Johnny sits motionless before a mirror, still new and unbroken and unframed, leaned against the rough boards of the wall.
-I'm convinced that there is no glass, nothing, separating me from the room I see on the other side.-
An hour passes. Another. Midway into the third he moves, one hand lifting delicately, confidently off a bladelike knee, stretching towards the glass. This time it will work.
-Everything is different over there. Better. There are people, in that world, who I would like.-
But his reflection is faster, pressing back at Johnny, keeping him out of the better world, guarding the good thing it has. Johnny howls in frustration, snatching his hand away before the bony skin-feel of his luckier double's fingers against his can shift into the bitter, slick glass he has felt too many times. But as he snarls at his reflection he knows it almost worked this time, almost almost almost because it couldn't have been glass. He touches his fingers with those of his other hand, testing, pats them against the ground, against the metal of a knife. It was skin he felt against his own. It had to have been. He draws himself into a crouch in front of the mirror- it's a window, it is it has to be fuck not again- and looks himself in his pain-crazy wild eyes. Not again.
He rams the window headfirst, all the strength of desperation and a stronger-than-it-should-be body poured into one fluid lunge, and his world explodes around him with the sound of shattering glass.
He wakes up with a headache to end all headaches, dizzy and sick, unused to such violent rebellion from a normally merely petulant body. He draws himself upright against the wall slowly, his shirt catching a little on the wood as his shoulders dig in, wanting more than anything to keep his eyes closed a moment longer, hold on to the unfamiliar spark of hope a little longer.
I only know if I'd only waited just one more second-
Something slaps him, hard, smashing him to his hands and knees with an involuntary cry of pain.
"You fool." He hears himself grate above him, the thorny curse digging into his ears as claw-like nails dig into his shoulders, drawing him face to startled face with another version of himself. A very, very angry version of himself.
"You fucking bastard, you fucking optimist, you couldn't leave well enough alone?" his reflection screams, shaking him.
"N-no!" Johnny protests, dazed with horror, fending off himself weakly. "It wasn't supposed to be like this- you're not supposed to be here- it's supposed to be different- better-"
The fight goes out of his other self as the reflection drops him, wheels away with his hands clasped tight around his shoulders, making a low, strangled heaving noise. Laughter…? Johnny recognizes the mirthless sound. Laughter.
"You fucking fool." The reflection says eventually, peeling a clenched hand away from a shoulder just long enough to run his hand through his matted hair, his voice flat and dead in a way Johnny can't remember ever feeling. "You fucking bastard, you thought that this was the good side, didn't you?"
This hits Johnny in the gut like a ton of wet cement, crushing out all thought, filling his gut with a heavy, numbing coldness. No. NO. "You aren't me."
"I should be that lucky." The reflection laughs bitterly, still not looking back, looking out the boarded up windows.
"Then-" lucky? Lucky to be himself? Lucky to live inn a world overflowing with the offal of people's shitting, filthy little minds? Lucky to be poked and prodded and tormented until he longed for a death that wouldn't come, longed for a sleep he was too scared to take, hounded at by a thousand different facets of his fracturing reality? Lucky?
"You heard me." His reflection says, flat-calm-dead, as if hearing his thoughts or seeing Johnny's expression through the back of his head. "You think I kept you from breaking through for so long because I liked it on this side?"
"No, you- you're lying- you can't- this can't happen! It's supposed to be- it's supposed to be better here. I knew- You're lying. You're lying, like all of them lie. You have to be."
But his reflection is shifting, slouching, twisting, and when it turns around Johnny recoils, scrabbling against the wall as his body rises up in blind animal panic, bucking off the tenuous control of a damaged mind.
He's- hideous. His reflection of himself reflects now like a nightmare's funhouse mirror, thinness pulled into a malformed barbed-wire skeleton, blood-shot eyes sunk into a living corpse's hollow sockets, skin the color of rotting mushrooms, taloned fingers and lank, greasy shreds of hair clinging to a sore-ridden scalp.
"You idealistic fool." The monster hisses between ruined teeth. "I'd give my soul to be lying." It raises a ruin of an arm and indicated the blackness beyond the boarded up windows. "You think that's night sky I get to look at? That I get to torment myself with the bitter sweetness of a beautiful, starry night and think about ending it all because boo-hoo-hoo there's no one to spend it with? That I get to take midnight drives for Fizz-Wiz? That They would allow me even so much as a fucking chance at anything less than utter hell, to pace this ruin of a house and see your fucking little deluded, self-indulgent soliloquies of woe and your delusional ideals and your pathetic, aggravating, torturously melodramatic attempts to End It All?"
The monster gags on its bile, whirling around again –Johnny's knobby spine has been spread into a cruel mountain range- with deep, hacking coughs, a claw of a hand steadying the tormented frame against the rotting boards of the house. Finally the hideous spasm as stopped and his reflection drags itself back up pushing –no god no please NO- pushing a ruined eye back into the socket.
"You bastard," it whispers hoarsely, voice breaking, "You don't even know how good you have it."
Johnny whimpers.
"No-" but he doesn't know what to say next, his normal eloquence gone with whatever semblance of similarity his monstrous double had possessed. "No."
The reflection steps back, emotion flickering over the ruin of its face before fading into a bitter, resigned mockery of a smile. Before Johnny can react the reflection has whipped the mirror from behind its back like a magician's conjuring trick and slammed it down over Johnny's head.
The world explodes around him with the sound of shattering glass.
He wakes up with a headache to end all headaches, dizzy and sick, unused to such violent rebellion from a normally merely petulant body. He lies there for a long moment, exhausted beyond reason. He opens his eyes slowly, pushing himself shakily to his feet. His reflection is absent, and the shards of the mirror lie scattered around him, throwing back merely disjointed snatches of himself, unwhole but harmless.
Not as bad as it could be.
He sighs, a long breath forced through tired lungs, probing the painful knot on his skull and the gashes through his hair, eying the smear of blood along the wall. Did he knock himself out…?
It was a dream. Just a dream- but the snippits of himself he can see watching him in the shards briefly hold more than they should. Johnny turns on his heel and goes to his bathroom, washes the blood out of his hair and the scratches on his face and hands with practiced ease, applies band-aids- he'd borrowed a pack from Squeejee the other day-a trifle less expertly. There's no aspirin and he scowls, crushing the empty bottle in a short fit of rage- why did this always happen? Why when ever he tried to get something done, but nooooo, something like this had to happen and his head hurt like fuck and there wasn't any aspirin-
"I should be so lucky."
He shudders, anger draining out of him, drops the bottle's crumpled plastic. He drives to the 24/7 thoughtfully, picks out a bottle of something that promises instant relief, and a can of cherry Fizz-Wizz. The cashier sneers at him, taking his bills like they're covered in flesh-eating plague-weasles, and Johnny bites his tongue, giving him a casual wave as he walks away.
Squee's on his roof again –he seems to like it there- and Johnny watches the boy for awhile, sipping the fizzy goodness. Then he sweeps up the shards of the mirror and goes outside, going to share a roof and a sky full of stars with a human that doesn't remind him that he's a homicidal maniac.