[dreamwidth mirror]
~600 words
iii/iv

The first time he goes back to Barian world, gets a look at himself in the reflection of a crystal, he flinches. It’s not so bad in the human skin; it’s the kind of clean, careful scar that’s almost flattering. Not… this, not the deep rift in his mask like someone’s tried to remove it from his face. Deep and wide enough that he can slip a claw carefully between the cleaved-apart edges and brush the point just barely over the stinging, split skin underneath.

“Nii-sama? Are you okay?” comes a soft voice from behind him, makes him jump and spin almost guiltily away from where he’d been looking at his reflection more closely in the crystal.

“Not supposed to call me that here, Mikal,” he says for lack of anything better to say. He can’t answer the question - doesn’t really need to anyway, does he? They both know that he isn’t. That none of them are, that every moment they have to spend back in this place makes everything worse. Especially for him, the between-boy, the one who doesn’t quite belong with the rest of them.

His comment only gets him a little, tittering laugh, one hand moving up to cover Mikal’s face as if there’s any mouth there to hide - good, Thomas thinks to himself, good that he’s not the only one reaching for the human skin even if Mikal-Michael’s reaching is less desperate than his own.

“Fine then, Tohmus,” Mikal says after a moment, watches Thomas flinch and then softens again into Michael. “Nii-sama,” he says again, then. Decisively this time.

There’s a long silence between them after that, Thomas turning back to inspect his reflection further and probe again at the stinging, burning skin under his mask. He wonders whether it’ll ever stop hurting, ever heal from this. Whether he can escape this pain for a single moment that he’s in this form, or whether the human world is the only place he’s safe from it.

Would it be worth it? Would an end to the pain be worth giving up forever the starlight that burns in his veins, the stars that sing to him and through him? Giving up the flickering brush of Mikal’s light against his own as he stands there, the way it curls (possessive, biting) slow against his until he shivers where he stands?

God, yes, he thinks to himself, feels Mikal’s light shift and bite and knows it must have shown in his own.

“Are you going to abandon your family?” comes the voice from behind him, quiet and high and Michael, the soft human skin. Thomas can still feel the light biting at him though, little pin-pricks that feel like he’s trying to steal little chunks of Thomas’s light away from him, and that’s all Mikal. All the hard rock-thing with the sharp claws and the sharp eyes and the even sharper soul.

He pulls himself away, opens a portal - because their ‘father’ be damned, he’s not staying in this place a moment longer than he has to and they can call him back when they actually need him - and starts to step through it. Still. Cruel to leave with nothing, says the voice in the back of his head that wants to pretend that Mikal is the soft child he pretends to be in the human world - the bright, sparkling thing he’d been before Alberan had tried to join them there and gone so wrong - so he tilts his head back a little and tries not to look too hard at the hard-eyed thing watching him for fear of ruining the fragile illusion in his mind.

“Barians don’t have family,” is all he can make himself say in the end.