Story title: Brainwashed Into Submission
Author: Hazel Grace
The room smells like solder and jasmine tea.
There’s a soldering iron cooling on a metal plate next to me, the faint curl of smoke rising like a thought that forgot what it was supposed to mean.
The jasmine’s hers, of course, Vivienne brings it in every time she visits the workshop, like it’s some kind of branding exercise for our partnership. She once joked it should become the scent of the product, soft, inviting, safe.
How ironic that it usually lingers longer than she does.
I adjust the neural band one more time, tightening the strap around the mannequin’s skull just enough to press the EEG nodes into its synthetic skin. The readout stabilizes on my screen, waves dancing like a language I can almost understand on a primal basis.
“Jules,” Vivienne says from the other side of the room, breaking my focus.
Her voice is smooth and casual, like a sip of something aged and expensive. I take a moment to drink in her figure. She’s wearing one of her cream silk blouses, just barely unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled to the elbow with the kind of practiced effortlessness only someone who’s spent years around wealth could pull off.
“Can you mirror the beta sync to the secondary band yet, or is the drift still happening?”
“I fixed the phase lag,” I reply. “It’s stable to 0.2 milliseconds. Close enough to .”
“Perfect.”
She sounds pleased, which makes my chest do something warm and fuzzy.
I glance over at her again, almost as if my gaze has fallen victim to her simple existence. She’s reclining on the studio couch in a pair of tailored cream tros that match her blouse, bare feet tucked underneath her like she owns not just the couch, but the air in the room. She’s scrolling through her tablet with her usual feline grace, lashes casting shadows across her high cheekbones.
She looks out of place here, in this cluttered, humming nest of wires and prototypes and unwashed mugs, like someone carved from a lifestyle magazine and dropped into a server closet.
She catches me watching her and smiles. Not a performance smile, not one of the wide, investor-facing ones I’ve seen her rehearse in the mirror when she thinks I’m not paying attention. This one’s small, genuine-seeming, and above all, meant just for me.
“I told you,” she says, “you’re brilliant. I’d be lost without you.”
I swallow too quickly and nod like an idiot. This is the tenth time she’s said something like that this week, and it still disorients me.
I don’t look like the kind of man a woman like Vivienne would choose and I know that.
I’ve known it since college, when she used to drape herself across the laps of older men with Rolexes and tan lines from yachts, laughing in voices made of gold. I was invisible then, the awkward scholarship kid who knew more about machine learning than shaving properly.
I still am, more or less, that same guy.
I’m average in every way that counts.
Forgettable.
Functional.
Yet here she is, beside me, not as a ing flirtation, but as a business partner, as someone who says she sees something in me.
I try not to want too much from it, just the partnership, the work, but it’s hard.
Sometimes I let myself think that this is what love might feel like, if it ever landed somewhere close to me. Being around Vivienne feels like sunlight filtered through glass, warm but never quite reaching the skin.
We’ve been working on this headset for six months now, in what began as an idle thought during a late-night coffee chat, when she’d called me over, wanting to reconnect.
“What if people’s depression could actually be cured with a positive thought? What if we could trick people’s brains into thinking everything’s all fine and thus making it so? We could be changing so many lives. We could be heroes. We’d revolutionize healthcare. We’d be ed for centuries, forever, even.”
A once impossible hypothesis soon turned into something functional and nothing short of miraculous.
I built the prototype from scratch, repurposed medical-grade EEG sensors, stitched together machine learning models trained on mirror neurons and affective analysis.
Vivienne came up with the pitch, the name, the aesthetic, the vision.
We’re a team.
Uneven, maybe, but still a team.
For the sake of her and this dream of ours, I barely sleep through the nights anymore.
Instead, I’m always working.
Tonight, for instance, I’m wiring an additional neural relay into the second headset, fine-tuning the latency between mirrored signals. I run trial after trial, each one a millisecond closer to perfect.
Vivienne is sleeping curled on the couch, lashes resting against her cheek like painted strokes, her hair fanned across a velvet pillow she brought from home. Of course she brought a pillow. I bet even that thing smells of that jasmine she so loves.
I don’t know if she’s faking her comfort around me or not.
Part of me wants to believe she trusts me enough to sleep around me like this. Another part whispers that it’s all part of an act she’s putting on.
Clara, my only girlfriend, comes to mind, and how she used to smile at me like that, too. How she slept in my bed and texted other men from under my blankets. I the gut punch of her confession. I asking if anything she had said was real, and the look she gave me, pitying, like I’d been too dumb to see the obvious.
I push the thought away.
Vivienne isn’t Clara.
Vivienne’s here.
She brings me some of her favorite tea, home cooked meals, she compliments my code.
She says we’re going to change the world.
The two of us, together.
By morning, I’ve logged the best session we’ve had, emotional transmission fidelity over 91%. I pack the data, format the demo code, and prepare the headset like it’s an offering.
Vivienne stirs when I hand her the tea I made, yawns with feline elegance, then beams at the code results like she did it herself.
