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He only understood the changes truly in retrospect and after many careful questions, working together with his friend to make sense of them as best as they could.
The subtler ones had happened before they met, he was fairly sure, so he had no chance of knowing what the other was like before – before what, he didn’t know – nor when the newer changes had started exactly, only that they had been slow, gradual enough to escape his notice. At first, that is.
It didn’t help that his friend had always been a little on the odd side and very much reserved, not one to readily share what was going on in his head. Or perhaps he should’ve been a better friend, firmer when the man dismissed his worries with some flimsy excuse or other, dodging questions about himself, apparently uncomfortable with attention aimed at him, unused to sharing the burden that he felt his thoughts, and seemingly himself, to be.
Besides, he had not the faintest idea how to approach the topic. It’s not polite to pry and question someone about why they are the way they are, so he simply accepted his friend as he was, then each change as it came. If he thought about it, they fit the man and, looking back, they didn’t feel drastic, rather like crystallizations than distortions.
When they had first met, the man’s demeanor took some getting used to, if only because there was no readily apparent reason to explain it.
As it quickly became obvious, his friend was quiet, sometimes startlingly so, both in his words and actions. He had found that he rarely initiated conversation and instead let him talk while listening intently. When he did speak, his voice was soft and often hurried as if he was afraid that he would run out of his allocated time for being listened to. In the early days of knowing the man, he sometimes found himself spooked by his almost soundless steps upon entering a room, a silly thing that prompted him to lightly chide the other after one too many occasions of yelping his surprise at the quietly looming but entirely unthreatening figure.
The man apologized regularly, too, most of the time when there was no need for it. The much-repeated phrase came easily and without thinking, and sometimes sounded like it was not even for a perceived offense but for his presence, his entire existence and every mistake and inconvenience he thought it brought.
He would also flinch from time to time: at sudden sounds, loud noises, raised voices, the slightest of mistakes. He became like a skittish animal then: momentarily wide-eyed, alert in his whole body, shrinking into himself before looking around as if to make sure the danger had passed, then gradually letting go of some of the tension in his shoulders. At times, when he realized he had noticed, his friend extended a small smile to him – in way of a sheepish apology for his perceived overreaction, he supposed – and continued what he had been doing, eyes carefully averted.
Between the two of them, they sometimes joked – lightheartedly but with a mutually acknowledged edge of truth – that his friend was closer to a sort of creature than a regular human. The man often, perhaps worryingly often, admitted to feeling out of place among others, his family and peers, as if life was a game and everyone was aware of and able to effortlessly follow the rules except him.
He certainly had the looks for something creaturely: a lanky body that towered over most, long limbs and fidgeting fingers that often curled like half-hearted claws to pick on skin and nail in nervous repetition. With his height he slouched more often than not, as if to try and make up for taking up too much space in the world. Both his eyes and ears were constantly and quietly alert, picking up details and patterns, looking for the slightest shifts around him that required him to adjust, to blend more into his surroundings.
In short, his friend’s skittishness and awkwardness were of no help in what he once described as pretending to be human. It was one thing that he had quickly grown fond of the man regardless of his peculiarities, but there was always the looming knowledge that the other couldn’t shake his insecurities and tendency to avoid company, helpless against a perpetual sense of unbelonging.
That reluctance only became worse as the further changes began and his friend felt more and more like he was irredeemably damaged and so noticeably wrong that any passerby could tell just by a glance at him, even as that, to their shared astonishment, proved to be untrue.
With both of them being musicians, it took some time for them to realize that his friend’s hearing had begun to grow even more sensitive than before. First, he adopted a permanent frown whenever they played together, as if the hits of drum sticks and the pluck of chords grated on his nerves, until one morning he emerged from his room with a hood over his head and his gaze resolutely glued to the floor. After much coaxing – and among hurried explanations and warnings coated in apologies – he lowered his hood and revealed a pair of slightly pointed ears, their redness at the tips betraying the man’s previously private disbelief at the changed organs.
Apart from silent shame and a more heightened than usual nervousness at the prospect of leaving their shared home, his friend had taken the change with surprising calmness.
What was more unexpected: no one they encountered that day, and then going forward, seemed to have noticed anything different in the tall man or, if they had, they didn’t mention it.
Perplexed, yet relieved, the two of them continued life as usual or as close to it as was possible; his friend with more refined hearing and he adjusting to his new appearance with ease.
After all, it was still his best friend and nothing had truly changed.
