Mason - Chapter 23 (Patreon)

Hearing Skye’s threats against Mason had been so surreal that he wasn’t even sure at first if she was being serious; her raspy, overly throaty voice sounded like she was trying to be funny. But considering the pain he’d just put her through, it instantly clicked for him as soon as she lurched forward that she was, of course, not just joking around when she said she wanted to kill him. Her words might have been an exaggeration, but her wrath was not.

Diving off of “heights” was something Mason never liked to do, but it was something he could tolerate if he needed to. As soon as Skye made the first move, Mason’s reaction was to turn towards the end of the couch and book it as fast as he could before jumping over the edge. But his sister’s hand slammed onto the couch where he had been just moments after his leap, and he realized that he had to reevaluate his plan. Though she had been across the house just seconds ago, it was a distance that someone her size was able to traverse in the blink of an eye. Escaping to his room probably wouldn’t be possible against an opponent twenty times as fast as him, so as soon as he landed from his jump, he scrambled under the couch to give himself an opportunity to think of what to do next.

Skye sprung to the ground, practically growling at seeing her brother able to get away from her so easily. “You can’t hide from me, you piece of shit,” the girl rasped, honestly sounding like a demon from how ravaged her throat was. Her eyes glared directly at his tiny body as he backed against the wall, trying to distance himself from the couch’s outer edges, so she grabbed ahold of the furniture and pulled it away from the wall to expose his position. As soon as the light was shone on him, his prey-like instincts kicked into gear again, and he scurried towards the closest cover, a sofa chair just far enough away that he made it underneath in the time it took Skye to run around the couch she’d just moved. “FUCK!” she screamed, punching the chair from having just missed him yet again.

Mason continuing to escape his sister’s grasp only served to fill her with more rage, which in turn filled her with more adrenaline, and she grabbed the corners of Mason’s armchair-cover, lifting it completely off the ground in a feat of Herculean strength. Mason was utterly terrified of what Skye was turning into, and he gawked at the sight of her able to carry what was the equivalent size of a whole city block. It didn’t matter how many times he saw giant people exert a display of their “normal” strength, it was still unnerving how massive the difference was for someone like him. The recliner he’d hid under wasn’t even the kind of thing he thought about lifting. He thought about lifting mini-chairs and mini-tables and mini-furniture and other things that were sized for him, or maybe paperclips and pencils and toy cars. But to him, a normal-sized chair like what she’d just lifted wasn’t even something his imagination toyed around with. But once she moved to set the chair aside, he took off running again, this time making a break for the TV stand.

His momentary pause proved to be a mistake though. Skye let the chair topple to the side without setting it down neatly, and she dove towards the stand to thrust her arm underneath, successfully grabbing ahold of her tiny brother before he could run too deep. Her hold on him was of immediate tightness, and he felt a resurging sense of panic as her fingers squeezed his frail body without any seeming regard to his humanity. “Skye, you’re scaring me,” he tried to say as she pulled his body out into the open, but either she didn’t hear him or she didn’t care. The pressure on his chest didn’t let up though, and her grip on him was so tight that he couldn’t even look up at her face—he could only feel her as her fist slowly compressed the life out of him, whether she was aware of it or not. “Skye!” he managed to repeat again, barely able to breathe in and feeling like his ribs might be on the verge of cracking. She was lifting him to her face to tell him something, but he couldn’t handle the pain of how hard she was squeezing him while ignoring his pleas, so he bent over and clamped his mouth onto her thumb with the desperation of someone trying to bite through steel. That got her to let him go.

His sister let out a surprised shriek, automatically dropping him as she pulled her hand in close, and saw that his bite had been deep enough to draw blood. She didn’t even know that was possible. He didn’t even know that was possible. And if she was thinking straight, Skye might’ve realized that such a visceral reaction was clearly indicative of an obscene amount of genuine fear on her brother’s part. But her mind was racing too fast to slow down, and she didn’t exactly have the time to contemplate the moment or appreciate the rareness of a tiny actually hurting a giant. Because Mason was running away again, this time tearing down the hallway in a last-ditch effort to make it to his room, the safest place he could think of hiding.

