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Calisto Yew is pretty.
As soon as she wakes up, and before she does anything else, she’s in front of her bathroom mirror. She dots on fake freckles, draws on winged eyeliner, paints her lips pink. She becomes Calisto Yew before she is awake enough to remember who she really is.
It’s easier that way, to only be her.
But at the end of the day, when it all comes off, she does not get the blessing of an addled mind to stave off her insecurities. The freckles are washed away, the makeup stains a white towel, and she feels wrong.
She is a stranger in her own skin, and she is not pretty.
“You don’t have freckles.”
He says it like it’s important, like it means something. He’s wrong.
Then again, Shi-Long Lang is always wrong–wrong to trust her, wrong to save her, wrong to visit her. Is he this idiotic with everyone, she wonders? The thought is amusing, but there’s something so intoxicating about the idea that it’s her that gets him this way. It’s hilarious to think that she still has so much control over him, that her betrayal has seared his mind this badly.
She hopes that’s why he’s stopped by for a visit, because he needs to drive her out of his head and shut her up for good.
When she starts to laugh at him, he tuts and glares. Shi-Long just barely looks like the wolf he pretends to be, backed into a corner and full of fury he won’t act on. Enmity drips from him as naturally as sweat, and through his scowl, he bares empty-threated fangs. “Calisto Yew had freckles,” he continues, sincerely asinine. Her amusement flickers and he infuriates her, makes her want to dig her manicured talons into his mind even deeper. Until she’s grabbed every one of his strings, until she yanks and he dances, until he shuts up about her damn freckles.
There’s a pause in their one-sided conversation as her laughter evolves from amused and unpleasant to grating and irreverent. Through the cracks in his anger, impatience peeks through, and it almost seems like he’s about to forsake the little pride he has left and speak again, letting her control the conversation by making him drive it.
She doesn’t give him the chance, because she’d rather he not make another comment that sends her already struggling confidence back through the wringer.
“I’m not Calisto Yew. You know that.”
From wolf to puppy, Shi-Long crosses his arms and takes a deep breath. The cracks in his demeanor are no longer sealed with annoyance. They are just as angry as the rest of him now, but also hurt . She’s known him long enough to recognize when he wants to recoil and lick his wounds, but has too much dignity to do so.
It hits her then, that he’s not here to mock her or drive her out, nor is he here to piss her off with commentary about her looks. He’s here because he wants her to be Calisto, to be anyone but the partner he trusted. He wants their time together to be a lie.
That makes two of them.
Calisto approaches her nails as religiously as everything else she does, glossing on each layer like it’s some divine ritual. Fascinated, Byrne stares over her shoulder, watching the process just as curiously as his young daughter might. “Why white?” He asks with a furrowed brow–with the same level of concentration he possesses in the courtroom.
His focused interest makes her laugh, just as every bit of the genuinity that oozes from him does. “It matches my tie,” she answers, and he nods, trying to understand. “You know, you could stand to learn a thing or two about color coordination.”
“Oh, Tyrell’s teaching me plenty,” he jokes, quick on the draw. He’s so casual about it; it must be some sort of prerequisite for fatherhood. “Nothing more coordinated than cosplaying film noir.”
Tyrell grumbles, sucking on his lollipop. “Not funny, Faraday.”
“Really? I think I’m hilarious.” Byrne sits down across from her, so carefree that the woman beneath Calisto is poisoned with jealousy. The too-real mask she wears hides that, and she smiles at him with pink, sugar-sweet lips. “Ever consider switching it up? Gold might be pretty.” He’s heartfelt, and very sweet to take even a minor interest in the things she enjoys, but he can’t understand.
The colors aren’t a choice; they’re a necessity. White’s the one that makes her feel like Calisto, pure and refined. Everything else borders on wrong , on the way she feels when she removes her makeup at night and morphs into some shadowed excuse of a person.
“It would be, but it’s the little things,” she tells him, lightly blowing on her top coat. “I like it when they don’t change.”
