Becoming Her

TW: Sexual abuse, physical violence.

In silence, he could almost pretend the body wasn't his. That the thick, unyielding, veined body, bristling with hair in all the wrong places, was someone else's. Muscle hung at bad angles, the shoulders blunted and broad. Every movement reminded him that he was trapped inside something not built to carry his mind. Fingers scraped against tables in awkward arcs, wrists bent under gravity’s insistence, knees buckling when he tried to walk with any semblance of grace. Sweat pooled beneath arms, along the spine, in the groin, and it clung to the hair, refused the soap. Even breathing was an exercise in wrongness. Ribs expanded unevenly, chest flat. His voice cracked before it could form intent. The penis was the worst. It was featureless, gelatinous, a cruel appendage tethered to shame. Sometimes he gripped it until the world swirled black, hoping pain would will it away. It didn't.

The world only compounded all of this. Locker rooms smelled of sudor, masculine aggression. Men slapped each other with towels, growled over women. He could not participate. He shrank into corners, stomach twisting, teeth aching from the tension of failure. Every attempt at performing masculinity became its opposite, a grotesque parody, a failure witnessed. He lingered before mannequins for minutes at a time, transfixed by small torsos free from history, limbs without error, faces blank yet perfect. He wanted them, wanted to be them, wanted the immunity to wrongness that they radiated.

Then the ad arrived, slipped in with bills and spam. Printed letters gleamed; "THE WIFE OF YOUR DREAMS, BIOENGINEERED TO LOVE". Underneath, images of women stretched and perfect, smiling as if born to instruction, immune to the misalignments of life. The idea rooted itself in his skull, burrowing into neurone and nerve, feeding a fevered obsession.

He spent nights mapping the facility, memorising shadows, routines, and layers of security. The factory was enormous, not a single building, but a complex of metal, black tile, and warm glass. A hybrid of industrial plant and laboratory. Doors hissed open for employees and clamped shut for the uninvited. Staff moved in coordinated patterns, gloved hands and lab coats, faces hidden by visors. He watched the comings and goings, noting shift changes. It smelled of a faint sweetness, hints of pheromone-like chemical perfuming the air to condition the products within. His body shrank from the thought of approaching, muscles tightening in dread. Every vein, every hair, every nerve protested the plan. Yet the desire persisted. The factory was the only path from the body he hated to the body he longed for.

He chose a night with no scheduled deliveries, no maintenance rounds. The perimeter was ringed with fences topped with barbed wire. He waited for the gaps in patrols, timing his movements to the rhythm of surveillance. The first gate yielded under a lock-pick stolen from a hardware store. Sensors tripped faintly, a red glow pulsing in the corner, but timing and shadows carried him through. He moved along, over corridors, past rooms of machinery humming with indistinct purpose. Pipes pumped strange fluids, valves hissed.

At last, he entered the chamber. The floor was wet and black, glistening, the tiles alive with reflected light. Walls pulsed faintly, breathing like lungs, alive in some alien, procedural rhythm. Suspended from the ceiling were the wombs. Translucent membranes, bright with condensation, each containing a half-formed body. Limbs stretched and curled like sea creatures, hair sprouting, nipples forming, torsos softening. The bodies inside were written from the inside out, a virus imposed upon flesh, unmaking and remaking, bioengineered with precision. Some swayed gently in the warm fluid, others quivered.

He located an empty womb, one unused, designated for error correction or failed runs, never for a living, sentient person. It welcomed him, membrane warm, wet, sucking slightly with a vacuumed pressure, closing like a mouth around his body. The walls throbbed against his skin. He could hear his own heartbeat, irregular, panicked, bouncing off the womb walls. It pressed against every ridge and hollow of his flesh, warm and malleable. He realised immediately there would be no turning back, and he was glad.

The first change was subtle, horrifying in its intimacy. Bones softened. He could feel the hardness of his skeleton turning pliable under the chemical pressure, the cartilage at his joints curving, lengthening, bending in directions that made his muscles suddenly scream. The ribs broke inward first, a collapse of cage and structure. The sternum shivered, sinking into itself, hollowing the chest until the heart felt exposed. The pelvis followed. The socket widened, bones shearing with soundless fractures that left him gasping in the viscous dark. The penis shrank, skin peeling back like wet paper, folding into a soft, throbbing slit that burnt with new sensitivity. Testicles receded, compressed into themselves until they were gone. Pain roared through the lower abdomen, a fire that spread to every tendon, every nerve ending, every sweating follicle. Muscle melted and reformed, wax dripping over clay. Shoulders narrowed, fat deposited along thighs and hips. His hands lost the blunt weight of former knuckles, fingers elongating into trembling, delicate shapes, nails thinning, veins retreating beneath new, pale skin. Then came the breasts. They swelled from chest flesh with a rhythm. The nerves flared into consciousness like waking from dormancy.

The womb demanded alignment of the mind. He could feel it, a tickling at the base of the skull, nerve endings firing with implanted signals. The womb’s fluid carried more than warmth, it carried images, cues, memories, commands, erotic patterns written into synapses. He saw scenes behind his eyes: himself, kneeling, bending, offering, obeying. He heard things he had never spoken, tones he recognised as approval. Submission and desire were no longer concepts, they were encoded into his bones, his nerves, his blood. Sleep came, though not as rest. Each dream was a tutorial. Smiles learnt, gestures calibrated, spine curves trained. The final stage of transformation was the hollowing, the ritualisation of receptivity. Muscles that had once allowed resistance were rewired. Every fibre of the back, every sinew of the arms and legs, every segment of core strength, folded into obedience.

