AN: Here we go. This chapter's an important one. Illustrative art for this entry can be found on Bulbagarden/Serebii/Archive Of Our Own under the same title.
I'm having a hard time offline of late, and reviews — even very short ones! — would really help me feel like my efforts to update this story in a timely fashion were well-spent. Thank you, and enjoy.
Five
Second Nascence
It felt like dying.
She couldn't breathe. There was no air. Her lungs strained — no air. She choked and gagged on something, something stuck in her throat. Her lungs strained. Her chest heaved. Nothing.
There was no air. Yet she did not die.
She tried to move, to clutch at her throat. Her forelegs were so tired she could hardly feel them. Her limbs moved weakly, so weakly, as if through water. There was water, she was in water. Submerged. She was underwater!
She tried to flail, to swim, but her limbs protested every command. Her eyes were shut; she could be asleep. No. She was not asleep. She opened her eyes, it stung, it hurt, but there — there was the room, through the faint glass and the green water and the dim light.
She was in the tank.
She kept forgetting she was in the tank.
Each time Salem woke from sleep — if it was sleep at all, for her dreams felt like memories and when she woke it felt like a dream — it got a little easier to remember she was in the tank. It began with choking, then struggling, then opening her eyes. She always realised where she was when she saw the ward, made green in hue by the liquid in the tank. She was looking down at the room as if from a height, so she knew that she could not be standing on the floor. She must be suspended in the tank, like always.
This time she was just barely lucid enough to notice an alien intrusion in her flesh. A tube from above pierced her chest. Another pierced her neck. More on either side of her head connected to the mask over her mouth. There could be more where she couldn't see. She was suspended by them, held in place by them, held in this half-dream, half-death. She pawed weakly at one of the cables and felt it tug inside her. She would never have the strength to remove it. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe the cables were remaking her.
She hadn't expected to wake at all while she was being remade. This wasn't right. Something could be wrong with the tank, with the transformation. Something could be wrong with her. This was wrong. But thinking about it got harder and harder, and soon she fell back into the darkness once again.
Salem drifted in and out of unconsciousness, her eyes never open for long, her mind never able to cling to more than a droplet or two of memory from her dreams or her last days as herself. She dreamed of human faces and her own, of watching herself from behind and seeing her body standing on two legs; of needles; of being held; of being held tightly, too tightly; of blood and hunger and cold. Of fighting. Of losing.
When she woke to the room, she would look around for someone she knew. A couple times, she thought she could perceive Alisha, as a momentary hazy glimpse past the water and the tank, or as a faint familiar scent. But that was surely an illusion. She could smell nothing but the dead scent of rubber, the smell of the mask fitted to her muzzle. Still, she kept looking for Alisha's face past the tank glass.
Her reality was fleeting. Her eyes lied to her. Now she was in the bed from before, but a different room. There were curtains around her. Different containers feeding fluids into her body. Different items applied to to her body. Different covers over her body. She understood none of it. Now she was in the tank again, and there were wires in her skin that felt cold, the way her pads felt on icy pavement. More numb than truly cold. The wires went up overhead and she could vaguely make out glass canisters of liquid fixed to the top of the tank.
She was changing. It was hard to perceive, to concentrate, but she could tell. It was too clear even through the clouds in her mind. She could feel her body aching, she could see it stretching out below her, longer than could be true. She could feel sensations unfamiliar and strange — her tongue resting differently in her mouth, impossible to feel comfortable with. Different muscles twitching; different extremities itching. Even her heart was different. The beat against her ribs was slow and powerful, like the heavy thumping of human footsteps. A human heartbeat. She could hear her heartbeat in her head, slower than could be right. She'd known she would change, but she'd thought of documentaries, of evolution in normal pokémon, of instant growth and light. This wasn't evolution. It was slow, human change. Like ageing. Like the growth of trees.
Once, she woke up and tried to stretch, and she waved her paw in front of her face as she did. Her foreleg — her arm, it would be her arm — burned as she held her paw up, but she held it there all the same, to see the way her digits were lengthening. She tried to flex them, and they cramped up, making her whimper — a whimper that sounded strangely in her head, a whimper that felt odd as it formed in her throat. It never arrived at her ears past the mask and the fluid, instead she heard it from inside her own skull.
