Chapter Text
I wonder if birds enjoy the taste of the worms they eat.
I sat at the desk in my room, chin in hand and staring out the window at said creatures. Seagulls steal food from people because they like ours better, right? Would finches or whatever they were eat french fries and give up on worms if they knew how good they were? A yawn overtook me, despite my best efforts to stifle it with tongue and hand.
I'd read somewhere forever ago that you could stop a yawn by pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth, but it was a little hit-or-miss. My jaw creaked as it stretched open, wider than it used to be able to. Moisture gathered in the corner of my eyes, my cheeks split wide open; my mouth had slowly grown a little wider over the last few days, and I wasn't sure how to change it back. My maxillae - what a strange word - stretched out, too. I winced as it made me drool all over the desk in the process, and I tried to stifle it with an attempt to close my mouth but that only seemed to make my body double-down on the yawn.
When my stupid body finally stopped rebelling, I looked down at the big puddle of spit and probably a little poison all over my desk with a grumpy expression.
I was so not dealing with this.
I reached up to my mouth, tenderly stretching out the mandibles with my hands. It almost looked like I had a little mantis in the back of my mouth helping me eat. Kinda like that weird tongue parasite that fish get. Eugh, that was gross. I tried to imagine my tongue being replaced with a praying mantis or a slug or even a centipede. I gagged a little. Maybe if that happened, I could reduce crime by scaring people senseless.
My body doesn't feel much like my own these days. I glanced around and found the old make-up mirror left over my days as a little girl. I turned it up and opened my mouth, as wide as I could.
Holy shit, that's horrifying to look at.
Four long appendages extended out from the depths of my throat, covered in wicked-looking barbs. The top two were twice as long as the lower pair, with an extra joint in the middle, and the ends of both were like fangs; translucent, milky-white chitin that dripped a clear fluid. As a kid, all those cartoons make you think its this sludgy, purple fluid that acts like acid, but poison is actually usually a clear or sort of yellowish liquid, and very watery. To be fair, most biological fluids are watery. Artistic license does weird things to your expectations. I flexed them quietly, watching them turn and twist.
It wasn't quite like having really long fingers that could stretch out of my mouth, even though they had roughly the same shape. Less delicate, less precise; it felt almost twitchy. I wasn't sure how to explain it - they could move slowly, but it was hard. It felt like I was fighting against their nature. The muscles inside wanted to snap out, flex and relax in rapid succession, like rubber bands. I blanched suddenly as my alarm went off - I glanced at the time. I hadn't gone on a run in a while, so that was just my ‘be out the door for the bus soon’ alarm.
I stuffed the little grabby things back into my mouth, feeling the tiny muscles inside close and contract to fold up behind my teeth, before gathering my clothes up to get dressed for another awful day.
“You smell weird,” Emma told me. I looked around, but there was no one else with her today. She'd cornered me all by myself after gym class in the locker room. No Sophia or Madison or other little clinger-ons. Just me and her in the corner of a mostly empty room.
“You said that yesterday,” I reminded her dully. She must have been off her game, if she was repeating insults in such short succession. Maybe she was sick. Like, actually sick. So sick it made her stupid.
“Ugh, who said you could talk back to me?” She bit back snappishly, closing the distance. Her fingers pinched my mask, tugging on it angrily. She didn’t look the best - her hair was a little frizzy, and I grabbed her wrist, carefully trying to remove her hand from my mask. “And why are you wearing this? You’re not sick enough to sit out in gym, but you’ve still got this stupid little fashion statement on your ugly face?”
“Please let go,” I quietly begged. I didn’t want her to touch me - her skin felt positively clammy compared to my own feverish temps. My gym clothes were soaked with sweat - every time I did anything remotely active these days, I would get drenched. I didn’t want to feel it anymore; I was absolutely sick of this. I was sick of what little my power did for me, and what it did to me. I saw her nose twitch a little, and her eyes narrowed like she’d found some sort of clue.
“Tell me why you smell so weird,” she demanded. “Every time I see you, you smell like something I don’t recognize.”
Oh shit.
How could I possibly explain this away? She actually could smell the pheromones that drew the bugs in. If I had learned this in literally any other way, it might be funny to try and compare her to an insect, but right now, I was terrified.
“I-I-I got a new deodorant,” I bullshitted her.
Fucking idiot, I snapped at myself internally. Deodorant?! What kind of retarded answer was that?! She didn’t even come close to buying it, not for a second. Her eyes snapped down to my chest - and I felt myself redden a bit as I realized she was looking straight down my soaked shirt at an angle that definitely exposed me. One hand let go of hers to cover myself up, and I made an involuntary self-conscious noise. Fortunately, Emma seemed to realize the connotations herself and finally pulled away with a bit of red in her own cheeks as she came to the same conclusion that I did: it looked like she was perving on me. If only I was smarter, I could have come up with some snappy remark to make her storm off or something. I’d have to settle for flustering her enough to leave me alone.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I have to go,” I managed, bulldozing past her. I snatched my bag of clothes from my locker and ignored her protesting cries demanding that I stop and come back so she could get the answers she wanted. My heart raced in my chest as I fled. That was far too close, and now I think she was onto me.