Alert: This story takes place after Bender's Game. If you haven't seen that, you might want to steer clear of this story for now.

Better Than Normal

by Deb H

"Turanga Leela?" the nurse said.

"That's me," Leela answered.

She got up, and I did too.

"Well, I guess I'll see you in a couple of hours," she said to me.

"Leela, wait."

I took her hands, and she turned to face me. Her beautiful eye looked right at me.

My knees kind of buckle whenever she looks at me. Depending on how she looks at me, that can either be because of attraction or because of fear.

Even now, after we've known each other for years, I'm still not sure exactly what color her eye is. It usually looks like a really dark brown, but sometimes I swear I can see a little bit of purple in there. It's a deep purple.

Regal purple, it seems like.

I must have been staring, because I suddenly heard her yell, "Fry!"

"Aah! What?"

"Can I go now?" she asked, with a touch of impatience.

I asked her, "Look, are you sure you want to do this?"

She looked away from me for a moment. Then she looked at me again and said, "Look, I... we can argue forever about whether all that shit was real or not. I don't care one way or the other. It felt real. That's what matters to me. It felt real, and it felt... it felt right. I think that's how I'm supposed to be. I think that's..."

She pulled her hands away and waved them around, like she couldn't think of the right words.

"Yes, I'm sure," she eventually continued. "I've never been more sure of anything."

"That's what you said when you entered that short story contest," I replied.

"That's different. For one thing, they were completely biased against historical detective romance with a conspiracy subplot written in stream of robot consciousness. For another thing, no offense, but I've got better help this time." She tilted her head toward the hallway that the nurse had come from.

I said, "Well, I liked your story."

"I know," she said.

"Well, what if something happens to you?" I asked. "What if something goes wrong? What if you end up all... you know... freakish? Mutanty?"

"Fry!" she hissed at me, in alarm.

Nobody knows she's a mutant, I had to remind myself. If they find out, they'll send her to live in the sewers.

We both looked around, but nobody seemed to have heard us. We both relaxed a little bit.

"Wait," I said. "I had one of those... you know. Smarty-persony-thingys."

"A thought?"

"No, not that. Like a thought, but not as smart. Aren't they gonna find out? About you? While they're..." I waved my arms around, imitating what they were about to do to her.

The way I pictured it, at least. Based on how Leela was staring at me, I guessed that my guess wasn't close at all.

She shook her head and answered, "The doctors? They're idiots. Smart idiots whom I'm trusting with my life, but still, idiots. I've been to doctors plenty of times. They've never figured it out."

She leaned into my ear and whispered, "They still think my DNA is all fucked up because I'm an alien."

"Ahem," the nurse said.

"Hold your lanterns, Nightingale-o-tron!" Leela snapped at her. "I'm coming!"

Leela turned back to me and said, "I'll be fine. All right? Come see me when they're done. It'll be awesome."

She gave me a hug. As she pulled away, she ran her hand through my hair.

I wobbled again.

She backed away, a smile on her face. Then she suddenly looked down at her feet.

Looking up at me once more, she said, "You know, this is the last time I'll be doing this."

"You'll still be able to do that," I told her.

"Yeah, but not like this," she answered. Then she did a pirouette.

I smiled and said, "You might be able to do that too."

"I'd fall over trying."

She held up her hands and waved goodbye.

I waved back.

The nurse led her down the hallway. They turned a corner, and Leela was gone.

It was more than just a couple of hours.

While I was waiting, I talked to Bender twice – he was visiting all my favorite bars and sending me pictures of all the hot girls he found, plus the hot fembots, as well as a couple of things that I couldn't tell if they were hot girls or hot fembots. I read all the ads in all the magazines. I paced around the room until they directed me to the pacing groove in the corner.

Finally, a little past midnight – why did Leela insist on scheduling her appointment after work on a Friday? – a doctor walked into the waiting room and said, "Mr Fry?"

My heart thumped.

"Over here," I said.

"Leela's ready to see you now."

My heart played the percussion track from the music I heard at Bender's bar.

"Okay," I said in a voice that sounded scratchier than my normal voice. Also higher.

I followed her down a hallway.

I stammered, "So... um... how did it..."

The doctor looked over at me. Then she smiled and said, "It went very well. She's doing just fine."

My heart played the end of the 2001: A Space Odyssey music.

"Oh. That's good."

