Work Text:
Michelle woke up like she was thrown.
No slow drift from sleep occurred, no half-formed dreams dissolving into nothingness — only a violent, full-body jolt that made her gasp. Her back bolted off the mattress, lungs gasping in air that felt too full, too loud. For a second she didn't know where she was, only that something was severely wrong.
Her room. Dark. Ceiling. Faint ginger dance of streetlights that haven't yet welcomed first hours of morning.
Just her room.Her room.
Her room —
Her hands flew to her face, pressing hard enough to hurt.
Skin. Warm. Damp.
Familiar—
—but so wrong in a sickening way she couldn't begin to describe — like touching something that had been replaced while she wasn't looking.
She pressed harder.
As if something underneath might glitch, tear or disappear—
— No—no, no, no—
The words came out hoarse, already trembling and rising in volume. They tangled over each other, too fast, too loud, too unclear. They were trying to outrun something inside her head.
Because it wasn't her room.
It was—
Not.
The thought didn't finish. It refused to.
Where was the cold light with no source? Walls that breathed?
walls don't breathe, what is wrong with you
Toys scattered around the floor, like she was visiting a child's room? Not abandoned, but placed, watching her, waiting—
She reached to pull the curtains around her bed, but they weren't here.
A voice calling her name from inside her own skull, except it wasn't her voice anymore.
It wasn't anyone's voice.
And not a memory.
A sound that had not stopped trying to speak.
Michelle gagged and rolled onto her side, one arm locked over her mouth, another digging into her unnaturally flattened stomach like she could hold herself together through pressure alone.
I was there, something in her insisted.
Not whispered. Not remembered. Just stated, as thought it were a well-known fact.
Her heart stuttered — slammed against her ribs, one beat too many, another trying to catch up. Another wave of nausea made her curl up tighter.
She tried to swallow her breathing, and every shallow inhale through her nose brought something else with it. Not just air — but memories from before. One wave. Another.
Air in.
Too much.
With it came—
Running.
Not past. Not recalled.
Running now.
Running down a corridor that stretched longer and longer the more she moved. The sound of something chasing behind her. The certainty that she would die — not imagined, not symbolic, actual certainty of it — that if she turned around she would see something that would shatter her mind beyond repair.
No.
Don't turn.
Don't turn don't turn don’t—
At the same time—
Mint toothpaste. Bitter. Something she wanted to replace for months. Foam slipping down her wrist as she blinked sleep out of her eyes. Checking her phone. Ignoring a message she didn't want to answer them.
Both true.
Both complete.
Both happening.
Her fingers twitched against the bedsheet, and for a moment she didn't know which surface they were touching.
Her hand fell onto the pillow.
— I didn't… — Her voice pleaded to nothing in particular. — I wasn't there
But she was.
Turn around.
The thought wasn't hers.
It didn't feel foreign, either.
Fingernails dragged across the fabric until it almost ripped. Cotton. Real. Real. But her hand pulled back anyway, sudden and sharp, like it got pricked on a thorn.
Red hair flashed in her mind.
Another memory immediately slammed into her to replace it —
Falling. Not down, not up, not even sideways — instead in a way that couldn't be described. In a way that couldn't be named.
Falling through something, in a space where gravity kept changing its mind. Her body — not this body, which was a horrifying thought — stretching, compressing, being torn in ways that weren't possible — becoming something that could survive it. For a second the bend in her spine felt wrong, too flexible, like it might continue moving if she didn't stop it in time.
Michelle's breath hitched into a sharp, rising whine.
— No, no, no— this isn't—
She shoved herself upright — too fast, and the room tilted violently, didn't settle. All walls seemed too close, and shadows polled like something liquid.
Her brain tried to reconcile it.
Her eyes tried to correct it.
Both failed.
Tried again.
Two sets of rules. Two realities. Both insisting they were correct. Misaligned. Shaped in a wrong, impossible way.
Then something violent shot through her skull — agonizing, sharp pain with jagged edges. Spreading. Rotten. Like something forcing its way into space that was already occupied.
Michelle let out a small, broken noise and stumbled out of bed. Her legs nearly folded, as if they completely lacked either energy or muscle —
Either because she hadn't used them a month.
Or she had used them every single day.
Neither answer displaced the other.
— I was here, — She said, louder, like screaming could make it true. — I was here! I slept here, I—
She didn't sleep.
The thought wasn't separate. It was hers. Completely hers.
It didn't interrupt. Just dislodged.
Another spike drove through her skull, sharp enough to blank everything for a fraction of a second.
You didn't sleep there. You don't need to.
Michelle's hands snapped to her head, fingers tangling in her mess of pitch-black, long hair.
—Why?—
The word collapsed halfway out of her mouth.
Strands were tangled and soft. She wanted to rip them out.
You remember.
And she did.
Not gradually. Not like trying to recall something that happened years ago.
