i already started posting this on ao3 but now it’s here!
Summary: Dark, on impulse, takes the mirror from Markiplier Manor. He hadn’t expected it to still be occupied.
Pairing: Damien x DA (ambiguous), Darkiplier x DA (also ambiguous?)
Warnings: gender-neutral and vaguely described DA; reference to death, injury; depersonalization and identity crisis issues
Damien—
Can he call himself Damien, anymore? He feels like Damien, still. Sort of.
Damien was never this consistently angry. Damien never lurked at the fringes of reality, diving in and out of shadows and cracks in the veil on a mission, aided by power he doesn’t understand.
Damien didn’t always feel split down the middle like this.
He can’t say Celine did, either, when she was awake. When she was alive.
Because that’s what they’re in, now, some accursed undeath. He isn’t Damien, because he both is and isn’t also Celine, and when you add in that they’re possessing a broken body that isn’t one of theirs, that once belonged to a person Damien cared for so deeply that it ached—
Granted, that could be the injuries that killed them in the first place. His power doesn’t seem to extend to healing old wounds; his gut burns and twists if he ever tries to indulge in such unnecessary habits as eating or drinking, and his neck has an unnerving tendency to twist of its own volition, bend into an unnatural angle that needs correction with a painful crack.
(They died in agony! They died trying to help! They—)
Damien— is he Damien?— cuts off that particular train of thought. Guilt has no use except as a hindrance, and he has no time, not when he’s on Mark’s trail.
The annoyance of being so attuned is that sometimes, Mark goes... places. Certain places, places that bring to mind guilt and loss and longing and other painful memories that slow him down and throw him off.
Mark had always been too clever. A terrible combination— it feeds into his narcissism, yet never makes him sloppy.
That is, if that is his real intention. It’s difficult to say, at times.
This location, though... he can’t find any other reason for Mark to be here.
His old manor. Broken and fallen into disrepair after years of neglect— an entire party’s worth of people seemingly dying or vanishing off the face of the earth truly drives down the worth of the place, no matter how grand.
A spiderweb of cracks radiate from a spot in the marble floor, permanently stained rusty-brown. Underfoot, jagged shards of glass and pottery splinter into grit, spreading in quiet sibilant noise over the stone.
“Why?” He rumbles, and the voice echoes all wrong in the cavernous foyer: too close, too layered. It doesn’t sound like him and hurts his neck and throat, but that doesn’t stop a second question. “Why did he come here?”
There are no answers to be found, of course. For all of Mark’s— it’s quite appropriate, really— stench permeating the air, it gives him no clue as to motivation, no clue as to which rooms, when, and for how long.
An unnecessary annoyance.
He could trudge the halls, drawing up memory after awful memory, in the hopes of finding something, but that feels like a waste of his time.
Likely, that was the entire reason. Bastard.
All that said, he doesn’t turn to leave out the front door, slip through some tear in reality to find his way out. It could be some hideous vanity that turns him towards the mirror, or an unconscious self-punishment, but he forces himself to look.
It’s the body he inhabits—
(that we stole after promising them that everything would be fine, and they trusted us, God, why did they trust us—)
and it looks... like him. But not.
At least, he hopes he never looked half as ragged as the creature he sees in the mirror. It’d reflect quite poorly in the mayoral office.
Reflect, heh. Only a taste for poor jokes would remain, wouldn’t it? All part of the ultimate, cosmic joke.
Some shadow moves, deep within the cracked glass.
He doesn’t startle— that’s not easy these days, not with... everything— but not because he knows the source. It isn’t his aura dampening and twisting the light coming through the smashed windows. It isn’t an unconscious extension of himself, reacting to his thoughts. It isn’t even a rat, though several must have taken residence, considering the droppings.
It’s something else, and when it fades in again, in no more of a defined shape, he behaves... impulsively.
He wants to say that’s Celine’s influence, reaching through her slumber, but he can’t say for sure. Things are different, now.
That’s how the mirror ends up in his ‘office’— a place between here and there that stretches and warps because he’s never been able to keep visuals solid in his head. It hangs on a wall, in empty space, hidden by a curtain or front and center, pride of place.
It flickers a few more times in— time is arbitrary, but from previous reckonings— the next hour, then falls ‘silent’, as it were.
He puts it out of his mind and sets off on a new trail.
