DiaBA chapter 8 - Commitment

“And I make her prove her love for me

I take all that I can take

And I push her to the limit

to see if she will break”

—Pink Floyd

Megan awoke in the ball pit, seething and sweating from the lingering terror of a nightmare where the radiotherapy machine refused to turn off. She was strapped down securely, too tightly to move. Everyone else had forgotten and left left her in there for what felt like hours, while the machine continued to turn round and round and blasted her with over 9000 times the lethal dose of gamma radiation, until her whole body became cancer. “It’s funny how a thing that causes cancer is also used to treat it.” someone said, probably Randall. Her darling Randall was mocking her, possibly calling to her from outside the dream. She tried to roll back over to muffle the sound, to try and keep it going a little bit longer, because no matter how horrible the dream was, it felt preferable to the reality of her waking hours. It was hopeless. In the end, she always woke up.

Megan slowly opened her tired eyes. She was still strapped down and unable to move, but instead of the tumours pressing on her abdomen there were just play pen balls. regardless, there were still two very real tumours in each of her tits. It was them that were making Randall upset. That was why he behaved the way he did. He was such a sweet man really. He’d only ever done these things because of the cancer. Naturally, she blamed herself for this; it was her cancer that caused the problems.

She hadn’t left the colourful confines for over six weeks, not even to go to the bathroom. After a while, she began to rationalise that it was her punishment. It also brought her closer to Randall when he needed her the most. Sometimes though she needed reminding that it was for Randall’s own good, and every time she struggled against her bindings, he would tie them a little tighter, cutting off the blood supply.

Megan’s hair was long and tangled, just the way Randall liked it. Her skin was paling from the lack of sunlight, and her already-slim body was wasting away. She was also naked. With every passing day she looked more and more like the stick figure that Randall kept drawing, to the point of obsession. But Megan knew if she got too much thinner, then she would no longer be able to feed him. For this reason, her husband fed her every day, sometimes forcefully.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Randall would stroll into the ball pit, his meat stick rock hard from the satisfaction of updating the comic on a timely schedule, and made love to Megan forcefully and rigorously, saying that it was the best way to cure her cancer. By this point she’d almost started to believe him.

Tonight however, something was different. At first she didn’t hear Randall’s hushed panicky tones, but when she did, she snapped to attention. Randall had waded deep into the ball pit with one hand wrapped around his 13-inch MacBook Pro. He pressed the hot metal instrument into her bony thighs, and she flinched involuntarily at the sharp edges. She was suddenly very conscious of the fact she was naked.

“Ni-ahh!” Randall said.

“Is something wrong, darling?” said Megan. Of course something was wrong, but still she had to ask.

“Ni-ahh! Ni-ahh!”

And he tapped the top-right corner of the screen. According to the menu-bar clock, it was 23:40 on a Sunday night. Missing a midnight comic deadline would usually put him on edge.

“It’s alright.” Megan said soothingly. “It’s all right... In the next twenty minutes, we’ll just re-hash an old comic idea and make a graph joke out of it, just like we always do.”

This idea seemed to calm Randall somewhat, enough so that he loosened one of her bindings, and allowed her to control the laptop for a while. He opened Chrome, and sent the address bar to xkcd.com. Megan briefly considered the idea of sending for help via the internet, but the only other tab open was Twitter, and she couldn’t think of how to say it in 140 characters. Besides, Randall would see what she was doing. He was crouching next to her, knee-deep in balls, and resting his arm on her shoulder. It was Megan’s job to keep on clicking the ‘Random’ button until Randall found a comic he could use. After twenty or thirty clicks of the button, comic 631 came up.

“How could I ever improve on that— that masterpiece?” Randall asked rhetorically.

“Doesn’t matter.” said Megan. “We’ll keep looking.”

A few presses of the Randall button later:

“That one!” he said.

Randall hurriedly picked up a pad of plain paper, and sketched out a wobbly graph axis, then tore the paper from the pad and scrunched it up into a ball. That one wasn’t so good. He tried again, but he still didn’t like the result. The graph axes still looked wobbly. Yet another page was scrunched up and discarded.

“I’m not distracting you, am I?” said Megan. But Randall wasn’t listening. He was now too busy drawing a man and a woman that resembled Megan, having quirky stick-sex in the server room. After all, their copy of the Kama Sutra had a few mistranslations.

Randall broke away from his fantasy to make one more half-arsed attempt at a webcomic. The laptop screen wasn’t visible from where he sat, which was fortunate for him at that moment, because if he’d have seen the clock that said 23:54, he’d have panicked and had a temper tantrum.

