nexus_crossings | Icy Mirrors and Mistaken Identities

Icy Mirrors and Mistaken Identities

Unlike the sudden freeze of last Winter, this year there has been a subtle chill, a gradual progression of frost across grass and stone. It nips at your skin should you forget to wrap up, but is otherwise harmless. That is, apart from one section of the Nexus.

It seems to wander in the blink of an eye. Here one moment, gone the next. Sometimes slyly, sometimes by placing itself directly in a traveller's path. Either way the area is shrouded in a thick fog that is staggeringly luminous, suggesting a strong, obscured sun is trying to get through but only succeeding in illuminating the air itself. Even the most frequent Nexus visitors soon find themselves lost. It's eerily still, there is only the sound of your breathing, of your footsteps crunching frost and thin ice.

As you venture further you spot silhouettes standing in the distance. Drawing closer you find tall slabs of ice are scattered throughout the misty landscape. They all tower over you, and the perfectly cut surfaces all shine like mirrors back at you. The more you walk, the more of them seem to have erupted from the earth, until you catch yourself moving in the corner of your eye. At least, you thought it was yourself. You soon find yourself wondering: Are you alone?

((Winter Event! Hurrah! This event allows you to bring out a doppelgänger for your character to cause chaos or try out a different side of them! Details can be found here. Or for questions and plotting, the OOC post is here. Threadhopping and mixing up characters and doppelgängers is definitely encouraged. Feel free to ask me anything and, most importantly, have fun!))

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"Depends on the day. Seconds, minutes..."

Hours.

Voices crowing with glee horrible things that shake Josh's foundations and leave him a sobbing mess curled up into a tiny ball and hiding away from the world. but this isn't about him right now. It's about Adia and Josh is determined to help as much as he's able to.

"Hold my hand. Touch it. See? You can tell it's real. It's cold. Solid. That's how I know what's real."

She doesn't need to resort to pain, Josh thinks. Adia's got a solid head on her shoulders. She's not like him.

Her nervous gaze on the approaching image of herself, Adia fumbles for Josh's hand before gripping it tightly. Her own hand is cold as well, and shaking slightly.

Relaxing a little at the realness of his touch, she exhales slowly. "...thanks. I'm glad you're here." Her doppelganger rolls her eyes again, but Adia ignores it, focusing her attention on Josh instead. "It... it must be rough, to hallucinate in the Nexus, when things are already so strange..."

Oh, it must be sooo rough, her mirror image squeals in a mockery of Adia's sympathetic tone before sticking a finger in her mouth and pretending to gag. Save the doe eyes for someone who gives a frak and work on getting us out of here, okay? This is boring.

Thankfully, Adia does not seem anywhere close to a sobbing mess. In fact, she's looking a little pissed. "Are your hallucinations mean?" she whispers, glaring daggers at the figure that only she can see. "Mine is really mean."

"Years of trial and error, Adia."

Josh doesn't force any more contact on his friend, content with his other hand in his jacket as he looks around them at the fog. There's got to be a way out of this stuff. But he knows firsthand how dangerous wandering in low visibility can be after years on Blackwood Mountain.

"It is." Seeing things in the nexus, he means. "Sometimes I have to watch other people. See if they're seeing the same things I am." He gives her hand a reassuring squeeze when she gets visibly upset.

"Usually they're really mean." Not that Josh doesn't deserve it. He's a monster. "They know how to hit you where it hurts. What makes you vulnerable, ashamed."

Because in the end, it's all you.

It does not go past Adia, the amount of time Josh has been suffering from hallucinations, but if she says she's sorry again, she'll only sound ridiculous. "I'm glad you have a system," she says instead.

"This one is..." Her mirror image gives her a challenging look, as if daring to describe her. "I don't know... it's worse that you can't see her. It makes me wish she was an alternate instead."

Honey, you don't want that, trust me. Who'd be your friend if they had me around instead?

Adia keeps her hand firmly in Josh's. He's not about to leave her alone, even if she's being completely pathetic. There has to be a way out of this awful fog...

"Oh, my PINpoint!" Adia pulls what looks like a glorified stopwatch out of her coat pocket with her free hand. "This can take us back to the Plaza. Can you get where you need to go from there, or will you have to pass through this fog again?"

