Brockton Bay, December 26th, 11 PM.
"You some kinda freak, bitch?" called a voice that didn't quite know how to talk, at least not the way they taught you in school.
Brad looked at the Empire posse walking towards him from the alley. His nose could smell cigarette smoke and hair bleach, and he could make out the silhouettes of bald heads and baseball bats.
Funny, how no cops or heroes had showed up on his little night jaunt. No, his own former team was the first to take a swing. I mean, Lars' apartment was deep in Empire territory, but still.
Now, Brad was very, very obviously a Cape. Monster or Changer, one could assume, even if they were both technically wrong. Physique alone would have made him a threat to any number of unarmed, unpowered gang members. So what exactly did they think they were doing picking a fight with him?
He might've stopped to appreciate the irony of the situation if he wasn't feeling embarrassed on behalf of whoever was in charge of these idiots. Maybe Victor was putting ideas in their head about how 'skill trumps power' or something.
"Yeah, bitch, scram! This is Hookwolf territory."
Oh. These were his goons. The irony was being fully appreciated now.
Actually, as they moved closer, he recognized the one in front. Rodrick, with the fucked up jaw. He claimed that it was because someone broke it in a fight, years ago, but rumor had it his parents were cousins or something. Some members of the Herren clan were stricter about bloodlines than others.
One of them threw an empty beer can at him where it bounced off his breasts with a 'kunk!' of hollow metal. Terrible throwing form.
"Only room for one top dog around these parts! Get out of here before we call him in!"
What, was the town not big enough for the two of us? Brad thought.
"You fucking listening to us?"
I've listened to you for the past 5 years. I've spoken for you for the past 5 years.
He looked all of them over. They were close enough that he could recognize their faces now, all people he had trained. Taught to fight the good fight. And here they were, scuttling around in a trash filled alley in the middle of December.
"Look at how she's dressed. Some kind of lesbian, maybe?"
Brad had no idea if he counted as a lesbian or not. He had taken dick, but also had gotten eaten out by a woman. One of those two actions had to be gay, by process of elimination if nothing else.
He felt himself begin to growl. God he was still so fucking horny, and seeing his friend get reduced to… that had only made it worse, somehow.
"Alright, bitch, you asked for this!" Oh, were they actually going to try something? Wait no, Rodrick's just getting a cell phone out. He scrolled through the contacts and dialed a number. His weird-ass jaw was fixed in a smug grin as he held the receiver up to his head.
In the back pocket of Brad's jeans, his burner phone began to ring.
Rodrick looked at the phone. Looked at Brad. Looked back at the phone. Looked at Brad.
Brad dug into his pocket and opened up his phone.
"Hello?" he answered.
There was a moment of silence, broken by a gunshot in the distance. Brockton Bay's natural ambience.
Rodrick stammered, his voice echoed on the phone's tinny speakers. "I uh.." he turned back to the rest of his little crew, only to see his own confusion reflected in their faces.
"Yes?" asked Brad.
Roderick swallowed. "I think I have the wrong number." His hand was shaking at this point as he tried to put the phone away, missing his own pocket and dropping it on the ground.
The rest of the posse was backing up slowly, bats and chains in high guards, eyes darting around nervously. Hookwolf's finest, falling to pieces.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he reached down towards the ground. "Wuh-we're sorry to, uh, bother you," he said, sniveling. "That is, thank you… I mean apologies, Ma'am."
Brad started to growl before he even realized he was doing it. Rodrick grabbed his phone off the ground and ran, clutching it to his chest. There was a second between their fearless, jawless leader making a break for it and the rest of the crew joining him.
Brad couldn't help it. He laughed.
Spoiler: Image
They sprinted away and screamed about how some 'she-beast' had killed Hookwolf and taken his stuff. To be honest, that made a whole lot more sense than what had actually happened.
Brad just… watched them go. He should have told them. Hell, he had his cell phone with him, taken from his apartment before Lars blew the shit out of it. He should have called someone.
He pinched his brow and kicked a nearby garbage can, folding it in half without even using his power. Another loud 'Bang!' for the music of the city.
He was doing it again. He had an opportunity, and he was wasting it. Again! Vice was occupied with Lars. Probably would be for a while. And honestly, good for him. What the fuck was his business saying that shit about him? If Brad wanted to fuck Vice, he would have done it last night when they were alone together in their apartment. But no, Vice had laid out on the couch to watch an episode of How It's Made before falling asleep, leaving Brad alone in his bed while his body felt like it was on fire, while he panted wildy, drooling on his sheets, desperately trying to get cool as his sex burned.
Vice hadn't done anything. Perfect. Fucking. Gentleman.
Brad grit his teeth. What was even the point? You turn a man into a sex object and then don't fuck it after the first time? Was he playing coy?
Ohhhhh, no. Brad figured it out. He knew his game now, seeing what happened to Lars. Vice wanted Brad to beg. He wanted him to get down on his knees like a 'good girl', tail wagging behind him, and beg for Vice's dick. It wasn't enough to hold Brad in the palm of his hand, he wanted to break him.
He brought his fist back and smashed it into the wall, and it broke apart like packed sand. He knew what Vice wanted. He knew it was only a matter of time. He couldn't fucking stand the way this body made him feel. They way it needed.
Another blow to the brickwork. Why the fuck wasn't he asking for help? Why couldn't he go back? Someone could fix him, somewhere.
Why had he gotten on Lars' case about not running away when he couldn't even do the same fucking thing?
