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Discovered Hankey’s Toys recently! They have some pretty wild size stuff:

https://www.mrhankeystoys.com/realistic?search=true&option=4XL&category=realistic

CHAPTER 8: THE SKYLINE

Dawn wished that she could say that the kiss caught her by surprise, but she knew that look in his eyes, and even this small it was obvious his eyes were flicking down to linger at her mouth.

What did surprise her, though was the sheer thrill of it. His face was enormous, the size of a sedan to her, and it came close with such precision. Instinctively she held out her hands and they came to rest on his stubble-shadowed cheeks just before his lips pressed to the bottom half of her face.

She kissed him back, or tried to–Dawn wasn’t entirely sure he could feel her, so she made sure to throw her back into it. Keith’s hot, wine-cooler-flavored mouth found purchase along her jaw, and she supposed that was some geometry that he could settle on without swallowing up her nose.

Warm breath flowed over her and she felt like she were kissing some mythical beast. When he pulled clumsily away, the lawyer felt altogether like she was 16 years old again. How did that happen?

Dawn had been turned around and backed up his leg, and she couldn’t tell if she’d slid up herself up the fuzzy limb of if he’d pushed her that way, but in a calculated move she let her derriere come back down to rest in the crook of his thigh, making sure to keep her dainty legs away from the second brain surely smoldering away in those silly technicolor shorts of his.

This was a game of wills, she wanted to make him repeat for her. But somehow the idea of losing didn’t sound so bad. Not at twelve inches tall, at least. She didn’t have as far to fall at this size, and felt easier to catch.

“You’re drunk,” she said with a grin.

“I’m not the only one.”

Peter Gabriel played softly in the background, but it wasn’t exactly a soft song. “I wanna be… your sledgehammer…!”

Keith beamed in the long New York summer twilight. “Each of those shotglasses must’ve been like a fishbowl’s worth of drink for you.”

“I can hold my liquor,” she insisted.

He chuckled. “Sure, at 140 pounds, maybe. But three? C’mon, Dawn, do the math. The numbers don’t lie. You’re hammered.”

She found herself sticking out her tongue. “Are you always this much of a tease?”

“Oh, so now I’m a tease because I haven’t rushed you off to the bedroom yet, is that it?”

She watched him stretch and put his arms behind his head, well out of her reach. It was all the same to her, though, because his lean frame looked much broader this way and she could clearly see the outline of his biceps.

Dawn kept wanting to push him, goad him into acting out, but it was looking like the kiss was all she was going to get for now. She experimentally pressed her foot into his belly button and felt his abs tighten in response. It was like pushing a lever on a great, powerful machine and seeing what would happen.

“That’s not how all of my dates end,” she added with a little haughty defiance.

The song continued: “I kicked the habit… shed my skin… this is the new stuff… I go dancing in…”

“You should trying dating more artists,” Keith decided, returning his gaze to the view. “We can tease you for weeks.”

“And let me guess, “artists do it with style” or something.”

“No, we do it with longer strokes,” he said with a hint of bedroom voice she hadn’t heard before. It sent tingles down into her toes. When she looked up, he was looking at her with a bit of a self-satisfied smirk that she wanted to wipe off his face with a taste of her own sexual prowess.

Instead, she wiggled her toes among the dark hairs on his belly. “Don’t shorten them for me now, darling. I like 'em long.”

He just laughed, and it shook her in a pleasant way. Dawn decided that she liked playing with a giant like this. It was fun pulling his strings and feeling him tug back. A game of wills indeed!

“C’mon, turn around and enjoy this view with me.”

“I’m enjoying the view just fine from here.”

Keith rolled his eyes and leaned forward to adjust the beach chair further backward as she balanced on his activated rectus femoris. Then, not appearing to hesitate at all this time, he wrapped his thick fingers around her middle, tearing her away from her perch, spun her around, and set her in the crook of his arm. A relaxed pectoralis major was underneath her butt this time, and her view was of his long legs stretching out before her, the expanse of roof, still radiating heat, and beyond the river, the World Trade Center loomed and twinkled against a great backdrop of pink and orange sky. A plane hit a waypoint overhead, its engine dropping to a lower note as it prepared to circle around to JFK, and a siren wailed in the distance. The radio began playing Papa Don’t Preach.

“There. Let’s just enjoy this for a little while, alright?” He took another slurp of 7-up and held the can to his cheek, forcing a sigh of contentment.

Dawn brushed a lock of hair behind his ear, but it was too short to stay there. “What’s this about, now?”

“I don’t like to rush things, that’s all.”

“You don’t like to follow your passion while it’s sizzling hot? C’mon Keith, don’t tell me you prefer lunchmeat over a filet mignon right off the grill.”

“You’re not sober.”

“And it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I’m not sober.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time either.”

“This doesn’t bother you? Like, at all?”

He gestured with the can to her and then to himself, looking at her expectantly. Dawn grinned and leaned in toward his ear.

“I like a challenge.” When he made a frustrated sound, she doubled down. “Have you ever had one-night-stand?”

“Yes, I have. But that’s besides the point. The point is…” He made a handsomely befuddled face for a moment. “That you’re, frankly, barely bigger than my swack, and necking a drunk girl is bad enough without her being small enough to stuff in my pants while I’m at it.”

Oh, Keith, she thought. Those were the words of a very interested but very conflicted man.

He continued. “Look, I have no idea what this week is going to bring for either of us. But let’s not do anything that can make stuff worse for you. You’ll have enough on your plate tomorrow as it is.”

“I guess you’re not wrong,” she conceded with a huff.

“Do you know what you’ll do after you make that phone call?”

Dawn sighed and reclined against him, her head not even reaching his collarbone. It must’ve been more comfortable than his own sun-bleached beach chair, though. “I was going to call up one of my girlfriends, have her stop by. I can’t hide from everyone forever.”

“Could you stay with her?”

“No can do. She has three Great Danes.”

Keith’s chest swelled underneath her. “You can stay with me as long as you need to, I guess. You’ll need to hide when I have anyone over, though.”

“How often is that?”

“Couple times a week. I usually see clients on Thursdays.” A pause. “You’ll have to cooperate with police eventually, you know. There’s going to be an investigation.”

Dawn just groaned. She knew exactly how long and how stupid police investigations were, and she was not looking forward to getting caught up in one like this. Sure, she’d filed a half-dozen restraining orders in her time against unhinged clients who…

A little light went off in her head, then. Dawn remembered now a man she defended back in '82 who had killed a neighbor’s dog with some odd machine, and was found to be quite the all-around nutter. He was up for parole last year, and when he didn’t make any appearances around the firm, Dawn thought nothing of it and got on with her life. Looking back, though, he was an extremely difficult client. When she tried talking to him about the purpose of the machine, he said nothing. He’d taken no notes, wrote in no journals. The only details they could get out of him were what they could find in the stacks of loose papers he referred to as “the plans”, full of schematics and nonsense math that not even forensics could make heads or tails of.

“Dawn?”

She jumped up and turned around, planting a big wet one on his lower lip. His hand flew to where she was in case she fell. “Keith, you’ve just reminded me that I might have a lead after all.”

CHAPTER 10: THE VISIT

The artist was very apologetic when he had to excuse himself to get at least a little work done, but Dawn assured him she would have done the same thing if she could.

He left her on the couch to play the Price is Right while he disappeared into the studio to make phone calls. She tried paying attention to the tired old game show, but found her ears wandering instead. Dawn listened to him as he spoke with a customs broker of some sort, and liked the way that he was firmly instructing them to get to the bottom of some misplaced shipment of KEMO commercial pieces on their way to Paris from the woodshop.

His next phone call was to someone who dealt in lumber, it seemed, and Dawn was amazed that he didn’t have an assistant to make all these calls for him. She would try to remember suggesting it later, and go through her Rolodex to see who might know someone to suggest for the job.

Otherwise, the minutes ticked by with grueling slowness and Dawn couldn’t stand it. She paced in front of the TV until the buzzer sounded by the door on the wall. It was so loud and so sudden that she couldn’t help the yelp of surprise. Keith came bounding out of the studio

“Yello!” he said into the speaker.

“It’s Beverly, is this the right place?”

“It is, come on up.”

“I brought mace, so don’t try nothin’!”

