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You don't really know how you got here. Someone said something at work about a call for you, then you were rushed to a plane and dumped on this unforgiving continent in the most godawful snowstorm you'd ever experienced.
You're stood in snow that comes up easily to your hips in drifts all around you. As for how deep you've sunk into the snow, the red fabric you'd used to patch the knee of your pants just barely peers above the snow. It's bitingly cold but you don't have to stand and agonize for long because a duffel bag is slung onto your arm. The person who sinks into the snowdrift next to you was introduced simply as Mac. He's already walking towards a destination you don't see, following a guide line that's been here since before the place was abandoned.
Mac's farther ahead of you than you thought, the faint hazy glow of his handheld lamp looking almost like a sun filtering through thick clouds. You scramble to catch up and manage to do so only to slam into the back of his shoulders, unaware that he'd stopped dead in his tracks. You peer around him and see why.
There's pale pinkish-orange fluid puddling in malformed and unnatural footprints in the snow, not quite frozen yet so it must be fresh, and congealing dark blood smeared through the snow and on the concrete floor just inside the building the two of you would be calling home base. Mac's got his flamethrower ready and you recall the first conversation you'd had with him.
"Isn't that a bit much?" you'd asked, gesturing at his flamethrower.
He didn't respond verbally.
"I could be wrong, ..... I hope I'm right," you mumbled.
Your first encounter with the supposed creature and you couldn't even see it, just the evidence it was nearby. Mac walks into the building and scans around for a long moment before he waves to you that it's all clear. He scorches the iced-over fluid from the floor before either of you step in it and continues inside. You gravitate towards one of the bunks shoved into a corner as Mac sights something that has him aiming the flamethrower and pulling the trigger with no hesitation.
God awful screeching, haunting and melancholic and simultaneously wrathful and pained pierces your ears. You scramble over to see a small assimilant piece haphazardly trying to form some sort of biological defense against the flames, and ultimately failing as it crumbles into smoking ash. Mac doesn't stop burning it until there's absolutely nothing left of it, just a smoldering black stain on the floor. You're disappointed and relieved at the same time.
That thing could've killed both of you in your sleep, yet it was one of the most exciting scientific discoveries of this century.
The both of you move on from the area, and once it's clear the surrounding area is safe, you start properly setting up your living quarters. Sleeping bag, blankets, layers of pajamas so excessive you'd have laughed if you hadn't just been in the cold of the surrounding area.
Something impacts heavily against the wall behind your head and wakes you up. It's not snow or wind, definitely something organic and larger than a human.
You're scrambling out of bed and into outdoor clothing before Mac has even gotten out of his sleeping bag to get his gun. You snatch up the lamp and flick it on as you slam the door open. Instantly you see some sort of shambling creature off to your left and you're running after it, heedless of the damage it could cause you should it want to. Rounding the corner, there's nothing but a trail of serosanguinous fluid in the snow and bits of assimilant flesh clinging to the wall of the cabin.
As you watch, the pieces of flesh morph and rip themselves apart until there are at least eleven or twelve eyes staring at you, affixed to the wall like barnacles. All of them are different colors and possess different shaped pupils, some look human and others animal. You're particularly disturbed to note that one of the assimilant eyes is staring into the window that must overlook your bunk. Noise behind you makes you whirl around.
It's just Mac, who's staring at the wall as if he can't believe what he's seeing. You turn back to the wall and force yourself to swallow a scream. The assimilant flesh has warped itself into one hell of a nightmarish smiley face, jagged and misshapen teeth making up a monstrous grin beneath two large eyes. How the fuck would the creature know of emotive imagery??? As far as you'd known it was a primitive chameleon-esque lifeform with no intelligence of its own.
Mac burns it without remorse, careful to not overhead the metal wall of the shack.
The both of you return inside. You lay in your bunk, trying to sleep, but unable to shake the sense that this thing was far more intelligent than Mac was willing to let on.
Mac wakes you up in the morning. You suppose at some point your tired mind must've sunk into sleep, you're only human after all. Mac scouts outside the cabin while you sit and draw out a rough, but decent rendition of what the creature has looked like so far. An amalgamation of parts melting into eachother, separate chunks somehow forming functional organs, and some sort of intact creature.
You've still got no idea just how this thing acts, how it survives the transformations it goes through. You can only agree with the theory you had coming into this; it's some sort of multi-cellular hivemind organism, assimilation and consumption instructions written at the genetic level rather than the conscious.
There's knocking on the door, the short sequence Mac had told you meant he was back. It comes again, louder and insistent.
"Alright, alright, hang on." you gripe.
Setting your sketchbook down you walk to the door and unlock it, letting it swing open as Mac pulls the handle. Except. That's not Mac. You're not entirely sure what you're looking at, it's wearing human clothing and has hidden itself down into a human shape, but it definitely isn't human.