He kept smashing the wall, kept trying to damage his fists, and was continually disappointed. The brick gave up long before his flesh did, and when he stopped, there was nothing more than a big dark hole in the brick, leading into, you guessed it, an abandoned warehouse. All Brad had to show for it was scuffed fur on his knuckles.
Brad stomped on the can they had thrown earlier, a sliver of aluminum joining the empty space inside him. He needed to stock up on metal. He'd gone too long since Vice took it all away.
That's fine. He knew where could get some.
Brad was thinking about the Race War.
Back when Kaiser had first recruited him, after covering up his murder charge and clearing his record, the man had talked to him about 'growing conflict' between the races that soldiers like Brad would be on the forefront of.
To be honest, he had made a fantastic case. Max was a great orator if nothing else. The endbringers were causing the slow collapse of civilization; nobody liked talking about it, but they all knew it was true.
Eventually, things would start to break down. Enough port cities would be underwater for the shipping industry to collapse entirely, and that would be the end of the 'globalist agenda'.
Brad was standing in front of the evidence of that right now, the ruins of the boat graveyard. Tall hulks rusted slowly in the shallows of the bay. When Max first brought him here, he couldn't help but look at them and believe that civilization was going to fall apart.
Tensions would rise, over resources and livable land. Governments would break down, and powerful capes would rise to power, the panicking masses sheltering themselves under their protection.
This stage of the proverbial powerpoint presentation would be accompanied by an illustration of Kaiser raising fortresses from the ground, with thankful White families looking on in awe. You know, just in case Max wasn't being clear enough who he was talking about.
Battle lines would be drawn, and people, the easily led masses, would flock together under the most obvious of common factors. With the governments gone and borders breaking down, there could only be one unifying cause, obvious to everyone on sight. Race.
This all made sense to Brad, once upon a time. Now, he didn't buy fully that the white race was 'inherently superior'. Come on, they were using Arabic numerals to write down all those crime statistics they loved so much. And the Chinese had gunpowder like a thousand years before Europe did, even if all they used it for was to make pretty fireworks.
But he'd be damned if he was going to fight for some other ethnicity when shit went down. It wasn't like he could dress himself up in shoe polish and beat marching drums for the Africans. Even if it would be really funny for the 2 seconds before he was impaled by a spear in the back.
At that point, Brad was completely on board with the Empire's bullshit. He read it, he lived it, and taught it to his trainees. He was a war machine all on his own. Him, Melody and Lars, the pit fighters teaching the next generation how to survive in the coming Ethno-apocalypse.
Brad stalled momentarily in his ascent up the side of a beached cargo ship to imagine the current Lars, all four and a half feet of him, horny as shit and blushing hard, trying to act like a drill sergeant to a new group of Empire cadets. Her His scratchy soprano telling them to 'drop and give me twenty!' while desperately trying to ignore how naked he was. He laughed hard and almost fell off the side, before extruding some metal claws to dig himself in.
It felt stupid to laugh. Not like they weren't both in the same fucking horny-ass boat. He began to climb again.
In the beginning, Brad was there on the front lines, taking down the swarthy scum that dared intrude on their territory. Cutting them down, reducing them to bits, driving the remaining cowards off. Life had been good, For a while.
But then came Max's little comments.
"Oh, Hookwolf, could you try to be a little bit more discerning in your targets? The good people of our race want you to know you're on their side."
Those cops weren't crooked, Max. They would have talked.
"Hookwolf, while I admire your fervor, we're finding it hard to show people our benevolence when you reduce your enemies to red stains on the street. People don't want to drive over those on their way to work, you understand."
Max was the one paying Brad to be a human blender. How much discretion can you show with a power like his?
"Hookwolf, I know the ABB's territory is vulnerable here, but the current situation is too volatile. You could end up starting a fight we wouldn't be able to win. Perhaps just focus on your current holdings."
Which of course, meant the dog-fighting pits. Don't go around killing people willy-nilly, Brad, you might start something undesirable, like, you know, a Race War. Go watch people shovel dog shit instead.
Brad felt the exterior of the ship he was on begin the bend slightly in response to his anger. Over the years Max had just shuffled him off the the side to play his stupid fucking long game. Everytime Brad pushed forward, Max would pull him back. Until eventually Brad wasn't allowed to push forward at all.
He had started to suspect that the glorious Race War he had been promised was never going to happen.
Every time Brad would take it up with him, Max would not so subtly remind him that it was thanks to the Empire he wasn't in jail already, and not just because of that murder they covered up when they recruited him. Indeed, Brad had been on many transports to maximum security parahuman prisons, only to be broken out by a crack squad of Empire capes.
The implication was, of course, that if he didn't toe the line, he was on his own the next time he got arrested. So he sat on his hands and waited for the complete breakdown of society. Something that looked like it wouldn't come until Brad was an old man, one who would need to use his power just to chew his food, his Empire tattoos distorted and ruined by wrinkles and liver spots.
Brad had seen more Cape-on-Cape action in the last 2 days than he had in the last 2 months. As in fights, not the other thing. Last big throw-down he had gotten involved in was saving Rune's sorry ass from Aegis, Gallant and Vista. Max had chewed him out for getting involved in a fight with upstanding white children. Even though he was pretty sure Aegis was a spic.
Wait, no, that wasn't correct. Max chewed him out for getting seen fighting a bunch of upstanding white children. The neonazi leader was obsessed with appearances, who would have thunk it? It was back to the dogfighting pits with him, with a stern warning to pick his battles more carefully.
