Freak Like Me

by

Santanico

Eleven: The Rattlesnake That Bit Me

So often, the things that the mind forgets, the body remembers.

I'd forgotten the kind of effect that seeing him again, after such a long time, would inevitably have on me. Forgotten how I'd fallen into withdrawal when we were apart. But my body knows. Remembers it, the way it would remember being burned, or being cut, or being electrocuted. Instantaneous reaction. Recoil.

But, my God. He looks so…

The first thing I notice about her, really notice, after the initial shock has faded, is that she looks…

…Wrecked. I'm so used to thinking of him as a presence, an all-encompassing, enveloping presence, that it's like I'm only seeing him for the first time. And he's a mess. His hair is oily and unkempt; his skin pasty and sick; his clenched jaw dark with stubble; his hands trembling. His whole being just bleeds desperation. I wonder if this last is a recent development, or if he's actually been that way all along. My body betrays me: I raise my arms a little, instinctively, to hold him in an attitude of comfort; lower them when I remember he doesn't like that; hold them still at my sides when the memory of what he's done returns; dig the nails into my palms to dispel the nausea, as I recollect that I'm supposed to be convincing him how much I still need him.

…Different. Her tentacle is gone, that much I can see; they took that away, stole it from her. She's wearing a filthy nurse's uniform under a threadbare coat, and her face is drawn. But it's not the way she looks, exactly, it's something…else.

And the only thing I can think to say is "There's snow in your hair."

She raises a hand, touches it to her bangs. "Oh," she says weakly. "Yeah. Well. Outside, it's all – there's snow, everywhere…"

"I know," I say softly.

Silence. The students' eyes are clamped onto her, and the only sound is that of her skirt, rustling as she shifts her weight from foot to foot. I catch her eyelids fluttering.

"You seem unwell," I say.

"Yeah." She sighs, shuts her eyes, and leans her head against the doorframe, hands wrapped around her elbows. "Yeah, I'm, uh. I'm not great." She waves a hand. "Things happened on the way. On the way here." She opens her eyes and offers me a wan smile, and I realise that it is the first time I have seen her smile at me in an entire week.

Somehow, it doesn't feel quite as good as I had imagined it would.

"But it doesn't matter," I say, forcing myself to sound cheerful, party girl to the rescue. "Whatever, right? Few bumps, few bruises. It's only rock and roll."

Otto looks at me, and keeps looking at me, his face serious as a tombstone, and I begin to feel uncomfortable. I have to keep this up. I have to be nice, have to act like everything's cool.

Have to act like I don't see Peter, lying sprawled on the floor at Otto's feet, blood oozing from one nostril, making lost, incoherent mumbling sounds through split lips. Have to act like I don't see the body of that little girl, covered over in a corner. Mustn't tip my hand. Mustn't break the fourth wall.

I'm choosing this life. I'm choosing him. For everyone's sake, I'm choosing him. So that there won't be any more dead little girls, so that there won't be any more burning red marks on Peter's throat. So that real life will never bother me again.

Keeping the smile rigid on my face, I push myself away from the doorframe and walk across to him. His presence seems to wrap itself around my whole body, muffling even the echoes of my footsteps in the silent room, drawing me in like a fish on a line. And every step I take shudders upward through my spine, hurts me badly, but I ignore the pain, keep smiling. Because that's what he wants.

"Gotta say, I really didn't expect this, Otto," I say as I walk up to him, getting closer. I still can't quite look him full in the face, not quite in the eye. Easier to look around the room instead, as if any of this is something I really want to see. "I mean, you know, I've been away before, I've had some pretty big Welcome-Back bashes in my time, but you really went all out for…"

My voice fails, trails off into nothing; I forget my lines, as my gaze falls upon the tiny little covered heap in the corner.

Otto steps quickly in front of it, awkwardly; he must know he can't conceal it from me, but he's willing to try.

He's directly in front of me, only inches away. I can't avoid looking at him any more.

I raise my head, and meet only darkness. Those damn glasses, God, they're worse than looking into his eyes; I look back down, and there's Peter, bleeding and broken. Between his swollen eyelids, two white slits; he makes a croaking sound that might be my name, but I can't say his in reply. I can't say anything to him. Not ever again.

I thought there would be so many things to say. While she was gone, every possible thing I could ever have said to her flooded my mind, a deluge of words: hate you, need you, kill you, find you, please you, curse you. But now she's here, and now I have nothing to offer her but banalities. "You're hurt," I say, and my voice sounds like rasping sandpaper. She stands so close to me now, so close I could touch her. I see how pale she has become, how the sweat on her forehead has soldered her bangs to her skin; I see rings beneath her eyes, and the thin blue veins of her arms, interrupted by angry red track-marks.

She runs her tongue quickly over her upper lip; shrugs. "A bit, yeah. But that doesn't matter." She looks up at me, right into my eyes, and offers me another smile, bright as the sun. "We're back together again, right?" she asks softly. "You and me, us. The whole thing we have going. It's all gonna be good again, right?"

But she can't keep her eyes on mine. Can't keep them from trailing across the room, towards the dead girl, towards her mangled husband. And she can't keep me from seeing the way her smile dies, the same way a brilliant firework fades into a cold and unwelcoming winter sky.

