A small WMD (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
miniroth) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
childrenofbahamutlogs2024-12-01 06:45 pm
miniroth) wrote in childrenofbahamutlogs2024-12-01 06:45 pm
Entry tags:
In which there is messiness.
Who: Smallerroth, Angeal; maybe Olderroth and Genesis if they wish
What: Tending to the inconveniences of new limbs.
Where: At home!
When: First week of December.
Warnings: Blood, violence .. kind of, self harm, kind of, homebrew cosmetic surgery, topics of self harm likely. Body horror, gore.
The faerie festival was good for at least a couple things, one of which being the cup that kept refilling with strange, sweet drink that numbed the aches deep in his bones and down uncomfortable lines through his back. Most of the ache, he was pretty sure by its familiarity, meant he might finally be on his way to working to matching his future self's considerable height though that would still likely take a couple of years. But the pain down his back was of a different sort, and over the course of the last week more and more difficult to ignore.
He could, if he twisted carefully to look in a mirror, see the long distended shapes under his skin.
As they grew, and nerves and muscle with them, his habitual knitted turtleneck became unbearable, and then the jacket as well, unless he made ample use of the cup of pain-dulling nectar. Skin stretched to accommodate but didn't break, and waking in the morning to being able to move the things on his back, feel through the things growing under his skin, rub them against the inside of his back and the nauseating mix of sensations that caused as even the barest restless twitch lifted his skin away from muscle and fat in painful wrenches. It was like being skinned from the inside.
The nectar makes it bearable. For a while. But inspection morning and evening made nothing obvious about skin getting ready to split, and the urge to twitch the things he could feel, both under skin and wrapped over other, hidden skin was beginning to get maddening. Enough that a pair of stolen belts is used to keep them ratcheted tight and immobile one late morning, jacket carefully shrugged on, more faerie drink to dull how incredibly unpleasant that is, and slip quietly from the room he'd taken over as his own.
Ordinarily he'd have long since left the house in the relentless search for things to do. This time it's to pick his way delicately through, checking the most obvious places first in tracking down Angeal, the skinning knife he took with him when running trap lines still sheathed in one hand.
He would not be, if he knew the history Angeal had with his own changes. What he knows is that the SOLDIER has a very steady hand with a knife, and that his older self trusts him absolutely. Genesis he'd never seen wielding small sharp objects - swords certainly, but this required fine control that the redhead surely had, but ...what if he didn't? His elder also, might refuse, well aware of how uneasy the thought alone of handing someone a knife and asking them--
...It had to be enough.
What: Tending to the inconveniences of new limbs.
Where: At home!
When: First week of December.
Warnings: Blood, violence .. kind of, self harm, kind of, homebrew cosmetic surgery, topics of self harm likely. Body horror, gore.
The faerie festival was good for at least a couple things, one of which being the cup that kept refilling with strange, sweet drink that numbed the aches deep in his bones and down uncomfortable lines through his back. Most of the ache, he was pretty sure by its familiarity, meant he might finally be on his way to working to matching his future self's considerable height though that would still likely take a couple of years. But the pain down his back was of a different sort, and over the course of the last week more and more difficult to ignore.
He could, if he twisted carefully to look in a mirror, see the long distended shapes under his skin.
As they grew, and nerves and muscle with them, his habitual knitted turtleneck became unbearable, and then the jacket as well, unless he made ample use of the cup of pain-dulling nectar. Skin stretched to accommodate but didn't break, and waking in the morning to being able to move the things on his back, feel through the things growing under his skin, rub them against the inside of his back and the nauseating mix of sensations that caused as even the barest restless twitch lifted his skin away from muscle and fat in painful wrenches. It was like being skinned from the inside.
The nectar makes it bearable. For a while. But inspection morning and evening made nothing obvious about skin getting ready to split, and the urge to twitch the things he could feel, both under skin and wrapped over other, hidden skin was beginning to get maddening. Enough that a pair of stolen belts is used to keep them ratcheted tight and immobile one late morning, jacket carefully shrugged on, more faerie drink to dull how incredibly unpleasant that is, and slip quietly from the room he'd taken over as his own.
