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The first thing that hits you is the smell. Not sweat, not metallic, not anything. They say that you wouldn't be able to recognize yourself if you saw a clone in passing, but wouldn't you recognize your own scent? It's a completely foreign combination of powder and nothingness, and you're inextricably struck by a wave of nausea.
The appearance is next. Like you, but not. Like an age-progressed photo of a missing child, complete with sideburns that connect to a five o'clock shadow speckling a strong jawline and slightly exaggerated muscles.
The voice both freezes you to the spot and makes every tendon in your body tense. It's your voice, but with a different lilt, an unfamiliar rise and fall that doesn't fit.
"Can't fuckin' believe it," it says.
Your own voice, sounding staccato and sharp when compared to this buttery ebbing and flowing one, falls away from your lips. "What?" you say, and it's not about his statement. The word is questioning the entire situation, hinting at the line separating the possible from the improbable.
"Fuck."
You don't say anything, letting the word hang in the air as you take the time to readjust to the world around you, no longer hyper focused on the figure in front of you. Knowing yourself, and having some cognizance of the fragments of yourself floating around, you'd kind of expected this. In a way. Not in this way.
The day is slightly overcast, and his skin and crisp white shirt are washed in a translucent watercolor gray. The sun doesn't poke any holes in the clouds today, an impenetrable skywall for any intruders--except one. The trees behind him and the inviting house behind you both seem impossibly far away, though the distance is probably a few tens of yards. The wind blows, ruffling your hair; his strands duplicate the movement, though they're stifled by a hat. You always thought that you looked like a huge douche in hats.
The two of you continue standing, at equal height, matching shades, for a while before he speaks again.
"Been lookin' around. Earth C, huh?"
The second pause is when your emotions manage to claw their way through your analysis of the situation, through the barrier of hows, whens, and whys. Initial shock and those small puzzles partially solved, what's left are 70% thoughts of Dave and 30% thoughts of a more selfish nature that you'd rather not admit the existence of.
"Can we take this somewhere else?" you ask, knowing that you don't need to gesture to the house behind you for him to understand.
Giving you an almost imperceptible nod, the two of you walk in the direction of the copse of trees in the distance. About halfway there, just around the point when walking starts to feel sluggish and inefficient, there is a small noise from the house at both of your backs. Wordlessly and without removing your eyes from the trees, you pick up your pace. Now out of the line of sight of the house, you stand in the grass at the base of their coarse trunks.
You face each other again. The leaves rustle above you, but you don't glance up. You're shocked with how little you feel, even while meeting the identical black plastic gaze. Even though you know Dave's stories about this version of yourself, there is less rage and more understanding than you were expecting. There's more than a little self loathing involved, but there's an absence of really anything directed at him. You really should be outraged. You should probably force him to leave and never come back. And you probably will. But seeing him like this is giving you the emotional equivalent of a bad taste in your mouth, a huge under reaction. Fuck.
"Why are you here?" You ask the obvious question. You were always good at oversimplifying things.
A hand raises to grab and pull into shape the hair at the base of his neck peeking out from under the hat. He's playing with his goddamn hair. It's something you do. His stance with neck and knees slightly bent to avoid locking up and stay loose, his lips perfectly ambivalent--the reasons why Dave has trouble talking to you sometimes come into focus.
"To see you," giving your obvious question an even more obvious answer.
"You don't want to see Dave?" you ask, the sound of his name bringing a noose closer not to his neck, but to your own. Your stomach churns.
"Nah," he says, and you smell oranges and taste bile. He's literally you, so you don't know what you expected--maybe for him to be more different because he was raised differently. Maybe you were secretly praying for some huge tell, some kind of habit, something that would jump out and scream, “I'm a different person!” But it's not there.
There are little things, of course, but he's you, and you're him. Undeniably. 100% DNA match. Deep down, you expected this, but just knowing that he's a piece of the fucked up shattered mirror that is you, only causes your guilt to skyrocket. There is nothing about him that you can shrug off or not take responsibility for.
"Alright," you say. The trees sway slightly in the wind. You check that your feet are planted firmly on the ground, as blameworthiness sends your brain into overdrive.