Behind all of this, behind her jerky movements that struggle to be smooth, behind her faltering smiles and hesitant gaze, lies some truth, a truth that fills me with nameless dread even as I find myself lacking the ability to articulate it.

She runs her hands over her upper arms, as though she were cold. She glances back at me, and her gaze catches mine again. She looks momentarily startled, as if she had not expected to find me still watching her, and looks back down. "Listen," she says, her voice low, "Can I…You and me, can we, you know, talk? Someplace – " She shoots an anxious glance at the watching students "- Someplace quiet?"

He looks at me for a moment, and I think he's going to say no, that there isn't anything to talk about; think he's seen through me, seen past my pretty smile to the part of me that's dying with every fake, lying word. But he doesn't. He nods, and gestures across the room, towards a door leading off the main studio.

I lower my head, like a woman condemned, and walk past him. I brush against his chest, only for a heartbeat and only as lightly as a breath; though his expression never changes, he draws back as though scalded.

I step past Peter, who utters another low moan, but I doubt he really sees or hears me. It takes almost all my strength not to see or hear him. But that's okay. I'm opening the door, moving into the darkened room within; soon there will be nothing but Otto, Otto's shadowlike presence, wrapping around me, engulfing me, swallowing me whole. Soon, I remind myself, I won't have to lie any more. I won't have to behave as though I truly want a life with Otto. Because, soon, a life with Otto will be all that I'll ever know. Soon, there will be no need to pretend, because there will be nothing but the pretense; the real me will be submerged somewhere inside his mind, and I'll forget it ever existed at all.

I step inside the room; in the shadows, a dull gleam, a tarnished glimmer, light on water, a beetle's black shell. I move, I blink, and a thousand girls move, a thousand eyes flash open and shut; the entire room is lined, floor to ceiling, with mirrors, interrupted only by a polished barre running across the walls, caging us in. I'm almost positive that I have been here before. Wandering down a hall of mirrors, a familiar presence beside me, strolling towards a fate I never understood. I've been here before, oh, yes; but I can't remember when, or how, or with whom. It doesn't matter, anyway. It's just an echo in my mind, a last note of music from a silver box that's breaking down.

Otto slips into the room, soundless, and closes the door behind me; he seems to flow inside, melting into his fellow shadows. He flips a switch; dim spotlights pierce the darkness, shafts of light that seem to highlight the gloom rather than dispel it.

I take a couple of steps forward, winding a lock of my hair around my finger, like a little girl. I don't need to look at him to know that he's looking at me; I can feel his gaze, closing around me like a fist, with every step I take further into the gloom. A memory bubbles to the surface of my brain; a laugh bolts from my lips.

"God. This is all so…It's just like how I remember it. Sorta."

I walk up to the barre, wrap the palms of my hands around its cold surface, looking down at my feet, avoiding him, avoiding my reflection. "Did I ever tell you, Otto," I say, "That when I was a kid, I used to take ballet classes?"

"Did you?" I ask. "Did you?"

I want to know everything about you. Now, as I feel some kind of ending closing in upon me; now, as this terrible feeling of finality draws its noose around my neck, I want to know who you are, who you've been. I didn't before; then, I wanted to erase it all, wipe your past from the face of history. I wanted to be your past, your present, your future.

Now, I wish to know that something remains. Something inside you that is not merely a twisted reflection of myself. Now that I feel Time itself rushing past me in great, cold, uncaring waves; now that I feel the sand slipping between my fingers. Now that you seem so distant and so changed. Draw me close to you again, my Mary Jane, my girl. Bridge this gap. Tell me about your ballet classes. Give them to me. Give me your first pet, your first day at school, first ride on a bicycle; give me your first kiss, first love, first time with a man. Make all of these firsts your gifts to me.

If I could only be your last, Mary Jane.

"Mmm hmm," I say, drawing my feet into fifth position; another thing my body recalls, all these silly, tortuous poses. "I mean, it was never gonna be my profession or anything. Like, it wasn't my calling. It was Gayle's, actually. But Mom thought that, if I went along, too, it would help me develop poise. Help me balance myself." I laugh, and hope it sounds light and charming. "Me, I was just in it for the pretty clothes, really. But it made my Mom happy. That was what mattered."

I hold onto the barre with my right hand, raise my left arm over my head as gracefully as I can, shakily drawing myself up en pointe. I can do it; I'm sure I can still hold this pose. Just for a few more seconds, just while he's still watching me…

Something twists inside my spine, like a corkscrew; I gasp, and fall clumsily out of position, doubling over. "Oh," I pant, pressing my hands to my back. "Oh, God. That – now that was a bad idea. Damn."

Otto watches me from across the room, his arms folded, leaning back against the wall. Nothing moves but his tentacles, writhing slowly, caught in the spotlights and multiplied in the mirrors – a shining sea of mechanical arms. "Don't stop," he says softly. "Keep going."

I shake my head. "I can't. It's hurting me. Have to…have to stop."

He waits, still watching, as I catch my breath and lean back against the barre. Finally, he speaks again: "They changed you," he says quietly.

