out the daycare’s door and into the real world of Scrumpton, Tommy was standing on his feet, fully clothed, and had all of his potty training back.

It was annoying to the point of distraction. It was a limb that had fallen asleep and was suddenly becoming tingly and painful as systems came back online, except it didn’t stop.  It was an itch that he wasn’t able to or allowed to scratch.

Beyond bladder control, he got the basic skill set and knowledge back. “Do you mind pulling over?” Tommy asked. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

Unexpectedly, Annie pulled the car into a local gas station and put it in park. “No problem,” she said. “Go for it, big boy.”  She sounded so casual about it, too.

“Thanks”  All by himself, Tommy unbuckled his seat belt and opened the car door.  That was another thing. The seats weren’t as comfortable. They didn’t recline as much, and the belts were looser; less secure.

He stopped with the passenger door open and stared at her.  “What?”  Annie said. “I don’t have to go. Hurry up.”

If this was a trap, Tommy had no way of avoiding it.  The only trap, Tommy found, was in his own thoughts.  He power walked, alone, into the gas station and went into the tiny one sink, one toilet bathroom just a little smaller than the unit at his old apartment.

His knowledge base and fine motor skills fully restored and under his control, it was nothing for a fully grown and cognizant Tommy to walk up to the toilet, lift the seat, unzip his pants, pry open the overlapping layer in his underwear, pull his penis out, aim it, and then relax his bladder muscles.

“Uuuuh,” he groaned, releasing his bladder and hearing the sound of liquid hitting liquid. He grinned with satisfaction, but the satisfaction only lasted as long as the stream.  This wasn’t particularly long at all.  A pro-wrestler could have kicked out in that time.

What? That was it? Tommy looked down at his member like it was a gun that just clicked when it should have banged.  He hadn’t had to go very much at all, had he?  All of that anxiety and squirming and quiet discomfort for what? A few seconds of relief?

Unsettled, Tommy tucked everything back in, flushed the toilet, and stared at himself in the mirror while he washed his hands. He’d peed in the potty like a big boy. Whoopee.  Now his bladder would slowly fill up and stretch until Tommy decided to release it again.  And as an adult, it was up to Tommy to decide how much stretching and pain was acceptable.  

If he won this bet, he’d be spending the rest of his life having to constantly monitor himself, feeling the unpleasant aching burning and itching sensations again and again and again and having to decide whether or not he could handle the feeling.  Always at the back of his mind, even when he was sleeping, he’d be monitoring how it felt and whether or not it was a good time- a convenient time- to void himself of the waste his body was constantly pumping out of him.

Poop too. Except that would be worse.  The bladder emptied easily. Bowels were a literal crap shoot.  

Was this how it used to be? Or was this a trick?  Had he just gotten used to the distraction and discomfort or had he been spoiled by having even one less problem to deal with?

“Ugh,” Tommy said to himself.  “What am I thinking?”  Was he really already considering giving up? Over something as stupid as the inconvenience of peeing?

Tommy turned the water off and exited the restroom as quickly as he came.  “Hey,” a man behind the gas station counter called. “You gonna get anything?”  There was more than a hint of expectation in his voice.  “Bathroom’s for customers, man.”

He doubted the asshole would have said anything if he’d been a few feet shorter and being carried back by a lady with a diaper bag in tow.  Wouldn’t have talked to Tommy, save for maybe a friendly hello and wave. His Mommy or babysitter wouldn’t have gotten much flak either. Who would harass someone who needed to change a baby?  Babies tended to bring out the best in people.

That kind of consideration, it seemed, was for baby Tommy. As a baby, Tommy was special. As an adult, he was a schmuck who was expected to buy a candy bar for the privilege of pissing in a pot.

“Okay,” Tommy said.  “Fine, fine.”  He grabbed a Snickers and shuffled around in his pants pocket. It was so weird having pockets again.  He pulled out a dollar and slapped it on the table.  “This is all I have.”

The man behind the counter took the Snickers and the dollar.  “Good enough for me.”

Tommy curled up his lip.  “What about my candy?”

“A buck’s not enough for a candy. Good enough for the bathroom, though.”

Tommy inhaled to shout something. To curse the asshole out. To call the police.  Or Annie- she could probably do something nasty to the guy.  But that would be a hell of a lot like someone crying for their Mommy.   “Asshole,” Tommy spat before storming out.  He literally spit on the floor on his way out, too.

“So,” Annie asked, when he was finally buckled in.  “How was it?”

The young mortal man had enough of his wits to not take the bait. “So for this date,” Tommy said. “I don’t have any money.”

Annie switched the engine back on.  “Don’t worry about it.  My treat.”  She winked at him with her green eye, leaving the blue one open. “This will be fun. A real date.”  Her total ease was putting Tommy on edge.

The van started moving again, and Tommy looked out the window.  He was finally big enough again to where he could do that and see something besides the sky. He was woefully disappointed.  Nothing but gray roads, billboards, businesses he didn’t much care about and other cars.  

He would have much preferred a play steering wheel, or a mobile, or stuffed animal of some sort to dangle and play with to make the drudgery of transport and travel seem less dreary.  As an adult, he had to content himself purely with his thoughts of anticipation and anxiety.

He had to pee again, too.  Not really. If they pulled over again, it’d barely be a dribble or a squirt, but even the moon’s gravity might feel heavy after long enough in the weightlessness of space.  Social conventions gave him less to distract himself with, but expected him to ignore physical discomfort until the last possible moment.

Don’t think about it. Just don’t think about it.  Don’t think about it, don't think about it, don't think about it.

Annie looked over. “Watcha thinkin about?” She asked.

“Nothing,” Tommy said.

“Fibbing,” Annie teased. “You’re always thinking.” She waited for that to sink in. Then jabbed with, “It’s something I like about you.”

Tommy winced. He was both flattered and put on guard by the statement. Tigers could like people too. Lots of animals played with their food. “So what are we doing?”

“Going on a date,” Annie smirked. “Just you and me, enjoying time like adults.” Tommy very much doubted there’d be anything ‘just’ about this in any sense of the word. It couldn’t be that easy.  “You’ve gotten to be a baby. Now you get to see what it’s like to be a grown-up again, and decide which one you like better.”

Tommy cocked an eyebrow. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Promise.”

“A deal’s a deal.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. He looked straight ahead on the road.  “Deal.”

It wasn’t long after that Tommy figured out where they were going. There were only so many streets in a tiny Georgia town.  “The mall?” Tommy said. “We’re going to the mall?”

Annie kept her eyes on the road. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“Why?”

“It’s not even lunch yet. It’s a school day. Nowhere else would be open in this town.”

Tommy chewed his lip for a second. “And I’m trying to convince you that the real thing is better than your fantasy world.”  Just as ture, he was trying to convince himself as well.

Stupidly, Tommy wondered if he might convince her for a delay or maybe even to make them older. At least old enough to buy a beer.  He quickly perished the thought.  That wasn’t the point of this.  That wasn’t the point of any of this.

“Okay.  Fair enough.” He flashed her a smile. “Let’s go to the mall.”  He shoved the aching itching feeling in his bladder into the back of his mind just like he used to.  He had more important things to worry about today.

********************************************************************************************
(Back at the daycare…)

“Shit. Ass. Damn. Mother fucker. Cunt. Bitch.” Charlie muttered with each baby wipe dragged roughly between his cheeks.  His ass had chosen the exact wrong time to let loose and the daycare ladies had chosen the exact wrong time to check his diaper for poopies.

As a result he now lay helplessly on the changing table, his ankles crossed and lifted while a person who wasn’t really a person took its sweet time cleaning him up. Charlie didn’t struggle; there wasn’t a point in struggling he’d learned, but he was making a heroic effort to control his emotions and keep his eye on the purple duo tang folder on the floor.

The way this place was, there was a very good chance that if he stopped thinking about it for too long, or if another not-quite-child found it, he very well might not find it ever again. That would (to put it mildly) be bad.

“There we go,” the daycare worker said while she taped up the fresh diaper. “I bet that feels so much better!”

“Yeah yeah,” Charlie grumbled. “Just button me up, already.”  He tried to keep his tone neutral, lest it be decided that he was grumpy or fussy and needed a nap in a nearby crib. He dared not yawn for similar reasons.  

Damn his mother for dressing him this way.  Footed sleepers and the like were always the slowest to change. Charlie had to wait for his legs to be worked into the leggings so that the snaps- so many snaps- could at last be fastened all up and down his inseam.

What would have taken ten seconds with a simple onesie, and two if he’d been wearing basic stretch pants, took almost half a minute with the daycare drone agonizing on the snaps.  “Wanna make sure you’re not buttoned up all funny…”  

Thirty seconds is agonizing when every single one matters.  Charlie didn’t cry though, and just locked his jaw until he was safely deposited on the floor.  “What did I do to deserve this?” Charlie asked himself, but he already knew the answer…

*********************************************************************************************
(Soon…)

Flashing lights illuminated the couple’s faces in reds, blues, and greens. “On your left!”

P-TANG!

“I see him!”

P-TANG! P-TANG!

“It’s not a ‘him’, it’s an alien super mutant.”

P-TANG!  P-TANG! P-TANG!

“Whatever! He’s dead now!”

Tommy and Annie, both the size and appearance of normal eighteen year olds, pointed plastic guns at a massive projector screen and the digital horrors that flooded onto it.  Every time either squeezed the trigger, the gun let out an whirring buzzing electronic sound.  

Tommy had taken the initiative once they entered the mall, leading her straight past the toy store and into the ‘Quarter-Back Arcade’

P-TANG!

“RELOAD!” A computerized voice shouted from the arcade cabinet.   “RE-RE-RE-RELOAD!”

In unison, both pointed their plastic, shiny firearms to the side of the screen and fired a shot.  In the left and right corners of the massive screen, the counter keeping track of their shots went back up to ten.

P-TANG!  P-TANG!

“Got it!” Annie smirked, shooting an abomination that likely would have take a chunk out of Tommy’s hit points.

Two could literally play at this game.

P-TANG!

“Same,” Tommy mirrored the cocky smirk back at her.

The two kept firing as wave after wave of CGI mutant, alien, monster, and horror clawed and spit at the screen.  

“These things are weak,” Annie said. “It doesn’t matter where we shoot them. They explode no matter what.”

Tommy blew apart three bat winged lumps of flesh in as many shots. “Yeah,” he said.  “Most of them are one shots.  Some need two or three.”   Annie illustrated the point by having to reload in order to finish off a particularly beefy looking creature that looked like it was made up of cancerous tumors and roided out muscles.  “We don’t really have to worry about hitting specific body parts until we get to the boss at the end of the level.”

“How is this more mature or more adult than what we normally do?” Annie asked, still keeping her eyes glued to the arcade game.  “Is it the guns? Because I’ve had people play with guns.”

P-TANG! P-TANG!

“It’s not the guns,” Tommy said. He emptied an entire clip into digital thin air. The NPC monsters were lunging at them in more complex patterns that were faster and harder to predict. Both of them took a nasty hit to their life points. “It’s the real factor.”

P-TANG! P-TANG! P-TANG!

“What’s real about this?” Annie laughed. “This is no different than fighting monsters as a superhero or playing dress up and going to a fancy tea party.”

P-TANG! P-TANG!

“Except…” Tommy said, “It’s more honest.”

The mismatched girl goddess emptied another clip, making up for Tommy’s streak of bad aim and luck.  “Honest?  You don’t believe these things are real, do you?”

“No,” Tommy scoffed. “But at least it’s more honest about what it’s doing.  It admits it’s pretend and it’s up to us to play along instead of the other way around.”

His date (date?) kept shooting.  A look of annoyance slowly grew on her face.  “What is that supposed to mean?”

Tommy kept shooting. The random monsters were getting less and less fragile. “Do you ever tell people what Malacus is? Or do you let them keep thinking it’s a dream? Or let them think they actually discovered a magic world that needed them to save it? Do they know what will happen or do you trick them?”

“How is that less adult?” Annie scoffed right back. “Adults lie to each other all the time. They just claim to know better.”

Tommy aimed off screen and reloaded. “Adults acting like kids doesn’t mean they’re kids.”

“We’re playing a game,” Annie said. “A meaningless game.”

“Exactly,” Tommy said. “But we know it’s meaningless. We know the risks. We know it’s a lie. We’re making choices.  That’s not something babies get to do.”

The swarms of goblinoids on screen were starting to slow. The end of the level was approaching.  It was giving Tommy more time to talk since he didn’t have to concentrate.

“Ha,” Annie mocked him. “It sounds like you’re just trying to have your cake and eat it too, mister! Such a silly ba-!”

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The rumbling from the cabinet shook the air to the point where every other pointless machine in the arcade was drowned out. Two gargantuan feet filled their screen and the camera panned up cinematically to see a monster of such size that Charlie would have creamed his pants. It wasn’t Godzilla- it was more like Lovecraftian with teeth, tentacles, and eyeballs in places real living things shouldn’t have those organs- but it was close enough to Tommy’s thinking.

“Boss fight,” Tommy said.  On cue, targeting boxes highlighted the constantly moving ‘weak spots’ of the monster.

“I know,” Annie said.  “Let’s do this.”

They did not, in fact, do it.

GAME OVER!  The screen screamed at them.

Annie stomped her foot, and dug around in her pocket.  “Let’s play again. I hate losing.”

“That’s another thing,” Tommy said. “We can lose.  Adults have to learn how to lose.”

Annie’s nose wrinkled. “Why would you want that?”

“How many fights do your adventurers lose in Malacus?” Tommy quipped.

“None.”

“How many times do your socialites and princesses not get to the top of the ladder or be the life of the party?”

Annie wasn’t following.  “They always.”

