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Boring.

Always.

Boring.

I was not always furred. I actually began life as a human being - pale skin, head hair the only (visible) hair, no muzzle. Brown eyes, brown hair, skinny arms and legs, moderately tall; nothing deserving of more than a passing glance. Well, actually, allow me a moment of egotism: I had damn sexy hair. I mean damn sexy. It was thick, luscious, reflective; in a word, waxen. It wasn't short, but didn't even touch my shoulders, was straight beyond straight, and made a defined swish through the air if I turned my head too quickly. But enough on my hair. More would be silly.

So I was not particularly pleased by my lot in life. Not that it was bad, to be honest. I was from a middle-class family, middle child in that family (of five), healthy parental relationships, depressed brother, hormonal sister: all very normal things. My father was a biologist and my mother a home-maker who was once very close to being a high-powered government scientist, but had to give it up for three children and only commented on the trade sparsely. I made all A's in school and was a video game nerd at the sacrifice of my athletic ability, which even so was not pathetic; just, if I had tried, I could have been much, much better.

It was the video games and their complement - books - which opened my mind to the world of fantasy. Excuse me for a tirade, but I would spend hours in a day playing games too young for me just for their content, and then get mad at the people writing the storylines because all the heroes won by "friendship" and "love," whereas the villain, who always ended up fighting one-on-six with the good guys, would nearly beat them before the "surprise" deis ex machina comes in and light wins and darkness is kicked out like a kid with no visible physique with damn sexy hair because he's too socially awkward to have more than two or three friends beyond the embarassingly incompetent recluses and sociophobes who populate only the very backs and very fronts of classrooms, who cut themselves for the attention and write awful poetry just to fit in with the rest of their self-deprecating ilk.

I... have a problem with accepting the idea that you need people to get along in life. Everything paints a picture of society as hand-holding sex, rock concert orgies, team sport fuckfests. Woodstock was stark life cast in reality; the only goal is sex, progeny, immortality. We use others for our own comfort; we do everything we do to get attention; we get attention to either prevent others from having sex or to have sex; we have sex to make children; we make children because we have been genetically engineered by the interruption of the evolutionary flow by the phenomenon of complex emotion, self-convinced that we live through our children and if they are successful and produce more offspring, we will live past this ugly barrier of death.

The bad guys always end up alone, and that's bull. Perhaps the good guy started out alone, and "learned the lesson" that you must have "friendship" and "understanding" to survive. That's not true. We are capable of operating totally independently; that is, not subsistence, but co-existence without social interaction. The only way to break free of the chains imposed by society, by ourselves, and ultimately by Grandfather Ape, is to take time in life to cast aside the permanent quest for companionship and learn solitude; learn quiet contemplation; learn to live alone. You must abandon what you have never questioned to transcend what you have always known.

...

...sorry. I didn't mean to get that philosophical on you that quickly. I'm supposed to be telling the story of my transformation, of my realization of nonreality. Here it is.

Typical day at school. Fake my interest in other people's cares in first period (this is sophomore year of high school, for those of you who are wondering, so a year before the previous chapter); legitimately pay attention in second because history is too boring a subject to learn by sleeping through it. It wasn't until third period that something fun finally happened.

So I was sitting very innocently in physics when all of a sudden, the girl I've been building up tension with for a few months stands up, points her finger at me, and proclaims, "You, Glen, are too aberrant a human being to be allowed to flourish in our normalized world." She had always had a nack for diction like that. I think that was why the tension had happened; we were philosophically opposing entities and had political arguments all the time. I always took Darwin's side, and she Marx's. Every time, it boiled down to whether you let the poor die out or have a responsibility to keep them alive. And for some reason, everyone always saw me in the wrong. Usually, nothing came of it, but today, it was apparent she was somewhat upset.

"Seize him!" Before I knew what was happening, they had chained me like some class demonstration to the blackboard and I was facing thirty grinning faces in the overpopulated classroom while my teacher witnessed from behind her desk, her fingertips pressed together in contemplation. Evil eyes watched me from out of the girl's face, and her hair was hoar with her hatred as her angular features jutted her chin towards me defiantly. "You advocate the indirect murder of the innocent; I charge you with this crime. Do you deny it?"

"I do!" I rattled in my chains, straining, but they were tight.

"Your sentence is that you will be shamed on the first and third Mondays of every month in a manner similar to this, in the entrance hall! Do you accept this punishment?"

"I do not accept it!"

"And yet it is to be carried out, e'en so! Bring him to his ignominy!" she shouted, raising a bejeweled scepter high. The mob, jeering, wrapped me in chains and carried me to the school's massive entrance hall, filled with windows and drab concrete at constant odds with one another. Like God was trying really, really hard to liven up the place. It needed doing, despite the red and blue themed colors.

