Crisis?

[RiversD]

A belated birthday gift for @Garblin featuring a spider-monster man I made specially for the occasion. Contains implied mess but nothing graphic, acid sneezing(spider powers), and the character sneezing is human shaped but not actually human. Hopefully that covers the bases. Enjoy!

 

Esther stared at her phone again, as though she was somehow going to wring extra meaning from the eleven words by doing so.

“I know I said today but have to cancel. Personal crisis. Matt.”

Esther had been hoping Matthias would come to the British Museum’s ‘Life Among The Gods’ exhibition with her, as a kind of casual expert. The ancient spider-goddess who had sired his kind was long since dead, but that didn’t stop Matt from feeling he had one up on the majority of historians. It was more fun to go to this kind of exhibit with him there to mutter sarcastic footnotes into your ear. It was also a pretty trivial thing. He could cancel if he liked, and yet-

Crisis? What counts as a crisis? She wondered. Was a crisis a burst pipe, or a dropped plate? Matthias was useless at communicating effectively by text. On the other hand, he wasn’t what you might call a habitual exaggerator, so this was enough to worry her.

She sighed, and looked up at the block of flats ahead of her. Whether Matt had sent his message late or her phone had been up to its usual tricks and delayed it, she hadn’t received the text before she was already walking down his road.

Would it be rude to call him? It wasn’t unreasonable to be concerned. This, after all, was a man who had once described ankle-deep floodwaters in his lab as ‘a bit of a puddle’. And if he was having a ‘crisis’ there might be some way she could offer to help, since she was here.

Esther paced back and forth outside the wall for a couple of minutes, arguing with herself then, frustrated with her own prevaricating, pulled out her phone and made the call too quickly for second thoughts to get in the way. Four rings later, Matt picked up.

“Whozat?”

His voice sounded weirdly stuffy to her. Esther hoped he hadn’t just woken up, or worse, just been crying.

“Hi, Matt, it’s Esther. I got your text and I wanted to… check in? I guess?”

She cringed at her own awkwardness. Ought to have worked out what she was going to say before  pressing ‘call’, really.

“Oh, right,” Matt mumbled. There was a shuffling sound at his end, and she heard him sniff, close by the receiver. “Sorry about that. I didn’t realise this was going to be, you know… a thing.”

Maybe he wasn’t that good at communicating over the phone either, come to think of it.

“No, it’s fine,” she assured him, “I just… I’m… I only just got it and I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Good grief, she thought. We’re both useless.

“What? Oh, yeah, don’t worry about me. I’m just a bit housebound today, is all.”

Esther worried at her lip for a moment, then decided to bite the bullet. “Do you need anything? Only I’m here. I mean, I’m close, and I could-”

“You came all the way down? Oh man, I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be!” Esther squeaked. “It’s not really ‘all the way’ if it’s only three stops. Anyway, It’s my fault for not sorting my phone out yet, you know how it gets.”

“Your phone is ridiculous,” Matt agreed, sniffing again and, by the sound of it, moving away from his phone to cough. Esther was starting to suspect an explanation for his changed voice.

When Matt came back to the phone, he sounded more than a little sheepish. “Look, you really don’t have to get me anything, ‘cause I’m a train-wreck right now and you’ve got better things to do-”

“But…” Esther prompted.

“But, if you’re serious you could get me some fruit juice maybe? I’ve got cash at the flat, I can pay you back for it.”

“Sure,” Esther hadn’t exactly been expecting that, but hey, she knew where to find a Tesco. “Just fruit juice?”

“Yeah, this cold’s dragging my throat to hell. Juice usually helps.”

“Ohh, okay.” Esther opened her mouth again, then hesitated, the penny dropping. “Wait, this is your crisis? A cold?”

“You what?”

“Nothing. Only when I got your text I was imagining something a bit more dramatic.”

“You come up here and tell me this isn’t dramatic,” Matt growled, but changed his tune in a heartbeat. “Actually, don’t. It stinks like the back of a Brighton taxi up here.”

“Alright, Mr Branagh, Orange juice alright?”