Brad's frustration grew as he remembered the chewing out he had gotten. It didn't help that, right now, it was below freezing outside and he felt like he was running a fever. He began to pant heavily.
We wondered, idly, what Vice would do to Kaiser, if they met. When they met. A 'lovely game of Badminton', with Max's dick on the line? Or perhaps some water polo, and if Vice won he'd turn him into some kind of mermaid, never able to leave the gigantic pool on his country estate? Or maybe just another mewling kitten like Lars?
He realized with a start that he was kind of looking forward to it. As if they both wouldn't get nuked by Legend the moment they found out what Vice's powers actually were.
He paused in his ascent to wipe some drool off his lips. God, there was something wrong with him.
Brad climbed up over the edge of the railing surrounding the ship's upper deck. He had weighed his metal wolf form before, at an out-of-the-way station for weighing big 18-wheelers. He maxed out at 30 tons of steel, although he wasn't really sure if his limit was volume or weight. Either way, old ships like these could easily have a thousand times more than that in them. He began pulling sections of railings off and absorbing them, feeling it feed the empty space inside him. He began to form wedges and levels to strip large panels off the sides of the interior, folding them up and taking them in.
An hour or two went by like that, just peeling and dismantling the interior of the wreck and shoving it between his tits where it disappeared into his core.
Finally, he felt, for lack of a better word, heavy. Like a second stomach that was finally full. He began to wrap the metal around his musculature, its coolness settling under his skin. The heat in his body finally abated under a tide of cold steel. He began to feel the December chill in earnest again. Now that his body didn't feel like it was boiling, a deep tiredness settled over him. He had barely gotten any sleep last night on account of his little 'condition'.
He wandered through tight steel corridors, up a set of stairs steep enough to qualify as a ladder, and ended up on the bridge. The captain's chair sat mounted into the floor, it's stitching torn and stuffing scattered across the floor by some idiot bird, probably. The rest of the readouts and controls for the ship were wrenched open and stripped by desperate tinkers years ago.
Brad sat down in the chair and it immediately collapsed under his weight, pinching his tail.
"Ow, fuck," he said, laying across the floor. "Whatever." Cool air settled on his fur like a blanket, and he went to sleep.
In the dream, he is fighting. The opponent is bigger than him, stronger than him, more skilled than him. There is only a jagged stump on his neck remaining from when Brad would kill him 2 minutes from now. They are both trapped in here by a net of steel chains, draped across the arena like a cage.
Jokes on him, though, Brad doesn't have anywhere to go. The cage means nothing to him.
There is a woman in the crowd, sitting amongst an endless flowing tide of barking dogs. Her head is turned the wrong way around, so only a curtain of long brown hair faces the fight.
The headless soon-to-be corpse brings its hand back with the force of a skyscraper being ripped from the ground.
Slowly, it descends towards Brad's face-
Brad is woken up by a sharp clang of metal against metal. He shoots upright from where he was laying. How long had he been out? It was still dark out, and snowflakes were drifting in again from the windows.
He cast his gaze over the edge of the bridge's windows and saw from the moonlight that there was a shiny grappling hook hanging over the edge of the ship by a chain.
Attached to the other end, was, of course, Vice. He was using Brad's power to pull himself upwards by just retracting the chain back into his body. Damn, I should have done that instead of just scrambling up the side, he thought.
Brad laid back down with a slump, feeling his flesh sandwiched between the metal of the ship and the metal inside his body.
He could hear Vice approaching, singing some tune that echoed up and down the halls of the ship.
"Scrape your knees, it is only skin," he bellowed, "makes the sound of Vi-o-lence…"
I should run, thought Brad.
Where? Asked some deep part of him. A deep, growling voice, like some kind of monster at the back of a cave.
Anywhere. The protectorate.
They won't care. They'll just put you in jail.
Max. James. The Empire.
We've been through this before. They'll sweep you under the rug and only bring you out to kill shit. You think you're worth tinkering on? You think you're worth saving? Same as before. Another cage.
Kayden. Dorothy. Geoff.
They're not going to fucking take you in, Brad. You think Kayden's going to let you anywhere near her? Or her kid?
…I can't stay here.
Of course you can, Brad. You can do anything, except hurt him. The only reason you got far away as you did was because he let you.
Why? Why let me go? Why bring me back?
Because he wants to see you come back. To return to him of your own 'free will'. And you'll do it. Because out of all the cages you've ever been in, it feels the best. It feels nice, doesn't it?
I'm not a fucking faggot.
Of course you aren't. You're a woman, aren't you? A man fucking a woman ain't gay.
I'm not-
But then, there's Sabah. Doesn't quite fit with your little self-image, does it? Maybe you could run off with her?
That would fall apart within an hour. The second she realized who I really was.
Ain't that the rub? All the people who know you hate you, and all the people who love you don't know you.
Except Vice.
Except Vice. If you can even call it love. If you can even call him people.
There was the sound of bare feet on metal. Vice was standing in the door to the bridge. Brad looked at him from where he was laying on the floor. He went as still as possible.
What the fuck am I doing? Is he a T-rex, is his vision based on movement?
"Ah, The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep," he said. "But hark! Two lovely pillows lay in my path! Perhaps I shall take a small repose."
No, of course, his vision is based on sex. Makes perfect sense.
Vice stood in front of Brad's prone body, turned around, and fell backwards like a trust fall, his head perfectly lined up with Brad's tits.
KLANG.
"OW, FUCK!"
Vice rolled around on the floor, clutching the dent on the back of his head.
