Malevoween Day 14: Dark Waters & Mirrors

John looks into the mirror, but it’s not his eyes that look back. They’re Arthur’s eyes, in Arthur’s face. He’s never seen them, but he knows.

“John?” Arthur asks. “What is it?”

“It’s…”

The reflection smiles.

“Fuck. Arthur, look out!”

But it’s already reaching out. Stepping forward, out of the glass whose surface parts like water, to catch Arthur’s wrist.

Arthur tries to jerk away. “John?!”

“It’s the reflection. It’s a mirror. It’s you. It…”

Its eyes meet his, and he falls silent. Because what’s in them is…tender. Impossibly tender. Tender the way Arthur’s voice had been when he’d said, “You are something entirely your own.” When he’d told John, against all odds and sanity, that he trusted him. “Arthur, I…I don’t think it means to hurt us.”

Arthur’s body thrums with tension. John can feel it, in his arm and his mind, vibrating like a struck string. When the reflection reaches up to cup his cheek, Arthur flinches back. But all it does is settle there, and brush its thumb over his cheekbone.

“John…?” Arthur says again. His voice is trembling a little.

“It’s all right, Arthur,” John says softly, holding the reflection’s gaze. “It isn’t going to hurt you.”

It smiles, bright and painfully sweet, right at him. John’s breath catches. Is that what Arthur looks like when he smiles? He reaches back to brush his fingertips down the side of the reflection’s face. “You look so hurt,” he murmurs to it. He didn’t even mean to speak. “You look so sad.”

“I…” Arthur’s voice breaks and he tears himself away, backing up from the reflection. “I…how can you see me? Is it…what’s it doing to you?”

“No. No, Arthur, it’s not doing anything to me. I meant…” Their body is jarred as their back hits the opposite wall. “Arthur, stop! It’s not doing anything. I was just thinking out loud. It isn’t doing anything. Just standing there, before the mirror, watching us both with its hands at its sides.”

Arthur is breathing hard. He’s frightened. Of course he’s frightened. Why shouldn’t he be? Why should he assume this duplicate of him means him anything but harm? Except that John simply knows it doesn’t.

No, it holds something he wants instead. He wants it to smile at him again. He wants…to ease that sorrow. That sorrow that… He breathes out a shuddering breath. “Oh, Arthur.”

It’s a reflection, after all.

Arthur tenses again. “We should go. If it isn’t doing anything, then…”

When John glances to it again, it meets his eyes with something like grief on its face. On Arthur’s face. This is what he looks like. Is this what he looks like all the time? This sad and aching? John shudders. “I don’t want to go.”

“You…what?” Arthur’s body shifts, poised for flight. John can feel him on the cusp of it.

“I don’t want to go,” John says more firmly, making his decision. “Arthur. Let’s stay.”

“That’s insane, John. We don’t know what it is. What it wants! For all we know, it wants to pull us into that mirror and take our place.”

“It won’t hurt us, Arthur. I promise.” He can’t promise that. He doesn’t know, not in the sense of having evidence. But John has millennia of experience in trusting his intuition.

“Then why shouldn’t we just leave it to do…whatever? Whatever it means to be doing. Let it get on with things.”

“Because,” John tells him gently, “it’s here for us.”

Arthur’s hand is in his field of view, hovering in the air before their body as if he isn’t sure whether to reach out or ward off danger. John reaches back and the wall is right there, their shoulders still against it. The reflection watches them, sorrowing. Sorrowing for them, John thinks. The idea twists in him like a knife.

“Arthur,” he says, even softer. “Do this for me. Go to it.”

Arthur’s body trembles, all over, hard enough for John to feel it. “I…”

“Please. Trust me.”

Arthur gulps in an inhale that’s almost a sob. When he steps forward, purely on John’s say-so, despite his own fear, John feels a wholly unexpected wrenching within himself.

He takes a few steps, then hesitates. Waiting for direction, John realizes with a pang. “Straight ahead. You’re facing it.”

“Alright.” The word is barely a breath, but Arthur sets forth again.

