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The Road to Happiness for Skarlath by Draconicon

Roan shook his head as he stepped out of the clinic, pausing to look up at the night sky. The soft, cloudless night somehow didn't feel as calming as it usually did. Then again, usually he didn't have a series of chemically produced viruses running through his veins, working on changing him from the ground up.

The feeling wasn't good. Everything from his shoulder down felt like it was being scrubbed with a wire brush, and one that was under the skin, to boot. It was only the painkillers they'd put in first that kept it from being worse, and even so, he had to fight to keep from clenching his arm.

"It's worth it. Just...just keep remembering that it's worth it."

It didn't feel like it right then. It felt like his arm was going to need to come off on his next visit. But he had to believe that it was worth it. After all, he'd just sunk all of his savings into the treatment, and if it didn't work...

The sight of the beggars across the street looked like they'd have a better life than he would, if this didn't work out.

The sliding doors behind him opened again, and his...partner, for lack of a better word, stepped out. Just like him, Brock was rubbing his upper arm, but unlike him, the big guy was grumbling like hell.

"Fuck...God damn, how the hell are we supposed to deal with that?"

"The same way we deal with everything else. Head down, and hope."

"I thought we were doing this to get away from that."

"Soon, man, soon."

Brock shook his head, stuffing his hands into his pockets. Roan couldn't help but do the same. It was a cold night, and unless someone found a spot just underneath one of the vent ducts by the factories, there wasn't any heat to be found out of doors.

"Look, I'm heading home. I'll see you next week?"

"Yeah, if I'm still here then."

"You will be, Brock."

He patted his friend on the arm and turned away, walking home.

The first week was hell on earth. Between his construction job and his janitorial job back at one of the schools, Roan was used to the soreness that came from physical labor. He knew that the viruses would add to it, but he thought he could handle it without any problem.

He was wrong. He was so, so very wrong. Sprawled out on his bed every night after work, he groaned as he felt his bones being eaten away, then regrown, pushing at the edges of his body. Half of the time, it felt like he was getting inflated inside his skin; the other half, it felt like he risked cutting it open with his skeleton if he moved so much as an inch.

But it was doing something. His body was changing. By the end of the week, his skin had stretched to follow his bones, and he was able to lay down without feeling like he was going to break apart if he twitched too hard. Which was a relief, considering he had to lay down while he was getting the second treatment.

He looked over to the other bed, nodding towards Brock. His friend had grown too, though not as much as he had. While Brock was nearly six feet tall, Roan was nearly seven, his treatment giving him a different sort of shape than Brock's.

"Looks like it's working."

"Yeah, but it hurts like a son-of-a-bitch."

"Heh, soon we'll be working with literal sons of bitches."

"Oh, man, that was terrible. Don't even go there."

"Why not? We will."

And besides, he thought, They're the only ones that are gonna pay anywhere near a real living wage.

The treatment felt just as bad to receive this week as last week, the injections burning where the needle slid in and stinging everywhere else as his body was broken down and reformed, bit by bit. It was so slow that he couldn't see it, but he could damn well feel it.

"Just a couple more months. Just a few more months. We can take it, right?"

"Yeah...yeah, man, we can take it."

"I can't take it! I can't take it!"

Roan tried to keep from screaming, but it was nearly impossible. He would have dared any of those 'manly men' back at the construction job to do what he was doing. See how they kept back tears and screams when their spines were literally crawling out of their skin. See if they could keep their mouths shut when their feet were being warped into a half circle and hardening into place.

His bed didn't even fit him anymore, the man reduced to sleeping on the floor as his body kept changing. The only positive so far were the muscles growing in, but even they were a torture to his body. It was like growing pains all over again, except multiplied exponentially across his entire body.

His tail whipped from side to side as he rolled onto his stomach, panting for breath as he felt another burning sensation around his feet, his toes and a good bit of his sole melting together to form a hoof. It went on for nearly half a minute before it declined again. From experience, he knew that would have been lucky to cover a millimeter of the change, if that, and it would be back in just a few more minutes.

