The New Narnia- Chapter 56: No Going Back (Patreon)

Chapter 56: No Going Back.

Something was different when Tommy and Katy got home, and Tommy was able to put his finger on it immediately.  “The clock’s gone!”  Tommy gasped.

Mommy closed the front door behind her and set Tommy down.  “Yes it is,” Mommy said, patting Tommy on the top of his head.  “Good memory!”  Right by the couch there was a barren, empty spot where the portal into Malacus once sat.  “I just flipped that old antique for a tidy profit and I was so excited I decided to pick you two up from school early.”

Tommy blinked in disbelief.  He rubbed his eyes as if waking from a dream.  The Nanny had kept her end of the deal:  Tommy had willfully submitted to her, hidden the source of his retained intelligence, and now there wasn’t a big gaping regression portal in his living room that Katy might trip into and be left worse off than she already was.

Speaking of Katy “Mommy Mommy Mommy!” Katy whined.  “iPad!”  She hopped from foot to foot as if playing hopscotch with herself.

Mommy regarded Katy, half smirking and half frowning.  “Katy? Do you have to go potty?”

Katy waggled her head, flapping herself in the face with her own pigtails.  “Nooooo….?”  Her voice lilted up like she was asking a question, not quite sure of it herself.

“Why don’t you try, honey?” Mommy suggested.

Katy stopped long enough to stomp her foot.  “But I don’t wannnnaaaaaaa!”

Mommy kept her temper. “Just. Try.”

“Then I can have my iPad?”

“After you try.”

That was enough for Katy.  She bolted up and around the stairs, giggling with every step.

“Katy!” Mommy called after.  “There’s a bathroom down…” her voice faded back down to a speaking volume.  “...here.”  She chuckled and shook her head.  “That girl. At least she’s going to use the big girl potty this time.”  Tommy’s eyes were drawn to the half-bath just adjacent to the living room.  It only had a toilet and a sink, no tub, but the shrunken boy’s eyes also noticed a slightly larger version of a toddler’s potty chair beneath the sink.  “What is with her some days?” Mommy said to no one in particular.

Tommy thought he had an idea what was with her.  His twin had the proportions of a petite yet grown woman, but the size and dress of an elementary schooler…and the mental maturity of a preschooler.  Katy was no doubt in the “special” classes Tommy had breezed through on his way back down the totem pole.  The biggest difference between her now and Tommy a week or so ago, was that Tommy hadn’t lost anything upstairs and the mountains of remedial and simplified worksheets were painfully boringly easy  for him.  Katy needed all the practice she could get and if the schoolwork wasn’t hard for her, then it was only because her brain had given up trying and realizing how below grade she was.  That and Tommy had kept going down until he was pleasantly padded in perpetuity.

Tommy had a lot of mixed emotions: Guilt, fear, and longing inside him, but he could handle them. He could deal with his close shave regarding graham crackers and forced impotence, and what that might mean for how much he enjoyed his new life.  He could figure out a way to balance his feelings about the mismatched goddess who had done this to him and his guilt over choices he’d been making that others didn’t have.   He could handle being one of only two people left in the known world who had been to Malacus and still had the brains to talk about it.  

Eventually he’d come to a decision on whether his love of being babied and cooed at and talked down to was his own inner desires made manifest or whether it was something that was literally projected onto him from an outside source.  Someday he might fully be comfortable thinking of Charlie as his father instead of an older yet younger playmate….

Later.  He could do all of that later.  Right now, he needed a sensory distraction.  “Mommy,” Tommy asked.  “Can I have a bottle of milk please?”

Mommy had her back turned. “No, but I can give you some milk in a couple minutes if you can be patient, baby boy.”  She was bent over and in the middle of unplugging an iPad from its charger in the wall.

Tommy pouted his lip out. “I don’t wanna be patient.”  He’d been through too much to be patient, but he resisted stamping his foot.

Clomping footsteps signaled Katy’s approach down the stairs.  “All done, Mommy!”  Tommy couldn’t testify to how successful Katy had been at toileting, but something had changed. The girl was no longer wearing pants, only a neon pink t-shirt and extra thick cotton Lambchop training panties.

Mommy didn’t seem at all perturbed or bothered.  “Did you wipe?” she asked.

Katy nodded her head. “Uh-huh! Really good!”

Mommy sniffed. “Are you sure, I still smell pee-pee.”

