Ashes to Ashes
Ash sighed a breath of relief as she stepped across the threshold, firmly snapping the door shut behind her. It had been an unexpectedly time-consuming commute, the sun outside having already set, but at least she was home safe now.
She silently looked down at her ripped sleeve, the strip of black fabric turned into a makeshift bandage for her hand. The blood stains could be made out even through the black.
“Ash? That you?” Olive’s voice called from the living room.
“Yeah! Yeah, it’s me,” Ash called back.
Dropping her messenger bag to the floor, she made her way into the living room, strategically only leaning half into the open doorway to hide her injury.
Olive was sat on the sofa, the oversized plush suit filling a good chunk of the available space. They had evidently been watching television but had muted it when Ash was coming in.
“You got back late, today,” Olive noted, “Buses not showing up again?”
Ash bit her lip. It wasn’t in her character to lie, even lie by omission, especially to her partner, but she also knew that her partner was… not great with blood, or injuries, and would probably make her go to the hospital even though it wasn’t that bad, really and…
“Yeah, the buses were trash. I ended up walking back instead.”
That part was true enough. Still, she made sure to keep her arm hidden from view.
“Hey, I’m uh… pretty tired after today. Work was a whole thing. I’m probably just gonna go straight to bed if that’s alright?”
Also true enough. It was an excuse to get out of Olive’s sight before they might suspect anything, but she wasfeeling quite tired.
“Alrighty!” Olive acknowledged, waving one of their paws. “Sleep tight. Love youuuu~”
“Love youuuu~” Ash responded, smiling weakly before ducking back around the corner, grasping at her injured hand. Shuffling the shoes off her feet, she shambled her way into the bedroom, discarded the torn top in favour of an oversized graphic tee she wouldn’t be seen dead in—gifted by some clueless relative two Christmases ago—and collapsed into bed.
And then she woke up. She didn’t even remember falling asleep, but it only took a glance at her phone to see that a couple of hours had passed. A twisting feeling suddenly rose in her gut. An unpleasantly recognisable feeling. She gagged and then retched. Quickly stumbling back to her feet, Ash dashed to the bathroom and threw up into the toilet.
As she knelt, coughing and spluttering, she heard familiar ‘paff’-ing footsteps come up behind her.
“Are you okay?” Olive asked quietly. “I can try and hold your hair back?”
Ash barely stifled a chuckle as Olive’s oversized plushie paws pressed into the sides of her face and pulled back slowly in a loose attempt to move her hair out of the way.
“It’s alright,” Ash said, batting Olive’s paw aside and wiping her mouth. “I think it’s all out of my system now…”
“What happened to your hand?”
Ash froze for a moment before slowly standing up and turning to face Olive. She forced a smile, flapping her bloody bandaged hand slightly. “I have a big bappy paw now! Just like you!”
Barely a moment passed before the kayfabe broke, Ash’s smile cracking, followed swiftly by her voice. “I got attacked on the way home… I mean, by a dog, I think,” she quickly clarified, “But yeah, I got bitten,”
Olive’s face was telling another story, their look of concern and suspicion demanding more information.
“My bus never showed up so I decided to walk instead. I was walking past the old factory when I saw, like, the coolest-looking dog digging in some trash. It ran into the factory when I got near. I think it was injured? It was leaving a trail of blood or something behind. Anyway, I decided to follow it in to see if it was okay, and like… it bitme. It must’ve been scared, I guess? I wasn’t thinking. It ran away again and I bandaged myself up and came over here, after that,”
Olive looked horrified, the look of anguish on their face a stark contrast to their cutesy embroidered features. “What were you thinking?! A stray dog? It could have had rabies!”
“It’s fine!” Ash interjected, “I was just a little thing, really!” She started pulling the makeshift bandages off. “I can show you, it’s really nothing to worry… about…”
Ash lifted her exposed hand up to her face. The skin was still stained with dry blood, but the teeth marks that had so easily pierced the flesh a few hours earlier were barely visible, just a few shallow indentations remaining where they once were. A few green, glowing indentations.