“There, finished!” Randall said like a proud toddler showing a drawing to his mother.

“That’s very good Randall.” she said to humour him, but she couldn’t stop her voice from sounding tense and scared. “Now let’s get it up on the internet for everyone to see.”

She quickly pushed the COMMAND and M keys together, and handed the laptop over to Randall.

“There’s no time to scan it!” he said. “I’ll have to use the Android.”

“Oh, alright.” said Megan. She knew exactly what this would involve. Obediently she held the drawing up to her chest, trying hopelessly to cover her breasts, but there was no way she could cover her tits and her snatch with just one arm free. They would no doubt be visible in the picture.

Randall whipped out his smartphone, and launched the camera app. He stood back, held still and snapped a picture of Megan holding the comic. It didn’t matter that the comic itself took up a tiny percentage of the photo, because this phone was packing a 20.7 megapixel whopper. And it blasted out a pulsing flash that cast Megan’s body in an eerie white light that captured all its beautiful decaying glory. He made sure to stand far back enough to get her snatch in the frame. Once he’d taken the photo five or six times, he grabbed the laptop. Like most of the recent XKCD comics, he would make it look all formal and professional through careful cropping. He was about to launch Adobe Photoshop CS6 to do this, when out of the corner of his eye, he saw a minimised window on the Dock that hadn’t been there before.

Megan must have opened it when he was drawing.

“What— what’s this?” he said.

“Uhhh...”

Randall clicked it, and the window expanded to reveal a half-written email from Megan.

get me out of here before i die.

randall’s place, 101 rogers street, 021

But she never finished writing the ZIP code.

“Who are you writing to?” asked Randall.

The recipient line was blank, but the subject line just one word in it: HELP.

“None of your business.” said Megan weakly.

There was a long pause. Randall carefully closed the email and clicked on the ‘Don’t Save’ button. He then folded the laptop, and clutched it between his hands like a security blanket.

“I love you.” came the words in his trembling basso voice, and he started to stumble over his words. “And— and— and I take care of you! I— I feed you, and cure your cancer. There is— there is nothing I haven’t done to you— for you I mean. And now you’re asking someone for help? From someone who isn’t me?! Who doesn’t— doesn’t love you as much?!?”

“No.” she said, feeling a sudden burst of confidence. “There is someone else who loves me as much.”

“Is it someone I know?”

“No.”

“Oh, I think I do!”

“You don’t! You only know him as a 300-pound jerk from Seattle. If you really knew him, you’d know Rob’s actually a hundred times heavier, because his heart is just that big!”

Megan knew that her feelings of confidence came the memory of Rob’s love, and the hope that it might bring.

“You— whore!”

Randall slapped Megan on the cancer. He couldn’t bring himself to do it to her beautiful face, so he aimed his blow a little lower. He recoiled his hand from the blow, realising he’d have left a blushing red slap mark on his favourite milk pillow.

The XKCD creator was torn between a desire to kiss it better, and the need to punish Megan again.

“I’m so sorry!” he said. “Now look what you made me do! It’s not— it isn’t fair that you get hurt because of this. Just stop making me do this, you fucking bitch!”

Randall was already pulling his hand back to slap the other tit.

“Wait Randy, the comic!”

“Oh frakkin’ fuck! Unngh!” 

Randall tried to slap himself instead, but missed. So instead he resorted to throwing a tantrum and kicking his balls around the playpen.

When he’d calmed down after a few minutes, Randall grabbed the laptop, cropped the photo and saved it as a PNG. Then he uploaded it to the XKCD server, and added an essay-length mouseover text to it. It was well past midnight when the comic finally went online. Thousands of confused fans were stuck refreshing the previous day’s comic for 45 minutes.

Randall stared at the forum thread for a few minutes, basking in the praise and appreciation that his loyal fans fellated him with. But it was not enough. He needed something more physical in that moment to make him feel complete.
The forum thread was just enough to get him erect. From then onwards, it was all Megan. With one swift movement, Randall slid open his flies and jammed his meat stick into her withered pussy. He was harsh, shaky, unprotected. After twenty seconds of violent thrusting, against her pitched screams of terror, he spewed forth his man essence, planting his seed at the very back of Megan’s cave.
Afterwards he held tensely on to Megan’s hair, shuddering and almost crying with equal parts guilt and euphoria. He just hoped that he’d done enough to stop her from ever thinking about escaping.

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DISCLAIMER: this story and its characters are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons or cuddlefish living or dead is purely coincidental.

Trigger warning: people being mean. Please erase it from your mind if you already read it.