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 Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 10:32 pm
He is in a room tinted faintly green, and surrounded. Not by people. He's surrounded by himself, infinite awfully warped versions of himself. More and more and more and more of himself, too many to count, too many to want to count. He sees--Sees--himself in infinite variations, each more alien than the last. He Sees himself warped into a wolf. Into a monster. In the heart of a whale, in the heart of a dying star, blood pouring down from his chest and insides yanked through his ribs. He Sees himself picked out of woven fabric a long time ago and far, far away. And holding a violin, and, he sees monsters, but all of the monsters are also him.
There is no way out. No doors. He does it right, keeps his right hand on the wall so he won't get confused. He walks for what feels like hours, but with no way to track the time (he can't see his body, only feel it, only interact with it) he can't be sure. There's nothing there, nothing at all but the mirrors and the monsters and eventually Aleksey gives up on that avenue of attack because he has to, there's no other option. He keeps his hand on the wall and he goes insane. It's a binary, like so many other things.
It's alright (not alright but bearable) until the monsters in the mirrors start to talk.
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Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 10:42 pm
They speak Russian because of course they do. It's Aleksy's mother tongue. A mother for someone who would never be a mother and only remembered his in the dim moments between dreams. A woman with hair red as a flame and deep dark eyes and cheekbones sharp as stone knives, his mother. A kind woman, he likes to imagine, always has imagined. When he was little he pretended his mother was a princess and someday she'd come home and Aleksy and his sister would be welcomed back into her arms and she'd say, oh, oh, my little ones, how you've grown. Only his mother died. Diphtheria. Did people even get diphtheria anymore? He remembers her best with her neck swollen like a tire around her pretty face. Her awful coughing, a dreadful machine-gun braap braap braap. It frightened him. Frightens him. He hears it now and he is terrified.
He looks for her among the reflections, and finds only himself.
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Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 10:52 pm
First his mother.
Next it's Tatya.
By now Aleksey is so ******** thirsty he'd drink piss if there was any to drink. However much time has passed, he hasn't drunk anything since waking up in the darkness. His lips are cracked and bleeding. He tries distracting himself with thoughts of Finn, Thorne, Mercer, anybody at all, but his mother whispers to him (old songs in her old tongue, the humming that he thinks made Father so angry) and coughs that machine-gun cough and his chest has seized up tight.
Her voice fades and is replaced by the soft alto of his sister's singing. The apparitions take firmer shape now, less amorphous, more... concrete. He sees himself with a rounded belly and himself with red hair like flames devouring him.
He retches, brings up nothing but a foul taste and a petty amount of bile. His head hurts so badly he can't see. How long has he been gone? Has anyone noticed?
Aleksy sits. His legs have cramped too badly for him to walk. Tatya says, "Lyoshka."
He startles awake, and struggles to his feet, clinging to the mirror for support.
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Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 10:59 pm
This is what the wraith girl in the mirror says, when Tatya is gone:
When the time has come and the names are written into the book of life, your hand shall be in my own when the sea claims all else. Only entrust to me your soul and your pain shall be a sacrament, and I will show you everything that is true and everything that is not, and you will See, Sibyl, if that is what you want.
Aleksy feels her fingers in his hair. Familiar fingers. Familiar scars. He leans into the touch because he has felt so little of it. There is no breath on his ear but there should be, her voice comes on an exhaled sigh but there's nothing but her hands, but his body, but darkness and the other selves that watch him. Aleksy, Aleksandra, Alex, so many names and which one is him? His head spins even though the wraith holds it still.
Do you want it, Sibyl?
"I want to die," he whispers in Russian.
And he does, but not for long.
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Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 11:12 pm
In the end, this is how he gets out of the mirror world: a flash of light and a bruising kiss, fingernails raked through his hair and leaving bloody lines on his scalp. He palms along the mirrored walls, no longer hungry, no longer thirsty; these are words without meaning to him now, though he doesn't know it yet. Words come back to him but slowly: acosmist, one who believes in nothing. Paralian, a person by the sea. He dwales (wanders about deliriously) for a time, begins to think himself a cicada-thing: the human life, all 26 years of it, nothing but a cycle for these few days, weeks, months of mirrored hell.
There are things he has said that have no meaning. There'd be no point to saying them if they weren't to be heard.
Hello.
Good night.
I love you.
There's a word for this if he could only remember it.
He Sees all of these other selves. The worst is the him he has been: long straight hair, cabernet red, slump-shouldered in a white dress. The lace hides the bruises delightfully. He Sees each self and he knows what changed, why it changed. He Sees it and he knows he is right, and he is not quite human anymore, and his eyes burn but he doesn't cry.
His head doesn't hurt anymore. His vision lightens at the edges. He steps forward and he Sees himself, as he is, small and compact and square at the shoulders. His tattoo crawls up the side of his throat. He reaches out and touches the mirror, hoping for something to shore up his self against all the others in the mirrors.
But he wakes up on the bathroom floor at home, a puddle of blood around his head, and he thinks: what has happened to me?
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