“Um…”
“Is that gangrene?!” Olive looked mortified.
“What? No! Gangrene isn’t actually green… Or glowing. This is something else,”
Ash cautiously brushed a finger over the indentations. There was no wound, no pain. Despite appearing on the surface, the green stuff didn’t budge.
“Well, it doesn’t hurt anymore,” Ash shrugged.
“You should go to the hosp—“
“No,” Ash interrupted. “It’s fine, really. I barely feel sick already and— trust me, I’d rather stay here with you,”
Olive’s concerned looks didn’t dissipate, but they visibly softened.
“Thanks, plushie. Love ya,” Ash offered a hug, flopping against Olive’s cushiony body and burying her head into her partner’s latent softness.
Thank goodness Olive hadn’t noticed the stubby tail pressing uncomfortably against the back of her pants.
Hiding what was happening to her didn’t feel good, but Olive’s own metamorphic experience had been sudden and difficult for them to adapt to. Olive still had the occasional reservations about being a living plush suit.
But for Ash, Olive’s transformation was a cause of celebration. She had spent so much of her adolescent and adult life trying to be something different to an average, boring human. There was only so much she could do with a human body, however. She dyed her hair a mix of black and unnaturally bright colours; wore clothes of similarly clashing styles; listened to harsh, aggressive music; and employed her interests in the macabre, the cryptic and the unusual to maximum effect.
They were exaggerations and affectations, perhaps, but ones rooted in a genuine desire to be something other.
And now, finally, it was happening to her. She wasn’t sure what was happening, but it excited her, enough so that she couldn’t tell whether the sensations she felt in her stomach were butterflies or the consequence of whatever was happening. She couldn’t hide it forever, but she could save Olive some amount of anxiety in the interim.
She had excused herself back to bed, but sleep was not on the agenda this time. She lay there, her mind buzzing, too stimulated to relax now she knew there were changes afoot. Over the course of the hour, she felt her body slowly succumb to a persistent, all-encompassing tingling. It wasn’t painful, but every part of her seemed to have gained some sensitivity to being touched, the tingling sensation becoming unpleasantly harsh if pressure was applied to any one spot.
The tail kept growing longer and thicker, already too large to comfortably keep her trousers on. She kept urging it to move, feeling so strongly that it should, but it wouldn’t respond. Tufts of fur had started to grow in from the base of it—a mixture of black on top and a mildly minty green-white on the bottom.
The palms of her hands and soles of her feet had started to shift hue, turning the same green as the bite mark, brighter and slightly swollen on the tips of each finger and toe. Off-white fur was starting to sprout around them.
Looking into the mirror by Olive’s bed, the same green tint was starting to appear in the sclera of her eyes. Even her tongue looked like it was turning green.
Her ears were growing taller. Not extremely tall, yet, but enough to look kind of like a weird elf. There was definitely some subtle difference in her face too, though she couldn’t quite pin down what had changed.
Her heart was rushing. Things were progressing so quickly, already past the point of being able to hide it all. She would have to tell Olive.
Deftly, she ducked into bed—laying slightly to the side so she didn’t put pressure on her fledgling tail—and smoothed her hair over her ears, pulling up the duvet to cover everything below the disgustingly baggy tee.
“Plushie, can you come in here?” she called aloud. She heard a dull thump as Olive stood up, the recognisably soft paff of their footsteps growing louder as they approached.
As the squirrel suit’s head poked through the doorway Ash skilfully whisked the duvet off, exposing her half-naked, half-mutated, patchily-furred figure to Olive.
“Surprise?” Ash said sheepishly.
Olive stood agog for a moment, struck speechless, the early stages of a panic attack visibly rising in them.
“Keep calm! Olive! Olive, calm down,” Ash jumped out of bed to Olive’s side, her mind briefly distracted by how uncharacteristically fluid that movement was before returning squarely back to Olive. She placed a hand on the squirrel’s back and grabbed a paw in the other, squeezing it groundingly. “It’s alright. Everything’s okay. It’s all under control… kinda. It’s fine. Really. Please keep calm,”
Olive’s embroidered eyes shot daggers at her. “How is this okay?! How is this fine to you?!”
