The Fusion Wave was not a mercy, nor was it a curse—it was something far crueler, something that stripped away excuses, that forced all to confront what they truly were. For Sarah and Katie, it had been their salvation, and for Ethan, their stepfather, it had been his reckoning.
Before the Fusion Wave, they had lived in the shadow of his drunken rage. His slurred insults had been as frequent as his blows, and their mother had done nothing but turn away, unwilling to see the bruises and cuts, or hear the trembling in their voices.
Sarah and Katie’s lives were defined those welts that took too long to fade, by words that cut deeper than fists ever could, and by the ever-present shadow of their stepfather, Ethan. He was a man bloated with his own bitterness, steeped in alcohol and the misery he wielded like a club. Their mother had died when Sarah was thirteen and Katie was ten, leaving them alone with him, shackled to his wrath. The girls learned to be silent. They learned to avoid his gaze, to measure his moods like one measures an oncoming storm. But no matter how much they tried to shrink, to disappear, Ethan always found them.
Slammed against the walls. Faces smothered with mud. Cigarette burns on their backs.
If their teeth didn't rot and fall out, a hard slap or a punch to the jaw did the job.
For years, the sisters had learned to survive, to endure, to dream of escape. And then the sky had burned red, the air had gone fever-hot, and in an instant, everything had changed.
When Sarah and Katie awoke, their bodies no longer belonged to them alone.
They had woken, no longer in control of their own bodies. They were not two, but one. Or rather, three, as one.
They were conjoined now—two heads side by side, facing in the same direction, sharing a single torso sculpted from their combined features. Four arms extended from their shoulders, each sister retaining control over a pair. It should have been horrifying, but it was nothing compared to the wretched form Ethan had been twisted into. Their waists did not taper into legs. Instead, their abdomen stretched backward and connected seamlessly to another, one facing the opposite direction. Ethan’s weakened, diminished, shriveled frame - as feminine and as helpless as his victims. His arms remained, but his voice was stolen. His mouth had been erased, replaced with a puckered, useless maw.
An anus.
His protests had been silenced, his authority erased. Where once he had been their tyrant, now he was nothing but a vestigial parasite, a pitiful, silent thing.
A Queen Conjoinment - with some extras.
For the first time in their lives, Sarah and Katie held power.
At first, they had not known what to do with this newfound authority. They had been fearful, uncertain, wondering if some cruel joke had been played on them - their abuser now a permanent half of their body.
At first, Ethan fought. He flailed, he struggled, his feeble fists lashing out. But he could not strike them without striking himself. He could not escape them.
But one day, when Ethan had tried to strike them yet again, his remaining strength had lashed out in desperation once more, they had realized the truth.
They controlled everything.
They could stop him from resisting. They could seize control of his limbs with nothing but willpower, leaving him a passenger in his own body. His fury turned to panic. And when panic failed him, when he was reduced to nothing but a trembling, caged beast, the sisters reveled in his powerlessness.
Every muscle in his stolen body was theirs to command. Every impulse to resist was effortlessly subdued. They had no need to fight back—he could not even move without their permission.
This was body now.
At first, they had laughed. They had made him walk for them until his arms gave out. They had denied him simple itches and scratches, let him feel cold while they wrapped themselves in warmth. He was denied the luxury of consuming food and water - they were perfectly capable of that task, and their digestive systems were linked as well. He was delegated to bathroom and toilet duties - and the sisters reveled in his facial expressions as he expelled waste from his former mouth instead of insults and castigation.
When he had raged, they had mocked him, pinching his nose and sphincter shut when he tried to make those awful, wheezing and flatulent noises that passed for screams. And when he had finally stopped fighting, when he had slumped in miserable silence, they had made him work. Forced him to scrub the floors, to cook, to tend to their every whim and perform every menial task like a servant in the house that had once been his kingdom.
And no, they did not beat him, that would have been too simple. Too brief. They made him pour out his own liquor, bottle by bottle, and watch as the amber poison drained away. They denied him the comfort of privacy, of autonomy, of any small semblance of control - and he felt the humiliation and terror they had endured for years.
It had felt good.
They had told themselves he deserved it, that every moment of his suffering was justice for the nights they had spent cowering from his wrath. That every humiliating order, every instance of forced submission, was a fraction of what he owed them. They had called him pathetic. Useless. Less than human.
