Rainbow

Disclaimer: this chapter contains a description of an anxiety attack, including the physical symptoms

The first couple of classes were a living hell. Not in any physically measurable way, but just spiritually. What I could only assume was an anxiety-fueled stomachache had returned, and quickly increased throughout the day, so I decided to lie to the P.E. teacher that I’d forgotten my change of clothes.

I absolutely despised the fact that we weren’t allowed to have a phone, or even a book to read while sitting on the benches. Not only was there literally no reason for that rule, but, especially now, it also left me to my thoughts without any distraction other than what was going on on the field, and let me tell you, it wasn’t exactly making things any better for me…

I tried to watch Abigail and other girls play volleyball. It made me feel envious, but that was normal; the atmosphere around girls during P.E. was much better than around guys, and they seemed genuinely content with playing sports the way that didn’t include serious risks of injury. But today, there was more than that -- Abigail seemed to have integrated really quickly, and was overall one of the more physically active players, but more than that, she seemed to legitimately enjoy herself. It kinda hurt thinking about it, so I turned to watch how it was going on the guys’ side.

It was, in fact, exactly as the usual. Remember the serious risks of injury I mentioned? The fact that it almost never happened seemed like some sort of statistical anomaly of cosmic proportions. With the great variety of sports, from soccer to non-American football, these guys somehow found the energy to be somewhat-selfish show-offs literally every single time this hellspawn of a class came, for literally the entire duration of it. I honestly didn’t even understand how they managed to do any team-sporting with those attitudes, which clearly showed in my inability to do the same with them. But at this point, looking at them, and realizing I’d need to go among them again, was honestly… just scary… I shuddered at the realization it was practically inevitable; sooner or later I’d need to go back there…

So, that was how I spent over half an hour now, looking to the girls’ side, then to the guys’ side, then trying to pretend that I could distract myself with the ceiling for a couple seconds, and repeat. I barely even noticed that I started to heat up, which was then followed by a strange feeling of coldness in my limbs. It wasn’t until my stomach ache evolved into full-on nausea that I decided enough was enough, and asked the teacher if I could go to the toilet, to which I got an uncharacteristic “Sure, kid.”

I was a bit confused until I saw my face in the mirror -- I looked more than a little sick. But there was something else to my face, I leaned on a sink to get a better look, and realized that my hands and legs were also shaking. I ignored this increasingly less minor case of my body malfunctioning to finally notice what was wrong -- while I’d normally disliked the person in the mirror, it was just a passive feeling, something I could ignore if I really tried, but now I felt nothing but pure hate for him.

My breathing got heavier and erratic, my face heating up even more, and as my stomach got worse, I rushed to one of the stalls. Luckily, the nausea didn’t end up going anywhere beside just a very unpleasant feeling, and about five minutes later I felt safe enough to exit. As I washed my hands, I shot a quick glance at the mirror -- I looked like even more of a mess than before; even my hair didn’t avoid the total disarray. I didn’t bother fixing any of it, though; this body didn’t deserve it.

When I returned to the hall, the teacher looked at me weirdly -- no wonder, I’d clearly used the wrong excuse, should have just said I was feeling sick. The rest of the class passed really quickly, all things considered, and I wasn’t looking forward to the two classes still remaining. I slowly got up, got my backpack from the changing room, and left before anyone else, only to enter the corridor and see Abigail waiting there, her clothes already changed. When did she…?

“You look sick; did you call Sophie to pick you up?” she asked.

“N-no… I’m… I’m fine…”

While that wasn’t entirely true, somehow I could tell my sickness wasn’t physically caused, so I could technically ride on that plausible deniability.

“Listen, I can tell something’s up, and I do worry about you. I know you asked me to give you time alone with your thoughts, but at this point, it’d feel really irresponsible to do that.”

“I… I…” I couldn’t force out a response, both because the words wouldn’t physically come out, and because, really, I had nothing, so I decided to do the only reasonable thing.

I ran past her and started sprinting towards the exit.

I think I heard her yell for me to stop, but I was out of her range so quickly it didn’t even matter. The moment I crossed the exit door of the building, I started to sprint, with so much force behind it that it could distract me from what I thought and felt.

