#yes even saner than Vanguard

[nat-of-personifs]

Nao

My experiences of imposter syndrome, jealousy, and mostly creative FOMO, put through a metaphorical google translate. Second person practice. A bit of Guardian!Ira lore, as a treat. It’s google translate. Not all the metaphors correlate exactly.

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Your friends are always in your thoughtspace.

They trample the garden you see it as with booted feet, behind five locks you never intended for them to navigate. They don’t know it. You let them: they are Active and you are classified as Passive, they are older, and they deserve this space to play in. They deserve the play they were denied while they lived, the imitation of which your own Active mocked you for. 

You would have been like your friends if you’d died earlier, before you met them, before you miscarried your own fandomspirit, because children always become Actives. It’s only fair. They should have lived longer. The Wall has a limit that changes, but there’s always a limit.

Or maybe there’s not, and the In-Betweenness has warped your feelings into Reality again. But this isn’t Reality: that was the first thing you remembered. You exist in the iPad under your pillow on the night you died, but you aren’t in Internet, you’re beyond. Your first friend exists in the pages of the last Wikipedia article they read on their phone, and the second exists in the code of the computer in the hospital on the day he lost his fight.

Maybe you’re the Pattern Screamers Ira manifests in Fiction. You’re surprised your memory, your thoughtscape, was strong enough at all, but the Wall emphasized that you should have woken up to Reality the next day. Sometimes proto-Guardians are just too tangled.

You only had a chance of becoming Passive because you tied your thoughtscape to your friends, anyway. They were marked from the day they were old enough to think: with the scraps of paper that hold their limbs together, clothing labels they cut off and keep, doctor’s offices diagnosing the colors in their brains. They didn’t like the way they bled into Reality–his more obviously than theirs, but no less valid. You would have grown up loving Reality and yourself if it wasn’t for them, but in the old tales, eternal life was the greatest gift to give. Is it worth it, in this form?

Only if you want it. Your thoughtspace is too close to the Wall, and it’s your true body now. Everyone’s an avatar. It beckons. You don’t exist, anyway. You also don’t care enough to terminate yourself. That’s always been the problem, hasn’t it? Reality flowed over you, bland but filterless, and your thoughtspace eroded as slowly as igneous rock.

Homogenous. Silent. Thoughtspaces are refuges, but yours withers with boredom instead of flowering under duress as it should. You pried it open when you met your friends, a platonic love letter never sent. They assumed you were always as vibrant as you became when your minds crossed. It’s how they entered, why they trampled. It’s not fair that they’ve done so much and all you can feel from it is the string in the fabric of your chest pulling tight. You are vomiting emaciated imitations of the colors, even now, where everyone can see, and silently complain of the bleeding as your thoughtspace cuts you with their knives.

You could fight it back with a breath, or count the perceptions it doesn’t warp, or simply stop believing the knives can hurt you. You’re an In-Between, another forgotten mistake of the Wall. You have some defenses. But isn’t it better to bleed? You’re only mistaken for an Active when the colors leave marks on your face, the highest compliment a Guardian can send. Euphoria makes your arms softer (your mother always commented on how solid you were, compared to her looseness) and sharpens your knives. 

It doesn’t hurt, at least compared to the lonely blacks and blues you see rising above the heads of new Actives like halos. Your synesthesia is a dead end, words to colors, so the halos spell out bruises in cues only your thoughtspace unravels. They come apart with the satisfaction of ripping out knit mistakes in yarn. You take their colors too, and pretend they’re yours when you bind together loose papers in the Wall, but it knows your deceptions.

You can’t keep yourself away from the initiation rites, but newly-rough knife edges point to your arms when you look. The threat is enough. The only defenses your thoughtspace doesn’t block are your legs, and the tightness in your chest, locking together in an ancestral rite that most Actives use far too often. You run, it’s simple. Opposites aren’t attractive to you.

It’s not like you can’t look away, though. Pacing makes you feel like an airplane in a holding pattern, waiting to land, but you’re so impatient. Even the colors can’t help with the twitches and the boredom when you finally fall into bed, still peeling your nails, as your friends sharpen the knives they don’t know they have when they joke that you should have been an Active. Dopamine, as the flickering colors are validated, and cortisol, as you force the self that yearns for them to object to a falsehood you desperately want to believe. 

Your friends have walked longer. Your friends cultivated their thoughtspaces properly, or improperly, depending on whose normalcy you take as the truth–but your normalcy is only whatever they do. Your body is eleven and the youngest of your friends, who say they look exactly the way they did when they died. You haven’t checked. The house you dreamed of the three of you sharing is constantly shadowed, and you put redaction bars over their faces. It’s a remnant from a fandomspirit whose Guardian body could put all your colors into boxes, and leave you barren and Passive as you should have been. But, like her, you can’t bear giving up the bits of meaningless control you have now. It’s why you made the locks.

They were never for your friends: your friends are free to access your thoughtspace whenever they feel the urge to (you dreamed of them visiting you in your lowest moments while you were alive, and blinding them with the colors you bleed), they’re for Ira, when the Wall finally forgives her behind an Old Triumvirate secret.

#creative writing #NTJ #Eyes of an In-Between #Nat’s Guardians #the Ira brainrot #imposter syndrome #is this purple prose because it feels like purple prose but ehh #or melodrama #oh well #second person pov #tw suicide mention #tw knife #uhhh Nao’s a little fucked up but they’re the most sane of all my characters #yes even saner than Vanguard