Work Text:
It was raining again.
Well, the tense of that wasn’t entirely true. The weather had been uncharacteristically precipitous, raining near constantly for the past three days. It was far from monsoon season, and the event has been much more severe than any season Reigen had seen or heard of anyway. The streets were flooded with at least four inches of water at any given time. Being outside was being subject to the constant movement of water, whether that be from the sky or across the ground or below the pavement, rushing through the wastewater system. Driving was getting increasingly dangerous. First he’d seen two crashes on his way into work, then two on his way home. Four the next morning, three that evening. Five already that morning, with another occurring on the street below as he flicked on the office lights.
The subway system was at a real risk of flooding, if it wasn’t already, but the above ground trains didn’t seem to be affected. The rain was coming straight down, with no wind to speak of. So, it wasn’t necessarily a storm. Just an oppressive downpour that showed no sign of stopping, the clouds snagged on the high rises of Seasoning City or walled in by the nearby mountains. At the rate it was coming, a wild thought planted that the city would fill up like a bowl, the water level rising too quickly for anyone to get out, slipping back into the basin of it all like a spider struggling in a bowl of milk.
Reigen exited the Mobpedia page entitled ‘List of Deadliest Floods’ and opened his email. The past few days had brought in house calls concerning the flooding, alleging that the circumstances that befell the city were personal to them, some sort of punishment from a vindictive spirit, they were so sorry to have done this to the town they shared, if Reigen would just help them, this all would become a distant dream and they’d be a changed person from it all, never to do anything to demand a punishment to this magnitude ever again.
He scoffed, deleting the three most recent emails. Yeah, if only he could just go outside and throw some salt into the puddles. Like he didn’t already try that.
He opened the next message in his inbox, apparently having been received at 3:01 in the morning the night before. He frowned, always finding the desperate, middle of the night emails particularly upsetting.
Dear sir,
We do not know each other, but I implore you to read on. Something terrible has happened to me and someone must know. I have no family or friends or even pets to mourn my absence. I pray you read this and feel some semblance of pity on me and thus allow me space in your heart.
Reigen frowned, scooting his chair into his desk. A chill pricked across the back of his neck and down his spine, dread echoing through him with it. He’d yet to get any enquiries that warranted reaching out to police (he was far more capable in this business, despite being a total fraud), but this seemed outside of his capabilities or responsibility.
He exited the message and refreshed his inbox. Nothing else had come in. He checked the time and saw that it was still only 8:32. Serizawa wouldn’t be in until after 9 and despite the activity in his email, walk-ins and office appointments had been sparse. People were less and less willing to brave the rain, and he couldn’t really blame them.
He drummed his fingertips on the smooth surface of his desk. He wanted to go home. Staying open during these days seemed to be more money than it was making.
His computer suddenly made a noise and he startled, slapping his hand on the desktop and sitting up straight. He chuckled when he realized it was just an email coming in, a perfectly ordinary sound to hear in the office, especially during business hours.
His eyes narrowed as he skimmed the preview of the message. It only read ‘Dear sir,’ as the rest of the email was on another line. He took a suspicious breath and opened it.
The contents were exactly the same as the previous. Okay, maybe it was some new chain mail letter. It was close to Halloween after all and if this was how kids were getting their kicks, so be it. He scrolled down to reveal the rest of the message.
I pray you read this and feel some semblance of pity on me and thus allow me space in your heart. You don’t know me any better than anyone else, which is to say, not at all. But my choosing you to share this message with is not random or meaningless. I… think you should understand what it’s like to be unwillingly chosen by something bigger than yourself, and the resulting, surprising pride that comes from that. The fall is scarcely at the forefront of your mind, if at all. But it looms behind you, waiting for the most minute of slips, waiting to come down on you like the blade of a guillotine.
Have you ever cut off a significant part of yourself? An accident while cooking, you’re distracted by a noise outside while gently rocking your knife and when it carves your own flesh, there’s a moment in which you don’t notice. Your body cuts as easily as the food you’d been preparing, even though you’ve drawn such a hard line between yourself and sustenance. A body is a body, whether it is pig or chicken or fish or human. Meat is meat and knives don’t discriminate, the only biased part of the interaction is the wielder. Who gave you that permission? How is paring down the fat on pork belly any different from cutting your fingertip off?
Other than their taste, of course. There’s nothing succulent about a fingertip.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Have you ever cut off a significant part of yourself? I work as a butcher’s assistant, so maybe that’s where these thoughts come from. They’ve never struck me at work, despite all the tools I’m surrounded by while there. I’d been sitting at home preparing dinner, snipping apart herbs with my kitchen shears.
I can’t… put this part into words. Something came over me and I was suddenly bent over, using my shears to separate my second toe from my foot. I had to saw with them, sliding them back and forth to get through skin, muscle. The ligament was the most difficult part—it’s so much thicker than you expect. I was silent as I worked, needing the same attention I gave to my day job. When the toe gave way, the final snip was louder than the rest, as the blades of the scissors were finally able to come together, closing with finality.
Finality, but far from the end.
I was on my floor covered in no more blood than I was at the end of every day. It was true that I had one less toe, but somehow it didn’t feel like a loss. It felt as though something had been gained. The reverence that graced me rivaled that of the most profound spiritual clarity. It wasn’t a surprise when my apartment door swung open. The hallway outside was as well lit and cheerful as ever.
The snout of a slow moving, snuffling creature came into view. The rest of its hulking head followed, pink flesh swaying as it traversed the hallway. I’ve seen many pigs, both dead and alive, but never one this massive. It seemed to fill the large hallway beyond my door and I had to tear my eyes away, struck with an insurmountable fear that I had never felt before.
