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secret-bug-pain-blog · 29 days

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Febuwhump Day 28 - ALT PROMPT - Human Weapon

You can also view this on Ao3, here. This took us long enough to post that we feel fully justified in getting it beta read and such before posting. This work is a ship of Theseus compared to the original we had done in February because we kept revising the outline for the main work this is based off of. At the very least, we think it's solid now.

Thanks to @wormlette for beta reading this for us, and we hope you enjoy.

In the first few hours after getting the tattoos, he isn't thinking.

There are more things to worry about than what the things stabbed into his skin mean, at that point. He's stuck in the back room of a place he doesn't know, shaking with the remnants of a paralytic he can't identify and grappling with the aftershocks of the most pain he's ever felt in his life, with an ominous list of instructions rattling around his head and no idea if he'll even be capable of leaving.

He's not thinking straight, and he knows it, but he's too thoroughly in shock to do much about it, so he doesn't. He sits on the dingy bench in the back of the room, and he stares at the lines inked into his hands, and he listens to the tallman tell him care instructions as he tries not to think about the way a single slip of a sleeve could get him jailed for life.

There are runes etched into his skin. There's dark magic inked into his flesh. There's a person talking just over his shoulder who tells him that he'll need to pay her back for the procedure, because even if his friend vouched for him, her expertise doesn't come cheap - and he's stuck with a bill he needs to pay, for a procedure he never wanted, and the creeping awareness that the sounds of beasts fighting from just beyond the wall are just a bit too human for it to be just normal monsters.

The tallman that she called his friend walks in, and the moment that he recognizes him the blood roars in his ears with the bitter, bitter memories of betrayal.

And then he's trapped in a room, with a curse inked into his skin, and a man who tried to feed him to monsters barely a few feet away.

It is a very, very small mercy that Laios manages to find him here. He's astounded that he even managed to find him, honestly - tracking things on cobblestone is difficult enough with half-foot senses, let alone tallman senses. Still, presence is one thing, and actually helping is another - and Laios merely being there does nothing to stop the tallman in the room with him from picking him up by the ankle and holding a jack-knife to his throat.

The pulse of magic that runs through his body is new. The pain flooding his senses is not.

Something in his body shifts, joints pulling out of alignment in a way that sets off alarm bells in the back of his head. He dangles, abruptly, a few inches lower, his spine crackling and popping like sand in the delicate gears of golden machinery, and every inch of the runic tattoos spread over his skin lights up with the sensation of being stabbed with thousands of needles. He thrashes, some instinct in him saying to kick out, and-

When the pain clears, he's toppled over on the floor, every inch of his body itching with something new and wrong. The tallman who signed him up for this is dead on the floor, his head nearly three metres away from his body in a quickly-spreading pool of blood, and Laios is staring at him as if he's never seen him before.

His hands are covered with deep brown fur. His stomach feels like it's been abruptly overrun by starving beasts. When he looks down at his feet, he finds himself looking at an entirely too long set of rabbit's paws.

It takes him a bit longer than he's comfortable admitting to realize what it is that's been done to him. Laios reaches out to help him up, tentative in a way that he's never really seen from him before - there's a snide remark welling on his tongue about it, something barbed and bitter and colored by years of being manhandled before then this is what finally makes someone think twice about hauling him around as they please - but the words die on his tongue, caught in a throat that can no longer form words and drowned in the overwhelming pain that flares the moment he tries to pick himself up.

His body aches.

Searing pain rolls through his muscles every time he moves, like he's been boiled in oil again and somehow left alive. Every motion he makes only seems to make it worse - the burning rolls along any limb he tries to move, searing deep into muscle and bone. The first hint of weight on his feet erodes his nerves as if they've been dipped in acid, and even just trying to walk is, if anything, worse - like trying to walk with red-hot spikes imbedded into his soles.

This form feels alien, strange, wrong- and it takes all too long before he figures out how to make himself turn back.

The rabbit form withdraws back under his skin, bones shifting and flesh warping in a halting, agonizingly slow display he has to force himself to keep going through. The magic subsides. The pain does not.

Muscling through the sort of soul-deep agony that the transformation inflicts is far, far easier said than done. Thinking coherently, when he's grappling with consciousness through a haze of pain that makes it feel like he's dying every time he moves an arm, is even more so. Knowing this doesn't make it easier to think, nor does it make it less horribly, horribly embarrassing when he realizes that he's got nothing on but the thin, flimsy, tallman-sized dressing gown he was wearing when he first woke up.

The realization that he's been trotting around in a bathrobe so oversized that it makes him look like an actual child would, in any other circumstances, be just about the worst part of his day. This situation is already far past horrible on so many levels that at this point, it barely registers.

At the immediate moment of time that he notices it, it's also largely overpowered by the realization that there are slits in the back of the dressing gown, and the fact that he's horribly, horribly humiliated himself in front of a party member, badly enough that his most remote chances of it being forgotten are as good as dead.

It's a unique kind of awful, even without the curse bands on his wrist, to realize just how much of himself might've been bared against his will. It's even worse when he thinks of how the other races tend to view half-foots, and the way that rumors tend to proliferate between adventurers, and the fact that it's Laios, of all people, who came across him. Laios, who couldn't keep his mouth shut if his life depended on it, who talks about monsters like no one else he's ever known, who's just seen him turn into a monster-

Chilchuck takes all of five seconds before his pain-wracked brain finally catches up with the facts enough to foretell the imminent end of his adventuring career, at which point his joints finally decide to give up the ghost, and he narrowly stops himself from falling face-first into cobblestone, just to put the cherry on top of the entire awful ordeal.

He's about five steps past even being capable of dragging his thoughts together enough to try and think of some way out of this horrible situation, to the awful modifications stabbed right into his body, to the idea that whatever's been done to him has run deeply enough to behead a tallman without even consciously trying, when Laios offers him one of his spare shirts and he's forced to come to terms with the realization that the world has simply decided to stop making sense entirely.

He's battered, exhausted, and grappling with enough awful revelations to choke a nightmare to death on the bad dreams alone. He's on his hands and knees in a room that belongs to someone he doesn't know with arterial spray spattered on his skin and a soldier's strength curse stabbed into his body. He's too far past done to try for more than the barest hint of dignity, still stuck in a dressing gown so fine it's nearly transparent, and...

Well. He's not really sure he even has enough left in his brain to try and get himself together.

He takes the shirt.

He tries not to speak, while he shuffles it on. He's painfully aware of just how bad the situation is, and every movement he makes feels like he's exposing himself all the more. The way his skin burns every time something so much as brushes the new-laid tattoos doesn't help in the slightest, and the slide of coarse fabric over skin is almost more painful than the idea of leaving himself bare - but he's not willing to go that far, not yet.

The blood on his skin makes the fabric stick uncomfortably. Every movement makes it cling different, prickling at his whiskers and pulling at the tender lines of ink that make up most of his abdomen by now, glued to his sides in disgustingly tacky red. He doesn't think he's ever felt so humiliated before in his life.

When the woman who stabbed the curse into his skin in the first place comes back, it just feels like the punchline to the overly long joke that's become his life.

He checks out through the bulk of the speech she makes the moment that he registers she's retreading the same treatment instructions that she gave to him. Nothing makes sense and everything is wrong. He stares at the brilliant red lines on his arms, his ears flattened to his head, and he barely registers it when whatever conversation Laios has with the tallman woman putters out.

His legs dangle entirely too far above the ground when Laios picks him up, but his complaints sound dull and useless, even to his ears. After tonight, he has very little in the way of dignity left to lean on. He and Laios both know that he won't be walking out of here, anyways. Not when trying to put weight on his feet makes them hurt so much he threatens to pass out.

Somehow, knowing that he'll have to submit to being carried for as long as this takes to heal makes him dread the coming days more than anything else.

