Waves of possibility smashed against his kneecaps. Each one a click of a ballpoint pen, in constant, aggravating white noise. Hands outstretched to the fleeting moment, he lowered them to his sides in the starry dark, long lost of any explanation. Past lives and future dreams. Bubbles collected in his lungs and threatened to overtake his bloodstream, a stake to the heart. He tried to block the current in his mouth as it poured nebulous rivers from his eyes. This isn't happening. This doesn't make sense. I don't know what you're trying to tell me.
Let me out.
Geometric truth molded in his head against the lances tied into the stars. Possibilities looped on themselves, a fracture he made. Underneath him, the low rumble of pure oppression grew teeth around the circle of time. Grey stars bounded and created the perfect edge of the swallowed light. What is this truth? What is this reflection?
The abyss stared back with his agony.
No.
The waves stilled, and crawled past his knee caps with the growing teeth. An audible groan escaped the event horizon, but he remained silent, drowning in terror. It rang out with a single name.
Kairos, the guardian of a single, fleeting moment.
He drew his attention to the broken black hole above his head, where the bipedals long disappeared into the darkness. "Why can't I see my reflection?" he whispered his inane question, but then received a single, eerie response in his own mind.
That is your reflection, little star.
It popped in a century.
His back slammed against metal, and he jolted away from the embrace. Voices droned on and he wheezed for his lie of a life. People sat at desks. Questions danced. But where, or when am I? Is that what happened? Stuck in the non-linear promise of space and time, he examined his environment. He came face to face with the tall, imposing Admiral Mythrai before twisting around to his mistakes. He scowled when the mirror sat in his desk, face in his cheek while Nova suffered a few seats over.
Eyes wide in torment.
Of memory.
"Fuck," Neo hissed and ran past Izerva, but he frowned when their fur stood on end and a low, confused hiss left through their nose when they shook their head. Onto the section, he raced to Nova's side when her breath came out in shattered fragments, her eyes darting to the lie once more. No, no no no, you weren't supposed to remember! ... why do I say that? No, concentrate! He smacked the sides of his head and focused on her, on the torment he put on her when she rocked back and forth in her seat, between two different realities, the one he put her in, and the one he dragged her out of. "Oh, Nova, I'm sorry, I didn't mean—" He raised a hand to his mouth to stifle a sob when she leaped out of her seat, running out of the hall and causing everyone to turn to her suddenescape.
"Huh?" Thuni Horizol asked audibly.
Neo stared at himself, the useless mirror too startled to move.
Alarms rang out in different truths as he rushed out after her into the eastern sector, everchanging and unfamiliar. A soft cry left her lips as she fumbled into their dorm, and he ran in after her, checking around before heading to her side when she clung onto his chair, digging her fingers into the cushion. "Nova," he pleaded, and she spun around on the wheels with a soft gasp, swinging her arms out through his body. "I'm sorry, I didn't know that would happen. Hey." He clung onto the solidity of his previous reality, and she stilled with a soft sob, tears reddening her eyes. "Hey, it's okay. I'm going to fix this."
"Nova?" his own voice questioned.
Ugh, here we go. Neo stepped through space to allow the cracked mirror to reach out for her. Nova closed her eyes tight, not believing the lie.
"Nova, hey," his mirror echoed his sentiments, worthless on his own lips with no action to go along with his words. "Hey, talk to me."
No, you need to talk to her, not the other way around. He went to kick into his own back, but hesitated when Nova tore open her eyes and stared at them both. "Don't just stare at her," he hissed, and the mirror squirmed and threatened to break apart at the slightest, superficial pressure. His reality drew back from the person who needed him the most, frowning at her instead of doing anything of sustenance.
"Should I just be quiet for a minute?"
Neo found it said on his own lips, then scowled down at him. "I mean, you should shut up sometimes, but no, you should say something here, and don't say something stupid like you always do to make everything worse."
Nova patted the floor with a startled, confused whimper. On her knees, his mirror held out a bloodsoaked hand, and he flinched when she grabbed onto his arm tight, strangling it with the same intent that he wanted to do to his own neck. "You're fine?" She latched onto his cheeks.
"Ow-I'm fine."
It was a scrambled lie.
Neo blocked the vomit in his mouth when she pleaded, "Talk to me, just talk to me."
I... I can't...
"Tell me about the anomaly being a heart," she begged to his split half. "Tell me about your theories. Say anything." A horrified gasp tore through her throat when she came closer to his startled reflection. "I just need to hear something."
He wanted to send his heel into the side of his own head when the reflection uttered, "How did you know a heart was one of my theories?"
"Nice priorities," Neo growled and knelt between them. "Out of all the things you could say, that's what you go with? No bringing attention to what she's really saying? You ask her that question? It has no bearing. It doesn't mean anything — and another thing, not a heart." He hesitated on his own words. It's... something far far worse.
Nova's confusion ripped space apart. "You... the briefing? Didn't you mention it?"
"Nova..." He reached out to the expanse of space between them to cling onto her shoulder. "Come on. You're way smarter than I am. You got to see what this is... what I've done," he released his own soft sob. "I just didn't want you to be stuck in that reality anymore... but it was supposed to be me." He slammed his other fist into the mirror, to shatter it. "I thought maybe just... breaking it I could come back... and fix it." He let go of the truth, and his anger fluttered through his throat when the reflection tipped his head in fatal curiosity.
