“Ix? Is that you?”
Ix’s dark brows furrowed together. “Who else would it be?”
Some impostor demon who took your form, but Eric didn’t say that out loud. “Your hand is different.”
“What?” Ix lifted his hand, curled and uncurled the fingers, and turned them around. He sounded genuinely surprised. “You’re right. What happened?”
“I should be asking you that!” It came out harsher than Eric intended, and he cut himself short. Sat down on the chair abruptly.
“Now you understand,” said Ixthan. He laughed, then gasped, and wheezed like laughing required too much effort. Ix was still looking at his hand, examining the way his fingers flexed curiously. If a demon was impersonating him, they probably wouldn’t be acting like this, but neither did this seem like Ix.
“Now I understand what?” asked Eric.
“You’re angry. But actually you’re worried. But you don’t know how to be worried, so you’re angry instead. It’s very tiring,” murmured Ixthan dreamily, “to not understand emotions.”
“I understand emotions just fine. I can be worried and angry at the same time,” said Eric mulishly.
“Yes, yes, that’s right. You understand my emotions for me,” said Ix, putting his hand down as if it was too heavy.
This wasn’t like him at all. Eric had never seen him this out of sorts even when they’d got into all sorts of scrapes over the years. Ix had been bucked off horses more times than Eric could count because horses hated demons. When they fenced, Eric used an untipped rapier because Ix found it amusing to get lightly stabbed. He’d jumped out of a second-story window when they’d been fifteen and practically bounced off the grass below.
“Ix. Concentrate. What happened?” asked Eric urgently.
That sobered Ixthan up. He scowled, eyes visibly snapping back into focus. “I failed, it seems. I don’t know why, the spell was perfectly constructed.”
Under his disgruntlement, Ix sounded exhausted. Eric instinctively reached up to press the back of his hand against his forehead to check the temperature. Ix frowned, rolling his eyes upwards, and Eric could feel his forehead furrow under Eric’s palm. “What are you doing?”
“You sound… sick. But your temperature is normal. But for you perhaps that means you are sick, since your temperature is never normal,” said Eric, flustered as he snatched his hand back. His voice shook. “Your eyes are different.”
“I hadn’t noticed that you noticed my eyes,” said Ixthan. It was an attempt at a joke, because anyone who had ever met Ix had noticed his cat-slit eyes, some more obviously about it than others, but it came out flat.
Eric hurried to Ix’s vanity table, rooting around the drawers until he found a hand mirror and pressed it in front of him. “Look.”
“What!” Ix sat up this time, and Eric noticed that his nightshirt was damp and clung to his body in places. He let hiseyes slide away, and tried not to think about it too much. It was sweat, because Ix had taken ill, what was wrong with him for such thoughts to intrude at this time?
Ixthan touched his face lightly, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Even Eric hadn’t noticed at first, what with the dimness of the room and the being distracted by the oddness of his hands, but the vivid amber color was muted into a honey brown, and the vertical slits that made Ixthan’s eyes so striking were simply gone. They were normal now. Human.
This wasn’t the Ixthan that Eric had fallen in love with, the slightly feral child that had grown into a statuesque beast of a man. He was still tall, still handsome, that hadn’t changed. There were others who certainly would consider him more handsome now, but Eric’s chest tightened.Grief.He almost laughed, because why did he feel it more keenly for the missing tips of Ixthan’s fingers than he had for the death of his own father?
Ix examined his hands again, flexing the fingers, and then ran his tongue across newly flat teeth. He brushed the hair back from his face to touch the tips of perfectly rounded ears. They were mostly hidden under his thicket of hair so it wasn’t as immediately obvious as the eyes, but normally his ears extended upwards into a point.
“I look human. How is this possible? Is this what it’s like for you all the time? My fingers are so short, how do you reach anything,” said Ix as he wiggled his fingers. Throwing off the rest of the covers, he got up and immediately wobbled. That was the most startling change for Eric. Everything else was a small thing but Ix had never had feet.
As he lumbered across the room again, catching himself against the door, Ix scowled. “Relearning how to walk is going to be very cumbersome. This is ridiculous.”
Ix extended one leg. He never wore hose or shoes, owing to how his legs usually ended in lion’s paws, instead opting for altered breeches that ended at the mid-calf. He rotated his ankle so Eric could see the flex of his well-defined calf and flexed his toes. It was bizarre to see them on Ix, it didn’t feel right. It was also deeply unfair that even in some magic mishap where Ix had his body parts replaced, he somehow ended up with such shapely calves and ankles.
“You’ll need socks and boots. I’d lend you some but I don’t think they’d fit,” said Eric, rather than voice any of that aloud. He was impressed with how even his voice came out.
Ix pressed a hand against his stomach. “Hells!”
“What else has changed?” asked Eric with alarm. As far as he knew, those were all the telltale signs of Ix’s demon blood: the ears, eyes, the teeth, the hands, the feet.
“My cock.” Ix was shaking; it took a moment for Eric to realize that he was laughing in disbelief. It took another moment for him to register what Ix had actually said; when he did, he immediately choked on his tongue.
“It’s – I, um,” said Eric with supreme eloquence, and then shut up. He wasn’t going to be able to say anything useful about that one. It wasn’t as if he’d noticed, he’d been very careful not to look in fact. Ix walked across the room, swaying his hips ridiculously, thankfully ignoring whatever crisis of self Eric was having at his bedside.
“So light now,” Ix murmured quietly. Eric pretended he didn’t hear that.
