Someone To Come Back To

“‘If you don’t know who to mimic, mimic me’ is quite the powerful sentence to say to a shapeshifter.” His voice is soft as molten rock, dark eyes glittering with some deep, consuming hunger. The room seems to breathe with him, and I suddenly feel like nothing in the centre of it, a mere speck looking up at him.

But I stand strong as he stalks towards me, pulling his form in as he does so, shadows bleeding out of the chamber as he absorbs them like a sponge until I stand face to face with my own likeness, uncanny in its lack of mirroring, unsettling in the voice that sounds so different without the vibrations carried through my skull as he whispers, “I could do anything like this, anything, and all the world will see is you. Do you understand what you’re asking? What you’re risking? You’re willing to unleash me, wearing your face as my disguise, upon the world?”

“If it means you always have something to come back to, yes.”

He recoils, the snake-like movement oddly disjointed in my body, narrowing his eyes and tilting his head like a cat about to strike, staring at me for a long moment. He was never able to hide his surprise. “Do you even hear what I’m saying?” His voice is still harsh and whispery, almost a hiss without the resonance it had in his natural form, though he seems more bewildered than angry, sparks of curiosity showing through the hunger. “I could go out there, do whatever I want, hurt everyone you care about, destroy everything you love, break every single one of the principles which you hold so dear, then return here and leave you to face all of the consequences alone, as you have always been, and you’re allowing me?”

“I have not always been alone.”

“From the moment of your birth, unloved, unwanted, pushed aside by everyone you tried to grasp hold of, you say you weren’t alone?”

“At times I was.” I shrug. “But not since I met you – even before, when you were there but I didn’t see you, you were with me.”

He stares at me, tenseness draining into blank shock.

“And while you could go and do all those things,” I continue, “something tells me that you won’t. Because if you do, you’ll have to sit and watch me suffer the consequences, or choose to turn away and leave me to deal with them alone, and if you do you’ll be just as alone as you were before you met me. And I don’t think you want either of those options, do you.”

Even the blankness drains away, and he seems to become smaller, my own face softening before my eyes to what it must have been the first time he saw me, caught my little speck and magnified it to admire the beauty of a single snowflake. He crumbles under the ocean welling up inside him and bows his head to rest it on my shoulder, wrapping his arms around me, and I hold him until he knows that no matter how far he goes, he always has someone to come back to.