Here we were again; and I was no closer to getting used to any of it.
I bit down on the nipple, stemming the flow of poison so that only a few sweet drops landed on my tongue. I made eye contact with Janet. The smile was still there, but it was put in place and didn’t reach her eyes.
Her eyes. Those big blue beautiful eyes. The warning was all there. “Be good,” they said. “Be good or else.” Either she’d get what she wanted in this moment, or she’d give me something to be afraid of. Typical Amazon.
I thought about my teeth clamping down on the rubber nipple. I’d seen captured Littles with only gums lining their mouths. They hadn’t looked old enough to merit it, but their “Parents” had thought it looked “cuter”. Things could be a lot worse. The warning of her eyes was all I needed, just then.
So much for pride.
I unclamped. I let the sweet liquid dribble into my mouth, neither nursing in earnest, nor resisting the flow of the bottle. The juice didn’t taste like it’d been tampered with, at least. Pop Science would have us believe that Little taste buds are more sensitive than Amazons’; that we can more keenly taste the hints of diuretics, laxatives, alcohol, and other drugs put in our beverages. That’s why so many Littles’ close call stories end with switching drinks only for an embarrassed giant to run shrieking to the toilet.
A lot of good that precise palate did me.
Cradled in her lap, and unable to more than glance at the television, I looked past my nose and through the amber colored concoction, to the only piece of clothing that had been made available to me.
It wasn’t the diaper I woke up in, and it wasn’t the diaper I’d go to bed in, either. Drugged or not, this bottle would end up making its way through my stomach and end up splashing against my privates before too long. The only choice left to me was how much dignity and control could I wrest out of the situation. A life of compromise. It wasn’t fair.
With a sigh of resignation, I started draining the bottle, actively tugging on the nipple with my lips and pulling the apple juice into my mouth. I felt, more than heard, the tension exhale from out of Janet. Looking back up at her, her eyes had softened, I noticed; changed in some indefinable way.
Looking at us right then, you’d never have guessed that a few months ago she’d been crying her eyes out, telling me about her nasty divorce; that she was wanting to cry on my shoulder instead of burping me over hers. You wouldn’t have thought that she’d help me get a diaper off, and not just so that a clean one would go on. You might have thought we were friends, if not equals.
That friendship was dead now, and from its corpse had sprung this scenario.
I had no desire to watch the Muffets, just then, but closing my eyes only made me more aware of every other sensation: The juice on my tongue and rubber on my lips. The body heat radiating out from Janet. The slow but steady ache of my bladder. The canned laughter from the T.V. My own terrified and anxiety riddled thoughts.
Instead I stared up at the only other things left to me. Janet’s eyes had shifted again, staring down intently at me. I reached up to try and grab the bottle, only to have my hands lightly brushed away. “No, no, sweetie. Mommy’s got it. Let Mommy do it. Please?” That last word got my attention. There was a hint of desperation in that word.
In her own way, she was asking for my consent.
We just looked at each other while the television droned on in the background. Trying to guess what the other might be thinking. Where had I seen that look before? I had seen Amazons stare at Littles in a million intricate ways, but this wasn’t one of them. Not quite.
I’d seen a kind of greed when one saw a Little they thought was particularly cute; been witness to a kind of hunger, waiting for an opportunity to present itself to snatch one up. The giants had a kind of petulant snottiness about them when the rare circumstance allowed a Little or an In-Betweener to upstage them, and a psychotic rage when they thought they were being defied. Naturally there were also the flashes of manic, gleeful condescension- smug superiority- whenever they spoke to a dolled-up diapered Little; flashes I knew would become constant spotlights on me for the foreseeable future.
This wasn’t it, though. What it was, I didn’t know. It didn’t match the tired weariness or jaded bitterness of Little eyes; eyes like I’d seen more than my fair share of yesterday, (nevermind the eyes in the mirror). Janet’s were nothing like Cassie’s intense “fuck me or fight me” stares. I’d never seen anything like it. Whatever it was, it was madness. All Amazons were at least a little crazy.
