The night after what became known as the Exchange ended, Mercy felt exhausted, drained in a way she never had as Macabre. As a villain, Vivian had always had control over how far she pushed and when, and she’d had the sense to know that if you felt like you might collapse from standing, it was time to exit, whether that meant abandoning your plans or - much more common - taking a break to strike again.

Usually, in her new role as a C-tier heroine at best, she didn’t feel the need to push any harder than she was perfectly capable of. She’d had almost a year to get a sense of what she needed, but she usually only went in when she had a good idea what the criminals were up to or at least felt like she had a clear idea how to stop them - often not a huge issue locally, not with her power level and the insight she had into typical criminal operations.

The Exchange had tested all that. Almost overnight, any superhero or heroine who had a namesake a thousand years into the future all disappeared, their namesakes showing up instead. The remaining heroes native to our time had found themselves needing to help both with a generations-spanning cult which reared its head as a threat in both eras and to act as guides to the exchanged supers. And, as usually happened around this kind of crisis, a bunch of petty villains thought this was a great opportunity to advance their own plans.

(It had been an absolute pleasure to pop up behind Cascade while he was gloating, tap him on the shoulder, and send him across the room with a punch. She’d never liked Cascade, but she’d never before been responsible for getting her locked up. She might had to do it again in future, given how satisfying it had been - and with her face mask still in place, she’d grinned ear to ear while she heard Cascade protest that it wasn’t right a ‘no-name newcomer’ had got the better of her.)

It wasn’t the same, going into battle when Ms Miracle wasn’t around - or, well, not the real Ms Miracle; running into her so-many-years-later namesake was a weird experience. She could hardly confide in a heroine who didn’t know her secret; she didn’t really trust that the newly arrived heroes weren’t Psi-Clone’s work or something similar until it was almost too late, too. If the final decision on activating D.A.N.I.E.L.’s time capsule had been left to her, the cult would have succeeded - and the future Ms Miracle would doubtless have been speaking Saurian.

Moments where she had to trust in other heroes were always the toughest times Vivian faced these days. Where Ms Miracle would smile and make some comment to break the tension, then sit back and let them do it, Vivian always fretted. And that didn’t make it easier for anyone.

The Exchange had only lasted for about two weeks, but Vivian had got, maybe, three hours of sleep a day during that time, and any time she wasn’t asleep her brain was completely engaged.

At least she didn’t have to deal with the paperwork the Justice Guard always had to put together. Exhausted and reeling as the dawn broke on the first day with the heroes back in place, she gave Ms Miracle - the real Ms Miracle - a quick hug, stopped briefly in front of a New York hot dog stand to buy two dogs with everything - leaving the server wondering if they were for her, in which case she probably wasn’t a robot, or not - and then took to the skies.

She ate her dogs during the huge arc of her trajectory back toward Eureka Springs, racing the retreating shadow of night around the globe. Beautiful, it was. Truly beautiful. She’d always thought so, in these moments soaring high above, and she’d occasionally got very annoyed with journalists who wrote about how only heroes really understood the simple pleasures their powers afforded them. Vivian had always understood the simple pleasures. She’d just wanted the expensive ones too.

Still did, really - but not so much that her programming didn’t keep her a good girl.

She was nearly back to Eureka Springs when she realised she wasn’t doing what she should. She wasn’t being a good slave. Not at all.

She hadn’t seen Master in over two weeks.

Well, nobody was going to be paying attention to the skies over Memphis for a while, and if they did, the assumption would be that Ms Miracle was coming home. Mercy rolled her shoulders, turned over in mid-air, and redirected herself, aiming for a private apartment block with an enclosed garden on the outskirts of the city.

*

Master was at this point possibly the only person in the state who’d installed a number-pad lock on the outside of his balcony sliding doors, but then he was one of the very few who had visitors who’d drop by there. Even Ms Miracle stopped by from time to time, and he didn’t technically control her anymore; on the other hand, pretending for him might by why she hadn’t fell prey to a mind controller in almost a year. It was usually a much more frequent occurrence.

She let herself in, closed the door behind her, and she stood stock still, arms by her sides, eyes closed, listening hard. She was nowhere near as adept with her super-hearing as Ms Miracle; she hadn’t needed nearly as much practice. Still she could hear Master’s breathing in the kitchen. A smile on her lips beneath her mirrored mask, she walked through to the kitchen, allowing her pace to slow and to steady into a rhythm that required either concentration or no thought at all; a slow pace with an almost robotic precision about it, and one that made her hips roll with every step.