"He-" it begins to speak only to cut itself off with horrific screeching that means absolutely nothing to you. Frozen in fear, you wait for the painful death Mac had described; being ripped apart and dissolved into its body until there was no you, just the creature.
"Hello," it says. You stare, jaw dropped in shock.
"Right?" it asks. You're still staring. It looks human, sounds human, it's even tilting its head like a curious kid. It extends a hand, palm up, but there's something wrong with the fingers. Too many joints, or too few, your addled brain can't quite tell.
"Hand. Shake," it pantomimes a handshake. "Hello." You keep staring. This isn't at all what it did to Mac's team. This isn't congruent with the documented behavior of the species at all. It's not a perfect imitation, it's not trying to fool you. It knows you know what it is and yet it keeps its shape, doesn't lash out.
"Wrong?" it asks. It blinks, but the eyelids close the wrong way. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
"Not. Hand. Shake," it questions, head tilting the other way. "How?" You blink. You must be dreaming. It advances a step, limbs awkwardly lifted for a hug.
You find your voice.
"No. Don't touch me, I know what you are," you say to it. A ripple runs through the flesh of the mimic it hides behind.
"Know. But. Not. Burn?" it asks, a slight snarling whine creeping into its voice. You shake your head.
"No reason to. As long as you don't touch me, that is," you answer. It stares. Skin shifts along the puppet it hides in and once human features begin to distort. The ribs split open to reveal an empty internal structure, looking almost like a sleeping bag made of flesh. The head arches up, extended upon a serpentine neck that you don't doubt houses vocal cords more complex than any species you've ever seen before. Limbs elongate and it settles onto its knuckles.
The body warps and stretches into a lupine shape, meant for quadrupedal travel. A tail unwinds into the snow behind it, dozens of reddish tendrils coiling together and sealing shut with a new layer of skin. It speaks again, voice distorted into a dozen different tones.
"Still. Not. Burn. Us?" it asks, distorted face tilting like a curious puppy. You shake your head again.
"No. As long as you don't touch me or hurt me, I've got no reason to hurt something as fascinating as you," you tell it. An uncanny smile splits what's left of the face, sharp teeth poking out at angles no mammal could ever achieve.
"Fa scin ate-ing?" it repeats in stilted syllables. You feel yourself smiling against all odds.
"Interesting, unique, strange, new. Fascinating means you're different, and that's good." you explain to it. Its smile grows wider.
"Good. Different. So you. Won't burn," it says. The cadence of its language is getting better, less stilted and more fluent. You smile back at it.
"Yes. You're good, so I won't burn you," you answer. It tilts its head and lolls a massive, prehensile tongue from its jaw. Your fight or flight instinct kicks into full gear and you back up a step.
"Stay. Still. Do not. Want to hurt," it growls. You freeze as its tongue wraps around your arm, coiling under your sleeve and running along your skin. You remember your one rule to the thing, that it shouldn't touch you, as the tongue melds seamlessly into your skin. It pulls itself into your arm and replaces just a small cluster of cells, it doesn't want to assimilate, it wants to learn you and make you closer to it, so you're not afraid anymore.
"......EY FUCKING GET DOWN," Mac shouts. His flamethrower isn't with him, but his gun is and you feel the sensation of the bullet that strikes into the thing. It keens, shrinking in on itself and running, disconnecting from you in a fluid motion yet you still feel the pain of each bullet piercing skin that doesn't have time to calcify.
It vanishes into the snow and you pass out from the pain, Mac's frantic shouting barely reaching your ears.
You wake up cuffed to your bunk. Mac's arguing with someone over a radio.
"It fucking had her. How am I supposed to believe that just because it wasn't ripping her apart, it didn't infect her?" he shouts into the radio.
You glance at your arm, where there's absolutely no evidence of the assimilation process. Except. One of your freckles is gone, the sun exposure damage to the skin healed right over. Maybe you aren't you anymore.
"I should just shoot her, it had its goddamn tongue snaked around her arm. There's no way she's not sick," he argues back to whoever's on the radio. You actually hear their response this time.
"Don't fucking shoot her. If she is infected, then why hasn't she attacked you yet? You're the only other lifeform around for miles, and you've bested it once before, it's got every reason to want you dead" the radio crackles.
That shuts Mac up for a good while. He glances at you, at your unblemished arm, back at the radio, only to look back at you again. Eventually there's an answer on the radio.
"I'll assume you've seen reason, and are not going to harm her. She's a major scientific discovery, the first instance of this creature behaving in a calm and civilized manner. Perhaps she can domesticate it," they say.
