Tale #85: Scout's Dishonor (Part 8)

Tale #85: Scout's Dishonor (Part 8) (Content Tags: Messy diapers, supernatural stuffed animals, hypnosis, the usual) Today was the day that'd been agreed upon. Today would be the day that Liam explained the truth, as he himself saw it, to the unfortunate boy that had strayed into his path. The truth that their existence, their reality, was held up on strings by the maleficent paws of a stuffed bear. Every move, every moment was dictated by the toy from beyond; it was the millstone around both his neck and Fritz, except they kept it between their arms instead, but it'd weigh them down to the depths regardless. It was a bitter truth to swallow, and it felt even worse to have to force upon someone else's throat. Liam couldn't even be sure that he'd come to accept this knowledge himself; he'd certainly been in a more blissful state when he'd been completely ignorant to it. That made it more difficult to decide whether he was doing the right thing; Fritz deserved to know what unseen forces would be ruining his life, but Liam knew he'd be happier if he didn't know. The school day had dragged on because of this gravity that was so oppressively weighing down on him. Liam's thoughts had been aswarm with anxieties and doubts; he kept second guessing himself, and he kept looking at his motionless bear. Teddy had been suspiciously quiet the last few days. When Liam thought about it, he couldn't remember the bear saying anything since his scout meeting, and there were no inexplicable gaps in time unaccounted for either. For all intents and purposes, the teddy had just been a toy since then; Liam still felt compelled to carry him everywhere, but he couldn't tell if that part had simply become conditioned into his psyche by this point. Even without the bear's direct influence, not much had changed for Liam's daily life. His toilet skills were still reset to zero, so he was wetting and pooping his diaper as usual. His family still acted the same toward him, though maybe they'd noticed he'd been different lately too. He wasn't the kid he was before all this began, but he wasn't walking around being brainwashed into acting like a giant toddler either. The quiet had been pleasant at first, but it'd become unsettling. He would have thought that his bear would actually ramp up his shenanigans, since Liam hadn't exactly been subtle in discussing that he was going to spill the beans about the bear's influence. It should have been a real concern that Liam would be forced to go full baby, and that he'd be rendered too incompetent to bring forth the revelations. It wasn't what Liam wanted, but it was something he would have really expected. He should be blowing spit bubbles or sucking his thumb while he filled his britches up; he should be babbling about Bluey and his poopy diapers...And yet, he had been more consistently lucid than he'd been in months. He was left waiting for the shoe to drop. If he was being allowed to go through with his plan, then that meant the bear had already considered a counterattack or wasn't concerned with such knowledge being spread to the other ursine acolyte. Either way, it hardly boded well. Liam saw Fritz a few times throughout the school day, but he only spoke to him once. The conversation was essentially a confirmation that Fritz would come over before scouts, so that the pair could have their important talk. With that dealt with, there was no other reason to chat with the boy prematurely; there'd be plenty to talk about later that afternoon. Fritz had been anticipating their playdate with bated breath as well; he still wasn't completely sure what to expect, but he knew there had to be something worth discussing. More than that, it had to be a discussion that's finally answer some questions about the strange way both he and Liam had been behaving. Liam wasn't sure what all Fritz needed to do after school, before he would come over, so he just let the other boy know to head over as soon as he was able. At the very least, Liam knew Fritz would need to go home and get his scout uniform, and he lived close enough by that it would only be a fifteen minute brisk walk. Whenever Liam got home from school, and after he got his dirty diaper changed, he began to do what he could to spruce his room up. There'd been changes since Fritz had last been over, most recognizably would be the addition of the changing table, which was fully stocked with his puffy Pampers and all manner of cleaning supplies. There was no hiding that, but he could hide some of the more infantile toys that he'd been given, as well as things such as the pottytraining books he was expected to study up on. It was petty, since he knew Fritz already perceived him in a certain way, but he didn't see any reason to make himself look any worse than he already did. About an hour and a half after he'd gotten home from school, the doorbell suddenly rang, and Liam tore down the stairs to go answer it. His older brother had just gotten home from middle school a little while ago, and he wanted to keep Bobby away if at all possible. It was one thing to have his big brother tease or harass him, but it wouldn't be fair to let that happen to his guest too! Fritz had admittedly dawdled. He'd thought about whether or not he actually wanted to go through with coming for what was ostensibly another playdate, especially considering what had happened to him the last time that he'd been there. Eventually, he'd realized that it