half empty, half full (cup runneth over)
Here was a strange occurrence, lost to a myriad of them: when Declan smiled, his reflection did not.
*
Declan dreamt of dying, and woke up silent.
The bed was too small, too empty. He sat up slow and swung his legs over the side to toss his bedding, piece by piece, onto the rug. The floor-nest soothed one ache and worsened the other. Declan curled up on his side and ran his thumbs over the keyboard of his comms, staring absently at his own reflection in the dark screen. He thought about calling Echo, calling Rassel, but it was late and he couldn’t find the right words, the right song. His empty hand curled into his shirt, claws catching on the soft fabric over his heart.
Inexplicably, he thought of 10. 10, in that wide-open, empty bedroom, lying down in that too-big bed alone. 10, asleep next to him, face half-buried in the pillow, stress softened by sleep, neck exposed. He gripped his comms a little tighter. The image made him heartsick, had him swallowing against a lump in his throat, reaching out for empty air. He didn’t understand.
He closed his eyes, forced it away. He could bear the loneliness instead.
Eventually, Declan dozed off again, between one unsteady breath and the next. In the morning, he couldn’t remember the rest of his dreams, could barely remember the first. His eyes were dry and the pillow beneath them was damp. He forced himself up and went to watch the sunrise.
*
“Tell me about how we met,” Declan wrote, sitting cross-legged as he leaned on the crafting table Echo worked at. Their eyes flicked across the paper and then to him, something tight and sad in their expression before they pulled it back.
Smiling, lopsided, they said, “It’s a bit of a funny story, actually,” and then abandoned their project without hesitation to sit next to him, pressing their knee against his. Declan relaxed, shifting his weight to rest his head on his hand and listen. “You and 10 lived together first- barely went anywhere too far apart, honestly, from what I could tell back then- in some terrible camp in the woods. All your shit was out in the open, chests just there-”
He laughed, crackling, scribbled out something before they could continue. “Did you steal them??”
Echo stuck their tongue out at him, grabbing his writing hand and squeezing it gently. “Don’t interrupt!” They let go a second later, with a goofy little wink. He bit back another giggle. “And yes. Obviously. You’ve always been a farmer, you had a shitton of food, so I just- borrowed a bit! You noticed, because of course you did, and ambushed me when I came back for more. Full-on pounced on me. And then- instead of doing the logical thing you do when you catch people stealing- you gave me these little- porcelain creatures–”
“Pets,” Declan wrote. Echo blinked, then grinned, wide. “I was right?”
“You got it, yea! Inventory pets. So I could make my own food. And you told me to keep stealing.”
“I was probably growing plenty!!”
Echo rolled their eyes, but they couldn’t take back their grin. “Yea, yea, that’s what I thought you’d say. Sap. Eventually I started actually coming over for dinner, and then I dragged Rass along- ‘cause Rass was staying with me- and- y’know.” They faltered, looking off to the side. Their hands knit together, their thumb running over the knuckles of their left hand. “It all came together.”
“A part of us is still alive,” the headphones sung, and without thinking Declan repeated it aloud. Echo looked at him for a moment, wide-eyed, before they gave him another rueful smile. He ducked his head, ears twitching back, guilty. “I would miss so much of the world– without you close to me–”
They wrapped one arm around his shoulders and tugged him close. He went without protest, huffing softly as Echo knocked the side of their head into his. “You won’t miss it,” they promised. Declan’s chest rumbled in an unsteady purr as he nodded. “Wanna hear another?”
“Talk too long, I’ll stick around–”
Echo didn’t pull away as they launched into an animated retelling of how they met Rassel, each word of which Declan took and tried to memorize, never to forget again, to tell Rassel, later, secondhand, to dream of instead of the altar, instead of dying, instead of a ghost that looked too much like him. They were a good storyteller. He couldn’t look away from their mouth, the way their lips quirked up when they made some offhand commentary, the way their shoulders shook with laughter when Declan mustered up the same, inked out.
He couldn’t imagine being anywhere but here, at their side.
*
Home was a living thing meant to hold other living things, a matryoshka doll of habitation. Declan wasn’t sure why he felt so strongly about that – like with almost everything else, there wasn’t a memory at the other end of the belief, just the echo of one. It was enough to know that a memory used to be there, could be there again, maybe. He tried not to think about the absence too much. It stacked atop the others and became too much emptiness to bear alone, all at once.
He wasn’t sure if that was what unsettled him so much about 10’s house, either. It didn’t feel so much like a home as it did a tool, and even that tool was a half-dead thing, incomplete. The foundation of the tower carved itself down to bedrock, a window to the void, and the walls stood tall even under construction. A monument, an obelisk, an altar. If it was alive it only held one other living thing and too many dead. Declan thought of his own corpse, there and not until he mustered up the strength to break through the first altar and find out.
