Work Text:
When Winter first contracted Medusa, she was hiking into a field of flowers.
It was such a nice day, and the flowers smelled so sweet, that she couldn’t help but kneel and breathe the scent into her lungs.
The creature had been hidden. Sitting on a blue orchid, it was camouflaged to have the same color as the flower and was thus hard to spot. It was half worm, half medusozoa—many appendages, tendril-like antennae, and no eyes. Except it didn’t match any insect or worm Winter knew—it had a lot of legs, way too many, and no matter how hard Winter tried to remember its shape after the fact, she could not remember if it had a solid body within the tangle of tentacle-feelers. It was soft, and when it moved, it writhed and twisted like a squid. It looked more like a twisted ball of neurons than any living creature.
Winter did not register what had happened before it got her.
The medusa-thing protracted its long, orchid-stem antennae toward her as she was leaning in to sniff the bunch of flowers it was sitting on. Winter felt a brush against her eyelids, something thin like hair catching between her eyelashes. The medusa’s antennae, with their willowy tips and incredibly flexible range of motion, found the seams between her left eyelids and eyeball and slid themselves underneath.
The pain of having the hair-like appendages against her eyeball was so strong that Winter screamed before she even comprehended what was going on. Then the medusa was latching onto her face and squeezing itself through her eye, its long feelers reaching deeper and deeper until Winter could feel them poking at her optical nerves. Her eyeball throbbed and itched. She pulled at the medusa by its many squirming feeler-legs. The creature collapsed its body and slipped through her fingers and into her eye.
She felt it moving inside her head, climbing through nerves. Her eye flashed and twitched. For a moment, it felt like her whole head was swollen, throbbing with an expanding tumor.
Then the medusa was inside her skull, a soft mass finding itself a spot inside her tissues, poking around, shoving and reconnecting neurons.
For a long moment, Winter sat in the grass, head throbbing and disoriented, as the creature settled, rooting itself into place, rooting its own nerves and consciousness with hers.
The neuron-creature didn’t have a language, but it spoke to her through her brain. It let her know of its pleasure in having found a body at last. It flashed her ideas of its intentions.
It didn’t have speech, but it had a sense of self.
The initial fear Winter had was quickly sapped away by a wash of euphoric feeling. A tapped nerve center, a gland being made to produce more serotonin.
She knew “it” was really a “she.”
And she knew that Medusa had been waiting for ages for a body like Winter’s.
The first changes Winter noticed were the veins. Blue, tentacle-like veins that started spreading mere hours after she’d contracted Medusa.
They began at the base of her skull and branched out. The main body of tentacles twisted down her spinal cord—their bulging shapes and bruised colors visible from the surface, and could be felt by pressing a finger over them, squishy to the touch. The side branches sprawled sideways: some traveled down the sides of her neck and split from there, some crawling away from her back to reach her stomach and breasts. Within a day, Winter’s whole body was covered in a spiderweb of alien veins.
Within a week, those veins had spread to the most remote parts of Winter’s body—covering and branching on each finger, forming a web over her small breasts, spreading between her thighs and buttocks into her cunt and anus. The veins bulged to form little mountain ranges over her skin, pulsating.
They were tubes that transported unknown fluids throughout Winter’s cells. Then they started moving, writhing around like living worms underneath her skin, the branching tendrils of a creature building its legs from her existing bones and muscles.
Where the tips of these moving tendrils meet, especially in her nipples and the most sensitive bits around her sex, fluid gathered and created pressure. There was no pain of a foreign body piercing through her skin, only a numbness wherever the veins spread. But the tentacles itched. They tickled. Medusa’s neurons were titillating Winter to enhance her sensations until every touch caused spasms. Every touch began to feel like a full-body orgasm.
It was unbearable. Leaving home was an anxiety-inducing ordeal that Winter avoided until she ran out of food in the fridge. She became a hermit, and when she did have to leave the house, she covered her face with masks and sunglasses so as not to scare passersby with her veined skin.
Even so, leaving home was an adventure every time, because the alien invasion in her body had made her private bits all the more sensitive. Even the brush of a nipple against the inside of her bralette could cause an orgasm.
So Winter stayed home while Medusa took over her body, spreading her tendrils throughout her body. Medusa had a fixation on parts of Winter that were especially private. Her nipples, clitoris, and labia had the most alien neurons growing into them. Because of that, these parts had ballooned twice in size.
When Winter looked in the mirror, she could see the enlarged areolae deepened to a purplish red, her clit throbbing from the countless alien neurons threading through the inside of that tender organ.
