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Published:
2023-06-15
Completed:
2024-12-29
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2,414
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2/2
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Harold the Worm

Anonymous

Summary:

Harold fled in shame. He was practically an old man, and he had done nothing with his life! His sister, Destroyer Yogosoth, had burned entire houses to the ground by herself. His father, Clever Belemoth, had tricked an entire human family into eating themselves. He was nothing but a burden to the Flesh Hive. Filled with self-loathing, Harold left the colony and vowed to never return.

Or: One of Jane Prentiss' worms gains agency and a friend.

Notes:

I read DpsMercy's fic where Jon gets a pet worm from Jane Prentiss and I decided that I wanted a fictional pet worm too. His name is Harold and he was cast out from the Corruption for being too nice.

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

worm and ocean

Harold had lived in the Flesh Hive for all his life, surrounded by his brothers and sisters. But Harold was different. His siblings were silver and sleek, with hundreds of razor-sharp teeth in their mouths and a thirst for human flash. Harold didn't match.

The biggest and most obvious difference was that he wasn't silver, because of some freak of genetics. He also lacked the consuming drive to devour that always seemed to fill his family.

"You're almost a common earthworm," his mother sneered, and turned away to go tend to her other children (all two hundred of them).

When Harold was three months old, he had a midlife crisis. When worms turn one month old, they were all supposed to get a title, a signifier of their accomplishments, given to them by someone who loved them. But at the naming ceremony, Teacher Toupli, an old and wise worm who claimed to love all his students, skipped right over Harold.

"I must admit that I can give no name to the worm known as Harold, for he has done nothing of consequence," Teacher said, to all the worms gathered there. "If he were to die tomorrow, we would not miss him. We would not remember him."

Harold fled in shame. He was practically an old man, and he had done nothing with his life! His sister, Destroyer Yogosoth, had burned entire houses to the ground by herself. His father, Clever Belemoth, had tricked an entire human family into eating themselves. He was nothing but a burden to the Flesh Hive.

Filled with self-loathing, Harold left the colony and vowed to never return. He wandered for a time, getting lost in the nooks and crannies of the world. He saw the wonders and depravities of wormkind, and reveled in the bustling mayhem of it all.

There was a girl in one of the towns he passed through who fished him off of the ground as he lay there, tired from a day of travel. She put him in a jar filled with leaves and dead bugs, then screwed the lid on tight and skipped away, bouncing him against the walls of his prison with every step. He even got a name, sort of. She called him Wormy. But a true worm title is earned, not given freely, and anyways she did not know him.

Harold grew to hate the girl that put him in a jar, as time went on. She did not know what to feed him, so he grew thin and starved, longing desperately for real meat instead of the flowers she gave him.

But one day an eternity into his captivity, as he lay at the bottom of his jar, he saw a strange yellow door shimmer into existence on the wall across from him. He squirmed his way up to the edge of the glass that contained him and watched in awe as the door creaked open, and a human-shaped thing with teeth sharper than Harold’s stepped through.

The sharp person waved his hand, and the prison around Harold shattered into prismatic light.

"My name is Michael," he said, lifting Harold up. "And I think we will be the best of friends."

"You're not a worm, we can't be friends," Harold said, laughing, because in those days he was very close-minded.

"I can be," Michael said, and twisted until he looked just like Harold.

Michael and Harold explored the world together, spending days basking in the sun and chasing after children. They stole candy from babies together, spent some time gnawing on a tired nuisance who called himself the archivist and made fun of Elias together. Harold came to know his tunnels better than he knew himself.

“I want to give you a name,” Michael said softly, after years had passed. “I know that this is a tradition for your people.” Harold squirmed anxiously.

"But my name must be given to me by someone who knows me, and loves me despite my flaws. Back home our teacher did it, because he was old and wise."

"I know you," Michael said softly, his tail tracing spirals in the air. "I love you despite your flaws, and I love your flaws too."

He had nothing to say to that. Shifting closer, Michael wrapped around him like a blanket.

