Evening's House of Fun

“Hi Mads & Flare!” The message got a little puppy emoji reaction. You smile at it through the stress. “Nothing’s really gone right today. Going to need lots of cuddles when I get home.”

“Oh you’re going to get plenty. Do you want it to be just us?”

She was asking if you needed girlfriend-Sof specifically, which you aren’t going to be comfortable with Madison seeing for a long time yet. It was a good question… You hadn’t thought about it very much. To be fair, it’s really hard to think of anything right now.

It would be really nice to have access to that more explicit physical support, but it’s not what you need. What you need is care, and with how much care Sof needs all the time it’s difficult to ask for a situation where she would need to put her symptoms aside to look after you.

It’s a really uncomfortable thought, actually.

So if Madison was there, especially with how genuine Mads could be, she could take care of Sof while Sof takes care of you. You’re willing to accept that.

“No, I think extra company would be helpful.” You respond.

“Oki. How long until you’re done?”

The idea of dealing with more today is… untenable. The idea of chasing down the missing part for any longer makes the patience in your brain snap.

“Now. I’m fed up.”

“Oh, it’s a really bad day, huh?”

“Yeah. Home soon.”

Packing up is easy. Walking home is easy. Climbing the three flights in the elevator is weirdly hard due to the low, mechanical whirr that your sensitive ears pick up easier than usual which grinds into the soft temples of your migraine.

But then you’re practically falling through the front door and into Sofia’s arms.

“Woah, heyyy, it’s okay, I’ve got you.” She catches you and holds you tight, grounding you in your body how you’ve been unable to do all day by yourself, now shoved into a tangle of clothes and hair that smells like the rose conditioner you share and the budget detergent you use. She smells comforting, and very familiar. You feel yourself relaxing even just being held by her.

But your nose picks up something less familiar.

Old orange blossom, instant coffee, and brittle sugar wrapped together by a fragrant incense smoke that could have been lavender or gum wood earlier in life. It’s joined by natural smells you’ve come to expect from people: sweat that makes it incredibly difficult to deal with some under-hygienic men or incredibly attractive people, which sits heady and light here; lingering flavours of deodorants and soaps that mix together into an unwieldy cocktail of sanitation; the gentle and homely smell of the fabrics making up someone’s outfit; a half-shadow of old emotions from experiencing a normal day.

Smelling it all, out there, had been so overwhelming. It was so hard to deal with some days, and you had predicted that some of those days wouldn’t be worth finishing. You’re glad you reached that conclusion before today, because otherwise you would have just powered through and suffered as a result.

But this still-unfamiliar bundle next to you is not overwhelming in that same way, and it’s incredibly relieving to know the two aspects are not intricately linked. You open your eyes to acknowledge the scent’s source.

Madison, standing just behind Sofia in the entrance, watches you with wide and curious amber eyes. She lacks confidence in how she’s assessing you but she still studies you, and looks incredibly kind as she does, which leaves you feeling awkwardly observed while intensely comfortable in Sof’s arms.

Madison spots something on your face and pulls her stare away, leaving you to your recovery. You don’t think you look all that bad, but you feel it so maybe more is reaching the surface than you thought.

You take the moment to study her back, and you see her dressed in a black singlet painted with bleach into something akin to a two-tone album cover of a psychedelic band that stretches from her collarbones to the top of her thighs. It’s almost a dress on but for how short it is, a reversed mirror to the first outfit you saw her in, and so simple jean shorts were worn beneath for modesty. Apart from those, and the permanent piercings that never come out, there is nothing more complex to her outfit. She is truly casual in this space.

You smile at that.

Sofia finally ends the hug and pulls you up straight.

“Hey, sis,” She smiles playfully crookedly at you while her eyes analyse you with much more practice than Madison’s, “You okay? You need meds?”

You nod, rasping out your tired voice, “Yeah, meds would be great. I need to sit down.”

Sof almost passes you off to Madison before heading off into the apartment to fetch ibuprofen while you struggle your way to the sofa, letting your bag fall to the floor near the kitchen table. You collapse onto the pillows and clasp your eyes closed to master the impact of the fast change in height. It takes a moment for the dizziness to fade, but then you start on the process of removing all your accessories. You’re thinking about every step more than you should need to, but whatever.

You’re prying the nudibranch earrings - which have more whimsy in each of them than you have felt all day - when you notice that Madison had stuck near you and looks very indecisive as she watches you.

Before you can figure out what’s going on with her Sof calls out from the other room, “How bad are the migraine symptoms?”

“…Bad.” You can’t really hide it from her, and she’d just be upset if she worked it out, so you give the honest answer that hurts to acknowledge.

You don’t like struggling this much, or making Sof run around to do things for you, but you’re still able to realise that the best way to take care of her again is to recover. Properly recover.

“Okay, you’re having three then.”

Sof comes out of your room - which was quickly becoming both of yours - and hands over a glass, two paracetamol, and tree ibuprofen. Madison looks at the collection and then up at Sof, confused as your sister sits next to you on the pillows.

“Aren’t you not supposed to take more than two?” Her voice is solid in its concern, almost flinty as her mind behind it processed the long-term impacts of what she saw.

“Yeah, but her doctor is concerned enough about these spells she told Ivy to not take ibuprofen regularly and to down more than recommended when it gets bad.” She rubs your back as you take the pills and wait for the pain relief to start. “She probably only suggested it because of the regular blood tests we’re doing for lycanthropy management: if anything bad is happening as a result we’ll catch it easily.”

“It just feels weird… We’re told by the box how much to take, by parents and doctors, and everything, and then the rules can be changed?”

“That might be an autism thing.”

“It’s not autism, it’s CPTSD.”

“Yeah but-”

“Can we close the blinds?” Your voice cuts through the casual banter, the gentle humour that had bled into Madison’s voice, and the relaxed tone that Sof was speaking with. You feel like you ruined the moment, but Sof is immediately kind.

“Yeah, of course we can.”

Your sister responds, but when weight lifts up off the couch your sister’s arm is still there around you. Darkness is spread through the room anyway, though, and you find yourself able to relax your eyelids that you had scrunched up at some point. Then it gets darker as the door to Sofia’s room is closed, and darker still as the most of the lights are turned off.

“Thank you.” You relax, and breathe out an almost-sob.

“You’re welcome, Ivy.” Mads responds. You know its her because you’re finally able to process the subdued flight in her voice. Her tone always feels like it’s being shaken around inside a tin can for fun, but she’s trying so hard to be calm for you.

Sof leans you backwards with the sideways hug until you’re resting back into the sofa. You can open your eyes, and unlock your muscles, and breathe easier, and it’s thanks a lot to the company you’re with. You watch Mads sit down on the other side of Sofia as you melt into her cuddle, water long since finished and glass scavenged from your grip.

“How was your day…?” Sof is gentle as she asks. The offer to vent is genuine, and not a demand in the slightest. It’s not a test, or a bar you need to meet. It’s just one of the ways she’s ready to be kind to you.

“Ugh… Do I have to?”

“No.”

“Can I wait until the pain meds kick in?”

“Yeah, of course.”

You bury your face into the nook between her neck and her shoulder, pressing your forehead into the wild warmth of her muscle. It’s become a favourite spot of yours when you need to think, in the week or so since you tossed away the pretences between you, and you know it will remain a staple of her comfort for a long time yet. You’ve only truly needed it once since you found it.

Most days you’re flying through, ecstatic and giddy at worst and smiling from ear to ear at best, excited by the chance to come home to Sofia as your partner and share your day with her like you’ve always wished for out of a relationship. Yeah, a lot of it was done before, and you’re going to get the chance every day from now on, but it’s still a wonderful feeling. You feel almost gravitated home, almost anxious to see her smile.

And then there was a difficult day.

Every moment felt like a slog; the hours felt like they were on strike with how slow they moved, and the urge to check the clock was impossible to ignore but constantly unsatisfying; every word slid off your mind like water, but left you with the memory of being wet. It was frustrating and maddening, but you had this to come back to. Warm arms and a kind smile.

Which made it possible to slog through.

You’re not going to wait for the pain relief.

You sigh, “Someone fucked up my entire plan for today.”

“Oh no,” Your sister picks up on all the little hints of your mood in your voice, and reacts appropriately.

“I was supposed to be testing the impacts on conductivity on the new meta structures from various treatment options, and I had everything set up yesterday for it, but when I got in today the multimeter was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Stolen! By someone!” You pull your head out of the nook to tell the story properly and to watch your audience take it in. Sof looks like she’s biting back her vocal stim from that one two sentence horror post while Madison sits attentively, but not still at all. “It’s the only multimeter sensitive enough for the differences in treatment, and it’s not even really a multimeter it just looks like one because that’s what it used to be. It’s been customised specifically for my experiments so I needed that multimeter. So I needed to go find it!”

“How long did that take?” Madison’s voice is calming in how much frustration it holds on your behalf. You find it comforting.

“It didn’t.”

Flare scoffs, “Oh it just wasn’t around?”

“No!” You flail your arms around, hoping to express your exasperation. “It probably would have been fine without the migraine, but I was set a task that I couldn’t complete and that really got to me.”

