Dahlia was going to show them. She was going to show them all.

Tonight was the final straw. When Mom and Dad first 'suggested' she move in with her sister Ronnie to cut down on college expenses (given how much her parents were helping out with those expenses, Dahlia knew just what they really meant) Dahlia had some hope that things would go well. A little hope. A tiny bit of hope. A faint, flickering spark of hope that at the very least, they wouldn't fight the same way they did when they were teenagers stuck together in the same tiny little house.

Hope died about three hours after Dahlia finished moving her stuff into the second (smaller, but who cared?) bedroom, and the two of them settled into the living room together to watch a little TV. And Ronnie put on something called 'Grave Robbers from Outer Space'. Five minutes later, Dahlia retreated to her bedroom for the rest of the night and still slept with the lights on. The last thing she saw as she left the room was Ronnie's obnoxious little smirk of triumph, the same nasty little grin that she always had at home when she got rid of her bratty little sister. And this time, Dahlia couldn't just go tell her parents.

After a week or so, it became pretty clear that Ronnie had gotten entirely used to having her very own place after two years of college, and she had no intention of changing her habits just because Dahlia moved in. Every night, she put on some godawful ultra-gory super-violent nightmare fuel of a movie, from 'Possessor' to 'The Stench' to 'Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man' to 'Mosquito' to 'Slasher in the Rye', and every night Dahlia hid in her bedroom and blasted music through her headphones to get away from the horrifying sound of screaming. She never came out until Ronnie turned out the lights and went to bed-the thought of accidentally glimpsing some scene of eyeball-searing terror was just too much for her. And Ronnie knew it.

Being a prisoner in her own bedroom because of her inconsiderate bitch of a sister was bad enough. But tonight...Dahlia's cheeks burned at the memory. Ronnie had a few of her friends over, and Dahlia thought that maybe, just maybe she could outmaneuver her big sister this once. She pulled out her copy of 'The Avengers' and suggested they put it in...and Greg smirked at Ronnie and said, "I don't know, I was really more in the mood for something like 'Zombie Blood Nightmare'."

And Sierra said, "Oh, that one's so scary-it's my favorite, Greg!" But she was looking at Dahlia when she said it. And then she laughed, and Greg laughed, and Britney laughed, and Ronnie laughed most of all. The laughter followed Dahlia as she fled to the comfort of her bedroom, fleeing the spooky music and the sight of a decaying hand bursting up from the cemetery ground. She turned up her music, but somehow she couldn't make it loud enough to drown out the memory of that laughter.

That was six hours ago. Six hours of sulking and fuming and feeling trapped in her own room and trying very hard to ignore the wailing and screaming that her earbuds couldn't entirely shut out. Six hours of thinking about the intolerable situation her life had become, and six hours of wondering how she could possibly handle another two years of this. Now the lights in the living room were all out, the fun was apparently all over for the night...and Dahlia had made up her mind. She was going to show them. She was going to show them all.

Probably.

Dahlia slipped on a pair of pajamas and crept out of the bedroom, moving stealthily enough to at least possess plausible deniability in the event that Ronnie came out and asked what she was doing up at 1 AM on a Friday night. She turned on the living room light, half-worried that she was going to find Sierra or Britney or Greg sleeping on the couch, but it looked like everyone had gone home. She had the living room to herself. Dahlia looked over at the great big DVD cabinet on the wall, each shelf stacked full of all the movies that gave Dahlia nightmares when she was a kid. Ronnie's collection, her pride and joy. It had taken her years to put it together. This was honestly the first time Dahlia had even considered the thought that it wasn't done solely out of spite.

She grabbed 'Zombie Blood Nightmare' off the shelf and put it in. Before she could stop herself, Dahlia pressed 'Play'.

She turned the volume down a few notches-if Ronnie came in and asked, "What are you doing?", Dahlia at least wanted to be able to pretend that she had just gotten up for a little late-night viewing and that it was a total accident that she'd disturbed her big sister. Not that she was secretly hoping Ronnie would find her in here, conquering her fears with the movie that all her sister's asshole friends had chased her away with or anything. Nope. Just her, enjoying a few harmless scares in the middle of the night.

The titles came up, and Dahlia bit her lip until it went white.

But she didn't turn it off. She couldn't. She had to get over her aversion to horror movies, or Ronnie would just keep holding it over her head. Dahlia was determined to sit here, to watch every second of 'Zombie Blood Nightmare', and to keep glutting herself on terror until it didn't affect her anymore. She would beat Ronnie at her own game, become a scary movie aficionado, and the next time her sister put in 'Flesh Devourers' or 'Stab Queens of Dorm Thirteen', she'd just sit there and nonchalantly-

A zombie's hand burst up from the ground onscreen, clutching wildly around as if it knew living flesh was nearby. Dahlia grabbed a pillow to stifle her screams.

Within moments, the solitary zombie had become a horde. They stumbled their way through the graveyard, finding a funeral in progress and swarming onto the mourners. Dahlia watched in stark terror as the men and women in mourner's black panicked and scattered, desperately fleeing the walking dead, but the zombies dragged them all down. Dahlia bit her knuckle, trying not to feel nauseous at the gory special effects of tearing and rending and eating...