“Jules,” she says, setting the mug aside and wrapping her arms around my shoulders, catching me entirely off-guard. “This is it! This is the one!”
I nod, because my throat is too dry to utter a single word.
Vivienne doesn’t let go right away, her fingers tracing the top of my spine, just briefly.
Then, all too soon, she pulls away, taking the headset from the table like a priestess lifting a crown.
This is it…
The day of the pitch arrives like a crashing wave, much too sudden, way too loud, and entirely unrelenting.
We’re due at the investor showcase at noon.
Vivienne is radiant in a minimalist white suit with thin gold cuffs at her wrists and a silk scarf tied loosely at her throat. Her perfume is subtle, expensive, the kind of scent you smell only when she leans close. She looks every bit the visionary founder she’s pretending to be. Or maybe she actually is. I don’t even know anymore.
I pack both headsets, power cables, backup firmware on an encrypted drive, and the emotion mirroring demo onto a tablet. When I get into the car with her, she turns toward me with a strange smile.
“Listen,” she says, “I was thinking… you should hang back from the actual pitch.”
The words don’t compute at first and I blink at her, like a PC battling a sudden BIOS crash.
“What?”
“I mean, just for today. It’s optics, Jules. You know how these things go. I’m going to kill the room. You’ll be more useful staying back here and troubleshooting if anything goes wrong remotely. Backup genius mode.”
She smirks like it’s a compliment.
“But I—” I try to find the thread of logic. “We were both supposed to present. We agreed.”
“You agreed,” she says, gently, “because you thought it mattered. But this is the real world. And in the real world, a stuttering engineer doesn’t close a half-million dollar seed round.”
It hits like a body blow and I find I can’t speak as my chest tightens.
Vivienne leans forward, tapping my cheek with two cold fingers.
“Don’t take it personally, Jules. You know I love your brain.”
She takes the headset case from me, gets out, and walks into the building with her head high and her stride confident, as if she owns the whole future.
I watch the livestream from my laptop, alone in the workshop. Her voice comes through clear, practiced, magnetic. She paces the stage like a natural, showcasing the prototype, running the demo with a hand-picked actress instead of me.
She explains the technology in simplified, digestible language, stripping out all the nuance and struggle, all the sleepless nights I coded through, all the fear that it would fail.
She calls herself the inventor. The visionary. The mind behind the machine.
Not once does she say my name.
By the end of her pitch, the investors are clapping. One of them actually stands. Someone asks about her background, and she smoothly reinvents her resume, saying she “collaborated with a small technical team.”
That’s me, apparently, a one man army behind the scenes and nothing but a footnote in the biography of her acclaim.
My fingers twitch as I close the stream window.
I stare at the line of code still running in the debugger and the emotional fidelity buffer reads 94% now, higher than we’ve ever gone.
She walks back in hours later, half-drunk and grinning like a wolf in designer heels.
“They loved it,” she says, tossing her keys onto the table. “One of them wants a follow-up dinner. We’re in.”
“You mean you’re in. As far as I’m aware, you didn’t even mention me once.”
She shrugs, as if it doesn’t matter. “They don’t care who wrote the code, as long as it works. And it does.”
“I care.”
“Well, that’s the difference between us, Jules.” Her voice sharpens slightly. “You care about proper credit, about fairness, about good versus bad, as if this world’s all cotton candy and sugar bears if you just believe in it hard enough. Well it’s not, and I’m done being broke and at the whim on others, hoping for a morsel of what they have. Now the world’s my oyster. Mine.”
“I thought we were partners.”
“Well, you thought wrong.”
She walks toward the couch, takes off her blazer, and tosses it aside. There’s no malice in her voice, no heat, just the cold efficiency of someone who’s done this before and never lost sleep over it.
“You used me, then.”
It feels hollow and I’m aware that I’m merely stating the obvious, but it’s all I can manage.
“You let me,” she replies, without even as much as turning around to look at me as she’s demolishing the façade she’d been carefully building all this time. “Let’s be honest, you liked the attention. It made you feel special. A pretty girl was finally looking your way and you didn’t want to spoil the fantasy. Don’t go pretending now that you didn’t know what this was.”
I watch her for a long moment, until her shape blurs in the periphery of my vision. I blink, and when I open my eyes again, I’m staring at the prototype, its dull matte frame sitting, waiting on the edge of the table like a forgotten relic.
Once, it was everything, a bridge between hearts, a promise of healing. I had built it with trembling hope, soldered it with the belief that this, that we, could be something more. That I could make something real, something good.
It was supposed to fix things.
It was supposed to fix me.
Now it watches me, as if it knows what I’m about to become.
I sit down and I boot the development build. I open the neural link software and load the most recent session. Her session, the one she doesn’t know I recorded. The emotional signature is there, raw awe, fleeting affection, the complex cocktail of tension she gave off the night we synced for the first time. I could play it back. I could amplify it, tune it, reshape it, make her relive it again and again until it feels like the honest truth.
She gave me access to herself and all I have to do now is to take it.
I repeat to myself that I can just take, without any regard for others, the way she’s been doing.
