Alter Egos

[muscle growth, personality swap]

Drake left his therapy appointment realizing he actually didn’t hate these sessions. As a matter of fact, after an hour with Dr. Dramovich, he actually felt better! When he ran into his teammates McCale and Jordans, he lied and said he’d hit up some old girlfriend for a quick lay.

“Coming from Baker Street?” McCale had said with an eyebrow raised. “All that’s down there is medical offices and warehouses.”

Drake shrugged it off, didn’t offer any further explanation, and told his buddies he had to get to the gym. He hoped they hadn’t noticed that he had turned left, toward the pharmacy, rather than right, toward the campus weight center.

With his prescription refilled, he actually considered a workout, but searched himself and found he really didn’t have it in him. Back when he started playing for the Granite State Goliaths, he’d been aching to practice and train and lift weights and spend time with his teammates every waking moment of the day. He would dream about football, then wake up and head to the gym to maintain the momentum. He wondered if it was the little yellow pills Dr. Dramovich had prescribed him. What else could have eliminated his fire?

Back at his dorm room, Drake took a look in the mirror. He was starting to lose his football bulk. He’d never been one of the bigger guys on the team, but he’d always had a layer of muscle that came with being an elite athlete his entire life. He stared at the lean, but otherwise average physique in the mirror. “Maybe I could model underwear someday?” he said, running a hand over his stomach. There were guys on campus who would be jealous of these abs, he knew, but all he could see was the minute layer of softness forming over them.

Toddrick, his roommate, stomped in the door and the room suddenly filled with the smell of sweat and Axe bodyspray. He peeled off his sweatsuit, still in his singlet from wrestling practice. “Hey man,” Toddrick said with a nod of his head. As he peeled off his layers, Drake turned around.

“Good practice?” Drake asked his buddy. Todd nodded, massaging a kink in his neck.

“Yeah, but my whole fucking body hurts… and coach wants me to drop down a weight class.” Toddrick’s body was compact and sinewy. He strutted to the bathroom with one hand over his junk. Every part of him rippled with each movement. “When do you go back to active football duty?”

Drake shrugged. “Coach said whenever I feel ready,” Drake said. “Maybe never though…”

“Naw,” Toddrick scoffed. “You’ll be back in no time. No sweat. Just wait until you’re 100%, bro.”

Drake let out a sigh as the bathroom door slammed shut. He missed the ache of pushing his body to the limits, the blissful sleep of the exhausted. What the hell had happened to him?

“When things start spinning out of control, do your dishes,” Dr. Dramovich used to suggest. “Do your laundry. Clean your room. Your daily responsibilities may seem tedious but they’re finite; there’s a clear beginning and end, you know how to do them, and they’ll keep your life grounded.”

Drake took a look around. There was a basket of laundry that needed to be folded. He could start there. He tried his best to shut out his racing thoughts–maybe he should take another pill?--listening to Toddrick’s shower as background noise as he folded his cutoff t-shirts and shorts, putting them away. When he played football, he never had time to take care of his own laundry. He used to just have some chick do it for him, if he bothered with it at all. Was this how normal people lived?

“A lot of these are gym clothes,” he reflected as he started piling up the folded garments. He wondered what he would do with them if he was done with the gym. How long would he keep them in his drawer, taunting him with a life he would never return to?

A knock at the door broke him from his deep thoughts. He hopped up and opened the door. He recognized the scrawny nerd at the door: Sylvester, a punk who had creeped on football players since they were all freshman.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Drake barked.

Sylvester, his blonde hair slicked to the side, jumped at Drake’s outburst. He slid his glasses back up his nose and walked away. “Oh!” he said, seeming truly surprised that Drake had answered his own dorm room. “I thought… well, I’m sorry. I guess I had the wrong door.”

“Fuck right you do,” Drake sneered. “Get the fuck out of here!” Knock-kneed Sylvester in his high-water jeans shambled down the hall, barely glancing behind him as he went around the corner.

Drake slammed the door shut and returned to the laundry basket. He grabbed a jockstrap that he instantly recognized wasn’t his own. “The fuck?” he said as he held it up. This thing was HUGE! The guy who wore this thing had to have a 40-inch waist, and the basket looked like it could cradle a healthy gourd.