"Did you fill your fucking tits with cement? What the hell! Agh!"
He just stared at Brad accusingly. Angry, but not retaliating. Not telling him to hurt himself, or suck his dick, or apologize.
"Carbon steel, actually. Helps with the jiggling," Brad replied.
Vice sat up, his head fixing itself in a split second. "Well, quit it. The jiggling is the best part. Physics in motion. Books have been written about their beauty."
"Which books?" That sounded like a good read.
"Hentai comics, mostly," he said, scratching the back of his head. "Hey, you ok? You kinda looked like you were having a nightmare."
Like you care. "Yeah. Dreamt I was fighting a headless dude, back in my pit fighting days."
"Unhappy memories?"
"Best years of my life," Brad said. He wasn't even sure if that was sarcasm.
"Yeah, well," Vice said, standing up, "Probably has something to do with sleeping on a cold metal floor. There's a bed back at the apartment. King-sized, if you can believe it."
"I can believe Lars would buy one, sure. Hope springs eternal for him and all that."
"Yeah. Well, her dream is coming true tonight. Let's go back."
Brad stood up. "Is he, you know, ok?"
"Oh sure, horny as hell, but less of that attitude he was showing towards the end there."
Brad scowled. "You mean the bitchy cocklust?"
"Yeah, that!" replied Vice without even a single atom of shame.
Brad pressed his palm into his own forehead, trying to avoid putting his claws into his eyes by accident. "Vice, can you be honest with me?"
"Yeah. Among every living thing, you're the one I can be most honest with."
Brad didn't know how to decipher that sentence, so he didn't. "Are you mind controlling us?"
Vice tilted his head at him in confusion, the way a puppy would.
Brad tried to clarify. "I mean, I, and Lars, both of us… we're doing and thinking shit we never would have. I mean, beyond just what you did to our bodies, we're acting differently. I know Lars would have never said anything like that to me."
"You've seen Lars get turned into a flying sexpet before? Did he react differently that time?"
"You know that's not what I fucking mean," Brad growled.
Vice shrugged. "Well, to answer your question, no. Not directly. I mean, there's the obvious hormones and stuff. But I mostly left the brain alone, besides hooking up the ears and tail and wings. That thing's complicated as all hell. Don't trust myself rooting around in there."
"Then why-"
Vice held up a hand. "A person isn't entirely their brain, Brad. There's more of you in your body than you would think. People act like you could cut a person's brain out of their head and have the entire person, but that isn't true. Hell, there's parts of 'you' that aren't even your body."
"...Like your soul?" The idea of Vice being a religious type was so ridiculous that it stunned Brad for a moment.
"Hah! No. Like gut bacteria. I knew a girl who ate some bad yogurt once and got depression. Had to get a shit transplant." Oh. What? What the fuck?
Vice wandered back towards the stairwell, gripped the railings, and slid all the way down.
And Brad, like an idiot, got up and followed him.
"I mean," Vice continued, "say you've got two people. Identical in every way, same life, memories, body."
Brad nodded, even though Vice couldn't see him from where he was.
"One of them starts waking up with scars, injuries, all over his body. A slash across the back of his neck. A limp knee. An ankle that doesn't bend quite right. He doesn't remember getting them but they're still there. They affect the way he moves, they cause him pain when he tries to do something fun, like dance, or sports."
Vice glances around, his eyes drinking in the dark corridors inside the ship. "Where the fuck was…?"
"Vice, how did you get lost inside a ship? It's a big rectangle."
"Shush. Where was I? Right. The scars aren't 'mind controlling' him, but they are changing his behavior, the way he interacts with the world, the way he thinks." Vice opens a door, an inky expanse of darkness standing before him. "Wrong way." He shuts it again.
"So, then, with Lars-"
"Brad, I'm going to be real with you. I have no idea what the fuck happened with Lars."
"Wha-"
Vice began waving his arms around in exasperation. "Like, I expected him to break in like 2 days, or 2 weeks, but that was like 2 minutes. She was hungry for it out the gate. I mean really."
That's going to be you, soon.
Shut the fuck up.
"I left her back at the apartment. She should be a little more normal when we return. Hopefully."
Lars sat in the bath, letting the cold water from the shower run down her face and wings, and shuddered. It helped with the heat, at least, and let her stop attempting to masturbate long enough to get her thoughts in order.
She tapped her claws along the rim of the bath.
Shit.
The horrible fact was, that with the cold water stopping her from getting aroused in response to her own shame, all she felt was just... Shame. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Not the newly discovered sexy variants of those emotions, but the Plain Jane horrible versions. She honestly considered just turning off the water, getting out, and going back to being a horny little animal again, because the sexual frustration was less agonizing than the just plain frustration she was feeling right now.
Frustration at Vice? She'd already gone through that, for all the good it did her. Yeah, she was fucking angry, but that wasn't going to help her, and if she started getting mad at him when he came back, he'd only make everything worse.
Even if she was allowed to hurt him, she didn't think she could even actually kill him. He'd gotten blown through 2 solid brick walls and out a building. It had been the most compressed air she'd ever detonated at once since she the day she got her powers.
It barely inconvenienced him. She got more hurt than he did.
Angry at Brad? Brad had done everything she could have done, namely tell her to get help. And Lars ignored her! And then she called her a slut! Like an asshole!
It occurred to her that she was more angry at herself for being a shitty friend, than she was at getting turned into some sex-crazed humiliation-hungry animal-creature.
The reason why was obvious, of course; she could actually do something about the former. She shoved her head below the cold water and screamed for a bit. That felt a little better.