The combination of the two effects together pleased Master greatly, and ever since she’d had Ms Miracle’s desires and fetishes imprinted over her own, Vivian had loved that.

Pushing open the door into the kitchen, she lilted “Hello, Master.” There was no voice distorter on the mask; nobody ever recognised her voice as belonging to Macabre simply because there was no anger in it any longer, none of the tension and suppressed rage people had associated with her. Now they had little more than an accent and a pitch range in common.

He set down the big chefs’ knife he loved and turned to face her. “Mercy,” he greeted her, his voice quiet but his eyes sparkling with amusement and approval. “How did it go?”

“It’s… done.” It was the most positive thing she could say about the situation, but she felt bad about it. She tried only to bring happiness to her Master, but she was so tired…

Master tilted his head to one side, looking her over thoughtfully. “Take off your mask,” he instructed.

Vivian took a moment to compose her features as expressionlessly as possible as she unclipped the mirror from her headgear, but as she met Master’s eyes, she knew that hadn’t worked. She’d been able to lie to everyone, once, but she couldn’t hide anything here.

Master crossed the kitchen to her, cradled her cheek in his hand, and smiled. “Kiss me,” he ordered, and Vivian couldn’t help but obey. The moment her lips met his she felt better, happier, even more confident. Kissing Master was good but obeying was even better. Her body pressed against his. She forgot everything but the need to obey. The pleasure of service she’d accidentally copied into her own brain from Ms Miracle’s.

“This one was rough, huh?”

“Yes, Master,” she nodded. Her eyes were downcast, not from any need but because it was embarrassing to be seen to be vulnerable like this.

“Look into my eyes, Mercy,” he ordered, and of course she did. The glow of green power was already welling up into him, and within moments she could not have looked away even if she’d wanted to.

His power didn’t capture instantaneously; it was slow, and comfortable, and it insinuated its way into her head, and before she knew it she was lost in a helpless, blissful fog, her worries and wondering left far, far behind.

“What you’ve just done was worth it,” Master told her. “You did important things. And you did them well. And you can come to me, if you have to, when things have been rough. You don’t need to hide it.”

He let those words hang in the air.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“Yes, Master,” she said, and she did understand. There was no need to fear she’d let him down. He was her Master and, she suddenly realised, he didn’t just feel smug and happy to own her. He felt some level of responsibility.

Whether he would have done if he’d taken her mind during a fight, before Ms Miracle set them on their implausible, unethical collision course, she didn’t know. She didn’t think so. Of course, it didn’t matter. He was in control. She was his slave. That would be true even if he was careless and callous - but she was still glad he wasn’t.

His hand was wandering over her chest, above her bustline and below her shoulder. “You’re going to take off your uniform,” he told her. “And you’re going to have a good shower. Take your time over it. And when you’re done with that, come back to the kitchen, and we’ll eat together. Right?”

“Yes, Master,” she said, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t yet. Not until his eyes released her.

“After that we’ll figure out what you need, and we’ll figure out what both of us want. In that order.”

“Yes, Master.”

Vivian hadn’t had someone care for her this way as an adult, she thought. And then, with just a touch of shame, she realised that they had, and she’d knocked them not just back but down, and strode away.

She hadn’t been willing to accept anything freely given. She’d distrusted it.

Master didn’t give, though. He took. And he took in ways that made her happier and better, and in ways her mind didn’t object to.

Of course, he was the reason her mind didn’t object. But she still felt grateful.

The shower was a relief. It always was, but Master had paid to have his replaced with a bigger model, large enough for two to move around comfortably. Sometimes he had Mercy bathe him, settling to her knees mid-shower to wash and worship his cock. For one person alone it was pure sybaritic pleasure, especially with the shower gels and shampoos he’d told her to use; he liked the lingering scent of them as he groped her from behind, kissed along her neck, took a handful of her hair and used it to tug one of the world’s most powerful figures willingly to her knees.

It wasn’t the result of a command but simply conditioning arising from all the other changes he’d made but over the past year Mercy had come to love their scent herself, not just their scent but the way they felt in her hands as she lathered herself up, and in this shower there was enough room for a cloud of scented steam to form. A cloud that summarised the bliss she now felt in obedience.

She put her long blonde hair up in a towel and padded naked back through the apartment to the kitchen where her Master waited. His order had said nothing about getting dressed, after all; she left her cape and her bodysuit draped over the heated towel rail, her boots beside it, as if she was making herself at home.

If Master was surprised at her nudity, he didn’t show it; as always, he stopped what he was doing for a long time to look appreciatively, that grin of his that told her exactly how much he wanted to use her back on his face. Vivian smiled at that, a little, but took her seat at the table when he gestured to it.

