Work Text:
You take the needle out of its container. Sturdy plastic. It pops open with a thock , revealing the slender, shining piece of metal. You pry it free of the frame keeping it in place, plastic snapping out of the way as you move it. This is... impressive. This is a whole-ass sharps container. It was even wrapped in that heavy cellophane to keep it sterile. All this from one witch selling body mods out of her house? Your friend sure is something.
You’ve known her long enough that you watched her go from experimenting on herself--she didn’t seem to know what she was looking for, and even though she’s found some things that she liked, she still hasn’t ever settled--to getting asked for help doing the same, to making a living out of the whole process. You haven’t seen her turn a customer away yet. Even if she doesn’t know how to make something work, you can bet she’ll work her ass off to find out. That kind of passion for making the most of yourself has made her well-known, trusted to Hell and back. There’s a whole community supporting her, just people like her exploring what they can become and giving back what they can.
And now here you are, having bought from her.
You suppose that’s only fitting. You’ve looked up to her for so long... You only realized recently that maybe part of that was admiration of what she had for herself. Which brings you to, the needle.
You look at it, pinched between your fingers. Roll it between them. There’s a silvery sheen to the metal, but that’s the wrong magical substrate. It’s cold iron, instead--if it can interact with the fey, it can certainly restitch your little patch of fate’s tapestry. The eye is rather large, and the short length of thread tied through it rather unusual. It’s a Yarn. Not a piece of yarn, but a physical manifestation of a story. They’re normally the byproduct of the transfer of information, forming like stalagmites out of air charged with the excitement of a good adventure, tense with the hungry curiosity of an eager student. Often, they’re found in libraries, webbing up the pages of books and the corners of shelves, mistaken for cobwebs.
Your friend, however, found a way to make them on purpose. A way to encode specific information straight into them. You compared them to magical instructions, at first, a sort of conceptual DNA, but she insisted that they were still very much stories. Addenda, she said. Revisions. Alternate twists, another flourish here or there. One of the people who volunteered to help her test them out said they were like headcanons. The possibilities were practically endless , she said when you could take the narrative into your own hands . After a very, very long conversation--lots of questions, she wanted to get this right for someone so important to her, and eve more answers you didn’t think you had until they jumped from your lips all by themselves--she took what she knew of you, and what she had learned, and spun a Yarn just for you.
It’s in your hands, now.
You’ve given yourself injections before, and you were told it’d be just like that. You’ve never done it with this kind of needle, though, and after pulling your clothes out of the way, you aren’t sure how exactly to hold it. You try putting it between your first two fingers and bracing your thumb against the eye, but that... doesn’t feel right. You try holding it like a pencil, and...? No? You try a few more grips, and when none work, you huff, let go of your clothes, and pull out your phone. How... to... hold... a... sewiiiiiiing, needle. Fuck it, let’s try that. You hold your fingers like a hand puppet, a bla-bla-blah motion, and pinch the needle between them. Okay, that feels right, and waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait okay. Okay. Wait.
For a moment, there was total certainty about what to do. Like you could do it with your eyes closed. Like you could do it without even thinking about it. In the same breath, the weight of doing it crashed through that clarity like a brick through a glass. You take a deep breath. You raise the needle again. You pull your clothes out of the way again.
The metal seems to thrum in your fingers. The magic it was made with? Maybe it’s just your hands trembling. The anticipation of the poke, like before, or perhaps of the change. It feels heavier in your hand, but now you’re thinking about it so hard. It hurts less when you aren’t looking at the needle, right? Right. You close your eyes, take another breath to steady yourself, and hold the needle at an angle. You drive it gently toward yourself, forcing it along with your thumb. It breaks the skin. You don’t know what you expected--at this point, you normally squeeze out the medicine and pull the needle back out, but you’re this far and you just can’t fathom backing up now. Something deep--not instinct, you think--guides you, and you pinch the skin. You push the needle further, completing a stitch in your flesh, and pull the needle out through the other side. The Yarn unravels as it passes through you, weaving itself into you; it sheds wispy fibers of light as it enters, dissipating as your hand completes the motion. You blink, and after a moment process that you didn’t even feel the huge eye of this thing as you pulled it through your fucking skin. Your friend really is something.
The thought is interrupted by a warm sensation from the spot where you poked yourself. You touch it and find that the skin is softening. Not as in “smooth and supple”; you’re seeing “like touching velvet”. Dude, it’s happening. It’s fucking happening. It starts to spread from the spot, slowly radiating outwards, up your torso, down your arms and legs. The hair on your body thickens, starting from the same spot. It grows out thick, rapidly becoming a blanket of fuzz, growing as you watch like a timelapse of a seed sprouting from the soil. Its texture changes, too; not coarser, but becoming more like tiny, tiny threads. The hair--fur--catches up with your softening skin, and overtakes it, the wave crashing along the remainder of your body with a fwoomf .
You feel it along your face, and reach up to find whiskers, stiff and plasticky. Your ears must’ve been carried along with the tide, because you miss them when you squish down the fur on your cheeks. You find them sitting on the top of your head instead, two cute and springy little triangles. They perk up involuntarily as you rustle your hair around them--you suppose you’ll learn to flick them around on purpose with time.