"I don't give a damn. If she shows any sign of turning. I'm shooting," Mac growls. He slams the radio down and stalks over to your bunk. You shrink back best you can with your arm cuffed to the frame of the bed. There's an unreadable expression on his face.
He unlocks your cuff and you scramble back further. You press yourself into the wall and raise your hands in surrender.
Wrong Move
The first bullet ricochets off the wall next to your head. The second finds a home in your bedroll. The third, well, you're not sticking around for Mac to put a shotgun shell in you. You're bolting out the door, barely having time to grab your jacket as the third bullet pings off the wall of the shed. Mac is swearing his head off, the radio is alight with frantic shouting, and there's something very very wrong with your hand.
The joints are changed, more reptilian than human now, and your nails have grown longer, sharper too. Fingers elongated and palm narrowed, your hand looks almost like an aliens. The skin is beginning to shift hue, darkening until you can't quite tell if it's bruised from smacking it against the door or if it's the Thing's cells at work.
Surprisingly you don't quite feel the cold. At least, you don't feel it until you're waking up facedown in a snowdrift; completely covered and packed into what must be ice.
There's a small tunnel in front of you and you're surprised to see an approximation of some kind of bird tapping its feet anxiously. It doesn't look quite right, the eyes too large and the wings too bat-like, and you know with certainty that this is It again.
You reach out to the bird, and slender red tendrils coil around your hand. Before you know it, you're being pulled through the tunnel under the snow by something much stronger than one little bird. In moments you're face to face with It again. Arms that are a mix of human and foreign anatomy cradle you as the cold begins to hit you. You're shaking like a leaf as it slowly drags various coverings over you. One is an old vehicle cover, another is a coat that must be from the research station that It first took over.
"Bet-ter?" it asks with a voice that comes from no discernible face.
You nod, pulling the thicker cloths close around you. Skin shifts and ripples as it makes itself a face, human but not quite, too angular and the eyes far too large. There's no nose on the Thing's new face, no mouth either. Just large eyes that seem to have no color, pure black and shining with life. It speaks again.
"Sorry. He burn?" it questions. The voice hums from somewhere in its twisting, winding throat though there is no mouth moving with the words.
"No. He didn't burn me. Someone was talking to him on the radio though, they're why I'm alive. Mac wanted to burn me," you explain.
It growls and the noise vibrates organs you didn't even know you had.
"Want to. Hurt you. He wanted. To hurt mine," it snarls. You reach out on instinct and pat its 'face' just beneath the uncannily large eyes.
"But safe now. Here. With mine," it says. Not knowing how to answer, you nod and cradle its head in your hands. It purrs, but the sound is like if a dog tried to purr, just ever so slightly off yet still comforting.
You have no way of knowing how much time has passed beneath the snow. The Thing found old wiring and you helped it sneakily hook up power from the cabin to your den. It's been busy beneath your skin and you don't know what it's doing.
It cradles you for long periods of time, interfaced with the skin of your abdomen as it coils misshapen limbs around you in an amalgamative mockery of a lover's embrace. You ask it each time, what it's preparing your body for.
"Being mine," it always says.
That's another thing. It's been learning English as you live with it, phrasing slowly becoming more natural to it until it can almost perfectly pass as human without the aid of a nervous system that's pre-wired as 'human'. You think about what the radio operator said. "She might domesticate it" You chuckle softly as your new hand deftly dresses the arctic hare It caught today. If anything, you were adapting it. It was just as intelligent as you or Mac.
It dug around old memories until it remembered how to make a functioning oven and stove, although that was relatively easy compared to the escape ship it had tried constructing. Except now, it had no reason to leave this planet.
Your diet has been mostly arctic hare, cooked over an open flame or baked in the makeshift oven. Sometimes They venture down beneath the ice and bring back fish to eat. You taught them how to make sashimi and you never regretted it. The slight crunch of snow underfoot alerted you to Their return. You didn't quite know when you'd stopped thinking of Them as an It, but the switch had been made and you were treating Them as the sentient creature They were.
"We're home," they say as they wrap a limb around you. You've long since stopped bothering to identify just what animal Their body is mimicking, and don't particularly care anymore. "You ready?" They ask as they nuzzle one of their face-facsimiles into your shoulder.
You smile.
"Finally gonna tell me what you've been re-arranging in there," you ask playfully.
They nod, one of their other faces creeping into your vision. This one looks mostly human, but off in so many different ways you don't quite know where to begin to describe it.
"Not telling. Showing," they tell you, placing a hand analogue over your stomach.
You smile, setting down the now-filleted rabbit and rinsing your hand in the snow. They lift you in their arms and carry you over to the 'nest' that the two of you had constructed out of whatever cloth they managed to steal from either the old outpost or from Mac's shed. You get settled and take off your shirt, your own hand cradling the soft pouch of fatty flesh that'd started developing over your lower stomach. It felt right to just keep your or Their hand there, protective.