Keith just buzzed her in and stood with his back against the door as they both listened to her climb the stairs. When the creaking stopped, he counted down from three and after one, Beverly knocked.

Dawn dashed behind something, wanting to give Keith a chance to butter her up before revealing herself.

“Hi there, mornin’,” Keith said as he opened the door. “Welcome to, uh, Studio KEMO.”

“Yeah, yeah. Where the hell’s my friend?” She started walking around. “Dawn? You here?”

“I’ll show you in just a minute but I-I have to just… reiterate what she told you, alright?”

“Whaddya mean, reiterate?”

“No screaming, OK?”

“Why the hell would I scream? What’s wrong with her, she disfigured or somethin’?”

“Oh no,” she heard Keith chuckle. “She’s still figured alright. She’s just um… you know.”

“I don’t understand what that means with the hands.”

“She’s, uh…”

“Would you stop gesturing and tell me so I can hurry up and see her?”

“Dawn’s been shrunk, alright?”

“Shrunk? What kinda shrunk, like in the dryer?”

“No, like like in the Incredible Shrinking Woman!”

Beverly gasped. “But that was a harrible movie.”

Dawn took the opportunity to step out of her refuge behind the big statue of Ganesh, and much to her chagrin, Beverly did scream. Keith grabbed her by the arm to keep her from running out the door.

“DAWN?”

“Yes, it’s me!”

“Holy shit, girl, w-what happened to you?” The platinum blonde got down onto the floor to gawk, and Dawn dared creep a little closer. “What on Earth are you wearin’?”

“Keith got me a Cabbage Patch dress. Look, I have no idea what happened. I-I was about to let myself into my apartment Thursday night after grabbing a bite with a client, someone comes up behind me and bam. Next thing I know I wake up on his couch Saturday morning all the way out here.”

Dawn looked to Keith and he shrugged. “I found her in the trash outside.” In fact, they all took a moment to listen to the rumble and hiss of the garbage truck a block away. Monday was trash day. “Glad they didn’t dump you last night.”

“Wait, I thought you two knew each other?”

“Yeah, that was to keep you from hanging up on me.”

“This guy’s treatin’ you right, right?”

“He’s been a perfect gentleman. I’d be dead without him!”

“Good, because otherwise I’d have to send over my cousin Frankie to check up on you. Oh! I almost forgot.” The woman reached into her purse and pulled out a water bottle filled with something that wasn’t water. “Brought you some of your favorite juice, hun. It’s carrot and celery, made it just before I left.”

“Oh thank god!” Dawn cried, running over to twist the cap off and tilt it carefully over so she could take a sip. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed these kinds of creature comforts.”

“She was going to ask you to bring her juicer,” Keith said with a shake of his head.

Beverly laughed in that nasally, tittering way of hers. “What are you, movin’ in?”

Dawn’s cheeks turned red and she looked away. “About that…”

“Would you like to sit down, Beverly?” Keith offered with his outstretched hand. In a few moments they were all seated on the big red sectional.

The artist spoke first, raising his brows at Dawn. “I guess this is a good a time as any to figure out how long you needed to stay here.”

“Yeah, where were you gonna go?”

“Well it’s obvious I can’t get along by myself, I need help. I’m like a geriatric, guys. I… I haven’t thought about it too much, I’ll be honest…”

“What if you got like, a seein’-eye dog?” Beverly said.

Dawn blinked. She hadn’t considered a service animal. They could be trained to do all kinds of things nowadays, why not this? All she’d need then is maybe a housekeeper to keep the apartment in order, prepare her little meals…

“Wait, no. No, the goal here is to get back to normal. I have to. I’m not staying like this forever. I can’t.”

“Well your next step should be to see the doctor, then,” her friend shrugged. “Maybe he could tell ya what to do.”

The doctor… doctor. That was… surprisingly actionable. Yes. Yes, she’d make an appointment, explain everything. Her case was so unusual that she’d surely get the best care possible, be treated by the world’s leading experts on whatever the hell this was. Maybe she’d get to be someone’s Nobel Prize-winning research.

“Beverly, you’re brilliant.”

“Nah. If I was smart, I’d have gotten out of the restaurant biz years ago.”

The two women laughed at that. Beverly owned a small chain of Italian restaurants and was making just as much money as the lawyer. She was probably putting in fewer hours, too.

“And what about you, huh?” The New Jersey girl cocked her head at Keith. “Who, exactly, is Keith Morgan?”

“Well,” he said, “Let me tell you.”

The trio chatted for a little while, but Beverly had to leave before too long. She and Keith exchanged numbers, and she promised to keep in touch. Dawn gave her a list of things that she needed from her own apartment, and later that evening, she came by to drop off the small box.

“You know I talked to my aunt–the one who collects dolls–and she gave me the number of the lady that makes all her outfits. That’s all she does, you know, is doll outfits. I can probably get her to whip you up some clothes in a jiffy.”

“Oh could you!”

“Sure thing, hun.”

Keith quickly found a tape measure and they began to collect a few measurements.

“I’d like some shorts and a sleeveless shirt for this weather. And some linen slacks… and maybe a tee-shirt. Oh, do you think she could make me a suit, too? Navy. A pencil skirt should be fine. Don’t know where I’ll get hose, though… Does she do shoes?”

“No, but did you want any panties? Not sure if she can do anything but bloomers but I’ll ask.”

“I know a bra is out of the question but what about something to, you know, keep the girls tidy?”

The man cleared his throat but they ignored him.

“Honey, you’ve got the world’s smallest A cups. I hardly think you’ll look like Jane Fonda.”

“I’m not putting a suit on without a bra.”

“I donno, sounds like a power move to me.”

In the end Beverly could only sort of promise a single outfit by the next day on a rush basis, and Dawn gave her a blank check for it, which she folded up and put carefully away in her wallet.

“I’ll be calling my bank to make sure you didn’t go to Atlantic City with that!”

After she left, the pair finished up the leftover pizza, and in small celebration cracked open a couple wine coolers again. Keith limited himself to two tonight, and swore up and down that that would be all.

After eating they both lounged on the couch together and listened to the sounds of the city coming in through his big open windows. They were bathed in the bright orange light of the streelamp outside; he tried keeping the place dark in the summer because the hot bulbs only made things worse.

Eventually Dawn rolled over onto her stomach and propped her chin up with the heel of her hand. “How cool is your room at night?” she asked.

“It’s not awful,” he mumbled lazily. She liked the way he looked when he was lazy. Like a sleeping animal she wanted to give him a poke. “I’ve got a couple fans in there.”

“Fans!” she exclaimed. “There’s no fans out here. The air flow is terrible.”

He opened one eye and looked at her.

“Could I stay in your room tonight? This sofa is hell on my back, too. I’m sure you’ve got something much softer in there.”

“We’re doing this again, eh?”

“What do you mean?” Dawn rolled over onto her back and looked at him upside down with her spine arched. “We never stopped.”

He leaned over her and god she loved being able to see nothing but his face and shoulders. “It’s 'cause you’re nervous, isn’t it. You do this when you’re nervous.”

“Actually, Michelangelo, I do this when I know I have something to look forward to.”

He studied her for a beat before sliding his great big hand under her and lifting them both away from the couch. “I guess that’s what I was hoping you would say,” he said and crossed the floor to the last room of the apartment she hadn’t caught a glimpse of yet.

Oh yeah, sometime there be Transformers in here for those who don’t know me.

I would totally be the mysterious, mythic figure living in the mountains and minding my own business, Big Lebowski style. People would seek me out to complete their manhood initiation rituals, to cut a lock of my hair in my sleep or something and bring it back to town. Of course the “battle” that they have to do with me to get it would involve more cum and less blood!

There’d be stories about capturing maidens and things too, but mostly it would just be unmarried farmgirls or unhappy princesses coming to me to ask if I could eat their betrotheds and save them from a life of misery. For especially horrible arranged marriages I’d probably be down for a little murder, but I might have more fun helping fake the girls’ deaths so they could go off and be happier somewhere else. My services wouldn’t be free, though…

I’m more interested in being an immortal and modestly-sized giant (20-30 feet) with generations of folklore surrounding me, a slew of villages that would defend me and my territory to the death because my existence is a backbone of their local culture, than a tyrant. Because let’s face it, at the end of the day I’m lazy!

