Work Text:
He found it in a box of scraps. The mirror. Nestled among an onyx inlaid comb, a set of leather bookmarks, and two quarters minted in 1932, it glinted at him with a sparkling sheen of glass that looked like it had been set just yesterday, yet the appearance of the silver lid, darkened in the curves of its conch shape, and the feel of it in his inquisitive hands told that it had been made many yesterdays ago. Decades worth of them, at least. The size of a tea saucer, it didn’t seem to possess any special value. It was just an old mirror, Oswald decided, placing it back in the box. And yet, there was something curious about it. It wasn’t a bad mirror. Small enough to slip into one’s pocket, although he had no need to carry around an old mirror. Still, he could keep it in his room. It wouldn’t take up much space. Hadn’t he hoped to find something intriguing as he explored his father’s—his house? Sure, this didn’t look like much, but it was a piece of his family’s history. Why not? He set it aside.
The mirror sat on his bedside table for a few days before it occurred to him that he should store it somewhere else. He opened it as he made his way across his room to the dresser. Gasping, he stumbled to a stop, gripping the frame of his bed as he held the mirror up to his face, beholding… nothing. The wall and window behind him showed up, but him, his face, his body, his hand waving in front of it didn’t appear on the reflective glass for even a second. He moved the mirror around the room. All the rest of it was perfectly reflected. Except one thing. The armchair on the corner. In the mirror, a silver-grey fleece blanket lied pooled atop it. In reality, there was nothing there. Oswald wiped the mirror’s surface with his sleeve, as if that might solve anything, and held up the mirror again. Obviously, there was no change. He opened the closet. The contents mostly looked the same, but a few of the garments were in different order, and some weren’t in his closet at all. There were also two extra pairs of shoes in the mirror. Impossible. He was having an aftereffect of Strange’s torture. Some hallucination. Maybe he was sick and seeing things. He felt his forehead. No fever. He had seen his reflection in the mirror when he had first found it, hadn’t he? Of course he had. Right? Alright, so he couldn’t specifically remember seeing himself in the mirror, but unless the world had turned completely upside down and he had become a vampire within the last few hours, there was no such thing as a mirror that couldn’t catch his reflection. And showed a blanket and shoes that weren’t there.
He shut the mirror with a firm tap, buried it in the bottommost drawer of his dresser, and resolved to put it out of his mind.
He succeeded. For about a month. Then curiosity nagged at him again. Clearly, he had been seeing things that day. It was just an old mirror that had probably belonged to his grandmother or one of his great-aunts. It certainly couldn’t be magic. Sure, some seriously strange things happened in Gotham, but magic was a bit much. He took the mirror from the dresser and opened it. Nothing. Two inches from his face and he might as well have been invisible. His hand shook. Hallucinating once was, well, bad, but twice? He dropped the mirror in his lap, his breath shallow and agitated.
Something flickered in the mirror. A light. Cautiously, he raised it again. The ceiling lamp was on in the glass. He looked up, despite being sure that his own was off. Something moved in the mirror behind him. He looked, swiftly kicking himself. Of course there was no one there. The doors and the windows were all firmly closed. But there was someone in the mirror. Him. But not him sitting on the bed. The mirror showed him by the closet, taking off his green lapelled jacket. Oswald was currently wearing a deep purple suit. The phantom him’s hair was longer, bangs streaking down over his eyes. Oswald watched, speechless, as the other him removed his vest as well, then went to the chair to take off his shoes. It was like watching a ghost of himself, a doppelganger in another world skin close to his own. The fleece blanket was still on the chair, now folded and draped over one of the arms. The other him slipped on a pair of loafers, then left the room. Oswald observed his progress in the mirror, then snapped the mirror closed and threw it away from him on the floor.
No. This wasn’t possible. How could there had been another him in the room?. A ghost might have made sense, but this? Everything in the mirror looked as solid as real life. There was nothing faded or translucent about it. Was the mirror reflecting a parallel world? But how could a mirror possibly do that?
Yet people weren’t supposed to come back from the dead, either.
He wasn’t crazy, he decided, inhaling deep breaths to steady himself. Nor was he having an Arkham induced hallucination. With trembling hands, he got up, reached for the mirror, and opened it.
