Tawny Brown - A Beef Stew fanfiction

1 - Tawny Brown

Though most of his mornings were starkly uneventful, Beef couldn't help but shake off the immediate feeling that something this particular time was unnervingly off. The aura of the new day felt completely askew the moment he woke up, and for once it wasn't the way his long hair attempted to frisk away from his hairline to give him an unkempt lion's mane as he rose from bed. Brushing his fingertips through the locks didn't exactly tame the mess very professionally, but it did what it could, and he hardly stood in the mirror for long anyways unless necessary. Especially not now, hardly a stale glance at his own familiar face dappled with iconic freckles, as he stretched his arms above his own head and felt his shoulders pop.

"God damn, that's unpleasant..." Beef mumbled to himself, grimacing at the ache in his torso that lingered even after he arched his back out a bit and felt it crack, which somehow worsened the aching feeling in his gut. Something that usually woke him up nicely in the morning only worsened the discomfort with the stretching of his muscles. Whatever it was, however, Beef stubbornly refused to dwell on it long, expecting the sick feeling to fade off naturally as he progressed throughout the day, reaching for his glasses and pressing them up the bridge of his nose

As Beef mindlessly trudged down to the kitchen and took a moment to rest his elbows on the counter, letting out a sharp, uneasy exhale, the lingering sickness continued to pester him unrelentlessly. His nails were irritably clawing into the hard countertop on repeat for a few moments, attempting to alleviate the twist of worsening pain spreading gradually throughout his body. It was beyond discomforting by this point, and before he could reach for his phone to search for potential advice online, perhaps an explanation for his morning aches, Beef spontaneously felt his knees give out upon taking his first step away from the counter, his lanky body collapsing sideways onto the cold floor tiles.

Mumbling something incoherent under his breath, Beef kicked his heel into the ground and attempted to quickly hoist himself back onto level feet, but soon realized his body wasn't giving him the proper energy to keep itself stable; though not paralyzed, he might as well have been from the amount of pain in his body, as moving at all had become a sudden chore.

Something really was wrong.

A fruitless conclusion, he knew that much, but it had taken a gradual period for the pain to become this excruciating and limiting for Beef, and only now had the feeling begun to alarm him when he, quite literally, could no longer do anything about it. He had no choice but to wearily succumb to the pain and hope it would soon subside, as his pain tolerance was pathetically fragile otherwise, and fighting against the gut-twisting feeling would only wear down his starkly limited energy.

Again, his nails scratched the hard surface below him, now the tiled floor, raking them across the digits in the ground until he heard an awkward grinding sound from doing so. Lifting up his hand and eyeing his fingers closely, Beef's eyes widened in shock as he watched his nails sharpen and blacken before him, slowly hooking forward and boasting pointed claws, layering thicker and sturdier until his other hand could no longer risk breaking the once fragile nails when he raked them through the floor to vent out the pain. It made him queasy to watch, yet Beef felt frozen in place, apart from his incessant trembling.

It hurt. It fucking hurt to feel those claws change alone, but as if to further rub the salt in his metaphorical wounds, the rest of his body was quickly following suit with its otherworldly transformations. Beef didn't have the stomach to watch whatever his body might be morphing into anymore, and quickly squeezed his eyes shut with a desperate whine, a noise that sounded oddly more animal-like than he had intended it to. One whine soon became many, laced with obscene curses to vent out the feeling somehow, feeling his body morph and twist his figure in ways he could not see and refused to think about, but god damn if it didn't hurt.