“DEATH ITSELF IS NOT THE WORST THING.
worse still is to live when you want to die."
They have changed, Bexley thinks. Or they haven’t at all—and the deep sense of dread that fills her when she looks at Seraphina, and the terrible, magical world in the mirrors around them, only means that she is what is wrong with both of them.
Because Seraphina looks almost the same. She looks young, and clean, carefully kempt; her coat is the starshine of real silver, still bright when even it’s trapped inside this maze of mirrors; and Bexley cannot remember the exact moment they first met, her memory clouded with the passage of time and a fierce refusal to look into the past, but she thinks Sera must have looked nearly identical. Stoic. Proportions so perfect they’re almost doll-like, if a doll were made for killing. Her eyes are molten in the strange gray light.
Back then, when they first met—whenever it was—Bexley would have been young too. (Child-young, she thinks, looking back at it. It would have been less than a year since leaving home. Less than a year since her first taste of death, and back then was so long ago she remembers being convinced that that heartbreak would be her worst.) But she has aged by now; Seraphina has not. And when Bexley swallows her bitterness she can’t help wondering just who is so dedicated to ruining the both of them.
Worst case scenario, she thinks, it is no one: it is not that they are being punished, but that they are punishing themselves, and no one cares enough to stop them.
But that—that is too horrible to think about.
So she doesn’t. She won’t. She pushes the welling horror down, down, down, into the pit of her chest, into the crevices of her ribs and legs, and if Bexley feels any real, dizzying, black-at-the-edges panic—well, it does not make an appearance. At least not as much as her body might threaten to show it. Her only visible reaction to the thought, and to the scenes that play over the mirror-walls, is a short huff of breath that rips into the air with wild teeth. (But inside she is trembling, almost. Stupid lamb in the slaughterhouse; deer fleeing the arrow. The visions of them follow her like a hungry dog. The happy scenes are almost worse than the violent ones, because Bexley can imagine being dead but not being content: their sheer impossibility will haunt her all the way down, into the dark.)
I'm... sorry.
Bexley's reaction is instant. "Euch," she spits, face screwing up in a flash of immediate disgust: "Don't ever say that again. It doesn't suit you." Her expression remains half-cocked, somewhere between repulsed and unconvinced, like she can’t quite believe the phrase even came out of Seraphina’s mouth and wouldn’t want to, anyway; the fact that the girl-queen can’t even meet her eyes afterward only cements the feeling that this is wrong.
Maybe, Bex thinks, half-serious, they aren’t real. Maybe this space between them is a mirror, and the real gold and silver girls are somewhere far away, outside this little hell. Maybe they are watching from their paradise on the outside, and maybe they are laughing because the situation is so ridiculous, or crying because it is so real; and she cannot decide which one would be worse, and for who.
It doesn’t matter. None of this is real. Nothing is real.
Bexley runs her tongue around her teeth. When Seraphina’s words hit her, they do so with completely undue force—she winces at the sound of it, scraping, grating against her ear, making her teeth itch and her shoulders tense together. Rigidly she pushes a piece of bright-white hair off her face and settles it behind her cheek.
“I…” Her voice trails off; but before it fades completely it wavers, and Bexley wonders bitterly who she has become, who is this girl with a failing voice. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
Her mouth settles into a thin line. She watches Seraphina’s mismatched eyes fall away from her and down to the mirror-glazed ground between them.
And then—against her better judgement (although really, when has good judgement ever been a factor?)—she reaches out to brush her mouth against the girl-queen’s cheek.