Was it Toddrick’s? No, that was insane. Toddrick was smaller than Drake was! Had one of the linemen somehow gotten his stuff mixed in with Drake? As he held the jockstrap up, he caught a waft of its thick, manly smell. This thing was used! What was it doing in his clean laundry? He panicked as he heard the shower shut off, slipping it to the bottom of the basket.

Toddrick was on his phone as he strutted out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, his shaggy hair still wet and starting to curl. He was staring at his phone. “Bro, you know how I couldn’t find my wallet anywhere? Some bar called the Hammer just called and said they had it. Why the fuck would it be there? You know I don’t drink when I’m training!”

Drake blinked. He knew exactly what kind of bar the Hammer was: once, when he was a sophomore, he had come out of a black-out there with some big guy’s arm around him, but he had never admitted it to anyone. Toddrick didn’t seem to know it was one of “those” bars, so Drake didn’t fill him in.

“I guess I’m gonna go pick it up,” he said, pulling on some shorts and a hoodie.

“I’ll go with you,” Drake said, the stink of the jockstrap still fading from his nostrils.

*

Officially, Drake had forgotten six whole weeks of time. The last thing he remembered was a late night weight session, digging in deep to up his squat, and then, nothing. (He actually remembered jerking off in the shower afterward, but he had never admitted that to any of the professionals.) Six weeks later, he found himself walking alongside a highway two hundred miles away wearing only a t-shirt so big it hung down on him like a dress.

For awhile, people didn’t believe his amnesia. It took him weeks to convince everyone that he truly had no idea where he had been, or why. In the meantime, no one in any of the surrounding areas had seen a blonde, good-looking All-American jock literally anywhere.

Resuming his everyday life had been murderous. He was haunted by the idea of what had actually happened to him, lost in the mystery of where he had been, and terrified that it may one day happen again. He was excused from the team, given a pass on classes, and allowed to room with his good friend Toddrick (as living with the team without playing may have overwhelmed him).

Now, as he watched Toddrick struggling with the mystery of his lost wallet, a part of him yearned for his buddy to be going through the same thing he had. “The guy on the phone,” Toddrick explained, “...he talked about me like he KNEW me. Like we were old buddies!”

“And you’re sure you’ve never been there before?” Drake asked as they approached. Outside the Hammer was a huge rainbow flag. Toddrick gestured at it.

“YES, bro, I’m pretty sure I would have remembered stopping by a gay bar, even if it was just for a second,” Toddrick snapped back. He yanked the front door open. Both of them were grateful it was the daytime and there weren’t many people there.

The shirtless bartender had a thick mustache and big hoops piercing his nipples. His pecs were HUGE, much bigger than the rest of his muscular frame. “Hey, boys,” he said in a detached tone. “Have a seat wherever.”

Drake glanced around, genuinely curious. It looked the same as the last time he had been there: a dancefloor out back, a bar up front, uncomfortable stools and low-to-the-ground tables surrounded by TVs playing the Bravo network constantly. Behind the bartender were rows of brightly colored liqueurs backlit by neon.

“You guys have my wallet,” Toddrick said.

The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Oh, honey, I don’t think so,” he said, cocking his head to the side. “Pretty sure I’d remember if either of you two were here before.”

“Toddrick Banes,” the wrestler explained. “Blue leather wallet.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow, ducked behind the counter, and returned with a wallet. “Oh, see, THIS wallet,” he said, holding it up, “belongs to a VERY large man who dances here some nights. Come back in a couple hundred pounds, sweepea.”

“You called me,” Toddrick said, impatient. “You just fucking called my cellphone.”

The bartender looked perplexed.

“Open it up. Check my license.”

The bartender checked and sure enough, the man in the driver’s license and student IDs was the man standing right there. “Well, I’ll be,” the bartender said. “Why the hell was Toddrick carrying YOUR wallet around with him?”

“I’M Toddrick,” he said, snatching the wallet back. “Toddrick is ME.”

The bartender blushed. “Pumpkin, Toddrick also left his shoes here.” He ducked behind the counter and rose with a GIGANTIC high-top sneaker. It hit the bar with a thud. “These babies are size 19. Can you fit into size 19s?”

Drake intervened, exhausted by this back-and-forth. “Dude, I think some guy is here using your name.”

