Synopsis:

A pretty puppet hung by her own strings and hating every minute of it. Wake up with Stark on a typical morning, and get a glimpse of why "live and let live" isn't in her vocabulary anymore. It's a new definition of "One Day at a Time." It's Her Hell ... and welcome to it.

Story:

Stark: Just Another Day In Hell
by Randalynn

"When you wake up from a nightmare
and it's worse when you're awake,
and there's no one you can turn to,
and there's nothing you can take.

(You gotta ask yourself)

Are you real or not? It's a fine line.
Are you ready or not for the light of day ?
Are you real or not?
These are strange times
and I don't want to live this way."
-- Warren Zevon, "Real or Not?"

It's always the same.

In the instant just before I wake up, I smell the lavender. I am surrounded by softness, slick silk caressing every inch of me. It feels warm, and safe, and oh so wonderful. I just want to swim in it forever, and never come to back to shore.

Then I remember who I am. What I am. What I have become.

And the peace is gone. I push it away as hard as I can, with every ounce of will I can muster.

Because I am Stark.

I don't want to love the softness, and the smell. I don't want to feel warm and safe and oh so wonderful. If I ever truly choose to swim in it, I will most certainly drown.

Because they made me love these things. They made me what I am. They stole the man I was.

And they left me … like this.

I open my eyes and the reality hits me hard enough to make me wince. I stare into the reflection in the full-length mirror mounted in the canopy above the four-poster bed. I can't take the mirror down. They wanted me to see myself this way, every morning when I woke. The tousled curly blonde hair spilling over the pillows, the round full lips still half-smiling, framing perfect white teeth, high cheekbones, dimpled chin. Arched brows that will never need tweezers. Pale blue eyes framed by long lashes that will never need mascara.

My eyes travel down the length of the form outlined by the blue silk sheets. Breasts, large and high and firm and oh so round, even when I'm lying down. Hard nipples pushing up against the soft fabric. Chest tapering quickly past ribs to an impossibly thin waist, then swelling to round full hips whose curves all seem to point to the mound between my legs, surrounded by full sensual thighs.

The mound where my penis used to be. Where my vagina is now.

Mine.

I shudder and fight my way free of the soft sheets and sweet smell, just as I always do. I need them to sleep at night … when I sleep at all. They made sure of that. But of course getting free of the sheets makes it worse, because then there's nothing at all hiding what I've become. Soft and pale, and so female I ache just thinking about it.

I sit on the edge of the bed, hang my head and take a few deep breaths, ignoring the mirror on the canopy, and the one above the dresser. Ignoring the wide spread of my hips, the softness of my well-rounded bottom pressing down into the softness of the bed. My breasts quiver and bounce just a little with every breath, but that's okay. They're my breasts, after all. Just because they don't belong there, that's no reason to resent them.

Except I do. Always.

Once again I think about getting rid of them somehow, but the minute surgery pops into my head I'm wracked with a nausea that makes me roll to my knees and gulp to avoid vomiting.

They won't let me fix me. Even though they're all dead, even though I killed them all slowly and with great pleasure, the things they did to my mind remain. I can't change me. I'm their masterpiece, after all. And if someone drugs me and tries to change me in any way without my knowledge, I know I'll die when I wake up from the surgery. I read the lab reports, all the files, when I first took over their facilities. They put a self-termination trigger in there, somewhere, so I couldn't even try to take control of my own body again.

I know everything they did to me. All the little trigger and tricks. And I can't change a thing.

Damn them.

When they first changed me, they named me Bambi. They made me smile and eagerly embrace my new name. And they laughed because they knew that, inside, the man who had been Joseph Stark cringed and gibbered and went quietly mad, trapped in his own flesh.

I'm so glad I killed them. But sometimes, late at night, in the soft-skinned, sweet-smelling, silk-wrapped prison of my own flesh, I wish they were still alive.

So I could kill them all over again.

