CHAPTER FOUR: HOME AGAIN

The visit to Melanie's was awkward, at least at first. Brian Harmon, Melanie's dad, answered the door and the two of them didn't recognize one another. Elias, obviously, looked more and more different every day. Mr. Harmon looked about five years younger and a lot more buff, with an angular, stubbly jaw and thick, coal-black hair. Beyond him in the living room, a woman - who must have been Angie Harmon, his wife - lazed on the sectional couch, casually groping herself through a too-tight sweater. Apparently, everybody in Melanie's family had gotten AHS except for the two older Harmon siblings, neither of whom lived in Corona.

"Hi, Mr. Harmon. I'm here to see Melanie," Elias said. In his own ears, his voice sounded like that of a thirteen or fourteen year old kid.

Brian Harmon blinked in confusion. "Uh... Elias? Is that you?"

"Um... yeah."

"What the hell happened to you, son?" He looked vaguely embarrassed at the comment. "Sorry. Sorry, Elias. It's just... well, you look. Um..."

"Yeah. I've got AHS and they think it's turning me into a girl," he said. He was definitely turning into a girl. It was pretty obvious what was happening to him... but it felt a bit weird to be divulging it so matter-of-factly.

"Shit. Well... I'm awfully sorry to hear that, Elias. Does that mean that you and Mel... I mean..."

Elias shrugged. "We'll see. I hope this isn't a problem."

Brian Harmon saw Elias inside, scratching at his stubble. "We're a Christian family, Elias," he said. "We're taught it's a sin." What they were taught was a sin he left as an exercise to those present. His broad shoulders sagged. "But lately, things have been so goddamn crazy - pardon the language - that I just don't know. I guess at this point I just want what'll make Melanie happy. Really happy, I mean, and not just... well, you know. Sex. And if that's you, whatever crazy thing it is that's happening to you... well I'm not going to make too much of a fuss over it. But you should probably knock before you let yourself in. She's been..."

"I think we all have," Elias said.

"Yeah. Anyhow, for what it's worth, I hope things are okay between you two."

"Hiiii, Elias," Angie Harmon mumbled as he passed.

He went up the stairs and knocked, opening the unlocked door when Melanie called for him to come in. She wasn't up to anything indecent in her room, though Elias's notion of what was indecent had changed a lot in the past few days. After all, his new friends at the community center had casually gone in for an impromptu threesome just before he left. These were strange times. Melanie's room smelled of sex, but the odor was understated and her bedding was all fresh. She sat cross-legged upon her bed, her face tense in concentration as she did problems on her phone. Rather than interrupt, Elias just watched her for a minute as she finished the brain exercises.

She was dressed in a too-tight sports bra revealing full, softball-sized breasts that must have been every bit a D-cup. Her midriff was toned, and her gym shorts were stretched over too-wide hips and smooth, toned legs. When she looked up at him and her frown of concentration became a sunny smile, Elias could easily imagine her as a Pixogram fitness model. In fact, she was picking up Pixogram followers by the truckload and her suggestive posts increasingly looked exactly like those of an 'influencer'. Elias wasn't sure how he felt about that. But there was no question how he felt about her. Even in its diminished state, his cock was poking taut in his loose jeans.

"Oh my god!" Melanie giggled. "El! You're so skinny!"

"It's not funny," he said. God, he sounded like a petulant kid!

She uncurled from the bed like a lynx and padded over to him. They were almost eye to eye, and if she'd been wearing sneakers they would have been exactly that. "I think we're the same height," she said. "I'm 5'7" and 135 pounds now."

That was up quite a bit. She'd been around 5'4" and maybe 110 pounds before. He still outweighed her, though not by a hell of a lot, and there was no indication that he'd stop getting shorter and slimmer anytime soon. But he forgot about the extent of his changes when she started kissing him. She smelled slightly floral and a bit musky and she easily had twice the volume of hair she'd had before, soft and dark and full-bodied. She groped his crotch and he moaned.

"I see you still have Mr. Happy," she said, and they rolled onto the bed.

"Your parents..." Elias said.

She sighed, but it was a happy sigh. "They've been going at it like gangbusters," Melanie said. "Every three or four hours since I got back yesterday. If I hear one peep from them about us, I'm going to install soundproofing and send them the bill."

"Fair enough."