Master had been making a hoppin’ john and a side salad; the two bowls he set out were both a little small, and Vivian could easily see this had been one overlarge portion before she let herself in. She felt a pang of guilt, but quenched it when she reminded herself that Master had decided she would be eating with him. She could always offer to buy a pie later, she reminded herself. “I wonder sometimes why you don’t have people conditioned to cook and clean for you,” she told him, and she heard the criticism of his cooking that he might think she meant as soon as it was out of her mouth and winced.

“Have you never been here when Maeve drops by?” he asked, surprised. “I have her in once a week to clean the apartment and bring me up to date on her gossip; she’s pretty well conditioned now. I don’t have a cook, though, because - well, why would I go to that kind of effort just to stop me doing something I enjoy for myself?”

Vivian shook her head. “I guess we’ve missed each other, Master. Or you’ve been hiding her from me?”

Master looked surprised at that, but he gave it some thought over a mouthful and laughed. “I might, at that,” he said. “She’s a holdover from before I met your friend. When I was still setting up my operation here.”

Vivian mulled over her next words, but not carefully. Her implanted sense of ethics made it hard to accept that Master ran a criminal organisation, but he was also her Master, so there was only so much she could do about it. Usually she tried to avoid the discussions, but she’d lost a lot of her filter through the past two weeks’ exhaustion. “You’ve mind controlled a mob wife?”

“Basically, yes.” Master actually looked sheepish about it. “I needed information when I started setting up my operation. Needed to know weak links and key resources. So I engineered a meeting with Maeve MacLaren.”

Vivian wasn’t local, and Macabre had never really done much work with the Mob, but the MacLaren name had come up a couple of times in Eureka Springs, especially as they’d more or less had to shift their operations out of Memphis when it became clear the new mob had their number. “So she’s married to a MacLaren. She’s really close to the heart of the family, huh?”

“Fergus MacLaren thinks of her as his good luck charm.”

“And his luck started running out about two years ago.”

Master nodded and grinned. “She won’t tell him,” he said softly. “But I don’t think she would have even if I hadn’t enforced that. She’s wanted Fergus to take his stake and go legitimate for the best part of twenty years.”

Vivian pulled a face. “Why haven’t you made him?”

“Every time we come close to a meet, something gets in the way, or I end up thinking it’s going to be a trap.” He shrugged. “I was meaning to have Amy play her own evil twin some time, so I could have her work security. Hard to do that now, of course.”

And I can’t use you to do it because it’d feel too much like your old identity. He didn’t say it but she could practically hear him thinking it; Master was probably the one person with more to lose if she relapsed than she did. Macabre would kill him for what he’d done for her.

…To her, she reminded herself. Not for her. To her. But it was hard to make that notion stick, for some reason, even though he’d never told her exactly how to feel about all this.

“Have you been fucking her?” she asked, and cursed her lack of mental filter. Why did it matter? She didn’t mind sharing Master with Ms Miracle. What would make a mob wife so different?

“Uh…” Master blushed. “I actually haven’t for a while. Maeve’s surprised about that.”

“Why not?” Because he definitely didn’t get a chance to have her as often as he’d had the Miracle. If anything his sex drive ought to be higher.

His eyes went from Vivian’s face to her chest. “You know,” he said, “I could make you so distracted you’d forget you never got the answer to that.”

She couldn’t help herself; whenever he was staring at her breasts, she arched her back, pushed them out, shimmied her shoulders a little. He liked them to jiggle, so she loved to jiggle them for him. The charge of pleasure that ran through her just from doing that…

Master was right, though. He could change the topic with an order. He just… hadn’t.

“Is that what you’d prefer, Master?” she asked, and she made sure to load down her tone with as much amused innuendo as she could. Just eating properly and being clean had her feeling so much better.

He looked at her for a long quiet moment. Then, as she’d hoped, he smiled. Seeing him smile made her feel better in turn. “Get under the table,” he told her, and her pulse quickened. She slid forward from her chair, using paramuscles she’d honed in flight to help her balance and flex and duck under the solid oak of the tabletop without colliding with it. This put her in a kneeling position, but not actually kneeling; Vivian had found she liked to float with her knees and toes just half an inch or so above the ground. The symbolism of kneeling without actually touching down seemed, to her, a compromise; an acknowledgement that she submitted alongside the pretence that she could stop at any time.