"Glad it's gonna be useful to someone other than me for a change."

Knowing his tested coping mechanisms are helping someone else nearly makes Joshua smile. Now isn't the time for such a thing, but he can't help the slight upwelling of confidence. That he knows how to help Adia even a little bit. He's useful to his friends. not just a burden.

"Tell her to suck your nonexistent dick and step off." josh turns away from where Adia is staring and takes a long look around the fog. He turns back when she mentions her PINpoint. "Back to the Plaza? Yeah, I can find my way around there. If it'll get us outta here by all means."

"It is," Adia says sincerely. "I could have been lost here by myself, or with someone who didn't understand what I was going through." Which, if she's being honest, she doesn't entirely understand herself. Did hallucinations really look and sound this real? Her mirror image is so vivid, so... so bright.

So much prettier, a voice whispers, but she can't tell if that's coming from the other Adia or herself.

Josh's vulgar suggestion brings a bit of color back to her face; she tries to ignore her doppelganger's raucous laughter as she puts her finger on one of the PINpoint's buttons. "You already have my hand, so that's good. Some people get a little nauseous when they teleport, just to warn you."

She taps the button. Nothing happens. Adia looks around in confusion before reading the error message on her PINpoint's tiny screen.

Service temporarily unavailable. Try again in 5 minutes.

"I... I don't understand. I've never had it not work in the Nexus." Her hand twitches, like she might pull away from Josh's grip in embarrassment. It's the one thing she could have done to help, and she blew it.

Somebody frakked u~up, her mirror image sing-songs. Guess who's become a little too reliant on her PINpoint?

Adia clutches the PINpoint hard enough to turn her knuckles white. "Shut up," she whispers. "It's not my fault."

"I'm used to nausea. Gun it."

Josh gives Adia's hand a reassuring squeeze while she fumbles with the device in her hand--her PINpoint Josh assumes. Nothing happens. He can see shock and fear on Adia's face and knows before she says anything that it wouldn't be so simple. He fumbles with his free hand to reach for his phone and turn on the flashlight function to give them a bit more light in this place.

"Come on. Leave her here. We'll fin our own way out if we have to."

"I'm sorry," Adia says softly, unable to look Josh in the eyes. "I can try again in five minutes. M-maybe it'll work then..."

Or maybe he'll get bored and leave you here instead, her doppleganger comments blithely. Wouldn't be the first time!

The light from Josh's phone bounces off the thick fog, giving it an even more eerie glow. However, one direction seems less populated by the tall slabs of reflective ice. Maybe that's the best way to go.

"What if she follows us?" Adia half-whispers, turning away from her mirror image and letting Josh lead her wherever he chooses. "How do you learn to ignore them?"

"It's fine. We'll figure this out."

Josh is glad there's A direction that seems to have less of those godawful ice mirrors than the rest of this place. It's as good a direction to go in as any with nothing else to go on in this place. The cold is starting to seep into Josh's clothes. He hadn't been dressed for an hours long excursion outside. This was supposed to have been just a quick trip to get food.

"We can't stop her if she does." There's sympathy in his tone and in those green eyes when he looks over his shoulder at his friend. "...I uh...I don't. Very well. If we're bein' honest."

"O-okay." Adia is going to let Josh take the lead on this, both literally and figuratively. She tucks her useless PINpoint away and adjusts the scarf around her neck, trying to keep out more of the cold.

It's the answer she expected, not that it makes it any easier to hear. She squeezes his hand a little, at his admission. "So... so what do you do, then?"

"I don't...always know it's not real. So, I treat 'em like anyone else. I tend to assume most shit I see isn't real unless it proves it is. Touch. Things I can touch, things that hurt me. Physically. That I know is real. but I don't know half of my friends in the Nexus are real or just more hallucinations, waiting to turn from nice to nasty the minute I let my guard down."

Josh doesn't want to tell Adia what he does. How he screams at things to get away from him because they're not real. How he digs his nails into his hands until he breaks skin to see if they disappear or not. How sometimes even that doesn't help.

"So I just act like nothing is real."

It sounds hard; both living like that and admitting it to her. She wishes she had something to say that would ease his burden, something sympathetic, but her own mental issues seem insignificant compared to his. "Things that can hurt you?" she echoes instead, her voice soft and uncertain. "Even in the Nexus?"