"Changed me back," I correct him, without thinking, and wince as soon as I realise my mistake.

Otto doesn't seem to register it, but, given that he's apparently determined not to show me anything but a poker-face, it's impossible to tell.

Then: "Show it to me."

I open my mouth to say something, God knows what; something like no or I don't want to. Something like that. But I close my mouth, and raise my eyes to bore directly into his, before I turn on my heel to face the wall. I gaze into my own eyes, breath misting the glass and echoing in my ears, as I pull the coat off my shoulders, reach around behind me, draw the zipper down. The sound of the metal teeth snapping open sets my own teeth on edge; a bizarre image of myself unzipping my own spine sweeps through my brain.

It occurs to me that it's stupid to turn my back to him as I do this, since the wall is a mirror and Otto can see everything anyway. But I do it nonetheless.

I lower the zip to halfway down my back, and shrug the smock down. The air is cold on my bare skin; even though he's halfway across the room, I'm sure I can feel his breath on the back of my neck.

She peels it off, this nurse's uniform of indeterminate origin; peels it off, revealing to me that white expanse of flesh, that body I studied, X-rayed, made notes on for days, the body more familiar to me than my own. The downward curve of the neck, strands of black hair falling across it; the shadows of the shoulder-blades; the hollow of the spine – and I wince, actually wince, as the rough white bandages come into view, as I witness for myself the Rorschach-blot of blood that glues them to her back. The color of rust around the edges, grading into a dark starburst of arterial crimson…

It's bad, yes. Very bad. But I have to see it all. I have to see the worst there is.

"Take them off," I demand flatly, moving in closer.

She hesitates, then reaches back again. Her hands shake as she grasps the edges of the gauze, tremble as she begins to unwind it. Unwind yourself for me, Mary Jane. Show me your nakedness. Your every wound. Every wound I caused you. I want to promise you that I will make it better. Even if I know I am a liar.

I watch her eyelashes flutter in the mirror, like the wings of a distressed bird. Are you trying not to cry? And, I wonder, is it this, rather than your bare skin, which stirs my desire for you?

She looks up, and her reflected eyes sear past my dark lenses and into my heart. No tears – no fear – lurks within them. Nothing does, nothing I recognise. She is shielding herself, as my glasses shield me.

An intelligent move, perhaps, Mary Jane. I don't deserve to be let in.

But do it anyway. I beg of you. Be vulnerable for me. To me.

She stands before me, stripped to the waist, stripped bare. Her back is a riot of angry color – burst steel stitches oozing blood, black and purple bruises, wounds yellowing around the edges and twisting into white scar tissue. No haemorrhaging, as far as I can see. But those scars will be there forever. Nothing can ever remove them. Not even me.

I reach up, press my fingertips to the surface of her back. It is like touching a pearl, shrouded in skin. The first time I have ever touched her here with my own hands; here, her back, the site where I first desecrated her beauty.

"This is nothing," I say, all business. "They've performed a fairly routine amputation of the artificial limb." Of Brenda, your Brenda, the child I gave you, whom you loved so much. "But it's an easy enough process to reverse. I can fix you."

She flinches; I feel it. Only slightly, so slightly that you might not notice it, were you not paying attention to her, to the way her body moves. But I do. And I feel it.

"Yeah," she mumbles, "Yeah. That'll be great."

And that is when I know, with absolute and total certainty, that she lies.

The knowledge tears down the surface of my heart with the surety of a scalpel blade. She lies. To me, of all the people in the world; me, to whom she once swore total and abject felicity; she is lying to me.

Parker was right.

She no longer wants me.

I shut my eyes tightly, as tight as I can.

She no longer wants me, and no amount of acting on her behalf or fantasy on mine will make it so.

But I won't believe in it. No, this truth is unpalatable. I will not accept it on circumstantial evidence alone.

She must tell me. I will believe in nothing, nothing, unless it falls from her lips first.

Idly, keeping my shaking muscles firmly under control, I wind the stained bandage around my hands. "Perhaps," I say slowly, "I can give you more than one, this time. More than one tentacle, I mean. Since you did so well with – what was its name?" I enquire.

"Brenda," she mutters, still refusing to turn and face me – modesty? Fear? Disgust? I can no longer tell.

"Brenda, yes," I agree. My fingers slip over the soiled surface of the dressing; I caress the bloodstain. "You did so well with her, I thought maybe we could see how you went with more than one. I could even give you four, if you'd like."

"Maybe, yeah…"

I hold her eyes in the mirror. "Just like me."

She is silent.

I look back down at the bandage. My tentacles delicately pluck it from my hands, holding it between their pincers; I draw back to give them room, or to give myself air, as they deftly wind the bandage back around her torso. I imagine that I feel the warmth radiating from beneath her skin, the light brush of her breast against the tentacle's cold metal, the thud of her heart underneath it.

"Everything, you know, has changed," he goes on, just when I'm allowing myself to hope that he won't. "And yet is still the same. This could be a marvellous opportunity, you know. A new start for us. A rebirth.

"I can take you home. We can make new lists of things to destroy; create new enemies to fight, new dragons to slay. Would you enjoy that, Mary Jane?"