“Why the fuck would anyone do that?” Toddrick said. “Anyway, who cares? Let’s get out of here.”

“Do you have a picture of this guy?” Drake asked. “Something we could go to the police with? Because he obviously stole my friend’s wallet.”

The bartender shrugged. He pointed to a screen behind him. “There’s a slideshow from last Saturday night playing on the screen behind you. He and his buddy Drake sure tore up the stage! Good god, they made TONS of cash that night.”

Drake’s blood went cold at the sound of his name. They turned around. “See? There they are!”

The two men on the screen had to be photoshopped. They looked bigger than apes! Each of the man was an absurd display of muscularity, bulging out in all directions. The bartender (who appeared to be 6’2” tall) was in one of the photos, just barely coming up to the gigantic musclefreaks’ shoulders in the photos.

“I guess the mystery isn’t, HOW did Toddrick get YOUR wallet,” the bartender mused, “but… WHY would he carry it around? And give out YOUR phone number.”

Toddrick stomped toward the door, frustrated. Drake lingered for one moment, glancing at the giant men on screen. Their muscles were so huge and pumped, so shiny. The two men with their names seemed so powerful, so sure of themselves. He held his breath as he sprinted out the door.

“Toddrick, I know what it’s like, to kinda… forget things,” Drake said to console his friend. “Like I did it too!”

“Are you fucking mental?” Toddrick said, walking away from the bar at double speed. “That guy showed us a picture of two guys WITH OUR NAMES! Two fucking roidmonkeys. I mean, those guys must have weighed 400 pounds!”

“But those guys obviously aren’t us,” Drake said, gesturing toward his and his buddy’s athletic but relatively compact bodies.

They turned left to cut through an alley, a shortcut back to their dorm, when they saw a single blonde man standing awkwardly at the other end.

“Fucking Sylvester,” Toddrick said. “Fuck, dude, not a good time.”

“Yeah,” Drake chimed in. “Go fucking creep on someone else.”

Sylvester’s head hung low, but he had a blissful smile on his face. “Guys, there’s no one around. It’s okay. You can change!”

Toddrick and Drake glanced at each other. Was Sylvester talking to THEM?

“I brought some of your clothes to change into,” Sylvester said, holding up a backpack. “Sorry I didn’t bring any shoes, but I have some back at my apartment…”

“Sylvester, get the fuck out of h–”

“Big Is Beautiful!” Sylvester spoke the words like they were a magic spell. A moment later, as if they were, Toddrick’s body seized. He fell against the wall, choking. His muscles flexed, he groaned… and then he BURST out of his clothes, muscles swelling like the Hulk.

“Holy FUCK!” Drake said, backing away. Sylvester didn’t even flinch as Toddrick blew up from a 5’9” wrestler to a 6’5” bodybuilder. His body kept expanding, muscles still bloating out, until he was over 7 feet tall, every inch of him glistening and pulsing. Thick veins snaked throughout his beefy muscular body. His bones and tendons popped and cracked as they settled into place, supporting three times the mass they had before. Toddrick’s shaggy shoulder-length hair stayed the same length, but on his bigger body it only came down past his ears.

Drake tried not to look, but there was no avoiding the arm-sized cock swinging between his elephantine legs, just in front of a couple of grapefruit-sized balls. “Good… fucking… god…” the massive beast that had been Toddrick said. He stood up, made his pecs bounce, then chuckled. His huge cock sprang to life as a massive paw reached down to grab it. “Fuck, guys,” He said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Being trapped in that little body all day, having to wrestle with all those hot fucking studs and not flipping them over and fucking every single one of them… you have any idea what MURDER that is!”

Drake backed away as the Toddrick-beast’s gaze settled on him. Shockingly, it was still his friend’s face, albeit much bigger and blockier, the muscles of his facial structure as hyperdeveloped as the rest of him. “Drake, buddy!” the monster’s deep voice groaned. “Why didn’t you change?”

“Big Is Beautiful!” Sylvester repeated. Drake backed away as the two approached him.

“Sylvio, where’s my big guy?” Toddrick said with a wink. “Make him big! I wanna cuddle with Drakey!”

Sylvester had opened up the backpack, handing massive articles of clothing to him. Drake had no idea what to do. He reached into his pocket, regretted that he didn’t have his medication, and sprinted down the alley for his dorm room.