Still she saw her paws nonetheless; pads pulled apart from each other and joints stretched out too far. They were neither paws nor hands now. They were ugly, useless, halfway things. Too stubby and crude to grasp with, but elongated enough that they would be hard to walk on. She imagined her paws being stuck like this; useless for all but the most crude pokésign. She dared not move them too much. It might stop them growing.
She tried to tell how long she'd been this way. Days? Moons? Seasons? Hard to guess — impossible to know. There were only human lights — no windows, no way to measure the suns and moons. As her ordeal went on, she tried to track time by remembering details: what level the fluid canisters were at, how many plasters she wore on her arm and where, how far below her body her hind-paws — her feet — were. She tried to count how many times these details changed, and always lost cost after three or four.
It never got easier to focus, to stay awake, or to control her body, but it did get easier to think. Not easy, but possible to do without her thoughts bleeding out of her head. The drowsiness was less raw, more like an irritating scab than a fresh cut. First, it was just that her thoughts were clearer. Then, she could recall details more readily. At last, she was certain, the drip that fed into her arm had been changed five times since she started counting, half as many times as the plaster where the tube that bit her arm had been changed. She was certain too that she'd never recalled so many distinct moments at once. It was as if she'd been half asleep her entire life, and only now was she truly lucid.
Remembering several things at once and comparing them was thrilling enough, even through the continual panic of not breathing, not standing, not breathing. Even had she been breathing, it would have been breathtaking to think about something someone had said and at the same time consider why or how they had said it. At least, without the memory streaming out of her brain like water off her paw. More so to be able to think about both how she had felt, and why she felt that way. The difference between remembering and understanding… It was the difference between merely drinking water, and actually tasting it as you drank. For the first time, she could taste her thoughts. For the first time, she could clearly ask herself, "did I have to leave Laura? Was that the right thing to do? What if I hadn't done it?" That was not thrilling. It was terrifying. It was miserable.
She could not escape the dark panic that came with those thoughts while conscious. So, she sought sleep again, and despite the cold bruise flowering in her chest, and the burning of her skin and eyes, she found it. With sleep came an escape from these new and jagged thoughts. Her dreams changed too. Now she dreamed of speaking English to Alisha, of full and plentiful sentences spilling out of her mouth like water from a tap, on and off at will. She couldn't make sense of what she was saying, though, and when she tried to pay attention to the way her mouth and tongue were moving to produce the words, the dream wavered and she was pulled out of it. She stopped trying to listen to her own voice, and willed the dream to continue. So long as she did not concentrate, she kept speaking. She would speak forever.
She dreamed of speaking to Laura, but the words were trapped in her throat, and she choked on them, unable to make a sound. She dreamed of speaking to Mienshao, to the glameow tom, to the throh and the chatot. Of saying something to Church or another morph. These were good dreams. A zoroark hybrid, red mouth grinning and full of teeth, replied to her, saying "well, soft cat, Salem, good well, all and happy." The words swam in her ears, meaningless but good, so good, and so comforting.
When she woke next, it was dimly lit in the ward, and a torrent of thoughts hit her with "is my body any different today" and "where's alisha is she here" and "jamie lied to me why would he do that" and "i'm going to live like this for the rest of my life" and "can i still become a liepard" and "i have never been this tired." Not just feelings or desires or half-thoughts, but full, clear thoughts. A half dozen at once. Now a dozen. Painful and scary and beautiful. She had never spoken a word of English and yet somehow she could hear her own voice in her own head, sounding out her thoughts.
The green-soaked shadow of a human moved past the tank, unseeing.
Her body ached in every possible place: in her stomach and her limbs and her head and her pads and her eyes. Even her fur seemed to be hurting. Once she'd paid attention to the cacophony of hurt, the blunt pain behind her eyes was the worst of them. Still, she made herself lift her forepaw in front of her face, just to examine it one more time, to examine it as was now her habit whenever she was awake.
Five distinct digits, long and dexterous and complete. A hand. A more or less human hand — albeit still covered in dark fur, still with firm pads, and still tipped with curved retractable claws. A hand all the same. One that could do everything a human hand could. A hand that could do anything at all.