“Crap, nonono!” Matt’s voice squeaked, and he paused just long enough to clear his throat. “You want alkalines. Pineapple, apple, mango- tomato for sure if they’ve got it. Pomegranate, maybe. No citrus, no cranberry. Please?”

“Tomato, pineapple, apple, mango. Got it.”

“You’re a star,” Matt croaked. Esther hung up on him.

Tesco did have tomato juice. Esther bought two Value cartons then took advantage of a 3-for-2 offer to buy pineapple juice and two apple-mango mixtures.

 

Matt buzzed her in at the front door. Arms starting to ache a little by this point, she was intensely relieved to find that the elevator in his block was functioning. It even smelled clean, and she privately decided that Matt was getting a much better deal on this flat than she had thought.

He met her at the door, blinking uncertainly into the corridor with dark, huge-pupiled eyes that only his impressive eyebrows stopped from appearing far too large for his bony face. He was wearing a grey t-shirt that looked very hastily thrown on- he didn’t seem to realise that it hadn’t been pulled all the way down on his right-hand side.

“Hey, Matt!”

Esther made sure to announce herself and move more slowly than she was used to. If Matt wasn’t wearing his glasses, he had trouble picking up on movement with only two eyes.

“Aw, Esther, you didn’t have to get that much!” he said, taking the bag from her. “Your arm must be killing.”

“Not really,” Esther white-lied.

Matt ground the thumb of his free hand against the reddened arch of one nostril. It didn’t look all that gratified by the attention. “Alright, how much do I owe you?”

“It was three-ninety, but you don’t need-”

“Nah, best to fill debts as they come up. I’ll get m’wallet. Sorry about the smell.”

Esther would have said something polite, but the lie would have been too obvious. Matthias hadn’t been kidding, earlier. His flat smelled like thirty children had tried out their baking-soda volcanoes at once. She followed him into the flat nonetheless.

“You been cleaning the drains?”

Matt laughed. “Could be I have. But I don’t think-”

He stopped dead in the middle of the room and crushed a hand against his nose, apparently to very little effect. His breath caught and he stuttered through a series of short gasps, evidently fighting the sneeze to the last.

“heih’izsschuuh!”

He snapped into the sneeze, the carrier bag of juice bouncing off his leg as his body quaked.

“Ugh, gross,” he moaned, lowering the bag to the floor. “Excuse me a second.”

He nipped through a door on the far side of the flat, leaving a caught-by-surprise Esther to call a too-late blessing into thin air.

The splash of water clued her in to Matt’s purpose in excusing himself and Esther, feeling that it would be too awkward to simply wait for him to emerge with clean hands, picked up the carrier bag from the floor. Despite having worked on different floors of the same building for three years now, she didn’t think she and Matthias were close enough for her to go through his fridge without him present, so she arranged the juice cartons on the kitchen counter instead. Non-humans (or quasi-humans) could be especially sensitive about that stuff, she knew.

Matthias wasn’t long in returning, rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously.

“Right, where were we before that nonsense happened? Cash, that’s where we were. Two secs…”

He rifled through the pockets of his jacket, which was slung over the arm of a chair. The seat of the chair was taken up with one of his Meccano marvels- whether this was taking his work home with him or tinkering for pleasure, she couldn’t tell. Engineering at Matt’s level remained a mystery from her seat down in Secretarial.

“There you go,” he said, holding out a handful of change. “Four shiny British pounds, keep the change.”

“Excuse you.” Esther raised her chin haughtily in his direction. “I think you’ll find that’s my service charge.”

Matt laughed and clapped her on the shoulder as he walked towards her neat line of juices.

“Attagirl. You’re worth your weight in gold, you know. ‘Specially today.  My throat’s a bloody warzone.”

So saying, he cracked open the pineapple juice, put his lips to the spout and started chugging down the contents like he’d been dehydrating for a month. He only broke off when his body forced him to take a breath, and he set the carton down on the counter with a relieved sigh.

“Ohh, that’s the stuff.” He tipped his head back appreciatively. “It’s the worst, you know, when you can feel it eating away at you inside. Water only kinda helps, and it always makes my throat itch, which is another kind of hell.”