One of his hands was waiting for her below the tabletop, his finger held directly in front of his crotch, beckoning. It was wordless but no less a command for that; she floated slowly forward on her knees until the tip of her nose and her lips brushed across his finger. The towel around her hair caught against the table, unravelled, and fell behind her with a wet thwomp.

“Know what to do?” Master asked. Vivian felt rejuvenated, fully awake and energised again even though she hadn’t slept. The eager, half-teasing tone in Master’s voice was a big part of that.

There was no puzzle to be solved here. No cultist lurked at the edge waiting to take advantage of a wrong decision. The worse that could happen would be guessing wrong and being told what to do.

She belonged to her Master, but she did what her Master wanted or, if not, she was corrected. There was no punishment. No consequences. There were no bad answers.

It was the absolute opposite of any other relationship she’d ever had. Refreshingly simple, and there was a true, deep inner peace in that.

“Yes, Master.” She rested her hands on his thighs in anticipation, feeling the soft material of jeans worn thin by too much washing and, beneath it, feeling his pulse quicken. She’d been surprised to discover that most people didn’t have senses that acute, but with her hands where they were, his heartbeat was so very clear to her.

“Then begin.”

She sighed happily, running the fingertips of one hand up his inner thigh and over the bulge of his groin, loving the sudden twitch of excitement beneath her as his cock hardened under contact. Deft fingers teased his belt open one-handed. She found the zip between thumb and forefinger and ‘walked’ back down his cock and balls with her other fingertips, guiding the zip down until she was under the bulge and could slip her hand in between jeans and boxers.

She gave his balls the gentlest of squeezes, listening to the startled, excited intake of breath as her fingernails grazed across him over his thin boxers, and then slipped back up, taking the waistband of his shorts and drawing them down until everything was on display, his cock proudly thrust out.

Her fingers wrapped gently around his cock. Vivian was always exaggeratedly careful of her strength around Master. She was pretty confident she wouldn’t hurt him, but the idea of being wrong when it mattered so deeply to her was horrifying. What was a light touch for her was firm enough that he went from stiff to rigid in moments. She flexed her fingers, stroking up and down the shaft for a few moments, grinning to herself.

Usually when she did this her eyes were on his face, watching for every reaction; with the tabletop between them she had to rely on the touch and the sound, and that somehow made it even more fun than being his pleasureslut always was; there was a puzzle to be solved now in order to be a good pleasureslut.

She heard a quick, shocked, delighted intake of breath, and something about that pushed the last of her buttons. Before she realised what she was doing her hand was down at the bottom of his shaft, thumb and forefinger steadying it, her other three fingers slowly curling and uncurling, lightly tickling his balls, moving to the same slow rhythm as her head, her mouth now enveloping him, bobbing up and down without really registering the point where need took her and she had to begin to suck.

The worries, the fears, the exhaustion of earlier, all were gone. In this one shining moment, Vivian was exactly who and what she needed to be, having nothing but the moment and her Master’s cock to focus on and to live through. The more pleasure she gave him, the more she experienced; and like her friend, after her mind had been conditioned, she could draw such delight in submission from sucking a cock.

If she felt there was any chance she’d delight in submission to anyone but her Master she might have considered offering her skills more widely. But Master owned her, and the woman she now was found real delight in that.

Vivian knew that there was a clear way for her to be useful to her Master, at least for the time being. These moments, where everything was as simple and straightforward as a command to give pleasure - they were such a perfect release from the worries of the world.

She had gotten settled happily into her rhythm and was just starting to increase the pace and passion, looking to push him over the edge, when Master abruptly said “Stop,” and Vivian stopped, choosing to remain in place, her lips stretched around him, her tongue tantalisingly just below his cocktip, hoping he would be persuaded to restart shortly.

“Come out from under there,” Master told her, and she reluctantly lifted her head from his cock and half-crawled, half-flew out from under the table. The way he was talking told her he had an idea in mind, so she stood rather than remain kneeling. There was no issue in her mind with trying to lead Master’s decisions through hints when he hadn’t made up his mind. If he had it felt disrespectful.

Master reached out and took her nipple between thumb and forefinger, tugged on it gently, saw her lip quiver as she tried not to give anything away in her expression. Laughed as, feeling freed when she knew he’d noticed, she whimpered.

Master was good like that.

“Bedroom,” he commanded, and his voice fairly throbbed with urgency. “Now.”

Which meant he wanted her to go ahead of him. Vivian had started out by imitating the slow roll of the hips that Ms Miracle was fond of in these circumstances, but over time she’d developed her own version, a strut that made the most of her thick, powerful thighs. She walked on her toes as if still wearing heels; her swagger lost the rhythmic click of heel on hardwood, but she knew she cut the same figure, and his eyes would be glued to her thighs and her ass.