His clothes, thankfully, are still intact. There's running water somewhere in the cranny of the dungeon they're in, but the tallman doesn't acknowledge it, simply directing them back the way they came. He doesn't want to stick around long enough for one of the resurrectionists he spots on the way out to get to his old "friend", anyways. At this point in the night, he's too burnt out on everything to bother getting blood out of multiple items of clothing.

Tallmen have a lot more gore in them than any reasonable creature should.

The lines on his palms burn with every bit of contact they make. He shouldn't be surprised that the ones up his back are the same. Laios carries his pack, and he's trapped between being grateful for it and hating his own lack of ability more than he hates nearly anything else that's happened since he woke up on a damn table.

There's a lot going on in his head. He struggles to work through the pain enough to make it make sense.

At some point between the arena and the campsite, he passes out.

Considering the circumstances, it shouldn't have been possible to hide it. Considering every prior encounter he'd had with Laios, he shouldn't have been capable of keeping it a secret for an hour, let alone a day, let alone the rest of his life-

But in the morning, Chilchuck wakes up in his bedroll, bandages wrapped around nearly every square inch of skin he has, to an elf fussing over his bedside, a plate of dry rations set just within his arm's length, and, though some unbelievable stroke of luck, no sign that they even know what happened on a single party member's face.

He's still alive. The world doesn't end. He hasn't been submitted to the canaries.

Somehow, that feels worse than if he had been sent off for dark magic.

At least, when Laios corners him to ask if he can tell Falin about his new condition, it feels more like normal than anything else in his life right now.

For all that means, anyways.

The tattoos spread over his back. There are rings inked into his skin, cuffs of ancient runes like shackles around his wrists and ankles, circles of runes on his heels that sting like the devil every time he sets a foot down just slightly too hard. He washes them every day that he can, unwilling to deal with either infection or whatever consequences that fucking with the magic in it might bring. He's lost enough weight from the initial spellcasting that he's not allowed to skip meals anymore, even if they buy his excuse that half-foots simply need to eat less. All of the padding over his ribs is simply gone, everything standing between him and his own organs thinned to near-nonexistence - he doesn't have enough body mass for a healing, let alone a resurrection, and it shows.

He looks like he's been starved halfway to death in the space of a single evening.

It's the least dramatic change in his body in the past forty-eight hours. It's the only change that his party's been able to see.

He's not sure he wants to know what they think of him. But he can't stay ignorant without blinding himself to nearly everything they do.

Marcille sneaks him extra rations, and Namari asks after hauling his bow, and Shuro makes pointed comments about how close they still are to the surface, and all he can think of is how frail they must see him, now that he's forced to rely on them for everything.

He hopes that they won't think less of him. He's not naive enough to really believe it.

Three weeks to fully heal, according to the arena tallman. At least a week before he can try walking on it, according to Falin. Laios asks if he wants to turn back now, but he refuses - they may be only a few days from the surface, but that's still a few days from the surface, on an expedition where their party still hasn't found anything of note - leaving now would just waste their progress and leave them all off worse for it.

They have the supplies they need to delve deeper. They just need to find the guts to do it.

Chilchuck might be dead weight, but he's less weight than if it happened to anyone else, and he, at least, can try to do his job even when he's stuck being carried.

Being stuck in a dungeon without working legs is a death sentence, but a dungeon has less people willing to question a mysterious injury, and his chances of being able to get by on the surface without someone poking too far into his cover are so small they might as well be nonexistent. Half-foots have only survived as long as they have through community, but there's no such thing as privacy in a half-foot den, and he fears the death he'll face at the hands of the Canaries more than he fears the death he'll face at the hands of the dungeon.

He doesn't mention the latter half of his reasoning. No one knows what's inked into his skin yet, not besides the Toudens. His party doesn't need to know how likely he is to wind up as one of the criminals who treat the dungeon as their home, and so he's not about to tell them. He still has eyes and ears and expertise, and they're all blind and deaf by his standards anyways. He can survive a week, as long as they can work like a proper troupe for seven days.

And if he dies, then it'll be quicker than old age.

Laios agrees to the plan surprisingly fast, for all the concern he's directed Chilchuck's way since the day in the arena. Suspiciously so, even. Falin's willingness to back his decision is, Chilchuck thinks, the only reason the other party members don't veto it on the spot - he's infirm and unstable right now, and as far as all of them are concerned, he might keel over at any minute. He's hardly dungeon-delving material right now, and all of them know it, but Falin is the most accomplished healer out of them, and most of the party has enough affection for her that they'll bend over backwards to fit her word.

The door they need to map is on the sixth floor, more than a month deep. If Chilchuck were at his best, he'd be able to shave weeks off that time. As he is now, all he can do is offer insight from above and pray that his party won't be stupid enough to get themselves killed anyways.

The decision goes through, and everyone looks at Laios like he's lost whatever few screws kept his head on previously, but they let the decision slide.

Objectively, it's a stupid choice to make. His party must think he's gone mad. Right now, Laios is the only thing standing between him and a lifetime behind elven bars, and he knows he should be grateful for him for listening to his pleas, but-

He doesn't voice the suspicions he has.

He knows the way that Laios looked at the fighters in that ring, even in passing. The love that the tallman has for monsters is so poorly-veiled it barely even counts as a secret - he's surprised it hasn't come up more often, now that he's part monster himself, but he's not blind enough to think that Laios's pet obsession doesn't have a part in this - he wants more time to examine the monstrous rabbit half stitched onto his bones, and he's so bad at hiding it he might as well not be trying at all.

He's... not sure how he feels about it.

He knows, already, that Laios is... odd. Strange. Out of place. His habits are an anomaly even among other tallmen. He can speak for hours upon hours on monsters that no one else would spare a second glance to, dedicating endless time and energy to fields of study so niche that Chilchuck could swear he's the only person he's ever seen show the slightest interest.

He's oblivious to social mores, more interested in rambling on about living armor or kelpies than the tired expressions of his peers. He's unable to go a single day without talking of some obscure beast from the depths of the dungeon, yammering about its biology with more enthusiasm than some people announce their engagements. He cares for the beasts more than he cares for his own teammates, Chilchuck thinks.

He understands monsters more than he does the people he interacts with every day of his life.

And now Chilchuck is one of those.

Chilchuck doesn't have much more to do than watch, while he's stuck being lugged around like a sack of flour. Laios notices... more, now. He's more attentive. More careful. When his carrying abrades more than usual, he readjusts at the slightest hint of discomfort, sometimes before Chilchuck notices himself - he doesn't realize how unnerving it is to not have his feet on a solid surface now until he spends an hour being hauled around by Namari and has to pull himself off halfway through. Walking makes the scabbing on his feet burn like fire, but it's easier to tolerate than the awful fear that rises in his chest with every second he spends with his legs dangling in the air.

He's picking up habits that he didn't have before, and they fit in so seamlessly that he barely even realizes until someone points it out.

Too much meat turns his stomach. He can hear better, whispers that he once could have tuned out now louder in his ears than even a normal conversation would. His heart beats faster than before, nearly two hundred and fifty beats in a minute - he worries, when he notices, that it'll give him away, and it only beats faster at the thought. He nearly forgets how little the other races can hear. It's only hours later that he puts real thought to how little it took to nearly drive him to a panic.

There's a stranger in his skin who isn't him, who isn't even human - something etched into him in bone-needle pricks and searing, boiling-oil agony - and he's the only one who knows that it's anything more than just a few odd habits.

He, and Laios.

And isn't it strange, to be sharing something so delicate with someone so indelicate?

Laios, he thinks, still probably knows more about his new monstrous biology than Chilchuck himself does. He can't say that his feelings on it are anything less than... mixed.

Chilchuck doesn't know much about artificial beastkin. It's forbidden to know about, illegal to even try and research - he's not stupid enough to go poking at things better left buried, much less to put himself in the line of fire for long-lived races who'll put him in jail for the rest of his natural life. Still, he's heard gossip.