"I was planning on mentioning it but then you ran out," he said and wrapped his hand around her forearm. "Nova—"
"I don't want to talk about it," she rasped, and he found his worthlessness compounding on his shoulders when he sat with her, unable to fix his mistakes of self-sabotage. "Please don't ask."
"At least respect that request," he mumbled.
The mirror lifted his gaze in a haphazard direction, drifting over to him. "If that's what you want," the mirror muttered just as uselessly as before. "It's like you said, I theorized it was a heart, but I'm all but certain the anomaly has something to do with the D.S Butterfly."
The name sent a jolted, murderous sensation through his stomach, but he chewed on his lip. "Once again, stating the completely obvious," he said and drove his fingers into the ground. "And still missing so much. Here people thought you were smart, thought you were going places. You're not. You never were. You just masked it as such to make it mean something." He lifted his hand and longed to rip out his own heart.
"The senior researchers think it's a coincidence."
Neo scowled. "They're stupid too. This whole operation was stupid from the get go and we couldn't see it until it was too late. I'm just the crux of this whole stupid sandwich," he said and threw his arms up, nearling driving his fist into the mirror's slack jaw. He'd deserve it. "Honestly, you make everything that you touch so much worse, I don't know why you bother." He twisted on his hips to glare into his reflection. "I'd ask what's the matter with you, but I know because I had to live with said idiocy."
"I-I don't know," the mirror whimpered pitifully. "I might go on too much—"
"You often do."
"I don't want to bloat the conversation—"
"Yet you do."
"I don't want to make it worse."
"You will. It's the only thing you're good at."
The mirror squeezed its face. "What's going on?"
"Neo, I asked you to talk to me," Nova whispered.
His words died on his throat.
In the mirror, his frown deepened further. "Yeah... sorry, don't mind me," he mumbled and tears bit at his own eyes. "Thanks for listening, then."
Nova held onto him tighter. "Thank you for talking."
...what?
"What do you mean?" he found himself asking. "I don't get thanked for something like that. I need to shut up. Should tell me to do that instead." He shook his head in disbelief, choking on sudden pain in his throat. "I'm not helping you by talking. I'm making it worse." He got up on his feet and tangled his fingers together, shifting on his heel.
"I appreciate you, chatterbox or no."
That's not true, I'm just a lot. I'm just too much. Neo drove his face into his hands. Just tell me to shut up and I will. I'll make myself shut up if I have to. He jolted at the sound of footsteps meant to abandon him, and he checked on the two when time shattered apart with his heart. He raced after them, but the alarms blared and he lost himself in the evershifting corridors.
He caught up to them through the crawling dark, where his mirror bounded along and carried none of the worthlessness he forced him to carry instead. On his toes, he snuck up on them to listen in on the conversation — excluded from his own life.
"What's that for?" Nova said with a nod at the metal container in his hands.
"... good question," he muttered to himself.
"It's a peace offering for Thuni, of course."
"A better peace offering would be to shut up and leave him alone, but whatever." Neo tensed his shoulders against his neck and waddled behind them, trying to hunt for a chance to pull Nova out of the fractured zone.
"I haven't gotten a chance to analyze the liquid. I have a couple of tests in mind before I come up with a conclusive hypothesis—"
"Stars, do you ever shut up..." Neo rubbed the bridge of his nose. "No one cares..."
Nova shoved her fist into his side, a playful gesture, but he wished for her to have driven it into his face with intent instead. "Don't put it in your mouth, Neo."
His mirror sighed. "I give an anomaly one tiny poke and everyone thinks I'm going to go around licking them." He slammed to a stop and chewed on his tongue, trying to measure the distance between him and the mirror to strangle the life out of him instead for his stupid comment which made Nova flinch. "I have seen you do much worse with explosive compounds."
"She's ten times smarter than you are, genius, don't even make that comparison," he bit, trying to muster energy to lunge at the mirror to get it to stop smiling constantly. On the transit, he groaned when the mirror stared not at him, but at Nova in examination.
Until Nova hugged herself.
"I don't like it when you look at me like that," she whispered.
"You exist and you create problems," he said into the mirror.
"I'm sorry—" the mirror replied back. "You just worried me."
He went to berate his ignorance, but came to a stop at the veil of tangled crimson webs splattering across the transit tunnel. "Wait," he said as they slowed to a stop, and Nova's eyes widened with the truth. "No, wait." He slammed around when the two left with nothing more than shared whispered words. "No! No!" He ran after them as they came closer to the droid bay, the tension cracked along his spine and grew further into his heart. "You're going straight into it! It's been here! It's still here and I don't know how to deal with it yet!" He scowled when it hissed and moaned with a thousand voices. "He's not the only one that needs to shut up." He tried to get in front of them, around them, to block the door.
Ignored over and over again.
The bulkhead slid open.
Time fractured on bloody rivers, and a metal container slammed to the ground and scattered the sweet temptations of curiosity.
It left a trail in the lap of an innocent engineer, and a deeper call rocked his throat when Nova, his best friend, the last person to have deserved such calamity, collapsed from the shock and terror he shoved her into.