New Reflections (Burnsmithers)

Part 15: Introspection

Listing all the odd occurrences since they'd woken in the new time after the change was fairly simple; the problem lay in knowing what was causing these occurrences and what their connections were to one another.

They were sure their headaches were a key factor, but not of their meanings. What was it about the mirrors that caused such reactions, when the action involved was so simple? They were only reflections, looking back at them.

"What about your fever?" Waylon asked. They were trying to list all possible anomalies. It was a couple of days after the dinner, and the day after the incident with Burns' possession.

"What about it?"
"It came out of nowhere, and you were really sick. I don't think it was just from being hungover after the bar."
"I suppose..."

"There was a time, when you woke up in the hospital," Waylon explained, "and it was like you didn't remember you had changed, like you were seeing it again."

"A memory lapse? I thought I had dreamt that; it was rather surreal..." Burns titled his head. "Speaking of which, our dreams, do you recall the nightmares we both suffered? They recalled the past, in a way... and at the time they felt real."

Waylon did remember the dream he'd had involving a child Burns, that had ended with him falling to his death. Burns', though, had been horrifying, as he'd described it.

"So everything involving our pasts in some way has affected us negatively here," Waylon said, "... it was like the past was trying to hold on to us."
"Are you saying the past itself- our lives before- is a sentient force?"

"Do you think it could be?"

"I have no idea," Burns admitted, "if it is, it doesn't care for us as we are now. It wants to harm us. The mirrors, they are the most direct form of viewing ourselves, and perhaps where it's easiest for this force to cause us pains."

The mirrors housed reflections looking back... as if Waylon or Burns, standing in front of the mirrors, were looking to the past. As if the past were trying to hurt them, through the mirror.

"And it's gotten stronger."

"Yes, and if the voice you heard that night at the dinner was, in fact, a tainted remain of the past, that's why you recognised it as both your own and not."

"Why hasn't that happened to you? You've looked in the mirrors, too. But..." There of course had been the possession recently. "Yesterday..."

"I don't know. We've experienced different things, obviously, if yesterday is an indicator... Nor do I know if there is a pattern..."

Waylon thought. He remembered how Burns would say he was weak, insisted it, and wondered if that had been a voice inside Burns' head.

"Possibly," Burns said to that idea, "though I thought that was entirely my own. But it's possible, with what's happened to us since."

Burns' idea about the past wasn't unfounded; there was a malicious nature to the more peculiar things they'd witnessed. And if that were true, was there another, more benign force that had caused the change in the first place?

To answer the latter, they tried to think about what they had done the day before the change, which seemed like a lifetime ago. It was now the next day after they'd discussed the possibility of a sentient past.

"You were afraid of being weak, and wondered what it would be like if you were younger, and we talked about that a lot that day..."

"The photographs," Burns said, "the photographs, do you remember? That night, I threw them into the fire..."
"But the fire destroyed them, how could that have caused the change?"