Work Text:
i.
Here’s the last time she saw her sister, she says:
She floated down the Winding Way like a ghost in white robes and a pretty Rorschach of blood painted across her chest. The sky was too bright to puzzle out the stars, but if she could, Ini would have picked out some nice constellation for her, with some big grand meaning, so neither of them would have to waste time thinking about words or consequences.
Ini closed her eyes and scolded her, all the while pretending that she couldn’t smell death clinging to her sister like smoke riding the back of a breeze. Like, yeah, you gotta turn yourself in, sis. I totally get it, but like, revenge murders are just such a bummer. Uh, of course it's possible to arrest a ghost! Let’s just take care of this, okay? It'll be easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.
But that fucker in blue spins something about Fey’s kid patching an urn back together, and Mimi hasn’t pulled all her hair out just yet, but this is when the reality of the situation really hits. The courtroom lights are flashing like xenon headlights in the rearview mirror and the podium has a shoddy wobble to it. Ini would probably hate to die in a place like this, so maybe it’s a good thing Mimi’s just stabbing a corpse at this point.
She realizes she’s not gonna step out of this room a free woman. Mimi’s eyes are drawn to meet Fey’s for one terrifying moment, stormy and quiet, the honest-to-god evil in her heart eclipsed by a placid sheen of serenity. Maybe there’s something to be said about synchronicity and the pseudo-scientific potential of twins sharing thoughts beyond the grave, because Mimi's never been able to tell on instinct who's good and bad, but Ini always had this extrasensory empathy that let her smell the poison in people’s veins (she told her, sis, this Dr. Grey guy’s gonna kill you, I know it, and Mimi ignored her like an idiot).
Mimi thinks she gets it now because she can’t do anything but falter under Fey’s killer smile, catching her beret between her teeth and clinging to the lies for as long as she can. She can’t place herself in this fabricated reunion anymore—something in her is waking up, and it’s getting harder to remember whether she’s supposed to be the ditzy girl stretching her arms after a nap, or the vengeful spirit who’s got nothing better to do than draw fresh blood.
ii.
Here’s the last time she saw her sister, she says:
The awful truth is that Mimi doesn’t really know how much of this new life was actually her own choice. Maybe she heard the paramedics coming and she stuck her hand into Ini’s charred pocket to pry out the wrong ID, hoping to pretend it was hers all along. But with the way her memories are clouded with smoke and guilt, it could just as easily be the case that she was already fast asleep, and her surgeon just had to make an executive decision and pray he was right. She doesn’t dig deep enough to find out. Ini was always going on about unlocking repressed memories, but Mimi thinks some things just aren’t worth remembering.
She’s always been self-serving like that. Maybe Mimi deserves to be haunted by the image of her sister lying dead to her left, but maybe it’s just as well that she only sees black when she dreams. So, yeah, better to not bother. She’s already blown off her grief counselor and shredded her copy of the medical reports, so she might as well commit to walking around with her eyes closed.
They stick a tube in her throat and keep her face wrapped up for a few days after the procedure. It doesn’t really feel like days, mostly because she’s hopped up on too much anesthetic to care all that much about the passage of time. She realizes vaguely somewhere around the second day that she probably has wires in her jaw now and that the drug-dulled ache in her thigh is probably where they cut away flaps of skin to patch back into her cheeks. The smell is so clean and familiar, she keeps losing sight of why she’s there in the first place.
When they call her Miss Ini, she hazily tries to tell them about the mole on her sister’s right shoulderblade and how if they’d just look, they’d realize they’ve got the wrong gal. It's fine, it happens all the time. They couldn't be more different, but people are always mixing them up. The doctors don’t seem to understand, and Mimi can only watch critically as the bubblegum-popping nurse reaches over to up her dosage.
It’s the same nurse who, later that day when no one else is around, hands Mimi a pink phone with the camera turned on. Beaded charms bounce on Mimi’s wrist as she stares at it blankly—it’s a picture of her sister, Ini, swollen-faced and with a tracheostomy tube clasped around her neck like the shoplifted chokers she wore in high school.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to be doing this,” the nurse admits, glancing towards the drawn, pale blue curtain that gives the illusion of privacy.
