A Bet to Lose

[Jacqueline]

[Note: This part deals with trust and humiliation.]

Richard had a couple of private messages from Susie waiting for him when he woke up the next morning. Her aunt had lightly scolded her that she had to be careful when wearing her new shoes, as the heels had left some soft indentations in a couple of rugs. That was definitely the sort of behavior that warranted a spanking for Richard, although he'd have to take a rain check on it because it was going to be storming all day and Caroline would be at work.

Of course, something like that certainly wasn't going to stop him - he was a teenage boy, after all, a mere mile's walk through a thunderstorm was nothing compared to the demands of his dic-k - but Susie mentioned that the thunderstorm wasn't the only thing that was having a 'heavy flow' that day, and he caught her drift.

He considered whacking off, but decided against it. Susie had taken charge of that, after all, so his orgasms weren't up to him anymore. Instead, he squatted down, messed his diaper like a good boy because that was what it was for (it was still gross, but his mom was coming home so it'd obviously be the last time he'd get to even try it for a while), and walked downstairs, still in his nightie, to where he smelled eggs and burritos.

"You're up early," he said.

"Can't sleep," she replied. She obviously had been worried sick over Leslie. "Hope you like it."

"Yeah, thanks." He sat down and ate with his sister. In a way, it was a normal morning, except for the fact that he was in a poopy diaper and wearing a pink nightgown, in which he felt more normal than he did before. They ate in silence because they didn't know what to say to each other, but it was a comforting sort of silence. At least Mom wasn't home yet. Given how his poop was smearing itself against his butt, he wasted no time in hurrying to the shower, throwing the diaper away (he really didn't want to show THAT to his sister), and washing himself off, his pee running down with the water. After trying them a few times, he decided that used diapers were very much not his thing.

His sister did change him into a fresh one, though, the last one in the house for presumably the last time, and at his request, she started braiding his hair into the pigtails he'd had yesterday. They were so little girlish, so innocent-looking, and just so him. She wondered if Susie would be able to find even more frilly, little-girl dresses in his size. This was the sort of person he really was, the person he'd (wisely) protected behind a shield of social avoidance, and she was glad she could help him be that person.

Of course, he'd tried to help her, too. "Ricky, we're both worried about whatever that thing on Friday is going to be, but I just want you to know that whatever you did for her yesterday, the important part is that you tried."

"No it's not!" he hotly replied. "What matters is if it worked or not! If I only tried, it means I just wasted my time! Just trying isn't gonna lead to her getting better!" Zoe really wanted to ask what he'd done, but she knew she'd find out tomorrow, and he'd obviously said too much as it was. "Sorry, I didn't mean to yell at you."

She smiled at him, shaking her head at the absurdity. "Look at you. I've just put you in a diaper, I'm braiding your hair into pigtails, and the only reason you're getting mad is because you think you might not have helped someone enough. I wish I'd known this about you before." Doing this for him, giving him the compassionate and caring treatment he wanted, felt like making up for lost time.

His reply was simple and honest: "I didn't trust you to know it before." He'd read a definition of trust a while back, written by some professional intelligence something-or-other in the context of computer security, that had made a lasting impression on him, right around the time when he consciously realized he really liked playing game characters who wore dresses. Trust, simply put, was the ability of someone else to hurt you. The more trust you had in someone, the more that person could do to ruin your network, your files, your friendships, your life. A great deal of the various stories he'd read on sites he was too young to visit had featured various females discovering the secrets of males just like him and then completely fuc-king them over to the point of lifelong dependence and physical mutilation. He knew such stories weren't real, but he was certain that some people had to want to do that; why would they have wrote them otherwise? Trusting anyone with his sissy secret was obviously a very bad idea, and making the bet with Zoe was an impulsive act, a chance taken. If he had thought beforehand, he would never have done it, and he was very, very glad he did.

Zoe was somewhat annoyed with herself that she didn't, couldn't have, trusted him, either. She had been reading stories of her own, but they were all presumably real, of girls being disowned and worse by their parents as soon as they came out of the closet. She had far less interest in expressing herself as she did in being able to live anything like a normal life, and if that meant staying hidden, then so be it. She intended to stay firmly in a very fortified closet until she was financially independent. At least she didn't have to keep her bisexuality hidden from her brother anymore, and if he somehow made this thing with Leslie's evil birth parents go away, she'd never be able to repay him in a thousand years.

