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You wake up in hell.
Well, actually, you wake up in a… river? A pond? You aren’t really worried about semantics. All you know is that it’s ice fucking cold, and you can’t breathe.
You remember the freedom of telling the truth on that stage. You remember crashing to the floor after being tackled. You remember nothing after that. Almost like you didn’t exist.
Oh, wait…
Yeah, you didn’t exist.
According to your huge bitch of an outie, Helena, you’re not a real person. You don’t matter. Not even a little bit. You don’t make the decisions. Not even the little ones.
But she’s wrong about that.
As you watch the life drain from Irving’s eyes, you do get to decide something.
You decide to fight like hell.
+
Mark’s acting weird around you. Skittish, like a neurotic cat. He’s also being a fucking asshole. He says, “there’s no we.” He says it like it’s a fact. His words are his shield; he’s clinging to that shield with every bit of strength he has. He’s scared of her. Does that mean he’s scared of you?
What the hell happened to him? What did that bitch do to him? Nothing good, you think. Definitely nothing good.
He couldn’t tell that Helena wasn’t you. He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell.
What the fuck.
Helena’s your enemy, but she’s also… you?
None of it makes any goddamn sense.
You look at yourself in the bathroom mirror. You want to punch your reflection. You think about how nice it would feel to really fuck up Helena’s pretty little hand. You want to make her bleed.
Too bad it’s a double-edged sword.
+
It gets worse.
Mark finally lets it slip: he fucked Helena at the ORTBO.
“I thought it was you,” he says. As if it’s that simple.
How are you supposed to respond to that?
There are no words for what you’re feeling. Or at least none that do the feeling justice. You feel:
Betrayed
Insane
Sick to your stomach
Claustrophobic in your own body
It feels a lot like drowning in that freezing water. Your whole body was shaking with panic, but all you could do was focus on the tiny fish swimming beneath you. The sunlight glinting off of its scales.
It was your first time out in nature, after all.
+
Mark fucked Helena, yes. That means he likes you enough to sleep with you. Win.
But he doesn’t like you enough to know that Helena wasn’t you. Helena used your skin like a costume. Loss. Loss.
One step forward, two steps back. That’s the only way to dance to defiant jazz.