Content notes: D/s, bondage, vibrators
Connie stood before him, stunned. She’d seen a lot of orgasms in her life and a reasonable amount of BDSM, but no domination so total, no pleasure seized through someone so violently and completely without them ever seeming to break free of it and come back to reality. The thing before her had fallen dormant, slow breaths making its clamped chest rise and fall. Still he didn’t react to any nudge or touch. Looking her friend up and down, Connie could see slightly bruising on his nipples and cunt, the pain of repeated, seemingly unending stimulation marked on his body.
Slowly, Nix’s eyes rolled down and, still looking past her entirely, reoriented to the screen. It locked back onto its purpose. Connie watched with fascination as his pupils swelled up and became lost in the vision again and his mouth fell open once more. He began repeating the mantras again. His arousal returned, nipples stiffening, body automatically, brainlessly pushing against the vibrator at a slow but consistent pace.
It was beautiful and terrible, what had been done to him. Connie finally found herself breaking free of numb curiosity, and experiencing something like fear. She was reaching out to touch her friend, trying still to wake him up, and still it was like he had evacuated his body entirely.
“Nix, wake up,” she said over and over, her voice increasingly loud and frantic now, having been so hushed and stunned before. “Nix. Come on. This isn’t funny. Enough. Nix. NIX!”
That was when Anthony finally emerged from the back room, rushing out to find out what the commotion was. He was absent-mindedly holding a leather blindfold and a penis-shaped mouth gag with a shiny metal lock.
“What the hell is going on,” he barked loudly, darkly, before his eyes locked on Connie and, recognizing her, softened. He was dressed in the same outfit he’d been wearing earlier at the party, except he had glistening latex gloves covering his hands.
“Connie,” he sputtered, his posture dropping into his usual friendly, affable stance. “Did you…need something?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said dully. “But this is not…normal. I’m not kinkshaming, I swear but. He didn’t even hear me come in.”
“Connie,” Anthony said apologetically, putting the gear down on a footstool and raising his hands. “You have to understand, what I do with it is very—”
“What’s wrong with him?” She heard herself getting agitated, felt herself moving across the floor as if to close the distance between them, “What did you do to my friend?”
Half an hour later, Nix met her in the front yard, as Anthony had promised he would. Connie was smoking and choking down a Diet Coke, bracing herself against the wet and cold. Nix appeared beside her, wearing sweatpants and a robe. She could see red marks fading on his chest. His collar was still on. His eyes were bleary but alert. He leaned against the house beside her and together they stared out into the darkness.
“Hey,” Nix said.
“Hi,” Connie replied, sucking air through her teeth. “Look, I’m sorry I interrupted you two.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It was rude to do that during a party.”
“It’s not that it’s rude, that’s not the problem. Like who cares, we’re all sluts.” She folded one arm across her chest. “The rude thing was that you didn’t stop. Why didn’t you wake up?”
“I couldn’t,” he said.
“What do you mean, you couldn’t?”
“We’ve been training me,” Nix said. “To really go deep and not see or hear anything else.”
Connie knew people who got into altered headspaces when they had sex, furries and puppy players and people who roleplayed. But it was always fake. You could always snap out of it. But when Nix claimed that he couldn’t, she believed him. He had truly seemed dead to the world.
“How often do you two do that together?” she asked.
Nix pulled in a fortifying breath of cold air. “Every day,” he told her. “The Controller requires I do it every day for several hours.”
She let the Controller thing slide for the time being. “Hours? How many hours?”
“As many as I can get,” a smile sneaked out of the corner of Nix’s mouth. “I understand it looks…weird…but I love it.”
“You mean it loves it,” she said knowingly.
His eyes went dark. “It needs to be reminded of what it is,” he said simply. It sounded like an incantation. Like a law inscribed on the inside of him.
“Uggh,” Connie said with a shake.
Nix looked at her, concerned. “Look, I’m sorry I scared you. I didn’t think you’d ever have to know about this.”
“What the fuck did you think would happen, Phoenix? You thought you could just get brainwashed by this guy every day of your life, for hours, and I’d just never — I’d never know?”
Nix nodded, embarrassed. “Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you could tell. I thought I could just keep it separate from the rest of my life.”
