aer
Bug Catcher
- Pronouns
- they/them
Hi! I wrote this oneshot for the Thousand Roads 2022 Mischief and Malice contest under the pseudonym "vexology". It won 1st place.
CW: gore, torture
Feedback preferences: Anything goes! I like all feedback of any kind, including praise, crit, and horrified or confused or indifferent reactions. (I do especially like linequotes, though. :3)
CW: gore, torture
Feedback preferences: Anything goes! I like all feedback of any kind, including praise, crit, and horrified or confused or indifferent reactions. (I do especially like linequotes, though. :3)
Look back into your memory for me: Cotton candy, strands of sugar pulled lighter than air, grains hot and thready from being pressed into heated metal machinery. Like fairytales settling into life as they whirled around a paper cone. Your eyes sparkled about as meaningfully as the excited babble that came out of your mouth as you accepted your cotton candy from the carnival vendor who told you, “Don’t eat it all at once!”
I know you treasured that memory, because that was how you met your starter pokemon. The gloops of milcery that lined up among the carnival stand shelves bounced in delight at your delight and that candy-coated connection turned into a desire that was real. “Two hundred tickets for your very own souvenir!” You pulled out strands and strands of tickets, earned from playing Voltorb Skee-Ball over and over again, used up all your quarters for the sake of that memory. Oh, how joyful those mindless little milcery were, as joyful as you’d been to taste the candy from their stall, as joyful as they would be to become yours.
You couldn’t have known what that meant at the time. You were only a child, after all, two years shy of becoming a trainer. That carnival, with the automated fairy floss maker, the blinking lights, the computerized interface for ticket distribution – yes, that was years after the era of giants, where droplets flowed into drinks, where nets and webs made up gods. Years before your time. Nowadays, it’s unlikely you’ll meet a pokemon that can say it knows kin at all. Nothing like the love between humans and pokemon.
When you left that fair with your new friend on your shoulder, you were two years shy of becoming a pokemon trainer, but you knew that was what you wanted to be. That dropped cone, that piece of saliva-soaked paper that joined syrup-stained popsicle sticks and the cinnamon-laced sugar on the churro wrappers, the mixed beads of dark color and dye from where the wetness of your mouth touched spun sugar – but there was no spark. No love drawn unseen. All that was was between you and Milcery now.
You always were such a hungry child.
As surely as it beats from your heart, as it thumps against ropes made of caramel twists and bars made of nougat candy, that memory is love.
I only want to show you the same.
Drops of cream and sugar puddle into pudding. The spoon that enters your mouth is filled with your favorite treats: Hot chocolate like the cold night on those routes and trails that humans call wilderness, Milcery enriching that comforting drink with drips and drabs of its own cream body. Rainbow crystal candy like the shimmering flavors and colors in Milcery as it matured towards evolution: matcha, lemon, mint, caramel, as it learned control of its own flavors. As much as it needed to do so, anyhow. Nowadays, milcery don’t need to do so much as concentrate flavors, no. They sell those sweets freshly wrapped in cellophane at every bakery, not too little to leave a shape unformed, not too much to create something that’d keep growing. Just enough to change shallow, translucent memories of sweetness into rich, full-fat whipped cream. Just right.
I only want something just right for you too, see? Shh. Don’t struggle. Take note of each sweet thing on your spoon. It’s true that most things can’t grow as large as they could nowadays, but, a fairy tale house in the woods made of gingerbread and sugar lets me break those rules just for you; you can grow as much as you’d like.
I remember when you first came to see. You were covering your face with one arm, protecting Milcery and your eyes against the dense tangle of trees and branches, when the deep woods suddenly opened up into a clearing. You saw a gingerbread house in the clearing among the dirt and leaves and natural things, and when you took your hand up from the candy cane fence posts, a fly landed on your sugar-coated hand. Its eyes were so wide and multifaceted, its legs dark and hairy, its little proboscis sinking into the sugar powdering on your skin. You couldn’t move.
