PrincessFelicie

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CW for this chapter: confined space

First Waves Day

    He arrived at his apartment with just enough energy to drag his feet one after another. He’d pushed himself too far again, and as always, got overwhelmed and had burned out. His thoughts had become a jumbled mess of imagery and background noise reverberating inside his mind, with what barely amounted to a cohesive need to regain the safety and solitude of his bedroom. 

    He fumbled with the front door’s lock, trying and failing to put his keys in before simply letting them drop on the ground and shuffling for his room.

    His roommate had been looking from the tiny kitchen located right at the corner of their entrance. He sighed, went to pick up the keys and locked the door properly. He knew that when his roomie got like this, there wasn’t much he could do but give him the space he needed. 

    The first few times this had happened, he’d thought it helpful to ask what had gotten him in such a state, but he quickly understood his roomie wasn’t able to talk when he got like that. The explanations always came a posteriori — got blamed for the coffee machine at work not working in one instance, had a fight with his mom in another, one too many customers that day… He couldn’t help but think it was often silly little things, but he kept that comment to himself; who was he to judge? His roomie’s brain clearly worked radically differently from his. 

    He didn’t even give his friend his tried-and-true tip of hitting the gym like he did. The idea of a regular training schedule usually sorted out most of his other friends’ negative emotions, but he could tell his roomie required a different solution.

    Sighing, he went back to scrolling through social media on his phone. He saw an article linking to an interview of a local celebrity, clicked through, and moved on, though a small part of his mind stayed vigilant for any roomie troubles.

    As he entered, he firmly closed his bedroom door in an attempt to make the noise in his head go away. His first action, once alone in his private little cocoon, was to struggle against his clothes to remove them, the discomfort they gave him having grown unbearable. Quickly nude, with the pile of fabric tossed onto the ground, he took a few steps towards his bed and crashed upon it.

    The room was his sanctum of silence and darkness in a too loud and bright world. The blinds were never opened, nor were the curtains. It filtered the incoming light to just enough to see around his room and nothing more. The place was cozily cramped, with the door just at the foot of his bed, a desktop right under the window, a tiny closet built inside the wall lined with a mirror on its outside, and an old TV placed on the floor with a game console linked to it. His plan was the same as always — nap, then play low-stress games for a week, waiting until he regained the ability to coherently speak.

    If he had been able to pay attention, he would probably have taken note of the thundering boom outside, mercifully muted by the walls around him. As it stood though, it didn’t even register in his mind.

    Instead, he felt the usual numbness wash over him as he finally hit the soft mattress. He barely had the time to slip a sheet over himself before he felt his energy leave him, his position tensing and locking up. After a couple minutes of staring into the void thinking of nothing, he managed to get his eyes to close and drifted off to sleep.

    He awoke some time later in the middle of the night, his slightly sore throat demanding from him to pour himself a glass of water before falling back asleep. Instead, he felt an all-surrounding warmth. 

    Trying to struggle out, he found his arms folded against his chest, his whole body immobile against his will. He became aware of the touch of his hand against his skin. He was inside something mildly hard, that he felt connected to... He could feel its touch, too. Something was sliding off of it, starting above his head and slinking towards his feet like a tense rubber band going back to its original state. As it dropped and he felt isolation from touch coming back, sleep took him again.

    The next time he regained a semblance of his senses was when something touched the outside of the thing he was in. A finger, then a palm. It touched and prodded and caressed it, trying to figure this shell out. Even through it, he heard muffled noises — a worried voice, he realized... that of his roommate, even. He tried to tell him he was okay, but his own voice was as muted as his movements. After a few minutes, his roommate’s hands removed themselves from the shell. As he regained a complete lack of sensations, his mind faded again.