He knows, if faintly, that the spell was created for the sake of enhancing soldiers. He doesn't remember where he first heard it - some bar somewhere, maybe, or an offhand comment from a former teammate - but the fact floats in the back of his mind when he thinks of it, faint and damning. He can see its echo in the spurs sprouting from his heels, in the leg muscle he's never worked to get, in the speed and acrobatics that come horribly naturally to him, in the thump of rabbit's legs against a neck-

The first thing that he ever did with this new form was take a man's head off. And all he can think of, when he looks back at it, is how easy it was to do it.

Chilchuck never would have gone anywhere near the arena, if he had a choice in the matter. He wouldn't have paid for the spell inked around his wrists, much less be put into an unknown amount of debt over it. He doesn't need a body made for fighting - he doesn't need a body so obviously inhuman, so easy to dismiss and dispose of. Half-foot tails are cropped for a reason - he doesn't need to be farther from the other races, doesn't need to be even more of an other.

Laios carries him from place to place, unfalteringly attentive to whims he didn't even know that he had as the soles of Chilchuck's feet heal from the tattoo needle. Laios tells him about monsters, and animals, and rabbits, more than he ever thought was possible to know. Laios... looks at the curse etched into his skin with a sort of longing that he doesn't know how to put words to.

He wonders, as he washes the still-healing ink by the river, if Laios wishes that he were the one with black magic forced under his skin.

Chilchuck isn't perfectly observant, not with people, but he knows how to interpret at least some of it. He might've been half-conscious at the area, but he's not blind enough to not see how Laios looked at those beastkin fighters, and he's not blind enough that he can't see the way that the tallman looks at his curse marks. It's a strange mix of emotions, something like flattery curled around something slimy and squirming in the pit of his stomach. He's got a spell etched into his body that'd get him thrown into an elven jail to rot for the rest of his life, and Laios...

Laios, he's beginning to think, would have wanted this body. Would have wanted to have someone stab a soldier's supplement written in a curse tongue into his shoulders. He cares for monsters more than humans, beast body language more than simple common - hell, Chilchuck's seen first-hand how massive of a gap there is between his common communication and whatever he has with monsters.

Laios is an actual combatant, the kind of person who signed up to swing a sword - sturdy enough to take a few knocks, chubby enough that transforming probably wouldn't make his stomach scream like it's trying to eat itself, knowledgeable enough that he wouldn't be struggling to figure out a whole new set of rules from first principles. Chilchuck has spent so long being himself that trying to adjust to a whole new body this late in life is being thrown into the deep end without a paddle - but Laios, he suspects, knows monsters' bodies better than he knows his own hands.

...if their positions were different, he thinks, then Laios would have handled this far, far easier than him. And he's not sure how to handle it, when Laios seems to envy him for a curse that was forced on him against his will.

Chilchuck is a locksmith. Chilchuck makes his living in traps. Chilchuck is a noncombatant, who has never really wanted to become a combatant, who was stuck with this body against his will, who'll have to scrounge up the money to pay for it, who has no need to behead a man in a single kick, no need to cut through flesh like butter, no need to leap with enough strength that he knocks Laios stumbling just from using his pauldrons as a kick-off.

The body he's been given is made for spectacle. For loss of humanity. For violence. It's modified for death, for flashy sprays of arterial blood in the coliseum. Rabbits don't have spurs on their feet, don't have a kick that decapitates - don't dent armor from lashing out on instinct, let alone have instinct to go for someone's neck when threatened. Rabbits don't have legs strong enough to break solid oak to pieces - half-foots might not keep them as livestock, but he's lived in mixed-race settlements for years, and Laios has been murmuring facts about them into the backs of his ears for nearly two weeks now-

Rabbits can break their own spines with the force of their kicks.

And he didn't know, before now, but he has to know now, because he might be the same way - and that makes it feel all the worse when he has to find it out from an offhand comment from Falin, because it's something that she knows that he doesn't, because it's another reminder of the landscape full of landmines he's struggling to navigate, because it's yet another thing that the Touden siblings seem to know like the back of their hands where he-

He doesn't know the slightest thing about this.

About what he is now. About what he's supposed to be. He doesn't know anything, and every time he speaks with them, it gets hammered in more and more. There's a gap of knowledge so wide that it might as well be unbridgeable between him and them, because there's half a world of difference between him and tallman farmers who've dedicated half their lives to farming an animal that he only knew by tangential proximity before it was stabbed into his soul.

And that's the problem, isn't it? His own shortcomings, in the face of people who feel so much younger than him, who he has to rely on for his own well-being. Who he has to lean on, if he wants to get anywhere, and who he's becoming more and more aware are more suited to bearing this sort of thing than Chilchuck ever has been.

This has never been a life that Chilchuck wants. If there isn't a way to break the chains shackling magic to his body, then he'll be stuck hiding parts of himself for life - either forced to hide the spell well enough to pretend it doesn't exist, or locked away in some elven prison somewhere until he forgets his own name. He doesn't want to be a monster, he doesn't want to be a tool, he doesn't want to give another excuse to treat him like he's disposable-

But Laios, he's beginning to think, would rather be a monster than human.

He can't claim to understand it. He's spent too long watching what people do to beast-men for that, too long watching how people act with anything they think they can mistreat - beast-men are a level below the rest of humanity, and he doesn't even want to think how something like him might rank. They're inhuman, illegal - he's seen half-foots taken away for as little as looking into the wrong books, he has no doubt that it would be worse if the elves caught wind of someone altering their body with magic. Who would want an enchantment that guarantees they'll need to spend their life hiding?

Laios would, apparently. And he hasn't the slightest idea how he's meant to handle that sort of want turned towards him, towards something he had no choice with.

He has the rest of this dive to avoid answering it. After that... he doesn't know.

The scabs, he knows, will heal eventually. Will set into his skin, like any other tattoo, probably settled to the same rusty red that the tallman who gave them to him had, if the way they've been healing is any indication, and then... well, he doesn't know.

He can't be seen with them by anyone, not if he wants to keep himself from going to jail for the rest of his short life. He can't ever take off his gloves in someone's company again, can't wear his hair short - the length it's grown out to now only barely hides the diamond-shaped rune that caps the array on his scalp, and it's a small miracle that no one's looked too close at the outsides of his ears yet. He can't hide these, not like he can hide anything else about this.

Paranoia's had him double-looping his cowl around his neck to hide the markings, and he's seen the other party members look twice at it, heard them absently discuss it even through the walls. His hearing's never been sharper, and they're far from oblivious - discussion of just what he's doing with the Touden siblings, discussion of what he's doing with Laios, makes up more dinner talk than he'd prefer under any circumstances.

He's not entirely sure what to make of the fact that something like half of the party appears to have jumped directly to the hare-brained idea that they've been having relations, even after Chilchuck set down the very clear base rule of no inter-party romance.

He's not sure if it's better or worse that the idea seems to be working to get them off his trail.

It'd be a decent cover, for someone else. Plausible, especially in parties with similar no-relationship clauses - when you're skirting the rules, you tend to dance around your other party members. But it's a wrong impression, directed to the one member of the party he's least likely to fall for - and worse, it makes him seem flaky and ingenuine, going back on his own rules the second he sees a pretty tallman. It stings to know they think so little of his self-control, and it stings more to know he can't say anything against it without incriminating himself in an entirely different way.

He hates the situation he's found himself in. He hates it with every ounce of his body, every bit of his breath - but he can't do anything about it, and that just makes it worse, if anything.

Maybe, at the end of this, he'll be able to go back to normal. He'll be able to cover up the tattoos crawling over his skin and brush off the allegations of a relationship with Laios. He'll be able to go home to the guild and make believe that he's fine even to a room with dozens of pairs of listening ears pricked for gossip. He'll be able to pretend nothing has changed.

But he won't be able to make things be the same.

There's a second body bound to his, made of muscle and bone and blades. There's a living weapon lurking just under his skin, waiting to be used, and he can't make it go away no matter how much he wants to - and that scares him, maybe even more than everything else does.

