AnnouncementContent warningPlease read the content warning before diving into this chapter.

  SpoilerSevere dysphoria, one use of a slur

  [colpse]eighteen

  [14 august 2024]=-=[wednesday]=-=(1134)

  Evan is sleeping comfortably now, restrained to the bed. He’s been given a sedative and tranquilizer shots, as well as a pill to hopefully help calm the fshbacks as he sleeps. He’s also been given a testosterone injection.

  “I don’t know how much more we can do for him, Miss Kelly,” Danni says as she looks over the traumatized, abused boy. “We might have to consider more drastic measures, like the ones we employed on Morgan and Delih…”

  “No,” Kelly says, adamantly. “This kid is a victim. We’re not going to re-traumatize him just to make him easier to deal with.” She sighs and crosses her arms underneath her chest. “I already feel uncomfortably adjacent to Levin using the brainwashing techniques on the guilty. Delih had it coming, but…”

  “I get it,” Danni says. “I was just throwing the option out there. What would you do if he requested it, though?”

  “Still no,” Kelly says. “There’s been times Joy has asked me for the same thing in the middle of the night, as she’s reeling from remembering everything those bastards did to her. I won’t allow it. I won’t destroy her to save her, and the same goes for this kid.”

  Nearby, Jeri and Bke are sitting in a makeshift common area.

  “...This is all my fault,” Jeri says. “I should have been watching over him…”

  “Neither of us knew how bad he had it…” Bke says, softly, as she looks down at a small cup of vending machine hot chocote. “Levin raped me too, he was trying the same exact pybook, but… I guess since I’m kind of ambivalent about my gender, it hasn’t fucked with me anywhere near as much. I get fshbacks, yeah, but… I never considered hurting myself, or worse. I honestly suffered more from him trying to convert me to his twisted brand of Christianity and calling me by that name than anything else.”

  “I should have seen the dysphoria earlier, I mean, I’m fucking trans, if anyone should have seen it…” Jess says. “I shouldn’t have pressured him to talk.”

  “Sis, you did nothing wrong,” Bke says. “All of this is the fault of a dead man. It’s a pity we can’t fuck him up any more than Morgan did.”

  “...Morgan should have shoved his dick down his throat so he could choke on it,” Jeri says, angrily.

  “Probably so,” Bke says with a little bit of a forced ugh.

  Both girls sigh softly.

  “I think we both need help too,” Jeri says. “We’re talking like shit like this is normal.”

  “Probably,” Bke says as she sips her hot chocote.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [15 august 2024]=-=[thursday]=-=(0953)

  Morgan sips a mango Monster as she heads down to the armory to get her daily shooting practice in. She likes getting it out of the way early like this. As she turns the corner to head to the armory, though, she hears shooting.

  Who the hell is down here at this hour? she asks herself. Whoever it is, they’re a complete newbie. Hope to fuck they don’t hurt themself.

  As she enters the room and heads over to the lockers, she sees just who is shooting. She’s having a lot of trouble with the standard service pistol the contractors use. “Jeri, what are you doing?”

  “Aaahhh!” Jeri shouts as she freaks out, lifting her hands some and ending up putting a round in the ceiling. “You scared me…”

  “Not what I asked,” Morgan says as she pulls out her 1911 replica. “What are you doing, and why?”

  “Shooting centers you, and I thought, maybe…” Jeri says, apologetically.

  Morgan shakes her head. “Exactly. It centers me,” Morgan says. “You’ve got to find your own thing.” She reels in the target Jeri’s been theoretically firing at. There are a couple of graze marks on the edges of the paper, but most of the rounds have been nowhere near their target.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Morgan, I…” Jeri starts to say.

  “Don’t ‘Miss’ me,” Morgan says as she shakes her head. “Mistress and Miss Kelly are the ones in charge around here. I just get sold to perverts so I can kill them. In some ways, my status around here is less than yours.”

  “I had no idea…” Jeri says. “I just… this Evan thing is eating me alive, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “This, again…” Morgan says with a sigh as she clips a paper target in pce and sends it down the line to the wall. “I get that you care about him…”

  “It’s not like that! I don’t like…” Jeri protests.