I grip the barre tightly, so tightly I feel its steel curves imprinting themselves on the palms of my hands. The tentacles daintily tie the ends of the bandage, and pull away from me. They have brushed up against my skin in the course of their task; I see my own sweat glistening on the tips of their claws as I pull up the front of the smock.

"Well?" Otto asks. "Would you?"

Live the part, MJ. Believe in every word you're saying, and it'll come naturally. Don't get nervous. Don't choke. Not now. Not when it counts. Even though he keeps looking at you with his hidden eyes, and even though not one muscle in his face has shifted position since we entered this room, and even though slipping up could mean the end of everything – don't choke.

I take a breath, turn around to face him, still leaning on the barre for a support I really do think I might need. "Sure," I say breezily, tilting my head to one side. "Yeah. Why not?"

But he isn't finished with me. He moves closer, the tentacles drawing him silently past the spotlights, through the dark. "And us," he says quietly, and hidden in the shadows, his voice sounds disembodied. "Our partnership. Together for…so many years to come. Are you glad of that, Mary Jane?"

And he's right in front of me before I even know it, looking down at me; he fills my field of vision. Even if I moved away, I'd never escape him; thousands of duplicates line the mirrored walls, of him, and of me, looking small, looking scared.

"I am," he says. "Very glad."

Tell him you're glad, too, MJ. Tell him.

Damn it!

Aren't you listening to me?

Tell him! Or everyone dies!

"I…"

…Can't finish that sentence. Hell, it's all I can do to keep looking into his eyes.

He looks back; and just when the silence reaches breaking point: "And what happened, almost, the other night." Pause. "On the table."

Oh God. Oh, I can't. I can't. I look away, I just have to. It all floods back to me, that sick desperation inside, the hard wood under my back, his weight on top of me. Once I couldn't decide how to feel about this memory; now I don't even get the choice.

"Will we do that, in time, Mary Jane?" Otto asks sharply, coldly, watching me all the while. "Will we share a bed as well as a life? Are we going to make love, Mary Jane?"

"I…Well…"

My head swims; maybe this is what vertigo feels like. I can't believe I didn't anticipate this, that he might want this, even though it somehow feels as if he's actually asking me something else, something quite different.

But there's no other option. I've got to go through with it. Hold the pose, MJ. For everything you're worth.

Click.

"I…If that's really what you want, Otto," I say, drawing every word from my mouth slowly, painfully. "If you think…If you think it would help us. Draw us, uh, closer…"

Nothing changes in his face, even now, even after that. I wonder if he'll kiss me; I wonder if I could bear to kiss back. But he doesn't. Instead, he moves away from me, turns his back, moves towards the center of the room.

Oh, lord. Was that the wrong answer? I start to sweat again. Did he want me to say something else? Christ. If only I could just ask him. Just tell me what you want me to say, goddammit. Tell me what you want to hear, and I'll give it to you.

Just don't ask me to mean it.

So. My destruction of you would seem to be complete, Mary Jane.

Is that how afraid you are of me? So afraid that you would even sleep with me. You would let me have whatever I thought I wanted. Have my way with you. In every sense of the phrase.

The idea holds a terrible, dark, deviant appeal. To hold you in my sway, so completely and so utterly. To make of you a slave.

This urge in me to crush you. The urge of the butterfly collector, to hold down the delicate thing of beauty and drive a spike through its still-beating heart. To preserve it, keep it, forever, even after the heart has stopped beating and the soul long flown.

No. No butterfly genuinely wants to be the possession of a collector, no matter how much admiration it would earn in the years to come. It isn't the truth.

Oh, Mary Jane, tell me that it is. Why is it that you, a trained actress, fail so spectacularly in the effort to make your lies convincing? Why, even when I want to believe that you belong to me body and soul, that you are the woman who will not go away, will not die or vanish or otherwise leave me alone - why do I still see that anguish in your eyes that tells me, in no uncertain terms, just how undeserving I am?

If I want you, and am never to have you, then I am wretched.

If I have you, without your wanting me, then I am damned.

But what I want, and what you need…impossible to reconcile.

"You are certain, then, that you wish to stay with me?"

"Yes. I mean, of course, yeah," she says quickly.

"Indeed. But let us play a game, Mary Jane," I say, unable to look at her, knowing that to invite this is to invite everything I fear. "Just a meaningless little game. Humor me." At my back, I sense her confusion, that of someone certain that they are being led into a trap. And in a sense, she is.

"What – out of sheer curiosity – what would you have said to me had you decided to leave?"

In the mirror, I see her shocked expression, swiftly brushed aside by that damnable actor's mask she wears for her own protection. "Well, I didn't need to make any decision, Otto. I mean, I belong with you. It was –"

I cut her off brutally: "What would you have said?"

She starts to speak, and falters. "I, uh…"

She lapses into silence. Then: "I don't want to play this game. Or any game. I mean, it's pointless, right? I am staying, and that's, that's all."

A touch of nervous irritability. Tremors in the earth, before the volcano erupts.

"What," I repeat, "Would you have said?"

She looks up at me; for a crucial instant, the mask slips, and she looks at me through eyes dulled with exhaustion and pain. Her own eyes. "Otto…please. You've won, okay? You got what you wanted, you got me. You finally get to win this time. Just be happy with that, okay? Don't make me…"

"What. Would you. Have said?"

