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Davesprite wakes up with a searing pain in his gut.
Something’s wrong. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being normal and 10 being incredibly fucking wrong, something is currently at an 11.5. He feels like he’s going to burn out of his skin. A sweat breaks on his head. The pain is excruciating for a few seconds, but it fades.
Weird.
He tries to go back to sleep – not that it matters, not that he needs to sleep, but John and Jade are still fully human so they’re asleep and there’s jack all to do on the ship when they’re knocked out for the night – but the pain wakes him up again. It burns, and it fades.
This becomes a pattern, with increasing frequency. Every time it goes away, he hopes it’s the last time. It doesn’t. It comes back, over and over, a little worse every time, and that hope fizzles out and dies.
He’s never felt anything like this. The closest thing he can think of is getting food poisoning from some shitty rotten food that he didn’t know better than to not eat, because he was so fucking hungry, because Bro didn’t really bother to get food most of the time. Dave didn’t care if the half-empty pack of lunch meat ham was a little slimy and a little stinky. He ate it because it was there and anything tasted great after two days of tap water. And he paid for it with a night of crying over the toilet shitting and vomiting, and cleaning up the mess in a half-awake fever state.
But Davesprite doesn’t eat anymore. He doesn’t eat, so he doesn’t have fucking food poisoning. He just has this screaming pain in his gut, like something in there is trying to claw itself free through his viscera.
He tries to outlast it for a few agonizing hours, but it just get worse and more demanding. He feels like his body is trying to tell him something, but he has no idea what, and it just hurts and he can’t think about anything but how much it hurts. And it feels like something is actually forcing its way out of him. Physically. And it’s almost out. He has something inside of him and it’s coming out. He feels like he’s going to pass out, his body racked all over with paralyzing, electric fear as he opens up his slit with to fingers and sees something hard and smooth and foreign poking out from his slit, covered in his thick orange blood.
Another blinding wave hits him, and the thing pushes itself out a little farther. He holds himself open and tries to touch it. It’s slippery with blood and fluids that Davesprite doesn’t want to think about, but under that it’s hard, like a shell. Like a thick egg shell.
Davesprite wants to retch. He leans over the bed and heaves, but nothing comes out, because there’s nothing to leave his stomach. He’s laying fucking eggs. He’s laying fucking eggs, and he has to imagine something got really fucking messed up when he fused a bird and a human together, because there’s no way that evolution would allow this much pain to happen to any living creature on a daily basis.
Oh, god, is this going to happen every day?
He’s shaking when another wave hits him. He tries to push this time, and feels something give. Maybe he’s actually making progress now that he (kind of) knows what he should be doing. The thing presses its way down his … whatever the fuck is down there, coming closer to the surface. It looks bigger than any egg he’s seen before.
He wasn’t built for this. There was no way he was built for this.
He keeps pushing and trying to breathe. His slit is swollen and angry-looking. God knows how many more eggs are sitting in there waiting to come out. He presses a shaking hand to the skin right above it and feels them through the layers of flesh and muscle and organs, these hard, roundish lumps that somehow formed inside of him.
Another wave hits him, and the thing pops out far enough that Davesprite can see the head of it. He pushes through the pain, trying to get it out. There’s an agonizing burst of pain that blacks his consciousness out. When he comes to, he sees the thing laying on the bed. It’s about the size of a clenched fist. Blood and goop drip off of it onto his sheets.
The next one is a little easier, at least. And the one after that is easier than that. Maybe the scariest part was not knowing what was going on, he tells himself. Now this is just part of life that he has to accept. Somehow. No, how can you accept something like this? He wants to die. It’s too scary to go on like this, knowing that at any moment his body might do god knows what to him. Force him into this freak of nature sideshow shit that nothing alive was built to endure. He shouldn’t exist. Why didn’t he just throw another fucking dead animal into the bird? What the fuck was he thinking, that it'd be easier this way? He had no idea this would happen. How could you know something like this was going to happen?
The pain distracts him from his thoughts. The task at hand is getting these fucking eggs out of his fucking womb.
He wants to die.
Davesprite feels relief crash over him the second the fourth one is out. He can feel that it’s over, for now. Tension he didn’t realize he was carrying fades and he relaxes into exhaustion.
Now that his gut isn’t screaming at him anymore, he notices new, duller pains. His slit (cloaca, it’s a cloaca, and a functioning one, apparently) is aching and raw, sensitive to any kind of touch. Even just moving makes the lips of it rub together, and it’s too much. So he stays still.
He drifts off in a half-sleep rest state, glad that it’s over, until the thought hits him like a fucking truck.
They might hatch.
That wouldn’t make sense, would it? He’d never had sex before, so there’s no way they were fertilized. Chickens laid eggs every day, and they didn’t hatch. And what the hell could fertilize him, anyways? Weren’t a huge amount of male-sexed bird-boy hybrid kernelsprites running around.
But they could hatch, couldn’t they? Why was that of all things impossible?
Davesprite stares at the eggs. What would come out of them? Chicks? Humans? Little childlike versions of him even more fucked up than he was?
They probably wouldn’t hatch.
But they could.
Would he be expected to raise them? They would need him to, wouldn’t they? He's just a kid himself, but they wouldn’t know what that meant. They’d just know he was older than them and that he smelled like family. They'd want him to take care of them. He'd have to take care of them.
He forces himself to gather them up inside a blanket and put them out of sight.
-
Jade comes to wake him up a few hours later. Davesprite is staring at the door and trying not to panic. He can’t look up at her. He can barely think. He’s worked himself into a comfortable spiral of they won’t hatch, they won’t hatch, they won’t hatch.
“Davesprite?! Are you okay?”
He doesn’t say anything. Comfort would be nice, and he wants it almost but not quite enough to explain. But he can’t bring himself to outright lie about it anymore.
“What’s wrong?”
He turns away and faces the wall. The words aren’t coming out and it’s humiliating.
“…What’s in this blanket, Davesprite?”
He doesn’t respond.
“Can I look?”
He swallows, and nods.
He hears the blanket rustle, and she gasps. “Oh, woah.”
“Do you think they’ll hatch?” he asks. His voice sounds pathetic and childish. His mind screams at him to dance around the subject more. Being this direct is wrong. But he’s too tired and terrified to do it.
“I, uh. No, I don’t think so, Davesprite,” she says softly. She’s keeping her voice so soft and gentle. It helps. Not that it really makes anything okay, not that it fixes anything, but it helps. “They aren’t fertilized, are they?”
He shakes his head.
“Then they won’t hatch.”
Logic. Yes. But he doesn’t know for sure. He never would have logiced his way into thinking he would be capable of laying them. “I really don’t want them to hatch. They can’t hatch. I can’t have them hatch.”
She’s quiet for a minute. “Do you want me to help?”
The room is dead quiet except for their breaths. He doesn’t really want that, either, but of the options. That’s. Better. That’s probably better. It’s so fucked up. It’s fucked up but it’s better.
He nods.
“Okay.”
She gathers up the eggs and leaves the room. Whatever she does, she does it far enough away that he can’t hear it. Which he’s glad for.
She comes back. “Okay. They won’t hatch.”
Davesprite curls up in on himself. Relief and pain in equal measure.
Jade sits on the bed next to him. She runs her hand up and down his back, over and over, and doesn’t. It helps. He gets up and hugs her, which helps more. She wraps her arms around him and he lets himself cry. In front of her. Fuck it. Who cares? Who gives a shit?
What the fuck.