Commission for Toddlergirl
Star groaned tremendously and rubbed her aching muscles as she walked through the door to her newly acquired, and newly furnished, apartment. Despite her fatigue, the result of a long day getting used to her new station as commander of Alpha Team Military Communications Division 994, then an evening spent slugging brand new furniture up flights of stairs, boxes out of trucks, and dealing with burly males who considered the twenty five year old female lynx a liability, though she was perfectly strong and capable in her own right, she managed to be surprised by the large, empty spaces of the flat. She was, after all, a military woman, and one of four children in a military family. She had spent practically every night since graduation sleeping in a barracks bunk, in a room with thirty other people, and personal space a distant fantasy. Even before that, their parents had purposefully quartered her and her three older brothers in a small room with bunk beds to acclimate them for their inevitable service time. It had helped a great deal, Star imagined, though she had never known anything else to compare it to. 
Wiping back her short, shaggy hair, Star pulled off the tailored officer’s jacket and neatly folded it against the arm of a chair before hanging it away for the next morning, then repeating the process with the rest of her clothing, decades of discipline making sure everything was in its place before she gave herself free reign for the rest of the evening. It was eight PM by the modern, laser engraved steel wall-clock that she had been coerced into buying, and the last lights of the spring sun were disappearing over the horizon. 
The lynx’s stomach growled, and she realized she hadn’t eaten since early that morning, her trained reserve having let her ignore the discomfiture and loose herself in whatever task was at hand. But Star yielded to the basic need, seeing no reason to ignore it further, and dressed herself in some loose fitting casual clothing. Any normal person at this  time of night might have opted to wear simple undergarments, or to move about their home completely naked, but such was neither allowed officially nor tolerated unofficially in a barracks, and a lifetime of habit was not easily broken. 
“Now, what to eat,” Star said, looking over the modest, though all brand new kitchenware and appliances. Normally her army wage, even as an officer wouldn’t have been enough to pay for such things, all in pristine condition, but, since she was no longer in direct service housing, she had been pleasantly surprised by a sizable government housing subsidy, one which she had put to good use. To someone used to the confines of a training mess hall, having just only gotten off the boat from two years training in Germany a week ago, the spacious and clean kitchen seemed the height of luxury. Star wasn’t the best cook, but she could make something edible, not burn it, and not light the kitchen on fire. Luckily she didn’t have to, that night, as there was leftover delivery pizza they had bought for the moving crew that afternoon. Pizza, or junk food of any kind, had never made up a large part of Star’s diet, but she wasn’t as opposed to it as some, and took a few cold slices stacked on a box, not bothering with the plates in the cupboard. A napkin would do just fine. 
Eating mechanically, Star plopped down onto the brown leather couch, considered turning on the TV, then decided against it. The silence was comforting to the feline, and, as she chewed and swallowed the cheese and peperoni, contemplated the freedom that she would now enjoy. Her officer’s training had been grueling, and left almost no time to develop personal interests. The position of Communications leader, however, was more of a desk job than anything else. She spent a handful of hours a day observing incoming and outgoing orders from the local base, directed radio traffic, relayed messages, and made sure everyone knew what they needed to know, when they needed to know it. It was far from a combat post, and no mistake. She now worked basically nine to five, had weekends off and five and a half weeks paid vacation, and got paid more than all of her brothers for a fraction of the man-hours. Her conundrum was that she hadn’t the slightest inkling what to do with all that time; no hobbies, no organized interests, nothing to occupy all the stray hours.
“I could take up knitting,” Star said between bites, then almost choked as she doubled over laughing. No. Knitting was definitely not an option. Then she stopped, cheeks and nose going bright red with embarrassment, and swallowed the mouthful of pizza as something occurred to her. She could always try… that. 
The very idea of taking up her secret interest had been far beyond reason up until now, bound as she was by military protocol and procedure. But now… why not? There was nothing stopping her, and nobody around to catch her. She had a house to play in, a mansion with high walls, stern gates, and private gardens compared to the communal bunk rooms that she had spent all her life in. Why shouldn’t she?
Despite her conscious protests, Star’s legs stood her up, and started her walking towards the mildly out of date, though still perfectly functional computer that she had gotten on leave prior to her training on the continent. Setting her remaining slice of pizza down on the desk, she booted up the machine and opened up a search engine, in the query bar she typed diapers. 
As one might have expected, the results were mostly pertaining to absorbent infant undergarments, with one odd website reviewing a luxury mattress. Her blush deepening as she looked over all the playful, colorful tapes, cute prints and thick padding, she closed the tab, feeling butterflies starting to bubble up in her belly. The urge to search, however, would not be so easily dispelled, and she found herself clicking away into a new search engine tab, adult diapers. These results were substantially less terrific, detailing consumer products for old and injured people, promising modesty, silence and invisibility, despite the garments being an inch thick. She amended her search once again, adult baby diapers, and nearly whimpered with unconcealed embarrassment at the images that showed up. There had been a bubbly white furred feline, looking to be about Star’s age, all curled up around a puffy, pink diaper, looking like it had been taken right out of a case made for newborns, but sized up to fit an adult. 
