Work Text:
There was no magic split-second of change or oblivion that altered her irrevocably afterward, which made things all the worse. A blindfold darkness fell over her eyes, but Sasha was fully aware of every wrenching second of change.
She wanted to vomit at the sensation of her bones being pulled through muscle and tendon, leaving her a jellied bag of unstructured flesh, but something wouldn't let her. It wouldn't let her scream at the feeling of bone pulling her back into human shape, either. With her eyes rendered useless, she was left to conjure nightmares of the things she couldn't see. The shape her body was reconfigured into was shorter and rounder; she didn't know if the bones returned to her were altered forms of those she started with, or something else altogether.
Sasha half expected the feeling of things drawing through the meat of her to feel like a worm burrowing through her shoulder, or the sharp fingers delving in to remove it. Those were sickeningly different sensations; she supposed it was only fair for this to be a feeling all its own as well.
The fire alarm was still screaming when sight and sense returned to her. Her cheeks were wet. She scrambled away from the table, then hesitantly moved back toward the door. What else could she do? Before she could peer out, unsure whether she would stay or dive into fresh and final betrayal of her flesh if she found the halls still writing beyond, a different scream harmonized with the shrieking alarm. Sasha knew before looking that the carpet of worms would be still and dead; she couldn't imagine anything being alive after screaming like that.
Her legs were far too short, but she tottered on them as though they were stilts. She had no idea what to say when she reached the street where all her coworkers milled about waiting for someone to do something.
"Ah, Sasha!" Elias beamed at her in wobbly relief, hair mussed and forehead shiny with sweat. "I was concerned to see you hadn't made your way outside after we were separated. It's good to see you all in one piece."
"I was in an accident in Artefact Storage," she tried to say. They had protocols for things like this; even if the changes couldn't be reversed, staff received excellent benefits and compensation for the stranger sort of workplace injury. Sasha just wanted someone to tell her what to do about it, should she try to reverse it or start to make peace with a new reality? The words refused to come, and her mouth said, "I found somewhere safe to hole up, luckily. You set off the fire suppressant?" It didn't sound like her voice.
Elias smiled shakily. "I did, eventually. I was afraid for a bit that I wouldn't be able to get to it."
Sasha looked around, and this time her voice obeyed her instructions. "Where are Jon, Tim, and Martin? Did they make it out?"
Elias' eyes clouded with suppressed emotion. "The paramedics have already called ECDC. They should be here any minute, and they'll clear the building. They'll find them, and anyone else still inside." He tried for a reassuring smile. "I'm sure they'll be fine. The CO2 probably just knocked them out, and that damage should be minimal once they come to."
Sasha's throat refused to scream.
-
She staggered home with her mind racing, having seen the boys into the proper medical aid and stammered a lie that refused to allow the truth passage into Jon's tape recorder. No one said a word about how she no longer stood eye-to-eye with Martin. She barely came up to his shoulder.
Sasha didn't expect what she saw in the mirror when she dragged herself toward the shower. Stupid, why would height be the only thing altered?
She could see the base materials in the warped product, was the awful thing. The flesh redistributed over a smaller frame made her pudgier, but it was her skin, her moles, her crescent scar on the forehead from thunking into a loose bit of a neighbor's fence riding her bike at top speed when she was twelve. The eyes were hers. Her lips went somewhere, thin and pale now. The color of her hair was unchanged, but it was short and straight. She might have passed for a cousin, but she didn't look like Sasha. The flat roundness of a nose that comforted or pricked her grief by matching her dad's was pinched into a narrow spike.
The tears came in the shower. Once they started they were half relief, knowing that she wouldn't be entirely prevented from mourning whatever this was.
-
The ache of being pressed into new and unfamiliar shapes didn't fade, lingering deep in her muscles and bones. Heat helped, and standing piqued her legs and back into pain, so Sasha found herself answering emails about the extended leave all the Archives staff were being put on until they had a non-hazardous working environment again, and about Jon's stubborn investigations going on from bed rest, and Martin's burbling anxiety about everything, with her laptop balanced on the toilet lid so she should use it from the bath. She couldn't put the wrongness of her body into an email, couldn't cry and plead for help in any medium, but she could make an appointment with her GP about the pain.
He barely listened to her explanation of everything she wasn't supernaturally barred from saying with disinterest, even though she overstated the degree of pain, pinning the constant background hum of plateaued pain at the intermediate peaks, and stretched the onset back further than the truth. She could feel in her warped bones that this wasn't going to go away on its own, and she needed to know being reshaped like clay wasn't going to result in some fatal side effect down the line.
He asked how she was sleeping, and when she said the pain kept her up sometimes, but with work on hold and the pain keeping her from leaving bed for anywhere but the bathtub she was sleeping more than she could remember doing ever, he rattled through a lecture about people mistaking sleep deprivation for a pain disorder anyway. He asked about her sleep six more times, and was unmoved when she maintained that she slept more than was healthy, if anything.
She left his office with a roiling mass of stress and frustration, pulsing pain arriving in her calves for its fourth encore today, and a prescription for sleeping pills she didn't want or need.
-
Shambling out of bed intending to buy groceries, Sasha instead found herself climbing into a delivery van, the abrupt terror of her feet refusing to obey her drowning out rational thought; it took her seconds too long to recognize the dirty, fading name painted on the side. The deliverymen said nothing, and Sasha was too weary and frightened to interrogate them. Every time she opened her mouth, the mystery of what might happen if she broke the apparently amiable mood and made it clear that she was not on the same page made her shut it. She hated herself for the cowardice.
They drove for hours. Her ability to maintain apprehension broke eventually, and then she occupied herself with wishing that whatever took control of her body and mind had given her enough warning to bring a book.
Arriving at their destination was apparently the cue for the deliverymen to start up a grating double act, with Sasha's lack of appreciation and failure to tip a major theme. It was easy to tune them out when she had rising anxiety and unnerving waxworks to distract her. Arriving in the buzz of activity at the center of the possibly-abandoned building made Sasha's brain skip like a scratched CD.
She didn't know the whole story and all the gory details, but she knew enough. more than enough; how different was it, to have your skin reshaped instead of removed? What were the odds that England had multiple questionably-human ringmasters and any resemblance to what happened to Tim's brother was entirely coincidental?
"Ah!" the plastic and gore spindly monster squashed into a ringmaster's costume trilled. "There she is! Sasha, we're so happy to have you helping us handle the Archivist! Welcome!"
Her lips spread into a smile that wasn't hers and her heart pounded in her ears. "I'm happy to help!"