Chapter 5: Newfound Obsession
The words on the screen seemed to pulse, a digital cancer in the dim light of the room. Sympathetic anchor trigger. Marco’s mind raced, trying to piece together the clinical jargon with the visceral reality of the last hour—the bite, the change, the horrifying intimacy on the mats.
“It’s a link,” he muttered, more to himself than to Brock. “She wired you to me. Through the bite. It’s not just you anymore.”
He felt Brock’s presence shift behind him. The tense, trapped energy was softening, sliding back into the curse’s default setting. A manicured hand, nails still perfect, came to rest lightly on his shoulder. The touch was warm, insistent.
“You’re thinking too hard,” the airy, feminine voice sighed into his ear. “You should relax those muscles. Let me help.”
Marco shrugged the hand off, not roughly, but firmly. He needed to think. He needed to find a reversal thread, a counterspell, anything in Lydia’s damned archives. He clicked into a sub-forum titled ‘Unbinding & Binding’.
A shadow fell over the laptop screen. Brock had moved to stand in front of the cracked mirror leaning against the wall. He—she—was staring at her reflection, a curious, vacant tilt to her head.
“Bro,” Brock said, but the voice was different. It was lower, less performative. It held a flicker of real amazement, edged with the horror Marco recognized. It was Brock, surfacing again. “Look at this.”
Marco turned. Brock was facing the mirror, his back to Marco. He watched as his friend’s hands, those delicate feminine hands, came up to cup the full, round curves of his own breasts through the thin fabric of the borrowed t-shirt. The gesture wasn’t sexual. It was analytical, almost clinical. A profound, dawning fascination warred with disgust on his face.
“This body,” Brock murmured, his own voice straining through the sweet soprano. “It’s actually… not bad. I mean, objectively.” He turned slightly, looking over his shoulder at the reflection of his own exaggerated backside. He gave a small, experimental wiggle. “The balance is weird. The center of gravity is all in the front. But the… the construction. It’s kinda fun, tbh.”
A cold knot tightened in Marco’s stomach. This was new. This wasn’t the horny persona or the trapped victim. This was Brock, the consummate physical craftsman, assessing a new piece of equipment. It was a coping mechanism so fundamentally Brock that it was more unsettling than any panic.
“Don’t,” Marco started, but the word died in his throat.
Brock’s eyes in the mirror met his. For a second, they were clear, intelligent, and utterly lost. “How do girls walk in these things?” he asked, utterly serious. “It’s like having two built-in counterweights. You gotta lean back just to stand straight.”
Then he blinked. The analytical light faded, replaced by the glossy, empty sheen. The persona was back, swallowing the moment of clarity. “You like watching, don’t you?” she purred, turning fully now, a hand on her hip.
Marco looked away, back to the screen. His heart was hammering. The dissonance was worse than anything yet. Seeing Brock’s mind flicker behind those eyes, only to be smothered by the curse’s programming, was a special kind of torture.
He heard Brock take a step toward him. Then he heard a sharp, wet intake of breath.
A sound like tearing Velcro filled the room, low and visceral.
“Oh,” Brock said. The word was small, tight.
Marco spun in the chair.
Brock was standing frozen, looking down at himself. The borrowed t-shirt, once stretched tight, was beginning to sag. The magnificent curves beneath it were… receding. It was slow at first, then accelerated, a grotesque reverse-inflation. His chest flattened, the dramatic swell pulling back into the broad, muscular plane of his pectorals. His hips narrowed, the sharp bones of his pelvis pushing back against the skin. His jawline squared, the softness evaporating to reveal the familiar, stubborn angle of his chin, now shadowed with the dark stubble that was pushing through at an impossible rate.
Brock lifted his hands, watching as the slender fingers thickened, the knuckles grew prominent, the fine blond hairs on the backs were replaced by the familiar dark, coarse ones. The nails shortened, lost their gloss.
“Oh, man,” Brock grunted, his voice dropping an octave, then two, cracking on the way down like a teenager’s. “What the fuck?”
It was him. It was all him. The shaved head, the thick beard, the massive, vascular arms, the dense torso. He stood there, naked and utterly male, in the middle of the living room. He stared at his own hands, flexing them, a wave of pure, unadulterated relief washing over his features. For a moment, he was just Brock again. Whole.
The relief lasted exactly three seconds.
A searing cramp locked Marco’s lower body. It wasn't the diffuse pain of the first change. This was specific, targeted, a white-hot wire twisting through his pelvis. He gasped, doubling over in the chair, his hands flying to his gut.
“Marco?” Brock’s voice, his real voice, was thick with alarm.
