[OC][Non-BB] Sinews

[YseultNott]

There is blood on Alison's fingers, slick in-between where they rub against each other, tacky where it started to dry, and it tastes of salt under her tongue.

Under, her skin is warm.

Under, she can feel bones.

There is a void in her stomach, an empty, all-devouring hunger, and Alison, Alison needs to eat. Alison needs to eat now.

There is flesh around her finger bones, and the blood isn't enough.

Dog-Hungry is looming over her. Alison is dog-hungry, too.

"Alison!" someone screams. It's not Mom. Mom is licking her fingers, too, and digging them back for more into the flesh of her arm.

It's Sweet Dreams.

Sweet Dreams. Sweet, sweet Sweet Dreams in her rainbow dress, dizzying Sweet Dreams, vertigo Sweet Dreams, who make your head turn and lights dance behind your eyes.

There is blood trickling off Dog-Hungry's ear as she bends over and throws up.

 

[YseultNott]

The hunger doesn't leave. Not completely. It merely subsides, recedes, and Alison has space to think again, has enough of herself back to part her teeth and pull her fingers away.

There is blood in Dog-Hungry's sick. Meat. Chunks of things Alison can't recognize.

There is something like fear on Dog-Hungry's face as she presses her hands to her mouth to hold it back inside, something like horror as she chokes on it, something like despair that makes something clench in Alison's stomach.

It's a relief when Dog-Hungry collapses. When Alison doesn't have to look at her anymore. When Officer Mills, made faceless by her helmet, drowns her in foam, like a teacher in a schoolyard pouring sand over a kid's vomit.

"It's okay," Sweet Dreams says. "It's okay, Alison."

There is someone kneeling over Mom, holding something white, bandage or gauze pad, whispering words of comfort. There is the sound of sirens ringing through the air. There is a hand on Alison's shoulder.

"It's over, Alison," Sweet Dreams says. "You did well."

 

[YseultNott]

There is a newspaper on the nightstand, and an article spread over the front page, broad and bold title announcing the arrest of the villain, of the monster, of Dog-Hungry.

Of Amber.

Amber Goodman, Daisy Bell said. Talk about irony, Sweet Dreams said. Her sister lives on this street, Officer Mills said, Alyssa, I know her, she works at the post office.

Mom said nothing. She wasn't there.

They said Amber Goodman went missing last year, two towns over, and hadn't been found. They said she was a waitress. They said she used to be pretty, and isn't that such a shame?

They said she can't turn the hunger off, the one she spreads to others. They said she might feel it herself. They said maybe it drove her mad.

They said she might not go to jail. They said maybe she'll go to the Asylum instead.

They said sometimes, you get a tragedy instead of a bad guy.

There is a newspaper on the nightstand, and a glass, full of water. Her glass, on her nightstand, in her room in the Wards headquarters, because Mom is in the hospital, and she has to stay somewhere.

Sweet Dreams will take Alison to visit tomorrow.

 

[YseultNott]

Sweet Dreams looks different with her hair down, bun undone to make a braid, with a leather coat instead of a dress, with silver instead of rainbow. Still neater than Alison, whose ponytail can't quite keep her own hair in place, still prettier, but she looks more solid like that. More real.

She looks out of place in the white hallway.

"I'll wait here," she says, waving her hand toward a line of plastic chairs affixed to the wall. "Give you some privacy. Come here when you're done, okay?"

It's not far, from there to the door, to the room, to the bed with Mom in it.

"Alison," Mom says. "How are you doing, sweetie?"

There are bandages peeking at the edge of her hospital shirt. Alison hates them, a bit. A lot.

The bandages are white, at least. Unstained. No blood seeping through. That's good.

Alison shrugs.

"I'm fine," she says, as true as not. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Mom says. "Don't worry. The surgery went well, I'll be out in no time."

"I know," Alison says. "Sweet Dreams told me."

Mom could have died. They both could have.

It's hard, to shake off the leftover dread.

"Can I have a hug?" Alison asks.

Mom opens her arms.

The hug is uncomfortable, awkward, Alison bent over the bed, twisted to keep away from the wound and the morphine bag, Mom half sitting with a tube sticking out her elbow.

"It's okay," Mom says. "It's okay, sweetie, it's over. You were very brave and she's gone and it's over and I'm so, so proud of you."

There is something soft on Mom's face when Alison pulls out of the hug. Something nice. Something…

Her hand reaches toward Alison's forehead, brushes the blonde strand away from her eyes.

"I love you," Mom says.

"I know," Alison says.

This time, she believes it.

Spoiler: Author note

And that's a wrap! There's gonna be a bit of extra material coming over the next 2-3 days, but that's it for the story proper. I hope you enjoyed it!

 

[YseultNott]

Daisy Bell:

Tinker. The more complex what she makes is, the more fragile it is, to the point of things being essentially single-use when advanced enough. Her tech tends to look pretty and delicate, often with light shining through clear, cristalline parts. She generally has a flying apparatus shaped like wings stashed in reserve, but she tends to only use it for predetermined PR occasions or when she knows she will have to fight or has a strategic reason to need to fly.



Sweet Dreams:

Not entirely sure what classification it is, but the publicly known aspect of her power is to select people in her line of sight and give make them feel dizzy, along with loss of balance, nausea, headaches and seeing spots of lights behind the eyes similar to what can happen during a hard cough or certain kind of migraines. What is less known is that she can "push" her power to cause outright vomiting and, in extreme cases, strokes or brain hemorrhage.

