Chapter Text
It's one in the morning and you are stumbling around on Manchester Street with your arms wrapped tight, shoulders up to your ears, walking fast. Every little sound makes you jolt out of your skin. There's hardly anyone out at this time.
Just the weirdos.
Because Evergreen isn't really known for its nightlife, it's hardly known for anything at all. Just another mid-size city in the Pacific Northwest with pockets of white supremacists. Pretty typical for the area. Oh, and that one guy. Well, two guys.
You don't mind it much, the white supremacists. It's a good, steady source of food.
It's ideal, really. You feel like a gecko in an enclosure full of crickets. It's so fucking easy to lure these inbred, hateful morons— all you have to do is walk past them looking like you're terrified and eager to be back home, and boom, you've got one trailing behind you. Just like you do right now. You can hear the quiet, exhaled laughs of his friends behind you, his lips part to smile at the back of your head. They think it's funny. He thinks he's going to enjoy this.
These types think they're the predators. The top of the fucking food chain. The man following you thinks himself a wolf stalking a stayed lamb. What he doesn't know is that he's actually a perfectly plump sheep being led to the slaughter by his shepherd.
You pick up your pace, still playing your role. Still pretending you're a poor, frazzled damsel just trying to get away from him. You've perfected the act, you've played it hundreds of times. It doesn't matter what you wear, because these idiots don't need to see some leg or a bit of cleavage to be lured. They need fear. That's what attracts them. It's about control, exerting dominance over someone weaker.
You don't really give a fuck. What you do give a fuck about is eating tonight so the thing living inside you doesn't start messing with your nervous system again like a child switching the lights on and off, except way more excruciating. That, and the man that's been following you and your meal for the last block. He's not obvious about it, but you see him in the shadows, in the corners of your peripherals. You hear his purposeful steps. His humming.
Ah, fuck. Not again.
Whatever. You'll get to him after you finish off the one hot on your heels. Maybe this time you'll kill him and stuff his body in something that you can lug home.
The nazi follows you into the alley you made a sharp turn into. You face the dead end and he says something to you, but you can't really hear it over the clicking noises coming from deep inside and the dread pooling in your gut.
Or where your gut would be, if you had one.
The thing inside you ate most of your organs when it took over your body.
Some time ago, you were in an alley much like this one, on a night much like tonight. You were lying there, bruised and bleeding out from a stab wound. No big oaf in a stupid costume to save you just in time. It was cloudy that night too, so you didn't even get to see the stars one last time. And it was kind of hot? Overall, a really sucky night.
But there was an orchid mantis walking up your torso in that funny little stunted way they do, each step a hiccup meant to imitate a petal moving in the wind. Orchid mantises aren't native to Washington, your last coherent thought was that someone with interesting hobbies lost a pet. The idea of a missing pet poster with an orchid mantis made you smile. It would likely die out there in that alley, just like you, its exoskeleton would contrast too much against the trash bags and grime.
It was pretty, though. It wasn't the moon or the stars, but it made up for their absence in your last moments. You watched as the pink and white mantis stopped at the wound on your side. It looked down at the gash, the steadily growing pool of your blood soaking your clothes, its legs swaying side to side.
And then it tilted its head up to look at you.
And though it doesn't have vocal chords, you heard it ask you if you wanted to live.
You knew that you were losing it, obviously. This was all some end-of-life hallucination. But you nodded anyway, because why not? It's not like you had anything to lose, bleeding out in an alleyway on a shitty night. So you consented with a weak laugh, and the last thing you saw and felt was that slick little creature burrowing inside of you, spiny legs pressing into the tender, untouched meat of your organs.
And the next day in that filthy alley, you woke up feeling nothing at all. The stab wound was a scab, sutured shut with a white, almost opalescent scab. For a few days, you were sure it was all some kind of dream and some well-meaning stranger super glued your wound or something— until you heard it in your head while you were eating lunch at work. The mantis was in there, clicking and hissing at your brain.
The mantis was in your head, telling you it successfully suppressed any and all pain signals in your body. It was a mercy, it told you, because as it would grow inside you, it would take up space in your body. So much space that it would have to eat a few of your organs to fit. But they were all organs you could share, organs it would attach you to, like grafting a branch onto a tree.
Great. Awesome. This is really cool for you.
You didn't really do anything about it, there's not much you could've done. If you went to the doctor, they probably wouldn't believe you to begin with, but if they did? They'd probably call some government agency and you would rot in Area 51 or something. Or the mantis would kill you. Not ideal. The cops would shoot you or someone's dog, so that was out of the question.
Months went by, and for the most part, things went pretty much back to normal, save for the absence of pain, that was something that took some getting used to. The vast majority of people, yourself included, don't realize how important it is to feel pain. Not in an annoying what-doesn’t-kill-me-makes-me-stronger way or anything, it's actually integral to survival. A week into being a host body to what you could only guess was an alien lifeform, you were covered in bruises and cuts you couldn't place. There was a sizable shard of glass in your foot for several days that you just… didn't notice until you felt it drag along the tiled floor of your shower.
You became very observant as a result. People die from infections all the time, and after all you've been though, an infection would be a stupid way to die. Like how Steve Irwin died from a stingray after making a career wrestling crocodiles. Did Steve Irwin wrestle crocodiles? You don't remember.
You fished your phone out of your pocket and typed in ‘did steve irwin wrestle crocodiles’ into the search bar as the mantis burst out of your back, ripping the fabric of a blank t-shirt you buy in bulk specifically for nights like these. It snaked the tarsi of its forelegs out first, the little spiny pads cut through your skin like a new knife slicing through the fat cap on a cut of pork belly, just far down your spine enough for the tibia to fit through. The hooked spines of the tibia tore through your shirt, down your back, and by the time this random, unfortunate man realized what was happening, the mantis' head was out and already had the spines of its tibia and femur digging through his clothes, lodging into his abdomen.
It's pretty amazing how fast mantises ensnare their prey, and how difficult it is to get out of their grasp. The spines of the femur presses into the man's chest while the spines of the tibia press past the meat of his back. The spines hook into him, holding him upright by his ribs. He can't move down, move left or down, move back or forward. At this point, all he can really do is scream, but it's too late for that when the mandibles part and the mantis lunges forward, tearing into his jugular right as he opens his mouth to take in his last breath to scream for help.
The sound of the mantis eating was unpleasant, visceral. If you had a stomach, it'd be upset at the sound. But on the bright side, you remembered correctly— Steve Irwin did wrestle crocodiles. According to Wikipedia, he wrestled his first crocodile at the age of nine, and his dad taught him how to do it, which is probably child abuse but he's dead anyway, so—
A shot rings out, just centimeters to the left of your ear and you whip your head back, eyes wide. Your phone clatters to the ground. “Jesus— fuck, man!” You yelled at the shadowy bastard pointing a gun at you. He's not a regular drunk or a weirdo.
He's something worse.