Any kind? I just want people to say "oh, gross, why the fuck is he doing this? Why the fuck am I reading this??" It needs to be grosser for that.
Spoiler Hmmm. Main thing that comes to my mind is to emphasize that he's damaging his body by trying to deal with it this way. Tearing holes into his own skin, trying to pull the plants out. Violate the boundary between mundane stuff like a haircut (of plants). The fact that his eyeball isn't full of blood is interesting, and gives me less of a gross feeling and more of a.... removed feeling? The specific lack of blood, and having it pointed out, tells me that it could be worse but isn't.
@Bel Capricorn i am good at visceral gross stuff so lemme see what advice I can give Spoiler get into the nitty gritty disgusting details and don't be afraid to do so - eden prods with uncertain fingers, past the tangle near his uvula, grasping at something velvety and wrong at the back of his throat; he gags, feeling thorns scraping up his esophagus as he yanks, none-too-gently, at the intruder. there are roots growing out of his hair? cool. eden brushes through his hair with his fingers, scraping his nails over the raised lines he can feel under the thin skin of his scalp, woven deep into bone and hair. bits protrude at random, thin snaking roots from puckered skin, and he yanks, and he can feel some longer parts pulling and tugging the underside of his skin. the roots in his hand are bloodstained and writhing. gross. also I agree with swirlingflight - the lack of blood with the eyeball, while super neat, could use some more description to really convey the wrongness. even with a lack of binocular vision he could see the mass of writhing vines, pressed deep into his skull, fitted glove-like into veins and arteries and tugging gently, reverently, at the displaced eyeball, letting it swing without any pain besides the scrape of thorns on the bone of his eye socket. play with words, sensations, and syntax - really think to yourself, what would having a plant inside me feel like? could I taste dirt under my tongue? does my skin still feel like my skin, or does it feel unfamiliar? go wild, man - scenes like that are the ones to really let lose on :""D p. s. pls share when completed, it looks super interesting
@swirlingflight @rats thank you both, I think that'll work. It is part of a much much longer story, so it'll be a while before I can really share it, but I'm sure I can copy paste in the relevant parts from this particular character arc at some point.
the plants in his head, where do they take their water from? could be that the force of tugging them out is something he feels, or imagines he feels, trailing down his chest cavity, winding round organs and sinking roots into his stomach or bladder. maybe he drinks and drinks but doesn't piss anymore. that sorta sense of being changed deeply, injured beyond the scope of his knowledge. that hits me pretty hard. things connected to things they shouldn't be. and some plants release chemicals when they're injured and junk, like talking almost, how does that feel under his skin? pruning the stuff could be a thing he feels weird gross afteraffects for. retaliation. i always adore the mental affects of stuff like this. humanizing the plants. imaginng malice. imagining love. they need him they adore him they can't know how much they're hurting him, that kinda stuff. oh mn, plantz can crush rocks into gravel with their roots, imagine feelig something pike that poking around your skulls, your spine, looking for little fractres to push into. gross.
just imagined him peeling his scalp off. a bizare rush of affection or a stray thought after coming to a kind of truce with the plants, striking a balance between killing hem all and nust killing he ones most likely to kill him. roots in his skull, anchoring vines and stems and branches,cfinding weak points in bone, burrowing deep deep into the meat of his brain, realeasing chemicals, poking holes, winding round sections, carving up his mind, reshaping his thoughts till he gives up, till he becomes somethkng he's not, a complient host, the kind of man who'd comprimise himself. panic. anger. needs to see. easy enough, a kitchen knife jammed into his forehead till it hits bone, tugging and sawing at the edges that catch, peelig it off in ragged hunks of skin and hair and plant matter. like people who think they have worms in them. they pull themselves apart trying to get at all the little bits.
