The Reversed Throne

Chapter 18: The Transformation

The fluorescent light in the bathroom buzzed like a trapped insect, casting a stark, shadowless glare over everything. It reflected off the cold white tiles, the porcelain sink, the mirrored cabinet whose surface was beginning to fog at the edges from their shared breath. The air was thick with the scent of saline, sex, and the coppery tang of birth. Beneath it all was the clean, astringent smell of bleach Rod had used to scrub the floor.

Wut stood under the spray of the shower, water sluicing in streams down his back, over the dragon tattoo, carrying pink-tinged swirls down the drain. His body felt like a battlefield after the siege had moved on—aching, hollow, profoundly changed. The physical memory of the hard entity passing through him was a phantom pain, a clenching void. The memory of being inside Rod, of Rod being inside him as it happened, was a different kind of fissure, emotional and raw.

Rod leaned against the sink, watching him through the foggy glass. He’d already showered. His lean frame was wrapped in a towel, his blonde hair dark and wet, plastered to his forehead. In his hand, he held two small vials, one resting in each palm. They caught the unforgiving light. One was filled with a fluid the opaque, creamy white of mother’s milk. The other held a liquid that seemed to swallow and refract the light, a shifting, iridescent blue that moved like a living oil slick.

Wut turned off the water. The sudden silence was heavy, broken only by the drip from the showerhead and the low, rhythmic thump of the toilet tank refilling. He pushed the door open, steam billowing out, and reached for a towel. His eyes went immediately to Rod’s hands.

“What are those?” he asked, his voice hoarse from screaming.

“The next step,” Rod said. His tone was calm, analytical, but there was a feverish gleam in his hazel eyes. The curator was back, but the madness was closer to the surface now. “We’ve pushed the envelope of hosting. Of gestation. The body has proven it can restructure itself internally to accommodate foreign matter. It can create new life from genetic templates that aren’t human.” He held up the white vial. “This asks a more fundamental question. What if the host body’s very architecture is… mutable?”

Wut dried himself slowly, the rough cotton dragging over sensitive skin. “Mutable how?”

Rod stepped closer. The fluorescent light made the hollows of his cheeks look deeper. “This one,” he said, indicating the white vial, “is for you. A topical catalyst. It will stimulate rapid, localized cellular differentiation. It will take your existing… gateway… and remodel it. Temporarily. For a few hours, maybe a day. It will give you a fully functional, self-lubricating, cervix-less vaginal canal.”

The words hung in the steamy air. Wut stared at the vial. A cunt. The serum would give him a cunt. The idea was ludicrous, terrifying. It was a violation of his fundamental physical reality. And yet, a part of him, the part that had thrilled to the song of the Opalescent, that had felt the rightness of the hard entity growing in his belly, sparked with a dark, eager curiosity.

“And the blue one?” Wut asked, his gaze shifting to the shimmering liquid.

A slow, dangerous smile spread across Rod’s face. He held the blue vial up to the light. “This is for me. An oral compound. A different kind of stimulus. It won’t change the architecture. It will… exaggerate the existing hardware.” His smile turned sharp. “Dramatically. It’ll give me the cock of a stud horse. Thick as your wrist. Long enough to reach places inside you that have never been touched. It’s meant to pair with the white serum. A key for the new lock.”

Wut’s breath caught. His mind conjured the image, vivid and obscene. The sheer, impossible scale of it. The stretch. The penetration. The feeling of being filled beyond any sane limit. His own cock, which had been soft and spent, gave a half-hearted twitch against his thigh.

“The entities… the basin…” Wut stammered, seeking an anchor in the routine. “They need to be fed. The paste—”

“The paste can wait,” Rod cut him off, his voice dropping to a low, intimate register that vibrated in the small, hard room. “This is more important. This is exploration. This is claiming. After what you just did… after you took me while you were birthing… I need to re-map you. I need to plant my flag in territory that’s never existed before.” He stepped right into Wut’s space, the vials held between them like sacred offerings. “Do you want to see what it feels like? To be a woman? To be split open on something that’s not even human-sized?”

Wut looked into Rod’s eyes. He saw the caretaker, the lover, the mad scientist, the dominant who had fucked him senseless in a supermarket parking lot. He saw the man who had screamed beneath him as he was taken. He saw the future, strange and glistening and terrifying. He licked his lips, which were suddenly dry.