“Olive…” Ash sighed. She tried to gently lead Olive to sit on the bed, but her partner was having none of it. Ash sat down alone.
“Olive, I… kinda want this,” She saw Olive about to interject but raised a hand to stop them. “I’ve wanted for so long to… well, not be human, I guess? And I know you struggled to get used to things after what happened to you, but me? I was so jealous of what you got.
“We were both here, in this bed, on that night, and I’ve spent so many nights since then asking myself why it happened to you and not me, and… I know it’s weird to want it so much, but I do and I— I didn’t think I could ever make you understand why so I just never brought it up,”
Silence fell. Ash just looked at the floor, scared to meet Olive’s gaze. Olive was just standing there silently. Tears began welling in Ash’s eyes.
Olive sat down next to her. “Is this why you’ve been so supportive? Because you wanted it to happen to you instead?”
“No, not at all!” Ash upstarted, “I support you because I love you, no matter what you look like or are made of. This— this is just a me-thing, always has been,”
There was another brief silence.
“Are you sure you want this? Do you even know what you’re becoming?”
“Not exactly, but I did always love a little of the unknown, didn’t I? It’s kinda exhilarating, y’know? I do want this, I really do…”
She held a hand up, the green, raised areas having visibly coalesced into the shape of a paw print. “I guess the thing that bit me wasn’t a dog after all…”
Olive gently placed an arm around Ash’s shoulders, withdrawing it in a panic as Ash flinched violently.
“Sorry! Everything’s just kinda… tingly right now,”
“…Is that how it feels? To transform, I mean?” Olive asked quietly.
Ash looked puzzled for a moment before her memory fell into place. Olive’s metamorphosis had happened overnight as they slept—they had never been conscious for the actual process.
“I guess?” Ash shrugged. “It’s not painful, really. It— it’s like my skin is fizzy, almost? Like every little bit is constantly moving. I guess my cells are having a time of it,”
She slowly placed her head down on Olive’s shoulder, sucking up the unpleasantly magnified tingling so she could be close to her partner.
She must’ve been growing taller, she mused quietly. She had barely come up to Olive’s shoulders before now.
Olive had insisted on being present for the rest of whatever was still to happen. They brought in snacks when Ash suddenly craved food, a bucket when she was overcome with nausea (though didn’t throw up this time, thankfully), and watched patiently as her energy levels crashed and she fell into an almost comatose sleep for 20 minutes at a time.
“You have a snout now,” Olive commented on one of the many occasions that Ash awoke suddenly, having once again violently bounced from unconsciousness to overzealously awake in a matter of seconds. Her plushie partner had been laying next to her, watching her sleep.
“I do?” Ash asked, shuffling over to see herself in the mirror. The tingling had faded, at the very least.
Olive’s comments were an understatement. Before she had slept she had a noticeable bump to her face, sure, but the changes since had been drastic. Were it not for the unruly mess of dyed-black hair, she might not have recognised the being looking back at her.
Her long, rabbit-like ears stood to attention. “Holy shit…”
What was once a line of scruff along her chin had grown to envelop her whole face, coating it in luscious fur. The lump had become a snout—an actual honest-to-god snout—her mouth extended across its length, a prominent set of canines poking out past the lip, just like the ones that had bitten her just a few hours earlier.
She lifted a hand (A paw? These nubby little things were hardly fingers anymore) to touch her face, to feel the softness of the fur that had overtaken it. A second paw joined it quickly, squishing and squeezing the most-definitely-her features almost in disbelief. Then came a third—
She screamed, her long tail instinctively slapping the third paw away from her.
“What the fuck?!” She shouted, turning herself around rapidly to try and see where the rogue limb had hidden itself, pulling off the now much more confining tee, but it had seemingly disappeared into thin air.
Olive had started to hop up from the bed upon the loud cursing, but Ash had already calmed down upon catching sight of her unclothed body.