The phone was still in the living room. She needed to call someone.
She turned off the shower and let the water drip off her face, feeling it run through her fur. She shook her wings out.
Spoiler: Image
She was shocked to find herself lifted out of the water, just a tiny bit. Air rippled across the bathwater, creating tiny white crests of waves. It hadn't occurred to her that the wings could actually let her fly. Another point in the 'Lars is a dumbass' column.
Her power only ever let her hover around a bit, supported on a compressed column of air. She hated doing it; it always felt like a balancing act, like one wrong move and she'd accidentally send herself careening into a wall. It was faster to just run than to attempt to move around while she was doing that.
She got up out of the bath, trying to ignore the way she had to clamber over the side. A quick gust of air dried herself off. She very pointedly didn't look in the mirror; she probably looked like a giant ball of fuzz.
She walked towards the living room, past the phone on the coffee table. She still needed to figure out who to call and what to say.
The window beckoned, and there was suddenly something she needed to know, desperately.
She opened one of the tall windows lining the end of the room, and stepped out on the tiny little balcony.
Man, it'd really suck if I just jumped off and fell to my death. Like 'peace out Brad, solve your own problems.' Call her a slut and then dip when I can't handle the same thing she did.
She flared out her wings. She could feel the way they caught the air just so, the current moving across her feathers. All she had to do was force the air over them in a certain way…
She stepped out into the night and took off.
"Give her time to get her bearings and do something stupid. She'll be fine."
Vice continued to walk down the hall, until he finally came across the right door. Brad knew the right door, but he didn't feel like correcting him.
Vice cranked open the valve, and it opened onto the deck of the ship, the tilted horizon studded with stars. The cold brushed against Brad's fur.
"Don't." He didn't even realize he was speaking.
Vice stopped.
Brad took a deep, shuddering breath. "I'll do it."
Brad let the metal unwind itself from his muscles, slowly retreating back into his center. Like taking off a cold jacket. Each place he took the metal away, heat sprung up from within,opening the vents on some great furnace with him.
It was so much worse, now, for trying to suppress it. It burned so hot inside him. All his steel, undoing itself like a wave moving towards his center. His breath steamed.
Giving in?
I said shut up.
The wave reached his sex, and his knees buckled. He fell into the wall, feeling the cool metal across his back.
It was all too hot. He needed to get out of these clothes. He shed his jacket and tank top and started undoing his pants.
"You having issues there?" Vice asked.
"I'm not going to beg."
"Huh?" Brad had no idea if he was playing dumb or was actually just this stupid. Both options were infuriating.
"You're not going to break me."
Vice turned away. "It's not the breaking you need to worry about. It's the bending."
Brad stood up, the heat seething beneath his skin, waiting to be satisfied. He wouldn't make it back to the apartment.
Vice looked back at him, and began to close the door. "Again, we have a bed at home. There's better places to do this."
"I know," Brad spat out. "But there's not a better time."
What's your plan here? You know this can only end one way.
I know, he thought. But there's more than one way to get there.
What?
Brad had actually been reading that book Lars gave him, on the roof. There was a sidebar, in the section about Venus, about how the Romans were gay. Or, to be more precise, there were only two real sexualities back in the Roman times. You were the masculine one, the dominant, or you were the feminine one, the submissive. You weren't really 'gay' unless you were taking it from behind.
Brad was naked now, but he certainly wasn't cold anymore.
He walked up to Vice and shoved him to the floor.
"Woah," he said, momentarily stunned.
"I said, I'm not begging." He took a deep, shuddering breath, and felt something warm drip from his sex. "I'm not even asking. This is a demand."
He knelt down and slammed both hands to either side on Vice's face, straddling him. He felt himself grimace. Or maybe it was a smile. Who knew anymore.
"You're going to fuck me. Now."
Straight? Gay? Man? Woman?
Fuck it. Brad Meadows was a Top, and that was all that mattered.
Spoiler: Image
Brad tore off Vice's pants, revealing…
"What the fuck is this?" Brad asked. He gestured to the limp little thing hanging from Vice's crotch.
"I'm not going to make it giant while I'm hanging around, that's just asking for trouble."
"You're not hanging around. You're fucking me. Make it bigger."
Brad could swear he heard Vice gulp. "Yes Ma'am."
For the first time tonight, or in fact, her entire life, Brad didn't hate being called 'Ma'am'.
The penis grew, not just in the normal way, through the increase in blood pressure. This one was adding mass to itself, taken from some stores all over the body. Still limp, it pulsed, girth and length increasing. Junkyard Dog's pussy dripped and twitched.
It was about as big as Brad's used to be, now. She cupped the balls with her hands, pawpads rubbing against it, claws tickling underneath. She could imagine the way it tingled.
"Not big enough," she snarled. "Is that all you have?"
"No, Ma'am," he answered. As she rubbed along the base of the shaft, it grew again, one-and-a-half times the size. It was becoming erect, standing at attention. Junkyard Dog grasped it firmly, giving it a squeeze. Firm.
"Still not enough!" She barked.
Vice gazed up at her. "You sure?"
She squeezed just a bit harder.
"Unf! Yes Ma'am! Yes Ma'am!"
The shaft grew even more, thickening, veins protruding. It was almost as big as a human arm at this point. She couldn't take it any more. What Junkyard Dog needed, she got, and she needed that dick inside her.
She pinned both of Vice's arms against the floor and straddled him. Bits of drool splattered against Vice's mask. She breathed in and dropped herself onto Vice's shaft.