She turned to face him dead on. “What life? You haven’t been the same for a long time. You get lost in your thoughts. You don’t care about your career or the things you used to worry about. You’re dreamy and stupid around him. You don’t hear half the things I say to you. Probably because you’re listening to those words in your head all the time, oh my God!!”
“You really know me so well,” Nix said, as if to himself. “I don’t know how you can tell, but that’s exactly right. My programming runs all the time, in the back of my head.”
“Why?”
“To remind me of what I am. And take me deeper and deeper into…always knowing that it’s true.”
“Are you even — are you even awake right now?” She took hold of his shoulder. Shook him a little. He smiled at her, impassively. “Explain it to me, seriously.”
“I’m in something called a waking trance right now,” Nix said, all matter-of-fact. “I can do work like this, run errands like this. I’m under His control all the time, but I can simulate what it’s like to be the person I was before. But if He said the right trigger word, or gave me a look, I’d go into another kind of mental state, like the one you saw upstairs. There are phrases and commands, daily rituals and homework.”
“Nix, this is so freaky. How do you know you really want it? How do you know if you need it to stop?”
He blinked a few times and composed himself. “Look, I didn’t mean to disturb you. The arrangement the Controll — Anthony — and I have is something I’ve dreamed about all my life.”
“And it’s like, real?” Connie asked. “Like, are you just a hypnotized thing all of the time, that he can fuck whenever he wants?”
“Do you want the answer to that?”
She paused. “Yes.”
Nix sighed and said, “Yes. I am His obedient fucktoy and He can use me any time. All the time. And he can change any part of me that he wants. My thoughts, my desires. How I act. Make memories disappear. Change my opinions. And it’s real, and it’s what I want.”
“And you thought I just…wouldn’t notice you turning into some kind of weird Stepford Husband slave thing? Your best friend, who realized you were a guy two years before you did?”
“You know what’s really fucked up?” Nix said, taking the cigarette from her hand and pulling it to his own mouth. “Hearing you say how much I’ve changed…it’s incredibly hot to me. It means I’m responding to His programming more than I thought. I’m not glad I made you upset. But. I wanted to give myself over to this, as completely as possible. So yes, I’ve been changing. And I want to see how deep it can go.”
He passed the cigarette back to her, but Connie was too dumbfounded to know what to do with it.
“Look, I won’t put you in a situation where you have to see that again,” he told her. “We don’t want to make you feel gross. But it’s good that you know.”
Connie dropped the dying cigarette to the ground and stared at it. Nix’s foot, which was shoved into Anthony’s oversized slipper, she now noticed, jutted forward and stamped the ember out.
“I’m not grossed out,” she strained to tell him. “I will never be grossed out by you. I just want to make sure this is good for you.”
“It’s more than good for me,” he said. “It’s so right that it’s worth anything bad that comes with it.”
“I want to be able to talk to you about this, to check in with you,” she said. “To make sure you’re okay. Is that fine?”
“Of course, Connie,” her friend told her, his words surging with emotion for the first time in the entire conversation. It was the same Nix who’d once told her that of course, she could always call him by his chosen name from now on. “You can come over and check in on me whenever you like.”
That answer was enough to satisfy her, at least for the night. She couldn’t control her friend’s choices, but at least she could watch over him and learn more about what he was doing. Maybe with time and exposure she’d come to understand it. Connie gave him a brisk hug and excused herself to leave.
A week and a half later, cases were surging all across the country. Offices were going remote, kids were being pulled out of school, and the restaurant where Connie worked shuttered its doors. After a few more days of people voluntarily distancing, Ohio finally entered lockdown.
They talked about drama in the art world, and the weird girl Connie’s roommate Lainey was dating. They refilled their tea and joked about an annoying client who used to call Nix in the middle of the night. When their salads were gone and their soups were drained, they used crusts of French bread to sop up the lingering drops.
“This is really nice,” Connie said. “I got sick of only ever seeing you through a Zoom screen.”
“This is a lot better,” Nix agreed. “It’s easier to feel…normal. When I’m not in the house.”
The waiter brought them the bill. When Nix reached forward, Connie caught a glimpse of a new tattoo on his inner wrist, a power button symbol in teal. She noticed again how huge his biceps had gotten.
