Why did it have to be naked?
It was the first thought that came to mind as she began to stir from a sleep that had felt endless. Her body lay somewhere unfamiliar, stiff and strangely arranged in a darkened room. She had no idea how she’d gotten there. The sweat-stained sheets beneath her and foreign scents she couldn’t quite place at first, concentrating on distinguishing each one until they made sense. Somewhere masked by the sweat, stale smoke and sharp acrid smell of cooked chemicals was something vitally and distinctly masculine. It flooded her senses, confusing them. It made her think of Perry.
How long had it been since she’d seen his face?
Too long, she decided and yet…
That was why she’d ended up in the darkness, to search for the face of her loved one. She’d seen it walking the streets in unfamiliar clothes, with different markings on the skin and an expression twisting his features. It wasn’t him, but a doppelganger or clone, a subpar version that left her feeling even more desperately alone. A mere glimpse of a man who she missed with her entire being. He was her disaster, more so now than ever before and she wondered if she’d ever see him in the flesh again. Thoughts of him had consumed her waking hours, the imposter causing her to seek him with greater fervor than before. Her failure had only lead to a deep and unshakable despair, one that had her neglecting all chance at happiness if it meant being able to fall into eternity in his arms. It was a curse, a cruel and lonely thing that left her utterly bereft without her sire and with the need to replicate the feeling by making more of their kind as if that could fill the void. The only other option had been the all-consuming shadows, the broken realm of endless cracked pavement and broken windows, of doors that always seemed just out of reach. A place to wait out eternity.
She’d chosen darkness, rather than inflict her curse on others.
What drove her to crawl through one of those doors when she finally managed to catch up to it seemed to escape her memory for the moment. Her brain felt heavy and sluggish in her head, a mass of wasting grey matter that was struggling to spark signals to stir her painfully splayed body. It felt like hours just to get her fingers and toes twitching, even longer to make those limbs stretch out and shift upon the wreckage of a bed. She felt marooned upon it like a ship crashed upon a deserted island, dashed to bits against the rocks that surrounded it. Pulling herself into a seated position was a near embarrassing amount of effort, finding herself sitting taller than she remembered even in the awkward slouch her spine curved into. Still too weak to achieve much else. Her limbs felt too long as if stretched by some macabre medieval torture device until they become ungainly weights she struggled to arrange appropriately. It didn’t help that her mouth felt like it had been swabbed with cotton, the moisture removed to leave behind the sickly acidic taste of bile that she couldn’t seem to swallow away. Even her throat felt strange, something bobbing heavily at the action. Another added weight she had not counted on.
Was this because she had spent so long in the shadows?
Her body did not feel like her own, she assumed it was just a matter of the spirit taking time trying to fill it, perhaps it had not yet finished the process and she had woken too early. Too late now. What was most perturbing was the strange discomfort between her thighs, the position she’d managed to arrange herself in upon sitting up made something pinch uncomfortably. It forced her to shuffle forwards until feet slapped against the dirty ground of the decaying apartment she’d found herself in, wriggling until she was able to part her knees in a most unladylike manner. The effort of it was enough to make her want to give up, to fall dizzily back into the bed and she damn near did. Everything felt out of proportion, her torso too had been put through the wringer and her legs fathomless, the knees bending up too close to her chest. Perhaps the bed was low to the ground, she reasoned, grasping for the explanation rattling lazily around her aching brain. Her back, however, felt oddly relieved as if a weight had been taken from her upper torso. It was why she finally cracked open eyes that felt glued shut with gathered sleep, reaching up to gently push it from her lashes with finger pads that felt too large and rougher than remembered. The room was dim, dust motes barely perceivable in the gloom as they floated down, angrily disturbed by the motion of the rising vampire. It took time for her eyes to adjust, blinking thick lashes and stretching her face, testing its responsiveness. She could part her lips and wriggle her nose, she could see and frown and raise her brows, she could look up and she could look down. She looked down.
She looked down at herself.