The quiet slurping sounds were replaced with quiet as I sucked air, and Janet readjusted me to an upright position on her lap, gently patting my bare back. “It’s just apple juice,” I said. “I don’t need to be-” a loud belch rumbled out of me before I could finish my sentence. Damnit.
“Good baby!”
Before I could protest any further, the Muffet Show had rolled its credits, and a new show had replaced it.
“Muffet Littles, we make our dreams come true.
Muffet Littles, we’ll do the same for you.”
Still keeping me in her lap, Janet rotated me around to see the cartoon. A cartoon…fuck. “If you like the Muffets, you’ll love this. It’s like the Muffets, but they’re cartoons.”
I looked back up at Janet, purposefully avoiding the screen’s gaze. “I know what this is.”
Only I didn’t, exactly. The only cartoons we were allowed to watch at my house growing up were from imported shows from Little majority countries. We hadn’t gotten quite as careless as Michelle and her children. No Pennycade. No SeaBenedict Cucumberbatch
For my fifth birthday, my Grandmother had gotten me one of the few safe cartoons. It was called “Muffet Babies”. Such a rare cartoon; a treasure from a foreign land! I’d watched and re-watched that tape and it’s handful of episodes until I could lip sync along from start to finish.
“Muffet, Muffet, Muffet, Muffet!
Littles, Littles, Littles-
The Muffet Littles!”
Still looking at Janet, I heard the show behind me. If I hadn’t heard the title of the show moments before, I might’ve sworn I was listening to my old DVD. “Muffet Littles?”
My bladder ached with even more urgency as Janet lightly bobbed me on her lap. “Yeah. It’s like the Muffets, but they’re Littles.” I closed my eyes, turned my head to the screen, and listened. Nope. That was the Muffet Babies, alright. Word for word and beat for beat.
“You mean babies,” I corrected her. “It’s the Muffets but they’re babies.”
“Sure.” It was the placating assurance of someone agreeing because they didn’t care enough to argue. “Just watch.” She might as well have said ‘Just hold still while I bite you’. I couldn’t help it, though. I just couldn’t. Curiosity finally overcame me.
I opened my eyes.
I immediately wished I hadn’t. If it wasn’t hypnotism, it was something worse. Much worse.
Cartoon Fuzzy was in his red romper and beanie. Cartoon Puggy was in her puffy blue party dress. Cartoon Gongzo wore green shortalls with the little smiley face on the bib; just like the Muffet Babies. But there was something off.
Their legs were too long. They weren’t as round. They were still cartoony, and still definitely Muffets, but they didn’t read as “babies” to me. And unlike the Muffet Babies, you could definitely notice a certain padded bulge between their legs. (Ralph the piano playing rat was still in nothing but a bib and diaper, but that had always been part of the character design.) I let out a small, startled gasp. “They’re Littles.”
“Yeah. It’s like you said.”
I glared up angrily at Janet. Not that she noticed, her eyes now fully watching the T.V. “I said Muffet Babies.”
“Exactly. They’re Muffets, but Littles.”
“BABIES!”
Janet stared back down at me. She blinked. She opened her mouth. Then shut it. Then opened it again. “Clark….” the warning faded before she’d spoken it. “Clark…” She nudged me off her lap and turned me around so that we could properly stare at each other. She seemed to work something out in her head before speaking again. ”Most non-Little babies can’t talk that well. Can they?”
I opened my mouth.
Then shut it.
Then opened it again.
They were supposed to be the Muffet Babies, weren’t they? I went through every line of dialogue that I had unconsciously memorized decades ago. The recording from my childhood had said they were “The Muffet Babies”, but nowhere in the script had they ever referred to themselves as babies. They’d never even said their ages.
I stood there, staring at Janet; still listening to Muffet Littles break out into song about how words could hurt. Was it possible that the only difference between the two cartoons was the animation? Was it really so purposefully vague? Why?
DING-DONG!
Janet stood up from the couch, instantly forgetting our micro-confrontation. “Company!”