They made out on the bed for a while, their tongues intermingling, his hands upon her plush, full breasts, her nipples hard and prominent beneath her overtaxed bra. He snaked one hand down Melanie's shorts and found her hot and wet and without panties. Perfect. He ran his fingers along her slit, paying special attention to her slippery clit. He groaned when she stroked his hard member - it was only three inches long now, less than half its original length, but it felt better than ever. Melanie didn't play with his nipples, though, which he'd been doing in his own still-frequent self-exploration sessions. She didn't know about them yet. He reached a juice-slicked hand up to fondle his own chest when he felt a hand clamp over his wrist.

"Huh?"

With a shift of her body's weight, Melanie rolled Elias over and straddled him, grinding on top of his abdomen. Her hands held him to the mattress and she looked down at him with a mischievous, lust-glazed grin. He could feel her pussy, hot and wet through her shorts, but there was precious little friction upon his own small but insistent erection. He thrust his hips a few times but got nothing out of it. He tried to push free of her, making a little headway before realizing with some chagrin that they were almost evenly-matched strength-wise. He rocked his own body and managed to roll on top of her, positioning himself to face her as she spread her legs. Her cheeks were flush with arousal and exhilaration.

He pulled his jeans and boxers off easily - they were far too loose on him anyhow - as Melanie divested herself of her own shorts. He slipped into her hot snatch easily and thrust a few times. It felt pretty good, but there wasn't much friction. He was too small. Melanie must have been of a similar opinion, because she pushed him back and waited for him to reposition so they could sixty-nine. Then Elias sank his shrinking prick into her hot and waiting mouth and went to cunt city with his tongue, lapping at Melanie's wetness as she moaned beneath him. Her own ministrations sent shivers up his spine and had Elias moaning. She'd suck him in, swirl her tongue around his little rod, and then pull out and give its dainty head delicate flicks with her tongue that sent vibrato pleasure all across his body. More than once, his back arched out involuntarily at the sensation and he couldn't believe how shrill and insistent the cries of passion that came out of him were. He came almost as many times as she did, the meager spurts of semi-cloudy fluid that came out of his prick doing little to quell his arousal. That was new. And when Melanie was sated, she pushed him off with a little grunt and drew him into a cuddle atop her no-longer-fresh sheets. Elias ran his fingers up and down her body. Her skin was almost blemish-free and had only a few downy body hairs interrupting its perfect, sweaty sheen. Her arms and abs were taut beneath smooth skin, as if she'd embarked on a life-altering fitness regimen in the course of a few short days.

"Wow," Elias said.

"I have HT-02," Melanie said with a sigh. "I'm only going to get better." She ran her fingers through his increasingly long, thick, and blonde-streaked hair and drew him into a languorous kiss.

In his CDC booklet on AHS and its 'flavors', Elias had committed some of the more common types to memory. There were just over 100 flavors, a few of the ultra-rare ones cataloged by only a single odd case study. Most flavors were pretty rare, and the ten most common subtypes occupied over half of all cases. Fifth or sixth on that list was HT-02 or 'hypertrophic with secondary hyperfemininity', which most people just called Sporty. It comprised two to three percent of known cases. Women with HT-02 gained an average of about five inches in height, had their figures swell out to an extent just a bit less than the hyperfeminine 'Basic Bombshell' body type, and gained twenty or so pounds of muscle. It wasn't enough to look masculine, especially not with the other body dimensions considered, but they could effortlessly pull off the hardbodied female athlete look. Melanie was perhaps half-way to that end. She was only going to get bigger, stronger, and sexier, and Elias was conflicted on how that made him feel. Unless he was very mistaken, he would be getting sexier, probably a lot sexier than his current cutely androgynous look... but he wasn't getting any bigger or stronger. Quite the opposite.

"What does this mean for us?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "I think we should give it time."

"I should visit my family," Elias said eventually.

"Do they know yet? About how you're changing?"

"Not exactly... I should probably just straight-out tell them. Rip off that band aid, you know? But it's sooo embarrassing."

"Yeah," Melanie said. Not the support he was looking for. "But it's not your fault." She kissed his forehead. That felt a bit more like it.

They cuddled for a while more before Melanie rolled off the bed and padded over to her little study desk to do more cognitive exercises. "I think that maybe I can be a doctor like this," she said hopefully. "Maybe I'll study sports medicine. I figure I'd be good at that."

"You would be," Elias agreed. He hadn't had any clue what he wanted to do before AHS and he was even less certain now. "I should go," he said.

She threw her AHS book at him and laughed. "Then go already, doofus! I've got a doctor brain to preserve over here!"