No wonder her chest had felt lighter, for it was no longer voluptuously curved. Her ample bosom, which usually dominated the space, was notably absent. It was flat. More than that, it was tattooed, marked with words her adjusting eyes couldn't quite read and symbols she didn’t recognise. The torso was pale in colour, shaded in places by freshly bloomed bruises that appeared to be healing, the ribcage looking painfully discoloured with fine zig-zag markings that spoke of recent fractures. It was quite clearly the torso of a male. The body she stared down at was slender but holding clear definition, flat and firm, the muscle curving in places that suggested it might have once had more bulk. Not badly maintained, but it had been neglected at some point. Her eyes widened in disbelief, unable to stop herself from letting them travel further down over the sharp crest of hips, hollowed on the inner sides where muscle strained and pulled to support the weight of something resting casually between her parted thighs. It was familiar and entirely out of place, entirely wrong.
She was looking at a man, she was staring at a body that brought a familiar pang to her stomach and watched the man beneath her gaze flex and the muscles convulse from the very real physical reaction. It was, for a very clear moment, very much like she were leaning over Perry’s shoulder on a remarkably memorable night, looking down at him and marveling at everything she saw. He had the same shape to him, but broader, no doubt taller than Perry by a few inches. Her hand shook as she lifted it and slid it across the flat planes of a stomach, feeling the sensation of roughened fingertips dragging over smooth skin. Over her skin. She felt a jolt of shock, that hand flexing, balling into a fist that pressed against her guts as they spasmed violently. She was going to be sick, this body was going to be sick.
Her body. His body.
Whose body was this? Why was she in this body? She was…
A man.
Physically, Merry was a man.
The realisation had her reeling, scrambling to try and stand on those long legs and planting the too large feet. She swayed dangerously, stumbling forward until she fetched up against a nearby wall, shoulder slamming painfully and collecting a few flakes of crumbling paint on her skin for the effort. Her lip took up a similar tremble to that which had started in her hands, spreading up her limbs and through her body until she was convulsing and shaking so violently she thought she might break apart. She was afraid, intensely and deeply afraid in a way that had the rational part of her brain trying hard to catch hold of the panic that was spreading through her so that perhaps it could beat it into submission and replace it with a reasonable explanation. There was one, she knew it but it felt out of reach, flickering around the edges of her memory. Something someone had told her once, something about the bodies of her kind. Too bad all she could really think about was the change of weight distribution, of trying to arrange the cumbersome limbs and what was going on below her waist. His waist?
Instead of focusing on the body that had her wanting to scream Merry tried to get a sense of the room around her. It was a crumbling shell of a place, an apartment made up primarily of one large room, a broken bed with a sagging mattress dominating the space. There were two doors in the place, one that appeared to lead towards a bathroom that had a horrifying smell permeating from it and the other she believed to be the exit. A dingy excuse for a kitchenette was off to one side of the room, pots coated in congealed old food shoved in with plates and other dishes in the sink. Upon the stovetop were items that, to someone with a broader knowledge of the big bad world, might mark the place as a drug den but to Merry were nothing more than another layer of confusion for her brain to fight through. Balled up on the floor by the bed she’d emerged from was a pile clothes, and it became something solid to cling to. Clothes. Getting dressed. She figured if they fit her then she could at least cover herself.
Merry approached them, teetering like a newborn giraffe taking those precious, and remarkably awkward, first few steps. Nobbly knees kept making weak threats to give way and send her sprawling back onto the stained sheets to lay and waste among discarded ends of hand-rolled cigarettes and other pieces debris she began to identify in the low lighting, yet she persevered. Merry made it to the clothes, toeing them cautiously, acting like they might bite her were she to reach down and put her fingers into the fabric. Having established that they were safe to collect she needed to pick them up and was surprised to find the bending down was less problematic than she had anticipated, getting some semblance of control over the body now that she was focused on the mechanical, urging it to collect the clothes and dump them on the bed. The haul wasn’t impressive but it was sufficient. It consisted a pair of jeans that had seen better days, a long-sleeved shirt that was remarkably soft to her new fingers and well worn with small holes in places, a white undershirt, a pair of unremarkable black underwear that she was reluctant to put on and a pair of scuffed up boots. No socks. Who wore boots without socks?
