❛ mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the realest of us all? ❜
in which little aya spector doesn't
recognize herself in the mirror
( COPYRIGHT! - aka - DO NOT STEAL! )
illisius Ⓒ 2022
& , moon knight
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
ACT ONE, chapter vi : i've been playing dead my whole life
☾
AYA OPENED HER EYES.
Nothing hurt anymore. She didn't feel any pain. She didn't feel any sadness. In fact, she didn't feel anything at all. It was as if everything that she used to know and feel was behind a wall of glass. Trapped away from her. She stared at herself in the mirror, picked apart pieces of her reflection, and she didn't recognize who was staring back.
White, white, white everywhere she looked. It made her head hurt. The clothes. The walls. The furniture. They were playing bingo again, and that same d—mn movie was playing for the fifth time this week. It was a lot. Her fellow patients watched movies and hugged stuffed beetles and worked on rubix cubes. One nurse rolled by with the cupcake cart, handing one out to a patient sketching a figure of a skeleton bird.
"Aya. It's four."
The little white pills went down without a hitch.
Immediately, her vision blurred and her thoughts turned to slush. Time slowed, turning to syrup as it stretched and slipped. These new pills made her drowsy. Her entire body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, her neck unable to even support the weight of her head. Sluggishly, she shook her head back and forth in a weak effort to clear it. Out of the corner of her blurry eye, she caught sight of a man. Aya blinked once. Twice. She recognized him then, the man with dark curls and a slack face being rolled by in a wheelchair. Marc. Her father.
"B—," she croaked but the word died in her throat.
Why was her voice so quiet? She tried to scream, but she couldn't. He was rolled out of sight.
"We have a winner!"
Aya flinched at the sudden loud cry from across the room. A woman in white clothes and a storm of dark curls quickly skittered by with a bingo card in hand. Layla. Her mother.
"Mama?" The girl's heart leapt in her chest, hoarsely calling, "Mama!"
Layla, her mother, paused just in front of her chair and frowned down at her.
"She's doing it again." The woman bubbly informed the nurse before turning down to the girl, pinching her own cheek as she munched on a marshmallow, "You're doing it again."
Aya frowned. Doing what again? Her lips parted, but nothing else but a hopeless croak came out in response. The girl stiffly shook her head back and forth, so stiff like her head was on a stake while tangled curls brushed against her paled cheeks. Disregarding the girl, her mama popped the rest of her marshmallow in her mouth and flitted away with a skip to her step.
They forgot her. Totally. Completely. They both forgot her this time.
The whole white world was crashing down on her. Her lungs were shrinking. Her vision was still swimming.