"You worried or somethin'?" he says, letting his hand fall from his hair heavily down to his side.
"Not so much worried as guilty," you say. Lying to yourself usually has no purpose. Usually.
"Give me a fuckin' break," he says, and you both know and don't know what he means.
"You don't think I have any responsibility over myself? I mean, I guess I didn't expect you to know much about real responsibility."
"Christ, give it a rest," he says, drawing a sword that had been slung around his back. He points it at you, levelly at your chest.
"I see. You didn't come for a lecture about responsibility, after all. You've been searching the universe for people to fight, right? And I, really you, am your last challenge.”
"Somethin' like that," he says, waiting, sword still aimed directly at you. His arm is steady.
You give him a slight shrug, and, seeing that you don't currently have a sword with you, he tosses you the other sword that was fastened on a strap and slung around his back with his left hand, sword in his right hand not ceasing its aim at your chest. You catch it deftly by the hilt and instantly recognize the weight.
You glance down at it, seeing a long scratch about two thirds of the way up the blade from an intense rap battle with Sawtooth that went too far, which you inevitably lost. Various other scars are scattered across the blade, all with their own stories. This isn't just a similar sword. This is your sword. How the fuck...
His sword inches impatiently closer to the fabric of your shirt as he waits for you to initiate the fight. You don't.
"Nicked it off one of your copies. Three guesses which one," he says, the tip of his katana now lazily tracing the hat design on your shirt as if you're boring him.
You inhale, forcing the tip of his sword to create a dimple in the front of your shirt. He does nothing to recoil, but stops his drawing act, sword frozen in a single spot. A few threads split under its sharp pressure. You don't use any of your guesses. You don't make a move to fight.
"We gonna do this or not?" he asks. You grasp your sword a little more tightly in your hand, and you see the smallest shadow of a smirk tug at the corner of his lip.
"Seeing as fighting me seems to be your main goal, I'm guessing you won't leave until you're finished?"
"You bet," he says, sword finally falling from its position at your chest, arm swinging to his side in a fluid picture of control.
"Fine. But it's not for you."
"Right. It's for you," he says, slightest smile dead at his lips and replaced with usual stony stoicism.
You reach your other hand to grip the hilt of your too-familiar sword, and he's on you. His face is almost touching yours, and his smell, the nothingness of it, is overpowering. You angle your sword upward and block with a fraction of a second to spare. Metal on metal screeches.
"It's not for me either," you say back to him, teeth clenched and the feeling of your two blades scratching against each other sending shockwaves through your bones.
His nostrils flare briefly with a snort at that, and he appears behind you. You parry. He appears to your left, and you block him. "The kid, huh? What a saint," he says. He's faster than you. Stronger. You guess that this is what you would become if you'd spent most of your time for thirty some years--plus whatever ungodly amount of time he'd probably been searching the galaxy for others to spar with--on fighting. His precision is mechanical, but his movements are smooth like liquid.
He's in front of you again, lunging. You sidestep it wordlessly, mind calculating a plan to deal with him. There will be no out speeding him or probably even outlasting him. You're really buying time at this point, thinking about his style. It's more similar to Dave's than yours, and you think back to fighting alongside him. You guess 'the kid' was a good student. This is so fucked up.
You continue evading him until you're certain that you know his move. There's nothing as discernible as a pattern, because that would be foolish in a fight, but he plants his foot in a way that's so similar to something you've observed Dave doing that you're nearly completely sure he'll--
You launch your first strike on his downswing, leaving a superficial red gash across his upper arm. He uses this injury as an opportunity to strike back, and he narrowly misses this time. It's a controlled miss, and you realize that he's been strategically holding back until you were actually ready to engage him instead of just playing it defensive. Shit.
The two of you exchange a heated series of parries, your body bending and twisting, feet trying to find traction, trying to gain your edge. Dave's face starts resurfacing in your thoughts. How could you do that to him? Logically, you can understand it, but emotionally... The responsibility is heavy and all yours to carry.
