Giantess World
“Did she say anything else to you, Lexi?”
Stirring the contents of her dinner plate until it looked like a smeared race track, the Alpha looked up at once, startled, at her adoptive mother’s delicate expression. She opened her mouth to speak, but it took a few tries to get it out. Both Alpha and Omega, matching one another’s hushed mumble-volume, glanced in the direction of the hallway at Bridget’s bedroom door, which had stood closed and locked for nearly twenty-four hours now, mere minutes after their fanfareless homecoming the evening before. There hadn’t been a peep from the other side since.
“Not too much. Not after she caught me in the garden,” Lexi answered. Sliding out her tiny chair from her doll-scale tray, she shuffled along the wooden plain of the Omega dining table toward Evelyn’s place setting, where the giantess’s hand rested on its side, slowly kneading the corner of a parachute-sized napkin between two humongous fingertips. “She got her things together, stopped to say goodbye to the kids in the market, and then she just walked us home. Without stopping. I think the only thing she said the whole way back was to ask me if I was hungry. I almost pretended and said I was, just to get her to say a few more words. But I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It was very brave of you to do what you did at all, Alexandra. You brought her home. That’s more than enough for now.”
Lexi couldn’t decide if she agreed with that, but kept silent for another minute, watching the immense white wall of her sister’s door in hopes she could will it to open at this exact moment, with a happy-go-lucky Bridget to step through it, so their personal world to return to normal. But nothing moved.
“Will she talk to you?”
“Not yet,” Evelyn said. “I tried, last night, but she didn’t answer her phone or the door. In all honesty, dear, I think she’d speak to you before she speaks to me. Whenever you felt the time was right, of course.”
“I… don’t know if that’s true. She acts like she’s afraid to touch me, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“I think she may be afraid, yes,” Evelyn said. Extending her pointer finger, she gently laid the tip against the Alpha’s back. “And she’ll have to make peace with that somehow. But it won’t be… oh, Alexandra… it won’t be your responsibility. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Lexi said, quietly lying through her teeth. She couldn’t even look up at the Omega when she said this now, and likely Evelyn sensed her lack of faith too, but the woman was either too kind or too nervous of impeding Lexi’s recovery period to risk pushing any harder. Instead, the Alpha placed a hand on her surrogate mother’s comforting fingertip, which curled more protectively around Lexi’s narrow shoulders, as the pair observed Bridget’s unbudged door together for several achingly contemplative minutes.
###
The dishes were long put away, most of the lights switched off, and Evelyn had retired to her own room after insistently offering to give Lexi a lift back to her quarters, which the Alpha refused in lieu of remaining on the empty table, alone. After some maternal needling from the Omega, Lexi agreed to have a snack left on her tray in case she got hungry before making the eventual trek back to her room, even while Evelyn must’ve known the strawberry wouldn’t be used, since the girl had scarcely taken from her dinner. When at last she had some solitude, and the stinging quiet that came with it, Lexi eyed the juicy red synthetically-grown produce the size of a beach ball, studying its intricate green seeds. Every so often, her gaze diverted back to Bridget’s bedroom door in the hall, only to find it was just a trick of the shadows making her believe for an instant the way was opening at last.
Lexi had traveled a very long way to reach her sister in Sanctuary, but somehow the short distance from here to the end of the hall, where the tortured Omega planned to hide for who-knew-how-long, felt much further now to the Alpha than any cross-country voyage. Though she hadn’t certainly hadn’t fooled herself into thinking the tension would dissipate for everyone the very minute Bridget returned home, it was hard not to hope anyway. She’d made up her mind about what she had to do then before Evelyn went to bed, which was precisely why she had to wait to be alone, knowing her mother’s protectiveness of Lexi’s own healing process would ensure she protested. Summoning whatever reserves of chutzpah she still had after jumping off a balcony for Bridget yesterday, the Alpha hoisted her strawberry up, clutched it to her chest, and began her trip to the hall with the fruit in tow.
There were faster ways to get where she was headed, but Lexi purposefully chose the most circuitous route for herself, strolling along the walkway that wound around the whole room before curving along the corridor wall. She was too wary earlier today to actually stand at the Alpha-scaled door alongside the colossal Omega way into Bridget’s bedroom, having only watched Evelyn occasionally pass by the entry to give a gentle knock and a loving invitation for her daughter to join them as each of the day’s meals came and went without her. Balancing the ripe berry against her knee, Lexi reached for the door and tried the handle.
