“Zef, you okay in there?” Bryce called from outside their bedroom, and they spun away from the horrors unfolding on their computer.
“Bryce, you must save me,” they shrieked, and Bryce made an alarmed noise as he burst through the door.
His eyes fell to the desktop where a dominatrix was whipping a weeping Dryad. “What in tarnation?”
“The internet betrayed me,” Zef defended, their upper hands clamping over their ears. “Help me, Bryce. Make it stop!”
Determination set Bryce’s shoulders, and he cracked his neck. “Out of the way. I’m going in.”
They stumbled out of the computer chair. “You are so brave.”
“Get out of here,” he said as he sat down and grabbed the mouse. “You don’t need to see this.”
“I will not leave you to face this horror alone.”
“Just go! Save yourself,” Bryce pleaded, but Zef shook their head resolutely.
“I will not leave you!”
Keeping their lower hands pressed tightly to their ears, they peeked through the fingers of their upper hands as Bryce clicked away the videos, one after another.
“Do you not have pop-up protection on this thing?” he asked, and Zef blinked blankly at him. He sighed. “Never mind. That probably means you don’t have virus protection either?”
At Zef’s silence, he nodded. “Well, you’re definitely gonna have viruses now. Might as well chuck the whole thing. How did you even find all this porn?”
“I was simply trying to read an article,” Zef said, face sweltering with humiliation.
“About what? Furry porn?”
He gestured to the screen where the Araknis milkmaid and the cow were back.
“Come on, you have to say the line. You promised,” the Araknis said, sounding eerily familiar.
The co-star in the cow suit chittered in annoyance, then muttered out a husky but resigned, “Ugh, fine… moo.”
Bryce cringed away from the monitor. “Oh my God, is that Gem and Rusty?”
And horror like Zef had never known flooded through them. “No! I cannot see them have sex. I will not survive it.”
“That’s right, Mr. Cow, come make my ass your bitch,” Gem the milkmaid said.
With a battle cry, Zef shoved Bryce out of their way, grabbed the desktop monitor with all four hands, and threw it onto the floor with all their might. It landed with a resoundingcrash, plastic flying, glass crunching. Their ears rang as the traumatizing porn sounds finally stopped, and the room filled with nothing but Bryce’s and their heavy breathing.
They both stared down at the destroyed, smoking monitor before Bryce raised a shaky hand and swiped it down his face. From the corner of their eye, they met the human’s wide-eyed gaze. Then Bryce nodded. Just once.
“You did the right thing.”
“I was not fast enough,” Zef lamented as the human shook his head.
“Don’t do that to yourself. You did everything you could.”
“But the damage has already been done. I—we—saw things that cannot be unseen.”
Stepping nearly toe-to-toe barbs with Zef, Bryce jutted his chin fiercely. “But we’re still here, and we’re still standing.”
“Yes,” they whispered, straightening their spine. “We are survivors.”
Later, after they had cleaned up the demolished desktop, they sat at the table, pushing their helping of pot pie around their plate. Bryce wasn’t eating much either, picking at his food half-heartedly. They had spoken very little in the past hour, and Zef had half a mind to take their second shower of the day, in hopes that the physical act of washing themself would somehow erase the haunting memories.