Because the rumors, no matter how bad for his career, are temporary. Because talk can be forgotten about, or fade into obscurity, or fail to take off the ground more than a handful of whispers. Because even if laws have been changed or forgiven before, if the laws around artificial beastkin were lifted today, he still wouldn't be able to be the same-

Because this, whatever it'll wind up meaning to him, is permanent. And it's that permanency, more than anything, that terrifies him.

He washes the tattoos. He rewraps the wounds. He returns to camp like nothing's ever changed, even though the rabbit's soul still itches under his skin.

He's been changed. He's not wholly human anymore. He'll never be the same again, and the proof of that is seeping into his very soul with every moment that passes, no matter how much he tries to dig his heels in. His body isn't wholly his own, and the only person who even knows is a freak who wouldn't understand social graces if they bit him on the ass, and-

Everything's different. And yet, almost nothing's changed.

A human weapon sits at a campfire. His party sits around him.

One more job. One more floor. Just one drawing of the runes on the door, then a return trip to the surface. Just a bit more time to let his wounds heal.

He won't be able to hide this forever. If things keep getting worse, then he probably won't be able to even keep it subtle for much longer.

But for now, he can play at normalcy, and given the givens, that's more than he ever expected to get.

#whump #my posts #writing #dungeon meshi #chilchuck tims #laios touden #werebunny au #werebeasts #febuwhump #febuwhump2024 #febuwhumpday28 #human weapon #nonconsensual body modification #dysphoria #(somewhat unconventional form)#dungeon rabbits

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 1 month

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Fandom: Bug Fables (Video Game) Relationships: One (1) mentioned OC/canon ship Characters: Astotheles (Bug Fables), Butomu (Bug Fables), Niothibng (OC) Additional Tags: Whump, Alternate Universe - Selkies, rope burns, magical bindings, Dehydration, Starvation Series: Part 1 of Febuwhump 2024, Part 5 of Febuwhump, Part 1 of Selkieverse Summary:

A geis or geas (pl. geasa) is an idiosyncratic taboo, whether of obligation or prohibition, similar to being under a vow or curse, yet the observance of which can also bring power and blessings. It is also used to mean specifically a spell prohibiting some action. Geasa are common in Irish and Scottish folklore and mythology, as well as in modern English-language fantasy fiction.

(Geas. (2024, Feb 5). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geas)

#bug fables #febuwhump2024 #febuwhumpday5 #selkieverse #astotheles #whump #writing #my writing #rope burns

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 2 months

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The fun part about stress is that when you're under a particularly large amount of stress from a single source, it's really hard to actually buckle under that One Thing. Even if it's a really, really big thing, that is threatening to ruin your entire life in one fell swoop, it's hard to fully get yourself to wrap your head around it. Big Things, in our experience, almost always take a good chunk of time to chew on and fully digest. You don't give way under the weight, you simply have to chew on it. Work through it. Maybe not directly work on it, but you don't really shatter from it. It just sort of hangs over your head, like a single massive weight.

The thing about these sorts of weights, of course, is that this adds to the stress from other things. You don't break down about the Big Things directly. When it happens, it won't be the Big Weight of, say, that cloying medical problem. It'll be the little things. That big weight is too big to really wrap your head around, too heavy to comprehend in one piece - so what gets you is, instead, the little things. The stuff that reminds you of it, in a way that's ever so more tangible.

Because you don't just think about, say, your future potential inability to financially support yourself. You go on with your life. You keep acting as normal. You work as you are, for as long as you can. And then that straw comes along.

You go out to a club with your friends. You think of buying drinks together. All of a sudden, you remember your bank account. Every penny spent on gin feels like a risk, a waste. You're irresponsible. You're wasting your savings away. How long can you sustain this? Everything you buy, and everything your friends buy, feels like abrasions on an invisible plane. Thinking about it makes you feel sick, and the more you stay, the worse you feel.

It's not spending two dollars on a beer, realistically, that's causing you the stress. It's the looming spectre behind it. The problem, showing itself in symptoms, so much more easily grasped. Your phone slips from your hands, and you think of the nerve problems that will only compound, and all of a sudden the mere idea of picking it up and dropping it again makes you feel sick. Your friend texts you something just north of warm, and all of a sudden you're spiralling worrying if your continuing problems have finally alienated them.

It's easier to grasp the smaller things, you see. It's easier to have one little thing happen and realize that you'll have to grapple with that for the rest of your life than it is to go through the symptoms list, because it's simple and immediate. Thinking of your future is too big to wrap your head around, but thinking of having to rely on someone to hold your hand just to walk you to the bathroom, over and over for the rest of your life - that thought scares you, more than any thought of the underlying cause ever would. It's not she's dead, it's how will i water the roses without her? or what will i do on tuesday now that she's gone? or how do i ever care for her pets?

Small is easy to grasp. Easy to think about. Easy to worry about. Easy to have happen, and have the horrible, bleeding spectre of its underlying cause crash into you, and leave you shaking and struggling to pull yourself together on the floor. A forced windows update might not scare you, but the looming fear of forced obsolescence will, the horror of not even being able to choose to opt out on a should-be-optional update.

Which is to say: it's not being forcibly turned into a werebeast that really gets you. Not the blades at your heels, or the blood on the floor, or the immediate knot of emotions when you realize your teammate's just seen you behead someone without even meaning to do it. It's not the injury, or the inability to walk, or the burning like boiling oil trickling down your muscles hours afterwards. What really gets you, once everything's over and done with, is sitting down and realizing that your only pair of shoes has been slashed to ribbons because of your own cursed body's spur blades.

Because it might not be the boots, on their own, causing the problem. But that, in and of itself, makes it worse. Because even if it's not the core of the problem, it's still the part that you'll fixate on, because it's faster, because it's simpler, because it's so much easier to grasp than wrapping your head around all that's been done to you, and crying over something as horribly, horribly trivial as boots makes you sound - well, it makes you sound like an immature fool, doesn't it?

A cruelty, perhaps, that the emotional state at which you'll cry over boots isn't one where you can put the source of the problem together. But really, knowing that it's the werebeast thing doesn't make you feel any less stupid. Because now you're the kind of person who cries over boots, and stupid, material possessions, when you have so many more problems, when a slip of your sleeve could get you arrested. And that, more than anything, makes you feel a tiny bit more helpless than before.

They were good boots, too.

#we speak #whump #stress #writing #context: we are writing cool and fun and normal content for werebeast chilchuck #although this isn't necessarily Part Of A Fic on its own we think it stands alone nicely as short fiction :3 #we are simply tinkering around with alt povs and such of scenes we want to write later #something something. we feel like this will appeal to the chil aios gang based on Generally Appreciated Themes but its more general stuff #welcome to god's most normal situation. we're the god and we say put that guy in situations

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 2 months

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Febuwhump Day 15 - "Who did this to you?"

The We Forgot To Post Some Prompts Special, part two. We're linking the index here. This one's more Scarlet In The Worst Possible Situations.

"And what on the path could put in a state like that? I know I'm not an ant, but I don't think that a trip to see the queen is that treacherous."

"Ah, I appreciate your concern, but I'm not-" Scarlet cut himself off as the moth set a heavy paw on his shoulder, their scent shading to concern in what he was almost certain was a trained response by now. He could practically taste the sympathy in their scent, carefully laid to mask the trace scents he'd been following- they knew what they were doing, he was sure, and trying to work out what motive could possibly lead a bug to pretend at warmth like that made his wings itch for the safety of open air.

Scarlet quickly checked to make sure that his stress pheromones were still out of production. Something was giving him a very, very bad feeling about this.

"It was nothing," Scarlet said. "Just me getting a bit lost."

"So you've been saying," the moth agreed. They didn't move a muscle. He couldn't help but feel the slightest bit skittish at the clearly-trained scent they were still putting off. What were they playing a role for?

