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w0lp3rtinger · 10 months

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Alternative Form

Day six of ShadAmy Week 2023! Big shout out to @shadowsfascination and @killingthecringe . They have been patient enough to beta for me, and to them, I am eternally grateful 💜 Especially as, once again, I was fucking around with writing styles for this one.

(It’s not... REALLY that much of a shadamy piece, but it’s there enough so XD )

Our favorite critter is not having a great time with alien hybrid puberty.

WARNING: Body Horror / Eyes / Medical Horror

ALSO! I AM BACK ON A03! If you would like to read the story there, please click this link!

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It started with a headache.

That was in the beginning. Right in the middle of Shadow’s forehead, just above his eyes, it would come and go for weeks before settling into a dull but constant ache. A few painkillers and it would vanish, but then, the very next day, he would swear it would feel worse.

Rouge told him to take a nap. Omega suggested he ‘get a better meatbag.’

Amy worried, and he wished she wouldn’t.

“You can go to the doctor, you know,” she’d say with her brow furrowed and her hands on her hips. “It wouldn’t kill you.”

He’d shaken his head, choosing to ignore the memory of white sterility as he instead focused on the way the sunlight caught her eyes. “It will pass. I am not concerned.”

His sleep suffered, as did his work, as did his patience. Even his gardening fell victim. No matter how he tried, there was a tremble in his hands now. Not a lot, just a little, and always when he was trying to be the most delicate. After one too many a stem snapped in his hands, a pair of garden shears was the next thing he grabbed, and they stuck out of the brickwork of the next-door apartment complex for weeks.

He could see them from his bedroom window, gathering bird shit and rust, and he’d growl at the pain.

Rouge laughed and said he was finally hitting puberty. Omega suggested sparring if he wanted to throw around sharp objects so badly.

Amy worried, and he wished she wouldn’t.

She placed her hands on either side of his face, and he had to work very hard not to melt on the spot as she leaned in.

“It doesn’t look any different… Well, maybe a little swollen? It’s hard to tell. Did you maybe get hit and didn’t realize how bad it was? What’s it feel like?”

“Tunneling.” That was the only word he could pick for it. It felt like something was tunneling into his head.

That was the wrong choice. Shadow knew it as soon as it left his mouth and Amy’s face pinched as she pulled away.

The next time she called to hang out, he did not answer.

He didn’t answer any of her calls the next day either, or the next, or the twenty-seven that came after. Each one served as a reminder of how he was failing, her smiling face on the caller id looking up at him buried itself into his brain. He saw it everywhere, heard his ringer when there was no call. Even without her present, she hovered at his shoulder.

His stomach would turn when he denied the call.

And then she got Rouge and Omega involved.

Shadow should have known it would come to that. The moment he walked into the kitchen and Rouge rushed to hang up the phone, he knew what it was about.

Of course Amy would call her. The fact that they too now were concerned at all should have been an indicator that this was more serious than he was willing to accept, but the fact of the matter was that Omega’s overprotectiveness and Rouge’s sideways glances left him avoiding them both rather than gritting his teeth through their inquiries.

He did accept Rouge’s meds though. She always did have the stronger stuff on hand, all of her old prescriptions kept in their neatly labeled bottles at the far back of the refrigerator.

But then, one day, Shadow heard two low voices in the kitchen. He stayed frozen in the hall, his breath stuck in his chest as Rouge whispered to Amy that he wasn’t okay, telling her he was getting worse, telling her that she was going to see if someone on the medical team could fit him in for an appointment.

Shadow didn’t have to see Amy’s face to know what she thought. He could hear it in her voice, the way the pitch rose and rose, the hitching of her breath snatching her words from her. There was the familiar, heavy thud of her placing a container of foodstuffs onto the counter as she started to cry.

The altercation between the roommates afterward ended with him throwing the pills back into the refrigerator and choosing to sleep atop the apartment complex roof.

Shadow’s gaze burned two more stars into the hot city sky that night. Teeth and fists clenched, he tried to keep his breathing even to quell the fear taking root in his heart.

Amy worried, and he wished she wouldn’t.

But he’d make this right. He’d get better. Amy wouldn’t need to worry about him anymore.

About three months later, after another botched mission, Shadow stood in the GUN headquarters basement bathroom. His hands pressed into the wall, sweat beading on his brow as he took measured breaths through his teeth.

When he tried to look into the mirror again, all he saw was a sickly image swimming before him.

Shadow dropped his gaze back to the sink, letting the world go fuzzy as his eyes started to burn and drift out of focus.

He couldn’t see.

Why couldn’t he see?

Bile burned at the back of Shadow’s throat, and as he swallowed, he bowed his head to wash his face in the sink. The fridged, tinny water only made the shaking worse, made his stomach churn more, and he gagged as he shut the water off and ran a hand across his eyes.

This wasn’t right.