Naturally it too was locked, and in fact would barely tremble when she tried to feebly test the hinges, which made her suspect that not only had Bridget latched it shut from the other side, but barricaded it with something. This wasn’t a surprise, though it still hurt Lexi enough to give her pause for a moment. She pressed her ear to the door but couldn’t hear anything, not a sigh or a sob or even an exhale. The nearest elevator was at the edge of the hall leading into the kitchen, so an undeterred Lexi turned around and made her way back. It felt strange operating the lift, as she’d hardly ever had reason to use it even before her retreat from home; there was always a faster, safer way to get where she was headed than by going for the ground level, and since their childhood, Bridget had always scoffed at the concept of Lexi ever needing an elevator when the Omega had a perfectly good working hand at her sister’s beck and call.
The elevator buttons clicked loudly in the otherwise still dimness of the huge house and chugged along to bring the Alpha to the floor, which made her approach toward Bridget’s towering entrance all the more intimidating. This felt more like preparing to infiltrate a castle drawbridge than outmaneuvering dual-locked bedroom doors. Standing at the base, with strawberry still in hand, Lexi eyed her only means of ingress, shrugged, then flattened herself to the ground and started to crawl under, her offering still in hand. Intent on keeping the fruit from scraping along the floor as she went, the Alpha was glad her mother had provided one of the “smallest” strawberries from the batch, because it otherwise would’ve turned to jam while sliding under the relatively narrow crack beneath the Omega door. Protecting the berry like a swaddled newborn in the hem of her shirt, Lexi crept silently out on the other side.
Bridget wasn’t immediately visible on her bed from down here, which was impressive considering how difficult it was to conceal a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall being, but Lexi chalked this up to her low and unusual vantage point. She couldn’t even remember the last time she stood on the actual floor of this room, let alone anywhere in the house. The Alpha was grateful, though, since the peculiar perspective, combined with almost-nonexistent light except for a purple lava lamp on the bedside table that hadn’t seen use in years, made it easier to distract herself from the fact that this familiar and once-comforting space had previously served as the enforcer’s detention block for two and a half life-altering weeks.
The bobbling lilac goop in a lantern the size of a water tower cast just enough of a glow over the tangle of blankets up above for Lexi to see her sister’s leg hanging over the edge of the mattress, her foot dangled close to the floor. In the darkness, and with so little experience needing the in-house elevator system at all, it took the Alpha a moment to even recall the location of the lift in this room. Once it was found in the corner, however, she thought better of using it, for fear of Bridget making a getaway out of the room the moment she heard the little metal box rising up the wall.
Instead Lexi traveled across the carpet, cautiously eyeing the Omega’s leg the whole time out of anxiety that she, ironically, would spook her exponentially larger sister. Reaching the bedside table still without making a sound, she found the old built-in steps which coiled around the back leg of the immense furniture. Though she momentarily questioned whether there was really a point to lugging this berry around so many roundabout paths through the house, Lexi was strangely determined now to get it all the way to its arbitrarily-important destination. So she took the steps two at a time, circling round and round the table limb, until the Alpha and her strawberry stepped into the quivering purple spotlight which coated the whole table and spilled all the way into the bed, where at last Lexi could see Bridget.
The Omega was definitely not asleep, but gazing in a trance-like state into the lava capsule, watching plasma beads fly up and down the watery shaft. Her head was cradled sideways in her pillow, a hand wrapped over her cheek. It was tough to know what was a trick of the wobbling violet light and what was a tear-stain, but Lexi didn’t have to squint very hard to see the moisture tracks dried and unwiped leading down from Bridget’s face, darkening the pillow all around her head. Lexi steeled herself to see a flinch when her sister’s dazed pupils refocused on the finger-sized creature walking across her bedside table with a strawberry. Bridget wasn’t startled, but seemed to recede another few feet away from the edge of the bed, drawing the covers tighter to her chest like she expected a monster to crawl out from under the mattress. It had always been the younger Lexi who anticipated such scares first, needing nocturnal soothing from her much hardier sister, but this time it was the Alpha’s turn to banish whatever intangible forces haunted Bridget.
“H-Hey,” Lexi whispered. She hoisted the berry aloft, hoping the few dented smudge-marks in its red flesh formed by her defensive grappling would go unnoticed. “I, um… thought you might hungry.”
The Omega breathed heavily out into the padded dune of her pillow. Lexi expected the next sound out of Bridget’s mouth to be a polite but firm request to be left alone right away. Instead, the Alpha was delighted almost beyond belief when the gargantuan blonde nodded slowly.
“Thank you.” Using more effort than was physically required, Bridget rolled herself closer to the side of the cot, until her cheek could almost touch the edge of the lava-lit table. “You were right. I am.”
“Here,” Lexi said, having to stop herself from sprinting at her sister’s face. She screeched to a halt halfway there, looking down at the strawberry and at once remembering all the bitter green leaves wreathed around the tip. “Oh. Wait, I’ll… sorry, I forgot to… you know… pluck it first.”