The hall was filled with onlookers as I was raised up to a balcony on the second story in my chains, roaring my defiance. "You are all of you guilty of perverting the wills of God and Darwin and fail to promote constant improvement!"

"Ignoble cause!" defied a shrill voice. Her evil eyes made themselves apparent from out of the crowd. "You have ignoble cause, and will be the downfall of decency and all that is right! Shame! Shame him!"

And a man was brought to shave my head, but I resisted, and so they held me down and shaved my hair from my head and I felt shame. But I would not give in.

"I claim myself as a Samsonite, inheritor of that legend's bloodline!"

They gasped. "You daren't! Blasphemer!"

"Samson fathered my line!" I screamed.

"Liar! Calumnies; he infiltrates your mind!"

And then, just when I was about to tear down the building around their Pharisee heads, the bell rang for fourth. So they all jumped up to get on the way to their classes, and my chains kind of rolled off, and I picked up my backpack and headed to chemistry. My fantasies always seemed to get interrupted right at the climax.

Catherine intercepted me as I walked. Her dark blond hair covered her angular face over eyes that weren't really evil; they just seemed to switch back and forth between green and blue depending on the lighting and her shirt color, and that was cool. "Glen, were you fantasizing about me again?"

I blinked. How to respond? What was social custom? I was caught in a whirlpool by just one person; what did I say? "Um..." Not that. "I- no, I wouldn't... I kinda got bored-"

She laughed like I imagine a butterfly would laugh if they could. "Don't be so embarrassed- oh! Your ears are so red!" She giggled and pushed my shoulder. I gasped silently at the touch. She had no idea how much she meant to me. Maybe I should tell you exactly where that fantasy started and where it would have ended. It started with the arguing. We argued, but it was about petty, funny things, even if it was in magniloquent terms most people couldn't follow. She was a brilliant linguist, and if I could ever drop into the flow of the argument, we could get a crowd rolling over themselves with laughter. Which irritated the teachers to no end, obviously. It would have ended with her revealing to me she had been acting the whole time just so I could bring down this socialist structure around its occupants' communist heads, and she would kiss my lips and I would hold her soft body in my arms and tell her it was all right...

Catherine didn't know that. Catherine had a boyfriend on the swim team named Joe, and Joe was buff, if not beefy. (Quick level-of-muscularity info: athletic, buff, beefy, beastly, titanic. There's a negative list, too, but I won't type it because I'm on it.) Joe was also socially competent and had access to alcohol. Those were two things I couldn't and wouldn't, respectively, beat.

In fifth period, the characters in the stories and video games and animés and movies I knew in addition to some characters I had written started talking to me, as usual, to give me something to do during the lesson. Pre-Cal. Ick.

So there I was, innocently mentally talking to my little self-made hallucinations when in bursts this student from last year's graduating class with a submachine gun, demanding that I show myself. He was a dark-haired child with a penchant for failing to foil my attempts to tie or beat his records. We had had a good-natured rivalry, but it had progressed to something darker as freshman year slowly ticked by and I showed no sign of slowing my ascent to his level. I, naturally, stood up and immediately fused with Gaara of "Naruto," with whom I had been talking earlier. His deeply-ringed eyes shone out of my face and his gourd of sand weighed heavy on my back, but I approached the idiot with deadly intent. He began to shake, hopped up on adrenaline like he was, aimed the gun, and pointed, emptying the entire clip into my chest. I grinned at him as my face cracked apart and revealed a hollow interior, then jumped down on him from the ceiling where I actually was and kicked his head freaking off.

A voice cornered me from the front of the classroom. "That was very nice of you, Glen, but what I asked was the cosine of pi over six." Pre-Cal teacher was cool, even if the course was not. "Care to answer?"

And then she really did ask me a question, and I had to wake up and glance around to find the problem before answering it.

You probably weren't expecting sex quite so soon in the story, but you know that point during masterbation right before that particular pulse happens that means you're cumming on the next stroke? I don't know if it's the same for girls, but for guys, if we're sufficiently lubed by whatever substance (soap is popular among teenagers, I've heard), we can keep that feeling going for a painfully frustrating length of time while all we want is a release. Another method that'll cause that (guys only, obviously) is to-try this, it's weird-stroke the back of the head insead of the front. Holy crap, but if that isn't the most sexually frustrating method of masterbation, I don't know what is. Once was enough.

My life was like hanging on that damned edge every single day. I could feel energy, limitless energy, welling up within me in tandem with these wild fantasies. So I went through them in my head, submitting every sense I could manage to the power of my mental imagery until I felt surely, surely, this must be real. Some part of this must have invaded reality.

But no. Every night, trying to do telekineses, trying to summon flames, imagining a crossover between worlds, I was denied access to the realms of fantasy. Not only that, but I had a stupidly strong crush on two or three different girls and at least one guy at the time and not one of them was my actual girlfriend, who was grating more and more on my nerves, but I didn't have the heart to just tell her, "Let's be honest. Even as hopeless a misfit as I am, I can do better than you." The truth is harder for the barer than the receiver, sometimes. Especially when for me, it meant I would never have a chance at the three beauties I admired.