Sof speaks quietly to try to not interrupt your flow, “Do you want some tea?”

You look at her gorgeous, calming grey eyes and generous smile and nod, but before she can even get her arm out from around you Madison is already up and in the kitchen.

“What am I grabbing?” The words float over with brimming energy, but it’s oxymoronic when combined with the distinctly Flare-like scowl on her face as she looks at the tea cupboard.

“Ginger honey, Canberra Breakfast, and whatever you want.” Sofia gives out the request and then studies Madison very carefully until it’s obvious that she’s only grabbed two tins. “What are you doing?”

Madison pauses like a spotlight has fallen right on top of her in a prison breakout. Mads’ response comes saccharine and hopeful. “Making tea?”

“What are you making for yourself?”

“…Canberra?”

“The fuck you aren’t! I bought that caramel tea for you for a reason.”

You see, in the dim light falling out of the ajar pantry door, a small but pretty blush crawl across Madison’s cheeks as she reaches in to the cupboard for another tin with a thankful smile. You feel the expression on your face change a little to match.

“Sorry, Ivy,” Sof continues, “Please continue.”

You regain your flow, remembering from the brain fog where you had stopped.

“I assumed that someone who knew what it was had grabbed it, so I chased down everyone in the lab who could have possibly needed to use it, and then anyone who knew it was so sensitive, with every technique I could - including sending emails to the people who weren’t there. But nope!” You watch Madison working, and still feel the need to care for Sof in the ways you can manage like this. “Sofia likes hers really overbrewed and milky, by the way.”

“Yeah- I know how she likes it.” Madison sounds like she caught a live fish in her throat. The upset is clear to hear.

“Oh, sorry.”

She shrugs with a wide grin as soon as you apologise. “I’ll spit in your tea and then we’ll be even.”

“That seems like an overreaction.” You still laugh at her jester-esque performance. It’s endearing. You get back on track, “But, anyway, that means whoever took it just saw a random multimeter and borrowed it, not even knowing how important it is to track down! So now my nice tool is floating around somewhere in the chem department, or possibly further, and I might never see it again.”

You pause as the sound of the boiling kettle becomes too loud to focus through for a moment. The moment it clicks off you continue as Madison pours the water into the individual mugs and messes around with her phone.

“I could at least try to go around to the other labs nearby, ask if they have something I could use or if they’ve seen a random person walking around with the fucking thing, but no luck. I went to everyone I was willing to stomach in the building, and was about to just start wandering to others, when I threw in the towel.”

“Yeah that’s a good place to call it.” Sof spoke with compassion but not much else, instead using her focus to study you and figure out what you need and want to hear, and how exactly to say it.

Flare speaks with enough scorn for the both of them, though. “Look, they fucking stole that thing, alright? Not ‘borrowed’ or ‘misplaced,’ they stole it and made your job impossible. If you’re not letting yourself be upset about that I’m going to be upset for you. I’ll do that anyway.”

“I am upset.” Your voice feels meek, worn out, as she deposits Sofia and your mugs onto the coffee table in front of you.

“Did you spit in mine?” Your sister asks the question with a wide, shit-eating grin.

“Yeah.” Mads responds while already turning back for her own mug. “A really big glob, didn’t you hear? I was working on it for minutes.”

“Good.” You see the smile on Sof’s face dial back down to something genuine and enamoured.

“What did your colleagues say?” Madison finds her spot on the sofa again, placing her mug and a small sauce dish on the table before turning to you for your answer.

“Not much. They wanted to help but didn’t have any more ideas than me…”

“Then! Bah-!” She throws her hands up in frustration. “No wonder you had a shit time of it today!”

“Anything else happen?” Sof asks.

“Lunch was nauseating. I really struggled with it…” You pause to think for a moment. “Nothing else. What have you been up to?”

Sof nods towards the TV. The screen is off and dark for your comfort, but connected to it by a cable is a laptop you don’t recognise set to a very low brightness and open on Steam.

“Mads was playing Hades,” Your sister smiles with a conspiratory, secret glint, and you wonder why until she throws her crush under the bus, “But we got distracted.”

Madison’s eyes fly wide open in miniature panic as she rushes to defend herself against the accusation.

“No! Well, yeah, but not like that!”

You decide to join in the fun and add a scandalised tone to your voice, “Not like what, Madison?”

“We were talking about the Illiad!” The blush rising up her neck was beautiful, but the answer she gave was so mismatched you can’t help but laugh while her voice rambled on. “We were!! We did a couple runs and got talking about how Supergiant represented Achilles and Patroclus, and then got sidetracked further when that obviously led to the parallels with Hades II and the Odyssey, and we did not fuck!”

“Okay, okay, I believe you!” You force the words through the giggles. “I would have smelt it on you anyway.”

That made Madison crumble. She looked tiny and so easy to corner, and the feverish energy she used to correct the mistake was adorable on her. But you decide to be kind.

“Tell me about it.”

You manage to make yourself sound serious and genuine enough to only make her question your motivations a little. Her doubt is, thankfully, interrupted by one of the three separate timers on her phone.

Madison reaches over to your mug and pulls the teabag out while she slowly gears up to answer.

“Well…” She starts slow, and it’s impossible to tell if it’s either Mads, Flare, or Madison-soup. “As I was telling Sofia, if you look at the two classics as joint thing - a series - you get a world built around a choice: seek glory in war or head home. Achilles chose glory, or rather chose revenge and the glory followed, and in Hades he is plagued with this loneliness as a result of being separated from Patroclus. Fuck, even the deal he struck with Hades represents it. ‘I’ll serve as your eternal guard so send Pat to Elysium when he’s probably already there’ sounds a lot like ‘I’m going to kill this one guy so good the entire world remembers because I can’t get my husband back’ if you look at it the right way.”

The other timers went off as she finished, and all three teabags ended up on the sauce plate Madison brought over so the seeping tea wouldn’t stain the table. She didn’t slow down once she hit speed, and a lot of it was going over your head, but it was more about hearing what interests her so you let her go wild. It was nice to hear, and by the comfort radiating out of Sofia she was really enjoying it too.

The tea is delicious, when you take a tentative sip, and you find that it’s not as hot as it usually is. You realise that Madison probably brewed it at a little under boiling like the packaging told you to but you never bothered with. The taste of the tea is different as a result. A little sweeter, a little softer.

It’s really nice.

“But then we get to Hades II and oh boy is Odysseus a wet fucking puppy who needs a good bath and shampoo. He’s miserable too! Even though, as we established, he chose the other path to Achilles.”

“He also took nine years too long to get home, so it’s kinda on him.” Sof smiles at Madison, but she just gets a little mad, which is adorable on her.

“That’s-! …A fair criticism! But!” Flare searched for something to follow it up with for a moment before giving up and rejoining Mads. “The thing about Supergiant’s Odysseus that makes him really interesting to me is how he’s different to the Odysseus from his source material. With Achilles they sort of just… extrapolated. Extrapolated really well, mind you, though not always accurately, but they didn’t change all that much.

“But with Odysseus they made him depressed! Sure, he’s sad about his men dying, and upset about Penelope’s suitors, and dejected and trapped on Circe’s island, and so on, but he’s never depressed. Homer writes- orates him too wise for that. Athena’s blessing means he can’t be depressed. The structure of the epic as a whole makes it impossible for him to be depressed.

“So!” It sounds like Madison is building towards a point she’s proud of, so you listen as best you can, finding it a lot easier than you thought it would be. “The Odysseus in Hades II must be from a version of the Odyssey that is a tragedy.”

“Must be?” You hear the gap she left for a response and filled it as well as you could.

She nods, smiling wide, enjoying being able to talk to anyone - or maybe even especially you and Sof - about this.

“Yeah! There’s a few lines in the game from him about finding Penelope and Telemachus in the afterlife, and how they decided to go separate ways, which implies the big emotional reunion at the end of the epic just didn’t happen to this version of the family, but the biggest reason why I think this is because he’s the main strategist of the war against Chronos.

“One of the big themes of the Odyssey that we know, and probably still for his version, is about the cycle of violence and war. It’s about how easily war begets war, and harm against others reflects against you. One big example is that when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and runs away he can’t bear the idea of the credit going to ‘Nobody’ so he calls his real name back at the cyclops who gets his father, Poseidon, to make sure all of his men die under his care.

“Another example is from the end of the story: when Odysseus does the bow thing, and then the arrow-through-Antinous thing before murdering everyone who wanted to marry Penelope, the families of all the suitors are obviously very upset, and want to kill Odysseus. He, essentially, starts a war for the throne of Ithaca. Which Athena then stops. It’s only through her intervention that the cycle ends. But what if she didn’t interrupt it? Or couldn’t?

“Odysseus being at the centre of the Crossroads in Hades II and leading the shades’ efforts against Chronos means that war hadn’t settled on simply chasing him home, it kept chasing him after. He ended up in another, endless war like the Trojan war, but this time he doesn’t have a family to go back to. It’s only really Zagreus’ intervention of Melinoe’s cycle of war that eventually frees up Odysseus’ task, but even then through the limitations of a rougelike’s plot he’s stuck leading the cleanup effort for all eternity anyway. I wonder if we’ll get a Hades III, but there’s not really much you can do in a story paralleled to Oedipus that Supergiant’s audience would be open to…”

Sof leans over, smile still plastered over her face, to whisper, “I think that’s her steam all spent.”

