"So mirrors don't work the same way in dreams that they do in reality," Myrrah explained, wheeling out a tall, wide object covered in white cloth. She was in human form tonight, wearing a loose-fitting long sleeved shirt and skinny jeans, both in dark colours. "There's no actual light in here, no photons bouncing off things. You don't even have eyes, not really, you just have things that look like eyes in roughly the place you feel like you should. Your mind tells you what you see when you look in the mirror, and usually what you see is how you think of yourself."

 

She whipped the cloth off, and Lucas beheld himself in a mirror - more or less. T-shirt, cargo trousers, brown hair, brown eyes, grey shadow, in vaguely the right places, but there was a... vagueness to the image, a fuzziness round the edges, as if he was always just slightly out of focus.

 

"I guess that makes sense," he muttered. "I don't really like looking at myself in the mirror."

 

"Well, see, the one advantage of having a vague self image is that it'll be pretty easy to change it," Myrrah replied. "If you're not emotionally attached to this idea of how you look, it's not gonna be hard to give you a different one."

 

"I don't want you to do anything... fantastical," Lucas declared. "Don't do anything to me that wouldn't be possible in the real world."

 

"Keeping it real, huh?" Myrrah chuckled. "Okay, but you're gonna have to trust me when I say you'll be surprised just how much just the estrogen and growing your hair out can do."

 

Lucas looked doubtful, and said nothing.

 

Myrrah felt compelled to fill the silence with something. "So I don't want to take this outside your comfort zone, I'm gonna do color checks like I would if this were a kink scene, okay? You've done a bit of kink before, do you know color checks?"

 

"No," Lucas replied, looking up. "I know safewords, though."

 

Myrrah nodded approvingly. "Okay, good. Color check is kinda like a safeword system I can use proactively! I just ask you 'color check' and you reply with a traffic light color. Red is basically just safeword - everything stops, we go straight to looking after you. Yellow isn't as severe, we don't stop but we ease off or try something else. Green is 'everything's cool, keep going.' Think you can handle that?"

 

"Yeah," Lucas grunted. "I can handle that."

 

Myrrah walked over behind Lucas, and gently touched his shoulder with a couple of fingers. "So, do I have your consent to start messing with your appearance?"

 

"Yes!" Lucas exclaimed impatiently.

 

"So, let's start with the most superficial change," Myrrah said, waving a hand in front of the boy's face. "Let's get rid of that shadow."

 

Lucas stared at his face in the mirror. It was gone. It was gone. The awful grey shadow on his face was gone. He reflexively reached a hand up to touch it, and felt only smooth skin. He could almost have started crying right then and there.

 

"Oh god," Lucas whimpered, voice cracking. "It's gone."

 

"Color check," Myrrah chirped.

"Green," Lucas whispered. "Oh, it's gone."

 

"You like that, yeah?" Myrrah chuckled. "Not the easiest thing to do in real life, but close, and I thought it would be a good opener. Laser can just do that for you! Shall we try some stuff with the face, or your hair?"

 

"Hair," Lucas answered, still running his hands over his face.

 

Myrrah flexed her fingers behind Lucas' head, keeping them clear of his scalp. "Gonna need to at least touch you. Is that okay?"

 

Lucas blushed furiously.

 

"Now see," Myrrah murmured, chuckling, "as cute as that is, I am actually gonna need you to say yes or no."

 

Lucas turned his head to one side, as if it would hide the blush somehow, and nodded. "Y-yes."

 

Her fingers slid gently through his hair, and he shivered at the sensation, his scalp tingling at the sensation of another's touch. His eyes slipped closed and he let out a breathy little sigh, which immediately brought a fresh blush to his face. The hands on his head played gently and carefully through his hair, which he suddenly realised there was a lot more of.

 

"Now I don't know exactly what your hair looks like when it's long, but take a look."

 

Lucas had a lot of hair now - it fell around his shoulders, straight at the roots but curling at the ends. It was long enough that he could actually perceive it as having colour and nuance, instead of a featureless uniform mass that sat on his head. There were shades to it, russet and auburn shimmers where it caught the light. He reached his hands up to touch it, feeling the texture as his hands flowed through it, parting it, fingers running up against Myrrah's... and he was blushing again, eyes squeezing shut.

 

"Color check."

 

"Green," Lucas mumbled.

 

"Good! See, this is pretty much the easiest part." Myrrah ran the tips of her fingers over the back of Lucas' hands, teasing a little shiver from him. "You just stop getting your hair cut, and this'll happen all on its own. Or... something like it. Like I said, I don't know exactly how your hair will look when it's long."

