Doors Masquerade (doorsmasquerade) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-03-27 23:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | plot: masquerade |
Who: Goblin Market
What: Reveal.
Where: The hotel.
When: After sunrise.
Warnings/Rating: No warnings.
It was his perhaps his worst nightmare, come to vivid, terrible life.
As the Changeling raised his head and watched the girl that he'd been attempting to destroy back out of his reach, the sun passed over the line of the horizon. There was no time even to be surprised as the change began, as rage began to melt back into resignation, then transmute swiftly into horror. As ears shrank back to normal, and dark eyes melted into light, the starved-thin frame of an ill-fed youth gave way to the lanky stretch of thin adult. Ash grey skin warmed back to simply pale. And horror grew, and grew, until it was his whole world.
He pushed himself carefully to his feet, putting a hand on the wall and making his way down the stairs as quickly as he could take them without tripping. He had to get away. If that girl came back - no one could see him like this. No one could know. No one could ever know.
All his vulnerabilities had become the main stage attraction, the freak show persona of who he really was outside the bars and on the attack. The things he kept hidden behind a hundred layers of stiff artifice and tight control had run wild, unrestrained and as desperately strong as he felt them. He could think of nothing worse. The Wolf he'd driven off, in particular, could never find out who he had been with. The very idea made him shudder with revulsion and shame. All the worst things about him that hid there at his core had stepped into the light, been seen, been known. That Wolf, should they ever meet again, would know exactly what sort of starved thing lay at the center of who he was. A Changeling - apt enough, he recognized, as he dizzily wound his way through the hotel that had become a hotel again, lightheaded from blood loss. He had been exchanged at birth, had he not? And he had never fit in anywhere since.
How his failings racked up as he marked all the ways his weakness had opened wide to the world during the terrible night. Like a thing possessed, his wish, troubled, dark, and deep, for someone, anyone to love him, to take him as he was, had been everything. His willingness to prostrate himself completely for that love. And the pain, the pain and the terrible anger he felt when he was inevitably rejected, the anger he smothered, swallowed, and did not express, only growing more bitter, more hardened, more insecure, and all the more sure that he simply did not possess the qualities it took to be loved.
Maybe becoming the Changeling had been a message. In clear letters, being that creature said, You will never be good enough. What makes you unacceptable is unchangeable. It is best to give up now, and forget you ever desired the affection you were willing to whore your own life for.
More important than any message or moral, though, was secrecy. No one, no one could know. If they ever did, he didn't know what he would do.
He stood at his door, ready to pass through. The presence of his key in his pocket was his only grace. He was growing faint, his train of thought spinning out thinner and faster all the time. After all, the Wolf had torn deeply into him. While the Changeling had barely felt the wounds in his fury, he felt them deeply, and the blood loss even more. Through his door, though, he could be mended, and he could hide. They were a welcome excuse to let go of control. Through the door, at least for a while, he could put off the inevitable, turn his back on the world, and try to piece himself back together enough to face his own life again.
He felt as splayed open as a dissection. It would take some time to get the pins out, and put the sutures back.
In the end, all that the night in the Parisian Opera House had done for Louis was verify things he already knew about himself, and then bare the terrible thing inside him, naked, raw, and screaming in smothered anguish, giving voice to the voiceless misery hidden for so long behind smiles, careful acts, and politesse.