"If you have no other objections…"

Harold was silent. If he wasn't able to breathe through his skin, he'd probably have lost his breath.

"I name you Friend Harold," Michael said, his voice rumbling through the dirt. Harold snuggled into his embrace.

"What have I done to earn this name?"

"You have made me happy on sad days," Michael said.

Friend Harold gave the sort of smile that only flesh-eating worms can, joyous and full of teeth.

Chapter 2

Notes:

Hello! It's been more than a year but I got the urge to write about Harold again. Be warned that this chapter is an extremely drastic change in tone from the previous one.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Over the years, Harold learns what Michael is (not who he is, because Michael cannot be described with who), and learns it well. Michael sets up his doorways in the forgotten places, where people wander when their minds are open to madness: underneath old bridges that crumble at the seams when someone drives over them, the end of the candy aisle at an almost abandoned convenience store, in the alleyway between two competing hardware stores, in sewers and basements and undercities. They are always yellow, even to the colorblind, even to the people who can’t see at all, and they always have a magnetism that is impossible to resist once it’s got a solid hold.

He feeds on fear, and he is indeed fearsome, but he is not cruel. He plays with his victims until they’re soaked in panic, marinating in it like a roasted turkey, but once they’re afraid, he kills them fast. They are alive, collapsed and trembling, and then in the time between nerve impulses, they are not. 

Children stumble into the hallways, sometimes, and they are easier prey, in many ways. Their minds are more malleable, more given to believing the unbelievable and bending without breaking. Michael hunts them with the same diligence that he would anybody else, because he is a monster, and he cannot deny his nature, but he gives them opportunities that he doesn’t allow adults. If they are very fast, and very cunning, they can find their way to an exit, and stumble out into the sunlight, traumatized but alive. If they were not children, they would find that exit slammed closed just as they reached it, offering them hope only to snatch it away. 

Michael enjoys lemon cake. He likes to lounge sideways in the air, body spiraling into fractals, and eat from a never-ending cake that tastes just a bit too sharp when Harold tries it. All types of sweets appeal to him, really, whether they are cookies or brownies or cheesecakes. Sometimes he makes an illusion of a kitchen, down in the heart of the Distortion, and the two of them bake together, sending flour swirling up into the air, where it floats until it crystallizes and collapses. The things that they make can barely be classified as food, but they are delicious nonetheless, and they taste like memories. 

Harold knows the hallways of the Distortion in all the ways that it is possible for them to be known. It is, after all, the nature of the Distortion to be unknowable, even to itself. This, too, is the nature of it: centuries pass in seconds and days pool into an ocean of missed opportunity and time stretches like taffy in the summer sun. Michael is perpetually iterating on himself in endless loop-de-loops, and Harold accompanies him for the ride, kept safe in the cupped palms of his power. 

Michael loves him. Harold knows this as a fact, and he holds that knowledge close on difficult days. But Michael is not the Distortion. He didn’t understand this distinction, at first; he didn’t realize that although Michael is the puppet on the finger of a greater power, he is not only a puppet. He and the Distortion  interlocked, like lovers lacing their fingers together, but Michael had clawed out his own separate personality. 

The Distortion is not Michael, and he is loved by one, and hated by the other. The hatred develops slowly, over the years and decades and centuries he spends inside it, growing outwards into gnarled branches of resentment. His very presence as Corruption grates against it, and it tries to shake him off, like a dog itching at a flea. He is small, though, and stubborn, and loved by Michael, and that is enough to keep the worst of it at bay, for a time. 

It would have been easier to accept, maybe, if he’d roamed too far, if he'd left Michael’s protection behind and slithered obliviously into the maw of the Distortion. But the Distortion does not need him to wander to hook itself into him. He became its creature as soon as he entered it and did not die and only went slightly insane. 

The Distortion catches him up between the space of two heartbeats. It rips him away from the surface halls, where he is cushioned by Michael’s will and by his own innate status as a predator, dragging him down into the underside. That’s the best way he can describe it. It’s the place beneath the window dressing it puts out for its prey and its avatars, where it exists as pure madness. It pins him, holding him splayed and wriggling, and he can’t even put himself together enough to scream. 