I figured out a long time ago that I don't get nervous when I'm in danger. I get nervous when Leela's in danger. She's been to hospitals a few times, and I worry every time. So this time, I wanted to take her here, and, to my surprise, she accepted.

I tried to figure out if that meant anything, but I was pretty sure it didn't. I've never been able to figure out how she acts. Sometimes she's the most caring person I've ever seen, and sometimes she wants to crush my throat. A lot of times there's just a couple of minutes in between.

She never wants to go out with me, but then when I start going out with some other girl, she acts all jealous. A few times she actually tried to break up my relationships. I don't know why she bothers, because my relationships never last long anyway. If she would just wait a little while, they break up on their own.

I keep telling myself that she's just trying to protect me. She doesn't want me to get too close to a girl who's going to break my heart.

But she's never realized that I am too close to a girl who breaks my heart.

The doctor said, "It took a little longer than we expected, but she's doing fine. Everything's working correctly."

I looked at the doctor and said, "You're, like, the buffest doctor I've ever seen."

She answered, "Well, I should be. We needed some strong hands for this one. After all, I'm a two time Dr Olympia."

"Cool."

I had thought Leela was the strongest woman I'd ever seen, until I saw the Amazonians. Then I had thought they were the strongest women I'd ever seen.

This doctor looked like if you scaled down an Amazonian to normal size, but gave her the same size of muscles. It looked like I could crawl through one of her sleeves. And it looked like Hermes could crawl through one of her pant legs.

I asked her, "So... um... do you have..."

"A boyfriend?" she asked. "No, not for a while. The last two guys I was with, well, they both suffered from dislocated pelvises."

"Oh," I squeaked.

"Why?" she asked me. "Is there something wrong between you two?"

"No, no, no, no, no, no," I said. "We're just friends."

I wondered if I sounded nervous.

"Oh, I see. Well, here we are." The doctor opened the door and said, "I'll leave you two alone for a little bit."

"Okay."

I stepped inside, and the door closed behind me.

"Hey," Leela said.

"Hey," I said.

"So... what do you think?"

She was lying on her side, facing toward me. She had on her usual tank top, but it fell loosely at her waist. Below that, things started to get a little funny.

It wasn't quite like I had seen her before. Her coat (Pelt? Is that what they call it?) was kind of a pale brown, like when I pour milk into my coffee. Her front hooves, grayish black, hung over the side of the hospital bed. The hair got longer on the lower part of each leg, below the ankle, until it was a tan mop enshrouding each hoof. I'd seen boots like that, even back in my time, and I always liked it. I kept hoping Leela would buy those kind of boots some day, but it never happened.

Her lower body extended away from me, right off the back of the bed. There was another bed behind it, at an angle. It looked like it had been pushed into the room later. And on this bed was the back half of Leela's lower body.

The one muscle that stood out, the one that I think is called the quadriceps, in humans anyway, bulged out of the front of the leg that I could see – there had to be another one on the other leg underneath her. Below that, the rest of the back legs looked much like the front legs, with the same longer hairs covering the same dark gray hooves. From her new ass extended a purple ponytail, almost identical to the one on her head.

Then I noticed that she was talking.

"You don't like it. Oh lord, you don't like it. You're gonna go back and tell everyone all about how I turned myself into a freak. Even more of a freak than I already was." She started twisting her ponytail – her original one – in her hands and went on, "And Bender's gonna start calling me 'Big Hooves', and Amy's gonna bring me a stack of fluorescent tops because she thinks I have to draw attention away from my freakish centaur body, and guys are gonna stay away from me even more and the only kind of guys I'll be able to find are centaur guys who only care about racing and staying in shape and don't care about environmental issues or social reform or laser gun control or anything and I won't even be able to see my parents again because I can't fit in a manhole! Fry, I can't fit in a fucking manhole!"

She had my jacket in her fists, shaking me back and forth as she gave me a desperate, wild eyed stare.

I did the only thing I could think of. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and held her close to me.

It must have been the right thing to do, because she released her grip on my jacket and slipped her arms around my waist. She pushed her forehead against me, just below my shoulder, and started to weep.

"Shhhh..." I said. "You'll be fine. Nobody's gonna call you 'Big' anything. They're just gonna call you Leela. Or is it 'Leegola' now?"

She sniffled, loudly. "No, it's still Leela."

"Then that's what they'll call you. And if they don't, they'll have to get through me."

