#crouch writes

“Yeah, I got nothin’,” says Zanka. 

“Yeah, me neither,” says Jabber. He continues to poke. Zanka is sure that if he leans over to look at Jabber’s face, he’ll see that intense look of concentration Jabber sometimes wears while “processing” a new substance for Mankira. 

He sticks an arm into his pack. “Lemme make a sketch to show Nee-san later. Maybe the Boss, if I can catch him. Between the two of them, I swear they know everything…” He pulls out a notepad and a pencil, both provided by Tomme, who wanted him to make notes on the Trash Beast he was scheduled to exterminate today. 

Hate to break it to ya, Ms. Mima, but it ain’t exactly easy to take notes on the damn things when yer the one they’re rushin’. An’ I can’t exactly sit back and observe when it’s actively destroyin’ stuff. He flips past his post-mortem observations and sets the tip of the pencil to the page. Makes a mark. 

Blinks. 

“Hey,” he says. “What, uh, what shape would ya say that is…?” 

“Hmmmmmm,” says Jabber. “Uh… kinda… oblong?” He flicks it. “But it’s got this kinda… knobby bit down here. Oh, wow. That part’s hard. The other part was squishy, but this is, like, rigid ‘n’ shit.” 

Zanka makes some more marks. “Lean back a sec, yer blockin’ the light.” 

“Huh? Okay…” 

Zanka steps forward, but Jabber unexpectedly shuffles toward him—putting the taut Achilles tendon of his left heel right under the sole of Zanka’s boot. 

He pulls his weight back, but it’s too late. Jabber yelps and hops away like a frog, clutching his heel. Looks up, blinking owlishly.  

“Sorry,” says Zanka automatically. “You okay?” 

Jabber’s brow furrows. One eye squints. “Yeah…? The fuck?” His lashes flutter rapidly and his eyes don’t fully close. “Since when do you say ‘sorry’ to me?” 

Zanka blinks. “Uh. I mean, we ain’t fightin’ right now, an’ I stepped on yer ankle, so…” 

“Yeah, but I like it when you hurt me,” says Jabber, continuing to blink as well. 

“I mean, I know, but this time I wasn’t, like, intendin’ to,” says Zanka. 

“Oh,” says Jabber. “I mean, yeah, I figured, ‘cause if you meant to step on me, it woulda hurt a lot more- But. Like. What?” He cocks his head. “Just ‘cause it’s an accident, you gon’ apologize?” 

“…Yeah?” says Zanka. 

They stare at each other. 

“Okay,” they both say at the exact same time—in nearly the same tone, too. 

Zanka almost viscerally recoils. That… that is twisted. I did not know we could sound that alike, an’ I sure as hell never wanted to, neither. 

Jabber, who looks like he chewed a lime, seems to agree. 

He swivels his head back toward the mystery object. His elbow follows, pulled by the hair wrapped around his forearm. “But, like, what is this thing?” 

“Literally no clue,” says Zanka, returning to his sketch. Shading. Maybe some shading will help. “Shit. I wish I had a camera.” 

“Yo, maybe it’s a camera.” 

“What?” Scoff. “What’re ya talkin’ about? Where would the damn lens even be?” 

“No, no, look-”

Most of his fellows were soon slurped up by much larger things in turn. But Jabber was lucky. He was left alone, and soon he had eaten enough that his body grew to the shape of a tiny little sail, still barely the length of a human’s first knuckle. Currents took him further inland, close to island shores, where he continued to eat and grow, until he stretched out and became a tiny little ribbon of glass, too small to even tie around a child’s wrist. His little body was so clear that when he ate and swallowed his prey, which was also gradually increasing in size, it could have seen straight out of him and watched the reefs where he lived go by. 

At this stage of life, he was still vulnerable, protected only by being difficult to spot. And hungry ocean creatures are wily. The few fellows he had left dwindled day by day. The ones who remained kept on growing bigger and bigger, and they all began to take on color, which only made them easier to spot and snap up. By the time he was fully opaque, there might have been two or three others left at his side. Not that he particularly cared—and in fact it was good that there were so few, since by now, they would have begun to look upon each other with great disdain. As a rule, his kind do not generally associate with each other except to create the next generation, and they were all far off from being able to do that. But soon it became moot anyway, because the others did not find themselves a safe cave or a hidden hole quickly enough, and alas—they all perished. This was simply the way of the ocean. 

But not Jabber. Jabber, by this point, was quick and clever, and proudly in possession of his own little place in the reef, a dark crevice between some rocks in which he rested during the day and from which he emerged at night, stalking the coral forest in search of fish, shrimp, crabs, urchins, and other tasty treats that were too slow or too stupid to avoid him. Sometimes, all he had to do was lie in wait at the mouth of his cave, still and silent with his head poked out, until the inevitable meandering arrival of some unsuspecting passerby—he lived in a rather busy neighborhood—then out shot the jaws, and there was his supper. 

