Something To Hold Onto
What do you want?
The voice sounds like your own... no, like your old human male self's. You look up from burying your muzzle in your hands, but it's just you on the hill. Your tail's soaking up water from the grass and flowers. "I shouldn't have a tail!" you say. This new voice of yours is ragged and you can't quit crying like a sissy self-indulgent emo teenager. You don't have a right to be whining. Not with a wonderful life laid out for you like this!
Keep telling yourself that, you hear. It's not like you can ever go back.
Your ears flick to catch a rustle in the grass. If it's Bragho he'll cuddle you in his arms and everything will feel okay... Damn it, no!
Old You asks, Is it the thought of being female? Walking to the altar in a white dress or whatever they do here; becoming a mother? Or is it the fact that you'll never be human again, stuck with a big pointy muzzle and fur all over? Or the fact that you could've made a difference back home? You're stuck barring what, eight hundred rounds of the costume game.
"I'm scared," you whimper. "Scared that --"
The grass rustles again, distracting you. Then you catch his scent. Wylan smells like well-worn leather and trail dust down to his skin or beyond. "Evenin'," he says with a tip of his hat. He moves stiffly up the hill to reach you. "Feeling all right?"
"I'm not some damsel in distress!" you say.
"Didn't say you were. I see somebody that needs help, I get my conscience poked with pitchforks till I do something. Doesn't have to be damsels. Or foxes."
Right; he knows your story. When you look up pleadingly into his eyes, they flash like an animal's in the moonlight. Not human. But the feeling behind them is the same. You ease yourself into sitting on the grass, patting a spot beside you. "Just don't touch me."
Wylan lowers himself to sit beside you. He tilts his hat back and looks at the stars fading in. "Nice night. You have stars like this back home?"
"Y-yeah," you say. The sun's vanishing in a blaze of purple and gold, wind's teasing through your fur, and there's a scent of flowers and old leather. "I ought to be happy."
He glances over as you sniffle, then looks back at the sky. "Used to camp out during the war. I wasn't a fighter like my wife, just a maintenance guy. But we were outside together." His scent takes on that clammy tone you sensed from him before. There's hurt buried there.
You start to lean over to hug him, but stop yourself with a shudder. "Nobody knows what I've been through to get here. Nobody except Bragho, and he... he..."
Wylan looks up sharply. "Did he do anything improper?"
"No! That's just it. He was wonderful, and I felt like I wanted to stay. But what am I doing? I've been rewritten so that I like all the wrong things, I have a tail, I don't know anybody here, my old family and friends are gone. I'm not Lenara, and I'm being pushed into being her!"
Wylan grunts. "I think I get it. You're worried that the wizard fella stole your soul."
"What?"
He takes off his hat and waves it over the sunset valley. All this could be yours... He says, "This here's my world. Never known another. I've got its dirt in my fur and some family in the soil. And when I get a script I'm always basically the same guy, typecast as a cowboy. The time I played an ancient warlord instead, it was just awful. If you handed me a script like that and said I'm stuck in that role, I'd feel like quitting."
"A script," you murmur. Here, the wizard and Bragho basically told you: you're a different person now and here are your house and your job and your new name and forget your past. "And if I quit, I still can't really go home. I can't ever be the same person I was. At best I'd get back eight hundred identities later, probably insane."
Wylan nods. "I know you're not our Lenara, and Bragho takes a shine to you because you've gone through the costume thing like him. The thing is, have you kept what's most important?"
"What's that?"
"You tell me."
You take stock of this strange body you're in. You used to be a decent-looking guy, but you weren't vain enough to think your furless face was the most important thing about you. You're uneasy about some other parts, but even those changes aren't the end of the world. You shut eyes and think back to your Earth, your childhood, your friends. You clench fists at your sides, knowing you won't see that world again. That's been taken from you. What's left are the memories, and some part of you that wants to keep them.
So there is something left of your old self. "I'm still the same person, at least a little. Even if the rest of me got stolen, eaten, rewritten, I still remember where I'm from, and I still think the same way."
Wylan's tail flicks across the grass, wagging a bit. "That'll change a bit, though. Life tends to do that."
You force a smile. It's getting dark and the stars are all blurs as you keep blinking back tears. "I got shoved into this role, but I can play it how I want, right? As long as I keep that memory with me, and some of how I think, I can let myself change and still be the same. Even if I end up using another costume. Oh, I'm not making any sense, am I?"
Wylan says, "It sounds good to me. Actually, there's something I've forgotten." He hauls himself to his feet and offers a hand. "I don't think we've rightly been introduced. I'm Wylan, and I'd like to be your friend."
You look at his fuzzy hand and tell yourself you don't need the help... but your macho pride isn't important, right? You reach out and let him pull you up, feeling light. It's then that you notice the night breeze, making all the plants around you whisper. Every strand of fur tickles you, making your outline blurry and constantly changing. But you feel your own breathing and your heartbeat just the same, inside.
"Hello," you say, shaking his warm hand and pulling him into a hug that feels right no matter what you are. "For now, at least, call me Lenara."
Written by Snow on 06 July 2010