The truth, Mary Jane.

The whole truth.

And nothing but the truth.

So help you, God.

There's a ringing inside my head, clear as a bell; I'm sure if I closed my eyes for long enough, I'd be able to focus on that ringing to the exclusion of all else, and maybe then I'd be able to figure out just what in the hell I'm supposed to do now.

I don't know what he wants. I don't know what he expects me to be to him. Just when I thought I knew, thought I had a clear picture of him in my head, he shatters the frame, splinters his image into distortion, and I can't tell which part of him I'm supposed to appeal to.

I walk slowly forward, in the opposite direction from where he stands, as if I'm getting ready for a duel. With every step, I feel the shifting plates of ice cracking under my feet; dangerous ground, nowhere to stand safely, nowhere to rely upon. Christ, lying was hard enough; telling the truth and disguising it as one more lie might just be more than I can bear.

I swallow, try to think of it as being like an audition, or a drama-class exercise, or, screw it, anything other than what it really is. "Well," I begin, weaving my fingers together and pressing them to my heart. "Well. Um. I guess I would say…I guess I would say: Otto, I think we shouldn't stay together. Because, ah…"

Damn it, MJ, just tell him straight out. Tell him that you've been tearing off pieces of yourself ever since the two of you first met; tell him that everything's gone too far, that you can't live the way he does any more; tell him that every stupid, submissive lie that you spit out from behind a fake smile takes you further and further away from what you know to be true, and right, and real; and tell him how much you hate him for putting you in the middle of this situation in the first place, and how much you hurt and rage inside because, damn it, you still care, after every hideous thing, you still care, and you don't want to care and you hate him for making you care and –

No, it's not possible. I can't. Can't do that.

Give him something nice, instead. Something civilised, and hesitant, and polite.

"I think we ought to, um, split up. Well, no, not split up, since we're not…I mean, not see each other any more, not be together. Because – because, we're…not good for each other, and I've – you know, I've changed, and, ah…I feel differently, now, than I did. I'm not so angry any more…"

You're furious, and you know it. You ache to explode, to give your fury voice and see it burn, white-hot, through the atmosphere of this room. To heat the mirrors until they break.

But instead, you're still acting. Still holding back.

What is it that you don't want me to hear you say? What feelings do you possess that are so taboo that I must not hear them? What sliver of honesty is so sharp, so painful, that I cannot bear to feel it?

You no longer want me, and you have good reason not to. But you will not say it.

"Not so angry any more, eh?" I ask bitterly. "Then I suppose that means you'll be crawling back, doesn't it?"

She looks up, startled. "Crawling back…?"

"To him. To that creature you call a husband." I spit the word out like venom. "You'll walk out of this room, and you'll go to him, and you'll both go home to your cozy little apartment and lick each others' wounds. And you'll go back to your modelling and your joke of an acting career, and nothing that I have done for you, nothing that I have taught you, will matter one bit."

Mary Jane blinks, the hurt as visible on her face as a scar. To my surprise, I find that I am trembling with anger; I thrust my hands into my folded arms, the fists clenching and unclenching convulsively. I realise that every word I said, I meant.

The hurt in her features slowly coalesces into a frown. Her jaw clenches tightly. "You really think all that's true?"

"I have no reason to doubt it," I say, and fail to keep the snarl from beneath the surface of my voice. "You do realise, of course, that everything you are today is due to my efforts, and my efforts alone? But by all means, Mary Jane, walk away. Walk away from me, and drop, helpless as the puppet you are, the second your strings are cut. Watch as your life fades back into the shiny, soulless, plastic daydream it once was; cater to the lusts and passing whims of the society that you will forget once rejected you –"

"Wait a minute –"

I can't stop; it pours from me, a deluge of poisonous invective, delivered in tones of ice; a flood of words I didn't even realise I was waiting for the chance to unleash. " – And your husband, oh, yes, your husband; he who defines you, gives you your identity, is the clay from which you mold your entire world. Let's not forget him. How long have you been waiting, Mary Jane, to run back to him, shrieking timorously away from the horrors of reality –"

" – The hell would you know about reality?" she says, deadly quiet –

" – To be his prize once again, his toy, his pretty little doll, the trophy he trots out to show off to his friends – you would rather belong to him than to me, correct?"

"No, not correct." Her eyes narrow. "Not in the slightest bit correct, actually."

I turn away. "Apparently my experiment was a total failure," I throw over my shoulder, making a gesture of futility. "A write-off in every sense. You were scarcely worthy of my time at all, really. I don't know why I bothered."

He doesn't know why he bothered.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know…anything.

He doesn't know how much he's hurt me. What he's done to me. What he does to people, what he did to that little girl and to Peter and to countless others.

Maybe I ought to feel sorry for him. Feel sorry for the sort of decaying mind and eroded soul that can't conceive of the damage it does; that can't even begin to comprehend that people – that I, goddamn it, that I am more than some experiment, a pastime, something to while away the hours. An object. Of beauty, of scientific curiosity, whatever. Some pretty little store-dummy ruled by whatever he says, or whatever society says – never, oh God, perish the thought, never by what I need, by what I want.