As the days stretched on, he found himself preferring this method over the active hunt. He did not know why, but lately his body felt rather strange and unwieldy. All his life, even through all his growing and the last two drastic changes, movement had always come naturally and instinctively—now he was not sure where his insides ended and his outsides began. He often found himself trying to stretch out parts of his form that didn’t seem to exist. His cave, too, was becoming too small for him, the sharp rock walls rubbing against his tender back and sides. So he moved to another, and then another, with his little head poked out, lying in wait for a meal that, thankfully, reliably came—until one day he stuck out that head to eat, and it fell clean off instead. 

Shocked still, he watched it tumble down the sandy slope, snout and eyes and all, until it settled into a crevice, where immediately a crab began to pick at it with its pincers, shortly joined by a bevy of its fellows. Jabber was so at a loss that he didn’t even think of going down to collect a morsel of his own. My head! he exclaimed silently in his mind, entirely without words, for he had yet to learn even one. Instinctively, he reached up to touch the place where it had been—which struck him as very odd, since he had never had any appendage with which he could reach out or touch before, save for perhaps his jaws, which weren’t in the place he was trying to move anyway—and nothing happened, of course. But an ache began to spread through the upper part of his body. He did the only thing he felt he could do—he blinked. And then he realized he was doing something he had never done before. 

New sensations swept over him. He understood, now, that there was, in fact, still something on the end of his neck. It had eyes that could see, ears that could hear, a nose that could smell, and a mouth that could open and close, with a second set of jaws nestled deep inside like usual. But there was more. His face now seemed to have all these different parts that could twitch and move, and there was something fleshy inside of his mouth, nestled within the first pair of jaws, attached to the bottom half—a dextrous length of muscle with a thick base and a thin tip that could wriggle and writhe like the length of his tail. When he opened his jaws and let it out, it unspooled to quite a length. He rubbed it over the border of his mouth, soft and fleshy and new, and discovered that it was all quite sensitive—the muscle and the smooth lips both. 

His nose, too, was different. It could flare and twitch and scrunch, and it was no longer quite so attached to his mouth. He blinked again. He had quite forgotten about the blinking. Never before had he possessed something he could cover his eyes with, and it was very novel. He shut them just to see what it felt like and marveled at the warm darkness. There were two pieces to each cover, an upper one and a lower one, and at the edge of each piece, forming a frame around each eye, sprouted short feathery tendrils that felt even the slightest currents in the water with great sensitivity. 

More of these tendrils grew on the top, sides, and back of his head in a great big thicket. They were much longer than the ones around his eyes, and seemed much finer and more flexible. He could not move them, but they moved with the sea, brushing against the great big cartilaginous protrusions of his new ears, and as they swirled and swayed, he felt the movement tug gently at their roots, where they grew out from his skin. And, oh, his skin. It was different on the new head. Thinner, softer. Completely absent of mucus, but it did not feel dry. Instead, it felt sensitive and curious. He wanted to touch it. But with what? Sometimes he let a certain kind of shrimp pluck the scraps from between his teeth, but that was with his old head, and it wasn’t what he wanted now. What he wanted now was something he knew he had never had before, and he had no idea whatsoever how he was going to get it. 

But get it, he would. 

END PROSE

Plot Notes:

After this, Jabber starts to feel super sore all over and crawls into his cave, where he goes through an intensely painful transformation as the "maid" half of his body sort of has to pull itself out of his eel tail. This process hurts like hell and leaves him exhausted, but he's very enthusiastic about it and super interested in the results.

He soon becomes engrossed in exploring all the new sensations he's just become capable of, which leads him to discover the beginnings of his love for pain. This will be cemented by his very first interactions with human beings, in which he is treated quite cruelly.

He's very into having hands now and touches absolutely everything, a habit that follows him into maturity.

Yes, he does still have pharyngeal jaws in this form. They're pretty far back in his throat, and when they come out, they slide out over his long, pointy tongue. It is super freaky. The teeth that are in his outer jaws are sharp as well, though they're much closer to human teeth than the needles he's got going on in the back. When he shifts into human form, though, he has normal human teeth, an ordinary human tongue, and only one set of jaws. Thank goodness.

Meta:

Here, I tried out a different style of writing from the way I usually Jank it. It was fun! I thought it rather suited the subject material.

I have no intention of continuing this unless I randomly feel like it at some point, and if I do, I certainly won't put it through anything close to my usual editing process.