There May Be Song

The Girl and the Mirror

She runs along the brick wall, gasping for breath, stifling moans of pain as her broken fingers twitch involuntarily against her chest. She can't afford to be loud, and she definitely can't afford to stop running. Looking over her shoulder she sees the silhouette of her pursuers against the low moon, barking orders that crystallize in the cold night. Icy tendrils of breath hang about her face as she stops for air, only to be left behind as she sprints away a moment later. Left, right, right, straight. She knows her way around. Unfortunately, so do the silhouettes, matching her step for step, turn for turn. Only they don't seem to tire. It doesn't matter. She's almost there...

But something went wrong. A dead end. No, no, no. She spins in a circle. It can't end like this. She needs to protect the names. Billions of lives depend on it. Fight or flight. She can't run, but she didn't bring anything to protect herself~she'd thought this would be the easy part--and in a fight, she would surely lose. Except... there's something in the corner. She rushes over to the rusted thing and finds her salvation: a mirror. She almost cries with happiness, for now, she can flee.

Something moves in the corner of the looking glass, and she whirls around. Six hulking shapes clog the way she came, all of them drawing weapons. Despite the desperate situation, she can't help but grin. Guns. Alien guns, granted, but guns? They have no idea what they're getting into... The men shift, unsure what to do now. They have their orders, and they were warned what would happen if they failed to follow them, but she's just so small. What threat is she? And that smile. She's cornered. Why the smile? The unease grows, filling the night with twisting snakes of tension, and the grin expands with it. They really have no clue... She directs her beaming smile at the man to the very left, and he falters, losing his hold on his gun, then gripping it tighter. What the hell? All the men train their guns on her, strangely scared now of this obviously mad girl, so it's a breath of relief they release when she places her hands over her head. Their grip on the guns and triggers relaxes as their leader steps forward, a crushing mistake. The second the girl sees this, she thrusts her hand to the mirror. BAM! A blinding flash of light whips around her, and the men drop their guns automatically to shield their eyes, knocked to the ground by a wave of pure energy. Who brings a gun to a Talent fight?

~

He's on his side, face pressed against the cold cement. One eye cracks open, and a warm trickle of blood runs down his forehead. With a groan, he pushes himself off the ground, whimpering despite himself as his left ankle screams in protest. It was no longer a normal joint, but a bloated thicket of inflamed mass, obscenely disproportionate to his right. He closes his eyes and opens them again, but his foot is still twice the size it's supposed to be. No matter. He has been trained to not feel pain.

He hobbles to where he was sure the girl was, and curses. She was there a second ago. He was sure. The moon and stars hadn't even moved, and the cold breeze whipping about his face was the same that was blowing when the girl had--had--Christ what had she done? All he remembered was the light...it must have been a bomb. Yeah, that made some sense.  Not much, but nothing did anymore, not since the fucking aliens had shown up, not since-- he caught himself. Cooperate and you'll survive accept it and you'll thrive, cooperate and you'll survive accept--He breathes in sharply as his ankle reminds him he has no time for anything but following orders. She hadn't enough time to escape, he knew. But where could she be hiding? A flash of movement catches his eye, and in the time between two breaths he has drawn his gun, trigger half-way back, but that seems unnecessary when he realizes he's training his gun on his own reflection. He lowers the weapon and curses quietly under his breath. If he doesn't get the girl, he knows what will happen. Failure was not tolerated in his line of work.

He scours the alley and walls, confident she could not have scaled them, knowing their backup team would have prevented her from going back the way they came. She must be here, somewhere. She is. He knows it. In panicky frustration, he slams his fist into the mirror, spiderweb cracks spreading across the transparent surface. That's when he sees her watching him, in the mirror. He whips around, firing wildly at where she was. But no body drops, no sizzling contact is made. Confused, and arguably a little scared, he turns back to the mirror, and she's still there, watching him.

"Who.. what are you?" He whispers, throat dry. Her earlier smile is long gone, replaced with a sad look he knows too well. It's not sadness directly, no, it's more like disappointment.

"Not who I hoped to be." Then she turns and begins walking away, down mirror alley.

"No!" he shrieks in unholy desperation. She mustn't get away. A consequence is a consequence is a consequence, and he'll be damned if some vague girl is the reason he suffers the ultimate one. A last ditch effort, he grabs at the girl, trying childishly to grasp her through the glass. His fingers clumsily scrape the surface, the ever so solid surface of the ever so solid mirror, but he put too much force into it and the mirror topples backward. For just a second he sees the girls face as she falls with it and for just a second, he sees the most unmistakable kind of fear across her features. For just a second, he regrets everything and wishes for nothing more than the glass to not break, and for just a second it does remain intact, suspended in the air by the crawling passage of time. But only for a single second. The glass shatters, but instead of spraying out across the cement, it explodes upwards, and he shields his eyes again, this time from shrapnel. He wishes he had covered his ears instead. The girl's horrified shriek ricochets off the brick walls, more painful than any shard of glass could be, piercing his core and rattling him to his very bones.

Recovering, his eyes scan the ground, half expecting a punctured corpse on the cracked cement. But no, she's still alive. And still in the mirror world. He wraps his hand in a scrap of cloth and picks up a fist sized shard of glass. In it, the girl stirs but doesn't stand up. He's not sure if she can, for her world is no longer a reflection of his; there's just... white. No shapes, no dimension to it, just pure whiteness around the still figure. He grins despite it all, mission accomplished, although he feels strange inside. Something had happened to him, and it was that blasted girl's fault, her damned scream: For just a second, he'd seen another girl in her place. A girl he'd not seen in a long time. He shakes his head clear and pockets the glass with the shrunken girl inside, wiping at a stray tear that he didn't know he had shed before radioing in his location for the cleanup crew.

When he gets home, he covers every mirror in his house in the hopes it'll keep her screams from entering his dreams.

A/N: Hey would you guys mind letting me know if any part of this was worded in a way that was confusing or hard to understand, thank you!

Dedicated to malfioy 💕