Tommy put the plastic game gun back into the arcade cabinet’s holster. “Babies always get to win because of how fragile they are.  But always winning is boring.  Winning doesn’t mean anything unless you can also lose.”  He gestured to the machine as proof.  “Would this have been fun if there wasn’t the risk of losing?” He didn’t wait for Annie to answer. “I don’t think it would be.”

In the dimly lit space of the arcade, Tommy saw her eyes look left and right, mulling possibilities over in her brain.  “Tell me more.”

************************************************************************************************
(A little later…)

“How’s your ice cream?” Tommy asked.

Annie daintily licked at her strawberry cone. “It’s pretty good,” she said.  “Yours?”

In contrast, Tommy destroyed his frozen confectionery in big hearty mouthfuls. It had felt like forever since he’d had mint chocolate chip. It was a good thing he’d opted for an extra scoop or he’d have finished his morning dessert long before she did.  His reply was more of content mumbling than anything coherent.

She chuckled knowingly yet condescendingly between her own licks. “Silly.”

He took a napkin from the dispenser and wiped his lips.  “Hmm?” he asked. “Why silly?”

She shook her head.  “It’s ice cream before lunch,” Annie said. “And you’re going to make the case that if you’re an adult you can do all sorts of fun things like eat icecream for breakfast or something.  Pick your own flavors. Make your own schedule. That kind of thing.”

The ice cream on Tommy’s tongue tasted of sour milk with that thought. Darn it. She was kind of right. That’s where he was going with it. That and really wanting ice cream just in case this plan didn’t work out.

“All you really need,” Annie said, “is a Mommy or Daddy to spoil you if you want ice cream or video games.”  Annie threw a playful wink, this time with her blue eye closed.  “Don’t worry. I’ll be happy to spoil you. It’s okay to spoil them if they’re never going to have to grow up.”

Tommy felt his blood rushing to several key strategic areas.  He looked away from her and tried to think about other things, like the people in the food court: Cute old couples sipping from the same drink cup.  Men and women by themselves, picking at Chinese food.  Mothers and fathers with children too young to go to Kindergarten, digging through diaper bags for bottles of formula and jars of baby food or cutting up greasy slices of pizza into tiny bite size pieces depending on how many teeth the kid had.  One woman, while discreet and using a blanket, was very obviously nursing her child while she herself scarfed down an (as advertised) New York size slice of pepperoni.

“I still think I’d rather be them,” Tommy said, pointing to the people sitting by themselves, “than them.” He indicated the smattering of preschoolers, toddlers, and infants.  “More control. More independence. More…everything!”

Annie took her first big bite of the ice cream, mirroring Tommy. “Oh yeah?” She asked, cocking an eyebrow.  “You think bigger and older is more freedom?”  She took her own napkin from the metal rectangle and dabbed at her lips. “Look again.”

Tommy did. Nothing had changed, as far as he saw. “What am I looking for?”

“How many of those people want to be here?” Annie asked. “How many of them have any real freedom?”

“All of them.” Tommy felt a slick line of melted mint dribble onto his fingers and winced.

Annie pointed to a man in a crisp black polo with a store’s logo on the breast. “He works here.” She pointed out several more in turn.  “So does he. So does he. So does she. And him. And her. And him. And her.”

“They’re on break,” Tommy said.  “Getting an early lunch or a snack.”

“Did they choose to go on break?” Annie quizzed. “Or did somebody tell them they could go? Do they want to eat, or is this going to be the only time they can?  Do they want food court pizza, or just not have the time or money for somewhere better or further away?”

Tommy licked at his fingers.  He gave his ice cream another slurp to keep it from dripping further, but his attention was on other things.  “Okay. So they have a job. How is that different from having to go to daycare everyday?”

Annie made Tommy wait for her to swallow another chomping bite. She was finishing before him.  “What happens if your Mommy stops taking you to daycare? Withdraws you?”

“I’d stay home,” Tommy shrugged. He took a chocolate chip on his tongue and chewed it, thoughtfully.  “Same as them.”

“Nope,” Annie giggled. “They don’t work. They die. They starve to death or get kicked out of their cruddy apartments. You sleep, eat, and play in one place or you sleep, eat, and play in another place.”  

Tommy thought about that. It wasn’t that long ago that he was dreading graduation because it more than likely meant he’d have to go out and find a job to help make up for Mary’s stupid schemes.  Either that or go hungry. Or freeze. Or abandon his family.  “That’s not the same thing,” Tommy said. “Kids don’t have options. They’re just dependent.”

“Look at the kids here,” Annie instructed. “Look carefully.”  She bit into her sugar cone. “They only look like they have fewer options because they have fewer wants. They don’t need more, and nobody has lied to them yet, telling them that they do.”

In scattered little pockets Tommy saw all the children.  Some screamed. Some cried. Some were falling asleep. Some laughed. To their parents they were at the center of it. The mother of the newborn kept nursing.  A father held his son’s hand with the little tyke leading him towards the bathroom.  A mother played peekaboo like her son’s laughter was currency.  A dad dug through a diaper bag like the key to disarm a nuclear warhead was in there, so his toddler would stop wailing. What looked like husband and wife tiredly bobbed twins, looking at each other, praying neither one looked up.

“With great power comes great responsibility,” she quipped. “Never said both were in the same person.”

“Doesn’t last, though,” Tommy sighed

“It could,” Annie said. “For you.”  She popped the last bit of cone in her mouth and crunched down.

Tommy motioned to the adorable old couple. They looked like two smiling, wrinkled gnomes.  “What about them? They seem to have plenty of freedom. No one is forcing them to be here.”

“Do you want to wait that long for it?” Annie asked.  They both already knew the answer, so Tommy did not reply.

He looked left and caught a glimpse of a toddler getting their mouth wiped for them. They’d bitten off more than they could chew and a whole hunk of cheese pizza had flopped onto their chin, leaving grease and pizza sauce all over their chin and neck. He looked to his right and saw a tantruming toddler being pulled away from a crying infant.  Based on the bigger baby’s hands and the smaller one’s face one had been trying to either fight or feed the other.  Their caregiver didn’t look like they cared much at the moment.

“Face it,” Annie said. She leaned across the tiny circular table where they’d parked for ice cream after video games. “You know I’m right. Let me give it to you.”  She gave him frosty cold a peck on the nose and Tommy’s face burned red hot.  He crossed his eyes and saw a tiny pink drib fall off the tip of his schnoz. Again, Annie giggled playfully and sat back in her seat, grinning.

“How about I give you something, first?” Tommy flirted. “Right here. Right now. In front of everyone.”

Annie’s eyes fluttered. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She closed her eyes and leaned forward, lips puckered.  Tommy took his mint chocolate chip ice cream cone and smushed it in her face.

“Aaaaaah!” Annie shrieked.  She swatted the cone off her face and then pawed at her nose, manically to make sure that no trace of mint or chip remained on her unblemished face.  “You brat!” She didn’t sound mad, just surprised; annoyed at herself more than Tommy.

“If I was a baby,” Tommy grinned. “You wouldn’t have fallen for that.  And if you did, you could punish me. Carry me out of here. Spank me. No dessert tonight. No ice cream ever again.’

“You booger!” she laughed. “You don’t think I can punish you?”

Tommy kept baiting her.  “If we were both babies and we were fighting, an adult would just separate us.  No way would you be able to get me back.”

“You don’t think I can punish you?” Annie repeated herself, her voice tinged with evil playfulness.

“But because we’re both adults,” Tommy slid his chair back, “I can boop you on your nose…” he stood up.  “And the only way you can punish me,” he purred, “Is if you can catch me!”  Tommy took off, legs and arms pumping and an idiot grin on his face.

He was enjoying this! Why was he enjoying this?!  

Annie was right on his heels. “Oh! No! You! Don’t!” She cackled after him.  His panting laughter mingled with hers and echoed up and down the hallowed halls of consumerism.  “I’m gonna get you!”  Annie called.

“No you’re not!” Tommy called back.  He couldn’t turn his head and maintain his breakneck speed so he just yelled loud enough so that his voice would carry back to her. They bobbed in and out of other people- employees, shoppers, the elderly, the bored, and more than a few people who themselves were likely on shopping dates.

“Hey!

“Huh?”

“Wha-?”

“Stop!”

“Fu-?”

The protests and complaints blurred into a regular stream of random irrelevant sounds; not unlike the other bleeps and bloops from surrounding cabinets in the video arcade.  

PSEEEEEEEEW!

“Hey!” A strong, serious voice broke out above the din.  “You two! Stop! No running! Mall Security!”  

Oh no! Oh yes! Tommy’s grin got even wider.  Neither of them slowed down. “Catch us if you can rent-a-coppers!” Annie taunted them.  If Tommy was going to slow down, Annie’s words sped him back up.

“Here!” Annie was beside him, grabbing his hand. “This way!”  She laughed. She tugged him hard and to the right and swerved wide, the sound of mall security huffing and puffing behind them.

This was all a game to her. Why wouldn’t it be?  But what was Tommy’s excuse?

They made a mad dash into one of the bigger department stores that fed back into the parking lot.  

“Left!” she called.  They zigged left past perfumes.

“Right!” Tommy called. They zagged right at the racks of lacy lingerie.

A sixth sense guided the mischievous duo, their escape route was more a matter of impulse and instinct than anything else.  

“Straight!” They said together, sprinting forward and only middle aged sales clerks were around to object. They peeled off and U-Turned at a wall of big screen T.V.’s and raced towards the parking lot.  “RUN!”

They hadn’t won anything. No race completed, or record set. They more than likely had lost security well over a thousand yards prior.  It didn’t stop them from giggling like idiots, panting with their hands on their knees.

“Can…a baby…do…that?” Tommy asked, huffing and puffing, waiting for his breath to catch up.  “I…think…not…”

 “That’s the other thing…” Annie huffed back.  “Of being an adult….” She took one more deep breath. “Nobody kicks a precious little kid out or bans a toddler from the mall.  No long term consequences.”

The thought sobered Tommy up. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess they don’t.” Though being stuck in diapers and confined to cribs still seemed like a hell of a long term consequence.  “So what now? Do you wanna go find some other place to hang out?”

Annie rolled her eyes as if Tommy had just suggested something silly.  “Why?” she asked. “Nobody got a good look at us. Let’s just go around to the other end. We stay quiet, we walk.  Maybe get some new clothes, and we’ll blend right back in.

“Oh,” Tommy replied. “Yeah. Guess so.”

So they did.  
***********************************************************************************************
(Shortly thereafter…)

The store ‘4Ever’ did not sell men’s clothing. From rack to roof, it was filled with the kind of flashy, skimpy clothes that middle school girls wanted to wear to look mature and middle aged women wanted to wear to feel young. Everything was a matter of thin, breezy fabric that abused the definition of what ‘clothing’ was.  

It shouldn’t have been called ‘4Ever’.  The store should have been called ‘Technically’ since so many of its wares were only ‘technically’ clothes.  All the naughty bits and pieces were covered…technically, but little was left to the imagination.

Tommy sat in a chair by the dressing rooms, his skin salty from the sweat and the outside air. He’d hunched over with his elbow on his knees and his chin in his hands.  “Everything okay in there?” He asked.  He felt a pulse inside of him and asked. “Need any help with anything?”

“Not yet,” Annie called back. “Almost ready.”

Tommy kept looking out the shop’s windows, weary of security guards. He didn’t think they’d be arrested, just kicked out and banned from the mall.  If he made it through today with his dignity and adulthood intact, it would suck to have one less place where he couldn’t go.  He’d wanted to go shopping at one of the punk goth stores, where everything was baggy, black, and spiked, and every t-shirt had a pop culture reference or ironic slogan on it.

That’d be different enough from the milquetoast clothes he was presently dressed in.  Annie got priority this time, and it had nothing to do with the funny feelings she constantly imparted on him.  4Ever was closer to the entrance they’d come back in, and point of fact, Annie was still paying for everything.

That thought made Tommy feel weird, too.  Some combination of old fashioned toxic masculinity, and wanting to feel more in control of the situation made him want to pay for something.  He’d started the sunrise in a wet diaper, he reminded himself, and had managed to get out of the daycare for the day only because he’d managed to charm the idea into Annie’s head.

In every manner of speaking, he was still at her mercy.

Schhhlink.

The curtain to the dressing room slid open and Tommy found himself at a different kind of mercy.  Annie walked out wearing a completely different outfit. She was technically still covered- technically- but Tommy saw so much more than he had.  The tight little skirt was practically a loin cloth, and the spaghetti strap tank top that showed off her midriff was barely a bra. Her light blonde  hair was up in pigtails and smooth polished black boots snaked up to just below her knees.

“How do I look?” she asked, her lips painted ruby red by either magic or makeup she’d snuck in with her.

Everything Tommy had been planning ran away from him.  “Good,” he said.

“Just good?”

“No. I mean yes. I mean…really…really…good.”

She gave him a devious smile. “I know,” she teased. “I just needed to hear you say it.”  She stepped backwards into the changing booth.  “I’m gonna wear these out of here. Come help me get the tags off?”

Wordlessly, Tommy rose from the chair and followed her into the cramped changing booth.  It was big enough for the both of them, but just barely.  Comfortable for one. Cozy for two. The space would have been cramped if they had a third.

Annie turned so that her back was to him. “Back shoulder,” she said. Annie pointed to a tag sticking out just above the shoulder blade. “Rip it off?”

Tommy plucked it out like a flower.  A little, practically imperceptible, snap sounded out between his forefinger and thumb.

She loves me.

“Skirt,” Annie said. “On the side of my hip…?”

He reached down and took the tiny petal of price, snapping it off.  His hand trembled, so wanting to rest there and feel the warmth of her body.

She loves me not.

“Boots, too.”

Tommy lowered down to his knees and peeled the price sticker off. Handing it and the others dutifully to her slender feminine hand.

She loves me.