She looks back down into Mimi’s eyes for a second with the precision of someone trying not to set off a rabid animal. For a moment, there’s some kind of solidarity that passes between them—maybe it’s the look of two tired, rule-breaking nurses who don’t like to worry too much about the grimace of pain that crosses a patient’s face when you stab them with an IV.
Mimi looks back at the phone, seeing that same hesitant expression replicated in the grainy screen. It’s only in that moment that she manages to connect the dots through the multiple prohibitive layers of opioids clogging her system.
That’s how Mimi’s fantasy shatters. The mummy-wrapped girl in the front-facing camera is a simple reflection. She’s not reuniting with her sister through the mirror; the phone falls noiselessly into Mimi’s lap as it occurs to her that she never will.
iii.
Here’s the last time she saw her sister, she says:
It’s seven on a Saturday night and Mimi’s so dead tired, she forgets she made plans to meet Ini for dinner after work. Because surely Dr. Grey wouldn’t keep her past five today, not when she was supposed to be off. She half-dozes on the bus ride home, wishing she could be driving her Bentley Continental instead.
On the ten-minute walk home, she holds her keys like ineffectual claws in one hand and clasps her phone in the other. She has three missed calls from Ini and one quietly scathing voicemail.
“I guess you’re probably still, like, at work or something, huh? Sorry, I guess I should have figured at this point. Mimi, you really need to stop letting Dr. Grey boss you around like that—well, I mean, I know he’s like, literally your boss, so some bossing is probably reasonable but still, I think—”
Mimi calls her back.
“Hey,” she greets.
There a pop of hesitance before Ini says, “Hi.” It’s gentle, like she’s not even mad.
“I’m sorry I missed you. Work again. I could—if you want, I can still…”
“No, I know, it’s okay.”
“‘You know’ what?” Mimi asks testily.
She can nearly picture Ini pursing her lips at the question, tapping her fingers against the side of her head. “I know you’re tired, I can tell.”
Mimi reaches her front door and readjusts her grip on her keys. Ini can surely hear as she fumbles once, then twice, against the lock.
“Remember, you’re still picking me up in two weeks,” Ini continues, her tone hard to read in a way that Mimi isn’t very accustomed to.
“I remember,” she says, dropping her gym shoes below the thin antique table perched near the door. She slings off her bag with a clatter and shuffles into the next room, collapsing onto her bed with a groan. "Fuck."
“Aw, do you have to sound that upset about it?” Ini says.
“Just tired,” Mini says redundantly. “Sorry.”
“Careful, or else people are going to start thinking you’re the sleepy one,” Ini teases.
Mimi huffs a bitter laugh. “Maybe they’d be right.”
“Well, I'm just kidding. Professional napping is a very competitive business, y’know. I would totally eat you alive.”
“You don’t think I could even finesse a tie?”
“Nah,” Ini yawns easily, as if to prove her own point. “Well, just promise you’ll try to take care of yourself until then, okay?”
“Okay,” Mimi lies.
“Eat something before you go to bed. You’re hungry, too.”
“What, your clairvoyance tell you that?”
The line crackles softly for a second before Ini laughs a little. “Yup.”
Mimi sighs. “Fine, I’ll eat. Let’s call the Friday after next so this doesn’t happen again.”
“‘Kay. Night-night, then?”
“Yeah. Bye, Ini.”
Ini manages to squeeze in the first syllable of a ‘love you’ before Mimi’s already hung up the phone.
To her credit, she does get up and manage about half a granola bar before she’s right back in bed, awake only in the most technical sense of the word. The second-to-last thing she thinks is that it used to be a lot easier with Ini, before she got hired at Grey’s clinic. Before she moved away, really, back when they saw each other every day and held hands when their parents got into fights about money, when they would put on a CD of Kaleidoscope by Siouxie and the Banshees in the car every morning on the drive to school.
The actual last thing she thinks is a prayer for her legs to stop aching so bad, and then Mimi is finally out.