Twenty minutes later, he was still making his way through the house, noting the differences. It mostly looked the same. This wasn’t the sort of house one did a massive remodel on, after all. A couple of pieces of furniture were different. Some of the paintings on the walls. But the biggest,, most alarming difference, were the people. While his own house contained a few of his mafia underlings, including Butch sitting in the dining room reading a newspaper, this house was empty save for the other him reading in the library, the cook (same woman) in the kitchen, and a few gardeners outside. The sun had begun to dip toward the horizon in both worlds, so the times coincided. Oswald made sure to search out the clocks to verify that. The date was also the same according to the calendar on the kitchen wall and the newspapers on one of the library tables, all from that day. Parallel indeed. He observed himself in quiet awe. They shared the same wrinkles, the same limp, the same way of holding books by reclining them on their right hands while holding the front cover open atop their left thumbs.
Oswald stared at him for endlessly fascinated minutes until a sharp ringing came from his pocket, making him jump. His cell phone. Of course. Closing the mirror, he grabbed his phone from his pocket, willing himself not to stare at the empty chair in his own world. After finishing the call, he cracked open the lid of the mirror, purposely stepped away from his bizarre twin, and spent the next half hour looking about the house.
The next day, Oswald looked in the mirror again, but he didn’t learn anything new other than that the other him was also a leading mobster in the city, and that they employed much of the same people. Victor Zsasz appeared down a hallway, as did Butch in the dining room. The next day was much the same. By the third, the novelty began to wear off, the fantastical becoming familiar, and he put down the mirror after only ten minutes of inspection. A few more glimpses later, with days growing in between each one, he put the mirror back on his dresser and didn’t touch it for a long while. He got swept up in the day to day of rebuilding his empire, time consuming busywork, followed by the dream of becoming a respected man in his home city by seeking the office of its mayor.
He took out the mirror again then, a few months after the last time, curious as to whether the other him shared his train of thought. Yet holding the mirror up to rooms filled with campaign posters, typing interns, and loud phone calls, he saw only the same mafia business he had before, as a planning meeting took place between him and his chief lieutenants. The other him’s style of dress and hair remained unchanged save for a trim.
Oswald’s campaign manager called to him, holding out a revised speech for him to inspect, and he closed the mirror. It would likely have remained in his pocket all the way up to his room at the end of the night, yet one more stab of curiosity prodded him just before dinner. He took it out as he walked down the hall to the breakfast room, where he ate all his meals now that the dining room had been appropriated for a far more important purpose. The same Tiffany, seashell lamps glinted on the walls, shining warm light onto a sliver of short, blonde hair. Oswald shifted the mirror and froze as the man’s full face filled the frame, so close that he passed through Oswald down the corridor and on beyond his shocked body.
Jim.
Quickly, Oswald turned the mirror around and began walking backwards, stumbling over himself as he sought to follow Jim’s progress down the hall and into the drawing room. Luckily, no one else was in the hall with him, or he would have looked like a buffoon, not that anyone would dare call him such to his face. And he wouldn’t have minded a little embarrassment in exchange for seeing Jim in his house. Jim was probably here for a favor just like his Jim. The other Oswald waited in the drawing room, taking out a couple of glasses from the small bar along the right wall next to the bookcase. He smiled at Jim, but not with any tone of surprise. The other him expected Jim to be here. Oswald stepped fully into the room, changing the mirror’s angle to see Jim’s face, who smiled, too. Not a sarcastic smile. Not a “I’ll play along with your delusions and break your heart later” smile. The smile filled him up, warm and genuine. He held up a bottle of wine. Oswald angled the mirror down to catch the label. Expensive make. Jim handed it to Oswald, who received it as if it were a gift, shaking his head with a pleased exchange of words, his lips forming what might have been “you shouldn’t have”, though lip reading wasn’t in Oswald’s skill set. Oswald observed the conversation with growing wonderment. They were friends. In the world beyond the looking glass, he and Jim were friends. Jim gave him presents. They laughed at each other’s jokes. Drank together. Were perfectly at ease in each other’s company.
For how long had this been going on? Had this bond already existed when Oswald had first looked in the mirror and he’d simply missed it or had it blossomed when he had looked away for so many months? Might there be any hope of the same amazing outcome occurring in his world? Could there be any link of causality between their two worlds? Both he and his shadow twin had lost their parents, inherited the same house, engaged in the same illicit business, and held the same position of power in Gotham. The other him wasn’t running for mayor, but he might at a future time. Might Jim, too, tire of always being at Oswald’s throat, and relax around him with the same friendly disposition as the one here, consuming the wine he had brought with friendly abandon as he and the other Oswald sat comfortably across from each other in the drawing room, a friendly game of cards on the table between them? Could this ever be his life?
