Bodies Are Disgusting (16 page)

That makes you laugh again. "Jesus, you might
as well be eating me the way I see it, I'm up to three shark-bites
already." One of the tentacles around your thigh worms its way
toward your crotch. It's only now that it truly hits you that you
are standing (floating?) naked in the dark, your bare skin pressed
to Ori's, the strange texture of the beast's tendrils sliding
against you. Yes, you have in fact seen enough hentai to know
what's coming next.

The tentacle lying against your thigh slips
between your labia majora. It rubs lightly at your
clitoris–eliciting a tiny shudder–before it pushes into
you.

It's unlike anything you've experienced
before, not as firm as any toys you've used and far more lively.
There is a moment in which you almost flinch away, but the desire
to do so crumbles in the wake of a jolt of pleasure. Another
tentacle joins it, this one more rigid and less flexible. You can't
help but gasp.

The beast seems to take that as an invitation.
You and Ori are suddenly swarmed with tendrils: large and small,
thin and thick, textured and smooth, slick and dry. They slide over
you both, leaving barely any of your skin untouched. They tease at
your nipples, skate down your spine, prod gently at your anus. Some
with suckers attach to the sensitive skin of your neck and work
there like a particularly zealous lover.

Name Us.
Ori's imploring words echo
through your being as he presses his fingers into you alongside the
tentacles already writhing there.
Name Us, Douglas, and your
will shall be done.
You shiver against him, squirming with the
impossible thrill of it. The beast rumbles, and Ori exhorts you
again:
Name Us, name Us.

It's all too much. One moment, you are
suspended in the darkness being held up by the great beast and Ori,
the next your perception goes white with pleasure. It's as if your
entire being is suffused with a crackling electricity that can't be
contained.

In a rush, everything you lost comes back to
you. You recall with clarity that your parents were married on the
fifth of February, while the date you woke up in the hospital was
the thirteenth of March. The German word for revenge is
Rache
. The day before you woke up in the hospital, you were
unconscious, but before that you had been working a little later
than you'd planned; you were tired, sure, but that doesn't matter,
his light was
red
and you had right of way.

But, most importantly, you remember your first
date with Amanda. It wrenches at your heart because you loved her
so, even then. You still do. But that doesn't matter. She'd shyly
asked you for your number while you were waiting for Simon to get
off work. Three days later, she'd called to ask if you wanted to
hang out. A few months later, you went on your first official date:
a trip to the natural history museum with a bottle of rum smuggled
in under your winter coat. It was stupid, it was immature, but you
can only remember looking into her eyes and thinking that she was
the loveliest person on the planet that day.

You latch onto that feeling. Whether Amanda is
capable of reciprocating or not, hers is a life worth saving.
Simon's is a life worth saving. With the aftershocks of the orgasm
shaking you to your bones, you know what to do. Without your
conscious input, your mouth forms the words:

"I name you. You are Ori, Heir of the Sharks,
Bloodbather, Reaper of Sorrows. You're a shard of Fl'thuum, Ruler
of the Lightless Realms, They of Many Arms, Soulkeeper, Devourer of
the Morning, They of Sightless Eyes."

Ori curls his lips against your skin in what
you're certain is meant to be a smile.
Very good, Douglas. And
now we name you: Bastard Chosen of God, Dearest to Our Hearts,
Vessel of Our Mercy. Ours.

The final pronouncement rings through you,
reverberates in every atom of your being, tears it all apart. If it
weren't for the fact that you can
feel
, you'd think that
you've been blasted asunder. Maybe you have. Maybe you are too
small. Maybe you're a cracked vessel and this moment will see you
completely obliterated from the universe. All that would be left
are little motes of dust to spin off into the cosmos, cold, empty,
and alone. To call it pain is like calling a glacier an ice cube:
technically accurate in only the loosest sense of the word and
woefully inadequate to express the true breadth of the
subject.

It feels like an eternity before you emerge
from that moment, but when you do, you are not
destroyed.

You think that this is what it would feel like
to be a glove wrapped around a hand slightly larger than it was
meant for, complete with the sensation of something beyond your
control flexing inside your ribcage and abdomen. Without a doubt,
you understand that these tendrils can move you if they so choose,
just as the fingers will warp the material of a glove. They are
quiescent now, leaving you free to do as you please even as the
understanding that they will not always be silent fills you to the
brim.

At your side, their hand in yours, is Ori.
Where before there had been a hint of masculinity to them, now they
are utterly sexless and nearly devoid of a human seeming. They are
as you have named them: Heir to the Sharks. Blood pours down their
face, their throat, their chest, mixes in with the blood that seeps
through gills like knife wounds. They grin and it reaches their
eyes filled with stars.

For a moment, you see yourself reflected in
those wide, glassy scleras as clearly as if you were staring into a
mirror. You've been worn clean of color and divested of any outward
signs of the sex assigned to you at birth. Your eyes are
reflections of those you stare into: round with shock and pricked
with tiny points of light. Your piercings look like they've all
been ripped out, leaving jagged edges of flesh that ooze ichor like
Ori's gills. You glance down at yourself and find your skin to be
translucent with a queer writhing blackness hidden just beneath the
surface, speckled with additional eye-like growths through which
you can see nothing. Everything is painfully elongated and thin
with bones like jagged chunks of glass pressed against bleached
paper.

It should horrify you.

It does not.

You're filled with so much now. You know Ori
inside and out, now that you've named them. Their being mingles
with yours and you can see all the ways in which they shaped you.
All the ways in which they primed you to be their perfectly broken
vessel. They never intended to win with you, had always intended to
see how far you could be pushed before cracking and you can feel
the intensely fierce pride rolling off of them in waves.

