Story

tongue-tied

Summary: There are certain words and phrases that make Cent Vasquez’s feelers twitch. Words that just seem to rub the mellow boy the wrong way.

Question 1

1. Why are you always so quiet?

Cent had always been a mellow boy - the child who slunk away to the corner of the library to make origami cranes in peace. He wasn’T exactly shy (in fact, he was rather decisive and confident in his actions, always knowing what he wanted and when he wanted it), but he wasn’t a people person either and often kept to himself when he could.

It wasn’t because Cent didn’t like people per se, he was just introverted and preferred to spend most of his days playing video games, doing origami, or practicing his skateboarding with Cliffer at the park.

It was a challenge to ruffle his figurative feathers, but something about the phrase: “why are you so quiet,” as if there was something fundamentally wrong with him, made his feelers twitch. It didn’t help that the people who asked him this to his face were almost always acquaintances.

He had one answer to that question: “I just have nothing to say, I guess.”

After that, people would leave him alone and he’d grab a sheet of paper from his bed and fumble around until he brought paper flowers and paper planes to life at the tip of his fingers.

Question 2

2.You’re lucky to be a hybrid.

Cent Vasquez was born to two human parents, so when his mother laid eyes on the tiny bumps on his head, it was difficult for her to hide her frown from the attending doctor.

After the war, everyone who was ever born was either human or a hybrid.

It was kinder to be the former than the latter.

Hybrids were either loved or treated with mild disdain depending on the kind of hybrid they were- wolves, lions, eagles, animals that were seen as “more regal” were treated with a certain kind of reverence, but hybrids like Cent (while not exactly treated cruelly) were often shunned by society and seen as less because of instead of wings or majestic tails, they had feelers or extra appendages.

Growing up, nobody was outright cruel to Cent - no one walked up to his face or called him disgusting, but it was in the little details - in the way the human girl had scrunched up her nose at him when he sat beside her in the 5th grade, in the way the lion hybrid from high school walked away as soon as he got too close, in the way people sometimes stared at him with a slight frown when he was out in public.

Cent grew used to it as he matured, but something about the way people looked at him stuck. He’d always been introverted as a child, but this was one of the reasons he kept to himself even when -sometimes- he wanted to branch out and be more than just the quiet centipede kid who sat in the corner with his origami cranes and lo-fi beats.

Question 3

3. What does it feel like to be different?

It wasn’t the question that bothered him- it was the people that assumed he was sad because he was a centipede hybrid instead of something else.

It was hard to explain, but Cent never felt sorry for himself- even if others did. He knew what he was and who he was, but he didn’t mind. Most days, he felt just like any other hybrid or human. It was only when others brought it up that he felt he was different.

Despite varying opinions, Cent knew that his horns, his tail, his centipede-like features. All of it combined made him who he was.

He was proud to be him, and he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way

Credits!

All credits for this little "interview" go to Foxofspades (and, you should go commission them if they have slots open, theyre super nice to work with, and I adore their writing)