Everchanging

Changeling

!!TW!! Slight panic attack, talk of abuse/bullying/abandonment, Affair/cheating, Prison (Setting)

"I just– I don't know if I should be mad or not?" Sakura was still pacing around the house, her son calmly fetching himself a bottle of water. His grandfather wasn't home yet but the man would be soon, getting the same phone call she had gotten. "How could you get suspended, Kaigaku?!"

"I already told you, mom. Gyutaro deserved it." The boy whined, setting the bottle on the counter with a pouting lip. His mother nodded her head, but he doubted she truly understood, and he was proven correct when the woman continued on.

"How could he have deserved a broken nose, crushed orbital socket, and missing teeth? Kaigaku, you have to explain it to me so I can understand." For the first time, the boy felt a little guilty as his mom looked at him with a pleading gaze. She looked desperate to understand and the boy had almost forgotten that he couldn't be acting like this anymore. He couldn't be a bully anymore; he had a mom to go back home to. To look at him with a kicked-dog expression and ask him too many questions.

Had he even changed at all?

"I just– He..." His first instinct was to beat Gyutaro until he couldn't speak anymore, until he couldn't annoy him anymore. It was just like a few months ago, hit first and worry about everything later. Kaigaku had thought that he had gotten past that, changed at least enough to not resort to violence the moment someone made him a little angry. "He was harassing Genya."

It made this feel a little better to think of it like that. It wasn't some selfish act, it was protective. He didn't hurt Gyutaro because Kaigaku felt the need to, he hurt him because Genya needed someone to protect him. But...did the other boy see it like that? Did he actually need protecting or was Kaigaku so self-absorbed that he mistook the whole situation?

Maybe he hadn't grown at all, just changed enough to trick everyone. Sure, he wasn't a bully anymore, but he was still capable of those same actions. He hadn't grown like Genya had claimed, he had simply changed into something more manipulative and calculating.

"Okay, is Genya okay now?" Sakura nodded easily, taking a step closer to her son as she watched his features shift into something sadder. He looked devastated– or no. Disappointed. He looked disappointed. "I would never be upset about things like this if you're protecting your friends, Kai."

He wasn't worried about punishment, he never was. He could take whatever pathetic lecture anyone threw at him. He was, however, worried about falling back into old habits. What happened when he resorted back to swinging and spitting like he had before? He would lose all the friends he had made, and now he didn't even have Gyutaro or Ume to return back to.

If he didn't grow, he would lose it all. And he wasn't growing. He was just changing.

Wasn't there a creature like that? He could remember reading about it one time when his grandpa took too long to pick him up from the library when he was little. It was a kind of fairy, something not human but pretended to be.

They would switch out their own baby for a human one, taking the human baby for their own. It was a myth in Europe, different stories spanning the entire continent. Changelings, or aufs, pretended to be human and took the original away to continue living the Taken's life. They acted unusually, and some of the rumored ways to get the human baby back was by torturing the fairy.

A lot of scholars saw the myth as a direct study into Pre-Industrial Europe, where poor families tried to find ways to truly understand the one member of their family that was a constant drain on their resources since Changelings' appetites are frequently described as vast and never-ending.