He turned off the vid-file, his hand uncertain. He had watched the entire recording, including the meaningless credits of all who had worked on the film. He had needed to hear the song playing over them, to have time to register the plot and events of the movie.
Time to think.
He thought back to the first time he had arrived on his homeworld, the first time he found his people and was given the first instruction as to how to be a better Changeling. He had been told to be a rock, to discover and learn what it truly meant to take the form of something.
And he had done so, taken the form of a rock, of various textures and shapes, and the most exhilarating — various birds and flying creatures. And yet, outside of his natural gelatinous form, his most comfortable state was that of a humanoid. He was constantly observing them, jotting down mental notes about their behavior, their likes, their dislikes, but despite his interaction and observation, despite his guise as one of them, he had never truly known what it had meant to be one of them, to be truly humanoid.
…what good is it to have wings if you can’t feel the wind in your face…
He had wondered about so many things: smell, taste, what it felt like to touch something with a living hand not just some silicon-based representation of one, what it felt like to have to yearn to hear something or not be able to shut out an unusually boisterous noise, not to be able to shift away anything uncomfortable or bothersome. To lose control all around you and yet maintain control inside of you.
The Great Link had been like that, great clarity and order all around him, infusing every thought and inch and anything he possessed — but there was no room for individual control, individual peace.
…Can you hear it?…
He could hear it, that siren-like calling of the Link, begging him to return, still tugging at him. It was the purest harmony he had ever heard or felt — like the song a sunset or sunrise would sing.
But then there was this other song, this other longing in the back of his mind, pulling at him, tugging at him no matter what else he tried to concentrate on. And this one too had a name:
Kira.
And then it had no longer mattered. He had been cast out, thrown down. He had fallen and been made human.
It had been unsettling, to say the least. To have everything stripped away. Yes, he had made the decision to fight the Changeling onboard the Defiant but he hadn’t anticipated being turned into a humanoid. How could he be who he had been before? He was no longer a Changeling, and yet he didn’t feel human either. He hadn’t been born, hadn’t grown up human, hadn’t experienced a thousand different things humanoid lifeforms did — except in an odd second- hand way. But then every moment he breathed in reminded him, every action was a poignant reminder of what he was – – and what he was not.
Even the transformation that returned him to being a Changeling had been incomplete. He had become too much of that other person, and now he was trapped in between worlds and still belonging to neither. He was neither god nor mortal, so much the part of a fallen angel. Decisions made had holed him in, secured him in a way unlike any other choice he had made before.
Heaven had been left behind — but so had the hell that lay just beneath its skin. And perhaps among the people on the station, in this city of sorts, he could find a new form of clarity.
A different way to fly.
(-|-)