And so I ran. I ran as fast as I could run, until I ran out of space to run, having reached the door of our apartment. To my surprise, it was open, as Sophie’s weird uni schedule had her at home once again.

I quickly ran past her before she could say anything, quickly mumbling something along the lines of “Sorry for bothering you,” and locked myself in the bathroom.

She of course tried to get an explanation of what happened or what was wrong out of me, but in the state of both mental and now physical exhaustion I was in, I was barely capable of getting out words. The most I could manage were poor attempts at deflecting.

That was, at least, until we heard the doorbell ring. Sophie went to open it, and I heard Abigail’s voice.

That was bad. That was really really bad. They were both here and they were both going after me. I had to run, I had to hide, but I had already run and hid as far as I could.

“Okay, I know for sure that you two still have classes going on now, so what the hell happened?” Sophie asked Abigail.

Instead of answering to her, she got really close to the bathroom door and addressed me directly. “You didn’t think you could just run away right in front of me like that and I’d just go about my day like nothing happened, did you?”

“Ran from -- Okay, seriously, what the hell happened?” Sophie responded.

“I don’t know myself. He looked sick, but said he was fine. I asked what’s wrong, and he ran away,” Abigail said.

The words finally got past whatever was blocking them. “How am I supposed to tell you what’s wrong when I don’t know myself?! How am I supposed to understand any of this if I don’t even know how to, or why it’s even happening in the first place?!”

There was a moment of silence, after which Sophie spoke up. “You don’t have to figure it out alone, you know? We’re here for you, we can help, but you need to tell us what you’re feeling.”

“I don’t know… I’m just so scared… Scared of people looking at me… and seeing… I dunno, probably seeing whatever it is I hate so much when I use the mirror…” I tried to hug my hoodie closer around me for additional protection, but I realized it was way too hot for that, so I reluctantly took it off.

“Uhh,” Abigail eloquently added.

Sophie just shushed her. “Do you mean you… don’t like how you look?”

“Umm, yeah? Isn’t it kinda normal though? To not be comfortable with how you look?” I responded.

“There are many ways you can be uncomfortable with how you look, and the one you’re feeling is very much not normal; and even if it was, we have to acknowledge that most people do not have breakdowns like that. Can you tell what’s making you feel this way?” Sophie asked.

“I don’t know, it’s really hard to tell… Hell, it doesn’t even feel like me in the mirror, just some guy I kinda hate…” I responded sadly.

“Uhhhhh,” Abigail aggressively repeated.

“Please don’t go jumping any conclusions here,” Sophie said.

“I’m not, but considering when it all started…” Abigail argued.

I vaguely heard them still talking about whatever they were talking about, but my brain got stuck at the ‘when it all started’ bit. At least when it comes to when my whole mess started, it was when I visited Abigail’s place after she first transformed? I mean, she just transformed explicitly because she had underlying issues with her body she was unaware of, which seemingly led directly to me becoming aware of my own issues with my body I was unaware of before; I didn’t see any connection here. I mean, yeah, those sounded pretty much identical, but now she knew what was wrong and I still didn’t, and that made it different because of… reasons. Right?

Okay, no, even I wasn’t that dense.

Were the two of us, just, like, stealing each other’s coping mechanisms without even knowing? Or was she suggesting that our ‘underlying causes’ had more in common that we initially assumed?

Wait, wouldn’t that mean that I could…?

Sophie and Abigail were busy arguing about implications of saying something when it might have been ‘too soon’ to say it or whatever, but I had to get my clarification. “What is it exactly that you were suggesting?”

Just as I asked, a very uncomfortable silence fell for enough to tell me that I made a mistake.

“Um, uhh, I-I mean… uhh…” I tried to say something.

I heard a sound of snapping fingers, “I know!” Abigail exclaimed. “Alex can do magic, right?”

“Yes, my girlfriend can indeed ‘do magic’; what are you suggesting, exactly?” Sophie asked flatly.

“Well, if she can do the kind of magic that can find people’s internal self image, then we can just ask her to do it and find out -- if it’s a body issue, then we know what’s wrong and how to fix it, if not, then we know to look for something else,” Abigail explained.

“That…” Sophie groaned. “That’s actually a good idea. Okay, I’ll call her and say that we’ll be coming. Is that okay?”