"That won't stop them," she said. "But it's nice that you care."

"Having second thoughts?" I asked her.

"Yeah."

"I know what that's like."

"Fry, you don't even have first thoughts," Leela replied, her head still resting against my shoulder.

"Well, I mean, when I came to the future, there were times when I wished I hadn't."

She grabbed my shoulders and pushed herself up so that she could look up at me again. There were tears in the corner of her eye.

She said, "That was an accident. You fell into the chamber. It's not like you could have decided not to."

"I just did."

"What?"

I said, "I just decided not to fall into the... the thing. The magical mystery freezer. I just decided not to fall into it."

She started to laugh a little bit.

"What?" I asked her.

"No, nothing," she said. "It's just that you always seem to have a way. You can always make me feel less stupid."

She leaned into my shoulder again.

"But I'm still never going to be able to get into the sewers again," she said.

"We'll figure something out," I told her. "We'll get Scruffy to build an elevator in the Planet Express building."

"Who's that?"

"Scruffy. That guy we work with."

"Who is he?"

"You know. The bureaucrat."

"That's Hermes," she said.

"Oh. I mean the doctor."

"That's Zoidberg."

"The delivery boy."

"That's you."

"The guy from The King and I."

"That's Yul Brynner's head."

"Oh. Does he even work at our company?"

"No," she said. "Remember? We fired him three months ago?"

"We did? Why?"

"He was fraternizing with Amy. Remember?"

"We fired him for that?" I asked. "We don't always fire people who do that. Like when I did that."

I felt her arm tense up.

"That would have been a good time to stop talking, right?" I asked her.

"Right."

She lifted herself up again.

"Fry," she said, "be honest this time. What do you think?"

"About firing Yul Brynner's head?"

"About me."

"Leela, you know what I think about you," I told her.

She looked down at her new body.

"You really don't like it," she said. She said it softly, like it was to herself.

"Wait," I said. "That's not what I meant. I think it's... I think maybe you're right. I think maybe it really is you."

"Do you think so?"

"Yeah, maybe."

"'Maybe'?" she asked. "Come on, Fry. What do you think, really?"

I looked down at her again.

"Come on," she prodded. "I want to hear it. Honest truth."

"Honest?"

"Totally honest."

"You won't get mad?"

"I won't get mad."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

"Okay, fine," I said. "I think..."

"Yeah?"

"I think I'm going to miss that ass."

She leaned back in her bed, a smile on her face. She was looking up at the ceiling, and I couldn't understand her expression.

Finally, she looked at me again and said, "Fine. Don't tell me."

I looked away from her.

I couldn't explain to her that I wasn't making up something to make her feel better. That was what I thought of her. I thought her ass was perfect. I couldn't understand why she wanted to take it away.

But if she did want to, I was behind her all the way. I've told Leela plenty of times that I would do anything at all for her. She did love being a centauress, and her happiness was all that I could ask for. And if that meant that I could never again see that impossibly firm ass in those really tight pants, then that was all right.

Another thing I couldn't tell her was that Amy was waiting for a text message from me. Amy was standing by for word that the surgery was successful, ready to install the upgrades to the Planet Express ship that she had worked out in secret from Leela.

Since it was well past midnight, Amy was probably in bed right now, or at a bar trying to fill her head with alcohol in hopes of forgetting about Kif, but when she was awake, sober, and had her own pants on, she would go in and replace the pilot's seat, bringing in a custom model that folded flat onto the deck. Leela would lay her horse body on top of the folded seat, so that her upper body was at the same height as if she was sitting in the chair like normal. There was also a harness that Leela could strap into for liftoffs and landings.

Amy was also planning to replace the head in Leela's bathroom, but she had been complaining for days about how they don't make toilets for horses. In fact, she had been complaining so much that we were running out of things to pretend that we had been talking about when Leela walked in. Before Leela and I went to the hospital, Amy and I had reached "Which would you rather lose on: The $100,000 Tetrahedron or Bowling for Bachelor Chow?"

I would totally rather lose on The $100,000 Tetrahedron. Amy thought that would make you seem stupid, but in my case, that ship has already launched.

After I sent the text to Amy – "leelas fine, looks great, well, weird but great" – I yawned.

"Are you tired?" Leela asked me.

"Yeah. Kind of."

Dr Snapyourpenisinhalf peeked into the room and said, "How are you feeling, Leela?"

"Just fine," she answered. "You wanted me to stay overnight, right?"

