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m4gp13 · 8 months

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Day 2: Soulmates / Games

Supdercalifragilisticexpialidoscious (Al/the eldritch personification of Al's powers) X Ethan

Word count - 2200

@them-awesome-rarepairs

“What the fuck kind of game are you playing?” Alabaster demanded of the bathroom mirror. It gleamed under the fluorescent light of the flickering bulb in the ensuite bathroom of his quarters aboard the Princess Andromeda and he gripped the basin of the sink while he waited for its answer. Anyone walking in on him would have assumed he was crazy or going through some classic teenage self-hatred but Al knew what this was. He saw the small smirk quirk up the lips of his reflection, contrasting the pursed frown on his own face. He saw the luminous glint flash in its eyes that he knew was absent in his own. And he heard the voice that would have sounded so foreign spilling from between his lips.

“What ever are you talking about?” the reflection, this strange other Al, said. Its voice was so smooth and its tone so soft. Like a calm surface hiding a riptide below.

“Don’t act coy with me.” Al pointed an accusatory finger at the mirror. His reflection had its hands in its pockets. “You think I haven’t noticed? The odd blank spaces in my memories, blacking out at random only to come to somewhere else hours later, not to mention people talking to me about conversations I have no recollection of participating in!”

“So,” the other Al in the mirror tilted its head to the side as it looked at him like a cat looked at a bird under its paw, “What is it you’re accusing me of exactly?”

Al slammed his fists down on the countertop hard enough to rattle the glasses. “Stop hijacking my body to fuck with my social life!”

“Our body,” it corrected. Its face fractioned into shards between the lines webbing out over the mirror from the crater in its epicentre. Al drew his trembling fist back, ignoring the flecks of blood on his knuckles, and glowered.

“You seem to have a very overinflated sense of your place in this arrangement,” Al spat. “You are not me, okay? You belong to me. I’m the one in charge here.”

A smirk sliced up its face, further distorting the image of himself into an unrecognisable creature formed from jigsaw pieces in the glass. “Then fix the mirror,” it said. Al stilled. “If you’re the one in charge, if I’m simply a resource you call upon and not an entity myself, fix the mirror.”

Al clenched his hands into fists. “Fine,” he bit out. Cracking his knuckles, he extended one hand to the mirror and touched its surface with the tips of his fingers. Magic was a part of him, just like the blood running through his veins or the skeletal scaffolding holding him up. And just like his blood and bones, he owned his magic. It existed to serve him. So why the fuck couldn’t he access it now?

The other Al’s lilting chuckles infuriated him and he found his nails digging into the surface. “Having trouble?” it asked.

“Shut up!”

A knock rapped on the door to his room and Al scampered backwards, almost tripping into the shower behind him. “Al!” someone called from the hallway outside. Not someone. Ethan. Dammit. “Can we talk?”

He opened his mouth to speak but the call of, “Come in!” was not his own words. He clamped his mouth shut before the other Al could fill it with more nonsense. The door clicked open as Ethan entered the room and knew well enough to close it behind him. His eye scanned the room, the sheets lying in a heap on the bed, the paperwork strewn over the surfaces and the piles of clothes dumped on the floor. Al shoved himself out of the bathroom before Ethan could notice the broken mirror, closing the door behind him. So soon after talking to the other Al, he wanted his lieutenant as far away from him as possible but that wasn’t really an option for him. “How can I help you?” he asked, shoving his bloodied hand in his pocket.

Ethan looked over at him with a tight frown. He stood rigid amidst the chaos around him and was a solid block of black and inky plum fabric that stood out starkly against the vibrant patterns and bright greens Al decorated his room with. “I just wanted to figure something out with you,” he said, his tone tightly clipped in a way that made Al’s chest seize up and the other Al sent a fluttering of humour through him. Without a mirror to project the figure onto, its communication with him was entirely internal.

“Figure what out?” he asked. Ethan closed his eye and took a deep breath. When he looked back at Al, he pinned him under some hybrid of his professional lieutenant stare and his exasperated friend look. Al cringed under its weight.

“Whatever’s going on with us,” Ethan said.

“Us?” Al repeated dumbly. His stomach lurched with dread and a sickening rumble of pleasure from the entity made him even more sure of where this was going.

“Yes, us,” Ethan managed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You and I. This.” He motioned a hand between them. “Sometimes when you’re talking with me you act so . . . purposeful and forward and sweet and it’s like we are something but then other times you keep me at arm's length and act so closed off and clinical with me as if we’re just a General and his Lieutenant and that’s all we’ve ever been and all we ever will be but other times you’re being all chummy and pally and we’re bumping shoulders like we’re kids again and I never know which one I’m going to get or why.” He took another deep breath, trying to steady himself after his rambling speech, but Al could see the subtle way his chest trembled. “I just want to know why you’re always so mercurial with me.”

Well, you see, my powers have manifested as a separate consciousness inside my mind and it sometimes likes to fucking possess me, just a quick fyi, he thought to himself, biting the inside of his mouth to suppress a grin he wasn’t sure belonged to him or the other guy. “It’s not something I can easily explain,” he ground out, careful to keep his voice in a firm grip so the other Al couldn’t say something abhorrent enough to hang, draw and quarter the fragile relationship that was left between him and Ethan. After all the damage that thing had already done to it, his fears weren’t unfounded.

