When Linda Was Two
A Round The Twist Fanfiction
The horrible moment when the other her disappeared is forever etched upon Linda Twist's mind.
Her fat, hot tears splatting hard on the lighthouse floor, the shadowy blank space where 'sis' had been just a second prior, Dad's arms around her, Nell murmuring she should try to forget.
But Linda knows she can never forget.
It's like she told them while she crouched there, choking on her sobs.
She sees her – the sister she had only for one single, strange wonderful day – every time she looks in the mirror.
Because she was Linda – Lina exactly, only in reverse.
Plenty of people have talked to their mirror selves, to the person whose eyes they may or may not choose to meet in the glass every morning, but Linda reckons she was one of the very few – if not the only one – who had hers talk back.
She hadn't been thinking of creating a proper twin when she cloned herself to win that stupid race up and down the lighthouse stairs – it had been on impulse, to impress a boy. A boy who turned out to be a complete dag...
She hadn't exactly needed a twin – she had Pete already, even if he was, ugh, Pete.
But at the end of everything, for a few glorious minutes, getting off that train and skipping arm in arm back home to the lighthouse, she'd thought she could keep her other self.
They'd be like real sisters.
Why not?
Stranger things had happened. Like the time her little brother Bronson adopted a green baby, then gave it back because he didn't fancy being a full-time mum. Or the time she'd broken her nose and found herself embroiled in a war over magic gum leaves.
There were real twins in the world who were born with one of them having all their organs on the opposite side.
Then had come the horrible note, telling her only one of them could survive.
So more like conjoined twins than mirror twins, after all, then – one of them needed to be cut away, to stop existing, to die, for the other to survive.
Linda had tried to sacrifice herself. For, in just the one day she'd come to love the other her that much. Of course, the other her wouldn't let her do it, fighting all the way amidst the melting goo of the copied clocks and the overpopulation of bunnies taking over the room...
The choice was made for them when the duplicating machine broke down on its own.
For days and days after the loss, Linda covered the mirror in her own room with sheets and scarfs, with anything she could drape, because she couldn't stand to see herself looking back – the other Linda's expression was so very, very sad.
There was precious little she could do to avoid seeing the ghost of her other self, transparent in window glass, a flicker in anything shiny.
It was torment for a while.
Linda can face the mirror now – most of the time – but every once in a while, she will still fall into a reverie, fingertips to the glass, whispering, "Sis... Can you hear me, sis?"
And her sister in the mirror mouths the words right along with her.