Your empty mug sits on the table in front of you, scarfed in your lust to experience one of the first good things you’ve felt today while your adrenaline strength sapped away and left you leaning your full weight against another focus of comfort. You feel yourself being held up only by your sister’s grip on your shoulder, but you really, really want to lie down.

“Oh, wow, you almost need a nap.” You can hear the smile in Sof’s voice.

You shake your head as best you can, “No, I just need to lie down…” The stress bleeds out of your mind in a happy sigh halfway to a yawn.

“Okay… how are we doing this…”

Sofia eventually gets you all rearranged, placing herself at one side of the sofa so your head can rest on her thighs and placing Madison at the three-quarters mark so the crook of your knees can rest comfortably over her lap. You’re a little too sleepy and also dazed from the brain fog to argue too much about the princess treatment, but your one protest about wanting to not bore the two of them is mitigated ahead of time as the monitor is turned on with low volume so that Madison can continue to play Hades.

It’s incredible how quickly you become comfortable with the setup.

Comfortable until you get too warm… You can feel it starting, especially with Sof’s raised body temperature against your head.

Glaring in focus at the TV screen Madison singles out Sofia, “Ivy and I had our turns, Sof, now it’s your turn.”

“What? My turn to what?” There’s a laugh on the tip of her tongue whenever she talks to Madison. It always sounds like it belongs there.

“Infodump, talk forever, I dunno.” A flash of damage crosses the game screen. “Fuck! Theseus! You bitch. You’re almost done with Princess of the Forest, right? What’s next?”

“I’m not sure…” Her face turns thoughtful and, if only a little bit, stuck.

You turn your eyes up to her, “I think you should write something original.”

“I don’t really know how to do that.” Her eyes meet yours, glittering like grey steel in the reflected light of Madison sucking ass at Hades. “What would I write?”

“Well, think about the themes of the Mononoke adaptation. What drew you to that?”

She smiles, but stays quiet. You answer for her.

“Self identity, lesbian love, the worth of love even if reaching for it hurts, not being defined by terrible, obsessive thoughts.”

“Girlstink,” Mads adds, still mostly focused on the screen.

“Just write more of that!” You finish.

Sof pats your head as she turns to her tiny-statured crush, “I did not write it just to obsess over girlstink.”

“I dunno!” Mads chimes, enjoying the teasing. “It’s pretty prominent in the story…”

“Because they’re wolves.”

“So why were you drawn to them, then? If not for the unparalleled allure and stank of a girl who doesn’t wash herself basically ever?”

“Because,” Your sister huffs out the word, her baited frustration sitting playful on her tongue, “The implied unwashed-ness is a representation of San as a member of the ‘other’ that Irontown rejects, which is part of the queer allegory. The allegory you helped me refine.”

“Hey!” You call out quietly from your spot in the middle of them, fighting the warmth that is slowly becoming unbearable. “I helped too!”

“Yeah, you helped a lot!” Sof agrees, grinning that frustrated grin at you. “But you aren’t trying to brat your way into an early grave.”

“I’m not saying girlstink is a- motherfucker! Theseus! I hate this boss…” You look over and see the game’s death screen fading away to black. Madison carries on like nothing happened. “Girlstink isn’t a bad thing, far from it. A story based entirely around it would be really fun to read. Hello Hypnos, goodbye Hypnos.”

“Entirely around it?” Sofia’s tone hits a particular set of instincts in your mind. Your body reacts to the intensity and familiarity of the attitude by helpfully flooding your cunt. “Your brain, especially, ms. Art History major and classics nerd, would rot reading that book. You need more substance than that.”

“It’s also not always great,” You add. Madison looks curiously at you, Flare’s seriousness peeking through the veil of Mads’ playfighting. “It’s not always helpful to know if someone showered in the past three days or if they got fucked really good last night.”

Mads’ grin grew outwards again, closing the veil. “I’m not talking about helpful, I’m talking about hot!”

“It’s not always hot, either.” You laugh when you say it, though. Because there is a part of you that loves having that inside knowledge.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve smelt on someone so far, then?”

“Worst in what way?”

“Okay, most distinctly out of place.”

You take a moment to think, as Mads and Sofia discuss the tactics and the build of the next run. Sofia suggests the Aphrodite keepsake, which makes sense for her, and Mads is so eager to make her happy she accepts the suggestion without comment. You draw a blank on Madison’s question. The heat in your body, and the nausea wired into the feeling like a cable-tangled, action movie bomb, had spiked really badly and got in the way of your thoughts.

“There’s always something out of place, so nothing really feels out of place.” Your answer is obviously unsatisfying for Madison, and you hate the look of disappointment on her face. You elaborate as you start to wriggle out of your jeans to free your overheated legs and avoid the risk of throwing up. Fuck it, it’s dark enough she won’t be able to see much. “Before I changed there were scents like that. Things stood out. Like if someone pissed in a stairwell. But now I smell everything from much further away that I’m basically smelling everything around me at once. Obviously, the strength varies, but still. If there’s piss in a stairwell I can smell it outside the fire escape door.”

Madison nods, half focusing on the screen and taking chip damage that Sofia jokingly berates her for. Maybe that’s why she’s so bad at the game.

“What I mean to say is that, while the stairwell shouldn’t smell like that, what happened to me means that scents don’t really have a place to be out of place in any more. They’re just… everywhere.”

“That’s really interesting.”

“It’s a fucking pain is what it is.”

Madison looks strangely hurt, like she wants to say something she definitely shouldn’t.

“Are there no good bits to it?”

“Oh, obviously!” Sofia’s scent, the remembered wisps of previous meals that add slowly but surely to the smell of the apartment, the way bodies react to emotions and send out endorphins. “But it’s a pain in the same way having eyes would be a pain if it was constantly midday and everything was painted a couple hues more saturated.”

“You need sunglasses for your nose,” Sofia jokes.

“Unironically, though. The only problem with medical masks is instead I just smell my own mouth in that detail. I could get used to it, or I could get used to not wearing the masks like I have been.”

“Have you two had covid?” Flare’s question is a classic, neurodivergent jump in topic - logical but unpredictable - so it’s well suited to you and Sof’s conversation style.

“We gave it to each other, actually. Pretty early, too.” Sof answers, taking point on the conversation while you let your mind wander.

The brain fog is slowly leaving, which is wonderful to feel, and you are finally cooling down again.

The feeling of your bare skin against Madison’s thighs is dragging some complicated endorphins out of the tiny girl, who is still trying desperately to not notice the bite marks running down the inside of your thigh which are yet to heal, and the conflict in her head is drawing your attention. You hadn’t thought there was enough light in the room for her to notice, but the TV is glowing enough to give her glimpses.

The most obvious of your marks is the bright-white, adhesive dressing you put over the spot where Sofia’s teeth had broken your skin. It was there to help the wound recover and to help with the constant pressure and chafing on the area, but it still left you rather distracted at times when you clamp your thighs together hard enough. And now the white fabric sits as a beacon for Madison’s attention in the darkness.

The poor girl is struggling so hard to not ask about it, and you’re trying not to find her mildly panicked expression and endorphins adorable. Easy to do, when your anxiety wakes up from its migraine-nap.

What if she’s uncomfortable? Should you move your legs? This was a dumb idea.

You try and shift some weight off of her and she lowers her arms to rest them on your legs while she plays.

Flare interrupts the conversation after clearing a room to glare at you, “Stop moving, dumbass. You need to rest.”

“Wow you play really well when you want to swear at someone.” Sofia chuckles. You relax back into the contact.

“I play really well all the time, thank you very much!” Mads’ voice is aggrandising and entertainingly proud, but you hear a quiet whisper afterwards. “It’s just distracting when you’re watching.”

You bump the bottom of her elbow with your knee to get her attention back on you and the knowing smile you can feel crossing your face.

“Sofia’s not that distracting.”

She blushes and glares at you, before curling in a little bit and whispering, “She is to me.”

“Why is that, Mads?” You make your smile a little more merciful, but not any weaker.

“Aren’t you able to smell it?”

You could. The saccharine crispness of uncanny-valley green apple and basil, the closest things your brain can register from the hormone. It’s strong, complex, and deceptively heavy. It slots easily into the wilting orange blossom that is part of her unique smell, but it’s a very recognisable smell. One that’s the same in basically everyone: oxytocin.

Madison is overjoyed just to be here with Sofia, to be spending time with her and relaxing like the time will never end. But her heartbeat is hammering in her body loud enough that you can pick it out beneath the intentional sound effects of Hades and the low-whine of accidental tones caught in the music or emitted by the laptop.

Madison is very warm as well. And fidgety. She keeps looking over at Sofia while she thinks your sister won’t notice.

It’s nice to see from an outside perspective, even with how different you are from both Mads and Flare.

You respond very simply and softly, “I can.”

That was not the answer Madison was hoping for. She pauses the game and sighs, retreating into herself while you hear her heart doing backflips behind her ribs. She breathes slowly, and you can hear the emotions catching on her breaths. Flare recovers first, and decidedly ignores you to shove the controller into Sofia’s hands.

