The muffled thud from across the room sent Lupe sprinting for the bathroom door, her body in motion almost before she consciously realized what she'd heard. She crossed the small suite in record time, cursing herself with every step--of course it was going to happen in a hotel, Elizabeth didn't have any of the familiarities of home to ground her, she was in an environment that was custom-tailored for pleasantly bland anonymity, Lupe should have thought of this, she should have brought a few things along to remind Elizabeth of her identity and keep her centered--and burst into the en suite bathroom already knowing what she was going to find. Damn it. Maybe they shouldn't have taken this trip at all.

But it was getting better. This was the first episode in... what, five months? And another three months before that, and another two months before that, and it wasn't like Elizabeth should have to put her whole life on hold waiting for the next time it happened. There was never going to be a neon sign that came up one day saying 'YOU'VE PUT THIS ALL BEHIND YOU'. She needed to be the person she was and live for herself. That was the whole point, right? If she hid from it and let it crush her down into a tiny little ball of anxiety, she might as well just unpack Lizzie and leave her out for good. 

All those thoughts flashed through Lupe's mind in an instant as she looked down and found her girlfriend naked and kneeling on the bathmat, her light pink skin still flushed bright red from the heat of the still-running shower and her long dark hair clinging to her back. Elizabeth--no, not Elizabeth, Lizzie for now--had one hand down between her legs and the other pinching and twisting her long brown nipples until they stood up stiff and swollen under her fingers; her eyelids were perhaps a quarter of the way open, revealing only a fluttering slit of pure white where her eyes had rolled up into the back of her head. She was mumbling something under her breath and drooling onto her chest. Lupe couldn't make it out, but she didn't have to. This looked like a bad one.

Lupe squatted on the floor next to her on one knee--they'd learned the hard way that it wasn't a good idea for Lizzie to find another woman kneeling alongside her--and very gently took the dazed and drooling slave's head into her hands. "Come on, Elizabeth," she murmured, lightly patting her girlfriend's cheek. "Come on back to me, sweetie, come on back, Elizabeth. It's okay. I know you're in there. Come back." She didn't really think it would be that easy, not this time; whatever triggered this particular episode, it must have hit her pretty hard. She looked--and smelled--like she must have been standing in front of the bathroom mirror with her hand between her legs for a while before her legs finally gave out and she collapsed to the floor.

But the first step in their recovery protocol was always to try to wake her from the trance and hope that she came back as Elizabeth, not as Lizzie. And the steps helped to keep Lupe grounded, allowing her to push her frustration and anger at the man who did this to her girlfriend to the back of her head. That way it didn't distract her from her important task of bringing Elizabeth out of these episodes of disassociation that swallowed up her mind and left a bubbly, compliant slave girl named Lizzie behind. Lupe could bring her feelings up in therapy later. Right now she needed to focus on Elizabeth. "Come on back to me," she murmured again, hoping against hope that this was all it would take.

The eyes opened. The face lit up in a cheerful smile that had all the intelligence behind it of a particularly bright golden retriever. Lizzie didn't stop masturbating even for a second as she burbled, "Hi! Did Master send you? I'm Lizzie, and I'm a good girl. Would you like to fuck me now?" And Lupe's heart sank, tears welling up as she tried so hard not to think about how much it hurt to look at her beautiful lover and not see a trace of recognition looking back at her. She pushed it all away, forcing herself to focus on the recovery protocol. Elizabeth needed her to keep her shit together more than ever right now, and so that's what she was going to do.

But she couldn't completely stop the seething hatred from boiling up and overflowing from the little cracks between one step and the next. When Lupe said, "Yes, Lizzie. Your Master gave you to me for a little while, and he told you to listen to me like a good girl," she couldn't stop the self-loathing that she felt--she could only hide it behind syrupy sweet tones so dumb little Lizzie didn't pick it up. While her hand reached out automatically for a towel to dry off the glistening moisture from the obedient woman's body, she couldn't make herself not wish death on some anonymous stranger hiding behind a computer and a bullshit username in a location Lupe couldn't trace despite her best efforts. She was as human as the next person, even if the next person wasn't thinking of herself as human at all right now.