He checked the mirror every day for a month after that. Jim only appeared five times more, yet, again, sharing the same amiable companionship with the other Oswald. Oh, if he could only have seen how they had arrived at this wonderful conclusion. Were they also meeting outside the house? Would the mirror work elsewhere? Oswald took it outside and strolled down the driveway. It proved harder to distinguish differences with their grounds being so much alike. For a while, he even feared that his world was now the one being reflected back at him, until he saw that one of the trees in the mirror had lost a branch, while his own still bore it. Yet, as he neared the gate, an odd change came over the mirror. Once razor sharp images began to grow soft and unfocused. When he crossed the gate onto the road and, thus, off his land, all that remained on the glass was a blurred pool of green, blue, and brown, as indistinct as liquids mixing in a cup. He rushed back inside the gate, fearing that he had broken the mirror, but shapes emerged from the colored soup within a few paces. He tried leaving again. Same effect. He wound his way all around the property, zigzagging to watch the shapes solidify and vanish. The result was as he feared. The mirror would only work inside the property line.
What magic was this? Why was it tied to the house? He dedicated his free time, shrinking as it was, to reading up on magic mirrors, even ordering Butch to bring Edwidge to look at it, although he wouldn’t let her open it or tell her why he was so fascinated with it, only that it was an old, family heirloom and he wished to learn some family history. But she knew nothing about it. Nor did any book or academic journal he could lay his hands on. There was no record of supernatural activity in the house despite his father’s ghost stories. Nor any record of the objects in the house apart from some old receipts in the cellar, none of which mentioned a mirror. In his desperation, he grabbed every book in the house one by one and searched the margins for notes, but, while he did find some, all pertained to the text at hand, not a mysterious mirror lying in someone’s drawer. Meanwhile, Butch started giving him weirded out side glances every time he saw Oswald with the mirror or mentioned anything to do with mirrors, questioning his obsession, so Oswald avoided the subject altogether and forced himself to face the hopelessness of his search and give up. So what if he never discovered the provenance of the mirror? What truly mattered were its marvelous contents. Namely, Jim and the other him’s growing friendship, and the hope that the parallel world’s happenings might someday translate into his own.
But he hardly had time to focus exclusively on that, for he won the race for mayor of Gotham, and his joy over his victory, as well as the new duties that they entailed, rendered him too busy to be checking the mirror more than a couple of times a week. During one of those times, the other house was being decorated for Halloween, replete with carved pumpkins on every porch, fake cobwebs hanging at the doorways, and plastic skeletons scaling up the outer walls, the house’s design making it the perfect haunted setting.
“I’m going to decorate the entire house,” he declared after Butch commented on the carved pumpkins adorning the front steps. “And we’ll have a trick or treat event for the kids.”
The people of Gotham would love a family friendly event on such a popular holiday, which had always been one of his favorites. It would help distance him from his former image of murderer and Arkham inmate which still held in many Gothamites’ minds, as well as provide a handy excuse to revel in the holiday. Although, if he was perfectly honest with himself, he may have harbored the wish that copying the other world, even if only in home décor, might result in further similarities, especially one in particular. In the other world, Halloween would be celebrated with a costume ball. Oswald had found the invitations in the study being prepared to send out. Doubtlessly, one would be addressed to Jim. Taking advantage of the child oriented nature of his own event, he scheduled it to take place from 4 to 7 on the Saturday before Halloween (which landed on a Monday), while the ball would begin at 9.
Those five hours trickled by with sluggish impatience, during which Oswald frequently checked his watch between the pumpkin carving contest and the handing out of candy, which he did personally, of course. As soon as the event, his interview, and smiling for the cameras was finished, and the materials were cleared away from the ballroom, Oswald kicked everyone out and locked the doors so that he could spy on the other world without people thinking that their mayor had lost his mind. The walls of the other ballroom, usually a creamy off-white, were paneled with greyish, white wood to give the appearance of a decrepit, creaking house, like the Addams residence almost. Skeletal sentinels stood at the doorways holding aloft hands of glory, making the cobwebs overhead glisten as if the room had been abandoned for years to the phantasms that dwelled in it. Even the backs of the metal chairs scattered throughout bore latticed outlines of bats in their backs, their cushions bright white to contrast the metal’s black sheen. Oswald swiveled the mirror to and fro with glee. If only he could step inside and behold it all in its full glory instead of having to settle for these tiny, halting glimpses.
