The next morning, or whatever time it was, Katie finally came back with someone from the college administration who could help. The faceless machinery of bureaucracy had sprung into action, literally. The person Katie came back with had apparently been fused with a bunch of computer equipment, and the LEDs on their head lit up in surprise when they saw what had happened to Jordan and Alex.
There were a lot of new accommodations to be made. Yellow caution tape was put up to block the stall doors, preventing anyone from accidentally using either of them - which was a relief, but also a little bit of a disappointment. Jordan couldn’t stop herself from thinking that she’d just been deprived of the one thing she was now good for, not that she was going to admit that out loud. Her shower curtain was fashioned into a makeshift dress and draped over her immobile body, giving Jordan back some modesty. And a voice-activated laptop on a stool was placed below her head, so that she could still participate in her classes over video call.
Of course, it was anyone’s guess when classes would actually be ready to resume. The whole campus had been hit pretty hard by the Fusion Wave, few people coming away from it unscathed in their area. Jordan soon learned that one of her professors, a total bore who taught Intro to Philosophy, had been merged front to back with his pet dog, his face replaced by the dog’s anus. A lot of people were already posting memes about it in the student social media groups. Jordan probably would’ve found it pretty hilarious, too, if she hadn’t been through a debilitating change of her own.
So, for now, the laptop filled a much more important purpose: letting Jordan stay in touch with the outside world. Scrolling through the internet gave her something to occupy her mind with that wasn’t centered around her water pressure and the desire to clean people off. It made her feel more like a human again and less like an inanimate object, even if most of the stuff online was other people reacting to their changes, and even if she had to yell “Scroll down!” every five seconds instead of just using her nonexistent hands. She was far from happy, but she started to feel like the worst was behind her now.
That feeling lasted for a few days. Then the deeper and more unsettling thoughts started to sink in. Jordan hadn’t tried to contact any of her family members back home yet - what would they say when they found out the likely permanent fate of their little girl? She wanted to put that off for as long as she possibly could, especially when she remembered that they were all completely unaffected by the Wave. What would be worse, she asked herself: never seeing them again, or being removed from here and reinstalled in her parents’ bathroom? There weren’t a lot of other possibilities coming to mind.
And she worried over what might have happened to her boyfriend, Colin. Sometimes she let herself fantasize about him coming in and bathing under her stream, wishing he’d been the one to accidentally use her instead of that deer guy. But she knew he was probably fused with someone or something, and he hadn’t answered any of her messages yet. Maybe he was stuck to a particular spot like she was. Maybe no one had even found him there yet. And if he was immovable like her... she’d probably never see him again. She tried to remind herself that that was just one of the endless possibilities of his Fusion, but the thought still sent a few tears seeping from her mouth every now and then.
Until she got a video call from Katie. “Accept call!”, she immediately said, having nothing better to do with her time. The girl’s wooden face immediately popped in on the screen. “I just found out what happened to Colin,” she said breathlessly. “I was just in the dining hall, and I saw...”
“Wait,” Jordan said, a little playfully. Katie was starting to feel like her only friend in these tough times. “What were you doing in the dining hall? You don’t need to eat anymore, right?”
“Yeah,” Katie said with a sigh, “I realized that after a few bites. The food just collects in the back of my mouth. Plus, I can’t even taste anything. But that’s not the point! Here, look at this!” She sent a video she’d taken on her phone into the chat, and it immediately began to play.
The camera was shaky at first, and mostly pointed toward the floor. “Stupid wooden fingers,” Katie’s voice muttered. “There! It’s filming!” And the view promptly tilted up until Jordan could see...
Well, it was Colin, all right. And a girl Jordan barely knew, one of the cheerleaders for the football team Colin played on. And they were fused together, face to face, stomach to stomach, in a very incriminating position. Their lips were locked together, with only a small opening left on one side where their tongue was hanging out. They were completely naked - not surprising, since many Fusions couldn’t find clothes that fit their new bodies and walking around nude had become rapidly normalized. But it revealed their single, shared torso, and the unending sex act that was going on underneath.
His penis was forced to sit inside her vagina. He couldn’t pull out if he wanted to, and it seemed like he didn’t want to. With every careful step that the four-legged fusion took across the room, Colin’s legs sticking out of the cheerleader’s butt and vice versa, a loud moan escaped from their shared mouth as the genitals rubbed together, again and again and again.
By the time the video clip ended, Jordan was on the verge of spitting scalding hot water everywhere. But she restrained herself, not wanting to destroy the laptop in front of her. She wasn’t sure whether they’d replace it or not if she kept ruining them with her stream. “That’s why he wasn’t responding to anything I sent?!”, she shouted, her whole internal plumbing shaking with rage. “That bastard was cheating on me?! I can’t believe I ever trusted him...”
Katie was hesitant. “I mean, maybe he wasn’t? They could’ve just been sitting near each other and the Wave shoved them into that position, I don’t know...” She trailed off. Neither girl found that idea very convincing.
“I’m sorry,” Jordan said, “I just... want to be alone right now. End call. Power off.” The laptop obeyed her commands, automatically closing its lid. Jordan turned her head away and let the water start to flow out of her mouth at full power. It felt oddly soothing, the way it ran through her whole body and relieved the pressure as soon as it got to the top. It was just as cathartic as crying, which was what she really wanted to be doing right now. And she was starting to realize that she needed to do it, at least every once in a while, just as much as her unfused self had needed to eat or go to the bathroom.
She let the water run and lost herself in the simplicity of being an object. Showers never went through bad breakups - they never had relationships with the humans they cleaned in the first place. They didn’t have to worry about course credits or student loans or parents missing them. She had those memories along with her own - she knew that the shower had never experienced a twinge of pain before it was part of her. If only she could let the object side of her take over... Maybe she could be like that, too.