###

Nausea dwindling, I rise to my feet and strut across the bedroom towards the bath. I can't just walk anymore. My body and my mind work together to make sure every move is a sexual invitation. I glide, I strut, I sway. My hips roll with a mind of their own, calling to anything male in the vicinity. Screaming a message I can never silence, because I'm not sending it. They are.

"Come get me, stud," they beckon with a seductive swivel that promises the ride of a lifetime. "I live to be fucked. I want to be fucked. By you. All the time."

And part of me does, too. I fight it, every minute of every day. I crave that release. Sometimes I wake up shaking all over, empty, needing a man like a junkie needs a fix. Toys don't do it. I can use them and bring myself to orgasm if I want, but that won't stop the craving.

I need a man in me, on me, over me. Or I'll go mad. But that's not the worst part.

It's not just the sex. I can't just prowl and find a quick easy stud to lay me down and scratch my itch. No, I have to … submit to them. My body and brain need to be ordered. I go out and find some man, go back to his place and become his bitch. I kneel, and do whatever he says, give him whatever pleasures he desires. And it fills me with an awful pleasure that makes me faint with longing. Being used, a plaything, a toy … it fills me with an unholy joy I cannot fight.

Then he fills me, and I cum.

And I get up, get dressed, and get out as quickly as I can, eyes down, running from my own shame. Afraid of being someone's slave again, and liking it so much.

Until the next time, when my body commands, and I must obey.

Once, I accidentally stumbled onto a sadistic Dom while prowling for release. His idea of pleasure was to deny me his cock, which unfortunately happened to be the key to my freedom. When I knelt at his feet, he commanded me to be … his. Of course, I could not refuse. They saw to that.

I became his pet, naked and collared. I slept in a cage at the foot of the bed, eating scraps from a bowl. Every day he would allow me to use the toilet, just once, then made me kneel in the tub so he could bathe me like an animal. Every time he allowed me to speak, I begged and pleaded for his cock between my legs. Every time I begged, he made me take him in my mouth and suck him until he came, then swallow the cum and thank him politely.

And the worst part was, I enjoyed every minute of it. All the triggers the bitches placed in me came into play, and I was in Paradise, living as some stranger's piece of meat.

I was in Heaven. I didn't want to leave. And it still sickens me today.

I was there for four days. Then Jeff and the recovery team tracked me down. When they saw me in the cage, they almost shot him. I told them no, and in a voice I had to wrestle from deep inside me, fighting the submission all the way, I ordered them to order HIM to fuck me.

It would have been comical if I hadn't been so crazed. Five combat-trained shock troops in black stealth suits, automatic weapons at the ready, surrounding the bed until he gave me an orgasm. Until I had my release, in every sense of the word.

I didn't have him killed. How could he know what they did to me?

But I did think about it. A lot.

Worst of all, I had to tell Jeff what happened. About my need. After he stood there with the recovery team and watch me get fucked. When it was over, and I was free of the compulsion, I cried. I couldn't stop crying. I would have thrown myself out a window if the programming would have let me.

Jeff just held me tight, and I let him. And that made me feel worse.

I really didn't want him to know about this part of my life. What I had been forced to become. It's hard enough between the two of us as it is, since he knew me back when I was … what I used to be.

###

I enter the bathroom and use the toilet. I've been this way so long, sitting to pee is just what I do now. It's long since lost its power to remind me of what I lost. Anyway, there's no need. Every time a man looks at me, I know what I am. And every time I look at a man, my body lets me know I'm not the man I was. Of course, when they retrained me, they made it impossible for me to think about peeing any other way.

I wonder what the hell I'll do if I ever go camping again?

I run a hot bath and take a quick shower to wash my hair while the tub is filling. The skin and hair care regimen they set up is so well established I could do it in my sleep. I leave the shower and wrap my hair in a towel as I walk to the bath. I sink in and let the heat and the smell bring back an echo of the pleasure I felt right before waking. It makes me dizzy, sometimes, fighting what feels so damned good.

