Work Text:
Most children are born made of flesh, blood, bone. Electrical impulses.
Thomas was made of clay.
Malleable. Shaped into a facsimile of a person with bent wire. Strung together with elastic. Brittle until touched by heat and flame. Forged and broke into shards. Each different yet part of the same whole.
None of his brothers were truly human either. Chris was deep water and star stuff. Michael was sun-warmed stone and cushioning moss.
(Their father may have been, once.)
Before he was Thomas, he had another name. She was a person he barely remembered. He only knew she took her name from their mother's mother, from Greece, and so it stuck out amongst his brother's English names.
She was clay too, pushed through machines and into molds. Learning how to fit a square peg through a round hole with a degree of sleight of hand and misdirection.
(Look at the nose and not into the eyes. When they say this, they mean that.)
He hardly remembers when he decided he wasn't her anymore. In his mind it was like he had always been Thomas, and everyone else only saw a distortion of him through a funhouse mirror. Becoming Thomas in their eyes took time. It took practice and effort and sleight of hand and misdirection. He entered the hall of mirrors and studied his reflection.
(Legs apart, Don't cross them. Shoulders back. Shave your face - yes, even if there's nothing there. Don’t wear fitted shirts or shorts that are too short or skirts or dresses or flannels or-)
When he left, people recognized him, but even in his bathroom mirror he looked distorted.
When Tron returned, he pulled Rio and Ryouga into the hall with him. He hid in the shadows and showed them his monstrous form, fangs and claws bared, towering over them.
Ryouga left with him. Rio did not.
(For the time being-)
Thomas wore the skin of the monster well - he had always had fangs, and claws, never quite fit into the human-shaped mold he had been pushed into.
When Ryouga killed him for the first time, though, he was happy to take its furs off. To show Ryouga the man beneath, if only for a second, distorted and crushed by the weight of the monstrous skin as he was.
(He felt like Ryouga was the warden in the Panopticon, shining a light on each of his forms, seeing each perversion of the human shape in turn.)
When Ryouga killed him for the second time, he recognized the reflections from the hall of mirrors in his eyes.
No matter how many times he traveled back through the hall, he couldn’t retrace his original path. No matter how many times the spotlight in the Panopticon shone on him, it never showed the same thing twice.
The wire beneath the clay was gone. In its place was empty air and dreams.