On the Edge of Emergence
(Note: this story contains a scene of a "cub"-aged character observing a sexual situation. It has been conservatively tagged accordingly.)
Lilla leaned over the balcony railing, tail flicking lazily back and forth behind her as she looked out over the gentle, rolling fields and valleys below, the dense, tall grass that covered them waving in the gentle breeze and tinted a beautiful shade of gold in the light of the setting sun. She gazed out past them, to the city in the distance, tall metal buildings glinting as they cast long shadows. It was a beautiful view, and one that she knew she would miss once the year of her emergence had passed, so she had vowed to treasure it while she could. There was schoolwork to be done, of course, but it could wait until the sun had vanished below the horizon - for now, she was just content to watch, and let her mind play across ideas of the future.
After a few moments, Raiste wandered out to join her. Her roommate, and the first person she knew outside where she'd grown up, they'd met when she'd first arrived at secondary school. Unlike the closer local ones, students at that level were all boarded at regional schools, outside of the bustle of the major cities, so they could focus keenly on both their studies and the decisions they would have to make facing adulthood. When Lilla had first learned that she would have to head off at the end of 9th grade, she'd done so with considerable trepidation, especially when she learned that most of the other kids she knew had been chosen to head to different regions, leaving her with next to no one she knew at the new school. Raiste, though had been in the same boat, and when they became roommates, they'd formed an instant bond. They had both built other friendships from there, but theirs remained the closest, and they'd become the kind of friends that told each other nearly everything. There was one thing, though, that they hadn't really discussed, even though it was the one thing that loomed heavily in front of them, and the one thing that, uncharacteristically, Lilla had been struggling with.
"Hey, what'cha doin'?" Raiste asked, leaning against the rail next to her. Lilla looked over, smiling as she saw her friend grinning back, her golden-brown fur gleaming in the fading sunlight.
"Oh, just watching the sunset, and... thinking..." Lilla replied, glancing back out for a moment as the bottom part of the sun faded from view behind the towering cityscape on the horizon.
"Thinking, huh... yeah, plenty of that going around." Raiste let out a gentle sigh. "I guess for our class, though, it's the right time of year for it. Comprehensives finish up the week after that, and then..."
"Yeah... emergence."
Raiste turned back to her friend, cocking her head to the side a little. "So that's what you're thinking about?"
"Mostly, yeah. It's just..." she trailed off, wondering whether the idea was something she really wanted to broach at the moment. It was still something that was more in her head, but if anyone would want to know, it was probably Raiste.
"Just what? C'mon, it's not like you to be so coy about something... Wait, don't tell me you got a bid already?"
"No, nothing like that, just..."
"Yeah? Now you've got me so focused on it, you know I'm not just gonna let you leave it at that..."
"It's, well... about emergence. I've been thinking about it a lot, and the more I think about it, the more I keep wondering if, well... if I want to try and find some way to make it so that I can emerge as a man."
She looked over at her friend, who didn't look surprised so much as curious. "A guy, huh? I mean, I know that technically we can go either way, and you're not so girly to be the type that would never consider it, but I gotta say I didn't see it coming. You never even so much as mentioned it before, so... why now?"
"I dunno... I guess it's just something that I never really thought about before, but now that it's so close, I just keep on thinking about it more and more, and... when you get right down to it, guys just have more freedom, in a lot of ways. They don't have to deal with bids and contracts, don't have to worry about whether or not they get to have careers, or get weighted down with kids, or have to spend so much time answering to someone else's needs instead of their own. If you're a guy, maybe it's a little more complicated, but the world just also opens up in a different way, and if I just stay as I am, and emerge as a female, it seems like there are so many things I might be missing..."