"I'm better than that," I say out loud. "I know I'm better than that. And you know it, too."

Otto spins around, folding his arms tightly across his chest. "Oh, yes?" he asks skeptically, advancing towards me. I stand my ground, my arms pressed to my sides. "And I suppose you also know better than I just what is best for you? You think you know what you want, is that it?"

"That's right." The first time I've ever said it with any certainty. And the certainty I feel now is all the certainty in the world. I feel it as surely as I feel the blood pounding behind my eyes, as I feel something hot and dark seeping into my veins like a second dose of painkillers. I no longer remember that this is supposed to be an act. I no longer remember that, afterwards, I'll be leaving with him, no matter what. "I know what I want."

"As do I," he says viciously. "As I should have, all along. You want him. All you want out of life is Peter Parker. That's the truth, isn't it, Mary Jane? A slave you were, and a slave you shall remain."

Some spark ignites inside my brain, some spark of white fire; it travels down my tense, tightened muscles, down my arms, into my fingers, pulling them into fists. Anger, that most familiar of feelings; for the last few months, I wore it, tight and snug against my body as a suit of armor. But to feel it towards him, towards Otto, he who was once my whole universe; to know without doubt, for the very first time, that I am right and he is wrong – this is new. This is alien territory.

My breath is coming short and shallow. I draw in air through my nose, swallow it down into my lungs. "You have no right to say any of this," I say, trying to keep my voice level, trying to remember how easily he could kill me, and finding that I don't really care. "You, of all the people in the world, have no right to tell me how to think or feel. Not after everything you've done –"

- Steel, and blood, blood through a morphine haze, white mask, something squirming and black –

" – To me. After how…" I breathe in sharply. "…You hurt me."

There. It's out there; it's finally, finally been said. And his expression never changes. Not even a little. The sheer selfishness of the man; he's not even willing to surrender a clue as to how he feels, how any of this affects him. If it even does.

Finally: "I hurt you." I can't tell if it's a question or a statement.

I look down. "Yes." Suddenly conscious of a strand of hair falling into my eyes, I brush it slowly back behind one ear. I see myself reflected in the floor, forehead puckered, eyes red-rimmed and blazing in a white face.

"Badly," I say, more loudly than I probably need to.

Otto doesn't say anything for a while. Then: "You belong with me."

I look up, my anger spiking. "Belong with you, or to you?"

He waves a hand irritably. "What's the difference, Mary Jane?"

That's all it takes. All it takes to set off the powder keg inside me; for the words to burst out of me and all rational thought to melt down. "It's all the difference in the goddamn world!" I scream. "I don't belong to you, I'm not your girl, and you know what, I'm not Peter's girl either. I never was!

"I am so sick – so sick – of constantly having to be somebody else's girl, okay? I don't want to be your girl. I don't want to be Peter's girl! I want to be my girl! Mine!" I slam my fist hard against my chest. "And nobody else's, nobody…"

My voice cracks. My head, suddenly heavy, falls, and I find myself staring at my trembling fist, still pressed against my heart. I'm tired, and every part of me hurts, and I just can't do this any more. "…Nobody else's," I whisper, as the breath shudders out of me.

Otto hasn't moved. He stands there still, watching me, as he always has, all along. I can't bear to look at him.

It's all wrong. Every bit of it. Everything I tried so damn hard to make right. I was good, and I failed at that. I was bad, and I failed at that, too. And the end result is just so…pathetic. A kid dies, and Peter gets beaten up, and I rant and rage and shriek my independence, and none of it makes any difference, because Otto's already won. That's why he isn't reacting to anything I do or say. It'd be like reacting to a malfunctioning clockwork doll. Just a waste of emotion, really.

"Oh, to hell with it," I say wearily. I push off from the barre, slowly drag my feet across the floor, towards the door. "Forget it, Otto. Forget all of it, right? Game over. Let's go home."

As I reach for the doorknob, he says it. So quietly I might never even have heard it. "I'm sorry."

I let my arm fall, and turn around. He stands, statue-like, in the middle of the floor, not looking at me, or at his reflection, or, it seems, at anything.

"What?" I ask flatly.

"For what I did," he continues, and the words sound wrong, awkward and stilted, in his mouth. "Have done. It was wrong. I think I…I believe I may owe you that. An apology."

I walk forward; the sound of my shoes against the mirrored tile beats in exactly the same rhythm as my blood in my ears.

I stop right in front of him, and stare directly into the opaque surface of his glasses.

You're sorry. After everything that's happened…

After everything you've done…

You say you're sorry.

I draw back my hand, and I deal him a ringing slap, right across the face.

Physically, I am far stronger than she. It isn't the force of the blow that makes me reel back. Nor is it the stinging pain. It's the shock, the sheer surprise of it.

"You hit me," I say.

Apologising at all was difficult enough, forcing the words "I'm sorry" through vocal cords unused to them. I don't know what I expected her reaction to be. Part of me had hoped that it would make her run to me, take me in her arms, promise never to leave. That it would make everything all right.

Part of me, though, expected it. Expected it, and welcomes it.

