"Oh, Doctor, I just feel like I don't know who I am anymore."

Doctor Karen Matthews looked over at the young woman on the couch and thought ‘I know exactly what you mean’. This was their fourth session, and pretty much all she knew about her was that she called herself Teen Fire and liked to wear a very skimpy red bikini with matching latex stockings and gloves.

Just entering her details on to the practice registration system had been a nightmare. They had no name (she had eventually admitted that ‘Teen Fire’ was an alias or, as Doctor Matthews called it, a made-up name), no social security number, no home address, and her next of kin was listed as ‘Teen Frost’, another made-up name!

She had only taken the case because it looked so intriguing. The young woman seemed to have some kind of complex, the doctor just couldn't work out which one. Sometimes, when she talked about her ‘mission in life’, it seemed as if she had a God complex, while at other times, she portrayed herself as a martyr. Whatever was going on in her head, Karen noticed that she didn't seem to have any issues with walking around in broad daylight dressed like a stripper.

The problems had started just getting her to attend sessions, she seemed incapable of turning up for her appointments. It was only after lengthy talks with the girl weeks that the psychiatrist had realised that they would literally have to abduct her and bring her to the doctor's office bound and gagged. Karen had also had to adapt her psychiatrist’s couch by adding manacles to hold the girl’s wrists and ankles, with extra straps to hold her down and stop her fighting to free herself all the time.

The next problem had been to get her to talk, other than to say ‘I won't tell you anything, you sick, psychiatric supervillain, no matter how much you torture me!’ It had taken a decidedly sideways leap of logic and a suspension of her usual ethical mindset before the doctor had hit on the idea of attaching crocodile clips to the girl’s nipples and wiring her up to a car battery. It required a lot of juice and a lot of screaming before she finally broke down and would discuss her issues.

The use of the term ‘supervillain’ had given Karen another idea, but one which she was as uncomfortable with as she was electrocuting her patients. She now reluctantly dressed for all their sessions in the skin-tight black latex catsuit, stilettos and mask she was currently wearing. It was uncomfortable, felt very silly, and really didn't suit a woman in her late thirties, but it seemed to do the trick. Fire, as the doctor had come to think of her, seemed to respond best when forced into a situation of peril and faced with someone she saw as an ‘evil torturer’, as she often called the psychiatrist.

"My sister came up with the names, Teen Frost and Teen Fire," the bound woman began once the electric current was switched off, her tone a mixture of disgust and despair. "Teen Fire! Mid-twenties Fire more like! And then what? Over-thirty Fire? Midlife-crisis Fire? Dying-embers-of-the Fire?! Where will it all end?!

"My sister wants to go out every night, patrolling the streets on the lookout for criminals. Every night! I have a full-time job! I have a mortgage and bills to pay! My boss is always on at me for screwing up, and it's because I'm just so tired all the time!

"And for what? We never catch any of these criminals, they catch us! Every week, some new bunch of weirdos tying us up, torturing us, trying to kill us! It's so depressing! They treat us like animals, or like toys… sex toys, that's it, they treat us like sex toys!"

"Have you talked to your sister about how you feel?" Doctor Matthews interjected.

"She won't listen! She says it's our duty as superheroes to use our powers to fight crime! Supercilious bitch! She comes over all holier than thou, but I know she gets a huge kick out of it! "

"You think she takes sexual pleasure from being tortured?" The psychiatrist’s interest was piqued by this revelation.

"Oh, for sure! I love my sister dearly, but she’s a dirty little slut! She likes nothing better than being tied up, you can see that by the way she practically wets her panties whenever she's put in bondage, the tighter the better! She literally orgasms as soon as they start whipping her or chewing on her nipples!"

"And what about you, Fire?" Karen asked sharply, "do you achieve sexual gratification during these ‘torture’ sessions?"

"What?! No! Well… only when they… do stuff… sexual stuff… they force me… it's horrible… I hate it!"

"But you achieve orgasm?"

"I suppose so, yes, sometimes."

"How many times would you say you orgasm in a torture session?"

"I… it depends… a few maybe… but never as many as Frost!"

“Tell me about one of these… sessions.”

“Well… there was this one time… we were walking around the warehouse district… we thought this place would be deserted, but we could hear noises from inside. We decided to check it out, there was an open window so we sneaked in… but it was a trap! These guys jumped us and, pretty quickly, we were hanging in chains, legs and arms spread, wide open, surrounded by all these thugs…

“Then this guy, obviously the boss, steps forward. He had that look, the crazy, just-about-to-cackle-maniacally smile that they always have. And he starts monologuing, like they always do. Turns out he’s converted this disused warehouse into a high tech torture chamber, just for us! His twist – they always have a twist – was that it’s all controlled from a subscription website, where people can pay to activate the machines and have them do their thing to us while the whole world’s watching.

“So this mechanical arm reaches out and rips our uniforms to shreds, and then all hell breaks loose. Whipping, caning, shocks, insertions, we got it all! Hour after hour, day after day – it was just incredible… I mean incredibly awful!”

“How did you escape?”

“Blind luck, to be honest. A couple of tax inspectors just happened to be touring the area looking for unregistered businesses. They found us and released us. Then they made us fill in all this paperwork – now that was real torture!”

Karen decided to pursue another avenue.

"You said you were ‘superheroes’ earlier. Is that how you see yourselves?"

"We are superheroes, we have special powers!"

"And these ‘special powers’, they help you fight crime?"

"You'll get nothing more from me, you evil witch!" Fire screamed, struggling desperately to free herself.