"Yeah... maybe?" Raiste replied. "Guess I just don't see it that way. Yeah, you don't have to deal with pregnancy and all that, but becoming a guy is expensive, and really living as one is even more expensive than that. I mean, just the course to get there in the first place costs a serious packet, and after that, you've gotta work like mad, because it's not like you can accept bids or anything. And if you want a collective, even if you start real small and are looking to attract only one single girl to it, that's more money still. There's a reason emerging as a guy's usually a game for those with a ton of cash, because you've gotta have it if you really want to do it right. You ask me, it's better to stick with what you've got. Just play it forward, let yourself emerge as a woman, pick up a nice bid, and you'll do just fine. I mean, c'mon, you're beautiful, you're bright, you've got the softest fur of anyone I've ever met - you keep going, once you emerge and make your debut, you'll probably be flooded with bids. Is some random possibility you might never even take really worth so much struggle? Yeah, it's up to you, but I'll take the path that's laid out right there for me."
"I know, I know it's the easiest path, and probably the one I should take, but... it would really be something else. Haven't you ever wondered what it would feel like to emerge that way? How it would feel to own a collective, to call the shots on your own? It's just... I always imagined it would kind of feel like this," she said, gesturing out at the landscape in front of her. "Looking down from on high, watching as everything spread out before you, knowing that every place, every possibility you saw, could become your reality..." She looked over the expanse again, sighing. "You're right, though - it's probably more of a dream than anything else. I don't even have a plan, or an idea, for coming up with the cash to buy the chemicals you need. I looked it up, and to actually emerge properly that way, you need sixty days' worth of chemical doses, and each one's a thousand wegs per vial. Sixty thousand... that's more than I've seen in my entire life. To get that much, in time to get started before emergence happens naturally the other way... yeah, a dream, to be sure. Even if I could get a job before then, once Comprehensives are over, by the time I made that much, I'd have been emerged as female for years. And once it's done, it's not like you can just go back and choose again..."
"So, why worry about it, then? If it's a future you can't reach anyway, there's no sense in pining for what never would have been anyway. And why think about what you might have lost, instead of what you might gain? Sometimes keeping things the same isn't a bad thing. I mean, we know what being a girl is basically like, right? Everyone does. Just let yourself emerge naturally, and you don't have to worry about everything being all different and weird, having all that stuff between your legs shifting and growing and doing all sorts of crazy things. You don't have to buy new clothes, or learn how to do basic stuff like peeing all over again, or worry about how much differently you'd feel, or think, or any of that. You stay this way, and stuff just kinda... opens up, I guess, and then you can do the stuff that adult women do, and everything's just fine. Plus, you know that there are things that women can do that men can't, like accept bids, and take on all sorts of interesting things. I mean, it's true that only women can be ambassadors, right? And some other things as well, so it's not like it's only guys who have opportunities. Besides, who knows? Maybe it's a one-in-a-gazillion chance, but every so often someone does emerge as a guy all on their own, without the usual chemicals. If you ask me, then, just don't worry about it - finish things up here, go through your emergence, and we can do our debut together. We're cute enough together, we might even get bids from the same guy, and then we could be together there! Well, that's what I think you should do, and what you're probably gonna do anyway, but if you really do manage to scrape together sixty thousand wegs, I won't complain if that's what you wanna do. Well, as long as you get around to giving me a good bid, of course..." She grinned at that last comment, sticking out her tongue briefly in jest. "Seriously, though, if you do, as your friend I'm gonna hold you to that..."
"Besides," Raiste continued as she watched the sun completely vanish below the horizon, "emergence is gonna be fun either way, right? If you ask me, it's gonna be even more fun to emerge as a woman than it would turning into a guy. I mean, I've seen those explanatory videos on the education net, the ones with the computer renderings, and turning into a guy just looks crazy, you know? The way that the little bud where you pee from just swells up into that big, long thing, how it flares out and gets all weird-looking at the end. And where would you even put it when you put on your clothes without it being all bulgy and obvious?" She gestured along the lines of her stretchy, grey form-fitting shirt and pants that were the school's standard issue.