Connie wondered if exercise was part of his daily homework. It would be easy enough, working out while listening to Anthony’s audio files with all the mantras. The same hooks and straps used to bind Nix’s entranced body could easily be utilized for pull-ups. She imagined Nix hanging upside down from the wooden frames, eyes staring at the spirals, his body involuntarily pulling itself into sit ups while the words flowed from him in a monotone.
Nosy. She was so nosy. But all this year, she had barely said a thing to him about it all. It had seemed so impossible to broach.
“Do you still like it?” she asked, after he’d paid up and pressed the bill holder shut. “The spirals, the words? Do you ever get bored?”
He smiled at the ground. “Never. You can’t really be bored if you’re just…gone.”
“Gone.”
He made a fluttery gesture with his hand. “Plus that’s just part of it. I’m always getting new rituals, new commands…It’s always becoming, more.”
He stood up.
“Wait. What’s something new that he’s added lately?” she asked.
He looked off into space, clearly filtering through possible responses until he found something that wasn’t too upsetting.
“Stop that,” Connie said. He blinked back into awareness. “Just tell me honestly, I don’t mind. What’s the last thing he trained you to do?”
“If I see that He’s hard, I drop everything,” Nix said. “My mind goes blank. I stop what I’m doing. Strip. Fall to my knees. Mouth open, arms behind me. Ready for Him to fuck me in the face.”
“No matter what?”
“He has some safeties installed in me. If I’m in a work meeting I must turn the camera off first. If we’re in public I go into standby, and it has to wait until we’re in the car. But it just happens. I see Him hard, I drop into Service Mode.”
Connie felt a slight twinge between her legs. If she didn’t think too much about it, it actually was kind of hot. Nix had mistaken her interest for judgement though and started walking to the parking lot. She dashed after him.
“Nix, wait. How does it feel? What is it like?”
“I thought you didn’t want to hear this stuff.”
“I do,” she blurted. “I’m not scared anymore. I have to love the real you. This is the real you now.”
He stood in place with his back turned to her. “Everything is darkness most of the time. I’m down deep below the surface. It’s like little cuts from a montage. Whole days go by, all I see are flashes. His cock in my mouth, His cock in my ass. His come running down my legs. His hand on my head, guiding me. His voice in my mind. Telling me what to think, what to be. My beliefs, my way of speaking, moving…everything changes. Endless bliss. I know my purpose. And then I wake up, and it’s weeks later, and He’s telling me to get dressed, because today I have a lunch date with my very best friend.”
Cis people had a tendency to believe that transitioning was a kind of self-destruction or self-erasure. They mourned the changes in their trans loved ones as if their new freedom were a death. It was a big change, but not as dramatic a change in selfhood as this. Connie reminded herself the two things both were, and were not, analogous. “And you love being down there? Under the surface or whatever?”
“I do,” her friend told her. “It only becomes more beautiful, the deeper it goes. It seems to be endlessly deep.” He turned to her, adjusting the collar of his shirt. His gaze was naked, honest.
“I want to see it,” blurted Connie. “Is there a word I can say, or.”
“You can use the trigger ‘Nix, go away,’” he said. And quickly added, “To bring me back, say ‘Nix, return to me.’”
They placed themselves behind Connie’s big pickup truck. The thick foliage of the Cuyahoga County Metroparks hugged the parking lot on the other side. Everything around them was quiet and still. She stepped forward, and extended her hand as if casting a spell. Her palm pressed gently against his chest. “Nix, go away.”
He exhaled and swayed forward slightly, eyes rolling back into his skull. His lips pursed with pleasure. Connie looked around and confirmed they were alone. She heard a car honking in the distance, and saw a lone goose ambling around the side of the restaurant. She looked back at the thing before her.
Her friend was truly gone, just a warm vulnerable body with empty eyes, opened up under her touch. Connie felt his slow breathing make his chest rise and fall. His posture was perfectly poised, yet submissive and at attention. He would do nothing now, be nothing, if not for her. It was somehow entrancing itself, having this kind of power.
“Who are you?” she asked the being before her.
“This unit is Ph03n1x, the Controller’s programmed, robotic toy,” it stated in a flat tone.
“And who am I to you?”
“Connie,” the robot told her. “The human Phoenix’s beloved friend.”
