Work Text:
You hadn’t remembered falling asleep. Your head pounds as you attempt to sit up, and you soon realize that the attempt is useless. Instead, you settle on examining your surroundings from where you are, your head too heavy to lift your cheek off of the ground.
How had you gotten here? All you can see is a void, an emptiness of black. You tear your hand away from the ground and it comes back black and sticky. You press your fingers together and pull them apart, watching as the tendrils of liquid separate and then congeal, beading up against your fingernails.
Your memory is completely shot, you realize. Of course you remember your name, your place of residence, the feel of your cat’s “love bites” on your nose, but you don’t remember anything that you had done last night. Had you been drinking? You bite your lip as the thought crosses your mind. It would certainly explain the wracking pain in your head, though the sharp pain through your stomach was a mystery of another caliber entirely.
You begin to panic as you feel yourself going numb from pain, shock or something entirely unrelated, but you soon realize that you’re being hoisted up by someone much stronger than yourself. Your stomach lurches uncomfortably, but the person leans you back so that you’re supported by their weight.
Instinctively, you try to twist your head back to look at them, but the person rests a hand on top of your head. “Shhh,” they say insistently, and you allow yourself to be coddled like a two year old for a few more minutes. You’re in no position to object as your legs can’t even support themselves on their own.
The person presses a hand to your stomach and a comforting feeling blankets itself around you. Suddenly, you find yourself able to push away and you step forward. The person lets you go without fuss, and while you don’t feel so comforted anymore, traces of the feeling still cling to your body. You don’t feel pain anymore.
You take the time to inspect your stomach. There’s a rip through your shirt and blood on your abdomen, but it wipes away easily and there is no wound underneath it.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
You turn around too quickly, your hands balled into fists, but your defensiveness evaporates when you see who’s addressing you. A creature — upright and with a degree of cephalization, but the similarities between you and it end there — stands before you, its grey skin glinting wetly despite the poor lighting. You’re fairly certain that it has other notable features, but your eyes keep stopping on its hair, or what might be hair. It’s impossibly long and it twists around itself, akin to a giant mass of tentacles, or the tails of a rat king or something as unappealing. Your face must have betrayed your horror because the creature’s mouth twists into a frown. “Did I scare you too much, mankind? Aw, I’m sorry! I only wanna talk,” it says, sharp teeth showing themselves every time its mouth opened. You’re more bothered by the fact that it called you mankind, though. The entire situation is far too similar to a horror game you once played when you were fourteen.
You hope that you’re not in some strange projection of your own mind, and you really hope that this thing doesn’t shove a bunch of morality tests in your face that you have to repeat until you do what it’s looking for. You're too tired, too confused for that.
“Mankind?” You ask warily, the possibility of the situation making you uneasy. The creature’s eyes widen, its hair coiling around its legs.
“Oh, was that a bit much? I guess I was trying to play that up a bit,” it says, parts of its hair curling around its face. “It wasn’t really necessary anyway! I know who you are,” its says plainly, and a distinct fear settles in the pit of your stomach. If you listened enough-but-not-hard the creature’s voice contained undertones of hushed whispers within it; you had an active audience.
You can’t say anything. You try, but your words lodge themselves in your throat and threaten to choke you if you don’t swallow them. The creature looks alarmed when it notices, its hands going to its chest. “Oh! Your body’s probably still adjusting. That’s only temporary, so don’t feel that bad! I can supply both sides of conversation for us if you can’t talk anymore,” it babbles, but you hadn’t really been listening past a certain point. Adjusting? Adjusting to what? You look at your perfectly normal hands, your remarkably boring surroundings. The creature sighs.
“Jeez, don’t you know the Furthest Ring when you’re standing right in it? Do I have to make it obvious?” It slinks forward, some bits of its body glowing a brilliant fuchsia. It stops only when it’s close to you, so close that you might’ve been able to smell its breath if it had any odor at all.
“You’re dead!”
Before it can pull back and presumably cackle to itself, you impulsively reach out and grab the thing’s shoulder. You knew about the Furthest Ring and the creatures in it, some awful and repressed part of your mind reminded you. Your eldritch obsession had known no bounds and, an even more repressed part gently adds, you had even attempted a fake summoning of them, once. Omniscient beings or not, your past self had no tact when it came to dealing with human-shirking gods.
