No, Nathan wasn’t crazy. To say he was WOULD be crazy. He was a very well adjusted man.

He was just frantically scouring the internet for any evidence of magic being real.

The part of him that still wanted to be rational was thinking “of course magic isn’t real, that’s ridiculous, you’re being ridiculous”. And he was being ridiculous, magic was not something that existed in the real world, and it certainly wasn’t something that sensible, level-headed adults believed in.

The much larger part of him was screaming that when he woke up, his hair wasn’t just down to his shoulders, it was STYLED differently.

He was forced to admit the hairstyle looked very nice, maybe even pretty if it was on a woman. But that was the thing, it was a woman’s style, not a man’s.

But when he looked in the mirror, he had to concede it looked pretty fitting on him. That was because, for the most part, he just looked like a woman now. Sure, he still had his penis and testicles, which had definitely gotten smaller in the past three weeks, and his chest hadn’t exactly “filled out”... yet. It could still only really be described as “swollen”. But the rest of his body was undeniably feminine. Hell, the last time he was next to Astian, he found that he had gotten even shorter. He was a full head shorter than him now, the top of his head touching the bottom of his chin.

And he could only tell that because of the part of him that liked being around Astian. That ever growing, terrifying part that really liked being close to him. The closer, the better.

He didn’t want Astian to hug and hold him. He didn’t want Astian to kiss him. But sometimes he daydreamed about it, and he couldn’t stop when he did.

He loved those daydreams. But he didn’t want to love them.

His frantic internet search may have just been to calm him down, and if it was, it didn’t do a very good job. He found nothing, except a few videos with a title along the lines of “REAL TIME TRAVELER CAUGHT ON VIDEO”. If magic was real, then someone out there was doing a great job of containing it. Maybe they had a spell that directed every forum post or video showing magic to them, so they could delete it. Maybe the internet automatically rejected any post or video about magic. It could be anything.

Either way, the result was the same, Nathan was fucked and on his own.

That is if magic was real, he could just be having a major psychotic break making him think he’s becoming a woman. Or maybe he was always a woman and he was coming out of a psychotic break making him think he was a man.

Okay, he needed to stop speculating. Speculating led to bad thoughts like that.

He should shower instead, it was getting late. A shower could calm him down, right? It had worked before.

He went to the bathroom and saw his face in the mirror again. And when he did, he noticed another detail he missed before.

His eyebrows were much thinner and nicer looking than before. He didn’t know what the exact word for it was, but he looked like he had them “done”, whatever that meant.

He sighed, hearing his voice for the first time in hours. It was the only thing left about him that hadn’t changed at all, thankfully. But with how the rest of his body was, that probably wouldn’t last much longer.

The shower did feel nice. He was really coming to like how the hot water felt on his new, soft skin. That wasn’t the only thing he liked either, as when his hands kept feeling around his body, he noticed just how fit he was. It wasn’t the first time he noticed, but it was never more apparent than it was then. He wasn’t buff, not remotely. His arms were thinner than before and didn’t look like they had any muscle. But his body felt graceful, limber, even elegant, especially with his new hourglass figure. Moving around felt WAY better than it did three weeks ago. He hadn’t realized how shit him getting fatter was making him feel.

He should really keep this up and work out more.

He did feel a lot of hair as he cleaned his body though. It’d been a few days since he shaved. He should get on that again.

He reached out for a razor, which…

Wait, why was there a razor in here?

He held the light blue razor up, puzzled. This wasn’t here before. Hold on, what had he been cleaning himself with anyway?

He looked to the shower shelves and realized he’d been washing his body with feminine looking and smelling soaps and shampoo. He’d even used the conditioner. He didn’t recognize the products, where did all the girly stuff come from? Was it Astian’s?

Actually, it was probably his sister’s.

He figured he might as well make good use of it so long as it’s here. He hoped Astian’s sister wouldn’t mind him using her products.

Little by little, all the hairs on his body were cut off, falling down the drain. It was immensely satisfying, and once he was done, he felt around his skin and relished how smooth it was. He needed to do this more often.

When he got into bed that night, he felt so clean. He loved it so much he almost forgot what he was so upset about.

Something about Astian… Astian was so nice. Nathan really wanted to lay in bed with him, feeling his arms around him. Astian was like a bed himself, keeping him safe and warm. Even just imagining cuddling with him made Nathan feel aroused, and his penis began to stir.

A smile crept onto his face.

There was a small part of him, at the back of his mind, screaming that this was wrong, that he was going mad, and that he needed to keep focus.

But the rest of Nathan was too tired to care.

***

Natalie had a smile on her face as she slept. She loved Astian so much. In her mind, she pictured him on top of her in the bed, moving his hands through her body, caressing her, kissing her, and… taking off her clothes.

She suddenly stood up in bed, breathing heavily, frantically running her hands through her head and hair as if to shake off a bug infestation. Her hands wrapped around her chest, trying to stave off the hideous feeling she had in her gut.

The revulsion.

That’s all she felt when she thought of Astian, revulsion.

She came into a fetal position and cried. As much as she hated him, the hold he held over her was overwhelming. He wasn’t even there and he still had so much control.

She wanted it to stop, she wanted him out of her mind.

She didn’t care if Kira didn’t like her back, she didn’t care if nothing ever happened between them. She didn’t care that she liked her that way anymore.

She just wanted Astian gone.