Losing the shirt really brought the extent of the changes to the fore. She was… long? The shirt had obscured just how much she had been growing. Her neck was almost as long as her forearm. Her torso alone had more height than some of her shorter friends, all of it precariously held aloft by relatively short, cat-like legs. She stroked a hand down her side and to her hips, taking a small step backwards and letting gravity pull her down onto all fours. Somehow this felt more natural.
Almost every part of her body was covered in fur now. Lighter colours on her paws, face, ears and front. (Was front even the right word now? Underside.) Darker fur covered her back and legs, and ran along her tail almost to the tip.
And what a tail! It was thick, strong and longer than even her torso. She moved it with a familiar dexterity, wiggling and curling it a little before reaching out and curling it gently around Olive’s foot, eliciting a squeak from the squirrel.
Deftly she turned around and leapt up onto the mattress, standing over Olive, her ears pointing skyward and a wide grin on her muzzle. Everything already felt so natural to her. This body was still brand new, but all the discomfort and discontent that her old body had given her was rapidly evaporating.
She hopped nimbly side-to-side a couple of times before settling down, laying her forelimbs and head upon Olive’s chest, looking towards her plushie partner’s face.
“I love this, more than almost anything,” she muttered happily, “I really do,”
Olive gently ruffled Ash’s head with a paw. “I can tell, noodle,”
Ash chirruped. “Noodle?”
“You’re long and skinny now, like a noodle!” Olive chuckled. “You call me plushie, so I’m calling you noodle. That’s the deal on the table,”
“Fine, deal,” Ash muttered, resetting her head onto Olive’s chest and nuzzling into it softly. “You’re genuinely alright with all this?”
Olive hesitated. “Well, you know I have some… anxieties over stuff like this, and it might take some time for me to get used to… but if you’re happy, that’s what matters. But… hrmm…”
“What is it?” Ash probed.
“If we’re both like this, who’s gonna be the one to go out and make money and do the shopping and stuff?”
“Hmm, good point,” Ash mused. “I guess we’ll just have to work that out as we—“ She paused. The forelimb she was looking at was… rippling? The same tingling sensation from earlier was rapidly spreading from it, flowing through her shoulder and into her torso and other extremities.
She watched in horror as within seconds her thick coat of fur melted away and reverted to pale flesh. Her fingers elongated into thin sausages. Her tail receded into her shrinking torso.
“No no no no no no…” she whined, dragging herself from Olive’s bosom to put herself in front of the mirror—a very distraught, very naked human being standing there, looking back at her.
“It’s over? It’s already fucking over?!” She cried. Tears rose in her eyes and anger in her voice, her usually calm demeanour cracking as she kicked the mirror in frustration, knocking it ajar. “Why?! I finally get the one thing I want and it’s fucking ripped from my hands the instant I get it,”
She felt Olive’s body push against her, the plush wrapping their paws and tail protectively around her in a tight hug. Her welled tears turned into streams as she turned and pushed her face into the soft mass, still screaming through the fabric and padding. “I don’t— I can’t go back, I just can’t… I hate this! I hate it!”
“Ash…” Olive whispered.
“This body isn’t me,” Ash kept mumbling, “It can’t hold my shape. I know I’m meant to be something other, I—“
“Ash!” Olive interjected more forcefully.
“What?!”
“Tail!”
Ash spun back to face the mirror. She had a tail again! Long, slender, fuzzy, and quite solid. By comparison, the rest of her looked like it was shimmering, the very surface of her skin seemed to ripple like the surface of a disturbed puddle. She hadn’t even noticed the tingling sensation returning.
All at once her body seemed to solidify and she was back to being a long, furred creature, standing alertly upon her rear legs.
“What in the hell…”
Olive released her grip and let Ash approach the mirror again, her looking at every angle as she re-examined every inch of her body. It was almost exactly as it was. The green skin of her inner ears, tongue and paws had taken on a weird consistency, being thick, viscous, not quite solid but not fluid enough to be liquid either. A patch of it had soaked through the fur of her tail tip too, giving it the appearance of having been dunked in neon green paint, yet no matter how vigorously she wagged her tail the goop never splattered.