  “...Let me finish next time,” Morgan says as she starts emptying a clip into the target. “I get that you care about him because you’re the kind of person that cares about everyone, and that’s a good thing most of the time, except when it comes time to accept that a person may have too many problems for you to fix. And… I’m sorry. He strikes me as too damaged to fix. He might honestly be better off going through the same thing me and Delih have.”

  “...What do you mean by that?” Jeri asks.

  “We were both bad people. We were… changed. We became better people, but… but we lost a lot of ourselves,” Morgan says. “I don’t remember much from before I was employed by Miss Kelly.”

  Jeri starts to look ill. “You… you what?”

  “I used to have a whole ‘nother life, but now I don’t remember it,” Morgan says. “Just bits and pieces. I had to completely reconstruct my identity and sense of self.”

  “You sound like you were brainwashed…” Jeri says.

  “I might have been. That’s what’s happening to Delih right now. She was feeding info to Levin, she got caught, and that’s how she became Delih,” Morgan says as she repces the clip and starts to fire at the target again. “I… honestly, I think I’m better off like this.”

  “But your old identity…” Jeri says, almost in a pleading tone.

  “You can’t miss what you don’t have anymore,” Morgan says with a shrug. “I don’t. All I know is who I am now, and I like who she is.”

  Jeri shakes her head. “What happened to you is disgusting, and I feel sorry for the person you were. You never got a chance to improve, you were just… the old you was thrown out like week-old garbage.”

  “He probably deserved it,” Morgan says as she ejects the clip.

  Jeri looks disturbed by the turn the conversation’s taken and she storms out.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (1055)

  Kelly is sitting in the security room with Danni, watching Delih’s progress. Now that Levin’s dead, they’ve started to ramp up some of her changes, both mental and physical. She’s been castrated. Vocal and facial feminization surgeries are not too far away for her.

  “We can’t really put her through much physical training while she recovers from the orchi,” Danni says as she observes the new girl on a monitor.

  “Yeah… there’s still a little bit of Riley in there, though…” Kelly says, pondering. “Evan was promised to her by Jason, right?”

  “Yeah,” Danni says. “What are you thinking?”

  “I want to rub his nose in it a bit,” Kelly says. “Show him the cost of what he was betraying us for, really break those st bits of him so Delih can start to blossom into her own without his baggage.”

  “Yeah, I like that idea,” Danni says. “Let those st little bits of him see what he did it for.”

  There is loud banging on the door. “Kelly, Danni, I know you’re in there and we need to talk!” Jeri shouts from outside.

  “...What the hell?” Kelly asks. She’s not used to being shouted at like that, even through a door.

  Danni gets up. “I’ll handle this…” she says as she goes to open the door.

  As she does Jeri is standing there, wearing a facial expression that wouldn’t be out of pce on the world’s meanest Karen. “I want to know what really happens here,” she says, almost growling as she spits it out. “Morgan told me about what you did to her and Delih. You’re not going to do it to Evan.”

  “...I’m going to punish her ter…” Danni says with a sigh. “She needs a refresher in opsec.”

  “We’re not pnning to do that to Evan,” Kelly says. “We’re trying every conventional option we can – medication, therapy, if it comes to it things like ECT, but we’re not pnning to…”

  “You’re not going to punish Morgan for anything!” Jeri excims. “And you’re not going to force Evan through whatever brainwashing they went through!”

  “No… she is,” Kelly says. “It’s part of their retionship dynamic. You don’t get a say in that.”

  “Did she even consent to that sort of retionship?!” Jeri asks.

  “She didn’t have to,” Kelly says. “But she did in the end.”

  “You… you’re monsters…” Jeri says, believing that she just traded one hell for another, this one paved with good intentions.

  “Jeri… I mean it when I say that Evan isn’t going to undergo what those two have,” Kelly says. “I don’t employ these methods and techniques lightly, not after what was done to Joy…”

  “How am I supposed to believe you?” Jeri says.

  Kelly pulls out the tablet PC with Levin’s master list on it. She turns it on and scrolls to one specific entry, then highlights it and hands the tablet to Jeri. “Read this, and you might understand.”

  Jeri takes the tablet. She starts to read the entry out loud. “Subject former name: Jourgensen, Stefan…” Her eyes open wide as she suddenly connects the dots. “Was this…?”

  “Finish reading it,” Kelly says.