Camp Fox was currently located in a wide, shallow granite canyon, its floor carpeted in fine sand and dotted with fire ants. It was only a few hectares in size, but it was enough: Corps leadership preferred to limit contact between the camps in its broad, diffuse network, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge Alpine ran 22 camps like this, each staffed by around a thousand. The logic was that it was harder to take out the whole resistance when you could only hit one or two outposts at a time. And so far, the strategy worked. It’d been over a decade since the Anakim were able to mobilize enough bodies to launch a full–scale assault on even a dozen camps, let alone hit Base Camp far, far in the mountains.

Visits between camps were reserved for officers and toons borrowed to bolster numbers on the rare occasion when an attack was anticipated in advance, but transfers happened often enough. Once or twice a year a camp’s weakest soldiers were rounded up and marched off to other parts of the Corps, never to be seen again. Problem corpsmen were also usually sent off to be Retrained—that is, to work Corps quarries and ammo-packing lines, where afterward they were said to be given another chance at Freedom at some other camp. Gray had met transfers but not any retrained corpsman. Fox was a well-oiled machine, however, and Hitch made quick work of malcontents in his own way. Supposedly their camp had one of the highest morale rates in the Corps. Hitch made sure to keep it that way, and Gray actually managed to find a little pride in it.

When Exercises were done, she was filthy. But it was also Friday, and she lined up outside of Captain Burke’s office to receive her two weekly liquor vouchers because truthfully, she wanted a drink more than she wanted a shower. A minute or so later and she was already walking out, little while slips in hand, each embossed with the seal of the Western Human Defense Corps. Though they felt like sturdy paper, they weren’t, and melted when held to a flame.

On her way out, Gray checked the bulletin board, and her heart sank when she saw that this month’s movie had been canceled. The projector was broken, and they were waiting on some replacement parts form Alpine. And who knew when that would be. A pair of corpsmen came up beside her to check it too, and grumbled loudly at the news.

“And it was gonna be a Henry Fonda!”

Gray made a face and sulked away. She liked westies. Movies (when Camp Fox could get them), books (when she could get them), it didn’t matter. She liked them for being simple. She liked that even in a gunfight, nobody ever had their brains shot out, or their throats cut open. Nobody took 3 days to die of a gangrenous leg. The action was exciting, the stakes were high, and it resembled life as she knew it in the Disrupted world, but there was an ease to it all, a cleanliness, that helped her forget the dirt under her fingernails and the ever-present preoccupied hum of fear in the air that you could very well die out here before earning Freedom.

Moreover, Henry Fonda was handsome. Errol Flynn wasn’t so bad either.

The broken projector was going to be the least of her worries that evening, though. As the sun was getting low on the horizon, she sensed tension in the camp, even freshly showered and with a shot of ‘shine in her belly. A few clerks were running between officers’ tents with that look in their eyes. Slowing to an amble near Green Fox’s captain’s tent, Gray trained her ears and through the canvas heard that they’d lost contact with the first checkpoint.

“Reroute the outgoing B patrol to see what happened. Tell them to use the cable box to check-in, and if they don’t, we assume the worst.”

“Yes, sir. Should I inform the Commander?”

“No, I’ll do that. Dismissed.”

Gray made sure to keep walking by the time the clerk rushed out again, then as soon as she was a little ways away, picked up the speed herself. She rushed past corpsmen at work in the fading light, past a group gathered around a badly-tuned guitar, looking for Harper and Finch; Wesson was still out on Exercises.

She ran into Harper first, but the wireman already seemed to know what she was about to tell him.

“Look alive, Gray,” he said, grabbing her shoulder. “Somebody’s gone and dusted our-”

“First checkpoint, I know.”

“Second now, too,” he said. “Berg’s just been ordered off the box to go get his gun.”

“Fuck. Where’s Finch?”

“She wasn’t with you grabbing her Fridays?”

“No.”

“Must be at the showers, then.”

“I’ll go get her.”

Gray was only halfway there when she heard shots report at the edge of camp. And worse, it was an all-too familiar kind of sound: deep, loud, brutal. These were no brigand weapons. They were ‘Nak guns.

And ‘Nak guns hit harder than anything else she knew: their standard-issues used fifty–fucking–caliber rounds, and could blow a corpman’s head clear off their shoulders. It had been eight months since she last heard one. Gray swallowed a ragged gulp of air and turned to beeline for her tent to grab her gear. Finch could get herself to the muster point.

“’Naks!” came the call from around camp. “’Naks incoming!”

Out of the corner of her eye, Gray spotted Harrison, the resident Corps chemist and almighty bartender who had just served her, hefting the camp’s only submachine gun as he moved like a thunderhead out of the bar and cellars dug out of the canyon wall. He closed a camouflaged door behind him to protect some of the their most precious resources: not just liquor, but solvents, ethanols, combustion fuels and rare chemicals, all prime targets for both human and ‘Nak raiding parties.

The shouting and exchange of gunfire was drawing closer, and Gray sprinted over to the muster point outside of her toon’s captain’s office where about sixty other Brown Fox corpsmen were already anxiously gathering, with more pouring in every minute.

“We think there’s only about nine or ten dozen of the bastards, so this should be easy!” Burke shouted. “Form ranks at the southern end and maintain cover! Break into your fireteams if you have to, but do not, I repeat, do not go solo! Get going, move, move!”

Gray ran, not knowing where any of her close friends were, so she clumped together with some other corpsmen she knew and let both her training and adrenaline work their magic. She began to wonder why the ‘Naks were sending such a small force against an entire camp. They weren’t dumb. But it wasn’t long before her ears were ringing with the sound of battle, and there were suddenly more important things to think about, like the fact that it appeared that ranks were already being broken.

This was a deadly embarrassment to both sides. Not that Corpsmen weren’t gifted survivalists, but there were too many fuckers running around without clear orders. Out of the small handful of engagements they had with the ‘Naks each year, most of them were lethargic, and rarely did they get this close to home. Neither side could afford to lose so many soldiers so often, but they still needed to exchange fire and make a bunch of noise. Worse than losing men was losing morale, and going soft on the enemy was out of the question. There’s no telling what the ‘Naks would try if they knew just how threadbare the Corps could be some days. This, however, was not one of those days. Eleven-hundred corpsmen against one hundred of the giant bastards on Corps turf was going to be far from lethargic.

Gray knew something was different when the smell hit her. She paused just long enough to scowl as it sank in. This was the pheromone, she noticed, and her body reacted. Her heart raced and her muscles wanted to pull her in the opposite direction. She was supposed to run, this was it, this was the unthinkable thing. But the seventh-year steeled herself and dove down behind a water drum to remember her discipline.

“It’s strong,” she said to herself, panting. Stronger than usual.

Was this a new cocktail from The Algo?

When she glanced up, the evidence was all around her. The chaos, the cries of panic, the sound of someone puking, someone else sobbing. It was amazing what a chemical could do, the suggestion of predation, the thought that you could have a hundred exit routes and still be cornered. It was evil. Gray swallowed and knew what she had to do. Against all animal logic, she turned the safety off on her kicker and prepared to fight. It was her or them. As much as she hated it, this was her life, and she was going to defend it.

“They’re advancing!” someone yelled from across the road as they turned on their heel to take cover further up the path. They were made quick work of. Gray had to do something. The ‘Naks were moving quickly, hunched like big, bloodthirsty beasts as they popped off thundering blasts from their even bigger guns. Down the road someone’s chest exploded, spraying canvas with red.

She got down low, peeking out from behind her cover, and got off a few shots at one of the ‘Naks’ feet, crippling him. She gave the same treatment to another who watched his comrade fall, but a third noticed her muzzle flash in the growing twilight and she pulled back.

“Shit, shit, shit…” Gray’s brown eyes darted around, looking for a window of opportunity to make her retreat, but her water drum cover was quickly turning into a deathtrap. She couldn’t help the scream when the metal suddenly filled with holes and precious water poured out onto the dusty ground.

The ‘Nak’s guns grew louder and louder, and Gray knew she was going to get shot. Which was all the more reason to at least attempt falling back.

“It’s working! Spread out!” she heard one of the giants bark, and they broke formation.

