“Are you sure you want her to be here?” 

Morgan nodded. He’d asked Mikhaila to join him in talking with Typhon-Morgan. Part of it was that he wanted to know what they’d talked about, what conclusions they’d come to, but what he wasn’t ready to admit was how utterly terrified he was. There were two possible outcomes. It was possible this was all a pipe dream, and none of this was possible. It was a harrowing thought, and he’d tried to push it to the back of his head, but it kept clawing forward. Images came to him of mimics crawling towards him, forcing him to stay the same forever, to slowly become a horrible copy of his father. 

The alternative was that change was possible and that the woman in the chair was exactly who she said she was. It was, somehow, even scarier. So he’d asked Mikhaila to be there, because he was scared to his core. 

“You two have met,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but they both nodded. 

“We have,” the other Morgan said, and nodded at Mikhaila with a genuine smile. “Hello, Mikhaila.” She was beautiful when she smiled, Morgan noticed. He wondered if his eyes ever lit up like that when he smiled. He’d tried it in the mirror, smiling genuinely, but it had always felt like lying. His eyes didn’t smile. Hers did. He shook his head to get rid of the thoughts, the constant comparisons. 

“Hello,” Mikhaila said. Morgan was a little annoyed to see that she returned the smile. He knew his annoyance came from a sense of envy -- the sensation was a familiar one -- but he didn’t know envy to who. Was he jealous of her affection, affection he’d denied himself? Or envious of her ability to accept Typhon-Morgan as a real Morgan? With that thought came the scary realization that he wanted to see that Morgan as real. If she was real, then he could be too, after all. He shook his head again. 

“So,” he said. “You’re… You can change, can’t you?” He paused, formulating his thoughts. “Even if it was… subconscious, you used to look like a Typhon and now you don’t. You can do everything I can?”

Typhon-Morgan shook her head. “I only remember using the neuromods, I don’t actually have all of them installed.” She paused. “But I am -- apparently,” she added, a little sourly, “Typhon.” She scanned the room. “So I suppose…” and then, almost in the blink of an eye, she was gone. Well, not gone. In the chair was a small, pristine Transtar cup. And then, immediately after that, she was back. Most baffling of all, she was in the exact same position, hands in the restraints. Morgan and Mikhaila both stared at her with utter confusion. Mikhaila was the first to say something.

“You could have… escaped, the entire time?” she asked incredulously. “But…”

“For what reason?” Typhon-Morgan asked, and Morgan felt she looked a little… self-satisfied? She looked happy to have proven Morgan’s preconceived notions about her wrong, he figured. “Alex is my brother, as far as I’m concerned. He’s… well, you know him. And Morgan, well, I’m you.” Beat. “Hah.” Mikhaila brought her hand to her mouth and Morgan saw she was suppressing a laugh. “Get it? Yu?” 

“I got it,” Morgan said, not nearly as amused. 

“And Mikhaila,” the woman in the chair said, “I… well… we all know how I feel about you. I couldn’t hurt you.” That pang of envy and jealousy shot through Morgan again, especially when Mikhaila’s expression was one of pain and… that word he didn’t want to think about. “Regardless,” Typhon-Morgan said. “I have nowhere to escape to and no reason to do so.” She leaned forward. “I just want you to believe me, for you to find yourself. Even if it is a little self-serving.” She smiled at that little joke.

Morgan paced back and forth. To consider the fact that the Typhon was only still locked in this room because it… he paused. He couldn’t force himself to keep doing that. Because she wanted to be, that she was a willing prisoner… it scared him. But it also made it much harder to question her motives. She could have killed them all. She genuinely seemed to want him to be happy and that implied his happiness was attainable. “But that’s still mimicking. Where did that,” he gestured at her, “come from?”

Typhon-Morgan thought for a moment. “It wasn’t something I consciously thought about, Morgan. I can’t help you there. But… if you can mimic… you could try mimicking me? And see if that works?”

“Would that even work?” he asked. “I’ve never successfully mimicked a person before. It’s only ever worked with inanimate objects.” 

Typhon-Morgan shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out, Morgan. You’re a scientist, you know that. It can’t hurt to try.” Morgan had agreed with every part of what she’d said, every part right up until now. Here, she was dead wrong. It could definitely hurt to try. But the only remaining option, the only painful one, had been not admitting that the attempt was an option. Now that he knew, trying, not trying, succeeding, failing, it would all hurt him to his core and there was no going back. He felt as if he’d stepped onto a sheet of ice to explore, and now that he was on it, it had broken off and he couldn’t go back. 

Mikhaila looked at him curiously, waiting to see what he’d do. He didn’t know yet. He wanted to try it, desperately. He’d always considered the possibility, mimicking a person. The woman in the chair in front of him had proven to him that the Typhon’s ability to mimic extended to human shapes. But would it be real? Would it be him? Was it worth it? What if it felt right? What if it felt wrong and that feeling of not belonging stayed with him regardless? It was too awful to think about. But the alternative. The possibility. 