She didn't blame Elizabeth. They'd had that conversation more than once, especially during those first few months when the episodes came almost daily and Lupe had to take away her phone and prescreen all her emails and basically become the controlling asshole that her 'Master' wished he was. Elizabeth wasn't at fault here, she was only eighteen when she first met him and as far as she was concerned, she was exploring a few kinky fantasies with some fun and sexy roleplay with an older man who flattered her for her maturity and praised her for pushing past the discomfort she was still too young to realize was her boundaries staring her right in the face. Elizabeth didn't know what the consequences were.

But he did. Whoever he was behind his stupid screen name that Lupe couldn't even think without wanting to punch a wall, he knew exactly what he was doing when he twisted Elizabeth around his finger and slowly, inexorably crafted Lizzie to do all the things that Elizabeth still wouldn't do despite his best efforts. He knew and he didn't care, and Lupe would cheerfully go to jail for the rest of her life if she ever got the chance to repay him for all the damage he did to the most wonderful, kind, caring woman Lupe had ever met.

But he wasn't here. And Lizzie was. Lupe turned off the shower and patted the smiling young woman dry with the fluffy white hotel towel, trying her best not to make it any more erotically charged than it had to be. She knew from long, bitter experience that Lizzie took pretty much everything as an invitation to sex, and the longer she thought she was fulfilling her purpose as a... a fucking toy, she literally thought she was a goddamn toy to be lent out to strangers whenever that motherfucking asshole wanted, god fucking damn him--Lupe clamped down hard on the stray thought. The longer she thought she was serving her purpose, the longer the episode would last. Lupe needed to avoid that, to engage with her as a person instead. "Lizzie," she said, keeping her voice calm and patient and hiding all her anger behind a bland, unthreatening smile, "do you know where you are?"

Lizzie looked around, her eyes wide with confusion and her teeth worrying away at her lower lip. She looked like that same golden retriever after its owner only pretended to throw the ball. "A... a hotel?" she ventured, the need for praise and approval dripping from every syllable. "Did Master bring me to a hotel to fuck me again? Is he waiting for me on the bed?" Her rubbing, thrusting fingers increased their pace. Lupe would have pulled them away if she didn't know that Elizabeth's other self got off on denial.

"No, sweetie," Lupe replied, trying to keep eye contact as much as possible with the hypnotized woman. "No, Master isn't out there. This is a... a different hotel." She only stumbled a little on the word 'different', despite all the weight of meaning behind it and all the memories it stirred up. That was probably the closest Lupe ever came to catching the bastard who did this, and it happened before she even knew anything was wrong with Elizabeth--before they were even dating, back when she only thought of Elizabeth Boyd as a sweet, flaky, hopelessly naive girl in a woman's body who was well on her way to blowing her first adult job despite all of Lupe's efforts to cover for her.

And then Elizabeth vanished for a solid week. And when she came back, she... she didn't know how long she'd been gone. She didn't believe it until Lupe got out her phone and showed her the days and days of increasingly anxious text messages, messages that Elizabeth had apparently deleted without any memory of doing so. That was when the breakdown hit, when all the terror about how much of herself she'd been losing finally poured out and Elizabeth Boyd broke down sobbing in Guadalupe Machado's arms. And that was also kind of sort of when they started dating, even if it was a really weird relationship for a while.

It still wasn't exactly normal. "Come on, Lizzie," Lupe continued, her voice still calm and soothing as if speaking to a very small child. "I'm going to show you a few things to help you remember why you're here." She helped to haul the dazed, smiling woman to her feet and walked her gently out into the bedroom, still hoping that her clothes or her suitcase or something might spark a flash of memory that would allow Elizabeth to resurface. It had happened a few times, and Elizabeth was getting better at reasserting herself--if she hadn't been in a hotel room that reminded her of that lost week when she saw her own nude body in the mirror, she might have even fought this episode off. She could still come back.

But she didn't. "Oh, nice!" Lizzie cried out, pulling herself free of Lupe's grip and racing over to flop out onto the bed with her legs spread and her hairy cunt lewdly exposed to Lupe's gaze. Any other time, it would have been sexy as fuck--Lupe loved a cute bush on a woman, and she had to admit she didn't mind so much when Elizabeth stopped shaving down there for fear of triggering herself back into smooth, hairless Lizzie. But seeing her like this, with nothing behind her bright shining eyes but obedience and arousal... it felt like the person Lupe loved had been erased. Like she wasn't in there at all.

