Work Text:
The Entity spawned into this world on four tiny feet that sunk into the swamp mud as it stumbled along. Its shape was undefined and uncertain. When it slid into the water, its sides split into the dark, gossamer folds of gills that allowed it to filter oxygen out of the silt-filled liquid.
It lingered in the stagnant water like a cloud of spilled ink, catching every little creature who was unfortunate enough to swim inside. Once it swallowed enough fish into its body, The Entity grew large enough to haul itself back onto land and sculpt six shiny eyes out of its gooey innards.
That was when it saw Him. The Him was a grumbling creature wearing a hoppy-thing skin pantomime. He used His big fake webbed hands to slap the weeping willow threads aside as He trudged through the empty bog.
The Entity had never seen anything like Him before.
It wanted to LOOK LIKE HIM.
It wanted to BE HIM.
When AverageHarrry finally made his way to the nearest village, he was shocked to find a creature bundled up in a frog suit eerily similar to his own. Its limbs bent irregularly when it moved too quickly.
Much to Harry’s irritation, they all called it by his name. At some point, the creature had gotten its slimy hands on a communicator and was using it to type messages that grew more comprehensible the longer it Watched the others. The stupid bastard couldn’t even talk—all it did was poorly impersonate him by existing under the guise of his appearance.
They began referring to the creature as ‘Harry1’ while he got saddled with ‘Harry2.’
He began insisting that it had to be a clone made from a pube or something. The doppelganger refused to play along.
Harry HATED it. Harry wanted to KILL it.
Unfortunately for him, Harry1 had already reached the firm conclusion that it wanted to live.
Sometimes, Tommy could’ve sworn that he was somewhere else.
One moment he’d be speaking to Schlatt, Lukey, or Reya, and suddenly their facial features would grow blurry around the edges, causing him to squint to try and reconcile who he was seeing.
He struggled to pay attention when they spoke to him. Lukey promised not to hurt him over, and over, and over again, but Tommy couldn’t shake the gut feeling that he’d already witnessed everything around him.
The constant deja vu crippled Tommy’s newfound pacifism by forcing his heart to beat faster and faster until he was wildly crashing through the server with a lighter in his hand, drenched in a cold, fearful sweat that soaked through his clothes.
PRIME TOMMY was shouty and scrappy and kept them safe from all of the terrible, horrible people. Tommy didn’t mind so much when he emerged, so long as everyone understood that he was a pacifist. Unlike him, PRIME TOMMY didn’t bother making any grandiose promises of peace.
(He knew better).
PRIME TOMMY was a Big Man who wasn’t scared of anything. He understood that anyone who didn’t join them was the Enemy who would undoubtedly Hurt Them when push came to shove—so PRIME TOMMY shoved first.
PRIME TOMMY burned Lukey’s sauna down to smolders, then stuffed tinder into the bamboo thickets of Schlatt’s New York and lit them into roaring pyres that spit out tall columns of flames. The Entity AverageHarry1, or “One-ry,” joined him.
Harry1— Onery was all too familiar with the perils of counterparts. It— they knew that Tommy was a slave to the base instincts yanking him along in a prong collar, urging him to snap-snap-bite! like a cornered dog at every opportunity.
PRIME TOMMY dug his trembling. violent hands into the dirt and stacked the mounds on top of one another until there was a half-built tower leering down at them. Meanwhile, Onery stood with their “head” tilted upwards and gazed at the sea of sparkling leaves spinning and bobbing in the waves of heat that radiated from the bamboo fire.
The others didn’t believe in PRIME TOMMY.
Tommy swore until he was red in the face that Lukey would betray them if they would only open their eyes and see it, but they were too distracted by the destructive acts his younger self forced him to commit whenever PRIME TOMMY’S mad spirit possessed his body.
Likewise, they chose to believe that Onery was a clone. Even when the real Harry stared at them with fear masked by rage, spitting out harsh words that only grew more brittle when Onery’s skin grew loose around the seams—a sloughing pile of skin and fur mimicking fabric with beady eyes that peeped out from the shadowed mouth of the frog costume.
And as Tommy and Onery sat side-by-side in the ruins of Lukey’s sauna, they eventually found themselves pondering the person they were instead of the people they were not.
Tom would never be the version of Tommy that escaped to a cozy cabin, who had the time and the patience to heal PRIME TOMMY until that bitter child side of himself was put to bed and deemed unnecessary to his continued survival.
Onery would never quite achieve the simple, human life that brought them fascination upon further observation—hardy, yet delicate flesh bags with a tightly-wound bundle of thoughts and feelings and meat inside. They watched Tom mutter to himself lowly and scratch at the tight, burned skin of his hand.
“Why’ve they all gone off…?” Tommy whispered, itch itch itching at the shiny paleness of his fingers.
Onery stared back at him with deep, unreadable eyes.
AverageHarry: i don’t know
AverageHarry: i’m here
Tommy pressed his lips together and didn’t respond. He withdrew a flower from his inventory with a flick of his wrist and rubbed his injured thumb along the soft petals. The silence and smallness of his demeanor was nothing like the PRIME TOMMY from before. Onery wondered why the other humans couldn’t see it.
The sun was setting overhead. Its reflective light cast the rough texture of Tommy’s scarred skin in rich panes of pink and gold.
Eventually, he spoke again. “What is it that you want, AverageHarry1?”
The way Tommy asked it was quiet and rhetorical, as if he expected an answer that was equally as lost and unsure as he was.
But Onery was their own person now, and they had only ever had one goal in mind. Something they had wanted since before Harry. And if their instincts were correct (which they usually were), the older but still young, oh-so-tired Tommy held the same desire.
AverageHarry: i want to live
An exhale.
Then a reply, with some amusement: “That’s something, innit?”