Ori tilts their head to one side. Your gut
clenches in the grip of your unseen god, or an emotion queerly like
it. You are sure you will learn to tell the difference, given time.
"Shall we?" Their words no longer vibrate through you; they speak
with their mouth, their shark teeth ruining sibilance in the
process.

Yes. Let's go.

The elemental blackness is gone, replaced by
the hospital room you'd been standing in not long ago. Amanda rests
in the bed just as she had been before, no less wan.

You reach out, rest an impossibly thin hand
upon her forehead. You can see something curl beneath your skin
toward her. Something stretches inside you and you can see
through
Amanda as easily as you could see her before. Her
spleen has ruptured, one lung has been punctured, both kidneys have
failed, she's bleeding out slowly into herself.

It's instinctive, the way to fix her body. The
essence of what makes you vessel to They of the Sightless Eyes
flows from you and through her, knitting bone, mending flesh,
leaving tiny trails of dark splendor in its wake. One moment, she
lies there with her life slipping between your fingers, the next
she is whole.

A stray tendril of energy brushes against her
skull; there were no indications of head trauma, but something
there grates against your senses all the same. It feels like a
blight or a tumor. A gnarled knot of sickness lodged between
neurons, blocking her thoughts. It does not take much to wrap
yourself around it and yank it out.

You roll it around in your mouth. It tastes
like despair and hopelessness and Amanda's toothpaste. Images flit
across your mind: Amanda crying on the phone with her father; a
project laying half-finished on Amanda's drafting table; dinner
alone; a shouting match with her younger brother; a phone call like
the one you had received; a note full of platitudes pinned up next
to her bedroom door. There are other images, too, like a scene from
one of the fights you had with her not long before the break, or
when she called you nearly in tears just yesterday (
but you
couldn't make time for her; even after all your claims that you
still loved her, you couldn't even make time to talk to her for a
meager five minutes
).

Whatever this is, it has been growing for a
while. Of that you are certain. Your extra senses tell you that,
though it lacks true physical mass, it had likely grown so large
that it pressed against every thought or feeling or sensation she
experienced, blocking any goodness from her mind until it seemed
reasonable to walk out in front of a bus. Most of it feels like the
heavy weight of a father's hand on her shoulder, but you can find a
few tiny thumbprints about the size of Ori's nudging (much like the
ones you now know are all over your being).

Your ruminations on her mental condition grind
to a halt when she lets out a vague murmur. Without thinking, you
move your hand to cover her eyelids, which flutter beneath your
fingertips like the ineffectual beating of a broken bird's wings.
Shh,
you tell her,
don't try to wake up. It's all
right.

"Doug?" Her voice is thin and cracked, but you
hear it as clear as a crisp autumn day.

Yeah
, you say,
I'm here. Don't
worry, you're gonna be fine.
For a moment, you consider lying
to her, telling her that everything will be fine. But that's just
it. It's a lie. The world will soon burn, of this you are
unwaveringly certain, and you are going to be the spark that
ignites the tinder and the wind that fans the flames. Through
everything, though, you know that the Devourer of the Morning will
let Amanda be safe.
Nothing's gonna hurt you
anymore.

Silence yawns between you, an ever-widening
chasm that reminds you viciously of the way you'd drifted apart.
Tendrils of your god have nestled in the fissures of your heart in
such a way that the pain is a distant echo of what it once was, but
you still feel it. You never stopped loving her.

"What happened?" she finally asks. The fingers
of one hand trace the slightly frayed edge of the blanket pulled
over her. It takes every ounce of willpower to stop yourself from
running the remains of your other hand over the veins in her
arm.

Please forgive me,
you say, and you
don't mean for fixing her body. Her brow is furrowed in
confusion.

"What'd you do?"

Just remember that I love you,
you say.
She shifts as though to sit up, so you withdraw your hand and step
away. You can't let her see you this way. You would rather her last
memory of you be your most recent fight than what you have
become.

Sensing your train of thought, Ori slips their
hand into yours. "Time to go," they say, tugging on you
gently.

You nod, letting your fingers fall from
Amanda's face. Your dark god's tendrils flick behind your sternum
and you are gone like a whisper.

You are immediately transposed next to Simon,
who sleeps where you left him splayed awkwardly on his bed. What
damage he carries is not as straightforward as what you just
mended, but you have bone-deep knowledge that it can be done. The
hand not gripping Ori finds its way to Simon's stubbled
cheek.

You know that his damage isn't physical, and
it will take a much more invasive technique to bring him around.
Tentatively, you extend yourself through your hand and into his
skin.

The room shifts. You no longer stand next to
Simon's bed. Ori is no longer at your side. Instead you see a room
that seems to have no ceiling, filled from top-to-bottom with
bookshelves. This, you realize, must be how Simon visualizes his
mind. You glance down at yourself and find that most of the changes
your god wrought have disappeared. Instinctively, you understand
that this must be because it's how your friend sees you rather than
a true reflection of what you are.

"Simon?" you call. The stacks seem to amplify
your voice until the echo is almost unbearable. He doesn't respond.
Of course he doesn't. It couldn't be that easy. Squaring your
shoulders, you pick an aisle of books and set off down
it.

The further from your point of entry you
stray, the more moth-eaten and rotted things become. Letting your
hand drift along the spines of the books, you catch little glimpses
of things: pieces of data he presumably learned in school, snatches
of memories from his youth, fleeting impressions of feelings he
experienced at some point of time or another. It feels like
skimming the surface of his soul. Which, you suppose, you may well
be doing.

Finally, you come to what you can only assume
is the heart of Simon's internal library. It's blown apart and
charred, the shelves weeping ink like blood and the circulation
desk twisted beyond all recognition. There is still no sign of the
library's owner.