He had spent many nights like this in the days since Angel came. Hidden away in his room, laid flat on his back with unseeing eyes turned up towards the patchwork metal ceiling, unsteady, deliberate breaths forming tumbling gossamer clouds of frost in the midnight cold. Alone with his thoughts. Drowning in them.
As the leader of his Tribe, he had more than enough on his mind to begin with. The state of Muladhara's borders. Politics across the Junkyard. Strategies for upcoming battles. Making sure his people had enough to feed themselves another day. Each and every one of the lives entrusted to him, held firmly, fiercely in his capable hands that on nights like this one would shake as if an earthquake passed.
It would be enough to put a man at wits' end, in any case, but he took all of it in stride, managing every smothering responsibility with that legendary stoicism the Embryon knew and relied on him for. It was his purpose in life, after all – to be a dependable, powerful, incorruptible leader to his Tribe, to guide them through this bleak world of rain and rust and endless warfare, to protect them to his last breath. For as long as he could remember, this had been his duty in the simplest terms, and the meaning of his life in the most existential.
To say Angel's arrival had made his job a lot more difficult would be an understatement for the ages. The demon virus had sent his already-turbulent world spiraling into bloody chaos, turning every last denizen of the Junkyard into a finely-tuned weapon of mass destruction, pitting them against friend and foe alike in a ruthless fight for survival – for salvation. Mayhem without rhyme or reason, all in the name of living. Nothing in his years of serving the Embryon could have prepared him for what was to come.
And, for the first time in his life, he felt fear.
Fear. A word completely alien to him, one of many that had appeared rapidly, inexplicably in his vocabulary like hives erupting in his brain. He didn't have a clue what it meant – in fact, it would almost hurt him to think about it, ramming himself helplessly against the firewall that cordoned off this newly-unlocked part of his mind – but he knew, somewhere deep inside him, that it was what he was feeling. Fear, that insuperable, paralyzing sensation that would plant itself deep in his belly and radiate in sickening waves throughout him until he could no longer stand. Fear, that would leave him like this, prone on the cold hard ground and gasping desperately for the thin air of the Muladhara depths.
For a man who had spent his life knowing everything, shaping his life and the lives of others with his own hand, the confusion, the disorder, the swirling sea of new and strange and terrifying emotions had proven to be all too much. The very thought of being unable to fulfill his duty, his purpose, having never once crossed his mind before, now haunted him as if a waking nightmare. Weakness, impotence, uncertainty, fear – he marked them as disgusting, shameful feelings, hanging like smog over his head, clouding his rational thought and obscuring his vigilant eye. And just as strongly as he knew, instinctively, what these emotions were, he knew it was a side of him he could never show another.
His Tribe needed him - his strength, his wisdom, his indomitable will – now more than ever. And though the circumstances of it all were vastly different, his role, in principle, was no different than before: to be a leader his people could believe in. Showing weakness to the very individuals whose lives depended on him would be unacceptable then and catastrophic now. So to them he would show a brave face, that same intense visage he'd worn as long as he or anyone could remember, crowned newly by the stark black and cyan brand on his cheek. A reminder, as if they needed one, of the vicious reality they now lived in – and an unmissable symbol of his power to overcome it.
It was not until he was alone in the deep of night, having confirmed that the base was secure and reassured himself that they would make it into the next day, that he would allow himself to dwell on the uncertainties. Like that, every worry, every doubt he'd suppressed during the day would come sweeping forth, bowling him over like a cannonball to the gut; he would sink, breathless, to his knees, every drop of his feigned vitality drained in an instant. And in time enough he would find himself as he was now, spread pathetically on the floor, listening to the sound of his own ragged breaths and the rhythmic pounding of blood in his ears.
Why was Angel here? Why had they all become demons? Was this some sick divine experiment? What did all of these new feelings, sensations, instincts mean? Where did they come from? And most importantly, how could a man so easily and completely overwhelmed by it all expect to lead anyone? A tempest of emotions and questions swirled inside his head, ones he knew neither he nor anyone would be able to explain. On nights like this one, when that storm threatened to sweep him away, he found it helped to ground himself by reminding himself of that purpose – his duty to his people. Yes, though the world was changing around him faster than he could comprehend, he could take solace in one immutable truth: he was Serph, beloved leader of the Embryon. And that was all he ever was or would be.
…Lately, he found, he couldn't even be sure of that any more.
Here his heartbeat began to quicken, and he became acutely aware of the cold, sinking slowly, painfully through his armor and into his core like a thousand needles of ice. What if he wasn't the person he'd believed himself to be all these years? It was a silly question, one his mind had posed to him many times on these runaway spirals, as if only to see his reaction – the look of panic that spread across his face, the way his breathing suddenly stopped and then picked back up, frantically, like the air had been sucked out of his lungs. He was scaring himself without reason, he'd have to tell himself. His thoughts, bound up in this confused tangle of emotion, were only trying to deceive him. How could he be anyone but himself?