"Just for observation," said the doctor. "If there's still nothing wrong, you can go home in the morning. Mr Fry, if you'll come back to the waiting –"

"Can he stay with me?" Leela asked.

The doctor smirked, just a little bit. "I suppose so. If you're already prepared to test out your new equipment."

I turned back to Leela. Her face was turning red.

She answered the doctor in a calm, flat tone. "He's not going to be testing any equipment."

Then Leela looked up at me and added, "Right, Fry?"

I gulped. "Um, right."

When her jaw is set, and her ice voice is on, I've found that it's best for me to just agree with Leela.

"Okay," the doctor said. "Good night."

The door slid shut behind her.

"I feel bad," Leela said. "I'm taking up two whole beds, and all you have is that chair over there."

I looked.

"It's a nice chair," I said. "It has... like... feet."

"Here," she said. "Let me move my hindquarters out of the way." She moved her hind legs and her horse ass toward one end of the bed that they were lying on. "How's that?"

"How's what?"

"Take the other end," she told me.

I stepped around the pair of beds and came to the top of the second one. With her back legs hanging off the bottom, I could sit on the top.

"Can you sleep like that?" she asked me.

"Don't twist around like that," I said to her. "It makes my back hurt just watching you do it."

"It feels fine to me," she said. "Is that enough room? I might be able to move them a bit more, but then my legs would be falling off, and twisting like that would hurt."

I leaned back.

"Yeah, I think I have enough room," I said. "Can I... um... can I, you know, use your..."

"What?" she asked.

"You know." I looked down at her horse body and put my hand, tentatively, on her horse flank, just ahead of her horse leg.

"Can you use my ass as a pillow?" she said. "Sure. Of course."

"Okay." I settled down with my head where I had put my hand, facing toward Leela and away from her ass.

Well, toward Leela's human part. The ass is still part of her too.

It doesn't look like it, and it doesn't feel like it, and it doesn't really smell like it either.

But I guess I'll get used to it. I got used to everything else, after all. I got used to the fact that it only takes a few minutes to get to Mars. I got used to the fact that nonprofit organizations give Earthican TV networks report cards on how many alien characters they have in their shows. I got used to the fact that girls have remote controls in their purses with OVULATE buttons.

So I pulled up my legs onto my half of the bed and said, "Good night."

"Good night, Fry." She turned away, but then she said, "Aw, dammit."

"What?"

"One of us is going to have to get the lights."

"Not it," I said.

She glared at me over her shoulder.

Then she lifted up one of her front hooves and, carefully, maneuvered it to the wall next to the door. It wobbled around near the switch and finally flipped it.

"Ha!" Leela said in the dark. "Eat that, human lower bodies!"

"Good night, Leela," I said.

"Good night."

As I was trying to get to sleep on her back, there were so many things that I wanted to ask Leela. But all the brochures said that I should wait for a little while and let her adjust before I started to pepper her with questions.

Leela had given us brochures from a group called the Earthican Centaur Society with titles like "Centaurs in the Workplace", "So Your Friend Wants to Be a Centaur", and "Centaurs are Real? That Totally Fucks My Mind". After Leela had left one night, I went to their website and printed a copy of one called "So Your Friend Whom You Secretly Love but Can't Say Anything for Fear of Destroying the One Friendship That Means More to You Than Anything Else You've Ever Come Across in Your Entire Life Wants to Be a Centaur".

Amy was reading it when I came in the next morning. She looked up at me in surprise and said, "Oh. Um, this is yours, right?"

"Yeah." She gave it back to me, and I asked her, "What were you reading it for?"

"Just... just curious."

"Ow!"

"Hey," Leela said looking down at me. "Sorry."

"What happened?" I asked her. "I dreamed that I fell off your ass and landed on the floor."

"Yeah, it... wasn't a dream."

I got up and asked her, "What time is it?"

"Just after eight," she said. "How did you sleep?"

"Pretty good. Can I use your ass as a pillow every night?"

With a sigh, she responded, "Keep dreaming."

"I will."

Then I saw the table next to Leela's bed.

I pointed to it and asked, "Hey, are those...?"

"Hm?" She turned her upper body – with some effort – and looked at the things sitting on the table behind her.

She said, "Yeah, I guess I'm not going to need those any more."

Her boots sat on the table. Underneath them was a pair of something white and cottony. Underneath that was something black, fabricy, and foldedy.