was well worth the risk to be able to understand things more thoroughly, so he threw his scout uniform in a backpack, along with his bear, and hit the road. Now that the two boys were facing eachother, Fritz could appreciate how completely different things seemed. Last time, when he'd come over for the slumber party, Liam had answered the door in his diaper and with a dopey smile; this time, he was normally dressed and looked almost somber. The Liam that he'd seen lately hadn't been the Liam from before, nor had it been the Liam from long before. He wasn't acting like an overgrown toddler, but he also wasn't the happy and fairly normal kid that he'd been before any of this started. He carried worry in his eyes and perhaps some amount of guilt too. "Hey Fritz...Come on in." The blond greeted, holding the door open so his friend could come inside the house. Having heard the doorbell, Liam's mother was finally approaching too, and she looked happy to see that her son had gotten his friend to come over again. She didn't know the circumstances, obviously, but Liam couldn't really expect her too. "Oh, hello there! Do you two boys want some snacks before you go to your meeting?" "Uhh, sure? Thanks, Mrs. Liam's mom." Fritz smiled nervously, hands on the straps of his backpack. "I'll throw some rice crispy treats in the oven." The woman beamed, turning to head toward the kitchen, while Liam gestured for Fritz to follow him up the stairs. Before they got to his door, Liam stopped and turned around to face Fritz. "Open up your bag and let me see inside." Fritz thought it an odd request, but he shrugged and unzipped the backpack. Liam looked inside and reached for the raggedy blue bear inside; he pulled it out and walked past his door to go to another one. "What are you doing?" Liam put his fingers to his lips to shush Fritz. He opened the door to the guest bedroom and pointed inside, where his own teddy bear had been placed on the made bed. The blond tiptoed inside and put the blue one next to it, before heading back outside and gently closing the door. "...We need some privacy." Liam explained, heading back to the door of his own bedroom. "Privacy? From stuffies? You know they're just toys, right?" Liam almost envied such ignorance. He shook his head and opened his door, quickly ushering Fritz inside before he closed it behind them. "Trust me. They're not just toys." Fritz felt his nose twitch once they were in the room, and he remembered that Liam had an actual 'diaper genie' in here, since his padded rump was anything but secret. The rest of the room looked the same, if not a little more tidy than last time, except for one particular piece of furniture... "..Is that a diaper changing table? Like, for babies?" It was actually pretty surprising to see; it was a bit bigger than the ones that you would see in a toddler's room, but otherwise looked just as infantile. "Y-yeah, my parents got it a while back...I guess to make things easier." Liam awkwardly shrugged, not really sure what to say about it. "That sounds kinda like...Too much. I guess the diapers are too much too though, so..." Fritz trailed off, putting his backpack on the racecar bed. "Tell me about it...I'm still waiting for the highchair and the crib." Liam grumbled, going over and pulling what seating options he had out; that amounted to the chair from his desk and a little inflatable chair that he'd had since last Christmas. Fritz let out a laugh, but it wasn't completely apparent that Liam was making a joke. "So, umm, you wanted to talk about some stuff?" Liam sat at the less comfortable of the two chairs and smiled weakly, "Y-yeah...Uh, have you been noticing anything weird? Like, about your teddy bear?" The brown-haired boy took the desk chair and raised an eyebrow at the silly question. "Weird? Like, what kind of stuff do you mean?" "Well...Like, why do you carry it around? You started to do that after our sleepover, when I told you to bring the bear. Do you know why you carry it around now? Aren't you afraid of getting teased?" Fritz blinked and thought about it. The whole sleepover was a haze in his mind; he remembered that he had fun, but the specifics were murky, and when he'd gone home, he'd just felt compelled to make the bear and the diapers a part of his life. But why had he felt compelled to do that? Rationality said that he shouldn't, especially when he'd been making fun of Liam behind his back before the sleepover. "Well...I...Uh... I don't know, I guess... Just feels right... I could ask you the same question though! You're the one people have been making fun of, by acting like a huge baby." Liam nodded and nervously tapped his fingers against the plastic of the chair. "...And you've been wearing diapers too, haven't you? Since we had our sleepover? Using them too, I bet. Just like you did at scouts." The other boy would have called him out for ignoring his question, but this line of inquiry caught him a little more off-guard. The diapers had been an oddity for him; he knew he wasn't lacking in potty skills, and the garments were highly humiliating, so why did he wear them? He'd even bought more with his own allowance after his initial supply had run out! Fritz was suddenly reminded by the thoughts he'd had after their last scout meeting; he'd already gone through all this before, questioning what was going on, but it was like it'd been difficult to recall until now. He was trapped in a cycle where his epiphanies were forgotten and then