The getting dressed part was awkward, uncomfortable and didn’t do much to soothe her shattered nerves, it did, however, mean she didn’t have to look at so much of the body she was inhabiting. Two of the pockets felt weighted, making the jeans sag slightly, and she reached into her pockets to find a worn leather wallet, a set of keys and a very modern looking smartphone that had been roughly treated. Clearly, he didn’t hold much value in the objects, they were there to be used and well used they had been. She wasn’t sure she wanted to open the wallet, not sure she was ready for a thing that felt quite so real. Did this really belong to him? Who was he? Was she him now? Was he her? The thought that had been alluding her began tugging at her attention once more, forcing it’s way to the forefront and demanding to be acknowledged. You’re a mystic, it whispered, your body is a vessel; temporary and interchangeable. Yes. She had been told as much by her friend, Zo. The energy that made her who she was, that animated her own body could move to another upon the return from the shadow realm and animate it in turn. She was herself, that did not change, but her body did. What, then, had happened to the energy of the bodies owner? Curiousity, it got the better of her, fumbling the wallet open so that she could search the contents.
A credit card, a couple of coupon cards, some loose change, a condom, an employee card and a license. A license with a young man’s face and a name. Felix, Felix Sharpe.
She stared at him the face, a hand reaching up to feel the one she wore, fingertips tracing along a jaw that had a few days worth of stubble upon it. Was this what she looked like now? There were no mirrors to reflect the face back to her, and part of her was immensely relieved. “Felix.” She tested the word out, her voice cracking, sounding dry and low. It was a man’s voice, the word sounding strange as she tried to shape it, the mouth not wanting to curve around the vowels in the way she was used to. Merry tried again, loosening the jaw, “Felix, Felix… Merry.” The accent was off, not her own and the vocal chords strained with the effort of trying to make the sounds. American, she thought, a certain twang that if mastered could be quite unique and attractive. It was something she would never have considered, how different it would be trying to shape words in a mouth that did not belong to you, that had been trained differently. It was like trying to speak a new language and being unable to quite capture the tone.
It was just one of the many things she’d need to figure out, one of the many things that were distracting her from the panic gathering beneath her ribcage and threatening to suffocate her. She had to keep moving, had to keep going because if she stopped she’d lose herself to it. There was one obvious choice, the address on the license. It was most likely his house. Perhaps it was exactly where she was, but she had to know either way. Who was he? Who would people think she was?
It was the first thought that came to mind as she began to stir from a sleep that had felt endless. Her body lay somewhere unfamiliar, stiff and strangely arranged in a darkened room. She had no idea how she’d gotten there. The sweat-stained sheets beneath her and foreign scents she couldn’t quite place at first, concentrating on distinguishing each one until they made sense. Somewhere masked by the sweat, stale smoke and sharp acrid smell of cooked chemicals was something vitally and distinctly masculine. It flooded her senses, confusing them. It made her think of Perry.
How long had it been since she’d seen his face?
Too long, she decided and yet…
That was why she’d ended up in the darkness, to search for the face of her loved one. She’d seen it walking the streets in unfamiliar clothes, with different markings on the skin and an expression twisting his features. It wasn’t him, but a doppelganger or clone, a subpar version that left her feeling even more desperately alone. A mere glimpse of a man who she missed with her entire being. He was her disaster, more so now than ever before and she wondered if she’d ever see him in the flesh again. Thoughts of him had consumed her waking hours, the imposter causing her to seek him with greater fervor than before. Her failure had only lead to a deep and unshakable despair, one that had her neglecting all chance at happiness if it meant being able to fall into eternity in his arms. It was a curse, a cruel and lonely thing that left her utterly bereft without her sire and with the need to replicate the feeling by making more of their kind as if that could fill the void. The only other option had been the all-consuming shadows, the broken realm of endless cracked pavement and broken windows, of doors that always seemed just out of reach. A place to wait out eternity.
She’d chosen darkness, rather than inflict her curse on others.
What drove her to crawl through one of those doors when she finally managed to catch up to it seemed to escape her memory for the moment. Her brain felt heavy and sluggish in her head, a mass of wasting grey matter that was struggling to spark signals to stir her painfully splayed body. It felt like hours just to get her fingers and toes twitching, even longer to make those limbs stretch out and shift upon the wreckage of a bed. She felt marooned upon it like a ship crashed upon a deserted island, dashed to bits against the rocks that surrounded it. Pulling herself into a seated position was a near embarrassing amount of effort, finding herself sitting taller than she remembered even in the awkward slouch her spine curved into. Still too weak to achieve much else. Her limbs felt too long as if stretched by some macabre medieval torture device until they become ungainly weights she struggled to arrange appropriately. It didn’t help that her mouth felt like it had been swabbed with cotton, the moisture removed to leave behind the sickly acidic taste of bile that she couldn’t seem to swallow away. Even her throat felt strange, something bobbing heavily at the action. Another added weight she had not counted on.