Tommy felt the hairs on his arms standing on edge. “What about your bra?” he asked, hungrily. “Do I need to take a tag off that too?”

Coyly, Annie turned around and looked down on him.  “My bra is over there, silly,” she pointed to the pile of more plain, more sensible clothes she’d started the date in. She whispered, “I’m not wearing one.

Like a hungry cat pawing for a fish, Tommy’s hands rose up above him, reaching, groping, and clawing at the air for her breasts.  “Ah-ah-ah,” She slapped his hands away. “Grown-ups have to get permission for that kind of thing, don’t they?”  

She loves me not.

The seductive, almost mocking kiss she planned on his forehead was anything but chaste. Tommy could no longer ignore the feelings that were rocketing to the surface.  “Please…” he begged. “Let me…let me…”

“Let you get one more tag?” Annie taunted.  “Okay.  How about the one on the inside of my new panties?”

She loves me.

Fast and trembling, Tommy reached up her skirt and yanked down the thin panties from her hips all the way down to the floor.  He was putty in her hands.  She shoved him all the way down to the floor and kicked off the flimsy, useless underwear.

Tommy’s body went into a kind of horny autopilot, wherein he gasped and huffed and puffed, despite being flat on his back, and he slid his pants and underwear down past his hips, while she straddled over him.  The space was just big enough to where they could do it if he bent his knees and laid his feet flat on the ground.

She moaned a bit, settling over his cock, and he playfully bucked his hips, bouncing her so that she was forced to grind him.

She didn’t laugh, careful not to make any more noise than she had to, for just outside the curtain, they both remembered was an entire, and very real world, oblivious to the act of passion going right under its nose.  

She leaned forward and kissed him. He leaned up and pulled her hair with one hand and groped her breasts with another.  “Mmmm baby,” she hissed. “Give it to me. Give it to me, Tommy.  Give it to me, baby.  I need this.  I want this.  I crave this.”

Tommy’s body, for his mind was less than operational, was happy to comply.  They writhed on the dirty ground of the changing room. Tongues locked as if in combat.  Breathing unsteady yet somehow synchronized. Thrusting and grinding to the beats of generic up tempo trendy fashion music.

They rolled over so that Tommy was on top. He got to his knees and grabbed her ankles for balance, then moved his hands down to her hips to pull her closer onto him and his face contorted in animal lust while her eyes remained closed, face awash in ecstasy.

She needed this.

He did too.

They both did.

Another loan groan and moan poured out of her, making the hairs on the back of Tommy’s arms feel like they were standing on end.  There were no hairs on his arms however.  Tommy slowed and examined himself, still pumping.

His body hair had re-vanished. So had some of the subtle definitions of muscle on his body.  He stroked his cheeks and found not a hint of stubble.  He was changing back.

“Please,” Annie begged. “Please don’t stop.  Take me.  Take me here.  Take me now!”

Fuck it.

Tommy leaned forward and clapped his hand over her mouth, thrusting and pumping with all of his might. “Go ahead,” he beckoned. “Let it out. Let it all out. No one will hear us.  I promise.”

Annie obeyed, screaming into his hand like a gag.  The noise and the wonderful, excited shock, sent him over the edge so that they came in unison, or close enough that neither could tell.

Tommy rolled over onto his side and they held each other for a second while their heart rates slowed back down. “That was…” she panted, “so good.”
“Yeah,” Tommy replied. “It was.”  They held their breath when a few feet away from them they heard the heavy footsteps of passerby.  “We gotta get out of here.” He suddenly felt very shy and bashful.  A child doing a prank, or sneaking out after curfew.

Annie disentangled herself from him and stood up over him.  He marveled at her in her glory, breathless and in awe from that moment, until she pulled the paper thin panties back up over herself and smoothed down the skirt.  “Come on,” she said, reaching her hand down for him.

He took her hand and sat up, with his pants still around his ankles. “I gotta get a disguise next,” he said.

Her thin smile spread across the entirety of her.  “No you don’t,” she said.  “Look down.”  

His gaze followed hers. Down past his hairless balls and his limp but satisfied cock, was an entirely different set of clothing than the ones he’d been wearing pre-coitus.  Embarrassedly, he pulled his underwear back over his privates. It was now Spider-Man underoos instead of plain boxer-briefs.  Next he tugged dyed blue shorts with an elasticized waistband with leggings that went down just below the knee.   No more erection concealing denim.  His shirt perfectly complimented his shorts too, also Spider-Man themed like he was close to a set.

Tommy knew what was happening, but found it difficult to find the outrage.  He looked up at Annie, and realized that he was currently shorter than her, his head now level with her breasts.  

She shouldered a purse that Tommy knew for a fact hadn’t been there previously, picked the price tags up from the floor and stepped out of the dressing room.  Tommy looked at where her old clothes had been but saw none. He looked up and stood there gazing at himself in the dressing room’s mirror.  He already looked like he had after a few trips to Malacus.  Somehow, he couldn’t muster the outrage.

Annie poked her head back in through the curtain. “Come on,” she said. “It’s my turn. You’ve made your case, now I make mine”  She reached her hand out and he took it, following her to the cash register.

There was suddenly no doubt in his mind that the twenty-something sales clerks and the other shoppers at 4Ever knew exactly what they’d been doing in that changing room. They just didn’t have the gall to interrupt. But from the stares he got, and the lingering smell of sex that wouldn’t quite leave his nose, Tommy was positive that they’d been caught.

Walking forwards, Tommy winced and quietly marveled at the feeling as he moved. His new underwear seemed to have gained all the thickness that Annie’s clothing had shed. His freshly exercised cock felt nestled and happy, close to swaddled.  Tommy leaned back and contorted his spine so that he could see over his shoulder. As half-expected, police officers were walking up just outside to the store. Tommy’s cock wanted to shrivel up inside of them.  In that moment, the threat of going to jail for public indecency seemed much more real than fantastical regression.  

While in line, Tommy caught sight of a man who might have been Tommy’s age, Tommy’s real age that is, nodded sympathetically at Tommy.  His girlfriend, thumbed through racks and racks of ‘techncially’ tops.  “Get used to it kid. First it’s your big sister. Then it’s your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my sister,” Tommy said, defensively.

“Babysitter, then.  Same difference. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Guys like us are always waiting on a woman.”

Tommy wanted to reply but he had none, and the line to check out was very short. He looked around, and suddenly counted far fewer stares than he had imagined. They were barely stares, more like glances. And they weren’t accusatory as much as they were of knowing recognition.  A hot young woman and her little brother weren’t anything to take notice of, beyond a kind of pity. Romantic partners that got dragged along still benefited in the long run; not some kid.

Little did they know…

“I hope it’s okay if I wear these out,” Annie said to the cashier. She put down the price tags and then fished out far too many hundred dollar bills. No place in the mall was that expensive.  
The cashier counted the money and put it all in the machine. “No problem at all ma’am.”

Annie waited until the register was opened and said “Keep the change.”

“Thank you!” the lady beamed. “Have a wonderful day!”

They about faced and went towards the entrance. Beads, entire marbles, of sweat started to form on Tommy’s forehead.  “What’s wrong?” Annie asked.  Tommy tilted his head to the entrance where the police were waiting outside. “Ah,” she said. “That.  Don’t worry.”

Each step felt like Tommy’s shoes were filled with lead. His knees felt wobbly and each successive step felt like he was wading through pudding.  Tommy had had dreams like this, where he was running from monsters or trying to get something he desperately needed, but his legs wouldn’t work or the ground itself slowed him down.  

“Morning miss,” an officer tipped his hat at them.

“Good morning,” Annie said.  She squeezed Tommy’s hand. “Say hi, Tommy.”

“Hi Tommy.”  That hadn’t been a joke. In the moment he was just that nervous.

Both cops chuckled nonetheless, and the young duo kept walking  “Told you,” she whispered.

Tommy looked up at her.  “Told me what?”

“That you didn’t need to worry. No one knew how naughty we were being back there. Didn’t even suspect.”

“Because you altered reality,” Tommy quipped.

Annie quipped back, “Because you’re so little and cute, and I’m young and beautiful.  Innocent until proven guilty applies more and more the more babyish you are.  It’s almost like it’s your natural state and all the other stuff that gets piled on makes things bad.”

Every word out of her mouth was like soft cotton wrapped around his brain. It made it harder to think and feel. “Let’s go to another store,” Tommy said.

“Why?” Annie asked. “You’ve already got some new clothes.” His everything trembled when she piled on with a “And you look very cute in them”.  

“I LOOK LIKE A-...!” He stopped. Heads were turning.  This, of all things, was getting people’s attention. “Let me pick out an outfit.”

Annie wiggled her nose and looked down at him.  “Okay. That’s fair. You can pick.”

************************************************************************************
(A short walk across the mall later…)

Tommy had never been inside a Scorching Subject before.  Considering that it was ninety-nine percent black t-shirts with pop culture references and spiked belts, everything cost too much. By the time Tommy’s family had been wealthy enough to afford overprice pop-punk-goth-poser clothes, he’d been dressed even younger than he presently was.  Tommy looked to fix that.

“So much black,” Annie mused, looking around.  “Not even the original goths wore this much midnight.”  Tommy wasn’t a history buff, but considering how old his date was she might be old enough to have met some of them. She was certainly closer than Tommy. Annie pointed to a poster.  “Who is Roman Reigns?”

“An actor,” Tommy said, picking out a suitable shirt and spiked jacket. .  “Sort of.”

“Why do you even do with these?” Annie asked.  “It’s bad fashion, and bad armor. The spikes are blunted.”

Tommy held up a shirt to his chin. He wasn’t used to this size.  “It makes me look more mature.”

“How many mature people do you know who dress like this?”

Truthfully? None.  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I like it though.”  

“Is this like the video game?” Annie teased. “Where a lie is okay if you know it’s a lie up front?”

Tommy’s shoulders sagged and fought against giving himself a pounding headache.  “Why are you wearing that stuff?”

“It makes me feel pretty,” Annie said.  Then much quieter, “And it turns you on.” Tommy had no answers to that. None. He couldn’t even argue against it.  All according to plan he was beginning to forget why he’d wanted to do this.  Whose plan? Not even Tommy could say at this point. He’d thought it was his, but he wasn’t sure anymore.

One of the cashiers, tall and lanky, but with more muscle tone than Tommy ever had, slid up beside Annie. “Find everything you’re looking for? Need any help?” Like a peacock he primped and preened his light purple mohawk.  Tommy used to be intimidated by guys like this. Right now he wanted to look exactly like him.

He wasn’t talking to Tommy, though.  Tommy was practically invisible. “Excuse me-” Tommy started to say, but Annie cut him off.

“No,” Annie said. “We’re fine.” She thumbed over to Tommy. ”Just waiting for someone to make up his mind.” Tommy knew she was talking about more than just clothes.

The jerk poser cut in front of Tommy. “Yeah? Are you sure I can’t get you anything? We keep the AC on really high. Maybe I could get you a little something to warm you up.”

A new warmth started to bleed into Tommy. Indignance. Jealousy. What was this wanna be tough guy thinking? She clearly wasn’t interested in him, but he wasn’t taking the hint. And who dressed like that? It’s not like Scrumpton had a big Punk Rock scene.  Dude was a total faker.  Which begged the question: Why was Tommy here buying the exact same clothes.  Wasn’t this just another layer of dress up?

He pushed the thought away. One thing at a time, he decided, and the most important thing was right now.  With one hand he spun the interloper around “Hey!” Tommy barked. “Dickweed!”  Tommy wasn’t so small that the other man was immune to him, but it was clear he was turning around out of habit and influence instead of force.

“What’s up little man?” He grinned cockily.  “Having trouble reaching some-?” As pale as he was, he went a shade whiter.  He backpedaled away from Tommy as if the boy were a coiled up rattle snake. “Uh…miss? Ma’am? I think you’re uh…kid…”

“What?” Tomy demanded. He stomped forward. His ears registered the slight splashing sound of his first step, but his brain didn’t comprehend it.  The unexpected surprise and fear in the other man’s voice only embolden him. “What?! Do you want a piece of me?”
“Dave!” A dark haired girl with an emo haircut scolded. “The fuck did you do to that kid?”

“What are you talking about?” Tommy wondered. He leaned uncomfortably to his right and felt a squish all the way down to his socks. “Huh?  He looked down and his brain finally caught up to his body.  

Starting at his crotch and then trailing all the way down his thighs was a stream of hot flowing urine. It dripped down past his knees and pooled at his feet with roughly half of the droplets tickling down his hairless legs and soaking into his socks. The other half pooled directly between his feet and spread out beneath his shoes so that every time he took a step there was a thin little splashing sound.  Tommy had been so angry, so distracted and concerned, that he’d forgotten his bladder entirely and peed his pants without noticing.  His decision to think about only one thing at a time had taken a far more drastic turn than he intended.

“I am not cleaning that up,” the punk with the mohawk said.  

His coworker was shaking her head vehemently. “I’m the manager. It’s your job.”  The attention was directly on him, and yet not.  They were talking about him, but not to him, and it was almost too much.

Tommy opened his mouth, but that just made the air come out of him faster, huffing and puffing in shock and awe at the puddle beneath his pants.  His underoos were soaked through and through, with just barely enough padding in them so that Tommy felt wet from the tip of his penis all the way down to his taint before gravity gave out and the trickle continued down his legs in earnest.

In the dim light of the pseudo-goth store, Tommy didn’t appear to need darker pants.The massive wet blotch that ran from his belt line all the way down his legs was so dark that his Peter Parker Spider-Man shorts may have gone full Venom Symbiote. His poor ignored bladder finally stopped spraying, but the flimsy fabrics of his big boy clothes made the sensation of hot running liquid linger.  His skin itched, besides, making it feel as if the stream was still going.