    He felt himself drift in and out of consciousness a couple more times. This thing he was in had hardened some more. Maybe even the inner layers had tightened a bit, there was this sensation of having shrunk that even his fatigue-riddled mind could worry about. Plus, his fingertips informed him of the presence of hair on his torso… Well, it didn’t feel quite like hair. But it wasn’t fur either. Fuzz? That was the word he thought as he fell back into an unconscious state.

    At least he was regaining his energy, he told himself during his next glimpse of awareness. He could think words again. The shell around him was thinning… But so had he. He couldn’t tell the specifics, but he’d definitely lost some of his already meek figure. He was afraid of what he’d discover when he came out… If he came out.

First Waves Day +5

    He didn’t know how long had passed since he’d first laid down and found himself inside this shell. But agitation took him once more, and trying to wiggle about, he felt his prison give in against his movements. He tried stretching, and the thin walls cracked and ripped against his arms, creating a merciful opening from which air flowed in. He took a deep breath, coughed and sputtered. He felt like a newborn baby breathing in air for the first time in his life.

    He looked around him. He was still in his room, on his bed, the only difference was the weird, brown-spotted pod in which he was sitting. A cocoon, he realised? It was a cocoon he had been in… Well, it wasn’t made of silk, so his childhood scout leader would’ve told him this was just a chrysalis. Nonetheless, something very insect-like. He felt an eerie sensation just below his shoulder blades… His guess was new muscles and articulations? He didn’t like that guess, but that is what it felt like.

    His mind was starting to grow wild with possibilities, and what he spotted at the tip of the pupa, crumpled and battered, didn’t help. It was him. Or what was left of his skin, looking like an emptied corpse. He picked it up and unfolded it. It was dry and flaky. How…? And did that mean…?

    He climbed out of his bed and walked to his mirror.

    No

    Overwhelmed

    No no no

    Not fine

    Not... him

    What?

    Forbidden

    Panic

    Noise

    His roommate didn’t know what to do. It had been five days since he’d been trapped inside that thing. The news updates the TV from the living room was giving him were bizarre at best, but they seemed related, and that was all he could listen to to know there wasn’t too much to worry about.

    Then he heard a scream come from the next room over — his roomie’s bedroom — and instincts kicked in as he sprinted off the couch. He swung the door open, flipping the lightswitch on as he entered.

    He was quite surprised to find, curled up in front of the mirror, a young lady with butterfly wings between her shoulder blades. He’d thought he would be able to handle what would have happened in this room, that the news had prepared him enough, but… This detail didn’t match any of the reports he’d gotten. But he had to ask, right? To make sure? 

    “…Roomie?” He spoke up.

    The woman looked up at the source of the word, and the two’s gaze met. The familiar way her jaw moved rhythmically — like she was trying to say something, but nothing would come out — all but confirmed his suspicions.

    Seeing his roommate was like an anchor in the chaos of his thoughts. He complied when his friend slowly lifted his hand, and he followed him into the brighter living room, where he was then placed on the couch to take a moment to breathe.

    Not really knowing what he could do to get his roomie out of this catatonic state, he decided to let her be for a while. He went back to her room to try and gather exactly what had happened. But beyond the fact the cocoon from a few days ago had burst open, nothing else he hadn’t gathered from his visit earlier in the week. So it had really been his roomie inside, huh? And he’d… she’d turned into a girl. 

    He picked up the strewn-about clothes and piled them near the entrance, then quickly swiped a t-shirt and some underwear from the closet for his roomie to wear.

    The sounds of the TV were just like sludge in his ears and he couldn’t focus on anything it said. It was all just voices talking over each other coming from the other end of the living room.

    Comparatively, his roommate’s voice, just to his left, sounded crystal clear. “Hey,” he said before dropping some clothes on his lap.

    It took him a moment to realise he had been naked this whole time, and blood rushed to his face as he quickly slipped them on. “I-I’m sorry!!!” he exclaimed.

    “…What for?” asked his roommate, who was frowning in confusion. “You’ve never had a problem being naked in front of me before.”