“Here!” The expression of harmless frustration gets most of her roiling emotions to settle. “You’ve been talking so much shit, Sof, let’s see how good you actually are.”

“I’ve never played with Coronacht before,” Sofia starts.

“Then learn.” Flare wasn’t budging.

“This is heat sixteen!”

“And? This is your punishment for saying I’m terrible. You get thrown in the deep end.”

Sof gives in and holds the controller in an awkward way to not rest her arm on your face, readying herself to play.

“You can put your arm down,” You say up to her, since you don’t like her being uncomfortable at all, “I don’t mind.”

Your sister looks down at you like you’re teasing her, and then sees your expression. “You’re genuine? No, I’m not doing that.”

She instead shifts around so she has her hands draped over your chest like she’s a safety bar on a roller coaster, which gives you room to breathe and see while also letting her rest her arms’ weight on you. Good enough.

You turn your attention back to Madison, feeling a little too lost about the game.

“Fill me in?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, sure.” Madison considers for a moment and then fully turns to you, ignoring the screen. “So I’ve just given Sof an impossible task.”

“I might surprise you!” Sof calls out from the side of her mouth while she struggles.

“No you won’t. But anyway. ‘Heat sixteen’ means that I’ve got sixteen, out of a maximum sixty-four, levels of extra difficulty on this run - though only like two people ever have beaten sixty-four heat so it’s not really the effective maximum. Coronacht, the bow, is especially bad for Sof because it has a strange learning curve. And she doesn’t have much time to learn because I’ve already taken a lot of damage this run, and I’ve turned on the difficulty modifier that gives you a time limit, so she can’t just stand around wondering what to do.”

“Ah shit!” You feel Sof frantically mash her fingers into the controller. “I forgot about that!”

“All this to say I’ve been struggling because I made the game harder but received banter like it’s on the base difficulty. Now I get payback.”

It seems like good payback since the frantic stress on Sofia’s face only gets more and more intense. She dies very quickly, and Madison laughs softly at her.

“You’re forgiven now. You can play without heat.”

“Oh, thank you, my magnanimous princess.”

The chemistry is really nice to see. You’re really glad Sofia has someone to talk to like this, it feels really healthy for her. And especially on the days where her pain is unmanageable and she’s just stuck at home waiting for you to finish your work it’s comforting to know that Madison is always only a message away. She’s been there for your sister through a lot.

The smiles on their faces are wonderful as well. But you wonder whether the play fighting is actually how they want to interact - and not just something that gets in the way of them growing closer.

It’s a nagging feeling, based on Sofia’s tone shifts throughout the afternoon, and how she keeps dragging herself back into the box you’ve seen on display.

It makes you a little melancholy, but it’s easy to move past. You trust your sister to take any opportunities that pop up to express her affection. She did it to you really well. She’ll find a way to get through to Madison.

The tiny girl, on the other end of the sofa, has been returning to the tone like raising a shield. It seems more like a face she’s willing to show, but there’s plenty more behind to explore, if she ever feels safe enough to let Sofia in. The way her heart is still misbehaving in her chest is a clear sign of that.

As you’re listening to Madison’s heart there’s a moment where its rhythm suddenly spikes. Madison chews at her bottom lip, and fucks with her now-empty hands on top of your legs, while her eyes are rooted on a dark, shadowed spot away from both you and Sof. You smell something sharp and acrid float off her.

You put your hand on her arm. It’s just a gentle touch, enough to ground her if she needs, and enough for you to feel how light she is beneath your touch. Like her bones could shatter if you touched her wrong.

Her heartbeat calms again, and she pulls her eye away from the patch of nothing to meet your eyes, and what greets you is not the panic that has been coursing its way through her body, but instead is a deep and grateful relief mixed with a vexing twist to her lips over how well she you read her. Mads and Flare’s individual responses, blended together.

You’ve done a little reading and a lot of talking with Sof, so you’ve figured out that Flare is a classic ‘protector’ alter, and now she’s questioning - either subconsciously or not - whether she needs to protect Mads from you. But Mads accepts the contact willingly and just smiles down at you.

“Thanks, Ivy.”

You smile back, and keep your voice quiet and non-confrontational. “What happened?”

There’s a complicated look that crosses her face, there and gone in a flash. Like a faster-than-words conversation that happened beneath her eyes. Mads continues.

“It’s okay now. You should worry about yourself.”

She looks over at Sofia for a moment, while the music swells and a boss fight starts. Life glitters in her eyes like candles fighting to stay lit in a gale, sheltered as best they can be against a hurricane of thoughts and hopes and predictions. She stares at your sister with a half-held breath and a yearning whine in her throat that you pretend to not hear.

But you can’t let that look go without comment.

You whisper, trusting in Sof’s hyperfocus on the game to make your words inaudible to her, while you speak.

“She really likes you, Madison.”

You fill the words with the kindness you’re overflowing with and a hint of the wisdom that comes from an outside perspective, as well as a fair chunk of hindsight. Mads turns her eyes away, amber glow filled with almost-tears.

“She won’t-”

Your stomach grumbles incredibly loud. Enough nausea has faded to let your hunger wake back up and scream it’s angry growl, upset that it has been ignored for too long today. It follows the noise up with a demand for food that slides like an iron lance into the centre of your attention deficit and twists your focus, through the bruising impact point on your soul, fully and wholly onto food.

“I’m really hungry…”

Sofia pauses the game to look down at you with concern and confusion, “What actually was your lunch?”

“Sichuan fried noodles.”

“With a migraine?!” Sofia looks like she wants to grip each side of your head and shake you until some sense falls out of you: percussive maintenance at its finest. But she’s too careful around your head while you have a migraine to try. “Well… that should have been enough food anyway.”

“Oh, uh… I didn’t finish it.”

Sof looks a step closer to flipping your brain on its head like an SD card that went in the wrong way.

“Okay,” She starts shifting around, gathering her energy and pushing her muscles’ ache to the back of her mind, to get up, “I’m starting dinner. You need something solid to eat.”

“Yay! Thank you, puppy!” Your use of the matching pet name makes her grin wide, but you realise belatedly that Madison can also hear. Oh well. “What’s for dinner?”

“Eh, I can invent something as I go. We have that mince and a few veggies, so maybe a pasta dish?”

Sofia seems to finally get enough of her energy together and heaves against the pillows of the sofa to lift herself up, but gets interrupted by Flare.

“Hold on! Wait, wait, hold on a minute. Sit back down, Sofia!” Sof follows the tiny girls’ order. You’re grateful to get your head’s pillows back. “You don’t have to be the one to cook, I can do it.”

For some reason that offer seems to duck through some shortcut in the complex labyrinth of your heart to end up closer to your core than should have been possible. You built it halfway around Sof’s presence in your life, so feeling someone else navigate you so easily is a shock.

She’s willing to cook for you. Willing to cook so that you can stay close to Sofia.

The frustrated glare Flare is using to keep Sof in place, comforting you, takes on a new, fiery charm.

Madison is not just here to spend time with Sofia. She’s trying to take care of you, too.

“But also!” She continues. “We don’t have to cook anything! Your cooking is incredible, Sof, and very comforting, but with a day like you’ve had,” Flare looks at you, “And the migraine you’ve had to deal with, and the way I know even through Sof that you deny yourself nice things even when you deserve them - today is a delivery day if anything. You deserve good, indulgent food that no-one around you has had to work hard for. You deserve something free to enjoy.”

A smile and an avoidant blush had crept onto your face, and you relent after a moment. “Okay, okay! We can get delivery.”

“Good.” Flare nods and relaxes back into the sofa to match Sof, and drags out her phone. “What are we getting?”

Both Madison and Sofia look to you, silently prioritising your cravings. You think for a moment, before your stomach takes over and growls again.

“Whatever it is it needs to arrive quickly.”

You study your hunger and focus on the craving. It’s more of an extra hole in the absence of your hunger than anything distinct, but it’s shaped like the inverse of chocolate, or cocoa. It’s dark and heavy and rich, like a coffee bursting with fruit notes, but solid, and chewy. It feels uncaffeinated as well. You don’t really want to be more awake for this. The relaxed, almost-sleepy vibe the three of you have is really comforting.

A thing that comes to mind is one of those Chinese dishes that are caramelised and soaked in rock sugar, balanced by rice beneath, but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.

The thing that does fill it, though, is surprisingly, “Dried dates.”

Sof perks up at your non-sequitur before turning to Madison. “Is there a Middle Eastern place nearby?”

“There’s a lot of kebab places…” Mads trails off and turns to you, and you shrug. One of those places might make something to fill out your craving, but the app isn’t that tuned to giving answers you want.

“Hmmm… Try looking up ‘adas polo.’ Or-”

“Ah, I found a place! I looked on google instead, much better results.”

She tilts the phone towards you both and Sof approves, “Oh wow, that’s perfect! Good find, Madison!”

You watch as a small, hesitant shade of a smile creeps into Madison’s expression, a little peek of something vulnerable around the edge of her shield. You expect her to respond to Sof with a barbed comment or two, but she stays quiet on that front the whole time she plugs in your order. Her more sensitive smile stays as well.