This had been going on for over two years. Yeah, you people from three paragraphs ago are like, "Dang, that's painful just for those couple seconds or minutes; he must mean it only lasts during those little fantasies." No, folks, I'm talking two years of nearly constant desire and lack of consummation. Two years of stroking my subconscious and my right brain with only ghosts of climaxes. It made me cry once, and I will not say I didn't damage myself physically in an attempt to drive away the insanity derived from a contained imagination. Luckily, all of those more violent expressions of myself are kept carefully under the surface and are only allowed out at about two in the morning, when my house is asleep.

I did, at the very least, have one friend who wouldn't fry my dreams when I talked about them with him. Jason was very similar to me, physically and mentally. His face was perhaps a bit sharper, his hair shorter; he was maybe a half-inch taller than I and wore glasses, but we were equally academically competent and had imaginations on a level with one another, so we could theorize about the impossible with one another pretty effectively. I mean, the impossible often had to do with Jell-O pants or shogun koala bears than with anything serious, but we could still sit down and have an honest conversation with one another while we were supposed to be learning something.

"But if they were made of Jell-O, you'd have to be extra certain to never microwave them."

"Why on Earth would you microwave them?"

"Well, you certainly can't put them in the washing machine. They'd dissolve."

"That is a problem. They'd just have to be cheap and disposable."

"But who wants to eat Jell-O pants you've already worn?"

"You'd have to wear underwear with them, wouldn't you?"

"Eww, Jell-O rape!"

And on, and on. He was a cool guy.

He and I underwent (yes, underwent, not undertook; it was heavy work) an English project in our third year of high school. It was to research druidism, Wicca, and other religious or semi-religious doctrines with heavy occult influences-"randomly" assigned as a topic of study, meaning I'd been using my position of quasi-teacher's pet to lean towards it. He was not at all happy with the assignment, because his dealings with the fantastical ran more along the lines of science fiction, whereas mine were based more in classic fantasy: dragons, sorcerors, and the like. We considered each the other's interests to be way too nerdy for common society, but mine won out because our instructor thought we would work well together. Instructors tend to pick out alliances between and among students much more quickly than the students would like to believe.

So we dutifully ploughed into the research, meaning we had an initial surge of zeal, which study quickly diluted to a more passive fervor, and then even more quickly to procrastination. Three days before it was due, we were stressing out of our minds trying to find sufficient material so we could BS a sophisticated report out of it. I came across an ancient text printed in a book of study on the subject at some point and glanced at it in offhand curiosity. It was druidic in origin, and was composed of illegible characters I could not initially discern. However, upon closer inspection, during a momentary lull in fervor, I began to make out words.

We were in the library, but no one else was there, so it was okay when I had to call to him from across the room. "Jason. Jason, come here."

"What?" He didn't look up from his books or his writing.

"This is cool; come take a look. It's some Celtic thing or another, but they wrote it in English. Check this out."

He put his pencil down with an exaggerated sigh. "I have enough problems finding ways to put this off without you coming up with them on your own. The Druids didn't write in our alphabet."

"Sure they did." I turned with the book and set it in front of him. "Look, in the picture on the left."

He examined it for a moment. "Glen, are you sure you weren't just substituting English for gibberish? You know the brain will do that-try to make familiar objects when it can't... hold on." He bent his head closer as I crossed my arms in triumph.

"See?"

"But this is stupid. That doesn't make sense. The side-panel even says, 'This is a prime example of ancient Celtic inscription. At about this time in their history...' Yadda, yadda, yadda... It doesn't give a translation."

"But you see it, right?" I was very excited at this point. This was something weird. Something very possibly beyond the invisible bounds of reality. Even if my brain was passively trying to rationalize it.

"Yes, I see it, but we could both be seeing the same delusion. I mean, what do you think it said?"

"Hold on, let me look again." I pulled the book over. "It says, ah- 'The mirror. There begins a cross-over/ Cross-phase of world to dream (no, it might say "spirit" or maybe "bent light"; I can't tell.

"How can you not tell among those three?"

"It's... you'll see, when you read it again, it's weird. Let me finish.")

'When what follows is read: / Walk the planes 'twixt twilight and dawn/ Reflected light shows doubling souls/ Watch the parallel; life-switch to memory.' Sounds like it gets increasingly confounding as it goes. You read it."

He pulled the book back and mumbled the exact words I had, with variations on the parenthetical above. When he was done, he set it down. "That's ridiculous. I think it's just our subconscious minds playing tricks on us."

"In that level of detail?"

"What's the other explanation? That we can read Celtic, or whatever the language is called, as though it were English? How would we ever know what was Celtic and what wasn't? When did you take a class in it?"