Used to having someone ever looking over her shoulder, Star nearly panicked, and reached for the power button on her computer, then sighed deeply. “There’s nobody here, Star,” she said to herself, swallowing hard and opening a new tab, “just a few more searches, then I’ll go to bed.”
The picture of the girl in the diaper was too alluring for her to forget, the resemblance too uncanny to neglect. In fact she jumped back and forth between her results and the picture several times, having to convince herself thoroughly that the cute little girl wasn’t, in fact, her. It wasn’t, of course, the cat in the picture wasn’t even a lynx, and had none of Star’s coloration or markings. She finally stumbled upon a chat site of some kind. It was pretty minimalist, made up of a query bar into which the user was supposed to put their interests, and then it would link them with someone who had that same interest.
After a moment’s hesitation, Star sighed deeply, and typed in Diaper, Diapers, and adult baby, then hit the connect button. There was a few seconds delay as the website searched, and then a chat box covered the screen, a message that said You are now talking with someone who likes: diaper, diapers, and adult baby. A moment later, a message popped up in the box.
Hey, the other person said, and Star replied in kind.
Hi, Star replied, shivering a bit and blushing. She was about to talk to a complete stranger about something that, before that evening, she had kept entirely to herself. It was like a breath of fresh air to be able to let her thoughts out, but she clamped down on her emotions, lest the lead her to rash action. 
Asl? The stranger asked, and, after a quick google search to find out what that meant, she replied.
25, Female, U.K.  That must have been some kind of right answer, because the other person replied almost right away.
27 Male US. You wearing? He replied, taking the lynx aback slightly. She made the obvious reply.
Wearing what? She said, a silly grin on her face and with fingers that shook so much that typing was a pain.
Diapers, lol. They said, and Star’s butterflies doubled. She squeaked like a schoolgirl, and wiggled around in her chair happily. 
No, don’t have any, Star replied honestly, her face flushing so red by this point that it might be visible through her fur. The stranger’s reply came quicker than before.
So go get some, I’ll wait.
Star’s eyebrows went up instantly. He was telling her to go get diapers, and, totally out of her right mind, the lynx actually started weighing the pros and cons. There was nothing, nothing, that had more of an effect on the lynx than the concept of having a strong, dominant male ordering her around. Affectionately, of course, she was a feminist after all, but being expected to obey a powerful paternal figure had always gotten the feline wiggly with excitement. Up until that point, it had been nothing but a fantasy. A pipe dream, really, dreamt up during long, lonely nights after a hard day’s training, being put back into diapers and baby clothes by a dreamy, masculine husband, who’d love and treat her like his own baby daughter. Her rational mind, subverted by the base impulses of this fetish driven dream, could do nothing to stop her fingers as she typed in her reply: Okay, leaving now. Be back in 20 minutes.
There was a brief pause, then the person on the other end messaged her back, get the thickest they have, and buy a pacifier. A soft, feline mewing noise compulsively exited the lynx’s short muzzle, and her long-established hierarchical discipline told her that she had her orders, and now it was time to move out. 
Without the loss of a moment, or a drop of protest from her temporarily dormant pre-frontal cortex, Star grabbed a casual coat out of her closet, put on a pair of sneakers, and headed out the door, giddy and almost skipping with the happiness bourn of the release of energies that had been pent up and dammed in for years, growing and begging to be let out. She took the elevator down to the garage and hopped into her rental sedan. As she drove up and out of the concrete garage, Star suddenly came to the realization that she hadn’t the slightest clue where to get diapers. Her slowly awakening brain overcame the impulses briefly, telling her to go back upstairs and do some research before gallivanting out into the evening looking for somewhere that sells them, but a glance at the clock put a stake into that plan. She had half an hour before everything closed, there wasn’t time. 
“Alright… pharmacy,” Star said to herself, taking out her phone and searching for local maps. There was one within a ten minute drive, one of those big, specialty stores for people with disabilities. She blushed again, remembering the plain, unprinted medical diapers in comparison to the specialty ones that the feline girl had been wearing, then reconciled herself with the knowledge that, printed or not, the pharmacy diapers would probably work fine for her purposes. 
Equal parts excited and scared, the lynx began following the blinking lights on the map. Despite the application’s claim that it would be a ten minute drive, Star managed the trip in five. Whether by haste and eagerness, or by the relative absence of traffic, Star wasn’t sure. But, as she pulled into the driveway of the Wellness Warehouse, she could barely contain her enthusiasm. This was it! In a few minutes, she’d be able to go home, feel the soft, fluffy padding around her waist that she’d always dreamed about, and be ordered around by the daddy she’d always wished she had. Of course, her perception of the situation was viewed through the glass of someone who’d been denied this sort of release for decades on end, and it almost certainly wouldn’t be all that she wanted to imagine, but that never occurred to her dopamine flooded brain, which, try as it might, simply couldn’t see any downside to the situation. At least until she got inside.
