Amy’s fingers shuddered and jumped as she tried to force a meaningful reply to the terrified human being on the other end of the email. “I can’t,” she said aloud. She pushed back from her folding table desk and stood up, growing three feet taller as she stalked into the living room. Her partner Jude looked up from their own makeshift pandemic desk to take in the sight of Amy standing eight feet tall and shaking.
Eyes wide, they pulled off their headphones. “Babe?”
“What good is it to have magic powers when I can’t use them and can’t leave this apartment and can’t do anything?” Amy looked desperately down at them. “I want to scream. The grant writer needs stats on community outreach but direct service’s hotline is going nonstop and I’ve lost count of the heartbreaking emails this week from people I want to help but can’t. I can’t, Jude.”
She was nine feet already, her head brushing the ceiling until Jude came and pulled her into a safer, more open space that had been her primary reason for renting this apartment.
They brushed their hands down her arms, and held her huge, chilly hands in their own warm grip. “Can’t what?” they asked gently.
“I can’t write one more email about our waitlist. Can’t figure what to say, anymore. I’m trapped and useless and I sit at that window watching maskless people walking down the street and I want to smash the entire wall down—” She stopped, her voice tremulous. She unclenched her hands from Jude’s small grasp before she hurt them without meaning to.
“Do you… can you help me?” Amy had to close her eyes to ask it.
Amy rarely asked for help, especially while large, but Jude didn’t hesitate. “If I can help, I will.” They pulled her into a hug, though their head barely came up to Amy’s stomach. She opened her eyes again and ran her hands gratefully over Jude’s strong shoulders. Her fingers brushed against the binder under their shirt and her mind shied away from her own sense of being bound and trapped in this too-small space.
“I need to fight someone, need to break through this fury before I snap and outgrow the apartment.”
Jude looked up at her with alarm. “Should I set up my punching bag in the closet door frame again?” Jude was an amateur boxer, or had been before the pandemic, and when they both could find privacy in the ring late at night or outdoors, Amy loved to roughhouse and tease them to blow off steam as a Giantess. Jude loved to pit their skill and tenacity against Amy’s enormity and brute strength. Jude was more sub than switch, into kink for the seduction of the fight, giving it their all and being overpowered, anyway. Amy craved a scene like that, they both did. But they'd never risk it at home. Never surrounded by neighbors in an apartment that was their only refuge.
Amy shook her head. “I'd punch it through the wall. I thought, maybe... you could overwhelm me. If I went small.”
The hard lines of Jude’s face softened. They nodded, and Amy let go.
Shrinking into their arms was a relief in its own right. Jude kissed her when their sizes matched, the kind of crushing caress you steal when you know a moment cannot last. Amy’s size drained away from her as she looped her arms around their neck and clung tightly. One more kiss. She tried for a third, but missed. She almost stopped shrinking, then—perhaps it was enough to cling to them, beg for comfort? But rage and size magic still boiled in her stomach. She gritted her teeth and pushed smaller.
They stayed present with her, maintaining touch, asking the questions they had learned to ask in kink scenes back when the dungeons were still safe havens of physical connection. They negotiated the most important details before Amy lost herself in smallness and the submissiveness that often—but not always—came with the territory.
Amy lay nude against her own mouse pad, six inches small. She was surrounded by her own cluttered work area and the music pounding from Jude’s headphones on either side of her. The beat of Amy’s workout playlist throbbed around her, reminding her what it was like to push herself to her limits.
Jude looked intense as they stretched their right hand, massaging it as if warming up their body for a bout in the ring. Then they hovered their hand over Amy’s body, locking eyes with her as they lowered their fingertips to the table. Their index and middle finger rested on either side of her head, their palm over her chest but not touching yet. “Green?”
“Green.”
Amy understood the need for precautions. But she was impatient, jumpy with adrenaline from stress and desperation. And so she groaned with a kind of relief as Jude’s hand came down full against her body. Heavy, like the weighted blanket Jude bought during the protest fireworks of June and July that set off their PTSD. Amy remembered holding them while they endured through the endless nights, remembered how she grew to add her weight, her protective presence, as if she could smother Jude’s ghosts with her own magic. Now Jude returned the favor, pressing firmly against Amy’s breasts and stomach and hips.
“What do you want to do right now?” Jude asked, looming.
“I want to scream. I want to fight.”
“Then do it, bitch.” They sneered down at her, enormous, formidable. “But you’re too small to fight me.” Amy gave a kick, the top of her foot slamming into the solid wall of Jude’s wrist. She made fists and shoved the left one upwards into the broad warm skin of Jude’s palm. The right fist she slammed into the side of Jude’s hand, into the flesh between knuckles. “Oh, come on. You’re not even trying.”
Amy inhaled and kicked harder, again and again, bringing a knee up as if she were practicing in a self-defense class. She punched and kicked. A scream built inside her as her tiny frame filled with the warmth of her anger, a match for the heat radiating down from Jude’s immense, immovable body. The sound burst from her throat like steam from a kettle, drowning out the music.
