Work Text:
Grian is standing in the middle of the shopping district, with dirt under his fingernails and his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, and that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, necessarily, except for the fact that the last thing he remembers is working on his base, and he has no idea when or how he got here.
His health is, he notes with alarm, down to less than half, and he has no idea how that happened, either, so before addresing anything else about this situation, he reaches into his inventory for some golden carrots. It’s a moment of fishing around before he’s forced to conclude he doesn’t have any golden carrots, or indeed any food besides, for some reason, raw mushrooms, red and brown.
Well. He can make mushroom stew. He guesses.
He slaps down a crafting table with no small amount of irritation and sets about making himself a bowl. Normally he doesn’t particularly care for mushroom stew at all, doesn’t particularly appreciate the taste or the texture, but he must be terribly hungry, because today even the smell makes his mouth water.
He gulps it down and makes another bowl, and then a third, before his hunger is finally sated and and his health is ticking back up to full. Goodness, how long was he at low health without noticing? That’s not like him at all, usually.
…The sun is nearly setting, he realizes when he glances skywards to check the time. That can’t be right. It was high noon just minutes ago. And- sure, he’s been known to lose track of time while building, but usually he at least remembers it afterwards.
He racks his brain for any reason why he might’ve come to the shopping district. There must have been something. Some building material he’d realized he needed? What would that be? Right now basically all he needs are mass quantities of concrete and glass, and he’s certainly not wanting for either. Dye? But he doesn’t have any dye in his inventory. He just has- he checks- an impractical number of mycelium blocks, and two stacks of mushrooms, and his rockets. He doesn’t even have his tools.
Weird.
Well. He’s always been distractible. He hadn’t known it could go this far, but it’s not that much of a surprise. So long as it doesn’t happen again.
—
It keeps happening. He keeps losing time in little jumps and starts, almost like there’s lag in his brain, and it’s getting to be a little concerning.
It doesn’t start being a lot concerning until things start… growing.
He finds the first mushroom just under the collar of his shirt, when he’s pulling it off to wash it.
His fingers find a bump, tucked just in the fork of his collarbone, tiny and squishy, and he freezes in place as he feels at the spot, trying and mostly failing to convince himself that a clump of clay or something had gotten caught in his sweater while building. When he scrapes at it with his fingers, trying to pull it free, it tugs at his skin in a distinctly uncomfortable way.
He hesitates a moment, shifts his arm for a better angle, and then digs his nails into the base of the soft little lump, wincing when it squishes, and yanks. The spike of pain is half-expected, but still jarring. He rolls the growth between his fingers for a second, eyes averted, before looking down at it.
It’s small, with a white stem and purple-brown cap. The ragged bottom of the stem, where he’d torn it from his skin, is red. Gross. Alarming, also, but predominantly gross. He grimaces, drops it, stomps on it; the bolt of pain, this time, is completely unexpected, and makes him seize up with the sheer surprise of it.
He finally finishes pulling his shirt and sweater off over his head, and is alarmed all over again by a sizable bloodstain on his collar. His first thought, almost absurdly, is irritation, because bloodstains never wash out all the way, and then, a second delayed, it occurrs to him to worry about the actual injury, because it’s definitely bled way more than it should, and maybe needs a bandage, or even a healing potion?
He feels at the join between his neck and shoulder with one hand as he hurries over to his bathroom to check it out in the mirror. The skin under the injury feels swollen and hot, like there’s some sort of infection in the meat, like there’s a soft lump just beneath the skin.
He flicks the lights on and examines the tear in his skin. On first glance, it seems like his initial thought was right; the injury really doesn’t look like anything major to worry about. It looks like a little abrasion, slightly bloody. He leans a little closer to the mirror, frowning, shifts his head, and gets a better look into the injury itself.
Just under the skin, exposed by the wound, he can see a cluster of tiny brown spots, pulsing slightly, crowded together, pushing upwards towards the tiny gap, blood welling up around them and beginning to trickle down his chest.
Panic surges, and then, just as quickly, subsides.
There’s a skip behind his eyes like a scratched record, and then he’s standing beside his bed. When he blinks, brings a hand up to feel at his shoulder, he finds the spot bandaged, the skin still warm to the touch.
He feels a little disoriented, but, more than anything else, he feels exhausted, all of a sudden. He can’t really muster the energy to be scared, or anything more than faintly irritated. He has a lot to do- he can’t go getting… sick, if that’s what this is.
He all but falls into bed, and is asleep in seconds.
—
The air underground is warm, and teeming with life. She’s lying on her back in the dirt, in a little pocket of buried air, when she comes back to herself, by degrees. She doesn’t know where she’s been, or what time it is, or what day. She doesn’t know how long she’s been sleeping, if she’s been sleeping at all.
When she tries to think, all that comes to mind is growth, and love, and rot. She doesn’t know why she’s she. Everything around her is soft and warm. There are clusters of mushrooms blooming in her joints.
She pushes herself up to sit, pulls at her sleeve until it covers the colony in the curve of her left wrist. She knows, without knowing how she knows, that secrecy and deception will be her keys to victory. And that means she will remain unobtrusive.
She stretches, relishing in the movement under her skin, frowns down at her jeans. Tucks some trailing threads of mycelium into her waistband, out of view.
Maybe, at least, she can get a gown. For special occasions.