So I lift the headset.
Its bonded pair is still fitted snugly around Vivienne’s temples and I don’t think she realizes she never took it off after the meeting.
The LEDs blink once.
My fingers tremble, but not with fear.
“If you won’t love me willingly,” I murmur, sliding the band over my temples, “I’ll make you.”
“You didn’t have to lie,” I start, keeping her distracted as I’m working on her downfall.
The words feel too small, too soft, but they’re the only ones I can find at first. They sit in the air between us like static, unacknowledged.
Vivienne doesn’t even flinch.
“I didn’t lie,” she says, with a sigh that sounds like she’s already moved on. “I curated the narrative.”
The narrative.
I look down at the headset in my hands. The thing we built. The thing that was supposed to mean something. I trace the line where the neural band connects to the sync relay. I when she first called it elegant, like the machine had style, like the tech had soul.
“You erased me. You pitched my demo with a different test subject and you called yourself the inventor.”
“Jesus, Jules! I led the pitch. I didn’t erase you. Do you even hear yourself? You make it sound like you’re some sort of victim in all this. You’re not.”
“I do,” I murmur. “I hear myself now more clearly than ever. You know what I also hear? Every single conversation we had where you told me we were in this together. Where you made it sound like I mattered beyond the code. Where you said—”
I stop. I don’t know if I’m trembling because I’m furious or heartbroken, or if those two things have just become indistinguishable.
“You said we’d change the world,” I go on, voice low. “You said we’d do it together and I believed you. God help me, I believed everything.”
She leans against the wall, arms crossed, eyes narrowed like she’s waiting for a tantrum to .
“I ,” I say, finally lifting my head to look at her with a full on stare. “I you laughing in the dark the night the sync first worked. You got so giddy you spilled your wine on the carpet. You made me dance with you, barefoot, like we were kids who’d just cracked magic open. You looked at me like I was something, Vivienne, not just the nerd in the shadows. You looked at me like I was yours.”
Her gaze flickers for a half-second, something unreadable skimming the surface before vanishing.
“You brought me jasmine tea, and leftovers from that place you love in the Ninth. You called me brilliant, said no one had ever made you feel so understood. You curled up on that couch like you trusted me.”
She shrugs. “I never said I didn’t care about you.”
“But you care about what more? Money? Power? What you call survival is just greed.”
She doesn’t answer.
“I didn’t fall in love with you because you were pretty and nice to me,” I whisper. “I fell in love because you let me believe I was enough. Not perfect. Not polished. Just seen. And for someone like me, that is everything.”
I pause, breathing in the quiet hum of the machines behind me, and I focus on the faint blue light of the screen as it fills up with data. The sync begins and my thoughts flow to her, unencrypted, uncompressed.
Her head snaps up and I watch the understanding dawn.
She makes a single step toward me, eyes wild, and from there, it all takes less than a second.
A dozen emotions flit across her face as I feed her a mirror image of the very moment I fell for her. I replay her own memory, twisting it, amplifying the wonder, the tenderness, the quiet, overwhelming feeling that she might just be the one. I remind her of her smile, of the way it spread across her face that first time she looked up at me like she actually wanted me there.
I convince her mind that this feeling, this warmth, is her love for me.
I give it the exact shape that I craved, all these lonely months, that sense of being truly desired.
Vivienne lets out a pained gasp. She raises a trembling hand toward the band at her temples as if trying to pull it off. Her cheeks flush, eyes bright with fear and longing in equal measure, her face contorted in confusion as she fights my mental grasp, even though there is no escape from my mind in hers.
She doubles over, lets out a low groan. I feel her in my head as her mental presence fights, as her own emotions ripple with something between desire and panic. She stumbles backward, gasps my name like a plea.
I close my eyes, push a little deeper, and I turn the memory of my love into something primal, all-encoming, as if she can barely stand being apart from me for one more moment.
She collapses to her knees.
God, she’s beautiful like this, vulnerable, undone, lost in me.
The device pulses in time with her breathing. I can feel the loop syncing faster, smoother. Her neural patterns stabilize, bending like reeds beneath a tide.
I know this technology better than anyone.
I know what full integration feels like.
I know the exact moment when resistance becomes surrender.
This is it.
She lifts her head slowly, lips parted, tears trailing down her cheeks, catching the light like crystal threads.
“Jules? Help me,” she whispers, voice ragged.
I kneel beside her, careful, reverent. Her gaze locks onto mine, wide and wet, pupils dilated like she’s seeing me for the first time.
No, not just seeing. Wanting.
Her hand finds my wrist, delicate fingers curling around it like she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she lets go.
A breath catches in my throat.
She leans into me, her lips ghosting close to mine. “It hurts,” she whispers. “Wanting you this much.”
Her face crumples, and I wrap my arms around her, holding her like something sacred.
She doesn’t resist.
She melts into me.
My thoughts, my memories, are hers now. The resistance has collapsed. Her heart beats in time with mine.
“I need you,” she says.
