It was hard to pretend he was seeing what everyone else was seeing. More accurately, it was hard pretending he couldn’t see /them/ the way he did.
He knew, thanks to movies and pictures and such, that people generally had the same body arrangement. Taller than they were wide, two arms sticking out from the shoulders, two legs jutting downward. A whole slew of skin colors that generally ranged from one end to the other of the ‘beige-ish yellow-brown’ color spectrum. Other than that, though? Nothing.
The way he saw it, saw /everything/, was much different.
People were every color in the rainbow, a few outside it on occasion, much like himself. Two legs were generally the case, but some had short, scaly legs, others had long, loping legs with stout fur or hard skin, some had hunched legs like those of a quadruped being forced to walk upright. His father, a jackass in his own right, had lizard legs. His mom, not an /active/ jackass, but far too complicit for his well being, had the sharp, seemingly decaying legs of a turkey vulture.
The faces were the most expressive, though. Some people had multiple heads, some had nothing, some managed to have more faces than heads, and the reverse as well. Eyes bright forever like imploding suns,or dark pits of maroon, green like those thorn vines that wrapped round the old apple tree out back; mouths open and smiling, snarling, screaming all the time, teeth tiny and round like pearls, or sharp and innocent like the common house cat; ears that curled up, down, weren’t there, were /massive/. And every little bit spoke about people.
He, quasi-innocent little Sebastian, didn’t know what his looked like. In mirrors, he had evidence of what other people saw him as, but he didn’t know what he really looked like. He would, sometimes, wonder what kind of traits he would have, if he could see himself proper. Oh, just look down! some would say, but that didn’t work. He knew, he had been trying for years. Outside of standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he had no idea what he looked like. Much akin to the sorts of shenanigans seen in video games, he literally saw nothing when he looked down. He sort of saw how light bent around him, though, although that hadn’t helped much. In the same sense that one knows the car in front of them isn’t shifting and wibbling, and that it is just the head radiating off of one’s own car that makes the effect, he knows that that is not what he looks like. He can see the background shift around where he knows his fingers are on the keyboard, and he can see the bend of objects under the curl of his feet, and when his hair got, reportedly, long, he could see slivers of his vision changed by swaying lenses that painted everything in subtly tilted, rainbow-effected illusions.
So he had begun to cut his hair short, shaved as close as the hair dresser would let him. He wore the most basic clothing he could imagine— single color tee shirts and jeans— so he wouldn’t have an outfit for someone to compliment him on. He didn’t want praise for his looks when he couldn’t enjoy them. He didn’t want scorn, either, but you can’t please everyone. Somehow, it still wasn’t easy, not that he had thought it would be.
Nothing is easy, he learned that first hand years ago.
Him, at three years old, asking why that lady’s feathers were all droopy, and being told it wasn’t make-believe time.
Him, seven, screaming for his mom when the man with smoke curling from his no-eyes asked him to come inside, and his mom telling him he was too old to be afraid of teachers.
Him, eight, not understanding why no one could tell his grandmother was sick. To him, it was obvious. Scales picking off everywhere, oil sluggishly oozing from the gaps in her skin. And then his parents being shocked when she finally passed. Cancer, and no one had had the guts to make Gramma go to the doctor, even when she said she was fine, so they hadn’t found out until after.
Him, ten, the last time. He had asked what his parents looked like, and they had set him down for a really uncomfortable talk. Not just because they had thought there was something wrong with his eyesight, and not just because the furry eye-doctor had hands like ice and scorn when the doctor positioned his head. None of that. It had hurt, down to the feet he couldn’t see, not even then, because he knew they couldn’t see what he saw.
He had stopped asking questions after that. He just. He got by, okay? He peeked in when his mom was doing her hair and found out her reflection had /green eyes/ even thought she hadn’t ever had eyes. He popped into the bathroom while his dad was shaving and caught his reflection. His dad’s eyes were /brown/ and he had /blonde/ hair.
With other people, it was tricky. As he grew up, he realized that there was something about the way he saw people that meant he saw /more/ than other people did, and it had lead to a few problems as time went on.
In seventh grade, Sebastian’s mom had scolded him for hours after the first family Thanksgiving, all because he wouldn’t go in the same room as his paternal Aunt. He couldn’t help it. She had pits and crags of stone all about her heads, one with a face carved into it, a permanent smile and eye-holes wide open. The other was, well, melting. It drooped down and sloughed off everywhere, and steam grey smog popped out when bits dropped off. Steam, sour and thick, poured out of both. She looked like the sort of monsters he had read about in story books, like a demon from the sermons he had been dragged to as a child.
Her wings were the worst. They had looked /broken/ and so sad, like someone had a pet bird but had become enraged when the bird tried to fly from its dirty cage, so they had broken its wings so it wouldn’t leave.
He hadn’t known what that meant, meant in the greater spread of things, until he was older, almost an adult himself, when that aunt had gotten a divorce. Her looks hadn’t changed, after, not much. But the sluggish head grew sharper; the smiling head moved more, inching toward a more genuine tide of expression. Her wings healed, kind of. The feathers grew back, but they were sickly brown and thin, he could tell.
Regardless of his later understanding, he hadn’t been able to stand being in the same room as her for long. The rest of the family was a similar problem. There wasn’t a one of them that didn’t look sickly, broken, volatile, dangerous, or just plain too fragile for him to be around. After his fourteenth birthday, another part of the family came into the picture, and things sort of improved.
