Broken Compass Drabble Prompt: Mold
-- a superficial often woolly growth produced especially on damp or decaying organic matter or on living organisms by a fungus
As humanity lies barely skin deep
Bootstrap thrashed, tore at himself, dug his fingernails deep into his arm, piercing the skin, and clawed at the flesh burning beneath the surface.
The repugnant skin.
His skin.
Encrusted with barnacles and mussels, it tingled as the aquatic parasites rooted themselves deeper into his body. They fed, they bred, and they LIVED - all over him. In him.
His scaled nails scratched something, perhaps the source of the searing torment, nestled in the muscle of his arm.
Did it just.... twitch?
He hooked his index finger underneath the object, and with much discomfort, pried it into his clenched hand. Holding his hand up, he could indeed feel the obtrusion move.
A quivering whimper escaped his lips and his heart pounded against his ribs as, one by one; he opened his fingers to find a small crustacean perched on his palm.
It blinked.
He wailed and shook the creature away. The discarded crustacean scampered away and disappeared into the dark unknowns of the Dutchman.
The bile burned as it rose in his throat. He doubled over and retched so violently he thought his back would break during the heaving.
He found himself disoriented on his hands and knees, panting and spitting, until a sound brought his eyes to gaze upon the very vomit he had just ejected. Except, there was no vomit. Algae covered small fish flopped about the floor in front of him. An eel, coated in a mucus film, slithered forward and bared its jagged teeth.
He threw himself backwards until his back slammed into the wall.
Bootstrap rocked in the fetal position, raking his fingernails across his face, screaming his horror incoherently into the night.
Bootstrap, if he could still call himself that. How much further could his body corrode before he ceased the ability to call himself a man?
One hundred years servitude in exchange for freedom and delay in judgment, was it worth losing humanity?
Part of the crew. Part of the ship.