Skye got to her feet, squeezing her hand in a fist both as a method of masking the pain while also simulating what she wanted to do to Mason as soon as she caught him again. Leaping over anything in her path, she chased after Mason, who was already turning the hallway corner, but she moved so fast that as she turned, she managed to slip on the rug. Her arms flailed out to catch herself, and they even nearly managed to land on Mason, but he didn’t bother looking back. He nearly tripped over himself, as Skye’s mountainous body crashed to the ground behind him, and there was a few seconds of eerie silence that followed before she let out a blood-curdling scream that didn’t even represent a fraction of the emotions she felt from attempting to capture her brother and becoming even more injured in the process.

But Mason knew better than to make sure her sister was alright, and he managed to turn into his room just as she was getting up again. Knowing he was seconds away from his final escape, she clenched her teeth while sprinting down the hallway, running so fast that she had to grab onto his room’s door frame to slow her trajectory, which in turn caused her to swivel 90 degrees into Mason’s room as he scampered the last leg of his journey. She didn’t even have enough time to try using her hands, so she hurled her leg out and slammed her foot down right in front of his mini-house’s doorway—but Mason had had the foresight to turn to the side instead, seeing that one of his windows was open and opting to jump through that as a countermeasure. Her foot had come so close that he could feel the wind against the back of his neck as it fell right beside him, inches away from making contact.

As soon as he was inside, he made sure to slam the window shut, and then he collapsed onto his floor in a shaky, adrenaline-filled fit. The colossal teenager outside his walls screamed out an enraged “SHIT!” at having barely missed him, and she stomped the ground again in a seething, unsatisfied temper. Theoretically, there was nothing she could do to get him now, although he knew she wasn’t about to let the whole thing go just yet.

When the whole family was younger and Mason had gotten into a fight with Skye or Mikayla, whichever sister he’d pissed off would simply take the roof off of the toy house and grab him so she could exact her revenge how she saw fit. He would almost never even try to use the Lincoln Log cabin as a means of escape since he knew there wasn’t any point, and wasted hope felt exhausting. But one day his mom had had the suggestion that he rebuild his personal abode, this time by laying out gorilla glue on top of the logs. Sure enough, neither of his sisters had been able to pry the house apart after that. Mason had felt captivated that he’d been able to build something that such insanely giant people were unable to break.

Then his sisters had realized that they could just pick the whole house up and shake it really hard, starting out gently and slowly increasing the longer he didn’t forfeit. But he’d come up with a solution for that too: he glued his bed to the floor of his mini bedroom, and padded its underside and the floor beneath it with a thin layer of foam. The space was tight enough that he could make sure he wouldn’t get rattled and shaken towards one of the windows or doors to get grabbed, but also cushioned enough that he wouldn’t hurt his body no matter how hard they shook (although he did get some pretty insane headaches the first few times they tried).

Which is why Skye was so furious now that her brother had made it back to his house. Despite how small it was, there wasn’t anything she could do to retrieve him. She dropped to her hands and knees next to the window he climbed through and slammed her first on top of the roof, rattling the entire house. “You better come out of there before I make things worse for you,” she hissed, but Mason shook his head.

“Why the fuck would I do that?” he argued back, a little bit of pep in his attitude now that he was in a safer position. “You’re just gonna hurt me.”

“Of course I’m gonna hurt you!” she yelled back, her eyes still red from her prior crying, and she started tearing up again at the possibility that she wouldn’t be able to get back at her brother. “You ruined my throat,” the demonic sounding teenager remarked, “you made me trip in the hallway, you bit my thumb.” To emphasize her point, she smeared her finger on his window, wiping a translucent layer of blood all over the glass. Her bottom lip was quivering and her jaw slightly trembled, a faint glimpse into how much energy she had pent up in her system, but she had no way of expending it all.

Standing on her knees, she straddled Mason’s house between her calves and squeezed it tight, giving her leverage to grab onto his roof and pull up with as much strength as she could muster. She was pulling so hard that the house vibrated between her legs, and Mason was actually worried for a moment that she’d be able to unroof his safety, but the gorilla glue came out as the winner and kept his house intact.