discovered once more, over and over. "...I don't know why. I don't want to wear them, but I keep buying them and using them. I don't really need them, but..." "You're having trouble remembering things too. You keep thinking something weird is happening to you, but then you forget, until you think about it again." Fritz gave a wide-eyed look at the way that Liam had basically reached right inside his thoughts to describe his situation. "Y-yeah! I have these, like... gaps. Where I can't remember what I was doing or what I was thinking..." "That's how it was for me, but I think it was actually worse for me. It started with me pooping in my night-time pants, and I couldn't remember doing it. Then I wore one to school and well...You remember." Liam cringed at the memory of what had happened to his social life after donning his poopy Goodnite into class. "But why did that happen? Everyone just thought... Uh... I dunno, like, that you became a big baby, I guess." As Fritz talked, he became aware how ridiculous he sounded; why hadn't anyone been more concerned? Liam had never been 'cool', and sure he could be a little immature, but why had everyone in their class accepted the transformation he'd gone through? That first time could be accepted as just being a truly humiliating event for a grade schooler, but the way that things had accelerated, someone should have been suspicious about Liam's regression. It was as if they had just 'accepted' the strange turn of events as something to mock, as casually as mocking a kid for a belt malfunction. "Everyone *did* think that. Even my parents, and my brother. They just punished me and made me start wearing diapers...And it just kinda went downhill from there. Last year, I got taken to the doctor about wetting the bed, but they haven't made me see a doctor about all this." Liam squirmed uncomfortably, his diaper rustling underneath his shorts. "I think with enough time...The same thing will happen to you. You'll have the same problems I did." That didn't sound good at all. Fritz had seen firsthand what kind of bullying that Liam had been on the other side of, and more frighteningly, he'd seen the vacant eyes that Liam so often had, that betrayed no maturity in thought past daycare. "B-but why? How?" "The bears." There was a brief silence after Liam finally let slip what was going on. The why and the how were unknowable, but the who was something that Liam was quite confident in. "...The teddy bears? Like, the stuffed animals? Are they cursed or something?" Fritz sounded incredulous, but simultaneously open minded. As ridiculous as it sounded, it was better than no answer at all. "I don't know if I'd say that. They're alive though, and magic or something, and they're trying to turn us into babies. That's why I didn't want them in here with us; I didn't want them to stop me from telling you this." It sounded like childish make-believe, as if Liam had invited Fritz over here to play with their imagination, instead of solving a real issue. This was very real though, and the seriousness in Liam's voice made that apparent. Whether or not it was true, Liam believed it to be true. "You're kidding, right? They're like, evil Care Bears? Don't you think that sounds--" Fritz stopped midsentence and looked distant, like his mind had packed up and gone on vacation. That vacation was into memories that'd been obscured. More specifically, he was brought back to that moment in the locker room; that time that he'd first realized what was happening to his classmate. He'd been hiding behind the corner, while Liam was changing out of his gym clothes; the boy had been wearing a clearly soiled diaper, which had filled Fritz with disgust. And then he'd heard that teddy bear talk back to Liam. He'd seen the bear move independently. He'd been ensnared by it and deeply entranced; Fritz could remember reaching down to squeeze the large, warm lump in Liam's diaper, and how he'd been so impressed and enticed by it. That's why he'd agreed to the sleepover, even though he knew what a bad idea it was to entangle his social life with that poopy pariah. The bear had hypnotized him or something, and it'd made him forget about what he'd really saw! That sequence of events had gotten him to go to the sleepover, and then the bear had again mystified him into letting Liam put one of his diapers onto him. They'd hung out the whole night in diapers; eating pizza, playing games, and eventually doing the unthinkable in their crinkly babypants. And he'd brought a teddy bear of his own. Fritz connected that he'd been tricked into creating his own tormentor, with Liam's bear bringing his to life, to become the same supernatural manipulator. That'd been the first time since infancy that Fritz had worn a diaper, and similarly pooped in one. "..Fritz? You okay?" The flashback and introspection ended, but as it did, Fritz could feel something warm and sticky nestled against his butt. A cursory sniff of the air around him would confirm that he'd had a genuine accident, likely when he'd remembered pooping at the sleepover. "I-I...Y-yeah...Its just a lot to take in...So, uh, how do you think we stop them?" Liam had heard the crackling of an icky deposit, so he didn't need to take a whiff to know his guest had pooped. He didn't feel the need to point it out either, since they were in the same boat here. "Well, I thought we could come up with something together. Two heads are better than one." It was the first step in fighting back.