That was a near-constant fear back in the bad old days, when Lizzie was an almost ubiquitous part of their lives and Lupe wondered with every episode whether this was somehow the one where Elizabeth would simply give up and allow her other self to take control for good. Lupe didn't know whether that was ever a real possibility, or just a product of her ignorance and paranoia--for all that she'd taken a crash course on the practicalities of hypnosis and brainwashing, there was still so much that even the experts didn't know. Most of them still thought Elizabeth was just faking it... and even the ones who believed her weren't willing to do the kind of horribly unethical research required to find out how far Lizzie's 'Master' could have pushed her obedience if he'd kept going. Lupe had to treat Elizabeth's complete mental obliteration as a very real outcome back then, and even though she knew how much stronger her girlfriend had gotten, that old anxiety was still there.

But that was what they made the recovery protocol for. Because they learned what worked to bring Elizabeth back, they learned what didn't, and they learned that Lupe handled her shit better if she had a process to go through. Like now, when waking her from the trance didn't work and engaging her as a person didn't work and reminding her of her real self didn't work. When there was only one way to reset Lizzie's fuzzy little brain to a place where she could accept going back to sleep for a while. "That's my good girl," Lupe purred, sitting down on the bed next to her lover and pushing her masturbating hand out of the way so that Lupe's warm, terra cotta fingers could sink into the soaking folds of Lizzie's cunt. "That's my good little fucktoy."

She hated herself for it. She hated herself for stepping into the role of Lizzie's absent 'Master' almost as much as she hated him for creating the void in Lizzie's mind that craved domination in the first place. She loathed every moment of telling Elizabeth what to wear, who to talk to, when she could leave the house, all the necessary limits they had to put into place for keeping the treacherous little bitch in the back of her mind from trotting obediently back to her owner to be brainwashed right back into mindless compliance again. She hated that she had to become this domineering, controlling, gaslighting partner in order to keep Elizabeth safe from a single mistake she made almost ten years ago now.

And she hated the tiny, evil little part of herself that got off on it. She hated that most of all.

"Good girl," Lupe drawled, hiding all her emotions behind the mask of bland, pleasant domination as she churned Lizzie's messy cunt with her fingers until the helpless woman was shuddering and moaning and squeezing her nipples tightly in ecstasy. "That's my good girl, that's it. You can't fight the pleasure. You can't fight that deep, helpless need. You're going to cum for me and then you're going to go limp and blank and empty. Nice and limp and blank and empty for me now. Nice and limp and blank and empty as you cum for me... now."

Lizzie let out a squeal of utter bliss, her hips straining up in the air until she arched clean up off the bed with arousal and ground her cunt hard against Lupe's fingers. Her breath came out in shuddering gasps, and her hands tightened their grip around her nipples until the tips of them went almost purple. Her eyes rolled back in her head until only the whites showed, making the helpless young woman look almost like she was having a demon exorcised for a moment before she flopped back onto the bed, completely limp. It never took very long to make her cum like this. That was one of the few things Lupe liked about Lizzie.

She extricated her fingers from Lizzie's cunt carefully, then patted the limp woman's flushed cheeks again. "Good girl," she cooed. "All done now, and it's time for Elizabeth to come back." The eyes opened, the face went into an expression of confusion and panic. It was never very hard to convince Lizzie to sleep again when she was blank and happy and blissfully post-coital like that, but Lupe still didn't like doing it. It felt a little too much like she was rewarding the usurper for taking control, and maybe giving her an incentive to come back whenever she felt Elizabeth getting horny or subby or stupid. Lupe didn't want to encourage her, not when she still didn't understand everything about the circumstances that triggered another episode.

But that was the recovery protocol. They did what they had to. "Did... did I go away again?" Elizabeth murmured, her voice small and sad and terrified. Lupe nodded, gathering the nude woman into her arms and holding her close while the sobs came. It was getting better, they both knew. Five months was a long time to be herself again. But there was never a day when Elizabeth could be sure she wasn't going to simply fall into oblivion, leaving only a simpering slave behind. And sometimes she just needed to cry that out a little.

And Lupe was always going to be there for her when it happened.

THE END