Then the more significant changes began to happen.
Those first things were still small—fingers and toes elongating ever so slightly, neck stretching out until it’d become hard to ignore how she could no longer center herself in the mirror.
But the other things were harder to ignore. The shift in her skin texture into something almost translucent, where one could see the muscle fibers underneath if one looked hard enough. The way the very chemistry of her bones seemed to change. One day, Winter took one finger and managed to fold it the wrong way all the way down.
The neurons growing into Winter’s breasts and sex had become so concentrated that what looked like extensions of the parasite’s tentacles grew out of her nipples and the lips of her cunt. Each night, when Winter slept, the tentacles did not. They caressed her in her sleep, causing all kinds of sexual dreams that Winter did not want. Winter would wake up groggy, sometimes with a wet patch of slick and ejaculation beneath her.
Another day, Winter woke up and fell straight onto the floor, her bones soft and stretchy, like a medusa’s feelers. If she wanted to move, Winter had to crawl on the floor with her new tentacles like an octopus. It took her a week to learn how to manipulate her transformed bones to stand up again, but she could no longer walk the way a human could. She was clay, being molded and twisted out of shape by a ruthless creator.
But worse were the mental and behavioral changes.
Winter used to have a diet made up mainly of grains, protein, and veggies, but those things disgusted her now. Now, she salivated over raw fish and shrimp and would devour them as they were—head, bones, and innards attached. She preferred to sleep in her bathtub in lukewarm water. It didn’t matter that she’d sometimes wake up with her head under the surface, because she would no longer suffocate, and the third eyelids that had grown since Medusa’s contraction prevented her eyes from getting wet.
Sometimes, Winter could see a full image of Medusa when she closed her eyes, though she did not know if it was the parasite projecting these images or if she was simply going mad.
It was like looking through an X-ray machine directed at her. In her head, Winter saw Medusa as just that: a medusa. A network of neurons, now grown long and branched into the shape of a woman. The woman had Winter’s short height (five-foot-two exactly), her prominent hips, even the perky shapes of her small breasts, honeycombed neurons without any fat tissues or mammary glands. Here, Medusa was a skeletal net of alien neural strands shaped to look like a person, but was anything but. She had no eyes or mouth, or anything resembling a brain.
The nerve tendrils in her nipples and sex were especially concentrated. The strands making up her labia were so dense that the rounded mounds on either side nearly took solid form, with many endings gathered at the clitoral glans. A web that was shaped to fit exactly into Winter’s body. A hollow replica of her.
In these visions, Medusa showed Winter her new neural growths proudly. She would prance and twist like an eldritch swaying medusozoan ballerina, the way girls would twirl in a new dress. As a net of neurons, she looked like a jellyfish. An orchid with wispy petals that squirmed when she moved.
But Winter knew that Medusa felt more whole each day. Medusa, the uninvited guest in Winter’s body, was merely an imitation of a human. Still, Medusa was content living like this, experiencing womanhood by proxy of another life form. She did not balk at letting Winter know this through the link of their minds. And perhaps that was why she would caress Winter’s body to the point of ejaculation each night, so that she could feel her new flesh, this body that she’d stolen. So she could feel whole.
And perhaps, if Winter was a good host—if Winter didn’t try to get help for herself, or to run, or to escape by destroying herself—then Winter would let her keep an autonomy on what was left of her.
It wasn’t like Winter had any choice. Every time she so much as thought about resisting, thought about the horror and disgust of having this network of alien tentacles rooting and growing in her tissues, something shifted in her brain. A calming wave of feel-good hormones would spread throughout her body. Don’t fret, the voice in her head seemed to say. Don’t fret, and just let it be.
And just like that, with a feeling of euphoria, Winter often found herself roaming aimlessly, picking the early morning hours to take long walks in the streets. She no longer seemed to care. She no longer thought about complex ideas.
A deep part of her brain still knew of resistance, but it was buried. What mattered, anyway? That resisting part wanted to run, but Winter’s legs were no longer hers; it wanted to call for help, but Winter’s tongue and lips were both numb.
The woman who used to be Winter was now skin for someone else. She did not speak; she did not think. She no longer kept in contact with her friends. She was merely a vessel or an otherworldly being.
And when this new Winter had to tell a concerned bystander that she was okay, that she simply had a cold and her eyes were so sensitive that even the streetlights hurt them, it wasn’t Winter speaking.
It was Medusa, speaking in Winter’s voice.