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total-maehem · 3 months

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"Can I tell you something?"

The girl sat by the campfire, lazily stoking it with a stick doesn't remove her gaze from the licks of flame. "Depends. Are you going to give me an explanation as to why we're here?"

"I—," you sputter out the short noise before clamping your mouth shut. It'd be better if you showed her. She pokes at the crumbling logs again, a dance of embers bursting upwards in drifting spirals.

"Because I know we're not here just to camp," she continues, eyes tracking upwards with the glowing specks. "You've been anxious as fuck since we arrived. I have eyes. Your fingernails look like shit with all that biting." Ah, fuck.

"W-well, it's something you should really know about me." You shuffle between the fire and the foldable chair placed beside it, eyes stinging as you catch a face full of smoke on your way to her side. You take a knee on ashy soil, still slightly damp from showers the prior day, and steady yourself with your hands.

She doesn't look at you. You dig your fingers into the dirt.

"You know what I've been thinking this is," she finally asks after a prolonged moment.

"What, hun?"

"The moment since we've got here, I've been thinking, 'This is it. This is the part where he breaks up with me.' I been thinking this is your intricate, fucked up way of separating." She waves her free hand in the air, continuing, "And how would I know! I can barely tell what's on your mind most of the time!"

That's not what this is. Not at all. Your heart breaks to even comprehend she's felt like this.

Perhaps it shows on your face because she gives you a peculiar side-glance, eyes glinting with curiosity.

"No!" You reach for her but she flinches, your hand halting in place mid-reach, going slightly limp. Softer, "no, that's not it. Why would I—"

"You're a mirror."

The first time she says it, it sounds like a profound realization.

Silence. The crackle of fire, the chirping of night critters, the cacophony hiss of wind swept tree branches, gone. She sits there, an infinite stare piercing the flames once more.

"What?"

"A mirror. You take on the mannerisms, the patterns, the emotions that others show you, and give it right back." She hangs her head low to the dirt as if she's espousing some fatal truth. "It makes you so easy to love but impossible to know.

"Because, love? Your mirror is cracked. I've known you long enough to tell it isn't you.

"And that was okay for a while. It was so simple to be with you... until the past month.

"You've grown distant and quiet, and I'm worried that you've been a mirror for so long that you haven't noticed your cracks were growing to the point of you being unable to reflect me anymore.

"I'd like to know what lies behind the broken shards but...

Is there anything even there?

Her head turns to you, golden fire-lit eyes landing on your face. You can see your perfectly blank face reflected in them. Hairline cracks decorate your face in an intricate web, crumbling shards falling from your glassy cheeks.

Your hands find their way to your face, fingers landing on the smooth surface with a hard clink. More cracks form at the points of contact, branching to other splits in the material of your smooth skin and knocking more shards loose.

The dirt beneath you is littered with ash and glass. Pieces of you, sharp and fractured, sunken into the earth. Your glass fingers try to pluck the shards out of the ground but only manage to break them further, chipping away at intricately painted details of soft skin and nails bitten away to the false skin. Soon your struggling to bend your fingers at all, stiff as can be in a straightforward posture.

Soft, fleshy fingers gently grab your flaking chin. She turns your emotionless face towards her. Her eyes glow brighter, no longer permitting reflection.

"I'm sorry." A hand is placed upon your chest, just over your heart. "It's too late to go back, you already saw it..."

Another hand combs through the thin glass hairs on your head, shearing them off as she goes. A soft smile tugs at her lips as she says, "but it'll be okay. I've been here before too you know."

She pushes with an inhuman force upon your chest...

And your glass shell shatters.

Emptiness prevails in the sensation of your chest, a million shards falling inwards and disappearing into your void. The gaping hole spreads further as your internal gravity wins over the failing integrity of your body.

Before you, a known but undefined entity kneels onto the dirt with you, in a body of its own design. Her perfectly crafted hands place themselves upon your cracked thighs, thumbs gently tracing circles over the smooth surface. She leans forward, lips next to your broken left ear, its top half snapped off. She speaks in a voice she spent much time perfecting.

"It's almost done, sweetest. Just know I'll love you, whatever you decide to be without your shell. I'll be by your side."

With a quick movement, she shifts all of her immense, impossible weight into the hands on your thighs. They shatter instantly, and take the lower legs and feet folded beneath with them, shards falling upwards into your core. All that remains of you after a few moments is a wispy void. And then...

"Oh. Gorgeous."

An ember from the campfire strays from its upwards path, drifting towards the void of you.

And then another.

And another.