But I can't enjoy it. I mustn't enjoy it. Ever.

Because it's not really me. It's them. They put all this stuff in my head. If I give in to the things they decided they wanted me to enjoy, they win. Even though they're dead.

Unfortunately, they took all the joy away from everything I used to love. So nothing gives me true pleasure anymore.

Well, almost nothing.

###

I stay in the bath as long as I can before the peace and contentment becomes too much for me to fight. Then I rise quickly, wrapping a huge bath towel around my altered form and leave the bathroom at a near run. I am ashamed of my own cowardice -- all I want to do is dive back under the water and feel something other than despair.

I hate this. I have to FIGHT my body for the right to be miserable.

I blow-dry my hair back and it falls in place without a struggle. It's some kind of … well, permanent permanent. All bouncy golden curls that tumble halfway down my back. It can't be cut. I don't even think it grows.

It may not even be hair.

I get dressed, all frillies and flouncies, black thong panties and matching bra, black half-slip and a short skirt with flirty ruffles, and a wrap-around blouse with a plunging neckline, covered by a short jacket that matches the skirt. Black stockings caress my legs, with their tops peeking out from under the skirt. And the matching pumps with their four-inch heels make my hips scream their siren's song ever louder.

"FUCK me, baby! You know you want to!" I shudder.

No need for make-up — my skin is flawless, my lips unnaturally red, my lashes unnaturally long. The thought of doing anything to change that makes me queasy again, and I push it aside.

"Accessorize, darling!" a female voice suddenly shouts in my head, followed by a vivid memory of an electric shock. I scramble to add bracelets, necklaces, earrings, a choker -- anything I can find to stop the voice, and the pain.

Then out the door and down the halls of my not-so-new home, heels clicking, body swaying. As I cat-walk through the mansion I earned with murderous zeal, others pass me and nod respectfully. I nod back, and they go on their way. But those who were like me, the unwilling playthings of those who came before, almost fall to their knees as I pass.

I am their savior, you see. The psychopathic saint. I sigh.

As I reach the stairs to the first floor, I look in the mirror mounted on the wall. That stupid cheerleader smile has pasted itself onto my face again, like it always does when I'm not paying attention. When I'm thinking of something else.

Click, click, click. Down the stairs I go, fingers trailing lightly on the railing. I reach the first floor, and instead of turning towards the dining room where breakfast is served, I hesitate, then turn left and head into the office wing.

Jeff sits at his desk in the anteroom to my office. He's on the phone, dealing with something, and I take a moment just to watch him. The Bambi part of my mind is screaming "DO him! DO him! He is SO hot!" And the part of me that's still Joe agrees he was always a magnet for the ladies. Joe used to be the wingman, courting the girl friends of the women Jeff charmed, happy to be second. What was Joe, buried deep inside, freely acknowledges that Jeff is, in fact, a hottie, and always was. Major league stud, Bambi agrees.

What's worse is that the bitch thing I've become agrees with both of them. I feel the lust making my insides throb, my chest feels swollen and heavy, my lips part eagerly. My panties are soaked, and not for the last time today, either.

But I can't play with Jeff. Not ever. I can't let anything happen between us.

He's not my secretary, or even my assistant. He's my XO. My executive officer.

And my best friend.

"Hey, Jo," he says, hanging up the phone. He's the only one who calls me that. To everyone else, I'm just Stark. Even to the people I've taken home with me, the ones like myself, the mangled and twisted remnants of men beaten into a new shape in the iron forge of a woman's revenge. Even to those who love me as a savior and as a friend, I am and always will be Stark.

But to Jeff, I am Joe. Or Jo, now. I know he writes it without the "e" to remind him that I'm not the man I was.

One look could tell him that. But I'm pretty sure it's not my outside he needs to be reminded about.