"Um, I'm pretty sure once you get to be a guy, they let you wear stuff that's looser than that..." Which, Lilla knew, wasn't exactly the case for women, one more thing that had factored into her considerations, even if it wasn't nearly the biggest issue by far.
"Yeah, I guess, but I still think emerging as a woman is a lot cooler. I mean, I never knew that little line down there could do all of the stuff they showed in the video. I didn't even really think it did anything, just sat on that weird patch of skin down there between your bud and your butt. I never never even figured out that it's actually two lines, just pressed really, really close together, and how when you're getting ready to emerge they get all puffed up and really soft and stuff, so you can actually feel that they're there. And your chest starts to swell up at the same time, and all this other really cool-looking stuff, although a bunch of it happens inside you so I guess you can only see that part if you watch the renderings. It's still really cool, though, all this stuff unpacking and rearranging in there, where on the guy video it all just kinda sits there, getting a little bigger but not doing anything else at all. So, it's already a lot more fun than emerging as a guy, right? And that's not even the best part - once all that is done, then those lines unfold, kinda like the petals of a flower, creating all these cool little concentric ridges, and some of them even wrap around the bud and make a cute little nest for it. It just looks pretty, you know? Way more beautiful than that weird guy stuff, anyway. Although they say that once you emerge as a woman, all that weird guy stuff starts to look all attractive for some reason, but I dunno... you ask me, women look a lot better. They don't diverge like that, don't go all bulgy and angle-y, but just get more like they already were, all curvy and fluffy and cuddly..."
Lilla flashed her a grin. "Hmm, really? If you find women that attractive, maybe you want to be a guy after all?"
Raiste laughed at that, loud and uninhibited. "No way! You're not getting the point on purpose, aren't you? I think women are nice-looking because that's how I want to be when I emerge! Not flat-chested and barely adequate like we are now. I want to look pretty, on the inside and outside, and guys just aren't. You know what I'm talking about, right? I mean, you grew up in a collective and all, so there were probably all sorts of women around to see. Don't tell me you didn't look at them and think about how much you wanted to be them someday..."
Several different expressions threatened to flash across Lilla's face as soon as she processed what her friend had said, but before any of them could manifest, she managed to fight them down and maintain her neutral, smiling mien. After all, she did know exactly what Raiste was talking about, but admiration wasn't the first thing that her mind conjured up. And as good a friend as Raiste was, it was those memories that were one of the things she just couldn't share with her, no matter how much they really were at the center of her thoughts about emerging as a man.
True, she had grown up in a collective, and while it wasn't the richest by far, it was reasonably well-off, with an accumulation of ten women and about thirty or so of their various offspring. The women were all contracted with a man they called Jochen, but the kids had been encouraged just to call him "everyfather," as while they each had their own individual mother, he was the father of them all. Jochen himself wasn't always around, and Lilla had usually only gotten a fleeting glimpse of him every once in a while, and any actual attention from him even more rarely, but with so many other people around, it was only to be expected. She'd seen far more of her own mother, Rachla, and the other women, as they were around all the time, keeping all the kids in line as best they could. It was true that they'd all looked glamorous in a certain way, wearing an assortment of brightly-colored halter tops, stretchy, snug little shorts, and fancy, high-heeled shoes that Jochen had bought for what were essentially their collective uniforms. They were a far sight from the boring, neutral clothes that the children had worn, and while Rachla had been first and foremost her mom, it was impossible to miss the sort of glamour she and the others were all aspiring for.
There were, of course, other things that women had to deal with as part of a collective, and although Rachla had tried her best to shelter Lilla from them, it was only a matter of time before they had been literally laid bare. While Raiste, perhaps, had only the clinical renderings to go by, Lilla had no illusions about the supposed beauty that lay between an emerged woman's legs. After all, she'd still been a child, several years prior to her secondary education, taking a break from being with the other children and playing with a pair of dolls in her mother's private quarters, when Jochen had come in. He had come up behind her, wrapping her up in his arms, then tucking them under a shirt that was tight enough that Lilla had seen the outlines of his fingers as they wrapped around her mother's breasts, squeezing them repeatedly as her mother had started to make weird moaning noises that had quickly frightened her, while in between begging Jochen to slow down, to let her take Lilla back out to the other children before she did things with him, but Jochen had refused. "Let her watch," he'd said, in his deep, booming masculine voice. "She has to see the way the world works somehow. In ten years, this is her life anyway, so might as well get her used to it now."
