Change and a Haircut
Gratuitous Shower Scene!
It was rare for both of Sid’s legs to hurt, but trying to stay off the bad one last night had only overexerted the other. And all for what? He didn’t even know Billy’s tiger buddy, and the other girls likely could have managed without him, but he knew that if he just stood by he would have come out of the ordeal feeling even more like s**t. Now if only good deeds were enough to take the pain away. He felt as though someone had worked his body over with a meat tenderizer while he slept, and once he hauled himself out of bed he was reward with a fresh jolt of pain as his feet touched the floor. His head ached, his teeth ached, and on top of that it tasted like something had crawled into his mouth and died sometime during all that tenderizing. He’d really outdone himself, and yet the weird thing was he hadn’t had
that much the night before. Maybe it was age creeping up on him again, a thought he promptly shoved to the darkest recesses of his mind. Last night had been a b***h for more than a few reasons, that was all.
He was just thinking his cane wasn’t going to be of much use when he saw the rusty wheelchair sitting by his desk. It was ludicrous to think the thing could have an accusing air about it, but his thoughts took him to odd places in his groggy state. He felt guilty for leaving Billy behind, that was true, but all his yelling had been what had driven him to go help the tiger man in the first place. Now all he had was the wheelchair, which he’d talked Gaius into bringing up after all the unconscious folk had been delivered home.
“He’ll be fine,” Sid told the chair. “It’s not like they have any reason to hold him.”
Happy thoughts weren’t helping, neither was talking to inanimate objects. Both the pain and the hangover had to have something to do with the headache, but there was no explanation for why the duplex felt so damn hot. The thermostat was the same as he’d left it the night before, and if anything that was too cold. He knocked the temperature down a few degrees just to be sure and went to the bathroom in search of a way to fix things. He was running dangerously low on vicodin, making every use of it something he had debate about. He stared at the nearly empty prescription bottle as he did just that. Would the pain be worse later? Should he hold off? If he went ahead and asked for more would the labs know he had a problem? Of course not, because he didn’t really have a problem with
any substance. Sid put the bottle back in the medicine cabinet just to prove that to himself. The pain had been worse before, the incident where he’d walked as far as the cliffs came to mind, and having that as a frame of reference made it possible to hold off. In the meantime a cold shower would take care of the heat, if not the hangover.
The water helped a little, even though he skin felt so tender that it felt like a thousand needles hitting him. He was in the middle of slicking his wet hair back from his face when his teeth crept a little further into his peripheral vision, accompanied by pain that felt like every last one of them has suddenly developed a nasty cavity. He reached up to touch them, to confirm that they had grown longer, and while the pain in his teeth quickly faded to a dull ache, the pain in his legs suddenly just stopped entirely, leaving them feeling numb. When he looked down and saw scales emerging around his knees he uttered a shaky laugh. At least it wasn’t old age that had made him feel so poorly. Small consolation there, as he had all those graves to think about as the changes began in earnest. What if something went wrong now? What if they found him dead in the bathtub with the water still running? Screw that, what was happening to him right now?
He tensed as his back began to itch and burn. He tried to turn to see what was happening, only to lose his footing on the slick surface of the tub. His legs slid out from under him and the hand that went out to try and stop the fall slid uselessly along the tile. Cold water continued to pour from the showerhead, but he was too afraid to move to try and turn it off. He was sure he had broken his hip in the fall, some complication
that would be, until he realized the horrible pain at the base of he spine was from his growing tail. It came as a great relief that his hands and feet simply went numb as they joined the changes, even if that in no way dampened the horror that came with seeing them grow longer and thinner. He turned his hands palm up, splaying his fingers to see the webbing stretch to the tips of every one. He could barely even feel the water striking them even as new spines pushed through the sides of each hand.
He drew his legs up and was a little encouraged as neither leg gave him any complaint. There was no time to wonder if the dumbness in his extremities was a bad sign, as no sooner than he had changed position one of his vertebra decided it was time to push outwards. When he screamed the room’s acoustics did interesting things to the noise, making it sound even louder. The pain of bone extending outwards in a brand new protrusion did well to chase all the fears of dying from his mind. In that agonizing he
wanted to die. He wanted it even more so as the light in the bathroom, even defused through the shower curtain, suddenly became far too bright. He closed his eyes and waited for the worst. His heart was racing, he couldn’t breath. Damn it, he was too old for all the strain. He clutched his chest, his webbed fingers digging into the new slick scales.
Nothing happened. Nothing
more happened, anyway. There was no cardiac arrest, no rupture of any one of his vital organs. First the changes slowed, then his breathing. The itching stopped with the changes, and water ran down his body across all the new scales. He was fine. He was cold and wet and miserable, but he was alive. He leaned forward in the tub and reached a trembling hand out to turn the water off. Sid sat there for several minutes, just shivering and dripping, before he was able to haul himself back up to his feet. He felt terribly calm in the wake of all that had happened, shock was once again there to cushion the blow. It would hit him later, but for the time being he had to get out of the shower. Clothes could also come later. The new length of his tail seemed to weigh him down, but one flick from it was enough to help him regain his balance. His legs felt fine, even at the moment it felt like they were made of jelly. The light was still too damn bright, and he recoiled when he pulled back the shower curtain and made it worse.
He squinted in the mirror after stepped out of the tub, which for the first time in nearly he year he managed without holding on to something. He pushed his bangs up to examine the scales that had emerged on his forehead, and the more he moved around, the more annoying the tickling sensation along his back was. As he turned his head from side to side to try and get a look at the new thing, he realized his hair was the problem. He awkwardly gathered it all into a ponytail which he pulled up above his head. If he had waited a little while, given the shock of the change some time to fade, he would have never gone so far as to cut most of it off. Instead he stalked out of the bathroom, still naked and dripping, and grabbed the scissors of his desk, ruining a few words with every drop of water that hit his notes. The trembling has subsided by the time he made it back to the bathroom, but the light was fueling, making his headache even worse. In that moment, as he saw it, there was only one thing he had any control over. As methodical as his movements were, his clumsily fingers took several attempts to tie his hair back. Handling the scissors was even more awkward, but he’d had worse haircuts from more skilled hands. When he was done he threw the severed ponytail into the sink and gave his reflection one last hard look before he left the bathroom. He pulled the shades and turned all the lights in the duplex out before collapsing on the bed. When he remembered there was no turning off the glowing scales he pulled a pillow over his head. Exhausted all over again, cocooned in darkness, he slept. He could deal with everything when he woke.
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