Annie took Tommy by the hand and yanked him closer to the counter.  She slammed a fist full of dollars on the counter and snatched up a bundle of clothes.  “Sorry about that,” she apologized. “We’re still working on a few things, today.” Tommy was too humiliated to argue.

His shame intensified being led out of the shop. In the open air of the mall concourse. There was no hiding what Tommy had done there with the tall ceilings and great glass windows on the roof letting cheap sunlight in.  “Hide me,” Tommy begged.  “Wrap something around me. Pick me up. Anything, please.”

“I thought you wanted to be an adult,” Annie replied. “Grown-ups have to live with the consequences of their accidents.”

“That’s not fair,” Tommy yelped, feet still walking, and socks still splishing. “My bladder shrunk or something…”

“Whomever said life was fair?” Annie asked.  Tommy had no answer for that.  “Don’t worry, bubby. Our date isn’t over yet.”  She strode them over to a directory.  “Now where’s the nearest bathroom, I wonder.”

Tommy stayed routed there, with Annie taking up the majority of the space in front of the mounted mall map. He wanted to cling to her and hide his shame, but even when he was less than a foot shorter than her, he was still much weaker.  She wouldn’t let him hide.

About half the passerby didn't seem to notice Tommy, the state of his shorts, or the almost imperceptible trail of droplets that followed him out of the store. For that he was quietly grateful.  Most of the others, if they saw him, quickly looked away; embarrassed for him, trying to mind their own business, or spare him a bit of pride.  To them he gave silent, prayer-like thanks.

A small, statistically insignificant amount of old people, and mothers of children who were just under kindergarten age, seemed bemused. Nostalgic even. The looks on their face painting rosey colored memories; making them reminisce when their children had such awful public accidents and giving them great relief that that time was past.  Those who still had infants were suddenly reminded to check the state of their children’s diapers.

“Mommy! Mommy!” A boy much younger than Tommy pointed and grinned. “That big kid went pee-pee in his pants!”

“It’s rude to point,” his mother said loudly enough for Tommy to hear.

“But he did! He went pee-pee! You told me big kids couldn’t do that no more!”  Tommy noticed the slight hint of a Pull-Up poking out of the lad’s clothes.

“That’s not a big kid,” the mother said, tugging her tyke along much the same way that Annie had led Tommy this far. “He’s probably…special…or something.  Anyways, it's still rude.”  Tommy wanted to melt into a puddle and get flushed down the drain hearing all this.

“Got it,” Annie said, putting her finger on the directory map.  “We are here. And the nearest potty is riiiiiight here.”

“Excuse me,” the mother with the extremely loud toddler interrupted. She’d doubled back with her spawn and approached Annie directly.  “I couldn’t help but notice, does your kiddo need one of these?”  She opened up the flap on her diaper bag and produced a fresh Pull-Up.  “I couldn’t help but notice.  He’s tall but skinny, so I think this will still fit him.”

Annie looked appreciative towards the woman. “Oh no,” she said. “We couldn’t.”

“I’ve got plenty,” the mother insisted. “My Austin is almost totally day trained. I only have these out of habit because he sometimes has a problem with public restrooms.”  Austin didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed by his mother talking about his bathroom habits.  Based on his age and size, Austin probably hadn’t had bathroom habits all that long.

“It’s a good habit,” Annie said. She took the training diaper from the woman’s grip, appearing gracious and grateful, as if she hadn’t orchestrated this meeting in some way herself. “One I need to pick up myself.”

“No worries,” the mother said.  

Annie redirected Tommy so that he was square shouldered with the woman and her little boy. “Say ‘thank you’, Tommy.”

Tommy’s face almost collapsed.  “Thank you….”

“For?” the mismatched woman said.

Tommy felt a nudge. “For giving me a Pull-Up.”  He looked down at his feet and saw the thin trails on his legs left behind by his own piss.

“Because?”

Tommy snapped his head up to Annie, silently begging her not to make him say it.

“Grown-ups admit their mistakes, don’t they?” Annie said.

Tommy almost sobbed from embarrassment.  “Because I went pee-pee in my pants and soaked my brand new underoos.”

“Awwwwww,” the mother melted at the sound of Tommy’s confession. Tommy realized much too late that he shouldn’t have specified the newness of his oversaturated undies.  “That’s okay, sweetie. You tried. You’ll be ready for big boy undies one day.”  She reached out and scuffled Tommy’s hair like he was a puppy.  “Such a sweet, special boy.”  

“He most certainly is,” Annie agreed.

“Bye-bye special boy!” The snot nosed toddler called out while the duo walked away.

“Wasn’t that nice of them?” Annie asked, sounding innocent. “Come on. Let’s go get you cleaned up.”

Tommy didn’t see the way to the bathroom. He was too busy staring at the floor, embarrassed, and panting, knowing that so many people were looking at him, seeing his soaking shorts and how he was being led by the hand by a much taller, much prettier girl. When his eyes weren’t fixated on the concourse’s broad tiled floors, they were glued to the Pull-Up that Annie was now forcing him to carry.  

It looked so much thicker and crinklier than what he was currently wearing, but not nearly as thick and crinkly as what he’d been wearing this morning.  Not thick and crinkly enough. Damnit.  He was backsliding. Fast.  And to compound things he wasn’t sure how to feel about it.  Just another addict who had gotten a taste of the good stuff.

“Uh oh,” a couple of ladies putting on chapstick in the bathroom mirror remarked. “Somebody had a tiny tinkle accident!” One of them laughed.

“Not so tiny,” another tittered.

Tommy wasn’t surprised that he was in the women’s room. Annie was doing this, he reminded himself.  This is what she did. They would be here and react this way because Annie all but willed it.

A moment later, the pair were isolated in the extra large handicapped stall. “Come on,” Annie said. “Let’s get you into your nice dry Pull-Up.”  Tommy braced himself for the chill of exposed air on his privates and was caught off guard by his t-shirt getting yanked over his head forcing his arms up to the ceiling.  He felt as much as he heard the rectangular piece of cloth fall from his hand and waft to the floor like a leaf in autumn wilting off a tree.  Tommy literally couldn’t get a grip.

He sputtered and glared indignantly at Annie.  Wordlessly, Annie held up the shirt for his inspection. More than his shorts had gotten wet. He’d peed so vigorously that it had soaked through and moistened the hem of his shirt too.  

“Shoes off,”  Annie instructed. Tommy dug his right toe into his left heel and pried off the shoe and quickly replicated the feat a second time with his left foot and right heel. Annie got down on her knees peeled the wet socks off his feet one at a time and he winced and wiggled his toes.  “Yeah, that feels yucky, doesn’t it?”

Dumbly, Tommy nodded.  His shorts and underwear came off right after, leaving him naked in front of her.

Annie opened up her purse.  It was barely a handbag before, now it seemed much bigger as she pulled out a packet of baby wipes. Tommy shivered before the first one even touched his legs.

“Brrrrrrrr….”

“Yeah, it’s cold.” Annie agreed.  “It feels a lot colder when it’s all over you too, up and down your legs.”  She ran a few wipes over him to illustrate her point. “Gee,” she feigned talking to herself, “what if there was a way to minimize this? Make it easier.”

“You’re trying to make it sound smarter or more mature to wear a Pull-Up,” Tommy said the obvious.  

The first reply he got was the fresh cold wipe coming into contact with his scrotum.  “Turnabout’s fair play,” Annie joked.  She finished wiping him down and then picked up the the disposable training pants.  “Ready to step in?”  She popped them open, stiff and rigid, already expecting the answer.

Tommy kept glaring.

“What?” Annie asked innocently. “You’re doing this. Not me.  I didn’t make you have an accident.  You just know the truth deep down.”

Tommy kept glaring.  Like a statue.

Each eye on Annie blinked, one at a time, like she was afraid to fully let him out of her sight.  Down on her knees she once again shorter than Tommy and so appeared especially vulnerable; perhaps halfway reasonable, even.  “What’s wrong?  I thought we were still playing.”

“I’m not special,” Tommy said.  He hadn’t heard an echo as ominous as this one since he’d first journeyed into the caves beyond the clock.

“I didn’t say you were,” Annie said. “You are. But I didn’t say it.”

“Those people thought so,” Tommy said. “The lady and her kid.”

“They were right.”

“I’m not stupid. I know how to do this. You’re the one making it harder.”

“Stupid and special aren’t the same thing,” Annie said.  She reached forward and caressed the back of Tommy’s right ear. He didn’t flinch away.  “And you’re the one that’s being difficult.” A hint of the playful and flirty nymph revealed itself.  “Making a bet. Challenging me.” She sounded like she thought it was the most adorable thing in the world.  “Making up stories.All because you really just want me all to yourself, huh?”

“I’m not making things up,” Tommy insisted. “There’s a reason me and Charlie didn’t lose everything.”

“I know,” Annie reminded him. “But that’s not the part you’re making up.  THe part you’re making up is that you’re not special.”

“I’m not!”

Annie put the Pull-Up off to the side.  “Here, my sweet sweet boy,” she intoned. “Let me make you feel special.”  Lips pursed, she leaned over on her knees to kiss Tommy, just not on his lips

“What are you…?”  Tommy’s voice dropped till it was inaudible.  His penis quivered at feeling her kiss, and came to near full attention at the sensation of her whispering breath.  His elbows tensed and his eyes rolled in the back of his head when he felt the tips of her fingers gently tease his now hairless balls. “Yes…” he moaned. “Please…”  Just like that, he was ready to go again.

He watched the top of her head, in rapt fascination, inhaling deeply through his nose while he felt the moistness of her lips surround his penis. He growled, feeling powerful and big while she sucked harder and forced her mouth down over his penis as she sucked.

“Please…” he repeated. “Keep…don’t stop.”  The suckling girl didn’t need to be told. He soon wondered if the women who’d been there were still present, hearing this.  What would they think of him now, hearing this?  Would they giggle and feel sorry for him now?  Or would they be impressed at what he’d accomplished?  

Such a beautiful girl, tempted and determined to break him. That in of itself made him special.  There was a victory in that.  He lifted his head up and stretched his neck, trying to make one head as tall as the other.  Playfully, Annie reached under him and tickled him while she continued to run her tongue over his member.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmm…..” Her humming sent vibrations all up and down him, set him on the very edge of his passion.

“I’m not gonna…” he lied. “I’m not…” He reached out and grabbed her pigtails, using them like bike handles.  He tugged on them, gripping them, and thus bringing her closer to him, and he closer to her.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmm….”

He tasted good to her.  Better than strawberry ice cream. Better than mint chocolate chip.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmm…..”

Tommy blew his load right into her.  Right into her mouth. A whole part of him just exploded on the inside and launched deep into the back of his throat.  He gripped her pigtails and twisted the strands of her hair into his fingers, his face breaking out into a gleeful rictus grin and his toes curling on the bathroom floor.  

Annie remained still and unfazed. Her tongue moved and bathed him throughout, lapping up his gift to her like a dog licking up peanut butter.  They remained like that for several minutes until Tommy’s penis had reduced again to a single flaccid strand of fleshy rope. She smoothly pulled her lips back from him, drawing out the final moments as if she were just as disappointed it were over as Tommy.

“Ready now, my special boy?” she asked.

His brain back in a fog, Tommy nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“I need to hear it,” Annie said.  “Do you feel special?”

“Yes.”

They were alone now. No witnesses. Tommy was certain.

“Who's my special boy?”

“I am,” Tommy said.

She asked again, more enthusiastically.  “Who's my special boy?!”

“I am!” he roared back with equal energy and twice as much belief.

Annie leaned sideways and picked the Pull-Ups back up where they’d lain. “Good. Now step in.”

Tommy did. But it was the only thing he did. He basked in the feeling as Annie pulled the training pants up over his waist, butt, and privates for him. These were even softer and bulkier than his underwear.  He wasn’t ready to admit it, but he was now very glad he’d had that accident.

Next, Annie attended to the clothes. That wad of cash she’d slapped down on the counter wasn’t just to pay for mopping up the floor. She’d also taken clothes to dress Tommy in. She slid the dark black shorts up over him, past the bright blue Pull-Ups. These didn’t have pockets, and they stopped above the knee, but that was okay.  

To help, Tommy raised his arms straight up over his head so that it was easier for her to slip on the T-shirt; also black, with a logo of a bleeding heart in bright red splashed on the front.  “Little Heart Breaker,” Tommy read the shirt; proud that he could both read and translate the letters despite viewing them upside down.

Annie blushed, grabbing his wrist. “I know you wanted something with spikes,” she said. “But this was all they had in your size.”  The comment about size didn’t register to Tommy. What did register was the piece of leather she fastened along his wrist.  

The wristband had blunted metal spikes, but each one was further softened with the addition of a jingle bell.  A punk rock wrist rattle. “I love it,” Tommy said. And he did.  No lie.

Annie wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. “That’s wonderful! I knew you would!” Tommy curled his toes again, not noticing or caring how easy it was for his heels to leave the floor when Annie leaned back with him.

She released him and stood up, content and pleased with herself. Tommy looked up and Annie seemed even bigger than before. With both of them standing he only came up to just barely past her belly button. More size and proportion had gone sloppy dead.    

Tommy examined the toilet that he hadn’t even thought to try and use.  There was no way he’d manage it now. He’d fall in if he sat down with how wide the gap was. It seemed and felt like he’d always been this small, but in actuality, Tommy knew she'd sucked more out of him than just his seed.

Annie replaced his socks and sneakers with a pair of snug but breathable sandals. Perfectly appropriate for Georgia fall weather, and it gave him the ability to wiggle his toes, too.  “Ready to go?”

The boy looked down at himself. Something didn’t feel quite right. It was his shorts, he decided. He grabbed at the sites where the pockets would have been and tugged them down just an inch or two so that the hems would scrape the middle of his kneecaps. It also made it so that if he wasn’t extremely careful, any random person at the Mall might see that he was wearing a Pull-Up.

