#of course i took this terrifying creechur primed to kill and made him Sads(TM)

[angeart]

'grumbo horror' in all caps sounds interesting 👀 (for the ask game)

oh yeah :D that's an unfinished drabble i wrote when me and ben went insane about his grumbo horror apocalypse au.

cw for body horror, but to put it simply, grian is an absolute Creature in this one. he's got strong hunting/kill instincts, and his form is fluid and terrifying as he shifts shapes in ways that'd make your head hurt. number of limbs? arrangement of organs? skin, scales, fur, feathers? open ribcage with bones all funky and wrong? anything goes! he's just trying to be a Thing. to hold a Shape. (to not scare mumb 👉👈)

grian also can't speak, but he can mimic people's sounds (copy them in their voice), which in this case mostly means death screams <3 he gets all sad about it sometimes. he wants to communicate! (he'll eventually learn to make his own sounds and even words it's okay <3)

mumbo's just a pathetic wet cat that somehow managed to survive the first bit of the apocalypse and this grain Creature took a liking to him. (mostly because he didn't run and trigger grian's prey instrinct to pounce aha) they proceed to get insane about each other.

i will drop the entirety of the unfinished drabble here 💕

note that there are disjointed pieces that were eventually meant to slot together (i'll separate by x), but you can have it as a treat anyway, even in this messy form, since i don't know if i'll ever be finishing this.

cws are mostly just one big body horror. some insect mention right off the bat if that bugs you (aHA) (pun intended)— also yes this isn't actually horror (besides the body one), it's just angst. (you know me)

drabble starts here—

He can feel the feather shafts skittering underneath his skin like a pile of restless cockroaches, fluid and ever-shifting, complete with a disturbing, grating sound. They should scratch and pull at his flesh, but instead his form parts around them and allows the motion to be harmless, even if everything about it screams unease into his tangled mess of veins. The scales around his cheeks and neck shiver, lifting up with his uneven breaths as if they were gills instead. His clawed fingers (too many— too few—) are dug into the soil, damp and cold and covered in dead pine needles and withered moss. Head tilted back, he gazes at the rustling canopy above him with two eyes—big and round, glowing with faint purple and glistening with hot wetness that used to be so unfamiliar to him, so strange like Mumbo himself.

He’s taken it from him. He saw Mumbo cry many times. He watched and watched and learned. 

Two eyes and hot, salty tears, and somewhere in his throat, a sound that desperately, wretchedly wants to escape him, but it isn’t his. It isn’t made for him; it sits askew in his chest, discordant with the rapid echoing heartbeats (three of them, drumming and tripping over each other, trapped behind a bony cage that wraps around them like vines). 

It never bothered him the way it does now that the sounds he collects and holds close aren't really his. That the only way for him to speak is to take and imitate, hiding behind the mask of someone else's sounds and hoping they would fit. 

They don't fit. 

They don't, except maybe one. 

It's a sound of anguish—an emotion so deep and raw and human he can't quite comprehend it, but the writhing thing inside of him that insists he's in pain despite not being physically injured still selects this singular sound as the only way to really let the world know. 

He's hurting and he doesn't understand it and he can't make it stop and Mumbo left, why did he leave, did he hurt Mumbo? 

He's scared. 

He's terrified and confused and he wants Mumbo to come back to him. 

So he tilts his head back a little more, face breaking to allow space for a mouth, and in a borrowed voice, he wails. 

The sound of Mumbo's ravaged scream rips from his throat and pierces the white night, until everything around Grian shakes. (It takes him a long, muddled moment to realise that it's not the world that's shaking; it's him.) 

x

It’s something sharper and less monstrous than the [motion of his feathers and shifting forms]; something rooted in vulnerable humanity that he’s not supposed to possess. 

x

He didn't want mumbo to be afraid of him, because he didn't want to hurt him. 

[And yet, when it came to it days or weeks later, Grian pounced anyway.]

x

His vocal cords, crafted deliberately to fit this one sound and no other and nothing else, fray and quiver in a way they weren’t designed to, a way they aren’t meant to—and what comes out of him is wobbly and destabilised, a hitched noise interlaced with something that wasn’t originally there. Not when Mumbo made this sound; not when Mumbo was screaming like this, with his raw, anguished humanity, curled up not dissimilarly to Grian’s own posture right now and clutching at his hair. It wasn’t there but now it is and Grian can’t find it in himself to try to find out what it is, because he’s crumbling in a way he’s never crumbled before, and he’s grasping at nothing but the example of Mumbo’s pain to guide him to a life raft that maybe won’t let him sink.

The scream plays on loop, desperately and urgently let out over and over again, with heaved breaths in between; it slowly veers more and more off course, into uncharted territories. It seems to be filled with splinters and debris and torn off pieces of a soul—whose soul? not Mumbo’s, that much Grian knows, but whose then?—a helpless explosion of a terrifying, unending pain.

x

As he startles, the entirely of Grian's body gets skitteringly covered in black feathers. Their edges are shining with a metallic sheen, a literal silver lining, and when they puff up defensively, there's something dangerously razor-sharp about them. 

Countless of eyes spawn with a squelch—most of them on Grian's face, but some stray and find their home elsewhere. They open asynchronously, staring in the direction of a perceived threat. 

Mumbo stands there, rooted to the spot, watching him with an onslaught of bewildered apprehension. "Grian? Buddy?" 

As soon as Mumbo speaks, most of the eyes disappear until only two remain. Instantly, they fill with hot wetness, the tears spilling down into the feathers. 

There's a sound—a whiny, broken sob. 

Mumbo doesn't think he ever heard that from Grian. He didn't even know Grian stole that kind of sounds, too. Unless—? 

The thought is absolutely wretched. 

"Are you alright?" Mumbo tries weakly. 

The feathers fall off Grian's body as if they were plucked all at the same time; some of them leave small, ugly gashes in his skin, but most of them separate and fall as if they were never a part of him in the first place. What's left is  a soft, unprotected skin—helplessly imitating humanity, hazardously displaying open vulnerability to Mumbo, both in an attempt to express something and in an attempt to tone down Mumbo's fear.

Because Mumbo fears him if Grian's anything else than human.

But Grian can never properly be human, no matter how hard he tries for him.

Things remain that are askew and wrong, more feathers embedded under his skin, ears too animalistic and covered in tufts of fluff, fingers ending in claws—and three heartbeats still tripping over themselves in his chest cavity.

He tries harder to fix it, but doesn't know how.

Instead, another miserable sound leaves his throat and he trembles where he sits on the forest floor, crying harder.

x

Eventually, only one heartbeat remains where before there were three.

—that's it <3

–—–—

wip question from here