Slowly but surely, the Valley is becoming his home.
Home was another concept that was unfamiliar to only Taylor. Everyone else seemed to know what it was. It felt good to be in on the joke. Planck was a threat that was growing more immaterial by the day. In his dreams, even in his nightmares, he can put a hand through his brother. Translucent.
Lost in thought, knee-deep in the Meadow, Taylor sees his doppelganger.
Blonde and blue-eyed— in front of this mirror, he freezes. He's outside of his body, looking at the back of his own head. Then he's back, tingling, the definition of gravity shifted two spaces down and to the left.
Cautiously, he traces a circumfrence. The boy's mouth is red. Taylor is thrown gently across the coffee table of reality. In his evacuated throat, not a single word for miles around.
He stops when he feels eyes on him, immediately self-conscious as he looks up. He's never liked being stared at; it always meant something bad back at home. Yet when his gaze lands on the circling yearling, he finds the boy looks as unsettled as he feels. He doesn't pay enough attention to his own appearance to note the similarities, though it occurs to him in passing that the boy looks a bit like Delilah. Um,
He starts a little too quietly, then pauses as he realizes how he must look right now. Ragged fur, bloody muzzle, metallic scent hanging in the air around him. His tongue swipes over the blood stains in vain, and he tries again. Something wrong?
The doppelganger speaks, and the spell is broken. Taylor blinks, and he notices the differences: he's shorter and thinner than him, and a good deal lighter in colour, and the way he carries himself is worlds apart from Taylor's awkward and stiff posture.
I—I'm sorry,
he says, trying to pinpoint sheepishness on the chart of facial expressions. I thought you were someone else.
He concedes that it isn't entirely a lie.
They stand there in silence as he tries not to look at the blood on the other boy's mouth. Where the hell did it even come from? By any chance,
he ventures, nervously tugging at his sleeves, Are you looking for somewhere to stay?
It feels comfortable to be a tool in someone else's hand. An instrument. He thinks that this role is what he was born to do. A mallet and a string line, all coming together to make a brick wall, labeled Ursus.