See Yourself Be Yourself

[12] Nakedly Showering

"Something I haven't heard yet. Maybe. Brent Lewis is my name, but my life has changed, and I want a name that reflects my own feelings, not something chosen for me at birth or at this possible new beginning. You can use either name until I decide who I want to be. Maybe a little more Brent, at least around here, but Misty is probably more appropriate for whatever comes next. Like the way you use Elle. How did you feel about that sort of thing?" All that felt like another marathon effort she had to shove into a few words.

"Okay, you tell me when you figure out what you want your name to be for good. I'll just call you Brent and Misty, whatever feels right. As for me, shit be complicated. Elle keeps it simple, but it's good to have everything in the same ballpark. Well, you better start showering, Brent. There are plenty of clean towels in the upstairs closet. I've got a whole bunch of different soaps if you need anything you don't have. Some of it is unscented and gentle because Valerie has problems, and I keep buying it because it is cheaper. Because it's raining, there's going to be a water flow problem, but it should be fine. Try to keep your shower time to about twenty minutes, as it gets lousy longer than that, and I want to shower too. If there's anything else, please just ask, and don't be afraid of me. I'm not a jerk. I'm just... me. Alright?"

Brent thought about the bags. There were a lot of soaps in them. She probably wouldn't need to borrow anything, but it was good to know. And it was good to be filled in a little about Lillis's situation. It wasn't much, but every little piece of the puzzle gave her a more complete impression of the girl. Or rather, the boy she started out as. She considered asking directly for her pronouns and preferred name, but all that was clear without the complications of her past.

So there was really no good way for her to broach the subject, but she would keep her ears trained, hoping to learn more. If she could figure out how this person dealt with such a monumental betrayal and life complication, it might provide ideas on how to handle her own situation.

That alone should have been reason enough to just ask, but this version didn't feel sturdy enough to be presented on its own. It needed the scaffolding of the right moment, the right theme, or something else woven together in just the right way. She would find it, but it would take time. In the meantime, she had to face the scariest subject that had nothing to do with other people: the presence of her own body now.

It was a ponderous task to gather everything she might need and set it in the bathroom. The upstairs of the apartment had a narrow hallway, and the doors were all tightly packed. Lillis made economical use of the spare room, packing in a lot of things related to music, tabletop games, and some video games to give Misty more clues about her life.

A large shelf of science fiction books, recently dusted, should have been a given after what they talked about in the car. There was also a large, detailed poster of the solar system, with celestial bodies she never knew existed, like Sedna and Eris, way out there. There was also a scaled-down, realistic version compared to the dramatic, exaggerated one in the center.

Slipping into a familiar existential place, Misty took in the fact that this was a small fragment of the full solar system, which could range from half a light year to almost four, which would be within spitting distance of the next star.

There are tens of thousands of stars of immeasurable complexity, with over 80% faint brown and red dwarfs that may be even more numerous than have been cataloged. The exact details were listed on a nearby poster of the galaxy. Misty had a sense of all these elements, but to feel the vast qualities affirmed some of her smallness but also hope.

All that out there, and then there were the layers, the vast grooves of density between and beyond dimensions that represented universes and etched aspects of reality that could be transferred, interacted with, and communicated between.

Everything was so huge, but they could take the smallest but most compelling steps out into the vast splendor. Maybe there were aliens, but if there weren't, that meant it was all theirs. A blank canvas of fresh possibilities to write whatever anyone wanted. It's all there to inspire, and almost too much when counting the create-your-own-reality possibilities of other dimensions, realms, and universes so deeply layered.

All this began to make her dizzy again. Even though it was a vague thought, she did her earnest best to hold on to the kernel of it, so she could pass it on to Elisha and Prentiss and whoever else was "the company".

Perhaps they were already beyond such wonders, but this would be her modest contribution. It allowed her to ignore the reality of having to undress and face all the hidden features of her altered body for a few minutes more. Lillis already started to prepare the bedroom. She didn't want Misty to see, and that was fine with her.

Just stepping into the bathroom took a long time. She wasn't sure how long she spent just absorbing her reflection in the mirror. It wasn't new. It wasn't shocking or strange anymore. But that didn't make it easy to witness as a physical reality. She had had so much time to think and reflect on herself before, but words still felt terribly insubstantial before the jagged reality reflected in front of her.

That was not her face. But the face moved when she made it move. The faint blonde eyebrows shifted in the directions she asked them to. Blinks in the mirror coincided with the moment of blackness. Those huge lips moved with her nerves. Her face was unimaginably smooth compared to anything she had known since puberty.

Despite the sweaty heat, it was relatively easy to ignore the hair and denounce it as some trickery of a wig. Some frizziness was scattered throughout the longest stretches. She ran a hand down and came up with a little ball of golden fluff that had shed from the main body. So much hair that clumps of it could fall off, and they wouldn't be missed.

The nose looked objectively cute. The nostrils flared slightly with a delicate span. At least her eye color hadn't changed—not that she usually noticed it—but it was a small, reassuring trace that she hadn't been completely replaced by someone else. Focusing on the small facial details was a way of preparing herself for the big body differences. And faces were important. She was grateful to still have one, unlike horror stories of reconstructions from tragic accidents. Remembering that should have helped more, but the incessant drumbeat of "that's not my face, that's not my face, that's not my face" refused to stop. And that was only the beginning.

There was no other real place to start but to slip off the top. The weight of her breasts wrestled with the rest of her body. They weren't as heavy as she might have imagined they would be. They weren't balloons, either. Personal memory foam pillows with a striking shape and intimacy were about the best analogy she could work with.