Vivienne is everything I have ever wanted, a woman carved from elegance itself, a creature of impossible grace. Even now, collapsed in surrender, there’s nothing fragile about her, only precision, like a dancer mid-fall who still controls the arc of her descent. Her movements, even when broken, are deliberate, regal.
Her skin glows in the low blue light, flawless, pale, kissed faintly with gold where the heat of her body rises through her collarbones, then trails upwards along the curve of her jaw. I brush my fingers along her arm and she’s soft, like cashmere warmed in the sun. The kind of softness that doesn’t just invite touch, it demands it, haunting the skin after .
She smells like jasmine, like something foreign and exquisite. Not artificial, not perfumed. No. It’s her, her biology woven with the delicate echo of wildflowers from some lush, distant garden.
Every breath of her makes my pulse stutter. I could drown in that scent, abandon the world just to inhale it from the hollow of her throat.
Her lips, full and impossibly perfect-shaped, as though made to speak secrets into the dark, they part, and when she breathes my name, it’s not just sound, it’s music.
I want to memorize every pitch, every vowel, every tremor.
Her eyes, liquid, dark, cat-like in their mystery, they don’t just look at me. They devour.
Every time she blinks, it’s like the universe itself concedes defeat.
She could command kings with those eyes.
She could have so easily commanded me.
But she’s mine now.
Entirely.
I see it in the way her pupils widen when I touch her cheek, in the way she leans in like there’s gravity between us.
She’s going to become what I always imagined; the perfect lover, the final piece of the life I deserve.
A goddess bent to my will.
I imagine the future, so close I can taste it.
The way she’ll wake in the morning, curled beside me in silk sheets, sunlight brushing her shoulder as she murmurs my name like a promise. I’ll watch her pour coffee barefoot in the kitchen, my shirt draped over her perfect frame, her eyes catching mine with a soft, knowing spark.
She’ll laugh at my jokes. She’ll rest her head in my lap while I work. By day, she’ll fight beside me when the world tries to deny what we’ve built and at night, she’ll reach for me. Not out of compulsion, but out of need. Out of love.
The kind of love I’ve installed in her neuron by neuron, until it became indistinguishable from truth.
She’ll whisper she’s never felt more herself, that I completed her, that all the years she spent alone were just prelude to this. To us.
She’ll wear black velvet and diamonds, walk beside me at summits and ceremonies, the other men never quite able to meet her gaze because even they’ll know that she is power incarnate.
And she chose me, the nerd.
I reach for the first button of her blouse and my fingers shake as I slide it through the buttonhole. The silk parts easily beneath my touch.
Vivienne sighs and the sound sends a shiver of want through me, low and raw.
I take my time, kissing her collarbones, tasting the heat of her skin as the silk falls to the ground. My fingers skim across the lines of muscle in her abdomen and she exhales, arcing into my touch as if to invite it lower, into the curve of her hipbones and then lower still, toward the warmth I feel rising between her thighs.
My thumb finds her nipple and she gasps as if I just reached through her skin and caressed the core of her.
I don’t stop.
I can’t stop.
I have been dreaming about fucking her for too long, craving it, yearning for it like a starved beast and today, I finally get to feast. I’m drunk on how much power I hold over her.
She presses her forehead into the hollow of my throat.
“I feel you in my blood, Jules, like fire,” she breathes against my skin, voice heavy and urgent, like she’s almost out of air. “I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.”
Her lips part at the words and I can feel her desire surge, so strong I taste it at the back of my throat, sweet, cloying, and rich as caramel.
“I’m going to show you just how good my cock can make you feel,” I tell her as my hand skims down the softness of her skin. “You’ll beg me for every thrust, beg me to keep you like this.”
She’s so warm beneath my fingers, wet and trembling as I trace the line between her hipbones, as I cup the curve of her ass. I spread her legs for me, part the lace of her panties to find her wet, slick with heat that’s all for me. I part her gently, slipping a single finger between the lips of her pussy and she makes a soft sound at the touch, something between a sob and a sigh.
“Oh,” she breathes as I caress her clit, circling the most sensitive parts of her until her body moves with mine in rhythm and the only word on her lips is my name, repeated over and over until it stops sounding like language.
I find the tight entrance of her cunt, feel her heat rise as I dip my fingers deeper into her slickness. She’s ready. She’s so ready, arching for more even when she knows she won’t get it, her hands clutching the front of my shirt as she looks at me like I’m her world.
“You are going to beg me to let you come, to fuck you like this.” I slide my finger in just a little bit more, not too much further, just enough to show her how easily she’s ready to give it up.
She closes her eyes and her mouth forms a word and it takes her two tries to make it out.
“Please,” she whispers. “Please.”
She’s never sounded this needy, this desperate, and my cock hardens at the sound. I need to hear her say it again, to beg me over and over, and so I trace the line of her lips with my slick fingers and her tongue darts out to lick them, to taste herself on me and God, I’ve never seen anything as hot as the way she flicks her tongue like that, the way her lips part and her eyelids flutter with lust.
“Again.”