The guests began to file in shortly after 8, all dressed in elegant costumes. A lovely mermaid in a long pencil skirt. A finely rendered Frankenstein’s monster. An exquisite Belle from Beauty and the Beast. The other Oswald greeted them at the door, himself bearing the appearance of Gomez Addams with his pin-striped, black suit, slicked back hair, and thin mustache. Jim showed up around 8:45, long enough for both Oswalds to grow impatient, but when he entered, all recrimination went out the window, for Jim was dressed as Jack Skellington, one of Oswald’s favorite characters. Oswald had never imagined that Jim would be the type to go all out on such an outfit. Someone must have obviously helped him with it, for his hair was dyed white to match the white makeup on his face, which had been hollowed out in dark greys and blacks to resemble a skull. He wore a very well fitted black pinstripe with the characteristic skull bow tie. He looked perfect, the white of his teeth matching the outline painted over his lips as he smiled at Oswald. In his amazement over his costume, Oswald had positioned himself exactly where the other him was, so that Jim looked out of the mirror straight at him. A frisson of shock and fear and hope thrilled through Oswald, half believing that the worlds connected in that moment and Jim gazed deep into his eyes.
But then Jim’s eye line dipped to the lower right, the other Oswald’s shoulder obscuring his view as the two hugged. Oswald snapped the mirror closed. His breathing was shallow, his palms sweaty, heart clutched in his throat with a frenetic thumping. He grabbed a bottle of Merlot from the bar and poured himself a dose in a whisky glass, too shaken to look for a wine glass. He clutched the mirror in his right hand as he drank, slipping into a chair, staring at the spot where Jim and the Oswald that he yearned to be were talking and holding each other at this very moment. After a few minutes of drinking and increasingly solemn contemplation, he jerked up and fled outside, welcoming the blast of chilled air on his sweaty skin. Setting his now empty glass on the patio table, he took out his phone and pulled up his contacts. Jim’s name stared at him from the small screen, beckoning. But what would he say? He couldn’t simply call for no reason. That wasn’t how their dynamic worked. Jim would find it strange. It might drive him even further away. Oswald put the phone back in his pocket. He had to play this safe. Now that Jim had thrown off the law completely, he might be more amenable to their arrangements, but it would better if Jim approached him first. Which he would do eventually. He always did, in the end.
When the wind grew so cold that it cut through Oswald’s bones, he returned inside, intending to go up to his room, but as he reached the middle of the ballroom, curiosity nagged at him again. They were dancing now in the other world, couples flitting all around him. He had to swing around for a minute, but in the end, he found them closer to the end where Oswald had just come from. Oswald couldn’t really follow a waltz with his limp, but they twirled around in a tight circle just the same. One glimpse at their happy faces and their intertwined limbs made it clear that friendship wasn’t the only bond that they shared. With a wistful sigh, Oswald closed the mirror, and went upstairs, hope flowering in his heart that this destiny might one day be his.
Jim called the next day, asking to meet. Oswald contained his glee, adopting a business-like, although pleased, manner and told Jim to come by his house at 7. Jim arrived on time, asking for help catching Mad Hatter, his demeanor curt and serious like always, but Oswald strove not to let that diminish his optimism. Oswald acquiesced to his request. Of course, Jim. My door’s always open. The arrangement was even more congenial due to their aims coinciding yet again. As mayor, he had to deliver on his promises to rid Gotham of the noisome, chaotic forces that wouldn’t play by the rules.
“Would you care for some candy?” Oswald offered Jim as he was about to leave, holding out a plastic pumpkin filled with bite sized chocolate bars. Jim frowned at it, or rather, it seemed, at Oswald’s offer of it. “It’s Halloween, after all. We had leftovers from yesterday and I can’t eat them all. Please, take as many as you like.”
For a moment, Oswald feared that Jim would disdain his gesture and walk out, but Jim finally reached for the pumpkin and took out a handful of bars.