Scarlet racked his memory, trying to remember if he'd done anything to prompt it. His memories of the past week were entirely too blurry to parse, muddled in the haze of whatever substance he'd had to clear from his bloodstream- indistinct rivulets of thought that he hadn't the time or the presence of mind to parse. Everything was a mess of texture, the taste of rose tea, the distinct feeling that something had gone wrong, the presence of a bug he couldn't name melted into his side-

"I don't think that nothing breaks shell like that. I don't think that nothing splinters carapace, or layers a scarf to hide beetle-horn wounds, or drugs a bug to the gills on nectar that'd have to have been harvested during a festival that happened months ago. I especially don't think that nothing lands a bug on enough of something to have him cuddling up to my daughter like letting go for a split second will stop his heart dead."

The moth ruffled their wings, a faint steel underlining their voice. "Doing something like that needs intent. Needs effort. Needs a bug behind it - and I know for a fact that it's too far out of season to find Venus Bud nectar in the wild. Be honest with me. Who did this to you?"

#whump #my posts #writing #febuwhump #febuwhump2024 #febuwhumpday15 #“who did this to you?”#bug fables #monsieur scarlet #grandpa #<actual name of that guy #this situation is venus's fault btw. unfortunately “god did it” isn't on anyone's bingo boards here. scarlet doesnt even know she exists #we know it is not february but we've long since reached the point of fuckit and we also. fucking forgor things #our organization system. beautiful.

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 2 months

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Febuwhump Day 13 - "You weren't supposed to get hurt"

Part two of the We Forgot To Post Some Prompts Special. This one's family drama edition!

"...Kina?"

What.

Astotheles briefly abandoned his guard to glance to the side. Kina was frozen in the middle of moving into position, staring at the Royal Blade like she'd seen a ghost.

"...Maki?" Kina asked.

...did they know each other???

The Royal Blade- Maki, apparently, if that was his name. It was an odd trick of perspective to try and think of the mantis as the person who would have an informal name, considering that he had been half-certain the bug didn't have any sort of life outside of being Elizant's personal lap dog before now, but considering that Kina seemed to know him-

"I- Kina, what are you doing here? You- the mission- we thought you were dead!"

Kina reared up- breaking formation entirely, Astotheles noted somewhere in the back of his head, but considering whatever bundle of something she was bringing to light with the Royal Blade, he couldn't really bring himself to resent it. He could easily question it, though. What in Bugaria could have possibly given her the chance to build any sort of relationship with Elizant's top minion?

Kina took a step back as the Blade- Maki, advanced on her. The blade fell limp in his claw as he abandoned his guard almost entirely. "I-"

"You- you were missing for months! Were you here this whole time?" His scent muddled as he advanced further, a mix of emotions that Astotheles struggled to decipher- and that he really shouldn't be spending the time to decipher, in the middle of a battle. Kina continued to back up, driven by the Blade - a sight that would've been almost comedic, if it weren't for the situation at hand. He was barely half her size against a bug that towered over most of the battlefield - and she was still retreating, though she smelled more of shame than of fear.

"Didn't you think that I might still care?" the Blade asked, somewhere between accusatory and hurt, and Kina reacted, flinching back as if she'd been struck.

"I didn't want you to get hurt!" she cried, distress leaking into her scent- an Ant stumbled out of her path as she flared her wings, a cricket darting around her ankles. Astotheles was getting increasingly certain that this was not the time or the place, and yet...!

The battle still raged around them. With the Royal Blade distracted, the tide was changing, if slowly. Astotheles caught a handful of bugs slowing, shooting glances at the unfolding drama in their midst before dealing with the actual fight. Distracted. Off their game.

He didn't have time for this.

"Kina-"

Astotheles had heard enough.

The mantis saw him coming, but he didn't react quickly enough. A sharp blow to the back of the claw, and he was disarmed- another few blows to the head knocked him out before he could bring his guard back up. The Royal Blade crumpled to the sand like a puppet with its strings cut, taken down by a needle-hilt to the head, and Kina jolted to attention, raising her blades in preparation to...

To attack the bug who had downed her squadmate. A conditioned response. And one that Astotheles knew very, very well.

She stared at the bug on the ground like her whole world had abruptly been turned upside down, and all that Astotheles could think was that we don't have time for this.

"We will need to talk about this later," he told Kina. Her expression wavered, stress, worry, relief, and resignment mixing so closely that he struggled to tell where one scent ended and the next began. It was a concerningly long moment before she nodded.

There was history, there. But he didn't have time for whatever new surprise that Kina had been hiding in her back pocket, and right now, he had a battle to win.

#whump #emotional whump #febuwhump #febuwhump2024 #febuwhumpday13 #bug fables #maki #kina #writing #welcome to the most dysfunctional sibling relationship ever. there is so much context in this situation we Have Not Posted Yet #but for now all you need to know is that the specific universe this takes place in is a later date of horror hunger

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 2 months

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Febuwhump Day 12 - Semi-Conscious

Hi. We forgot to post things. Our apologies for any tag spam that may occur, we're putting these under-cut regardless of actual length so that we don't violate common courtesy too much here. Behold, part one of the We Forgot To Post Some Prompts Special.

We are staggering these by a day or two because we don't want to flood the tag. You can expect three today and four (probably) in a bit - our apologies for the flood, and our apologies for repeating the same crime as in the end of February proper.

We have a grand total of seven prompts in the same technically-finished-but-we-were-busy-on-the-day-of state for this event - which is entirely too much for loading the Bug Fables tag with in one day, since there are other people also posting who may not want their stuff buried under seven different bits of mostly "we cut this up because the full concept is a few thousand words long and got too ambitious to fit in a single month" works.

Although technically one is an illustration, it is also an illustration that we finished... in a different country, while travelling. In theory, it's in our bags somewhere. In practice, we're mostly unpacked and haven't found it, which means it's either lodged in a sketchbook somewhere or left in a different country. For obvious reasons, this puts a slight damper on being able to post it (thus, the probably four).

The smell was even stronger here, a pervasive corpse-scent seeping through the space. As she got closer to the source of the scent, Celia couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching her, hidden in the shadows just ahead. Celia glanced around the cavern, fear creeping up her throat-

A moth laid in the corner, staring at her with wide, pale eyes.

Celia froze.

It looked like death warmed over - or like it was already dead, and the body just hadn't fully collapsed yet. Its limbs were limp, only barely propping up his body, its eyes glazed and reflecting the light of her torch like white pearls, its chitin looking brittle and half-faded. She took a moment just staring, trying to tell if it was still alive or already gone, trapped in its blank, unmoving gaze.

Its sides weren't moving.

Celia uncertainly moved closer, staring at the... was it a dead body? She felt the setae raise on the back of her neck, the distinct feeling of something watching her creeping into the back of her mind. The moth's body was still, but she couldn't shake the feeling that it was looking at her.

The tracks ended here. The scent trail, likewise, had dropped off. The scent of dying ant was strong, but there weren't any ants in here. There wasn't anything here but the moth's body, in fact - and though she knew that her sense of smell wasn't the best, compared to other ants, she could swear that the pervasive dead-ant smell was coming from...

Celia tentatively reached out to touch the moth's wing, and it moved.

#whump #my posts #writing #bug fables #febuwhump #febuwhumpday12 #febuwhump2024 #semi-conscious #leif #celia #leif's request spoilers

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 2 months

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Hello to the mothers and fuckers of the Dungeon Meshi tag. We have finished editing one of our Febuwhump entries. Come read our weird flesh prose for our yearly "actually posting a ship" content. This contains spoilers up to Chapter 27 of the manga, "Red Dragon V", due to the fact that it is a novelization of part of Chapter 27 of the manga. Also contains some alluding at later stuff, but honestly, it's a "if you know you know" type thing - you can probably read this and not get spoiled, provided you're at least at Chapter 27.