A finger was leveled at Katy’s shrunken twin. “That’s Tommy! He’s wet!”

“I am n-!” Tommy stopped himself. He wanted to shout his sister down, but it was coming from a place of sibling rivalry.  He looked down at the bright blue stripe running down the middle of his diaper, kenw that it was important, but for some reason couldn’t access the information. Tommy genuinely wasn’t sure if he was wet.  More importantly, he didn’t care.  His diaper felt nice and squishy in the moment, and it was difficult remembering if it ever felt any other way.  “So?”

The two women- such as they were- ignored him.  “I’ll just have to make sure to clean you up good,” Mommy said more to her elf than either of her shrunken adult children.  “Did you flush?”

Katy nodded her head and said a hearty “Uh-huh!”  But then glanced at her bare feet.  Call it Twin-ESP or a hidden memory from when Katy was actually a barely potty trained toddler, but Tommy knew his sister was lying.  No flushing had occurred.  Wiping was now decidedly suspect.

“Should I go check?”  Mommy asked.

A rosy blush accompanied his big-little-twin’s bluff. “Yeah….”

Mommy bobbed her head, curtly.  “Alright. I’ll go check.”  

Tommy and Katy watched their mother go to the upstairs bathroom.  Katy did a poor job of hiding both her apprehension and her emotional hunger.  The anxiety, Tommy figured, was aimed at the fact that she might get caught. The hunger was directed at the iPad that Mommy carried with her.  Something desired and something to be avoided.

“You didn’t flush, did you?”  Tommy asked. Katy didn’t answer. “Why’d you lie to Mommy?”

Flashes of the old Katy showed themselves. “Don’t worry about it.”

Mommy came down, seemingly satisfied.  “Okay, honey. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”  She punched in a passcode on the iPad and then handed it to Katy.

“Yaaaaay!” Katy held the device up like it was Excalibur and ran to the otherside of the living room.  Tommy’s ears wiggled, when from out of the tablet some children’s website like PBSKids started playing.

Tommy didn’t have time to process or ponder what deception Katy had pulled off. Before he knew it, Mommy had taken him over to the couch and his bum was squishing in her lap. “Ready for that milk, baby?”

“Yeah!” Tommy said. His head started swiveling, looking for a bottle.  “Where is…?” His eyes locked onto his mother’s lactating nipple, dripping with creamy milk.  “Oh…”

“Come on,” Mommy coaxed. “Eat up. Don’t be shy.”

The boy wasn’t shy. Not at all. Mommy tilted him so that he was cradled and he immediately latched on to being suckling. Mommy held him tight so that he couldn’t wriggle away; not that he wanted to.

Thuck-uck. Thuck-uck. Thuck-uck.

He nursed in time with her heartbeat, enjoying the warmth, closing his eyes and syncing his breathing with hers as Mommy gently hummed and rubbed his back.  He might have wet his diaper even more right then, or it could have just been the warm milk of her love filling him the bottoms of his toes and slowly rising up to his head.

“I’m so glad you never grew out of this,” Mommy whispered gently to him.

Tommy agreed, but made no sign to show that he heard her.  His body laid peacefully in place, sculling thoughtlessly, while his mind soared in the clouds above.

Thuck-uck. Thuck-uck. Thuck-uck.

“My sweet, special boy.”

Tommy was tempted to nurse faster at Mommy’s praise, but he resisted, enjoying the steady flow from her to him.  Had he been a cat he’d have started purring endlessly.  He was better than a cat though. Nobody liked cleaning a litter box, and babies didn’t have to deal with hairballs.

“Okay,” Mommy whispered. “Switch.”

Already?  Time had lost some meaning for young master Dean. He didn’t have time to complain or let out more than the slightest childish whine. Mommy had already uncupped the other half of her nursing bra and adjusted him accordingly.

Thuck-uck. Thuck-uck. Thuck-uck.

Three sucks and Tommy was back in his own personal paradise, nestled up against her and drawing the stuff of life.  Thoughts and sensations buried too deeply in his mind to be called memoires bubbled up to the surface.. This was how it was supposed to be.  Him a baby, being taken care of by his Mommy.  On some level, Tommy knew that as surely as he knew he was born.  He didn’t care just then whether that was a need he’d always had, or one that had been magically cast upon him.

Thuck-uck. Thuck-uck. Thuck-uck.