"Speaking of, Zoe, you didn't trust me before, but do you want me to actually teach you Starcraft, the way I play it?" He had offered to help when she'd first gotten started and had been harshly rebuffed.

"I'd like that, and there's one more chore you didn't do," she said. "You actually didn't finish the laundry."

"I did all four loads, like you showed me."

"You did all four loads of clothes. You didn't do the sheets and blankets. It's all right, I didn't realize it either."

He went to put on a blue dress with floral accents he hadn't tried on, but the chest area was too baggy, so he put on his fake boobs so it would fit and, after a bit of thought, his butt padding as well. He put on his jingly socks and favorite pink heels and twirled around, watching his dress flare back and forth, smiling at how pretty he looked, not wanting this to end and knowing that it had to, at least while their mother was home.

That was how they spent their morning, brother and sister: him as a cute, pigtailed, high-heeled houseboy, her in shorts and a T-shirt, as he used Archon Mode to show her how he managed building and units in between mincing downstairs to do sheets (on hot) and blankets (on warm). He was honest and genuine with her, both when she messed up and when she did well, and she greatly appreciated that. This week had felt for the first time in her life that she had an actual brother and not just some kid who lived in the same house. Even if he was the sort of brother that obediently and carefully made everyone's bed while trying not to overbalance with his rubber boobs and high heels.

Then they prepared for their mother's arrival by putting a reluctant Richard back in his boy clothes, throwing away his used diaper, and unbraiding his hair, right before they took out all the trash, washed all his girl stuff, and moved it to the back of his closet where their mother never went. No heel-prints in the carpet, no dirty diapers in the house, no evidence anywhere that any of this had ever happened at all.

And then their mother called when she arrived at the airport, and they found themselves waiting in the living room together, watching something they didn't care about on TV. It wasn't really conscious on either of their parts. He was anxious, and she was anxious, and they just kind of hung out together because neither one wanted the other to be alone with their mother at that point.

She finally showed up with a tired expression and suitcases in hand, took one look at them, and mutual misunderstanding struck.

Despite Susie's command not to brood, Richard's mind had been wandering into a dark place as he awaited their mother, and he'd been considering plausible but unlikely scenarios cooked up from some of the worst real-world shit he'd heard about online. His mother was anti-pharma in general so he didn't worry about her trying to put them on some psychotropic drug. But one of his least favorite scenarios, and therefore the one that got the most fixation, was that his mother was going to call up a Focus on the Family "counselor" once she found out who her children really were, or, worse, some "educational consultant" asshole who was going to force one or both of them into nightmarish "residential treatment". If she gave a single hint that she had put any thought into doing anything like that, his very first resort would have been to go straight to the thing in the darkness and give it the full names and home addresses of everyone he knew in his entire extended family, beginning with himself. (Richard strongly suspected that it had a great deal more life-ruining and perhaps physically destructive power than all of 'cancel culture' put together.) Then he was going to find Caroline's PTSD veteran workshop buddies and trick the asshole into an in-person meeting somewhere else, telling him about a troubled teen with the unusual name of Ty Ryron and asking him to please come and receive Ty Ryron immediately.

Of course, Heather had no knowledge that such things even existed and would have never interacted with them if she did. What she did have was a fairly solid grasp of nonverbal communication and a modic-um of social awareness. Her children - usually avoidant of one another - were standing unusually close together, both of them looking at her with anxiety and distrust written all over their faces. She didn't understand why. The house was sparkling like new, all surfaces tended to and everything neat and clean; she'd half-expected to need to start yelling at them about doing chores properly or break up some spat that had occurred between them. This situation made no sense to her. They'd done everything right, had grown close somehow, and yet they were looking at her that way? The thought briefly crossed her mind that maybe they'd killed somebody and had spent plenty of time cleaning it up, and she found herself checking the walls and floor for bloodstains. "What happened?" she asked immediately.