But then, on nights like this one when it got to be all too much, his mind would dredge up those memories – the ones he'd suppressed, hidden away on the pretense that he was just thinking too hard about them, that they meant nothing in the end, that it would do him no good to dwell. Minor occurrences in the grand scheme of things, just a handful of things over the course of days, months, years, but things that nonetheless started to scare him the more he put the pieces together. The way Argilla had looked at him one day, when they were alone together in the command room, discussing unit placements for an upcoming assault on the Vanguards – how that curious emotion he now knew as fear had crossed her face as she watched him talk, twisting it into a tragic mask that burned itself into his memories. How Heat had once confronted him on the battlefield, as they stood over the body of a fallen comrade, watching the eternal rain gently wash the blood from her wounds; how he'd turned to Serph with unbounded hatred in his eyes, an anger so intense it stunned him into silence, but one that Serph knew, even without words, to mean "this is all your fault." The time Cielo, who had been nothing but love and good cheer for as long as Serph had known him, cast him a look of contempt as he held Sera in his arms, consoling her after another day of bloodshed.
Why had his trusted officers, his closest of friends, looked at him as if he were a villain? With fear, with disgust? And the thing that had troubled him the most – a series of occurrences, really, having begun after Angel's arrival and only grown more frequent as the struggle for salvation went on – was something he'd seen in himself, with his own eyes. He had a single mirror in his quarters, a small wall-mounted thing no doubt built for a man a good few inches taller than him, flecked with dust and oil and pits from chipped-off glass. It was never something he afforded much attention, giving it at most a quick glance in the mornings as he straightened his disheveled hair; he knew what he looked like, of course, and he had neither the need nor time to fixate on that. He'd look into it, and looking back at him would be Serph, the same as he'd always been.
Sometimes, crossing the room, heading to his desk or his cot or somewhere outside the sliding metal door, he would catch his reflection in the corner of his eye and see someone else.
Each time it would take him a moment to register; he had somewhere to be, of course, and far too much on his mind to pay attention to every minute detail in his peripherals. But then the image would crystallize, just briefly, and he would stop dead. Though he could only ever catch a glimpse of the other, he knew, he was certain, that every time it was the same – a man quite like himself, small, delicate, smooth and round of face, but with hair much darker, eyes cast in shadow, and that smile, an eerie, uncanny smile that would chill him to the bone if he lingered on it. He would get his wits about him, then, take a few steps back and lean his head into frame, make sure he'd really seen what he thought he did – but all he would find staring back at him was Serph. The same Serph as always, his clear blue-gray eyes dilated with just a hint of panic.
Trivial incidents, he'd tried to tell himself, perhaps just the product of stress. Maybe stress, maybe lack of sleep, maybe the insatiable hunger that gnawed at him, occupied his thoughts more often than he'd wanted to admit. Maybe even a trick of the light - those dull blue strip lights that would flicker whenever one of the lifts moved, or when the wind up above grew too strong, or when tremors from surface combat sent shock waves deep into the earth around him. Those answers had satisfied him for the time being. They had to, of course; the leader of a Tribe had more important things to worry about than seeing a ghost in his mirror.
But now, on this worst night of them all, those weak excuses were no longer able to tide him over. He had been overcome by a new emotion, stronger than any fear, sadness, or doubt that had him pinned to the floor of his darkened quarters – a morbid, destructive curiosity, a compulsion, a need to confirm that grim realization beginning to piece itself together in his head. And so, he pushed himself off the ground on numb, quaking hands, fighting off the stars swimming in his vision and the wave of nausea that followed, until he could stand, unsteady, on his own two legs. He caught what little he could of his balance, then staggered single-mindedly over to that mirror, curling his hands around its frame in a white-knuckled death grip, and stared, scarcely breathing now, as hard as he could at the reflection in the hazy glass.
It was Serph. The same Serph as always, his eyes wild, his thick gray hair plastered to the sides of his face with cold sweat, his mouth open and gasping pitifully. He wasn't sure what it made him feel; nothing in the wealth of strange new words he'd acquired seemed to apply. Relief? Disappointment? He shook his head, almost unconsciously, and it made him dizzy. Was he thinking too hard about it, inventing macabre realities that simply didn't exist? Was everything he'd seen just a coincidence after all? It was too much to think about all at once. He realized his eyes had been fixated on the mirror so long they'd started to burn, and so he closed them gently, letting the cool, empty darkness soothe him. Slowly he opened them again.
And what appeared before him now was the shadow, its face so close to his own they were nearly touching, its piercing ice-blue eyes locked fiercely with his own, boring holes into him, sending electricity searing through every nerve in his body. He stumbled backwards at the sight of it, his hands tearing away from the heavy frame, flying urgently out to his sides to keep him from falling. He could make out the other clearly now, through the mosaic of dirt and rust – the jet-black hair that stuck out in the back just like his own, the feminine face with curves and angles in all the same places, the long-lashed eyes so light they bordered on white. And, at the center of it all, that nightmarish smile, dripping with so much malice it took everything he had not to get sick.