Tommy wasn’t sure if he liked the idea or not.

“Now I am,” Tommy said.  He reached up and grabbed her hand, and they walked out of the ladies’ room, hearing the bells on his wrist tingle and jingle softly while their wrists swayed together in time.  

Just like in the dressing room, whatever clothes had been discarded remained behind, and may or may not have ceased to exist, and Tommy was physically smaller than before. It was like a snake shedding its skin but in reverse.

“Ready to tell me the secret?” Annie asked.

Tommy finally remembered himself. “No.”

“Good.” Annie told him. “If you told me now, I might just keep you this way.  That wouldn’t be any fun.  The real you is still much littler than this.”  The way she said it sounded so nice that for a second Tommy forgot that he was supposed to argue.  Feeling how cozy and safe he was in his new Pull-Up, Tommy wondered if he really was supposed to argue.

Maybe losing wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

“Come on, my big special boy,” Annie coaxed. “Let’s get you a snack. Something nice and sugary.”

“Won’t that spoil my lunch?”  Tommy regretted asking it the very next breath. He sounded like his mother.

“If you don’t think you’re responsible enough,” Annie joked.

“No!” He yelped out. “No, no, no, no, no, no!  I totally am!  I can handle an extra large slurpee! And a cookie!”

“Even though you already had ice cream?”

“Uh-huh! I’m positive.”

“Okay…”  Annie sounded neither convinced nor disappointed. “If you say so…”

****************************************************************************************

(Much Later…)

“Yabba-Dabba-DOOOOOOOOOOO!”

The embedded speaker behind Tommy’s head sang out:

“FLINTSTONES! MEET THE FLINTSTONES! THEY’RE THE MODERN STONE AGE FAMILEEEEEEE! FROM THE TOWN OF BEDROCK! THEY’RE A PAGE RIGHT OUT OF HISTORY!”

Tommy gripped the plastic toy steering wheel and spun it wildly left and right.  He pounded his feet rapidly, his legs like little pistons. It was important to him that he did so. It added to the authenticity of the experience.  Beneath him, the miniature recreation of Fred Flintstone’s signature ride bobbed and sloped up and down like a horse galloping in slow motion or a lifeboat gently bobbing in the ocean.  The latter comparison was probably more apt that the former.

The turning of the fake stone steering wheel did nothing. It didn’t even pivot the steam roller tires at the bottom of the play car.  His stomping affected neither the motion nor speed of the ride.  The car bobbed up and down on its track because the electric motor had power going to it, and the only reason it was switched on was because Annie put in a sufficient amount of quarters.

There was no goal to reach. No objective to fulfill. No official game or rules. Tommy’s rip roaring escapades would last only as long as the pre-recorded theme song.  The ride was scripted and on the rails as any arcade shooter, but there was no test or skill or story to engage with to prolong it or shorten the experience.

Unlike the arcade which was purposefully dark, labyrinthian, and loud, the kiddie rides at the mall were out in the open, easy to find, and the surrounding shops and concourse were silent save for the gentle music that served more as white noise.

“Yabba-Dabba-Dooo!”

Tommy didn’t have to yell to be heard, but he did it anyway.  There was nothing else to tune out, but his focus stayed razor sharp.  As far as Tommy’s pulse was concerned, he was driving along the roads of a cartoon show even older than his parents. He pumped his fist, his wrist rattle adding to the soundtrack of the ride.

The shrunken young man was unconcerned, but even if he was the anxiety would have been misplaced.  Shoppers both young and old paid no mind. There was nothing out of place with someone of Tommy’s size enjoying themselves on a ride that was clearly designed with them in mind. (Calling it a ride was being generous. It’s not like it moved that much or went anywhere).  Tommy was in no position or attitude to worry about what other people thought.

“HAVE A YABBA DABBA DOO TIME! A DABBA DOO TIME! WE’LL HAVE A GAY OLD TIIIIIIME!”
For what was at least the dozenth time, the speakers cut, the fake car wound down to a crawl and then to a full stop, and Tommy looked up at his date.  “Again!”

“Having fun?” Annie asked. She’d been standing next to the kiddie ride the entire time, staring adoringly at him.

Tommy blinked and then peed his pants without hesitation. “Yeah!” The massive slurpee had energized and gone right through him.  The women’s restroom was practically on the other side of the mall from where they were. It was easier, more logical, more efficient, to just let go and get the maximum amount of time and energy out of the experience as possible.  “Again!”

Annie smiled coyly, and inserted another round of quarters, starting the machine up.

“FLINTSTONES! MEET THE FLINTSTONES!”

By his own rough estimate, had Tommy chosen to go to the bathroom, they would have had to walk back to the restrooms at least three times and then return to the hub of plugged in toy helicopters, cars, rocket ships, and submarines.  Tommy saved himself at least half an hour of transition time and got twenty more rides as a result.

Mary never let her children ride these sorts of silly things- literal rockets to nowhere.  Said they were a waste of money that they didn’t have. She was technically right, but if something made you happy, was it really a waste?

By the time Tommy had pocket change of his own and could go somewhere unaccompanied, he’d been too big to try these things out.  The arcade was fun. So were places like the public library.  He’d done all of those before.  Tommy was making up for lost time in more ways than one.

“WE’LL HAVE A GAY OLD TIIIIIIIME!”

The song was over and the machine slowed down to a stop.  “Already?” Tommy whined. He pounded the steering wheel just to show his enthusiasm at the experience and annoyance that it had paused.

“Yeah,” Annie said. “It sucks when nice things come to an end, doesn’t it?”  Tommy braced himself for another lecture on how he should give up and be a baby.  Instead, Annie looked Tommy straight in the eye and asked.  “It’s been a while. Do you gotta go potty?”

Tommy concentrated and felt his bladder. It was just barely starting to fill up again. He’d have to force it, but he could technically pee. “Yeah,” he said. He might have used his Pull-Up for its just-in-case purpose more than once, but he wasn’t going to lie.  That would be immature.

“Okay,” Annie chirped. “Let’s take a quick bathroom break.” She held out her hand.  Like an adult, Tommy took it, stepped out of the car and then jumped off the mounted platform the rest of the way down. Even more of his bright blue Pull-Up was showing. The pulp was fuller, more swollen, and sagging. That made it droop and push his shorts down further.   “Uh oh,” Annie said.

Tommy cocked an eyebrow. “Uh-oh? What uh-oh?”

“You leaked,” Annie told him. To illustrate her point, she pressed the back of his shorts against his legs. Tommy tensed when he felt the telltale wetness and chill of  damp clothing. It felt nothing like the pleasant puffy pulpy sensation of his Pull-Ups.  “I think it was all the bouncing on your butt and stomping around.”  She made no mention that he shouldn’t have peed in the first place.

“You know,” Tommy said. “I think I should go get cleaned up.”

“That’s very mature of you,” Annie granted. “Good boy.”  Little did she seem to realize that her grip on him was loosening.

Tommy flashed a toothy wolfish grin.  “Doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with it, though…” Tommy took off. “Race ya!” And just as quickly, he was off; sprinting as fast as his shortened legs could carry him, heedless that his underwear was bobbing up and down behind him and swinging side to side between his thighs with every step.

His magical date was bent over and chasing him with outstretched arms and tickling fingers. “I’m gonna getcha!” Annie teased. “I’m gonna getcha!”

Unlike their display earlier, no one called out or complained yelling for them to stop. The same security guards who would have been giving chase and blowing whistles only took notice long enough to realize that it was a harmless game between a very special boy and the girl taking care of him.

“Oh you better hurry,” one of them shouted, playfully, “She’s almost caught up!”

“If she catches you she’s gonna take you to the potty!” Another ribbed jovially.

Little did they know that they were already on their way.  Too late did Tommy realize that he had no idea where he was going. He’d been caught up in the moment and was too focused on the impromptu game of tag.  More concerning, Annie had gone mysteriously quiet.  Tommy didn’t slow down, but he looked behind him.  “Ann-?”

BAM!

The side of Tommy’s face collided violently with the ground. Pain rocketed through his body and his limbs went limp from shock. Tommy tried to stand, tried to at least push up to his knees, but his legs got all tangled in his shorts.  While he’d been running, his shorts had steadily slid further and further down his ankles thanks to drooping Pull-Up until the inevitable happened and gravity combined with inertia to teach him a most painful lesson. Babies didn’t just wear onesies because they were cute; they did so because diapers drooped and little legs could get tangled up in sagging shorts.  A onesie would have provided extra support.

The first time Tommy opened his mouth, his throat was too tight to emit any sound. He wailed and wailed and wailed, but it was only air that came out at first. His vocal chords produced no sound and his lungs would not push hard enough.  His face throbbed and his skin was on fire. The rational part of his brain knew that he’d tripped and fallen, just a silly accident; probably wouldn’t even leave a bruise.

Like a little kid, the rest of him didn’t care. Too shocked. Too hurt. Too stunned. Too completely fucking overwhelmed.  One big deep breath later and Tommy was screaming out a mournful wail that had he been bigger would have been taken as some kind of mental breakdown over the death of a loved one.

It felt like a gust of air was blowing by him, just because Annie was lifting him up off the ground.  He sobbed and his body shook while he cried into her shoulder. It hurt so much! It hurt so damn much!  It really didn’t, but he couldn’t help but let every single bad feeling he’d kept contained in him out!

A light bouncing from Annie’s hip signaled to Tommy that they were moving, the sudden drop in altitude and being slid down onto her lap signaled that they hadn’t gone very far, just the nearest bench.  He was sitting side saddle, with him and his wet Pull-Up on her lap, and his sandaled feet

“WHY…AREN’T…WE….GOING…?” Tommy’s words came out in gasps and shrieks. No volume control. No breath control.  Everything was shouting and struggling for air.

Annie didn’t seem to mind.  “We’re not going anywhere, baby,” she whispered to him. She started gently rubbing his back, petting him, letting him know that he’d be okay. “Not anywhere.”  Her hand caressed his still throbbing cheek. “Let me help.”

The pain dulled. Then numbed. Then it went away completely. So did the wetness in his pants; not his Pull-Up, his pants.  It was as if the pee-pee that had leaked out of his Pull-Up had been wicked right back inside.  Tommy pulled open the front of his shorts and stared down at his underwear.  Still a Pull-Up, but the trim had darkened and the decorations had taken on a twinkling star and nighttime sky motif.  

“What are you doing?” Tommy demanded to know.

Annie’s response was low, slow, seductive, and humiliating. “Toddler boys like you need thicker, nighttime Pull-Ups, even during the day.  You’re such a heavy wetter it’s practically the only choice.”  She kissed him on the cheek and followed up his question with one of her own.  “Why are you staring down at your pants in front of everybody if you’re so big?”

Tommy’s face blushed bright red at that realization. His lips wanted to sew themselves shut and his teeth begged to be welded together.

“Don’t worry,” Annie said. “Your favorite Nanny Annie will fix.” The way she said it was almost mocking.  

Tommy barely struggled while he was shifted and turned so that he ended up facing her, straddling her leg. He reached out and took her hands for balance. Only a second later did he think better of letting her trap him like that, but it was too late by then.

His clothes started to ripple like water and melt like hot candle wax. The faux goth pre-schooler outfit started to rearrange itself on his body, with every fiber shifting and changing color.   His shirt became a simple yellow, and his shorts rose up and over his shoulders, snaking down his back.  

Ten seconds passed and Tommy’s clothing had shifted into a small, yellow t-shirt, and a pair of bib overalls that didn’t make it all the way down to his knees.  Shortalls in fact. The material wasn’t even denim, but a soft light red fabric that felt more like something one would wear to bed than any suitably manly activity that one might use as an excuse to wear overalls.

On the front of the bib pocket was a distinct blue paw print. In case he couldn’t get the hint (or clue) Tommy saw the outline of an equally blue floppy eared puppy stitched into the shortalls thighs. Speaking of footprints, his sandals had  melted over completely, turning into velcro sneakers with light up soles.

He looked adorable.

“Big toddler boy shouldn’t be out of these,” Annie cooed and taunted. “Now you can’t take a peek at your widdle boy undies in front of everyone and your pants won’t sag no matter how much you go pee-pee in your Pull-Ups.  

That baby talk. That cutesy, humiliating, condescending, sugary sweet. She was speaking in a normal volume but it was so embarrassing to hear spoken out loud that Tommy felt like she was shouting it over the loudspeakers for the whole mall to hear.

Nervously, Tommy looked left, right, and backwards. It was still just the mall.  It was a little more crowded because it was just before lunch, but otherwise it was the same old concourse filled with shops and people walking around.

Logically, it made sense. If people weren’t going to notice that his clothes had melted and rearranged into an entirely new outfit, they weren’t going to pay any mind to a little bit of baby talk.

Tommy tried to change the subject.  “Can we maybe go back to the rides?” he asked.

“I thought we were going to the potty,” Annie teased. “Did you forget already? Maybe you went pee-pee in your Pull-Ups even more.”  Tommy’s penis twitched, his bladder forcing out what little urine had accumulated.  Part of him wanted to blame that on Annie, but the rest of him knew it hadn’t been her.  That had been a hint, not a hypnotic suggestion.

“No…” Tommy lied.

“Awwww,” Annie cooed. “Widdle baby toddler boy doesn’t know when he has to go pee-pee in his pants.”  She started bobbing him slowly, very slowly, on her knee.  “Do you need to use the potty?”

Tommy shuddered. The sopping wet squish between his legs had spread all the way to his bottom.  “No…?”

“THAT’S RIGHT!” She squealed. “YOU DON’T NEED TO USE THE POTTY! YOU JUST GO PEE-PEE IN YOUR PANTS”  Her knee got a bit of a giddy up there, making Tommy jolt. More than just his spine started to stiffen.

