Chapter Text
There’s a mirror in 007n7’s cabin. Every “morning”–before the rounds start–the mirror gets charred completely. Every “night”, the mirror gets charred over again. When he wakes up again, the mirror is clear. The cycle repeats.
She does this because she is not 007n7.
No matter how much she looks like 007n7, and how she’s surrounded by people he’s supposed to know, she is not 007n7. She is not him because she doesn’t know what he did, what his relationship with Coolkidd was like in depth, or why everyone is so wary of him. She is not him because he shouldn’t open his entire face into a mouth, or have no understanding of how to use the c00lgui. She is not 007n7.
Despite this fact, everyone seems to think she is him.
***
The round starts up again. The killer is John Doe. She goes looking for a generator to do because 007n7 has no defensive capabilities. The idea of running away is foreign to her, but is apparently familiar to him.
There’s a digital footprint next to the generator. She opens up the c00lgui, the red and black so unfamiliar yet not, and summons a clone to clear the trap. She gets to work.
The generators are hard. Her fingers don’t move as they should. It’s an issue that she had before, and it seems to follow into him. It takes longer than it should to finish the generator. He’s supposed to be a technological genius, if the way Builderman once approached him for ideas to escape this realm was any indication. She thinks that Builderman thinks that he’s intentionally being stubborn over a long dead grudge.
As she walks to the next generator, her thoughts spiral. Guest 1337 thinks he’s a horrible father, because she said that Coolkidd wasn’t her kid the first couple of rounds with him. Elliot thinks he’s unremorseful, because she doesn’t know what he did to him. Shedletsky thinks he’s starving himself, with how she goes off into the woods each time they eat, just so they won’t see her open up his face like a horror movie. She would feel bad for 007n7, if it weren’t for the fact that in his cabin, there’s a clipping of a newspaper that has his photo next to an article about a grieving father committing suicide.
The rest of the round is relatively peaceful. There’s only two deaths in total: Chance and Shedletsky. The main cabin is filled with jokes, mostly about how Chance’s death was from his own gun exploding on them. 007n7 doesn’t join in the conversation before the next round takes them.
***
There’s a notebook in 007n7’s cabin. It’s a bare record of his life that updates sporadically. He was a hacker. He knew how to code. He burnt down Elliot’s workplace multiple times. He was loud and annoying. He stopped and got a child somehow. His child burnt down Elliot’s workplace. His child went missing. He killed himself.
He almost reminded her of herself. She caused suffering, just as he did. The only difference was that he actually changed for the better, while she just caused harm anytime she tried to do something.
She goes back to the notebook. She does this every night. She can’t analyze people well–she’s not Dark–but maybe if she reads what she knows about 007n7 enough then she can pretend to be him better.
She knows she’s lying to herself.
When 007n7 heads to bed, she ignores the feeling of wrongness that comes with it. She hates how his body feels and looks. She wants to go back to her old body. She wishes she wasn’t him in the eyes of other people.
No One cries.
***
Another round starts up again. The killer is 1x1x1x1. She goes looking for a generator again.
Shedletsky dies only a minute into the round. No surprise.
She looks for a generator, and instead stumbles upon a bloxy cola. She checks the current roster. Elliot, Shedletsky, Guest 1337, Noob, and Veeronica are all dead. Three out of the eight original survivors are still alive. 007n7 takes the bloxy cola.
He stumbles upon Taph throwing one of their subspace tripmines. Taph nods at him, acknowledging his general existence, and she makes the decision to pass them the bloxy cola. He leaves before she can see Taph’s reaction.
She gets on a generator, and is hit by a Mass Infection. Moving from the generator, she gets hit with an Entanglement. She fumbles the pop ups, getting a couple of hits, before running off again.
She dies.
It’s a brutal round. Taph is the only one who survives. (She thinks there’s something between 1x1x1x1 and Taph, because how else would the demolitionist survive so many rounds against one of the most brutal killers?)
007n7 leaves the cabin again, with Taph trailing slightly behind.
The next round begins before anything interesting happens.
***
The lighter in his cabin was a taunt. It was a reminder of all that she had lost before she had died. She uses it anyway. The fire was comforting; the only staple that stayed with her. She spends a good minute just staring at the fire before using it to burn the mirror in the cabin’s bathroom. There would only be so much fuel in it, and she doesn’t know if the thing keeping her here would let her refill it.
Her reminiscing is cut by a sharp pain on her finger. It’s only a small burn, one that’s easily fixable with a quick rinse under water. She doesn’t move towards the sink. It’s another reminder of all she’s lost. She doesn’t blame the fire. It’s only doing what it knows how to do. It reminds her of another lost someone.
She misses a lot.