He felt the smallest, faintest ache inside him and with it an urge he didn’t have the ability to put words to.  Tommy didn’t need words, however.  It was simple enough to relax and let his body do what it needed to do.  He was only vaguely aware as he pushed out the mess into the seat of his diaper.  It was the feeling of his cheeks spreading and the added weight ballooning out more than anything.  Tommy grinned, slightly, but he stopped as soon as he felt a few bits of droplets trickle out of his mouth.

“Mommy!” Katy whined. “Tommy pooped!”

“Yes, dear,” Mommy said. “I know. I heard it too.”  Tommy felt his mess press up against him a little more when Mommy patted the back of his diaper.  Interesting. Tommy hadn’t heard the sounds coming from his rear because his ears were too full of his own suckling, greedy mewls, and Mommy’s tuneless humming.

“Mommy,” Katy asked. “How old is Tommy?”

Tommy didn’t stop nursing.

“Eighteen dear. Same age as you.”

“Why does he get to wear diapers?”  

Tommy stopped suckling. There was something about the way his sister said that: ‘Why does he get to wear diapers.’  Not ‘Why does he have to wear diapers?’ or just ‘Why does he wear diapers?’

Mommy pulled Tommy away from her and shifted him over her shoulder.  “Because he’s a baby.”  Tommy felt her start rubbing and patting his back, coaxing the.gas bubbles out of him one burp at a time.

“I’m eighteen,”  Katy said. “Am I a baby?”

“No, Katy,” Mommy told her. “You’re a big girl.”

Tommy heard his sister break into a whine.  “But whhhyyy? We’re the same age. Why is he a baby?”  If reality hadn’t been molded around Tommy like play-doh, it would have been a fair question.

Reality had been, so it wasn’t.  

“Your brother has severe developmental delays,” Mommy said, still burping him. There was a rote quality to it like she’d told Katy this a million and one times previously. She finished burping Tommy and sat him back down in her lap, neither one bothered that it was newly filled.  “You have…less.  You’re a big girl.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Babies don’t get to play with iPads,” Mommy said with a hint of warning. “Big girls do. Do you still want to be a baby?”

Katy hung her head and stared at her tablet. “No….”

Mommy stood up, taking Tommy with her.  She held him by the waist so that she could tilt her daughter’s chin upwards.   “Good girl. Now help me change your brother.”

Katy’s appearance changed instantly. “Kay-kay!”  Katy scampered off and returned ten seconds later with a changing pad.  She flapped it open and watched as Tommy was laid down upon it.

Tommy was laid down on the floor and his shirt was scooted up past his belly button so that nothing was even remotely get in the way of the impending change. He made eye contact with Katy. She looked at him intently; intensely, with unblinking eyes.  Hungry eyes. Jealous eyes.  This was gonna be weird.

“Can I have some privacy, please?” Tommy asked.

“Nope,” Katy said. “Mommy said I get to help and I get to help.”

“It’s nothing Katy hasn’t seen before, baby.” Mommy told him.

He supposed that from their point of view, Mommy was right. He thought he saw Katy’s eye twitch a little bit.

“Can I hand you the diaper?” she asked Mommy.

“Sure thing,” Mommy said. “Wipes too.”  

On the living room coffee table was a small stack of diapers and a pack of wipes. Nothing ornate or decorative, like the mounds of Pampers and Huggies and Luvs under Tommy’s changing table, or the diaper rash creams, oils, and baby powder in their little alcoves on top.  Just the kind of layout a family that was very used to changing a baby might have for when they didn’t feel like going all the way to the nursery. Tommy gazed as his sister grabbed the top diaper, looked at it a little too long and then handed it to their mother.

Mommy didn’t seem to notice. “Wipes too,” she repeated.

“Can I hand you them one at a time?” Katy asked hopefully.  “It can be like that funny kitty cat cartoon.  You say diaper, and I hand you the diaper, and you can say wipe and I’ll hand you a wipe, and then you can powder and I can hand you the powder.”

“Katy,” Mommy said. “Just give me the whole packet of wipes.”

“Yes, Mommy.”

She was trying to draw this out.  Tommy didn’t need to ask himself why.  Were there positions reversed, he would have done the same thing.

He quietly laid there on the change mat, making eye contact with his sister.  Mommy opened up the diaper and leaned forward to wipe his penis and genitals. Tommy gritted his teeth and tried not to think of Nanny doing the same thing (which did not help). Getting an erection in front of his own mother would have been embarrassing if not statistically impossible to avoid after a long enough time.  His twin sister standing over him and staring jealously down at him just took the cringe to a whole new level.