And, you suppose, your current self doesn’t either. Your hand still rests uncomfortably on the creature’s shoulder, and it’s looking at you expectantly. Weakly, you manage to say “What, exactly, do you mean by that?” You know that it’s a stupid question, but it’s very likely that you’re talking to a dream projection conjured up by your embarrassing interests from the past. You don’t suppose that humouring it is out of the question.
It blows out a puff of air in an almost endearing fashion, its arms folding over its chest. “Your voice seems to be working again, but your ears still need work. I just told you! You’re dead! But,” it adds suddenly, “don’t worry, you won’t be for long. I just have a few more finishing touches that I have to do, and then you’ll be shipshape!” Before you have time to process that, it seizes your arms and pulls you down. Both of you sit on the seemingly-absent floor and the creature folds its legs neatly, like a gradeschooler getting ready for story time. You have the creeping suspicion that the roles are reversed in this situation.
“But I think we have some things to discuss first!” Shit, you were right. It’s not that you don’t appreciate a good story told by a weird not-quite-human thing, but you’re sure that you were in the middle of something important. What had it been? The more you try to think the less you can. If you had died, how had it happened? Your companion notices that you’re not alert, and it snaps its fingers in front of your eyes. There’s strange webbing in between its digits.
“We! I said we! It takes two to discuss something, Rose!” It says, its voice raising to a distinctly effeminate range. It glares at you with its large eyes, its w shaped pupils reminiscent of a squid’s. Your palms sweat a little.
“All right, I’m here, I’m listening,” you insist hastily, not bothering to ask how it knows your name. It’s either a part of you that would intrinsically know who you were, or it’s an omniscient being that would naturally know your name. Asking would be redundant. “Does this mean that you’re actually going to explain yourself to me? Perhaps run me through some pointless morality tests?” You venture. After careful reconsideration, you’d actually love to do a few of those right now. Soul searching? On your own accord? You’d do nothing of the sort. If it’s a forced exercise by some other being? You’d definitely consider it.
The creature doesn’t seem to think so. She (you hope that it’s a she, at least. Do other species even have concepts of gender? Perhaps this encounter will be informative) sticks out a pale purple tongue, the colour jarring against her black lips. “No, stupid! We’re gonna talk about actually important stuff, like what you’re gonna do when you’re alive again! But, uh,” she says, fumbling slightly, “it might help if you knew who I was at all, right? Right.” You don’t show outward preference of knowing or not knowing, but you (begrudgingly) admit to yourself that you’re quite curious.
Suddenly, she juts out a hand and takes yours with it. You’d complain about how clammy hers were, but you don’t feel justified. Yours are still pretty sweaty. “I’m Feferi, heiress of the Furthest Ring, eldritch royalty, and nominee to investigate Earth! I’ve finally answered your summonings, Rose Lalonde! I, um,” she fumbles again, “don’t really know why you want horrorterror presence on your planet, but I’m determined to heed your call!” She finally lets go of your hand, but you don’t put it down straight away.
“A… call?” You ask, feeling your voice strain again. “If you mean my awful summoning attempt from years ago, I had no idea that I was actually calling anything otherworldly. It was a stupid hobby I dabbled in, nothing more,” you say, hoping your voice is steady. You couldn’t have honestly called anything, could you have? You had an old grimoire and a few candles and some nonsense language that you had earnestly attempted to speak. You hadn’t believed that these gods had even existed, not really. You swallow hard as you see the heiress’s reaction, a bemused smile, and your arm instinctively clutches your stomach.
“Meant to or not, you still did! Your summon was a clear signal that your planet was habitable and ideal for us to travel to. We don’t even respond to all summons! We had to have a council and everything, and I was elected to do the dirty work. Not that I mind!” Feferi grins, her hair raising in apparent excitement. “The dirty work’s the fun work! Which is even better for you, because you get to do my dirty work!”
What.
“Because you summoned me, you’re my new proxy! It really sucks that you had no idea what you were actually doing, because this is some heavy duty stuff!” She exaggerates an exhausted sigh. “Sorry that I had to kill you for this, though. I just don’t know how else to bring someone to the Furthest Ring otherwise.”
What.
