“Drop her,” Zed growls.
“Never.”
“Let. Her. Go.”
“NO.”
They are about to fight again, but this time I am trapped in the middle, held hostage by the rough hand around my neck and the even rougher grip between my thighs. I feel myself pulsing and squirming with need, my ass riding back against the Zed behind me, the one who will claim me and use me no matter what the price.
“You can’t stop me,” Bad Zed laughs. “There’s no way she’s ever going to give herself up to you now she’s felt my touch. This is what she needs. This is what she craves.”
I want to say he’s wrong, but I can’t. Not only would it be a lie, but it would be physically impossible to express with the way he is holding my throat so tightly.
Then Bad Zed comes up with an idea. He pats my pussy proudly, as if he believes he has truly come up with a solution.
“Let’s put her down between us and each present our cock. Whoever’s dick she sucks, wins.”
“I’m not going to make her suck my dick to choose me,” Zed says. He’s so noble, so good. So completely out of his fucking depth right now.
“I will,” Bad Zed says. “Don’t you know she likes to be fucked and used, spanked, punished, made sore? She should be with someone who knows how to put her on her knees and make her suck his dick properly.”
He drops me down onto the ground and proves his point by grasping the front of my hair and tipping my head back. He frees his cock from his pants, the thick, green powerful head of it swelling and dripping with alien come. He holds me there, rubbing it over my lower lip.
This is wrong. This is humiliating. This is hot.
“Look at her. She doesn’t remember a thing. Doesn’t know either one of us, but her tongue is reaching for my cock,” he says. He is making a display of me, but he is not wrong. The sky is melting around us, reality is collapsing in on itself, and all I can focus on, all I need to focus on is this big alien cock.
“This is what she deserves,” he says, pulling me closer, thrusting his dick deep into my mouth. “She’s a disobedient human outcast. She needs to be dominated, used, traded. It’s what she was made for… OUCH!”
The last part is where I bite him.
He lets me go real fucking quick. I scramble back and away, expecting him to be furious, expecting him to try to hurt me. He has that air of menace that makes me think he might.
“Ha!” Bad Zed laughs. “Your teeth can’t do any real harm to me.”
I notice that his dick is away again, though. He’s reconsidered exposing the most vulnerable part of himself while he degrades me to his better half.
“You deserved that,” I tell him.
“And you’ll deserve what I do to you in turn,” he promises me.
I am starting to remember.
I’ve felt it since I incarnated in the bush. It was slow at first, and fuzzy. Distant and not at all useful. With the collapsing of the time field, I’ve felt memories forcing their way back into my brain, synapses swiftly making linkages which were not there before. It’s like a direct download from the universe to my brain.
I know who this Zed is. The bad one. I know he hurt me. I also know he regretted it, but too late. I know he deserves to be punished. I think he might know it too.
“Why is there only one of me and two of you?”
The question bursts from me suddenly. The answer appears just as swiftly.
It’s because Zed can’t forgive himself. Every selfish, stupid, greedy thing he did has been pushed out and into this other Zed, not just the bad Zed. The rejected Zed.
Zed can’t accept himself. But maybe… maybe I can accept him. If he will shut up long enough for me to not hate him.
“I, uhm. I…” It’s hard to form the words. I have to be very sure that I actually mean them, and I’m not entirely certain I do. “I forgive you.”
Bad Zed stares at me. “You don’t remember enough to forgive me.”
“I do. You lured me to a library and sold me to Aberks. And then you felt bad. Bad enough to come rescue me at the expense of your own life.”
“Don’t forgive him,” Zed says from behind me. “I don’t.”
“I know you don’t. That’s why the world is breaking. You hate yourself so much the whole universe is collapsing around you. We have to get back to the beginning. To a place where you never sell me and the time squid is never unleashed.”
If current Zed won’t let past Zed in, then this will never be resolved. They will be a splinter in time, causing chaos for all of us from now until infinity. We’ll be eaten over and over again, no matter where we hide, what bus rides we take, or what books we check out. We’ll cause pain and chaos to everyone around us.