The comfortable, warm feeling stretches out languidly after the food is ordered, and small topics fill the space to pad the difficult, spiky points of your migraine and the slow, tentative trust Madison is expressing.

Noticing it, reading her so well, is really nice. You can feel everything going through Sofia’s mind just by having your head resting against her skin. The tiny feedback on touch would be all you need to follow her mind’s footsteps, even without your highly-tuned sense of smell, and you’d be able to pick out every small moment of pride and challenge she’s facing and overcoming while learning to play Hades.

But Madison… You don’t know her that well. You properly met her a little after getting back from the coast, and have only really interacted with her in small moments since then. In the past week or so she’s hung around a little longer while you’ve been present, which was interesting to see, but it’s been nothing like this.

You remember how awkwardly she just… stood there when you got home, but now she has her hand curled around the outside of your bare thigh like it belongs there, and she’s smiling with a less-guarded joy than even an hour ago.

It’s delightful.

You want to tease more out of her, but that’s not what she needs. You understand, maybe only a tiny bit so far, why Sof had said a while ago that she and Mads set each other off.

You hug her as best you can with your legs as you wait for the food to arrive.

You could get very used to her company.

Her care.

But that involves telling her about you and Sof.

Oh, now it’s your turn to fade from the conversation and have a small panic attack.

She’s kind, and playful, and soft, but Flare is reactive and hyper-protective of Mads and Mads herself feels very easy to hurt. It’s not impossible that telling her about your relationship with Sof would shatter something fragile inside her. Fuck, you don’t even know if she’s poly. You had been assuming, and maybe Sof had already told you and you’ve forgotten, but what if she’s not?

Well, if she’s not then the relationship that’s shakily forming between her and Sof would have to break, one way or another, and from what little fragments of her life she’s let slip, accidentally hinted about, or conveyed by Sof there are very few good things in her life. Sof is one of those few things.

Would she hate you for taking away that hope from her? Monogamous thinking doesn’t come all that naturally to you, you’ve never sunk into it the way people around you have, but you also don’t know polyamorous thinking that well either. Do they have an easy answer for this situation?

Now that was a funny image. Calling up one of the poly podcasts that end up in your feed now and then with the dilemma: ‘My sister is falling for someone monogamous but doesn’t know how to let her down without saying she’s already in a relationship with me! Help!’

“Hey- Ivy…”

Sofia’s voice, like crystallised honey and warm, worn-out bass strings, brings you so easily out of your spiral. She pets your head, running her fingers through your beach-bleached brown hair with endless kindness and patience. Her touch sends electric shocks of dopamine through you, scattering the cloud of anxiety. You feel your heart rate settling.

You smile up at her, calmed and tamed and happy.

“Hi Sof.” You hear how in love with her you are in your voice. It’s sickly sweet and perfect.

“Dinner’s here.”

You sit up like you’ve been struck by actual lightning, or an incredibly angry golf club straight to the stomach wielded by your hunger, and see that Madison had freed herself from your leg-hug at some point and is accepting a bag of spiced, sweet food that fills the apartment so easily with its heavy flavour.

“Oh, fuck yeah, gimme!” You call over to Madison who takes forever to walk over, so you impatiently meow at her to speed her up.

“That’s not what foxes sound like.” Madison responds.

“It’s what hungry Ivy sounds like!” You parry. “Now give. Give!”

Dinner marks the blending of afternoon into evening, the time only getting more relaxed and casual with the veritable feast you bought and then only half-ate. Full stomachs and soft company does wonders to finish the flip of the day from ‘horrible’ to ‘wonderful.’ You feel so happy. Happy and looked after.

Mads allows herself to become slightly more cuddly as time goes on, and the high-octane feel of Hades is eventually put away for an emulated, old Animal Crossing that Madison plays as she curls up against your arm.

You share a few knowing, appreciative smiles with Sofia over her warming up to you like a shelter puppy or a wet cat.

But it inevitably gets late. You all get tired. And you half expect Sofia to offer for Madison to stay - just for a warm bed tonight. Maybe something more when you’re all recovered tomorrow. But Sof sees your thoughts on your face and sends an expression back that’s half a shake of her head and half a shrug. It feels like she’s asked her in the past and it’s not been accepted.

You look back at Madison and see an warring twist of feelings from Mads who clearly doesn’t want to leave, and a deep, shaky fear from Flare that’s pulling her up to standing and towards the front door.

She’s awkward as she leaves, but you make sure she knows how much you appreciated her company and care tonight. It makes her smile a little lighter. Then she takes one last look at you two before closing the apartment door behind her, heading off into the dead of night.

She summons a mirror in her neural implant, seeing her naked form stare back at her through the fuzz of tiny CRT lines she’s styled her HUD to have.

She’s gorgeous. Brown hair tumbles down her shoulders, strands still half-remembering the shape of the ponytail they were in moments before as they frame her easy smile and glitter of blue-green irises watching out from bright eyes. She finds herself beautiful, her face shape very similar to her gorgeous wife, and appreciates the lingering touches of makeup that she forgot to remove last night.

She’s fit in a casual way, built off her job repairing the outside of the ship where the edge of the artificial gravity goes wonky, but she’s also full. Her tits sit heavy on her chest in matching, candid beauty to the plush thighs and wide hips filling out her silhouette, each stretch of skin studded with tiny gems of beaded moisture that gather and vanish in the humid room. The obviously good bits come with harder parts to like, like the tummy pouch or the stretch marks, but she’s been slowly working on liking those too.

The most recent effort to improve how she sees herself is where her eyes dip next.

Between her thighs, peeking out as her legs spread apart in happy exhaustion, is a mound and a clit that weren’t there until very recently. Having her dick never really stressed Ivy out, she could use it and enjoy the sight of it, and even sometimes use it the way it was designed, but never to the extent of her wife, but replacing it wasn’t really an issue until she randomly, suddenly, and genuinely considered changing.

Now, with the novel new organ dragging her attention down to an ache she still has to get used to, combined with the thrill of others being able to watch her in the room, there’s a part of her that wishes to drop her hand and continue her exploring of her new lust. Using the locker room for sex wasn’t taboo and definitely wasn’t even that rare- but. No. That’s what Madison is for, and she would be a lot more fun.

Ivy dresses in her simple jumpsuit, and next to nothing else, and enters the main thoroughfare of the ship with her front zip undone a tastefully slutty amount to show off her cleavage, and heads towards home. And to her waiting wife.

The familiarity of the space opens up to her asleep mind, reminding her of a real apartment lived in for years now clad in sci-fi white panelling and greebles lit by internal neon lights, but she discards the interruption and looks around the front room, finding Madison easily.

No, that’s not Madison, that’s Sofia-

Ivy recognises Sof within Madison’s face as she rises to greet her wife, sporting a brand new strip of shaven hair that runs down one side of her head - now dyed a rich brown to match Ivy’s hair and a contrast to the electric blonde she had before. Grey eyes simmer with glee and arousal as they stare Ivy down, glittering in their hidden depths with some inside joke she wasn’t let in on, and when they come close Ivy realises she’s looking slightly upwards towards them. Madison isn’t taller than her, but some deep part of Ivy thinks it suits Sof really, really well.

“Hello, kit.”

“Hi Sof!” Ivy greets back with bubbly optimism, enjoying the intimidation just as overly much as both she and Sof like. “I like the new hair. Just you up there right now?”

“Sort of.” Her smirk invades her tone, and she twists her neck to show off her neural port, which had an unfamiliar, shining device plugged into it. It glows softly pink, like infrared emission got twisted and scattered by the muscle surrounding the wires that plunged into her brain, twisting the light to reach the surface flesh-coloured and alive. She lets go of her hair to cover the implant. “We’ve been experimenting, too.”

If Madison has been experimenting, on top of the knot she requested of the same surgeon-bot Ivy got her new pussy from, then there was something very exciting waiting for her very soon.

Ivy swallows a shaky breath and tries to be composed as the new flavour of arousal she wasn’t used to yet floods her mind.

“O-oh, that’s exciting! What have you been up to?”

Sofia deflects, “Are you feeling good? Thirsty, hungry? Hurting at all? Migraine?”

Ivy shakes her head, “No. Feeling pretty good, actually.”

“Good!” The menace of Sofia’s smirk purposefully breaks slightly to let genuine care peek through for a few moments. “Then come with me.”

Sofia leads Ivy to their shared bedroom, and what greets Ivy far exceeds her expectations for what the surprise could be.

Tangled into a sweaty and naked pile on the bed is Madison how Ivy expected to see her; long blonde hair still intact, and still the correct height; grey eyes coiling with a maternally anxious smile that has etched itself into Ivy’s memory. But she’s wrapped around another girl.

She’s tiny, first of all, like she’s just barely eighteen. She looks like how Madison did when she was that age, or how Ivy did, or like a secretive third sister who neither of them remember. Her face shape is squashed a little, ears protruding more, a dimple present in her lower lip that Ivy and her sister had grown out of, which creates a soft contrast to the jagged mess of her hair. Blonde strands are hacked away into a birds nest of uneven ends that form a mop or a mane of bright hair around her face that makes her look like a puffer fish from the right angle and exposes glittering expressive black eyes staring through half-lidded, blissed-out eyelids.

