Hazily, he looked, and noticed everything he once wore was not what he used to be. Nothing resembled him. A snail that had shed its old carapace, it old soul while time withered away and everyone had grown older, the skies had grown colder, and ideas and words had grown bolder.
The jackets and t-shirts and jeans and the old things he once carried on his back, they meant nothing to him and projected nothing true about him to the world. Things had changed. The clothes were still pressed and clean, yet the words they spoke about him were nothing but lies and facades.
She looked at her old dresses, and thought they were wrinkled and decaying. In the mirror, she felt they were different, but when she saw them with her actual eyes, they were as scarred as gray elephant skin.
There was no funeral, and no mourning. Upon the screeching cries of the crows that had observed everything from the outside of their home with their blue glass eyes, the clothes were suffocated with a plastic garbage bag, and were thrown away and never investigated. The old selves were buried in the most appropriate way they felt was right.
Acrid smells of gasoline had attracted the crows further to the ceremony, and the clothes were ignited and burned. Everything they once regretted was cremated. Dead gray souls tilled the permafrost. They weren't them, no longer. Liberation from the pinions they were once held by both society and what the Others had felt was right and true required the process of recovery. The Others had gazed at the hedgehog, and felt he was scarred, bruised, and given up his morals. Internally, he was happy. And so was the lavender cat that felt the only safe place for her gold eyes to stare at was the aging, yellowed moon.
Money was never an issue, they felt. They could pick up the pieces of whatever they wanted and apply it to themselves. Sonic had felt what the Others said was frail, weak, feminine and hues too bright for the gray city, was his perfect bandages to heal her wounds.
Blaze no longer wanted to be seen as what her family had always projected onto her. She felt the binders, jeans, and suits were right for him.
They were right for the person they meant to be. Sonic neglected her true self, hiding in the cask and was always told to stay where she was. No one should've been so unfairly cruel to her, she felt. She was me. I was her. I had to be her, because she was a beautiful hedgehog, and she needed to live. I could not deny her the life she needed.
The pink satisfied her. Bows consummated her, comforted her, the skirts were what she always wanted, but was deprived for nothing more but to follow what the whites had thought. They depicted these common phenomena that appeared in the sky, the sun and moon, as yellow and gold and gray and silver, but they changed colors of what they felt. Yellow, the moon said, when it felt melancholy. Pink, the sun said, when it felt newborn. Soon, the sky would no longer be dotted with crystals, but at times those crystals were blown blue glass ornaments.
These changes, as she observed, they were at first adamantly rejected, and the whites had felt things had to remain the same. Change brought disorder to the structures we felt we were familiar with. Oceans were soon smoothed out, and we were familiar with what was new. She was familiar with herself for so long, yet she rejected her, cause the Others had said No.
He wanted to help his friends, help with the family, but his parents often ordered her to remain a pacifist and look pretty to all the men he truly never wanted. They were regarded as princes, men of high regard, but they felt more like a pack of starved lions ready to tear into her flesh and find who he really was.
They no longer lied about themselves, and they carried their new wombs of their forgotten selves, and they returned to where they once died.
The new shells were attached, they were true, they were happy, and they felt that nothing could dissuade them from being the neglected selves that deserved their chance to Be.
And He said, it was good.
More things had changed other than their appearances. Gradually, as time withered, and as the oceans became tilled land, carrying the ashes from the absorbed soil through the world's veins.