Was this because she had spent so long in the shadows?
Her body did not feel like her own, she assumed it was just a matter of the spirit taking time trying to fill it, perhaps it had not yet finished the process and she had woken too early. Too late now. What was most perturbing was the strange discomfort between her thighs, the position she’d managed to arrange herself in upon sitting up made something pinch uncomfortably. It forced her to shuffle forwards until feet slapped against the dirty ground of the decaying apartment she’d found herself in, wriggling until she was able to part her knees in a most unladylike manner. The effort of it was enough to make her want to give up, to fall dizzily back into the bed and she damn near did. Everything felt out of proportion, her torso too had been put through the wringer and her legs fathomless, the knees bending up too close to her chest. Perhaps the bed was low to the ground, she reasoned, grasping for the explanation rattling lazily around her aching brain. Her back, however, felt oddly relieved as if a weight had been taken from her upper torso. It was why she finally cracked open eyes that felt glued shut with gathered sleep, reaching up to gently push it from her lashes with finger pads that felt too large and rougher than remembered. The room was dim, dust motes barely perceivable in the gloom as they floated down, angrily disturbed by the motion of the rising vampire. It took time for her eyes to adjust, blinking thick lashes and stretching her face, testing its responsiveness. She could part her lips and wriggle her nose, she could see and frown and raise her brows, she could look up and she could look down. She looked down.
She looked down at herself.
No wonder her chest had felt lighter, for it was no longer voluptuously curved. Her ample bosom, which usually dominated the space, was notably absent. It was flat. More than that, it was tattooed, marked with words her adjusting eyes couldn't quite read and symbols she didn’t recognise. The torso was pale in colour, shaded in places by freshly bloomed bruises that appeared to be healing, the ribcage looking painfully discoloured with fine zig-zag markings that spoke of recent fractures. It was quite clearly the torso of a male. The body she stared down at was slender but holding clear definition, flat and firm, the muscle curving in places that suggested it might have once had more bulk. Not badly maintained, but it had been neglected at some point. Her eyes widened in disbelief, unable to stop herself from letting them travel further down over the sharp crest of hips, hollowed on the inner sides where muscle strained and pulled to support the weight of something resting casually between her parted thighs. It was familiar and entirely out of place, entirely wrong.
She was looking at a man, she was staring at a body that brought a familiar pang to her stomach and watched the man beneath her gaze flex and the muscles convulse from the very real physical reaction. It was, for a very clear moment, very much like she were leaning over Perry’s shoulder on a remarkably memorable night, looking down at him and marveling at everything she saw. He had the same shape to him, but broader, no doubt taller than Perry by a few inches. Her hand shook as she lifted it and slid it across the flat planes of a stomach, feeling the sensation of roughened fingertips dragging over smooth skin. Over her skin. She felt a jolt of shock, that hand flexing, balling into a fist that pressed against her guts as they spasmed violently. She was going to be sick, this body was going to be sick.
Her body. His body.
Whose body was this? Why was she in this body? She was…
A man.
Physically, Merry was a man.
The realisation had her reeling, scrambling to try and stand on those long legs and planting the too large feet. She swayed dangerously, stumbling forward until she fetched up against a nearby wall, shoulder slamming painfully and collecting a few flakes of crumbling paint on her skin for the effort. Her lip took up a similar tremble to that which had started in her hands, spreading up her limbs and through her body until she was convulsing and shaking so violently she thought she might break apart. She was afraid, intensely and deeply afraid in a way that had the rational part of her brain trying hard to catch hold of the panic that was spreading through her so that perhaps it could beat it into submission and replace it with a reasonable explanation. There was one, she knew it but it felt out of reach, flickering around the edges of her memory. Something someone had told her once, something about the bodies of her kind. Too bad all she could really think about was the change of weight distribution, of trying to arrange the cumbersome limbs and what was going on below her waist. His waist?