His mother’s family came to Thanksgiving dinner, and at first he had thought he would have the same problems. On the drive up, he had been told all about cousin Aaron, and cousin Reyna, and their respective aunts Samantha and Meredith. Cousin Aaron had grown pot, and been to rehab, and almost killed someone with his car. Cousin Reyna had tried to kill someone at her school and had had to drop out as a result, and got a bunch of tattoos about gangs or something. Aunt Meredith had been to prison. Aunt Samantha lived in a trailer park.
He had expected to walk into the house to see four more grotesque monsters, and had been met with a lovely surprise.
The aunts, well, they looked like they had lived life. Like they had experienced woe and heartache and trauma, and built new life on top of it all.
Aunt Samantha was bedecked with scratched, beaded skin that gleamed gold under the bright kitchen lights, and her many eyes glittered with joy at ‘finally meeting your little boy, Deborah, he’s gonna grow up so handsome!’
Aunt Meredith looked like someone he did /not/ want to mess with. Her coat of curled, dreadlocked fur like it had been stricken with mange was nearly /slaughered/. Wide gaps, barely healed with latticework skin strings held back beating vessels of black and ruby, and her claws were perfectly manicured with little blurbs of color. The space where she would otherwise have eyes was decorated with swirls of flowers and blades, like the hoard of a dragon.
After seeing them, he had been eager to seek out these new cousins. A little trouble in trying to find someone based on physical descriptions he couldn’t see anyway later, and he was being introduced to two people who promised to be much better company than the people he had had to endure the past couple of years.
Cousin Aaron was headless, but atop his shoulders was the largest bloom of flowers and leaves Sebastian had ever seen. Goldenrod, daffodils, roses, peach flowers— he couldn’t list them all. His cousin had flames and ash constantly dripping off of him, but they floated away on not-there wind, unlike the bitter smoke that bled off of his Uncle Greg, the kind that always tried to cram itself up his nose. There were some parts of Aaron that looked sickly, but not like Gramma. It was like a tree with a fungus that had been cut off, and the leftover bark was bleached, almost dead, but it was easy to see the slivers of new growth breaking through, like on his fingers and some patches on his feet. Said feet were those of, if Sebastian could guess, a kangaroo. Ready to fight and ready to run if he had to.
Cousin Reyna was, if anything else, looked like the spitting image of her mom, but her own self shown through without fail. Her skin, like that of her mother, was slashed and split in places, but rather than holding it together, it was left open. Tiny tendrils of metal had reached out and grasped hold of the tattered flesh, but Seb couldn’t tell if it was trying to keep it in place, pull it closed, or keep it open. She had, rather than the tall, spindly-strong doe legs of her mother, a long, slinking, coiled strong tail. It had looked, to his guess, sort of poisonous, but he would have to go a’googling before he could say anything for certain.
”Hey man,” Aaron had said, and that gave Seb his best guess for whereabouts his cousin’s ‘face’ was located, “I got my xbox set up in the basement. You ever play Left4Dead?”
”Yeah!” Reyna had said, before Seb had had a chance to answer, “Maybe you can help me kick his butt this time.”
”I haven’t played, but I guess I could try?” From behind him, Seb had felt his mom trying to pull him back subtly. Putting on his most innocent face, he had looked back and asked, “Mom? What’s wrong?”
”Well,” she had said, all three of her mouths going thin with fake smiles, “You haven’t said hello to your Aunt Mim yet, and you know how she misses you.”
Aunt mim had had only half of a body, the left side, and had always been bleeding oil and grease onto everything she touched. She hadn’t any eyes or face or head, but there was nothing atop her shoulder, and she felt like she was covered in outward-facing sewing needles whenever she hugged him. No thanks.
”We’re gonna be here for three days, right? It’s not like I don’t see her at Christmas too.” He had shrugged, not really seeing why his mom would want him to see that creepy ‘relative’ of his, anyway. It’s not like she had anything good about her. “Plus,” he had said, waving an arm (he guessed) at his cousins, “I haven’t seen these guys /ever/ and they have /video games/. Can I at least have some fun?” /Before you stick me between dragon-breath and ashy and I have to fake eating food so I don’t barf, you stupid jackass/ he didn’t add, but oh, how he had wanted to.
His mom, apparently giving up, had let him go. His cousins had had the best idea once they were down in the basement— locking the door and just eating out of the mini fridge down there— and it had been the best Thanksgiving Seb could remember.
Then Reyna had moved up to Maine, and Aaron had joined the army, both within a year of each other, and Thanksgivings had gone from tolerable to hellish real quick. He only had to suffer it once before he started coming up with ways to avoid it.
while coughing through a throat roughened by screaming into a pillow for a few hours, he had told his mom that he didn’t want to get anyone sick.
Saying that he had been invited to that new Marvel movie by friends that had been out of town for a while, and just hiding in the woods the whole time they were gone.
Breaking three bones in his foot, and causing a hairline fracture in his pelvis, plus a concussion for good measure, so they would just leave him the fuck alone.
Now he was seventeen, had few enough friends to count all of them on half of one hand, and was waiting behind the shed for his parents to finish packing up and leaving.
Once they were gone, he waited some more. It wouldn’t do to go through the trouble of claiming a friend was in the hospital just for them to come back in ten minutes because they’d forgotten something and see him sitting in the living room watching television.