Bridget opened her mouth as though to speak but withheld her comment, looking a bit lost while the Alpha clumsily wrestled with the oversized berry until all the leaves were shorn off and left in a pile at her feet. Now satisfied, Lexi marched forth again, at which point Bridget extended a hand, but only making enough of a shelf from her curved fingertips to accept the fruit. There was no mistaking this as a suggestion for the cargo and its carrier to step aboard the girl’s palm. Slightly disappointed by that, Lexi still hefted the food into her sister’s hand and watched it airlifted gradually away, again with some apparent arduousness disproportionate to how puny and feather-light the little red blob must’ve felt while pinched between Bridget’s fingers.
“…thanks,” she said. The Omega pressed the strawberry between her lips and sealed it shut inside, but rather than chewing, appeared to use her cheeks to compress the fruit into pulp like a trash compactor, which made a continual squelch the only sound in the room.
“Please tell me how I can help. Anything,” Lexi said, once the Omega swallowed the pulverized gift. She edged her way nearer to the bed, hands folded behind her back to hide her nervous shiver, until she stood at the precipice. Noticing the instant alarm in Bridget’s already-tormented expression, those swimming blue eyes darting from her miniature sister to the floor below, Lexi cleared her throat. “I, uh, won’t jump again. I swear.”
This seemed to sate the Omega, who nodded again and ran her tongue around her inner cheek, perhaps gathering the last scraps of the berry, though after receiving this vow, she never took her gaze off the Alpha again.
“You already did way more than you had to. More than you should have,” Bridget said, sounding to Lexi like a more-anguished repeat of Evelyn. “To tell you the truth, Lexi, I was starting to think I’d just live there at Sanctuary.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe not forever, but mainly I thought I couldn’t… you know. Come back here again.”
“But you did. That’s… something.”
“Because you came for me. And if you really were ready to see me again, when I already thought I’d seen you for the last time, well… I couldn’t have lived with myself to just… sit there another day,” Bridget groaned, stringing out some of the longest sentences that Lexi had yet heard from her in close to two years, which was its own sort of blessing, even if the words were hard to hear. “I’m sorry. This is just so… I can’t even… what I mean is, I should thank you. I know that. Thank you, Lexi, for coming for me. For… giving me permission to come back.”
“You’re welcome.”
“But I don’t know how things can go back to the way they were again. It just doesn’t seem possible to me. I… can’t… forget what happened. I don’t deserve to, and I don’t deserve to put it behind me. Yesterday was the last time I can pick you up again. Ever.”
This was the moment Lexi’s knees almost gave out from the wave of forlorn gloaming that washed over her at this tender admission, but she managed to keep standing, afraid of prematurely ending a hard-won conversation. It was impossible to refute Bridget’s need to remember especially, which wasn’t just idle wishing to erase history; Lexi herself had refused a very-real proposition from Kayla Everett to have that portion of her life wiped from her mind, but chose to retain it as a scar, and so had Bridget.
“You caught me, though,” the Alpha said, trying and failing to keep her voice from suffering a crack. She wasn’t sure what good this information did now, but she couldn’t think of anything else worth a damn. “You held me. You carried me home. And before I got there, too, the things you did for the people in that city? I only met a few and every single one of them knew you. They knew the real you, the one I know from before all this bullshit. Especially those kids. I have to believe they love you so much… that you’re so much of a hero to them… they’d forgive anything that they heard about you, no matter what it was. So… can’t they be enough for you to let yourself be here again? You don’t have to forget what happened, but… you can’t just stop living when everything seems like it’s going wrong.”
Lexi was freight-training her way through her case now, knowing she might well give up if she stopped speaking long enough to breathe, and Bridget, realizing her trauma was being compared to the Alpha’s childhood darkness, kept her mouth shut, unable to reply.
“I hate this,” Lexi said. “I hate having to wake up every day and remember all over again that I can’t have back the most important parts of my life just because of some bad goddamn luck. It was awful what happened. I won’t be able to forget it either, but it was like getting struck by lightning. It just… happened, I can’t change that, and it hurt more than anything that’s ever happened to me before, but listen to me, Bridget: I’m so sick and fucking tired of feeling helpless, like I can’t do anything, and God, maybe I still can’t, but I have to TRY. Do you understand? I have to try to fix this, for us. So I’m here, and I need you to believe me when I say I’d do anything to make things right. Anything it took in the whole entire world. I… don’t know if you’re thinking that things won’t be the same because of “justice” or “fairness” or whatever, like something wrong was done that can’t be taken back, but it can be.”
“It should’ve been me,” Bridget rasped. Tone aside, her voice was surprisingly lucid and mindful, even while the flowing tears dampened her sheets again.
“What?”
