- i. teeth.
xx◤. 01 A mental or physical change relating to your were animal. If it is a physical change, it must be a non-visible change. (500 words)
xx◤. 02 "the lynx can feel where it is biting the prey with its canines because they are heavily laced with nerves." blue experiences extremely sensitive teeth.
“You have a bad habit, Kolya,” his mother had told him when he was younger, “You really shouldn’t chew on so many things that way. Your teeth will go bad before you’ve gone grey in the bed.”
“Bad habits die hard,” his father had added, laughing. “It is something you should try and fix now.”
Perhaps it had been the chastisement or the gentle condescension or the nitpickiness of his parents in that moment, but Blue had kept his bad habit out of spite more than anything else. All these years later, the cameras saw a smile and a laugh and a heart shaped mouth but they never really realized all of the things that lay underneath, that hadn’t been built for the public eye by overly conscious parents, but rather by the childish spite that came from being constantly molded for a role on the ice rather than the person that he actually was.
It wasn’t that Blue didn’t love his parents, or figure skating, or even their doting. What he hated was that sometimes it seemed like they loved the person he was on the ice more than they did the child he still was at home. Don’t chew on things, don’t go out wearing yoga pants, don’t dress like that. Smile wider, smile bigger, don’t scowl, don’t cry. It’s alright in private but don’t let them see. Always be polite, don’t snap.
As a child, Blue had been good at all of these things. But as he grew up, he’d become even better at spiting them off screen. All of the rules were crushed beneath the heel of his boots and the frightening wing of his liner and his vivid, vicious eyes. He could be the figure skater they wanted in public, but he would not be that way anywhere else.
So Blue chews things. It’s a habit now, for him. It’s a cure for nerves. It makes him calm down, stay still, his hands no longer shaky as long as he’s able to chew on something in his mouth. Most of the time it’s straws or popsicle sticks. His coaches have learned not to let him have their pencils because he’ll worry them in his teeth until they’re marked up like a dog had gotten hold of them.
He keeps having to buy new styluses because of it too. His DS has gone through so many.
Blue brings his habits with him to Ashdown.
The skating rink is small and mediocre for the most part. Not many people frequent it during the chilly October weeks, so Blue has mostly free reign over it in the evening when he isn’t traveling down to Boston for practice there. It’s a blustery Tuesday night when Blue finishes practice and picks at a popsicle stick he’d fished from his gear, worrying it away between his teeth as he skates slow circles around the rink, twirling and dancing and moving on the ice like a fish through water. It’s as easy as breathing. It makes him relax. He gets fidgety though the minute his mind travels to an earlier argument his coach had had with him. A phone call with his parents.
Try harder, they were all saying. Put your all into it. You could be great, you are great. Just be better. Just reach for the stars.
“I don’t want to reach,” Blue had said to no one, “I don’t want to fall. It’s too much.”
His teeth worry away at the popsicle stick until it’s lodged against his entire row of molars, and he chomps down on it hard enough to feel his gag reflex kick in. He’s used to it by now, used to the feeling, of wanting to do it again anyways.
But he’s not used to this – a sudden sharp understanding of everywhere the stick meets with his teeth, the sudden shock like he’s nothing but nerve endings digging into a hard and unyielding source. Blue yelps and his skates tangle together and he goes sprawling across the ice, his teeth throbbing, his head spinning from where it had connected with the ice. Everything in him aches from the graceless fall, his legs tangled up together, mouth burning and full of wetness, full of – not pain, but –
He runs his tongue over his molars, his canines, and the sensation is suddenly more visceral than it ever had been before. Blue recoils from it, scrambles on the ice. His breath comes out labored, and he freaks out because he brushes his teeth twice a day and ******** – he flosses too, he can’t possibly have cavities – what the hell – he doesn’t want his teeth to fall out!
His mouth – no, his teeth – feel too sensitive now. Like he’s bitten into something extremely cold and gotten that awful sensation that comes from it. He rubs his canines together and it sends sensory overload to his head, making him whine loudly into the empty space.
Someone calls out to him.
Are you okay, they ask, and Blue wants to shout that he isn’t alright. How is this happening to him? Forget weird “Other Ashdown”. This is bullshit!
Blue crawls to his feet and his bad mood worsens when he goes home and his food is too hot, his drink is too cold, his mouth feels abused. The dentist checks him out the next day and says he looks fine, even though Blue fidgets and whines the entire time because every tap of the instruments against his teeth is like banging on a nerve ending that overstimulates his entire brain.
His parents hadn’t been able to kill his habit and neither had his coaches, but Blue doesn’t eat for two days and he tries to ignore the way his teeth grate on one another, the way he wants to chew things, cheat meat and Blue has never even been interested in meat before like this.
Eventually he does have to eat though, and he ends up chewing on everything with a new sort of intensity, worrying popsicle sticks to death between his teeth until they splinter in half. Everything in his mouth feels hypersensitive, but stopping also feels like a crime against something inside of him, primal and wanting.
Blue doesn’t know what it is, and if he’s being honest, it terrifies him.
But bad habits die hard, or something. And if Blue was going to get ******** over by this place like that detective had said he would, he was going to do it his way.
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