"Our disabled friend's biological parents are going to get her killed," Zoe answered. Richard hadn't wanted to tell her anything at all, but Zoe pointed out that she was probably going to figure something was up, so Richard offered the idea of bringing this up instead.

"What?"

[Jacqueline]

They both explained, taking turns, what Leslie's condition was, the hope she had, and how it had been cruelly taken away; what Richard had been doing yesterday went totally unmentioned. Heather understood the situation in broad terms, but the thing that she had found most fascinating was that Richard was actively caring about someone else. The boy had always been aloof and unconcerned, spending a lot of time on his computer, and Heather had found it nearly impossible to get him to show any concern for anyone, even his own family. Since when had he started caring about other people? A suspicion grew in her mind. "Richard, is Leslie your girlfriend?" she asked when he was done explaining, and Zoe took great care in keeping her face unchanged.

"No," he said immediately, as casually as he could, "Susie is." He wanted to pull his mother away from other suspicions.

"Susie, from up the hill?" she asked, her eyes widening. Zoe had told her about her friends, because Heather wasn't going to let her daughter run around with people she didn't know. All she had really known, though, was that Caroline's dad was a mechanic, Leslie had some debilitating condition, and Susie was extraordinarily rich. "She's a couple years older than you. You're not messing with me, are you?"

"Not messing with you, Mom."

"He's really not," Zoe added.

"I certainly hope this works out for you," she said, and her children saw through her greed. The only way any of Susie's money was going to reach Heather's pockets was via winged swine. "By the way, Zoe, your cousins were asking where you were."

Both of her children tensed up and she realized immediately that she had said the wrong thing. She couldn't fathom why. Her daughter had been upset, but that was months ago, so what was the problem?

"Yeah, Mom, did they ask how I was doing, or did they just want to see my body again?"

"Zoe, that's not right. They're your family."

"So they didn't ask how I was doing. They just wanted to see my legs in striped tights so they could pretend to lick me again."

"Zoe!" That had been six months ago! Heather could not understand, at all, why she would bring something like that up again. "I told you then and I'll tell you again, I don't know what you thought you saw, but I'm certain that wasn't it!"

"Weren't you yelling at the television about how we should believe a woman when she says things about this stuff?" Richard asked quietly. He couldn't even remember which woman it was. Was it Tara Whatsherface or Christine Blaggowhocares? Conventional, mainstream politics were a mystery to him. He was thirteen and had other things on his mind.

"That's different," Heather said, keeping a patient tone. This was not the conversation she'd expected to have when she got home.

"No it's not," Zoe said. "You forced me to wear disgusting dresses in front of disgusting literal incest cousins. Twice." Zoe inwardly grinned a bit, imagining what her mother would say if she knew who had been wearing them instead.

"Zoe, I didn't intend for you to be disgusted by them. I thought that if you wore things like that enough, that you'd come to accept it and like it."

She knew, immediately, that this was an even bigger mistake. She had entirely rubbed both of them the very wrong way - no, that was an understatement.

Her daughter was staring at her with betrayal and no small amount of hatred in her eyes, the same way she had looked after that terrible Christmas (she wished she still had the pictures, as she figured that, later in life, her daughter might appreciate what she was trying to do for her) and even after her son's rather dismal birthday. She had actually been quietly grateful when he'd given her a reason to stop trying to make her daughter more feminine. Those looks, along with her lingering avoidant and distrustful attitude, even after it was all over and she figured Zoe had no reason to be angry with her anymore, had stayed with her. Was she really going to turn Zoe into a lesbian doing this, as her son had explained? Why couldn't her daughter just accept that she was a girl?

But that was a picnic compared to the look of sheer contempt that her son was giving her. His body language told her that he was willing to do absolutely awful, unforgettable things to her, perhaps violent and perhaps not, at the drop of a hat. Richard never acted like this, especially not towards her. She had seen this look directed at her only once before in her entire life.

Heather wasn't quite the queen bee of high school, but she was up there, and she considered the nerdy Jessica to be lucky to have her as a friend. She couldn't remember all that her and her friends did - occasionally stole her homework, called her names, got her to participate in harassment of other students, generally things that Heather considered to be harmless kid stuff. And then they had been arguing by her locker, something about how Jessica didn't want to do something or other, asking if she really wanted to be their friend, and then Heather had taken a small pair of scissors, reached under the collar of Jessica's shirt, and snipped her bra strap just to remind her who was in charge. A fun little prank, really.