The heat from the lava flowed past the glass, heavy and suffocating. Declan took shallow breaths and watched his reflection more than he watched where he was walking, the path around the altar memorized after so many visits. It watched him back, hands tucked behind its back, eyes bright. “Once you say it out loud, it can’t be undone,” it reminded him, interrupting the low static of his headphones. He bit his lip and it looked past him, scowling. “I want a love I can make with scraps on the floor–”
“You’re burning up,” Declan interrupted in turn, finally tearing his eyes away. It wasn’t healthy, whatever this was. He wondered if anybody else had something like this – some hallucination, delusion, or maybe some real haunting – or if he was worse off than he thought. It wasn’t saying anything he wasn’t thinking, and he hated it. “At least it was mine–”
“I probably die here, I probably will,” his headphones spit, but he still didn’t look back to the glass. The fire resistance potion was slick and warm on his hands, on his skin as he poured it over himself and shook off the excess. When he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the bottle, distorted, it looked him straight in the eye and his headphones said nothing at all.
Declan stepped through the lava, to 10’s office. There might be nothing new at all in the journals there, nothing for him at all, but it was something to do.
*
Declan woke up with a hoarse throat and a scream still on his lips, and he couldn’t remember why, but he would’ve sworn the dream was happy before he opened his eyes, would’ve sworn it was warm.
He tore all his bedding off the bed again, gathered it off the floor and threw it off the balcony onto the grass next to the aquarium, the glass tube glinting in the moonlight and the dim glow of the hanging lanterns. The makeshift nest was damp, grass soft but ticklish against the bare skin of his abdomen where his shirt rode up. He dragged it down, shifted until he was comfortable, and comfortable had him facing the glass, again.
His reflection blinked at him, languid. “Some drown in the warmth of home,” his headphones murmured. Declan had long gotten used to the way they dug into his skin when he laid on his side, but even that mild discomfort felt faded in the late hour, distant. “Something tells me you know why I lie–”
“And I know why I stay the same,” he murmured in answer. He pressed his hand to the cool glass, against his reflections, claws scraping gently. “Why am I lonely?”
“Things I don’t remember– you know everything that I know so I know you’ve heard the voice that makes the silent noise that says–”
“Everything right is wrong again,” Declan finished. He rolled onto his back and threw his arm over his eyes, plunging the world into darkness. “And I still can’t sleep–”
The headphones crackled, almost a sigh, if he wanted to think about it that way. “Leave a message– and through the canyons, they hear I love you– if I could see it in your eyes the truth, belladonna–”
Something bitter bloomed in the back of his throat. “Cross-section between this mortal plane–”
Static. When Declan raised his arm and looked back to his reflection, it looked back unfalteringly, inanimate, or good enough at pretending to be. Another absence. He thought he’d be happy about this one, but it only compounded again. He rolled away from the glass.
*
10 sat at the edge of the gardenbed, still and focused on what he was writing. Declan moved around him, a bucket of water in one hand and a bag of bonemeal in the other, working both into the soil as they checked on each and every flower. When they were done, they sat down next to him, hands tucked in their lap as they craned their head to read.
“Nosy,” 10 said, without looking. They tensed for a moment, tail stilling, but he didn’t move away. If anything, he tilted the book a little towards them, so they could read – but it was a motion so subtle, so slight, they could’ve imagined it.
Declan stayed there awhile, content. It fed one of the absent little aches in their heart, one that only got more overwhelming the longer they thought about it and did nothing. They fussed with a loose thread on their skirt and remembered Echo saying they barely went anywhere too far apart and wondered just how big what they were missing was, how big it could possibly even be, the shape of it fading into that same tattered, unknown void as the rest of their memory.
They almost wanted to ask if he was lonely too, but they couldn’t, even if they knew the right song. They kept coming to tend the garden anyway.
*
When Declan walked into 10’s bedroom, his reflection did not.
*
In two letters, discarded, Declan asked: what were we? What did we mean to each other? Why do I lie awake at night wishing you were there? Why do I dream of you? I want it back and I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry I don’t remember. I wish I did. Are you there? Are you the same? Does your reflection look past you in the mirror? Would you come over?
He delivered the flowers and not the envelopes. He buried the paper in the backyard beneath the roses and overwatered the roots until he knew the ink would’ve long since dissolved into the dirt, illegible. In the tiny puddles of water trying to soak into already soaked ground, his reflection looked up at him with damp eyes, something like grief in the twist of its expression.
The headphones offered only static. Declan opened his mouth, closed it, and walked back inside in silence, alone.