She reaches for my zipper with trembling hands and pulls me out like a prize she’s won. The feeling of her fingers is electric. I can barely keep still. I can’t hold back the groan that escapes me, and she smirks like she knows exactly what she’s doing to me.
“You want it bad, don’t you?” I whisper, as I reach for a handful of her hair to pull her face even closer. “You’re going to learn what you really want, what you crave, what you’d die to get your hands on. And it’s all here.” I grasp my cock, give it a slow stroke to watch her gaze go glassy with hunger.
“Tell me again, Vivienne. What is it that you want?”
“Please…”
She tries to turn her head, but my fingers hold her firmly in place.
“You will ask for it,” I say and my voice is almost a growl, heavy with something that feels primal, feral. “And when I’ve had my fill of watching you beg for what I can give you, and when I am certain I’ve made you as desperate and hollowed out as you made me, when you know I’m the only one who can fill the empty space inside you, when you are broken for it and all that you have is the need for more, only then I might just give you the kind of pleasure you’ll even after death. You might beg for more, you might weep with the force of it and even then, it still won’t be enough. You’ll beg me to come back again, to take you in a thousand ways. But this? This will be the last time I’m going to let you come.”
I trace the outline of her lips with my fingers, leaving behind a trace of her own arousal.
“The last time you’ll feel what it is like to come at all.”
Her eyes fly wide. “Yes,” she breathes.
I grasp the front of her hair, tipping her chin upwards until her face is right below mine, and my mouth hovers inches from hers, close enough that she feels my breath on her lips and my cock on her belly.
“Tell me again, Vivienne. Say it right now, because you might not ever have the chance to ask again. Tell me how much you need it. Tell me how badly you need to be fucked.”
Her hands reach up to caress the outline of my face as her voice trembles with desperation.
“Jules, please fuck me. Please. Please.”
I tighten my grip in her hair, hard enough for the sting of it to break through her haze, to sharpen her senses and to make her pay attention. I lean into her, our bodies aligned in the way that she’s going to crave when the waves of the addiction first start to come on.
I hold her gaze until the last second when my mouth finally reaches hers and then I claim it.
Vivienne arches into me as if trying to pour herself into me, as if our skin isn’t enough of a barrier between us, as if she needs to find some other way to melt into me, to merge her mind with mine and to feel our hearts beating as one.
Her eyes close as if she can’t handle looking at me when her mind is a kaleidoscope of desire, when I’m everywhere at once. Her arms reach for my neck like a drowning woman.
I push her against the wall, pressing her so close her heartbeat drums into mine and her breath becomes my breath, the only air that’s sweet enough to breathe. I cup the back of her skull to keep her from banging into the concrete and then my hands wander down to grasp the curves of her ass, lifting her so that she’s seated on my hips and her legs wrap around me so that I can grind into the hot wetness that’s all for me, and only me, and the friction between us makes her shudder with pleasure.
Her arms tighten around my neck and she moves as I move, our rhythm so in sync I could swear her body is reading my thoughts.
“I don’t know if I can bear it,” she breathes, voice shaking with lust and need.
Her words hit me like a fist in the stomach because I’m in the exact same position as her.
I didn’t count on this, on how it would feel to have her need me so fiercely that I need to fight off the urge to surrender. I didn’t anticipate the need to hear her say it, to tell me that she wants me, that I’m all she wants, that there is no room for anything or anyone but me inside the labyrinth of her thoughts.
“You are everything,” I breathe as I position myself to enter her.
I need to be inside her, need it like water and air.
She wraps her fingers in my hair and leans back just enough to be able to meet my eyes with her own and her voice is ragged as she answers.
The sound I make in response is somewhere between a sigh and a growl. She has never been more perfect than she is now, begging to be fucked, her lips trembling with the force of it. I thrust into her with all my might and she arches against me, meeting each thrust as she draws her knees up to the side, letting me get as deep into her as I need to go, as deep as we both need.
“Is that enough?” I growl.
She shakes her head as if she doesn’t trust her voice to work anymore.
I need to hear her. I need her voice, need to know she wants me and me alone.
“Is it, Vivienne?” I pull out and slam back in, making her moan in ecstasy. “Do you need more? Do you need it to hurt?”
“I don’t know, yes. Please… Jules. Make it stop. I need… I don’t know…”
Her voice is broken, full of confusion and fear.
She’s in this state simply because I put her in it, but it doesn’t matter.
I need it, too. I need the pain to stop as badly as she does. I want the friction between us to ease. I want to soothe the burn that I started.
“You just need me to finish?” I ask as I pick up the rhythm again, faster this time, slamming her against the wall. Her breathing becomes more erratic as her fingers grasp my hair in her fist and the pull sends a bolt of heat straight to my balls, which tighten in readiness for the pleasure that is about to take hold of me.
I have never been more ready for anything than I am to finish inside her, to have her milk the come from my body as her pleasure consumes her and the wet heat of it takes me with her.
