CW: FMG, muscle worship, extreme muscle, blood.
(read part 3)
Pain.
My life is fucking pain.
And I love it.
Love...?
I don't know what that means anymore. There was someone there... but it's hard to remember anything trapped inside the thunderous growth of my own body.
Diana? No. Not her name. What was her name? She felt like... love. I think. Can't remember. Fiona? Deena... Dinah! That's right. She was Dinah. I remember. She loved me. Once upon a time... when I was human.
I can't see her anymore. Can't remember what she looks like. It's darkness now. Crushing darkness and heat and pain surrounding my skull, pressing in on all sides, drowning in my own power. So much power…
Sometimes I hear her voice. Sometimes I sense her presence. She's like... softness. Something soft. That's it, soft in a world of crushing stone. A soft light I can't see, only feel. I know when she's nearby. Her voice sounds like it's buried under the earth, under the sea, miles away in another life. I'm buried alive, too, head gripped by all my mass like a vice of flesh, hard to breathe, suffocating, but I can't find her. My Dinah... I don't know how I could forget her. Dinah. I have to repeat her name. Have to remember. Dinah.
Dinah… What do you look like? Is your face as soft as your memory? Were you human and healthy and lovely? Or… were you like me… a woman transformed into a living weapon?
I can remember only one face now. My own. What I used to look like. I remember I was a normal teenage girl once upon a time. I had... green eyes. No. Gray. Brown hair. I can remember running, the wind in my hair. I can remember laughter.
I remember the sweet face of that girl, my face, looking into the mirror, daily watching my body take over. The old man–how could I forget the old man, what was his name?–he said it was my genetics. Unique genes. I was immune to some kind of virus. Can’t remember. My genes did this to me. This is who… what… I was meant to become.
I can remember undressing, when I used to be able to wear clothes, feeling my heart leap at the sight of a little progress. The excitement that ran through the tips of my fingers as I traced them over the gentle line running up from my belly button to my rib cage… barely visible unless the orange lantern light hit them just right. The sign of abdominals to come, new definition to be celebrated.
I didn’t even know how to flex my abs. So young… so naive. I thought that’s what real power was, a few pathetic lines cut into my stick of a figure. But I was proud of them, proud of my progress. In a normal world, I could’ve worn a bikini to the beach. Turned some heads. Had attention for the right reasons.
I stayed proud for… a long time. Maybe too long.
Those soft feminine lines curving around the bottom sides of my tiny biceps, carving up sections of my stomach like lines in the sand, radiating out from the center of my chest over my visible ribs–I’d never had breasts, never been well-endowed in that department, but my chest was girlish then in a way it could never be again. Not anymore.
Days turned into months. Months turned into years.
I could see my metamorphosis in that dirty, broken mirror, leaning against the sink as the weight of my body continued to increase, showing no signs of stopping. Still proud of my progress. Still naive about what it would mean. But pride was slowly turning into horror… and beneath that, something even more terrifying. The unshakeable feeling I tried to bury, to deny in repulsive disgust… that I enjoyed what was happening to me.
The shattered glass spread like chaotic spiderwebs across the face of the mirror, making me look even more like the freak I was becoming. The broken glass barely obscured the similar pattern covering every inch of my body: my revoltingly extreme vascularity. The first thing to hint that something was wrong. I’d put on some muscle, nothing too major, rounded out my shoulders, defined what was already there, gained some extra pounds, but my veins… they were like worms writhing under my skin, surging so bloated and distended it looked like I could fit my finger under them and pull and bleed myself out.
They formed ravines and chasms and valleys all over my flesh, up my neck, on my scalp and cheeks and forehead, rendering my face into a quilt of flushed skin spit into patched sections by my throbbing veins. If I closed my eyes, I could just hear them carrying the irresistible sound of my own heartbeat like a wardrum summoning an army inside me. I was a network of vines. I was a mesh of branches and twigs, a hoary tree in the winter stripped of its leaves until it’s nothing but rock hard bone-like wood.
But this was just the beginning. That thought, I remember having it, I remember the anticipation setting my imagination ablaze. I pictured the women in a magazine I’d stolen. It was a fitness magazine of some kind. I was just a kid. Didn’t know any better. Probably wasn’t ready for those images.
Barely clad in anything but their tiny two piece swimsuits, the women in the magazine posed and flexed and lifted weights as their misshapen male-like bodies puffed and panted and pumped. I thought some of them were men. I thought they were just fat. I didn’t realize that a woman could look like that with enough work, the right diet, lifestyle changes, and so on. And I never thought it would happen to me.