“Thanks,” he said, peering at Oswald for a second as he read the labels.
He reached for another bar and turned to leave.
“Always a pleasure seeing you,” Oswald called after him.
Jim turned his head. He didn’t stop, but he nodded jerkily. Oswald beamed to himself. Baby steps, but progress was progress.
Taking down the Mad Hatter was long and messy, and most of it the public would never hear about. Oswald publicly commended Jim for his brilliant efforts in helping rid the city of such a dangerous parasite. And though Jim didn’t take to the spotlight as eagerly as he used to when he was a detective, his smile did reach his eyes, he appeared a tad lighter after the ceremony, and he didn’t scowl at Oswald once. He even seemed appreciative of the large bounty that Oswald had made sure to place on Mad Hatter’s head, although he didn’t express it in so many words, or any, rather. But his body language toward Oswald was changing, his glances no longer cold, his posture less guarded and hostile. At home, Oswald took out the mirror and found his twin and Jim cuddling on the couch watching Young Frankenstein. He grinned as the other him stroked the top of Jim’s head, which lay on his shoulder. He had first seen them snuggle two weeks earlier, bodies bound tightly around each other, and had almost squealed for joy. He was getting closer to Jim. He knew it.
Yet, for a month, he didn’t see Jim at all. Mid-December, he caught a glimpse of him leaving the GCPD precinct, but they didn’t speak. He pondered, agonizing, whether he should send Jim a Christmas card, whether it would be too much or just the right amount of attention to get Jim to notice him again. After opening the mirror to see the other Jim and Oswald spooning in bed mere inches away from him on the other side, he took a detour from his usual route to city hall, stopped by a card store, and bought a simple, blank card with a cute drawing of a snow man on the front and Merry Christmas written in bright, red letters. After discarding half a dozen note ideas for fear that Jim might find them too sentimental, he simply signed his name inside and sent it off.
Christmas passed with the somnolent quiet of last year with both his parents gone, yet with a jagged edge that robbed him of sleep and peace. Jim made no contact. Really, Oswald had not been expecting any, but the sharp demarcation between his empty house and the Christmas party on the other side, small though it was, cut through his heart. Maybe next year, he told himself wearily as he watched the other Jim and Oswald share eggnog, hand in hand and nothing but bright smiles.
The next day’s business took him near the precinct where Jim used to work. Sheer coincidence, but it yielded that yearned for boon. Jim strolled up the street toward the station when Oswald got out of the backseat of his car right behind him. Jim turned, his eyes widening a tad at the sight of Oswald. Oswald resisted calling out a greeting, waiting to see if Jim would stop on his own. He did.
“Hey,” he said, voice flat, yet not discourteous.
“Hello.”
After a sharp glance from him, Oswald’s men moved back to give him space with Jim.
“I got your card. Thanks. I wasn’t expecting it.”
Oswald shrugged.
“Last minute impulse.”
“I guess I owe you a merry Christmas. I know it’s a little late.”
“No, that’s fine. We know each other too well to have misunderstandings between us.”
“I guess so. Um, I’ll see you, then. Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year.”
Jim turned away and continued his journey.
Then came the long, hard winter. Three months passed by. Frost and ice chilled the world outside his windows and in his bones, and the only Jim he saw was in the mirror. He endeavored not to lose hope, even as the images on the glass made him ever more forlorn. His phone finally rang, Jim’s name on the screen. He came over to the house in the evening, needing help catching another of Strange’s monsters.
“Would you like a drink?” Oswald asked as Jim stood up to leave.
Jim stared at him with that confused expression he always regarded Oswald with whenever he wasn’t sure whether to be nice or to get out, yet something new sharpened his eyes. A reluctant hesitation.
“No, thanks. I’m trying to cut back.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, there—“
“Listen, I… Um…”
Jim cut himself off. He placed his hands on his hips, hunching his shoulders, and looked away from Oswald, whose breath had clutched in his throat with a painful intensity. Jim had the look of a man measuring his words for fear that he might be too honest. Jim never did that with Oswald. His speech was always blunt and unrehearsed.
“You’re a better mayor than I thought you’d be,” Jim said in the end.
Oswald frowned. That wasn’t the sentiment that he had first glimpsed in Jim’s face. This was him retreating, changing the subject. Did he know, perhaps, what Oswald’s invitation hinted at?