“Yes,” he whispered.

Rod’s smile was triumphant. “On the toilet. Lid down. Legs spread.”

Wut moved obediently, the cold porcelain a shock against his warm skin. He sat, spreading his thighs, presenting himself. The aftermath of the birth was still visible—swollen, dark pink, loose. Rod knelt between his legs on the damp tiles. He unscrewed the cap of the white vial. The substance inside had no smell.

“This might feel… strange,” Rod said, his clinical tone at odds with the intimacy of the position.

He dipped two fingers into the milky serum. It was cool, slick. He brought his fingers to Wut’s entrance, circling the stretched ring of muscle. Then he pushed them inside, deep, coating the internal walls. He worked the serum in with a slow, massage-like motion, his fingers curling and pressing. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then a warmth began to bloom, deep inside Wut’s pelvis. It wasn’t a painful heat, but a profound, cellular tingling, like a limb waking from numbness multiplied by a thousand. He gasped, his hands gripping the edges of the toilet seat. The tingling intensified, becoming a buzzing, reorganizing hum. He could feel it—a literal shifting of tissues, a softening, a re-knitting. The familiar channel of his rectum seemed to dissolve, its structure melting and re-forming into something utterly alien.

“Oh, god,” Wut moaned, his head falling back. It didn’t hurt. It was profoundly, deeply unsettling. It was like listening to the Opalescent’s song made physical inside his own body.

Rod watched, fascinated, his fingers still inside. “It’s happening,” he murmured. “I can feel it. The texture is changing.” Slowly, he withdrew his fingers.

Where there had been a single, tight ring of muscle, there was now a complex, folded flower of slick, pink flesh. It glistened under the bathroom light, already beading with a clear, natural lubrication. The lips were soft, swollen-looking. It was undeniably, graphically a vagina.

Rod let out a slow, shuddering breath. He reached out and, with a touch that was almost reverent, traced the outer lips. They yielded under his fingertip, soft and giving. He pushed one finger gently into the new opening. It was hot, incredibly slick, and tightly sheathed him, but the texture was velvety, completely different from the grasping tension of his ass. He slid a second finger in alongside the first, scissoring them gently. The walls clung to him, soft and hungry.

“Fuck,” Rod breathed. “Look at you.” He pulled his fingers out, shiny with Wut’s new wetness. “Now you’re a real woman. At least for a little while.” He brought his fingers to his mouth, sucking them clean, his eyes locked on Wut’s. “Sweet. Different.”

Wut looked down at himself, a dizzying wave of dissociation washing over him. The sight was wrong. It was fascinating. A part of him was horrified. Another part, a deeper, more surrendered part, was throbbing with a low, anticipatory heat. His cock, now ignored, was fully hard, curving up against his stomach, dripping onto the skin above the new, foreign slit.

Rod stood up. He placed the now-empty white vial carefully on the sink. He held up the blue one. The iridescent liquid swirled. “My turn,” he said, and his voice had gone rough with need.

He uncorked it and threw his head back, swallowing the contents in one gulp. He grimaced, as if it tasted of ozone and metal. For a few seconds, nothing happened. He stood there, breathing deeply, his towel tented around his obvious erection.

Then a visible tremor ran through him. He gasped, his hands going to his lower abdomen. A low groan ripped from his throat, part pain, part ecstasy. The towel around his hips began to move, to bulge grotesquely. It strained, the fabric stretching. With a frantic motion, Rod tore the towel away.

Wut’s eyes widened.

Rod’s cock, already impressive, was transforming. It swelled in his grip, not just lengthening but thickening exponentially. The veins on its shaft raised like ropes, pulsing with a dark blood-flow. The skin darkened to a deep, flushed burgundy. It grew past his navel, past his sternum, the head becoming a massive, plum-colored dome, the slit weeping a steady stream of clear pre-cum. It didn’t stop. It kept growing, reaching a monstrous, absurd proportion. It was indeed as thick as Wut’s wrist, longer than Rod’s forearm. It was a brutal, animal shaft, utterly inhuman. It curved slightly upwards, a fat, heavy club of flesh that looked less like a sexual organ and more like a weapon of penetration.