She slots into the arms of the Madison you expected to greet like she was made for it. She hazily waves at Ivy.

The glow behind their necks sits bright and orange, like a strip of firelit copper that glances off their hair and makes their strands look woven out of gold. Ivy recognises the air of constant protection from Flare, still in a recognisable body, which means that her mind isn’t playing tricks on her and the impulsive, energetic Mads has indeed put herself in a body that is even easier to overpower. That same bit of her brain tells Ivy that the sight is deeply correct.

“What? Huh? But- you’re all separate?”

Ivy turns back to Sofia, surprise on her face. Sof just smiles while Flare extracts enough energy out of the comfortable cuddle to answer.

“The new devices help us spread our mind across new bio-drones,” She gestures at herself and Mads, especially so at the fire-light glow behind their necks, “Aaaand… it’s maybe a little jailbroken to help each of us only focus on one body at a time.”

“That’s- incredible, Flare! This is so cool!” Ivy takes a step towards the bed and endorphin-rich pile of her sister (sisters) in the sheets, not noticing as Sofia moves into the space she left, blocking her escape route. “How does it feel?”

There’s a moment where the lights behind Flare and Mads’ necks dim towards red slightly, and their expressions smooth out into a cocktail of differing perspectives, before reestablishing themselves into that fiery orange glow.

“It feels incredible.” Flare’s answer is simmering in arousal and awe.

The desire to curl up and do nothing vanished from Mads’ face after the dimming, and she suddenly darts up at Ivy to wrap her arms around her waist in a very energetic hug.

It feels different to normal. There’s less mass behind her hugs so she throws herself at Ivy with more speed to compensate, sending part of the sheets flying with her legs and exposing more differences between Sof and Flare as the latter girl starts to sit up and Ivy returns the hug.

She doesn’t have a knot. She’s still massive but it’s a relatively normal girl cock that meets Ivy’s eyes. She starts to drool anyway.

“We can choose to re-soup again, to check in or feel what the others are feeling. It’s very useful in carefully chosen moments, but having separate bodies is kind of a wish come true.”

“I see you’ve already tried it out.” Ivy tries to keep her voice steady under the generous squeezing from Mads’ fingers and the encroaching feeling of Sof closing in behind her.

“Mhm. It’s like when we plugged into you, before, but better. We’re more in sync. Plus it helps that we’ve been dying to do something like this for ages. Headspace just isn’t the same.”

Ivy remembers a moment where Madison had brought out a neural link adaptor, and had used it to fuck Ivy in her head, take over her arms and finger her mercilessly, send fake sensations of impossible things down the wire, and plenty more. Ivy had stumbled around for a few days afterwards a little confused, like she had to accommodate a limb she wasn’t missing, so the cable had been put away for special circumstances but the memories are still strong.

“I make really cute noises with my new voice!” Mads squeaks up at you, her words lilting with her usual jester playfulness in a new tone and timber that suits her very well.

“I bet…” Ivy tries to lean in to Mads’ touch, to take her reigns a little and toy with her new body, but is stopped as Sof’s hand curls around the front of her neck and holds her in place. She gasps, making a matching squeak to Mads, and freezes.

“We’ve gotten a grip on it, yeah,” The rich strain Sof puts on the words curls over Ivy’s ears in a delicate whisper and threatens to steal the strength from her legs. “It’s your turn, sis.”

At the same moment as Mads’ hands drag her up to kneeling on the bed to steal Ivy’s lips in a kiss, revealing as she went a matching absence of a cock to Ivy and contrasting against her triplets, Sofia’s hands drop from Ivy’s throat and curl around the shape of her tits, groping through the fabric and through the artfully placed gap in her zip. Ivy finds herself trapped between energetic, giggling lips on a fuzzball of a feral girl and fiercely strong hands married to an immovable torso that is keeping her from falling to the floor.

Eventually the barriers are considered too obstructive, and the zip of Ivy’s jumpsuit is slowly pried further open to spill her breasts out as a tongue as sharp and warm as rubies finds its way past her lips.

Air is stolen from her by Mads, slowly but surely, as she is exposed to the air of the bedroom by Sof’s encroaching hands. She feels Mads’ underdeveloped tits press against hers and feels the warmth and softness of Sofia’s body along her back. The jumpsuit stops its descent at her hips, always the most difficult part to fit into the standard cut of the outfit, and instead the hands find Ivy’s body again, without the layer of durable fabric obscuring the sensations. Madison giggles at Ivy and bites her tongue slightly as her attention wavers.

Ivy’s nipples are standing hard when one hand presses itself into the squeeze of Ivy and Mads, and the smaller girl gasps and twitches from sensitivity as the hand brushes against her sensitive tits. The amusement Ivy feels, the heaping serve of cuteness aggression, is short lived as Sofia’s desire and fingers clamp around her stiff nipple.

Pleasure rocks through her body, sending her hips twitching in response and her mind spinning as the vague air of arousal clarifies to a single, bright point.

Mads doesn’t let up, though. She keeps her tongue buried in Ivy’s mouth while the girl whimpers against her captors. She uses the muscle like a gag as the noises fail to settle, and presses her chest into Ivy’s tits and Sofia’s fingers, seeking out stimulation, friction, and pleasure against the attention that’s being spent towards her object of lust from another limb of her mind. She also struggles against the wave of arousal and need that is slowly clarifying into parseable, processable chunks in the hours since getting her new cunt. She remembers how much fun it had been for Ivy, and how intense it had been, to discover the tips and tricks, and imagines Flare’s cock sliding into her warmth, slick with Mads’ own saliva, once again.

While Mads is struggling to stay coherent in front of Ivy, Sofia is struggling to keep herself reigned in. She had volunteered to greet Ivy at the door and reluctantly dragged on clothes to do so, but being pressed up against Ivy’s grinding was making those clothes feel very tight. To remove them, though, and to free her knot to grind against Ivy’s addled attention, required her to let go of the soft and gorgeous tit in one hand and the soft expanse of soft, warm stomach in the other, and that was unacceptable.

They could feel each other in the back of their mind, and could feel small, distracting tingles of the other’s sensations. They could even half-see themselves through Flare’s eyes and feel her hand gently stroking herself to get hard again. But they pushed them down. Soup, melding, being one person was wonderful, and had both great benefits and wonderful insights for them, but they each loved their sister more than they could handle. Being separate was their way to process that all at once, without taking turns in a more implicit way than just needing to take up space near Ivy.

There is something that bleeds through anyway. It’s in all of them, so it’s easy to accept more. The pressure of love and lust for the hard working girl in front of them.

Ivy squeaks as she’s twisted by Sofia’s arms, following a silent suggestion sent over the transmitters, and feels the rough hands pull her easily out of the tight jumpsuit that she always struggles with. She looks up at grey eyes and a sleek, new patch of shaved hair and swallows hard.

She moves to speak, but whimpers instead as Mads’ hands drop down the front of her newly exposed abdomen to discover both her lack of underwear and how wet she is. She’s trapped once again against one of her sisters’ bodies.

The tiny girl is not merciful as she explores, sending new, sleek fingers deftly exploring Ivy’s folds and teasing just at the entrance, hesitating to press further in while her lust is so out of control. She darts back to your clit and sends tantalising, merciless attention through it. She leaves one set of terrible fingers there and chooses to grip the other around Ivy’s waist, gripping her where she’s softest and easiest to move around, and only a little to support her weight.

She ends up with her mouth on the back of one of Ivy’s shoulder blades where Sof and Flare like to bite. Muscle memory bringing her anxious kisses and licks to a familiar spot.

Sofia takes the distracted moment to rid herself of her offending clothes, exposing more muscle than Ivy remembers Madison’s body having, and prying a stiff, leaking knot from her inadequate shorts. She comes in close once again and with the weight of her wolfcock making it droop down slightly while it’s not inside something - the sight of which sends a shiver through Ivy’s spine and a difficult swallow down Mads’ throat - when she presses up against Ivy’s body again both other girls can feel the heat of the knot press up against Ivy’s clit and the fingers currently rubbing it.

Mads makes room for her triplet as her mouth finds Ivy’s, feeling Sofia’s need to get friction on her length as soon as manageable, but then pauses when her fingers on instinct (possibly borrowed from one of her headmates) were about to plunge themselves deep into Ivy’s cunt.

Breathy, like she had run out of oxygen rations, and in between the lustful, deep kisses with Sof, Ivy begs, “Please- Please Mads, can- c-can you finger- mmmfh!”

She gathers her bravery and arousal and pushes her fingers in, immediately amazed at all the little differences between the feel of hers and Ivy’s, and tries her best to work around Ivy’s intense arousal and Sofia’s knot pressed up against the ideal space for her hand to be. Was she doing it okay?

Flare, sensing the usual apprehension in Mads and the desperation still running rampant in Ivy, pulls herself around to Mads’ side. She puts a hand on the back of the tiny girl’s neck, drawing a sensitive moan from her from the touch placed over the implant and new device that have spines of metal that plunge into sensitive nerves, and opens a small connection to her triplet.