 

He opened his eyes to look at himself again, and already the blurriness was receding from around the edges of his form. It was amazing to see just how much had been done for his appearance just by growing his hair out. Myrrah released his head, and he turned it this way and that, taking a look at himself from various angle. It didn't make him feel feminine, precisely; rather, it made him feel less masculine, and that was enough.

 

After letting Lucas inspect his hair for a couple of minutes, Myrrah spoke up again. "Is it okay if I touch your face?"

 

That brought another furious blush to Lucas' cheeks, but he managed to force out an answer. "Y-yeah. That's fine."

 

Her hands briefly snuck into his field of view and gently closed around his chin, and his entire body tensed as a shudder ran through him, a wave of energy rolling down his spine. He could feel the delicate texture of her fingerprints against the smooth skin of his cheeks, feel the warmth of her palm as it slid gently around the curve of his jaw. His breath caught in his throat, a shivery little gasp. His eyes rolled back. She was so gentle, applying so little pressure her skin barely brushed against his but it felt like every point of contact tingled with sensation, she was touching him, touching him touching him   t o u c h i n g   h i m

 

"Lucas, color check."

 

Lucas snapped back into the present moment. He was breathing in sharp, shallow little bursts, his body shaking. He shrunk on himself a little, shoulders pressing in towards one another, and let out a breathy sigh. "What... what...?"

 

Myrrah had taken her hands off of his face, and had pressed them against his back, supporting his weight. "Well, I was working on your face, and that needed a whole lot of touching, and you let out a moan... so I wanted to check you were alright."

 

Lucas didn't need to look in the mirror to know that his face was currently a brighter shade of red than it had ever been before. "G-green. Maybe... maybe yellow? It... it felt good. I just... might need a moment."

 

"Well, good thing I got most of the work done on your face. You can look for yourself while you cool down," Myrrah crooned, giving him a wink that somehow made his blush even stronger.

 

He looked at himself in the mirror once more. His face was... different. He couldn't say exactly how, couldn't put his finger on exactly what had changed, but it was clear to him that something had. The angles of his jaw were less pronounced, softer; there was a little... more to his cheekbones. The texture of the skin had changed, too - smoother, cleaner, his pores less visible, blemishes less apparent. There was something distinctly feminine to it, not in any way he could quite put his finger on, but he wasn't manly anymore.

 

He looked like a girl.

 

 

 

The tears started flowing, and they didn't stop. His hands were on his face, fingers digging into the newly-softened skin of his cheeks and temples, running along the subtly altered ridge of his brow. He was weeping - loudly, he was pretty sure - and letting out a hysterical kind of noise halfway between laughter and sobbing. His entire body shook violently, and he wrapped his arms around himself like he was going to fly apart. Distantly, he felt a comforting pressure on his shoulder.

 

"Lucas, buddy..."

 

Myrrah was the one who had done this for him. Myrrah was the one who'd shown him this. Myrrah was the one who'd stuck with him through all the self-hatred and misery and acting out, Myrrah was the one who had convinced him to try this, Myrrah was the one who had put in the time and the effort to help him and he needed to say thank you, but how could he ever say thank you in words that would actually mean anything to this, to being able to see himself like this, to being able to see that this was possible and that he could actually be something other than the grey featureless husk he tried to avoid seeing in the mirror, how could any words match up?

 

"... are you-"

 

There were no words. There was no way he could express the gratitude he felt towards Myrrah in this moment in anything verbal. In a motion Lucas didn't really experience, just executed, he turned and placed his hands on Myrrah's cheeks and pressed his lips against hers. Her body relaxed against his, and she let out a soft sigh as their tongues met briefly.

 

Suddenly aware of what he was doing, Lucas pulled away, a horrified expression of remorse and guilt on his face. His entire body began to flicker violently, blurring in and out of reality. "God, fuck! No! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-"

 

Myrrah held up her hands, smiling reassuringly. "Lucas! It's okay, it's-"

 

"God, I fucking, I, I, I'm so sorry, I-" His breathing came in ragged gasps, voice cracking, a note of panic rising within it. He was freaking out about having violated her boundaries, and just about nothing she could possibly say was going to calm him down. He was trapped in the headspace of having ruined everything just after he'd finally discovered himself.

 

So Myrrah did the only thing she could do to show him it was okay.

 

She kissed him back. Hard.