“Oh, little bro,” Carly sighs wistfully as she crouches over you, her fingers tracing along the features of your face, probably to convince yourself you’re real. You’re having trouble believing the same about her, so it’s nice to have the confirmation of those grooved digits traveling without pause to every corner of your countenance. It’s a little startling to be experiencing them at the size of actual fingers instead of the muscular pillars they normally are in reality and dreams, but you wouldn’t mistake the soft touch of her skin for anything.
“Been a while,” you mutter. It’s impossible to know what move to make next, so you resolve to just wait until general instinct gives you some pointers. With any luck, it’ll be soon, because your heart is fluttering so fast it’s getting difficult to pick out individual beats.
“Yes,” she coos, and despite the blaring light above, you can make out the twinkle of twin teardrops welled in her eyes. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
It gives you an immediate sense of bizarre déjà vu, after the fit Sophie put up over your handling by the diabolical redhead, to see precisely the same blue eyes ready to burst with aggressive saltwater over you.
“I thought the same,” you answer, devoid of emotion.
“Have you been all right without me?” she demands softly, tucking her fingers under your chin.
“I don’t know,” you answer, finally able to cough up some definitive truth.
“What am I saying? Of course you haven’t,” she croaks, clenching her eyes shut and releasing a cascade of hot droplets that plunk immediately down to your cheeks. “I’m so sorry about what happened, Jackie-poo.”
“Me… too,” you say. You’re perfectly aware that Carly is reading you much differently right now than the maelstrom of confusion you’re actually experiencing, but for now, it can’t hurt to play long. In many ways, you’re staring into the eyes of a wounded deity. And if the limited mythology you studied in high school was any indication, it would be unwise to test her without a substantial backup plan.
“I didn’t want them to take you away. I… didn’t want anything to change,” Carly warbles, now freely allowing the tears to flow from her eyes and doing precious little to stop them from trickling to your face. “But I couldn’t stop her. Sophie, she… she turned you against me, what we had, twisted you up and made you do things for her and… it was too late. You have to understand that.”
Shock envelopes you like a warm blanket. She clearly doesn’t blame you for a single act of agency you pulled off in your escape. You’ve gone through this possible meeting every which way in your head before, imagining what Carly might say to you in vengeance for all you did to destroy her self-contained empire, but it was all wrong. All of it.
“Do you understand, little bro? I wanted you. I always wanted you… all of you, for my own, forever and ever. I just wanted you to be happy… with me. Do you know that?” she questions violently.
It’s getting harder to come up with words as you lay beneath your sister’s shuddering form, the overhead light glowing like a halo around her dark-golden head, but not out of fear or doubt any longer.
You just can’t quite remember seeing Carly this low before. It’s too strange. If anything, you have to convince yourself you’re not still looking at Sophie, whom you’ve seen cry on at least a weekly basis in the very difficult past year and a half, though considering you just had this girl’s toes in your mouth, you know there’s only one person it could actually be.
Sure, you’ve seen your sister cry over boys, cry over unfair treatment by your parents, pretend to cry about your pretend death, and be literally jammed up your cousin’s every orifice, but this is different.
In her own mighty, unstoppable, inhuman way, she’s become like you. Vulnerable.
“This is all so wrong, isn’t it? This isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” she continues, probably half-demanding these answers of the heavens themselves as she continues leaking tears into your eyes. She shuffles around, pressing off your chest with her soft hands and rising back to full height. Not much, but from a purely objective standpoint of the kind of attitude she throws around, an improvement. “I’m supposed to be big. Above you. Like we had before, for so long, like we might’ve had. Where I could take care of you, everything you needed, and you could be my… my… mine. It… it was so… beautiful.”
You can’t help but feel your heart break.
“But it’s not like that anymore,” you hear yourself say in the aching silence.
Carly is yanked from her reverie. Her hair clings to her sopping cheeks as she trains those crystal eyes onto you, leaning in again until her shadow engulfs your head completely, and you can see her features with newfound clarity.
“I know,” she moans. Even as her feet are planted on either side of your reclining body, her legs cast up as high as they can above you with regimented strength, you detect a tremor running through them. “But it could be.”
“They’ve been trying to reverse this all the time I’ve been out there. No one knows how.”
“They can,” she says, pointing off into the metallic blackness beyond your shared glass tank. “They almost can. That’s why you’re here. They needed… you. To finish it.”
Your chest almost atrophies at the realization that, as you feared, your own scientific value as a specimen has dragged Sophie to her probable doom. Of course that’s why you’re here now.