  Jeri gulps. “Subject former name: Jourgensen, Stefan. Current name: This subject does not deserve a female name. End goal…” She starts to feel like she’s about to throw up. “End goal: Complete sissification. Test subject for recently discovered Soviet mind control techniques. Complete mental transformation with obedience training. Castration, but leaving the genitals otherwise intact. Additional notes: Maybe once Tiffany sees what kind of man Stefan truly is when I’m done with him, she’ll move on, and she can be married off to a proper, God-fearing Christian man… my God…” She starts retching. “Sold to Roderick Javier...”

  “You know that person as Joy. She used to be my son, and she had all that shit inflicted on her for the crime of loving the wrong girl,” Kelly says. “And then once Levin was done brainwashing her and Roderick was done debasing her, she was unceremoniously dumped on our doorstep, broken like Oleg was, but far, far worse. There are some aspects of her mental reprogramming she will never be able to overcome. She will never be able to live completely independently. She was a genius programmer, now she can barely remember how to write a post with Markdown. Her intellect is gone.”

  Danni slides a trash can over to Jeri as she falls to her knees and begins to vomit.

  “So, you see, I don’t do this lightly,” Kelly says. “I don’t consider my methods hastily.” She pulls a file out of a nearby cabinet. “Read.”

  “No… I get it…” Jeri says as she spits into the trash can, trying to get the taste of vomit out of her mouth.

  “Hon, you really don’t get it,” Kelly says. “You wanted to know how the sausage is made. Well, I’m showing you the meats that go into the sausage, in hopes that you’ll understand the methods I employ to make it. Read.”

  Jeri opens the file beled “Bailey, Anthony.” “Oh my God…” she says. His criminal history is in here, including his juvenile record. “This person was completely out of control…” He had been arrested several times as a juvenile for assault and battery, in some cases nearly killing his victims, and each time the charges got dropped or he’d get probation for the really bad ones. Then once he hit 18, he got in trouble for beating up his friend, and suddenly shit got real because there wouldn’t be a juvie charge this time. Luckily for him, he got the choice to go into the Army… until he got court-martialed there for assaulting a CO and for insubordination. “Dishonorable discharge? You can barely get a job at a gas station with one of those…”

  “Especially around here. You can’t even get the gas station job. Too many military connections in the community. The st thing they’ll employ is someone with a dishonorable,” Kelly says.

  “Who was this?” Jeri asks.

  “You know her as Morgan,” Kelly says.

  “I…” Jeri says, dropping the file.

  “She’s a lot different from that now, isn’t she?” Danni asks.

  “There’s no way these two are the same person…” Jeri says.

  “Do you want to watch the video of her retraining?” Kelly asks.

  “You recorded videos?” Jeri asks, shocked.

  “We record everything in these basements, short of people fucking and using the restrooms,” Danni expins.

  “But what if all this is ever discovered?” Jeri asks, now as quiet as a mouse.

  “That’s where I take a page out of Mr. Levin’s pybook and buy enough cops to make it go away,” Kelly says. “Besides, who would believe a story about a feminizing torture basement?”

  Jeri can’t think of anyone. She remains silent.

  “Exactly,” Kelly says. “That’s part of how the people we go after continue to thrive after all this time.”

  “...I’m in way over my head…” Jeri says as she sits cross-legged on the floor.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (1426)

  Jeri sits in her room, trying desperately to digest everything she’s learned in the st few hours. Everything she thinks she knows is a lie, lost in a maze of omissions and half-truths, all in the name of opsec.

  She had kind of lionized Morgan as this great hero in her mind, but now she knew the truth about her past. Finding out that she was a toxic man with a temper issue changed how she saw her now.

  Finding out Joy’s past nearly broke her by itself.

  Kelly had said she wasn’t going to employ the same brainwashing on Evan, but how could she trust her now?

  How could she trust anything anymore?

  She leans over onto her mattress, curling up in the fetal position. Way to break it, girl. You would have been better off knowing none of any of this. They say ignorance is bliss for a reason. Now what? How do we fix Evan now?

  Jeri shakes her head. Fuck that. How do I fix me?

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (2256)

  Evan finally wakes up as the sedative wears off. He… he’s still a mess. The testosterone injection was by no means a magic bullet, as he is still consumed by dysphoria and doubts about her own identity. Is he Evan, or Tiffany? She doesn’t know. She can’t even keep his pronouns straight in her own head right now. It’s very disorienting.