I wrap my arms around her and bring her against me until I am pressed into her, her breasts flattened against my chest, our bodies fused as one. I lower my head into her hair and inhale her scent like a drug, like the last breath I ever want to draw, and just as I am about to lose my mind in it, her teeth find my throat and bite down and the sting of it pushes me right to the edge of the cliff. Her breath shudders against the side of my neck and she moans, low and rough as I drive myself inside her, once, twice and then one last time before I fall right into the abyss and let my orgasm claim me.
I lose track of how long we stay there, bodies stilled by the force of the climax, my hands on the wall as I hold her upright, still inside her, her forehead resting on my chest. We breathe together. She exhales and I inhale and when we breathe out together it feels like it’s one body we’re sharing, not two.
If only this were real…
Hours later, I wake to motion.
Not the lazy kind, no stretch, no sigh, no turning toward me like she does in the dreams I’ve had for weeks. This is something sharp. Urgent. A snap of muscle, the whisper of bare feet on tile.
My eyes open, hazy with sleep and something sweeter. For a second, I smile.
“Vivienne…” I murmur.
I reach for her, but she’s already across the room, standing, staring at me like I’m something vile.
My body jerks upright, heart slamming against my ribs as the reality clicks into place with horrifying clarity. The band, the neural interface, is gone. It must’ve slipped off in the night, maybe dislodged when she turned, maybe a flaw in the clasp. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s off and she’s looking at me like I’m a stranger who’s crept into her bed, unwanted, like I’m a disease.
“You disgusting bastard,” she spits the moment our eyes meet. She’s standing at the edge of the mattress, the sheet clutched around her like armor, her body taut with fury. “What did you do to me?”
I rise slowly, hands up, placating. “You have it all wrong, I can explain.”
“Explain?” she barks a laugh that’s pure venom. “Explain how you violated my mind and body? How you rewrote my memories like some sick little love story and then fucked me against my will?”
She lunges for the nearest object, a lamp, and throws it at me. It smashes against the headboard, glass exploding inches from my skull.
“I only wanted you to see,” I choke on the words. “To understand what we could be, if you just…”
“If I just gave in?” Her lip curls. “Is that it? If I just stopped resisting and let you mold me into your fantasy? Do you even hear yourself? You sick fuck!”
“I love you!” I shout, more raw than I mean to be. “I love you, Vivienne. I have for so long.”
“No,” she cuts me off, cold and razor-sharp. “You don’t love me. You love the version of me you built in your head. The one who smiles on cue and begs for your touch. The one who doesn’t fight back. That’s not love, you asshole. That’s obsession in a prettier dress.”
I take a step toward her, and she immediately backs away like I’m something filthy.
I scramble off the bed, still tangled in the sheets, nearly falling.
The band.
The band!
It’s on the floor near the foot of the bed, pale metal glinting in the dim light. If I can just get to it, if I can just reach her mind again, then maybe…
“I felt things for you,” she spits, stepping back as I move forward. Her voice cracks. “And none of it was mine. You poisoned me.”
“It wasn’t poison,” I gasp, crawling forward, hands out. “Vivienne, it was real. You felt it because I gave you the truth.”
“You gave me a simulation. A lie. And then you raped me.”
Tears glitter in her eyes, but there’s no softness there. Only rage.
I lunge for the band, but she’s faster. She kicks it across the floor with a feral scream, sending it skittering under the console.
“No!” I roar.
I dive after it, but she’s already at the door. Her fingers fly across the access like muscle memory. She’s bying the lock. I showed her once, I taught her how to do it, back when I thought I was being romantic.
She’s getting away.
No!
She can’t!
I snap.
I don’t think.
I surge to my feet and grab her arm, just to stop her, just to make her stay, but she twists, slaps me across the face, and in that blinding second of panic and fury, my hand moves on its own and the back of it connects with her cheek.
The crack of it echoes in the room like a gunshot.
Vivienne stumbles, eyes wide with shock, and then folds to the floor, the sound of her body crumpling like silk.
I stare down at her, breath ragged let out a sob I don’t recognize. It erupts from somewhere deep and ugly. My hands hover over her like they don’t belong to me anymore.
She was supposed to love me.
Not despise me.
Not try to run away from me.
I rock back on my heels, clutching my face, gasping like a man drowning in his own skin. My palm still stings from the . Her skin is reddening where I hit her. I can’t believe I touched her in violence. I can’t believe I hurt her.
I never wanted this.
I just wanted her to see me. To know me. To choose me.
Why does no one ever choose me?
Is there something wrong with me?
Is that it?
I gave her memories that should’ve made her understand me. Cherish me. I showed her the truth of what we could be, and she ran from it.
My hands tremble as I brush her hair back from her face. The mark on her cheek is deepening, angry red blooming against the perfect softness of her skin.
I did that.
Me.
A part of me wants to rip my own hand off for it.
Another part, darker, quieter, says I had to stop her. That if she had left, I never would’ve seen her again. I would’ve been nothing to her, not even a regret.
I crawl across the floor, knees scraping tile, and reach beneath the console. My fingers find cold metal.
The band’s still intact.