The walk from Melanie's room out to his car was one of the stranger ones that Elias had experienced. He didn't say anything, carefully avoiding eye contact with any of the Harmons. The Harmons, too, avoided any eye contact with him. The little wooden crucifix mounted on their wall sat like an accusatory blot. Nobody said anything. But they knew what he and Melanie had been doing, he knew that they knew, and they knew that he knew that they knew ad infinitum. In their open, two-story living room, they couldn't have helped but overhear the young couple's unrestrained cries of passion. And like some teenage punk in his older brother's clothes, Elias had to keep one hand on his belt buckle to keep his pants from sliding right off his skinny ass as he shuffled down their stairs.

"Good seeing you, El," Angie Harmon said distractedly. "Keep in touch."

"I hope everything turns out okay," Bryan said, holding the door for him.

His cheeks burned with embarrassment. "Thanks," he said and walked out to his Accord, still parked in front of their house from before his world went crazy.

- - - - - 

Elias's return to his own home was hardly less awkward, though at least his parents were amazingly supportive. Mrs. Pinella from across the street just happened to be visiting at the time, and boy had she changed. She was in her early seventies, a widow, and a grandmother. Presumably, she was still the latter two - AHS didn't kill people or bring them back to life - but she was no longer in her seventies. Mrs. Pinella looked to be about twenty years younger now and was sporting some serious curves to go along with the 'cougar' look she now had going on. She was leaving just as Elias came in, intercepting him in the entryway before he even had a chance to break the news to his parents. She noted Elias's attention to her body with a slightly bemused look.

"Brat," she said.

"Excuse me?"

She laughed. "The one I have is PH-02, called brat," she said. "It makes you a short, sexy bitch. Which isn't so much of a change for me, really. I've always had bitchy."

"Isn't PH-01 the flavor that makes you into a... um... disagreeable person?"

Mrs. Pinella laughed again. "If you say so. I guess there's more than one kind like that. But I'm a grown up and know when to bite my fucking tongue." She blushed and covered her mouth. "Mostly."

With a flavor named 'brat', Elias wondered whether she'd get much younger-looking, too. He recalled from the handbook that AHS generally split the difference between your current age and late puberty in changing your appearance. For the very old, it was a godsend, and for the extremely rare cases of young children catching AHS, it could catapult them years forward. For him, though, it hardly meant a difference - a year or two younger, maybe. And, by those same calculations, Mrs. Pinella should have wound up in her mid-forties eventually. But some of the flavors had more substantial effects on age, and if Elias had to guess, his elderly neighbor was going to drop a few more decades before all was done. He just couldn't imagine her as a sulking, sexy, sixteen-year-old brat... or could he?

As he thought this, Mrs. Pinella looked him up and down with the same bemused expression that appeared to be her default mode. "Do mommy and daddy know?"

"Not yet," he said, blushing. Why was he blushing so much lately? Well... he was pretty sure he knew why. His hormones were going wild.

"Well I'll leave you to break the good news. Go get 'em, girl!"

She gave him a playful swat on the butt and saw her way out of the house, her lime-green summer dress swaying and stretched taut against her expanding rear. Elias swallowed and headed into the house.

"Mom? Dad?" He hadn't spoken to either of them in more than a day. Back then, he hadn't sounded anything like this.

When his father, sitting in his reading chair, spotted him walking into the living room, he stared slack-jawed and dropped his coke, spilling it all over the rug. His mother - he presumed it was his mother, Lauren Bouquet - made a little 'eep' of surprise and minced over to the site of the spill, oblivious to Elias's arrival. She bent over at the waist, her newly-plump and firm ass swaying back and forth in her stylish pink dress as she blotted up the spilled soda. Her hair was golden blonde, tumbling down a few inches past her shoulders and he could see her breasts jiggling from behind as she blotted. Then she stood up primly, one hand on her cocked hip, and made a little huff.

"What was that all about?" she asked.

Elias's dad said nothing, he just gestured vaguely behind her, his uncomprehending eyes still locked on Elias. With a big, deliberate swivel, like an expertly-controlled marionette, she turned around to face him, her pouting crimson lips moving back and forth as she processed what she was seeing. Elias didn't blame her - he was pretty busy processing the vaguely-recognizable bombshell in the '60s fetish polka dot pink dress.

"Elias... is that you?" his father said.

"Yeah." He cleared his throat, hoping to get a little more gravitas. "Yeah, it's me," he blurted. Mission failed.