“Not that I actually killed you. I influenced another human to, but I take responsibility for the stuff I influence! Oh, but don’t worry! No one’s going to have missed you, I made sure of that.”
Because you had been just so worried about how your mother would have taken your death. She probably would have constructed a polished marble monument lamenting your untimely demise. You can almost see her smug, self-satisfied grin.
You suppress a shudder, and Feferi obviously notices, but politely chooses to ignore it. “Well, I hate to cut our great conversation short, but you need to wake up again. You’re going to feel a little different, but it’s totally normal!” She takes your hands and hoists you up, only letting go when you’re standing completely on your own. “We’ll talk soon, okay? I have a feeling that we’re going to be great fronds!”
Before you can berate her for her awful pun, she leans forward and kisses your forehead. You feel a rush, a surge of rhythm and order, flood back into your body and you gasp and clutch at your chest. You feel as though you’re going to burst, and the Furthest Ring blurs around you, transforming into a mess of light and colour that you hadn’t ever seen before. You don’t know how much more of this you can take and your body seems intent on rebelling against its nature, pushing against your sides as if your skeleton is expanding through your skin and you can’t breathe, you can’t breathe….
——
Your bedsheets are cold despite the fact that you’re lying on them. You pull them up to your nose, shivering, and inhale the comforting scent of artificial rose. Mother thought it was a hoot; all the detergent in the house was rose scented, and her most darling daughter was Rose! Mother’s sense of humor intrigued and disgusted you. In all your years living here, you had never quite figured it out. You even remember when she had gotten you these sheets, pure white in every form. You had just gotten your first period, and Mother had been absolutely ecstatic. She dressed you in a little red dress and threw a party where you and your poor friends had eaten angel food cake with thick strawberry syrup on top. At the height of the party, she had hung these sheets outside and insisted that you, in your little red dress, run through them as a symbol of your new womanhood.
You had never wanted a stupid period party, but it had made you feel somewhat… grown up. Now, though, as you wake up from a childish nightmare about your old interests, you couldn’t feel more sophomoric if you tried. You’ll begrudgingly admit that Lovecraft is a genius writer, perhaps the only writer (barring yourself) that you’ll let get away with such copious amounts of confusing description, but to actually believe that the content had the slightest possibility of being real was incredibly embarrassing.
Sighing, you run your hand through your hair. It’s fine, everything’s fine. No one has to know what’s going on in your head, your thoughts are yours and yours alone and you have nothing to worry abou—
What the fuck is wrong with your hand.
Its shape is fine, there’s nothing on it, it’s just a completely wrong colour. It’s grey, grey like the skin of the girl in your dream, and your few freckles are a pure white. Experimentally, you cup your other equally-grey hand over them, shielding them from light, and you see that you’re glowing. Panic wells up and travels directly to your head, and you sprint to your bathroom and hunch over the sink. It’s not just your hands, you realize as you look into the mirror. And it’s not just your skin, either. Your hair is glowing faintly in the dim light (you should really get your lightbulbs switched out), and your eyes look completely hollowed and dead.
It’s… a trick that your mind’s playing on you. All you need is a nice splash of cool water to the face; that will surely help clear your mind. You grasp the faucet control and turn it shakily.
You don’t realize that you’ve moved until you find yourself huddled in the corner of the bathroom, your arms covering your head. Water hadn’t come out of the faucet — bile leaks from the tap, dripping slowly into the basin. You watch dumbly as it spills over and begins to flood your bathroom, the black oil slowly seeping toward you. You cover your mouth and suppress a scream, but when it begins to solidify you find yourself unable to keep quiet anymore. It sculpts itself, toes poking through the muck, shapely legs with delicate fins showing themselves, until it assumes the form of the girl from your dream. She blinks, and the colour you had seen her with in your dream floods to her body. Her hair gradually flows out of the sink, keeping the oily consistency of the bile.
You haven’t stopped screaming. You hear a muffled “Rosie? Rosie are you all right?” from downstairs, but you can’t bring yourself to reply. The eldritch princess is either real or you’re hallucinating to an extreme degree, and for once in your life you don’t know which is worse. The girl takes in her surroundings and sees you on the floor, and her hands fly to her mouth in an almost hilarious Disney princess-esque manner.
