That's what they all say.

radiant

One of those nights where the dreams - whatever they are - seem to wrap around your neck and viscera and throttle you. Discursive, discordant. Displaced somehow, and you wake up without a clear sense of where you are and when you are and where you should be, just a throat full of bile and a pounding heart because because because because there was something - something - you should've done.

The apartment.

Oh right. The apartment. His apartment. How precisely Elijah ended up here last night is a blur, but distinct pieces of an argument - oh, let us call it a 'discussion' - he had with a tearful Jenn at some ridiculous hour over the electric stove and a late night pot of Kraft Mac'N'Cheese.

It's not fair, Elijah.

I tell you everything.

I told you everything and now it's like -

I'm worried about you. I don't even know what to say. I don't even know if saying anything is worth it because it's not like you give a fuck -

--

There's no way around her hurt. He hasn't been anything close to frank with her and of course it feels to her like he is letting her go in favor of nothing good at all.

That was then. This is now.

He wakes up in a bed, warm in here, gray sky through a grinding window and a great slab of wall. The streetsounds muffled but present, this background haze that makes one feel both in the world and outside of it. when he sits up, the sheets pool around his torso, but he's still in last night's clothes.

There's a mirror propped against the wall by the door.

Movement within that captures his attention but - somehow - so hard to see.

Elijah

She knows when he's lying. She knows when he's lying because Jenn has seen him when he was not a practiced liar, has seen his eyes dart to the side and has seen his stomach tense up the world start to slide. She knows when he is lying, because he winces when he's done talking, like it hurts to say. LIke he hates doing it, like he hates lying to her. Maybe that's the reason for the silence. Lies of omission.

It isn't fair, and I'm sorry, but really-

Any time there is a but, there's a hit coming. Something painful and unexpected, or in this case very expected. Rote excuses for everything.

He doesn't go to class.

Elijah doesn't go to class all the time, not religiously, but just enough to pass. Just enough to blow through those alotted absences early because he has a theory that if he saves them up for the end then he'll miss something important while the professor is slamming hard and fast through to finish the syllabus. He has a theory, and it's worked out so far. How nice it must be to skate so easily, to have no repercussions if he does fail because it's not his money on the line. Not his scholarship. Not his financial aid because, even if the apartment- his apartment- was on a crappy side of town and even though he he had a crappy job and allowance, he still had parents who would foot the bill if he fucked up. People who were willing to-

Nevermind. It didn't matter. He could taste tequila and blue box Mac'n'cheese still. Sat up and pushed his hand to the side to see if there was a body beside him. Seems it's just him right now.

Elijah slid out of bed, pocketwatch pressed to the inside of his rib cage courtesy of a vest he never took off. His jeans were half unbuttoned. His shoes were... somewhere. He never remembered where they were. If I could tell you, you would think-

What would she think? Shouldn't you let her decide that?

He cleared his throat and he meandered closer to the mirror.

radiant

"If I could tell you."

The mirror's just a mirror. There's a surface, and a reflection. There's Elijah Poirot reflected in the surface, the disaster area of a bed behind him. He's barefoot. Red lines from the pillow still etched into his skin. Morning, morning morning.

If I could tell you, that's bullshit.

It's just a mirror.

If/would. If/could.

It's just a mirror. And he's reflected in it.

It's just a mirror.

(Except: he's smiling. A viscious note of challenge in his eyes.)

"Fuck that. Move your ass, kid."

Want/Will.

Elijah

There is a challenge in his eyes, a smile that doesn't mirror on his own face but he looks at the mirror- can you trust your own body to tell you the truth? Maybe he was smiling and he didn't know it, didn't feel it. It's just a mirror, except he's smiling, and Elijah knows his own eyes. Knows that challenge in them and doesn't precisely know what he's challenging.

He put his hand on the mirror, the thing that's just a mirror and he hears something.

Fuck that, move your ass, kid.

"What, do you want me to go-" he took a step away from the mirror and was ready to go to bed again but... he didn't. Elijah paused and turned around. "She's going to think I'm fucking crazy."

He tries to reason with his reflection. As if that wasn't crazy enough.

"You don't think I'd tell her, do you?"

radiant

Elijah's reflection rolls its eyes and flips him the fuck off.

"Coward."

Says the voice, and it comes not from the mirror but from everywhere. The bed and the sheets and the walls and the matte gray skin. Inside his skin and without his skin. From the singular molecules of dust dancing in the stale apartment air. Wherever.

It isn't even accusatory right now.

Just, somehow, Naming.

In the mirror, his doppleganger sticks up a second middle finger to match the first. Then turns around and starts to walk away down a long dark corridor.

Which, you know, there doesn't seem to be one of those in the room.

Elijah

But naming something makes it real. Naming something makes it true, gives it form, gives it purpose, and he knows this to be true, and knows it to be true when the voice says what it is. As though this were just an act of stating what was in the room. There was a mirror. There were floorboards. There is a coward.

"I am not a coward," he insists, turns to find an exit, to find Jenn, because he has to prove this, he has to say something he can feel it in his gut and in his knees that he is scared, and he can think of forty thousand quotes about courage but finds them failing because he can be a coward. And some part of him is fine with that.

There is a louder, more insistent part of him that is not fine with that. Not content to settle with definitions, not content to stay and not take a risk because look where risks got him-

No. Look where risks did get him. He's here, he's awake, he's alive and vital and the walls feel stale and that sound is coming from everywhere. He then takes his moment to look for his corridor. If there was one in the mirror, maybe there was one here, maybe he was losing touch, maybe that was a symbol, but he couldn't... he couldn't just walk away.

