#shapeshifter shadow knight solidarity

[kurithedweeb]

“You have to deal with it eventually.” Travis flipped the knife around and held it out to Laurance, hilt-first. “In my experience, it’s better to take the edge off than let it simmer up until it boils you alive.”

Laurance stared at the knife. He had a strange look on his face, one Travis couldn’t read. It was usually easier to read Laurance than most other people, he was usually a very expressive man, but this expression was a small one. One where all the nuance was bunched in the low angle of his brows and the slight part of his lips. 

His eyes were on the sharp edge of the blade, where it pressed against the bare skin of Travis’s forearm. He did not take the knife. There was a tremble in Laurance’s fingers as they dragged through the sand, closing into a fist.

Travis stabbed the knife into the sand between them. Sunlight bounced off the blade, painting each of their hands in slivers of shining color.

He looked back out over the water. He said, “For when you need it most.”

For a long time, neither of them said a word. Travis watched the water ebb and flow. It splashed against the sole of Laurance’s boot. Warlock Valkrum grinned up at Travis from his reflection, twisting away as the waves receded.

Laurance took the knife with him when he left.

[kurithedweeb]

Does anyone else remember how Travis is implied to be a shapeshifter in canon? He has his human form, his demon form, but he's also said to have several other forms that we don't see in canon. I've seen redesigns where he has a third form somewhere between the full human and the full demon that's his real form, usually including horns and cool markings, but what if he also has less humanoid forms?

He lives in complete isolation for years, surviving in the wild and protecting the local village as best he can like his mother did before him. Everything he does is to protect and survive. Being able to shift is a tool: turning into a bear saved him from freezing to death when he got caught out in a blizzard, being a wolf or a snow leopard helps him track and hunt in ways he can't when human, becoming a fox or something else small lets him slip out of dangerous spots like that one time the snow gave out beneath him and he fell in a hidden ravine. All of these forms have pure white hair/fur too, which is amazing camouflage when you live on an island covered completely in snow and ice. These forms are useful, they come to him so naturally that they're a part of him, and he accepts these parts so much more readily than he does the warlock part of him.

Here's the thing about shapeshifting, though: it hurts. It hurts a lot. When Travis shifts, he's rearranging everything inside of him and shedding his skin to condense himself into another's. He doesn't like to do it in front of other people because even though he's used to it, it's still a very uncomfortable and an incredibly vulnerable moment for him because he can't exactly stop halfway through. But what's worse is not shifting at all.

If he goes too long without changing forms, a sort of itch will build up inside him. At first it's not so bad, it's comparable to a bug bite, but if he ignores it for too long it festers into something unbearable. It hurts so bad it makes him want to peel himself out of this skin by hand. He has scars from scratching at his arms and legs, trying to pacify the itching for long enough that he can find somewhere safe to shift. Sometimes he spends a week scratching and bleeding and tearing off the scabs, rinse and repeat, and then he has to wait for the scratches to heal enough that he won't hurt himself shifting. He learned the hard way that shifting while injured just means tearing out his stitches and worsening his wounds. But he has to shift eventually or he'll drive himself insane.

This leads to some interesting interactions with Laurance. As far as Travis knows, everyone with multiple forms is like him. Everyone seems to know already that Laurance has another form (his Shadow Knight form) but Travis has never seen him in any form besides his human one. How is he not going crazy? Doesn't it hurt? Isn't he in pain all the time?

And maybe they're not in the same kind of pain, but there's an odd sort of understanding there.