However, anger, my automatic default, has already been triggered inside me; I press a hand to my face, feeling my teeth draw back in a growl. "You hit me, Mary Jane."

"Yeah." Her voice is choked; I look closely through the dim light, and see that tears are coursing down her cheeks. "I did. What're you gonna do about it, huh? Kill me? Like you killed that girl?"

Involuntarily, I flinch. I look down, away from her burning eyes, twin accusations. That girl. Amy Lowell. Devoured by flies. The young life I extinguished. Who could so easily have been you instead, Mary Jane.

"I did that," I say, my voice low, "For you."

"Yeah. Funny how all the things you do for me are things I never asked for."

Silence descends, uninterrupted save for the sound of her breathing as it slows. The air between us is heavy with words, the lingering afterimages of the words we have hurled at one another, and behind those, the fading echoes of words we once said, long ago. Or should have said, and didn't, and left it too late.

The smell of flowers is thick in the charged atmosphere, insinuates its way inside my head. The smell of her; that sweet and mysterious scent that no perfume on earth could replicate.

"You regret it, then?" I ask softly. "All of it?"

Mary Jane is taking slow, deep breaths in; when they leave her body, she shivers, as though the surrender of them leaves her body cold. She wraps her arms tightly around herself, containing herself.

"I did not realise you hated me so much," I say.

A pause.

"But it isn't any more than I deserve, really."

A long silence, before she speaks.

"Hate you?" she says quietly. "No, Otto. I can't do that." She swallows, and stares at the floor. On the top of her lowered head, I can see the blood-red of her hair, vein-like roots snaking through the artificial black.

"I should," she says, "I kind of wish I could. And maybe some day I will…but I don't now. I can't hate you, Otto. You're the…"

Her voice drops to a whisper; she speaks only to herself now, not to me, not any more. "…You're the rattlesnake that bit me."

I don't know if he realises this – don't know if he even feels it – but I hit him hard enough to draw blood. There it hangs, at the corner of his lower lip: a single dark bead, a lipstick trace from a vampire's kiss. At any moment, it could fall to earth, blurring the mirror-images beneath our feet.

He walks across to me, and places both hands on the sides of my face – only the palms, the fingers splayed, brushing through my hair. "Look at me," he says, voice low. "Look me in the eye and tell me that I am not what you want."

I tear my eyes from my reflection on the floor, and draw them up, slowly, over the great shining black mass of him, past the undulating tentacles, and into his face, whiter even than normal; into the dark recesses of his eyes, the glasses seeming as transparent now as water.

"You're not what I want," I say softly.

His arms fall to his sides. He draws back, breathing in deeply, crossing his arms, looking as though I've hit him again.

"So that's it, then," he mutters. "This is how it ends. This is how we end."

He is still; then, in a burst of motion, his tentacles lash out, crack uselessly against the walls. The mirrors splinter into cobwebs.

"It's not – " he rages, then cuts himself off, the unspoken word, "fair", hanging between us.

"It never is," I say quietly. "Someone always has to lose something."

"But why does it have to be me?" Otto demands, spinning to face me. "Why is it always me?"

"Because…you keep getting it wrong."

Silence. I stare at the walls, into the spirals of shattered glass. Peter once told me that mirrors were made by heating up water and sand to white-hot temperatures, creating enough pressure to transform them into reflective surfaces. That stuck with me for quite a while: two rough elements, dragged from the dark sea depths, united in fire and turned into something that shows us ourselves, if we can bear to look.

I only just remembered that. It still seems as beautiful to me now as it did then.

I gaze upon her. It occurs to me that I have always been gazing upon her like this, from across a darkened room, uncertain which version of her I prefer: the real one, the one that lives and feels and whom I know I have hurt; or the one whose lovely image is reflected back at me in a mirror; a mirror that shows me only her, never changing, always what I want her to be, but never shows me myself.

I should have known. Should have realised. It was always only one choice: either accept every version of her, or be left with none at all.

"I could kill you, you know," I say quietly. One of my tentacles unfurls, slithers across the room like a sea snake, and gently, loosely, entwines itself around her throat. "So no one else could ever have you. You know that."

Mary Jane looks back at me through lowered lids, her aspect calm and serene as a Buddhist idol. "Yes. I know that."

She closes her eyes, and leans back into the tentacle's grasp.

"But you won't," she says.

Her form, so small at the end of my arm, her skin luminous in the darkness. A fallen star. Purple smudges beneath her eyes; so tired, she looks so tired.

All the books I read as a child, all those tattered tomes of myth and legend, of gods and magic and blood spilled in glorious combat: none of them ever tell you what happened to the Bacchae after the madness was over. They never tell you what became of those women, what they felt after their god had abandoned them. Did they weep for the lives they destroyed, for the children and lovers they tore apart in their frenzy? Did they fall into black despair, knowing that they would never again be able to act with such freedom, such selfish and hateful and destructive freedom, ever again?

Or did they just leave? Did they quietly and compassionately turn their backs on that chaotic world, that insane god, and go back to their own lives?

…And I see us, she and I, our life together – not lives, for there would be nothing left of us as real people, only as a fantastic two-headed beast, a monster of fiction.

