Shifter - pt. 2
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Beck had recovered just enough to be pissed.
The shock from being forced to shift and shift and shift had worn off, and now he was planning his retribution. The only thing tempering his rage was the growing hunger.
“Are you ready to try a few easy experiments?”
Beck’s head snapped up. He had no intention of trying shit, but the man was laying out those damn gas-filled spheres on a tray and bringing them over along with the plugs for the air holes.
Beck narrowed his eyes and set his jaw. “The fuck are you trying to do?”
“Well, I want to see how far I can push you.”
He could certainly try.
The man was about to learn why every authority figure in Beck’s life had cursed his name and why even his friends despaired of ever getting him to do something he hadn’t always intended to do anyway.
“Shift your tattoos away.”
This was going to suck.
“Go fuck yourself,” he answered, tipping his chin up defiantly.
The man frowned. “Now, there’s no call for that,” he chided, reaching for the tray.
Beck braced himself. He didn’t know what he would be forced to become, but he knew he would not participate in his own destruction. He had just enough time to be seized with the sudden fear of being aquatic, of drowning on dry land, before whatever was in the sphere reacted with the air around him and filled the case with gas.
With a painful squeeze, his body crumpled in on itself.
All his muscles shrank, contracting sharply around bones that couldn’t quite keep up. Fur split his skin and a tail pushed free below his spine.
His strangled cry of pain came out a squeak, and, when the fog of it lifted, he was a rat in a glass case, staring up at an infinitely huge testing room.
The man tapped a pattern on the front of the glass, which glowed slightly at his touch, mimicking a keypad. It hummed a soft vibration that he could feel through his whiskers, and the top came free.
He ran.
There wasn’t anywhere to go, but adrenaline coursed through his body, spurred by the hands reaching for him. His best efforts to evade or sink his teeth into the the grip were pointless, though, and he was yanked to a stop by his tail and dangled in the air.
The room swayed, tilting around him while he tried to pull himself up, to bite or free himself or at least right the twisting world.
“We could have tested this a much less painful way,” the man tutted.
Beck’s heart pounded in his tiny chest.
His struggles, swinging freely at the end of the muscular tail, took on an edge of desperation when he saw surgical scissors in the man’s hand. If he’d had the voice to do it, he would have shouted or threatened, but there was nothing he could do to stop him from sliding his grip down the tail and cutting off the last half inch of muscle and bone.
His reality collapsed into that one point of pain.
The shrieking sounds that rat lungs could make were humiliating and inadequate in response to the white-hot, electric pain. It felt like losing part of a limb. It was losing part of a limb. He was dropped back into the case, blood spattered, streaking the floor around him with each distressed movement, and he shook, unable to shift back, unable to do anything while he waited for the time to be up.
He pressed into the corner of the cage.
The lid closed.
He was still gasping in pained cries when he shifted back.
It hurt.
Even human again, it hurt, sharp pain radiating from the curve of his tailbone. There wasn’t all that much blood spattered on the glass, but it felt like he’d lost a lot more.
“Why would--” Beck shuddered, swallowing down the desire to puke or sob. He wouldn’t give him that. “What the fuck was that for?”
“Can you still feel it?”
Beck breathed deeply, desperately working to get a hold of himself, and didn’t answer.
“I can try again,” the man offered.
“Yes,” he snapped. “Yes, I can feel it.”
“Shift back to a rat.”
“Go to hell.”
He sighed, like the whole process was putting him out, and selected another of the drugs.
Beck gritted his teeth and steeled himself.
The glass bead cracked and the transformation took him again. The shifting of his muscles, the shrinking of his bones--all that discomfort paled in comparison to the splitting shock of growing back a cut tail.
His tail: back, in all its disfigured glory.
Blood spilled freely again, and all of his instincts were screaming to run and hide and bite. He hauled his mind back from the brink of falling totally into animalistic terror and focused instead on shifting back. The faster he overcame the gas, the faster he stopped bleeding.
Time dragged torturously, seconds ticking out with the course of blood from his tail.
The man cleared his throat as they approached the minute mark. “Make it easy on yourself and shift to a mouse next.”
A moment later Beck knelt in front of him, human, hissing breaths through clenched teeth. “I have never once in my life gone easy on myself, and I’m not starting now.”
The man picked up the next dose, and Beck braced himself.
This time, he shrank even further, a mouse with soft white fur and a whole, if throbbing, fuzz covered tail. He trembled with relief to see the undamaged tip of the tail, even while the man hummed curiously and scratched out notes.
Rat wasn’t a form he defaulted to. It had never been a favorite.
He could lose a bit of tail there if nothing else changed.
The pain was there and the horror, the blood loss, but he wasn’t irrevocably damaged. Not in every shape. Not even in any shapes he liked.
He was still shaking with pain and relief when he shed the mouse, telling himself that he could keep defying the man and doing a decent job at believing it.
“Now, can we try that with markings or are you going to make me keep cutting off pieces of you?”
***
The noise of someone cursing and struggling with the display case woke Beck where he was sleeping, curled up as an arctic fox in the scraps of his clothing, his tail over his nose to keep out the cold. He squinted up at the familiar face.
Avery.
He jolted up, snapping into his human form, and pressed his hands to the glass. “Avery!”
“I’ll kill them. Whoever did this, I’m going to kill them,” he snarled. “Fuck, how do I get this open?”
Beck shook his head. “Some kind of touchpad. I don’t know how it works. God, Avery, how’d you find me?”
“I tracked your phone to a dumpster.” He slammed his hands against the glass. “Fuck!”
“Shh, don’t--”
“I see we have a rat out of the cage,” a voice commented idly from the doorway.
Beck stiffened. “Avery, run,” he breathed. “Don’t fight. Run.”
Avery tossed a disbelieving look over his shoulder at Beck, already shifting into place between the man and Beck’s cage. “Open it.”
“How did you even get in here?” the man said curiously, stepping towards them into the room.
He was too calm. Beck was beginning to panic.
“Don’t hurt him.” The words spilled out of Beck.
Avery reached for his sidearm, hand brushing the grip, but didn’t get it drawn before he fell with electric prods in his chest and current spasming his muscles.
“No!” Beck slammed against the glass. “Don’t hurt him, fuck, please. He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
The man stepped casually over until he was standing over Avery. He looked between him and Beck, head cocking curiously to the side. “Inter-species copulation is generally frowned upon.”
“Fuck you.”
He tutted and leaned down, sliding a needling into Avery’s arm while he was still groaning his way back to consciousness. “Well, a complication, certainly. But I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”
“Don’t,” Beck breathed, but Avery’s eyes were sliding closed again before they’d even really opened.
“Waste not, want not.”
He hadn’t fought against his containment so hard in days, but nothing seemed to matter. His nails scraped uselessly on the glass, his hands and feet slammed into the sides without leaving a crack, and outside, Avery was dragged away.