I bring it back with reverence and shame. I stare down at it in my palms, this beautiful, terrible thing I built. I swallow down the doubts, the voices in my head that scream at me to stop this vile retribution, and I do it. I fit it gently over her temples. The device locks into place with a soft click.
I don’t turn it on just yet.
I could.
With one thought, I could bring her back to me, the other her, the one who looked at me like I was her sun, but I don’t. Not because I’m noble, but because some part of me, small, bitter, pathetic, still clings to the hope that maybe, someday, she could choose me without the wires, without the lies.
So I sit there, the weight of the device pressing against my conscience like a loaded gun in my hands, and I wait for Vivienne to wake.
I wait for the verdict.
For whatever comes next.
Minutes , minutes which feel like hours, and then, I feel it before I see it—her body stiffening slightly, the faint tremble of returning consciousness. Her fingers twitch, her eyelids flutter.
I brace myself, thinking I’ll have a moment. A second to speak, to explain.
I get nothing.
Vivienne’s eyes snap open and the moment she sees me, she erupts.
She jerks away from me like I’ve burned her. Scrambles backward on hands and heels, crashing into the edge of the console with a hollow clang. Her eyes are wide and wild, and for the first time, there’s no confusion, no fading trace of my influence, only pure, raw horror.
“Get away from me!” she snarls, voice hoarse but sharp enough to slice open the air. “Don’t you touch me!”
“Vivienne,” I start, holding up my hands like it’ll make a difference. It doesn’t.
“Don’t say my name,” she spits. “You don’t get to say my name. You’re so small. Do you understand that? So pitifully, pathetically small that you had to build a fantasy woman out of stolen memories just to pretend you mattered.”
She slowly begins to stand, rigid, hands clenched into fists at her sides, fighting something invisible but all-consuming.
“Julian Ward,” she spits out my name like it’s a curse, eyes flashing with the sharp fire of a woman who won’t be owned. “You think this fucking machine can break me? I’m not some doll to be rewired on your whim. If you were the last man left in this galaxy, and I had to crawl through fire to reach someone else, I would burn myself to ash just to be rid of you.”
I watch her, my heart doing a slow drum roll in my chest.
I see it now, in its full, merciless clarity: she will never love me.
Not in this life.
Not in any version of it.
She would rather kill me with her bare hands than ever let me near her again.
And yet somehow, despite knowing this… it doesn’t make me stop wanting her.
If anything, it makes me cling even harder.
I swallow down the sick twist in my stomach, the voice screaming that this is wrong, so, so wrong.
Her hatred scalds me, peels back every last illusion I had of being anything more than a treser in her mind and if I let her leave now, if I let that look in her eyes be the last thing I ever see from her, I will never recover.
If Vivienne won’t stay on her own, then I will make her stay.
I know her brain. I know every fold, every fragile corridor of memory and feeling. I can undo the pain. I can erase this moment. I can soften the edges of her rage, sculpt her loyalty from what remains.
Is it monstrous? Yes.
But it’s also the only thing I have left.
I don’t want an obedient puppet. I want her, but if she refuses to be mine, then I’ll settle for the version who doesn’t scream when I touch her.
She sways slightly.
The device pulses.
The storm flickers.
The old Vivienne, fierce and unyielding, flares briefly, a flash of lightning beneath porcelain skin, but the device hums steadily, threading through her neurons, tugging, reshaping.
Her resolve flickers like a candle caught in a draft.
“You’re already broken,” I say quietly, stepping closer. “You just don’t know it yet.”
She whirls, the edge of her fury cutting sharp. “You don’t get to decide what I am.”
The words hit like thrown knives, but the device’s quiet insistence drapes over her like a cage, tightening with every breath she takes.
“Watch me,” I murmur.
Her legs wobble, betrayed by the slow unraveling of her will. For a moment, she sways, caught between rebellion and the creeping fog the headset’s spreading through her mind.
“I fucking hate you, you’re nothing but a pathetic nerd,” she manages, voice cracking with raw pain.
Her glare is fierce but it flickers like an ember struggling against an encroaching dark. I see the subtle tremor in her hands, the slight falter in the fire of her gaze. The edges of her thoughts fray, and somewhere deep inside, she feels it, the fuzzy, creeping tendril seeping into her brain, distorting her clarity like smoke through glass.
She knows what’s coming.
Her mind scrambles, clawing against the haze that threatens to swallow the sharpness of her identity.
“You think this… this… this stupid toy can rewrite everything?” Her voice quivers, but her words still carry venom, sharp and defiant.
I step closer, deliberately slow, savoring the moment. “It’s not a toy, Vivienne. It’s the future. Your future.”
A bitter laugh breaks free from her lips, cracked and raw.
“My future? My future didn’t have you in it.”
She tries to shake her head, desperate to clear the conditioning, but her fingers twitch uncontrollably.
“You’ll never own me.”
Her declaration rings hollow against the rising tide inside her. The device’s hum grows stronger, pulsating like a second heartbeat, syncing with the weakening rhythm of her resistance.