Rod looked down at it, his expression one of awed possession. He wrapped a hand around the base, his fingers not even meeting. He gave it a slow, testing pump. A thick rope of pre-cum spurted from the tip, hitting the tiles with an audible splat.

“Jesus,” he muttered, his voice strained. He looked at Wut, his eyes blazing. “You see what you made me do? You see what you get?”

Wut couldn’t speak. He could only stare, a mixture of terror and raw, undiluted lust tightening his gut. His new vagina clenched emptily, flooding with more wetness.

“The bed,” Rod ordered, his voice guttural. He had to walk with a slight stoop, the weight and size of his cock affecting his balance. “Now. I want to break in your new pussy. I want to be the first thing that ever fucks it.”

Wut scrambled off the toilet, his legs shaky. He stumbled into the bedroom, the cool air of the apartment raising goosebumps on his wet skin. He crawled onto the mattress, the sheets still stained from their previous joining. He got on his back, pulling his knees up to his chest, spreading himself wide in a lewd, open invitation. He could feel the air on his new, slick folds.

Rod followed, a towering figure with that obscene appendage leading the way. He knelt on the bed between Wut’s legs, the mattress dipping heavily. He used one hand to guide the monstrous head of his cock to Wut’s entrance. The sheer scale of it was laughable, impossible. The bulbous head was wider than the spread of Wut’s new lips.

“It’s not going to fit,” Wut breathed, panic finally slicing through the haze of desire.

“The serum will make it fit,” Rod said, his voice tight with the effort of control. “It remodeled you to be receptive. To take me. All of me.” He leaned forward, applying pressure.

The broad crown pressed against the soft, yielding entrance. It hesitated, then began to sink in. The stretch was immediate and immense. A burning, tearing sensation flared, but it was instantly muted by a deep, chemical warmth radiating from the new tissue itself. His body was accepting it, softening, stretching in a way that should have been anatomically catastrophic. Wut cried out, a sharp, high sound, as inch after impossible inch of thick, hot flesh invaded him.

Rod pushed steadily, his face a mask of intense concentration and savage pleasure. “Fuck… your new cunt… it’s hugging me… it’s like a hot, wet fist…”

Wut could feel every ridge, every vein of the monstrous shaft as it filled him. It wasn’t just in his vaginal canal; it felt like it was displacing his organs, pressing up into the space where the entity had been, crowding his bladder, his intestines. The head, when Rod finally hilted himself, seemed to be lodged deep in the very core of his being. Rod’s hips were flush against his ass, the heavy weight of the rest of the shaft lying on Wut’s stomach and pelvis.

Rod held still, panting. “You feel that?” he growled. “That’s what it means to be a woman. To be filled completely. To have nothing left empty.”

Wut could only whimper in response. The fullness was beyond description. It was total occupation. He was a sheath for this inhuman tool. His own cock, trapped between their bodies, leaked a constant stream of pre-cum onto his own stomach.

Then Rod moved. He drew back. The sensation of that immense girth dragging through his clutching, velvety walls made Wut see stars. It was a friction so intense it bordered on pain, mediated only by the unnatural slickness and elasticity. Rod slammed back in, a brutal, grinding thrust that shook the bed frame.

“Yes!” Rod shouted. “Oh, fuck, Wut… this cunt…”

He established a rhythm, not fast, but deep and devastating. Each thrust was a full-body event for Wut. He was being fucked in a place that had only existed for minutes, by a cock that belonged in a barnyard. The obscenity of it, the raw, shocking physicality, shattered his last remnants of coherent thought. He became a creature of sensation—of being stretched, filled, impaled.

Rod’s control frayed. His thrusts became harder, faster, driven by the drug and the novel, vise-like grip of Wut’s transformed body. The bed slammed against the wall with each drive. Wut’s cries were constant now, wordless vowels of overwhelming stimulation.

“You like being my woman?” Rod grunted, sweat dripping from his chin onto Wut’s chest. “You like this fat horse cock splitting your new hole open?”

“Yes!” Wut screamed, arching against him. “Yes, god, don’t stop, fill it, please!”

Rod’s pace turned frantic, piston-like. His balls, huge and tight, slapped against Wut’s ass with wet, heavy smacks. Wut could feel the pressure building at his core, the telltale swell and pulse in the massive shaft buried inside him.