"Had breakfast?" I ask him. The voice is sultry, temptation incarnate. He doesn't acknowledge the sexual overtones. He knows it's just how I'm wired to speak to any man if I'm not working actively to stop it.

"A while back," he replies, rising anyway. "I can keep you company, though. After all, you can never drink too much coffee."

I smiled. Damn, I love this man.

"Why don't you tell them to bring it to the table?" I struggle for matter-of-fact instead of bitch in heat, and succeed. A minor victory. "I'll be in shortly." There is an awkward pause. I want to ask, and he knows I want to ask. So I do. "Is she here?"

Jeff looks away, a tiny flicker but I catch it. He nods.

"In the basement. The nursery." He grimaces and slips out towards the dining room, so he cannot see the grin as it spreads across my face. Not just happy. Savage.

###

I know he disapproves of my personal involvement in cases like these, but he's too much of a friend to ever say so. And truthfully, I don't think he minds that much. After all, he understands what I went through. He loved me, as a brother, long before this all started.

He loved me so much, he came to get me. Even though I told him not to.

I snuck onto one of their computers and sent him an e-mail, because I knew Jeff would look for me after I'd disappeared. I didn't want him to. Don’t try to find me, I said. It's too dangerous, I said. If they catch you and do to you what they've done to me, it will kill me, I said. Please stay away.

He tracked me down anyway. Using the e-mail I sent to help him find me.

Men.

He found me here, right after my killing spree was over. I was naked and bloody in the mansion's great hall, a she-demon crouching like an animal, holding the gardener's machete and a butcher's cleaver, surrounded by pieces of the bodies of the inhuman monsters who did this to me. The other prisoners stayed away during the slaughter, half cheering me on but still deathly afraid of what I had become.

When he walked in, I was cold as ice, frozen in place by the horrors I had committed, but my eyes held a fire he'd never seen in any eyes before.

I dropped my weapons and launched myself at him, and came this close to raping the best friend I ever had. Or killing him. I was so out of my head, I don't know what it was I wanted in that moment. Desire and the need for revenge threatened to consume everything that was left of Joe Stark.

Jeff wouldn't let it.

He looked into my eyes and knew I was his friend. Naked and feminized, mad with hate and fear and lust. But still, his friend.

He knocked me cold as I flew towards him, with one single punch to the jaw. He tied me down before I woke, and waited patiently beside the bed, caring for me for days. I ranted, I raved, I cursed, and the whole story of what had happened, how I became what I am now, just poured out. The months of surgery and torture, of drugs and shocks. Of feeling my brain rewired and my body altered forever. My first blow job. My first orgy. The time they made me walk through the red light district and fuck everyone I met. I told him everything that had happened since they snatched me off a Baltimore street corner while I was waiting for a bus.

Including the moment when something inside just snapped, and I suddenly found myself thinking seriously about killing all of them, slowly and painfully. It pushed the all the programmed submissiveness aside, placed it in a box surrounded by high walls of anger that pulsed red and white hot in the corner of my mind. I watched and waited and plotted and schemed, quiet as a wolverine pretending to be a mouse.

Then my chance came. A gathering of the inner circle, from all over. All women. A coming-out party. For me.

Bambi, their newest living doll.

Sometimes, I can still hear their screams. It makes me smile.

###

After I told him everything, Jeff kept me tied to the bed until some semblance of sanity came back to my eyes. Not the real thing -- just something like sanity.

Both he and I knew I would never truly be sane again.

Still, he couldn't blame me for what I had done, not really. And he couldn't leave me to fend for myself. I was … damaged, possibly beyond repair.

So my cause became his. He helped me find the billions these women had hidden away in banks and investments all over the world -- the money that funded the evil that they did because the very concept of men as men offended them. We found the money, the property, the blackmail photos, the dirty little secrets they used to get things done. And we created an organization to find others like them and stop them, and help the men they had twisted if we could.