Then he'd flipped her mother over onto her belly, her legs hanging down the side of the bed, and he'd tucked his hand under the waistband of her shorts, just below the base of her tail, and yanked them down until they bunched around her knees. Lilla scuttled back at the sudden motion, but what was happening was so strange and inexplicable that she couldn't tear her eyes away. Without the shorts, her mother's crotch was laid bare, and it did look a little like a narrow sort of flower, with densely packed pink petals that shifted and pulled back and forth as Jochen ran his fingers down the middle of it until her mother made an even stranger sound, her body shuddering a little as Jochen started unfastening his own pants. Seeing her mother like that, just lying there on the bed and making weird and almost painful sounds, scared her immensely, and she ran over to see if her mother was all right. Jochen, though, had caught her arm, and with his other hand he pushed down on her shoulder and made her sit back down. "No. Just sit there and watch. Obey your father, like a good girl." And not knowing what to do, she had, even as he'd pulled his strange, fleshy pole out of his underwear and mashed it against her mother's petals until they gave way and stretched around it, each of the delicate ridges pulled suddenly out of shape and strung together into a taut pink ring that stretched around him. When it pushed in the rest of the way, though, his hips bumping up right against hers, the terrifying view of her mother's body being distorted and opened up around Jochen's thing had been mercifully blocked. Jochen kept moving though, his body slamming against her mother's with a soft, relentless thudding sound, and he was involved enough that he didn't bother to check back on Lilla, who had curled up and hid her head between her knees after one of the thumps had caused her mother to scream, something that sounded like a combination of shock and pain and something else that she'd never heard before and couldn't understand. She just tried to hide, covering her ears, and imagining that she was somewhere else, somewhere where everyone was just like the dolls she still cradled in her lap along with her head, where everyone was quiet and nice and the things that were going on next to her didn't happen. It was impossible to deny it, though, impossible to tune it out entirely, and all she could do was hunker down and try not to attract any attention as she cried, the noises around her seeming to go on and on until they mercifully started to quiet down, and then abruptly stopped entirely after a loud, bellowing, masculine roar.
She'd only dared to peek her head out when she'd heard him stomping towards her, and caught a glimpse of his legs right in front of her before he'd grabbed under her arms and hauled her upright, giving her a momentary up-close glimpse at his thing, all slick and floppy and glistening an angry purple at the tip, before he'd unceremoniously crammed it back into his pants as he looked down at her with disdain. "So, a coward after all," he'd said, smirking, before he turned around, looking back over at her mother laid out on the bed. "Here I am showing you how the world works, and you can't even face it. You're gonna have to now, though, because there's no way you'll be a man. If you had that kind of potential, you'd have confronted me, even if it was impossible for you to win. All you knew to do, though, was to hide and whimper and back down. There's no way you'd ever have the guts to be a man." He gestured over to her mother's prone form. "That's gonna be your fate. That's gonna be your life. So you might as well stop hiding your eyes and get used to it." Then he'd patted her on the head and walked out, leaving her alone with her mother.
She started to walk over, to see how her mother was, but froze when she got a closer look at what Jochen had done to her. The strange, delicate flower from before looked like it had been squashed and smashed, the petals bent and crushed together in disarray, distorted ridges of red that no longer covered the dark, gaping hole in the center. In amongst them, something was spattered, weird splotches of something mucusy and grey, oozing and dripping down toward the bed as her mother's hips occasionally shook. It was a terrifying sight, seeing a part of her mother seemingly ruined so callously, and it was only compounded by the eerie silence, punctuated only by her mother's ragged, gasping breaths and her own frightened whimpers that she could no longer choke back.
