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FIC: pheres dysseu, four reasons why
SIPARA NZINGA & PHERES DYSSEU | eight sweeps
“My back hurts,” he complains one day. He’s built a nest of blankets and covers, and is now sprawled across Sipara’s concuscpecient couch while she works on the floor next to it, husktop in her lap. He’s supposed to be sleeping, but.
She isn’t paying attention. He reaches out and tugs on a curl. “Sipa~,” he whines.
She turns her head, and he yanks his fingers away just before her teeth clamp down. Sipara is the worst. “Take off the shirt, then,” she says irritably. “Iunno why you even got it on still, jfc. I promise I won’t cull you.”
Pheres huffs. “Like you could!” Still, she has a point. His undershirt is hardly tight enough to be actively detrimental to his health, but… it’d be very nice to take it off. Let his skin breathe.
He hooks his thumbs into the bottom, and pulls.
> VITILIGO
The shirt comes off easily enough. The shirts for hiding, not compression.
The skin underneath is mottled with colour: not just the uniform dusky gray of his hands and face, but lighter shades of pinkish red, where the pigment has worn away, and rose gray where it’s in the process. Looking at it makes his skin itch, and his hands curl.
It’s spread, since the last time he checked.
He wants to scratch it off, dig his claws in and rip until it all looks uniform under the rosewood of his blood. He used to do that as a grub, when the first translucent spot appeared: pick and dig and scratch, because the dark weal of scar tissue is ugly, but the piebald marks will get him culled.
He places a hand on his side, and Sipara clears her throat.
“Nice spots, dude,” she jeers, and he drops the shirt on her head instead.
> SPHERES
The shirt is a struggle to get off.
The bottom wants to roll, for one, and the top wants to cling. Every time he tugs one way, the fabric wants to go the other, and when he finally gets it over his head, it’s to be greeted by the sound of fabric ripping.
“You broke the strap,” Sipara says, ever helpful.
He makes a face at her. It’s nice to be uncompressed, and he takes a deep breath, just for the novelty of it. After days in the undershirt, it almost hurts, but the feeling of his lungs expanding and detracting, unrestricted, is more than worth it.
The way that his spheres shake with the motion is a little disconcerting, though.
Pheres flops back down on the bed, and he’s promptly reminded why he wears the undershirt: he has to shift positions and figure out a new way to lay, because it seems like his rumblespheres are constantly in the way. Getting resettled takes a moment.
He’ll have to figure out a way to fix the strap before he leaves Sipara’s hive. He already has enough trouble with his horns: he doesn’t need a third rack always getting in the way, too.
> SCARS
He pulls the shirt over his horns, balls it up, and tosses it to the corner.
He isn’t planning on looking down: the scars haven’t changed in sweeps, and he’s worked hard to keep it that way. But curiosity gets the best of him, as it always does. The little nicks from knives and claws across his collar and chest, the rippled flesh where a blueblood stabbed him on his breastbone, the bite from Rmeros’s lusus… there isn’t much skin left unmarked, and he can feel bile rising in his gorge as he looks at it.
(Each one is proof of some mistake, writ large on his flesh, and he hates it, but what he hates more is the impression it gives. His torso is a mottled weal of scar tissue and damage. It’s not the skin of a docile book-keeper: it’s the skin of some sort of thug.)
“Hey, dude, stop eyefucking yourself,” Sipara says, and when he looks up, she raises an eyebrow and sneers. “My dads got better scars than that shit.”
“Hell, I bet your dad has better scars than that shit, and he’s dead.”
He huffs, flings himself back down on the bed, and bundles himself in one of the blankets, until there’s no skin showing at all, just fabric. It helps, a little. “Oh, shut up.”
> GILLS
He outgrew this shirt two sweeps ago, and wrestling out of it is a chore. When he finally gets it over a shoulder, it gets stuck to a horn: when he wrests that free, it clings around his face like a eggshroud, and Sipara has to get up and pull it free.
He was hoping to avoid her, but now that she’s up, there’s no point in objecting as Sipara performs her usual survey. She runs her fingers along his sides, prying gently at the closed operculum and peering at the maroon gills underneath. For once, she’s careful of her claws.