In some spots, your chest, along your arms and thighs, the fur is much thicker. A few inches long, deep enough to sink your hand into. As you relish the feel of it, wide-eyed, you feel a strange sort of tension in your hands. You clench them tightly, rolling your fingers as though you were stretching your knuckles, and as they curl, you watch them thicken. When you relax them, they’re huge--each easily the size of your face, the fingers rounded and covered with a pad each, just like your palms. You close them again, open them again. You take in the feeling of the fur between your fingers sliding past itself. They don’t curl quite like they did before, and they look like the gloves of a mascot suit, but they’re your hands . You feel something pop at each fingertip and watch as little, hard plastic claws, colorful and shiny, emerge.
You look down and find your feet much the same: replaced with paws that squish down under your weight, cushioning your steps as you pace around on them for the first time. Walking like this doesn’t feel quite right... You give your legs a stretch, straightening your ankles as far as they’ll go, and they just keep straightening and straightening until you find you can’t bend them back forward again. The joint now sits at about the height that your knees were just a moment before; you have to hold your weight in a slightly different spot, now, but the spring in your step is... wonderful. You take to your new gait in just a few seconds, but your balance still doesn’t feel quite riIGHT DID YOUR SPINE JUST SLIDE OUT OF YOUR BACK???
You twist around and see a tail hanging just above your hips, even fuzzier than the rest of you and coming to a rounded end. It’s a BIG one, too. You give it an experimental swish--another thing to practice, but it does seem to finally straighten out your posture! You try walking again, and it feels off every time you’re mid-stride. You try flicking your tail back and forth in time with your footfalls and BAM oh my GOD you feel like you’re walking down a runway. You’re fucking working it!!! Your hips are swaying and if you weren’t bouncing with excitement anyway you sure would be just on account of the way your legs are SHAPED now holy SHIT!!!
You press a paw into one of your thighs, just to see if they’re as soft as they look--and they look SOFT now. It sinks in further than you expect. Much further. You feel like you really should’ve reached the bone, at this point?? You pull away, and your leg holds a deep imprint of your paw. Slowly, it begins to return to its full bulk, and it occurs to you that you don’t just feel lighter because of the new way you hold your weight, but because you are literally lighter. Your insides feel airy; your limbs squish against themselves as you bend them. You wrap your arms around your chest and give yourself a squeeze, eyes shut tight and smile wide, marvelling at how SOFT you are.
You feel a buzzing sensation at the nape of your neck, which quickly spreads in all directions. Up behind your ears, meeting at the crown of your head, and down and around your neck to either side; down the sides of your torso; along the backs of your arms over the elbows; along your legs on the inside and outside of your thighs. Each feels like a pull tab being dragged along your skin, joining some unseen zipper. You twist your arm around in front of you, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever’s causing it, and see threads working their way along your body, dipping under and poking back over your fur. When they reach the ends of your limbs, they form a cuff at each of your joints, circles of stitches holding together your wrists and ankles, your knees and elbows, your shoulders and hips. They don’t do much in the way of actually making you sturdier, and you were already in one piece without them, but looking at them...
You run a paw pad--literally padded, it finally sinks in--along the stitch on your arm. The feeling under your fingertip evokes a fresh scab. Stretch marks. Old scars. The healing and the growing that have brought you to finally making the choice to be something, some one , you want to be. The marks left on you, chronicled on your very skin, of the changes that lead up to this. These stitches are the edge of an old couch, catching you as you collapse for your well-deserved rest, exhausted or sick or heartbroken. These stitches are the hem of a top that you had pinned your hopes on, hoping to make an impression on someone or trying to present as yourself for the first time. These stitches are the seams on a beloved doll, the creases on a loved one’s skin, comforting and familiar, even in spite of how new they are.
Compared to everything else that's different now-- better now--they're pretty small, but this wouldn't be complete without them. You wouldn't be complete without them. The way they stretch at your widest points, pinch at all the little turns, accentuates your new, pillowy nature. They're impossible to miss, and show everyone that you are a constructed thing; a you that you designed yourself, and with a little bit of help, made real yourself; a body purpose-built for the things that matter to you, built for closeness, and warmth, and being a source of comfort for the people you love. More than anything, they're an ever-present reminder that you were made with care.
You realize that, despite the feeling of your eyes welling up with joy, the tightness in your foam-filled chest that comes from crying, the fur on your face isn’t actually getting wet. The oddness of the sensation brings you back to the present, and you rub your face to collect yourself (dwarfing it with your new paws). You look around for the needle and realize that you’re noticeably bigger than you were before. It might be a pain to squeeze out of them, but you’re suddenly thankful that your new body has more give than your clothes. Despite the haystack now being a bit harder to navigate, you make sure you don’t lose the damn thing. You plan on going back to your friend to see if she can set you up with a chain to run through the eye of the needle. You have a feeling she will; it’s like her to think that far ahead. It’s going to make a lovely memento, and it’s only practical for a brand new plushie like yourself to have a needle handy while they get used to things.