Someone had managed to re-man one of the heavy guns and a dusky ‘Nak was knocked to the ground with the force of his own bullets, moaning in the dirt like any other wounded creature on god’s green earth, then a few more went down. Gray was about to take this opportunity to get away from the drum, maybe duck into a tent, when a ‘Nak soldier suddenly loomed overhead. He glanced down, and through the thin strip of face she could see between his helmet and the cloth covering his nose and mouth, their eyes briefly met.

Through the haze of panic that his proximity was inducing in her, Gray managed to notice his face soften, and turn to acute concern. And the squeeze… was not so oppressive.

But then there was pain. A 50-cal bullet hit him in the chest, clearing his armor and ammo pouches to land a bloody blow near his armpit. Her face was spattered with his living heat as he collapsed over the drum and on top of her, cloth torn away from his face. Gray suddenly found herself pinned under a pair of three–hundred pound legs with something stabbing her in the side. She hissed, barely able to breathe.

“F–fuck…” she wheezed, and then fell deathly still when she realized that it was the muzzle of her own kicker sticking her in the ribs. One wrong move and it could go off at any minute. She tried pushing against that weakening body on top of her, pushing against the fear. “G-get off me, you giant piece of shit…”

He was wheezing too, and she could now hear a wetness in his lungs. But he reached out with a massive hand, big enough to palm her skull, and touched her cheek. Gray froze.

“Signy…”

Signy? Who was Signy?

“I didn’t know you came… back.” Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth and he tried licking his lips. The ‘Nak’s brown eyes were glazing over. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… know…”

His hand fell away from her face and Gray just laid there, fighting for breath, unable to do anything but watch the fire disappear from those strangely human eyes as he gave his last gasping death rattle.

@Olo

Not to play sads olympics here, but uh… I have to say, I’ve seen way more giant couples material than the niche-r stuff I’m into. And of course I’m just talking art. I think you need to adjust your expectations when it comes to real-person video stuff - it is very expensive, very time-consuming, and if the market isn’t there, then… you as a creator out a lot more than $800-1000 worth of labor and materials.

I built an entire website around the under-served kinks I’m into. I built a Discord community. I make my own smut, in whatever capacity I’m capable of. “Make the porn you want to see in the world” is my motto; haters can go fuck themselves.

Chapter 3

Intimate relations between one (1) or more enlisted corpsmen are not expressly forbidden by Protocol. Corpsmen in good standing are permitted to indulge themselves in sensual, sexual, and romantic behavior without the permission of their overseeing Officers, provided that this behavior is not expressed while on-duty. However, intimacy is not to interfere with the good corpsman’s performance or punctuality, nor should loyalty to any individual corpsman overrule one’s loyalty to the Western Human Defense Corps as a whole. Failure to correctly prioritize may result in Gross Insubordination charges against offending corpsmen as a Camp’s ranking Officers see fit.

• HDC Manual, Annex I § 18

---

It was dark by the time she returned. The moon was out at least, bathing the dry, rocky landscape in just enough light for her to plan her steps by. On a whim, Gray practiced the footstrike of the Anak from earlier, ball first, heel following. It was difficult to replicate while wearing marching boots, but the modifications were effective. She knew that there were still some part of the technique she was missing, though.

Upon returning, Gray checked in with Captain Burke to fill out a debrief form: during her watch, did she see or encounter any humans; did she discharge a firearm at any point; would she be willing to submit her weapon for a count; did she see or encounter any Anakim. No, no, yes, and… no. Gray stared at the check mark she’d made on the form next to the last question.

It wouldn’t make a difference if I said anything anyways, Gray reasoned. It’s not like they don’t know we’re here, now.

Slipping the sheet back to Burke, she was promptly dismissed for the rest of the night. Gray was grateful, and she headed out the flaps of the officer’s tent to her own. I need to find the guys and put these fridays to use.

Until excavations were completed, Harrison’s was a tent like any other. Sappers were hard at work digging out cellars further up the canyon, and it would be another few weeks before they could wire the place for lighting and open up shop.

Harper was manning the cable tonight, so only Finch and Wesson were with her, and before long the three had gathered around an oil drum with their friday rations and a ratty deck of cards. Finch dealt, though Gray had no idea what they were playing.

“I thought you used up your last friday this week already?” she asked Finch, who was already looking over her hand of seven cards.

“Small miracle, gambling,” she said with a smug grin. “Gold Fox held some tarantula fights while you were gone, and I had my money on the smaller one. Now come on, it’s just a few rounds of Rummy.”

Gray shook her head and grabbed her cards. It was a terrible hand. “We’re not playing for keeps, are we?”

“You wanna?”

She shot a deadpan look at Finch. “Does it look like I have anything worth keeping?”

Wesson laughed and made his first discard. “So how was the treehouse?”

Gray suddenly found herself frowning and tried to make it look like she was studying her cards. “Fine.”

“Boring, huh? Even with your rib?”

“The pain was the most exciting part, actually.” She made to discard something.

“You forgot to draw.”

“Right.” She took another deep drink of her liquor and did as told, suddenly able to put together a short run of spades. The back of her neck prickled with warmth as she fought the temptation to start thinking about what she had seen.

“And how was inventory?”

Wesson shook his head. “Found a bad batch of ammo, leaving us with about a ton and a half until the next delivery.”

“Well, it’s good that we’re not expecting any company for a while, then.”

Wesson threw back the rest of his drink. “I mean, if ‘Naks were the only thing we had to worry about. Fox itself may be safer, but we’ve moved closer to gang territory.”

He was referring to organized bands of brigands that usually liked to stay just as far from civilization—‘civtown’—as the Corps. They were a dangerous type, known to jump anyone passing through their borders who might have anything worth stealing, sometimes shaking down entire caravans. She even heard stories of brigands taking on small teams of Anakim. Sometimes abiding folk in civtown would ask the Corps for help with particularly disruptive activity, but small-time brigands usually exercised more discretion than that.

“Patrols may be exchanging fire more often,” he went on. “Be careful out there.”

Finch made her play: four kings. Gray’s shoulders and eyelids both slumped. She stared at the ace and queen in her hand and cursed at her friend. Finch just grinned.

“Be careful in here too,” Finch chuckled, downing the last of her shine. “So I heard that Alpine says the ‘Nak scent was more concentrated for this last fight.”

“You heard? You were there.”

“No shit, but it’s nice for the Alpine labcoats to agree with us every once in a while.”

Wesson’s attention was piqued. In fact, he looked surprised that a sixth-year would find this out before him. “Harper told you that?”

Finch shrugged. “What? It was an open message. It’s going on the boards tomorrow.”

He looked taken aback. “Yeah, but you… gotta have a little respect for the process, right? You can’t just do whatever you want, the Corps couldn’t run like that.”

Finch rolled her eyes. “Look. Does Harper act like a gossip? Even if it were a secret, it’d be safe with me.”

“It just confirms what we already know because we were there, Wesson. Nothing confidential about that,” Gray said.

“Fair enough. But I don’t think I’m being unreasonable either.”

Finch sighed loudly. “We can both be right.”

“Hm.”

Wesson played a four-card straight and discarded something Gray couldn’t use, so she finished her drink and waved at Harrison for another. She parted with a second friday for it, and threw back the small cup, feeling it burn all the way down. They played a few more rounds.

Eventually, there was a lull in the conversation, and something was percolating its way through Gray’s mind as the alcohol started kicking in. “Something I’ve been wondering,” she began. “What’s the most human thing you ever see a ‘Nak do? How much like us are they?”

This wasn’t the smartest question she could have asked in a Corps camp as it skirted some important rules, but she could have asked dumber. Questions like, “how hot is the sun?”

“I seen one jack off once, remember that?” Finch laughed.

Gray did remember and she found a tightening in her chest at the thought now.

“Must’ve been a big piece of meat,” Gray muttered with a strained chuckle, keeping her eyes on her cards.

“God, are you kidding? It was like…” She held her hands up in the air, greatly exaggerating. “Wouldda been easy target practice.”

“How ‘bout you, Wesson?”

“They only look and act like us in order to fuck with our sense of empathy,” he said, avoiding the question entirely. “If you talk to vets from the first phase of the Disruption, they’ll all tell you that dusting machines was easier than flesh and blood. The Algo figured that out and decided to use our likeness against us.”

Gray frowned. “When did you get to talk to veterans from the old wars?”