It didn't matter that her mother had recovered a minute later, hastily pulling her shorts back into place before cradling Lilla and trying to reassure her after everything that Jochen had forced her to see. It didn't matter that Rachla said that she was just fine, that nothing bad had really happened, that her cries were the sounds that women made when men did things to them that made them happy, that the scary-looking way that Jochen had left her body would go back to normal soon like nothing had ever happened to it. It didn't matter that her mother tried to convince her that Jochen was still a loving man, if insensitive, uncultured, and a bit too abrupt in prioritizing his own needs over those of others, or her assurances that most men weren't like that, that once she emerged as a woman she would see that such interactions between men and women were nothing to be afraid of. All she could think of was what she had seen, of the way Jochen had seemed to use her mother as a thing more than a person, of how her lively and capable mother had, over the course of a few screaming, moaning minutes been reduced to something passive and limp and seemingly ruined. True enough, her mother bounced back as though it hadn't affected her at all, and later in the day no one ever would have guessed what had happened just by looking at her, but it was something that didn't flit away as easily from Lilla's thoughts. The images were seemingly burned into her mind, and flourished in nightmares that finally, after several months, had mercifully faded away.
It was the first and last time that Lilla had seen Jochen "hurt" her mother - whenever she was with Rachla in her private quarters and Jochen entered the room, she quickly darted around him and scurried away, hearing him scoff at her as she left. Jochen never pressed the point, though, never forced her back in to watch again or did anything else but generally ignore her. Whenever he was there, though, every time she saw her mother afterwards smiling and strutting confidently around, she couldn't help but wonder just how much of it was real, and how much of it was some sort of act to keep her daughters from seeing the despair that was hidden somewhere inside. Jochen had visited her regularly after that, though, and within a few months her belly had swollen up, and a few months after that Lilla had woken up one day and her mom was missing. She'd all but panicked, wondering what Jochen could have done to her, but one of the other mothers reassured her that her mom was just having the normal, expected medical procedure for her current state and would be more than okay. Sure enough, the next day Rachla had returned with a beaming Jochen at her side, cradling the cute, fuzzy form of her newborn daughter to her breast and introducing her as the newest member of their family. Seeing the pure joy on her mother's face as she cradled the baby in her arms, and the undeniably loving way that Jochen looked at them both as he hugged them gently to him, made her wonder for a moment about whether her mother had truly despaired at Jochen's touch, or whether it was a product of Lilla's own traumatized imagination. Even as life went back to normal, though, and she finished her primary schooling and was hugged by her proud and tearfully happy mother before she got on the transport to her current school, that initial experience had stayed with her, partly muted but unavoidably permanent in the back of her mind.
As the time of her emergence had crept onto the scene, drawing closer with each passing day, what she had experienced, and the words Jochen had spoken on that day, had once again begun to occupy her thoughts. She knew now, or at least thought she knew, that not all women would end up like that, part of a collective, underneath a man who felt free to use their bodies in whatever way he pleased. Even so, though, as his words reverberated through her mind, she couldn't help but wonder if he was right, that she would inevitably emerge as a woman and find her way to the fate he'd predicted for her. While trying to emerge as a man would certainly be strange, and scary, and probably a huge or even impossible struggle, it still didn't fill her with the same sort of certain dread that came with emerging as a woman. She didn't really know, exactly, what being a man would be like, but unlike most people her age, she was more than well aware of the kind of things that could be done to a woman, and that alone had been enough to fuel her contemplations. Now that she thought about it, though, she knew that the consideration really hadn't been much more than that - she didn't have any really serious reasons for wanting to be a guy other than that perceived freedom, which at the heart of it was less about being a man than it was about not being a woman. Maybe it was an easy choice for Raiste, who had never really seen anything to counteract the upsides she'd found to emerging as a woman, and maybe she was right that there was no real choice at all short of sixty thousand suddenly appearing in her account, but Lilla knew that she needed to do something. Even if she emerged as a woman, even if bids and contracts were the way that most women got by, she knew that she would have to find another way. She already knew the fate that Jochen and the nightmares that lurked in her mind had picked out for her, a fate where she was powerless as men did things to her, and she wanted nothing more than to defy the fate that for so long had seemed troublingly inescapable.