“Hey, Mads, you’re too tense…”

Flare’s voice is gentle in the ways Sofia tries to be dominating, but similar in how they try to be protective, but the gentle guiding voice matched with the comforting kiss that happens over Ivy’s shoulder, and the impact on how well it means she’s being fingered as Flare lets Mads borrow some bravery, makes Ivy feel like an item, a sculpture to enjoy, and it’s incredibly arousing.

Mads’ fingers are immediately more assured. They’re firmer where they need to be and gentler where it works better, and the whimpering into Flare’s kiss turns needy in time with the more arrogant curling of her fingers. She’s been teased by Flare’s attention and tongue, and the only way she has to get it out is through Ivy, which turns her into a very pushy lover.

Ivy feels the grip around her waist and the grind of the knot and feels trapped, she feels the tongue piercing her mouth and the fingers digging up against her sensitive walls and feels pierced, and she feels the ebb and flow of attention between all of her sisters and feels loved. The overstimulation, the flood of attention, builds deep in her abdomen, a fierce and hot forge of arousal that threatens to spill over with every new way these girls choose to fuck her. An ounce of incandescent fire splashes over the side and gifts her first orgasm to her audience as Flare weaves a hand through Ivy’s hair and drags her by her sensitive scalp into a new kiss.

Ivy’s hands, which had no idea what to do before and know even less now, shake as they try and hold her weight up using Sofia’s shoulders, but the necessary focus in her muscle is robbed by the friction against Sofia’s knot that she was getting slowly slick and the pressure inside her from Mads’ fingers she was utterly soaking. The kiss with Flare is a delicate contrast, even to the girl’s hand which is still gently tugging at Ivy’s hair, but her lips are soft, delicate, and endlessly passionate. It’s a slow kiss, and it finishes the puzzle of their affection while Mads returns to gnawing on Ivy’s shoulder.

The orgasm is quick and fiery and not nearly enough for Ivy.

It’s certainly not enough to sate the triplets.

Once the initial orgasm faded Flare properly took over. She took Ivy’s weight from Mads, getting her triplet to scoot out of the way, and gently leaned the dazed and excited Ivy down onto the bed.

Ivy easily complies, despite the butterflies in her stomach. She feels Flare’s arms gently coerce her limbs into position, and feels Flare’s cock press hard against her thigh as she falls down onto the bed above her. She gets pulled and softly encouraged by hands around her hips, and intense stares on parts of her body, to pull herself into the pose Flare wants for her.

She ends up on her back, legs spread and ready for Flare to fall into her, with Madison crouching over her chest, anxiously smiling down at her sister and following the orders of Flare while her empty pussy spreads her slick onto Ivy when ‘accidental’ contact is made.

Mads tries not to grind against Ivy’s tits too much.

Flare angles Ivy’s hips up, gripping the soft sides of her thighs to get her in the perfect position, and orders Mads to move - the words do wonders to make both Mads and Ivy pliable and needy.

“Mads, be a good girl and sit on her face for me.”

The voice is coated with honey, sticky and dripping and staining all that it falls onto. Anyone it falls on has the choice to leave its mark there, to feel the weight as it seeps further in, or can choose to lap at it, wipe it away with immaterial fingers and make a bigger mess as they try to clean themselves up.

Ivy chooses to keep it, Mads tries to hide her face behind shaky hands as she shuffles forward and lowers her aching cunt onto Ivy’s mouth.

The taste of Madison is rich and overpowering, but wonderful in that unique way Ivy has grown to love. With different partners in the past Ivy had predicted the taste of pussy badly, and a strange part of her half-expected Mads to taste of orange blossom, but the sharp reality is more arousing to her than any other option. It’s a taste she’s put effort into learning. She laps at her sister wildly.

Mads feels a rough tongue slide through the middle of her folds, tasting and sucking up her flavour as it passes over the hole she wishes for Ivy’s tongue to disappear into, but the wave of bright bliss that surges through her at Ivy’s exploration is enough to quieten that part of her mind for now.

Ivy’s tongue laps, and circles, and sucks Mads’ clit in quick succession, making the girl’s legs weak and stealing what little space she had been keeping above Ivy’s mouth for her sister’s comfort. She whines as her legs give out, and Ivy beneath moans loudly as her weight settles. And then the pattern of her tongue changes suddenly, but not too dramatically.

Flare had pulled herself forward underneath Ivy’s ass, positioning her thighs for the easiest thrusts, and had slowly started plunging herself into Ivy’s cunt. The stretch was immediate, relieving, and difficult to manage, and Ivy, feeling her attention split between pleasuring two of her sisters, is struggling to manage the sensations.

Between Mads’ begging - “Oh, Ivy please- Gods please keep going- don’t stop- don’t-” - and the difficulty of letting Flare into her Ivy kept flipping her focus between them, subconsciously sacrificing the other. If her tongue was moving well, pleasuring Mads well, then she was clenching around Flare too tight, and if she was relaxing herself to let Flare slide inside her the way she wanted then Mads was going ignored, and Ivy never wanted to do that.

A hand spreads across her stomach, soft, comforting, and still, joined by words Ivy was impressed she could process so easily. “Hey, kit, it’s okay… Just relax, and let us fuck you. Let us do the work. You’re focusing on Mads for us, just Mads. Let everything else just feel good.”

It works. Ivy feels herself relax, feels her hands around the back of Mads’ thighs grip down firmer, and begins eating Mads out with a newfound hunger and focus.

Flare slides into her with ease after her gentle words, and watches as the length of her disappears into her sister and has the knock-on effect of making her triplet cum on Ivy’s tongue. She pulls out slightly and thrusts back in, enjoying the brutally tight warmth of Ivy’s cunt as it fights to keep her girlcock inside.

She knows Ivy can take her, she knows Ivy can take Sof’s knot which is a lot thicker than Flare’s girlcock, and they had also specified the dimensions for Ivy before ordering the surgery. From experience she knows she can take it because they had gotten their knot inside her quite a few times already before this new experiment. But it was still new muscle. It hadn’t been properly broken in yet, and the struggle was gorgeous. They’re all planning to enjoy her while she’s like this.

She fights against Ivy’s tightness and pants heavily, her own moans joining Mads’ desperate noises and creating a gorgeous sound she finds herself enamoured with when listening to it through Sof’s ears. Flare fills her sister up as Ivy pushes orgasm after orgasm into Mads, bringing Ivy ever closer to her own.

Mads was struggling to stay up even this much, with all her weight resting on Ivy’s face and the tongue pressing deep into her cunt, and with both hands running through Ivy’s hair in an attempt to support more weight on her sister, but the orgasms were becoming too much. Spike after spike of pleasure jolted iron bolts of delirium up Mads’ spine, so she knew there was a time limit.

She was enjoying pushing the clock to its very end.

Ivy swallowed constantly, taking in huge mouthfuls of Mads’ new girlcum, general wetness, and her own drool, savouring the flavour for a moment, and then sending it down to her stomach. It was a constant battle to keep her tongue against her sister’s clit or pursuing the lofty goal of her g-spot for enough time to keep the overstim going while Ivy struggled to manage the fluids flooding her mouth, all while Flare continuously plunged deep into her, but she put all her mind to the task. She would pleasure this girl if it was the only thing she could manage.

But the constant friction inside her makes the heat in her cunt so much harder to ignore. It feels like it’s spilling down her body even as it’s endlessly pumped into her, rushing through veins and filling her with the bronze-gold that her sisters’ necks glow with. It’s making her lightheaded, and her focus is slipping, but it just felt so good she has to stay aware for it. And the hands in her hair pulling sharp points of desire to the front of her mind were helping with that.

Ivy’s second orgasm comes suddenly and strongly. She clamps tight around Flare’s girlcock, and sucks Mads’ clit hard, drawing a groan and a squeal from her respective sisters while tasting a larger rush of Mads’ cum coat her tongue and relishing the telltale throb of Flare’s cock as it finishes filling her up. Ivy is half surprised she’s able to process it all.

The surprise is short lived when the dream- when her mind loses focus and the bodies around her shift while emotions recover. When it all reclarifies Ivy finds herself on her chest, her hips dragged into the air with fingers pressed into her ass, digging into the spot where her prostate used to be, while a dripping knot presses against her achingly still-underused cunt. A slap, which brought her back to awareness, still stings against the skin her thigh.

Ivy whines at Sof, and presses her hips backwards to try and get onto her.

Sofia lets Ivy instead press further onto her fingers, stopping her with the simple, blinding stretch.

“Hnnnnnng-!” Ivy’s wordless protest falls on sadistic ears.

“Stop squirming, Ivy.” Sof’s words are immovable and grinds Ivy’s brain to a halt. The order is still so hard to follow, but she makes a very impressive effort. “I’m in charge now, and you’ll go my pace even if that’s too fast, ‘kay?”

Ivy desperately nods, correctly guessing the right path to getting more pleasure while the fingers she’s memorised over years sit stretching the wrong hole.

Ivy can hear the smile in Sof’s patient sigh. “You’re such a good girl for me, Ivy.”

She writhes under the praise and continued denial, hoping that the words would be followed by a reward for her good behaviour, but Sof just admires how much more Ivy drips from the comment.