“Deep breath,” she orders, and Pheres obliges, dragging in air through his lungs and forcing it slowly out of his protesting gills. He doesn’t look down as she works, but keeps his eyes focused on the cracks in the ceiling.
(Mutants deserve to be culled. But he’s not a mutant: just a cusp, Sipara says, like her, like Myrrha, like Rmeros and every other member of their line.)
(Of course, none of them have gills, not even Rmeros. He checked.)
“You need to use these more. Like, shit’ll starts rotting if you don’t -”
“Use them where?” he asks, incredulous. “In the river? Shall I remind you that the last time I tried that, we had to cull someone?”
She paps him in the face, her claws little pinpricks of pain as they drag on the skin. “No, dumbass,” she says, patient: “In my tub. Come on, I’ll get my husktop and you can like, blow bubbles or whatever. You need to get some water through those fuckers, ‘cause if they start crumbling off, I’m not cleaning it up…"
>NOTHING
He doesn’t get much farther then rolling the bottom of his shirt before he gives up.
Logically speaking, cloth is no protection. There’s nothing the opaque shirt does to benefit him: it won’t stop knives, claws, or even sharp words. But the constant pressure against his skin feels like it could, and he finds the idea of stripping and leaving nothing between his thoracic struts and the rest of the world thoroughly unappealing.
Even if he’s only lounging around with his moirail.
"No,” he says, flicking one of her oversized ears, “I think I’d rather just complain.”
>AFTER
It wasn’t like this when you were kids, but you didn’t have a trap back then - just that salty ass river. Everyone knows that sea dwellers are made for salt, but Pheres isn’t exactly a sea dweller: he might be weird and cuspy, too close to the edge of the circle no one wants to admit exists, but he’s still a lowblood.
A lowblood with gills in his chest and psionics in his pan. Ugh.
Your husktop is in your lap, and the diagram for your latest apiculture rig is up, waiting to be simulated and test-run. But it’s hard to think when your freaky ass moirail is asleep next to you. Even in your washing block, with all the doors shut and locked, you still feel on edge, knowing that all it’d take is one person seeing to spell ruin.
You’d feel better if he was awake, wrapped up in his cloth and clothes, but he does need to let water through those things, so you suck it up and stew.
Times like this, when all of his freakish vulnerabilities are lying out in the open, you fucking hate having a moirail. You look at him and you just want to cut him open, so you can catalogue everything that’s wrong. How deep does his highblood contagion go, beyond the gills and blood? If you cut him open, will you find salt in his veins and tyrian on his pusher?
If you did, could you fix it?
You trace the place where you’d cut with a claw, pressing just hard enough to leave a dark line on the skin: a line and a swoop across the torsal cavity is all it’d take, to make the skin peel back and let you see what needs work. You’ve never dissected a seadweller, but you’re not crazy. You know you can’t just cut out the gills from his side, drain the blood from his veins and replace it all with something right - but sometimes, you’re tempted to try.
It’d be so easy. All you would have to do is ask, and Pheres would pass you the scalpel and say please.
Maybe he senses the way your pan is churning, because he stirs, head half-submerged in your ablution trap. His snouts slipped under the water, trailing bubbles with each push of his chest, and you can see the obscene red flash of his gills at work under his covers as he breathes. Pheres’s eyes open, slowly, eyelashes lit by the glow of his psionics, and you watch as he blinks at your hand.
“Stop that,” he rasps, voice heavy with sleep but still affectionate. “Don’t you have work to do, instead of -” He yawns, his mouth stretching wide and showing all of his blunt, blunt teeth, painfully bright against the muted red of his membranes. “- haah - fondling me like a deviant?”
“Wow, gross!” You flick his nose, and then move your hand up, letting your nails work their way through the damp curls. “I was just thinking you need to like, eat some fucking food for once, that’s all. You could wash clothes on that shit.”
He murmurs something in response, but it’s sleepy as he sinks back into the tub, shifting his head so that you can get better access to his scalp. He’s already going back to sleep, and his voice’s broken the spell that’s brewing in your pan.
Pheres isn’t a fucking fish, and you’re not going to filet him like one. The only thing here that needs to be fixed is the apiculture rig lying on your husktop, and with that in mind, you turn your gaze firmly away from the mutant drowsing in your trap, and you get to work.