//This is a tad long be kind this is my first standalone..cw for a tiny mention of plague doing some bullshit science
[PLAGUE always felt it. It festered deep in his bones. The grave chill. It sat there. Festering for all those years. Forcing him to become all the more aware of each time he was uprooted from some god-forsaken island and chucked onto a new one, expecting him to be right and ready to pick his research back up. Piece by agonising piece. He had failed to recall where he had last saw his journal. PLAGUE’S memory often failed to aid him in situations such as these.]
[How many islands had it been now? He’d lost count. It was routine.]
[He could feel every crease in his gloves, the fabric irritating his skin every time he expressed the very thought of flexing his fingers. PLAGUE’S fingers curled ever so subtly tighter around the pencil he was scrawling with. Everything, as of lately, was becoming too much. It pained him to move most days. Agonised his very being. He supposed it was just the increasing chill of the forest.]
[Everything ached, and everything hurt. Whenever did it not? But alas. Pure spite kept him going, most mornings. He was staring down his latest..triumph..against death. A scuttling, squirming thing made from a hand and foot crudely stitched together with thread. He held the end in his teeth, closing the seams between the two specimens with a repetitive shhk. Shhk. Shhk.]
[It was obscene. It was revolting.]
“It’s beautiful.”
[PLAGUE murmured, willing himself to outstretch his arms to cradle the amalgamation like a father would his child alongside allowing his lips to stretch into what seemed to resemble a grin. Looking down at it with adoration. After admiring the product of his own genius for far too long, he dropped it back onto the tray with an uncaring clatter and steered himself to another rickety workbench.]
[He leaned heavily on his cane, staggering to and fro as he dodged upturned beakers or a spill of god-knows-what for the umpteenth time in his trek across his lab. He would have to clean that sometime. But now was not such.]
[He had forgone the security of his mask in the privacy of his sanctuary, barely sparing a glance of his mottled, gnarled features as they caught the reflections of several beakers and glass vials. Yet just for a moment, he paused in his frantic ministrations around his space to simply look.]
[He was no longer himself. And that frightened him. It was a thought that he feared to entertain when he was in bed with the darkness of night and the snores of his beloved as companions.]
[A name had come before PLAGUE. Before DR. MALACHITE. But just what was it? It was just out of his reach. He could touch its hazed edges in the very depths of his mind, yet never grasp it fully.]
[He raised a hand to touch the organic, misshapen side of his face as he peered at himself in the shattered fragment of a mirror. The skin warped and stretched from the accident.]
[PLAGUE felt the itch of his beard at the split between scar tissue and skin. He felt the delicacy of the barrier between air and muscle - marred with ridges from the burns. He felt the lopsided bridge of his nose where his spectacles perched precariously. He felt the wrinkles of age root themselves in his skin like worms to the earth. The sheer grotesqueness of his flesh amused him. To an extent.]
[The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak.]
[So very weak.]