And then Jessica had given her that look, the look that said she had gone too far, then made a beeline straight for the principal's office and told the principal absolutely everything, including, in incredibly self-incriminating detail, her own role when the group had targeted someone else. They all knew that this much tattling would basically end her social life at that school, but Jessica hadn't cared one whit. She was more interested in hurting them than protecting herself, and it had, of course, worked for its intended purpose. Heather had nearly been expelled right there, but the principal was clear that she was being merciful by giving her two weeks of suspension instead. Heather's parents had been absolutely livid with her and she spent the rest of her senior year grounded, subjected to humiliating therapy sessions in which she was accused of sexual bullying, and forced to write an apology letter of which she didn't actually mean a word and that she was sure Jessica didn't even read. One of her other friends had been so pissed off that she'd concocted a convoluted, probably unworkable plan to get back at Jessica at prom, but it hadn't mattered because Jessica simply didn't go to prom. They simply never saw her again outside of classes, where they were strictly forbidden from talking to her, on pain of expulsion, and Jessica didn't show up to graduation, either.

Heather's friends had gone off to college while she had gotten married and pregnant by the jock she'd had a crush on, and then he had gotten hurt playing college football in a low-division league, and once the prescription for oxycodone had run out, he'd turned to heroin. The only thing left of him was two children, one of which didn't even want to look at her and the other of which was silently staring at her with the exact same expression that Jessica had, back then.

She'd never told her children about what had happened in her senior year. Originally, the reason had been because she didn't want them doing things like that to anyone; now, it was that she expected a reaction of 'We figured you were always like that.' She felt agonized and frustrated that her daughter couldn't or wouldn't receive her good intentions in the spirit they were given. Why couldn't Zoe just accept that her mother she was just trying to teach a fun lesson in femininity?

Although Zoe didn't say anything out loud, Heather could read her lips: 'fuc-k you, Mom.' She turned around and walked upstairs to her room.

Normally, Heather might have said or done something just then, some threat of punishment or admonishment, but her intuition was absolutely screaming at her that if she said anything like that, her son was going to do something so unimaginably hurtful that their family life, at the very least, would never be the same. It did not miss her perception that her son, who had apparently just learned to care about people, had it in his mind that he needed to protect his sister from their own mother.

"I was only trying to help," she protested.

"You failed," Zoe replied simply, not even turning around. Heather breathed an audible sigh of relief when her son started going up to his room as well. She decided to let it go for now. Despite the hurt being flung back and forth, they hadn't actually done anything, and so she wasn't going to do anything. Richard, too, was relieved that his mother was not going to do anything and so he didn't have to do anything.

Something had changed, and Heather didn't know what it was. It had to be about their disabled friend, of course. That was the only explanation that made sense.

She was still their mother, of course. They hadn't had dinner, and now that she was home, that was up to her. She put away her suitcases - noting that every single surface had been expertly dusted, sheets and blanket washed, bed made perfectly - changed clothes and took a bath (the toilet was spotless), and went back downstairs to the kitchen. Every surface washed, spic and span. "What on Earth happened?" she asked aloud to no one, in total confusion. She fished a couple of cans of Spam out of the cupboard - she cooked it with canned vegetables in a way that her children found somewhat palatable - and called them down for dinner, only after noticing something very weird. The looks on her children's faces had only somewhat changed, but they sat at the table to eat anyway.

"May I ask why there are baby wipes and powder on the counter?" she asked, eyebrow raised, certain that she had caught them in something. If the two of them were quietly making money babysitting other people's children while she was out, that would explain at least some of their behavior.

"Mom, were you not even listening when we told you about our friend?" Zoe snapped, and Heather stared in confusion.

"Leslie, the one with the serious disability," Richard reminded her as if she were very, very stupid.

"Oh! Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you were doing that for her here. Why aren't they in the bathroom?"