“I mean, I didn’t talk to them. But I’ve hung around when we got some passing through once, and they talked about it with the officers.”

That was a mighty privilege, Gray thought. It wasn’t often that enlisted corpsmen were given an opportunity to even get near outsiders, let alone speak to them.

“Anyways, I don’t care what they look like,” Finch said coldly. “I’m happy to kill the fuckers dead after wiping six billion humans off the map. Including my mom and auntie.”

Gray swallowed at the reminder. She discarded, realizing too late that she had a run of hearts hiding in her hand, and Finch promptly won a second time.

“Remind me to never play cards with you ever again,” Wesson snorted.

Finch smiled obnoxiously. “There’s no shame in losing.”

The blond-haired man slapped the remainder of his hand on the table, not even counting his points, and Finch roared with laughter. She shoved the mess of cards at Gray. It was her turn to deal.

The alcohol made gathering up the cards more difficult than she thought it’d be. Her fingers were clumsy, and a few dropped on the ground. When she bent to pick them up, she hit her head on the table.

“God dammit,” she hissed. Wesson’s hand was soon on her arm and he pulled her up.

“You OK there?”

“I think I just… need something to eat.”

“And a night in your own cot,” Finch added. She took the cards back.

Wesson didn’t let go of her arm. “C’mon, I’ll help you back.”

Gray nodded and they began walking. With dehydration and growling stomachs being the accepted norm around here, a little shine, she remembered, went a long way in Corps bellies. She focused on walking straight.

They headed steadily down the road between tents. “Hey Wes,” she slurred, bending the ban on nicks by just shortening his surname. “You ever get confused sometimes?”

He chuckled, and his arm worked its way around her shoulders instead. “Yeah, when I’m trying to do inventory on 3 hours of sleep.”

“No, no. Confused about… what our enemy even is.”

He looked at her wistfully, cautiously. “Well, I can tell you what they’re not.”

Gray screwed up her face. “I’m trying to be serious, man. I’m not that tore.”

“After five years you’d think I’d know you well enough to know when you’re full of shit. Now look, we’re here.” She pushed open the flap to her section of the tent and Wesson helped her to her cot. “Hang tight while I find you something to eat, alright?”

“Yes, sir,” she mumbled, rolling her eyes. He disappeared back outside with a smile. It figured Wesson would like getting sir’d. He was gunning for promo, after all, and it was no secret that he intended to get it. It was also no secret that he liked being buttered up.

In the big toon tents, which were partitioned off into fourteen rooms, each housing four or five cots and a single light bulb that was cut off at exactly 10pm every night, there were usually a few folk mingling or trying to catch some shut–eye before a shift. The place was impeccably clean, mostly because her tent–mates hadn’t had time to settle in and make a mess of the place yet. The tents were not especially comfortable places to be: dimly lit, and stiflingly hot if you wanted to keep the sun out. Gray wondered what conditions the Anakim lived in, and decided it was probably much of the same.

She didn’t know how many minutes had passed before Wesson came back, though it was probably fewer than it felt. He handed her a small cup with a metal foon sticking out of it.

“It’s all the cook would give me,” he declared as she balked at the slurry inside. “And here.” He produced a flask of water, which he began to pour into her own. “Or you’ll be begging for a bullet to the head tomorrow.”

She sat up and spooned some of the green–brown mush into her mouth. It was salty, and the high algae content made it taste distinctly like pond scum. There was meat in there somewhere too, but the only clue was in the small tough bits of ground–up tissue and the thin film of grease that clung to the utensil when she took a bite. What animal the weekly shipments of ‘wet ration’ were made from had already become a popular subject of the rumor mill.

Still, it at least didn’t suck the moisture from your mouth like hardtack.

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

“And between you and me,” Wesson said quietly, crouching down to give her his best fatherly look. “Be careful of the stuff you ask around here, even with friends. I know you don’t sympathize, but some young boot hearing you talk at the bar doesn’t. People still get reported. People still get retrained.”

Gray just frowned.

“And I know it’s easy to get confused sometimes. But just remember that the Corps is our lifeblood. Without it, humanity wouldn’t have stood a chance. We could all be dead, or worse.”

“What’s worse than being dead?” she scoffed.

Wesson leveled his eyes at her and she swallowed. “We could be packing ‘Nak bullets right now, for one thing.”

Gray blinked, surprised at how odd this sounded. Bondship was bondship, wasn’t it? Every enlisted Corpsman was a bond. The only reason anyone was here was the hope of getting that coveted freemark and being addressed by your given name for the first time in a decade. The Freedom Ceremony was what dreams were made of.

She almost opened her mouth to ask him if he really thought that being the property of the Corps was better than being property of The Algo. But you didn’t say things like that in a Corps camp, no matter how much you drank or how much you wanted the last word.

“Probably,” she mumbled. “At least its only ten years of this, and the Corps does keep its word.”

“The Corps always keeps its word.”

Wesson smiled again as he rose, satisfied that he’d reached her. But just as he was about to leave, she stopped him.

“What happened to us, Wesson?”

The handsome tenth-year paused and his eyes fell to the ground for a moment. “It’s like you said, you weren’t feeling it.”

Gray thought for a minute, chewing slowly. “I guess I just got tired of sneaking around. We’re not youngyears anymore.”

“I think being a good corpsman really matters to you now. I respect that.”

“And you’re almost out of here anyways.” She looked up and their eyes met. “Even though you want to stay with the Corps, I’ll probably never see you again after you get your promo.”

“Everybody’s gotta say goodbye at some point.”

Gray nodded drunkenly.

“Now get some rest, I’ll tell Harper you missed him.”

I’ve seen the pedo comparison made before too and it really sucks.

And it’s as asinine as saying furries or people who like girls in cat ears are all secretly animal fuckers. Smh.

Aborigen is one talented mofo.

Going back to the OP, I agree - kink is not always about getting off, and in fact it rarely ever is, psychologically speaking. Kinks are fundamental needs being met in superfluous trappings.

I have a GF now who’s just as size kinky as I am (and a lucky bastard am I!) but more importantly, I’m actually getting to flex my dominant muscles in an actual relationship. It’s her first time getting involved in anything related to BDSM, and while it’s not my first rodeo by a long shot, what I’ve discovered is that the basis of dominance, control, is actually just a fundamental part of who I am as a person.

Like, I can dirty talk her for an hour over text, tell her what to do and what to think and what to say while she’s masturbating, and I may not even get that sexually turned on - I can do this while I make dinner and watch TV - but turns out it satisfies me on a level I didn’t really know existed and even if I didn’t so much as touch my dick, I still wouldn’t trade this kind of power for the world.

I’m not really playing with macrophilia right now because I’m getting deeper into the IRL BDSM scene and power exchange, but for me it’s where my size kinks come from, and it’s a VERY powerful way to scratch the itch.

Telling her what to eat, installing tracking software on her phone so I can see where she is at all times (and listen in with her phone without needing permission), having her put stuff in a calendar so I know what she’s doing - these are all non-sexual things that our dynamic is settling into because they satisfy a very deep need for both of us. “Being” a giant is just another way of signaling that I’m in control, I have the final say, and that I can withstand things that my sub/victim/pet/plaything can’t (the burden of authority.) But there’s a more direct route for me, and that’s through living D/s.

@nyx said in A challenger has appeared!:

@kisupure I’m a huge fan of your work

Yours too! Thank you

@i-am-insane said in A challenger has appeared!:

Hey, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen you last. How’s things? Good to have more people from before show up!

Yeah, it’s been a bit! I basically gave up after SW Realm went down, and was processing my identity stuff for a while so I took a step back from the community because I wasn’t sure how I really fit into it. Slowly finding my way in again, though I’ve been doing tons of writing in the meantime. It’s nice seeing you here too!

CHAPTER 9

FINALLY, A SEX SCENE!

---

Gray had spent the afternoon napping, or trying to. Her thoughts were spinning in all directions, and after staring at the canvas above her head for a long time, she realized that her feelings were not incompatible with each other. In fact, the fire in her belly burned for two reasons, like riders approaching each other from different directions on the road. They met, now. Shook hands. Her lust for the sentinel and her frustration with Wesson were one in the same thing.