“Eating away at you?”

“Yeah, my acid kinda- ohshi-”

Matt’s hands flew to his face, his satisfied expression crumpling beneath the sudden weight of what looked to be an awfully intense irritation.

“heit’zzschuh!”

“Bless you!” Esther exclaimed, as Matthias regained his breath in the aftermath. The sneeze had sent such a violent tremor through his body that she was genuinely surprised his knees had held.

Matt seemed to have more on his mind than responding to her blessing, however. He kept both hands firmly over the lower half of his face as he straightened up, gave a tentative, testing sniff, and whispered, “crap.”

Deliberately not looking in Esther’s direction, he hurried past her to the bathroom, still muttering a tangle of curses under his breath. There was the sound of splashing as he washed his hands again.

Esther waited awkwardly in the living room, not sure what to do with herself, until Matt called out from the bathroom;

“Hey, Esther?”

“Yes?”

“I’m so sorry, but- do you see a tub of bicarbonate of soda out there? Should be next to the kettle.”

It was.

“Do you want it in there?”

“Please.”

Esther took the bicarb. from the kitchen counter and stepped cautiously into the bathroom, half-expecting to suddenly hear ‘wait! Don’t come in!’ or some such protest at any moment.

Matthias was standing with both hands submerged in the sink, his face carefully angled away from the door.

“Matt?”

He didn’t turn around. “Could you tip some into the basin? Just a little. Thank you so much, honestly.”

“It’s no bother.” Esther uncapped the bicarbonate and began to gently tip some out. “Say when.”

“When it starts to bubble- that’s it!”

The water in the basin had indeed started to bubble, and turn oddly milky. As Esther stepped back, it continued to froth, spitting flecks of white solution over the edges of the sink. This could explain the smell, Esther decided, to say nothing of the chemical-looking marks on the enamel of both sink and bathtub. It was more than a little concerning, though.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Matthias still wasn’t looking at her. “I just need to neutralise the acid, is all. That was kind of a bad one.”

“Neutralise- ohh.” Another penny dropped. “Sorry, I’m being an idiot today. It’s your, uh, acid spit?”

“It’s a fecking curse when I’ve got a cold,” Matt complained, freeing the plug to let the white water escape down the drain. “Not that a defensive acid-gland is much use to me the rest of the time. But when I’m sick and my nose goes into like… overdrive or whatever, I get… leakage. Blow me, that sounds disgusting. It is disgusting. Sorry.”

He rinsed the sink out and replaced the plug, letting it slowly refill with water.

“No, honestly, it’s interesting!” Esther insisted, too quickly, and hastily over-corrected herself. “I don’t mean like museum interesting, I’m just glad you… I’m not like, taking notes or-”

“Esther.” Matt thrust out a hand and cut across her stammering. “It’s fine. If you were that kind of person I’d have noticed by now. Pass the bicarb?”

“Right. Sure. Here.”

Esther pressed the tub into his outstretched hand. Matt took it, wet a cloth and sprinkled it with the bicarbonate. Angling himself over the sink so that Esther still couldn’t see the front off his head, he started to wipe down his face.

Esther shuffled her feet, uncertain. “I can go.”

“It’d be just as awkward to know you were hovering out there. Unless you mind being here?”

“No, no, I’m fine.”

Silence, apart from the slosh of water and the fizz of base meeting acid, reigned for a few long seconds. Then Matt straightened up a little, evidently having decided that he was fit to be seen again.

“Sorry,” he apologised again. “Biology’s a nightmare sometimes.”

Esther nodded. “Supernatural biology doubly so.”

“At least,” Matt agreed. He sniffed and, judging by the rapid flicker of distressed expressions that crossed his face, immediately regretted it.

With little time to react, and probably little space for thought either, he gripped the sides of the sink for dear life and sneezed powerfully towards the water.

“hah’tzchh’ue!”

“Bless you!”

“Man alive, that had a kick. Thanks.” Matt wiped his face again with the wet cloth, while Esther struggled to find the most tactful words for the situation.