If you have already checked the tag here, you may have already seen the unedited version of this. This is the edited version. It's better, and also up on AO3 instead of being on a random Tumblr blog. If you've already read it, then we heavily suggest rereading - editing has done this one good! Considering the content, however, we cannot suggest reading this if you are squeamish or sensitive to some fleshy, meaty imagery. There is a lot of meat in here. You know how it is with resurruction.

Hope you enjoy!

#writing #whump #dungeon meshi #falin touden #marcille donato #febuwhump #febuwhump2024 #febuwhumpday24

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 2 months

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@febuwhump Day 24 - "I'm doing this because I care about you."

To anyone looking at this from the Dungeon Meshi tag - if you're anime-only, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS! If you've read the manga, the MAJOR spoilers are for Chapter 28 - plus a scattering of spoilers for later. This is a scene rewrite! Like the first time we've posted "just canon but from a different POV" also! We are counting internal monologue for that dialogue, and we are having Fun with it.

Watch your step, and we hope you enjoy.

From the instant that Marcille draws the first line of dragon's blood, she knows that she's gone too far to back out now.

There's a dreadful, solid certainty lodged in her chest as she brings her staff down, again and again. An awful sort of knowing, of

It's a unique kind of draining. Mana sickness is one thing, but this is another. Each line draws at something deep, deep inside of her soul, drawing more from her than she ever thought a spell could drain. She wants, so badly that it hurts, a sharp, desperate need for this to work. She dips her staff's handle in dragon's blood again, and she ignored the awful feeling of being bled to the bone. She's only ever theorized about dark magic before, never put it into practice herself - every line feels wrong, sickly, diseased, her staff scraping along the flagstones and funneling awful vibrations into her hands.

Every line she draws feels like a wretched, sickly sort of pain. Like picking at a wound that's only halfway scabbed over, half-clotted blood clinging to her fingernails as she picks at where her skin meets a gash, and scraping off the tiny, disgusting pieces of not-quite-scab onto a piece of paper. It's the worst thing she's ever done, and she hates it, every step of it, with a bubbling sense of revulsion that it feels like she'll never be clean of.

If she doesn't do this, then Falin will be dead. And Marcille doesn't want to live in a world where that's true.

She doesn't know how many runes it'll take, really. She knows the pattern, and that's enough - she just has to finish it. One rune, then another. She doesn't need to know how long.

The world, for what feels like a long time, is just her and the runes.

One, then the next. The future doesn't matter. The past is gone. She inks rune after rune in rotting, thickening blood, pausing to re-ink her staff when it runs dry. The only thing that matters is the next rune in the sequence, and it doesn't matter how long it takes. She has a thousand years to live ahead of her, a thousand years to spend doing anything she wants - she doesn't care how many of them she has to spend doing this, if it gives her Falin back. One rune, then the next.

Marcille reaches to dip her staff in dragon's blood a last time, and stops.

The circle is done.

Marcille is already horribly, horribly tired.

More than tired, really. Exhausted, a bone-deep ache in her chest like she's worked out a muscle she never knew that she had. She feels like she's on the brink of passing out, staring down at a circle of dragonblood runes that she's worn her staff's handle down to fraying roots from. The purpose in her chest that was so strong barely a minute ago is fading, flickering. Fatigue knocks into her like a truck, and she's swaying on her feet, struggling to cling on to consciousness.

She knows, more than she's ever known anything before, that she has to finish this.

She thinks of Falin, and she steels her will to move forward.

Pelvis, femur, humerus. Twelve rib bones, easy to tell apart. The vertebrae, the hands and feet - calcaneus, metatarsal, metacarpal. Eight carpal bones in the wrist, hamate, triquetrum, pisiform, lumate, trapezoid, trapezium, capitate, scaphoid. Falin's wrist bones are shorter than hers, shaped different in a way that's both subtle and the most obvious thing in the world. It's all she can do not to stop and stare at them, hypnotized by the broken remains of her friend - tallman bones, white and clean, so unfamiliar compared to Falin's soft frame, so much like the ones she's already seen buried.

She doesn't know what she'll do if Falin's soul has already left her body. She can't allow herself to entertain the idea of it. Falin will live, because she has to live, because she needs to- because Marcille can't let her die.

She lowers her staff, and she starts to chant.

She's doing this because she cares about her. Because she can't live without her. Because the very idea of trying to go on without Falin, after all this effort to find her, after all this effort to bring her back, is poison on her tongue, fire in her veins, a sickly death in the pit of her stomach. She's doing this because she cares about her, because she wants to talk to her again, because she wants to talk with her, to eat with her, to sit shoulder to shoulder with her as she talks about magic again.

She's doing this because she cares about Falin, so badly that it feels like her heart's started to rip itself apart in her ribcage - because she wants her back, because she wants to talk to her again, because she needs to hold her hand again and press her palm against her cheek and tangle her lanky, bony body around her soft tallman chest and hold her so tight that nothing else exists in the world. She's doing this because she needs Falin, with such strength that it nearly feels like she's drowning in her own skin with every moment she's away from her. She wants, so badly that she can barely keep herself from crumpling on the spot under the sheer weight of it.

Falin. Falin. Falin.

She chants her name in her head with every repetition of the spell, wanting, hoping, begging for this to work. The drain feels like she's cut a hole in her very soul, like she's bleeding out her lips with every word she speaks, like she's slicing holes in the vessel that holds all of her being. Falin, Falin, Falin - her soul to her body, the dragon's flesh to her bones, anything to make her whole again, anything to make her well again, anything.

She draws from the well, again and again, driving herself on sheer, desperate desire. Falin, a silent cry beneath the chorus of the spell. Falin, a desperate wish whispered into the darkness of the dungeon. Falin, Falin, Falin, she cries out, again and again, blind and deaf but for the runes carved into the stone. Falin, Falin, Falin, Falin, Falin-

Marcille is more exhausted than she ever has been, more exhausted than she ever knew was possible to be- she tastes bitter blood on her tongue as she chants. She draws from the well deep inside of herself, draws until it's dry and then beyond that, desperation and need driving her on and on and on. Falin, Falin- she digs deeper, deeper, past the well and into the ground beneath. She wants, she wants, she wants-

"Falin..." she starts. The words flicker on her tongue, abruptly uncertain and unclear. She knew what she was saying only a second ago, but now she struggles to put anything to words. The chant fades out, the words leaving her tongue - she can't remember why she was chanting them anymore, can't remember what she was doing. Her limbs feel weak, bowing under her body's weight, her willpower abruptly draining. Her fingers loosen on her staff, suddenly void of all drive they once possessed. She looks down, bleary-eyed, at rusty red runes drawn for a purpose she can't quite remember, and for a moment, there is nothing to her thoughts but the dull echo of a desire nearly entirely devoured.

And then she is unconscious, and she thinks no more.

#whump #my posts #febuwhump #febuwhumpday24 #febuwhump2024 #i'm doing this because i care about you #dungeon meshi #dungeon meshi spoilers #marcille donato #resurruction #fear of death #fatigue #writing #my writing

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 2 months

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FEBUWHUMP INDEX

Hello! We're trying out a new method of posting this year, after last year's posting revealed some very obvious errors in our methodology. Initial, unbeta'd drafts are posted to Tumblr the day of - AO3 posting is pending proofreading & beta checking, but will be posted once we've wrangled our beta readers into reading our Truly Excessive Amount Of February Fic, as well as done our own proofreading and potential light rewriting. We'll add those links later, but for now, there's just Tumblr.

This year, we pared down a good handful of prompts down to a "snippet and illustration" format to fit them within the month - these have been marked as "truncuated" within this index, and are likely to have more detailed fics when we actually get around to Ao3 posting. We also did not illustrate some of these because we got to having to illustrate them for posting and we didn't want to. As this is a time-limited challenge and our usual strategy for running out of spoons mid-sprint is to take a nap and get back at it later, we do apologise if these are lower-quality than hoped. If all goes well, the full, edited versions will turn out better. If all doesn't go well... well, you'll have a valuable snippet of our Worse First Draft, and if the idea strikes your fancy you're likely to be able to do it in a new and more unique way.