When that didn’t work, she unplugged the electrical wiring and water hose that led into the back of his house, and picked the toy-sized cabin up while standing to her feet again. Without any warning, she flipped it 180 degrees on its head, causing some of Mason’s things to tumble around inside (although the furniture and appliances were fastened to the walls and floor). “You wanna try again?” she asked, harshly shaking the whole of her brother’s house while he struggled to hold on inside. The whole scenario even turned her on a little bit, and when she looked inside the window again, she saw Mason cowering under his bed, which gave the younger girl a bit of a power trip from how dangerous she knew she was to him. But even with all her power, and even as much as she was able to violently shake where her brother was trying to hide, it wasn’t enough. She knew he’d stay relatively safe as long as he could shelter under his fortified bed, so she’d have to think of some other way to get him to come out.

Dropping the house with a dejected sigh, Skye turned to address the rest of the room, looking for a new strategy. Mason’s minor sense of relief began to falter as he saw her walk towards his model plane in the corner of the room, the one that he’d just recently finished building after a hundred hours of work over the past month. When she picked it up, confirming his fear, his face drained of its color.

“Either you give yourself up, or I’ll smash it so hard that you won’t even be able to repair it.” Her intimidation was cool and collected, which sent a chill through Mason. He believed her, and considering all the hours he’d put into building the plane, he honestly didn’t know which option would be smartest to pick.

“What are you gonna do to me if I come out?” he yelled up at her. But she didn’t answer him, and left him to imagine how far she might be willing to go to get back at him. Since he was taking too long to decide, she grabbed one of the wings and snapped in clean in half, not even giving him a warning before-hand. “WAIT, fucking stop!” he yelled, this time being the one to grow angrier as he saw her smirk with a smug feeling of satisfaction at finally getting back at the tiny boy. Seeing him mad and helpless made her feel powerful again, a tingling feeling she felt deep inside of her, like she really was a giant, unstoppable force. Staring directly at Mason, she imagined he was inside the plane, and she lowered it to the floor, lifting her foot above it and gently testing the cockpit’s flexibility against the bottom of her heel. Mason watched as the plane strained beneath her effortless weight, bending and flexing as she applied just enough pressure to scare him without breaking it.

“Skye…” he pleaded, beginning to feel riled up at seeing her come so close to destroying what he’d worked on for so long.

“Just come out,” she shrugged, twirling the propeller with her toe.

Mason would probably rather endure whatever Skye was thinking of putting him through rather than let all his work get ruined. But he wasn’t convinced her threat was fairly aligned with what he’d done to her in the first place. “Skye, I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t trying to hurt you like that, I put too much of the powder in on accident. I just wanted to make it gross and spicy, not cause you to puke.” But Skye thought that he was only apologizing now that he had something to lose, so she continued to hover her foot above the plane, slowly circling around it like a vulture. He gritted his teeth and glared back up at her, frustrated with the fact that she didn’t seem to understand its significance. “Skye, I literally spent months on that thing. Like, hundreds of hours probably. You can’t just fucking use it to get back at me!”

“Oh I can’t, huh?” she retorted, pissed off that he was still trying to get his way without suffering any repercussions.

“NO!” he yelled up at her.

She set her foot down next to the plane, and saw the relief wash over his face. But he continued standing by his window, waiting to see what she’d do next. And the audacity for him to make her eat ghost peppers, hide in his house where he knew he was untouchable, and then insist that she couldn’t go through with her payback? She hated it. He needed some kind of penalty for what he did.

“You wanna have everything your way?” she asked, lifting her foot back up, flexing her toes in eager, practically horny anticipation from how this payback would feel. “Then I wanna have something go my way too.”

Mason ran through the front door of his house, deciding that losing all his hard work wasn’t worth it, but he was too late. Skye’s foot stomped down onto the plane without a hint of hesitation or remorse, and he watched it splinter into a hundred pieces, which all flew around the room and littered the floor with broken fragments of his countless hours of work. In a fraction of a second, everything he'd built had been demolished.

And then, finally, Skye had a reason to grin.