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Finally - although far too soon for his liking the bandages were removed and Tyran could no longer hide from his own reflection. At first he saw it in glances that caught his eye as he passed the glass dividers or the highly polished metal and marble surfaces. These were the ghostly transparent things seen in passing and avoided. It was as if he was reflected in crumpled foil or in wavering water - twisted out of definition. He dodged such views as one might the stalking shadow of a man, but a curiosity mixed with fear from his own exaggerated imaginations crumbled his resolve.
In time, when the lights lowered in the infirmary, he explored his ruined face. As best as his dull sense of touch could allow, he traced the raised claw-scars that lined an alarming amount of his face. He touched tentatively around his empty eye socket and the thick mess of scarring that now occupied it. Every time this exploration ended with a snapped withdrawal of his hand, and the shaking, choking well of barely repressed emotions. He didn’t know whether to cry in despair or to roar in anger, and only his own self-criticism forced him to calm down.
Only a damn p***y cares about what he looks like. You’re a soldier. Grow up.
But he would still shake as his imagination twisted around the problem of his real appearance.
He was discharged from the infirmary when the accelerated healing had been completed, and they were sure the nanobots had dissolved from his blood stream. He ignored Dr. Jade’s persistent concerns that he should take up the therapy. He had even come to mostly ignore the looks people gave him as he passed. When he was finally allocated a room on board and gained some privacy, he felt ready to face his true reflection.
The mirror occupied the bathroom. It was clinical, white and completely square - incapable of lies. And yet Tyran hugged the doorway, staring at the thing form such an angle as to hide his reflection.
He had never thought of himself as vain. Had never cared much for appearances. Hell, he had never thought of himself as particularly handsome. And yet now, as he stood there, such a fear collected and tightened in his stomach that he’d have rather thought that he was here cornered with a gun to his head.
God damnit, get a hold of yourself.
He closed his eye - reminded cruelly that now he had only one - and tried to breathe. He shouldn’t have left it so long, he thought. He should have looked straight away, as soon as he could. By delaying it had turned the whole process into some child’s nightmare. He had been badly scarred before hadn’t he?! Why was this any different? But the scars all over his back, and those now all over his face were completely different from each other. He kept his back covered. His face would be permanently on display.
Just look you stupid b*****d. Just look.
His tail curled tightly around the inside of his leg. With his eye still closed, he took three steps forwards and grasped blindly for the sink below the mirror. He adjusted himself to fully face it, and exhaled. He forced his tail to uncurl and then opened his eye.
Instantly he saw himself as others saw him: the five slashes of claw marks from his forehead to his chin; the empty and ruined eye socket; the odd and slight smirk that tugged at the damaged corner of his mouth. Alarmingly brutal. A stranger. That wasn’t his face. He didn’t recognise it, he didn’t-
He breathed in short, shaking breathes and gave out a choked sob. He was alien. He squeezed his eye shut and clung to the sink as he grew dizzy, afraid that he’d throw up. He calmed himself down and gulped back the taste of bile.
Gradually, he looked back at his reflection. On second view it was less alarming. In fact in a way it was a relief because the reality of the reflection dispelled any Frankenstein’s monster images his imagination had been incubating over time. He lightly touched his face and his reflection did the same, and it all anchored in reality.
He was cold, but the ice that had drenched his spine slowly receded. He began to see himself in his reflection again. His remaining eye was as purple and clear as ever, and he saw himself within it - afraid, but very much there. For the first time in what felt like millennia he used his fingers to examine the undamaged part of his face. The skin was only a little rough, oily form sweat, but healthy and his own. If he turned his head to one side he was almost completely normal, but for the slight distortion of his mouth. It was all right -he assured himself- they were battle scars, that’s all.
He remembered how as a child he had wanted a scar to show the others how tough he was. How when he was seven he and Gaurana had dared each other to cut their arms with the arrowhead he had found in order to get one. A scar had never appeared - just the deep cut that stung and itched and would burn if the food seasonings got anywhere near it.
He sighed and allowed himself the relief of looking away again and turned on the tap to take a drink.
He didn’t know whether these new scars showed that he was strong or that he was weak and had instead been badly beaten. In part that was why he had never exposed his back: scars form a brutal flogging only showed that the subject had been weak enough to be forced to suffer it, and had been humiliated in public. Absently, his fingers traced to the bullet wound scar at the right side of his stomach. Until this point he had been proud of the battle scar, but he began to wonder if - instead of proof that he had seen a vicious battle and had fought- it alternatively only proved that he had been too slow to dodge.
Weakness.
But if he wasn’t strong, what was he?
The fear subsided, the shaking finally stopped, and with the monster of his new face gradually on the way to acceptance, Tyran now sagged with fatigue. He finally left the mirror, and succumbed to the neutral darkness of sleep.