If he showed up tonight—there was always the chance he wouldn’t—and if he didn’t use this opportunity to wreak bloody havoc—there was always the chance that he would—then maybe, just maybe, this was the solution to her problem. The middle finger she was looking for. Gray could dangle her treason in front of his face every time she stepped into his office without him suspecting a goddamn thing.

Maybe she could have this.

One of her bunkmates came in to change out of a shirt drenched in sweat. “You’ve been hard to find lately,” she said, pulling the garment off to reveal a back crisscrossed with a few old switch scars. “Gonna play some strip horseshoes when the sun goes down. You in?”

Gray swallowed. “Nah, I’m busy.”

“With what? C’mon, don’t you wanna see that nice ass Tucker’s got? Or how ‘bout Hill’s?” Hill was a woman.

“I think I might have a date with somebody else’s ass, actually.”

“Ooh. Who’s the corpsman?”

Gray bit back a smirk and her heart began to race at the thrill of it all. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“I’ll find out one way or another,” the other woman said, pulling down the new shirt. “Have fun!”

Gray waved her out. “I’ll try,” she murmured to herself.

* * *

2140 arrived. Gray was restless, abuzz with anticipation, excitement, a sense of danger not unlike the kind she felt in a firefight. But she wasn’t going to war, so the corpsman had settled for spending a friday to throw back some hard shine near the checkpoint to watch the summer sun dance along the far horizon. Near the end, it flattened into a lumpy red blob in the haze for a short while, then finally winked out of existence along with her drink.

Dusk in the Southland was her favorite time of day. The tans and golden browns of the landscape ripened to purple and ochre, and when the afternoon heat finally began to evaporate into the cooler night air, it was almost possible to imagine that the world wasn’t one endless, shell-pocked desert. As she started walking, a pleasant breeze picked up and Gray found that her nerves had calmed a little. But she couldn’t delay any longer, it was almost time.

Gray made her way up the canyon, shivering despite the heat.

For all intents and purposes, she looked like any other tired corpsman taking an evening stroll to clear the mind. She passed the mules in their corral, passed the pair of patrolmen whose movements the sentinel had tracked, noted, and memorized long ago. Their uniforms indicated that they were with Rose Fox, so she didn’t know them and by her guess, they were only a few minutes away from the beginning of their circuit. The Anak’s comment about their behavior was proven right also: these two were taking their sweet-ass time, barely aware of their surroundings as they talked and chewed on what looked like a couple codys. She nodded to them as they went by, but neither noticed.

The canyon began to narrow here, its walls steep and rocky. Gray had no idea how the sentinel would find his way down from a path along the top of the hills, but she didn’t doubt that he had one in mind. The hairs on her arms stood on end as she turned her brown eyes upward, following the ridges above, trying to see any signs of life or movement among the tall grass and tobacco trees. Nothing but the rustling breeze. Up ahead was the long maze of storage: mismatched crates, boxes, barrels of varying make and age, all of it salvage. Inside them? Extra tent canvas, spare parts for everything from guns to cot frames, paper, light bulbs, copper wire. The important stuff was kept under better lock and key, but everything here, bulky and unconcealed, was the boring necessities of sustaining a Corps camp. And it provided ample cover for an illicit encounter. In fact, it was a surprise that she hadn’t stumbled across anyone else with the same idea yet.

“Can’t believe I’m doing this,” she whispered to the mass of containers.

Gray passed row upon row of storage, some piled neater than others. She hurried along, not quite sure why, but decided that she was looking for a place they could meet. Don’t mind me, she declared in her head. Just figuring out where to fool around with a goddamn ‘Nak.

The perfect spot was near the end. Crates stacked well above her head, encircling a small area. But that’s when she saw it: several storage rooms dug out of the hillside, kept cool and hidden by a board of plywood and canvas flap. Gray glanced around, listened, heard nothing. Heart beating, she set the board aside and pushed away the flap. Feeling around for a switch, with a flick the single bulb heaved to life above. It couldn’t have been more than 20 watts. Just enough to bathe the small space in a meager, shadowy glow. Enough to find one’s way through a tangle of limbs. She checked her watch: 2158.

She immediately shrugged off her overshirt and undid her belt, setting them quietly down on the floor just inside. Her sider was going to be next, but as she considered its modest weight in her hand, Gray turned on the safety and put it in her pocket… just in case. He was still an Anak after all.

Then, she waited.

But she didn’t have to wait long.

There was a noise outside. It wasn’t him, as far as she could tell, and it took a few moments of searching to find the source: there was a stick at her feet that hadn’t been there before. When she held it to the light, she saw that it was roughly inscribed with three straight-lined marks, separated each by one dot. Her Morse was rusty, but the prosign was familiar: ATTENTION, it meant.

There was another noise, then. A faint crack from the right, the smallest shuffle, and a moment later her eyes fell on that towering wall of gray shadow that blended expertly into the twilight, rounding the corner with predatory skill. The sentinel was right on time. She looked at him, some part of her still in complete disbelief at what was unfolding.

The soldier in her reached for the comfort of her little sider, ran her fingers over it, told herself that if this was all a ruse then she still had a chance to make it out alive, because there was no turning back now. She wondered if she could ever trust him more than this, or if she was going to be content fucking a man she might have to pull a gun on.

All nine feet of him stood beside the bank of crates as he rested his elbow on it, the wood creaking under his weight. In the thinning light, though, he was quite a sight: lean, imposing, with his face obscured by that cloth and eyes hidden behind the striking green lenses of what could only be a pair of night–vision goggles. She’s heard about them before, but never seen a pair herself. Gray could only imagine what they would look like while in the squeeze.

Quickly he tugged the fabric under his chin and raised the eyewear to rest above his forehead, and his face caught the light in just such a way that it occurred to her she was looking at one of the most handsome men she’d ever seen in her whole goddamn life. Besides her nerves, it felt like her heart was going to explode.

“W-we’ve got forty minutes,” was the first thing she said. Gray could have smacked herself for how unsexy of an opener that was. Worse, her apprehension was showing.

But he didn’t seem to give a damn. The giant wasted no time kissing her: it was deep and salty and he tasted like cigarette smoke. That roughed–up palm of his glove was behind her neck, up in her hair, down to her shoulders and then her arms. He broke away, giving her a little wink and a smile before twisting on his heels and pushing her in through the door as though he knew what she’d planned for them.

“We’d better get started, then.”

Gray glanced at her watch for reference, committed the hour to memory and marveled as he entered the small shelter, ducking deeply. He closed the door behind them. This was it now.

As if reading her mind, he asked: “We gonna do the enemy soldier song and dance again?”

Fuck, she loved the sound of that deep voice, so raspy around the edges. Gray couldn’t tell if she wanted to jump him or call it all off. But she steeled herself. This is it, corpsman. You’ve got treason to commit now, or didn’t you know?

He didn’t have his pack on, she realized—he must have left it somewhere nearby—and so he started with his body armor. Slim spaulders went first, dropped to the dirt floor, then he quickly undid the bracers around his big forearms. Gray watched him in fascination, forgetting herself for a few moments. She never in her life imagined be here, close enough to a ‘Nak to see the whites of his eyes outside of a battle, outside the do or die logic of war. Well, she did on the rare occasion. But she never told a soul.

“Why?” she countered, blood still beating in her ears as she went for the belt holding her pants up. “You want to?” Surely, false confidence was better than none.

The Anak shook his big head.

“You wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight in a tight space like this,” he said with a smirk, eyes roaming around the interior of the sandstone bunker for a moment to punctuate his point. “I’d have you on the ground in no time.”

Was he talking about killing her, or fucking her?

Gray shot him a look, at once wry and flirtatious, and realized that he was trying to make her—or the both of them, maybe—feel more at ease. She was half his size and a quarter his weight, sure, but he could still catch lead like her, could still bleed out with a well-aimed shot. She cocked a hip and an eyebrow at him, acutely aware of the gun in her pocket and the fact that once she discarded her pants, she wouldn’t be within easy reach of another weapon.

“You don’t know what I’m packing,” she half–joked.

Before she had a chance to slowly shimmy off her slacks, he had her by the hip–bones against him again, pressed very fully against that familiar tenting in his pants. Every nerve–ending in her body lit up when he ground those hips into hers, pressing that bulge against a much smaller mons. She was surrounded by him, his dust, his need. She had to remember to breathe.

