That's when it happened, like a – bolt, a flash of, lightning maybe. Insight? White through my eyes, and…

I wasn't me anymore. Simple as that, a jarring throb inside my brain pounding on and off and on, repeating over itself like a skipping record. I'm not me. I'm not me. This body isn't mine, this flesh is not mine, this mind is not mine but it is stolen.

But this soul is my soul. This body not my body is now my body.

I stare heavily through the cloth over my eye, take in the world of tinted black and indistinction – and I can't help but rasp through my teeth, so dry and brittle. My lips spread wide, loosing a throaty chuckle.

I haven't laughed oh, in so long – it's been far too long. But the chuckle comes out as some sort of – pained cry. Like a scream from within. It rang as a plea for help.

That wasn't my voice. This body not my body, still held remnants of a soul not my soul. What to do. What to do. I ran a finger across my face, untainted by that hideous scar from long ago – smooth skin unbroken by steel.

Oh, there's a thought.

Speak when spoken to; speak when you're told to; a blade's caress across your head, stitch it shut with a bit of thread. This tongue of yours, so very crass, I'll break it now like so much glass; shards go down my neck like rain, blood it fills my throat with pain.

But you my friend, my seeing eye, I am you and you are I. Through you I seek, through you I feel, from you this body I now peel.

I murmur the song with lips so soft. Speak with teeth so white, so strong. It's almost a shame, really. After all, I think to myself, teeth don't belong – how to bite the hand that feeds once it strips you of your fangs?

Ah, but philosophy bores me so. Questions without answers aren't really questions.

I count an incisor, a canine, a bicuspid, running my tongue across the polished ivory – savoring it, secretly, a guilty pleasure to always indulge. The guilty must indulge themselves of course, from time to time to time, and guilty pleasures most of all; enjoy the thing no one may know, do it often, do it always, and so long as secrets made are secrets kept the weight is yours alone to bear.

Waxing poetic, transgenically, philosophic tendencies metastasizing from within – naughty naughty, little one, the prisoner does not influence the warden. Or does he not influence the cell? Oh, how delightfully senseless.

The dreamers always leave the most behind. I hate them, secretly. Don't tell, don't tell.

I smile, and raise a (healthy, so healthy) finger in front of my lips – shushing no one but the reflection in the mirror. This body not my body, this reflection not my reflection; it shudders still, in its crystal world of parallels, of opposites.

It'll be our

Little

Secret.