“Gonna come,” Rod roared, his body tensing like a bowstring. “Gonna flood this pretty new pussy… make it mine… mark it from the inside…”

With a final, seismic thrust that lifted Wut’s hips clear off the mattress, Rod came.

It was a torrent. A floodgate opened deep inside Wut. Hot, thick jets of semen pulsed into him, wave after wave, filling the new cavity, stretching it even further with its volume. Rod groaned, a long, shuddering sound of absolute release, as he emptied himself. Wut could feel the heat spreading, a liquid claim pooling in the deepest part of this fabricated womb.

Rod collapsed forward, catching himself on his arms, still buried to the hilt. He shuddered through the last pulses, his cock twitching inside the slick, clinging heat. Finally, spent, he slowly pulled out.

The sensation was grotesque and mesmerizing. The monstrous, softening shaft slid free, followed by a gush of milky white semen that spilled out of Wut’s gaping, used opening and soaked into the sheets beneath them in a wide, wet stain. The new vaginal lips were puffy, dark red, glistening with mixed fluids.

Rod looked down between Wut’s legs, breathing heavily. A slow, possessive smile touched his lips. “Now you’re mine,” he murmured, his voice ragged. “Every part of you. Even the parts I had to invent.”

He rolled onto his back beside Wut, his still-impressive but rapidly shrinking cock lying sticky on his thigh. The bathroom’s fluorescent light from the hallway cut a sharp line across the bed.

Wut lay still, overwhelmed. The feeling of utter fullness was gone, replaced by a hot, leaking emptiness. His body ached in a wholly new constellation of ways. He brought a hand down, his fingers tentatively touching his swollen, unfamiliar flesh. It was tender. Sore. Filled with Rod’s seed. A strange, quiet feeling settled over him—not peace, but a kind of spent, hollowed-out certainty.

In the other room, the Opalescent began to hum. Not its full song, but a low, questioning note that vibrated through the apartment walls. It was a sound of… approval? Curiosity? Hunger?

Rod heard it too. He turned his head on the pillow, looking at Wut. The feverish light in his eyes had banked to a soft, exhausted glow. “It knows,” he said softly. “It always knows when the territory has been expanded.”

Wut closed his eyes. The chemicals in his body were already beginning to fade; he could feel a subtle tightening, a slight reversion in the tissues. The temporary womanhood was receding. But the memory of it, the sensation of that profound, grotesque penetration, was branded into his nerves. It was another new channel carved into the map of him, another frontier crossed in the silent, glowing war they were waging against the limits of their own flesh. The drip from his body onto the sheets was a quiet testament. The hum from the nursery was the only answer.

The hum from the nursery was the only answer.

It faded slowly, a retreating tide of sound, leaving Wut alone in the silence of their bedroom. The stickiness on his thighs had cooled. The profound, invented wetness between his legs was gone, his body having reclaimed its original architecture with a silent, cellular sigh. Only a lingering soreness remained, a phantom memory of impossible girth. He was himself again. And yet, not.

Days passed in a strange, liminal space. Rod was preoccupied, spending hours in the sealed nursery, conducting low, murmured conversations with the Opalescent, preparing the nutrient pastes, charting the growth of the hard, chitinous entities in their basin. His touch was absent, distracted. The domestic routines continued—meals eaten, showers taken, laundry folded—but a tension hummed beneath it all, quieter than the entity’s song but just as constant. Wut felt like a vessel waiting to be filled again, his calm demeanor stretched thin over a wire of restless need.

One afternoon, Rod announced he was driving to the city. “Specialist components,” he said, not meeting Wut’s eyes as he shrugged on his jacket. “For the climate regulation array. The supplier’s only open for another two hours. I’ll be back by evening.” He pecked Wut on the forehead, a dry, perfunctory touch. The door clicked shut. The engine of his old car coughed to life, then faded down the long gravel drive.

Silence, thick and total, descended on the house.

Wut wandered from room to room, the emptiness pressing in. The silence was wrong. It lacked the underlying bioluminescent hum that had become the soundtrack of his life. He cleaned, pointlessly. He tried to read. The words slid off his brain. A low, familiar heat was building in his gut, an itch that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with memory: the brutal fullness of Rod’s transformed cock, the supermarket vibrator, the feel of the hard entity passing through him. His own hands felt inadequate, pathetic.