We have more or less finished everything here, but we haven't actually posted some of it - if something isn't linked, check back here at the source post later and we'll probably have it up eventually! For most of these our reasons more or less boil down to a mix of "tagging things sucks" and "we're photosensitive enough that comfortable light for us isn't really bright enough to photograph things well and it's a big pain to set up the right angles", and neither of these factors are likely to improve.

If we don't post a Collection Work before March 5 then someone come yell at us in the inbox. (EDIT: Collection Work's index can be found here!)

KEY

Day of origin - Prompt - Word Count - Fandom - Universe - Summary [Links]

Characters listed mostly by level of importance. POV character marked.

DAY 1 - Helpless - 919 words - Hollow Knight - Unnamed Hornetfic (working title: "hronet out of bugaria") - Hornet, captured and poisoned beyond a hope of escape, is stripped of her cloak and mask. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Hornet (POV), ??? (OC)

Contains: Poisoning, manhandling, loss of treasured items, debatably nudity (she doesn't care very much about it), loss of mask (she cares very much about it).

DAY 2 - Solitary Confinement - 341 words - Bug Fables - Canon/Canon Divergence - Hoaxe is still alive. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)][AO3 (collection)]

Characters: Hoaxe|Wasp King (POV)

Contains: Starvation, dehydration, slow and painful character death, tree angst.

DAY 3 - "Bite down on this" - 4442 words (+598 in omake) - Bug Fables - Unnamed Leipephilene Fic/Bug Fables Canon Crossover - Team Slacker collect a new version of an old informant. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Scarlet (POV), Delilah (POV), Stratos, Team Snakemouth but as background characters.

Contains: Manhandling, vampirism, fear of death, rampant paranoia, seedling murder, bartering, and the author's extremely self-indulgent crossover with a fic it has not yet finished.

DAY 4 - Obedience - 2099 words - Hollow Knight/???(Bug Fables) - "Walk In The Backyard" Transmigration - The Hollow Knight fails at its duty. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Hollow Knight|Pure Vessel (POV), Mothiva (not named in text), Zasp (not named in text), mentions of Hornet and The Radiance.

Contains: Heavy injury, mild suicidal idealation, mistaken identity, abandonment, literally kicking a bug while it's down, and the Hollow Knight's unfortunate inability to handle itself without being offered a purpose from an external force.

DAY 5 - Rope Burns - 2579 words - Bug Fables - Selkieverse - A geis or geas (pl. geasa) is an idiosyncratic taboo, whether of obligation or prohibition, similar to being under a vow or curse, yet the observance of which can also bring power and blessings. It is also used to mean specifically a spell prohibiting some action. Geasa are common in Irish and Scottish folklore and mythology, as well as in modern English-language fantasy fiction. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)][AO3 (Beta read, individual work)]

Characters: Astotheles (POV), Niothibng (OC, not named in text), Butomu (not named in text).

Contains: Feral behavior, magical bindings, mildly graphic description of injury, dehydration, overwork, (the bug equivalent of) prosopagnosia, and being manhandled by strangers with decent intentions.

DAY 6 - "You lied to us" - 1909 words - Bug Fables - Wereweevil Vi - Vi has a nightmare. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Vi (POV), Kabbu, Leif (dream), various others (mostly in dream, largely OCs)

Contains: Gore, painful transformation, dream murder, nightmare sequences, accidentally harming friends, a whole lot of verbal abuse,

DAY 7 - Suffering In Silence - 864 words - Hollow Knight - Canon/Canon Divergence - The Vessel has entirely lost count of how many times they've attempted to beat Nightmare King Grimm. They are beginning to grow very, very tired. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: The Knight, Nightmare King Grimm, brief appearance of Grimmchild, mentions of Dirtmouth residents.

Contains: Metaphysical burn wounds, frustration, The Ritual unfinished, and the general irritation of being stuck wrangling the affairs of gods.

DAY 8 - Lightning Strike - 817 words - Legend Of Zelda - Unnamed AU (Flesh, Bone, Blood, Magic) - "With brutal strength and extreme resilience, this type of Lynel somehow surpasses Silver Lynels in sheer power. It is said they are actually Silver Lynels who mysteriously transformed after being struck by lightning. If you see one, get away as fast as you can." [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Kasa (POV, OC), Link, Squall (OC), mentions of Lyr (OC)

Contains: Dragons, worldbuilding, the very predictable effects of holding a sword to the heavens during a thunderstorm, and transformation of the self (mild).

DAY 9 - Bees - 250 words (this one in particular has so many clashing versions that we don't want to even try a formal one) - Bug Fables - Canon/Canon Divergence - The problem isn't with the Hive. It's with Vi. [INITIAL POST (Tumblr, truncuated)]

Characters: Vi (POV), misc. bees.

Contains: Terrible self-esteem, deeply questionable familial dynamics, The Hive.

DAY 10 - Killing In Self Defense - 549 words (4125 words and counting) - Bug Fables - Canon/Canon Divergence - Bugarian autumn is cold. This is a fact of life around this part of the world, albeit one that Scarlet has never been terribly fond of, especially when his more favourable hiding places turn out to not keep out the chill. Thankfully for him, campsites are generally open to any traveller caught out in the cold. Unfortunately for him, the category of "any traveller" also includes bugs that he would rather not associate with... [INITIAL POST (Tumblr, truncuated)]

Characters: Scarlet (POV), Sasha (OC), Leif, Vi, Kabbu, Misc. OCs.

Contains: Sexual assault, overstimulation, stereotyping, murder, a not insignificant amount of nonconsensual touching, and the situational energy of having someone who is very much trying to come on to you approach you at the bar in a social situation where you can't explicitly say "no" and have to try to dance around the fact that you aren't interested whilst someone makes increasingly unsubtle come-ons to you in a way where it's increasingly obvious that they see you less as a person and more like a sexy lamp.

DAY 11 - Last Man Standing - 715 words - Bug Fables - Unnamed Forced To Harm A Loved One Verse - He has to protect them. Or they will die. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Leif (POV), Kabbu & Vi are mentioned but just out of frame.

Contains: Leif's Request spoilers, altered states of mind, unreliable narrator, significant injury (ignored), feral behavior, and fun facts about biology.

DAY 12 - Semi-Conscious - 270 words (in the same doc as Day 18, which is around 4k words) - Bug Fables - Multi-part (Calia and the Undertaker) - Domesticated forms of parasitic fungus are rare among most kingdoms. Celia's homeland, in this regard, is unique - to her knowledge, there weren't any kingdoms with domesticated cordyceps, save for home. A lack of evidence, of course, doesn't mean a definite no - and the thing that she's found lying by the side of the river certainly isn't a living bug. [INITIAL POST (Tumblr, truncuated)]

Characters: Celia (POV), Leif (POV), Levi, mentions of the rest of TSM, brief Leipephilene

Contains: Poisoning, Leif's Request spoilers, heavy usage of fan canon aka Shit We Just Made Up Because We Thought It Might Be Interesting, cordyceps-related activities.

DAY 13 - "You weren't supposed to get hurt" - 640 words (Too Many) - Bug Fables - Kinabbalism - The newest of Astotheles' Bandits runs into a familiar face our in the field. [INITIAL POST (Tumblr, truncuated)]

Characters: Astotheles (POV), Kina, Maki, a handful of Bandits and Ant guardsbugs in the background

Contains: Family drama, limited information, and dubiously ethical people management.

DAY 14 - Bloody Tiles - 537 words - Bug Fables - Canon/Canon Divergence - Every day that it is in the labs is another day that its siblings come to harm, and it is beginning to grow tired of waiting. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Kjdrira|Zommoth (POV), Misc. scientists, misc. zombugs.