You block his attack, and he grinds his blade up yours, using your sword as leverage for his strike. A searing trail of red appears on your arm, mimicking the scratch you gave him, but deeper. Your pain is dulled by a swirl of adrenaline and overbearing culpability.
After finally landing a blow on you, he stops. His body freezes, and he stands about two feet from you. Too close. His body heat is no joke. "No fuckin' use," he says, letting his sword swing to his side, flicking your blood off of it and onto the grass almost delicately.
He sheaths it, moving to the nearest tree and leaning against it casually as if he hadn't just been fighting you.
You lower your sword, but you keep your feet rooted to the spot, not moving any closer to his new position. The separation is almost enough to be awkward for holding a conversation. Distant.
"Is this not what you expected?" you ask. You'd be lying if you said you were completely sure why he stopped. You have your guesses, but decide to keep them to yourself.
"You have too much goddamn guilt. Not even a valid fuckin' sparring partner." His accent is stronger than you remember, stronger than just minutes ago. But that can't be, right?
You guess he has a point. It wouldn't be the first time that that oppressive guilt had held you back in life, not that you would like to admit it, even to yourself. "I guess guilt is a drawback of responsibility," you say. Your grip on the sword loosens.
"Again with that shit," he says, letting his head fall back against the tree nonchalantly, and you guess that showing his neck and being this casual around you is probably a passive aggressive way of saying that you're harmless. But you both know that you wouldn't strike mid conversation, anyway. It would violate some kind of mentally constructed and time honored fighting etiquette.
"I'm not really surprised that you don't feel guilt."
"Fasci-fuckin'-nating."
"I mean," you continue. "I don't know if I would have developed guilt in the same way if I didn't have friends." He turns his head slightly at this, and his eyebrows dip beneath his shades.
"You're slow. And weak." He is right that guilt is making you that way, at least in this case. However, you've also found that having a sense of remorse and responsibility has strengthened you, when you're fighting for something that actually matters. You're about to say this when he continues. "And your thought processes are horseshit."
Something you hear from yourself a lot. But you're a little curious to hear his take. Your take once removed. "Which part?"
"The guilt part."
"How so?"
"Alright, here's the thing. I'm gonna leave you with somethin’ to process and probably struggle with for an embarrassingly long time. Think of it as a puzzle. You like puzzles, right?" You don't answer because you're sure he knows the answer. He is you, after all.
He pushes himself off from the tree, and the leather of his gloves should crunch against the bark, but the motion is soundless. He stands in front of you again.
"Shouldering our guilt," he starts, "doesn't turn over control. You could do better.”
And with those drawling two sentences, lingering seventeen syllables, he's gone. He left you with a fucking haiku. There's no trace that he had even been there except your blood on the ground and a deep cut on your arm. Smell of nothingness gone, nature's perfume of flowers and dirt, with top notes of grass come back to you overwhelmingly. The sky has cleared up slightly. Sun pokes through.
A lot on your mind, you start the long walk back to the house you'd come from--the house where Dave is. You take your time.
You guess that he's right about some things. Had taking responsibility, taking your fragments' guilt, really just been a ploy to take control over entities you felt were both a part of you and disparate? Is your need for self control just that... controlling? You suppose it probably is, but maybe this doesn't make your responsibility any less valid. Or maybe it invalidates it completely on the premise that you would have been lying to yourself to begin with. He knew those eleven words, specifically seven of them, would make you go through mental gymnastics. Fuck.
In the middle of a mental fucking double back flip quarter spin into a pirouette into the Sun. Sun C? Whatever. Dave comes out of the house, and you know that he knows what happened. The gist of it at least. He tilts his head slightly to the side as if to say, "I want details, but you can tell me later," and you give him a nod.
You thought that seeing him would complicate things, but it’s made everything easier. Everything is clearer. It's now that you realize that you're still holding the sword. Your sword from some other reality. You guess that there will be an exact replica of it inside the house, and this somehow cements your newfound sense of clarity. Your muddled brain feels a little more navigable.
You put your good arm around his shoulders--a gesture that's taken years of building trust--and head inside the house together.