Every part of him was now screaming for him to stop, to tear his eyes away and run, but by fear or fascination he was rooted to the spot. It looked like him, that thing – a twisted, vile perversion of him, but him nonetheless. The longer he looked, transfixed, at the ghastly man in the mirror, the more that truth he'd tried so hard to blind himself to solidified itself in his head. It looked like him. It was him.
The storm of fear and confusion and despair in his head was growing rapidly towards its climax, and any rational thought he tried to form, clinging desperately to the edges of his psyche, was soon drowned in a primal rush of emotion. First he couldn't think and then he couldn't breathe, and his heart was beating so hard against his chest it threatened to smash his ribs. Worse still, it was starting to hurt – a sharp, brilliant pain, starting in his cheek, snaking down his neck and over his shoulder, and flaring out across his arm as if he'd been branded with the copper traces of-
Brand. For a brief moment a flicker of clarity returned to him, and he could see, as he cast his eyes down towards the excruciating pain in his arm, the glowing cyan lines that would fork out from his Atma Brand whenever he transformed. They had traced their way down to his fingertips and stopped. He flicked his eyes back up to the mirror and slowly lifted his arm into frame, resting his shaking fingertips just on the edge of his jaw, below but not over the brand. The other him in the reflection echoed his every move until its own hand had come to rest on its face, the radiant circuit tracks of its brand turned out towards him. Red, like freshly spilled blood. Like the lines had been carved into its flesh itself.
A new sensation was suddenly filling his head – feral, inflammatory, that same feeling that would rise up and consume him during a hunt, taking over any sensibility he had left in him. The pain in his brand flared up with every pulse of it, forcing his hand to curl up into a fist. The shadow in the mirror, watching him, mocking him – it was his, there could be no denying it now. But something inside him was driving him to reject it, to bleed the life out of it like he had so many others, to –
Rend… Slaughter… Devour your enemies.
The words supplied themselves, almost out of nowhere. Words spoken to him by Angel the day it had set upon his world, having seemed so bizarre and nonsensical then, that now made as much sense to him as if they were some natural law of the universe. "You're not me," he said to the other, softly, delicately, fear and pain tempering his voice to just a whisper. He found himself pulling his arm away from his face and drawing it back behind him as far as it could go.
There is no other way to survive.
"YOU'RE NOT ME!"
And then his fist met glass, pulverizing the surface of the mirror where it had landed and sending deep fractures spidering through the rest of it. Immediately his hand bounced back to him, and he let out an ugly noise somewhere between a sob and a scream; he'd felt something shatter, and it was more than just the mirror. He wrenched his eyes open, having shut them tight against the explosion of glass, and looked down at his throbbing hand. The sensation of shards buried deep into his skin and of his own hot, sticky blood streaming down his knuckles brought him an eerie sense of relief – physical anguish, to spare him just a moment from the mental. He tried to flex his fingers and found that he couldn't, gasping in agony at the effort.
"Serph?"
A voice from outside, somewhere not far down the hall. He almost hadn't heard it over the ringing in his ears and the roar of white noise in his head. Don't come in, he wanted to say. Everything's fine. But his mouth couldn't form the words.
At once the door to his quarters slid open, and he could see in his blurry peripherals that the one who had stepped in was Sera. The one he had sworn above all to protect. The last person he wanted to see him right now. "S- Serph!" she exclaimed, her voice rising and tinged with so much concern he felt vile. She ran over to him, standing hunched over in front of the mirror like some sort of beast, and threw her arms around him, cradling his brutalized hand in one of hers. The warmth in her touch burned. "Serph, what happened?"
He didn't have an answer for her. He couldn't begin to think of one, his head was pounding so hard; phrases pieced themselves together in his mind and broke apart in an instant, like trying to build a house on a foundation of quicksand. "Sera," he finally stammered out, his voice almost inaudible, choked with tears. "Sera-"
There were footsteps in the hallway, and he saw Heat and Argilla shove their way past each other, then stop dead just inside the doorway.
"Oh, my god – Serph!?" Argilla's voice.
"What the hell's wrong with him?" Heat's.
It was too much, too much all at once. The sense of panic from earlier was coming back in full force, and he was starting to shake again; Sera held him tighter in response. "It's okay, Serph," she said, looking pleadingly up at his face. "Please, tell me what happened."
Filled with sudden desperation, he wrested his good arm out of her embrace and pointed his finger at the center of the destroyed mirror, the blackened core of a shattered-glass sun. "Sera, who is-"
But all he saw, reflected many times over in the myriad shards, was Serph. The same Serph as always, his eyes overflowing with tears, a thin trail of sick at either corner of his mouth, a few splinters of glass embedded in his cheek. The glow from his brand had subsided to a soft blue haze, almost bioluminescent in the darkness. His arm fell slowly, lifelessly to his side as the others gathered behind him, looking in confusion at the mirror that, to them, reflected nothing but themselves and the doings of a madman.
"Sera," he whispered, choking down sobs and the sour acid that had risen into his mouth. She'd had answers for so many things, for almost every question he could think of since his new thoughts had awakened. Surely this was one she would know too. "Who am I?"
But all she could do was look away.