These Illusions
Toya thinks he understands now, why he dislikes mirrors so much.
He has been stumbling through a succession of identical gray days, rain splattering against the windows, pattering unenthusiastically on the roof. The rain has not the energy to grow into a storm, and the days are neither hot nor cold—there is no life to it, no willingness to make decisions on what it wants to be. It is as though the world has been caught in suspension.
His mind is racing. Even as his body grows more sluggish and sleep escapes him, Toya finds his mind racing. It darts back and forth between every last detail he can remember and reel up to the surface, and all the while curses him for his ignorance.
What does this make me?
Running his fingers against the glass, trying not to wince as he looks at water spots on the mirror and the reflected light of the bathroom light fixtures, Toya thinks he finally understands why he doesn't like mirrors. Why he's never liked them.
There are those who say that a mirror captures the soul of an observer in its glass. If that is so, than when Toya has ever looked into a mirror, he has seen not himself reflected there, but the pale shadow of Ushiromiya Battler. Even if he hasn't known that that's what he's seeing, Toya has caught glimpses of this other person lurking behind his eyes, twisting his lips when he smiles. He's seeing the unreality of the illusion that Hachijo Toya is a person who was never anything but what he is now.
The mirror serves to remind him that none of this is real.
Toya doesn't know how he ever forgot that. He always knew that he must have led another life before he woke in the hospital years ago. He always knew that he had been another person, and that his life as Toya was just something to fill the void in the meantime. He always knew that this day would come, as much as he had wished to avoid it.
Toya knows who he is now, knows who he was. The illusion has been laid bare, at last. If I had just taken a long look at that photo… If I had ever looked into the mirror, or at my reflection in the window…
Why didn't I see it before?
So… Is he still Ushiromiya Battler?
He still has little more to go on than small, disjointed bits of memory. Only one of those tells him with any certainty who he is. Toya has nothing with which to fill in the gaps of the life he had had before, when he was that other person. He knows his name, the name his parents gave him, but he has nothing of that person. He has images, but no emotional awareness. He has small memories, but no emotion attached to them. Toya gets bits and pieces of feelings associated with them, but he feels nothing when he remembers. It's like watching a movie about someone else's life.
Toya knows that Battler, that he has a sister and an aunt still living. Ushiromiya Eva is the prime suspect for the murders of the Ushiromiya family and their servants; who knows if she would be happy to see her nephew alive again? But Ange, Ange has grown up believing that all of her family, aside from her paternal aunt and her mother's apparently uncaring kin. Ange has grown up believing that her brother is dead. She's thought him dead since she was six years old.
Shouldn't that fill him with more sorrow than it does? Shouldn't the idea that he has been living here, while Ange is filled with loneliness, fill him with guilt? Toya thinks about her, and he does feel some vague sorrow, vague pain. That girl has lived a horribly lonely life. He knows that the relationship between Eva and Ange is not a loving one, knows that the Sumadera are just waiting for her to come into the Ushiromiya family money; who does Ange have, in the world? By blood, Toya is her older brother. She has been waiting for Battler to come back. How can he not feel pity for her?
But the love he should feel whenever he looks at a picture of this girl, thin-faced and morose and downcast, it doesn't exist. Whatever sympathy Toya has for Ange's situation is the sympathy anyone would have for a lonely young girl; he doesn't feel the pain of an older brother, watching her in her suffering. And he does feel guilt for that, because a girl who has lived such a life deserves better than that, for her own brother to look with distant sympathy on her plight.
What happens if he does start feeling that?
Toya's head begins to pound, and he looks away from the mirror.
What happens if he does start to feel genuine empathy, genuine love for Battler's sister? What happens if all those old feelings he must have had at some point come rushing back? What happens to him?
-0-0-0-
In the evening, Toya draws a picture of a scorpion on a scrap of paper, and tapes it to his bedroom door. He hears a voice in his mind saying that it's "a powerful ward against malicious magic." Scorpion charms have featured in the manuscripts, but this doesn't feel like something he picked up from them.
He sleeps fitfully, awakens, and then sleeps not at all, watching the rain splatter against the window, and trying not to conjure voices.
