Work Text:
It started slow.
After Bart had managed to cure the bacterium and freed the Sea Emperors, he’d decided to stay with them for a while to heal.
Small, iridescent scales had appeared on his skin a few days after that, and he’d noticed some sort of webs between his fingers.
He had shrugged it off, thinking it was just part of the process (the kharaa was supposed to mutate infected hosts, after all), and went on with his life, grateful for the new abilities.
Unfortunately, it was different. New.
Wrong.
He wakes up in the middle of the night a week later with the mattress soaked in blood.
“What the- what’s happening?”
Gasping for breath, Bart tries to sit up, but a piercing pain shoots through his torso and legs and he falls backwards.
He sits up more carefully, but the pain doesn’t stop. And, strangely, he can’t move his legs very well. He can feel them (unfortunately), so he doesn’t think he’s paralyzed, but they won’t move.
And there’s the matter of the blood still flowing freely from his back and abdomen that he still hasn’t found a source for— it’s not the right color, he realizes. Greenish-yellow in some places, and normal red in others.
Okay. Okay. I just have to get out of here. I don’t know- the lab. It has a first aid kit.
He pulls back the blanket and stops in his tracks.
His legs are… fusing together, seemingly already connected at the knees and ankles, and he presses his hand to his mouth to keep from screaming— he has to get out, he isn’t sure where but somewhere, anywhere else—
Thrashing desperately, eyes wide with pain and fear, he falls out of his bed and lands hard on the floor, curling in on himself as the impact sends another near-unbearable shockwave of agony through his system and tears running down his face.
Fuck- fuck, what do I do- please, someone- anyone, help-
As expected, no one comes, and Bart is left drained and terrified, lying on the solid titanium.
Alone. Always alone.
The sensation of hot blood on cold metal is the last thing he feels before he blacks out.
Between periods of unconsciousness, he drags himself towards his lab, attempts to stem the blood all proving futile and his legs still stubbornly, terrifyingly, connected.
During one period of lucidity, he tries to perform a self-scan, only to find that the scanner’s battery is dead and he is forced to leave it behind.
If the delirium lasts hours or days, he isn’t sure.
At one point he manages to get the clothes he had been wearing off; it rips the new, fragile skin, nearly making him pass out with pain he hadn’t even thought could worsen.
He isn’t sure when he started crying, but now terrified, hysterical sobs shake his body and he’s trying to make a sound, trying to scream, but there’s nothing, it’s like his vocal cords have snapped, and he’s coughing up blood and it’s the wrong color and he just wants everything to stop—
He doesn’t make it to the lab. Only curls up in a trembling, scared ball in the hallway when he’s met with a ladder that’s most likely impossible to climb.
His limbs won’t bend in the right way.
Skin tinged indigo, fused legs strangely iridescent and scale-like, eyes too big for his head, teeth sharper than before—
Bart closes his eyes and resigns himself.
He will let his body change and morph in the way it seems to want to, and the way he is powerless to stop. Let his limbs stretch and combine until bones snap, pop free of their sockets; let spears of cartilage emerge outwards, fragile webbing tying them together; let his skin change color, change texture, until it is satisfied.
He blacks out again soon after.
Waking up slightly more lucid, Bart realizes that the pain in his legs (well, more of a tail now) has thankfully lessened, and he pushes himself into a sitting position up against the wall, barely able to comprehend anything that just happened.
What am I going to do?
He raises his hand, feeling his skin (scales?), his neck— there are slits in it he thinks are gills— his face. Trying to figure out what to do next, how to pick up the shattered pieces and make something out of them.
The first thing, he thinks, is to go outside.
Dragging himself over to the hatch, he manages to open it and slip out.
The water feels so… light, and he realizes how little he’d been breathing as the air fills his (lungs? blood? how is he breathing now?) and he tries to figure out the optimal way his tail is supposed to move (up-down motion, which makes sense with human anatomy).
One of the baby Sea Emperors swims over to him, tilting their head in confusion. ‘Human-friend a water creature now? Like us?’ they ask telepathically.
Bart shrugs, and tries to respond, but his voice won’t work, and he takes a deep breath (if one can even do that underwater with gills), trying again. After the second failed response, he gives up and just tries to think very loudly at them. ‘I think so, but I don’t know why.’
Strangely, this works. ‘The green thing? The danger?’ the hatchling suggests.
He suddenly remembers that the Kharaa is supposed to manipulate genetics and curses internally (but quietly) for not thinking of it. ‘Yes! The bacterium!’
‘Is human-friend different now? Not human?’
Bart pauses after hearing that, thinking.
Is he still human? Has his body changed too much for that?
What is he now?
‘I’m sorry- I- I need a break. Go play with your siblings,’ he manages to tell them, then, with a few tail-beats, he’s huddled in the crook of the mushroom tree his base is built on, surrounded by the plants he’s managed to grow.
It’s comfortable enough for him to cry; the ocean won’t care about a little more saltwater, after all.
Realizing he’s exhausted, Bart leans against the mushroom trunk and closes his eyes, noting the way he feels what he thinks is a third eyelid under his original ones.
He can pick up the pieces of his life tomorrow.
Now he just wants to be broken for a little while.
And so, as the human something new curls up, struggling to adapt to the changes 4546b has wrought, the world goes on.
The world goes on, because it does not stop for one creature’s pain.
He didn’t expect it to.