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Language:
English
Series:
Part 1 of Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed
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Anonymous
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Published:
2025-05-10
Updated:
2025-11-10
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39,401
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12/?
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A normal retelling of Look Outside where everything is exactly the same I swear

Anonymous

Summary:

Sam left his curtains open on the day of the apocalypse. Whoops.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Chapter 1: POV: you forgot to close your blinds

Chapter Text

His dreams are very strange tonight.

There is a familiar voice beckoning him to his window. A name-- no, a face dances right on the cusp of his mind’s eye, but no matter how hard he tries, he cannot remember.

He goes to his window. There are stairs leading into the sky, bright and shining against the sea of dark colors choking the air.

He takes a step.

And another.

And another.

There is nothing to stop him from falling into the infinite void below him, yet he feels no fear as he continues his ascent.

The stairs become steeper. His body feels heavier.

He begins to crawl, dragging himself closer and closer to the blinding epicenter of the storm that rages around him. Inch by inch, he slowly gets closer, until he can begin to make out something in the light.

It looks like...

Sam shifted slightly. He didn’t want to get out of bed today, but unfortunately the sun shining on his face forced him to open his eyes. He was immediately assaulted by a colorful, blinding light, and quickly shut them again. He reached up to cover his eyes only to hit his mouth.

Huh?

Sam tried reaching higher, but he was met with... another mouth?

What the hell??

He jolted at the sound of several dozen whispers voicing his thoughts, opening his eyes again. His retinas burned from the light, but soon enough, he began to make out bleary shapes, and-- fuck, that didn’t look right. He waved a hand in front his face, only to let out a crowd of surprised shouts when he saw more than one hand appear in his view.

Sam shot up in his bed, sitting up way higher than he anticipated and bracing himself against the wall while his hair grazed the ceiling. How-- how was this happening? Sam wasn’t tall by any standards; hell, he could hardly reach the ceiling when he was standing! His room seemed taller, too, and everything seemed to have elongated like somebody had stretched his apartment ten or so meters wider.

Something had happened to him. Something had happened to his room. Something-- something wasn’t right.

Sam looked down at himself and screamed.

A bloated mass of eyes and hands and mouths screamed back as he looked up at himself.

“What the fuck?!” He yelled, and now that he was paying attention, he could feel all those mouths move simultaneously. He could feel air rushing all up and down his chest, or was it his torso? His body seemed to blend together, making it hard to discern any individual segment of himself.

Sam pushed off the wall and tried to rush to his door, but he ended up tripping on his dozens of arms and legs, slamming into the ground with a deafening thud. Tears welled up in his too-many eyes and he tried to curl up, but he couldn’t bring his knees to his chest(?), instead bringing something new to his attention.

He had a tail?!

Fuck, now that he was aware of it, he could-- see out of it? He had eyes there?? Hot air billowed against the floor as he began to hyperventilate out of what felt like hundreds of mouths

Calm down. Calm down. Maybe-- this wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real.

Of course it wasn’t real---this wasn’t possible! It was a dream, this was clearly a dream. More like a nightmare, actually, but whatever. This wasn’t real. This couldn't be real.

Sam made a conscious effort to reach over with only one clawed hand, pinching the skin of another one of his arms. If this was a dream, he could just wake up! Everything was going to be fine.

He kept applying pressure, waiting for the moment he’d wake up, but it never came. He pinched until his claws pierced through his rough, leathery skin and blood dripped into the eye in his hand. He blinked it away, tearing up from the pain and the blood and the horrifying reality he now found himself in.

What-- what was he going to do now? He couldn’t-- he was a monster!

A sudden voice interrupted his spiral, quiet yet much too loud.

“Look outside... it’s beautiful.”

Sam looked up hesitantly from his spot on the floor, spotting a crack in his wall. He didn’t remember that being there before---had he accidentally damaged his wall? Whatever, he had bigger things to worry about than rent right now.

“H-- hello?” His mouths stuttered nervously, voices stumbling over each other with all the grace of a beached whale. “Who’s there?”

The room was silent for a little while before an eye suddenly popped into the crack in the wall.

“Wait, no... don’t look outside.” The eye swiveled around in the crack before landing on Sam’s curled form.

“Oh.”

Sam held up several pairs of hands. “Hold on-- hold on! It’s not what it looks like!” He stumbled to his dozens of feet, hitting his head(?) on the ceiling with a painful thump and recoiling a little.

“Shit.” He hissed, and with his multitude of voices it really did sound like a hiss. He awkwardly stumbled his way over to the eye in the wall, his upper body teetering precariously before he finally propped himself up against the wall with his hands. Habit had him wanting to lean down and look at the crack head-on, but he was quick to realize that he was already looking at the mystery wall person eye-to-eye.

“You already looked outside, didn’t you?” The voice in the wall sounded... remorseful.

