#// here have the solo i manic wrote at midnight last night

[nelllraiser]

liability | solo

— - “our minds distort our mirrors”

contents: gore, death mention

     The attendant had given her a strange look when she offered him her ride tickets, as if he were looking for whoever she’d come to the carnival with. After all, why would someone go into a Hall of Mirrors alone? “Just me,” Nell offered him succinctly, not entirely having the emotional depth to say anything more at the moment. She just wanted to get this over with, to see what she’d come to see. Of course, there was no knowing what she’d see, exactly. But Morgan had promised her visions of the past, the future, or perhaps even things in between. Personally, Nell was hoping for the future.

     The path her life had taken thus far was one she knew well, and perhaps not one she was all that interested in reliving at the moment, not when it seemed she’d just been making mistake after mistake as of late. The most recent set of them had started all of nearly a year ago in the form of August Thompson and her summoning a demon in the depths of a Peruvian forest. Then Montgomery and Bea’s death. Did it count as two mistakes when it had metastasized from the original one? Or was it still just one? She decided it didn’t matter as she entered the first hall, and looked into the mirror. It was a familiar face, though she was already much changed from the girl that had returned to White Crest nearly a year ago. Compact with lean muscle, dark hair, a mouth that could turn as easily into a grin as it could a scowl, caught somewhere in between. Her arms were the most obvious change, the scars of the skin grafts and multiple attempted healings and reopenings sticking out like a sore thumb. Her skin was mottled, marred in a way that made her arms look like they’d been patched together, a quilt of slightly varying skin tones and textures, rough scarring in places, and smooth, shiny, skin in others. She’d been physically stitched back together after the resurrection, but what of the rest of her? Nell remembered what it had been like to shatter, to feel the very core of her world somehow both implode and explode, and she’d tried her best to pick up the pieces. To fit them back in the spots they’d been before. But the puzzle had changed, hadn’t it? The shapes and empty slots they were meant to fit into didn’t slide into place like they had before, so instead she’d had to jam them into place, folding and mashing them until she made them fit. She refused to be broken, to be anything other than something that could be turned into a tool to achieve the ends that she wanted, needed.

     But perhaps in doing that she’d made yet another mistake. The resurrection hadn’t gone as planned, she’d put blood on Adam’s hands, and then another old mistake had decided to surface. Her mistake to ask Remmy to the Ring, her mistake to confront Jax, her foolishness in believing that all the monster catchers had the same rules she did, the error she’d made with Jared and Ronald on his farm. How many mistakes was she allowed until she had to face the fact that perhaps she was poison, her own rottenness infecting the lives of others like a slow-spreading disease. Her latest past was muddled, and with the Ring gone, and no clear direction in her life, there was no future that she could see for certain. But the mirrors...maybe they give her something to work with, something to work towards. 

     There was still nothing as she stared into her reflection, dark brown eyes simply boring into themselves with an intensity that was often intimidating when she wasn’t smiling. And she certainly wasn’t now. “Give me your worst, then,” she demanded of the mirror, ready to sift through whatever it might want to show her until she found what she was looking for, even if she herself didn’t know what that was. As if ready to rise to her challenge, the mirror shimmered, her present self melting away until she was faced with her childhood self. The young Nell was playing with a deck of cards, shuffling and practicing sleight of hand while Bea and her mother were close by, beautiful eruptions of fire springing from her older sister’s hands. Nisa cooed at her eldest’s creations, and Nell seeing this, toddled over to the pair of them. “Mommy, look!” she began excitedly, doing her best to get the cards situated. “Pick a card!” Nisa spared her a quick glance, the matching brown of her eyes reflected in Nell’s. “Sweetie, I told you- it’s Bea’s lesson right now. I’ll get to you later.” But Nell knew what that meant. Later had yet to come, and seemed to never arrive when it came to her mother and teaching Bea the ways of fire magic and stage work. 

     “No,” a present-day Nell replied fiercely. “I know where I’ve been. I know my past. Show me what I want.” These childhood memories of being ignored weren’t what she was looking for. She wanted answers, something to show her that maybe all these mistakes had been worth it, to give her a sliver of hope that she wasn’t the terrible person she feared she was. Trying to focus her intentions, Nell figured her attempts to shape the mirror’s path and magic were worth a try. “You will show me what I want,” she nearly growled between gritted teeth. 

