“Halves”

His dreams of her dissolved into the sleepy rousings of consciousness. Eyes closed, bathing in the warm comforts of the transition, he reached for her.

His arm sang its searching song over the linen, and for a moment the waking joy of stretching sleep-heavy and love-sore limbs swept his thoughts from him. He added his legs to the stretch, tensing his body in a sleepy sprawl as consciousness returned to him.

It had been a long, wonderful, utterly exhausting night.

When he didn’t reach her – when his arm finished its stretching journey and found only more linen – no warm weight of his love to anchor to in a wakefulness-banishing embrace, he wondered sleepily. Had she risen already? No, they lived for lazy, entangled Sunday mornings. She probably rose for the bathroom, and would be back soon.

He opened his eyes, and his stomach roiled at the realization of how wrong he was.

A vast, rolling hillscape of comforter and bedding yawned out around him. A perilous canyon between mattress and bedside table stretched before him, and he instinctively rose to clumsily hurl himself back from the ledge from a scrambling, awkward half-seated crabwalk. The alarm clock, a glowing billboard in the dim room, cheerily informed him that it was 10:34am.

He stared at the clock, his hand on his chest as he searched for more stable breaths. As he found them, he searched his memories of the previous night for answers.

He had dosed sometime after 8pm last night. They had excitedly talked about this for months: sourcing the mushrooms, measuring the dosage for the tea, planning the perfect night together for their first real foray into sizeplay. The tea was supposed to reduce his height by roughly half every two hours for an eight hour trip, and restore it over a similar time’s come-up.

10:34 became 10:35 as he counted hours on his fingers in stunned silence. Something had gone wrong – clearly – after they had passed out together. They had meant to be more careful – his memories got hazier as the night had worn on, but the last thing he had remembered was being drawn out of her – slick, spent, and sore in ways that had occupied his imagination for years – and dropped gently onto her belly.

They had talked for a while, hadn’t they? It was hazy – they shouldn’t have added all that wine to the cocktail of the tea, adrenaline, and ecstatic excitement already locked into the night – but he was pretty sure they had. He had to nearly shout for her to hear him from the tidal plane of her plush stomach, but he had reveled in the way her belly buzzed and quaked in tandem with her speech.

She had teased him: “walked” a hand on middle and ring fingers down her torso to playfully push him with outstretched index and pinky when he tried to rise and journey to her chest. He and her hand had nearly shared heights at that point, which he concluded meant he had been near the nadir of the expected diminution at four inches and change.

He had made it to her chest, he remembered feeling butterflies as her flush, smiling face rose to greet him as his feet fell across soft stomach, then firm sternum, to pass between the gently rolling hills of her breasts.

They must have fallen asleep together shortly after that. He had vague memories: how warm and soft she was around him. She had thrown the comforter over her head, at some point, and the warmth rising from her body, the humid wind from her laugh-rolling voice, the dizzying medley of scents – her arousal in his hair and beard, the wine on her breath, the soaps and oils from hours earlier, when he’d still been big enough to be almost-useful in the bath.

He dragged himself from past revelry and focused on the dire needs of the present. He was, what, four and a half inches or so then? That made sense: a sixteenth his height, probably somewhere around half past four in the morning. If the tea’s effects hadn’t reversed – if he’d kept diminishing to half his height every other hour – then by now, 10:30, he’d be barely half an inch tall.

Was he still shrinking? He certainly wasn’t growing. He’d be a quarter an inch by noon then. Left to her own devices, she could sleep into the evening after wine nights. He’d be imperceptible by then – he needed to wake her, and he needed to do it quickly.

Purpose and panic warred in his chest, and he rose unevenly on the comforter to turn around. A football field from him the hills and valleys of ruffled bedding gave way to the mountainous rise of her sleeping form. She faced away from him, the tower of her bare shoulders rivaled only by the colossal pile of pillows at her crown.

He set off for her. The going was extraordinarily awkward: scrambling over comforter mounds that regularly rose to three times his own height felt like simultaneously climbing and falling, but at least his landings were always cushioned.

He thought briefly about making directly for her back, climbing the pillows to reach her head, and waking her from there. As he approached her though, and the reality of this scale set in, he banished the thought: he’d place himself at about the size of her thumbnail right now. That climb would be dangerous, and if she shifted at all the fall – or the weight of her head – would be a disaster.