Only a passing remark from him came to stick in his mind, returning whenever he found himself distractedly studying the man, carefully looking him over for signs of any real difference: “You know, I keep forgetting that I haven’t always been like this.”
Weeks passed, until one evening he looked up from his book to be greeted by a wide spread of arms – what seemed like his housemate’s best attempt at an impromptu imitation of a snapshot of Leonardo’s Vitruvian – and worried eyes on his.
“Do you think something’s changed again?”
He was just about to ask his friend what he meant when he noticed, owing to a momentary flash of teeth between the question and the subsequent awkward, apologetic grimace at the clumsy request to be examined: in the top row of his teeth, the man’s canines drew his gaze, elongated and just a touch sharper than he remembered; a bit unusual but not inhumanely so, simply shaped like they were meant for a different mouth.
His friend’s fingers twitched and his eyes were redirected to long digits ending in pointed nails, definitely unlike what he recalled the other’s nails to be. They were almost what one expected to grow out of scaled fingers: almond-shaped and just slightly curved, smoke-dark toward the tips, alarming in appearance but losing their air of threat as soon as the man lowered his arms and began to pick at hangnails, automatic, absentminded, awaiting judgment.
After carefully confirming that he did indeed notice new physical differences, the two of them retired for the night and as he lay in bed, eyes restlessly searching his ceiling as worry gnawed on his stomach, he thought he found the beginnings of a pattern.
The newest changes could doubtlessly be labeled protective, although his friend was far from violent, not one to hurt or bite back, only at himself in self-deprecation and stinging, readily-delivered self-reproach. Time only confirmed this, with the claws most often finding their home on the man’s forearms, mindlessly scratching the skin there, even as his every other touch remained delicate. In painful contrast, those same sharp-ended fingers sometimes caressed that same skin or wrapped around the man’s own torso in twisted attempts at self-soothing, instruments seemingly made to hurt seeking to provide much-needed care, defying their assumed purpose.
Before either of them knew, the holidays came, and his friend – very much reluctant but bound by traditions and filial duty – went to visit his family.
He was pacing behind their couch when the man returned, cheeks and pointed ears bitten pink by cold wind.
He couldn’t keep the abrupt question – the sole thing on his mind in the other’s absence – from breaking out of him. “Well? Did they say anything?”
At first, his friend only blinked at him blankly, then his features promptly shifted to recognition.
“No,” he simply said, pulling off his coat and stuffing his scarf into one of its sleeves. “I don’t think they noticed.”
It was then and there it dawned on him that he barely knew anything about the other’s family, his upbringing, his childhood or his relationship with his parents. Along came the realization that the man’s hesitance to share might have in itself been telling.
Of course, he had picked up on throwaway comments that indicated a less-than-ideal relationship, bitter quips here and there that revealed just as much as they kept obscured about the other’s life in the long years before they met.
“But it’s alright,” his friend added, shrugging, as if they were only talking about a slightly different haircut that went unnoticed. “It’s probably better this way.”
He did his best to compose himself and hold back from saying what was on his mind. The man’s family apparently failed to notice the fairly glaring fact that he had sprouted pointy ears and graphite-tipped claws. It was hard to wrap his mind around the idea that such things were not immediately obvious upon looking at one’s child.
He let the topic drop, though, especially when his friend visibly deflated beside him on the couch, settling back into the comfort of home, his muscles slowly losing their nervous tension as if he was winding down after a tiring performance.
Maybe it was this calm and the man’s weary but content smile as they said good night that made the next morning’s events all the more startling in contrast.
For one, he woke to low groaning from the neighboring room, which was already a surprise since his housemate was the quietest person he had ever had the luck to live with. Most days, he woke to find the other already up and long done with breakfast, having slept through it all, owing more to his friend’s mindfulness to avoid making noise than to his being a deep sleeper.
Then came the sound of shuffling in the corridor and running water as the man presumably reached the bathroom to freshen up.
He strained his ears but couldn’t make out what was happening on the other side of the wall behind him. His friend was up early, that was clear and not at all unusual, although he was usually much quieter than this.
It occurred to him that perhaps the man had contracted something – some cold or stomach bug – during his visit to his family.
Sluggish thoughts interrupted by what was unmistakably an exclamation of pain, he shot up in bed and let his feet rush him out of his room.
His hand hovered for a short breath’s length before connecting with the bathroom door to give it a few swift raps. “Are you alright?”
The tap was shut off and his friend’s strained voice came. “Fine. Well–” There was a sharp intake of breath before he hesitatingly added, losing strength with each trembling word, “I think maybe something’s not right.”