Tyrell stares at her. “.... And the big things?”
She gives him some general answer about the necessity of change, of how awful the world would be if the way it is now remained stagnant. Byrne jumps in with his own radical optimism–the one that Calisto loves and her shadowed-self loathes.
What she says, what he says–they don’t matter, because the big things won’t change either. The smuggling ring never stops moving, Alba gets whatever he wants, and she’ll always be Calisto Yew.
Deep down, she knows that’s not the truth, but Calisto truly believes this identity will be pried from her cold, dead, manicured hands.
“You’re not Shih-na either.”
It’s the smartest thing Shi-Long has said this entire visit.
“No,” she laughs–she’s still laughing, even though every mention of her former selves makes her amusement crack away like the paint on her cell walls. “I’m not.”
He grunts, and she hates how easily she recognizes it as a thankful one. He must not actually care if she’s Calisto, he just wants her to be anyone other than his perfect, idealistic Shih-na, the secretary and partner he trusted and held so close to his heart.
Lucky him, then, because she was never Shih-na. She bleached her hair and shoved in dry, uncomfortable contacts, but the identity never became her. She’d spend hours staring in the mirror, begging her mind to sink and drown in her new self, just as it did when she became Calisto, but since murdering Byrne, she hasn’t fully felt like anyone. She’s in a weird sort of purgatory, fluid between everyone she’s ever been and ever will be.
In the past however many years–she doesn’t like to think of how long it’s been–she’s tried many, many times to drag herself out of this hellish personality limbo. She does her makeup like Calisto, tries to replicate the one version of herself she actually liked, and fails. She never looks like her, never feels like her.
She feels like no one.
It’s amazing how lost she could be and how easily Shi-Long fell for it. He took her in wholly, accepted every word from her mouth as some graceful, divine truth. He was foolish to trust her, and even more foolish to take the bullet in her stead.
It almost felt real when he did that, but it wasn’t, because Shih-na was a lie and had always been one.
Lang was just stupid.
“That’s your real hair color, huh?” He breaks the silence with that same stupidity, and she scowls, her amusement all burnt out.
She wants to leap out of her seat and claw his eyes out. She wants to make him bleed and scream and stop looking at her . Whoever she is now, she doesn’t deserve to be looked at. She’s a puddle of bleach and smeared makeup, a grotesque reminder of all her forgotten realities.
Through a mirror on the wall, those realities torture her. She averts her reflection’s misery by painting on layers of black nail polish, but they all crack and demand she stare back at the diluted woman beneath. Her face is a muddled mess she can’t comprehend and she’s oddly thankful for it, because she knows that beneath the haze, her face is not Calisto’s . Her hair is where the suffering lies, on the jagged line where the slowly growing natural black meets Shih-na’s bleach. It is visible, and loves to mock her with how long she has gone without pretending to be anyone.
No, without being anyone at all.
Her hair is halfway between Calisto and Shih-na, and she wishes the rest of her was that simple.
“The black looks pretty on you,” he tells her, either that burdened by her silence, or actively trying to taunt her. She turns from the mirror and to Shi-Long, who is still staring at her with that stupid half-angry look. The hurt is gone, replaced with something she thinks is pity? Scorn? For once, she can’t read him. Maybe because she’s never seen this from him, something this convoluted and messy. He must be spending too much time with her.
She doesn’t care enough to dissect every single one of his emotions. She’s annoyed. He got what he wanted, didn’t he? She’s not Shih-na, and he has no reason to stare and continue to analyze her every little insecurity with that worthless commentary she’s so desperate to make him stop.
“What do you want?” She asks.
Lang smiles–that annoying, cocky smile that she wants nothing more than to scratch off his face. “Just one question. Who are you?”
She laughs again.
For her, it’s an act. For Calisto, it is not.
Byrne and Tyrell are like brothers to her. At least once a month they go out to dinner; they give each other gifts on their birthdays; they ramble about their lives late at night, past and future. The two of them make her feel loved, in the same way she thinks Cece would have loved her if her past wasn’t a carefully constructed lie.