“Where are we?” you manage, nearly choking on air.
“I don’t really know,” she says with complete conviction. “It’s underground somewhere. A desert, I think, or near it. It’s not our state. I’ve heard them say things. It’s far away from most people.”
“Who is that woman that… took us?”
“Her name is Claire Brookes. She’s a cunt.”
“How… how could we get out?”
“I don’t know that,” she says, again truthfully, though her attention has mostly shifted down to her right leg, which she casually sidles along your ribs before unpeeling her naked foot from the cold surface and lifting it up toward you again. Her toes dance in diagonal patterns, shifting the flow of the fleshy wrinkles in her peachy sole from one extreme to the other. Flecks of earth cling to the rosy valleys of her silky instep, and by instinct, you feel a tingling inside your cheeks at the assumed prospect of sustenance, given what the expectation would’ve been in years past when Carly returned home with dirt encrusted to her princess-like peds.
Despite the fact that you’re having what is technically the most normal conversation with your sister you ever have in her twenty years of existence, it’s hard not to pay attention to the appendage currently hovering like a specter overhead. Like what happened on Sophie’s couch, only exponentially more insistent in its draw, the slender underside of Carly’s exposed foot begins to take up stock in your brain.
“You, uh… you must’ve… seen… heard something we can… use… to get out,” you stammer, blinking rapidly in hopes the image of your sister’s playfully arching and flexing foot will disappear from view, but you hold no such power in the real world outside Dr. Felton’s office.
It’s happening again. Just as it always does. Like clockwork.
“The machine they’re making, it’s supposed to be able to make us… well, make me… big. Normal again,” Carly admits dreamily. Her foot approaches, descending above your compressed world like a UFO. Come to claim you. “They promised me I could have you. After all this is over, once they get it to work. They’ll let us go, and we can… we can get out of here. Go run and hide, do whatever we have to.”
“On our… own?”
“That’s how it was for five years. Did you forget that, little bro?” she lullabies. She clasps her sole down against your cheek, massaging side to side, working the grit of her wrinkles and oil of her pores into your own skin. “We don’t need anyone else. You know how I am. It won’t be hard to get what we need. I can find work, and when I can’t, people will give me things. That’s just what they do.”
This final statement, at least, is awful damn hard to argue with. You’ve seen your sister in action, both from afar at a height of six feet and later while peeking out from between her toes in a sticky summer sandal.
Carly Arton gets what she wants, one way or another.
“Don’t you want that back, little bro?” your sibling wheedles. Her tears have mostly dried by now, the confidence rising in her voice in tandem with the way she holds her chest high again at the revelation of the promise. “Don’t you want to live like that again?”
“I…”
“What have you been doing for all this time without me? Sitting at home, scared of everything, trying to pretend like you can live a normal life like this, letting people poke you and ask you things, never really knowing what’s happening inside your cute little head? Never really understanding you?” Carly rambles in a symphony of painful logic. “Feeling alone?”
Your mouth seals shut at this catastrophic destruction of your current status, despite the tanned bare foot so near, the big toe extended to mere millimeters away from your waiting lips.
“Please,” Carly begs. “Just think about how it was again. One more time, for me. And you’ll see.”
“I’m… thinking.”
“Imagine,” she whispered, just as her foot squeezes down harder onto your skull, forcing your head to its side on the floor. It’s sudden, but she gives you enough warning to follow her lead without pain, and as she shifts her weight again above, her left foot crawls closer to your face, her toes bouncing all the while. “Are you imagining it with me, little bro?”
“Yes,” you answer breathlessly, your senses devoted to processing the pair of divine feet re-entering your world, one with its sole wrinkles smeared warmly to your cheek and gently smashing you into the earth below her, the other shifting nearer and nearer, those dexterous toes aimed for your lips again, the doughy crevices in between parting continually and releasing the unwashed stench of stale BO and feminine grime.
“No more people looking at you funny, feeling sorry for you all the time, telling you things will be normal again when you know they won’t,” Carly explains steadily, measuring each word for perfect accuracy. Her toes splay into your hair, spreading her filth and making it yours again, while her heel clamps down harder on your jaw, but no more than you can handle. And you can handle quite a bit. “Doesn’t that sound good?”
“Y-Yeah.”
