#bittee sweet coffee

[true-squid]

provide a shadow lesbian moment :)

Ok so due to PROJECT "SHADOW": APOCALYPSE, Shadow eventually teaches himself how to read his own code (with DREAM's help). This is a thing DREAM teaches him after he finds out about it in order to help him deal with learning about the fact that Gerald programmed him to become worse and worse over time. DREAM figured that if they could figure out how to manipulate the code themselves, they could just stop Shadow from changing any more than he already has.

This is not what Shadow did.

He learned how to edit his own code and then started playing flash dressup game with himself.

Basically imagine you have a flash game and Shadow is the default girl and then you can add things to her like scales and horns and a third eye and wings and a long tail and extra fur and etc. By the time Shadow and DREAM find out about APOCALYPSE, most of the drastic physical changes to Shadow's body have already occured. (There are a few other ones that are less physical, but this isn't about them rn this is about GOGIRLSGAMES DRESSUP.) So Shadow and DREAM first do the practical thing and shut off future changes. Like, there's one that renders Shadow's voicebox unable to produce human language and thats fucking terrifying to Shadow so he shuts it off.

And then he realizes that he can turn off changes that have already occured, like his horns or his scales or his third eye, and this gets him really excited. It's one of the rare times where he like, literally wags his tail he is so excited about this. So he starts messing around with it and envisioning his ideal self. At first this is just his old self, like his canon design, but its so strange, because soon he realizes he actually misses things like his long tail or his extra fur, and that actually at this point the third eye is a necessity that he can't not have (or else Doom's Eye gets a lil weird) so he goes back to them.

In his euphoria and self-loathing, Shadow forgets something very important. Undergoing every stage of APOCALYPSE's transformation in the first place really fucking hurt. Because growing extra bones and rapidly increasing the rate at which your body changes is, you know, painful and not what your body expects, and Shadow already suffers from chronic pain on top of this. So he accidentally sends his body into the same kind of physical shock he felt the first time.

So now some days he'll wake up and be like "hm today is a horn day" for whatever reason and go into his programming and change the code and then spend the rest of the day in a fucking pain coma while they grow in. He's really fucking dramatic about it too he makes DREAM sit with him all day so he can go comatose in her lap and she can hold him cuz that's where he feels safest (they are wives).

It's usually not painful when he turns off a physical trait, because chances are it'll just fall off. Like, his horns fall off like a deer's horns would and the skin where they used to be is a little raw so he might but a bandage there until it closes up, but it doesn't hurt like a dagger piercing through his flesh, you know?

He likes to make himself fluffier and also give himself more breathing holes because those two things help with The Horrors. He will grab onto his fur and brush it when DREAM isn't around to stim with and having more breathing holes makes it easier to calm down when he's panicking. Everything is not finw but at least Shadow can play flash dressup with himself.