"Because she can't do stairs, Mom," Zoe said. "Even our doorstep is hard for her." Heather realized that she was only giving her children more reasons to think of her as a gigantic bitch, and they ate in mostly silence. Maybe she'd bring this all up with them later, but it obviously wasn't the time. Heather tried to lighten the mood by talking about the wedding, not mentioning the cousins Zoe hated, but they obviously didn't care and it just bounced off. They ate in a very uncomfortable silence, after which both of them went right back to their rooms. There wasn't really peace in the house, but at least it was only a cold war.

Heather couldn't help but feel that she had lost something very important and had no idea how to get it back.

[Sissy Little Girl]

Jacqueline, Richard and Zoe have a very complicated life.  Now that their mother is home, the tension is so thick that they could cut it with a knife.  I'm sure that Ricky wishes he could be his true self; but, Heather might get Focus on the Family involved and Zoe would be pulled in and both of them would be forced into conversion therapy.   I don't envy either of them.

This is a great story from a great writer.  Keep up the good work, Jacqueline.   :D :D :D :D :D :D

[Jacqueline]

As a general rule, I don't spoil my own stories, but I assure you, that's not where this is going. The story even says outright that that particular thing was a groundless fear. If it did happen, everything would burn, and I'm not going to sit here and write a(nother) story in which everything burns.

Nah, what he's getting in the end is something particular that nobody in any of these sorts of stories ever gets in the end. And that's all I have to say on the topic.

[dolly bo peep]

Jacqueline,

I'm enjoying your story and wonder where the current drama is going to lead.

I'm eager to read your next chapters.

[Sissy Little Girl]

As a general rule, I don't spoil my own stories, but I assure you, that's not where this is going. The story even says outright that that particular thing was a groundless fear. If it did happen, everything would burn, and I'm not going to sit here and write a(nother) story in which everything burns.

Nah, what he's getting in the end is something particular that nobody in any of these sorts of stories ever gets in the end. And that's all I have to say on the topic.

Jacqueline, Sorry I felt that way.  It must be because of the fact that I am a transgender female and that has always been a fear of mine and that discussion sort of triggered me.  Mea Culpa.

[Jacqueline]

[Content warning: This part contains a vicious and nonconsensual screwing involving two complete monsters and a thirteen-year-old.]

Richard woke up his computer seconds after he woke up himself. He fired up Jailtracker for his local area, fully expecting not to find anything, and there was Leslie's biological mother's name. His jaw opened a bit, and his breathing grew rapid. He clicked it and blinked, staring at the screen, looking at the magic words appear before him: POSS W/ INTENT DISTRIB HEROIN. Richard knew, from personal experience, that you stop getting a say in your children's lives when you get busted for things like POSS W/ INTENT DISTRIB HEROIN.

"It actually worked," he whispered. He looked down, and then up again, in disbelief. He had actually pulled it off. Relief, euphoria, and elation washed through him, along with a strange sense of dissociation, not quite the same as he'd felt when he first started doing this. Dazed, halfway in a dream, he posted the Jailtracker link in the Discord chat and told them how to sort by new, not expecting anyone to be awake.

[6:10 AM] Leslie: This is what you were working on? :astonished:
[6:12 AM] Leslie: How the f u c k did you do it?! :open_mouth:
[6:12 AM] Richard: Dark sorcery, how else?
[6:13 AM] Leslie: Funny but I'm not kidding. I have to show my parents this. BRB

Richard winced, but he understood. If the worst thing that came out of this was that he'd have to face the music, it would surely be better than the funeral dirge Leslie would have faced without it.

[6:15 AM] Caroline: HOW THE fuc-k DID YOU FRAME HER BIO PARENTS FOR DRUGS

Parents, plural? Oh, the other one had just appeared as well, along with someone else, probably the mule. Similar list of charges, beginning with the magic words CONSPIRACY DISTRIB HEROIN. (He noted that the police had probably gotten the charges of husband and wife flipped but didn't care.)

[6:17 AM] Richard: LOL I didn't frame them. Don't think you can get busted for POSS W/ INTENT DISTRIB without actually having drugs. I didn't plant or give them anything either lol
[6:18 AM] Caroline: ok then how the fuc-k did you catch them
[6:20 AM] Richard: I **really** don't want to explain that here!