Eyes closed, sanding in front of something that looked almost human. Its face lagging and distorted, deciding what it was every passing second, over and over and over again. It had spoken to her. Calmly. Kindly.
Like nothing was wrong. Like this was normal.
What if you are a copy.
— I'm not, — She shook her head in return. — I'm not a copy, I'm—I'm me, I'm here—
You are both.
Her voice sounded strange, but it was the same. It always stayed consistent. It stayed like this in both memories — but here it bounced off the walls in a real way. It echoed, silently, in a room filled with nothing but herself.
It was still her voice.
Exactly her voice.
No distortion. No difference.
Everything lurched again.
She stumbled toward the mirror, movement jerky, uncoordinated. Seeing herself — correctly — felt like the last possible thing that might be a lifeline to staying sane.
For a horrifying instant, there were two of her—
Not in a reflection. Just a delay of the brain.
One fraction of movement behind. Then it snapped back into sync.
Standing across from her.
Same posture. Same face. Same wide, terrified eyes with splashes of two mixing colors.
She was leaning on the surface in a second — hand hit the glass, another tugging her eyelid wider open. Those weren't pinwheels of color. Just simple brown with blue uneven spots. Like always. Like she had her whole life.
Brown.
Blue flecks.
Normal.
Always normal.
Her fingers — bare.
No gloves.
How did she—
…Her fingers weren't gloved. How did she not realize before?
The person looking at her from the mirror didn't register.
Not as "her".
It only mimicked her appearance.
It mapped correctly — face, proportions, movement — but the recognition didn't click.
It looked like her. The same short pale body of a girl she was trapped in for twenty-five years. But her brain insister it wasn't.
Who is that, then?
Trapped in perfect imitation.
She was looking in the eyes of a stranger who wore her skin; and that stranger was looking back, with no ability to do anything else.
Who's body is it?
Her fingers curled against the glass.
That's my body.
It didn't resolve anything.
Why does it look broken and distressed?
Why can't she just see herself?
That's my body.
Still nothing.
The statement just existed, useless and unheard.
Her chest stopped moving for a second. Another. Five. Seven.
Then overcorrected.
It's her. This skin is hers to tear. Hair hers to tug. Plain pijama shirt — fully white, only showing it's color in red-and-blue sleeves. It's hers to rip to pieces, too.
It's her.
It's the same body.
She tried to decide that it's her—
This is me.
This isn't me.
Her vision sharpened suddenly, painfully clear, every detail overdefined.
There wasn't enough air anymore. Not in her lungs, not in this room, not in this world. Michelle began to gasp.
She wants to look at it as if it's her body.
Insisted thought told her it isn't.
It didn't look like her. So it isn't.
Even though it did.
It was wrong. It was her, and it was wrong.
Wrong.
Not wrong.
Wrong—
The word didn't repeat right.
She was wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong—
A thin, almost inaudible sound escaped her throat—
—and then it tore open—
Echoed off the walls, but nothing answered her in this empty house.
The correction hit during the sound, snapping into place with horrifying certainty.
The name wasn't chosen.
It was recognized.
And Pomni screamed.
The horrible sound ripped from her throat and she curled backward, hit the wall, and slid down it, quickened breath shredding into sobs that quickly turned into a meltdown.
Too much.
There was too much.
Her chest hurt. Everything hurt. Her head felt too small, like it couldn't possibly hold all of this knowledge without tearing open. Memories crammed into spaces that no longer existed. Thoughts overlapping, misaligning, duplicating—
— I didn't die, — She choked, to no one but herself. Screamed, or maybe whispered.
Unfortunately, "you" is a person harder to convince than most.— I didn't—I wasn't a copy, I didn't—
You did.
The answer was immediate.
No space to argue.
A room. Too clinical. Too real. Abandoned. Messy. Clean. Bright. It's bright. It's too bright.
It was blurry.
She wasn't sure.
She clutched at her skull like it might split under her fingers.
It didn't.
It just kept holding everything.
Someone explaining something she hadn't fully listened to in a booming, cheerful voice. Something about consent forms. Something about non-invasive, harmless adventures. Something about rules and punishments, joys, time…
A joke about backups. Mind files.
One person died that morning.
Two others became alive.
And the chance of ever feeling whole crumbled into a simple missed opportunity.
Her stomach twisted violently once again, harder, and she sobbed, realization dropping onto her head like concentrated cement — heavy and absolute.
— Oh god—
You stayed here.
You went home.
You made dinner.
You watched something you don't even remember now because it doesn't matter—
Except it mattered in the moment.
And—
…
You woke up somewhere else.
Trapped.
Changed.
And not alone.
Pomni folded in on herself, forehead pressed hard against her knees.
I was scared.
The thought didn't belong to the present.
And the worst part—
The most unbearable, suffocating part—
It wasn't a new fear.