“You don’t know what I’m packing either,” he smirked into her shoulder as she could feel heat beat her cheeks red.

She braced herself against that wall of a body as his still-gloved hands began to roam, and it wasn’t long before he came to the familiar shape in her pocket. He reached in with two fingers and pinched it out. Gray looked away. Embarrassed?

“Weren’t going to be able to hide that for long,” he said, and dropped the sider to the floor before yanking her pants down.

Gray still averted her eyes, settling on the rippling muscle of his clothed thigh. “A little protection,” she said, forcing a laugh.

“Yeah,” he said with a faint snort. “Old habits die hard, don’t they?”

Then he reached into his boot and slid out a fierce looking knife, showing it to her before pushing the blade into the dirt beside her gun. The small gesture said a lot to someone like her. He kissed her again, finally tearing off his gloves.

“It feels weird to not be afraid,” she said when she broke for air. It was another dumb thing to say, but it was true.

The sentinel chuckled and it sounded like gravel. “Spoken like a true corpsman.”

A minute later they were both shirtless and he was on his back with her straddling his firm waistline. Finally, she could see what he looked like under all that brown and gray.

And he was marvelous. A quick survey of his chest, broad and strong, revealed a hard life: scarring, chillingly symmetrical from implants, and scattered others from his time in the wilderness. There was a fading tattoo underneath his left collarbone: R-402, it read in plain black. Gray became momentarily aware of the slight metal chain around her neck, and the stamped tags tucked into her compression top that had a something similar pressed into them, her Enlistment Identification Number. Her fingers found the ink in his skin. She wanted to see if she could feel the tattoo, and found that she could.

“They call me Rice,” he murmured. No given names for Anakim either, then?

“Gray,” she replied.

“I know.” His bare hands, almost as rough as the gloves, were on her back now, imposing against her slender bones. Imposing, but god, so good.

How could this be treason?

She could sit there, staring at that body, that handsome face, and feel those strong hands against her spine for eons. But they didn’t have eons: they had barely more than half an hour. The giant soldier underneath her seemed to remember this and he decided to push her compression top up to reveal soft, lean breasts.

Gray sucked in air as the sensitive flesh was exposed, and Rice rumbled deep in his chest, his eyes fixed on the smooth swells punctuated by dusky pink. His fingers soon followed, each one taking a breast and giving an almost reverent squeeze.

She couldn’t help the little moan. He grabbed harder this time, raking his thumbs across a pair of nipples quickly puckering up at the attention. He seemed to revel in their meager weight, their plump curves, stroking and cupping. Gray was aware of a throbbing heat between her legs and realized that she wanted to be touched there too. She arched, sliding her hips back so that her ass just grazed him through the fabric of his pants. A bold move.

“I’m not going to fit,” he grunted after drawing her face down to his for a second. Then he kissed her, as if to make up for the disappointment. “You know that, right?”

“Like hell you won’t.”

He cocked his head at her. “I’m nine–one, five–hundred and sixty pounds, Gray.” A chuckle. “If you’ve never taken five fingers, you’re not taking me.”

She bent over and nipped along the side of his thickly corded neck. “Never say die, Anak.”

The little human had no idea why she was fighting him over it. He probably could have convinced her if he’d stopped suppressing his pheromone, though, and the thought made her shiver.

“Hmm.”

In a swift motion, he was suddenly on top, a padded knee on either side of her ankles. He palmed at the bulge in his pants for a moment before going in to undo the buttons on the fly. She watched, enraptured and curious. It’s not that she’d never seen ‘Nak dick before, but she’d never seen one like this. Never seen one that wanted her.

Then there it was. The length of flesh that slipped out was almost startling, actually— thick, long, and with a little bit of a curve to his left. It only took a half second to realize that it was as big around as her forearm, and not at the wrist.

Poised above her, Rice met her gaze again with a pair of very dark eyes. “Told you,” he said.

The excitement went straight between her legs and she unconsciously arched up toward him, wanting, needing to be touched again. Gray, partly driven by a refusal to admit defeat and partly driven by some animal need to feel that thing between her legs, set her jaw and dug in her heels.

“Never say die,” she repeated.

He quirked a brow at her and one corner of his mouth curled in the faintest hint of a smirk. “I would if I were you.”

Rice seemed to enjoy moving her comparatively slight weight around because he had her again, grabbed her with those huge hands by the hip and the shoulder, turned her as he pulled her up to him and sat back on his heels. Gray’s shoulders were against his warm chest, simply dwarfed by the breadth of his own. The crown of her head barely grazed his chin as he held her precipitously above that heaving organ.

Big, was the only word that crossed her mind for a moment. Fucking big… all of him. Jesus!

With a hooked thumb he slid her underwear down her thighs just enough to expose that moist heat between her legs with practiced confidence. The suspense was killing her and she fought back a whimper.

Her mind nearly exploded when the head, a rich, purple-red, slid up against her folds and brushed her clit, sending a jolt of pleasure rushing from her head to each of her curling toes. Gray arched even more, trying to angle herself against it by some primal reasoning but froze when she felt the pressure of him trying to enter.

“Yeah,” he panted above her with both warmth and frustration, “Never say die until you realize you have no lube. Now hold still while I…”

He wasn’t interrupted so much as he didn’t bother to finish. With a deep growl he was in. Well, the first inch of him.

Gray hissed loudly and gasped.

“F-fuck!”

The sentinel’s girth had her stretched as wide as she’d ever been in her life and her aching cunt stung around the invading member. She had to do something with her hands— anything—and they settled for holding on for dear life. He shifted slightly underneath her, and even that seemed to push the air from her lungs.

Still, Gray was no stranger to pain, and it didn’t take long for her to feel the pleasure percolating beneath it.

“You can tap out.” Rice’s words were breathy and ragged, and he struggled to hold still.

“So can—” Gray whimpered when he moved the tiniest bit. “—you.”

That appeared to be a challenge he wasn’t going to walk away from. Quickly, the giant adjusted their positions, pinning her knees to her chest with one arm and wrapping his fingers around her slender neck with the other. A pang of fear electrified her and her own little fingers grasped at the hand at her neck, strong enough, she imagined, to crush her windpipe in the blink of an eye.

He plunged in another nearly unbearable inch, and muffled her cry with his tongue in her mouth.

Gray’s head swam, and she was prepared to regret playing with fire. But what she didn’t expect was the intense wave of pleasure when he pulled out. A clever quip would have taken more wherewithal than she had now. A wordless moan was all she could manage instead.

“Unh.”

He worked himself back in with what few inches her body could accommodate like this, hand still on her neck but not tightening. It was there for effect—an effect that she found she liked. It kept her on edge like the pheromone.

Gray realized that she wasn’t going to last long like this. Rice withdrew once more and drove back in, rocking his hips so carefully into her, and she was all ragged whimpers and straining muscles and hot, hot heat—

Orgasm rolled through her, spreading from the pressure in her pussy down to her toes and up to the scalp on the top of her head.

His hand was quick to cover her mouth before her cries could reach their crescendo. The corpsman’s body stiffened so much and so quickly that her bones felt like they would break if her climax had hit any harder, and she made ugly, desperate noises against the palm of his hand.

Her legs shook and her cunt shivered, greedily clutching at that massive cock, either trying to push it out or pull it further in, maybe both. The giant groaned when her muscles gripped him even harder, but he was patient, she dimly noted—he was waiting for her to finish. Eventually she collapsed back against him, shaking and holding onto herself.

“Mm, you sure showed me,” the giant muttered into her hair.

Gray didn’t dare move because he was still in her, still hard, and still putting pressure on all the right places. But she was tired now. Her hips ached. She was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. It felt like she’d just walked a mile with a hundred-pound ruck. But they weren’t done. At least, Rice wasn’t, and something told her that he hadn’t risked life and limb just to get her off.

She was about to say something, but the rosy haze had turned her mind to mush. After a moment he gave a small thrust into her hypersensitive cunt: she yelped, and he laughed.

“Wake up, corpy,” he chuckled. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”

He eased himself out of her, and she whimpered.