When I looked back to the mess I’d made, it was gone. The blood, the shears, even the toe, it was all gone. All I was left with was a fully healed over stump where my second toe once was, as though I’d lost it years ago and was just discovering now. When I looked back to my front door, it was firmly shut. All of it could be chalked up to a hallucination, too much time at work, whatever.
I was still missing a toe. That did not change. And I still felt as though I had contributed to some kind of gain.
Since that day, exactly a week ago, I’ve lost all of my toes, one by one. A hand, my teeth, one ear, my nose, whatever you’re imagining I look like, it’s worse. I no longer recognize myself. I’m now a kind of wraith, too frightening to leave my home without a mask and hat and heavy coat. Each bit of myself is taken in a violent, uncontrollable manner. I see that animal, I can’t look at that animal. My wounds are healed as though it happened years ago. But I no longer feel as though I’m gaining something. It’s as if I’m giving to a gain, like each part of me is building up… something.
The last time I saw that pig, after chewing off my own hand, its footsteps were slightly quieter. Before I turned my head, I saw that upon the beast’s back hooves, ten toes were lined in a row. Its large, swaying ears had been replaced with something entirely human, something I knew, something that wore the earring I had in before hacking the cartilage from the side of my head. It was my ears. It was my toes. It would have my hand by the time it passed the doorway, and would have anything further I gave it, anything to be taken from me.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know what I’ve done to invite it. Do you? How do I stop this? I want my life back. I want my body back. More than anything, I want to be without that feeling of giving, of creating, of adding to this monster that only wants more of me, to what end? What will be next? How much of me has to be given, taken, before that animal is more human than I? Is it already? Is being conquered in this way all that it takes?
I am the one being butchered, harvested. To feed what beast?
Reigen’s stomach was in knots. The email was unsigned, maybe intentionally. Maybe it was all they were able to do anymore. Maybe…
He went to his inbox. He’d received thirteen new messages and they were all the same as what he’d just read. He took a deep breath, shaking his head. There was nothing he could do, even if it was real. Which he doubted. He’d read scarier tales on places like Mobbit and those were certainly fake.
Suddenly, the front door opened with a bang, which made him startle, but what got him screaming was the small pig that came sprinting in, shrieking shrilly and heading right for his desk. He pulled his legs up onto the chair so abruptly he was sent toppling backwards, hitting the ground hard and just in time to lock eyes with the crying animal. He covered his face with both arms, gripping his hair, bracing for impact.
“Woah, relax, I’m sorry!” a familiar voice came but he still didn’t move, laying as still as possible on the floor, as if the second he moved was when the beast would finally get him. After a moment, a hand connected with his shoulder and he startled away, sitting up quickly and scrambling backwards, into the overturned chair.
“ Don’t take my toes!” he shouted, dragging his eyes up the body before him, expecting the visage of the sender of the emails. Instead, his eyes fell on the face of Serizawa, who wore a worried wince, only breaking when he struggled to hold onto the squirming piglet in his arms. Finally, he wrangled it into a more secure hold, with one arm under its belly and the other keeping it close to his still wet overcoat. The little thing shivered against the cold, and probably from anxiety of the loud and unfamiliar environment.
“Why would I want your toes?” Serizawa asked finally and Reigen’s face went red.
“Why do you have a pig?” he managed to ask, declining to answer his question.
“A farm truck tipped over on the street. They’ve been trying to round all the pigs up for half an hour. This one ran in when I opened the door downstairs,” Serizawa explained.
“Oh.”
“My grandparents were farmers and they had pigs to keep up with the weeds. Maybe I’m misremembering that, actually. The piglets were always so fun, they were so much cleaner than the adults. And their hair is so soft. Feel,” he prompted Reigen, holding the creature out to Reigen. He made eye contact with the thing, and the white of its eye surrounding the deep brown was too familiar, too human, too knowing.
“No,” he huffed, shaking his head. “Take it back downstairs before it poops or something.”
The pig made an indignant squeal, as though objecting to the accusation.
Serizawa was looking at his laptop screen, seemingly oblivious to Reigen’s distress.
“Your email is cursed,” he hummed, matter-of-factly, before turning away with the animal, making his way across the office and out the front door, leaving Reigen in total silence.
He inhaled uneasily, shaking off the dread he felt and dragging himself to his feet. He set his chair back on its wheels and sent a wary glance at his laptop. Thirty-six unread messages, all identical in content. That chill ran down his spine again and he shut his computer once again, with a finality.
When the office door opened once again, he looked up to see a tall figure with a rubbery head, oblong and droopy, with a protruding flat nose and deep black eyeholes. Their arms were raised over their head, fingers in threatening claws, a horrible shrieking coming from its utterly still mouth. Reigen screamed once again despite the bile rising in his throat and threw his wireless computer mouse across the room, which harmlessly bounced off the intruder’s head with a faint boing.
They laughed, and it was a familiar sound, one that frequently twisted Reigen into a flustered knot of admiration and anxiety and something else, something deeper. They reached for their floppy, pig ears and pulled the rubber mask from their head, revealing a still giggling Serizawa.
“Sorry,” he managed sheepishly. “The farmer gave it to me for helping out.”
“You’re crazy!” Reigen snapped, throwing a pencil and then a book. Serizawa held up an arm to shield his face, and then looked at the mask.
“I had no idea you were so scared of pigs,” he said, wiggling the mask around, smiling at the rubbery sound.
“I’m not! I wasn’t before today!”
“How did that happen? It’s not even 10 AM.”
“Do you want to close and get lunch, or what?” Reigen asked sourly. Serizawa made a slightly confused face, but it quickly cleared with a warm smile.
“Sure.”
Reigen got the vegan miso ramen and didn’t allow Serizawa get any pork belly, nearly turning green at the suggestion.