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“He's crazy,” Davy scoffed, though he didn't feel like it, “They're all crazy.
He walked forward into the bathroom, which he was entering for the first time since he had taken a breath on his life. The too-tall heels of his boots clacked like percusion instruments on the dirty tiles of the bathroom floor, familiar to someone he wasn't quite the same as. There was a mirror at the end of the bathroom, he might have recognized it, if he had been paying attention the other times he'd been there.
”Better not mess with me though,“ Davy said, unaware that he was being watched.
Davy locked his eyes onto the bathroom mirror and sent a punch forward, feeling a itch in his mind as he inched towards it. ”Come on,“ he jeered, somehow aware that there was a reason for it, “Put 'em up.”
The mirror didn't respond in any way. This would have been the expected if you were absolutely sure it really couldn't have. Davy wasn't phased by it though.
He scooted to a halt by the edge of the sink, smirking to himself. He couldn't help it. This situation was ridiculous. Getting yelled at by cops but saved by being surrounded by soldiers. That odd little conversation with Frank Zappa, and the talking cow that made Davy wonder if someone had slipped him a little acid in his afternoon tea. (He only knew nobody had because he had been too busy around noon that day getting punched in the face to have any tea at all.)
He scoffed and washed his hands in the sink. The water was cold, and the paper towels felt as rough as sandpaper. Somehow both the sandpaper and the cold water felt soothing to his fingers. His knuckles had gotten a little bruised in his boxing match, as had his face.
He glanced up at the glass, and when there were no bruises there, nobody knew to be surprised or not. He made a little face. He sure felt like he should have a black eye. Was wasn't it surprising that he didn't have one. How didn't he have one? He'd had one right after the fight, hadn't he? He locked eyes with the mirror and shuffled his aching hands through his hair, fluffing his moptop before smoothing it down before fluffing it up again. It felt like he'd had the hairstyle too long, somehow.
Was he stuck like this?
The room was silent, but something spoke anyway. The mirror, Davy. The silence reminded him, sounding like Peter's voice in an odd way that could only be a memory from another time. The cabinet. Davy didn't want to listen to the silence, but he knew he was meant to open it. He had never been there before, but he knew he had always opened it every time he'd visited.
He reached for the edge of the mirror, and it felt as warm as holding hands.
He shivered slightly and hesitated. (He wasn't supposed to hesitate, I'm sorry, I don't know how to make him stop. I'll try harder.)
He tried to reason with himself, because something told him to. Everything was totally normal here. Nothing that hadn't already been done a thousand times over. After all, since when had public bathrooms had cabinets behind their mirrors anyway? He might as well see if he could get a smoke out of it, then at least that cow might have seemed a little more normal.
The mirror swung open, taking Davy's hand with it in a rush of hot, breath flavored air.
There was no frodis behind the mirror, no were there any more traditional brands of smokes that he may have more preferred if he had been looking for purposes besides making sense of a talking cow and a silence that spoke to him. There were no green bottles, which the viewer may have remembered if they had been thinking of another opening of the cabinet. Instead, there was an eye. A huge bloodshot eye, skin blown bright pink and fleshy by the too-close stagelight, iris green as Davy's shirt, and staring right through it.
Davy stared at the eye, but he wasn't scared. He didn't know when, and neither did I, but something inside him had clearly snapped at some point. Maybe Frank Zapa had meant something more when he'd told him the kids depended on him. Maybe, on one of the cycles (cycles? since when?), Peter had told him something was wrong here. Or maybe Peter had never noticed the eye, and it was Davy himself who had told himself. Or maybe the silence itself had.
Either way, he knew one thing for sure.
He had been here before.
“Who are you?” he hissed, feeling as though it was not just one eye on him, but thousands and thousands of them. (Perhaps they were tuned in on their TVs at home, their clocks proudly reading that it was 6:40 CENTRAL TIME.)
The eye did not answer. It couldn't. He didn't even know if it had a mouth attached.
"I don't very well appreciate being watched," he snarled.
It blinked, studying him as if it had seen him through the mirror the whole time. (Or maybe it hadn't. Maybe it had been over his shoulder watching him open the cabinet the whole time. Maybe it had been looking down at a bright string of text, only able to see what a hurried writer could remember. Maybe the stagelights were that of a phone, or a computer. Maybe you should have been seeing this scene from its point of view.)
"If you're not going to answer, I'll shut this mirror right on you," He warned, "getting hit in the eye hurts, I should know."
They eye did not answer. It blinked again. (Perhaps, when its short lashes were tight against its face, Davy's bruises would be back where they belonged.)
Davy felt rage boil inside him, and with a loud huff, he dug his nails into the warm flesh that was the glass of the mirror. The eye flinched for a second. It had been enjoying the attention before,
"You get upset the second I confront you," he said (it hadn't, it had been quite happy to finally have a look at him longer than a few seconds), "but you've been watching this whole time."
He slammed the mirror back shut. Maybe a bit too hard.
It shattered, and shards of glass rained down on him like it had always been meant to break that way. A humorous gag prop on a sitcom about having fun, and getting kidnapped, and playing the tambourine with his friends. An effective tool in a musical production that this David Thomas Jones had never really been a part of.
He hadn't really be a part of that sitcom really, either, now that he thought about it.
Well, if he ever had, he certainly couldn't return now. (Blood breaks a children's show just as much as his hand had broken that mirror, doesn't it fellas?) The glass cut straight along the top of his hand, and he cried out in shock and pain as veins splintered under it. He clutched at the injured hand, warm blood spilling into the slightly dirty sink and staining it as red as he too-big boxing gloves.
Somehow, though, he couldn't help but laugh deliriously through his pained whimper. This wasn't the part where he was meant to get hurt. That was back at the ring. That was back in the river. That was back in the vacuum. (He didn't know if those had happened yet. He didn't know if they hadn't, either.) This wasn't a part of the cycle. This wasn't a wound that the viewer could just forget about.
Did getting out really mean bleeding for it? They said fashion was pain, but this was a bit much.
He grabbed at the sandpaper-y paper towels, and they stung like fire ants in his open wound when he tried to stop the bleeding.
The glass in the sink, coated in two shades of bright warm blood, stared up at him like some kind of delicious ice based treat. It probably wouldn't have been any good though, not unless you were trying to die of ingesting iron-flavored glass, or generally liked the flavor of one or two or three different blood types all together like that.
Davy wondered what he would see if he opened the cabinet now. When he tried to imagine it, he regreted it. After all, he thought that some of the blood splattered there was just a tiny hint too red to be his own.
…whatever that fucking meant.
(Speaking of which, sorry for all that glass in your eye. You'd probably prefer if that sink was full of eyedrops instead of a biohazard. Maybe next cycle 'round, we've got forever, after all.)