His feet took him to the top drawer of Rod’s bureau, the one that held the toys. Amidst the leather and silicone lay a single, unassuming egg vibrator, matte black, no larger than a plum. Its remote was nowhere to be found. But written on its side in Rod’s neat, technical script were the words: Auto-cycle. 30-min interval.

A reckless impulse, sharp and bright, shot through him. He took the egg to the bathroom, lubricated it generously, and without ceremony, pressed it into himself. The stretch was minor, negligible after what he’d endured. He pushed it deep, until the subtle curve of it settled against that sweet, electric spot inside him. He felt full, but it was a shallow fullness. A placeholder.

He pulled on a pair of soft, grey sweatpants and an old t-shirt. The egg was invisible, a secret. He walked through the house, waiting. Nothing.

Then, as he stood in the kitchen staring at the humming refrigerator, the egg came to life.

It wasn’t a steady buzz. It was a slow, deep, sub-audible thrum that vibrated through his prostate, a rhythmic pulse that made his knees soften. He gasped, gripping the countertop. It wasn’t controlled by Rod’s smirk, by a remote in his pocket. It was autonomous, indifferent, a machine executing its program. The helplessness of it, the sheer accidental nature of the stimulation, sent a jolt of illicit thrill straight to his already-hardening cock. The vibration intensified, cycling up to a sharper, more insistent pitch before dropping back to that low, tectonic rumble.

He was breathing heavily. He needed air, needed to move, needed to outrun the building climax coiling in his belly. He stumbled toward the front door.

The day was overcast, the air heavy with the promise of rain. He paced the porch, then the overgrown lawn, each step sending subtle shocks through his embedded core. The auto-cycle was cruel in its randomness. It would lapse into near-silence for a minute, leaving him aching and empty, then roar back without warning, a violent, juddering crescendo that forced a choked moan from his throat. Pre-cum soaked the front of his sweatpants, a dark, shameful patch.

A distant, metallic rumble broke through his haze. A delivery van, painted a cheap, cheerful blue, was bumping its way up their long, pitted driveway. Shit. The package. Rod must have ordered something. The egg chose that moment to surge into its most powerful setting yet, a frantic, buzzing drill-bit directly into his core. Wut’s vision swam. He had to get the package, sign for it, make the man leave. He couldn’t do it like this.

He clenched every muscle, trying to quell the tremors in his legs, and walked toward the front fence, a low, wrought-iron barrier more symbolic than functional. The van crunched to a halt on the gravel just beyond it. The driver’s door opened.

The egg switched off.

The sudden absence of sensation was a shock almost worse than the vibration. Every nerve ending screamed for its return. Wut was left painfully hard, dripping, his hole clenched desperately around the inert silicone shape inside him. He reached the fence, gripping the cold, rough iron for support.

“Afternoon,” the delivery man called. He was young, maybe early twenties, with a friendly, forgettable face and a company cap pulled low. He hauled a medium-sized cardboard box from the back of the van. “Just need a signature right here.”

He walked toward the gate, fumbling in his pocket for a digital scanner. Wut nodded, unable to speak, fumbling for the pen attached to the device. His focus was entirely internal, a prayer to whatever god governed batteries and timers. Not now. Please, not now.

He scrawled something approximating Rod’s name. As the delivery man took the scanner back, their fingers brushed.

And deep inside Wut, the egg whirred back to life.

It wasn’t the building cycle. It was the peak setting, immediately, as if the pause had been a capacitor charging. An electric, violent vibration ripped through his pelvis.

“Ah—!” The sound was punched out of him, too loud. He doubled over, his forehead slamming into the cold vertical bar of the fence. The world dissolved into pure, white-hot sensation. His hips jerked forward of their own volition, a spastic, humping motion against the iron.

“Whoa, you alright, mate?” the delivery man asked, taking a step closer, concern in his voice.

Wut couldn’t answer. His body was betraying him utterly. Each brutal pulse of the egg was a command he had to obey. He ground himself against the hard, unyielding metal, the pressure friction a counterpoint to the internal devastation. In his frantic, arching movement, the worn fabric of his sweatpants caught and pulled. The center seam dragged tight against his cleft, and then, with a subtle pop of fabric and desperate anatomy, the swollen, sensitive skin of his perineum and balls forced itself through one of the narrow, diamond-shaped gaps in the wrought-iron fence.