That had not been how Tommy had meant it.  His body didn’t seem to care.  “Please…” Tommy begged. But he didn’t finish the thought, because he didn’t know what to beg for. He just felt like begging was something he should be doing.  

“I wonder if you’re a big enough boy to even go on those rides,” Annie said. She kept bobbing her knee.  “I think I’ve got the perfect ride for you right here.”  She bobbed him up and down some more, smiling at him with those seductive all consuming eyes.

His underwear was so thick and slick and his balance unstable, that Tommy started slipping slightly, grinding up against her leg as she bobbed him. “Does the widdle big boy wike that?” Annie teased.

Tommy let out a low moan despite himself, he couldn’t help it. “Yeah…” he huffed. “More.”

He held onto her hands, and she continued to slowly, oh so slowly, bounce him on her knee.

“Okay, big boy…” She didn’t sound like she believed herself calling him ‘big boy’.  Tommy didn’t care.

With Annie seated on a bench, Tommy was able to look past her and at the people walking by.  They saw him, in that they were aware of him, but they took no notice.  A few pretty women made eye contact with him and gave him little waves, mouthing ‘Hi!’  Tommy let out another low moan that turned into a guilty giggle.  

"Pwetty girls. Hehehe…"  He was being jerked off in public and people thought he was cute. Tommy’s eyes rolled back into his head while Annie gently bounced him, causing him to gyrate and grind on her like a little puppy.  He could say anything he wanted; do anything he wanted.

He shouldn’t be enjoying this.  But he was.  His body was so small and underdeveloped. He should be bigger than this. He should be stronger than this. He should be fighting. But he wasn’t.  And every bounce, every bob on Annie’s knee made his pulse quicken and his wee-wee hard and tickly. Soon, he’d make and his sopping wet undies would go from mushy in the front to sticky.

“That’s right," Annie, cooed to him like he was no better than a three year old.  “We don’t need any rides or video games.  We can do this for free.  You can be happy.”  Still holding his hands she whispered. “Everyone is watching and they’re happy for you. Be happy.”

Tommy was.

A wisp of white smoke caught Tommy’s eye. The mist cleared and a full bag of Pull-Ups rested next to Annie. It was far enough away from Tommy’s tiny arms that he couldn’t have reached even if he were free, but close enough that he could see almost every inch of the packaging.

“Fun. Fast. Easy.”

Annie bobbed him faster to get his attention. “Don’t worry about that, Tommy. Let Annie worry about your wet pants.”  That’s right. He could let her do that. He could not worry.

“Bouncy!” Tommy shrieked in delight.

Annie kept bobbing him up and down,  cooing and baby talking. “Widdle boy playing around in his wet pants.”

With every slow bob, every gentle nudging and grinding, Tommy felt his underwear expand and get thicker and wetter.  He felt zero discomfort in his tiny baby bladder and his undies only got warmer and wetter and thicker with every passing minute.  He could be tinkling right now and not know it.

And Tommy didn’t care.  All that mattered was looking at the pretty lady bouncing him on her knee and holding his hands and every other person walking by oblivious to him getting the bouncy knee ride of his life.

Annie’s knee picked up steam and a silly grin spread out over Tommy’s entire face.  “Chooo-choooo!”

He looked at the package of Pull-Ups again.  As his own Pull-Ups had grown and bulged, so had the bag. The number of training pants per package had decreased, meaning each Pull-Up had gotten bigger and puffier to match the sopping wet one barely contained in his pants.

The advertisement on the label had changed, too.  The picture of a child model common on so many products had vanished and been replaced with cartoon sketches of cartoon animals playing.  “For big wetters,” it advertised. " Super thick,” and  "When your big boy can't get to the potty."

Tommy definitely didn’t need to get to the potty. Not with these thick soggy undies on.  No, not undies. Pull-Ups.  He was bouncing and grinding and gurgling- yes gurgling- and sitting in wet Pull-Ups. No job. He couldn’t even make it to the potty. He didn’t even know when he needed to go pee-pee with his wee-wee.

He did know that he was about to make sticky cum-cums in his soggy Pull-Ups. As if she knew it, too, Annie picked up speed.

“Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy,” Tommy mumbled while the wonderful, tickling pleasure built up inside him. He was going to burst!  Every bounce, every grind, brought him closer and closer to the edge, yet with every syllable out of Annie’s mouth, it felt like his underwear got thicker and thicker, making it so he had to grind even harder.  

“Not yet, baby,” Annie said. “Nooooot yet.”  She slowed her pace down, bringing him down and teasing him.  He was so weak and helpless in her grip that she was able to transfer his left hand over to his right and hole both of arms by the rist. From nowhere she stuck a pacifier into his mouth and Tommy began sucking on it as hard as he could.

“Does my widdle boy want to finish? Make stickies in his pants?”

Tommy nodded his head vigorously.  “Mmmh!”

“You do?”

Again, Tommy nodded, feeling his drive and desperation rise as Annie’s leg slowed.

“Does my big boy wanna make cum-cums in his pants?”

“Mhm”.

“Say it.”

Tommy shouted at the top of his lungs. “I WANNA MAKE CUM-CUMS IN MY PANTS!”  Everyone could hear what he just said.  Everyone.

She picked up speed. “Good boy,” she comforted him.  “But first you have to do something else.”  She didn’t wait.  “You need to make poopies. Can you make poopies in your pants for me? Can you do that like a good boy?  Use ALL of your Pull-Ups?”  She slowed down again just enough.

Just enough for Tommy to think about his stomach. Just enough to tease him and bring him even closer to the edge.  Still barely bouncing, Tommy leaned forward, raised his butt and started to push with all his might.

The mess came right out the back of him in a soft mush that caused his Pull-Ups to expand just a bit before it spread out, coating his bottom in a soft mud of his own making.  He sucked on his paci harder at feeling his cheeks spread and let out a low moan. “I make poopies…” he said with the rubber teat lodged comfortably between his lips. “I make big poooooopies.”

“That’s right,” Annie echoed.  “You make big poopies.”  She started bouncing him harder and faster, faster and harder.  That made Tommy’s wee-wee feel sooooooo good.

Still pushing and pooping, the back of his pretend undies expanded out, having a sudden extra amount of space to accommodate.  His Pull-Ups got even thicker.  Even if he weren’t straddling Annie’s knee Tommy knew there’d be no way that his knees would be able to touch.

His shortalls sprouted snap buttons along the inseam and his pretend undies were so thick and cushy that the seams were close to bursting. The package of Pull-Ups kept changing, too. It no longer advertised itself as training pants.  In big blocky white letters on a purple background the bag now read “DIAPERS”, and the key features included “For Special Big Diaper Baby Boys”.

Tommy wasn’t wearing underwear.  He wasn’t an adult.  He didn’t get underwear, not even pretend underwear like Pull-Ups. Underneath his snappy bottom shortalls he was wearing a very wet and extremely messy diaper and everybody knew it.

Annie started bouncing him even more. Faster. Harder. His bottom kept plop plop plopping up and down, every bounce spreading the warm mushy poopy mess more and more until every inch of his little bum-bum was smeared and coated all the way up to his taint, and his wee-wee was surrounded by warm wet padding that bulged thanks to all the pee-pee he put in it without even feeling it.

The rational part of Tommy’s brain was mortified, but he wasn’t actually regressing. He wasn’t losing anything and knew everything that he was doing. But he wanted to regress. He so wanted to.  He never should have tried this plan.  Never should have fought it.  This was who he was deep down.

“Are you ready?” Annie asked. “Are you ready for stickies?”

Tommy giggled and laughed behind his pacifier. “Uh-huh! I wanna make cummies pweeeeeeease!”  

“Say my name.”

“Annie!”

“No. My real name.”

“Anika!  Marry Anne!”

“No,” the mismatched goddess grinned. “My real name. Say. My. Name.”

“MOMMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”   Tommy screamed out so loud that his pacifier fell on the floor.  This was the greatest orgasm he’d ever had in his life. It felt so good that Tommy instantly knew three things about the universe to be true: He would never ever have sex again.  He would never go pee-pee or poopy in the potty ever again.  He would never grow up.  And that was exactly the way he’d always wanted it.  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” he huffed against her, collapsing and rubbing his face into her cleavage.  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”

Mommy wasted no time.  She laid her special diaper boy down on the bench and started unpopping the snappers on his cute shortalls.. “Let’s change that diapee!” she teased. “Right here. In front of everybody.  They won’t mind.”

It was true.  They didn’t.  They didn’t mind it when she shimmied up the shortals well past Tommy’s hips.  They didn’t mind it when Mommy untaped his diapee so that his wee-wee flopped out, still glistening and sticky with fresh cum.  They didn’t mind it when Mommy took wipes out of her purse and wiped his poopy bum-bum for him in front of everyone who walked by.  

Everyone knew.  Everyone could see.  No one cared.  A few more pretty girls came by and complemented Mommy on what a good baby he was and how cute he was lying there. Unable to help himself, Tommy reached down and grabbed his wee-wee until it was hard again. They thought that was cute too and said so.

Mommy finished wiping him and moved the full diaper out of the way, but she didn’t ball it up. “Looks like my special boy still needs a little help,” she cooed. She grabbed one last wipe and finished him off again, just like when they first met.

“Such a good Mommy,” a passerby said. “Taking care of her special baby boy.”

Tommy sighed contentedly and sucked on his thumb, while Mommy balled up the used diaper and throwed it away in the garbage.  That was somebody else’s problem now.  Everything was somebody else’s problem now.  He let out a satisfied smile when Mommy ripped open the pack of diapers, unfolded and slipped a new one underneath him. She wasted no time in sprinkling lots and lots of baby powder, because she didn’t want her special little man to chafe.

A strange sense of completeness overtook Tommy when the new thick, cushy diaper was brought up between his legs. Even completely dry it was still so thick that he couldn’t make his knees touch.  It would only get bigger when he made pee-pee in it. Not only that, but he smelled so good from all of the baby powder that Mommy used, too! Just like a little flower.

“I think we don’t need this right now,” Mommy told him while she unclipped the suspender straps to his shortalls.  “Everybody here knows what a special baby you are and that you go pee-pee and poopy in your big puffy diapers.  And Mommy is gonna carry you so you don’t fall down.”  Good thing, too.  Tommy didn’t think he could walk in his new diaper.

Tommy was looking up at his Mommy again, safely cradled in her lap.  “Is baby hungry?” she asked.  “Does baby wanna suck on Mommy’s titties? Here in front of everyone?” Mommy lifted up one side of her shirt. She still looked eighteen.

“Uh-huh!” Tommy shouted with all his heart. “Mommy milkies! Mommy milkies!”

“Okay!” Mommy said.  “But if you want it, you have to tell Mommy a special secret. You have to tell Mommy how you’ve managed to pretend you’re a big boy for so long.”

This was it. Would he resist? Would he manage? Or would the temptation overwhelm him?”

“I put my name on da gooey bluey wall in da cavey! So did Papa Chawie!”

Mommy’s eyes glimmered in recognition.  “Of course!” she remarked.  “Why didn’t I think of that?” She guided his head to her full milky tit and he hungrily latched on. “Good baby! Enjoy your lunch!”  She patted the back of his head with one hand and squeezed the back of his diapee with the other.  

As the milk filled him, Tommy felt his diapee getting warmer. He was already wetting it. He had no control.  Good. He was tired…

“Mommy will fix that right away,” he heard.  “Right…about….now…”

Mommy kept talking to him, but her words stopped being words to the baby boy. They were just pleasant happy noises that Mommy made.  It made him so happy. Tommy couldn’t remember a time when he was happier.  

Ever.

****************************************************************************************************
(Elsewhere)

“Oh no,” Charlie whispered. He could feel himself going.  Words. Numbers. Colors. Shapes. All fading from his gray matter like dust being wiped off a chalkboard.  “No, no, no, no, no!”

He tumbed back down to the floor with a padded thud landing on his bum.  He fought back tears, but it had nothing to do with the height from which he’d fallen. A shrunken idiot on all fours was only a little taller than a step stool.  The tears were coming from a much deeper, much more adult place; a place inside Charlie that felt like it was bleeding out.  This was the end! All out of time.  Game over!

Amanda tilted her head, curiously.  Whatever was affecting Charlie was doing nothing to her. None of the other babies seemed to notice anything. That only made it worse. He was dying alone and would soon be one of the shambling hordes of the brainless diapered undead.  

He was scared. Terrified! Suddenly, he didn’t know why.  If he wasn’t already wet he’d probably have went pee-pee and…being wet felt really good.  And there was a very pretty girl right in front of him.  That made Charlie’s wee-wee feel funny in a good way.

Charlie rolled over onto his back and spread his legs.  His hands reached down and started rubbing his wee-wee through the thick wet padding of his diapee.  “Heeee-heee-heeeee! Me baby!” He said. “Me big big baby!”  Bright blue splotches started appearing wherever he rubbed.  There would be no hiding how silly he was being, but Charlie didn’t know enough to hide.

“Charlie!” a pretty grown-up lady called.  Charlie looked up, but the pretty lady only made him want to rub more. So he did.

The pretty lady said some things, but Charlie didn’t have the words to understand them.  He only cared about how wet and stiff his pee-pee felt in his diapee. The lady picked him up like Mommy did and Charlie rubbed his face into the lady’s breasts, giggling and rubbing.  He wasn’t hungry for milkies right now, but the lady’s boobies were nice and soft and warm, just like his diapee.

“Charlie,” she cooed. She said some other words, but Charlie didn’t recognize them.  Hearing his name got him to look up and see the yummy looking cracker in the pretty lady’s hand. He wasn’t hungry but it looked tasty.  He opened his mouth and crunched down on the cracker.