He is caught in retrograde, his body unspooling in reverse. His scales peel up in long curlicues, spiraling beneath him like spaghetti, and his muscles go pliable with the softness of rotten fruit. The fluid-filled spaces between his muscles calcify, giving him the bones that he’s never had before, and he can’t see but he is also staring into a supernova. 

Harold feels himself tearing between his scales. He bends, a death loop made incarnate—and is caught in Michael’s hands before he can break. 

“No,” Michael says, and that single word is spoken with enough force to vibrate his newly-formed bones back to liquid. 

Harold huddles in Michael’s palm, small and insubstantial, until he feels the great heaving pendulum of the Distortion’s attention turn away, like a whale passing by in the water. 

They are more careful after that (even though their care would not matter if the Distortion truly wished him dead), but they continue as they always have. Michael drives his prey to madness and Harold feasts on the scraps of them left behind, growing strong and sharp on the remnants of insanity. They hear whispers, drifting up through the layers of the Distortion, about rituals and the Magnus Institute and the man at the center of the Eye. Michael is called away, occasionally, to do some task relating to it all, and he comes back from those trips grim and wanting to speak of his past. He forces out little tidbits of information, over the course of years that pass as seconds outside the Distortion, but never anything substantial. It is not in his nature to have a distinct past; he is the collision of time, past and present and future all existing at once, shoved up against each other in the same space. 

But Harold learns that Michael was not always a monster. It is not something that he understands. He was born sharp-toothed and vicious, even if he was less than his siblings. He coils himself at Michael’s neck and wills his body to warmth and hopes that it brings Michael some comfort. 

Time passes. He does not know how much of it, but it’s definitely some. 

Harold feels it when Michael dies. The two of them have become each other, down in the bones of madness, and their souls (or at least, what passes for souls among monsters) are one and the same, twisted so tightly together that they almost replace each other. He feels Michael die, and he feels the Distortion deliberate, for just a moment—and choose not to save him. 

He is being ripped apart. His soul, his other half, is being ripped out of him by force, dragged away to a place where he cannot follow, and he does not accept it. He opens his mouth, lined with layers upon layers of teeth, and he howls. The ancestral knowledge inside him is boiling, the part of him that he has never quite meshed with, the piece that is purely predator and Corruption. He pulls power to himself until he is overflowing with it, curls of it rising from his scales and disintegrating in the air. 

The hallways flex with rage around him, but he is the product of disease and rot, and he was made for gnawing his way to the core of things. He finds a corner where power snags against itself, and sinks his teeth into the weak spot. The Distortion tries to crush him into nothing, but he is small, and fast, and maybe there is something of Michael still in the halls, weighing down its attacks. 

Harold bites into the Distortion, and he draws on his birthright as the avatar of Corruption that he is, and he burrows into it. Down, then down again, into the underbelly and then past it, all while the very fabric of the universe around him curdles in fury. It is the nature of the Distortion to not understand itself, and he relies on that, tunneling between blind spots, relying on its own swirling eddies to hide him. 

Harold continues downwards. 

It’s dark, down at the bottom of the Distortion. There is nothing, not even madness, and that is a form of insanity all its own. He finds Michael sunk into the nothingness, covered by it up to the neck, eyes closed and body limp. 

The Distortion is past, present, and future all coexisting in the same place. Michael is dead in the present and the future but he was not in the past. Harold grips onto that knowledge with the power and desperation of another soul entwined with his, forcing the universe to twist itself (and the universe has already twisted itself, so many times, twisted and twisted until it straightened again) into a shape where Michael is alive again. 

It is not in Harold’s nature to love, but he does it anyway, and the pure maddening force of it reflects in Michael’s eyes when he finally, finally opens them. 

Notes:

I hope that you enjoyed! It is unlikely that I will ever add more to this, but I never thought that I'd write a second chapter, and yet here we are.

Feel free to tell me about spelling and grammar errors but I'm not looking for other varieties of constructive criticism at this point in time.