“Um, Matt?”

He turned to blink at her, face still dripping slightly. “What?”

“You, uh, you’ve popped an arm, there.”

Matt dropped his gaze to see, as she had, a long, furry, multi-jointed limb that had sprouted from halfway up his ribcage, thrusting the t-shirt aside.

“Oh, for the love of-”

He twirled absurdly on the spot, like a dog trying to get a fix on its own tail, before turning back to Esther and asking:

“Could you look away for a minute? It’s a lot less pretty going in than out, if you know what I mean?”

Esther wasn’t sure she did, but she obediently turned her back. Behind her, she heard grunts of effort, followed by a sliding, sucking kind of sound, and tried very hard not to let her imagination run away with her.

“Okay,” Matt announced, and she turned back around. His torso was deceptively human once more, and if Esther caught sight of reddened skin as he dropped his shirt back down, she knew better than to stare.

Matt dabbed at his face with a scarred old towel, embarrassment darkening his cheeks by several shades.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I still lose my grip sometimes. The sneezing doesn’t help.”

“Your grip on your, uh…”

“My skin, yeah.” Matt pulled a face. “That’s what my nana always used to call it, anyway. My shape. It always takes a little bit of effort to stay human.”

“Couldn’t you-” Esther was pretty sure she was crossing a line, but she’d done that when she followed him inside. “I mean, you could drop it, couldn’t you? While you’re ill.”

Matt shook his head. To Esther’s relief, the question didn’t seem to have offended him.

“This flat wasn’t really designed with prehistoric spider-monsters in mind. I’d end up lying with my head on the edge of the bath all day, and that gives me neck-ache like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Right.” Esther nodded sympathetically, feeling that this was something else she ought to have realised beforehand. “I guess most modern architects don’t tend to accommodate non-human needs.”

“Not on my budget, anyway. Although…” Matt looked at her as though he was also trying to figure out where their boundaries lay. “If it wouldn’t bother you, I might get my other eyes out.”

“Go ahead, dude, it’s your house.”

“Thanks.”

Matt closed his eyes and appeared to concentrate for a moment. When he opened them again other eyes opened below and to either side of these largest, central eyes. It was strange, Esther thought, how she never really noticed until all six eyes were out that none of them had eyelashes. Not that she had seen the full set very often. Matt’s glasses usually compensated well enough for him to comfortably maintain his human façade.

“There you are.” Matt smiled. “Nice shirt.”

“Oh,” Esther glanced down at herself. It was a light blue shirt with a pattern of tiny dancing dinosaur bones on it. “Thank you.”

“Very cute.”

Matt looked back at the sink and sighed as he pulled the plug out once more. “The water board’s going to hate me for this. I’m trying to dilute it as much as I can, but I’m probably wearing holes in the pipes. Too sick to care, though, you feel me?”

“I reckon if I sneezed acid whenever I caught cold I’d stop caring about just about everything else.”

Matt smiled. “Well, I’ve had practice. Speaking of…” he stretched out an arm as though to ward her off, not seeming to consider that she was already standing well out of his personal space. “I think I might be… about to get some more. Yes, I…sorry- hh’zzsschue!”

He snatched up the cloth again and sneezed into it with a force that left him swaying muzzily in its wake. All six of his eyes blinked slowly back at Esther, who had little to offer except;

“Bless you. Again. Are you okay?”

“Mm? Yes. Just… tired, I think.”

“I’m not surprised. Your sneezes look like they’d wear down an ox.”

Matt tossed the cloth back into the sink and grinned at her.

“Pshaw. The ox has nothing on the spider, Esther! Haven’t you heard?”

It would have been a better line had he not followed it up with a jaw-splitting yawn. Esther giggled, and he gave her a fond punch on the arm in retribution.

“Fine, maybe you’re right. I still feel kind of bad for dragging you down here…”

“Excuse me? Dragged? I dragged myself down here, Matthias, and I’ll drag my own self out!”

He laughed “Of course, what was I thinking? You’ve got your money, now shoo, shoo, let me sleep!”