“Over there.” Rice picked her up and set her on the ground against a few crates. Kneeling, his cock was at the perfect height for her to use her mouth. Above, she saw him brace his massive hands on the containers, effectively pinning her down. Gray swallowed, reminding herself that this was a dangerous position to be in. More dangerous than what she’d just done? Hardly. But things still felt weird without the fear. Disorienting; only, in a good way.

The one thing she could know for sure, though, was that this Rice, this deadly Anak sentinel, was using her as a means to an end. But it was mutual, they both understood. Their allegiances didn’t matter here in this cramped room, only that base hunger for touch. For a witness.

But there was something else, too: why agree to go through the trouble to fuck a corpsman on camp soil? Surely, there was another, bigger game he was playing that Gray was providing a set piece for.

And yet, it still didn’t seem wrong. Or, wrong enough.

As the massive man rolled his hips in closer to her face, Gray momentarily thought of Wesson. She’d slept with him a number of times; the sex wasn’t bad, exactly, but not good either. He’d been gentle and mealy, sentimental. But there was no time for that. Not at Fox, not in the Corps, not anywhere in the vast rolling desert of the Southland.

Why Wesson wanted romance was beyond her. Romance didn’t just stifle, it made things more complicated than they needed to be. Then she remembered another corpsman, his name forgotten to her now, and how he’d put his hand around her neck once too. But still, it hadn’t been like this. It hadn’t been an Anak’s hand.

Rice’s boots scraped against the floor, and the sound drew her out of her head. Boots in the dirt, she thought, turning the image over in her mind a few times. It was one of the most honest sounds she could think of.

He grabbed himself, touched the sticky moisture at the tip of his cock to her lip. Gray smelled herself on him and blushed. But beyond that, he was clean. He must have bathed for this, somehow.

Gray’s tongue darted out to lick at the precum, and she could feel his eyes digging into her from high above. She took him in both hands, suddenly wondering if her knowledge of human anatomy would be enough here.

“Are you… it’s like a human’s, just bigger, right?”

She glanced up, suddenly sheepish and feeling very, very small now.

“Far as I can tell,” he grunted.

Rice reached down to grab and stroke her chin, a little roughness in the gesture reminding her that the clock was ticking.

Licking her lips, Gray opened her mouth as wide as it would go and he pushed in to the back molars, which was as far as he could go. Even then she had to fight a gag.

Rice felt it and massaged at the bulge under her chin. “Don’t need you to deepthroat,” he murmured. “You can grip me harder than that, though.”

Gray nodded with his cock still splitting her mouth open and got to work synchronizing her pumping fists with bobbing her head around the first few inches of his heaving length.

She couldn’t believe how hot he was! Or how rock-hard now; it was like stroking sun-baked saddle leather. His veins were so pronounced that she felt like she’d be able to feel the pumping blood under the tight skin. It was like even his dick was made of muscle.

“Fingers can’t wrap all the way around me, can they?” he quietly teased.

She responded with a short moan that vibrated around his hot cockhead, so swollen now that she could barely tug at his foreskin. She rubbed her tongue along the underneath of his head, and when she pulled away, she licked up along the slit, oozing his moisture now.

“Getting close, keep going.”

Gray picked up her pace. She stroked along his thick shaft as hard as she could, lubricating him with her spit, and hollowed her her cheeks to suckle at the tip. A swear left the giant’s lips and wood creaked high above.

He reached down to cup the back of her head, threading fingers through her hair as he began rocking his hips in a way that told her he was still in tight control. One overzealous move and he could choke her. Or have his dick bitten. It was impossible to tell which one was the stronger motivator.

Before long, Gray was sucking and stroking as fast as her tired little body could go. He helped by grabbing himself at the root to stroke his bottom half, and from what she could see, his breaths were growing more labored, his cut belly tightening with every heave of his chest.

“Y’ready?” he breathed.

A second later he grabbed her by the hair hard enough to sting and stiffened. His huge body convulsed once, twice, and he kept his cock firmly buried in the back of her mouth as he pumped his load into her with a groan. Gray held onto his hips and made a noise as she struggled to swallow the globs of heat hitting her throat, concentrating on not gagging, don’t gag, don’t gag!

There was still so much of it in her mouth when he freed himself from her aching jaw with a thread of milky split connecting them for a moment.

Licking her lips, Gray was finally able to actually taste him. His flavor was surprisingly clean, too, and human enough, but there was a note there, faint, that was immediately recognizable, and it made her heart jump.

Rice sat down, an arm resting on his knee as he breathed slow and content, need satiated for now. Gray was still busy swallowing the last of his cum as she went to sit beside him. Idly, they both watched his erection flag until it lay limply against his leg.

He tucked it away again, buttoned up his fly, then without warning pulled her up into his lap like the rag doll she suddenly was. They sat like that for a minute or two, half–listening for approaching corpsmen, half lost in the doped–up haze of post–orgasm. But something else made her not want to get too comfortable.

“How’d you learn to fuck a human like that?” Gray asked, not sure she really wanted to know the answer.

“I’m a sentinel,” he grunted. “A free-range operator. And there’s still a lot of free–range humans out there.”

Gray started to wonder what that meant, having been only sixteen when she left that world behind. But why should that surprise her? There were more people out in the wastes than the Corps, after all. She supposed that if he had something valuable enough to offer someone, then they would probably have no problem trading themselves for it. She wondered if he ever threatened anyone for sex, but something struck her odd about the idea.

“Though to be honest,” he continued lazily, and there was the faintest hint of satisfaction in his voice that she couldn’t get a read on. “I’ve never fucked a corpsman before.”

Neither of them said anything for a long beat, but the way the air in the storage room was starting to feel, Gray could tell that a something was bubbling to the forefront of both their minds. He spoke to it first.

“Question is, the hell do we do now?”

He’d been naive, she realized, in pursuing her like that, and he knew it. Maybe he was used to having the kind of latitude that let him follow his whims, used to being able to bend the rules. Gray wondered if he hadn’t actually thought this through, or if he’d been thinking with his dick too much.

Because fuck knows she hadn’t been thinking with her brain either.

Her mouth was suddenly dry, but she spoke anyway. “We put on our uniforms and go back to doing our jobs,” she muttered.

Gray suddenly felt that his pants were too rough for her bare thighs, and his skin too warm for her bare back, so she released herself from his loose grasp and staggered back to her clothes across the room. Her watch told her that their time was almost up.

She hefted up her pants and underwear at the same time, and reached for her shirt. She stole a glance at the Anak as he dressed, watching him strap on his matte beige gear. He must’ve caught her looking, because he nodded in distant agreement, but her answer also seemed to bother him.

She was ready in the short span that he was, and it was time for him to go. The light was switched off again. She sucked in a shaking breath and held it as she peeked outside the door, listening to the silence for any trace of movement. There was none, and Gray stepped out. He followed and the two found themselves among the crates again, obscured by the deeper shadows of night.

“Let’s do that again,” he said. He’d taken a knee, goggles hanging loosely around his neck. His gloved hand held onto her hip with his thumb stroking her belly.

Images and sensations passed through her mind’s eye and she tingled with a small surge of adrenaline. Could they have this? Would they be able to hang onto this simple, dangerous arrangement, even when all the forces of their world were hurtling them towards the grim and inevitable? Gray felt compelled to try. If she couldn’t assert herself against the interests of the upranked, she could at least assert herself here. She could bring this back to camp and unlike shifts, unlike fridays, unlike codys and blankets, the Corps didn’t give it to her, and so the Corps couldn’t take it away.

Gray’s own game had begun.

“Yeah, we should.”

“When?”

“This is your territory, isn’t it?” she countered with a little smile. “You tell me.”

He laughed quietly, and she almost lost herself in that deep, earthy sound. “You won’t like me gettin’ the drop on you.”

Gray grabbed the webbing of his vest and yanked him forward with the help of his cooperation. “You thought my pussy wouldn’t like your cock either. Seems to me like you’re in the habit of being wrong.”

His smile widened and he showed teeth. “Big words for a human.”

She snorted, was about to make some kind of clever, sexy rebuttal, but Rice just kissed her before she had the chance. His fully-loaded silhouette, ominous and striking in its effect on the senses, blocked the starry sky from her field of vision. But he was gentle, if not a little trepid, even. Not the behavior of a well-trained ‘Nak.

Then he lifted up his goggles, depressed a button along the side, and disappeared back into the wild like a rustle on the breeze.