Sometimes in his dreams, she comes to him and touches him softly. She crawls over his body and brushes her curls over his chest. Her lips open, slightly cool and sticky and, latch onto his nipple, ever so teasingly. He despises his body. He has no control over it after all.

Sometimes, she cuddles into his lap and cries. She wants something he can never give her. He cajoles, he pleads, he threatens, he lectures. She turns her head around and smiles at him. Then her little lips open again and her tongue... he despises his body. He has no control over it after all.

Sometimes, as he wanders through his drab apartment, filled with files and crates of pictures and Most Wanted posters, he thinks he sees her everywhere. These are the worst times. She is pale, standing in his bedroom door. She is iridescence, vamping in his shower. She is at once irritated and seductive, eating fried chicken, naked, at his breakfast table. He knows she isn’t really there, she’s miles away, but his blood shocks and re-charges under his skin. He despises his body. He has no control over it after all.

He twists the sheets. He hasn’t gotten used to them. He never needed them before, he never needed to sleep before. He could watch her better that way. It feels like no one ever really knew him before, no matter who he chose to be. Now he vibrates all over, it’s hard to miss. Women stare at him, he can feel their interest and desire. It seems like he could have done something about that, once. But now she has him in her tiny hands and he twists and twists and twists.

Tonight she is dancing. Her hair is longer (He misses watching it grow. It made a little sound, a soft murmur. He never told her that.). She is swaying from side to side, slim-hipped and full of grace. She is laughing and a strap slides off her shoulder and falls right under the curve of her breast. It should fall any second now. It doesn’t. What is she doing there? Why can’t she feel him? Then she looks up under a fall of blond hair and smiles. Of course she knows. That’s why she’s off to the side, barely in his sight line. Isabel is front and centre of course, swaying regally and barely messing her artfully arranged hair. Such a princess. The other little one, shimmying with enough suppressed intensity to power the whole town, trying to be as unavailable as possible to that one person she’s dancing but not dancing for, sneaks glances over to the door just the same.

But she is dancing off to the side, just out of his sight line because she knows. She doesn’t know what to do with that knowledge yet but she knows, he’s sure of it. He had kept it hidden for so long, even from himself. He’s not there to feel, or to want. He’s there to do a job. Not to do.... He hadn’t been able to shapeshift fast enough, leave fast enough. He couldn’t explain it but he knew time was running out. Time was handcuffed to those damned orbs, and as he scrambled across the sand he felt the white-hot heat knife through his groin as the four of them activated the instruments of their destiny, and his shame. Now he’s hot all over, and he twists and twists and he despises his body.

Tess twists and twists to some cosmic rhythm and she is cool and confident and smiling, outshining her fellow blondes. The room is empty, save for them. Then she looks up and her smile slips. She is uncertain and picks at the hanging strap. She licks her shimmery pink lips and looks straight at him. She’s looking straight at him.

"We can’t," she murmurs. Then her voice changes. " Please...."

He steps into her sight line, just because he can. Isabel and Maria are dancing around each other now, sad and angry, sneaking glances at the empty door. Isabel and Maria are closing their eyes now, Isabel’s hands in Maria’s hair, Maria’s lips on Isabel’s neck. Their golden locks mingle as they twist softly in each other’s arms.

His hands curve around her slender shoulders. He looks into her endlessly cerulean blue eyes. She’s hot all over too. He leans into her ear, and breathes very softly. This part is new to him. He opens his mouth and he can feel her sway just slightly into his grasp.

" I’ll be anyone you want me to be," he says and a thrill runs through him. He’s wanted to say it that way for a while. He means it. His words twist in the air. His cells tighten in preparation, in anticipation. They both turn and look at each other in the mirror lining the wall. Isabel and Maria are gone. He looks at her and she looks at him. The silence is sharp and attentive between them.

"Be who you are," she says at last, her voice ending on a sob, and her little hands unpin his FBI badge from his jacket. His current identity mocks him beneath its plastic shelter as it twists and twists in the air. It clatters on the floor with a tiny ping, along with his buttons, like rain, like ice-cubes, like falling stars. Then her fingers are melting down his body and they both crumple to the floor on top of their clothes and she is calling him by his true and secret name , sweetly, urgently, piercingly, and he is on her and in her and....

He wakes up twisted in his sheets, her tart, lemony scent on his skin. He wonders how he smells on her, as she lies in her pearly pink bed, alone in that house, without him. His fingers tighten in the cheap cotton and he hears a satisfying rip. He despises his body. He has no control over it after all.