Work Text:
Tom hit the ground with significantly less splatter and gore than would be realistically expected from a fall of that height, bringing a hand up to rub the definitely-going-to-bruise indent of Eduardo's fist on his cheek. Not that the rest of him didn't hurt like a bitch, but frankly, he's dealt with worse.
Besides, none of his bones felt broken.
Still, this fuckin' sucked.
He was in some alleyway by the looks of it- he must have been thrown nearly across town, or at least, that's what it looked like, watching buildings fly past below him while he flailed like a lunatic and screamed his lungs out.
The skin of his cheek felt strangely tough under his hand.
Odd.
Wait-
His teeth began to sharpen, digging into his lips and tongue, and Tom absently spat out a glob of black stained blood while he tried to rein in the change- what was even causing this? He was fine, he was calm- well- "calm" was a bit of a stretch- he wasn't angry, was the point here. Certainly not angry enough for this.
And yet he scrambled to pull his hoodie over his head, hoping to save at least one piece of clothing from its inevitable fate. His nails were beginning to blacken, his rapidly darkening veins visible under clammy skin.
He caught a flash of green in the corner of his eye, there and gone in an instant as Edd was launched across the sky, and as Tom's knees gave out he connected the dots. Eduardo's radioactive punch must have set something off in his own body, the power behind the punch combined with the adrenaline of being launched into fucking orbit chain-reacting to force the monster to the forefront.
With that puzzle solved, the painful part finally kicked in- how polite that it waited its turn- and Tom could think no more. Bones shifted and elongated, stretching, stretching, stretching to reach their desired shape. Skin hardened into a dense hide, not unlike leather, and fur sprouted, coating him in a fine layer of purple hair. Horns twisted painfully out of his skull, and his vision blurred both from the pain and because his eyes were fusing into one, the separate sockets growing larger and larger until there was no separation at all.
His screaming reached a crescendo as the transformation reached his vocal chords, morphing the human screams of pain into an animalistic, guttural rumble, a symphony of cracking bones and stretching flesh the backing track to his chorus of agony.
Finally, blissfully, it ended, and Tom was no more- not really. Taking a barely conscious backseat to his body, he could only watch as the monster ambled its way- destruction in its wake- to Edd and Eduardo's little scrap fight.
and then he smacked one of them into a wall
why do they both wear green? do they not understand how hard it is to tell the two apart when your vision is nothing more than vague blobs? honestly, the nerve
and then the other one yelled something at him
and glowed even brighter
and the stink that he'd by now identified as radiation increased tenfold
and then suddenly Tom was flat on his back, in the grass, staring up at the sky, and very glad that whatever Eduardo hit him with didn't kill him.
…And then he stole Matt's coat.