Work Text:
It is four to ten when you transform.
It is three to ten when you catch your reflection in the window. You briefly wonder why you always change in front of this shopfront before your thoughts inevitably turn to your “costume.”
There is nothing typical about it, there isn’t even anything recognizably human about it. Flesh and cloth and magic have blended together into a single, roiling pastel mass. You have been doing this for two years, but that is of no help in telling where one ends and another begins. Your regular body must be somewhere within the writhing form you have become, but where exactly is a question even you cannot answer. Though, with some of the things you have squeezed through in this form, sometimes you are not even sure of that.
Your ruminations end as a zebra stripe pattern of yellow and gray coats the window. Your nightly hunt has begun and soon you begin ambulating south east, following the pull of senses you cannot fully describe. They tell you that there is prey ahead.
In a matter of minutes you are upon them.
You leap, your form contracting and then rapidly expanding, pouncing on them. The first is crushed under your weight. Tendrils of yourself shoot out, slamming down on a second and coiling around the third, constricting until it pops. The remainder surround you, circling to find an opening, but you have no blind spots when like this and more tendrils teach them their error, crushing, stabbing, and tearing. The final one hurls itself at your bulk with maw agape, but it is instead you who devours it, insofar as something without a mouth can do so, pulling it within yourself and grinding it to dust with your undulations.
With this group dispatched your senses pull you toward another. And then another. And another. It is a busy night, bouncing between buildings and slithering through alleyways as you hunt ones and twos of your prey.
At the seventh such encounter of the night you save another girl, you recognize her from physics class, from probable injury. She attacks you in panic. You retreat, deciding that staying to explain would be much too awkward. She doesn’t put much energy into pursuing. You try to distract yourself with more prey.
Unfortunately, that does not work. Worse, it also reminds you that there is physics homework due in the morning. That you forgot about. You twist and burble in self recrimination as your mood, and night, turns sour just in time for the barrier to reset and your last potential distractions to disintegrate.
Annoyed, you transform and actually walk home.