Something Strange

Changeling

Winter had always known there was something wrong with him - something more than just his peculiar nature name, of course. It wasn't that he didn't feel like "not fitting in" with others of his age: he did, he had friends, and in general he had a good, healthy social life for a 15-year-old boy. Rather, it was the way he looked that caused not only curious looks from other people, but also confusion in Winter himself whenever gazing at himself from the mirror: he had strong, sharp teeth (the dentists had been forced to polish them by Winter's parents, but Winter himself had refused them to be completely flattened; at that age he had thought his fangs were cool), his nails always kept growing in odd ways and he constantly had to cut them, and the texture of his hair was strange at best, feeling like animal fur rather than human hair.

What was even stranger, however, was the hair growing on his lower back, and what undoubtedly looked like a scar on his lower back.

Winter knew it was normal in puberty to notice hair growing in strange and often unexpected places the sex education classes didn't cover, but he had had this strange, white hair there as long as he could remember, and the same applied to the small scar.

Winter had often asked his parents about these and other strange things:

"Why are my teeth like that? Why do I have to flatten them?"

"Why is there fur growing on my lower back?", a question immediately met with an agitated response of "It's not fur, it's hair; your great uncle was the same."

He'd further ask about the odd shape of his ears, and the the scar on his lower back; about the nails and the way his hair felt, and the weird, small bumps on his head.

The answers always varied.

The strange, white hair was said to be an unspecified genetic disorder that ran in the family, but all the relatives with the condition were long gone by now. Likewise, the scar on his lower back was initially claimed to be a scar from Winter falling badly as a child. The bumps on his head were somehow related to his skull's structure, and the sharp tips of his ears were simply a remain from the more primal past of humans - it happened sometimes, with kids being born this way due to how their normally inactive genes were somehow activated in birth.

As younger, Winter would always play with the idea he was some sort of monster child who had then gone through surgeries to look more human.

However, such thoughts were quickly buried until logic and reason when he matured, and for a good while Winter had basically forgotten his odditions. Things changed when his puberty started: with the new changes his hormones brought with them, the strangeness of his body became much more apparent.

"Maybe you're intersex?" one of his school friends had suggested: Winter's strange medical past and secretive parents seemed to align with what he had read regarding the topic.

"No, no, that's not it," Winter had replied. "It's not like that; it's definitely different. I have read about it and I can't find myself relating to most of the things the books mention, let alone what people say on forums."

Things came to change, however, when a new boy arrived to the school.

He was a year older than Winter was, but although they weren't in the same class, it was easy to notice the peculiarity of the new student: he was tall, his ears shaped so similarly to Winter's it was almost uncanny, and when he laughed a row of almost predatory teeth could be shown.

All this interested Winter greatly, and a week later, during one lunch break, he sat opposite of the young man.

"Hi," he said as he placed the food tray in front of of the new guy's own. "Is this place free?"