Work Text:
Stop.
“Rocky, don’t argue with me! Go get a- a scalpel, or something!”
Please, stop.
“♪♫♪♪!”
You’re hurting us. You’re hurting me.
“♫♪♪♪♫!”
“I can’t just leave him in there!”
But you must. You’ll kill me otherwise. You’ll kill everything, Simon tried to project into the man before him, but either he hadn’t inherited madness-inducing telepathy from the eel or this stranger was immune to it.
“♪♫♪♪♪. ♫♪♪♪♫♪♪!”
“I know, I know, but I… Would you just help me?!”
It didn’t matter how hard Simon tried to speak out loud, how much strength he tried to draw from his new body. His jaw had refused to obey any and all commands since that seed had sprouted into the new Last Tree, wrapping Simon up in its bark and fusing him with its trunk as it grew, grew, grew to places it never should have been able to reach.
Namely, an ocean of plain saltwater, with one frazzled man and a rotating array of five-legged boulders.
“♫♪♪♫♪♪!” the rock that never left whistled, gesturing with its many limbs.
“Humans don’t sprout from trees, Rock! If you’re not going to help, then quit distracting me!” the man shouted back, forcing his shaking hand to keep still as he raised a knife to where Simon’s intact arm met the tree trunk, surgically slicing away the connection.
Though his mouth had lost the capability to form words, his vocal chords still let him give soft, unintelligible cries as pain dragged across his morphed flesh, cries that were constantly shushed even as tears flowed down both their faces.
“It’s alright, it’s alright… OK, I think I’ve got it, the man said, carefully setting the knife down on a table he’d brought out to the shore before gripping Simon’s arm with both his gloved hands and beginning to pull—
Simon screamed into the foreign atmosphere’s air, muscles constricting to raise his head towards a pixelized sky as his radius and ulna bones were snapped in two, the tree still holding strong to the back of his hand and his shoulder.
“Oh god, oh fffffffffuck!” the man shouted, hovering over the arm as if his shaking could cast a spell to make it magically heal. “I- I shouldn’t have been able to do that, I shouldn’t be strong enough to be able to do that!”
And yet you did.
You have to stop.
Please, please, please stop.
The sentient brown rock gave a long series of angry trills and whistles, batting at the man’s shins.
“No no no, I can fix it! I just have to— I just—” The man picked his knife back up, moving to point it at various spots along Simon’s body but never able to bring himself to make another incision. “Oh god, I… I don’t know what to do.”
Stop. Just stop.
The rock, now much less animated, paused alongside the man for a moment before setting a gentle claw on his knee and giving a low set of whistles.
Broken out of his paralyzation, the man let both the knife and himself fall at the same time, collapsing into a criss-crossed heap in the shallow waters, digging underneath his glasses to rub at his face.
“Alright,” he said once he’d more or less collected himself, patting the top of the rock creature’s crystalline outer shell. “Alright, we’ll do this your way. We’ll figure this out.”
But there’s nothing to figure out, Simon thought at the pair as they rose and began to walk away. I’m not what you think I am anymore.
The tree forced their shared pulse to quicken, stretching them further towards an artificial sky.
Please, just leave me alone.
You’re killing me.
You’re killing us.
Haven’t we been through enough?
But they had no answer to his question, gone to concoct their own plans.