“Don’t be so scared! It’s just me,” she says as if it’s even a slight comfort to hear. She kneels down and helps you up like she had before, steadying you with a strong hand. “Hey! It’s gonna be all right! Trust me,” she reassures you. The final drops of her hair have leaked out of the faucet now, and now water fills the basin. “Were you trying to wash up? Sorry about that,” she moves out of the way and gestures to the sink, but you don’t quite feel like it anymore.
You’re about to leave and bury yourself under the covers (and try to forget about all of this), but the door handle jiggles and Mother steps in, an apron tied around her waist and a featherduster in hand. Panic seeps into your nerves again. She couldn’t see you like this! And, perhaps more worrying, she couldn’t see this otherworldly creature in your bathroom! You try to push her out, but her foot’s already lodged in the doorway. Shit.
“Rosie? There you are baby girl! Are you hurt?” She fumbles for your arm and you try to yank away. The grey on your skin is too much to hide, however, and you’re sure she’s noticed by now. “Uh, who’s this though? Is this one of your little friends?” She then asks in reference to Feferi. You knew your mother was a royal bitch but you never thought that she’d blatantly overlook something like this just to get to you. You squirm uncomfortably.
God(s? You suppose that it is confirmed to be plural now, isn’t it?) forbid, Feferi actually steps forward and juts out a hand in greeting. “Yes, Ms. Lalonde! Don’t you remember me? I’m Felicity, I was at Rose’s 16th birthday party! We’ve been great friends since freshman year!” The lies flow from her mouth like sewage from a broken pipe. Your mother can’t honestly believe this, can she?
But, out of the corner of your eye, you see a different figure in the mirror. Alongside your perfectly normal, sans-grey reflection stands a chubby girl with coils of dark black hair. You look at the actual manifestation of Feferi, and she still appears as her harrowing self. Experimentally, you glance at your hands. Still grey.
What’s going on? Does your mother not see you two for what you really are? You watch as Mother takes Feferi’s webbed fingers without so much as a grimace. Enthusiastically, Feferi pumps her hand twice. “I guess you were there, weren’t you? Sorry ‘bout that! Memory’s not quite whatit used to be,” Mother says, swallowing her lies like an aged wine. “What are you girls up to?” Your mother looks at you, but Feferi is the one who speaks.
“Oh, I stayed over last night! I thought I’d play a prank and jump out at Rose from the bathtub when she came to brush her teeth, but I think I scared her a bit too much. Sorry to have worried you!” She grins so widely that you fear her face will break in two. You glance in the mirror and see that her utterly terrifying maw is transformed into a petite, cutesey smile. You seethe quietly to yourself.
Your mother seems thoroughly charmed. “Oh, Rosie you goose!” She says, and plants a sloppy kiss on your cheek. You resist the burning urge to wipe it off. “But! Good news! I just made breakfast downstairs. Peaches and ice cream, Rosie! Your favourite,” she says, and slips out with a wink. There are two huge problems with that, the most jarring being that ice cream is hardly a breakfast food. The one that’s more pressing to you, however, is that you’ve told Mother how much you hate peaches on numerous occasions. She thinks that it’s “cute” to pretend to think otherwise. Your loathing knows no bounds.
Feferi seems chipper about it. “Ooh, that sounds good! Not that I really need to eat and all, but it sure sounds tasty!” She tries to take you by the hand, but you pull away. “Can we go eat some? If you don’t go, I will anyway,” she says, and then she sticks out her tongue again. Asking her to leave would be pointless, and refusing to go with her would probably reap poor results.
“Fine,” you find yourself saying. “Let’s just get out of here.”
—-
When you look out the kitchen window, you see a sky choked by the bodies of Feferi’s kin. The sky’s turned completely grey, just like your skin. You’re not sure if you’ll see another blue sky again.
You look over to Feferi, who looks over to you with a spoon in her mouth. She grins widely when she sees your expression. You find yourself thinking to yourself, Amazing, isn’t it? It takes you a moment before you realize that the voice that you heard wasn’t your own.
You excuse yourself and go back upstairs.
—-
You find yourself waking up at odd hours in the night only to throw open your window and retch over the side. Slick ooze spills from your mouth, and every night there seems to be more. One night you pull away your hand and you see little white pearls amidst the muck, and you thumb them curiously. Feferi seems to materialize next to you (you say “seems” but you know for a fact that she’s capable of doing so) and peeks over your shoulder. “Oh, good! Drop those over the edge, you don’t want them hatching in here, do you?”