The fact that they simply existed as part of her body was the most unsettling aspect. Having time to get used to this new configuration would have been a huge help compared to just turning on the breasts. They were different, but the key thing was that they weren't sexy to her. She could see how she might have fun with them at some point, but they kind of ached, had nipples with minds of their own, were sweaty in places she wasn't used to feeling so irritated, and tugged viciously on parts of her body that had never known such strain. But then again, those parts were completely unfamiliar now, so it was more like a weird costume; she just couldn't find the zipper to take off. But the costume wasn't an addition, but rather a strange subtraction that cut closer to her flesh.

Enough of her male sexuality remained to "toxically" objectify her bust with fewer layers. She didn't learn her lesson. She was still an uncouth man. Whatever the fuck that meant. The release of the breasts drew her eyes. Aside from the immense pink punctuation points, the flesh was so starkly pale that it was embarrassing. Brent didn't sunbathe, even though Dina was pushing him in that direction. The rest of her body was fair, so her chest stood out even more in contrast. She would have to do her best to ignore all that.

They wiggled, jiggled, and shifted, reminding her of every move she made to undress the rest. The most subtle twists and turns, with her arms forming fleshy dikes, still did little to arrest the unfamiliar movements. Quite bluntly, she didn't like it. This wasn't her body, and it wasn't a body she'd ever want. This wasn't who she was supposed to be. She was disfigured.

It made her cringe to pull that thought out, but it wasn't far removed from how she felt. Sure, being remolded into the shape of a pretty girl wasn't the worst fate anyone ever faced. But if she started out like this and had to become some muscle-bound wrestler, then the same wrongness would still exist and persist in that situation. Her brain hated this. She could tolerate it. She could passively sink under the mask it presented. She endured, especially as a big fuck you to Dina for forcing it on her as a shriek of misandry.

She undressed the rest of the way and dropped her hands to her sides. The mirror and the counter area didn't provide her with the full picture, but she could see enough.

The impression of her vulva was suggested by physical feeling, the edge of the mirror, and what she could approach with her boobs parted and her legs shifted. With a hand mirror, she could have revealed all her secrets up close, but the vague and yet visceral impression was enough. He'd seen it before on women he knew. Dina wasn't particularly fond of hers either. A thin golden bunch of disheveled hair punctuated what she could see.

She reached down and gripped the flesh as if it were just part of her knee or elbow sticking out. It was massively disconcerting not to discover testicles that should have popped out or some other landmark. All new territory in the most intimate zone. Nothing crazy, lewd, or unexpected happened. It was just flesh. So far, underwhelming. There were some hints of responsiveness, but she wasn't ready to pursue them.

Her butt had a strange and overly fat jiggle to it, but in the mirror, it looked absolutely fine and respectable, like someone else's rear. A little stretching and flexing were enough for all the discoveries she wanted to make for now. Into the shower.

She waited at the threshold and stretched over with fleshy echoes to turn the knob and see if the water was warm. It lashed waves of harsh, stinging cold with jagged, thin lines of water slicing from the shower head. She stood outside, shivering, until a gradual warmth saturated the air, and the water began to steam without scalding as she tested it.

Adjusting the knob in tiny increments brought the flow to a balanced warmth, which seemed good enough. But once she was inside, with the door carefully shut, she found that her skin didn't like the sharp touch of the water. Dropping the temperature a few degrees lower than Brent usually preferred, was better, but also unusual. The earlier sense of being in a tighter costume proved to be true. Everything felt more pronounced and traced more vividly on her flesh. She panted and gasped when certain watery pinpricks found wrong, tingly places.

Washing was a careful, shifting dance to avoid setting her raw senses on fire with too much stimulation. It hadn't been so bad earlier, but so much was set to numbness and avoidance of processing. Slowly, orbiting around the strongest flow, she was able to situate herself for a normal shower. Only near the end did she realize that the little metal tab at the top allowed her to detach the head as a wand, and that other settings produced a less skin-ripping flow. That prompted her to extend her shower a bit, but not so much that she approached the twenty-minute warning.

When the water was finished, she let out a long breath and set her hip against the wall. A shower and quite an adventure in the body of her new self. Her heart fluttered in her ankles and around her back. It was a decent shower. Not the greatest shower she had ever taken, but the water pressure actually challenged her regular, left-behind apartment. The soap did its duty, even if she didn't push it into adventurous climates. It slid down the softened, reshaped slopes of her body, carrying away as much of the newborn grime, dense anxiety, and uncertainty about the future as it could.

The only thing left was bed and sleep.

[Welcome to the Seventh Book in the Cerberus Saga. Yup. We’re doing this. I never thought I would delve into such a big part of the backstory and this may be a good idea but I like writing about all sorts of characters. I have the ending of the story in mind already. But is it the ending you might expect from what you know now? We’ll see…Provisionally, I am focusing on one chapter a week and we’ll see how things go from there. They might be longer or shorter and more numerous. Always feel free to offer suggestions. Reader response is going to be very important going forward. I’m open to anything. Although the squirrel thing is probably the closest I’ll ever get to furry. I’m gonna have some fun and funny characters this time too. Dunno how long this will go. It might be much shorter due to the different pacing. I hope you enjoy it. I plan to get the earlier books together and released in an official form. Look forward to that hopefully. As always, vast details, especially types of characters, character names, and more are wide open for this narrative. Feel free to add any idea which doesn't show up in the eventual options. Also, if you see any random typos or uncapitalized starts of sentences, please pass them along. I am currently using Quillbot and DeepL to assist with speedy editing, but that’s not 100%. Thank you for reading!]

Poll after this. Since I've change the schedule, polls are more important than ever. Feel free to offer as much feedback as you can to help the story.