You're way too much of a wimp to try that, her doppelganger scoffs. Adia hazards a glance back. The other her is still there, but not quite keeping pace. Some of the fog has obscured her features.

She remembers her hand in Josh's. "So you know I'm real," she says with a small, relieved smile. "You've known since the Halloween party, when you helped me with my make-up." She looks him in the eyes. "Josh, if I'm ever nasty to you, it's not me. It would never be me."

"They can, if you let 'em. I want them to. Prove they're Real. It's worth the pain."

It doesn't work though because the people who are real refuse to hurt him, just like those that aren't. Still Josh feels like it's a good system. He hasn't thought of a better one, at least.

"Yeah." Josh exhales a breath that condenses into a cloud in front of his face. "Everyone's nasty to me. Even Chris. I think those might be dreams though. Hallucinations. Sometimes, it's hard to tell."

"I thought touch was enough," Adia asks quietly, her voice worried and confused. She wonders if Josh is trying to punish himself somehow. She doesn't know how his sisters died, or how he ended up starving nearly to death in a collapsed mine, but she can empathize with wanting to blame oneself for all of life's losses.

Or maybe it's a guy thing, a macho way of fighting against fear. She gives him another small, sympathetic smile. "That won't work with me. I've never thrown a punch in my life."

Maybe that's why you're so easy to push around, her doppelganger calls out, but Adia doesn't turn around this time.

There's a spot in the fog in front of them where the light from Josh's phone cuts through instead of bouncing back. Looks like they might be on the right path.

"Sometimes it is. Most times, even."

Josh nods along with what Adia's saying. When things are Bad, nothing helps. Sometimes not even pain. Her guess about his desire to punish himself isn't wrong in the slightest. No one hates Joshua Washington more than he hates himself. His worst enemies can only dream that they could hate so vitriolically.

"...Yeah, most everyone refuses to try. It makes things hard." But Josh hasn't let go of Adia's hand. Despite the discomfort he has about the subject matter, he's doing his best to keep her focused on him and not the voices in her head.

It's a small relief that he's not out getting himself beat up constantly. "You can always take my hand or something if you're ever in doubt with me," she says, squeezing his hand for emphasis. "But, no, I'm not going to hurt you."

He must be doing something right. She's stopped looking over her shoulder, although she can still hear the faint heel clicks of her doppelganger. "Who's Chris?" she asks, remembering his previous comment.

Funny, how the people who like him don't seem to want to hurt him. There's a kind of logic there, but to Josh it's frustration because the hallucinations who very much don't like him also refuse to hurt him. Physically. They can do more than enough damage emotionally.

The squeeze makes him slow his steps and look down at their joined hands for a moment.

"..Well, I don't need anyone to hurt me right now. I'm fine. ....For once." And with Adia not making any more outbursts into the fog, Josh hopes she's doing alright too. Though, she'll feel Josh tensing when she mentions Chris. He's forgotten he was the one who brought it up. But he's been gone for a while. Too long. How does he explain Chris to anyone else? Losing Chris was worse than losing a limb. He's been with Josh for so long.

He's..

"My best friend. I've known him forever. We're....really close. Closer than anyone." It's a start.

To be fair, Adia doesn't want to hurt anyone. But the thought of taking a swing at Josh is almost laughable, if this were at all a laughing matter.

She slows down to match his pace, worried about what's on his mind. Did she say something wrong by asking? It's a small favor that her doppelganger doesn't interject with some harsh comment while she waits for Josh to answer.

"Oh..." She smiles sadly. "I had someone like that. That... that must make the hallucinations pretty bad. To have someone who cares about you be cruel." Not that her own hallucination is a walk in the park, but a cruel-talking Caspar? She'd be absolutely gutted.

"Most of the people I see are people I love and care for."

The admission is quiet. A bit distant. His grip on Adia's hand tightens slightly as though he's trying to ground himself to the here and the now.

"My sisters most frequently. My friends. Chris. Dr. Hill..." Josh sighs and shakes his head gently. "It's something I've dealt with for a very long time." He glances back to her after a moment.

"Is yours changing at all? Or just you?"