That was an unusual development, but most importantly, there wasn’t a spot of physical humanity to be found.
She was herself again! She laughed as she pawed at her face and cheeks, stretching and squashing them. She wiggled her ears and rubbed at her slender sides. She hugged her tail like an old friend after a long absence, all four forelimbs squeezing it close to her chest.
This time she caught it. She let loose a loud, involuntary squeak as the supernumerary limbs caught her attention. They immediately turned to the same shimmering state as before and disappeared into the sides of her torso, no markings left to indicate that they had ever been there.
“Well hot damn…” Ash muttered.
“Do you think you’re a sorta shapeshifter?” Olive queried, head tilted.
“I guess? I dunno! I can try and bring them back?”
Staring intently back into the mirror, Ash focused intently on those extraneous legs. How they looked, how they felt, the way they positioned themselves alongside the ones she already had. It was remarkably easy—she had imagined what it would be like to have a tail or a set of wings since childhood, she could practically feel the legs already.
With a flourish, the extra legs sprung forth and solidified before her. She flexed them easily, rolling the toes on each one in turn.
“Haha! Oh wow!” She cheered. “Maybe I should give myself a second head or something,”
“Try turning into a bat,” Olive suggested. “I mean, you dolike bats,” they added sheepishly.
“I can give it a try,” Ash shrugged. She tried to picture a vampire bat, trying to remember each specific detail of their anatomy. She had never really imagined being an actual bat before—it’s not like she had a frame of reference for being small, winged, and kinda round-bodied with prominent fangs and beady little eyes.
She felt the tingling overtake her body for a few seconds. She struggled to stay upright and slumped forward onto the floor just as the tingling faded away. She cautiously opened one eye. A bat looked back at her, pretty much exactly as she’d imagined it, only it was the size of a human being and all the more horrifying because of it.
Olive was visibly grimacing at the outcome, but Ash couldn’t help but smile. She could shapeshift! Kinda well too, though the size issues left something to work on. Also, she was pretty sure these ears weren’t quite right. Still, this was basically a complete win! Shapeshifting was basically the next best thing to being inhuman, and she had both.
She returned to her long noodly body, shifting in the extra arms so that she could bound over to Olive and hug them as tightly as possible.
The bus hadn’t shown up again. Ash was walking down that same path, past the same old factory. Being able to shapeshift had allowed her to keep her job, provided she maintained the illusion of still being a human being.
Even months later, it required a surprising amount of concentration to stay stuck to one body. In the privacy of home, she had gotten so used to shifting that it almost came as a natural impulse. At work, she couldn’t shift extra arms to carry more, a tail for balance or some ears to emote with. It was frustrating how limited the human form was, even more so now than before she could shapeshift. For now, at least, she’d always managed to catch herself shapeshifting before someone else did.
Walking past that factory again made her pause. The creature that had bitten her was probably still nearby. Were they also a shapeshifter? Did they know more about what she had become?
She had the sudden urge to just run over, dump her bag and try to find the one that had made her this way: to ask questions about what they were, to thank them for this gift, she wasn’t sure what else.
Actually… no. It was late, the skies were already darkening; and besides, how would she find a shapeshifter that doesn’t want to be found in an abandoned factory full of dark nooks and secluded crannies? It was a foolish endeavour to even try.
Ash resumed walking, eyes still facing towards the broken and boarded windows of the factory for any sign of movement. Did she need answers, really? She knew who she was and was learning more every day about what she had become. Putting a name to it wouldn’t do much but make it easier to google, assuming it would even show up on google in the first place. Why go through so much effort to confirm what she already knew?
A glimmer of a bright green, goopy tail flashed past a cracked window.
Ash stopped and waved at the space where she had seen it. A few seconds passed before a face, animalistic and feral, popped into view, its long, glowing ears poised in alert. It raised a paw and flapped it back briefly before disappearing from view.
Well, maybe she could come back at the weekend?