Almost instantly there was an almost painful sensation of her walls stretching. She gasped involuntarily as she forced her own passage open.
Vice grunted beneath her. "I warned you-"
"Shut! Up!" she barked, each syllable punctuated by her forcing herself lower onto the shaft, feeling it strain deeper within her.
"But-"
"I! Said!" She raised herself off the shaft a bit, feeling the cool air leaking in the gap soothe her insides.
And then she brought it back down. "Shut!"
Further.
"UP!"
She heaved her chest downwards and smothered Vice's face with her breasts, feeling his protests against them. Nothing came out of his mouth but muffled "Mmf!"s and "Unf!"s.
Finally, no more smart remarks or shitty jokes. They could both stop pretending.
She lowered herself further down, forcing some juices out of the sides of her pussy and onto the floor. It felt like it was wriggling inside her now, probing deeper. Her hips were being forced apart now. She needed to support herself on her arms alone at this point.
"This is what you fucking get. You knew what I was feeling. You knew what I wanted, what this fucking body wanted. And you did nothing!" She couldn't go any further down, now. She was stuck working it up and down, their sexes twitching against each other. "You make a pussy, that means you fuck it! Understand?"
Vice nodded his head into her breasts, causing them to smolder and tingle.
She bucked up and down on his dick, the friction driving her to new heights of pleasure. "From now on, when I need fucking, you fuck me! And when I ask you to fuck me, you say 'how hard?'"
Growls spilled out from her throat, echoing off the hull. It was like she was surrounded by a pack of horny, angry bitches, all with her own voice. The bucking increased in speed, heat combining with pleasure in a hormonal cocktail that she was getting absolutely wasted on. Her tail was standing straight up, and she could see her abdominal region deform slightly as Vice's cock went deeper and deeper, the warmth traveling further in, not by inches, but by shitty tiny european units.
"And -uhn- when I say for you to cum, you -umf- fucking cum!" She could barely talk at this point. Her tongue kept getting in the way. Her bucking and Vices thrusts were starting to sync up, plunging it deeper and deeper with every second. "Are you -ah!- ready?"
Vice nodded into her fatty tits again. "Then c-"
At that moment, some sort of bottleneck was broken through. Something inside her stretched just wide enough, and she slid down Vice's dick by a good few inches.
She felt it hit the back. Her arms and legs both gave out as she was wracked with pure euphoria. Her body began to spasm, like she'd hit some sort of funny bone deep inside, wracked with a pleasure that was almost painful. Her braids bounced against her neck and her tail curled up. Her hands unclenched involuntarily, and Vice's arms went free.
"Cum!" she yipped in surprise. They both orgasmed, White hot semen flowing into the deepest parts of her. The dick inside her didn't have enough room to even twitch, really, so it just pulsed like a second heartbeat as it continued to fill her with sticky fluids.
She let her arms and legs go limp, her head falling over Vice's shoulder, nose pressed into the cool metal floor. She just let the cool air fill her lungs, trying not to move so as not to jostle the cock inside her.
She should probably feel ashamed or something, but she was feeling a lot of other things instead. Her own heartbeat, the cold metal floor, Vice's body against hers.
After a minute of them lying on top of each other, just breathing each other's air, Vice raised his hands and began to flip them both over.
And then he was on top of her again, eyes staring down. Expressionless.
There was a twinge of nervousness in her. For a second, she had been in control, but the reality was setting back in. Him on top of her. His dick inside her. Him fucking her. What was she thinking?
She was thinking she had any freedom at all. That she could make some kind of choice that would matter. Even a little. Some way to still be herself.
Vice brought his hand up to her neck, and she went stiff, causing a small pain to erupt from her pelvis where she was still impaled on his member.
"Stop," he said, pure calm emanating from his voice. "You're so tense. That was beautiful."
"What?" she asked, trying to keep some measure of calm.
He began to pet her, dragging his hands down the back of her neck, tracing little lines of warmth over her fur. "I couldn't have asked for anything better."
"You- you wanted that? I-"
"I wanted you, Junkyard Dog. That was you. The things I want from Lars are different from the things I want from you." He whispered into her ear. Her thighs squeezed together, straining against the shape of his penis again. The heat in her body had disappeared with the climax, but she could feel a small amount of it return to her face.
"That demanding, abrasive personality, that aggression. If I wanted the same thing from every girl, what exactly would be the point of a harem?"
That made more sense than anything she'd said or done tonight, she supposed.
"Close your eyes." he said, soft but sure. She closed them of her own will, but found she couldn't open them again.
There was a series of small snapping noises just above her, like straps being undone. She was becoming aware of the shape of her body again wrapped around him, his shaft still deep inside, filling her almost entirely. Her ears twitched, and she heard the sounds of the waves crashing against the hull, the wind blowing into the holes she had created earlier with her scavenging, the slow groan of metal beneath and within her.
And then there was the sound of Vice, so close, breathing above her in the darkness. What was he doing?
"Vice?" she asked, almost scared.
She felt one of his hands entwine its fingers with hers, gripping her tight, palm against her paw pads. The other brought a single finger up to her lips, so far ahead of where they used to be.
"Shush," he said, so quietly it was almost like an echo without any original voice to give birth to it.
She felt lips press up against her own. Soft, somewhat small compared to how large her own mouth was now.
She recoiled. Her head almost slammed back into the floor below her.
What the hell is he thinking?