She gives a sympathetic wince at the mention of his sisters, knowing that seeing them must hit the hardest of all. "I think you must be very strong, to deal with that for as long as you have." He must be doing something right, she wouldn't have known about any of this if he hadn't told her. "Was Doctor Hill your... um, was he helping you?"

His question makes her look over her shoulder. "Just me. But she's wearing a dress."

That's the best you can describe me? Her mirror image makes a face. At least tell him how much hotter I am than you.

"She's like every mean girl I ever went to school with," Adia says, ducking her head and turning away. It really isn't fair that she gets to look better, too.

"...Yeah, but he's not...the one that's here...that's not him. That--he's...He shouldn't be real."

He had thought the Dr. Hill in the nexus was just another hallucination. It certainly acted the way Josh's imaginary therapist always did. Appearing out of nowhere, twisting reality around at a moment's notice. But Chris could see him too. Everyone could. But he was still changing things. Manipulating things. Was Josh so crazy even his hallucination twisted nightmares of people were becoming real?

Yes, actually.

"My real therapist is normal....it's not the same...He's not.." A sigh that ends the tapered off attempt to explain. Josh focuses on Adia instead.

"Well, that's not so bad. I mean, you know you're not a bitch so. It's better if she's not convincingly close to you. Easier to ignore and remind yourself...she's not real." A beat, and Josh finds himself remembering another friend. One with dark hair and eyes who was always harsh but cared fiercely for her friends. He wonders, not for the first time, if Emily is okay.

He hopes she is. Hopes they all are.

"With people like...like that. Don't give them the satisfaction of a retort. Don't let 'em see that they get to you. Nothing drives 'em more crazy than to think you're ignoring them."

Josh's explanation is confusing. "Do you think he is an alternate?" It's her go-to explanation for these sorts of situations. "I haven't met him... should I avoid him?"

"No, it's not so bad," she agrees quietly. She knows that she's not a bitch. She keeps uncharitable thoughts to herself. Even when people might deserve to hear it because they were cruel to her first. No, she just turns the other cheek, and lets that one get slapped, too. And that makes her a better person. Right?

Ignoring worked out sooo well for you back then, her mirror image says sarcastically. Really got those girls to back off and stop making fun of you.

Josh is trying to help her. She focuses on that instead of a pile of insecure memories. "Do you think that's... that's a weird thing to hallucinate? Should she be someone else?"

"A what?"

That sort of explanation had never occurred to Joshua before. That this could somehow be someone else's Doctor Hill. That he could be real, and not just some sick figment of his twisted imagination. That there were an infinite possibilities of his life, his friends, his...family..

There are worlds where his sisters are still alive.

"Hngh...nnnuhhh...nnn!" Josh's grip on her hand is tight, nearly painfully so. If the AV field wasn't in tact, he'd probably be hurting her quite a bit. She's talking to him though. Pay attention, Joshua. He doesn't seem to see her when he turns and looks. It feels as though he's looking through her, to something only he can see.

"Dep...depends on w-what upsets you th'most..."

Adia lets out a gasp when Josh squeezes uncomfortably tight. She's well-aware how close he is to actually hurting her, and that, combined with his vacant stare and stuttering words, immediately put her on edge.

You had one job. Her mirror image clicks her tongue disapprovingly.

"H-hey... Hey, Josh, it's okay. I don't know what I said wrong, I'm sorry." She doesn't pull her hand away... not that she thinks she could if she tried. "I'm going to try my PINpoint again, okay? It's been five minutes." She pulls the device out with her free hand, nearly drops it onto the hard ground. "Don't let go."

She presses the button to take her back to the Plaza. This time, blessedly, it works.

He wants to articulate why it's so upsetting. Why the realization is enough to shake the foundations. How can he know what's real when any possibility of things could be real here in the nexus? How will he ever know that the Chris he sees here is the same one from his world? If Dr. Hill truly knows him the way he claims to?

What if the things Chris told him about that night were wrong? Wrong because they were from different versions of the same world? What if Josh...actually had killed like they had accused him of doing. There is no redemption from something like that. And he doesn't remember that night very well. He could have done anything.

What if...trying to start over in the Nexus is just him running from his punishment? How could Adia stand looking at him? A murderer. A monster. She might be the one seeing things right now, but he's the truly terrible thing here.

" ...Is she still here?" His voice is so quiet. So weak.

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