  She tries to move his arms and legs, but they won’t budge. He looks at her limbs. She’s restrained.

  There’s a contractor standing guard nearby, watching to make sure he doesn’t hurt herself. “Help me…” she says, softly. “Please… I’m okay… I need to get up…”

  “Sorry, kid,” the guard says. “I’m not allowed to let you get up.”

  “Please, sir…” Evan mewls, shifting into full Tiffany mode to try to seduce the guard into letting her free. “I’ll be a good girl, I promise…”

  The guard simply responds by holding up his left hand. He has a wedding band on it. “Sorry. That’s not going to work on me,” he says.

  Damn it… Evan thinks. He is both eted and disgusted at the lengths she is prepared to go to in order to obtain her freedom. She’d even go as far as offering to fuck the guard.

  What am I thinking? I don’t want to fuck another guy…

  I bet he’d be a better fuck than Daddy…

  S/he is literally of two minds about the subject at the moment. She is not Evan, but she is. He is not Tiffany, but he is. S/he is starting to think of hirself as both, but not in a healthy way. S/he’s getting worse. There’s just no way around it.

  The guard pulls out a walkie. “Boss, he’s awake. Yeah, you might want to get down here…”

  As the clock strikes midnight, Danni walks into the room. “Okay, what’s the problem?” she asks the guard.

  “I told him I’d be a good girl and he didn’t believe me…” Evan says.

  “I see. This is bad,” Danni says. She turns to the guard. “Sedate him again.”

  “No… please…” Evan begs. “I promise I’ll be a good girl, I’ll do anything you want... I don’t want to go back to sleep…” Hir body nguage suggests that s/he’s offering sex as a trade for freedom.

  “Evan, you’re not well,” Danni says. “You’re only degrading, and…”

  Evan feels a pinch in hir arm and quickly drifts off back to sleep.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [16 august 2024]=-=[friday]=-=(1111)

  Danni looks down at a cup of coffee and sighs softly as Kelly walks in. “I don’t get it,” she says to her boss. “I thought everything we were doing would be helpful to him, but he’s just getting worse as time passes… I’m worried.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Danni,” Kelly says. “We promised Jeri we wouldn’t use brainwashing methods to fix him, and I wasn’t going to do it anyway.”

  “But if we don’t…” Danni says, still concerned.

  “The answer is ‘no,’ Danie, Kelly says. “No. Non. Nein. Нет. いいえ。Do I need to say it in any other nguages? I know you speak sixteen of them.”

  “No, Miss Kelly…” Danni says. “...But then what do we do? It’s like… it’s like he has two separate personalities vying for control – himself, and an unfettered, twisted and warped version of the Tiffany persona he put on while he was still held captive. Hell, he said he’d be a good girl and by his body nguage, he was suggesting he’d let me or the guard fuck him if one of us let him out of his binds.”

  “We’ll find some way to do it that doesn’t involve destroying what’s there,” Kelly says.

  “Even if one of the personalities is a cancer that never belonged there in the first pce?” Danni asks.

  “She’s there now, she’s fully aware, so yes,” Kelly says. “Ideally we’d help him integrate with that part of himself and heal.”

  “I still think it’s just a trauma response,” Danni says with a sigh as she sips her coffee. “But you don’t pay me to think.”

  “That’s not fair,” Kelly says. “Your input is very valuable, and I listen to your advice a lot. It’s just… I’m a parent. I see things a little differently through that lens.” Something clicks in her head. “His parents… Danni, what if we tried reintroducing him to his parents?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Kelly,” Danni says. “We have the problem that for all legal intents and purposes, Evan has been dead since 2022. Multiple witnesses saw him ‘die.’ He isn’t just physically Tiffany, he’s legally her. His parents have probably moved on. Do we really want to reopen that wound? Plus, trying to convince them that the girl in our infirmary is their long-lost son? And we haven’t even gotten into the potential outcomes of if they do believe it. Maybe they’re accepting. Most likely they disown him anyway for being a filthy tranny, even though his transition was forced upon him.”

  “...Danni, I hate it when you’re right,” Kelly says.

  “Yeah, I know,” Danni says as she sips her coffee again. “Ultimately, the biggest barrier is that trying to reconnect with their families is going to require their consent, and in Evan’s current state of mind, he can’t give it.”

