Morning came too bright.
The blinds in Aaron's room leaked sunlight in narrow, unforgiving stripes, cutting the floor into pale fragments of day and shadow. Dust hung in the golden beams, drifting lazily as if the air itself wanted to linger in silence. He shifted beneath the covers, the weight of sleep still clinging to him like a second skin, heavy, reluctant.
From somewhere beyond his door, the house stirred awake. The faint clatter of pans in the kitchen carried through the stillness, rhythmic and familiar. His father's voice rose and fell in muffled tones—warm, steady, almost comforting in its cadence, though the words blurred together into something distant and unreachable. It should have been grounding, tethering him to the life he once knew.
His ears twitched automatically, betraying the sharpness of his senses. For just a heartbeat, he let himself drift into the possibility that things were normal—that the noises of home were simply the ordinary soundtrack of an ordinary morning. A school day waiting for him. His backpack by the door. The faint smell of toast climbing the staircase, butter melting and pooling into the warm bread, the promise of familiarity wrapping around him like a cocoon.
He wanted it. God, he wanted it. That aching, impossible normalcy. If he just pulled the blanket tighter, buried his face in the pillow, and refused to move, maybe the day would reset itself. Maybe he'd open his eyes and find himself whole again—human again—like all of this had been some grotesque nightmare spun out of fever and fear.
But then—movement.
His tail shifted against the sheets with a dull, betraying weight, the sensation foreign yet unmistakably part of him. The soft brush of fur grazed his legs, a reminder he couldn't shove away. His claws—sharp and curved—caught on the fabric when he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, snagging and dragging with a sound that turned his stomach cold.
The illusion shattered, brittle as glass.
Aaron froze, his chest tight, breath snagging in his throat. A hollow throb welled in his gut, the same one that had become his constant companion since the change. The world around him felt louder in that instant—the creak of the house settling in its frame, the birds outside calling to one another, the scrape of cutlery downstairs—yet none of it belonged to him anymore. Not the way it used to. The house hadn't changed, but he had, and in that shift everything had tilted.
He closed his eyes again, but the darkness offered no refuge. All he could feel was the alien presence of himself—the twitch of ears that weren't human, the way his jaw ached with teeth that no longer fit the familiar shape of his face. Even the steady thump of his heart sounded wrong to him, deeper somehow, more forceful, a drumbeat in a body he was still learning to inhabit.
The blanket, once comforting, now felt thin, inadequate against the weight pressing down on him from inside. He wanted to cry, scream, rage—anything to loosen the knot in his chest—but instead he lay there, silent, letting the sunlight creep over him in harsh golden bars. He'd grown used to pressing everything down, layering silence over silence until it felt like he was disappearing beneath it.
From the kitchen, his father laughed at something. It was brief, low, but it broke the air like a crack in glass. Aaron's ears flicked toward the sound instinctively. A part of him ached to run downstairs, to see them, to pretend it was all okay. Another part recoiled, afraid of the look in their eyes, the one that tried too hard to be normal, the one that whispered they were holding themselves together for his sake.
His tail curled tighter around his legs. His claws withdrew from the blanket, leaving faint threads pulled loose in their wake. And Aaron lay there, staring at the sunlight bleeding across the floor, caught between what he was, what he'd been, and the hollow space opening up where those two selves no longer touched.
Aaron sat up slowly, every movement deliberate, as though his body belonged to someone else and he was afraid of breaking it. The muscles in his legs pulled and ached, protesting the shift. They were stronger now—leaner, reshaped—but they demanded a kind of awareness he hadn't grown into yet. Balance wasn't natural anymore; it was something he had to calculate, a quiet act of concentration with each stretch, each shift of weight.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, claws grazing the floorboards with a faint scrape. The sound was sharp in the stillness of his room, and he winced, as if he had cracked something fragile. His tail dragged behind him, brushing against the sheets, heavy and stubborn, refusing to let him forget.
The room looked unchanged. That was the worst part. The familiar clutter of his desk—pens scattered in a crooked cup, notebooks stacked half-open, a sketch half-finished in the margins of an assignment—sat exactly where he'd left it. The chair tucked neatly beneath the desk looked like it had shrunk. The posters on the walls, once so vibrant, now felt like echoes of another life. They stared back at him with glossy faces and colors that belonged to a boy who no longer existed.
He didn't fit here.
Not in the chair, not at the desk, not even in the space between the walls. His body had changed, but the room hadn't shifted to meet him. It was like walking through a photograph of his own life, edges frozen, him blurred out of place.
Down the hall, the sound of pans softened, replaced by Catherine's voice—warm, gentle, ordinary. Too ordinary.
"Aaron? Breakfast is ready."
He froze.
The words cut through him sharper than claws ever could.
They were so normal it hurt.
Like nothing had changed. Like the world hadn't been ripped apart and stitched back together in a shape he didn't recognize. For a moment, he couldn't breathe. He clutched at the edge of the bed, claws biting into the fabric, trying to anchor himself. His throat tightened against the weight pressing up from inside, that ache that never left.
Breakfast. A simple word, wrapped in habit, carrying the shape of a thousand mornings before this one. But this wasn't one of those mornings. And no matter how gently she said it, no matter how careful the tone, he could hear the edge beneath it—the same edge in his father's voice, the one that tried too hard. Forced calm, forced ease, like painting over cracks that never stopped widening.