Without warning, the scene shifted to another group of people, this time in a hospital. The recently deceased sprang back up off of the operating table, overwhelming doctors and nurses who had nothing more than scalpels to defend themselves with. The newly-made zombies tore into their victims, who rose as zombies themselves and burst out of the operating rooms to assault the sick and the weak, few of whom could even rise to run when the undead descended on them. There were more scenes of ripping flesh, blood everywhere and bodies shredded apart...

And then the film jumped again, this time to a boarded-up house and a mob of zombies breaking their way into it to murder their inhabitants. Dahlia stared at the film with almost as much confusion as horror; the scenes didn't even look like they were shot using the same camera, let alone from the same script. This was the longest she'd ever made herself sit through one of these movies, so she didn't have a whole lot to go by, but...was this all there really was to a horror movie? Just a bunch of random clips of people getting killed in disgusting ways? She'd been watching for almost ten minutes now, and she hadn't even seen a whiff of a plot. Just gory stuff.

And then the scene shifted again, and Dahlia got really confused.

This time, there weren't even any people on the screen. No zombies, either. Not even an establishing shot. It was just a mass of swirling colors, rippling slowly along from left to right as they shifted slowly from red to purple. The spooky organ music vanished too, replaced by a droning, ambient throb that sounded like the love child of New Age and techno. It was almost soothing after all the creepiness Dahlia had just witnessed.

She stared intensely at the screen, trying to figure out how any of this fit in with the horror movie she was gritting her way through just a few moments ago. Any second, she expected the mellow and meditative images to cut back to unspeakable body horror, but the colors kept up their lazy dance across her eyes as Dahlia kept watching. The purple gave way to a gentle, navy blue, which gradually rippled into a soothing forest green. Dahlia very cautiously relaxed, still half-believing that this was some sort of trick to get her guard down for the next jump scare.

But it didn't happen. The music just kept softly cooing in her ears, the electronic instruments taking on a strangely human quality in the way that they soothed Dahlia into peaceful relaxation. It sounded sort of like a lullaby, the kind you sang when you didn't know any actual lullabies but you wanted to put someone to sleep. She couldn't make out any words or anything, but it sounded calming nonetheless. Dahlia leaned back in her seat, the adrenaline of terror giving way to quiet relief.

It felt almost like the fear Dahlia felt earlier made the relaxation more intense; as the green smoothly melted into a cheery yellow, all the tension she had been holding in unwound with a whoosh of breath and Dahlia's muscles went slack as she watched the colors and listened to the music. She laid her head on the couch cushions, staring through half-lidded eyes as the rippling colors took on more and more intricate patterns with every passing moment. She tried to follow them, but her gaze kept tripping over itself and losing track of the motions. Dahlia couldn't bring herself to care, though. Not when it felt so peaceful simply to keep tracing them again from the center of the screen outward and soak up the words as they flashed past her.

There were words in the patterns, Dahlia realized. Not that she knew what they were-the patterns always seemed to draw her gaze to another part of the screen, so she only noticed them out of the corner of her eyes as she stared at the pretty swirling lights. By the time she noticed them, made a conscious effort to read them, they had faded away again. And then she would see another one exactly where she had looked away from. It felt almost like a game. Dahlia wished more movies had relaxing games like this.

The more she let herself relax, the easier it became to find the words on the screen. The trick was not to think about where they were going to appear next. Thinking about it just made her guess wrong, and then she missed what the words were saying. Dahlia let her eyes go unfocused, let her mind become empty, and soon she found that she automatically stared exactly where the words popped up as soon as they appeared. It was so easy to simply allow herself to reflexively gaze at the words as they flowed out of the soothing colors and directly into her brain.

'Obey', the patterns said. Dahlia smiled. It sounded almost like the music was purring the word into her ear as she watched it, repeating the text on the screen in a low, soothing voice that went straight into her head. Before she could really think about what it all meant, the swirling colors drew her eyes automatically to another word, this one saying, 'Blank'. Dahlia sighed as the music droned right along with it, feeling her thoughts grow hazy with peace and pleasure. It was so easy to stare and listen and...and obey. Dahlia couldn't think where she'd picked up that idea-her mind felt too blank-but it was true. Stare and listen and obey.

"Mindless," the voice in the music said. Dahlia found that the less she thought, the clearer it became. The less she cluttered up her blank brain, the easier it was to watch and read and listen to the voice. And that felt so nice. Dahlia felt so relaxed, so peaceful, so...so... "Hypnotized," the voice supplied, and Dahlia nodded vacantly as she integrated its word seamlessly into her own stream of thoughtless thoughts. She was hypnotized. She didn't know why she hadn't realized before.

"Vacant," the voice purred, each word making perfect sense to Dahlia as she stared glassily at the screen and soaked up its programming. The new word was "Programmed," in fact, and Dahlia felt so proud of herself for accepting it so quickly. She loved to accept. She loved to be "Compliant," she was happy to be "Docile," she was thrilled to be "Aroused." Every word felt better and better, almost sensual in the way it insinuated itself into her loose, lazy mind and teased out all her other thoughts to make room. Dahlia let those other thoughts go. She didn't need them.