“Do you love me, robot?”
It processed for a moment. “Yes.”
“How much?”
“More than anything.”
“How do you feel?”
“Right. Peaceful. Still.”
“I want to help you with what you’re becoming,” she told it. “I love you, and I want to help you navigate all these changes safely. Would you like that?”
“Yes, Connie. It would like that very much.”
“Would you tell me if you didn’t?”
“Yes,” it said. “It must be honest.”
She pondered. “Do you ever worry you’re changing too much?”
“Sometimes the changes are huge and frightening,” Nix said. “But it never regrets them.”
“Do you miss how you used to be?”
“No,” it told her. “It is better this way.”
He breathed into her touch and she could feel the simple, all-encompassing pleasure that being like this brought him. For the first time, Connie let herself accept that Nix truly was better this way. Not just happier, but more fully himself. Her friend had revealed himself to her utterly, invited her to know his most private self. Connie had been too afraid to look at it dead on before. But now she realized that her friend hadn’t been disappearing from her at all. He had been becoming himself, right before her eyes, and she was the one who had been shying away. But if she availed herself to the darkest contours of his psyche, he would gladly let her in.
“Nix, demonstrate Service Mode” she said quickly, on impulse.
He fell to the ground, with precise, carefully modulated movements. In a flash his knees were on the pavement and his arms folded back. He tilted his head up at her, eyes shut, mouth open and glistening, ready to perform its duty. Connie’s pussy clenched at the sight. She’s never been a fan of oral, her bottom dysphoria being what it was, but the wild, yearning abandon on Nix’s face made her want to lower herself onto his expectant, servile lips.
“You’d let me fuck you right here?” she whispered.
“Connie is an approved user of this unit,” the robot intoned. “The Controller has granted her full access. It would be an honor for this robot to gratify you.”
“Exit Service Mode,” she commanded, and he rose up once more. Connie let out a sigh of relief. It was a good thing this side of the neighborhood was so dead in the middle of the day.
“How did that feel?” she asked him.
“It is a pleasure to serve.”
“Was it okay for me to do that to you?”
“It is immensely pleasurable for you to issue it commands.”
“Good, uh, robot,” she said, satisfied. “You don’t want to ever give this up, do you?”
“Never.”
Connie squeezed his shoulder. “Good. I want to help, so you’ll never have to.” She stepped back and murmured, “Nix, return to me.”
He gasped and leaned back, eyes falling down at her, returning to life. “Woah.”
“Hey there,” she said softly.
“Connie, you’re really good at that! You’re a natural.”
She smiled. The power. It really had felt good. “Did you enjoy that? Would you want to do that again sometime?”
Nix nodded hungrily.
She smiled. “Good, I liked that too. But, we have to balance it with normal-person things too. After all, that’s what He wants.”
The way she said He filled Nix with palpable pleasure. “I want that too,” he nearly purred.
“Is there a difference anymore? Between His wants and yours?”
Nix didn’t say a thing.
“I’m glad the Controller cares about your health as much as I do,” Connie heard herself say, somewhat seductively. “You’ve trusted Him — and me — with your obedience. And we have to take care of you, so you can continue to serve us for a long time. Don’t you agree?”
“Y-yes, Connie.”
“Good robot. I think we should do this maybe like, once a week maybe? Get a meal and catch up? Play around, and you can show me your new tricks?”
“I’d really like that,” Nix said eagerly. “And I know Anthony thinks the very same thing.”
“You can use His correct name.”
“The Controller,” he savored the word. “The Controller would approve.”
“Great. So. Do you still want to come to my house and look at some paintings?”
“More than anything,” Nix told her. He gave his head one final shake, breaking free of her spell. Still she knew that she could make him drop again at any moment and grant him the sweet release of returning to his true state. Connie promised herself she wouldn’t use the trigger again that night. They had plenty of time to savor and slowly develop this new side of their relationship.
She fired up the truck and he slid into the passenger seat beside her. As Connie pulled out into the road, her best friend spoke up.
“If you’re selling any paintings, we could use some new decor for the attic,” Nix told her. “I’ve never told you this, but the Controller is such a huge fan of your work. It would be nice to have you represented up there.”
Art by Laura Lee Benjamin
This was such a treat to read thank you for sharing!