Zoe needed to know, so he threw on his boxer shorts and tapped on her door quietly as their mother was still asleep. Receiving no reply, he decided to call her on the phone instead.

She opened the door half a minute later, wearing pajamas, her hair a mess, her phone in her hand. She'd known why he'd called her but couldn't believe it. "Ricky, is this a prank?"

"I can't prank Jailtracker," he quietly pointed out. "This is real, Zoe. It's over." He was very, very glad it was over. His next steps would have gotten him even more involved than he already was. Bereft of words, she hugged him, still holding on to her phone.

[6:23 AM] Leslie: This is Leslie's mother. Richard, Leslie's father and I would like to speak with you privately, in person. Can you get your mother to drive you here before we have to be at work at 9?
[6:24 AM] Richard: Ok.

Getting their mother out of bed took less effort than Richard had expected and more effort than Zoe had. They'd needed to show her the specific line in the chat room before she was convinced that this is a thing she actually needed to do, asking her if she wanted to call Leslie's parents on the phone, even after they'd promised her the answers she so sorely wanted. She wondered if she'd get the answer she really wanted: why and how had her children changed so much?

The chat had moved forward:

[6:26 AM] Caroline: sorry maam but were all invovled. we cant let him do this alone. just called susie
[6:28 AM] Leslie: Mom here. I understand.
[6:31 AM] Susie: She's picking me up. Will be there in 45 minutes or so.
[6:31 AM] Susie: HOLY SHIT btw.
[6:32 AM] Zoe: We're coming. Also what Susie said!

They were in the fairly old car within half an hour, mostly forgoing morning rituals except for excretions and tooth brushing, as Richard decided to transfer some screenshots to his phone, Zoe stared at her brother with a mixture of shock and outright awe, and Heather thought of the last time her children had woken her up so early. Christmas? No, certainly not last Christmas, and not the one before. Richard wondered if Caroline should have picked them up instead, but Leslie's father had specifically requested for Heather to be there, and Richard figured that maybe explaining what he'd done in front of her would give his mother a much-needed hint.

They arrived at a fortituous time, Heather arriving just as Caroline and Susie were walking in, and the full group met in the living room together. Leslie hadn't been kidding; the house really was full of assistive devices, some of which Richard and Zoe had never seen before. Leslie sat on a very comfortable-looking chair, her parents on the couch, Heather on another chair and the teens on the floor. They introduced themselves quickly, and Richard took note of Leslie's parents; they looked nothing like her. Willa had a harsh, lined face bereft of makeup, and her husband, Robert, looked almost like a version of Richard that had grown up, only with a neatly trimmed beard and glasses. He looks like Gordon Freeman, Richard realized, and would have laughed if he thought anyone else there would have had any idea what he was talking about.

Unlike the Half-Life protagonist, though, Robert had a voice, a deep, educated one that sounded like a guidance counselor. "If anything, and I mean anything, we say in here leaves this room, it's going to get very ugly for everyone in here. Especially Leslie. Do we all understand this?" The one person that Richard and Zoe worried about not understanding that was their mother, but Heather had worked a union job for longer than her children had been alive and was very, very good at knowing when to keep her mouth shut. "Richard, I want you to explain, step by step, what you did, and I don't want anyone interrupting or distracting him." He spoke with serious authority, Richard noted, like a principal or warden. It was a skill the man had spent time cultivating.

There were things that Richard had decided to leave out. The first was who, or rather what, had taught him to do this. The thing on his friends list had told him exactly what investigative procedure to use: search everything you can find, then use that to look into more things to find, and never stop doing that, not even when you think you've found something good. Think of what they would least like to be discovered about themselves, and then discover that. Dig into every rabbit hole. Analyze every piece of information. Consider the future state of things every step of the way. (Richard, a veteran Starcraft 2 player, did not need to be told that one.) Do not give up until you can no longer physically continue.

Richard would also not mention his missteps and false leads. He had made a hell of a lot of mistakes and crawled down a lot of blind alleys, including spending two hours tracking down an account that turned out to be owned by somebody else. If he had really known what he was doing, he figured, he would have had it done in maybe an hour and a half and probably would have felt a hell of a lot less emotion in the process. As it was, he'd actually spent an hour in total looking general information up simply because he was thirteen years old and had no idea what certain things meant.