"I will not be a coward," he corrects.

radiant

Elijah looks around the room and the room is perfectly ordinary. The rumpled bed, the brick walls. The window with a view of another wall, the patch of the sky. This sense of being lived in without being lived in.

The mirror leaned against the wall by the door, the murky light. His own tall frame getting smaller by that familiar trick of perspective.

Elijah tells himself - or whoever the fuck it is - that he will not be a coward, and that retreating figure stops. Makes this scoffing noise and glances over its shoulder, meeting Elijah's eyes.

They are not his own.

"That's what they all say, kid."

Turns around then, and keeps on walking.

Elijah

He looks at the figure, its retreat and its warning, that's what they all say.

It's him, but it isn't. Coward, he remembers, hears echoed in his own ears, translates across his shoulders and resides into the pit of his stomach where it can either fester or he can throw it back up like poison but something still lingers, something still stays seated in his mouth.

"I don't owe you a goddamn explanation," he tells the reflection. Not quite his reflection, because it's not quite his eyes but it's enough. Enough to make him pause.

And it settles with him, looks back at the mirror and he shakes his head. Just an encounter, just a reflection. Just... just a reminder. There's a world of infinite capacity and capability, he could do a number of things, if he wanted to do them.

"Hey Jenn, you still here?"

he meandered about for a moment. Uninterested in finding his shoes and, instead, finding something that mattered

radiant

"Mmmph."

He finds her in the kitchen eating a bowl of Froot Loops with almond milk. It's lunch time or something close to it. Her backpack is slung over one of the kitchen chairs, one strap slipping off the frame.

"I think you missed class."

It's not pointed. Just an observation.

Elijah

"I'm dropping physics anyway," he finds her in a chair int he kitchen, and when he sees her, he smiles, pleased but... on edge. He'd had a conversation with nothing, conversed with a reflection and now... now he was going to tell her something that he needed to have said about three years ago when the world came crashing down.

"Are you gonna miss class if I... y'know... talk to you?" it's awkward, and he knows it's awkward. Or maybe it's awkward because he's making it awkward, but whatever the case, Elijah perched himself atop the meager kitchen counters.

"I've been kinda weird since... y'know," the whole drowning, dying, sophomore year thing. The whole you stopped breathing and I thought you died thing. The whole we don't talk about what happened thing. "And... I kinda want to explain why."

radiant

This isn't the sort of conversation one expects one's sort-of best friend and sort-of roommate and sort-of everything to initiate sometime in the middle of day and yet here she is. Here they are: the middle of the day, the conversation changing, the moment being shifted as moments are wont to do.

Jenn is still holding the bowl of Froot Loops in her left hand, has a spoon full of them ready to shovel into her mouth, and gives Elijah a brow-lifted glance that is somehow both cautious and inviting. After so many months, she hardly knows whether to believe that he actually wants to talk to her about anything serious - she's also not ready to scoff.

"I might," she says to his question, with a quick shrug. "I don't mind, if it's important enough."

Elijah

It was easier not telling her. It was easier just dancing around it and pretending like it didn't happen, but Jenn knew things. Jenn knew about Alicia's dad, about some quasigovernmental organization. She knew that things were weird, but Elijah? Elijah hasn't told her anything.

"I did die."

It's easier to start there.

"I don't mean almost... I mean... like... heart stopped, everything stopped, tried to pass on to the next life but if you have unfinished business you're stuck here and I didn't want to be dead," it's on his face, plain as day, he wants her to believe him. Not out of some malicious joy, but a genuine, abiding need.

"And it's been different since then. There's been this push since then, and-and I don't know if it's me or part of me or something bigger than I am, but there's this push to find something bigger and-" he's rambling. He knows he's rambling, and his hands are clapsed in front of him. Knuckles white, disguising sweaty palms and a racing heartbeat. "It's like, I know the world is full of potential now, I've seen it and I want that potential to push past into kinetic and fuck if it doesn't sound lame but magic is fucking real, anything's fucking possible and everything's permitted and-"

He suddenly unclasps his hands and runs them through his hair. Pushes his back against the cabinets.

"I moved out because I thought I pissed off the same kind of people that took Alicia's dad. I didn't want bad shit to happen to you here so I moved in with Kalen and Grace."

A little quieter.

"There's this whole other world out there, and I'd show it to you if you'd let me and if you'd believe me."

radiant

"You're rambling," Jenn points out, quietly and not unkindly. "And I think maybe you're hung over. But seriously, quasigovernmental agencies or not - what's worse than lying to your best friend? What's worse than freezing me out? What's - "

She closes her eyes, spoon hovering over her bowl of cereal and shakes her head. There's an awful lot there to take in, and she wants to give him space to tell her, but he's rambling and there's so much space between them that has been inhabited by -

"I am gonna go to class. I'll be out by six. We can grab dinner and if you still think you have things you want to tell me and to show me, I'll listen."

Once upon a time she might've said that they were friends, and she owed him that much.

Now it feels like the debt is reversed: the other direction.

That doesn't matter.

"Text me, okay?"

She'll come. She'll listen. She can't promise anything more.

Elijah

He nods.

All he does is nod, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that there is space there. That there are things he has taken for granted because he thought he could.

"I'll text you," he says.

Elijah doesn't leave the apartment, though. Not until later, not until dinner. He has a lot of making up to do.