“W-woah, woah!” Before I knew it, I’d found myself stumbling through a foot of snow. I didn’t have much trouble steadying myself. Tromping about in the snow was hardly a foreign act. If anything, fresh powder was what made living in the northeast worth it.

Although, the presence of snow seemed a bit peculiar. It was May, and I hadn’t seen mention of any freak blizzards in the forecast. With a huff, I crossed my arms and surveyed my immediate area.

Hey—wait. Arms?

I shook my head and looked down. True enough, I saw my arms folded over one another, elbows jutting outward. I didn’t have to deal with a scraggly blue mess blocking my view either. I twisted my arm upward, and stared at my hand.

My hand. Hidden beneath a heavy, black glove. I took the glove off, and wiggled my fingers. It was definitely my hand, down to every little, braided crease, including the nice ‘M’ shape in my palm, developed from years of holding gamepads. I even had that scar behind my thumb, from when I’d burnt myself with a hot glue gun in high school. I put the glove back on, and turned to my surroundings once more.

At some point, I had stepped into a garden. Where from, I had no clue—there wasn’t an entryway behind me. Of course, also I couldn’t remember swapping bodies.

From the pagoda, something waved at me—the creature I’d become just a couple days ago. Me? It? With little else to do, I trudged my way through the snow cover.

“Hey,” it said to me, once I’d stepped beneath the pagoda’s roof. “How’re you holding up?”

“I’m okay, I guess,” I said. A couple seconds of silence later, I furrowed my brow at the odd, black and blue creature. It was almost my height. The longer I stared, the more and more I sensed a wrongness about it, a sense of uncanny disgust that crept up my back. “What are you?”

It laughed. It laughed in chorus. Chorus shoved through a light vocoder. “I’m you!” the creature exclaimed, pressing its nose into mine, “This is what they see. What your brother sees.”

“Bullshit,” I muttered, pushing it away. Well, pushing myself away, because the thing didn’t even budge when I leaned into it. “I’m me, and that is definitely a fact. You’re just that...thing I transformed into yesterday.”

“Yeah.” It glanced to the pond on the south side of the garden, then fixed its huge eyes back on me. “In other words, I’m you.”

“Ugh—”

“I’m your body.”

I held up a finger. I wanted to protest, yet, I couldn’t. It was right.

“And stop thinking of me as ‘just some creature,’ I’m just as human as you are.”

“That’s…”

“What? Are you going to say I’m wrong?”

“No,” I huffed, “Not anymore.”

“Good. So, let’s get down to business. You’re starving, pal. You gotta eat.”

I leant up against the pagoda’s railing and looked out over the garden. I’d eaten plenty. Physically and intangibly. I’d stuffed myself as much as I could, and it was one of the first things I’d done when I woke up in my new body. There was no way I could be starving after just two days. “No I’m not. What, are you gonna knock me out and nag me whenever you could use a snack? Are naps off limits now?”

“You, you—” It growled and shook its head— “You don’t get it, do you? You fell asleep. Something you’ve tried to do for 48 hours and you only just now manage it, when you’re wasting away and skipping meals. Like, seriously! You had a feast right in front of you, and rather than taking that opportunity, you got all—all—”

“All what?” I shouted back, “All conscientious about what a piece of scum I am? That I’m slowly turning into some psychic vampire that preys upon the only two people left in the world?”

“You are on the verge of dying. We are about to die!” It yelled. “You have to march down those stairs, grab them, and eat, no matter what you think. Or you will die. There’s no afterlife for us, you know that, right? We’re not like your precious brother, or that little cop. They have souls, they’ll go on and get recycled. We, we’re just this patchwork.”

“And what, we’ve gotta keep gluing ourselves back together with their soul juice?”

“Yes.”

“That’s dumb.”

“That’s life. We have a purpose, and you’re too busy being human to realize that purpose.”

“At least we aren’t playing the pronoun game anymore.”

“You dense motherfucker, you don’t eat, you don’t drink, you don’t sleep, you don’t feel pain. You can lift a car all on your own, you’re covered in barbs, you can even fly! You’re too busy being a mopey dope to capitalize on your potential. You are a predator.”

I didn’t say anything. What was I supposed to? Where had this even come from? When had we gone from mere survival, to realizing our potential? And—”Wait, I can fly?”

“You, are the single most powerful being on the planet. Imagine that. Think for a second. What’ll you do with that kind of power?”

I looked over at the creature. I looked it up, then down, took in its features. The segmented plates, glowing eyes, jagged teeth—everything. And behind the chilling nothingness I saw in it, there was an aura of power.

“You are not a human. Not anymore. You, are me. We are one. And we exist for a purpose—a purpose I’m not about to let a few insignificant morals hold us away from. You’re going to wake up, and you are going to shed this pitiful skin you call humanity. Or I’ll do it for you.”

Suddenly, I was back in bed, staring at the headboard, bathing in the feeling of a home not my own, and the lukewarm air of a spring night. There was a pressure on my barrel, and without even looking, I could sense something sour, something rotten. I looked over my shoulder to find Jacob draped across my side. His face was emotionless, and the fur on his cheeks had been matted down in an unmistakable pattern. Poor Jake had been crying. Over my corpse, no doubt. He looked to be half asleep, too. How long had we been like this?

“Hey,” I whispered, and his whole body jolted. “Remember when you called me a pussy the last time I cried—”

A tidal wave of emotion rolled over me, and I happily gave in to my instinct.

Sweet sustenance! Sweet guilt.

Author's Note

Original comment was going to be "dude" and nothing else.

This is the chapter that killed the fic for months. I very much wanted to write a chapter in Peter's heart sanctum, but I could never quite figure out how to tackle it. So I let the story sit and hoped I might come up with something better than what I already had. In the end, nothing came. Only real reason I'm publishing it as is is because it's key to P-swizzle's future behavior.