Contains: Leif's Request spoilers, unethical experiments, fallout from said unethical experiments, Kjdrira's distinct & growing distaste towards the living, and a certain amount of blood.

DAY 15 - "Who did this to you?" - 422 words (1.5k words) - Bug Fables - Canon/Canon Divergence - Muze unexpectedly finds herself taking care of an injured drone from an unknown colony. Though he's obviously in no state to answer questions, she doesn't need to be a detective to tell that some of his injuries couldn't have been inflicted by the wilderness alone. [INITIAL POST (Tumblr, truncuated)]

Characters: Monsieur Scarlet (POV), Muze (POV), Grandpa, misc. OCs, mentions of Todd.

Contains: Nonconsensual drugging, unexpected side effects of said nonconsensual drugging, unreliable memory, light interrogation, Scarlet's weird biology, and assumptions of assault where the POV character cannot remember at all if the assumptions accurate or not.

DAY 16 - Came Back Wrong - 902 words - Bug Fables - Canon/Canon Divergence - On some level, Leif knows that he's changed. It's simply easier not to think about it. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Leif (POV), mentions of ensemble.

Contains: Dysphoria, oddities, bodily anomalies, the distinct feeling that something has changed, the lack of desire to be aware of that change, subconscious suppression of impulses that perhaps shouldn't be buried, unreliable narrator, and a surprising lack of Leif's Request spoilers.

DAY 17 - Hostage Situation - 231 words - Bug Fables - Wereweevil Vi - They say they'll let her go when her hive pays for her. She knows all too well that that won't be happening. [TUMBLR] (snip from longer work - no AO3 posting)

Characters: Vi (POV), misc. bandits.

Contains: Captivity, resistance, and a slowly ticking clock.

DAY 18 - Too Weak To Move - WORDS (in same doc as other chapters) - Bug Fables - Multi-part (Celia and the Undertaker) - It's harder to nurse a not-quite-bug back to health than Celia expected. Thankfully, not-quite-living patients are forgiving, when it comes to not dying. [INITIAL POST (Tumblr, truncuated)]

Characters: Celia (POV), Levi (POV), Leif, brief appearances from Zasp

Contains: Leif's Request spoilers, questionable knowledge of medical care, terrible quarantine procedures, attempting to nurse someone back to health on your admittedly-poor memories of A Species Similar To Them.

DAY 19 - "Please don't." - 274 words - Bug Fables - Charmcraft AU - Something is wrong with you. Something has been taken from you. Something has been changed about you. You are in pain, and you, and you, and you. All you want is for it to stop. [INITIAL POST (Tumblr)]

Characters: ????????????????????

Contains: Unreliable narrator, unreliable identity, unreliable mind(s), mild gore.

DAY 20 - Truth Serum - 766 words - Bug Fables - Postcanon/Canon Divergence - Leif wakes up in an unfortunate situation after a night spent in a neighboring kingdom. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Leif (POV), Interrogator (OC)

Contains: Nonconsensual drugging, self harm, kidnapping,

DAY 21 - Unresponsive - 173 words (in our short prompts doc) - Bug Fables - Unnamed Bodysharing Verse - Kina's hibernation goes long this year. [INITIAL POST (Tumblr, truncuated)]

Characters: Maki (POV), Kina

Contains: Hibernation, fear of death, Schrodinger's dead sister, and a potentially irrational amount of belief in the idea that Said Sister Is Going To Wake Up Soon.

DAY 22 - "You weren't meant to be there." - WORDS - Bug Fables - Charmcraft AU - Vi's arm was broken in the Snakemouth Den flood. Though she's been trying to act like she's fine, it's obvious that something is wrong - it's hard to hide it when you're struggling to open your fingers, and no amount of insisting she's okay can hide the scent of hemolymph when she moves too energetically, and now, it seems like it's been getting worse. When she starts acting particularly shady, Leif takes notice. When she sneaks out the inn window at night, he follows. [INITIAL POSTING (Tumblr, truncuated)]

Characters: Leif (POV), Vi, Kabbu, ??? (OC)

Contains: Permanent disability, some very heavy discussion on said permanent disability and measures meant to take care of it, internalized ableism, self-surgery, arguments, and taking questionable paths to a more functional arm.

DAY 23 - Presumed Dead - WORDS - Bug Fables - Canon/Canon Divergence - There are, occasionally, some benefits to having a resting heart rate of zero beats per minute. Leif doesn't think this is one of them. [INITIAL POSTING (Tumblr)]

Characters: Leif, Thronja (OC), a handful of miscellanous bugs having a very, very bad time.

Contains: Leif's Request spoilers, body horror, Leif's normal and rational decision making process, and turning your back on the body.

DAY 24 - "I'm doing this because I care about you" - 1266 words/1565 words - Dungeon Meshi - Canon - Falin is dead, eaten by the dragon. Marcille can't let her stay that way. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)][AO3 (beta read, individual work)]

Characters: Marcille (POV), Falin's Skeleton. Technically, there are other people here, but Marcille isn't paying a whole lot of attention to them.

Contains: Dungeon Meshi spoilers - mainly up to Chapter 28 of the manga, but there are some subtler ones from later. Dark magic, a possibly unhealthy amount of attachment, wound-picking metaphors, fatigue, and bleeding yourself dry for the sake of someone who's already dead.

DAY 25 - Immortality - 3250 words - Bug Fables - Canon/Canon Divergence - ZB-162 reflects on a life lived far too long. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: ZB-162 (OC, POV), Kjdrira|Zommoth, Misc. other zombugs.

Contains: Leif's Request spoilers, terrible conditions, terrible mental states, death and rebirth of an identity, self-blame, and the world's most mentally ill fungal communication network administrator.

DAY 26 - Last Words - like 2k words - Dungeon Meshi - Chimerachuck AU - Chilchuck is eaten by the dragon. His former teammates sort out his will. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Chilchuck (POV), the Red Dragon, the entire rest of the party (minor appearances), Namari (minor POV), Mayjack (minor POV, Packpatty, Fullertom, Chilchuck's Wife (does not have a canon name as far as we know, but we will survive).

Contains: Major character death, Dungeon Meshi spoilers, character being eaten by a dragon, description of injuries from being eaten by a dragon, description of dragon innards (because of the being eaten by a dragon), digestion (done by the dragon), epistolary elements, and a handful of guilt and messy family dynamics that are mostly non-dragon-related.

DAY 27 - Left For Dead - 29 words - Bug Fables - Wereweevil Vi - You don't win friends by betraying them. [TUMBLR] (painting - no AO3 posting)

Characters: Ollie (OC), Misc. Leafbugs

Contains: Blood.

DAY 28 - Human Weapon - ~3k words - Dungeon Meshi - Dungeon Rabbit AU - The spurs on his heels are long and sharp enough to decapitate with a kick. He tries very, very hard not to think about what that might mean. [TUMBLR][AO3 (individual work)]

Characters: Chilchuck (POV), Laios, miscellanous others.

Contains: Nonconsensual body modification, an unorthodox form of body dysphoria, crippling debt, and spoilers for miscellanous worldbuilding bits for Dungeon Meshi.

DAY 29 - Not Allowed To Die - 1466 words - Bug Fables - Fifty-Two Pickup - Piece by piece, Kjdrira puts its eroded disc back together. It will not let the effort be in vain. [INITIAL DRAFT (Tumblr)]

Characters: Kjdrira|Zommoth (POV), Carmina, mentions of misc. zombugs.

Contains: Leif's Request spoilers, Blight magic, questionable methods of surgery, potentially unhealthy attachment issues, and a fungus who is loathe to let go of what they have only just been allowed to know.

#my posts #febuwhump #febuwhump2024 #index #whump #writing #my writing #counting this as done in the same way all of our misc snips are done #which is to say that if we posted this to ao3 as a finished work then we would have to strangle ourself personally #but that's not the focus of this season so it gets a pass

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