veryroundbirdfics | Arknights | Devour Without Guilt

Rating: Extraspicy
Words: 1435
Characters: Specter, Amaia, Skadi
Relationships: Skadi/Specter, Skadi/Amaia
Summary: Specter dreams of that creature that says it isn't Amaia.
Notes: this is a lot.

Content Notes:

strangulation, eroguro, general gore, body horror, bodily harm, ??cannibalism??, hard vore, specter is Coping (tm)

That thing is here again.

The thing that insists it's not Amaia. Stupid! No, even if she's changed, Shark can still smell her—the dusty smell of feather down, the salty ocean wind, something bitter and dark. She'd recognize it anywhere, and besides, it dances like her.

And it's singing again. Where is it even singing from, that angelic, faceless creature? It touches down on the deck before her, the high winds quieting around the two of them. The song is beckoning her—calling her kin, welcoming her, bidding her follow home into the mother-depths.

It's a real racket. "Give it a rest!" Shark says, laughing, throwing her head back. "You've got terrible taste in music as ever, Amaia."

The creature—Amaia, Amaia—bobs in the air, as if it's floating through the ocean, the bell of its body floating slowly like arms spread wide to embrace Shark like a sister. It doesn't stop singing, though.

Sweet, in a way, Shark thinks, and tilts her head, smiling, before reaching out to stretch her arms forward in a sort of return gesture.

Her hands find what passes for its neck, and she squeezes, nails digging in through soft, pliable, translucent flesh. Once she tears through to the trunk of its body properly, the gouges left by her nails start trailing a blue so bright it surpasses blue, staining her hands and arms.

It's warm. The blood down her arms is warm like a memory, and Shark laughs again, pressing her face against the shuddering top of its bell.

"I know you're in there," she says, grinning.

She wakes hungry.

Skadi's sleeping beside her—or more accurately, under her, the way Shark has octopused all her limbs around Skadi's sleeping form. She's always been good at sleeping like a soldier: sleeping like a rock, perfectly alert when it's time to wake.

The night is overcast; no light to be seen at all, and something about that settles her a little. She extricates herself, pulling herself up to seated, knees hugged against her chest.

Shark barely pays attention to the landship's travel plans, but she knows instinctively that they've drawn closer to the coast as of late—the fog of originium poisoning has lifted from her thoughts. And sometimes, she thinks she can hear music.

She slips out of bed, feet hardly making a sound as they hit the floor, covers slipping away from her bare form.

For a while, she stares out the window into the black that's not quite as black as the ocean depths—but close. Her foot taps to a rhythm only she can hear, and without really thinking about it, she hums along.

Then she pauses, realizing what she's doing. She shakes her head, snorts to herself, and throws on some clothes to go rummage through the kitchen.

Shark is hungry in dreams, too. Hungrier, maybe, for something she can't name. Amaia's back again, looking so pristine and elegant that Shark wants all the more to pull it apart to find the woman underneath, the one it insists isn't there. This "We Many" nonsense is ridiculous.

This time it slips out of her grasp as she reaches for it, floating gently through the air to land a few meters beside. It only makes Shark grin the wider, even as her mouth waters strangely; it's no fun if there's not a hunt.

Amaia is one of the few faces she has any recollection of, from her captivity. A quiet presence who stood watching, at first; then, who stayed and read aloud in a language she didn't really understand. Shark—pardon, Specter—hadn't really cared for the reading, but Amaia at least was fun enough to consent to dance now and again. Probably the reason why Shark remembers her at all.

This time, it's Shark who extends a hand, and waits for Amaia to take it—to remember what to do; to remember what she is.

It takes a long moment before Amaia reaches out one of its tendrils, looping it around Shark's outstretched hand as if to take the follower role. Shark grasps it, and then pulls, hard.

The tendril tears off in her hand, an iridescent ribbonlike thing she could mistake for a scarf. Amaia's song doesn't change. Maybe it doesn't understand fear, anymore.

Maybe Shark can help with that. But apparently not this way. She can tear off as many of the parts she can reach with hands and teeth, but none of them unfurl to reveal human flesh underneath before she opens her eyes to the dark, familiar Rhodes Island ceiling.

Skadi's noticed something is off. She holds Shark's shoulders in her arms for just a little too long in the morning, as if worried Shark will slip away again, retreating back into her own mind. Shark nuzzles up against her face, and then snaps her jaw to get an affectionate mouthful of Skadi's cheek.

"You're all right, though?" Skadi asks, after the wound has started healing, rubbing her cheek.

"Mhm. Just reminiscing a bit."

Of course, Skadi frowns; of course from her perspective there's not much good to look back on. So Shark leans in to loop her arms around Skadi's shoulders, grinning up at her. "Don't fret. You'll turn your hair whiter than it already is."

"We're near the sea," Skadi says, by way of explanation, and doesn't elaborate further; her meaning is clear enough.

"I know," says Shark. "I won't get washed away by the tides. I can't leave you on your own again, after all, love." She threads her hands through Skadi's hair and leans in, contentedly; she smells of salt and iron and sweat, and for one red flash of a moment Shark wants to bite down harder, to tear something away and into herself.

Instead she pushes back, and smiles toothily. She's so hungry.

"Come along," she says. "Let's head out. I'm starving."

Amaia escapes her grasp night after night. How many times has Shark taken it apart, blue blood spattering the deck and ribbons of luminescent flesh shredded ragged.

It never runs, though, or tries to fight—only skirts away, dodges, floats gently as with the currents. Their little dance. It always sings and sings and sings until the end.

This time, Shark finds herself humming along again as they circle each other. Or maybe she's just noticing it for the first time—the way her steps fall into the rhythm. She exhales—and stops. And laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

Amaia just waits for her—it's hovering right there when Shark rights herself fully. If Shark were reading anything into the posture, it might be confused.

Oh, Amaia. She'll have to teach it again, how to understand. Shark takes a deep breath, and sings.

It's nothing much—some popular song she remembers from her childhood in Ægir, cloyingly earnest, a much quicker step to it. She takes a step, and then another—

And this time it's Amaia who moves to her beat, tendrils swaying, taloned feet tapping out light percussion against the deck. Shark's skirts sweep around her feet, and she meets Amaia as they spiral in, forearm to tendril.

They loop in rings around the deck, stepping lightly, nearly meeting and then reversing direction. And then at the end of the song, Shark wraps Amaia in her arms.

Together, they tumble to the deck, Amaia for one moment no longer weightless. Gently, Shark puts a palm to where Amaia's cheek would be, if it still had one; traces her fingers lightly down the soft drape of its bell to rest at the center of its chest. And pushes.

Her fingers dig in, caving in a body scaffolded with flimsy, luminescent-white bones, her other hand curling into the soft opening to lever the flesh apart. Amaia writhes under her hands, the black of its body splitting open to the pulsing bright core as Shark drags her hands, nails first, splitting it from collar to belly.

Shark unspools it insides, coils of gut and soft wet organs of no human analogue. Presses her face and mouth into the soft cavity, seeking for something just beyond reach—some faded memory of a passing warmth. Tearing out all the parts that aren't Amaia until she can find the woman who should be here, winding her intestines around her arms like they might be a map leading her to what she seeks.

In the end, covered in that luminous, unnatural blood, she lays out all the pieces that remain. And in the hollow of that creature's body there is no woman, no Amaia; just an emptiness of wet, spent flesh.

"Goodbye," she says, and never has the dream again.