But it’s not a lie to Calisto. When she cries about her sister, she truly mourns. Byrne sits beside her, resting his hand on her shoulder. Tyrell offers her a lollipop and frowns, more comforting than he appears. They listen to stories about her past that are only real in her mind, and guarantee that as the Yatagarasu, they’ll make sure what happened to Cece doesn’t happen again.
She does not believe them. Calisto does.
When Alba gives the order to silence Byrne, she cries. She clutches the marble counter in her bathroom and weeps . Her tears wash away her mascara, her blush, her freckles, her face , until she is so unrecognizable that it is no longer Calisto Yew in the mirror. And then she stops crying, because the woman beneath does not care about Faraday or Badd. They are not her brothers; they are stupid men who fell for a sob story.
She formulates her plans, and feels no remorse for what she’s going to do.
The day of the murder, she is Calisto again, and she is heartbroken. She makes his death quick and painless, because he does not deserve it.
It’s not until after she shoots Rell and stages the crime scene that she notices she smudged her eyeliner. Time is against her, but she still pulls out her mirror and redoes it. If it’s not perfect, she doesn’t feel like Calisto, and now of all times, she needs to feel like Calisto.
She wipes the smear away and smoothly draws on the wing. It does nothing, and she still feels wrong . She tries again.
Nothing.
Again.
Wrong.
She is no longer Calisto Yew.
She’s laughing, because that’s such a stupid fucking question.
Who are you?
If she knew the answer to that, would she need to cover up her mirror and hide from the face she doesn’t want to have?
Shi-Long grimaces at her reaction. It must unsettle him, because his conflicting mess of anger and unreadable solemnity becomes concern. He’s a puppy, playing with a wolf.
It takes a while for her laughter to die down. It sounds the same as Calisto’s, but it feels sacrilegious, an antithesis to the kind and joyful spirit she was once supposed to be. Her visitor is silent, waiting for her to answer. He must be desperate for this one, to not jump down her throat with that rabid bark of his, demanding exactly what he wants to hear.
“No one, currently,” she responds as she struggles to recover from her fit of hysteria. “There’s no one to give me a new identity.”
He clearly doesn’t like her answer, because the concern is gone. Shi-Long borders on furious, gripping the metal bars and leaning forward to confront her. It looks like he’s trying to intimidate her, but it doesn’t work. Nothing can scare her as much as herself. “That’s not what I’m asking. I need your name. Your real name.”
Her real name might as well have been Calisto Yew or Shih-na. They are as much a part of her entire self as her childhood is. In fact, with all the time she’s spent as them, they may as well be all of it.
Because it’s not like she can remember her real childhood. There are vague memories of growing up on the street, alone, in foster care. But those might all just be another cover, thrust upon her by Alba. She couldn’t have been a part of the ring when she was that young, but she can’t remember a time she didn’t spend under his thumb, so she must have been.
Those memories have to be fake, and stand little chance of being real compared to the vivid detail with which she remembers Cece. The two of them, in a karaoke club for her eighteenth birthday, singing their hearts out. A year later, when she’s sick, her sister uses her lunch breaks for a whole week to bring her soup and make her tea. They’re sisters, and they love each other more than anything.
In her mind, that love is just as real as her love for Byrne and Tyrell, the big brothers that adopted her even after she spurned them at their first meeting. They all loved her, and Calisto was the only one that got to feel something so genuine. They made her smile–really smile–but now she has to tell herself that it was fake, because how else is she supposed to cope with what she did to them? How is she supposed to go on if she doesn’t pretend it was all a lie?
Because the smiling felt real. The laughter felt real. Calisto felt real.
The woman in the cracked mirror, she does not. Her face is abstract; her hair is a testament to the two people who tore her apart the most. The woman, she is no one.
“Just give me your name,” Lang orders.
“I don’t remember it.”
But she wishes it was Calisto Yew.