The only real surprise I had was how much work we had to do. Who knew how many women out there preyed on and betrayed the men who loved them?

I do. Now.

###

I walk down the stairs to the basement, past the labs where they changed me, now staffed with those like me who work for the cause. Past the rooms where I do my own changing -- the bending and twisting of those I hunt.

The rooms Jeff never enters. Ever.

And there she is, right where Jeff said she'd be. In the oversized nursery, in an oversized crib, surrounded by toys and stuffed animals.

When I enter, Consuela nods a greeting as she fusses with the diapers and supplies at the changing table. She was another of their victims, a Latina transformee with long brown hair and huge brown eyes. Her blue jeans and sweatshirt say soccer mom, but her size says something else. She is six-foot six inches tall and a former body builder, so when they remade her, the bitches made her figure proportionally large to compensate for her height -- wide round hips that roll like a ship at sea when she walks, and massively oversized breasts she needs all of her weight-trained muscles to carry.

A beautiful giant.

They also thought it would be amusing to make her always lactating, so her chest would always be swollen and full of milk. I remember them leaving her naked in the corner of the kitchen, her hands forced to hold up her heavy dripping breasts, begging to be emptied by anyone around her. Some of the women would milk her viciously, spraying her cream into their coffee cups, laughing while she cried. She used to be always in pain, a source of endless amusement, but unable to fight back.

Until my murderous insanity saved her. Saved all the victims still in their hands. And made them all insanely grateful.

To me.

Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable. But sometimes, like now, it's good to be the king.

Or queen.

Consuela's eyes flicker toward the crib, and her mouth forms a word.

"Mine?"

I nod back at her, smiling. A slow smile grows on her face, matching my own.

"Thank you," she whispers, and I give her shoulder a squeeze.

I walk over to the side of the crib for a closer look, and the woman inside it turns to face me. I can see the fear in her eyes, and I shiver all over.

"Hello, Linda," I say softly, womanly concern dripping from each word. Her mouth holds an oversized pacifier, and she sucks on it compulsively, unable to stop for even an instant. Her eyes roll from the effort of trying to make her own mouth do what she wants. So sweet.

Her hair is cut short, in a little girl style. It is twisted into two pigtails on either side of her head, held with place with pretty pink bows. She wears an adorable pink baby doll nightie, with a ruffled plastic panty sticking out below hiding an oversized cloth diaper. Tight thumbless mittens are locked onto her hands, making them next to useless. Huge heavy white baby shoes hold down her feet like blocks of wood, unyielding. Not that she'll ever need shoes again. The drugs she's been given have weakened her, and ruined her sense of balance. She'll never stand upright long enough to take a step again, let alone escape and run.

I grin, baring teeth.

"I think you ought to know why you're here. Bobby died two weeks ago." Her eyes flare. I nod. "You remember Bobby? Good. You should. After all, he loved you enough to leave his family and friends and everything he knew behind, to follow you to a new city and be your husband." I reach down and push an errant hair off of her forehead. She flinches. "Of course, he didn't expect you to drug him the night he arrived, and use more drugs, hypnosis, and conditioning to turn him into a giant baby girl. Then you sold him to a pimp to be rented out for sex parties."

She grows very quiet. I don't.

"So you got a new sports car and a few month's rent, and there's poor Bobby, riding from state to state, wearing an oversized pink party dress, tied down in the back of a van, lying in his own filth in a stinking diaper, force-fed baby formula and crying, all the time. Poor Bobby. By the time we found him, he was too sick to come back from what you did, but I was there with him when he died, and he really needed to talk. He was hard to understand, since they'd pulled out every tooth in his head to make blow jobs less dangerous for customers. But I knew your betrayal still haunted him, months after the first time some creep removed his diaper and raped him until he bled."

I look down at her.

"Who knows how many others you've done this to, before we found Bobby. Now there's a scary thought."

Linda moans behind the pacifier. She jerks her head at me, pleading for it to be removed. I smile and shake my head.