    “It’s… It’s different! It’s a woman’s body now… It, it… It has to be hidden…” he said, fully aware of the discrepancy with his previous behavior. But that was what had changed, so that must’ve been the source of it, right? He’d had no problem being naked in front of his roommate during his anxiety cocoonings because he had a body that didn’t… need hiding? But now he felt like he actually cared about covering himself.

    His roommate coughed and looked away. “Oh... Sure. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t seen my share of naked women.”

    For a moment, he grew scared that’d mean he was now fair game to his roommate’s flirting. And that thought scared him; he didn’t know if he could handle that… He frowned and closed his eyes. If there was one specific thing not to listen to his anxiety about, this was the one. He needed to be able to trust his roommate to hold him together through this event. No, his roommate wasn’t going to start hitting on him, he told himself, he was there to support him. Like always. Nothing was gonna change.

    He started doing some breathing exercises, while his roommate sat down next to him on the couch. After he had calmed down, he finally took a moment to glance at what he was dealing with.

    So… this was definitely a woman’s body. That much was obvious at the first look. But there were some inhuman elements to it. His skin had been overtaken by a thin white fuzz. It was fluffier around his collarbone, giving off the illusion that he was wearing a scarf. When he took a look at his reflection in the living room window, he saw that the irises of his eyes had become jet black, his hair had taken the coloration of the fuzz and grown to just above his neck, and poking out of it were two antennae slightly swaying with his breathing, striped black and white nearly all the way to the tips. His legs sported a similar pattern with a pale blue added to the mix.

    Last but not least, the elephant in the room. Glittering, blue wings with white undersides that were slowly uncrumpling and hardening, located on his back. The light passing through them reflected back onto the wall in a tinted, wavy pattern.

    “Holding up okay?” his roommate asked while he started blankly at his wings. “Need a hug?”

    He fidgeted. Physical contact usually helped, but now his body was different. He couldn’t allow that, could he… He had no experience in what was expected out of a woman. He would never be able to fool anyone; if he tried to act the part, all it would do was reduce femininity to mimicry.  He would look like a fool and tarnish what made women women.

    His roommate noticed his hesitation, and took a moment to think of the best thing to say. “C’mon, dude. Just because you’re looking different doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to do what you need to feel good, alright?”

    He looked at his roommate with a bit of apprehension, but had no rebuttal. He joined him in a hug and let the pent-up fear seep out.

    “I don’t know if it’ll help to hear, but…” he started telling his roomie, the hug coming to an end. “You’re not the only one having had a weird past few days.” He leaned towards the coffee table to grab the remote and pointed it at the TV; his roomie did her best to finally focus on what it was saying. He swapped through a couple news channels, and the headlines were all similar: they talked about an event that had happened five days ago, where, following a series of strange shockwaves all over the world, a notable portion of the planet’s population had metamorphosed, transformed into animal hybrids of various degrees of humanity. Some almost looked feral, while others, like her, had kept most of a human shape, only gaining animalistic traits in select places. Even her cocoon thing wasn’t left unmentioned; she hadn’t been the only one with an insect-like change. If the interviews made anything clear, it’s that no one knew what was causing it.

    But there was one element that was definitely absent. There was no mention of anyone having had their sex changed. He took a glance at his roomie, whose eyes shifted around the room while she parsed it all. “Should I go see a doctor?” she asked.

    “…Maybe?” He scratched his head. “If you find an opening, that is… Can’t imagine they’re anything but swamped at the minute…”

    She took a meek tone, her voice dropping to a murmur. “It’s okay; I don’t need to, I’ll just leave them alone…”

    Oh, maybe he shouldn’t have said that. She was probably panicking over imposing on someone again. “…No. If you’re scared of taking the place of someone ‘sicker’, I don’t think you’ll find many that qualify, considering the, eh, extra element.” He paused. “Leave this to me if you want. I’ll find you someone that can take you, okay?”

    “…Okay.”

PrincessFelicie

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