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[abrightboy]

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AH: A Puzzling Evolution - I (closed to Malcolm)

[conning]

Neal focuses a little too intently on getting some kind of result in that stupid game after several failures. He's seen other people get crab or weasel, and while he'd like something better, he's grudgingly satisfied to get the latter. It's how he spends the first twenty-some minutes of the day at the museum, losing track of Malcolm who's gone off with someone to look at another exhibit after they came inside.

He gives his fiancé a sheepish look when he finally makes it to their rendezvous in one of the normal-seeming areas of the museum. He hadn't meant to get so fixated.

It’s some time after that - not long at all - that Neal starts to feel wrong. Like his bones are sliding underneath skin and muscle tissue, moving when they aren’t meant to move. It hurts. It’s a full-bodied ache that makes him feel nauseated and makes his head pound.

He touches Malcolm’s sleeve lightly to get his attention. “Can we go to a bathroom?”

Which is when he realizes, startled blue eyes now flecked brown and getting rapidly browner, they’re looking each other square in the face. Neal glances down to make sure Malcolm isn’t standing on an unseen step, then looks back up. “Something’s wrong.”

He does everything in his power to sound calm.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm, as they walk, thinks - out of the corner of his eye - that Neal's slouching. Then Neal touches his arm and he looks at him properly.

"...Or a hospital?" he suggests, but he's following him to the bathroom already. "ADI's infirmary, maybe. Or..." He frowns faintly. "Was anything happening where you were when I was gone?"

[conning]

Neal shakes his head, beelining for a family bathroom he memorized on the maps they give visitors—one stall, lockable. He hurts all over. Half-way there, he stumbles over the loose hem of his pants, grabbing on to Malcolm to stay upright.

His fingers are longer, the nails sharper.

Neal’s breath catches. He’s definitely not doing his best fake calm any more. “Oh god. Oh god, oh god—”

He doubles up suddenly, clutching at his head as pain shoots through his jaw.

A tooth plinks out onto the floor.

“I’m hallucinating,” he mumbles. “I’m hallucinating, this isn’t happing, this is—”

He loses the words to a whimper and a sharp crack of bone as his jaw realigns and he’s forced to spit a few more teeth onto the floor.

They’re starting to attract the concerned attention of a nearby mother of three.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm bundles him hurriedly into the bathroom, slamming the lock into place.

"Neal, we have to... call an ambulance or something!"

[conning]

"No! No." He pants the words out, stifling a scream with his wrist--his hairy wrist--as the bones of his face crack and warp under his skin, the flesh roiling and his eyes, now brown, become rapidly more pupil than iris. His neck cranes and keeps craning, getting longer, limbs and body thinning, his clothes going slack around him as he falls onto his hands and knees. He has a peach fuzz of brown breaking out all over his visible body parts, except on his throat, which is a peach-cream.

"Help me," he whispers, gasping in pain and the horror of feeling things move inside him. "Help me, help me--"

He coughs out another handful of teeth as his face starts to settle into the heart-shaped structure of the pine marten.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm's expression goes from helpless and terrified as he rubs Neal's back uselessly to... sort of weirdly fascinated as he realizes that Neal isn't sick per se. He's not dying. He's... changing. Into an animal.

"What do you know about weasels?" he asks desperately. "Does that mean anything to you?"

He's hoping to get some kind of information out of him before he's too far gone.

But his hands are shrinking, even as Malcolm is talking, and when his finger shrinks out of the silver and emerald band it was wearing, Malcolm reaches for the ring.

[conning]

Weasels? A glances at his own hand as Malcolm reaches for the ring shows him it's not a hand any more, it's a paw. He whimpers, the sound skin-crawlingly animalistic, but he forces himself to focus.

"The game. The game, the game, that evolution game." Another gasp and he doubles up--but no, he curls up, wracked with pain, shrinking as he moves, until he's gone from six feet of human to four and a half feet of pine marten curled up impossibly small inside Neal's shirt. If Malcolm tries to lift the shirt, he's crawling right out of that and trying to scramble into Malcolm's arms or lap.

"Help me," he gasps. "I got the weasel in that game."

He noses all over Malcolm, looking for somewhere to hide, looking for comfort, looking for he doesn't know what.

"My ring," it's miserable, strained. "Make it stop. I hurt."

[abrightboy]

"I've got your ring. It's okay." He holds it out so Neal can see. Smell it, if he likes. He picks him up. "Let's go look at that game."

[conning]

He noses at it disconsolately for a moment, still three feet of body and one foot of tail, fur silk-soft with winter. He tries to grab the ring in his teeth but then squeaks in alarm as Malcolm picks him up.

Neal sticks his nose in Malcolm's ear, giving an anxious little chirp. "Don't play it. You can't play it."

[abrightboy]

"I'm not going to play it," Malcolm tells him, heading for the hall where he left Neal to it earlier. "But I want to know how it works."

[conning]

He clambers up onto Malcolm's shoulder, the ADI's glamour fizzling around them and trying without a great deal of success to disguise Neal as a service dog. He grabs a paw-full of hair to stay balanced, making throaty little sounds of anxiety that aren't even intentional.

"This is--I don't like this, I don't like this, everything feels like so much and it was already so much before but now I can't even make it stop being so much by thinking about it because there's. Not. Space? I can't. Make. Space..." He doesn't know how to explain. Neal gives a little croak and lets go of Malcolm's hair to try and climb back down into his arms.

[abrightboy]

"Did you ever go back to the counselling office?" Malcolm asks, if only to put his mind somewhere else.

[conning]

"Counseling office?" For a baffled moment he doesn't know what Malcolm is asking about, if for the simple reason that he has one mental track to operate from and it's currently occupied by worry. "Counseling--oh. I, yes, I did, I am, I. Sometimes. They want to, want me to."

[abrightboy]

"Did they give you a diagnosis or did you not go back for the assessment yet?" Malcolm asks.

[conning]

He bobs back and forth a little, hanging on, agitated and wondering why they're talking about this n-- "Why are we talking about this now?"

Brain to mouth filter: gone.

[abrightboy]

“A couple of reasons: you were spiralling and if you’d had the assessment I’d know what kind of spiral we were dealing with and also you’re not spiralling anymore.”

They reach the room with the games.

“Which machine were you on?”

[conning]

"I. Oh. Um."

He tries to process the first part and gets distracted by the second part, the question. He clambers down off Malcolm's shoulder and zooms over to the machine in question.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm steps over to it, examining it. He tries to pry the cover off, but it won't come. He glances around for anything he can use to break into it, but doesn't see anything that he could use to jailbreak it. He takes to examining the screen and menu and buttons instead.

[conning]

And while Malcolm is doing that....

Neal disappears.

Led off into the museum by weasely curiosity.

[abrightboy]

"Did you see a...."

Malcolm turns as he talks, then realizes he's talking to air. He gets up, glances around.

"Neal?"

He sighs heavily, because he doesn't know which door Neal ran from. So he picks one and heads into the hall.

"NEAL?"

[conning]

[continued here]