“Then try,” Ethan urged him. “Just give me something so I can have some kind of an understanding.”

“I can’t.” It hurt, by the gods did it hurt, to say no to Ethan, even when he wasn’t so desperately pleading for so reasonable a request. But this just wasn’t something Al could tell him. Ethan opened his mouth to speak but Al couldn’t hear him. Not over the other voice filling his head.

Of course you can, the thing inside of him crooned. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind having both of us around. After all, it was my flirting he was so receptive to.

“Shut up!”

“Excuse me?” With a jolt of horror, Al looked up to see Ethan staring at him with his eye wide in stupefied bewilderment.

“No!” He jerked forward a step. “I didn’t mean that!”

“Then what the fuck did you mean?” Al opened his mouth to answer but nothing came out. He didn’t have anything to give. It was a knife in his heart and the dejected look on Ethan’s face twisted it in deeper.

“See?” he said. “This is what I’m talking about. This morning you walked me to the mess hall and spent all of breakfast talking to me about weekend plans and what a great job I did during my last quest.” Al cringed to himself while the entity beamed in his chest. “Then later on in the day, you acted like that conversation didn’t happen and swore you had no idea what I was talking about when I brought up the plans you made.” In his pocket, Al’s bloody fist was trembling. He kept his head down and refused to meet Ethan’s gaze. “And now you’re–you’re this!”

“I don’t know what you want from me!” he yelled, fuelled by a sudden surge of desperation.

“Consistency!” Ethan bit back. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m talking to two different people with you!” Al clamped his hands over his mouth to muffle the laughter the entity tried to force out of him. All he did was compress it into a snort that might have gone down worse than a laugh would have. Ethan crossed his arms. “Is this funny to you?”

“No!” he blurted.

“Really?” Ethan demanded. “Because I’m starting to get the feeling that this is all just some game of yours and let me tell you, I am sick of being a player in it!” Ethan turned on his heel to march out of the room.

“Wait!” Al shot forward and just managed to catch Ethan’s wrist in his hands. The other boy whipped around to face him with the fires of the Phlegethon burning his eye but something softened in his gaze. Just as well, Al probably wouldn’t have survived the encounter otherwise. “Please, just hear me out,” he begged when he was sure Ethan wasn’t about to vaporise him.

His rigid demeanour softened and he stepped down from the stance he’d been poised to spring from, nodding his head almost imperceptibly. He made no pool to tug his wrist free.

The other Al watched from within him, humour rippling from its presence as Al struggled to find something to say. “I’ve got a lot going on,” he eventually landed on. “Hecate kid things. I . . . My powers have somewhat been escaping me as of late, and trying to control them is an effort and a half.”

“Right.” Ethan’s shoulders lowered, not quite a slump, but Al was going to take it as a good sign. Ethan knew what his powers were capable of, the distortions of perception and the disregard for reality. He knew the toll they could take sometimes. He knew Al better than pretty much anyone. Better than even the echo of his own soul tormenting him from the inside. It snorted at the accusation.

Al continued his plea. “I know it’s not ideal and I know I’m probably more trouble than I’m worth but just know that I am not doing this on purpose.” He let go of Ethan’s wrist and let his hands fall limp at his sides, palms turned out as if in a meek show of surrender. “I don’t want to hurt you, and I am working on fixing this.”

Ethan sighed gently and gave a shallow nod with his eye half closed. “You should talk to your mother about this,” he murmured, meeting Al’s eyes with a look of genuine remorse.

He let a small smile tug at the corner of his lips. “I will.”

Taking a step back towards the door, Ethan cleared his throat and indicated to Al’s hand. “And you should probably get that checked out.”

Al glanced down and alleviated his confusion when he saw the ruby speckles decorating his knuckles that he forgot he had so recently rammed into a mirror. “Oh, yeah,” he said as an embarrassed flush warmed his face. “I’ll do that too.”

Ethan pursed his lips in a tight smile and gave Al a brief wave before leaving the room.

See? The entity said, immediately wiping the smile off Al’s face in place of a drooping frown. That wasn’t so bad.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Al fell back onto his bed. “Can you not talk,” he groaned, “For a minimum of five fucking minutes?”

You love my chat.

“I really don’t.”

He loves my chat.

If it had a body for Al to look at or another mirror to project itself onto, Al would have been glaring daggers at it. “Leave him out of this.”

I can’t. Al could have sworn he felt it shrug.

“Why the hell not?” he demanded, some of the bite from his voice was reduced thanks to his exhaustion. One could only deal with that thing for so long at a time.

Because we’re the same, it said with a conversational airiness that made Al wish it had a neck for him to strangle. I am you and you are me. Whatever you’re obsessed with, I love it too. We’re soulmates that way.

“Don’t ever call yourself my soulmate ever again.”

One of those ‘ever’s was redundant. Al ignored that part.

Face it, kid, it crooned as if with an audible grin, If you want me to leave him alone, you’ll have to first. It had the nerve to chuckle. And we both know that isn’t going to happen. Its presence curled up in Al’s chest like a python constricting its prey and though he knew this was all in his head, he swore he was struggling to breathe. I have a feeling we’ll be playing this game for a very long time.

#pjo #percy jackson #ethan nakamura #alabaster c torrington #alabaster torrington #ethabaster #supercalifragilisticexpialidocious #pjorarepairs2023 #ta discord server besties you know what's up

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