“Instead, you get to live with me. You never have to worry about another thing. We eat together, we sleep together, we… wash together,” she mentions slyly, just so there’s no mistaking her meaning. On this mention of cleanliness, Carly’s left foot finally reaches your face at its creeping pace. Her big toe leads the charge, her digits lifting and passing the barrier of your open mouth slowly gasping for air. You have no choice but to accept them into your jowls if you want to keep breathing, and so you feel Carly’s toes literally in your head again, exploring your molars and cheeks, scraping her curved nails against your skin, the width of her bronzed ped testing the limits of your stretched lips.
“And most of all. I will never, ever let you feel alone again,” Carly declares triumphantly as her feet continue dominating your skull, her right one scrunching at your scalp and continually shifting more of her body weight onto your head, while her left foot slakes itself continually on your exhausted tongue, inviting more saliva to leak from your cheeks and lubricate the wrinkles of her sole.
“Mmmhf.” You can’t help but sigh, and not just from the emotional release of having your tongue pressed to your little sister’s foot again.
“You’ll be with me every second for the rest of your precious little life, Jackie-poo. You won’t even have to leave my body,” Carly says. “When I sleep, I’ll just put you next to my heart. When I eat, I’ll get to eat it right off of your body just as much as you eat it off of me. And when I go to work and earn money for us, you’ll work for me, down inside my socks, licking and cumming and licking and cumming until you fall asleep again.”
Your reality is being squeezed down into a space even smaller than your physical head is currently. The impossible imagination of your mad sibling stretches before you, becoming more believable by the second. The forked road you always knew you’d come to in person, even if you didn’t want to believe it.
“But I need us together on this, little bro,” your sister whimpers. At last her left ped is extracted from between your jaws with a final suckle of her toes and one more pass down the length of your tongue with the ball of her foot. “I need to know you’re still ready to be saved, ready to be… in your place again.”
“I…”
“Please, Jack. Please. Listen to me,” Carly sighs. Following suit, her right foot lifts away from your head, leaving you momentarily floating in a void where you can’t touch the towering blonde and therefore can’t be certain she’s still real. Before you can even have time to question it, though, she’s lowering back to her haunches, planting her firmed ass onto your stomach as before and flanking your head on either side again by those squirming soles with their spongy ridges and blooming shades of white, tan, and fleshy pink.
“What?”
“I need you,” she whispers as she leans in closer, her hair draping around you, interlocking your eyes on a golden path. Your mouths align. “I need you… to say it. One last time. For me.”
“Wh-”
“I need you to say…” she breathes, pausing for an instant before wrapping her bulbous lips around your own chapped ones, sucking a kiss and possibly what is left of your being right out of your body. She releases you only when she’s finished, her tongue having traced one lap around the rim of your mouth, a single bead of her saliva dipped into your throat. “…that you belong to me.”
You can feel it ascending, from your ankles, through this godforsaken body of yours, and toward your lips in answer to Carly’s gesture as much as her tearful request.
Your will. Or what little remains. Whatever amount you had left to offer to Sophie right before the existential decision was made for you for the second time in your life by a door bursting open. It hovers at your palate, threatening to fire out of your mouth and back up into your sister’s, for her to consume and keep inside her belly forever.
Your self.
“NO!” You roar far louder than is necessary, almost feeling it rattle the glass walls of your temporary cell as your sister is thrown back and off your body, in a way releasing you, despite the fact that you could’ve thrown her off on your own already. At last summoning the courage to command your own muscles, you leap to your feet, backing away from your sprawled sibling.
“W-What?” she croaks from the ground, gazing pitifully up at you through sweaty blonde locks strewn over her forehead. You can see the glistening tears starting up all over again, splashing against her trembling hands, but you don’t feel the same crumbling inside your chest that you did before.
You’re taking it back, right now. All of it. Yourself, above all else.
“You heard me,” you bellow. “I’m not yours. Not anymore.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she squeals, flinging herself back up to her full height, which you at last are able to compare and remember that you still have several finger widths over her in superiority. It’s been a long time since she wasn’t able to reach out and grab you when you weren’t following her rules, and it’s clear she doesn’t quite know what to do with her body in response. “They turned you against me, Jack. They told you lies.”
“Nobody else had to tell me anything,” you snap. “I’ve known. I’ve… always known. You used me, messed with my head, you’re the one who made me do things, not them, that-”
“For your own good,” she sobs, stumbling closer to you. “To show you what could be, if you’d just accept it.”
“You used me for your own sick games. We both know that.”