Instead of focusing on the body that had her wanting to scream Merry tried to get a sense of the room around her. It was a crumbling shell of a place, an apartment made up primarily of one large room, a broken bed with a sagging mattress dominating the space. There were two doors in the place, one that appeared to lead towards a bathroom that had a horrifying smell permeating from it and the other she believed to be the exit. A dingy excuse for a kitchenette was off to one side of the room, pots coated in congealed old food shoved in with plates and other dishes in the sink. Upon the stovetop were items that, to someone with a broader knowledge of the big bad world, might mark the place as a drug den but to Merry were nothing more than another layer of confusion for her brain to fight through. Balled up on the floor by the bed she’d emerged from was a pile clothes, and it became something solid to cling to. Clothes. Getting dressed. She figured if they fit her then she could at least cover herself.
Merry approached them, teetering like a newborn giraffe taking those precious, and remarkably awkward, first few steps. Nobbly knees kept making weak threats to give way and send her sprawling back onto the stained sheets to lay and waste among discarded ends of hand-rolled cigarettes and other pieces debris she began to identify in the low lighting, yet she persevered. Merry made it to the clothes, toeing them cautiously, acting like they might bite her were she to reach down and put her fingers into the fabric. Having established that they were safe to collect she needed to pick them up and was surprised to find the bending down was less problematic than she had anticipated, getting some semblance of control over the body now that she was focused on the mechanical, urging it to collect the clothes and dump them on the bed. The haul wasn’t impressive but it was sufficient. It consisted a pair of jeans that had seen better days, a long-sleeved shirt that was remarkably soft to her new fingers and well worn with small holes in places, a white undershirt, a pair of unremarkable black underwear that she was reluctant to put on and a pair of scuffed up boots. No socks. Who wore boots without socks?
The getting dressed part was awkward, uncomfortable and didn’t do much to soothe her shattered nerves, it did, however, mean she didn’t have to look at so much of the body she was inhabiting. Two of the pockets felt weighted, making the jeans sag slightly, and she reached into her pockets to find a worn leather wallet, a set of keys and a very modern looking smartphone that had been roughly treated. Clearly, he didn’t hold much value in the objects, they were there to be used and well used they had been. She wasn’t sure she wanted to open the wallet, not sure she was ready for a thing that felt quite so real. Did this really belong to him? Who was he? Was she him now? Was he her? The thought that had been alluding her began tugging at her attention once more, forcing it’s way to the forefront and demanding to be acknowledged. You’re a mystic, it whispered, your body is a vessel; temporary and interchangeable. Yes. She had been told as much by her friend, Zo. The energy that made her who she was, that animated her own body could move to another upon the return from the shadow realm and animate it in turn. She was herself, that did not change, but her body did. What, then, had happened to the energy of the bodies owner? Curiousity, it got the better of her, fumbling the wallet open so that she could search the contents.
A credit card, a couple of coupon cards, some loose change, a condom, an employee card and a license. A license with a young man’s face and a name. Felix, Felix Sharpe.
She stared at him the face, a hand reaching up to feel the one she wore, fingertips tracing along a jaw that had a few days worth of stubble upon it. Was this what she looked like now? There were no mirrors to reflect the face back to her, and part of her was immensely relieved. “Felix.” She tested the word out, her voice cracking, sounding dry and low. It was a man’s voice, the word sounding strange as she tried to shape it, the mouth not wanting to curve around the vowels in the way she was used to. Merry tried again, loosening the jaw, “Felix, Felix… Merry.” The accent was off, not her own and the vocal chords strained with the effort of trying to make the sounds. American, she thought, a certain twang that if mastered could be quite unique and attractive. It was something she would never have considered, how different it would be trying to shape words in a mouth that did not belong to you, that had been trained differently. It was like trying to speak a new language and being unable to quite capture the tone.
It was just one of the many things she’d need to figure out, one of the many things that were distracting her from the panic gathering beneath her ribcage and threatening to suffocate her. She had to keep moving, had to keep going because if she stopped she’d lose herself to it. There was one obvious choice, the address on the license. It was most likely his house. Perhaps it was exactly where she was, but she had to know either way. Who was he? Who would people think she was?