It was old. Rotten at the edges.
Months of it.
Maybe even years.
Layered, accumulated, carved into her like grooves.
It was Michelle's.
— I was so scared, — Pomni howled, voice breaking completely. It staggered on a high note, falling apart and collapsing into fragments of sound that barely resembled words.
Because she remembered all of it.
Not like a story. Not like something that happened to someone else.
Like trauma.
Her trauma.
It sat in her body like it had always been there, like it had been waiting for her to catch up to it. To realize how long it's been repressed, how long it took until she lost connection to herself — and now everything broke the gates, flooding back all at once.
Both different lives filled with misery.
Every second of it.
And she didn't even live through it all. Now she had.
Angered neighbors slammed their fists against the wall and she didn't care.
Her body reacted before her mind could catch up. Crying breathing spiraled into sharp, uneven gasps. Her hands clawed at her arms, gripping hard enough to hurt. The pressure helped, like it was holding her together by force. Barely. Somehow, it felt familiar. Somehow, she wanted for someone to hold her. To hide her from fierce sounds and screams and darkness.
It's a horrible thought. Why is she thinking that?
She never wanted to be touched. Not here. Not in this world.
She has no one here.
No one in her life who is close.
She wanted—
The thought formed wrong.
Not… formed, just—
—someone—
No.
…
The absence hit just as hard as everything else.
She misses her dad.
That idea forced itself into existing, misplaced and completely undeniable.
He was away a lot, and this version of her hadn't seen him in over seven years now, but that feeling began to crawl out raw and loud once again — it arranged itself, integrated, all for a broken cause.
He would make it go away.
He always knew how.
When she cried in the corner of her room from all the pressure, he knew what to say. What to do.
Seven years without him—
—and suddenly it felt recent. Immediate. Like she had just lost him again just a moment ago.
The feeling didn't belong here.
It was here anyway.
And everyone—
People who were her friends. Who stayed on her mind.
Someone she never met — not the person curled up in a pitiful sobbing ball, eyes red and fingers trembling. They weren't her friends.
She doesn't even know them.
And she already missed them so fucking much.
—I can't— I can't— I can't—
Muttered words filled the overwhelming silence like dozens of dark clouds covering the sky before the storm. They stacked, tripped over each other, lost structure halfway through repeating and broke down into a mess.
No— no, that was the other place. They were all there, not here…
It didn't feel separate anymore.
It was here now.
Inside her. Outside of that place.
Not a part of her.
All of her.
— I'm here, — She insisted desperately, rocking slightly as she choked on her words. — I'm in my apartment, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe—
Every word rang hollow.
It didn't matter.
It only rained on already wet pavement, making pools deeper. But it didn't make a difference.
Because she remembered saying it before.
And being wrong.
Silence.
Just for a second.
Total. Blank.
Her breath stopped.
Her mind… didn't.
What if it wasn't over?
What if there was… no "over"?
Pulse roared in her ears.
Her head snapped up suddenly — eyes wide, tear catching on her cheek and freezing here.
Her gaze scanned the dark corners of her room. Lock on the door. Closed. Normal.
Not stretching.
Not breathing.
Not watching.
Not bolting wide open, with someone behind it screaming a cheerful "Good Morgen!"
Flat. Still. Lifeless in a way that felt staged.
She couldn't trust it.
Any of it.
She couldn't trust anything anymore.
Knocking on the walls grew louder, angrier, and suddenly she felt like a small child hiding from night horrors.
A sob tore out of her chest, loud and raw. She pressed both hands over her mouth, but it didn't stop anything — it didn't stop the sound, didn't stop the shaking. Sobs forced their way through anyway even though she was tired of crying.
— No, I want— I want it to be fake— I want one of them to be fake, I want—
Nothing answered.
Because neither was.
That was the truth clawing its way through the panic.
She hadn't imagined it.
She hadn't dreamed it.
She hadn't been replaced.
She hadn't… escaped.
Not really.
Not truly.
Pomni squeezed shut her eyes, tears leaking through closed eyelids, cold and hot against her skin.
Two lives who separated from one.
Two versions of memories trapped in one.
Suddenly became a lone person again.
Not two anymore.
Just one.
Overwritten.
One human mind trying, absently, — and failing — to hold them both at once.
Her breathing stuttered, hitched, then broke into a ragged screaming that lasted until there was no air in her lungs left. Not a breath. Not for a second. Just empty, dry lungs.
And when it stopped—
Nothing replaced it.
And the chance of ever feeling whole crumbled into a simple missed opportunity.
In the dark, in her perfectly ordinary apartment, Pomni… or, maybe, Michelle now? Or again?…
No—
—she just stayed on the floor, shaking, unable to tell where one ended and the other began.
Trying to survive something that had already happened to her.
And now was happening once again.
But this time,
Only inside her.