@tinyhydra damn. I don't think the plants themselves are sentient, at least not enough for that but. Damn. He does get interrupted pretty soon after this because someone heard the scream, but I could have him just keep going....
it's prolly better if they are just plants taking what they need from him. but they're gonnq b with him for a while, it seems, and people have a way of fitting stuff like tht into their heads if it sticks around long enough. if it's hurting him it's because it hates him and wants to kill him, migut be how he'll start conceptualizing it.or something. i dunno. hard to write things out. keyboard fully borked, so i'm on mobile. hard to edit. stuff coming out stupid. sorry.
Oh, that makes sense. I'm wondering now if maybe along with being heavily manipulated by this one character, she also fed him a bunch of lies about his situation. I wouldn't be surprised, I just need to figure out what she might have told him.
like, it's not so much what the plants are as how he sees them. thinking weird crap about them, ascribing meaning to random happenstance, etc, etc. that's scary. it's watching someone struggle to fit something horrible and painful and completely meaningless comfortably into their life's narative. i dunno, that's how i see it anyway.
How's this? Spoiler: edited version Eden brushes the loosest of the leaves off his shoulders and looks in the mirror quickly, before he can think too much about it. His hair is wild with thorns and twigs. Daisies are poking up out of his collarbone like a cheesy tattoo. Unable to tear his eyes away from his face in the mirror, he fingers the petals uncertainly, almost willing to believe that they are a tattoo except that he can feel them, soft, tearing under his fingernails. It tickles a little. He pulls down the collar of his shirt to see that they’ve spread, pulls his shirt up and off. The trail of orange and yellow and purple continues all the way down his stomach. He pulls them out, one by one, each tiny flower making him wince as he tears at it. This is inefficient, he thinks. I need a lawnmower. He laughs quietly, so as not to let the flowers know what he’s thinking. He gets up and opens a feew drawers until he finds a pair of scissors. Good, he thinks. They’re big, black-handled heavy duty scissors, not the wimpy kindergarten ones he’d expected. He sits and leans in close to the mirror again, but before he can do anything else his body spasms as he coughs horribly, spitting up a few crumpled petals. Damn. It’s killing me from the inside out. He stiffens, and it’s minutes before he can work past the fear to move again. Scissors on the table, he positions himself in front of the mirror and carefully reaches down his throat, past teeth and tongue and uvula. He gags and almost relents, but he keeps going until he grips a firm, thin stem. Gotcha. He pulls up the flower carefully, slowly, curling into himself as he does so. Like peeling off skin, he thinks. God, what if it’s only using him as a host? Like those bees that inject eggs into beetles, or was that spiders? He’s nothing to these things. He takes the scissors and severs the stem as low as he can manage, scraping his tongue in the process. He lets out a whimper of pain, and when he swallows he can taste blood. The flowers seem to grow bigger even as he attacks them. They’re already inside him, using him, growing inside him. He tries to remember the last time he pissed – are they using the water in him? His mouth feels dry and he looks away from the sink. How much of him is already plant life? “Let him touch you,” the unnamed voice says in a pleading tone. “Let this pain end, for both of you.” “Shut up,” Eden murmurs. He scratches through his hair with his fingers, tearing at the roots that have poked out in the last day or so. When he looks at his fingers, they’re bloody. He sucks in a breath, and gets up to find a knife. A nice big kitchen knife. Those parasites won’t be so happy when he’s chopping them to bits. Knife in hand, he saws at his scalp, scraping over bone, grimacing and whining as he goes. In the mirror, he can see his skull, roots poking into and out of it. His hands are dripping, the blood is running down his face, the roots are in his brain. His breathing gets faster and faster. What about a truce, huh? What if he leaves these, these evil things alone, and they let him live, let him stay a person? What if they want him to think that? He cries out in desperation and redoubles his efforts. He’s dropped the knife and is back to scratching at his skin to get at the vines beneath. Veins. Vines. “This is unnatural,” he