Mommy crossed his ankles and lifted his legs so that she could wipe his bottom. Tommy, meanwhile, had developed an intense interest in what his knees looked like.  The coldness cascading quickly over his cheeks and brushing up against his hole made him just uncomfortable enough so that any form of arousal was not going to happen.  The Malacus daycare didn’t need magical graham crackers; it just needed Katy standing over him at the changing table.

Tommy shuddered and Mommy apologized. “I know the wipes are cold, but they get you all clean.”  The new diaper came underneath him.

“No powder?”  Katy asked.

“No powder.” Mommy echoed.  “All done.” And she finished putting the diaper on around Tommy’s hips.

Katy seemed disappointed, almost like she’d missed some kind of favorite magic trick. The disappointment didn’t last long.  A completely new and startled expression came over her.  “Mommy!” She yelped. “Poopy!  “

“Huh?!” Mommy left the dirty diaper where it laid and stood up.

“Poopy! I need to poopy!”  Mommy vaulted through the living room and into the half bath to get the training potty seat.  “POOOOPY!”

Like an army medic performing emergency triage, Mommy placed and sat the potty down with one hand, yanked the back of Katy’s lambchop trainers down with the other hand,then sat the girl down with both.

“Twins.” Mommy chuckled, wiping the sweat from her brow.  She bent back over and picked up the dirty diaper off the floor.  “Should have been ready for that.”

Tommy walked around and looked at this bigger twin sitting there on the potty.  Her eyes vacant, and her face twitching while soft little grunts came out of her.  She looked…hurting…like she was having a stroke.

“Mommy!” Tommy called, fearing for his twin. “Something’s wrong with Katy!”

The sound of running water mixed with Mommy’s reply.  “No there’s not, honey. She’s just going potty like a big girl.”  She was washing her hands after throwing away the diaper.

That was going potty?  No way was that…going…it suddenly occurred to Tommy that he didn’t know for sure.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Tommy.”

Katy continued to make funny sounds both from out of her mouth and somewhere else that echoed off the potty.

Why didn’t he know that?  He searched his personal memory banks and found…nothing.  His sister was sitting right in front of him and he couldn’t figure out what she was doing, exactly.  He didn’t know.  He just didn’t know.

“Katy?” he asked. “Are you okay.?”

“Mmmm.hmmmm!  Tryin’...to…poopy”

What did he know about going potty? He started pacing the floor in front of her.  Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of loud noise that was like roaring and sucking at the same time? The sounds he heard weren’t anything like that. Sharper. Squeakier.  And Katy was moaning but not in a fun way.

“The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides.” He rattled off the old geometry formula.  Mr. Jordan would have been proud. But he couldn’t make heads or tales out of this potty business.  He tried to remember using it, knew that he had been, but no memories came to mind.  A giant 404 screen in his mind had come up out of nowhere.

He suddenly realized that he was staring at his sister going potty just like she’d been staring at him getting changed and felt guilty for it.  He stared down at his bare feet and turned away.  He wiggled his toes anxiously and ended up accidentally staring at his own fresh padding.

How much did he know about diapers?  He knew they were soft.  And comfy.  And could get squishy.  Tommy’s member threatened to engorge itself.  He needed a different approach. He knew what a potty looked like.  His sister was sitting on one, and there was a bigger one nearby and one upstairs and one in Mommy’s room.  White funny chair.  But he didn’t know how they worked or how to sue them.  
Tommy asked himself the same thing: How did his diaper work?  How did he take it off?  He didn’t know. He looked down at the front. Did it have something to do with the tabs on the front? Or maybe the yellow line down the middle.  He seemed to remember that every time the diaper came off, the line was at least a little blue.  That didn’t feel right though.

He looked at the remaining diapers on the living room table, stacked neatly and rectangular. He looked back down at himself.  How did something shaped so square and flat  end up so round and puffy on him?  

Feeling stupid, Tommy grabbed the diaper and pressed it to his crotch.  Nothing happened.  Didn’t Mommy do something to it? Bend it?  It was hard for him to remember.  He never saw it because he was always laying down.  Maybe he had to lay on it?

“The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!”  He could remember that, but he couldn’t figure out potty training or even how a friggin diaper worked?  

What if Nanny had lied to him. What if he was losing his maturity and intelligence, but the glass was being drained from the bottom, not the top.  He was well and thoroughly not potty trained and a mental block was keeping him from recognizing potty training when it was going on right in front of him.