He made the noise he did when something tasted good. “MMMMMMMMMM!”  He opened his mouth for another bite and bit down again.  That seemed to make the pretty lady very happy.  He reached up with both hands and grabbed the snack from her so he could shove it all in his mouth at once.

He liked the taste of the cracker so much that he didn’t notice or care that his wee wee was now super soft.

*******************************************************************************************************
(A car ride across town later…)

The mismatched goddess of Malacus was glowing.  Not literally this time, but she might as well be.  Among the nuns, she’d heard that when women realized they were going to be mothers, they had a certain glow about them, and felt it to be true. Now she had a bundle all her own that she could keep instead of giving back at the end of the day. A sweet, special, foolish boy that was hers forever.  

Tommy babbled happily in his carseat. Purged of all those nasty big boy thoughts. He was wet again, but that didn’t bother either of them.  Pulling into the parking lot back to her realm, she allowed one last satisfied smile.  In addition to that ‘New Mother’ feeling, she also had something of a runner’s high, sending endorphins all through her system.

She’s won. She’d won the game. It had pressed her reality altering abilities to their limits, but she’d done it. She won. She always won.  And now she had a new challenge: What to do with her new baby.

“First thing’s first,” she said, cutting the engine.  “Let’s get this boy to daycare.” She still had at least one more appointment, one more mortal to unwind to their purest self.

She felt a bit of envy, unbuckling him from his carseat and picking him up. Yes, she got him to take care of and play with as her own forever and ever. But he got her to change his diapers and feed him and love him for all eternity now.

So who really won?

Carrying him on her hip, she opened the back door that led to the world between worlds.  She closed the door behind her and stepped into the antechamber, right on the edge of everything.  It didn’t look like a massive cavern, coated with electric blue algae, but that was only because she had purposefully willed it so.  It still operated on many of the same principles.

“And to think,” she clicked her tongue. “You lasted as long as you did because you did some finger painting on the wall.”

“Babababa!” Tommy babbled up to her, adoringly. He didn’t know what she was saying. He just loved the sound of her voice, and she loved his.  No longer bashful or having any sense of shame, the big baby started rubbing his diaper, cutely, right then and there.  She could almost see his erection forming beneath the layers and layers of soggy padding, but that was only because she knew where to look. His diapers were so thick that  it would be impossible to tell otherwise.

“We’re going to have to get you some crackers,” she said. Stopping at the Dutch doors, she grabbed a pen and made happy nonsense noises to her treasured pet.  She signed them in using the check-in book.  It was a fresh page, so she signed right at the top.

How appropriate. A fresh page for a fresh start. For both of them. She was in such a good mood, she paid no mind to the blue smudges next to the sign in sheet. Even magic pens could leak, she supposed.

Under the child column, she signed his name, his new name: “Tommy Becket”.  Oh that felt good!  And under the caregiver column she signed her own. “Anika Becket”.  Then she put the time relative to where they’d just come from.  All time was relative when the door to your realm existed in multiple points at once.

A sharp, biting wind gusted in from beneath the door back to Malacus.  It made the woman shiver.  Annie never shivered.  The pen dropped from her hand and tumbled to the floor.  Before she had so much as a thought of bending it over and picking it up, tendrils of thick white mist snatched it away and dragged it underneath the door.

Tommy started squealing laughter. “Heee-heee-heee-heeeee!”

CUH-WHAM!  

The top half of the door slammed shut in her face.  What was going on?  Mentally, she commanded the transformative mist to return the pen.  Physically, she turned the knob to open the door.  The mist would not obey.  The door would not open.

“HEY!” she pounded on the door. Had she made the daycare drones’ instructions too complex? They were little better than animated brooms some days.

Her arms started to ache, tiring from the baby’s weight.  Her arms never got tired. “Hee-hee-hee!”

She looked over at Tommy, her prize, her conquest, her baby.  Her very, very, very, big baby.  She looked up and realized that she was now only eye level with the bottom half of the Dutch door!  She was shrinking!  

“Heeeeeee!”

Her body was getting smaller.  Her panties were getting thicker! Her clothes getting more and more juvenile!  She was turning back into a toddler without willing it, and she had no clue as to why!  “Why is this happening?!”

She dropped Tommy. It wasn’t far. It was a toddler dropping a baby.   He landed squarely on his diapered bottom.  The sudden jolt didn’t so much as stop his laughter.  “Heee-heee-heee-heee!”

In horror, Annie lifted up the hem of her jumper dress.  She saw the sizing numbers on her diaper start to go down.  6….5…..4…..3….

Her knees buckled and she fell to all fours.  Her hemline melted out of her hands. Her jumper was wrapping between her legs and joining with her shirt to become a frilly pink onesie. Her diaper became incredibly thick to the point where she wouldn’t be able to walk even if her legs did have the strength.  She accidentally made it even thicker when her bladder released, flooding it.

The ground rumbled and on the other sound of the door lightning flashed beneath the cracks and thunder roared.  For the first time in hundreds of years, The so-called mad goddess of Malacus felt true fear.

“WHAT? IS? HAPPENING?” she called out.

In reply, Tommy stood up.  His speech was slurred, like a surgery patient just waking up from anesthesia.  “Wwwwweee….wwwwiiin.”

“We?!”

From the other side of the Malacus daycare, the knob turned, and both Annie and Tommy were engulfed in blinding blue electric light with the intensity of a thousand suns.

******************************************************************************************************
(Earlier…)

Hiding underneath an activity table, Charlie huddled with his collection of scrap papers. “It’s cool,” he said. “It’s fine. Totally fine.”  It wasn’t. It totally wasn’t. But it had to be. “Worst case scenario,” he said, “I’m not gonna have time to regret it.”

He spared one last look around the nigh infinite plane of infancy, just in case he was being watched. He couldn’t afford to screw this up.  Only one shot. He dug into the duo tang folder and took out the blank piece of paper.

Not blank, actually. Just not written on.  It was a rough replication of the basic sign in sheet used to sign the babies in and out of this place. Tommy had taken the blue algae he’d stolen and poured it into a printer cartridge.

It just so happened that even though Katy had the maturity of a three year old that was fighting potty training with all of her might, three year olds were still pretty damn good with computers. If this worked, he’d have to remember to thank his daughter.

Damn. That was gonna take some getting used to.  It made him feel old.  That was a weird feeling.  Weird. But good.  It might be nice to feel old after all this time feeling young.  Who knew?

“Focus,” Charlie told himself.  It wouldn’t do any good to rehearse a victory speech until they’d actually won.  Tommy was going to stall that witch for as long as he could to give Charlie the time he needed, but there was no set estimate on this sort of thing.

He dug into the pocket and removed the plastic baggie. Tommy hadn’t used all of the blue ink. He’d made sure to pour some into here and soak a colored pencil in the stuff.  Charlie prayed it would be enough.

His hands shook violently when he fished it out. “Careful,” he reminded himself. “Only use one hand.” He’d need the other hand clean.  He wasn’t going to have his brain erased permanently on the count of him leaving fingerprints.  It still shook.  

Charlie closed his eyes and took a deep breath.  He could do this.  He had to.  “Time to stop bitching and grow up,” he said to himself.  Something about that steadied his grasp.  Delicately and slowly, he signed his name. “C-h-a-r-l-e-s-Space-W-a-t-s-o-n.”  

Perfect! It all fit!  Tricky Part One, done.  Now for Tricky Part Two.

Using his clean hand he dug around and took out another sheet.  At a glance, this sheet looked blank, save for the slight plastic sheen whenever the light hit it from just the right angle. To Charlie this was almost as stressful.  Using his non-dominant hand he carefully peeled off a plain white sticker.  Visualizing himself cutting the yellow wire on a ticking time bomb didn’t help, but wouldn’t you know it, the thought wouldn’t leave his skull.

“One…” he hissed.  Adrenaline pumping like nobody’s business, he kept going.  “Two…three…”  

Including his carefully rehearsed signature, Charlie covered three spots on the makeshift sign-in sheet.  He dug through the duo tang folder one more time and took out a regular pen.  He grasped it with his blue stained fingers, trusting that nothing would smear onto the paper itself, and filled in two of the blank stickers he’d placed.

“There,” he said.  As long as Tommy did his job right and put up enough of a fight to make Annie think she’d won, she probably wouldn’t look close enough to spot the simple forgery.  Probably…

The sheet they’d fabricated using ink made from Malacus itself had one key difference, one barely noticeable imperfection.  The columns where the child was signed over into the daycare and where their parents left their signature had been switched.  

The whole sheet had been printed with the same will working magic mambo jumbo that had kept Charlie’s mind intact all these years, and Charlie had signed his own name firmly under the “Parent” role. That had been his idea.

Tommy had done him one better in their brainstorming session. He’d  just wanted Tommy to write his own name as Charlie’s child, but the kid had put the kibosh on that idea.  They were already father and son. A ceding of authority, magical or otherwise, wouldn’t matter since both of their tanks were running on empty.  They needed Annie, or rather Anika, to lose her power.

Signing her name on the form for her was too much of a gamble considering their limited resources. As reality warped children, their parents had the authority to sign their names for them.  Writing Annie’s name, real or otherwise, on the piece of paper might not do anything.  She had to be tricked into giving it away.

That’s where the stickers came in. Charlie covered up his own handiwork and left a blank space. Because it wasn’t a proper part of the sign in sheet, they rationalized, nothing written on it would count magically speaking.  

Just in case, Charlie had insisted he be left with one mundane writing implement. So that he could cover up and re-label the forgery with something less likely to be magically binding.  That way, if the something written on the stickers in magical ink did count, Tommy could still end up as Annie’s caregiver.

That was if the witch got suckered into signing her name on the wrong line. That was if the magic worked exactly how they thought it did.  They were gambling so much on things they didn’t know.  Still better than being stuck in diapers for another eighteen years and knowing it.  Still better than being harassed constantly by some nutter who’d been given a bad deal centuries ago and was determined to spread that bad deal around to everybody else.

Charlie slipped the forgery back into the sturdy folder.  He didn’t want to accidentally crumple it crawling over to the Dutch door that served as the portal in and out of this madhouse.  In their panic and sleep deprivation, Tommy and Charlie had forgotten one important thing.  How was he supposed to make the switch?

*************************************************************************************************************
(Later than that, but still earlier…)

“Blah blah!” Amanda heard.  She heard,but did not understand. Most words were meaningless to her.  When all you knew was babble, all you heard was babble. “Cah dah blah blah! BLAH!”

The sweet little girl kept crawling, looking for something interesting to put in her mouth or to rub her face on.

“Amanda!”  

She knew that word! That was her! Amanda crawled around in a circle like a puppy looking for its owner. She finally stopped and focused on another baby.

“Amanda!”

The baby knew her name!  She crawled over to him as fast as she could.  “Baga?” she babbled.  Maybe he wanted to play.

“Papa gaga taga gagagagagagaga,” he said very quietly. In reality, he said something very different, but her poor sweet baby brain only heard gibberish.  He sounded really excited, but also very nervous about something.  Amanda knew what that was like, even if she didn't   know why.  She gave him a kiss like Mommy did when she was feeling bad.

The other baby didn’t seem to like that.  His face scrunched up like he was going poopy or was about to cry. He didn’t cry though.  He just turned around and started crawling towards one of the doors.  Amanda knew that door. It was the door that brought Mommy back after nap time. Neat.

She was about to start crawling away when…“Amanda.”

“Mmmm?”  Amanda heard her name again. It was the same baby. Ooooooh! He wanted to show her something about the door.  

Okay!

She smiled and giggled to herself, following the silly baby.  What was so neat about that door?  She’d find out soon enough.   “Gaaaaa?” she asked.

The other baby made a sad face and had an itch on the back of his head.  He kept looking at her, the door, and this flat shape thing again and again and again.  “Babababababa Amanda. Blah blah blah blah.  Womp womp womp womp aga aga aga. Amanda.  Amanda?”

She stayed there and smiled. She liked the sound of her own name.  It was a really good word.  

The other baby growled and crawled around her.  He started rubbing up against her side, head butting her, but real gentle, like a kitty cat. That tickled!  “Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”

“Shhhhhhh!”

Amanda knew what that meant too. It meant she was supposed to go to sleep.  Too bad she wasn’t sleepy.  The other baby rubbed his eyes real hard. He must have been super itchy all over his head from all the faces he was making and time he was rubbing stuff.

The other baby crawled up to the door and stuck himself up against the wall, leaning up against it like the crib in her nursery.  Then he pointed to her and said “Amanda.”

The sun came out inside Amanda’s brain. Oooooooooh!  The baby got out of the way and patted the door with the back of his messy blue hand. Amanda crawled over and copied him.  This was so silly!

Now what?

“Ga?”  Amanda let out a grown as the other baby stood up and climbed on top of her like she was a chair or something!  She wasn’t really a crib!  She was just pretending.  

“Amanda…” he said. “Ga!”

This baby made some of the same sounds that her Mommy did. He was really good at pretending!  She held super still, as still as could, until he came tumbling down.

******************************************************************************************************
(Now…)

The daycare ceased to exist, such as it was. Tommy and Charlie found themselves in an empty void with blue lightning cascading around them.

“There’s too much!” Charlie said, feeling panicked. “What do we do?”

“Change us back. Put things back to normal!” Tommy’s pulse raced. It had worked! It had really worked! Down to the wire, but a “W” was a “W”.

“”What about the others? All the kids?”

“Give them back their maturity!” Tommy said. “It’s not ours. Let people grow up!”

“But there’s not enough for that!”

Tommy pulled at his hair.  It was hard to plan on what to do with the spoils of war when you didn’t know that you could win and didn’t know how much spoils you’d have.  From the way Charlie’s eyes were sparking, a decision needed to be made sooner instead of later.