Recognising this particular pattern of behaviour, Doctor Matthews picked up the flogger, which she kept by the couch for these moments when her patient became intransigent, and proceeded to spend the next ten minutes lashing the prone woman with it as hard as she could. She repeatedly thrashed her across her thighs, groin, stomach and breasts, only stopping when the screams became hoarse, the tears had completely soaked the girl’s face, and her arm was tired. She checked her watch.

"Now, I was asking you about the nature of your powers - do they help in your fight against crime?"

"Um… well… I guess no, not really, when you think about it. My sister and I can't fly, can't run at incredibly high speed, don't have superhuman strength or x-ray vision, but we can take as much pain as these freaks want to hand out without suffering any permanent injury. It's kind of a superpower…"

"So, you can withstand punishment and torture, and you go out each night, and you find people who will... punish and torture you. Interesting."

There was a long silence, then Fire’s face crumbled as if she was about to cry.

"Oh my God, are you saying that we go looking for trouble? It's true, isn't it? We go out there to get beaten up, and getting beaten up gives us our jollies! And we attract them to us, don't we? We're like catnip for sadists!

“The mayor should start a new advertising campaign based around us  - ‘You like beating up on girls? Come on down to the city, we've got girls you can torture all night and they'll just come back for more! And guess what? They'll even cum when you do it!’

“Fuck! I never realised just how sick this was!"

Karen sat back and breathed a sigh of relief - it seemed like they had finally made a breakthrough. But now she had to reassure her patient.

"Don't be too hard on yourself, Fire. Remember, if these ‘freaks’ weren’t attacking you, they would probably be attacking other women, women who could cope a lot less well than you do. You're doing a public service here, don't forget that."

"Maybe," Fire said pensively, "but I worry. What if we’re creating these sickos? If we didn't put ourselves out there, maybe these people would just stay home and fantasise about these things, never actually put them into practice. And anyway, once they've finished with us, what do they do next? Do they move on to other cities? Other women?"

There was another long silence as they contemplated this.

"I suppose this is the kind of thing that all superheroes worry about," Doctor Matthews mused, "whether superheroes require supervillains, and whether one begets the other." Teen Fire gave her a confused look.

"What you mean? What other superheroes? Superman? I don’t believe a man can fly, do you? Batman? Have you ever seen Gotham City or Metropolis on a map? On Google Earth? Me neither. Spiderman? Bitten by a radioactive spider?! Please! And I've been to New York City, I never saw some dude in spandex swinging around the skyscrapers!

“The Incredible Hulk? About as real as Bigfoot, and the only ‘incredible’ thing about him is those pants. If he were real, I’m sure we’d have seen at least one wardrobe malfunction over the years. Wonder Woman? A bull-dyke with big tits and hair who ties people up with her ‘lasso of truth’ – I’ve met a few of those!

"They're just in comic books, Doctor. No, for what it's worth, we are the only genuine superheroes, and we have to use our powers for good. But what is good? Sometimes, I think me and my sister are just torture whores, satisfying the sexual needs of a few crazy perverts downtown…"

"Well," the doctor said brightly, "I think that is something to explore next time."

“Is that it? Um… all this talk, it’s got me quite… I need a little help here, doctor… could you…?”

“I don’t prescribe drugs, I’m afraid, Fire, it’s not-“

“No, no! Not drugs, I need… you know what I need, doctor!” Doctor Matthews looked at the desperation on the girl's face, sighed and pressed a button on her intercom.

“David, could you step in, please?”

“Certainly, Doctor.”

David was her receptionist and, normally, quite a shy and reserved young man. For these sessions, however, he played his part by stripping to the waist, donning leather trousers and matching hood and wrist cuffs.

"I suppose you're going to use your henchman to soften me up," Fire murmured hoarsely, the arousal in her voice glaringly obvious.

"Yes, ‘henchman’," Karen said wearily, "take this young superhero out and make sure she comes to some harm. Oh, and as you go, send in my three o'clock appointment, would you?"

"Yes, boss," David dutifully replied, before unlocking the manacles and releasing the straps holding the girl down. As she struggled rather pathetically, making no real effort to escape, he bound her arms behind her back and applied the panel gag they kept handy for this point in the consultations. He then dragged her, kicking and screaming, out of the doctor's office.

"If you'd just like to go in, Mrs Somerfield," he said to the startled woman waiting in reception as he manhandled the bound and gagged patient past her, "the doctor will see you now."

He pushed the scantily clad girl onto the floor and tied her legs together at the ankles, knees and thighs, before suspending her by her feet from the ceiling fitting they had installed specially. He used the whip on her for a good fifteen minutes until she finally started to calm down, before leaving her hanging there while he got on with some work.

Several other patients came and went, all of them fascinated by the display in the corner of reception, some of them taking the offered flogger and using it to ‘treat’ the attractive redhead. Eventually, at the end of the working day, Doctor Matthews came out of her office, ready to go home.

"Is she still here?" she asked in surprise, watching for a few moments as the girl struggled vainly against the ropes, "what are you going to do with her?"

"A friend of mine is having his stag do tonight," the young receptionist replied, "I thought we’d save ourselves some money on a stripper and just take her along."

"Good idea," Karen responded, "why don't you get her sister’s number from the records and get her along too? It seems like they do everything together, especially if it involves sex and bondage."

"Yes, boss!"

Teen Fire let out a long, heartfelt moan. Was that in frustration at not being able to get free? Or in anticipation of the activities to come? As Doctor Matthews left the building, she wondered just how many expensive hours of therapy it would take to answer that question…

The End