“Thank you,” Oswald said, maintaining an undisturbed façade, unwilling to let Jim see how much his shift rattled him. “I didn’t expect such words from you.”
A tad backhanded, sure, but when had Jim ever complimented him?
“I didn’t think I’d ever say them. I’m glad it’s working out. So, um, I’ve got to head out.”
He began moving toward the door of the study.
“Okay. Good-bye, Jim.”
Jim murmured a good-bye and walked out, leaving Oswald feeling like a handrail had just slipped from his grasp as he stumbled and fell down the stairs.
In May, two days before his birthday, a card arrived from Jim.
“Happy Birthday”, it read in bright bubble letters above a puppy wearing a party hat. The inside was blank save for Jim’s first name, as simple and straightforward as the card that Oswald had sent him. Oswald picked up the mirror that night, the cold of the metal seeping into his skin, but he put it aside, returning to the card instead.
Despite Oswald’s fondest wishes and the comfortable affection that existed on the other side of the mirror, his relationship with Jim remained steady, the only change that Jim now treated him with friendliness rather than disdain, yet always with a careful distance, never remaining in his presence too long, as if fearful of what Oswald might say. Had he guessed at Oswald’s affections and had no wish to share them? Was that what the odd interruption in April had been about? Was their counterparts’ love not to exist in this world, after all? Oswald sought out the visions of the mirror with the fervent need of an addict seeking any momentary relief for their present pain. Looking into the past was impossible, but could there be any sign, any inkling of a similar recalcitrance from this Jim at the beginning? Unsurprisingly, he found nothing to aid or discourage him. Yet Jim had softened toward him. The significance of such a formerly improbable occurrence didn’t escape him. But should he let any hope for something more die? Was he doomed to watch his twin be happy while he had nothing but his business and a family-less house to look forward to?
Oswald sent Jim a card on his birthday. They both sent cards for Christmas. Jim came by for a favor every so often. They exchanged greetings when they ran into each other. In January, word reached him that Jim was dating again. Neither of them mentioned it when they next saw each other. Nor the next. One morning in August as Oswald got ready for that day’s work, no one wanted to meet his eyes. His men all lingered just out of reach, hiding some common secret that they feared him learning.
“What is wrong with everyone?” he demanded from Butch, who kept placing tables and chairs between them. ‘What’s going on?”
“Word is going around,” Butch said after an intolerably long pause. “Gordon’s engaged.”
Butch quickly fled to the other side of the room, clearly fearing a violent outburst, but Oswald didn’t move. Numbness froze his limbs. His breath stopped in his throat until his pained lungs reminded him of their need for oxygen. He stumbled back to the nearest chair and sank onto it, looking everywhere and nowhere as the finality of those words pierced his soul.
“I’ll leave you alone,” Butch mumbled.
Oswald didn’t even hear him close the door.
Oswald rarely delivered such a stellar performance at pretending that all was right with the world as he did on that day. He presided over his duties, both mayoral and criminal, with his usual determination, and attended the opening of a new clinic with a bright smile on his face, not allowing any of the downtrodden bitterness itching under his skin show. At 3:10, Jim called. Oswald didn’t answer, because the meeting with the Labor Relations Board went long, and as much as everything inside him screamed to kick everyone out of the room and hear what Jim had to say right that second, he had to be a professional and not let a man who would likely never return his affections get in the way.
And yet, the instant that his visitors were out of the room, he ushered out his staffers and called Jim. He answered after the third ring.
“Hi,” Jim said.
“Hi,” Oswald replied.
The line was silent. Oswald gripped the back of a chair.
“So, um…” Jim began. “I’m getting married.”
“Yes. I heard. Congratulations.”
Oswald’s knuckles hurt.
“Oh, shit. I should have called you earlier. I thought it’d be better if you heard it from me.”
Oswald doubted it.
“And why would that be the case, pray tell?”
The sibilant sound of a sigh hissed over the line.
“Maybe it wouldn’t. I might be wrong.”
Oswald knew then that he wasn’t.
“I just thought I should tell you.”
But not in person. It’d be too awkward and unpleasant and painful to acknowledge this truth between them in person.
“Your message has been delivered. I have to go. There’s a mountain of paperwork awaiting me on my desk.”
Cheap excuse, but Oswald expected Jim to receive it precisely how it sounded.
“Sure. I’ll see you later.”