He also had no intention of discussing what he had felt while he was doing it. It wasn't relevant, it sounded really stupid when he said it out loud, and his princess had specifically ordered him not to be emo.

The final thing he would not mention, not even to himself, was that he hadn't entirely done it for Leslie. He'd done it because he saw monsters, and monsters needed to be destroyed.

He took a breath. "Okay, I was actually just originally going to look up things to show your lawyer for the hearing. So, the first thing I did was I looked on their Facebook stuff, and on some of their older posts, they'd shown a bunch of screenshots." He showed Leslie's parents his screenshots as he talked. "One of them had her bio dad's computer username, and that username was also his Reddit account, which had posted a bunch of drug related stuff a few years ago. But I really wanted to look at his private messages, and his password was the third one I tried: p, 4, s, s, w, 0, r, d." Heather looked like she wanted to interrupt but kept quiet. "On there, he was talking to this one guy who said that he used a forum all about drugs. I found his account on there, and you're not even gonna believe what his password was. It was leslie, no caps." That was about the tenth one he'd tried, and he was utterly shocked and disgusted when it had actually worked. "I get on there, and he's talking to somebody else about a drug market on TOR, the dark web. I found his account on that site, same password, and he'd actually set up regular transactions with their escrow people. That's why we had to wait until Friday, because the next one was scheduled to be picked up at the Mission parking lot at 4 AM this morning. I called the cops and told them I overheard a couple of guys talking about transferring drugs there. As soon as I said Mission I knew they believed me." The 'Mission' had failed miserably; it referred to the name of an entirely local, heavily understaffed, and notoriously mismanaged homeless shelter, halfway house, and home of a wide variety of registered sex offenders.

"You said you overheard it," Robert said.

"What else was I going to tell them?!" Richard replied.

"You could have used some crimestopper tipline, but don't worry about it. They probably knew you were lying about how you got the info, but big secret, they don't care around here as long as the info's good." Richard nodded, having thought the same thing. "Did you give them your name?"

"I did, just to make sure they'd actually send someone, but I asked them to keep me anonymous."

"All right, it probably won't be a problem. At least I don't think so. Willa?"

"If we all keep our mouths shut about this, yes," she replied in exactly the voice Richard and Zoe had expected. "Even if they were told that someone overheard, if they admit to using a computer network to traffic drugs, they could be facing federal instead of state charges. They're going to just plead guilty, 99 times out of 100."

"I wish I understood more about computers," Heather lamented. Not for the first time, she could simply not entirely comprehend what her son was talking about.

"Here's the short version: Your boy's a freaking Jedi," Caroline said, sharing a knowing look with the rest of the teens. What Richard had done in his room that day had not involved the light side of the Force.

"The other short version is that we owe him a lot," Robert said. "You don't understand what he did for us. When you have a biological parent opposing an experimental therapy, it is almost impossible to get a judge to not issue a stay on something like that. They could have dragged this out for months and months." Caroline just nodded as the looks went her way; she'd called it. "What she has and how she has it, it's a progressive disease. I don't even know if this therapy is going to work, but I do know she'd just get worse without it."

Heather shook her head. "I don't understand that either. If this is supposed to save her life, why would her parents oppose it?"

Willa chuckled without humor. "That's basically asking us why we have jobs."

Heather shook her head again. "I just couldn't imagine a parent doing something so hurtful." There was more chuckling in the room, and she had a vague idea as to why.

Robert held up a hand. "Anyway, I need to be clear about something. All of what we just talked about would be true if Richard had been the one who did this. Instead, what happened was, I told you to give that story to the police, and I was the one who did all of this." A moment while that sunk in. Willa drew in a breath. "Phone," he told Richard in a clinical tone, one professional to another, and Richard immediately gave it to him. Robert was absolutely embarrassed at himself and decided that, if he could do nothing else, he could at least do this, even though nothing was likely to come of it. He could have done everything Richard had done, and probably done some of it better, if he'd really tried.