“Deal.” Esther headed for the door, conscience resting easy. “But you’d better rest, mister, or you’ll get an earful on Monday morning!”

“Yes ma’am.” Matt teased, and all but chased her out of his flat.

That could have gone worse, Esther reflected on her way down the stairs. There was always next weekend for the museum. And now she knew that ‘going prepared’ might include sodium bicarbonate, just in case.

[starpollen]

I hate hate hate hate hate spiders, so when I read the intro I didn’t think there was any way I would ever like this character...  but I do.   I can’t believe I’m saying that he’s kind of cute... but he is!... Wouldn’t mind reading more. 

Edited January 17, 2018 by starpollen

[Jelloicious]

OMG I don't even know what to make of this, except that it's awesome!  (I confess I didn't read the blurb, but that made it kind of fun to sort out just what Matt was). I could do with more Matt and Esther!

[AngelEyes]

Intriguing. I love monsters.

[Garnet]

First of all, HHHH you are so sweet to write me a birthday fic. Extra points for a monster birthday fic. Extra, extra points for said monster having supernatural consequences to the otherwise embarrassingly human act of suffering a cold. Oh girl. You know my kryptonite so well.

Also, can I say? Both of these characters... so adorable. They have a wonderful mix of awkward, earnest sweetness, both of them. Esther for trying really hard to be cool about her workmate being a giant spider monster, while also knowing that man, some shit is just beyond her scope of dealing with, at the moment. Matthias for being... well. Matthias. 

Esther paced back and forth outside the wall for a couple of minutes, arguing with herself then, frustrated with her own prevaricating, pulled out her phone and made the call too quickly for second thoughts to get in the way.

Oh my god, Esther. Big mood, girl. I feel you.

“Crap, nonono!” Matt’s voice squeaked, and he paused just long enough to clear his throat. “You want alkalines. Pineapple, apple, mango- tomato for sure if they’ve got it. Pomegranate, maybe. No citrus, no cranberry. Please?”

Adkfgkjhf what a cute detail. Of course! Also, I adore Esther's apparent decision to just buy ALL OF THE JUICE!!

He was wearing a grey t-shirt that looked very hastily thrown on- he didn’t seem to realise that it hadn’t been pulled all the way down on his right-hand side.

A very nice detail that goes hand in hand with "I have a cold and I'm a right mess" vibe. Half-assembled outfits are a look, Matt, it's okay.

Additionally, and so I don't overquote this response to death, I really like the detail of Matt's limited vision with a... limited number of eyes. Makes sense! Little cues like that are one of my favorite parts about imagining how very different monsters might compact into very unfamiliar human shapes. 

The seat of the chair was taken up with one of his Meccano marvels- whether this was taking his work home with him or tinkering for pleasure, she couldn’t tell. Engineering at Matt’s level remained a mystery from her seat down in Secretarial.

Oh more, more. I want to know more!!

He didn’t turn around. “Could you tip some into the basin? Just a little. Thank you so much, honestly.”

The desperate, sheepish politeness is KILLING ME. I like him so much. 

Also, the acid thing is very much delightful. I've got a couple of naga characters that happen to be venomous, and I've likened it to something where you just... don't really want to kiss or be close to them when they go off for biohazard reasons. Actual, sizzling, corrosive acid kicks it up another notch of desperation and I am LIVING (while also being killed, to be clear, it's very paradoxical). 

With little time to react, and probably little space for thought either, he gripped the sides of the sink for dear life and sneezed powerfully towards the water.

Boy. Hhhh this sure is a sentence that I'm... gonna be spending a little bit of time with, for sure. 

“Oh, for the love of-”

He twirled absurdly on the spot, like a dog trying to get a fix on its own tail

AND THEN THIS. Physical comedy monster humor is never not wonderful. I squeaked. 

And, then, the gently jibing conclusion. Aw. The sweetness. My heart.

Thank you, again, so much for this. It was a true delight <3333

<

[rockbell]

ahhhh so cute!!! any chance for a continuation?? 

[Subtly Clashing Wishes]

This was delightful. I always enjoy your stories.