     For a split second, it seemed to work, and another version of Nell appeared before her. Older, scars on her arms, as well as a collection of even more scars she didn’t recognize. Old enough to have crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes, but young enough to still be a woman in the prime of her life. Her gaze searched over the stranger before her, trying to discern anything she might be able to glean from the future version of herself that would give her guidance or hope. But nothing happened, she simply stood there, as still as a rock while the witch waited for something, anything to happen. Finally, frustration got the better of her, and a fisted hand banged against the glass of the mocking mirror. “Do something!” she yelled. Nothing happened. Or at least...nothing appeared to happen for a long moment. Then— from the corner of her reflection’s eye, something began to appear, pooling in the corner of it. A freckle? No, it was too dark for that. It gathered there, pooling before it dripped, ruby red down the front of Nell’s face. Blood. Suddenly, a twin tear trail of the blood dripped from her other eye, joining the other as they fell. Surprised and confused, the real Nell looked down, only to find that the rest of her future self had changed. Where her hand had been resting at her side before, it was now outstretched in her direction, cradling something in the center of it. A heart. A human heart by the looks of it, still beating as her future self’s hand closed around it, squeezing the bloodied organ until it deflated, and squished over the sides of her palm. The reflection’s lips had moved as well, stretched into a sharp smile as the rest of a scene began to unfold around her. A man, some ten feet from her reflection self, still standing with a look of horror and pain on his face, a hole where his heart had been literally wrenched from his chest. But Nell’s hand hadn’t been bloodied before she’d squished the heart, and there was no sign of any regular entry or exit wound on the person’s chest. Just a gaping hole, as if the heart had wormed its own way out through sheer force. Nell had done that? Without so much as using a knife or otherwise? Her reflection only smirked back in a silent answer. 

     It should scare her, worry her that her future self seemed to be so unmoved by the death of an unknown man, that she seemed to be reveling in it. But instead...all Nell could think about was how powerful she looked, holding a man’s heart in her hand and ripping it out as if it were nothing more than picking flowers from a field. This was the picture of a witch who didn’t have to watch as her sister was beheaded, who wasn’t cajoled into being a prisoner by an over-confident gancanagh, a woman that no one would even think of trapping in cages underground to steal memories from her mind against her will. 

     So in awe was she of her future self, that she almost didn’t realize the face of the man she’d killed begin to shift, to turn from one she didn’t recognize into one she very much did. His eyes shifted to brown, hair finding some medium color between dark blond and brunette. Adam. The power-hungry pride instantly dropped from her chest to a rock in her stomach, forming in a way that made her feel as if she might be sick. But as soon as she recognized the face, it was already shifting again, the mirror twisting it into another set of features she knew. This time, blond hair, blue eyes as the face of Jared stared back at her. “No,” she began in horror, taking an instinctive step back from the mirror. The blonde hair lengthened, eyes shifting again to match the color of Blanche’s. “No!” Nell yelled, hand fisting at her side as she now glared at her reflection, utter anguish etched into her face. She wouldn’t have done this, couldn’t have done this. Her friends meant everything to her. The body began to change once more, the bridge of Winston’s nose beginning to form, but it wouldn’t get the chance to finish. A loud crash rang through the Hall of Mirrors as Nell savagely screeched in denial, in anger, in pain. When she looked down again, it was to a broken mirror, her reflection back to normal and cracked around the shattered pieces of glass, her real, physical hand now bloody at the epicenter of it all. Her chest heaved with her breathing, and she grimaced as she carefully extracted her hand from the mirror, the pain nearly lost on her as she tried to deny what she’d seen. “I won’t- I won’t hurt them,” she whispered to herself, so quiet that she wasn’t even sure she’d said the words aloud, but fervent enough to burn as they passed over her lips. But hadn’t she already? August’s murder for Adam. The farm and Ronald for Jared. Asking Blanche to help with Bea’s ghost. Ripped the heart right out of them. All of them. 

     Nell turned sharply on her heel, refusing to stay in this cursed place any longer, turning her back on the future the mirror had shown her, and on the confirmation that all she did was hurt and maim and destroy those that she loved most. Ignoring the alarmed words of the attendant as she exited, she brushed past them, cradling her hand as she began to magically scab it over, watching the blood harden into place as, fixing the damage she’d done. She’d fix it. She’d fixed Bea and now she would fix the rest of it— fix herself so she could fix her friends, and make sure that no one hurt them ever again. Not Montgomery, not Ronald, not anything else that so much as glanced their way, and most certainly...not herself.

#// here have the solo i manic wrote at midnight last night #wickedswriting #solo #self para