He moved instead for the rising line of the comforter. It was gathered in a great, cuddled lump in her arms – evidently how she unconsciously dealt with sharing the bed with a partner too small to serve as a satisfactory little spoon – which left a taut-seeming incline of comforter rising from the mattress to her center.

He reached the incline and found that considering it taut had been optimism, but the linen layer above the down gave him purchase, and he could climb if he was careful.

He wasn’t. He got ahead of himself, overcorrected for the alien sensation of climb-falling upwards, and lost his footing. He fell, the incline suddenly feeling taut enough at least to grant him a bounce, and he had to scramble to keep hold as his legs slipped over the side.

Her back was a great vertical sheet of warmth at his side as he dangled from the comforter. He prayed – to her, why not – that she not roll over.

He tried to simply pull himself up. He was sore from, well, everything that happened last night: fucking your partner for hours as you lost more and more of yourself against them was hard, tolling work it turns out. But the comforter was too malleable to accommodate his lifts: it simply sagged where he weighed against it, and he couldn’t find the strength or leverage to correct for it.

He swung his feet towards her. More optimism, hoping to leverage his hold on the comforter’s edge to “walk” up her back and swing back onto the comforter. But when that failed too, he looked down: hardly a foot of real distance, yawning like a ten foot plummet at scale.

He couldn’t get himself up though, and so the only course was down. He shuffled on the lip of the comforter, easing down the incline while he could and hoping to close some of the distance before letting go, and then fell.

His stomach flipped as he dropped. For a moment the terrible certainty that he had made a grave mistake swallowed his thoughts, but before it could take root he met the ground.

He tumbled gracelessly, rolling in a heap and entangling himself in the ends of a microfiber blanket that she must have kicked off in her sleep. He took stock before he moved, realizing that by some miracle he had not been injured, and wrestled out of the blanket.

He dislodged himself and stumbled through the sudden absence of ensnaring blanket. He took in his surroundings, hoping to find an easy route back up to her side.

A few short paces from where he stood, the comforter rose overhead like a cave ceiling. A hot, muggy climate dwelt in the cavern that formed between comforter and sleeping form. In the low light of the room, he could make out the silhouette of her ass, her legs splayed in sleep. For a brief and utterly unhinged moment he considered venturing down: the muscular walls that had embraced and nearly crushed him as she came would be a profoundly different experience at this greater diminishment, and his overwhelming curiosity and excitement at exploring her at this scale briefly overtook his survival instincts.

Clarity won out, and he turned to renew his ascent.

The second ascent was more fruitful: he ventured much farther inland, climbing where the incline was steeper but the risk of real falls lessened by the stepped plateaus of her angled calves. He felt the broad musculature of calf, then thigh as he ascended and crossed her, making summit somewhere around the midpoint of her thigh.

He was extraordinarily grateful in this moment for what a heavy sleeper she is, that she did not toss or turn as he climbed. He knew that same trait would heap difficulty upon his need to wake her in short order, but it had almost certainly spared his life so far.

He ventured on, along her leg and towards her hip, still wrestle-falling with the sinking and swimming sensations of cresting and tumbling over mounds of down comforter.

She sloped at her stomach, where her love handle rounded and carried a pooling of fabric and sloping skin beneath towards her belly on the mattress. Her arm rode those lines, elbow hinged along her stomach, right hand before her sleep-eased expression. She sighed a little, some waves of rest and dream crashing against the breakers of distant wakefulness, and he was briefly overwhelmed by the profound beauty of her that surrounded him.

She was – always, but quite literally in this moment – a wonder, a monument to breathtaking beauty and soft warmth and worldshaping, life-altering strength. She ran beneath his feet as he walked: stomach low-rolling in once-woke hunger, ankles rejoining a great distance behind him to send tremors under him atop her midsection. She was a world, a plane her own: a vast presence finally proportionate in scale as his love and devotion constructed her.

