Based on a conversation with a friend
It had been a while.
A while since anyone had seen Her real face.
How long exactly? She didn’t know. Decades, centuries, maybe? Not millennia, She was sure it hadn’t been that long.
Each morning She woke and looked in the mirror, staring at a face that was Hers, but hadn’t always been. Sometimes She tried to remember what the original had been like. What colour were Her eyes? Her lips? Did She have freckles or moles? Lines from laughing a lot?
Her lovers kept giving Her compliments, admiring the beauty and flaws of the faces She chose. None of them knew that they were not looking at Her, but at someone else. More often than not, they were looking at the face of a previous lover, unaware that they would soon become a face themselves. So many pretty faces, She thought. So many lost loves.
Sometimes She wondered what it would be like to stop. To just grow old with the last face She had stolen. Let wrinkles slowly consume Her, let the aging face take over the rest of Her body and slowly kill Her. Eternal life was not all that great if it came at the price of losing your identity. Over and over again, until nothing was left. Although technically, Her body stayed the same. But nobody identifies people by their body, not really. It’s always the face. Honest faces. Evil faces.
Kind eyes. She had had so many lovers with kind eyes and wearing their faces had made it so much easier to find replacements. People fell for kind eyes faster than for anything else, She had noticed. Even if the rest of the face wasn’t traditionally pretty, the eyes could overcome any flaw.
Her current face did not have kind eyes. She wasn’t wearing the face of a lover, not even that of a friend. When She looked in the mirror now, She encountered the gaze of cold, hard eyes. Eyes that had tried to kill Her. But She had been faster, had seen it coming. The bloodlust.
If you’re hunting a killer, you need to be faster than them. And this killer had been too slow, too inexperienced. Too young, compared with Her. A young, but broken soul.
She had taken the killer’s face, but now it’d be harder to find a new one.
It would be a while.