*

Drake remembered the first time he had met Dr. Dramovich. The silver-haired therapist was discussion Drake’s “condition” as if he were talking about pancreatitis or a tumor. Drake hadn’t ever been diagnosed with anything. That was the job of the doctors, all of whom had theories without any hard ideas. Yet Dr. Dramovich already had a structured plan in mind after their first session. “This approach has been very successful with situations like yours,” Dr. Dramovich had said that first day.

“What kind of cases are like mine?” Drake had asked. He looked at what the doc was proposing: hypnosis, subliminal messaging exercises, masturbatory restriction.

The doctor had just smiled as if they both knew a secret. “Others may call what we’re doing ‘conversion therapy’ but what I’m here to do is to find exactly who the true YOU is, not this confused expression of your identity that you’re struggling with.”

Drake knew what the doctor was saying. He knew that guys on the team had whispered about it back when he was a freshman. He didn’t want to say it out loud.

Dr. Dramovich was going to make him straight.

And he wanted to believe that he could, truly. However, the doctor didn’t believe in Drake’s amnesia. He shuddered at what the doctor imagined he was up to during those six weeks–what kinds of lewd and lascivious behavior had a person “like him” been up to? The therapy was supposed to get to the bottom of why he blacked out, not why there were stories of him keeping muscle magazines under his bed.

In his dorm room again, he searched for the bottle. He had been doing laundry… DAMN, the jockstrap! He pulled it out, inhaled its stench. For a moment he considered it may have been Toddrick’s until he realized that it must have been his, worn by an alternate version of himself. It was version the pills could keep suppressed; he understood very little, but he knew that for sure.

The door flew open. He had locked it, but Sylvester had Toddrick’s keys in his hands.

“Sylvester, if you don’t back the fuck away right now–”

“BIG IS BEAUTIFUL!” Sylvester yelled again. Drake balled up his fists and charge toward the nerd, ready to pummel his face. His phone rang. It was Toddrick. “Answer it!” Sylvester begged as Drake grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him against the wall.

Drake froze. “It’s not him, it’s that… monster you made him into…”

Sylvester gasped as Drake smashed him against the wall again. “All I did was give you two forms!” he said, speaking quickly. “When we were freshmen! We, all three of us, did stuff drunk and you were worried about the team finding out… so I just made it so you could be this other guy and do whatever you wanted, then go back to being football guy when you had to be! And Toddrick could be wrestling guy…”

Drake’s hold on Sylvester started to loosen. Finally he had answers, although they made him feel nauseous. He let Sylvester go, then turned to his phone. He answered it. The deep, gravelly voice roared back at him.

“Drakey, baby, I’m sorry I can’t be there, bro… I’m too big to go into the dorms. Too much attention. But listen, buddy, just imagine… all that stress, all that anxiety, all that hopelessness… It just goes away when we’re like this! And you can spend all day just sniffing my pits, or licking my big crack, or suckling at my nips… God, you know I love when you play with me, big dog!”

Drake was repulsed by the things being said, but deep down, something inside him moved.

“Toddrick needs you,” Sylvester explained. “You can’t just let him be that big muscle monster alone. Together, you guys are a team.”

This couldn’t be happening. Drake saw the bottle of yellow pills on the floor. He knew that his medication was the reason Sylvester’s phrase wasn’t causing him to blow up with muscles and horniness. He could feel a warmth in his chest, a twitching in his groin. He knew that he only had to swallow a pill and he could get back to a normal life.

“Where did I go?” Drake asked. “Those six weeks?”

Sylvester blushed. “You fell in love.”

Drake stared at this phone. He could hear Toddrick’s heavy breathing. “Toddrick, where did I go when I was gone?”

“You met this big football player dude. Massive guy–not massive like us, of course, but NORMAL-people massive–and he was like your little teddy bear. You were head over HEELS for him and I told you to just follow your heart! And you left with him…”

“I guess he got a little scared of the idea of having a giant musclefreak around,” Sylvester said meekly. “And he left you at a hotel by yourself. That’s when you changed back… and they found you wandering around.”

Tears were forming in Drake’s eyes. “So you’re saying… I can be this big giant guy whenever I want? And the only reason I’m this little football player is because I need to be normal?”