  “Damn it…” Kelly says. Every option she’s tried short of the nuclear ones either hasn’t worked, has backfired completely, or threatens to blow up in her face. But she promised.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (1645)

  Bke looks over the sleeping Evan. Even in sleep, s/he appears to be in distress. She feels disturbed. How can we look the same, yet be reacting to this so differently? We’ve even suffered the exact same abuses at that monster’s hands. I’m managing, but he’s completely falling apart. I know we’re not really twins, and yet… it’s like seeing myself suffer. I’d put myself in his shoes in a heartbeat if it meant he’d be okay.

  I know he doesn’t feel the same, or at least he didn’t. He doesn’t see me as anything. Just someone who reminds him of how he’s been vioted…

  Bke walks over and sighs. “I can’t stand to see you like this… I can’t stand to see myself like this, and…” She leans over and hugs her effective twin. “Damn it, I don’t care if you end up my brother or my sister or nothing or everything, I just want you to get better! I…” She starts to cry, saying nothing else as she leans forward and kisses Evan. “...No, I don’t care what you said. We are twins, even if not by blood, then by spirit. I… I love you. I don’t know whether that’s as a sibling or as something else. I just… we’ll figure that out ter. We’ve suffered the same indignities and abuses. We were shaped to assume the same fate. The only way out of this is through. Together. You have to come back to me… I don’t know what I’ll do trying to face this alone…”

  She cries for another half hour or so, until she’s out of tears, before going back to the nearby chair to sit and wait.

  About a half hour after that, Evan stirs. He’s more himself now, to some degree. “Bl...Bke?” he asks.

  “Evan, are you…?” Bke asks as she looks up.

  “What happened?” Evan asks as he tries to move.

  “They had to restrain you… how are you feeling?” she asks.

  “...Horny,” Evan says. “I don’t know what happened, I just want to be fucked right now…” he adds.

  “They started you on testosterone, they said,” Bke says as she gets up. “It might have jumpstarted your libido. I can’t… I can’t help you with that,” she says.

  “Why not? Don’t tell me you only like girls…” he says.

  “We’re twins, Ev,” Bke says.

  “We’re not blood reted,” Evan points out. “We’re not reted by someone else’s marriage, so I don’t see a problem…”

  “We look identical…” Bke says, nervously.

  “Yeah… but you’re still pretty,” Evan says. “I need relief…”

  Bke starts to lean down. He does have a point, and she doesn’t like seeing him suffer… would it really hurt anything? Just once? Just as an experiment or something? A part of her does feel the need for intimacy as well...

  The intercom crackles. “Don’t do that,” a voice says. Danni’s voice. “He still can’t consent.”

  “I can too consent!” Evan cries as Bke backs up.

  “Were… were you watching us?!” Bke says, looking around for the camera.

  “No, just watching him for his own safety,” Danni says over the comm.

  “What business is it of yours if I want someone to fuck me or not?!” Evan replies, angrily.

  “Given what you’ve gone through and said before, and your current precarious at best mental state, we can’t trust that you actually want it,” Danni says, forcefully. “I don’t mind you being there, Bke, if it can help him heal. But please don’t inadvertently make it worse.”

  Bke shakes her head. “Ev, she’s right. I do love you, but it’s like a sister would. You need help. I don’t know how different what you endured was from what I went through back there, for you to be so damaged right now. I can’t give you anything physical except ptonic comfort. It would just be wrong on multiple levels.

  Evan shakes his head. “I’m sorry… my idea of what’s normal is kind of fucked up from being fucked for a year solid by a man who acted as if he was my father and insisted on being called ‘Daddy…’ I didn’t realize it’d seem too much like…” He starts crying. “…I’m too fucked up to keep going…”

  Bke hugs Evan tightly. “I have you, bro, let it out…”

  Evan shakes his head again. “I give up. I can’t keep going as a man… I’m just too fucking broken by everything, and Jeri said I was too much of a girl for her…”

  Bke shakes her head. “Don’t give up. Please. If you do, there’s really no turning back.”

  Evan sobs. “Maybe it would be for the best… I can cope with the dysphoria. I can be her again, if it’s easier for everyone…”

  Bke holds Evan tighter. “You only just got started on the testosterone again. It’s going to take time for your head to get straight from it. Just give it time.”

  Evan shakes his head one more time. “I just can’t take it anymore… this is killing me… I just want out.”