"Maybe we're special," I said stupidly, not sure if I believed it or not. I wanted to.

He gave me a sardonic look. "And maybe you're stupid. Just turn off your right brain while we're at this and don't cut it back on until we're done."

"Pragmatist."

"Moron."

"Ineloquent churl."

"Brain-dead idiot."

We went back to our studies with a vengeance, and I didn't let myself think about it again. We definitely didn't mention it to anyone else. Well, he didn't, and I didn't tell him that I made a copy and passed it around to a few people. They didn't see anything legible. They also never learned that I could read it.

Due date came for the paper, grades came back a week later, we got docked three points for poor formatting because we didn't read the grading sheet, and he, for all I knew, forgot about it. I kept a copy with me and read it every now and then, when I was bored. Occasionally, I would try to copy the characters, but all I could write was the English. It was like... well, it wasn't like anything. It was, through and through, spontaneously learning a language without any clue regarding how to speak or write it. I guess like Morse code listeners, except that they can tell they're hearing beeps and not someone spelling a message for them.

Nothing happened. I don't know if I expected anything to, but various phases of the year at which I expected heavy other-wordly influence (a solstice, the moon phases, an equinox, the new year, my birthday; not in that order) passed and I got nothing. My creative brain was yearning so hard for some release that my fantasies began to interrupt school work. Not that my grades suffered; instead, my energy level did, because I had to stay up later to make up for lost time spent daydreaming.

Obviously, I spent a lot of time contemplating my own reflection, especially naked, hoping the symbolic purity would do me some good. Luckily, I had my own bathroom in my house, so this facilitated my having time to do so. It also did wonders for concealing masterbation, but that's not quite as important, nor is it the point.

I would search my reflection in the mirror, especially my eyes. I had grown, over time, to like my eyes. Like every pair, these had tiny rings of darker colour just before the edge, giving them a kind of subdued dramatic flair. They were bloodshot from fatigue and irritating contacts more often than I would have liked, but they were functional, and that's all you can ask for when your dad's job covers eye care. I also looked at my chest and acne-scarred (lightly; nothing disgusting) face quite a bit, detesting scabs, pimples, and scars, but unable to remove them and so further frustrated. Luckily, my abs had just barely enough shape that if I really flexed, I looked like I had a recognizable musculature. I didn't look much lower; it was nothing special, but nothing to be ashamed of. Plus, flaccidity really is not appealing, generally, even to the bearer.

I came home one day in March (not the ides thereof; don't get any ideas) and, as usual, slacked off for four hours before doing my homework, slacked off some more, and then got ready for bed. I stripped down entirely, glanced at my photo of the inscription on my desk, and went into the bathroom, again absorbed. That particular day, I had killed three terrorists, tamed a dragon, and jumped down from ten stories to land on my history teacher. I also aced a math test and beasted an essay in English class, but that wasn't really important.

Anyway, so I wound up in my bathroom, stark naked, again. The house was quiet because everyone had gone to different things, be they dinner, soccer, or, in my brother's case, college, so I was all alone. No one home. And I stared into the bathroom mirror, then leaped up onto my sink and crouched there on the edge like a frog, glaring at myself, hoping for that crossover. My character hallucinations had been forgotten; I wanted the mirror to begin a crossover, or whatever the inscription said. There had been too much physical stasis in my life; way too much for me to stand it without going nuts like I had before.

I remember those times vividly; too vividly. Moreso when I looked at the fine, thin scars on my abdomen and shoulders. Don't judge me. Shirley Jackson did warn us: "No organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality."

Suddenly, I began to hear breathing. Not the quiet breath through the nose of a cat burglar. Not the mouth-breathing of a psycho serial killer. Not my own breathing, for those of you suspicious of my perceptions. But a controlled, heavy, arhythmic breathing like someone crying and trying not to be heard. I turned my head around and stepped back down, more than moderately concerned. "Anyone home?" I shouted after several moments contemplating the consequences of making known my whereabouts to a possibly deranged murderer. Murderers didn't cry while they killed; this was something else. Right?

There was no answer, obviously. Because no one was home. And anyone who was not supposed to be in my home would probably not answer. I was naked, and someone was robbing my house, and breathing abnormally loudly. So I went and put on some night clothes and peeked my head outside my door, pointedly avoiding looking out the closed window blinds in my room. My heart was beating very quickly at this point, because having a mind for fantasy goes hand-in-hand with having a mind for unnamed terrors. And terrorists.

Suddenly "ALLALLALLALLALLALLA" naw, I'm just fuckin' with ya.

The sound subsided to a pant for a few moments, then picked back up again. Concerned, I grabbed my flashlight to use as a beating stick, flicked on the nearest lights, and began to explore the house. The breathing got quieter as I crawled farther from my room, which bothered me intensely, because it increased the chance that I would have to gather the nerve to open my windows, and that simply was not a happening thing.