They nudge at you to remove your pants as well, their form expanding until you're happily settled in a cocoon of welcoming flesh and bloodless tendons. The cold doesn't reach either of you in here, not with the sheer biomass They've accumulated. You figure They probably look like some sort of capsule from the outside, like a large ribcage cradling the life within. Inside, they develop skin and lift you to that They can arrange the wrappings they gathered in along with you.
You're laid on your back in a soft nest, it seems like they picked only the most plush and warm of the cloth they'd stolen. They lean a face forward over yours, form a facsimile of a human body because They know you accept them, but not this much.
Thoughts race and swirl within Their head. It's new and foreign to them, a specie of nomadic, single-celled organism colonies. They never thought that division could mean anything other than death. And yet here they were, preparing to divide a small mass of Their cells and proteins to place within you.
"Do you want this," they ask, voice mimicking perfectly one of the humans They'd assimilated. "Want us?"
Your eyes rake along their human body. You examine each part of their perfectly mimicked disguise, and decide it's not what you want. You want them, in all Their imperfect and alien biology.
"No," you start. Their human face splinters into a dozen different skin tones, a dozen different expressions. "I want all of you, not just the shapes you think I like." You finish telling them.
You want all of them? All the specie they've absorbed? Everything They had ever been and would still ever be?
"Are you true? Sure?" they ask. "Could not -" They pause for a long moment, searching for a word. "- not be right. Could not fit? Puzzle? Key and lock?" They question, sounding more frustrated and confused with each analogy.
"Compatible?" you suggest. Their face lights up in a smile that's got entirely too many teeth, and you cradle their dissolving mimic of a human face.
"Could not be com-pat-ible," They manage to say.
You smile at them and gently stroke the fingers of your changed hand across their ever-shifting cheek.
"Always compatible. I accept all of you," you tell Them.
They mold themselves closer to you, tissue wrapping and prodding around your thighs and what you thought was the space between your balls and your anus. There's give there instead, an opening you've got sensation in and it feels wetter with each prod They deliver. They're purring proudly, sounding like a broken lawnmower mixed with a large cat.
"Perfect, you are perfect," They croon from no discernible mouth as they push protrusions inside of your new entrance.
They're not forming fingers, but they're not forming tongues or genitals either. Just formless, shifting shapes wrapped in soft skin that lights every new nerve They've put into you. Your hands grasp whatever of them you can reach as They bring a whole new sensation to your body. Before you know it, your new organs are clamping down around Their intrusion and your cock is spilling against your stomach. They form a mouth from nowhere and lap a long, inhuman tongue across your chest.
"Holy shit. You've been giving me a pussy, haven't you?" you ask them in shock as your heart calms down from your orgasm. They smile proudly, too many teeth and not enough face.
"We made you ready. To be mine," they tell you as they form a new limb.
This limb is obviously a genital of some sort, and you feel a bit intimidated when you recall telling Them that you wanted all the shapes they had. It's long, tapered in the middle and at the tip, covered in small fleshy spines, thickened out at the base like a canine, bulbous just beneath the tip like no animal you've ever seen, and ridged all along the thinner segments with little bumps lining the edge of each ridge. They watch you with many eyes, many mouths half open and ready to speak should you question them or ask to stop.
They gently rut the tip against your cunt, careful to not push into your asshole. You stay still as the first segment pops into you, the ridged, bumpy tip pushing against parts of you that you never knew you had. Then the bulb beneath slides in and you're fuller than you've ever been. The ridged middle portion slides in as it pushes closer to you still, bumps grinding against your insides. The spines on the bulb tickle as it thrusts slightly and the drag makes you keen. Then you're stuffed full, impaled all the way down on the swell at the base.
"So pretty, so perfect for us," they croon, voices distorted and broken in pleasure. Some of the mouths speak languages you don't know and others whine and howl like beasts. "Our breeder, our mate, ours Ours OURS," They practically howl.
The cock inside you begins moving, undulating and rubbing against your insides like nothing you've ever known. You cum again, clamping down around them. Much as They would like to continue with you, this is their first attempt at this and Their stamina is nothing to brag of. They push deeper still, cock stilling as they begin to pump you full of their cum. Small, round objects pass into you from the upper bulb of their genitals, and you moan at the feeling. They're breeding you, well and truly.
It takes quite some time for Them to finish filling you, and they don't pull out quite yet. They instead morph their body into a human facsimile and drape the both of you in their excess biomass and the blankets They'd brought you as a courting gift. Sleep comes easy for the first time since you've landed in this frozen hellscape.
FINISHED