There was a beat of silence in darkness again. God, she wished he could see what face he was making. Disappointment, maybe. Anger, more likely. She just screwed up again. She squirmed slightly, feeling him inside her-
What the fuck am I thinking? I fuck him, I literally go to him and demand sex and now he's kissing me that's the step too far? I'm impaled on his dick right now and the thing that makes me flinch…
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Junkyard Dog, one hand still entwined with his, took the other and placed it on the back of Vice's head, and pushed them back together until their lips touched again. She almost flinched once more, tasting his breath on her own, but then she forces herself to keep going. Her thin black lips brush against his human ones. They don't quite fit together quite right, and at a certain point they are just shifting around trying to find the best angle, getting closer and closer.
Their lower bodies join in, and she feels the cock inside her stir around the remains of the previous orgasm, the cooling warmth pushing against her insides and bringing back the heat again. It's not an agonizing heat this time, but a comfortable, relaxing one, one that presses against the cold air outside instead of burning from within.
They fuck again.
"Ah fuck, that's cold!" he yelled.
"I said you could take a dip in freezing water, Brad, I didn't say you'd enjoy it."
"I'm not putting my clothes on with all that gunk and sweat on me! Or in me!" He paused. "Vice, am I pregnant?"
"You wanna be?"
Brad shuddered as he stepped out of the cold ocean water. "God no. I'd make a terrible father. Mother. Whatever."
Vice looked unconvinced.
"And, uh, being pregnant would ruin my abs?"
"You make a compelling point. Here."
The orange eye on the left side of his mask blinked, and suddenly a burst of air wicked the moisture from Brad's fur. Brad was dry now, but cold as shit and his fur was all frizzy.
"Once again, we have, like, amenities and shit back at the apartment. Showers? Beds? Any of those ringing a bell?"
"I'm not walking home- I'm not walking back naked!"
"You've done it before. You just want to show off your girlfriend's duds."
"She's not my-" Oh, for the love of god. "Fine, what of it? You still mad about that?"
"I want to be, but I can't really find it within myself to do so," he remarked, laying back in the sand.
"I mean, to have one of my creations's beauty be appreciated, to entice a useful cape to our side, completely unrelated to the implied threats I levied against her? Feels like a compliment." He leaned back on the sand. "I mean that's like 3 wins for me, or something. I didn't expect her to be that horny. Seems like a running theme."
Brad stopped in the middle of wiping himself off. "You mean you're using me to get to her?"
"I'm getting to her in a lot of ways. You're just one unexpected vector of attack."
Brad crossed his arms. Great, he was being used as a honeypot. Or something.
"Don't worry," he says. "Soon as she joins up, you two can fool around as much as you want."
Vice stood up and stepped over to him, his bare feet leaving prints in the wet sand.
He put his hand on her back and began to rub it against his fur, slow circles on his back. They both stood there, for a while. A few minutes, maybe. Not saying anything.
And then he whispers into her ear. "I'm yours. You're mine."
Vice stopped, patted him twice on the butt, and walked back towards the city. Brad fell back into the sand.
That stupid bastard.
He felt something brush up against his tailbone, and whipped his head around to look.
Oh, it's my tail. Right. I have one of those. Still.
It was wagging.
He reached out behind him and grabbed it.
"Stop that."
It didn't stop.
Lars was flying. Actually flying. Not the shaky hovering she normally did, but actually feeling her body moving through the air currents, pushing and pulling her wherever she wanted to go. She shaped the currents, and her body contorted to catch them in just the right way.
She let herself fall into a dive, wings at her back, the smoke-stained and salt-encrusted brickwork of the city below approaching fast. She took all the air beneath her and threw it towards herself, and caught it with her wings until she was moving level with the ground, all the speed she built up falling, now carrying her forward, panes of glass rushing by.
She was initially shocked by how bright it was outside, even though it was after midnight. After a while, she realized it wasn't truly bright out, but that her eyes could simply see more. They were larger, more sensitive. She caught her reflection in a window, illuminated by the glow cast by a cheap Chinese restaurant's neon signage. Her pupils were dilated to the point of being almost black, with a thin ring of orange around them. The shame started up again, heat building within her.
She leapt off the building. Vice hadn't been lying about how light she was now. When you weighed less than half of what you did before while still being just as strong, you felt like you were under the moon's gravity, almost, each jump taking you so much higher that you thought it would, each bounce almost effortless.
Her wings flared out at the peak of her jump and she flapped them down hard, using her power to decrease the pressure above her and increase the pressure below her. She sailed upwards like a rocket, until she was climbing higher and higher, over the nearby apartments, over even the tallest buildings in the city.
At a certain point, she stopped rising, and simply glided forward, her power letting her simply float on without losing any altitude.
The cold night air relieved her of the heat inside. She felt like she could finally think now, free of shame and arousal, and the awful cycle between the two that consumed her entire thought process for the past few hours. She began to plan.
She needed help. She looked around. There. Below her. The lights of the Medhall building. No time for doubts.
She tucked her wings closer together and pulled into a dive. Being able to feel the air move against her inside and out meant she could find the perfect angle for maximum speed and control. As she approached, she began to turn back and forth, slaloming on the way down to bleed off speed and control the descent.
She could go for help now. Max had connections. If not those fancy Gesellshaft tinkers, then maybe he could pay someone off in Toybox, or find someone with similar powers to Vice's. His pockets ran deep. You could tell just by looking into his penthouse office on the Medhall building, large, the walls lined with glass, with strange abstract art pieces lining the walls. A series of crude metal sculptures were arranged on plinths in the center of the office. Max's own work.