She curled her fingers into a fist, and squeezed. Her claws extended, and dug into her palm, but it felt more wonderful than painful. Tiny swirls of dark blood emptied from the punctures she'd left. She tried to flatten out her hand, then to waggle her fingers individually. The experimental flexing ached awfully, but the satisfaction overwhelmed the discomfort. Nothing had ever been so satisfying. Not a meal, not a warm bed, not a victory. This was the only moment that mattered.
These were her hands. Her hands. Hers.
Salem brought her other hand above her head, and the sudden effort made her pass out again. When she came to, the lighting was no different and she was still alone. She attempted a ginger, awkward stretch, and though her body complained in a chorus of aching bones and sore muscles, she felt faintly better for it. Simply floating where she was and listening to her body did not tell her much about the changes she'd endured. All that she could be sure of besides the hands was her new size and proportions. Her size! She filled the tank. She could never fit on a pillow now. Or fit into cupboards. Or be held tight. But perhaps she could do other things. Maybe even better things.
Salem waggled her hind-paws in the same way as her hands, and to her vague surprise, they felt much the same as they always had. She tried flicking her tail, and found that it was still very much there, hanging weightlessly in the tank fluid. That was a relief. It would have been difficult to accept the loss of her tail. At least her limbs still belonged to her.
Her investigation continued, and for the first time it made sense why Laura had always made lists of things. She checked off items on an imaginary list as she tested each body part. She began to explore with her hands, starting with her face. There was fur, still, but the shape of her head was altered. Oh, she still had the same nose, it seemed, and she discovered her ears where they'd always been, but the bones… the structure of her skull was new. New brain, new head to keep it in.
A new brain. She would think differently now. Be different. A different person. That could mean anything. Now her new brain was screaming at her with thoughts and memories and sensory input and fear and pain and tiredness and everything, everything, everything all at once without letting up. She tried to gasp, and the gasp died in her chest. She couldn't bear to think about her own thoughts, not yet. Not now.
She couldn't gasp, not yet. The tube that breathed for her also muted her. But gasping reminded her — she had been promised a voice. Even with her tongue pressed down by the tube, she could move it as if she were trying to speak. She put a hand to her throat and tried to feel it vibrate as she mimicked human noises in the complete silence of the tank. She heard her own hums and whines in her skull, like before, and she ached with yearning even as her throat ached with effort.
Every part of her body that she touched ached in response, from her neck to her abdomen. Her gut churned when she pressed into it. Her muscles cramped as she touched them. She felt as tender as if her entire body was nothing but a person-shaped wound. But the important part wasn't feeling like one enormous wound. It was being shaped like a person.
Even in pain and exhaustion as she was, she wanted to yowl joyously, to run and jump and climb, to roll about and rumble thunderously. The weariness rose to match her joy, and she felt so tired that it hurt. The emotions, the mental fog, the bodily pains, all of it was too much. This was too much, and she should be dreaming. She could still be dreaming even now, but for her newfound and unstoppable unyielding unrelenting ability to think and perceive and remember all at once. Her eyes hurt from an unfamiliar pressure and her face contorted involuntarily as for the first time in her life, she managed to cry.
She knew what crying was, of course. Laura had sometimes sobbed into Salem's flank after difficult days, but she had never understood it. She understood it now, her chest heaving and her arms closing over on herself as tears welled up in her eyes and dissipated instantly into the hazy green liquid of the morphing tank. Her sobs were silent, but each one hit her bruised frame like a tackle blow. She let them happen, some part of her relishing the new and entirely human experience even as it hurt her.
Eventually, she passed whatever threshold she had for endurance and passed into sleep once again.
There were no more conscious moments in which to think and feel. Only a fleeting mist of faint and tiny memories.
Green shadows outside the tank.
The roar of draining liquid.
"Looking good, no problems here."
Gravity, absent too long and unwelcome to return.
"There we go. It's okay. It's okay, kitten."
Her lungs alive once more as they should be.
"Salem? Salem, can you hear me?"
Her tongue finally feeling at ease in her mouth.
"I hear you."