Hatching. Eggs. Leviathan Horror eggs. You comply hastily, wiping your hands on the sill, and you then hold out your hand for the wet cloth Feferi always supplies you with. You wipe your hands clean, your insides twisting inside of you violently; you have no idea if it’s literal or figurative by this point.
She takes you all over town, dragging you wherever she goes. She finds old houses and remnants of rundown businesses and you and her will camp there. Then, she’ll tilt her head to the sky and cry out to her kind in the terrible language you had tried to summon them in. You realize that she speaks it much better than you do. Curious, you ask her about it sometimes. “How was my eldritch abomination language? Was my accent all right?” You’ve said, and Feferi laughed at you.
“It’s festertongue, dummy! But you knew that, you’re just pretending to try to make me mad!” She said in response, and then tossed her hair. “It’s not going to work!”
She does admit that you need a lot of work. “You can’t be my proxy if you can’t even speak my language!” She’ll insist, and then she’ll teach you phrases as you go about mundane tasks. The alphabet as you do the dishes, simple greetings as you watch Whammy with Mother. She’s very enthusiastic about it all.
You get better, though, and Feferi rewards you by taking you to music shops. She tries to hold your hand most of the time. You always pull away.
When you’re there, Feferi will ask to borrow an instrument and a practice room. She’ll take you in with her and hold the instrument out to you. “Play something!” She’ll say, and you find yourself going along with it without question. You’ve told her that you can only play violin, but she’ll insist that you play different instruments, too. After you’re done, she’ll take the instrument back to the clerk and thank them for letting her use it. Then, you’ll leave.
Only recently did you ask her why. “Isn’t it obvious? When someone actually buys that, anyone who plays it or hears its music will become susceptible to our control, too! But, um,” she says, “not exactly like you. You’re different! They won’t ever know they’re being controlled. You do, though!”
The ease at which she says things like that made you feel sick, once, but now you just nod in response. It’s not very efficient, you don’t think, but it seems to make Feferi happy.
Sometimes, you’ll wake up in completely unknown areas drenched in saltwater, only comforted by Feferi and the always present voices of The Others. She’s not forthcoming with information in these situations. “Proxy or not, sometimes I have to have you do things that you can’t know about! Not only for the good of cosmic space, but because I’m not too sure what would happen to you if you were conscious through them. Here, I’ll help you get home,” she’s said before, and then she’ll wrap you in her arms tightly. The first time it had happened you had fought, but the feeling is comforting to you now. You let her hair wrap around you both and when she lets go, you’re home in your room.
Feferi likes to explore Earth with you, so you’ll take her places when you two get the chance. When you go outside you see little mini horrors with thousands of eyes and appendages wander the streets, passing by pedestrians without being noticed in the slightest. You and Feferi seem to be the only ones able to see the otherworldly presence around you, but you don’t quite want it any other way.
You take her to the aquarium. You’re not quite sure why you do, it just seems like a place that she’d like. You watch her touch the stingrays in the touch tank, smiling when she laughs at their slippery bodies. Every time she touches one a strange bleeding in the animal’s colour, like watercolour over a canvas, radiates out from her fingers. They turn purple, or black, or muddy brown; they always look corrupted once she stops touching them. She doesn’t seem to mind, though, and she waves goodbye when you tell her that you’ve checked out the map and that there’s an exhibit you think she’ll like. Feferi perks up again and follows you, grasping for your hand. You don’t pull away, but you make a point to not quite hold it back.
There’s a cephalopod exhibit that you discovered on the map, and you lead your eldritch princess to it. Soon enough her face is pressed to the glass, her hair attempting to curl around it with interest. “Look, Rose! This one has my eyes!” She says, pointing to a squid in the exhibit. She strays away quickly though and stops at a cylindrical tank, observing the tiny creatures inside. “And this says dwarf cuttlefish. Look! They’re so tiny and,” she lifts her shirt up so you can see the delicate web-like fins she has on her sides, “their fins match mine! I just wanna collect them all and give them little kisses!” You scuttle over and pull down her shirt in case anyone else walks in. Not that they’d see her fins, of course, but the last thing people needed to see is “Felicity’s” carefully crafted bellybutton.