Ordinarily he'd have long since left the house in the relentless search for things to do. This time it's to pick his way delicately through, checking the most obvious places first in tracking down Angeal, the skinning knife he took with him when running trap lines still sheathed in one hand.
He would not be, if he knew the history Angeal had with his own changes. What he knows is that the SOLDIER has a very steady hand with a knife, and that his older self trusts him absolutely. Genesis he'd never seen wielding small sharp objects - swords certainly, but this required fine control that the redhead surely had, but ...what if he didn't? His elder also, might refuse, well aware of how uneasy the thought alone of handing someone a knife and asking them--
...It had to be enough.
no subject
They won't be.
Then again... They weren't normal for a long time.
Angeal doesn't say that. This is something he knows his Sephiroth is struggling with on how to handle - the kind of bizarre situation that neither of them would ever have realized they'd run into years ago. Instead, he just tries not to look at the soaking red limb which fumbles out from the opening, focuses on the muscle beneath his fingertips. If he doesn't look, maybe it will help him feel a little better.
It won't, really. Still, he tries, and picks up the blade again. There's another wing struggling to emerge, after all, and he can't just linger.
"Maybe not normal past skin-deep," he mutters, struggling to gather all his own internal arguments together. The things he's tried to tell himself, so that he's not as much a burden on Sephiroth and Genesis. "But considering the percentage of people here who are going through the same thing, technically, we can say it's a kind of normal. And Charlie never said anything bad about those who have experienced this in the past." So they have to hope. Or at least pretend they're hoping, and maybe that will pay off.
Carefully, his guides the blade beneath skin and scale again. Tries to grab hope that the other side will open up as neatly as its sibling did. "And as SOLDIER... One could argue we were never normal to start with. But that hasn't stopped us from living lives, right?"
no subject
Not anymore, not with the sharp chill of cold creeping across wet, scaleless new skin in a way sixteen years of familiarity can't quite map properly onto an old and familiar bodyplan. It's a preview perhaps of what Angeal and his closest friends would soon be enduring themselves, if they weren't already.
Sephiroth knows he's supposed to formulate a response, hold a dialogue as Angeal had seemingly wanted with asking about his traplines and Gaia, some mundane task to keep his mind focused on anything other than the suffocating tide of emotions that made his hand shake when he raises one to scrub at his face and erase the suspicious wetness there. It's not conscious action but rote experience that makes him go once more as still as he can at the bite of blade under scale, moving always made things worse. Even if he couldn't quite stop the minute quaking of his entire too-tense frame, he tries. Compliance is not an option. There's no protections on the inside to preven the knife from doing its work, only cutting through the annoyingly tough skin, easier form below than above. Generously, it doesn't seem to be more of a struggle than the first had been, save that the first lay in the dirt carefully still. The limb still trapped beneath dark scales is as stained red as the first as it's exposed, just as strangely shaped and as unmoving as he can make it.
This isn't the sterile rooms of Research and Development. It isn't the Professor and a few handpicked aides, pursuing some new experiment.
He knows it. But the dread and despair tastes the same, tinged only new by a change of circumstance; this isn't a test, this is the destruction of ever being able to even pass as human again. Any impulse to fight back against the pain, resist in any way, do anything at all but remain still and as quiet as he can manage, has long since been driven out. It's useful here; he'd asked for this. Deliberately. The least he could do is try to bury anything like sniveling childish nonsense and endure.
Answer. "Charlie-" His voice doesn't sound right to his own ears, a betrayal. He tries again, desperately working to match what seems awfully like utter calm in Angeal. The second time it's less of a strained squeak. "..Charlie means well."
Better. Not good, but better. Just reasonable stress of the moment, surely, and nothing more. Breathe. Slow and deep. "But.. he's guessing." No, that's not the response anyone would want to hear, even if he knew it wasn't accurate there was an expected response. Doing otherwise was insulting the aid he's being given. "... Everything is living a life." Aside from him, SOLDIERs were perfectly normal to start with. "I'm sorry. You're right." Technically it's a kind of normal.
Technically they're all going through this. They're just dealing with it better.