He started to scrub his face.

Nothing was right. He was sick. He couldn’t take care of anyone, let alone himself. This just kept getting worse, and as it did, it took him with it, the pain growing and growing, pulling him apart. He was failing at his life’s mission. He was failing at everything.

And Amy was still worried.

He could still hear her crying from that day at the apartment, could still see her face when she had leaned in to see if she could spot anything. He remembered her breath on his skin and the taunt knot of her brow as she asked, again, for him to take care of himself.

He couldn’t see clearly anymore, but he didn’t need his eyes to see in order to be haunted by hers.

The little bell tone that he had picked specifically and only for her rang and echoed against the tile.

Shadow scrubbed harder, nails raking across his flesh, leaving it red and raw.

Amy worried, and he wished she wouldn’t.

He wasn’t worth the energy.

He wasn’t worth-

There is pain, unlike anything else. It’s white and brilliantly blinding, showering sparks through his brain. The ground is gone. He cannot breathe. His lungs are burning and he feels like he might collapse in on himself like a dying star, sucked in and down and becoming nothing.

And then, he was nothing.

A vast blackness thick with the ringing silence.

Weightless, effortless.

Until there was a hand in his.

There was a hand in his, and he knew this hand. He knew the texture of these gloves, the shape of these fingers, the weight of this palm. He knew the strength it held him with and the ferocity it would continue to hold on with.

He knew this hand, and when it squeezed, he squeezed back.

And Shadow was himself again

All at once, there is too much texture, too much beeping. He could smell the disinfectant all around him, a deadly fog encroaching, and the itching of the adhesive for the electrodes on his chest feeling like the tiny teeth of worms.

And he could not see at all.

His eyes were crusted shut, cotton gauze adhering to the gunk and laying heavy on his brow.

It needed to come off. All of it.

“Shadow?”

He felt her hands cradle his face. Her voice sounded so fragile, brittle and exhausted to the point of snapping.

Shadow’s heart clenched, breath caught in his throat.

He did this to her.

Unacceptable.

Shadow sat up and tore the electrodes out.

Every machine in the room began to wail, and Amy’s own shriek went off with them. She screamed at him to lay back down, to stop, to just be still, and he would not. Shadow ripped the iv from his wrist in a fever all while her hands scrabbled at his own.

The hands grabbing at him did not have the strength they knew they should have been carrying. Her voice, loud and commanding, was gone, almost entirely. How long had he kept her up? How much had she cried, that her throat was so raw she could barely speak? How long had he left her like this, sitting here, watching a body?

He did this to her.

Useless. He was useless. He had hurt her, made her worry.

Shadow scratched at his face. He had to get this damn thing off. He had to see her. He had to apologize now, right now. This was unacceptable. She was never supposed to worry. The feeling of tape ripping from his flesh, taking his quills with it, caused him to flinch, pull back, and-

And suddenly, there was light.

Everything was bright, too crisp, the depth unnerving to the point where he feared he may slip from the bed. Amy’s arms came to catch him as he fell, eyes rolling back, stomach clenching. She is the one who pulled him back to center. She is the one who repeated over and over that he would be alright, gentle nothings tumbling from trembling lips.

But he looked at her, her face so close to his, and she stalled.

Amy took his hands, the bloody gauze clutched tight in his grasp, and laid them to rest in his lap.

Her face, a mass of tears, eyes red and bloodshot, lips worried to shreds. She ran a hand along his quills and he shivered both from the touch and from the pain.

“Oh, Shadow…” Her wide eyes darted across his face. “I promise you’re safe. You’re gonna be alright.”

He tried to blink away the spots, tried to give himself a moment to adjust, but for some reason, he couldn’t. He shut his eyes, could feel them close, could feel the way the lashes bristle and the flesh wrinkle, but he still looked straight ahead at her livid green eyes.

The sound Amy made was soft, like that of something dying.

That was when he spotted it.

Just above her, looming over the bed, a magnifying lens encircled by a light, and there, in the faint reflection, he could see himself.

A low sound, pathetic, like weeping. Grotesque. He burned with it, and the longer it went, the worse the burning got. His jaw, his eyes, his skin, they ached, and the sound only grew louder. It was not until he watched the tears dripping onto his hands that he realized it was him.

It was him. He was crying.

Making this worse.

He could feel them then, trickling down from his forehead, down his nose, along his face with the rest of them.

Salt in the wound.

It burned. It burned.

Shadow sat there, shaking in her hands, forced to watch as she stared, as she ran her hands through his quills and cupped his cheek.

That horrid unblinking eye, now right in the middle of his forehead, forced him to watch her face contort in fear.

Amy, sweet Amy, was so, so afraid.

And, Chaos, he wishes she wasn’t.

#shadow the hedgehog #amy rose #tw // body horror #tw // medical horror #alien hybrid puberty #library #alternative form

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