“Fight me, damn it!” Jude’s voice was seismic. “Is that the best you can do?”
She thrashed against them. “So childish. Are you having a tantrum?”
Amy shrieked and her spasming “tantrum” escalated with the staggering fury that possessed her. She dug her nails into the webbing between Jude’s pinkie and ring finger, she tossed her head between their knuckles, she kicked and writhed and screamed and still Jude did not relent.
Bursts of size pulsed through her as she lifted up screaming. “Oh, no you don’t,” Jude snapped. “Shrink, you little bitch!” Amy snarled but obeyed.
“Green?” they asked, between clenched teeth.
“Green!” Amy panted.
Jude leaned close. Pressure sank down into Amy’s body like they were pinning her to the mat. “Fight me like an adult! Use your words! Why are you pissed?”
Amy screamed again, her heart racing past the beat of the music. “FUCK YOU! FUCK THIS!”
“Fuck what?”
“FUCK!” Amy threw the word up into their face. “Fuck the lack of funding! Fuck the hotline that never stops ringing, fuck the emails, FUCK THE EMAILS, the never-ending emails, full of pain and horror I can never hold, never in a million years, fuck the secrets I have to keep, the Goddamned confidentiality, fuck the fact that I can’t grow ten hundred feet tall and pry the roof off the Capitol and SCREAM but I can’t do anything, I just hide behind a computer screen and I can’t, God, Jude, I just can’t—what's the point anymore?”
Amy’s sobs were the only part of her pushing up against Jude’s palm now. She wrapped her hands around Jude’s fingers and buried her face in the side of their index finger. Jude used their free hand to pull the headphones away.
“How many people have you helped this year?” Jude’s voice was no longer a force of nature hurtling down from above, but their words held power. A fighter not ready to tap out.
“I—I don’t know—”
“Bullshit. How. Many.”
Amy struggled to force her thoughts back to the report she had pulled for the grant writer that morning. She looked up to her computer screen, up-side down. The numbers were somewhere in there, but they might as well have been on the moon. “I don’t know!” She curled up under Jude’s weight. Shrinking.
Her eyes snapped open at the sound of paper tearing above her. Jude held a note over her head. “Read it.”
Amy squinted through exhaustion and tears, and obeyed. “Do for one what you wish you could do for all.”
Jude set the paper aside. “Have you helped at least one person this year?”
Amy’s next words were barely audible to Jude, she knew, but she couldn’t muster the effort to try harder. “This country is a house on fire and we're trapped inside and people are dying and it’s like I'm using a thimble to try and put out the flames when all I want to do is to shrink so small nobody can ever find me again.”
Jude froze. “Red.”
Amy cried harder but nodded.
Jude raised their hand, but kept a finger of contact against her arm, then her back. “Lifting you,” they said. Amy let herself be carried to the glacier-sized bed.
Jude sank down next to her and curled their entire body around her. Close by but not overwhelming. And still touching. Always touching.
“Babe, do you have any idea the difference you make in people’s lives?”
Amy looked at Jude’s soft lips.
“In my life?” Jude tried again.
Amy’s tears swelled as she met Jude’s gaze.
“I love you so much, Jude,” she whispered. Their eyes glazed with the tears they’d never let themselves shed. They closed their eyes for a long time. Amy waited, wiping her own face dry.
“I love you, too,” they said finally. “Please promise you'll never leave me like… like you said. It's valid to feel that way right now. Just. Please.”
Amy unfolded herself. She walked on the shifting softness of the bedspread over to Jude, knelt by their lips, and kissed them.
“I want you to turn onto your back,” she said. “Green?” Jude obeyed. “Green,” they said, watching her as she climbed up their chin and straddled Jude’s lips. Her little hands braced against Jude’s nose and her thighs spread wide over their mouth, which curved into a sad smile.
Jude licked, and Amy moaned. And then Amy grew.
Heavier and larger. Grinding her clit and folds down onto her lover’s mouth. Fighting against Jude’s pain the way she fought her own pain. Raw and afraid and unrelenting. They moaned together and soon Amy was kneeling with a thigh on either side of Jude’s face. Soon she was surpassing Jude’s height. Soon she was sliding bigger over her lover’s body, swelling and huge and groaning as they serviced her to a climax that every single neighbor heard for certain.
Jude lay gasping as Amy sank down next to them and curled her entire body around them. They still didn’t cry, but their breath came in half-sobs, then broke into gusts of laughter.
“What?”
“All these things you do, they feel so small to you, right?”
Amy cocked her head at their crooked smile.
“Well, I was thinking… to that one person you help. I bet it feels really, really big.”
Amy’s heart caught in her throat.
“Jude?” she said. She was ten feet tall, but she felt so, so small when she spoke again. “I promise.”
Jude found her hand and held her tightly.