“I’mma baby I’mma baby I’mma baby.”  The words came out in tiny breaths between Katy’s lips.  He wasn’t meant to hear this.  “I’mma baby I’mma baby I’mma baby.”  Tommy knew those words and that frantic hushed tone all too well.  Those memories hadn’t been deleted.  Her eyes were open, but Katy wasn’t seeing anything in the room.  Looking at where her hands were, Tommy still knew enough about biology to know that his sister wasn’t using them to wipe.

Nervously, Tommy reached down and grabbed his sister’s iPad.  “Here,” he said, handing it to Katy.  “Pretend it’s a newspaper.  It helps.”  Tommy had no idea if he was telling the truth or not.  He just remembered a lot of old T.V. shows had old people walking out of the potty holding one.

Funnily enough, it worked. Katy snapped out of her trans focused her eyes on the glowing screen and it seemed to give her strength.  Within ten seconds, her grunts had become one loud relieved sigh.  At least one of the two things she’d been trying to do had happened.  “Done,” she said. Then “Mommy!  Come wipe!”

“Coming. Coming.”  Mommy said.  “Just had to send a few texts to work.”

As though it were rote memorization Katie stood up and bent over. She laid her iPad on the floor and kept poking at it while Mommy wiped her bottom standing up.  Tommy did not like what he saw inside the little chair with a hole in it. That was potty?!  Gross!

This was too much for him.  Tommy dashed out the living room as much as his stubby and waddling legs would allow him to. He crawled his way up the stairs and rose to his feet.  “Gotta get to my room. Gotta get to my room!”  

He’d been tricked by Nanny. He was certain of it.  She’d found a loophole or a workaround from him imprinting his name into the algae.  Scared out of his mind and racing with every single possibility save for how to use the potty and how to remove or put on his diaper.

The shrunken boy barreled into his closet where he’d last hidden it, certain that it would be gone, stolen by the mismatched nymph woman.  Surely that had been why she was absent today at daycare; she’d been sneaking away to get the-

“Ink?”

No. Still there.  All safe.  Even in the near pitch blackness of the closet he could still see the unnaturally electric blue algae stuff glimmering in the stolen vase.

“That was close.”

“Tommy?” Mommy called from down the stairs.. “Where are you, baby?”

Tommy re-hid the vase filled with otherworldly goop, and hurried out to answer.  “Uh…Katy’s room!”  It was a terrible lie, but it was the best he could think of. If Mommy thought he was playing around in his room, she’d want to see what he’d done and start investigating.  Maybe find a certain vase and pour its contents down the sink. Better to mess up his sister’s room. He skipped down the hall and slunk into her door, just to make the fib true.

“Why there?” Mommy asked.  No footsteps were forthcoming. No bodies were moving.

“No reason!”

Katie must have heard her twins lie and jumped to a different conclusion. “Leave my stuffie alone!”  That had struck a nerve.

A mischievous impulse took hold of the boy.  He’d cover his tracks.  He’d cover his tracks good.

“Make me!” Tommy yelled and burst through her door.  Katy would help cover his tracks for him.  She was still good for that.  He slammed the door shut and ran out into the middle of the carpet. The room was fairly pristine at the moment, save for the pants she’d shed in going potty upstairs.  She’d soon fix that for him, Let Katy tear everything apart trying to find him.  Where to hide, though?

The rapid fire pummeling of feet on stairs announced Katy’s impending arrival.  Thinking quickly he hit the floor and crawled under the bed.  His body was so small that he could scooch under. Poor simple Katy wouldn’t think to look there since she was too big. Even if she did find him, she wouldn’t be able to do anything to him.  Couldn’t reach.  

In the final few seconds before the door flew open and a manic Katy did what big sisters had done to little brothers for time immemorial, Tommy sniffed something so foul smelling that even his nose wrinkled.

Nanny had missed a spot in scrubbing his brain of potty training and diaper knowledge.  He couldn’t tell if he was wet or dry, but his nose still knew the smell of fermenting piss.  Wedged between the bedframe and the floor, Tommy turned his head one hundred and eighty degrees.  

Right next to him, balled up and discolored with lines turned bright blue down the center, were half a dozen used disposable diapers stashed away.

Tommy now thought he knew why he didn’t hear the potty roar sound when she went upstairs to go pee-pee.