He was stuck. Not painfully, but effectively. His lower body was pushed against the fence from the inside, his cock and balls hanging awkwardly on his side, while a soft, vulnerable mound of flesh—his taint, the tight skin behind his balls, the pressed-for entrance to his hole—bulged slightly through the opening, exposed to the outside world. The sweatpants material was stretched taut around it, a thin, grey veil.

“Seriously, pal, you having a fit or something?” The delivery man was right there now, on the other side of the fence, his voice laced with genuine alarm. He bent down, instinctively, to get a look at Wut’s face, to see if he was seizing.

His descent brought his head level with the fence.

His face, turned in concern, came within inches of the grey fabric straining against Wut’s exposed flesh. The egg vibrated, a relentless, jackhammering throb. Wut’s body gave another uncontrollable, heaving shudder. The bulge pressed further through the iron gap.

The delivery man’s eyes, wide and confused, dropped from Wut’s agonized face to the strange, quivering protrusion just below his waistline. The fabric was damp from sweat and pre-cum. The vibrations, Wut realized with utter horror, were visible, a fine, constant tremor in the stretched cloth.

Time fractured.

The delivery man froze. His breath hitched. It was a surreal, impossible tableau: a man seemingly in distress, presenting this odd, trembling flesh through a fence. The man’s brain, trying to process, to categorize, short-circuited. His instincts—to help, to recoil—collided and merged into something else entirely, a base, reflexive curiosity. He was too close. The smell of Wut’s sweat, the faint, musky scent of his arousal, hit him.

He didn’t mean to. It was a spasm of mis-wired impulse, a freak neurological accident born of shock and proximity.

His tongue, as he gasped in surprise, darted out to wet his own lips.

It touched the damp, grey fabric.

Wut felt it. A hot, wet stripe of pressure through the thin cotton. A living warmth against the most private, tortured part of him.

A soundless scream locked in Wut’s throat. His back arched impossibly, his fingers turning white on the iron bars. The sensation was grotesque, violating, and it collided with the ruthless vibration of the egg to create a feedback loop of unbearable stimulation. It was wrong. It was filthy. It tipped him over an edge he didn’t know he was approaching.

The delivery man jerked back as if electrocuted. His face flooded with a deep, mortified crimson. “Oh, fuck! Christ! I’m— I didn’t—!” He scrambled away, tripping over his own feet, falling onto the gravel. He stared at his own mouth in utter disbelief, as if it had betrayed him.

Wut came.

It was a silent, devastating convulsion. No shout, just a violent, whole-body seizure held in check by the iron grip of the fence. His cock, trapped in his sweatpants, jerked and spilled hot, thick pulses of cum against the inside of the fabric. The orgasm was ripped from him, merciless, fueled by violation and mechanical torture and an oceanic, shameful wave of release. His vision tunneled. His knees buckled, but the fence held him up.

On the ground, the delivery man scrabbled to his feet. He didn’t speak another word. He ran to his van, yanked the door open, and reversed down the driveway with a spray of gravel, the vehicle lurching wildly before he found first gear and sped away, the blue van disappearing into the tree line.

The egg shut off.

Wut hung from the fence, spent, dripping, utterly destroyed. The cold iron was the only thing keeping him upright. Rain began to fall, a fine, cool mist that soaked his hair and shirt. It took him several long minutes to muster the strength to gently, painfully, work his sensitized flesh back through the gap in the iron. The sensation of the metal sliding across his overskin made him whimper.

He stumbled back to the house, leaving the package forgotten by the gate. The inside seemed darker, colder. He numbly peeled off the soiled sweatpants, removed the now-silent egg, and stood under a scalding shower until his skin was red. He scrubbed, but he couldn’t erase the feeling: the hot, accidental wetness of a stranger’s tongue through cotton, the chaotic, public ruin of his climax.

He dressed in clean clothes. He moved to the living room window, staring out at the empty driveway. The rain fell harder. The hum from the nursery, which had been quiet, began again. But it was different. It wasn’t a song of growth or approval. It was a low, pulsating drone that seemed to vibrate in Wut’s teeth, in the newly hollow spaces of his bones. It sounded like hunger. A specific, tuned hunger. It had heard. It had felt. It knew the chaotic, electric signature of his shameful, accidental pleasure.

And it wanted to taste that flavor for itself.