"Oh no, missy. The only time that binky's coming out of your mouth is when a breast or a bottle goes in. I left your teeth alone, for now. But you won't even think of biting the breast, or a bottle. You can't even imagine it, because we went into your mind and made damned sure you couldn't. You can't even stop sucking on that pacifier unless I tell you to." She moans again, and I pretend to relent. "Sssssssh, baby. I can be a nice aunt to my new niece. Here, I'll let you stop for a minute."

I say a word she can't understand, a trigger she can never remember consciously, and the pacifier falls out of her mouth. She immediately starts talking. Or tries to.

All that comes out is a stream of baby talk.

I laugh, and she stops, startled. And tries again. I laugh harder. She stops, and looks … scared. I breathe deep, and smile down at her.

"See, baby? You don't need to talk. You just need to listen."

"I'm not sure what I'm going to do with you yet. Maybe keep you like this for the rest of your life. Imagine that. Twenty, thirty, forty years trapped in this room, in diapers. A perpetual baby. No talking, no friendship, no love … no sex? No solid food ever again. Just Consuela and others like her for company. People who know what you did, and have absolutely no sympathy for you at all. Like me." She starts shaking her head then, babbling louder.

"Or maybe I'll give you all the playtime Bobby got and more. Maybe I'll make very sure you stay alive and on the adult baby play circuit for a good long time. Much longer than Bobby lasted, I assure you. I do shut down these people when I find them, but I leave a few operating. Just so I have a place to send people like yourself, you understand. After all, there seem to be so many like you, it's downright scary." She starts moving her whole body, babbling louder. I say another word and she calms immediately as all her muscles stopped listening completely to her brain. I can hear her diaper filling, and see the disgust in her eyes.

"Or maybe I'll just give you to one rich sleaze as a baby playtoy, with the understanding that he never abuse you enough to kill you. I'm still thinking it over."

I lean over the crib and stare into her eyes, the smell of her excrement rising to meet me.

"But one thing is for sure. This is your life now. Whatever I choose for you. Baby." I let her see a little of the madness slip into my eyes, and she shakes with fear. "This is your hell. And I'm going to enjoy your stay here for a very long time."

I straighten up and nod to Consuela. She lifts her sweatshirt and unhooks one side of her custom-made nursing bra. Linda gets to stew in her own mess for a while. Consuela doesn't mind the stink, and her breasts are hurting too much to wait anymore, anyway. She lifts Linda and carries her to the rocking chair by the changing table, settling her down in her lap as she sits. I say another word, and Linda's mouth begins rooting for something, anything to suck on. She latches onto a waiting nipple so hard Consuela gasps, then smiles as the milk begins to flow.

I walk over to the rocking chair in the corner and sit gracefully -- the only way I can, these days. I smile as Consuela whispers mocking endearments to her new "baby," watching Linda swallow in spite of herself, and enjoy the moment. Jeff will have to hold breakfast for a few minutes. This is too precious to miss.

What was it Milton had his Lucifer say? "It is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven?"

Some days I can't decide, but today ... maybe Lucifer had it right.

I see the endless stream of tears falling from Linda's eyes, dripping onto Consuela's arm, and I grin. Her time in Hell is just beginning, trapped in this small corner of the Hell I rule. Her suffering is just a small repayment for the Hell I was trapped in so long ago -- the one I can never leave, because I carry it with me in this pretty flesh I wear.

Payback is a bitch, I think with satisfaction. And now, so am I.

Because this hate is all I have left … that's truly mine.

© 2005-2006 as a work in progress, all rights reserved. Posted with permission of the author.

NOTE: This is sort of an experiment for me, a "first person present tense" walk into the damaged mind of my new protagonist. It's dark, but so is her outlook, and I look forward to hearing what others think about walking a mile in Stark's heels. *hugs* Thanks for reading! -- Randalynn

Notes:

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