 

[YseultNott]

Dog-Hungry's power has two components. The one that is most obvious in the story is her hunger aura, which is ranged-based and can be dialed up to the level seen with Alison and her mother in the final fight - where the people subject to it will eat themselves or others if nothing else is available -, and down to what Alison experienced prior to the encounter - a craving for food that can be mistaken for normal hunger pangs. As has been guessed in the penultimate chapter, Dog-Hungry is affected by her own aura, which she is unable to turn down.

The second aspect of Dog-Hungry's power is less visible in the story, but still appears in two occasions (on the video footage and in the final fight): a regeneration-based brute power, fueled by the consumption of human flesh. In combination with the hunger aura, this power led Dog-Hungry to her murders and, when food isn't directly accessible, drives her to a constant cycle of eating herself even as she regenerates.

 

[YseultNott]

Although those aren't supposed to be necessary reading, readers who have had a look at my snip thread might have recognized some of the main cast. Indeed, Makayla, Daisy Bell and Sweet Dreams are taken from my snip A Nice Cloud of Pixie Dust, while Alison herself and Officer Mills are from Dirty Hands Reaching Out. Both stories are canon to Sinews, and take place before the events of the fic.

 

[YseultNott]

The first of Sinews' characters I created wasn't Alison, or Officer Mills. It wasn't Sweet Dreams, or Daisy Bell, or sweet little Makayla with her wings and pixie dust. It was Dog-Hungry. Morsel. Amber.

Ouroboros, as she was originally called.

Dog-Hungry's character was originally created as a concept for an X-men style mutant, alongside a few others, and predates me even learning of Worm's existence. For a long time, it sat there, in the corner of my mind, untouched, until I decided I decided that it would be wise to keep a few pre-made capes in reserve in a Google doc, so that I could just grab a hero or villain as needed while writing a story, and set to convert my mutant ideas to cape powers with the help of the Cauldron Discord's chargen channel. Originally, in addition to her healing factor, the powerset involved a telepathic ability, which the character would use to render her victims brain-dead before devouring them. This aspect was deemed too detached from the regenerative ability, and replaced by the hunger aura to reinforce what was always supposed to be the central theme of the power and character: eating, of people.

This is what was at the very core of Dog-Hungry, even in her prototypical stage, before any name or story could be given to her. A woman, a cannibal, tearing off parts of herself and devouring them, eating herself raw and bloody.

Although - with the obvious exception of Sinews - my Worm stories have featured relatively little gore and general bloodiness, the same cannot be said for those of my fanfictions written prior to Stepfather - my first Worm story and a major step in my progression as a writer. Indeed, if one were to look at my old Daredevil and Punisher works, they would find the ghost of Lisa Castle, made faceless by the bullet that killed her, devouring the corpses of those her father killed in her name, they would find a girl eaten by dogs feeding others to those dogs and finding sustenance from this consumption, they would find two children forced to drink the other's blood, a child forced to cut off and eat a strip of his own skin.

I have, if you will forgive me the pun, a taste for writing gore and cannibalism, in particular the eating of the self and others. Give me teeth and blood and meat and I will rather enjoy myself, as long as it all stays within drawings and the written word.

This is why I wrote Sinews. Or, rather, this is why I wrote Sinews now.

I have posted something - Chapter, snip, extra material such as power descriptors or this retrospective - at least once a day since June 13th, 2020. That is, if one cares to calculate, 690 days of publishing in a row as of today. That is, despite my general lack of verbosity, a considerable investment in both time and energy.

I love writing. I honestly, genuinely do. But 690 days of daily posting can, occasionally, prove somewhat tiring, and I have been struggling with keeping a consistent output since the beginning of the year. Sinews was an attempt to help out with that, rupturing the monotony with a return to my pre-Stepfather roots: Gore, cannibalism, and no outline before my own vague idea of the plot. This led me to two conclusions:

1) No outline was a mistake, let's not do it ever again, and
2) Yes, I still really like gore and cannibalism, and I will likely try to have more stories including it.

Regarding, 1), although I overall think the pacing of the fic was, if maybe not good, at least not worse than my usual story, it proved a struggle to write - not knowing what I was supposed to write before opening my Google doc made me dread having to do so and come up with something on the fly, pushing me to procrastinate on writing, which is rather the opposite of what I was trying to do.

Regarding 2), I don't really have anything to add, except that I think I did pretty well in writing the more bloody elements of the fic.

Regarding the overall final product of the fic, I am... Pretty happy with it. It has weaknesses - I feared the allusions to Alison's trigger event to be a bit confusing and I have received some feedback that it might have been, along with plot elements I genuinely thought were pretty clear, I feel the pacing might be pretty fucked in places - but I still honestly think Sinews counts among my best stories. It was also a good occasion to learn, with two major "first times": first actual, "on-screen" fight, and first time reusing original characters (Alison and Officer Mills from Dirty Hands Reaching Out, Sweet Dreams, Daisy Bell and Makayla from A Nice Cloud of Pixie Dust), which was something of a challenge, as I had to find ways to male fit what I needed them to be with what I had already made them to be in stories which weren't written with a continuation in mind.

I think I did a good job of it.

Finally, regarding the struggle with writing I have mentioned earlier: I have had a very bad time of writing on April and have eaten though much of my backlog, which is unfortunate, however! My next fic, although it is a short one, is nonetheless fully written, as well as a couple of snips and a handful of updates for my Harry Potter fic. I have also fully outlined another Worm fic, and intend to make full use of MayNo to rebuild as much of my backlog as I can though writing it, as well as workshopping future stories - I even have inspiration for an original story!

I haven't said my last word yet!