But flies are so much more afraid of you than you are of them, dear one, even as they terrify you with their familiar desires. While you stood there paralyzed, Milcery on your shoulder wiggled just a little, and the fly fled for sweeter, weaker, more stationary delights.
There were so many, after all! The candy cane fences surrounded a grass jelly lawn, overlooked by windows made of frosted sugar glass and window-grilles made of chocolate coated pocky. Cupolas of strawberry-topped whipped cream hovered over graham cracker roofs. A pink-frosted door leaning half-open in the pirouline door frame revealed itself as having the distinctive dark-and-light layers of red velvet cake.
Perhaps you wondered how such a house could still be standing if there were flies and forest and hungry pokemon all around. I know Milcery certainly did! It had never seen anything as grand, as untouched as this before. No bugs in this food, no, not like poor Milcery had to deal with. And on the inside, there was certainly no need for more flies caught among sugary spider web strands.
But Milcery isn’t the one to blame. Milcery didn’t know at the time, either; that’s why it only mindlessly jumped and pulled at the idea of going off-route, of wandering deeper in the wilderness than would be convenient to travel between towns. And you were a good child, to go along for your friend’s sake. The secret here went beyond it just as much as it went beyond you.
For beyond the angel food stucco, below the biscotti supports, beneath the chocolate bar floor, there is a glowing heart of red and purple light that came from a time before humans. That power enriches, adds sugar to the dough, whips milk into cream. The inside of the house cradles that life-giving energy source, feeds it, makes like into like and allows for something greater.
I hear, nowadays, they make milcery in patisseries. I hear they churn sugar into the air, filling stainless steel rooms with sweet-smelling particulates. I hear the milcery are borne from air to sugar like desire into substance. No need for congealing rot, no lumps of sugar needed to be caked together, no seepage and mixed flavors needed to be purified into purpose, only the pure sweetness of desire. No wonder those memories of giant alcremie, that Milcery had told me it so looked forward to becoming, were so insipid. Towers of politely stacked layer cakes, orderly and organized and demarcated by circular frills, with an human-shaped alcremie as the decoration on top. That this was what alcremie looked like now – oh, how things have changed indeed. Oh, how it makes me want to weep.
But you – take no heed of my salted and bittered memories. Take the spoonful of sweet I want you to have instead: one more bite of fond memories. Sliced cherubi, bright crisp scarlet summer against the tongue and blending against the cream. Sweet curry, the time you mixed smooth, mild coconut milk into your shared dinner. A bar of pineapple cake that you split with Milcery the first time you won a gym battle, warmed in your pocket and crumbling and only a little sour. How your love flowed into each other!
And there – yes, you believe me now. Trainer, human, my best friend: I believe in you too. Remember how proud you were of me after I won that battle? Don’t worry. That pain, this fear, will turn into sweet sugary love soon. Remember how proudly you talked to me when we thought of what I would evolve into? That time is now, more than now. I am complete. This is your evolution, and I will be so, so proud of you.
Yes! I can see it now! The layer of sweat on your skin is starting to turn to glaze. The place where you bit through your tongue is bright cherubi-red syrup. Where caramel ropes had bound your wrists, the rope burns are turning into flakes of coconut. The nougat bars digging into your shins are now affixing to your marzipan bones. Oh, how your skin swells! Where it is crispest the breaks reveal marbled and rich devil food cake, and underneath there are tendons and threads of lollipop sticks and licorice attaching to the peanut brittle of my walls. We are closer than ever before. For this is how milcery truly evolve into alcremie: not by separation, but by droplets of cream and sugar and love pooling together and given purpose under a single thought. I can feel it now: your heart beating slower and slower, hot waves of syrup slowing as chambers and ventricles solidify into gelatin, your veins pushing themselves into my icing plaster, becoming a part of me. Like this, my best friend, my trainer – our friendship can only grow for an eternity more.