"You're tanking for him," Heather realized. She had played World of Warcraft while Zoe and Richard were babies.

"Don't know what that means," Robert replied.

"She means you're eating the damage," Zoe answered.

"That I am. Honestly, I concur with Willa in that I don't actually expect anything to happen over this, this was a minor giving a tip for a future event and they got caught red handed, but I'm not going to let there be even a chance of a thirteen-year-old going down over saving my daughter's life and putting away a couple of sc-umbags in the process. There, now the screenshots of everything I did are on my computer, and your phone has nothing related," he said, handing it back to him. "Make sure nothing at home does. Did you save to a cloud service at all?"

Richard raised an eyebrow at him. The guy had shown him professional courtesy and then he asked him that? "Hell no."

"Good, well, we almost certainly won't ever hear about any of this again. And Heather, there's something else Willa and I should probably talk to you about. It's unrelated. In private, please." They led her past a couple of assistive devices into their bedroom and closed the door.

"What do you think that's about?" Susie asked, worried.

"Probably about the dresses," Leslie said.

Richard's eyes bugged out. "What?!" he blurted out quietly.

Caroline laughed. "She didn't mean your dresses, they don't know about that, at least I hope they don't." Leslie looked away for a bit, but no one noticed. "She meant that shit that your mom pulled on you, Zoe. Leslie's parents are not gonna let that slide while they've got her in here. Now c'mon, we have messages to delete. Pretty sure deleted actually means deleted here." Many of the previous conversations they'd had were unhappened in minutes.

"Also... they're not going to tell her..." Leslie's lip curled up a bit. "...but I told them everything. Everything. They're my parents, it's different between me and them than for any of you." Susie inhaled a bit. Caroline whistled faintly. "Dealing with abused kids is literally their full-time job." It was how they'd met, and they'd decided to adopt a child in need of serious help themselves shortly after they'd married. That child happened to be an, at the time, eleven-year-old girl with truly abominable parents and a serious progressive disease. "Ricky, they don't care about that stuff as long as it's up to you. Even before this." It was a breach of trust, but it was forgivable. Given what was going on in the other room - Richard overheard Willa nearly losing her temper with "can last for decades" - he was sure that they were on his and Zoe's side.

Zoe looked at Leslie. "About us?" Not for the first time, Richard had to remind himself that the preteen-looking Leslie was actually older than his sister.

"They said it's fine, that it's even good for me, as long as it's an equal relationship." She looked down at her broken body, as if to suggest that she could never have one while she was like that.

"Leslie, if they start talking to my dad..." Susie winced and moved her hands back and forth in a highly negative gesture. Ricky also winced a bit; after all this, there weren't many things that could scare him anymore, but despite his abilities, he had a pretty solid idea that Susie's dad was not a man with whom he wanted to fuc-k.

"They won't. Trust me, they won't. They have to worry about stuff like this all the time. That's why it was safe to tell them." Robert and Willa could not even count the number of times that a child had admitted something personal to his or her parents and received extremely vicious abuse in return.

The adults left the bedroom then, and it was immediately evident that Heather had been crying. Zoe and Richard both knew what that meant, and Richard gave a small sigh of relief, thinking of all the things that he wouldn't have to do, at least not then, including calling his Sith master to go full Palpatine on his own family. None of the teens had any idea what Leslie's parents had said to her nor exactly how they'd said it, but whatever it was, it had worked.

Heather offered a very awkward and too-long apology that involved her tripping over her words and repeating herself more than once, saying that she was sorry for not believing her daughter, putting her into dresses she hated, and not seeing the signs that Zoe's cousins were giving off, and that whoever Zoe chose to be, Heather had to, as her mother, accept that choice. Richard had expected her to apologize when they got into the car; for her to do it right then meant that she was completely defeated. Zoe was still not willing to tell her mother the full truth, and Richard never even considered it.

Zoe's reply was very simple: "If you never do anything like that again, for any reason, we can forget about this." It was a lie, of course; she would not forget about it for a very long time, if ever (as Robert and Willa had just been explaining), but the alternative to pretending was to live in simmering antagonism with her mother until she moved out. Heather readily agreed.