He caught up to her just after she crossed the threshold into the bedroom as he often did, a sudden surge of speed, his hands on her ass, on her tits, his teeth nipping at her invulnerable skin where her shoulder met her neck. She moaned happily. When she was with Master, this was one of her duties. Part of her role. And Vivian knew that letting Master take over like this, letting herself go completely, feeling herself as part of a cycle of pleasure that flowed from her to him and back, it was all part of what kept Macabre from fighting as hard as she wanted.

Master released his grip for a moment. His hand went to her bare back, between her shoulder blades, and he pushed her gently.

If she hadn’t wanted to be moved, he could have pushed with all his strength and not moved her. But she knew what was coming and she was just as intent on their game as he was. She sprawled artfully forward on the bed, one leg raised and cocked, hips at an angle, her rear raised invitingly as a result.

An invitation neither of them could wait for him to accept. He was on her in a moment, and her sorrow and exhaustion were forgotten.

*

Afterwards, the two of them lay close together under the covers, quiet, half-asleep, dozing companionably closely. Vivian certainly slept for a while, but Master had been worn out too. The sky was a much darker shade outside his bedroom windows when, his arm around her shoulders, he said “I don’t fuck her any more because it’s felt different since we met.”

Vivian had been nestled in against his chest, enjoying the warmth of his not-quite-in-shape belly, listening to his heartbeat. She lay there for more than a minute in silence, thinking about this, before she remembered the discussion about Maeve MacLaren. “I thought you’d decided to distract me from that,” she said.

“Mm,” Master half-agreed. “I did. But… well. It’s not like you’re going to tell her.”

“No, Master.”

“And you wanted to know. More and more I find I want you to know what you want to know.”

She mulled over that one for a while, and made no comment.

Master too remained silent for a while, then laughed, just once. “What a ridiculous situation we’re in,” he said, and Vivian smiled in agreement.

*

The conversation had trailed off as they continued to doze, but they’d both seemed content with that. Things had changed, and they both knew it; neither of them was quite willing to press the question of how. Not yet. Not when there was still comfort for them both in being together, in taking pleasure in one another. Vivian hadn’t left until after breakfast, which Master again took charge of cooking, refusing her offer to serve him in the kitchen with the same argument he’d used to reject an enslaved cook. She hadn’t really wanted to leave at the point she did, but Eureka Springs wasn’t going to patrol itself, and she’d definitely got fond of the place - not that she’d really had the time to dedicate to it throughout the Exchange. Things were going to be messy there, she knew.

She passed a day in minor acts of heroism; a mugging stopped here, a drug deal traced back to the local kingpin there, a dozen or more little acts for a superhuman, a dozen or more moments where Vivian had to make a moral call and try to find what was best for her town, some much easier than others.

A day like that was a busy day, but it didn’t drain her the way some big events did. She was satisfied just to make a difference, and she never had to strain herself.

In the evening she showered, pulled on her thick, cosy bathrobe, and wandered downstairs to the living room. There was never anything she wanted to watch - something she’d kept from before being partially overwritten with Miracle’s mind, one of the few opinions that was definitely originally her own - but she had a bunch of good books, most of which she hadn’t really had a chance to read.

A glass of red wine, Einaudi playing from the living room speakers, a good book… Vivian felt like her boundaries had been artificially shrunk, but she found she didn’t mind now; she was so much happier as a result.

Or she was until the doorbell rang.

Vivian loved her privacy. Always had. Still did. She was pretty sure that if Master tried to keep her around 24/7 she’d break free of her conditioning sooner or later. But it wasn’t even that which meant she didn’t want to answer the door. Virtually nobody liked answering the door to a stranger late in the evening.

It rang four times before Vivian understood that whoever this was, they wouldn’t just go away if they were ignored. She set her wineglass down carefully, marked her place in her book, and went through to check at the front door.

Ms Miracle, in her civilian identity, stood at the threshold, a pleading look in her eyes. Vivian blinked. “Amy?”

“Can I come in?” Miracle asked, and the distress in her voice was so clear and so real that it startled Vivian. Ms Miracle just didn’t freak out like that. Vivian looked at her again, trying to assess the situation -

And there it was.

Two days earlier, Vivian had hugged her friend when her friend returned from the future. She’d been exactly as always.

But now…

…now she looked about five months pregnant.

“…sure,” Vivian said slowly, her mind racing. This was…

Well, she needed to know more before she could answer that.