Kanaya Maryam and the Tagged For Body Horror

I got two sentences into “My name is Rose Lalonde and I put the clouds in the sky” “Fuck no, I’m not becoming a meteorologist, Kanaya OOOOUUUUTTT” so this is……… totally different than the original fic. im sorry. i couldn’t do it.

This fic is an AU of an AU. It won’t make ANY sense unless you’ve read Rose Lalonde and Her Untimely Death, so don’t even click the readmore if you haven’t read the fic yet~! (also warning for body horror)

“Read my story,” she says one lovely sunny day on the beach.

“Again?” you sigh. This fine young lady has been pestering you for weeks now. Well, you would not actually define it as ‘pestering,’ as you are the one actively and probably awkwardly texting her to have playdates with you, but that vocabulary helps stave off the horrible realization you have a big whopping crush on dear, pretentious Rose. Oh, oops, did you think that out loud?

It’s just a bit odd, as you rarely get crushes on others, and you want to spite your brain every day for choosing the odd Renaissance festival fortune teller who somehow makes a living as an author of horror stories.

This story is short at least, only five pages, single spaced and double sided. You begin reading with the sun on your back and a beautiful girl in a swimsuit next to you and you couldn’t be happier. You enjoy her stories after all, even though you prefer the… er… Romantic genre of horror more than what Rose writes. She writes these very, very long and elaborate tales, filled with sweeping metaphors and eerie comparisons to real life and is simply brilliant.

This story is a little different though. This story makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up unattractively. This story sends a little shiver down your spine in the hot sun. This story makes your eyes dart back and forth to make sure no one’s watching. This story is about a goddess, or a god in female form you suppose, who on the surface is a god of light. Of all things in the sun, of knowledge and writing. But she has a secret aspect underneath, something no one but her and her most secret dark initiates know of.

She is the god of Things That Go Bump In The Night.

A dual-faced god, one who uses her machinations not only to bring light to the world, but also nightmares and terrors and giant Lovecraftian things who lurk just out of the corners of your eyes. You hurry through the rest of the story, something about how this god ruled the empire through her tactics, and hand it back to Rose.

“That was quite creepy,” you say, and you very much mean it. “Will that go in a journal as well?”

She laughs, her charming, ringing laugh. “No, Kanaya. That was an autobiography.”

And for a second, just a blip on the screen of life, Rose changes. Her skin goes as gray as the static on a ancient television. Her hair goes white as though she died of old age. Her nails grow and grow until the tips are cracked and yellow in the barren sand. A innards-filled void opens on the side of her forehead, her skin no longer resisting the ravages of time. Two eyes blink in the hollows of each cheek, with thick engorged lids stretching open with a sick string of fluids between the lashes. Her jaw drops, hanging on muscles long rotten and unused, holes from worms burrowed in the plum-brown sides.

She tilts her head, inquisitively, and it’s gone. “Something wrong, Kanaya? I was just kidding.”

You might need to get out of the sun.