Unfortunately, after an unnecessarily long search of the house, I had found no one. I say unfortunately because I would much prefer to beat the snot out of someone who was hiding in my living room than out of someone who had scaled my house and was panting outside my window. Option two was a little creepy for me. But it was the only one left besides calling the police, and that was too embarassing, especially considering the altogether too-high probability of my fear being the result of an overactive imagination and branches scratching on the window. Even if it had never happened before and the closest tree branch was ten feet away from the house.

Finally, I got back to my room and opened the door. The light was still on, but the breathing seemed to have dwindled. It was there no more. Total silence, again. Shakily, I undressed again, this time preparing for my shower. Criminals tend to use showers as covers for the movements they make in the house they're robbing, anyway, so they had no reason to try to kill me in the shower. Right?

And I walked into my bathroom, my heartbeat pounding in my chest as my breath finally began to deepen and slow, and there in my mirror was a dark blue, dragon-winged, anthropomorphic wolf, wiping semen off the bathroom counter on the other side of the mirror, whose contents were far removed from those on my side.

Immediately, my heart felt like it was going to jump out of my chest, finish the tapdance it'd been doing all my life, and run off to join the circus. It seemed that intent on leaving my body. My eyes widened, I'm sure like dinner plates, but I couldn't tell because I had no reflection. Wolf-person seemed unnaturally agitated for someone who had just masterbated. He was breathing through bared teeth and pointedly not looking at his thing as it bobbed through the last few, dry contractions of orgasm and he wiped it off with a paper towel. His bathroom seemed to be very normal: different paint, different style than mine, but essentially a human bathroom. I didn't care.

He hadn't noticed me. "Hey!" I said. Or tried to say. It came out as some high-pitched squeal that cracked over two or three octaves. I cleared my throat and tried again. The other guy didn't respond. I latched onto the portion of me that had been preparing for something like this for the past two or three years and gave it the reigns. "Hey, you! Is this a one-way sound booth, or what?" I touched the mirror. It was solid.

He didn't respond until he looked up, at which point he let out a surprised gasp (that I didn't hear) and backed up quickly enough to land clumsily on his toilet seat. I crouched down so only my chest was showing above the counter, and he, once he recovered, adopted a similar position. His ears were shining bright red even through his fur, to have been caught doing what he was doing. We apparently had similar minds for shame. "Who are you? What's going on?" He had brown eyes.

He gave me a weird look, as if he couldn't understand me. Then, he opened his mouth and I imagine, through some biological twist, that he was making words come out of that lupine face, but they didn't transmit across the mirror, and I certainly couldn't read his lips.

"I can't hear you," I told him, not raising my voice. It was very odd. I could hear him earlier, gasping in masturbatory excitement, but I couldn't even hear him speaking clearly, now? The instantiators of this magic had apparently wanted to grant awareness, but not communication. Either that, or they were perverted authors.

...moving along.

He held up a finger, saying, "Wait," and disappeared for a few moments. His bathroom vanished and my reflection reformed, but just as I started to call for him, he came back, pen and paper in hand. Also, pants on butt. I held up my own finger to prepare similarly, and met him back at the mirror.

He wrote for a little while, then held up a sheet of paper. It said, ".bnarl trlqir ruoy qu bloH" Which, when read backwards, said, "Hold up your right hand." I caught on as to why, and raised it.

The next message was written the right way, if sloppily, and said, "Well that settles that."

"Clever," I wrote, struggling through the reverse writing. "First off, what's your name?"

"Sibra," he responded. "Yours?"

"Glen. Nice to meet you. What in God's name is going on?"

"Same to you. For both."

I decided to start thinking, something I hadn't done until just then. The mirror had begun the crossover. Whoever this was, he was in another universe. One which apparently hosted, as the dominant life form, anthropomorphic wolves. Logically, he was also my mental identical twin. So I naturally felt a little egotistical when I looked at the paper and saw I had called myself clever.

We had been staring at each other while I reasoned this when all of a sudden, we both got an idea and started writing.

"There begins a crossover."

A dark smile lit our faces as we realized what had happened. Fantasies were becoming reality. Time for some experimentation.

"I want to try something," I wrote, and realized as I held it up that he had written, "Let's experiment." I bowed and let him start, and he beckoned me closer. I didn't let go of my pencil and neither did he, but we pressed right hands together on the glass. His mouth moved, and I just grinned with a low chuckle and said, "I have wanted you for so long."

I didn't introduce the most important of my hallucinatory friends when I was talking about them earlier. This one, I had imagined for multiple years and never let go, no matter what society dictated. You may call it an imaginary friend, but I swear that's not what it was. He was real, to me. I never gave him a name, but he was always there for me, mostly because I controlled his presence or absence, little as I liked to admit it. He often held me right before I went to sleep and as I woke up; he was a strength during my mental trials, and a companion in my solitude. He was even, on rare occasions, my lover, but in general just a warm body to cuddle with for comfort. I know-how pathetic, to be that desparate for companionship after my tirade about total independence from earlier. But I loved him, and for three years, I had wanted him more than anything in the world. And now he was standing right in front of me, separated only by a mirror.