The pain was excruciating, deep in the bone. Marco felt a sickening pop-pop-pop as the joints of his hips rearranged themselves, widening. A violent shudder racked him as new tissue bloomed under his skin, a heavy, unfamiliar weight settling on his chest, pulling him forward. He clutched at his pecs, but his hands found not muscle, but soft, full mounds straining against his own black t-shirt. The fabric tightened, the neckline digging in.
“No,” Marco choked out. “No, no, no—”
His sweatpants, loose on his masculine frame, grew taut across his rear, the material stretching over a new, rounded swell. The waistband bit into a softer, narrower waist. His shoulders felt narrower, his frame pulling inwards, a sensation of shrinking within his own skin. A fiery itch erupted across his scalp as his hair, his short, dark hair, began to sprout, pouring down over his shoulders and back in a cascade of heavy, dark curls.
The final shift was in his face. His jaw ached as it softened, his beard retracting into nothingness. His features refined, his brows arching, his lips swelling into a fuller, poutier shape. The five o’clock shadow was gone, replaced by smooth, olive-toned skin.
The pain stopped, leaving a throbbing, full-body ache. He collapsed from the chair onto his hands and knees on the rough carpet, heaving. His new center of gravity was all wrong. The weight on his chest was a foreign anchor. A curtain of dark, fragrant hair fell around his face.
He saw his own hands, splayed on the floor. They were smaller. Sleeker. A woman’s hands.
From above, he heard a strangled, horrified sound.
Marco looked up.
Brock was staring down at him, his face a mask of pure, undiluted shock. He was fully himself, every muscular inch of him, and he was looking at Marco as if he’d just seen a building collapse.
“Marco?” Brock whispered again, the name a question.
Marco tried to speak. The voice that came out was not his own. It was richer than Brock’s cursed soprano, a warm, husky contralto that felt alien in his throat. “The anchor,” he rasped, the new vocal cords struggling. “It’s a balance. You go back… I take the form.”
The logic of the curse was horrifyingly clear now. Lydia hadn’t just linked them; she’d made them a circuit. One battery charging, the other draining. The female form was a state, a piece of cursed energy, and it had to exist somewhere. When Brock was free, it jumped to the nearest host: the sympathetic anchor.
Brock took a stumbling step backward, hitting the edge of the couch. He raked a hand over his shaved head, his eyes wide. “This is… this is so much worse,” he breathed.
Marco pushed himself up to sit on his heels. The movement made the new weight on his chest sway uncomfortably. He looked down at himself. The black t-shirt was now stretched taut over a pronounced, feminine bust. He saw the curves of his own new hips under the grey sweatpants. A hysterical, desperate laugh bubbled in his new throat, but it came out as a shaky sob.
“You’re…” Brock started, then stopped, unable to find words. He just gestured weakly at all of Marco.
“Yeah,” Marco said, the feminine voice flat with defeat. He reached up and pulled a thick curl in front of his eyes, staring at it. “I’m a Latina chick.” The absurd specificity of it was the final twist of the knife. Lydia’s cruelty had a type.
The two of them sat in silence for a long minute, a reversed image of their nightmare from earlier. The muscular man, whole and horrified. The voluptuous woman, shattered and trying to understand her new skeleton.
Brock finally moved. He turned and stalked to his discarded gym bag, pulling out a pair of shorts and yanking them on with rough, angry motions. The normalcy of the act was jarring. He tossed a hoodie toward Marco. It landed in a heap beside him.
“Put that on,” Brock said, his voice gruff. He wouldn’t look directly at Marco. “You’re… you’re shivering.”
Marco hadn’t noticed. He pulled the oversized hoodie on, enveloping himself in the familiar scent of Brock’s deodorant and sweat. It was a bizarre comfort. He zipped it up, the fabric swallowing his new shape.
“We have to find her,” Brock said. He was pacing now, a caged tiger in the small space. All his relief at being back in his body had been incinerated by this new horror. “Today. Now. We can’t… this can’t be the deal.”
“It is the deal,” Marco said, his new voice gaining a sliver of steel. He got to his feet, movements careful, testing his balance. It was different. Not bad. Just different. A body was a body. He could work with it. The thought was a lifeline. “Until we break it. The forum. There has to be something.”
He walked back to the laptop, his gait subtly altered. He sat, the hoodie pooling around him. Brock hovered behind him, a massive, tense shadow.
Marco navigated back to Lydia’s post. He scrolled past the clinical descriptions to the comments. Most were from other users with cryptic names like ‘ShadowWeaver’ and ‘Astaroth’s Hand’, offering perfunctory congratulations or technical questions about sigil alignment. Then, at the very bottom, was a comme