Work Text:
The human body is a collection of muscles, bones, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, and flesh. It is gentle and easy to scar. It is gentle and easy to bruise. It is gentle and it is easy to tear. It is gentle and easy to kill. He who wears the skin of a human is not gentle in nature, but rather flimsy in his skin, in his resolve. He who adapts the identity of a human is gentle to himself, as he lies and says he will fit in, that he will survive, that he will live a life full of joy and caresses from both ends, giving and receiving adoration and dying at the unripe age of 83.
Tohru is a collection of heat and sand and broken glass. She’s a clay pot that broke when fired. She swears up and down that the human disguise is nothing more than that, but all other bystanders saw a stolen identity. Swallowed, replicated tissues. A disguise exists for a purpose, for an operation. A shield isn’t needed without a threat. Her only threat is God. Her only threat is God.
But she slides into the cloak easily. Growing pains are different in human form. An aching neck, twitching hands, sore breasts. The breasts angered her the most. An entire organ existing for the mere possibility of use. She would not be raped. She would not bare young, not in a human form. She would not live to the age of full sexual maturity if all went according to plan. She had no use for weight on her chest. She did not know why she angered. There were many more, much more illogical details that adorned the human body.
Blonde hair is a growing trend in Rome. Pale slaves are shaved for their paler hair, and the wiser man spits at both of them for their vanity. She who cried over her lost beauty is no better than she who ordered her shaved. Tohru is the wiser man, she wants to believe. She wants to believe, as she tugs her hood over her head. She doesn’t care about her hair, she reminds herself, gently tucking it all behind her ‘ears’ and into her cloak.
Cloaks are out of fashion in Northern Europe. Tohru doesn’t know what’s in fashion. She doesn’t care. Nudity is apparently out of fashion too. Dragons are out of fashion. Slaves and women are always in fashion, under the condition that they can be abused, that they can be killed. Tohru doesn’t care, she tells herself, even as a royally sponsored explorer from some nearby kingdom corners her against a tree and lifts up her cloak. Lifts up her cloak, and reaches out to grope her. She kills him without a second thought. Not because she cares about what happened, but because it’s the quickest way to clear a path forward.
Two– no, three children, fight over a piece of bread near a bazaar, hungry and wanting and cruel. Tohru steals an apple and leaves. 20-something acres away from a palace, two women get into a ‘serious’ battle over a romantic interest. Hair is pulled, teeth are pulled, blood is shed. Tohru would rather watch grapes ferment. A conquest somewhere threatens the murder of all innocent civilians out in public. An Opera performer is stripped, and then killed for the ‘unexpected’ existence of her penis. Tohru feels itchy. Tohru never feels itchy. A political leader begins a new campaign, breaching contracts and enslaving all who fell under his gaze, and Tohru is done. She burns down 17 war tents, 4 posts, kills 20 people by hand. She doesn’t care anymore. Human morals are dumb. Humans are dumb. Her hands hurt from the strain of rapidly transforming from clawed to fingered. Human bodies are even dumber.
Tohru is, in human years, 19. She knows that much. She’s done growing, with the exception of her horns, which have lengthened much later in life than her father’s did. Tohru has stolen the concept of ‘human years’ from some nobody in the harmony faction. Tohru has stolen the concept of humanity from some passerby in the desert, with sweet blue eyes and sleek black hair. She scratches away at the hair around her navel, a nervous tic. A ‘nervous tic’. She has pick-pocketed human identity for herself. The falsities of it, the comfort it brang, the costume. Nobody she killed, nobody she passed by, knew how they were observed and scrutinized for her gain. Her loss. They didn’t really know, at least. What she was taking from them. How she slipped it into her ribs, folded up like paper and poking at her lungs, tickling her heart, irritating her skin.
Tohru undid the fastening on her cloak, bunched it up in her hand, and threw it onto the forest floor. She saw the light of god, reaching towards her, the terrible tendons and tendrils of ‘mercy’, of ‘hope’, of ‘divine right’. She saw it twist through the trees, mocking the scenery, invading her space. She saw the face of god, and emptied her pockets of all she had stolen. She saw the face of god, and opened her mouth, already burning herself with flame. She saw the face of god, and shed her disguise for the last time, intent on only taking one thing to the grave – God’s life.