Aaron's ears flicked back against his head. His tail curled closer to his legs. For the briefest moment, he wanted to crawl back under the blanket and stay there, hidden from the day. Hidden from the kitchen. Hidden from the looks that pretended everything was fine when everyone knew it wasn't.
He hesitated at the edge of the bed, claws curled against the sheet as if it could hold him there. Then, with a small exhale, he dragged himself upright. Standing was an exercise in awareness now; each motion had to be thought through. The stretch of muscles felt alien, coiled differently, stronger but also unsteady.
The hallway stretched before him, familiar but warped by memory. His footsteps made no comforting pad of bare skin on wood anymore but a soft, uneven scrape—digitigrade strides, weight too far forward, claws whispering over the floor when he wasn't careful. Even the sound of himself felt like an intruder in the house.
The kitchen smelled warm, familiar. Toast. Eggs. A hint of coffee that clung to the air like a ghost of mornings past. For a heartbeat, the scent almost fooled him. Almost.
His parents were already at the table, exactly as they should have been—Catherine with her hands wrapped around a mug, David folding the newspaper in half—but the picture didn't hold if he looked too closely. Catherine's quick, bright smile flickered up at him but stopped short of her eyes, like a lightbulb on the verge of burning out.
"There you are," she said. Her tone was light, practiced, polished smooth. "Sit. Eat while it's hot."
David pushed a plate toward him. "Made your favorite." His voice was steady, warm even, but his eyes stayed on the plate, not on Aaron.
He slid into the chair. It creaked under him in a way it never had before. His tail curled awkwardly against its legs, knocking against the rung, the gesture clumsy and loud in the hush of the room.
The toast was buttered just the way he used to like it—edges crisp, center soft. The eggs were seasoned perfectly, flecked with pepper. It should have tasted like comfort. It should have tasted like home. But when he bit down, the food had no shape, no warmth. His tongue moved, his jaw worked, but nothing registered. It was like chewing paper.
They talked. About nothing. About weather, about the garden, about groceries that needed to be picked up. All of it so normal it felt unreal. Each sentence came out in careful tones, measured pauses. It was as if the script had been written the night before: This is fine. Everything is fine.
Aaron chewed slowly, quietly. His ears angled toward them but his eyes stayed on the plate. He could feel it—the distance underneath their careful smiles. The way their eyes flicked away from him too quickly, as if looking too long might break the illusion. The silences stretched just a second too long, then got patched over with another question about milk or the rain.
They were trying. Trying to believe this was life now. Trying to convince themselves that this was enough. That they could hold on to something normal if they just played their parts right.
It should have hurt less, knowing that. But it didn't. It hurt more.
Aaron swallowed hard, pressing the ache down into the same place where all the other aches had been shoved, deep enough that maybe—just maybe—they wouldn't leak out. He managed a soft "Thanks," though the word scraped his throat raw.
Neither of them corrected him when he pushed his plate away half-finished. Catherine just gave that same small, bright smile. David's hand stayed flat on the newspaper.
The scent of toast and coffee hung heavy in the air. The kitchen clock ticked, loud as a heartbeat.
And Aaron sat there, feeling like a ghost in his own house.
After breakfast, Aaron pushed his chair back and stood, the legs scraping faintly against the tile. "I'll be in my room," he muttered, the words soft enough to feel like an apology.
His parents nodded—too quickly, almost in unison. Catherine's hands tightened on her mug; David's eyes flicked to the clock instead of to him. Their relief was small but visible, like they'd been holding their breath and could finally let it out. The moment passed without another word.
Back upstairs, his room felt dimmer even with the blinds cracked. He sat on the edge of his bed, tail curling against the frame, claws biting little crescents into the blanket without meaning to. The posters stared back at him—heroes mid-leap, bands frozen in poses of defiance, a scatter of star maps pinned like windows into other worlds. He'd once studied them for hours, imagined himself somewhere else, someone else. Now they felt brittle and far away, relics from a life he wasn't sure had ever truly belonged to him.
He reached for a book on the nightstand. The cover was bent from being read and reread, but when he opened it, the words swam together, unmoored from their meanings. He blinked, tried again, but they wouldn't settle. His eyes traced the lines without absorbing anything, and the book sagged closed in his hands.
He tried scrolling through his phone instead, thumb flicking listlessly. Notifications stacked up like unanswered questions. Every unopened chat thread felt like a wound. Are you okay?When are you coming back to school? The early messages had been concerned, curious, peppered with little hearts and emojis. Then they slowed, then stopped. No one knew what to say anymore. He didn't blame them. He didn't know what to say either.
A soft knock broke the quiet. Catherine's voice, muffled through the door. "We're going to the store. Do you need anything?"
Aaron's claws dug a little deeper into the blanket, leaving faint grooves. "No," he said, not looking up.
"Alright," she answered, too gently, like she was handling something fragile. Her footsteps retreated down the hall, fading into the hum of the house.
The quiet that followed was heavy, pressing in from the corners of the room like a tide. The blinds rattled faintly with a draft, and dust drifted in the pale beams of light. Aaron stared at his hands—at the claws and fur and tremor beneath his skin—and for a long moment it felt like the house was holding its breath with him.