My prominent ramified bugged-out veins… the new vascularity was preparing me. I realized that now. My body was prepping itself for the deluge of weight it meant to gain, whether I wished it or not. The old man–god, what was his name–he knew what to do. Forced me to eat till I threw up. Forced me to get under things and lift because my life depended on it. Told me I needed to be stronger. Told me I was special. I believed him… that nagging feeling inside of me enjoying becoming a monster… it wanted to believe him.
But it’s hard to explain what it was like gaining so much muscle in so little time, stepping in front of that mirror every day to watch how my body went from trashed, torn, and ragged the day before, rebuilt overnight into an ugly image of steel welding.
When I was a little girl, I filled up this water balloon. It was pink and it had stars on it. Why do I remember this? More and more and more water poured into it but my hand was on the faucet. I was going to shut it off. Just a little more, I said to myself. The pink latex stretched and stretched. Growing transparent.
I was squatting on my heels, I leaned forward amazed it hadn’t popped yet. How much could this balloon take? Inside, the water swirled and bubbled and rushed in, stained reddish by the color of the balloon, like it was filling up with blood. I didn’t want it to pop, but… I grew excited thinking about how big it could actually get.
Just a little more.
The sound. I remember the sound. Stretching. I put my face against the side of the balloon, pulled taut by the pressure building up inside of it. Heard the water rumbling. Anticipation kept my heart racing but at the same time, I felt peaceful. Relaxed. Let it burst. Let it drench me.
My hands were under the balloon now, hefting its weight. So heavy. So, so heavy. I even bobbed it up and down, felt it jiggle in my hands and then… the top of it tore off the faucet. It didn’t pop, just fell off the spigot and hit the ground. Water everywhere, but I felt only disappointment.
I was filling myself up now. I had no girlish pink or cute little stars. There was almost nothing left about me that resembled a girl, except for my face, and even that was raked with the wrinkles and circles of my anguished exhaustion, the pain I endured, forced my body to suffer, and the veins like fingers creeping up my neck… a neck that was soon thicker and wider than my head.
Had to get strong enough to defend my family. Had to use my genes like they were meant to be used. Had to listen to the old man. Wanted to. Wanted to feel like that balloon.
Just a little more.
Until something burst. I didn’t want a little more… I wanted a lot more. I wanted so much. There was no going back, anyway. I realized long ago that that little girl playing with water balloons and flipping through a magazine of female bodybuilders, she was dead and she wasn’t coming back. The world had changed. I would never go to high school. Never have a prom. Never get accepted by a college. Never go have dinner and a movie and then wind up in the back seat of a car. Never wear dresses or two piece swimsuits. Never get married. Never bear children.
None of that.
No going back.
More.
The dam inside me burst. The natural apprehension I had preventing me from ascending to my true limitless potential shattered like a mirror falling to the floor. I could see myself anymore anyway, my head swallowed by my own unstoppable avalanche of mass. In my own private sweltering, pulverizing, comforting darkness, I could only dream and remember. And desire. Want. Hunger. Crave. I could only wish that the chain reaction triggering the explosion of growth inside my body, breaking my bones, pulling my sockets apart, pushing my arms and legs and extremities outward, locked in sheathes of impenetrable armor. From my unenviable safety inside my own world, I could only hope that this would never end, that the balloon wouldn’t snap off the spigot, that I could see how much power could fit inside of me like water pouring in, filling up and expanding every cell to bursting, past bursting, without stopping.
I hate what happened to me. I hate that I’ll never even be remotely mistaken for human again. I hate forgetting Diana… no, that’s not right… fuck. I hate what the old forced me to do like a dog on a chain. But I can only embrace it.
Tore the skin off my arms today. Didn't need it anymore. Don’t need skin at all. Can heal anything now. More room for my muscles to expand. Get bigger. Bigger. More. Power. Fuck. God. Deena…? When it tore, felt the warm rush of blood, like when the old man broke his hand, tore his fingers off between the vice of my flex. He should have been careful.
Can't control what my body does. Can only give it what it wants.
It makes me scared.
It makes me aroused.
I can’t see what I look like, ripped and rent, a detonation of muscle opening up like a massive grotesque flower day again and again and again. I’m a mass of pain I never thought I’d ever experience but in pain there is power. She that masters pain masters herself. But over me, my body is the master. I can only do what it wants. I can only go where it grows. I can’t stop it, not for anyone, not for them. Don’t want to.
They need to stay away. An involuntary flex and I could destroy anything, shear the top of a mountainside with the arc of my bicep. God, what I wouldn’t give to see it, but I’m glad it was mine, my own delicious, excruciating, starving beast of a bicep.