“Yeah,” Toddrick said. “But after college, we can just be full time hulks. Just picture it.”

Drake picked up the fallen medication bottle. He walked to the sink, plucked off the cap, and turned it upside down. He ran the faucet and pulsed the garbage disposal for emphasis.

“What do I have to do?” Drake said, turning.

“Well, I have an apartment with VERY high ceilings and wide doors,” Sylvester explained. We usually all hang out there. You guys are free to fuck whomever you want, but we all three fuck quite a bit. Sometimes we bring in others… and when it’s time to go to class or practice, we just… shrink you right back down.”

“Let’s go,” Drake said, helping Sylvester to his feet. “I’m sorry I… hurt you.”

The two left the dorm room. Drake glanced back once, realizing that he probably wouldn’t be coming back.

“All this time, we had this… relationship… We’ve been hooking up since we were freshman?” Drake said as they walked to Sylvester’s car. Drake turned his phone over and over in his hand. “And meanwhile I treated you like shit.”

“Toddrick did too,” Sylvester said with a sigh. “That’s all part of it. And to be honest, I’m not the only gay guy hooking up with a college athlete getting treated that way.”

“Why did you put up with it?”

“Because I knew it wasn’t really you,” Sylvester said. “The real you LOVES me for some reason. The real you sometimes can’t cum without me sucking on your nipples. The real you has always considered me one of his pack. But you had to do that other stuff because… that’s just the way life is.”

At Sylvester’s apartment complex, Drake took a deep breath. It had begun to rain when they got out. He approached a deep puddle and dropped his phone in it, giving it a stomp.

Sylvester put a hand on the former football player’s back. “You ready?”

“No,” Drake said. “Don’t do it until we’re inside. I don’t want people to see it happening.”

“It’s funny, when you’re the REAL you, you’re desperate for people to see you,” Sylvester said.

Drake’s heart pounded as they climbed the stairs. True to his word, the doorways were huge and the ceilings were high. Toddrick–the 7-foot tall 400 pound bulging brute, that is–was wearing just a loin cloth, curling some 100-pound dumbbells that were on the floor. Strewn around Sylvester’s apartment were all sorts of weight equipment, all absurdly weighted and sized, clearly only for the super-huge and super-strong.

“Oh, buddy!” Toddrick said, tossing the heavy weights aside casually. “You ready to be big with me again? God DAMN do I just want to bury my face in your pecs!”

Drake blushed. He looked down at himself. He looked so inadequate next to this minivan-sized man!

“Do it permanently,” Drake said. “No more little football Drake. I want the new life forever.”

“It’s not easy being that huge,” Sylvester explained. “You’ll never really have a normal life…”

“DO IT,” Drake insisted. Big Toddrick smiled.

“I want it to be permanent too,” he purred, running his hands up and down the deep crevices of his turtle-shell abdomen.

“Oh god, guys,” Sylvester said. “If you’re really ready… BIG IS BEAUTIFUL!”

Somehow, that time, the words had power. In a blink, the room seemed to shrink. The looming behemoth seemed to stump down in size, but in reality, Drake was rising to meet him. Drake felt the weight of his uncertainty, the burden of his shame and the struggle of his identity suddenly lift away. It felt like he was evaporating… and all that was left was…

“BIG DAWG!” The massive Drake charged forward. He and Toddrick’s gargantuan pecs slapped together hard, making a thunderclap that echoed in the spacious apartment. As they started to wrestle, Sylvester urged them away from the furniture. In moments, the writhing muscleguys’ bodies were drenched in sweat, exuding clouds of a manly stench that filled the apartment.

“I’m gonna go open a window,” Sylvester said. “You two have fun!”

As he turned away, a big muscular hand reached out and snatched him off the ground. “Oh no you’re not!” Drake plopped Sylvester on his face, his huge tongue going to town on Sylvester’s ass. The smaller nerd rode the hulk like he was on a bucking bronco. Meanwhile, Toddrick licked deep into the crevices of Drake’s pits.

Luckily the neighbors were used to the ruckus in Sylvester’s apartment–and were too afraid of the giants who lived there to complain.

Meanwhile, outside, at the bottom of a growing puddle, Drake’s cell phone lit up with a message from Dr. Dramovich for a only a moment before it shorted out and the screen went dark.