#worker ant | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

iavenjqasdf · 4 months

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👷‍♀️occupational hazards🐜

WorkerAnt, the world's app-first construction contracting platform, revolutionized the building-building industry. All you gotta do is just scroll through a couple of boring legal things on your phone and check some boxes and voila; you have everything you need to try and build a living with your own two hands! Who needs a fancy degree, or the hassle of going to a trade school? I certainly didn't!

They didn't even make me do a drug test, or ask why my name and sex didn't match what it still says on my license, so honestly it's like a win/win for everyone involved.

I did my paid training in like 20 minutes; I just needed to watch a few videos telling me where to go and what I’ll get fired for, plus one on how to use pronouns respectfully.

I already knew most of the stuff they were telling me, so I pretty much just got paid to relearn what the right things to call myself are for liability purposes. I usually do that for free!

Every day, all I gotta do is show up at the check-in location, get handed all my tools, and then I take my mandatory 30 minute lunch break in the app right as I wait in line for the elevator up to the job site, so I can focus on nothing but work for the next 12 hours. I don’t need to worry about food anyways, because they sometimes throw pizza parties for us, and there might be a few slices left when I come back down.

Most of the time work’s pretty boring; I'm just hammering some boards together or whatever. The whole building looks like it's basically already all built, so I'm not sure what all the things we're attaching and connecting to each other are supposed to do, and I don’t get paid enough to care.

But I can’t complain. It’s an honest job; I have tasks to accomplish and all the tools I need to accomplish them, as long as I don't fuck something up.

I'm very happy with this arrangement and it's all worked out really great for me so far.

It does get a bit lonely up there sometimes though.

There is my one coworker, Lana; I think she might also be trans, though it's kinda hard to tell under the hard hat goggles and respirator I always see her wearing. But she's always polite at me and doesn’t give me any trouble, and the bits of her voice I’ve heard that aren’t drowned over by power tools sound really nice.

Sometimes I think about it even when she's not around, which now that I think about it is kinda like stealing from the job site, and that’s a firable offense, so maybe I shouldn't be doing it.

She tends to work late like me, too. It takes us both longer than everyone else to finish all our tasks, but at least they pay us almost as much!

Tonight, it's New Year's Eve, and we're the only ones still up there; hammering stuff together, unable to look out at the empty city below, lit up and then abandoned for the season, because I'm being paid the minimum tipped wage to cut a 2x4 with a dinky little dollar store dremel, and we have to finish up before the sun sets, cause the cost of running the lights gets taken outta your pay.

BZZSCHLKK!

And now my finger hurts too.

I look down, staring at the little squiggly meat piece of guy lying on the workbench, and after a minute I realize that oh shit, that used to be part of my right pinky.

So might the scarlet mist that now covers most of the walls and floor. I’m gonna have to get THAT painted over before the end of my shift, too.

First things first, though.

"Um, hey Lana?"

The whirring echoing from the other side of the room powers down. Lana pulls her plastic goggles over the rim of her hard hat, both now spritzed ever-so-gently with my crimson phalangemarrow. She looks only mildly concerned as she swims upstream along the spatter pattern.

One of the stickers on her hat catches the sunlight, holographic prism reflections dazzling my vision before my pattern recognition software kicks in-

Y-yeah, I know what that logo is. I’m too afraid to ask her if she does, too though. They make s*x t*ys, after all, and I think those are by definition Not Safe For Work.

Without saying a word she grabs my wrist, yanking my hand up to her face to examine it. Even under the visor, her eyes are red; bloodshot, and they scare me a little, so I try speaking up.

"Um, Lana, I think I need to go to the, uh. Hospital, place,"

"Why?"

I stare at her, dumbfounded for a second, before a pulse of pain reminds me of the severance’s urgency.

"W-well, to get it, like, reattached, y'know?"

She looks at the little meat squiggum lying sadly on the bench, letting go of my hand.

"Not really anything left to reattach."

Her voice is muffled by the respirator, but her expression is one of almost boredom. I feel bad for offending her, even though I’m not sure how I did it.

I try flexing a bit. OUCH! Bad idea. I pinch hard just below the cut, to try to keep more things from coming out of me. "W-well, we have to at least try…"

She eyes her own workstation impatiently, dying orange skyfire burning in the reflections of her eyes. A little spurt of blood squirts out of my pinky stump.

"Look, if you keep wasting time worrying about stupid little things like that, you’re not gonna last long here.”

What the fuck is she talking about?! I’m very badly hurt, and I need to go get it checked out right away. Tears well up in my eyes as I keep staring at where my finger now ends, just above the second knuckle.

I'll never get to pinky promise silly things to my little sister again; I’d only have a reminder of this loss, something permanently removed I could never get back.

I inhale a sniffle. "P-please, we gotta go. I don't wanna go around rounding up the number of fingers I have for the rest of my life."