Seeing her triplet’s cum leaking out of Ivy was hot enough, but watching in real time as her sister’s cunt grows more glistening and wet is intoxicating. The smell of it is intense and rich: it floods the room with the unmistakable brand of their sex, which wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t also joined by the sweat dripping off all three of Madison’s bodies.

Sofia looks to the side of Ivy, using a divine amount of self control to look away from her desperate prize, and checks in on Mads. Madison opens up the channels between herselves and checks in on all each alter.

Mads, lying sideways on the bed with twitching limbs, is filled with a manic glee that almost gets the other two bodies, who were not exhausted from overstim, to start giggling uncontrollably. She’s happy to watch what’s about to happen to Ivy and finger herself later on once it gets going. She’s very, very happy about being able to watch from a new perspective.

Flare had been out of the room for a few moments to fill up water bottles to keep them all hydrated, but the new hyperawareness of each other reveals the lie, or the half-lie. Flare had also been looking for restraints to put on Ivy’s arms later on, binding them behind her torso.

And Sofia is only being held back from shoving her knot into Ivy by her concern for her alters. But with that satisfied Madison closes the connections again and everyone resolidifies back into their own, unique bodies.

Sof wastes no more time. She pulls her teasing fingers out of Ivy to grip her hip, dragging a hopeful twitch from the girl, while the other hand grasps her shaft to lift the weight of her wolfcock up so it can be pointed straight into the core of her sister. The warmth radiating off Ivy drives Sof insane, and so she plunges into the hole without much foreplay.

Flare had done the hard work for her, anyway.

The length of Sof - bigger than she is in reality - slides past stretched muscles and slick tightness with practice. Seven inches of thick, smooth shaft fill out the empty attention Ivy had been lacking before ending suddenly in a sharp surge outwards. The familiar feeling of the knot’s impact sends shivers of memory and anticipation through Ivy, which cause her to clench frantically around Sofia’s length.

“Good girl… Oh it went in so smoothly - such a good pet.”

The tightness that Ivy had gained with her arousal is quickly turned to pliable looseness under Sofia’s words. She goes slack, drooling into the mattress and feeling her eyes roll into the back of her head, but her muscles stay working where Sof needs them the most.

As Sof groans in pleasure and begins a slowly increasing tempo, working her sister up to her knot, but suddenly stops changing her pace after a few moments. Flare had come back, supplies for later placed to the side and padded fabric handcuffs brandished in front of her. Sof lets Flare wrestle Ivy’s arms behind her and clip them together, but once that was done, and Ivy’s moans were exacerbated by her bondage, she sped up again.

Sofia was right, Ivy should have listened. Her pace was eventually too fast. But just like with pleasuring Mads, who Ivy could catch glimpses of when her eyes randomly decided to focus, it was a challenge that she enjoyed doing well at. Sof knew her limits, and so she kept below Ivy’s upper boundary while being intense enough to bee ‘too much.’

It was a skill she loved to perfect, day after day, and Ivy drooled for it.

It also meant Ivy’s thoughts weren’t anywhere near as formed as the other three.

Pleasure, friction, size, fuck… the sheer size of it was difficult to take at a slow and generous pace, and Sof is far more generous than she is slow. Ivy is spread apart, mercilessly and brutally, like she’s placed herself in front of a malfunctioning fuck machine powered by hydraulics or gravitics, and then has to deal with the sorrowful sensation of Sofia leaving her, emptying her and making her feel hollow, only to then flood back into her until she’s just shy of the length Ivy aches for.

She knows how intense the knot will be: she’s felt it plenty before. But this time feels different. Like there’s more attention on her, more ache and yearning. It’s making the anticipation worse. And the desire to force herself backwards onto Sof, to ignore the kindness she’s still putting into the pace, is incredibly bright - but Ivy has no energy of her own any more. She’s being fucked out.

While Sof is still being kind with her pace she’s only doing so because she really enjoys being kind to Ivy. In her total-power fantasies over her sister she’s a benevolent carer who provides everything to the mirror of her wants. In the achievable, kink-based fantasies she’s a presence of authority offering kindness where Ivy hasn’t seen it before: the ship captain, with authority to jettison her from an airlock, offering her a home and forgiving the theft charges; an old-earth soldier stowing their assault rifle to build a warm shelter for a stranger; a werewolf in ancient forests sparing her prey.

And right now kindness was giving Ivy repeated reminders of what she’d be forced to take very soon.

She flinches and squeaks every time Sof’s knot hits her entrance, which turns into grasping fingers in the sheets and gasps whenever Sofia puts a little more force into them. It’s entertaining, and playful on a very base level. It’s a mean playful, and that’s doing wonderful things to Ivy, but all good things must end, especially to make room for better.

So, with very little warning, Sofia digs her fingers into the soft flesh around the solid handholds of Ivy’s hip bone, and forces the knot into her sister.

Ivy’s mind goes blank with static as she tugs on the sheets beneath her and tries to breathe as she’s forced open by Sofia’s cock. Her toes curl, her knuckles go white, and everyone but her hears her high-pitched, keening whine that escapes her throat. She holds on in the electric storm until the worsening stretch of her entrance reaches that magical point and Sofia slides that last little bit in with all the ease in the world.

She’s actually almost sucked in. And despite the way Ivy’s mind relaxes, free of the intensity, Sof slid in so quickly that the tip of her wolfcock bumps against Ivy’s cervix, which draws an adorable and slack-jawed flinch from her sister.

Getting knotted feels like an orgasm to her, in shape but multiplied wildly in intensity, folded over itself a dozen dozen times into a sharp, slicing moment of clarity. She’s been told by Madison that nine times out of ten she orgasms during it as well, when it’s dull enough to be manageable. And with how shaky her legs are now, plus the heavy breathing coming from a very aroused Mads next to her, she probably came from this one too.

Sof never gets tired of the tightness. It engulfs her, traps her as close as she can possibly get to Ivy, and lets her put as much energy as she wants into thrusting because there’s no risk of pulling out by accident. The delicious elasticity of Ivy’s cunt keeps her in, and the wonderful sensitivity of Ivy’s cervix was the squeaker, within the plush toy that was her sister, that lets her know when she reaches deep enough into Ivy for Sof’s satisfaction.

Shallow, difficult breaths are forced around crushed organs and a heavily bent spine in Ivy’s body as she struggles to keep herself together while Sofia is impaled inside her. She’s been pulled tight around the knot and is practically fused to her sister’s hips, running waves of clamping pressure and twitching sensation through the muscle of her cunt. Sof holds her still enough to fuck her with the speed Ivy craves, and takes all responsibility out of Ivy’s mind’s weak grip.

As she’s being fucked, and as the flow of warmth inside her gets steadily harder to contain, she feels a small, shaky figure crawl up next to her, and part of Ivy’s mind registers the desperation and pleasure on Mads’ face. She brings herself close, seeking out Ivy’s face for a deep and desperate kiss, while her fingers stay focused on their task of burying themselves as deep as they can manage inside her still-new pussy. Her kiss is sloppy and as distracted as Ivy’s, but it’s arousing nonetheless, and it makes the two of them more lightheaded.

On the other side of Ivy comes the comforting presence of Flare, staying mostly on her knees but tucking in close against Ivy’s shoulder. She sends a hand up though the gap left by the arch of Ivy’s back and grasps one of her tits, playing with the sensitive nerves with the callous attention Ivy loves the most when things get this intense. Her fingers dance and grope as her teeth flirt with the idea of leaving another bite mark on Ivy’s shoulders.

And through it all Sofia keeps her speed and intensity at the maximum that Ivy can handle.

The girl never stops when she cums, so Ivy can only keep track of her sister’s orgasms through the vague awareness of the abstract ‘fullness’ of her womb, or the ‘heaviness.’ Ivy doesn’t want her to stop, either. Even as the minutes drag on over the course of subjective seconds and she’s forced to cum, burning hot and harsh, around the shape of Sofia’s knot.

She doesn’t want Sof to stop even when Mads finally wears herself out from masturbation, fingers slick with yet another surge of orgasms that have ripped through her before she relaxes into a stream of lazy kisses with Ivy.

She yearns for Sof to continue as Flare trails her hand around to the front of Ivy’s throat, clasping her fingers down on those delicate, blissful pressure points while she takes a portion of Ivy’s shoulder between her teeth.

She aches for it to keep going as Sofia’s energy fades enough that she stops pressing up against Ivy’s upper limit, and the tip of her wolfcock begins to fail to kiss her cervix.

She wishes with all her heart for it to never stop even as she is slid forward onto the bed and twisted so that Sof could follow into the pile without crushing her or pulling the knot out.

She smiles wide and still wants more even as the cosy warmth envelops her, and she feels the distinction between her sisters fades. She giggles and silently begs for for the formless aftershocks to never end when she feels the vulnerability of Sof in the tiny form designed for Mads trapped within Ivy’s grip, and both Flare and Mads’ obsession in the arms that used to be just Sof’s.

She finds herself engulfed on all sides by her sister, by Madison, once again, in a new and novel way, and it’s so comforting she can’t help but slip back into formless sleep and let the dream end.