Sneak Peek: Chapter 1, the "Body Horror" Rewrite (Patreon)

So, I had a go a tweaking the third scene of chapter 1, the one where David sees himself in the mirror and realises what's been done to him. And I think the feedback was correct: I can't imagine (though I suppose that's what I'm doing here) just how mind-warpingly hideous it would be to wake up to the realization that someone had performed surgery on you without either your knowledge of consent. And while I don't want to look -too- closely into that, because I'm not wriitng a psychological horror here, I did ramp up the reaction a little. Let me know what you think.

***

Three: Fragments of a Girl

Eventually I drew back from the mirror, though I remained kneeling.  The girl in the mirror mimicked every movement.  I wanted to pretend she didn’t exist. That wasn’t an option. As my mind cleared, I knew I had to see who she was. Not as fragments of a girl but as a whole, as a fully cast person.

            I confronted the girl in the mirror once more.

            She was both the Cindy I remembered, and a complete stranger.  There’d always been a lot of David lurking beneath the girl’s heavy makeup.  Now when I looked in the mirror I saw much of Cindy and very little of David.  The alteration was subtle but profound: this new Cindy showed none of the rough edges or strong features of before.  Her chin was small, the nose delicate.  My once thin lips were full and held a playful curve that seemed to naturally rest in a slight pout. There was an overall youthfulness to her face, a childish plumpness over once masculine features.  Her blonde hair was shorter than the previous wig but long enough to dance between shoulders blades, with a slight upward curl at the tips.  Small, almost elfin ears peeked out, each one glittering with a trio of golden studs, two in the lobe and one higher up.  Light makeup gently accentuated her natural beauty.

            Her face had a deeply unsettling effect on me, but the body nearly unmade me. 

            Slowly—in a vain attempt at controlling the chaos churning within, and with all the growing horror of an approaching train—I studied myself and felt the room tilt and roll vertiginously at the realization of just how much they had stolen from me.

            Decades of discipline and work; uncountable hours of running and weights, workouts in the gym and training in private; sweat and pain and the burn of muscles and lungs pushed to their limit—gone.  Everything that defined me—stripped away. 

            How?  Flimsy lingerie only accentuated how once strong arms were now slender and soft, hard pectorals melted away beneath rounded breasts, legs turned lithe rather than powerful.  My stomach remained taut, but no longer held their masculine definition.  Though my shoulders remained wide and my hips narrow, there’d be no need for the boning of a corset to create curves; this new body held its feminine shape naturally.

            I was—weak.  This weakness was felt as an absence in the flesh as I grew into an awareness of my own physicality. Weakness penetrated to the bone—an inability to change the world around me as before. Even at rest, I felt conscious of this newfound delicateness of the flesh: I felt exposed and vulnerable.  Everything about this girl’s body felt feeble and defenceless. 

            And staring aghast at my new reflection, I had a sudden glimpse of what might have been.  Take away the breasts and the smooth skin and the curve of the hip and there was a shadow of a young boy, a man who never was: a scrawny runt who never met Sakura. Equally, I also saw what should have been: the suddenly, startling impression of a battered and broken man: ribcage gaping open, leg shattered, face half-pulped, skin torn to ribbon, the entire figure bathed in blood.

            I blinked and saw—felt—what they did to me. Did they laugh, Katherine and Scooter, as I lay helpless on the operating table and they—what? Cut back the skin and slid sacks over pectoral muscles, pump them full of saline? I pictured the scalpel and the scissors, clamps and hooks: cutting flesh, carving away what made me a man--peeling back my face and sculpting these wide, terrified eyes, full lips and soft chin.

            My supine form lay vulnerable, a flayed mass of bloodied muscle into which they injected tits, grew hips, and sutured a new face over the broken horror of my old body. Muscles dwindled and lying prostate and powerless, I imagined ribbons of skin—a pale mockery of my heritage—wrapping around my helpless form: soft, weak and supple; beautiful skin, but not mine; and phantom hands worked the malleable flesh into Cindy’s, into her diminutive shape.

            A deep groan shuddered through my frame. I blinked and these visions disappeared and what remained in the mirror was a young woman, healthy and whole. She was beautiful and she was innocent and she was me. 

            She was too much: I fell away from myself, frantically clutching at—the floor, the chair, the bed—for stability as the world spun, tits jiggling obscenely as I shakily struggled to rise on all fours.  My torso heaved, and again, and I gagged as an empty stomach tried to expel the terrible fear that squeezed and poisoned my gut.  Yellowish-green bile spattered the edge of the mirror and the carpet.

            Crawling towards the bed, I squeezed my eyes shut and hugged myself and pulled my legs to my chest.  I buried my face into my knees.  My thoughts were incoherent, racing wildly. I began to rock. Something terrifying and powerful broke lose within and I felt a shuddering cry rise through the layers of my being.  I stuffed the edge of my hand into my mouth and bit down hard enough to break skin, stifling the howl that threatened to tear loose. 

            I began to shake. Nails dug into flesh. I dug claws into those tits and tried to tear them off. I sobbed with pain and fear as my grip tightened to draw blood and I pulled and wrenched but they were part of me, the pain was part of me and there was no escape from my own body. I yanked at my hair until my scalp burned. I collapsed into myself and curled into a tight little ball.

            I couldn’t say how long I remained coiled around the pain and hollowness, half-naked in a strange bedroom. There was no escape from my own body, from the fleshiness of this new femininity. The reality of my situation could not be denied.  The awareness of every twitch and shiver of my smoother skin—the breath of the babydoll at my thighs—and the press of knees against those soft pillows on my chest: every shift of these alien proportions ate away at my perception of my self.

            Layered over all this, an overwhelming rush of emotions threatened to tear my mind apart. Ouroboros-like, my brain twisted in amongst itself, the same primal emotions driving thoughts without purpose as empty thoughts sought to consume themselves in a cycle that had no end.

            Betrayal: I’d trusted her; I’d trusted that bitch. Agent K: she’d used my trust to twist my body into this caricature of revenge.

            Loss: everything I had worked for and built up these past two decades was gone. Wasted and thrown away for nothing: my body, my work, everything I owed and everybody I knew. 

            Fear: mind-numbing, stomach-lurching dear at what I’d become and the kind of life this body demanded; and the seeming permanency of it all.

            And confusion: How?  How the fuck was this even possible?  I’d been all but dead, body broken, bleeding out, Jeremiah-fucking-Steele’s mocking voice ringing in my ear, my assassin’s corpse laid out next to me.

            Still curled into that tight little ball, I fell back into darkness.