She rolls her eyes, reshielding them with her goggles. "Would a round number make you feel better?"

"What?"

My dremel's motor whines to life as she turns back to face me.

"For symmetry, y'know?"

Her tone concerns me.

She grabs my good hand, forcing it flat against the workbench. I try to pull free, but my knees are still a bit wobbly from the pain, and I don’t want to risk any sudden moves around the little spinning amputation death motor, so I can't try too hard.

“L-listen, I’m sorry for involving you. J-just let me go and I-I’ll just clock myself out, and get to the hospital on my own…” My hand grasps at her, trying to push her away, but all I succeed in doing is knocking her respirator loose, and I gasp as all the gouges and scars and other missing bits of her face come into focus at last.

I see her teeth click as her jaw clenches, bone trembling with the purest expression of rage. Her knuckles are white around the dremel.

"Long term, working here is gonna take a lot more of you than I’m gonna.”

BZZZZZZSZCHLRRKKRRRRRK--

“Oh, hold on, it got stuck.”

My vision doubles and quadruples, the room swimming around me as I try to keep myself from passing out. This is obviously a dream, and hey, I haven’t had one of these in a while, let’s just try to keep it going right hahahaha-

WHRRRGGZZCCHLLTLTTTTTT!

The spinny deathblade plants another gentle kiss against my fingerbone, tingling my entire skeleton with electromechanical sparks. I stare at a bead of sweat tracing down Lana's cheek as the blade grinds through at last with a spray of calcium white.

The whine fades as the disposable plastic motor inside the tool gets gummed up with mutilated chunks of gore. My mouth hangs open making a noise and I'm afraid it's probably kind of a pathetic one. The bottoms of my goggles are filling up with tears, but that means I’m doing a good job of keeping the crying contained inside, so there's a chance Lana might still think I'm cool.

“There you go. Eight plus two halves equals nine. Almost as many as before.”

“ohgodohgodohgodohgod-” I wish I had something more interesting to say.

“What? I thought you wanted a round number.”

“Ijustwantedmyhandstobenormalagain-”

She pauses for a moment, then wanders off into the neighboring room, leaving me standing there, trembling alone in the dark.

I think about trying to find my own way back to the elevator, but I’m afraid of tripping over a lead pipe or something on the ground and having to use my damaged limbs to break my fall and mangling them further, and I don’t wanna get my phone all bloody to use the flashlight either, so I stay put.

Fireworks burst off in the distance, prematurely celebrating the dawn of a big new thing. I try not to look down at my mutilated handflesh, instead insisting my gaze on the sunset bathing over the city.

It's a really nice view, and I don't know if I'll get to be up here to enjoy it ever again.

“Okay, here, I can fix everything.”

She's returned, and I can’t get away from her because I don’t want to say no, so I let her take my bleeding broken hands and lead me to the workbench again.

Behind her gore-spattered goggles, I can see her eyes are swimming with tears now too, like she doesn't know what the fuck she's doing either, but I don't even hate her for it, I don't think.

"Here, just hold onto me. I'll fix you."

She presses up close, close enough that I can feel a bit of her heat even through her jacket. She takes my unrecognizably mutilated hand in her own and strokes it softly.

The lead in my stomach sinks deeper when I see that she's holding a staple gun in her other.

I tighten my grip, spilling blood onto her palm.

THUNK.

----------------------------------------

She sweeps the remains of my amputated digits off the ledge with her boot, sending little chunks of meat tumbling into the glimmering city grid. Thankfully, the night is cold enough now that I can't feel much of my hands at all.

Staple gun didn't work out too good.

She fiddles with something on the side of her hard hat, and a light comes on. It's kind of dim, but it's better than nothing.

We walk past piles of unsawed boards, boxes of nails and wrenches and other tool things. Neither of us say anything to each other. Even more fireworks are whistling and exploding above the city in the distance but I'm not getting paid to care.

She stands beside me in the dusk-filled elevator. We descend slow, neither of us averting our gaze from the doors sealed tight in front of us.

“Um, Lana?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think I'm coming in to work tomorrow.”

“You’re not,” she states plainly. “Any injury sustained on the clock is grounds for termination, remember?”

“Oh, right…”

We’re quiet for a while. I don’t like the silence, the emptiness, so I try to fill it as always. “Um, I’m sorry for getting you involved…”

“It’s fine,” she lets out a quivering little sigh and turns to face me at last. “I don’t think they were gonna keep me on much longer, either way. I waste a lot of staples…”

I pick at a little crooked piece of metal worming its way through the layers of fat and muscle that once made up our entwined fingers, wondering how much more might need to be amputated by the time we get to a hospital, then a laugh catches in my throat, when I remember we no longer have health insurance.

ao3

#📝#guro #ero guro #original fiction #toxic yuri #worker ants

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