I see us awakening to the tinny sound of rain, eyes opening listlessly to another gray morning.

I see us sitting at the table, eating slowly, not looking at each other, not speaking.

I see us watching television together, on the couch; news reports, sometimes about ourselves, that elicit as little reaction as the reports about people we do not know.

I see us committing crime after crime after crime, a never-ending monotony of meaningless thefts, the spoils of which we care so little about that we lose them, under the floorboards, behind the sofa, and can no longer remember what they were or why we stole them.

I see us having sex. I can't call it making love, because it isn't. Eventually, after boredom and despair has eradicated awkwardness, we'll have sex, and she will watch me through eyes so deadened they cannot even muster contempt.

I see us fighting. Arguing, over little things, stupid things. We will fight for the same reasons that we will sleep together: because it relieves the staleness, the lifelessness, the loneliness. Because, for a brief time, it makes us feel something for one another, even if that something is only bitterness and resentment. We will fight each other with robotic, mechanical predictability. We will fight each other because we lack the courage to fight ourselves.

And so it will go, on and on. And the poison will seep inside, into the underground reaches of our hearts, but we will be too numb to feel it as it clutches at our souls.

We will become our parents.

There is no place in the world for Dionysus any more. No one believes in him; he has faded into the mud and dead leaves and tangled, twisted roots of history.

But the Bacchae survived. They survived. Without him.

Exactly as they should.

I feel the pressure around my neck slacken. I open my eyes in time to see the cold metal arm unwind itself from me, pull away, return to where he stands, unmoving, only a silhouette now.

He looks me in the eye, and holds out a hand. "Come here," he says softly.

I can't feel myself moving, but I know that I am. I can hear my footsteps. I can hear my blood. I can taste my heart.

It's as sweet as flower petals.

She stops in front of me, only breaths away. Gently, she touches one hand to the scar on my cheek. The other winds around my waist, as if she's about to dance with me, dip me, sway me; she touches, through the thick leather hide, my bullet scar. She breathes out softly, turns her head; through the forest of black hair, I catch the metallic glint of stitches.

What we've done to ourselves. What we've done to each other.

She stands, touching me, and I stand, not touching her. She holds all the power. I am undone. There is nothing left to do, nothing left to say.

She looks into my eyes, hers like beams of green light, witch-light, boring into me, rendering me open, and bare, and empty. Searchlight beams, seeking out the frightened fugitive, trying to hide in the dark.

Her hands still pressed to my scars, she leans forward, and she kisses me.

Soft as a falling teardrop. Not like before, no urgency in it, no desperation, no unhappiness. No bitterness in the aftertaste. Not in this, the very last kiss.

A kiss to break the spell, lift the curse, wake the sleeping princess.

Every fairy tale must end with a kiss.

His lips taste of salt water. Octopus. Monster of the deep. I taste the bead of blood on his mouth, draw it into mine, swallow it down: I have you inside me now, Otto. For the rest of my life.

If I never break this kiss, we never break apart. We never break.

We would live inside each others' dreams.

But I live in the real world now. Bright and loud and teeming with, oh, so many human lives. With all of its pain and all of its disappointment, it is still beautiful. And never more so than now, right now.

I pull my mouth away from his; we rest our foreheads together, breath fluttering across each others' faces. I catch a gleam, a glimmer of something wet.

"Are you crying?" I ask.

He almost seems to smile. "No," he whispers. "Of course not, Mary Jane. Just a trick of the light, that's all. You know how mirrors…can lie sometimes."

A pause. The kind of pause in which worlds are born, in which old lives die. Then:

"Go," he says to me. "Go. And don't you dare look back."

Slowly, I draw back from him. I look upon him with eyes that know they never will again, not in the way they once did, not in the way they do now. I see his face, the color of the snow outside, etched into the dark in sharp profile; the shining black streams of his hair; his body, held so tightly in its leather casing, as though, without it, he would fall to pieces.

I see him, for this one last time; and I turn my back, and start towards the door.

"Mary Jane?" I hear him ask, tentatively, his voice emerging from the room behind me, from a present that is already becoming the past, so quickly I hardly have time to breathe.

I stop, but I don't turn.

"Not all of it was fake, was it?"

I stare at the bronze doorknob, at the black keyhole, the edges of the door.

"No," I finally reply. "Not all of it was fake."

Tears threaten to sting my eyes, but I won't be crying any more. I grasp hold of the knob, twist it, and pull the door open.

The light pours in, bright and harsh and unforgiving. I blink, squinting my eyes against its onslaught. I had forgotten it was still daylight outside. Forgotten that there was anything other than that room, anything other than that darkness I left at my back.

I thought the light would kill me, once. Thought it would blind me, sear into my fragile flesh, melt me down to nothing. Underneath these chemical dyes, after all, I am still a redhead. And you know us redheads. How easily we burn.

But I don't. I don't burn up. And I don't melt, and I don't go blind, and I don't die. My body aches, make no mistake about that; I hurt, on the surface of my body and deeper inside my skin. And some of these hurts, I know, may never entirely heal.

But I don't die.

Despite all of it. Despite the exhaustion. Despite the pain.

Despite everything else, I live on.