You manage to drag her out of the room and back into the general crowd of people, who range from “two to five year old child” to “young confused mom/dad.” Feferi bumps into a particularly lost-looking father on accident. Her hand fly to her mouth in her signature “oh dearie me!” pose.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” She says, and casually touches his wrist comfortingly. It has the same effect as it did on the rays, his tanned skin turning grey around his hands, but he doesn’t seem to notice. She rejoins you and falls in step with you to the gift shop, not seeming to care about what she just did.
Not that you quite know what, exactly, she did, but you don’t suppose it’s helpful. You go to ask, but Feferi seems to read your mind and puts a finger over her lips. Not now! You think to yourself in her voice. You don’t think you’ll ever get used to her telepathy.
When you arrive home, she lies on your bed with a stuffed cuttlefish you had bought for her. She also has a huge assortment of other marine regalia that her hair had swallowed from the gift shop, and presently she works on untwisting them from her hair. The tendrils try to swallow them up once they become loose, though, so you settle behind her and try to fish them out with her (pun unintended).
“So, are you going to tell me what you do to things when you touch them?” You ask, getting right down to business. Her hair stops moving for a second — it’s tied in directly with her emotions and it tends to give her away. Does she have direct control over it? A question for another day, you suppose.
Once she regains herself, though, her hair continues to slide over itself. “Hmm… nope! It does a lot of stuff that’s useful for us, Rose! All you need to know is that it makes them a lot easier to control, okay?” She says, answering your question only superficially. You let out an exaggerated sigh. “Don’t be like that! You know I can’t tell you everything!” She huffs, and you yank out a cowrie shell necklace in response. She yelps with disdain.
“And why not?” You ask, and Feferi’s hair does the stupid stiffening thing again.
“Lots of reasons! I can let you know that your touch probably has the same effect, so if you only want me to be the cause of it you, uh…”
“Shouldn’t touch people?” You finish, trying to comb through her hair with your fingers. They don’t make it very far before the tendrils prevent them from going any further.
Feferi shakes her head. “No, just not directly on the skin, I guess. But look, this isn’t important! I wanted to ask you something,” she says, and turns around to face you directly. You switch your attention to a strand of hair in the front of her head.
“Listening,” you say, pressing on the ends with a thumb. The lock curls around your finger and seems to hug it close.
“Remember what I said before? In your dream, I mean. I know our situations are really different and probably super difficult for you, but…” she trails off for a breath before she talks again, “do you consider us fronds?”
You try to hide your smile. “No no, Feferi, I’d never call our relationship anything relating to an awful pun,” you say, and laugh without restraint when she blows her cheeks out in a slighted manner. Her eyebrows arch attractively in feigned anger. “But yes, I would consider us…friends.” You stress the word and she rolls her eyes, turns, and falls on your lap in one movement. Undeterred, you continue going through her hair.
“It’s kind of a shame that we’re taking over Earth, Rose,” she says, looking uncharacteristically humbled. She takes one of your hands and rubs her thumb over your knuckles. You feel your face start to sweat. “As cool as it is setting up possession traps for people, it looks like there’s a lot of fun stuff to do here! I’d like to see more of it, you know?” Your hands start to sweat, too. If she notices, she doesn’t make it obvious that she does. You know that you’re viewing an abomination, something that shouldn’t exist, and that she’s been usingyou to spread her kind throughout Earth, but your heart (or something like your heart — your insides don’t quite feel as solid as they used to) beats hard until it reaches your throat and you don’t care, you just don’t care.
You lean and kiss her on the forehead like she once did to you, and when you pull away the corners of her eyes are crinkling with happiness. She sits up and takes your face in her hands, her long claws grazing your neck, and she kisses your cheeks once, twice, three times.
Your smile cuts like a knife across your face.
—-
You see more and more of them every day — greyed people with their eyes completely sunken in, their hair as black as the filth you still spew from your mouth regularly. The horrorlings latch onto them in the street and feed off of the energy that they have, growing limbs and in size when they’re finished.
You can’t see the blue sky anymore, and it won’t be long until no one can either, you don’t think. But you can see the cosmos within Feferi’s eyes, and you can taste eternity on her lips, so you don’t suppose that it’s all that bad, really.