Elias couldn't help but notice his father's eyes making furtive little flicks in the direction of his mother's ass, now within easy groping distance. He suspected they'd been doing a lot of that - several articles of lacy lingerie were scattered along the staircase and dangling from the bannister. Elias was very careful to only maintain eye contact. If either he or his mother started ramping up along the horny sequence, it was going to be really awkward for everybody.

"We were worried sick," his father said eventually. "What's... what's happening to you? Are you?"

Elias nodded dumbly. "Yeah. AHS is turning me into a girl. We don't know what flavor yet."

"Oh!" his mother said, finally comprehending the implications of the scene playing out before her. Elias hoped she was keeping up on her mental exercises. "Well it's not so bad! It's okay..."

Lauren tottered over and pulled him into a hug. The flowery scent of her perfume and the softness of her bosom dominated his awareness for a moment. Elias started sniffing back tears, and he wasn't entirely sure why.

"Oh... oh no! What's wrong honey?" his mother said. She plucked a tissue from the little box on the end table and handed it to him. "Shh... there, there."

"We're just glad you're safe," his father said lamely. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not really," Elias said. "I have a group at the community center for that. I just want to, you know, make sure you're okay with me. With who I'm becoming."

His father shrugged. He stood from his reading chair and sidled up to El's mother, standing right beside her. And, with a sly glint in his eye, he shifted a hand to right on Lauren Bouquet's plush ass. If he'd thought he was being conspicuous, he was woefully and utterly wrong.

"Son... should I call you son?" His father said. Elias didn't know what to say. "El... it's not your fault. It's nobody's fault. As long as you're happy and safe, that's fine."

Suddenly, Elias's mother's face went from one of patient (if slightly aroused) understanding to one of blank terror. "Uh..." she said. "Greg? We should..." she whispered something to her husband. He, too went pale.

"Um... yup..." he said.

Elias's mother wandered off, the back of her dress settling back down from where it had been hiked up. Elias's father wiped his hand against his trouser leg. Gross!

"What was that all about?" Elias asked.

"We have some... things... left out upstairs. We... uh... were playing..."

Elias held up a slim hand. "I'm going to stop you right there. I don't even want to know. It's been a strange few days and if you knew half of what I was up to when I was... going through the first bit... you'd just about shit yourself."

"Language!"

Elias laughed. "The guy who was just manhandling his wife in front of their college-aged son is going to insist on clean language?"

His father laughed, too. "Old habit," he said. "I guess there's going to be a lot to get used to. Especially with your... you know. How long?"

Elias shrugged. "A week and a half, maybe?"

"And does Granny Olsen know?"

Grandma Olsen was Elias's maternal grandmother. His very religious maternal grandmother out in Tempe, Arizone. His best guess was that she'd think AHS was of the devil or some such nonsense and would insist on... something no fun. Elias couldn't guess. She'd want him to continue stoically pretending to be a man. Or insist that he embrace traditional Christian womanhood. Or dress in gender-neutral clothing and go live in a nunnery. Did Lutherans have nunneries? The point was she hadn't been happy to learn that Elias had gone on unchaperoned dates in high school, so she'd be none too enthused to learn that Elias was fucking his way all over Corona as he slowly changed into a girl.

"Granny Olsen doesn't know," he said.

"Oh thank god." Greg Bouquet sat back in his chair. "We're going to need to give it a good long think before we break it to that old bat."

Elias started up the stairs, the sounds of his mother bumping and shuffling things around in her clean-up frenzy clearly audible. He turned back to his father to give her another few moments to get things sorted.

"Um... none of my clothes fit anymore. Do you know where my and Nolan's old clothes are?"

Greg scratched his head. "In the guest room side closet, I believe. And - don't be embarrassed - your mother can't fit into most of her clothes either. Take whatever you want."

"Thanks, dad."

"Any time."

- - - - - 

Elias had no idea what to do for clothes - he had an increasingly slim and boyish figure, but it wouldn't stay that way forever. His current changes excluded a good chunk of the flavors… he wasn't getting Sporty, for instance… but that left dozens of possibilities. Depending on the flavor of AHS he had, his figure would either bloom into modest adolescent femininity, swell into outrageously-proportioned parodic womanhood, or anything in-between. Gender-changing cases were rare enough that there wasn't much information to go on. If he'd had a typical case, he'd have got his flavor figured out days ago along with 95% of those affected. Elias had no idea what sizes he'd need for the next few days, so he just took a bit of everything to have a change or two for whatever metamorphosis he might undergo. Once AHS was done with him, he'd almost certainly need a new wardrobe.