whispers. “This isn’t right.” He leans in closer to the mirror. No. No, that’s not fair. There’s a thin vine poking out from under his left eyeball. As he watches, it grows tiny leaves, curling down towards his nose. Another vine, under the eyelid, growing down in front of the iris. As he hesitates, a third pokes out from the eye itself, splitting the pupil and blurring his vision. As its leaves cover the lens, the voice says, “You’ll lose that eye. Immortal or no, you don’t want to spend eternity half blind.” “You don’t know what I want,” Eden tells the voice angrily. “You don’t know shit about me.” He grabs at the vine and it slips out of his bloody hands. He tries again and manages to grasp it, and grips and pulls and screams with the pain. Even without binocular vision, he can see his eye in the mirror, dangling from its socket. He’s not sure where the optic nerve ends and the vines tangling into the eye begin. Maybe they’re one and the same. He’s hyperventilating, now, muttering “No. No, it’s not supposed to be like this.” His eyesocket isn’t bloody, isn’t it supposed to be bloody, oh god, it’s just filling with hundreds and hundreds of tiny leaves, is he even human anymore? Is he just a vessel for this infernal plant, this terrible thing, this, this - Nick had woken at the scream and now he’s pounding at the door. “Eden? Are you okay? Eden, let me in!” “I’m fine,” Eden says shakily, a sob cutting into his voice. He’s not fine. He’s never going to be fine. This damned weed is going to kill him just because he can’t trust Nick, can’t trust anyone, can’t trust himself. He wants so badly to trust Nick but he can’t even trust himself. The plant is inside his head, inside his brain, changing it, changing him. “You screamed,” Nick says from behind the door. Eden wills him to go away but of course he won’t. He just wants to see Eden in pain. “I’m coming in,” Nick says, and slams himself against the door until the lock gives or the door gives, just as the vines release the dissected eyeball and it falls to the floor.
It's a good start! Like the bit at the start, describing the flowers like a cheesy tattoo. Here's a thing I need a bit of help with! It's a RWBY fic, bout a splinter group of the White Fang that's made a shitty cartoon disease to eradicate humanity but like not kill everyone? Just change them into not-humans. Genocide done by "pacifists". Anywho, wanted the first chapter to be from the POV of some of the group, talking about what they're doing and why individual members volunteered to be "vectors" for the disease and junk. Spoiler Cedar Monte has never considered himself a brave man. He keeps his head down. His nose clean. Doesn't draw attention to himself. It's a defense mechanism, he supposes. Faunus who make spectacles of themselves don't live happy lives. Truth be told, he doesn't know how he ended up wrapped up in all this. He's had so many chances to back out. They've been so careful to let them know that. It's been months of no shame, no pressure, tell me if it hurts, no more hurting if we can help it. Putting an end to that kinda stuff is what we're all about, the Doc had said. We're The Cure for cruelty, and we won't force you to do anything. He glances over to his left. He's sitting on the floor in corner of the warehouse cordoned off with a few sheets of plastic strung up between the skeletons of machinery long since picked clean by scavengers. The door is still there, right by his side. Still unlocked. He resists the urge to reach up and test it. Instead he pinches a stripe of curling paint on the door frame between his thumb and his forefinger and worries it gently. You can leave any time you want, up to the very last minute. The woman at his right coughs. Cedar jolts and tucks his wandering hands under his armpits, flinching into himself. His cheeks burn. He's never been a brave man. He peaks out from behind his bangs. The woman isn't staring. She knows him better than that now. From the very first day she's been there, by the door with him. He'd gotten there fifteen minutes early and sat on bare concrete after thirty minutes of twitching towards the ramshackle assortment of chairs and faunus clustered in the center of what they had already dubbed the "sick bay". She'd gotten there twenty minutes late and dragged a rusty folding chair towards the door, headless of the eyes on her and the hideous screeching of metal on concrete. Cedar had felt like such an idiot. He still does, sitting here next to someone like her. Afraid like someone like her. Like someone like him needs an escape route. She's so small next