I did not want to leave my hiding place, much less go out in public, but I wanted to bother yet another person with the mess that I was even less. “Y-yeah, sure.”

And so, after some calming down, we eventually left for a very uncomfortable twenty minutes’ tram ride, made even more uncomfortable by the fact I’d forgotten to put my hoodie back on. But besides that, I was doing surprisingly well — I only tried to run back five times. I think. I might have lost the count with how scared I was feeling.

I had my suspicion, of course, regarding what could be the source of my troubles.  Despite what I seemed like most of the time, I was capable of putting the pieces together sometimes; I was just having troubles actually judging it. Not because I was unsure about anything, but because some part of me desperately didn’t want to think about it, and honestly, I was kinda scared myself; so I decided to go with my tried and true strategy of simply avoiding thinking about the subject until I was literally forced to. Sure, it always seemed to end worse than it would if I just bothered to address stuff earlier, but that was the future me’s problem; current me was still terrified.

Now, I obviously hadn’t visited Alex’s place before, so I didn’t exactly know what to expect, but wooden floors and a bunch of wooden furniture sure were a surprise.

Alex herself welcomed us in surprisingly casual clothing, and as she stretched, she said, “So I hear you’re in need of some TF magic.”

Abigail looked like she was holding in a laugh, while Sophie just looked tired. “Please, don’t call it that.”

“Oh come on, don’t be a party pooper, my family’s too serious on their own,” Alex responded.

There was obviously some joke I wasn’t getting, so I did what I always did in those situations -- stayed silent, ignored the topic, and hoped it wouldn’t come up ever again.

“By the way, it’s Abby now, right? Nice to see you’re doing better,” Alex said.

“‘Abby’, huh? I like it,” Abigail responded.

“Anyyyyways, let’s get down to the thing you’re here for now; I wasn’t exactly prepared to have guests…”

Alex invited me to what she called her workshop, which looked like a completely different place to the rest of the house. Gone were the old-looking wooden things; modern minimalistic bright decor had replaced them completely, and I must admit, it looked much more like an Alex’s place.

I was almost kinda starting to maybe calm down a little about being in an unfamiliar place, but that all evaporated when she started taking a full body mirror out of one of the wardrobes.

“C-can we… do… no mirrors, please?” I formed an almost sentence nervously.

“I was just going to do some magic, so that… but I guess you’d still need to look at the reflection for a bit, huh… Yeah, no, okay, we can skip it if you want to, probably better to rip this band-aid off anyways,” she responded.

“Wait, just like that? We’re going to…” I trailed off, still trying to not think directly about what was going to happen here.

“Nope, still need to explain how it works, that part’s unskippable; come here.” She invited me to the other half of the room, which was unfortunately cut off by an invisible wall of mirror’s influence.

I carefully stepped ahead, making absolutely sure to not get a mirror in even the corner of my vision, which resulted in a very natural and not at all suspicious walking pattern. I promise.


“Okay, so the spell that I’m about to use isn't a normal transformation kind of spell; I can’t influence the end result, and neither can you, at least the part of you you have control over. It uses a different kind of magic to search one’s soul, and get the bodymap, and the image of how the soul desires to be seen; then the spell takes that, and uses it as a template for the transformation. It’s basically what happened to Abigail, but in a more controlled environment, and we won’t be making it permanent, of course — I’ll set a timer for one day, but we can undo it anytime you want. Okay, you got all that?”

I nodded.

“Okay, do you want a moment to ready yourself, or is it an ‘If I wait too long I might get too nervous’ kind of deal?” she asked.

“The second one,” I said quietly.

“Okay then,” she stretched. “Here we go.”

Before it even started, my brain kept yelling ‘Wait, what? Just like that? Already?’ over and over again, even if the rational part of my brain knew there wasn’t really any reason to delay it.

I remembered reading somewhere that being transformed doesn’t really feel like anything; your body just changes shape, and there are no other feelings that go along with it, and I must admit it was pretty accurate to the actual experience. I noticed my pants started feeling loose in the process and caught them before they started falling. Then I realized that it wasn’t just my pants; all my clothes felt really loose, and before I could even process the implications of that, it was done.