"So, umm..." I cleared my throat. "What are... what are you gonna do with them?"

"Toss them out, I guess."

Then there was a pause.

"Why?" she asked, with more than a hint of wariness in her voice.

"Well, I... that is... um..."

She sighed and turned to face me again. "Fry, we both know what you're going to aks," she said sternly. "So just come out and say it, instead of acting all flustered like Kif Kroker."

"Can I have the pants?" I blurted out.

"Well, that's a surprise," she answered. "I thought you'd want the underpants."

"Do I get a discount on the combination?"

"What are you going to do with them? Find a DNA sample and have the Professor clone me?"

"He can do that?" I asked, my mind suddenly filling up with possibilities.

"Zombie Jesus," she sighed.

"That's a lot better than the idea I had," I said. "Which was to stare at them, and sometimes smell them, and then go back to staring at them, and then, just every once in a while, let myself listen to them. Not too often. Maybe once every three months. That's it. No more than that. Two months."

Her anger slowly rising, she said, "Even if you did clone me, which you could never do without me putting a hoof up your ass, it would be eighteen years until the clone was legal. What would you do until then?"

"Probably stare at your pants, and sometimes smell them, and then go back to staring at them. Also, masturbate."

Her face registered disgust as she held her hands up in front of me. She said, "Way more than I needed to know."

I sat down on the edge of her bed.

She said, "So you're not happy with this."

I asked her, "Are you happy with it?"

"I aksed you first."

"I asked you second."

She turned away from me and clutched her pillow, saying, "If you don't like it, if you think it was a stupid idea, just say so. You don't have to spare my feelings."

I looked down at my shoes, trying to figure out how to say what I was thinking.

"Leela," I said to her, "I can't lie to you. It'll take some getting used to."

I put a hand on her shoulder and let it trail down her arm. When it reached her hand, I tried to pull it away from the pillow.

She let it go and took my hand, looking up into my eyes.

I realized that I had never seen her this exposed. This vulnerable. This afraid.

"But if you like it," I continued, "I like it."

"Really?"

"Really."

I could see her shoulders relax. Then she put her arms around my waist.

"Ahem," I heard behind me.

Dr Snapyourpenisinhalf said, "How do you feel, Leela?"

"Just fine."

"Have you tried out your body yet?"

"I told you, we weren't fooling around!"

"I meant, have you stood up?" the doctor asked. "Walked around?"

"Oh," Leela answered. "No, I haven't."

I got out of her way, and Leela pushed the front of herself off the one bed. Then she slid the back of herself off the other bed.

Before, Leela and I had been about the same height. Now her breasts were right in front of my face.

Some parts I would get used to faster.

Leela walked around the limited confines of the hospital room for a few minutes while the doctor waved a detector thing across her body. Leela tried lifting up both her back legs, then both her front legs, then both her left legs, then both her right legs. Leela sat on the floor, bent her upper body forward and back, twisted it to the left and right, and jumped up and down.

Finally the doctor said, "Looks good. I'm going to finish my report. You can check out whenever you want."

"Okay," Leela said. "Thanks, Dr Cole."

The doctor left, and Leela stretched her arms behind her head.

Then she opened her eye and looked down at me.

"So, ready to go?" she asked.

"Sure."

"Okay." She leaned forward a bit and held her hands together, fingers enmeshed, at the level of her horse knee. She said, "Saddle up."

"What?"

"Come on, Fry. I'm faster than you now. I'm not gonna sit around waiting for you to catch up."

"So... I can ride you?"

She smiled and said, "Of course you can."

As I put my foot in her hands, she said, "Two things."

"Yeah?"

"One, no going around telling everyone that you got to 'mount' me. Two... other foot."

I looked down.

"Oh."

I put my left foot in her hands and grabbed onto the back of her shoulders. She lifted me up, and I swung my right leg over her flank and sat down on her back.

"Giddyup!" I shouted, kicking her with my heels.

She twisted around and yanked my collar. "You do that one more time, I'm bucking your ass onto the pavement. Clear?"

"Hggkgclear," I said through strained throat.

She let go of my shirt and faced forward again. "Okay, hang on."

She walked out the door as I wrapped my arms around her waist.

"Can we get something to eat?" I asked her.

"Sure. Where do you want to go?"

"You pick," I said.

"Someplace with natural foods," she answered. "Like oats and carrots."