I didn't break it; I was too afraid I might lose him. But I did write "Stay there" on a page, spread toothpaste along the top, and stick it to the mirror, then leave the room for about thirty seconds. When I came back, he nodded. He could read it while I was gone, but I imagined that was all he could see of my world. And I hoped that anyone else could not see even that.

Time for more testing. We needed to know how similar our worlds were. "What's the formula for copper-III sulfate?"

"Cu2(SO4)3. Who wrote 'The Raven'?"

"Edgar Allan Poe. Who killed Aerith of Final Fantasy VII?"

"Sephiroth and twenty-thousand crying fanboys." That with a wry grin.

We laughed over the sheer amazingness of it all. It was... it was... too incredible for words like an aurora borealis in my brain. Something had finally happened. And not something with rules that were too screwy or confusing, thus far. Just something that did not conform to the previously accepted norm. It suffused me with sublime energy, and for minutes we couldn't do anything but look at each other and laugh about how incredibly phenomenal it all was.

Suddenly, he went completely serious and wrote something hastily. I felt I almost knew what it said before he thrust it up against the glass. "I want to feel you."

My heart jumped into my throat. Life. Love. Completion. I couldn't form coherent thoughts. My dream, my love, my only friend closer than Jason but not quite as close as God, wanted to touch me. And I wanted to feel him.

His wings started vibrating and glowing. I told him. "Your wings are glowing." They shone in an opalescent blue and green and for some reason more resembled butterfly wings just from the color change than the dragon ones they really were, but that would have taken too long to say.

He seemed confused. "I don't have wings, but so are yours."

I stared at him. "I don't have wings; I'm a human being."

"And I'm an anthro being and neither do I!"

Just to be sure, we looked behind us. Nothing.

And then, the universe bent. Somewhere in the middle of the mirror, an axis formed, around which reality started to fold in on itself. Nothing exploded, nothing even crumpled like it should have, but the very air was sliced in two and was bending around like a concave mirror that a giant was squeezing further and further inward. I had enough time to watch my fingers stretch ten feet away from my hand to the mirror (three feet away) before the action was complete and we were sitting next to each other in his bathroom, leaning over the counter with our pencils and paper.

My heart beat like a hummingbird's. I looked down at the pencil in my hand; one of the ones with which I had cut myself too many times in naïve attempts to escape madness. I looked down at the fingers and fingernails which had left welts on my arms and chest rather than tearing anything of value. I looked down at the hands which beat my body so they didn't beat anyone else's.

Never again would they need to be used like that.

Right?

Finally, I turned my head sideways to look at my doppelganger. "Am I here?" I whispered. "Who else is here?"

"No one," he answered, his breath as shallow as mine. "My parents are out for the weekend, my sister's at her friend's house for the night, and my brother's been at college for a year." He had my voice.

I reached in my pocket, not breaking eye contact, and brought out a tiny pad of paper. I always had paper, even in a wonderland. "You said Sibra?" He nodded. "Sibra what?"

"Roelan Terrian."

I licked my dry lips and finally broke contact to write that on the pad. "Hold on while I sketch you."

"But I'm not an artist," he answered, confused. It was all so surreal. I could feel the ethereality sifting through the air in a colorless mirage, but it wasn't a dream. Please, God, it wasn't a dream.

"You're a writer." I wrote his height and eye color in slow strokes, paying close attention to the living color of those eyes. The dark rim around the edge, the lack of redness; all was incorporated into the few characters I needed.

"I'm a spider," he murmured in dawning realization. He breathed swiftly, hesitantly. "Do you mind?"

I shook my head in the quiet. Swish. "Glen. Keldan Terrian."

He extracted his own pad and scribed me. For a long minute, every second was filled with the scratching of pencils and the brushing of air as we breathed it, painting detail into every stroke of the pencil; sketching one another. It felt like forever; he was endless. I could feel his past like a memory through a telescope lens. Recording his life in as short a time as I ever gave myself felt as impossible as that moment's reality, but his poetry ended only a split second after mine, and I laid my pencil down just to watch him.

He met my gaze, relinquishing his instrument as well. Whispered questions as thoughts penetrated the silence around us, but it didn't feel like we were speaking.

"Am I alive?"

"Are you here?"

"What time do we have?"

"Am I really you?"

"Can I touch you?"

"We're the same."

"Let me hear you."

"Feel me."

"I love you."