“Please, Jack, PLEASE! They’re inside your head, they’re… they’re hurting you like this. Let me… let me make it go AWAY!” she weeps, oscillating between a scream and a caw. She reaches out for you, her fingers tracing along your arm again, but you bat her lightly away, prompting her to tumble toward the ground, as if gravity suddenly snatched her by the throat and pulled her out of the clouds and back to earth.
She’s unraveling faster than you ever imagined possible for someone who once stood as tall as your sister. Like watching a god come unspooled. Somewhere inside, you can feel a deepening sting for her that quickly turns to internal bleeding, but you push it aside.
“I had a hard time believing it myself, Carly. I’ve gone through a lot of shit… because of you… a lot of things I can’t ever get over. But the one thing I can get over is you, thinking you control me anymore. Because you don’t.”
“Just a little bit longer, Jack, p-please,” your sister bargains in a voice that’s half garbled by water. “Just a little longer, then they’ll m-make me bigger and I can… I can hold you again… for real… make you s-see… make you s-see how it used to be, h-how it will be…” She’s hardly recognizable now, crouched on the floor, face flushed red with tears and horror, her fists gripped clumsily into her messy hair for support. In a way, she’s been reduced to the bratty young child you once saw her as, not the omnipotent goddess with the power to make you happy for every instant of your forthcoming existence.
“I know I can’t control what those people out there do to me. And I don’t care,” you say. You can feel yourself adopting the same ramrod posture your sister held mere minutes ago as she stood above you and inserted her foot directly into your sense of being. “Maybe they will make you big again. Maybe they’ll give me to you. But don’t you think… for a second… that it means you own me. And if it does mean that to you, well… you might as well just stick me under your fucking shoe and be done with it.”
“But Jack…”
“No,” you say with lasting finality, standing above the broken husk of your power-hungry little sister as she sinks into infinite wallowing. “I’m done. We’re… done.”
You turn toward the semi-reflective wall of the glass cage, remarking internally on how strangely human you appear to yourself for the first time in months, and maybe years. Clearly timed somewhat concurrently, though, the door of the cell beyond swings open with a metallic clang, and the redhead re-enters at a brisk gait.
“I hope family time has been going well,” Claire sings as she power-walks toward you, easily closing the distance and looming above in all her black, though somehow you find yourself even less afraid of her now than you were when she first carried you in here. “I don’t mean to interrupt the fun and games, but it’s time for a miracle or two, and you’re coming with me, hon. We’re gonna stack a few more inches on you.” Instantly her fist opens up above you, caging you in the shadow of her leathered fingers as she reaches down.
Resigned to whatever fate awaits now that you’ve finally beaten your sister, you remain peacefully cooperative as she collects you again.
“No… w-wait,” Carly says from below, staggering up to her feet. “Aren’t you… taking me? To… to get bigger?”
“Did I say your name, Carly? You’re going to stay here like a good little girl until I decide I have another use for you,” Claire says, twiddling you idly between the pads of her gigantic thumbs. “No offense, but I don’t even trust you at that size not to get into trouble. Do I look like an idiot to you?”
“But… but you promised that I… I would be the first one t-”
“I make a lot of promises, Carly. I’m a woman of my word, but I’m not God.”
“I… I need l-longer with him. You told me I-” your sister sputters.
“I told you you’d get to talk to him again. I’ve upheld that.”
“What about…”
“This is the end, Carly. You had your time. And now he’s mine. To finish the work we’ve all given so much to see finished.”
“NO!” Carly cries, reducing herself to the most barbaric and stripped-down creature you believe you’ve ever witnessed. Her hair whips about her head in frazzled golden arcs, her fists pounding into the ground, growing louder on each blow. “NO! NO! NO!”
Your sister rises again, sprinting at the glass and leaping at it so hard with her full weight, for an instant you believe she’ll break through, dash across the floor, and sock Claire upside the chin and into the center of the moon. Then probably fly into the sky and do the same to any celestial beings that may or may not exist but have nonetheless engineered this cosmic calamity of the world she believed she could own.
Claire begins marching back toward the door, leaving you at enough of an angle to the side that you and your sibling can still make each other out across the gap. You watch your sister between the creases in the massive gloved fingers, threatening to tear out of herself as she yells and foams and throws her trembling hands repeatedly into the glass, stomping the ground, perhaps trying to summon a dark guardian angel to her aid. It’s just about all she’s got left to hope for.
Even as the iron door slams and locks behind Claire, you can hear Carly’s clamoring scream flooding in the void beyond, the awful din coiled around a fragile wail of yearning and exquisite pain at its center like the eye of a storm.