Growing Pains

All around is still and silent in dark. Still, Deafness is impossible. Noises from without inevitably replaced by sounds within. Concentrate, convince the flesh to flow. Epidermis stretches, rends, re-knits. Take care, take time. This is no instinctive change, no pleasurable exploration of self-limitation. Steel is dragged through straining muscle, laboriously searching for the unique configuration of alloy and meat that will allow for-
Something.

Significant time required to traverse and circumvent left arm. The implement lies inert, held between shoulder tendons that anchor biceps. It hurts, of course. Sit up, find bite to eat. Have a Long night ahead. Drag half-inert body through dark.

Thank Lord Ruler rats here are fat and incautious. Sated for now, time to resume work.
All is quiet again, save for sounds of respiration, digestion, circulation. Concentrate.
protein stirs. borrowed calcium shifts to unconscious commands. Irate signals flare through nerves. Disregard. Attendant muscles twitch and release. Spike emerges with wet gasp of suction. Begins to edge through thick orbital ligaments.

It sounds the depths, strikes bone. Echoing shriek, heard as much as felt. Teeth scrape and grind. Ow.  

Spike still moves, in, out, like needle through cloth. Churning flesh often noisy. Now, together with the pounding blood in ears it becomes a crescendo. Jarring surging wave of biological noise. Mounting ever higher. Resolve weakening. Locked jaws. Have to stop useless, white hot impulses…

Better now, disconnected brachial nerves, then liquefied eardrums. Better this way, can work in peace. Move faster, unencumbered by petty agonies of the flesh...