He focused, found the part of his brain that wasn’t his anymore, flexed the muscles he’d used earlier, and held that woman in his head, the complexities of what it meant to be human. He didn’t know if it was because she was part Typhon and he was too, or because her approximation of a human was so accurate, but he found his body contorting itself into a shape it wasn’t used to. But instead of the strange feeling of compression, where his limbs became chair legs or fire extinguisher nozzles, this felt different. His senses remained the same. None of that usual discomfort was present. It reminded him of a specific feeling. Whenever he’d been on a spacewalk for an extended period of time, when the space suit had leaked some heat and he was mildly chilly, and then come back inside, and the warm air of the airlock blew into his face and his suit and a tingling warmth spread to each limb, it had felt like being on the receiving end of a sigh of relief. This felt like that. 

His entire body tingled, his face was flush, his fingers cramped up until he flexed them. He looked at his hands, his balled fists, and his breath got caught in his throat. These weren’t his hands, and yet they were. These weren’t the hands of the monster Morgan Yu. And yet they were his. He stared at them, turned them over, as if he’d never seen them before. And in a sense, he hadn’t. They were soft, slender, beautiful. There was a slight roughness to them, a sign that they’d been used to weld, fight, climb. But the skin was soft. None of the coarse hairs that usually peeked out from his sleeves covered the back of his hands. These weren’t made for… atrocities. They were hands made for gentle things. Kind things. Beautiful things. He realized he hadn’t been breathing. Couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t look away from them. In part because he couldn’t. He was mesmerized. But if his hands looked like this…

He sank to his knees, terrified of all the implications of reality. Was it possible? He looked up at Mikhaila with trepidation. What would she see? What did he look like? Had it succeeded? Mikhaila looked at him with a sweetness he didn’t actually remember, but one he knew that, if she’d once aimed it at him, he would’ve been defenseless to it. He was defenseless now. Mikhaila looked back and forth between him and Typhon-Morgan, and she stepped closer to him, and finally kneeled down and took his hands, his soft, slender hands, in her own and looked him in the eyes. Her words were like razorblades to his soul, not carving wounds but exposing his rawest self to the open air. It hurt like hell, the way your lungs hurt after holding your breath for too long.

“There you are,” Mikhaila said, and carefully held up Morgan’s face in one hand. Her touch was kind and gentle, the touch he’d wanted for so long. It was kind and gentle in ways he’d deprived himself of because he’d been terrified of how her soft caress would have felt on his rough skin, how her slender hands would have looked fragile in his. But now that she touched him, he felt how soft his face was. The strong jawline was there -- it was a family trait, after all -- but as she traced his cheekbone, gently ran her fingers down his face, devoid of coarse stubble, he could only shudder. The softness came from both sides and was complete and perfect. It scared him to pieces. But she was here and he felt safe, safe knowing she was here. It was strange. He felt that he didn’t take up as much space as he used to. That he didn’t take up too much space. That he could safely hide in her arms if he had to. 

Morgan stirred and began to cry. He felt small and fragile and for the first time in his life, he felt like that was okay. Sure, he’d taken refuge in being inanimate objects. He’d always been convinced that, well, everyone sometimes would want to stop existing. But maybe that had been him. He’d literally been objects marked fragile. But this was different. Maybe because he didn’t feel like he was supposed to go back to becoming a square-shouldered brute. Maybe because this was the first time he’d mimicked something with feet. He found it hard to calm his breathing, found it getting shallower and shallower as his head began to spin. It wasn’t until Mikhaila grabbed him by the shoulders and forced him to look at her, saying “Hey” softly, over and over again, that he realized he was hyperventilating. 

Tears streaked down his face and he looked at her through a haze of pain and panic. The best thing and the worst thing had happened at the same time. Changing into an inanimate object had never felt right or wrong. It hadn’t felt like much of anything and that had been what had always appealed about it to him. But this… this was an incredible feeling. Like taking off shoes that were too tight for the first time in years. An exhale of titanic proportions. That meant that he could never go back, because this felt right. And it made every single other piece of Morgan Yu fall apart like an unstable stack of cards. Of course he couldn’t breathe. But she’d heard his wordless plea, and took him in her arms as he unraveled.

Very carefully, she synchronized his breathing to hers and then slowed it down. It was cheap, he thought, aware but unable to stop it, and he was grateful she did it. He began to calm down, and found himself off. 

Morgan Yu leaned back, forehead pressed against Mikhaila’s. “Mikhaila”. That voice was soft, authoritative but kind, the way that of the Typhon in the chair had been. It was such a good voice. Not a man’s voice. Definitely not His voice. But it was, Morgan thought, Her voice.

Mikhaila pulled back and looked Morgan in the eyes. “There you are,” she repeated. 

“Here I am,” Morgan said, and she smiled softly.