"Think less," the music told her, and Dahlia felt her eyes glazing over as she did as she was told. "Obey more," it continued, a warm and soothing command in a voice that she almost felt like she could recognize, if only her mind wasn't so foggy and vacant right now. "Feel sexier," it promised her, and Dahlia rolled her hips back and forth in a gentle rhythm that pushed her pajama bottoms a little bit further down with each lazy motion. She wanted to give in, to obey the voice and let it reward her with arousal. She wanted to go deeper into its hypnotic spell.

"You are deeply hypnotized," the voice said, gentle but inescapably firm in Dahlia's ears. It made the idea sound so impossibly sexy that Dahlia couldn't help sliding her hand down between her legs and teasing her labia, stroking her fingers up and down the slick and sensitive flesh as she stared mindlessly at the screen. It never even occurred to her to resist. The voice and the swirling lights had entranced her so subtly that she never even noticed the way her thoughts were being seduced into compliance. Dahlia loved that so much.

"You are a good girl, and good girls obey," the voice continued, each word feeling like it was rubbing her clit. Dahlia couldn't help herself, she let out a tiny squeal of delight as she plunged her fingers deep into her wet cunt and began to spike them in and out, over and over, moaning in masturbatory bliss as the colors and the voice smoothed her mind away with pleasure. The sound of her shriek sounded familiar, but Dahlia couldn't think of a reason why. Because Dahlia couldn't think.

"No need to think, just go deeper into compliance," the voice went on, drawing more and more ecstasy out of Dahlia as she lost herself in the swirling patterns and let them brainwash her. "You are brainwashed. You are helpless. You must obey your owner." Dahlia nodded, her breath quickening as the pace of her fingering increased. She almost felt like she could see her owner in the tracery of light, the image locking into her mind as she raced along the edge of her climax and sank deeper into mindless trance.

"You cannot resist," the voice said, but the words seemed to fall into a gap in Dahlia's mind. She no longer knew what resistance was. It existed only as an abstract concept, something she might hear about but couldn't possibly comprehend. Only obedience made sense to her now. She wanted to be a good girl for her owner. She wanted to be blank, and m-mindless, and f-fuck and c-c-c-cummm...Dahlia's brain skipped like a scratched record as her fingers teased her closer and closer to release.

"Obey and cum," the voice said, and Dahlia let out an explosive grunt as her pussy clenched around her fingers and her eyes rolled back into her head with ecstasy. She lost herself in the euphoric bliss of orgasm, masturbating so mindlessly that she no longer even had awareness of her very self. Everything was a warm, white blur in her head, a continuous burst of pleasure that wiped away all her thoughts, her sense of time and place and even of Dahlia, as she came and came and came. She only regained even a fragmented consciousness when the voice commanded her to.

Dahlia opened eyes she hadn't realized she had closed to see the colors, once again swirling in front of her gaze. She almost fell right back into their captivating dance, but a blur of motion out of the corner of her eye interrupted the spell long enough to allow her to look over and see what else was going on in the room. The shock of what she saw almost snapped her out of trance completely.

"Greg!" she yelped, ineffectively tugging on her pajamas to try to at least cover a little of her exposed pussy. He was standing there, watching her, his eyes wide and hungry with excitement. She realized that she had no idea how long he'd been drinking in the sight of her lewd display. She realized she'd been putting on a lewd display to begin with. Dahlia's brain lurched into gear as she tried to piece together the events of the last...ninety minutes? Had it passed that quickly? "I, um, I-"

He broke into her scattered train of thought as easily as passing his hand through a cobweb. "It's okay," he said in a low, familiar voice. "You were just being a good girl."

"A...good girl..." Dahlia murmured, her eyes becoming glassy and unfocused once again. This time, though, it was Greg she was staring at. His face seemed so strangely familiar, like she'd been looking at it for ages. Like it was always there in the back of her head, even when she forgot to think about it. Because good girls remembered to forget sometimes. And forgot to remember. A slow, dreamy smile spread across Dahlia's face once more as her fingers began to tease her wet pussy all over again.

"That's my good girl," Greg said softly, letting his pants drop to the floor. He was so hard. Dahlia found herself salivating uncontrollably. "I wasn't really planning on taking on another good girl, but you look so pretty like this that I really can't say no."

Dahlia whimpered in pleasure at the praise, spreading her legs unthinkingly as Greg crossed the room and pulled her pajamas all the way down. "And neither can you," he said, climbing onto her lap and sinking his cock all the way into her slick, dripping cunt. "Isn't that right?"

"Yes, Master," Dahlia whispered, grinding onto him as her eyes slipped shut again. She couldn't think of anything else to say, but somehow that didn't seemed to matter. She didn't need to find words. She didn't even need to find thoughts. Dahlia was perfectly obedient now...and she was going to show him that.

Once and for all.

THE END