Sam quirked a hundred eyebrows at that (god, that felt really weird), leaning away a little. “Huh? What do you mean?”

“Something’s happening right now. There’s something outside, and-- if you look at it, it changes you.” The eye looked him up and down. “But I think you already figured that out.”

“I-- I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sam watched the eye flinch a tad bit, and he realized maybe he was a bit louder than he thought he was. “I-- uh, I just woke up like this.”

The eye blinked, then narrowed. “Did you sleep with your blinds open?”

“...Yeah?”

The wall-eye sighed. “That makes sense.” It looked back up to him, gaze flitting between his various eyes, unnerving him every time he made eye contact with it from a different angle. “You seem sane enough, I guess.”

“I was supposed to go insane?!” Sam reared back from the crack in the wall, upper body twisting almost like a snake as he took a few staggering steps away from it. Some eyes closer to his back caught sight of the open window behind him and widened. “Do-- should I cover my window?!”

“I’d say you’re in the clear now, but it wouldn’t hurt to close ‘em anyway.”

Sam clumsily made his way to the window, doing his best to close all of his eyes as he drew the oddly-resized curtains over the similarly-resized windowframe.

When that was finished, he slowly peeked his eyes open. It felt like a hundred painless cuts were opening all across his body.

“So...” The wall person’s eye flitted away nervously.

The two of them stewed in mutual silence before the voice in the wall finally piped up.

“...By the way, I’m Sybil, your neighbor. I don’t think we talked much before.”

“Yeah.” Sam sat himself down on the floor and tried to get comfortable, eventually settling for coiling up and resting his probably-head on his own back. The position was surprisingly comfortable despite how contorted he was; apparently, his hair had grown along his entire length like some sort of mane, and if he stopped thinking he could pretend that he was petting a dog or something.

“Well, my name’s Sam.” His voices were muffled by his own body---wow, that was a weird sentence. He was suddenly hit with a wave of revulsion at himself, his gut (if he still had that) twisting uncomfortably as he became hyperaware of every minute, inhuman feature.

Nope. Nooooope. Stop thinking about that. Stop thinking about that. Everything was fine. Stop thinking about that.

“Sam, huh?” Sybil smiled---or, at least, Sam assumed that she was smiling, because her eye was kind of narrowed. “It’s nice to meet you! Even if it’s under, uh... less than ideal circumstances.”

Sam actually snorted at that, closing his eyes; it was easier to deal with all the new features when he didn’t have to actually deal with the new features.

“That’s one way to put it. Do you know what’s going on, anyway?”

“Like I said, something’s in the sky right now. I heard it’ll leave in... 15 days, I think. We shouldn’t leave our apartments, though.”

Sam cracked an eye open, forcefully keeping the rest of them shut. “We’re supposed to hunker down for two weeks?”

“More or less.” Sybil said. Sam buried his face into his mane and groaned.

“I don’t have enough food to last me three days, let alone two weeks!” That wasn’t even touching on the fact that he’d definitely be needing more food at his size. He only had---what, a few boxes of frozen pizza bites and pre-made meals? That was nothing.

Sybil coughed, catching his attention. “You could scavenge for something... or maybe ask around?”

“Like anybody would lend food to a monster.” Sam huffed, shoving his face even deeper into his mane as if that would suddenly make him disappear. “I’m going to die here.”

“Look, Sam.” Sybil sighed, but Sam didn’t respond. “I’m... I’ll admit, it’s not going to be pretty out there. I-- I saw some horrible things happen out in the hall.” Her gaze shifted nervously as she continued. “I can’t get out of my apartment, so I can’t help much, but maybe you can.”

At Sam’s continued silence, she said, “You’re not the worst thing I’ve seen, if that makes you feel better.”

That finally got a reaction out of Sam, as the monster peeked over his mane with two eyes opened. “...Really?”

“Yeah.”

Sam took in a shaky breath, slowly unraveling from his coil and slouching to avoid the ceiling. “Okay. Okay. I can... I can do this.” He muttered to himself, but the words became indecipherable in the sea of copied whispers. He balled his hands into fists, letting sharpened claws and impossibly smaller hands dig into his palms. Wait, what?!

Okay, he was not unpacking that right now.

“Anything you need?” He twisted his upper body around to face Sybil even though he could simply open the rest of his eyes and avoid the motion altogether.

“Nah, I’m good.” Sybil said. “You go worry about yourself first, alright? Stay safe!” And with that, Sam’s neighbor disappeared into darkness, leaving him alone in his room.

Okay, okay. Okay. This was... okay. Just-- get out, get some food. Maybe talk to the other people on the floor? Warn them not to look outside? Yeah, yeah, he could do that. He could do that, and he could ignore that he was a horrifying mass of eyes and arms and teeth.

He stumbled over to the door of his room only to find that it had stayed the same size and shape, unlike literally everything else in his apartment so far.

Shit.