I don't know when we stood, but then I was wrapping him in my arms and feeling him hold me, his hands caressing my back and my... my wings. He trailed claws along them like ice on a loving burn, butterfly touches cooling my skin as my hands stroked the fur on his back, and his neck, and his head... I drew a finger from behind his ear, down past his eye, to the tip of his nose, and back across his forehead to smooth his hair. We stared forever into one another's eyes, unable to speak, only to shiver at our touches and tremble from the silent lightning storm in our fingers that spun a new melody of gasps from every touch, harmonics buffeting the air as we breathed thunder and the whole of life rolled around us.

He pulled me in for a tighter embrace and I returned it, feeling his silky chest against mine as he rested his beautiful head on my shoulder. "I have wanted you for too long," he whispered.

I didn't dare speak back. I didn't want my voice to catch. So instead I squeezed him tighter and buried my face in his neck, never wanting to let go. To be with him forever, to have his love forever, to feel his touch forever... was an unfortunate impossibility.

I think we both realized it at the same time, because we backed away in mutual hesitation and looked down to reascertain our emotional control. It was then that we realized, through our loose night clothing, that our tactile closeness had made things harder than we thought. A wet spot showed through my thin fabric.

There was no reaction I had built in for a situation like this, so I simply reddened as he laughed. But he was coloring, too, so I grinned wryly back at him.

"What would you think of me if I jumped you in your own house?" I asked him, shattering all sorts of boundaries I had once imposed on myself. He gave me the strength.

He shone forth a small smile. "I would think you're much more honest about your narcissism than I am." With that, he slipped his hand suddenly into my pants, eliciting a sharp gasp, but I let him do it; I knew who he was. If I hadn't, he wouldn't have been so forward; as it was, he was shivering with the abruptness with which he had moved. He closed his cool fingers around my erection, one by one, and I felt my testes pull up at the touch. In response, I snaked my arm around his back and pulled his lips to mine, then used the other to unstrap the strip of fabric over his tail and drop his pants to the floor. His hands pushed lightly down on my hips, and we were bare naked in his bathroom. We backed out towards his bed. He guided me in a dance, my eyes closed, to his door, so he could close it, and turned off the light, so the only illumination was that from the bathroom. His breath warmed my face and lips with sweeter aromas than any garden of candles.

I suggested in my movements, into which I let slip a subtle liquidity, grinding my hips against his as he swirled like cream under my touch, that we move to the bed, and backed him against it. We, both being shy and afraid of mistakes, found it hard to make any forward motion, so every action was a new step into the unknown. He grabbed my butt and pulled me with him onto the quilt, then we rolled until we were all the way on it, panting and kissing and licking whatever we could get at. Lips, ears, eyes, noses, necks, shoulders, chests... and I realized I had thrust onto his abdomen as he lay on his back so that his slickened member was poking underneath my balls. His tongue seemed glued to my sternum as we froze. My chest was arched towards him as I looked down into his eyes, and I let him know in my breathy silence that the choice was his. It made me positively tremble, and I could almost not nod my head, so much fear and ignorance had swollen in my gut. His heavenly wings, spread out beneath him, made even the leathered appendages angelic as I gazed upon him.

They vibrated, and I sensed a rush of fresh, clean feeling through my insides. He grasped my hips and began sliding me down his body, or at least applied the pressure he might need to do so. I shivered against him, having never honestly considered doing this, letting someone do this to me. His eyes were closed in concentration as I watched him, trusting him completely. His tip touched me for entry, but then he stopped. His mouth moved and I heard air waver.

I bent my head close to his mouth, lips bone dry. "What?" I whispered. I didn't know if I wanted it or not, but I wanted him to have anything he wanted; body, mind, or soul, was his for the asking. I trusted him with any or all three.

"I can't do it. I can't break virginity." Glass; neophyte; pristinity.

"Then don't." I kissed his forehead, lifted my hips, and settled down on him, chest-to-chest again. We rolled to our sides and entwined our legs. My breath caught in my throat, but I told him: "Anything that is mine, you can have."

His heart beat against my skin, and I laid my head on his breast to feel him speak. "Because I trust you with all that I am," he breathed in response, wrapping his arms around me, brushing my hair with his fingers. There was fear in his eyes, but not fear of what I might do. Fear that it wasn't real. Fear of what I might think of him. I knew, because he was the other me, and I felt the same. Suddenly, he rolled me over onto my back and began dragging his impossibly smooth body along my hard-on, down, down as I closed my eyes and breathed in ecstasy, the fur tickling my flesh to a lovely potency. Once his head was at my groin, he lifted it and put his hands on my scrotum, rubbing the balls within tenderly.