“After everything that already happened to you… with your mom… it should have been me in that box. Not you.”
“You can’t spend the rest of your life thinking like that, Bridge. The world just doesn’t work like that, where you can trade wrong things back and forth at each other, stupid eye-for-an-eye stuff. And besides, you’re the big one. You’ve always been the big one. That won’t ever change. And… I need my big sister back. Whatever it takes, do you hear me? Just tell me what I have to do to make you understand that I’m all right, that all of us can be all right again, if only you’d come back home. All the way home, I mean.”
Emotionally spent, Lexi crumpled to a slouch on the edge of the table, letting her legs hang in the dark abyss. Her vision was distorted by a double-whammy of the lava lamp’s flickering trickery and her own salty welling. She was too anxious now to look Bridget right in the eye, but neither could she fully look away, on that one-in-a-billion chance that letting her out of her sight for another minute might allow the Omega to vanish, this time permanently. For a long while the pair sat in broken solidarity without uttering another word. Lexi had already decided she would just sleep here on the hard table surface, so long as Bridget didn’t tell her to leave, and was in fact preparing to lean back and make herself comfortable under the dancing purple beams, when the giantess sat bolt upright in her bed, her curly golden locks whipping around her stained cheeks, where a few loose strands stuck to gummied tear-trails.
“That’s it.”
Bridget spoke so clearly and pointedly, like intoning a magic spell, Lexi didn’t even recognize the sound as coming from her giant sister at first, too thrown off by the violent uprising which accompanied it.
“What’s it?” The Alpha’s heart was racing now. She clambered to her feet and stood at the edge of the table in waiting, while also recognizing a distinctly phantom pain-esque dissonance upon remembering just how unnatural it felt to stand near Bridget, especially when she appeared ready to leap up and march somewhere in a hurry, without being offered a lift in her reassuring hand. Being left behind didn’t use to be a familiar sensation, but had somehow become one. Still, Lexi’s shock was mixed with some hope, as it was so surreal seeing a momentary flash of the same enthusiastic un-zombified Omega again.
Bridget, however, now rendered a waking catatonic, didn’t answer the question, but hopped from her bed and snatched her cell phone off the desk. From there, she paced restless laps back and forth from the wall to her bed, never halting for longer than it took to pivot on her toes, while alternately murmuring indistinguishably and furiously tapping away on her phone screen.
“Bridge, what is it? What did I say? What’s it?”
“Everything will be all right, Lexi,” Bridget promised at length, though she said it with such grim solemnity that the Alpha had trouble feeling at all inspired, even by something so optimistic. “Believe me. It will. I just… have to go and take care of… um, please don’t walk on the ground if you decide to leave. It makes me feel better to know you’re up where we can see you.”
“C-Can I just stay right here?”
“Yes. Of course. Wait…” Bridget said, still frantic for reasons Lexi couldn’t fathom. She darted across the room to her closet and rooted through it, shining her phone’s flashlight while burrowing past piled laundry. Finding something, she returned to the bedside platform with a matchbox-sized object clamped between her thumb and forefinger, which she set down on the table next to her adoptive sibling. It was a spare Alpha bed, leftover from a room-sharing sleepover from a childhood ago. “Here. I hope it’s… not too dusty from sitting in there. Get some rest. I have to go now, though.”
“W-Where are you going?” Lexi cried in a panic, genuinely ready to break into the full-on weeping she promised herself she wouldn’t succumb to. She only knew she had to get her desperate message out fast, because after a few sentences, she’d surely be reduced to the same blubbering little girl that once needed the saving, instead of the other way around, and the whole point of coming in here was to lead the charge in rescuing them both. “Please, you don’t have to leave. I’m sorry if I did this too soon, or made you think about all this stuff too much. But, Bridge, you just got-”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon,” the Omega declared with almost religious authority, and this had to suffice for Lexi, who leaned in a dumbfounded stupor against the portable bed, watching that leviathan shadow sprint barefooted out of the dark bedroom. Moments later, the Alpha heard the front door unlocking, swinging, and shutting again as her sister disappeared into the night. Hysterical bells set off in her brain, telling her to run after Bridget to keep her from escaping again, no matter how comically unrealistic it was to expect that she could catch up, when a single Omega lunge would take her dozens of sprinting steps to cover. Still, in spite of the inherent fear that the closest family she had left could disappear for good now as quickly as she’d come, Lexi took her second leap of faith in two days by trusting Bridget’s parting words, and stayed put.
Too full of questions and concerns to let her mind shut off for actual sleep, Lexi was at least grateful to have something soft and properly scaled to buoy her, and crawled under the sheets. With the lava lamp bubbling serenely overhead, she watched that door like a hawk and listened for returning footsteps, until all she could hear was her own pulse.