By the time the womb released him, she was unrecognisable. Limbs were thinner, curves precise, skin glossy and wet. Her eyes had shifted slightly, lashes thick. Her hands trembled with delicate readiness. Hair flowed and clung, following a rhythm. The body was complete, a product, a vessel optimised for someone else’s expectation of femininity. She stepped from the womb carefully. The wet black floors clung to her toes. Each step was rehearsed, precise, nothing spontaneous. The body remembered before the mind could even articulate it. Even standing, even breathing, followed the programming embedded during the process. She was no longer man, but neither woman. She was a vessel. A product. A wife grown to specification. And somewhere in the marrow of the spine, buried beneath plastic muscle and chemical nerve, the echo of resistance waited.

The world outside the womb was fluorescent and perfumed, a showroom built to showcase flesh, the lighting angled to flatter. She had been washed, dried, dressed in lace that clung and stung. Every curve had been accentuated. Her shoulders sloped in anticipation of command, her hips swayed exactly as the schematics dictated. She did not move, she performed.

He arrived without announcement. A man built of authority, of entitlement, smelling of leather and boardrooms. She recognised him immediately, not from memory, but from instinct, in every fold of muscle and skin. Her shoulders lowered. Mouth softened. Gaze tilted to the floor. Every gesture obeyed before thought arrived.

Then came the test run. He undressed her with care, reverence, as though unveiling a sacred object. Each hand on her skin felt alien, soft, foreign, and simultaneously expected. She shook, not from pleasure but from compliance. He spoke to her in the tone of a man addressing a pet he believes he loves. Beneath the softness of her skin, she remembered the before. The wrongness, the stares, the cruelty of men. She remembered the years of thinking her womanhood, if ever attempted, would always be counterfeit. The womb had promised to make her real. But this man, this buyer, looked at her with the same eyes as the ones who had laughed before.

He took her home after. The apartment smelt of cologne, the residue of a man accustomed to owning things. She sat on the couch, every muscle taut with the programming still coursing through her. The first night he ran his hands over her again, speaking in the same patronising tones.

Days passed in a haze of suffocating domination. He demanded perfection at every moment, the way she walked, the way she smiled, the angle of her gaze. If she faltered, he struck. First words, then hands, then the edges of objects. But the skin she had been given wouldn't bruise, couldn't. He called her “it” more than once, a venomous punctuation. It is perfect. It will never complain. Her mind, once flooded with chemical subservience, now simmered with something darker.

The fight began without warning. He reached for her, the same way he always had, expecting stillness, silence. The sound that escaped her was not a scream but a shattering. Glass, bone, breath, all splitting in a single note. He lunged at her again, confident, teeth bared in the self satisfied grin of a man who believed bodies could be owned. She barely moved, and his momentum carried him past her, crashing into the counter. Knives clattered, and he swung back, fists connecting with her ribs, or what once were ribs, and a sick, wet crack echoed. She tasted blood, hers and his, coppery and cloying, and it fuelled her.

She grabbed the nearest knife and thrust it blindly. He twisted, and the blade caught his forearm. He howled, and for a moment, she saw the surprise flicker. He had expected a doll, not a predator. They collided again, bodies slamming, sliding across the wet floor. Sweat, blood, and remnants of her engineered fluid coating their skin, a sheen that made her feel monstrous and alive at once. His fingers tore at her hair, she sank her teeth into the back of his hand, tasting musk, panic. He screamed, and she did not let go, the sound pounding in her skull.

The fight became a choreography of disgust and rage. She could feel the tendons in her arms stretch past endurance, muscles bending in ways that should have been impossible. She gouged at his eyes, tore at the soft flesh of his neck, dragging acrylic nails across the hollow under his jaw, the taste of bile thick in her mouth. He gasped and coughed, trying to bite, claw, command, but each attempt only dug him deeper into her world, a world that was no longer for him to control. He vomited onto her feet, the stench rising in waves of humiliation. She slipped, almost losing control, but she pressed on, every movement precise and terrible. She twisted his arm behind his back, heard the pop of bone, and the sound was like music to the horror in her chest. Every joint she bent in unnatural angles, every tendon stretched, every nail tearing was a punctuation of years of injustice, of being objectified, misgendered, reduced to commodity. He clawed at her stomach, a pathetic scramble, and she ripped his fingers away, watching sinew tear under her grip. His blood sprayed, a warm, metallic curtain across her skin, searing her chemical nerves awake in every way the womb had never allowed. She threw him across the apartment, he landed in the doorframe, wood splintering, teeth breaking. He cried out for mercy, and she laughed, not softly, not delicately, but a hollow, raw, abrasive sound. Finally, she sank to her knees above him, chest heaving, trembling, covered in his blood, the scent of leather and boardrooms overpowered by the sharp tang of her triumph. His eyes widened one last time, before they dimmed into nothing. She rose, dripping, stained, smelling like war and iron and life itself. The apartment was ruined, counters cracked, knives bent, floors slick. She caught her reflection in the window. Hair matted, skin glossy with exertion and red. Eyes wide, alive.

Then, slowly, it broke. A low, raw laugh, trembling at first, then rising. Filling the room with a sound that was all hers, no longer man nor wife, but woman.