Star walked through the double sliding glass doors of the pharmacy and looked around. The first thing she noticed wasn’t the aisles of products, but the people perusing them. There must be twenty people in here! She said, swallowing hard and breaking out in a cold sweat. If anyone I know sees me in here… She shuddered to imagine what would happen if tale of her buying adult diapers got out. There would be no official ramifications, of course, but the stigma attached to it in a heavily social profession such as the military would be more than she could likely bare. 
Her enthusiasm suddenly curbed in the extreme, Star made a great show of seeking out all of the other people in the store, just to make sure there was nobody that she knew, had ever met, or even passed on the street. And I thought this would be easy… She thought rolling her eyes as she looked down each of the aisles, then came to a stop as she found the section labeled, sexual health, feminine hygiene, incontinence, she of course knew that incontinence was  a fancy term for needing diapers, likely to help the self-esteem of those who did. And it was right next to the tampons and pads, which, surprisingly enough to Star, provided a perfect cover for her while she sent subtle glances at the huge wall of adult diapers in various thicknesses, sizes, colors, and shapes. The lynx breathed deeply, knowing that the hardest part was still yet ahead of her. The store had no self-checkout, so she’d be stuck going to an actual live teller. The very thought made her squirm, but her rational side took over quickly enough. Keep your head on, Star… she thought, breathing deeply, this is a pharmacy, they probably have people buying this stuff all the time. 
Despite her hesitation, Star remembered what the man on the internet had told her: get the thickest they have, and buy a pacifier. The pacifiers were by the front desk, and would be on her way out. Girding her loins, Star did what she could to steady yourself, “Star, you placed first for calm under fire,” she whispered reassuringly to herself, “this is a piece of cake.” Acting before she could stop herself, the lynx shamelessly walked over to the wall with the diapers, pulled a 30 diaper pack of the thickest padding they had in her size, then started towards the counter, feeling as though every eye was pointing at the back of her head. 
“Hi, how can I help you?” a smiling teenage tiger girl said from behind the one manned counter as Star walked up with her diapers and the rosy red pacifier that she had picked up on her way, and, like that, her cool broke.
“Oh, uh… Hi!” Star said, with a smile so phony that it might as well have been made of plastic, and mechanically hefted her purchases onto the counter. “I’d like to purchase these things… err, please.” 
“Sure thing,” the other feline said, getting out the scanner and running it over the barcode on both the diapers and the pacifier while Star blushed ruby red and scratched the back of her head nervously.
“They’re uh… they’re for my father,” Star said unnecessarily, “he’s in the hospital.” If the awkward way in which the lynx had delivered the obvious excuse didn’t make it clear she was lying, one glance at the medium 34 inch waist red feline diapers for women showed her story for the fiction it was. 
The tiger raised an eyebrow, Star realizing she should have kept her mouth shut, “and the pacifier?” the teller asked incredulously.
“Erm…” Star flushed with color and shut her eyes, knowing how badly her awkward excuse had backfired, “babysitting?” she said, more as a question than a reply. 
“Uh-huh?” the tigress replied, obviously not convinced, but not willing to press the subject further. “Twenty two pounds.”
Star paid with cash without another word, nearly whimpering with embarrassment as she bagged her diapers and pacifier and hurried out the door again, able to feel the eyes of the teller and nearby customers aimed at her back as she left. 
“I’m NEVER doing that again,” Star said, just to drive the point home as she got back into her car, depositing the bag onto the passenger seat before driving back to her apartment complex, most of the excitement now gone. The walk back up to her apartment gave her a few minutes to calm down, which physical exertion often did, and some of her longing for the moment began to rekindle. After all, wasn’t a bit of public humiliation worth the awesome payoff that was about to occur? By the time she reached her door, Star was almost as excited as she had been upon leaving, and pranced over to her computer with the bag, grinning like a small child.
Partner has disconnected. Said the words on screen, the site’s message clock telling her that it had been sent only a few minutes after she had left, and the lynx slumped totally. 
“Well, that’s a buzzkill…” she said, and looked down at the bag with the diapers and pacifier in it. She could still put one on, try it out for size, but without the dominant male figure enforcing her obedience, the scenario seemed half baked, like nachos and cheese. On their own, one was a bland, tasteless cracker, and the other a goopy yellow paste, but together they made a coveted dish to be shared around at parties and great nights out everywhere. With half the parties missing, half the pleasure was gone, and the diaper’s appeal to Star suddenly ceased to exist. She dropped the bag onto the couch, reminding herself to hide the contents for later. Right now, she was too tired to even consider finding someone else online. It would have to be some other time.