I raised myself up just enough to tell him to do nothing he didn't want to, then leaned back slowly against pillows I found at his gestured request and closed my eyes. His hands on me were soft and loving, rubbing me expertly in my lightless world, with just the pressure to make my body tingle pleasantly and send shivers down my spine. I flexed my member, which hurt with need, and he nosed it slowly, letting his tongue follow after from the workings of his hands to the sensitive tip. I felt his lips close around the head in a kiss, and he licked off the precum bead which answered him in tandem with my whines. Then, in a series of slow advances, he enclosed the entire length with his muzzle. I gasped in shock at the warmth, at the wetness, at the slow pushing of his tongue up and down my length, at the forever for which he drove me. I panted as it moved like the finest paintbrush, spreading his saliva thickly, with his hot breath like a private sauna, for minutes upon minutes, as he tasted me, and I could almost feel him memorizing me. I caressed his flanks with my foot, trying to let my pleasure ignore my callouses, until I accidentally bucked my hips in a spasm I couldn't control, feeling liquid fire knot itself in my groin... and then, I didn't want to climax without him.

Without giving him warning, I sat up and gently, so gently holding his cheeks, pulled him off. He looked at me in confusion, but then I drew him back alongside me and bid him stay still while I turned around until we were breathing one another's musk from its sources. It was heady, fragrant, and full of lust. Still nervous, but no longer hesitant, I gave the blue, yearning length before me a soft lick with the tip of my tongue, and felt him tense all along his body as I savored the taste of my guardian and my closest friend, my lover and my guide.

It was less ordered from there. I felt him take me in his mouth again, and licked thickly at his shaft and balls, surrounding the soft orbs with my mouth, responding to his stimulation. Reciprocated pleasure sent electricity like the blue lightning of a shooting star coursing through the night from wish to wish and we twitched and moaned and pressed each against the other in hungry need. Eternity had nothing on our driven, timeless union. Galaxies bloomed and spun their arms through my loins and my spine and my mind, suns lighting fires through the whole of my body as a nebula slowly collected itself again in the deepest part of me, pulled by my center of gravity. I knew the supernova was imminent, after these eons of pleasure, especially when I felt him harden ever more in my mouth as I ran my lips up and down along his length, around his head to a kiss of the tip and all the way back down with my tongue over and around and down and out to fondle his balls as my hands pushed his hips in heavy caresses, pulling him, pulling him, pulling him as he was reflecting me over the edge and into the white explosion of blinding orgasms we twitched, whined, moaned, and swallowed, sucking for more, breathing sepulchral beauty of the night through gasping strobes of epileptic lust.

I drained the last of my energy from him, his pale, unbrokenly smooth flesh undulating beneath my fingers while his fuzzy balls began to descend again. I lay against my side in the foreverwarm afterglow, pulling back to look down at the expanse of fur on his chest, such a contrast to the ball of brown hair surrounding the pink rod in his lap, and it was several seconds before I realized that our perception was no longer what it had been.

I was lying against me against him over and beneath as we rolled and from one side of this twisted mirror to the next there was no discernable difference because there had begun a crossover, and superimposed over our selves were ourselves. His eyes widened, afraid, but not of me; he was afraid that it wasn't real because only in dreams do the unreal reveal the bleary lines between sights of sleep and waking-who was who and where were we?

"How is this-?" I raised my hand to touch him and his met me in the middle, but we weren't touching in this invisible mirror that had gyrated into reality. He was a reflection of himself in me, and suddenly, he was gone, and I was left in his room, my tail twitching agitatedly as my heart quickened and my eyes couldn't find him except in the image burned on my eyelids.

"Sibra? Sibra, where are you?" I called frantically. He couldn't be gone. I couldn't be him. We were different people with separate souls; we were mirror images in mirror worlds; how had this happened? Why wasn't he here? Why couldn't I feel him anymore?

I rushed into his bathroom and looked into the mirror to find him drawing a message with his finger on the glass, looking at me from his side and finishing it as I watched. "Your mom is home. We'll have to talk later. Here at midnight tomorrow; I remember you. I trust you." His black and blue dragon-butterfly wings were ghostly and fading; they couldn't exist in my world.

As I read, I realized that his memories were mine; everything I had seen through that telescope, I had access to. I pressed my hands and forehead against the glass, careful not to hurt his nose as we tried to touch one last time. But then his pink ears twitched ever so slightly and I knew my mother was calling. In a last gesture, we pulled away and mirrored touches to our hearts, lips, and minds; an honored farewell.

I turned away in one motion and did not look back, instead surveying his room around me. My clothes and writing instruments were gone; we were each the other until we could figure out this switch. His phone rang.

I ran to pick it up. "Hello?"

"Hey, Sibra, it's your mother."

"Hey, Mom." My voice wavered.

"Sibra, is everything okay?" She sounded worried.

"Everything's fine, Mom. My voice just caught. How are you and Dad doing?"

I swung my tail around to look at its luscious length and couldn't help but smile as the conversation continued. This was... well. Let's just be literal, shall we? It was fantastic. This solidarity was so much more appealing than the two solitary lives I would be living, but it could only be with him. Eternally him, and of him, and with him, forever.