Flopping onto his back, Roan pressed his hands - so much bigger than they once were, almost dinner plate size - over his face and cried.

A month and a half went by, and the process got no easier. Roan begged the clinic for painkillers, and after a half hour of shouting - and the protestations of a number of other patients - the medical personnel finally relented. He panted, hooked up to several drip bags as he received his most recent treatment, lazily looking over to his friend.

Brock had gotten it a bit easier than him, though not much. His friend's body was covered in gray fur, save for over his belly, and his face pointed out in a flat, but pointed muzzle. His height seemed to have topped out around six and a half feet, but the rest of his body seemed to take on weight. Muscle bulged from his friend's arms and legs, and while Brock still had that gut of his, it looked a lot harder.

He reached out a hand to his friend, pausing as he realized that it was big enough to cover the badger's face and reach down to the base of Brock's neck. He pulled his hand back, just as Brock looked over at him.

"You okay, man?"

Even looking so strong, his voice was weak. Roan shook his head.

"I don't know. It hurts. It hurts a lot."

Looking down at himself, Roan could hardly recognize what he saw laying on the bed. What had been a pair of feet had become hooves. Between his thighs was a tail made of clumps of hair, too tangled to be comfortable, and he had nothing to fix it with. The clinic had him in a special bed, and it stretched more than nine feet long, yet his hooves still clicked against the footboard of it.

The icing on the cake was the constant ache in his body. His muscles were far larger, making him look like a series of bulges that were lumped together rather than an actual living being. If he bothered to lift his arm, he felt like his muscles were clamping down hard enough to fracture the bones, or at least crack them. Roan didn't know how he was going to make it through the rest of the treatments.

Brock reached out for him, but Roan kept his hand back. If he was hurting himself this much, he didn't want to do the same to his friend.

"Mother of god, make it stop!"

Roan shouted and bucked as he was tied down in the clinic, thrusting his body this way and that as the last of the conversion therapy continued. Though he was ten feet tall and no longer so horribly lumpy, the conversion process continued to wreak havoc on him.

And here, he'd stupidly thought this would be the only fun part of becoming a stallion. Panting and huffing through a black nose, he stared down at his exposed groin. The needles were pushed into his growing sheath, but everything down there burned like it was held in a fireplace. The nerves were on fire as his penis was forced to follow everything else in his body, and even as it had grown over the week, he'd grown to hate the damn thing.

It lay limp over his belly as he thrashed about, his body barely subdued for a few minutes at a time when the nurses flooded him with sedatives before they wore off, and he screamed again.

At some point, the bed broke, and he fell to the ground, knocking himself out. Even in dreamland, the fires of pain pursued him.

Recovery had been as difficult, if not as painful as the actual conversion. The ten foot tall horse was much larger than he once had been, and Roan shook his head as he made his way back to the hole-in-the-wall that was his apartment. The construction job was getting easier again, and with his new body, they were having him do the work of three people over the course of the day. It was the same paycheck, but the work was easier.

He stopped at the door as he saw Brock waiting for him. The badger stood on the steps with a trenchcoat wrapped around him and a pair of letters in his hand. Roan stared at them, barely making out the shield and gun letterhead.

"Is that -"

"You better believe it, man."

"We're in? They said yes?"

"Hell yeah."

The stallion grabbed the badger in his arms, lifting him off of the ground in a gleeful spin. He pulled the big gutted, thick armed man against his chest, squeezing him as tight as he could out of sheer joy.

"Hey, hey! Not so tight...ow...air..."

"Oh, sorry."

Dropping the badger, he patted Brock's head a few times as his friend dusted himself off. He looked at the letter. Nothing, nothing could make this day better.

"So."

Scratch that. Something could. Roan smiled as Brock grabbed him by the balls, pulling him towards the door.

"I think I have some thanks, for you making me go through that whole damn thing."

"Hey, you helped too."

"Yeah, but it was your idea. Besides, you helped me. It's time I 'helped' you for a change."

The End