The door handle turned and a thin slice of the man became visible. His eye was red and his cheek blotchy as if he’d been crying, but there was also something slightly wrong about the angles of his face.
Without another word, he let the door be pushed open and stepped backward, directly under the stark, yellow-white ceiling light.
It was characteristic of his friend to downplay what was happening, to soften his words. He didn’t possess that quality, so he had no difficulty concluding, in the privacy of his own head, that something was not only not right, but definitely wrong.
Namely, the irritated-looking twin bumps under the other man’s eyes, lined up perfectly with the watery, brown pair. Between the redness of the skin and the underlying pressure from whatever was causing the odd breakout, it looked like the skin would split.
His friend raised a trembling hand to his brow and winced when his fingertips made contact with the bone there.
He might have tried to blame the sleep still in his eyes or the unflattering color of the light overhead if not for the other man’s moan of pain that had him bending forward to cradle his torso.
He was sure that he saw his browbone shift at the touch, bulging under the skin of his forehead as if the light contact with his fingers jostled it out of its place.
They both cursed, one voice thin with fear, the other still thick with sleep.
Helpless eyes squinted at him, pleading yet apologetic. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
He could only shake his head, then press his palm over his mouth when his friend’s cheekbones seemed to move, too, all on their own. The familiar features slipped, but he soon realized that it was only that they were lowering, morphing right under his skin, as if to make room. For what, he didn’t know.
“Does it hurt?” Was all he could think to say.
The other man shook his head, hands hovering at his face. “No. But–”
By now, his friend’s eyebrows had made their way to the middle of his forehead to accommodate for new lumps that came to mirror the ones on his cheeks. He couldn’t take his eyes off it: the impossible stretch of skin, the round growths that seemed to harden as they swelled, the horizontal slits that appeared across them, deepening and threatening to burst apart.
Before either of them could make another sound, the thinned skin tore open, one cut after the other, fresh lids ripping apart to reveal surprised eyes moving out of sync, already scanning the room in newborn panic.
His friend tensed in his whole body and raised twitching fingers to try and shield his face, but it made no difference.
He had just grown four additional eyes, out of the blue, on a random Sunday morning. It was as if his near-constant hypervigilance had finally broken through skin and materialized.
The man rubbed at the new organs, further angering sensitive skin until he stepped to him, fingers encircling his wrist and made him wash his face, then ushered him out of the room.
By the time he was able to convince his friend to swallow at least a few bites of breakfast, he found himself already beginning to get used to the eyes. They were the exact replicas of the original pair and, perhaps surprisingly, their gazes didn’t make him feel unsettled when they were trained on him. Although they did lend the quiet man an even more nervous look with each pair almost always in motion.
He couldn’t help but wonder if his family would have noticed anything different about him if they saw him now.
There was no point in dwelling on what ifs, though, so they simply kept moving forward. Nobody made any mention of the unusual number of eyes, unless one counted what was probably intended as a compliment, something casually noted by a new acquaintance: “You’re so perceptive!”
At times, he wondered if there had been another change, one affecting his friend’s entire face this time, freezing his features into a bone-smooth mask of neutrality from time to time. But then, he couldn’t be sure and didn’t want to draw the other’s attention to it, not when he was already so aware of himself and so anxious about the prospect of his appearance making him stand out in a crowd.
Instead, he came up with a theory. He could tell that there was something, more likely several things, the other man didn’t tell him – or anyone for that matter – things that had no other way of emerging but through his appearance, as if his nervous system couldn’t bear it any longer and made his body share its burdens.
His body must have changed to protect him, to make sure he could fend off the harshness of the world, that he had the means to give back as good as he got, even as he was more prone to taking and taking, accepting what he was given without complaint, be it bad or worse.
There were things he couldn’t figure out, though, namely: what had triggered the changes and how far they would go or if the other’s body would ever revert to the way it used to be.
He supposed only time would tell. For now, his sad, nervous friend was all claws, teeth and darting eyes, but no bite.
And as it soon turned out, while he was trying to get his best read of the situation, the other man was coming to his own realizations, about himself, his family and why he was the way he was or, rather, why the way he had been for as long as he could remember was now coming to the surface.
One evening, he quietly sat beside him on the couch, shoulders drawn forward, claws picking at the skin beside his nails.
“You know,” he began, one pair of eyes turning to him as if seeking an anchor in the trusted gaze he should have known he would find. “I’ve been thinking and maybe not everything’s alright.”