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The faucet creaked as John turned it, the steady stream of water filling the silence of the dimly lit bathroom.
His hands shook, though the action of rinsing them was mechanical, almost automatic. Cold water ran over his fingers, washing away the blood he wasn’t sure was really there.
He wasn't sure about anything in Noir York City.
For a moment, he let the sound of the running water drown out the persistent hum inside his head.
Everything felt frayed, like the edges of a photograph left too long in the sun. The world had become a mess of half-formed thoughts, paranoia thick as fog, the lingering affects of the drugs that Mirra's men has pumped him full of still making him slow and confused.
But here, in this cracked and dirty bathroom, there was a fleeting sense of control. It was just him, the water, the grime under his fingernails - the blood that he couldn't quite get off.
Was it hers?
He scrubbed harder, watching as the pinkish tinge spiraled down the drain, disappearing as if it had never existed. His reflection in the mirror above the sink was blurred, out of focus - just a shadow behind the steam rising from the faucet.
John exhaled slowly.
He wasn’t sure when it started - this spiral, this fall into a world where nothing seemed to make sense anymore. This horrible version of New York City was a nightmare landscape, twisted and wrong. But this - this was real. This moment of quiet. The water, the bathroom, his hands.
He could hold onto this, if only for a second. He was safe here.
He was alone here.
He reached for a towel, drying his hands, and glanced up.
Mirra was standing there.
John froze, the towel still clutched in his damp hands, heart pounding. The air in the room felt suddenly cold, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.
He didn’t turn around. Couldn’t.
Instead, he stared at Mirra through the reflection of the mirror.
Mirra stood motionless, his eyes boring into John’s with a calm, almost casual malice. There was something about his stance, the way his hands rested by his sides, that felt so wrong. It was like looking into the eyes of a predator - cold, calculating, and ready to strike at any moment.
It was looking into the eyes of a serial killer, the eyes of the man who had murdered John's girlfriend.
"You thought you could wash it away," Mirra said, his voice low and mocking, echoing off the bathroom walls. "But you can’t, John. You can never wash it away. Her blood..."
John swallowed hard, his fingers tightening around the towel. His throat was dry, his heart racing, but he forced himself to breathe.
In and out.
He had to keep his head clear. He couldn’t lose it now. He couldn't lose it. He couldn't lose it.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," John muttered, though even he didn’t believe it. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the Mirra's reflection, couldn’t look away from the man who stood right there - his tormentor, his fallen angel, the devil incarnate.
But he looked, and beside Mirra was the bird, the flamingo, the pink bird. And the flamingo spoke, its voice strange and unintelligible as pink feathers drifted down to rest upon the bathroom floor, its gleaming red eyes stripping John to the bare bones of his tormented soul as it stared unrelentingly at him, "!redruM" The flamingo shrieked. "!redrum, redruM"
John trembled, his gaze trapped in the reflections.
"Listen to it," Mirra nodded. "You should go back to the institute. There's pink pills, pink cookies, pink uniforms that they won't let you touch. They'll let you draw pictures of pink birds. But only with crayons, pink and red, and you can't draw blood - they don't like that. But they're nice. The carpets are pink and the beds are white. They won't let you out. We can't hurt anyone if we stay inside."
"You’re... you're not real." John's hand drifted towards his side, where his gun lay. Mirra matched his movement. "The bird's not here!"
The flamingo laughed and laughed and laughed.
Mirra chuckled softly, the sound sending a shiver down John’s spine. "You keep telling yourself that. But we’ve always been here. And we always will be."
"This is a nightmare..." John gasped, "a terrible, terrible nightmare..."
He couldn't get out of Noir York City.
He was trapped here. With Mirra.
Mirra’s reflection in the mirror remained still, that same twisted smirk on his lips. His eyes glinted in the dim light, sharp and mocking, like he knew something John didn’t. "A nightmare, sure. One you’ll never wake up from."
John’s chest tightened. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his temples, the familiar pressure building behind his eyes.
This was just another game. Another trick. Mirra was trying to get in his head again, trying to make him doubt what was real and what wasn’t. That's it. The pills that Mirra's men had given him, they were causing this. The flamingo was a hallucination, it wasn't here. He was seeing things.
He wasn't crazy.
He wasn't crazy.
He wasn't crazy.
This time, John wasn’t going to fall for it.
His hand moved to the gun holstered at his side, fingers grazing the cold metal. The weight of it grounded him, steadied him. He wasn’t powerless. Not anymore. Not after everything that had been taken from him.
Not after her.
His grip tightened as her face flashed in his mind - her smile, her laugh, the way her eyes had sparkled when she was alive. And then the blood. Her blood. So much blood, staining his skin, pooling beneath her lifeless body, dying her beautiful hair red. Oh, the blood.
Mirra took that from him. Took her.
The rage that had simmered beneath his skin for so long flared up, white-hot, burning through the fear, the doubt.
He wasn’t afraid of Mirra. Not anymore. Not after what he’d done. Not after the lives he’d destroyed.
Not after he’d taken her.
"You deserve this," John whispered, voice low and dangerous. "I'm going to kill you for what you did."
Mirra’s smirk widened, mocking. "Go ahead, John. Pull the trigger. Do it for her. For all of them. See where it gets you."
John raised the gun, his hands steady now, the weight of his resolve bearing down on him. He aimed at Mirra’s head, his finger hovering over the trigger. For all the victims. For the blood spilled. For the nightmares that wouldn’t leave him.
For her.
"You don’t get to win."
The crack of the gunshot echoed through the small bathroom, deafening in the enclosed space. The mirror exploded in a shower of glass shards, the pieces scattering across the floor, sharp and jagged, glittering like diamonds in the dim light.
And Mirra was gone.
John staggered back, breath heaving, eyes wide. The gun trembled in his hand as the last echoes of the shot faded into silence.
The mirror was gone - nothing but broken glass reflecting his fractured image. And as John picked up a jagged shard with a trembling hand, he realized the truth.
The shards were showing pieces of his face, pieces of a man who had finally pulled the trigger on his worst nightmare. He had shot Mirra. He had ended it. But the reflection that stared back at him...
Mirra was still there.
He was Mirra.