to him. She'd grabbed his hand once after a particularly long meeting, joints popping and muscles creaking as she stood, and her fingers had barely managed to encircle his first two. Her whole hand could fit in his palm, he had thought, awed and ashamed. She's so small, but she stands so tall and so proud and when the meetings get into full swing he watches her bend forward towards the speakers like a flower towards the light, drinking in every word with something urgent and thirsty lurking just behind her gaze. Like she wants so deeply and so true that the world can't help but give it to her. Cedar has never felt anything so deeply in his life. Not even fear. She catches him staring at her out the corner of her eye. She turns towards him, and his gaze trails along the knotted mass of scars that twists her every expression into something out of a horror movie. She grins at him, conspiratorially. Her empty eye socket deforms with the movement. He finds himself smiling back. His teeth feel heavy and awkward in his mouth, and his heart shudders and jolts like it's trying to escape. "Today's the day," she croaks. The brilliant pink line slanting across her throat bobs. The shredded remains of her rabbit ears twitch with excitement and, dare he imagine, nerves. "Yeah." He whispers. He smiles again, making sure to cover his teeth with his lips. "No more hurting," she whispers, almost to herself. She wraps weak and unresponsive hands around her legs and shudders, helpless with joy. "Yeah." He says, wishing he had something more to say. "Yeah," he says again, softly, like the repetition can convey all that he's feeling and all that he wishes he felt. I think I got onto a weird path. Cedar is kinda impartial to the whole group philosophy and is only really going along with it because he craves meaning and purpose and he's sorta leeching off other people's passion. And he's the one who's gonna feel the most immediately and viscerally guilty about what he's doing. So I guess that's why he's the main focus. Plus I've decided that he's gonna be the one that infects Team RWBY, by way of Weiss. Buuut, now it's gotten kinda romantic? Naudia's supposed to be like 60 to Cedar's early 20s, haha.
@Bel Capricorn gross enough that I couldn't get through it in one go, so well done. Spoiler: couple additional suggestions the "dissected eyeball" in the last paragraph suggests that it was actually cut open, not just pulled out, but that could be an interesting place to go, especially as a segue to the "inside his brain" bit: cut the eyeball in half, it's not like it's gonna do him any good now, and oh shit, it's full of algae or something... also, a while ago, my sibling and i buried a bird that had been hit by a car under a plastic cover in our backyard, so that the decomposers would clean the bones for us. anyways, between forgetfulness and executive dysfunction, it stayed there for about a year. When I finally went to get the bones, they were half-buried in the dirt, and tangled in this really fine, snarled mesh of nasty little springy roots perfectly filling where the body cavity of the bird once was. creepy as shit, and i'm not often one to be bothered by decay
Congratulations on the successful body horroring. Meanwhile I'm over here with that feel when you touch a fic for the first time in four months and What Was I Doing Again?
so I just finished/posted a fic I'd been working on for the better part of 6 months and gotten really wrapped up in and now I have absolutely no idea what to do with myself whoopsies?
A friend's jaeger has PTSD. I learned this and immediately wanted to work out why and then detail it lovingly in prose. So I wrote this.
Hi. Y'all. Important question: I need a good reason for someone who is an abusive narcissist to allow her son to live at his boyfriend's house. Current reason is raising a fuss would make it public that she's transphobic and would show that one of her children doesn't love her. I'm writing a story.
Overestimating her ability to be without her boy supplying her with a stream of narc chow, maybe? The notion that something is wrong with their relationship and he's trying to escape might be so offensive to her that she loops around to complete denial and lets him do what he wants as a sign that everything has to be okay cause she did that one nice thing for him that one time. Maybe she's got a partner who she's separated from and she's making a display out of kiddo and other guy? Oooh, true love should never be halted by the meddlings of outsiders, hint hint come back to me. <---- Doesn't know anything about narcissism.