There is a well of compassion in the reflection’s eyes, watching them approach, as if he knows what this must be costing Arthur. How much courage and faith it must take to approach something based on nothing but his companion’s request. “Help him,” John says, and realizes how much he sounds like he’s begging.

“Help?” Arthur’s hand lifts again, reaching out for something that might need him. “I don’t… Does it, how can I…?”

Oh. Oh, it is Arthur’s reflection. It could truly be nothing else as it mirrors Arthur, reaching back to him with the exact same compassion-laden motion, the one John has seen so many times, to catch Arthur’s half-outstretched hand. It weaves their fingers together, palm to palm, while Arthur quivers under its touch, waiting to learn how he might be able to help. Waiting to be bitten for trying.

John meets the reflection’s eyes again, at the same level as his, directly across from him, and they’re filled with a depth of patience, the kind a man might learn when all he can do is wait to stop suffering.

This, he thinks with wonder, is how Arthur’s eyes might have looked in the days right after John possessed him.

With its free hand, it reaches up and brushes fingertips just next to John’s eyes, and then over the back of his hand. It will help. Of course it will help. Arthur would help. It’s Arthur.

It is Arthur, he realizes, and for some reason that makes him twist miserably.

“What does it want, John?” Arthur asks again. “What does it need?” And then he jolts, as its hand wraps around the back of the neck to draw him in till their foreheads touch.

I wasn’t speaking to you, Arthur, he wants to say. But he can’t quite form the words.

Drawn into the reflection’s embrace, Arthur stiffens so fully that John can feel the ache across his half of their shoulders. Bound by John’s request, he doesn’t try to pull away. But John can feel his mind wavering, caught between concern and panic. Always on the verge of fight or flight, it seems. John can hardly remember when he wasn’t.

But it doesn’t hurt him, just as John had promised. It would never hurt him, he understands now. This is the part of Arthur that knows suffering too well to want to do anything but help.

It strokes his hair; it nuzzles against his cheek. It doesn’t let him go, until his body finally begins to soften in its arms. Until John can feel the set of their shoulders drop as their spine relaxes and Arthur’s body at last begins to melt against his duplicate’s.

“I…” Arthur’s voice is muffled against its shoulder. “I—John?”

“Shhhhh, Arthur.”

“John…”

“Shhhhh. It’s alright.”

He trembles in its arms. Oh, god, he’s shaking them to pieces. John grabs hold of the back of the reflection’s ragged waistcoat to stay steady. It tightens its arms around them and presses Arthur’s head down against its shoulder. John thinks it’s rocking them.

He’d never realized how badly he wanted to be held like this. He closes his eyes and lets himself be hidden against the cloth of its vest. His eyes—their eyes—burn. Arthur lets out one muffled, gasping sob, but he doesn’t cry. John almost wishes he would. It’s an ache in him, how badly he wishes Arthur had the safety to break down.

He doesn’t know how long they stand like this. Minutes, for certain; quite a few. Not hours.

When Arthur’s trembling eases, the reflection’s arms release them. Arthur is still shaky; John can feel it in their knees when he straightens up. He keeps a hand on the reflection’s shoulder until he’s sure Arthur has their balance. Humor glints in its eyes.

John looks into its face. “Thank you,” he whispers.

With another dazzling, breathtakingly aching smile, it catches Arthur by either side of the face and leans up to kiss their eyelids, and then their forehead. John reels at the soft brush of its lips, gasping. He can’t—what does—

It lets them go, and steps back. Arthur’s hand lifts to touch his own temple, in the place where the reflection’s hand just was. “What…” he echoes John. “Why? Is that, is that all? It just…wanted a hug?”

But the reflection is stepping back. And back again, the surface of the glass parting like water as it goes back where it came from.

That’s all, John could tell him, but it feels too inadequate. Where Arthur is pressed against him inside themselves, there’s an easing. A little less pain than there was; just a little less fear.

John thinks he understands the impulse to sob. He reaches out and presses his fingertips to the mirror, but it’s only a mirror. And the reflection is only a reflection.

“It’s gone.”