***
The clock ticks down. Coolkidd is the killer, which she always hates because then she’s even more conscious of her acting. How would a loving father whose only child is stuck killing people behave? Would he be disappointed that the child he so lovingly raised ended up taking joy in hurting others, even if the child was in a delusion? Would he be horrified that the child he had soothed after getting injured would brush off swings of swords and gunshots after only a couple of seconds? Or would he be relieved to know that his child, whom he saw the dead body of, was alive and having fun?
She wouldn’t know. She wishes she didn’t have to know.
Coolkidd spots 007n7 almost as soon as the round starts, which is horrible because he remembers the first couple of rounds where she said that he wasn’t her child. While true, it was in the body of 007n7. So she gets hit with a Walkspeed Override, burning while having a crying child next to her.
“Papa! I’m sorry, I’m sorry for running away! Please, tell me you’re still my papa!”
It would be so easy to just say, ‘yes, you are still my child’; to finally have the child stop targeting her every chance he gets. But she can’t do it, not in good conscience. She can lie to everyone else except for the child crying out for his father.
So she tanks the hits. Tanks the cries of a lost child while she takes on the appearance of the grieving father; tanks the fire that used to barely affect her.
Even as she is held by Coolkidd, she can’t bring herself to comfort the crying child in anything other than returning the hug.
007n7 is the only one who dies that round.
***
There’s a photo album in 007n7’s cabin. It’s filled mostly with photos of Coolkidd when he was younger. His son looks happy in all of them, except for the one where he’s getting ice cream. There’s a little handwritten note underneath it: ‘Had a bad day at school’. Occasionally, there’s a photo of himself. He looks tired, but fulfilled. Like he’s actually done something good with his life. It’s nowhere near what she makes him look like.
She’s scared of this photo book. She knows that most of the other survivors dislike 007n7, so maybe one day they’ll enter his cabin under some sort of suspicion and find this book and know that she isn’t him. If she can spot the difference–her, unanalytical as she is–the other survivors would surely know if they had a reference. As much as she wants to be herself, she’s worse than 007n7. 007n7 caused cleanups that only took months at worst. She’s caused damage that’s talked about in schools each year. If the other survivors learned just how bad she was compared to 007n7, would they treat her worse?
She doesn’t want to know.
She hides the album. It stays underneath her bed, bound to the bottom boards with tape and dreams. The only time it leaves that spot is when she’s trying to understand it better, with hopes of it finally clicking and she can act like 007n7 better.
***
A new round with Guest 666 as the killer. 007n7 spawns into the map near Noob. She knows that Noob holds guilt towards Guest 666, making them one of the least likely to survive the rounds with him as the killer, so she makes the decision to stay nearby. Even if she can’t do much, she can at least try to help. It’s the thought that counts, or something like that, she thinks.
They both hop onto a generator. She hates doing generators with other people, simply because she’s embarrassingly slow in a dexterous body, but she knows that Noob won’t judge.
Once the generator gets finished, she checks the health of the survivors. Everyone is still alive, but Chance is at half health, and almost everyone has taken some damage. Noob’s health keeps going down, and that’s when she realizes that she got distracted long enough for Noob to wander off.
She hears music. Noob is nearby, and they’re on 5%. She sends out a clone, which tanks the next two hits for Noob before Guest 666 kills it. It works as a distraction long enough for the both of them to escape. She stays next to them, and eventually finds a dispenser that Builderman is next to to leave them at.
The rest of the round is spent just doing generators. By the time the round ends, Two Time and Jane Doe are the only casualties.
She leaves the winners’ table. Everyone else is talking, so they don’t notice him leaving. That’s good, she thinks. She doesn’t want to worsen relationships with 007n7.
Outside of the main cabin, there’s a forest. It’s an unnatural forest–all of its trees are uniform, and there’s no signs of wildlife. She grabs a fallen tree branch and opens his face. She wishes there was graphite, or some other, tastier food she could eat, but she’ll make do.
She hears a sound behind her, which sounds far away enough that whoever it is wouldn’t be able to see him like this, but she still closes his mouth and hides the branch. It turns out to be the right call.
Noob finds their way to him. “Hi… I just wanted to… tha–thank you for saving me… um… earlier…”
They’re nervous. Maybe if she were Dark or even Second, she would be able to comfort them, or uplift their spirits, but she’s herself and can only muster up a, “No problem,” before they both fall into awkward silence.
Her mind wanders off again. Another reminder that she isn’t 007n7. He wouldn’t fumble the easiest of conversations because he would’ve known how to comfort people. He wouldn’t be thinking about eating graphite because he wouldn’t be able to open his face like this. He wouldn’t worry about whether he seemed enough like himself, because he was 007n7.
Dark would know what to do.
She misses Dark.
There was the familiar ticking of the clock in her head, a sign that the next round would be starting soon.
She might as well become 007n7.
After all, she is No One.