She snapped out of her reverie as Raiste poked at her shoulder. "Hey, c'mon! Don't space out on me again! I swear, you've been doing that more and more lately..."
"Sorry," Lilla said, turning back to her friend. "Just have a lot on my mind, I guess..." She glanced at her friend, wondering if she should say what she'd been thinking, felt the words on the tip of her tongue, but at the last moment held them back. The experiences, the burdens, the visions that haunted Lilla were hers alone. They were, she knew, feelings that not even her mother, the person she'd seen everything happen to, shared. Even if she couldn't bear it, even if she was sure that it couldn't shake out that way for her, perhaps Rachla was right - that there were good men out there, and good collectives, and experiences that were good for a woman to have. If Raiste was able to find one of those, to get the kind of life she seemed to be after, then it felt wrong to stand in the way of her dreams, even if they were to Lilla the sort of dreams that were fraught with fear and peril. If that was the route her friend took, she promised to herself that when it actually came to pass, she would make sure that Raiste had that warning, and that she didn't accept a bid from anyone who seemed at all like Jochen. Until that happened, though, she would bite her tongue and let her friend seek out her own future, and her own happiness.
"Yeah?" Raiste replied, oblivious to the turmoil her friend held inside, at least for now. "I still don't think there's any sense in getting worked up over all this. I mean, we've all got to emerge, one way or another, and maybe it changes some of the things you can do, but it shouldn't really change what you are, right? You emerge as a girl or a guy, but it's still you inside, just with some different parts. And since we're both totally awesome, we'll still be that way once all this stuff shakes out. Besides, there are more important things to worry about right now, hmm?" She nodded her head back towards the room, where Lilla knew that two desks piled high with books and notes awaited them.
"Comprehensives..."
"Yeah... hey, at least we're through the really tough exams, right? The way you are, the rest of them ought to be a cakewalk, but I've still got to cram some more for mine. Speaking of that, I really should get back to it..." She sighed, dipping her head in the fading light. "Man, another night of staring at books that are beyond boring... but then again, it's not like there's anything else to do around here at night. I swear, the proctors around here wouldn't understand the meaning of the word party if you explained it to them with charts and drawings and stuff..."
She turned back towards the doorway. "You coming?"
"In a minute..."
"Well, try not to spend too much more time with your thoughts, okay? You do that, they'll just keep going around in circles, and that's the last place you want your head to be at tomorrow when the next exams show up..."
Lilla looked back out, across hills wreathed in shadow to a city coming to light, pinpoints flashing on one by one to form a sea of tiny jewels that glittered and shimmered in the distant air. She knew that her future lay out there, somewhere - if not in that city, then perhaps in one like it, or perhaps even a different one across the continent or maybe even the world. It was likely that it would be as a woman, and maybe, ultimately, she would have to end up in a collective, or in some other arrangement with a man. At the moment, though, she knew that none of those fates was guaranteed.
At the very least, even if Raiste had managed to bring a sobering dose of reality to her pipe-dream plans of masculinity, she had made one very important point - female or not, her future was perhaps narrower, but still wide open enough if she truly wanted it to be. Taking bids was the easy way, the customary way, and ultimately the subservient way, but it wasn't the only one. True, the other paths were less certain, and likely fraught with competition and struggle, but she knew they would be worth a shot - and for the first time, they started to feel actually real, actually something that she might be able to accomplish. After all, for all his words, Jochen didn't hold her fate in his hands. Once she emerged, she would be an adult, and her fate would be her own, as long as she could find the strength to reach out and grasp it...