Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-A-Villain — Villain who learned to shapeshift last week
"With my new mastery of flesh and genome—"
they'd been friends once, they'd been colleagues once
"With my new powers over form and appearance!—"
so they were both villains, so what, aren't there limits to what that can justify?—
"No doors will be locked to me! Nowhere impenetrable! Nobody safe from me!—"
years of watching the people with powers, with capabilitites beyond human, effortless, while he scraped and sweated over the science to cobble together second-rate imitations, frustrated, exhausted, jealous—
"I can wear every face, every form—"
no fucking shortcuts, not even when he cracked the powers-to-DNA mapping process, how to sequence superpowers, the retroviral therapy to splice them in; because you can't replicate growing up with them, a lifetime of learning to use them—
"The world is my oyster — mine to shuck—"
friends; and couldn't he, couldn't he have asked as a friend, as a colleague, as someone trusted — couldn't he have asked to copy the shapeshifting powers, asked to be taught—
"Mine to swallow alive—"
mapping the neurological activation, the control system, that was so much messier than the DNA; so much screaming—
"Mine."
so much screaming; eyes so betrayed.
He swallows, hating the weakness it betrays, even in a rehearsal to his lonely mirror, and attempts the change. He has all the data he needs, all the data (— as much as he'll ever have, now, it had better be —) and he just needs to flex his flesh in the unaccustomed newly-grown ways—
And in the mirror, he changes shape. Into another fat-fingered toddler's squashy fucking Play-Doh nightmare.
He beats another mirror to splinters.
"I have taken the power," he mutters, eventually, tensing to eject deeply-hammered shards from their temporary, bleeding homes, sealing the injuries after them. "I have taken the power. I have seized the power. I have mastered the power! It's mine, it's mine—"
could have asked; could have accepted help—
"It's mine."