“Then split up as evenly as you can!  Maybe it’ll jump start something.” Tommy shouted over the growing roar. A second later he thought better of it.  “But you take as much as you need to think and act your real age!”

“Then there might not be enough…”

“It’s fine!” Tommy said. “Take it from me! I’ll be a baby!”

“What?!” Charlie yelled.  “Are you serious?”
“I’m not gonna tell you to steal it from other people!” Tommy said. “My mom needs you to be an adult. So does my sister!” He swallowed. “So do I!”

“Excuse me,” A third voice interrupted. “Don’t I get a say in this?”
******************************************************************************************************
(The next day…)

Amanda woke up late that morning, closer to noon.  As usual, she’d woken up in a completely soaked diaper. She let out a yawn, and rolled out of bed, enjoying the sound of her crinkling pamps, and how they sagged when she first stood up.

As usual, she’d slept like a baby, literally. She chose to see the upside of being a lifelong bedwetter.  One last yawn and she tore off the Rearz Princess and tossed it into her diaper pail. She frowned having to stuff it down so she could shut the lid.

“Mom!” she called through her door.  “Do we have any more liners? I need to swap some stuff out.”

Her mother called back.  “I think we’re all out.”

“Mooooooom!” Amanda whined.

“Amanda,” Mom said. “They’re your diapers. They’re your responsibility, little lady.”  She was right of course, but that didn’t make Amanda like it any better.  “I’ll pick some up at the pharmacy.”  Mom finally relented.  That brought a smile to Amanda’s face.  She really still was Mommy’s little girl at times.

Needing diapers at night had been a bummer at first, but she’d more than gotten used to it. In truth, she’d never tried to hard to stay dry at night and growing up would invent reasons to get diapered earlier and earlier before bed; it let her pretend that she was still a baby for more than the few minutes it took to fall asleep each night.

Discovering ABDL had been a godsend in so many ways!  Not only did it feel great not being alone in liking this sort of thing, but there were so many cute clothes and outfits that she could buy and try on and take pictures of herself wearing.

She might not have been as physically developed as her peers, but that didn’t factor as much in ABDL circles.  Online she had tons of daddies begging to be the one to change her diaper.

Next year in college she was getting all the lap bounces and carried around every nursery and dungeon.

She still hadn’t figured out how she’d explain it to whatever dorm roommate.  Diapers were a big deal breaker for a lot of vanillas, and she’d be trying 24/7 ASAP.  Maybe her best friend Cameron could room with her.  She had a very good feeling she could ‘corrupt’ Cameron. Turn her into a ‘big sister’ or a ‘Mommy’ in just a couple weeks…

She wiped her hairless crotch down and added it into the bin.  A rare recessive gene in her family tree had made it so that she’d never grown body hair in the usual places during puberty.  Another sign that this lifestyle was literally made to her.

One last yawn and she grabbed  a fresh diaper from her closet. It was the weekend. Saturdays were too nice to wear big girl panties.  She grabbed a onesie to hide the crinkle under her street clothes, just in case she needed to go outside into the real world.

*****************************************************************************************************
(Moments before deletion…)

Gentle Reader,

What is reality if not a dream that we all share while awake? We agree that the sky is up and the grass is down, and that the only things that are inescapable are death and taxes.  Everything else is surprisingly malleable.

Boys were men grown when they’d reached their thirteenth birthday and sang a song out of a special book.  Girls became ladies ready for wedding and bedding as soon as their womb awoke and shed first blood.  Children were little more than small adults who had better get to work sooner than later.

Until one day they weren’t.

Gods far and wide blink into and fade out of existence depending on how many people agree upon it.  Historical figures change as perception of their legacy does. The dream changes, and with it so do the dreamers.

When at last the poor soul Anika Beckett- once called the Sister Mary Anne, then called the Mismatched Goddess of Malacus in addition to such sobriquets as ‘Nanny’ and ‘Annie’- finally relinquished the power she’d held onto like a security blanket for so long, everything she’d ever done was likewise unraveled the way dreams flee from waking memory once one has blinked enough times and rubbed the sleep out of their eyes.

Little Charlie Watson never journeyed into a grandfather clock into a corrupted land of dreams to escape the responsibilities of growing up.  He married his high school sweetheart and worked two jobs to support their twin children.  Fortunately, what he lacked in higher education, he more than made up for with imagination.  

Tommy and Katy were only halfway through kindergarten when he sold his first book to a small but legitimate publisher.  His simply written, but emotionally complex stories about a faraway land called Malacus was an immediate success with elementary and early middle schoolers.  Enough so that a single chapter book became an entire series, all about boys and girls who weren’t ready to grow up, and then later regretted that decision after realizing what a lack of responsibility would really cost them.  

He has since been favorably compared to J.M. Barrie, and categorized as something of a cross between Maurice Sendak and R.L. Stine.

His sweetheart and wife, Mary, had a good support system in the form of her own family as well as Charles’s. Raising her children in a reality where Charlie was remembered by all as an adult ensured she had a much more stable and reliable personality than in a life best unlived. Not knowing who the father of your children is because all memory and evidence of his life advancing past age eight months has been erased is more traumatic than it sounds.

Likewise, the world over, all of the Mismatched Goddess’s playthings and victims found themselves living a different life than the one they’d been living since a vengeful girl’s projected fantasies leaked into their lives.  Annie, as it turned out, had been something of a greedy toddler in an ice cream shop.  

She did indeed require other people’s essences to continue her existence, but not nearly as much as she had taken. But with there being no one to stop her, she never stopped consuming. A shame really. If she’d been more prudent she could have continued reigning indefinitely.  A blessing perhaps, because it was that insatiable greed that finally led to her downfall.  From a certain point of view, Tommy Dean was the ultimate tummy ache.

Once he’d been handed the reins, Charles returned as much as he could to each and every resident of the Malacus Daycare. It wasn’t precise; it was a little like trying to quickly fill up as many glasses lined up in a row with a single pitcher and pour. On average, every would-be adventurer and debutant who had been lured into Malacus found themselves with the maturity of roughly a sixteen year old. Some more, some a little less.  But they were still recognized as their proper age and there were already plenty of people who never stopped being teenagers at heart.  Many (most) also found an odd, lingering fondness for the trappings of infancy to one degree or another. What were a few more ageplayers scattered around the globe?

But as far as most were concerned, they’d all been this way. They’d all had a particularly strong inner child and had developed their kinks and mindsets as ways to cope or embrace a part of themselves that they just weren’t ready to let go.  They’d all made their peace with that.

None of them and no one had ever journeyed to that magical land where their every desire was indulged and then warped beyond recognition until all that was left of them was a drooling diaper wearing baby.  It had all been just one oddly specific dream that many lifelong kinksters had in common.

Yet it did happen. How else would Tommy Dean have fixed it? Thrown himself into the lion’s den like a steak? Strapped himself to the mast so he could hear the siren’s song and live to tell about it?


Dreams are fickle and contradictory. But being dreams, they don’t have to make sense.

Speaking of dreams, as for the residents of Malacus themselves, they were finally allowed the freedom to be something other than temptations and tormentors meant to prep innocent dupes for eternal infancy. They readied themselves to serve their new master, and immediately found that he was wholly uninterested.

Like his son before him, he had grown to a point where he craved neither vengeance, nor power, nor the ability to work his will and enforce his philosophy on others. He had already taken the one thing from Malacus that he needed, and it was the gift Malacus had once freely given: stories.  There was a communal sigh of relief as every character in that bright blue electric land of dreams and imagination was finally allowed to relax and melt back into the shapeless dreamstuff that they had started as.

And Tommy and Katy? Some think that their special conditions that resulted in a lack of development was the initial inspiration behind Charles’s stories.

But the truth is something else entirely.

-An Unreleased Excerpt from the Newly Renamed “Big Book of Happy Endings and Epilogues.”

By Award Winning Children’s Fantasy Author Charles Watson.

***********************************************************************************************

(A week later…)

Tommy Watson blinked, as if lost in thought.

He was standing in the middle of his family room.  Not the shitty apartment that he now only half remembered growing up in, but the nice big rural house with the carpet so comfy, it could be used as a blanket.

His little sister, his twin actually, was proving that point with all much he was giggling and rolling around on it.  “Katy!” Mommy fussed. “Hold still so I can change your diaper!”

Katy, who had never grown bigger than a two year old, laughed while Mommy tried to hike up her sundress and get to her sagging diaper. Katy hadn’t wanted to stop playing and was just fast and loud enough to make Mommy think twice about carrying her all the way upstairs, so a floor change was necessary.  “Gotcha you little stinker!”

“I’m not stinky! I’m only wet!” Katy said. Mommy ripped the tapes off and started wiping her down anyways.  She only ever understood the gist of what Katy said.  Same with most people.

“Tommy?” Mommy said. “Do you mind, sweetie?”

Tommy didn’t mind.  While Mommy worked on powdering Katy’s bottom and taping her back up, he walked up beside them, picked up the balled up diaper and took it to the kitchen. “Thank you honey.”

“Welcome, Mom.”

Feeling the weight of the used diaper, Tommy mouthed a silent “Wow”.  Katy really did need a fresh diaper.  This one was more pee than pulp. One last thing that didn’t leak.

He tossed the soaked thing into the lidded trash can.  Charlie sat plunking away at his laptop.  “Everything, okay Dad?”  It felt so weird calling him that. From his expression Charlie thought so too. .

On one hand they’d always been like this. On the other hand, no, no they hadn’t, and they all knew it.  All of them.  A tiny pair of arms wrapped around Tommy’s legs.  “Fank yoooo,” Katy said.

“Thank you?”  Mommy laughed. “I did all the work, Missy!”  Tommy knew what she was talking about.  

Through some weird happenstance- destiny, or dream logic, or whatever-Katy had been drawn into the moment and volunteered most of her maturity away. She had finally gotten her turn to be little and cute and crinkly bottomed.  With all the chaos, Tommy had gotten off relatively light.

He was smaller than average, but was socially and functionally a second grader. No responsibility, but he didn’t need someone to wipe his ass for him on the daily.  He’d never get to go to college or grow up and get a job, but no one would think less of him for it either.  Better than being something close to a middle schooler for the rest of his life.

Then came the real question:  What to do about Annie?

“WAAAAAAAAH!”

“Uh oh,” Mommy said. “Someone is up from her nap.”

Tommy and his father exchanged another wary look.  “You sure about this, kid?”

Tommy nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure. It’s the right thing to do.”  They’d had this affirmation every day whenever the new baby got like this.

“Somebody’s gotta keep an eye on her, I guess,” Charlie said.

“It’s what she needs,” Tommy said. “Just nobody ever gave it to her. This is our chance to give it to her.”

Charlie closed his laptop and sighed. “You always have been more about giving people what they need instead of what you want.  I guess that’s what makes you so special.”

Down from the stairs, naked save for the Size 2 diaper she’d just been changed into, came Annie, the official baby of the family?  She sulked when Mommy plopped her down in her playpen, crossing her arms over her naked breasts.  “No…fair…”

She said that a lot, but thankfully with less frequency than she had a week ago after the trap had sprung.

“How you doin’ baby sis?”  Tommy asked, leaning over the side.

“I hate you!” Annie screamed. Both eyes were a not pleasant, but normal shade of green.

Tommy didn’t flinch.  “No you don’t.”

Annie huffed and then fell over on her back. “No I don’t.”

“You’re just mad that you got beat.”

“Yeeeeeeeah,” she admitted.  “Kinda.”

“And you’re Mommy’s favorite.”

As if to prove this, Katy ran by and stuck her tongue out at Annie.  Annie obliged by sticking it back out.  

“Katy, don’t stick your tongue out at your sister,” Mommy barely looked up from her phone.

“MOMMY!” Katy stomped her foot. “SHE STARTED IT!”

“Do I have another little girl who needs a nap?” Mommy warned. “Or a time out?” Katy took that as a cue to run back to the kitchen. “Good girl…”

Annie smiled and then caught herself.  “It is nice to be able to scream and shout and nobody be afraid of me,” she admitted.  “And to get taken care of without magic.”

Tommy arched an eyebrow. “Without magic?”

“You know what I mean!”

It was true. He did.  Dad had given him a ton of bedtime stories about what it was like to be a god for all of five minutes. Disturbing stuff, both wonderful and terrible.  “Yeah.  I do.”

“We’re never gonna grow up, you know,” Annie said.

“Yeah,” Tommy agreed. “I can live with that.”

She sat up.  It was about all she could do in her body. Sit. Lay down. Crawl. Roll.  Even pulling herself up to a standing position was right out.  A true baby, through and through.  “You know,” the once mad goddess said, “I’m kind of glad you won.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was happy at first, but permanently taking away what makes you…you…it would have gotten boring.  I would have ended up regretting making you a full baby.”

“You mean you don’t regret it now?” Tommy asked.

Annie’s nose crinkled.  “Keep it up and I’ll find a way to put you on diaper duty ‘Big Brother’.”

She probably could. No one save him, Charlie, and Katy could understand her, but adults were surprisingly easy to manipulate if you knew how; and Annie had a lot of experience in that field.  “If you do that, I’ll give Katy Mommy’s makeup kit and let her play dollies with you, ‘Baby sis.’”

“You wouldn’t…”

“Try me.”

Annie stuck her tongue out and flopped back down on her back. “Mommeeeeeee!  I’m bored! Come play with me!  Bouncies! Now!” It was probably just a coincidence, but Tommy felt a certain satisfaction when he saw the wetness indicator on Annie’s diaper change color a little bit.  

Things were gonna be different from here on in.  But things were gonna be a lot better too.  No longer a loser, no longer someone on the D-list, Tommy Watson finally felt like a winner, even if ‘winning’ was just being the big brother of a cosmic tyrant.

(The End)