A Million Lives
When Matty looks at Mac, she sees a man with a hundred faces who wears a thousand masks.
She watches as he steps into the room and drops his shoulders, shedding the persona like a false skin. Dressed up in a three-piece suit and a thin black tie with his blond hair brushed expertly across his forehead, he looks every bit like the Hollywood elite, and yet nothing could be farther from the truth. His cocky, brazen attitude died with the confident smirk that melted away the second he reached the safety of the secure meeting room, the personality his looks make it so easy for him to adopt nothing more than a part to play, an unwelcome necessity of the job that he discards distastefully at the first available instance.
The young, handsome bachelor who strode through the ballroom with a swagger to his step is nowhere to be found in the quiet but composed man who stands before her now, his eyes sharp and his mind working faster than the computers stacked before him. This is the real man, not the flirt but the genius, dedicated not to the beautiful women who flock to him in the ballroom but to the mission at hand. He's determined, focused, powerful, and the hard gaze and clenched jaw that define him as he scans the security footage of the ballroom is a far cry from the teasing smirk and soft eyes he wore moments ago.
She finds herself marveling at just how different of a person he can make himself be in an instant, a chameleon in his own right, able to stand out or blend in with only the right look in his eye. He's an enigma, even among those in their trade, ready to be whoever he needs to be whenever he needs to be, and she attributes at least some of that power to the fact that even his true self is a million different people all at once.
Around his best friend, he's confident, carefree, and joyful. Around his partner, he's cocky, sarcastic, and brilliant. Around his coworkers, he's shy, quiet, and eager. And around her, his boss, he's calculating, kind, and careful. He has a million different personalities reserved for everyone in his life, each custom-made to satisfy a different expectation of him. Those who share his occupation see his talents as incredible, his uncanny ability to be anyone and everyone treated as a superpower, but she knows better.
Knows that it's easy to slip into someone else's skin when you don't have one of your own.
He nods to one of the screens, and she watches silently as he returns to the persona of before, becomes someone he isn't who is filled with elements of a million someones that he is. And when he steps back into the ballroom, that flirtatious grin returning to his face as if it was never gone, it looks to her as if it's meant to be there.
And she wonders, when he sheds his false selves at home alone and looks into the mirror, what version of himself he sees staring back at him. Which one of a million lives is the one he's crafted for himself?