“Father? Do you think we are-" Viv pauses, suddenly aware that the word we doesn't exactly include her anymore, not in this context, “-our family was something not truly human?"
Her skin, too soft, too warm, and so different now, itches in a way that feels so wrong, so foreign. Beneath it, an endlessly unsettling weight feels abysmal and incomprehensible.
It's terrifying.
Viv knows, in a empty sort of way, that she's fishing for a specific answer, one that, even with her now limited brain power, she can tell is unlikely. Despite this, she still hopes.
Vision shifts as he thinks, barely jostling Viv’s head where it rests against his shoulder. Her skin sticks uncomfortably to the leather couch in a way it never had before.
“I believe that in some ways, we were too human,” he pauses and something she's never heard and can’t understand floods her father's voice, “in other ways, I think we were terribly lacking.” His hand is on her head, the angle a little awkward, but loving and careful. She can feel the steady weight, just as she can feel her hair brushing her face, so soft and shiny and black and different from what it used to be.
Though it isn’t the answer Viv wishes for, she realizes it is one that's true. It is one she believes she would not have understood before, when she was what she was supposed to be.
But now, underneath skin that always feels too tight and too warm around her, she thinks she can comprehend the paradox of being simultaneously too human, yet not human enough. She can understand it in the sadness that floods through every inch of her when she looks in the mirror and misses her mother fiercely, misses looking just like her. She can understand in how, while she had always missed Vin, now the echoes of pain from his loss felt like they were tearing her heart apart.
The lack of control in what she feels, the pure instinctiveness and intensity of it, is jarring. She wishes she could go back, abandon the parts of her humanity that had stabilized with the shift.
Back to what she knew, what she had first been made to be: normal.