To Heal All Wounds

Phoenixes

The film had remained on his body, like a horrible second skin.

He wasn't clean. Not by a long shot. But he'd at least shed the visible remnants of what had happened. Maybe now, at least Max would be able to look at him.

He swiped a hand across the mirror and flinched, nearly recoiling against the wall behind him. It was the first time he'd seen himself since he'd been back. To his mind, it had been maybe twelve or so hours since he'd seen his own reflection and yet... it had shocked him. Not because it was different... or at least not really. Billy knew his face. Of course, he did. He knew the structures and facets of it. He knew the rises of his own cheekbones and the hollows of his eye sockets. It was the same face he'd had before...

Before...

And yet it felt like he was looking at a mask whenever he caught his reflection. Something hyper-realistic and just human enough, but there was something in the way of it actually being human. Like a doll's face.

Or a corpse's.

He turned the scalding water back on and stood under it until the mirror fogged back over, his slowly cooling flesh returning to an angry red.

The problem was that Susan had those stupid decorative mirrors everywhere in the trailer, and they were all at perfect fucking eye level and Billy wanted to scream. He'd nearly ducked out of the way of the first one he'd encountered after his shower, freshly dressed in borrowed clothing from next door. From then on he had paused before everyone, taking a small breath before he trained his eyes decidedly ahead and ignored his peripheral vision.

"Why do you have so many fucking mirrors," he had asked after he'd been startled by the third one. Susan's reply, "they make the place look bigger," was meek and he wanted to puke.

In the car wasn't much better. As they made the fifteen-minute trek to the sheriff's station to get Billy "set up" he had to train his eyes on the cracked asphalt before him because if he didn't, he knew that he ran the risk of catching his own reflection in rear-view mirrors and windows that were more reflective than they had any right to be.

And he tried to ignore the nervous glances Susan kept casting him.

The problem was that every time he shifted, the movement caught his eye. A survival tactic, he recognized vaguely before he pushed the thought away, from Neil. Being hypervigilant had been a matter of survival for so long that he couldn't help but track whatever moved around him.

He'd been called predatory before.

He felt cornered.

Cornered by his own damn reflection and a woman who cared more about him than he wanted her to.

And the worst part of it all, worse than the kid gloves Susan was suddenly treating him with and worse than the way his own face turned his stomach, was that Billy didn't know why Susan cared so damn much about him. He didn't know why he hated the sight of himself, but he figured that he'd just chalk that up to one more goddamned thing and leave it be, even though the not fucking knowing was eating him up from the inside out. He hated not knowing. He hated it so much. The unknown, the uncertain, the unseen. Nothing good lurked in the unknown.

Neil Hargrove lurked in the unknown.

Whatever had taken him lurked in the unknown.

Not knowing drove Billy insane for the simple reality that if he didn't know about it, it would come for him. And whatever this was that had him flinching away from his own face had to be a threat. Whatever it was curling in his guts like a wounded animal whenever Susan flinched away or hesitated to touch him had to be a threat.