“Not yet,” I it, voice low but unyielding. “But soon. You’ll see. And then all this fire,” I gesture toward her clenched fists and fierce eyes, “will be just a memory.”
She grits her teeth, biting down on the creeping despair, but the battle within her is uneven, brutal.
“You think you’re so clever,” she snaps suddenly, voice laced with sarcasm and spite. “But you’re just a coward playing God with a machine.”
“Maybe.”
One moment she stands tall, chin lifted, glare burning through me. The next, her shoulders sag as if the weight of invisible chains is dragging her down.
The struggle eventually fades into silence. Her defiance, once a tempest, now a faint ripple beneath the surface of something dark and formless. She stumbles back as if trying to put distance between us. Her pupils dilate, her gaze darts, but it no longer reaches me. Her knees tremble. Her arms loosen. The hands that once balled into fists now fall open, almost pleading.
I can still feel the echo of her words. Small, she said. Pitiful. Like I’m beneath her contempt. Like the months I spent building a future for us, constructing a perfect world in which Empathos Labs reigned supreme, safeguarding our business plans like a shrine, meant nothing.
God help me, I still love her.
I still ache with it.
I look at her and all I want to do is hold her, calm her, show her that if she’d just stop fighting, just give in, I could make her happy. She doesn’t understand that none of this was meant to hurt her. I did it because I need her, because the thought of living without her was worse than death.
But she hates me so much, she would watch me bleed if it meant she never had to hear my name again.
And suddenly, that love twists inside me like a blade, because how dare she.
How dare she look at me with such revulsion when all I ever wanted was to give her everything. How dare she spit on the devotion I carved from my bones to keep her close. How dare she make me feel worthless, again, again, and again.
She could’ve chosen kindness.
She could’ve played the part, spoken softly, pretended to understand.
But no. She needed to cut. She needed me to hurt.
So maybe I’ll make her understand what hurt really is.
Control. Rewriting. The slow unraveling of the fury in her gaze until all that’s left is confusion, and then warmth, and then need.
She thinks I’m powerless?
I am going to take her apart thought by thought, strip every ounce of her resistance, layer her back together until she thanks me for the mercy of it.
She should’ve loved me.
She should’ve seen me.
She deserves to feel the emptiness she left in me. She deserves to know what it’s like to be reduced to someone else’s version of herself.
If I have to choose between being loved or being obeyed, then let her worship me with hollow eyes. At least then, I’ll never have to hear her say those vile words again.
The spark of rebellion smolders beneath layers of growing control.
I let her wait for pain that never comes, let her linger at the threshold of punishment for just a breath, then I pour warmth again through the link. Her body slackens and she draws in a slow, shuddering breath. The tension bleeds from her limbs like spilled ink and a tremor runs through her entire frame. Her eyelashes flutter. A quiet moan escapes her throat.
“Come to me,” I command her.
Her legs respond before her mind catches up. She takes a hesitant step forward, then another, the movement slow and deliberate but undeniably obedient. Each step feels like a fracture in her resolve.
“Look at me.”
Her eyes meet mine, glassy but still holding a hint of that old fire, though it dims with every heartbeat.
I pause, savoring the tension between us. “Kiss me.”
The command hangs in the air, sharp and undeniable.
Her breath catches, chest rising and falling in a silent protest. The spark of anger flares again, weak but still flickering.
“Please,” she whispers, voice trembling, but the device’s pulse throbs steadily at her temple.
Slowly, almost painfully, her lips part.
I reach out, cupping her jaw with overt possessiveness, forcing her gaze to meet mine.
“Obey me.”
The heat in her eyes cools, replaced by an unsettling vacancy.
Our lips touch, a hesitant, awkward meeting that carries the weight of everything she resists and everything I demand. Her hands fall to her sides, powerless. She leans in, but only because I’m forcing her brain to think she loves me, not because she truly does.
I feel her trembling under my fingertips, but the softness of her lips feels exactly how I imagined it would and that’s all that matters to me now.
“You see,” I whisper, voice both cruel and triumphant, “this isn’t just about control. It’s about surrender. Face it, Vivienne,” I add, tracing a finger along her cheek. “You’re already mine.”
The headset’s LEDs pulse steadily as she lowers her eyes. The machine hums, and a fresh wave of warm emotion spreads from her to me, as I flood her mind with my desire for her submission.
Her defiance is still there, perhaps, but it’s buried, smothered beneath the layers I’ve woven into her. Memory bent into longing. Pain reframed as intimacy.
Soon, even the idea of hating me will feel foreign. For a little while, perhaps she’ll still vaguely the fury, but it will feel… distant. Discolored.
She’ll still be Vivienne, my Vivienne, but softened. Molded. Made right.
She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to. Her silence is enough. The way she looks down, lashes casting faint shadows, is answer enough.
I press a kiss to her temple like a benediction.
“You’ll thank me someday,” I murmur. “When the pain is gone. When all that’s left is peace.”
The machine continues its low, steady thrum, syncing her rhythms to mine, mapping her thoughts to the architecture of my devotion.