A sense of stillness settled over him, a realization of purpose and acceptance of being: this was right. It should be a perilous journey to wake this wonder. It should be a matter of life and death to seek shelter and safety from someone so magnificent. The night before – cuddling and being thrown against the wall at 3ft, wrestling and taking her thrilling weight at eighteen inches, washing and loving her in the tub at nine, failing to serve her wine and laughing as she dunked him at four – had been revelry at the opportunity to play at worship. But this – a living bodyscape beneath him, a sleeping form at such wildly disparate scale as his mortal confrontations atop her failed to even hint at disturbing her sleep – this was a real encapsulation of her glory, his will to serve.

Maybe he’s stuck at this size, and maybe that’s okay. He mused as he clambered up onto her arm and shimmied down it, his nude form hug-crawling over her goose-pimpling flesh.

The accidental tickles became too much as he neared her wrist. He let go and tumbled back to the comforter, sensing that her arm was about to wrench upwards to address the unconscious sensation of his presence, but he was too late: she caught his fall and sent him tumbling, her arm looming up to her face, met with sleepy murmurs, and then falling back down atop him.

He found himself pressed down under palm, a warm plane of deep pressure. He wondered again: she’d find him here, when she woke, if he did not continue to diminish against her. He’d be safe here, wouldn’t he? In her hand as she rose, likely brought directly to her waking face as she incidentally lifted him to drive sleep from her form.

He caught himself: he was exhausted and overwhelmed and totally enamored, but he could not remain here and leave his survival up to chance. He pressed upwards, pushing at the palm and succeeded only in driving himself deeper into the plush comforter beneath him.

So he wriggled. Gracelessly, grabbing at her palm and pulling, dragging himself gradually out from under her hand. He emerged between index and thumb, placing his own hand along her thenar web to rise, then turning and laying a reverent kiss along the knuckle of her thumb before continuing.

He approached her from her front now, having scaled and descended her. The linework of her jaw was breathtaking at this scale and angle, the severity of jaw and nose and brow made spectacle from this vantage.

Her deep, rhythmic breathing carried warm wind over his aching form as he approached her face. This was it: he had to wake her here, and do so in a way that would not bring ruin upon him before clarity and consciousness gathered around her sufficient to recognize what was happening.

He shouted. At the top of his lungs, he screamed. Her name, his name, help, anything he could think of that might rouse her. That sense of stillness and linearity of purpose returned to him as he realized how fruitless such a pursuit was: you did not call to the ocean in hopes of shaping its tide.

No, you invited ruin by surrendering yourself to its currents and counting on it to bear you where fate bade you. He stepped towards her face.

He only needed to scramble atop two pillows, stepped against one another, to reach her chin. He touched, then pressed, then pushed against it, reaffirming his belief that yes, he was nothing before her at this scale. She simply dreamt too deeply to register his meager contact.

So he swung one leg up, reaching for purchase in the linework of chin and jaw, and pulled himself up. He balanced precariously, offering her another prayer that she not open her mouth, not suck in a breath that might bear him to ruin.

He walked carefully over chin to cheek, stooping then crawling over dimple and seeking temple. The warm gale of her breathing briefly threatened to carry him back to the mattress as he passed her flaring nostrils, but he held steady.

He reached her temple. Dewed with sweat, curled strands of chestnut running in rivulets that seemed to defy gravity and rise over his head to sweep back into the main confluence of sheen that swept her hair back away from them. The sleep-swelled scents of sweat, breath, and her were a haze as rich as incense around him as he knelt atop her temple.

He’d plant a kiss here any other Sunday when ti came time to rouse her. A kiss to her temple, a firm hand on her shoulder, waxing out towards sweeping circles to help gesture her towards consciousness. He could only manage a crudely diminished facsimile of that devotion here, and it took his entire being: on his knees, he fell to her temple. His arms splayed, occupying the largest footprint he could, kissing and squeezing and hugging at her temple in the hopes of sending that signal, that sign of life-rousing that had coaxed her from dreams over so many mornings across so many years. A love-affirming rite, warped in space here but honed by time.

He felt the skin beneath his clutching body twitch. Watched with breath-held hope as the silent working of closed-eye blinking began. He kissed harder, hugged harder, poured everything he could into casting his body as pressure here at her temple. Distantly, distractedly, he was aware of his own voice, calling to her, hoping that this presence by her ear would add context that might spare him in those dire early moments of lucidity.

He felt the displacement of air, a brief and slight wind as her eyes fluttered open. Sleepy, grey-green aglitter and drowsily unfocused, was revealed.

Beholden.