Unlike your shattered shell, these embers do not flicker out of existence in your gravity well. Instead, they begin to wrap around your core in a tight orbit.

The campfire dims as the void of you draws out bursting flecks of glowing carbon, drawing more and more into your orbit, until you are just a sphere of spinning ember light. A sparking fire ball of potential.

Potential. You can feel liquid potential circling around you, currently formless. Potential you can control, shape and mold into whatever the void of you desires. You're not sure what to make of it.

"Whatever you want. This is for no one else but you. Don't hold back," your loving entity replies to your wordless question.

You begin with a small movement. An arc of flame goes wide of the sphere before falling back into the fold. Okay. Maybe you can put more strength behind it.

A minor explosion is the result of that effort, as you learn the extent of your shaping strength. The entity leaps back, a few nasty embers leaving burns across her skin, which are quickly overtaken by a golden glow from inside that fades back into unblemished epidermis. You feel larger, embers leaping off of molten liquid hissing and bubbling in the brisk air.

"Okay, now shape it!"

For lack of a better template at the moment, you try to form the liquid with invisible hands into curves just like the contours of her body. The torso comes into definition, followed by limbs shooting out, and finally a head filling out a rather obvious replication of her, made of the caustic liquid. Your molten feet touch the ground, boiling the water trapped in the soil beneath into steam.

A bubbly laugh comes from her. You look up from your glowing body to see her head thrown back. She's actually crying of laughter, what the hell? She said anything!

You place liquid hands upon your liquid hips, annoyed at the obvious judgement of your choice of form, which only serves to make her double over again.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry, it's just..." she pauses to wipe a tear from her eye. "I should have expected you'd try to be me first! Shattered one mirror for another, eh?"

Another bout of laughter. You'd consider her an ass if it wasn't so cute. Well, no, she is an ass, but a cute one at least. This sudden flow of emotion-laden thought comes with new curiosities.

You look down at your body once again, and decide you like its curves, but start to make simple alterations. Simple begins with changing your height, material expanding with a deep thrum and burst of heat until you're towering over her.

"Wow, that's like, a lot more than professional athlete height!" The comment wavers in tone, as if the size is affecting her. You lean in close and her face turns red—and not just from the orange glow of your molten body.

Having had your fun with height, you shrink back with a sharp hiss of escaping pressure and heat, much to her apparent disappointment. There are other things you try, like proportions and weight, but some things stay the same, like having breasts, which feel so right it feels wrong. You make this form your own.

It's pretty clear that you've settled on a feminine body, which makes so much sense to a certain part of you. You are a bit tired of being a humanoid light bulb though.

"We can work on that now. Imagine what you want to be made of, and reach for it."

The lava that makes you starts to cool off, flickering light ebbing away to dark basalt. You feel it crack and reform as you bend your arm at the elbow. A new idea strikes you, and before long, the rock crumbles away all across your body as if it were just a thin crust, revealing a shiny metal skin beneath. Neat.

After definitely not an abundance of playing around with this (you really liked being a sentient humanoid water thing, that was cool), you returned to what you knew best, with human skin and hair.

You test your voice for the first time, a feminine lilt, saying, "what happens now? Once I find what I want to be, will I be stuck like that forever?" The lightness of your tone gives you a fluttery feeling in your chest.

Her hands find her way onto your hips as she pulls you close. "That's the best part. What we want to be isn't a static thing," she says. "As we grow, as we learn, as we experience, what we want to he changes. You and I are gifted with the knowledge that we are malleable things. Entities of change. One's who can embrace it with no restriction."

You look at your hand, you shape it. Scales chase up the wrist and previously bitten down nails slide out into avian talons. You flip it over, and in the midst of the motion consider another form. Tufts of fur burst from the gaps between scales, and leathery pads swell upon your fingers and palms. The talons shrink back into canine claws, that you could easily imagine digging into the dirt to pull you into a sprint.

You let it return to a human shape as you look back at her, emotions overwhelming you.

"I had something I wanted to tell you," you say, tears pooling in your eyes. She tips her head forward, your foreheads touching. "I think... I'm a girl..."

"I know, baby. I know you are."

She wraps you in her arms as you let it all out, sobbing into her neck. She doesn't let you go even as the campfire simmers and cracks, no more flames licking up into the sky. She doesn't let you go as the night critters resume their chirping. She doesn't let you go as the wind swept trees bristle under the growing light of dawn.

Not even as you both let sleep take you, no more mirrors and broken shells keeping you apart.

#mae reads #writing #transgender #lesbian #reblog

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