Ignoring the discomfort in Jim’s voice, Oswald hung up the phone and shut his burning eyes.
The mirror showed the most beseeching domesticity that night. Jim played Skyrim on his Xbox while Oswald observed, commenting every so often. His feet rested on Jim’s lap. Jim touched them when he finished a level, massaging Oswald’s bare skin.
Oswald threw the mirror so hard against the floor that he heard it shatter. Breathless, he rushed to grab it. A large series of cracks rained down from an epicenter on the top right of the glass, its images now crisscrossing behind an artificial spider web. He touched one of the pieces, expecting it to come off, but it held fast against the metal back. Assuring himself that it still worked, he shut it, returned it to his cabinet, and didn’t touch it for months.
A wedding invitation arrived in the mail.
“I wasn’t sure if I should sent this,” read a note in Jim’s handwriting in the envelope.
No, you shouldn’t have, thought Oswald. He threw the invitation in the trash. But he kept the note.
Jim has been engaged before, a renegade thought insisted. Yet he had never actually gotten married.
Jim got married on the 8th of June. Oswald didn’t go.
Oswald moved on, funneling all his energy and enthusiasm into his position, and learned to be just as satisfied with his success as he had been before that cursed mirror had crossed his path. He and Jim continued to associate just like they always had. The first time they met after the wedding, Oswald pushed right past Jim’s awkwardness, smiling with his characteristic vivaciousness, refusing to acknowledge that anything should be uncomfortable between them. Jim gladly followed his lead. Oswald ran for mayor in his next term and won by a landslide. Jim returned to the GCPD. He admitted to Oswald that he liked working with him. Oswald let this confession warm his heart, but not rule his head.
One night in October, he got drunk and looked at the other house with the mirror. Skeletons and pumpkins adorned the place again, and Jim and Oswald wore twin bands on their ring fingers. Oswald shoved the mirror under the cabinet and collapsed on the bed with his throat aching.
Three years and three months after that 8th of June, Jim texted him,
I’m getting divorced.
Oswald tried not to feel anything but sympathy for Jim’s plight.
I’m sorry, he replied.
Thanks.
Another year passed. Oswald couldn’t remember the last time that he had looked in the mirror. Yet that October, curiosity nagged him once again. He had always so enjoyed the decorations on the other house. As long as he avoided the others and stuck to regarding the scenery, he would be fine. He had to lie flat on the floor to pull out the mirror from under the cabinet, covered in dirt and dust that made him cough. He dusted it in the bathroom with a wet towel until the silver gleamed again and took it downstairs. In the quiet of the ballroom, he opened it. The cracks in the glass created a dozen parallel images, but it still worked fine, the cobweb strewn candelabra as vivid as if Oswald could reach it and touch it himself. He tilted the mirror down just as a quiet footstep sounded behind him, and Jim’s face appeared in the glass. He shut it quickly, not wishing to see, then turned right into Jim. Oswald stepped back, gaping. How could both Jims have walked in the same space at the same time? Coincidence, of course, like Oswald and the other him inhabiting the same space for a moment at that Halloween ball.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Jim said. “I thought you saw me coming in the mirror.”
“What?”
Jim frowned at him, pointing at the mirror.
“I saw myself in it. Didn’t you? It seemed like you were looking at it.”
Jim had seen himself? How? Oswald opened the mirror and held it right up to his face. Nothing save the space behind him. A tremor shook his frame as he closed it and slipped it into his pocket.
“No,” he said, dissembling with a smile. “I was looking out the window.”
Jim nodded. His hair had grayed just like in the mirror, random, silver strands spread among his natural gold.
“You probably know why I’m here.”
He didn’t need to say the words anymore.
“I confess, I do like hearing you say it.”
Jim shook his head, expression bemused as he spoke the phrase that had defined their erstwhile bond for the last decade.
“I need a favor.”
Oswald smiled.
“Of course you do.”
He couldn’t trace a conscious thought to the motion, but his left hand rose up and touched Jim’s right cheek. Jim grabbed his wrist and started pulling it away, but he ceased after shifting Oswald’s hand barely an inch. He gazed into Oswald’s eyes, searching for an explanation that Oswald was too exhausted to give and which he already knew the answer to. After a moment, Jim’s frown smoothed out. He sighed, a long, weary, desperate breath, and covered Oswald’s hand with his own.