||ectoplasm
||notes.
- my fickle interest has latched itself onto Dragonball Z this week*, and what better way to appease that than to write about aliens~?
- (*along with my continuing underlying adoration of Yuugioh— ZENSOKU ZENSHIN DA lolol)
- this particular drabble returns to vagueness/incoherency; psychoanalysis isn't something I can do precisely. It also takes place before Stoica joins the Twelve Orders.
x•x•
—ectoplasm
WHEN MIRRORS BREAK YOU|
x•x•
For as long as he remembered (all of seven years), something had been off about the other—
The two of them had been acquainted since birth (growing up in the empty spaces of dark alleyways); they were mutual accomplices in crime and the closest thing to sweethearts that he had ever known. They were the precedent to cold-blooded killers on wanted posters; faces adorned in shadow cutouts pasted from the pages of coloring books.
But they were not something real, a repressible facet of life — the other existed in the misty space inside looking glasses that had never been his greatest fondness, for the double vision it gave him.
x•x•
Stoica's father almost-cries every day and his mother never looks at him.
In a world on the corner of an institutionalized space, Stoica knows that some would call him fortunate to have two parents, and others would take pity on him.
He thinks that the chemistry of his hollow veins is very measured; he has two parents and that is all, they are not an emotional attachment or investment. The other wants to kill them. He thinks that he should maybe reprimand the other, but then he might find himself alone.
Stoica waits quietly.
x•x•
The second time Stoica wakes up on his birthday, he is on the floor in a dark house and there are fingerprints ringed around his neck like spots of rust that align with his own.
The fragrance of decay is tangible in the air. In the kitchen, he finds his parents lying in pools of their own blood. After staring at them for a beat, he follows the diagonal slant of the hallway back to his room, idly reading the words painted on the walls whispering cold promises into his ears.
But he is not scared of the other, not really.
x•x•
The other tells Stoica it will kill him next.
x•x•
Stoica does not know how old he is now. He knows he is still alive, and that is all.
He likes laughing and death and forgetting. The only twisted thing he isn't able to leech amusement from is solitude. The thought of being alone scares him more than anything in the whole wretched universe. But the other is always there, behind his closed eyelids, underneath his skin, collecting in moisture.
He tries to choke down his fear.
x•x•
The other says it will spill his blood, streak it across his arms, pour it into the cracks of chipped porcelain, inject it into vitreous humor, drink it in. It will carve a snarl onto Stoica's face where a grin once was.
A simple murder would be nicer.
x•x•
(and death's kisses are cold on the mirror's surface)
x•x•
The other unwinds itself from his leaden soul, and Stoica smiles eternal.
(the taste of metal tears his back, hair spills over his shoulders like the sun's tears, he loved and he could never hate)
It is the only expression he can make now.