Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s a sound that rings out when Cater grips the bathroom sink. It’s the squeak of his fingertips slipping across the damp bowl. It’s the groan of his bones, creaking against the strain.

There are 27 in each hand, 54 total. Cater knows them intimately. If he peeled and pinned back his skin he could name each one like a close friend. He could tell you what they do, how far back they could bend. He could tell you the hex code for the color his knuckles turn. It almost matches the porcelain.

Same thing goes for the rest of him. The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to the knee bone— well, the foot consists of 26 bones and 33 joints, and those connect to the leg via several ligaments. The lower leg is two bones, actually, a fact most people should know, and these connect to the patella which is the “knee bone”…

On and on, Cater’s body branches out, a tangle of meat and marrow, pleasantly packaged by layer of muscles and fat and epithelium and these fucking jeans that he just bought yesterday because some other idiot on the internet influenced him and he fell for it. They don’t fucking fit, and the color is hideous.

Topping it all off is his head, with his mop of red hair thoughtlessly thrown half up. It’s chic. It’s easy. He has mom’s chin. It’s gentle and at the wrong angle it looks like he has no jawline, so he always makes sure to tilt his head just-so for selfies. He has dad’s eyes. Maybe. They’re the same color at least. The deep wrinkles and plum purple bags underneath match too.

There’s something about the mirror. It might be broken. 

It might be his front-facing camera. They always say it adds five pounds. Extra lines, errant polygons, impossible dimension. His nose is a collision of haphazard crosshatching, his smile a practiced knot. Are snaggle teeth still in? Still cute? Can people tell his eyebrows move independently from each other when he laughs? Do they see it? The stupid, disobedient shift in the warped plane he calls a face?

He could never get it right.

He tries. Redistributes his weight onto the heels of his palms (the thenar and hypothenar eminences) and grins into the mirror, pulling back the curtain of his lips. It’s just wrong. It’s all wrong. It doesn’t matter how much he studies, how many names of body parts he remembers, how they move, what they do, what they can’t do— there’s just no point. He’ll never look like a real person.

Magic putters feebly around him, rising off his body like steam. He’d grab it if he could. Compact it into little silicone molds, dozens of little crevices for each tiny metatarsal and tarsal, and then sculpt a foot before clicking it into its place on a leg. Then he’d dress it in pants that actually fit him.

It was a stupid idea, one fueled by abject loneliness and bottomless teenaged hubris. A Unique Magic where he could clone himself required a level of imagination and understanding he simply doesn’t possess. What an idiot. Memorizing every organ and muscle and shape in his body is such a slog, and staring at his reflection for hours on end like this has birthed nothing but headaches. It’s just cruel and unusual punishment. It’s beyond that, even, but he’s afraid. He’s afraid to have more of him out there, misshapen and wrong.

Who even is he? Here, in front of the mirror in the bathroom he shares with his sisters, teeth bared, eyes sunken, stupid fucking pants hanging off the ledges of his pelivs. Who even is he if not just a random combination of these things, bones connected to bones, an ever-shifting silhouette?

Who is he? Who is he, now, in front of the mirror, tucked away from other people’s thoughts of him? Does Cater Diamond exist? Cater Diamond, that careful curation of algorithmically generated, palatable traits and trendy language. Is he real?

He wants to be.

The grimace melts from his face, and the sound rings out again, 54 tiny voices screaming against the basin of the sink.

He wants to be.