She landed on the edge of the building, gripped her claws into the concrete, and hung over the side, peering into the building upside down.
She wondered, idly, if after fixing her, they'd let her keep the wings. They were… useful. No, amazing. Amazingly useful.
There was Max. Sitting in his office, after midnight, in the week after Christmas. Drinking and muttering to himself.
"Fucking four different encounters in two nights, giant animal woman, masked mutant moron, dancing and singing…" he said aloud to himself. He took a swig of what smelled like brandy. "One holiday and suddenly patrols are getting taken out left and right." He took a shitty burner phone out of a drawer on his rich mahogany desk and flicked it open.
"Hookwolf and Stormtiger still aren't responding. Probably off on a bender somewhere. Shit." He flicked it closed again. "I'm not going to reach 40 at this rate. Stress is going to fucking kill me."
The intercom on Max's desk went off, and he nearly jumped a foot in the air, spilling alcohol everywhere. He wiped himself off with an embroidered necktie and slammed on the button. "Jessica, what! What? I'm in the middle of something here!"
A woman's voice crackled on the other end. "I'm going home for the night, Sir, and you should too. I also received an email from our contacts in Germany that you should look at before heading out."
Max placed his head on his desk and began groaning. "Why are they reaching out to me at 3 AM?"
"It's 9 AM in Germany, sir."
He slammed his fist on his desk. "I KNOW THAT!" His body was trembling. He took a few deep breaths. Outside, Lars just stared as she watched her boss collapse back into his chair. Normally he was cool enough to take charge at Somer's Rock, where everyone wanted to kill one another but words were the only weapon.
Now he looked like he was about to fall apart.
Lars wondered if Max was always like this when his employees weren't around. Managing both a major Pharmaceutical company and one of the largest non-protectorate Cape groups on the east coast must be stressful.
Max's anger deflated. "I know that. Thank you Jessica. Have a lovely evening."
"It's morning, sir."
He gave a deep sigh. "I know."
The intercom clicked off.
Now's as good a time as any, Lars thought. She brought her paw up to the window and knocked.
Max's head whipped upwards, where he caught her reflection in one of his shining metal sculptures, her features distorted and warped by the artistic curves. "Fuck!" he swore, swinging his hand back without looking.
Lars' whiskers twitched, and he had a split second before suddenly the metal frames holding the glass windows in place grew hot and shot out a set of shiny stainless steel needles, each as wide as a finger. She leapt off the edge with… ugh, catlike reflexes and snapped her wings out to hover just outside.
"Wait, Max-" she cried, before more needles, longer and faster, began to chase her through the air, growing out of each other like branches on a tree. Their surfaces were hot and hissed against the cold air.
One headed straight between her eyes.
"Eep!" she squeaked, and closed her wings, forcing herself to drop like a rock. One of her ears flicked as she felt the hot point of metal strike just over her head.
"They know my fucking name?!" Max roared from inside, sprinting towards the window. More and more needles chased Lars down the side of the building, before she managed to fly away. She turned her head around and looked back at the office, where she could see Max's angry, hunched form silhouetted in the top set of windows.
Slowly, she turned her head back around to see where she was going. She was way outside his range now.
Now's as good a time as any, huh Lars? Just startle him while he's stressed about animal women attacking his patrols? You fucking idiot? Weren't you listening!?
She felt tears begin to form in the corner of her eyes..
"Why the fuck can't I do anything right?" she screamed into the night sky.
She looked down at the city below her, the wetness in her eyes blurring the building and lights together until everything seemed to shine.. A tear fell from her face and seemed to disappear entirely.
When she got back to the apartment, Brad was sitting on the couch, reading the book Lars got her.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," said Lars.
"You came back." she said.
Lars felt a blush form on her cheeks. "I, uh, yeah."
"Vice seemed convinced you would, I didn't see why." She set the book down on the end table. "Why."
"I, ah, I mean…" Brad was going to call her an idiot again. And she would deserve it. Now that she was out of the cold, the heat from before was returning, as did a shameful awareness of how stupid she had been. Which caused the heat to-
Fuck! Not now!
Her face scrunched up on itself and she tried to control her expression. Brad took one of her braids in her paws and began to twirl it between her fingers as she stared at Lars.
Lars took a few deep breaths through her nose, trying to- wait a minute. That smell. Seawater, but also…
Her eyes narrowed at the Wolf-lady on the couch. "Did you two… have sex?"
Brad startled and barked out a sharp "Ow!" as her grip on her own hair suddenly tightened and pulled. "I, we were…"
Lars gave a deep sigh. "Brad, it's ok."
"...It is?"
"I mean, if he told you to do it, there would be nothing you could do to stop it, right? It's not your fault."
Brad looked away pointedly.
Lars stared at her. Brad continued not making eye contact.
"You didn't." Lars finally said.
"You gonna call me a fucking slut again?" Brad growled.
"You gonna act like a slut? Brad, what the fuck?"
"Oh, and you've been just out all night, making the best decisions, haven't you? Making good choices?"
"I wasn't giving it up for that moron's dick, if that's what you're asking."
"Oh no, I suppose you were just traipsing around in the clouds like an innocent little fairy kitten-"
"Enough."
They both started, as Vice stepped out of the bedroom door, all the eyes in his mask narrowed to slits.
"Stop arguing. Get some sleep. We're robbing a bank in the morning."
And then he retreated back into the darkness of Lars' bedroom, leaving the door open just a little bit.
Silence reigned in the apartment for the rest of the night.