Months passed. His struggles lessened. His eyes, once filled with rage, grew dull. His resistance faded into a hollow, mechanical compliance.
And he had stopped looking at them. Stopped resisting.
Stopped trying.
His head and mind were vestigial. His torso and arms but an extension of their body.
It was months before they saw it, before the haze of their own vengeance lifted enough to recognize what had happened. It was Sarah who had noticed first, though she had not wanted to admit it.
Ethan—no, not Ethan. The thing that had once been Ethan—was gone.
The man who had sneered at them, who had barked orders, who had wielded his belt like a weapon, was dead. In his place was an empty husk, a body that moved only when commanded with mechanical compliance, a pair of glassy eyes that saw nothing. He was not a man suffering. He was not a man at all.
He was an object.
He was a pair of limbs.
And they had done that to him.
It had been the breaking point. The day they realized that revenge had turned them into something they did not want to be. That they had become the abusers, and he their broken victim.
That night, they did not issue orders. They did not make demands. For the first time since the Wave, they let Ethan move freely. He did nothing with his freedom. He sat on the edge of their bed, head bowed, hands limp in his lap.
Sarah spoke first. “Do you even care anymore?”
There was no response, of course. His ruined mouth gave him no voice.
Katie swallowed. “We hated you. For everything you did to us. But we’re not going to be like you.”
Still, he did not look up.
Sarah sighed, rubbing her face. “Ethan, we’re giving you a chance. If you can even hear us in there. But you have to want it. You need to commit to it.”
A single shudder ran through him.
That was when they had stopped. When they had forced themselves to look him in the eye and speak his name, to acknowledge him as a person again. It had been slow, agonizingly so, to undo what they had done. They had given him choices, even when he did not seem to care about them. They had tried to talk to him. They had given him clothes that were not rags, dignity that he had not earned—but that they could no longer deny him.
A month passed. Then two. Then half a year. The cruelty they had wielded against him was replaced with patience, with careful encouragement. It was slow at first. They spoke to him as they used to speak to each other, soft words in the quiet of night. Workloads were spread even, chores fairly divided, time was delegated for them all to relax. Ethan was given back the simple freedoms he had declined them once again, and with the control of his own half of their body, autonomy over his life.
The sisters had never thought they would feel empathy for the monster they had sworn to one day kill, but they found themselves encouraging Ethan during trips to restrooms - with their combined efforts, these daily ordeals were as brief as possible.
At first, nothing had changed. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, a flicker of something had returned. He had begun to react, however subtly. To make his own decisions, however small. To try, in ways they barely noticed until they realized what was happening.
And then, at this point, two and a half years after the Fusion Wave, it happened.
They had been eating dinner—something unremarkable, a quiet, uneventful meal. And then, without warning, Ethan had made a sound.
A dry, broken whimper. A heaving breath. And then, as Sarah and Katie turned to her in shock, her thin, scarred shoulders shook, and silent sobs wracked her stolen frame. Tears fell, uncontrolled, down the face they had once feared, the face that now belonged to someone else. And then, slowly, she turned to them.
Her hands—frail, still hesitant, no longer under their control—reached out, trembling.
The sobs racked through their shared body, shaking the frame that had once been his alone. He cried without sound, his ruined mouth unable to give voice to his grief. But the sisters did not need to hear it. They felt it. They felt it in the way her shoulders quaked, in the way his hands gripped at their arms.
It was an apology. One she could not voice, one Ethan could not beg them to accept. But it was real. It was raw. And as the sisters grasped his hands, as they let their own tears fall, they knew what it meant.
She did not need words to apologize.
Now, three years after the Wave, Sarah, Katie, and their newly christened sister, Emma, live no longer as adversaries, as master and servant. One early morning, the sisters had awoken to their stepfather's request, written on a napkin - he had chosen this gentler, softer name that did not carry the weight of their pain. By the time they all awoke once more later that day, he, now she, had been born anew. Emma no longer recoils from their touch, no longer flinches when they call her name. She moves with them, not because she is forced to, but because she chooses to. She still carries guilt like a stone in her chest, but she carries it willingly. And the sisters? They carry something new as well.
Hope.