He lay on his bed, looking down at himself. It was utterly surreal - here he was, back at home and in his room, the same room he'd been in less than a week ago planning to visit Melanie's for a Friday night tryst. It was the same room, the same bed, everything the same except him. He wore the little wannabe-hipster jeans he'd worn in seventh grade and the little maroon boxer briefs he'd sworn by. They fit him perfectly, except for the seat, which was tight, and the crotch, which was not. How embarrassing. His nipples were poking through Nolan's size small Coldplay t-shirt, which otherwise fit pretty well, and his old size-8 Vans fit just right. He'd gone down three shoe sizes! It was a simultaneous blast from the past and an ominous peek at things to come.

He tried not to dwell on his ongoing changes, though - he was stressed enough as it was. It wasn't like there was anything he could do about it and it wasn't like he had much to complain about beyond AHS. He had a roof over his head, understanding parents, and a girlfriend who...

Elias's train of thought was interrupted by the sound of thumping and cries of passion resounding down the hallway. There was a whole guest room - Nolan's old room - between his room and his parents', but he could hear them loud and clear. They were fucking. Again. If this was the stamina his old man possessed without AHS, he shuddered to think of what he'd be like with it. Quite possibly just like Elias, as his chromosomal condition was heritable and nobody knew how far up the family tree it went. Had he been in his father's shoes, Elias would have been tempted to get his mother to stop taking PV-981 (even though that was completely illegal) to get a little extra AHS mojo, and in so doing might have been completely thwarted by a cruel trick of biology. Hopefully, cooler heads would prevail in the current case - on the drug, transmission rates were less than one in a thousand.

He spent some time on his phone, messaging with his friends. He'd been taking pictures of himself to document his changes, but he hadn't posted those anywhere. He couldn't stand the thought of those pictures getting back to Grandma Olsen or anybody else in the family's more religious wing. His phone chimed.

<You gonna send me more pictures, babe?, Melanie messaged him.
<I sent you lots! :kiss face:

<You posted like half of those to Pixogram, he replied.
<They're a public commodity now

<Not this one!

No, that she had not. She was doing a handstand with her legs spread slightly past horizontal - a pose that there was no fucking way she could manage before AHS. And she was completely naked. Upside down, her breasts were just a bit more uplifted. They were as big as grapefruits, their raspberry nipples drifting chinward with gravity. Melanie had shaved her snatch bare, and it was clear she was aroused. Between the slightly swollen lips, the pink protrusion of her clit, and the line of slick leakage trailing up her groin, it was clear that she was quite wet and had been holding that pose for at least a few seconds. Lines of moisture streaked her swollen tits where she'd obviously been groping herself. And... yes, that was definitely a very wet, very big dildo lying next to her left hand.

<Does that turn you on?

     If I was there, I'd fuck the brat out of you>, he posted, thinking back to Mrs. Pinella the day before. He snaked a hand underneath his jeans and felt his little erection. It had already leaked a patch of sticky fluid down there.

<Would you now ;)
<How big are you anyway?
<Or should I say little?, Melanie texted.

<5'5"?

<Lol! You know what I mean!

He did, indeed. He was maybe two inches erect and his dick had started to migrate down, a little pinkie of a thing jutting down from his lower crotch at perhaps a sixty degree angle rather than its formerly proud 6 1/2 past-perpendicular inches.

"Honey?" his mother said. She tapped on the door.

Elias yanked his hand out of his pants. His other hand had been alternating between his phone and tweaking his nipple right in the middle of the 'O' on his brother's old Coldplay t-shirt.

"Uh... what?" His voice sounded more feminine than masculine now. His hair was mostly blonde.

"Are you... are you busy?"

He sighed. "No, I'm not 'busy'," he said, not entirely honestly. "And you don't have to sugarcoat it. We both have AHS."

She opened the door and peeked in, taking in the scene with some uncertainty. As small as his dick was, there was no way for her to tell he was smuggling a travel-sized stiffie, not even in his snot-nosed seventh grader hipster jeans. He offered her a terse smile.

"Didn't you say you had a group meeting thing? I could swear you said at three."

Elias was fairly certain that she was looking for an excuse to get him out of the house. While things were slowly getting back to normal in Corona, Greg Bouquet was taking the week off to 'help his wife cope' with the devastating effects of AHS. Everybody knew what that meant: lots of fucking. Be that as it may, she wasn't wrong. He had a group meeting with Team Gender-Bender at 3 pm.

+++++

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