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It’s been ninety years.
They rose as they had every day, casting cold sheets aside, ruffling hair. Not that they needed the sheets: but it was a way to feign, even embrace normalcy. They made the bed, stiff, joints limp.
The bed made, they found a suit. It was a suit upon a suit, really, one of flesh, one of fabric. They try not to think as they get dressed, the cacophony of voices always loud in the mornings. On high, one low, one wordless.
It’s not until they’re ready for the day that they take a breath, rotting muscle pulling brittle bone. They puppet a broken body, alive with spite and immeasurable power, but never flesh and blood. Still, there are appearances to uphold, and they count their breaths.
They never once look in the mirror.
Not a word is spoken out loud as they leave their room, ready to face the day, or as ready as they can be. Once outside, they are no longer they.
They are him.
They are two halves of a picture, torn and bloodied and stuffed into a frame they were never intended to fit in. They are a lingering taste of blood and the cold, hard glitter of eyes looking down the barrel of a gun. They are the heaviness that sits in the back of his stomach, that pulls him back from one edge and closer to another.
Dark has learned to live with it. It’s been nearly a century, across different dimensions, across warping timelines. He’s always the same, and he has to learn to breathe. He is the mask of the man who wronged him, and the motivation of damned souls behind it.
This is a masquerade, after all. He’s sweeping through the halls on borrowed time, a thirst for vengeance that can never really be satisfied. Dark’s not sure what he’s seeking vengeance for, most days, but there’s always the nagging feeling that it’s never enough.
And he breathes. And he counts to three. And he forces his broken bones back into place and he fights to keep all three people in him from bursting out at the seams and some days it works and some days it doesn’t and some days he’s reduced to ringing, ringing silence.
Dark is only a mask, after all, made pretty with human skin and a monochrome suit and a slow, dangerous smile. In the end, he figures, a corpse covered in roses is a corpse all the same.
The darkness follows him, whether in the third voice that listens but never speaks, or in the smoke and liquid shadow that hangs around his shoulders. He spent a long time, too long, trying to shrug it off. He’s spent far too little time breathing it in.
He walks downstairs without speaking, forcing the broken limbs to move. Sometimes, he lets the power drop, and takes in the sight of his own rotting flesh, revels in the pain of a puppet long since decommissioned. No one else can see, of course. No one else can ever see.
The others don’t know, of course. None of them live the way he does. He hates Wilford, some days, hates the readiness with which he can convince himself that their pasts were all a joke. Envies the way that he lives honestly, because he’s never known anything different. Not William, never William.
Not behind an elaborate masquerade.
Dark spends his days in tedium, convincing himself of safety, of something approaching loyalty. Black words against white paper are comforting, in a way, distracting.
Sometimes, he forgets that it’s all a mask, and can almost imagine that he can breathe without the pain of broken ribs, can almost imagine that he needs to breathe. Those are the better days, the days that the three of them are reduced to a buzzing that’s more harmony than dissonance. Those are the days that Celine leers through their smile, that Damien holds their body stiff with grace, that the aura envelops them all in heady power. Those are the days that they can see where they’re going, if the answer is only forward.
Other days, the worse days, come with increasing frequency as of late. These are the days where his bones poke though his skin, the days that the glamour of his aura can’t hide the strain of the past century. These days, he’s more him than they. Celine and Damien are quiet these days-- what’s left of them, anyway. The lines blur, and he’s left more purple, something more than simply the sum of his parts. These days, the aura wins, and Dark is left unforgivably alone.
The aura is winning more and more these days, the mask hollow and empty behind the masquerade. It comes out in fits and bursts: Dark has appearances to attend to, after all, has to pretend to sleep, to eat, to smile. A burst of thunder here, a strike of lightning there. Cracks in the shell, growing, growing.
Until one day, he can’t hear their voices anymore. All that there is is the purple, the buzzing, the heaviness. Anger, anger and pain. One day, its only static left in the hollow of his eyes, haunting.
And he rises as he has every day, casting cold sheets aside, ruffling hair. He tries not to think as he gets dressed, the cacophony of voices quiet in the mornings. On high: go back to sleep. One low: you have to wake up. One wordless.
And he takes a breath.
And he looks in the mirror.
It’s been ninety years.