They dragged me down the mountain. Literally dragged me. Can't walk anymore. My legs are endless eruptions of fucking steel cables and titanium ribbons, confused cords of raw tungsten and jumbled wires feeding them white hot burning torment with every beat of my rampaging heart. Shit. I remember feeling the cold ground with my overwhelming calves for the first time... standing straight up. Probably looks like a fucking elephant, a tree trunk. I can just imagine it. My feet locked in layered shafts of muscle. Cannon barrels. Upside down volcanos of flesh. Quivering columns of naked muscle fiber with skin pulled transparent over the top of them. Fuck.
They dragged me... yeah, that's right. In chains. Could hear the sound of the links rattling together beneath the sedimentary layers of my own delts and traps piled high above my head. Took me to the city. So quiet. Nobody there but them. The old man. And Dinah. My Dinah. Dinah is her name. Wanted to see what I can do? Fine.
Just lying there where they left me, I flexed. I wanted to do it for so long. I wanted to see what I was capable of even more than they did.
My chest ripped open. My whole chest just split in two, tearing in half. There's no way to describe the feeling. It's a mixture of terror, excitement, arousal, and agony. Always the pain. That's what happens when every last muscle fiber rips and frays in an instant before being rebuilt thicker and stronger and heavier, happening hundreds of times, thousands of times a second. Blood and sweat mingling, pooling, lovers enflamed by my lust for power. Thought I’d spill right out the front but my impervious torso couldn’t sunder itself–I was the rock too big for myself to carry.
Damn. I really went for it without caring what could happen. A part of me hoped they were standing back. A part of me didn't care. I just let my chest light up, burning like the sun. I let my torso explode outward. I would have screamed if the weight of my expanding chest hadn’t slammed into my chin, forcing my jaw shut, grinding my teeth. My eyes instinctively clenched in panic.
Layers of thick, striated, onerous muscle folding over itself. I could feel my weight shifting. God damn. I was getting heavier on the spot. Beneath me, I could feel the ramshackle raft of semi-truck beds they’d welded together groaning, metal bending... I was actually getting heavier by the second! The sound, like a howling, screaming train wreck. Metal snapping. Concrete cracking. Deafening. I felt a shriek rising in my throat, fright mixed with delight, spittle on my lips pulling back over my gritting teeth as my womanhood–heh, womanhood… a pathetically worthless phrase to describe the garbage disposal of meaty violence that my vagina had become–gushed and spat and basked in the sudden lightning strike of an orgasm, the intense onset of pleasure triggered by the satisfaction this woman felt that she could never be hurt again except by herself, that she was unstoppable and quite nearly immovable, powerful beyond comprehension, without a worry in the world except how to get bigger faster, harder faster, freakier faster.
My pecs tore through empty space. I could feel the wind on them. I felt trees breaking and splintering, brushed out of the way. My pecs were rushing out. Pouring out. Felt like I was made of incandescent lava flooding outward at high speed. So much pent up muscle growth. My own pectorals choked me. Not enough room. Muscle smashing my chin. Threatening to shatter my teeth. Crushing my face. Squeezing my head like a tiny blueberry in a collapsed mine. Engulfed in muscle growth.
My last scrap of sanity crumbled and burst, broken like my last will to fight and resist what was happening to me had been ground to dust. No going back. Just a little more. Dinah, help me. Stay back. As my body toppled under its own weight, pecs piercing the side of a skyscraper, tearing it down like mountains fallen from heaven through the concrete and the glass and the steel… as I became the fucking god my genes had doomed me to become, my sanity was over.
And I loved it.
I am blind. I am muscle incarnate. I am power made flesh. I am the sun. I exist without sight, without food, without humanity or even personhood. My transformation from human into superhuman and then inhuman is complete. I await the next metabiological leap that my body will irresistibly ascend to whether my mind hangs around intact for it or not.
What is past human? Beast or deity? Too clean. Too trite. Too easy. I am something the world has never seen before. I am muscle personified, infinitely flexing, endlessly growing, eternally thirsty for more. I am anthropomorphic muscle, no thoughts beyond a simple lustful word echoing through the inflating caverns of my impossibly swollen veins: More.
Can't remember what they used to call me. The old man. The girl I loved. Love. More is love. More is my only thought now. My identity. Grow. Must grow. Must get stronger. Must get bigger. Must endure pain. Must grow. Be the biggest person, no… biggest thing on the planet. Can this earth endure me?
(end of part 4)
(read part 5)