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Lifeless	By : disscordia Category: +S through Z > WW: World of Darkness Views: 1097 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Regardless of the mostly indirect references to story elements here, I personally neither own Changeling: The Lost nor intend to profit from the paltry prose presented here.

Chapter List
- 1-Lifeless
- 1
He heard it again. Soft, breathy, a sound like mice skittering through a wheat field at night, tickled behind him. He ignored it, he tried to at least, but the noise persisted. Like clockwork he turned and saw the others painted blue by the lamplight � their names escaped him, they often did � attendant on the instructor at the head of the class. The girl looked at him. He stared back a moment and she looked away disinterested. He stared into the shadows throbbing at the peripherals of his vision, glanced back and forth, but the darkened lecture hall betrayed nothing. He turned facefront again.
The whispers returned.
Stuffing his notes in his bag quietly as he could he slipped down the aisle and out the back door. The others ignored him, too engrossed lapping up every word and diagram of the arcane sciences revealed in that hall he could never quite wrap his brain around. Bad enough that he couldn't concentrate, but the noises, that unsettling feeling of a subtle shudder running through the fabric of the world was getting worse of late. It was like the feeling of someone standing still and perfectly quiet right behind him where nothing seemed to be. Sitting in the dark didn't help, even with a room full of people around him. He had to get out, back into the skin-sallowing incandescent world that dominated his days and illuminated nights.
It was an old part of the University he emerged into; a sinking hallway that was fracturing due to a poor foundation the original founders had failed to take into consideration and the general disregard their successors had adopted rather than rectifying it properly. Instead a patchwork of half-started repairs, mismatched tiles and crumbling grout peeked out from behind the antiquated, recent and newly-forgotten flyers that decorated the walls as some communal, subconscious attempt to banish the pallor-like varnish under a swarm of bargain announcements for many-times used paraphernalia ranging from the mundane to the necessary with the occasionally hapless �refurbished� pet in-between.
The Science Halls shared part of their territory with the Power Plant. This section in particular was close to the turbines that thrummed softly like the unyielding lungs of some hidden, gargantuan thing that used the walls as resonators for its perpetual, rumbling voice. Pipes and gauges of indiscernible function broke sporadically through the ceiling, petering off just as impudently through the walls and floors like a rough interlude of bone into a flesh symphony. Low-income lighting sallowed the skin of any faculty or student passing through too occupied with quantum equations to notice the effects of an environment reveling in its entropy. The young man passed quickly through into his place of quietude.
The washroom was empty, thank gods, not that it was any quieter. If anything the hidden turbines roared more pervasively here, but as a blissful sound that washed out all other noise in their reverberations. Kevin � that's what his name was � dropped his bag on the floor and ran some water from the tap, splashing his hands through the cold stream and burying his face in it. Hidden from the clinical world, encased in a peach void of numbness, he let the frustrations of his mind stagger through his breath. Ten ragged exhalations later he looked out.
�Godsdammit,� he muttered to the no one with himself, �it's getting worse.�
He looked at his reflection in the mirror. At twenty-four he stood on the brink of graduation with a head full of short-cropped fading bleach-blond spiked hair, some ear piercings, a slightly toned build with chiseled features that turned heads, and nineteen years of squandered lies behind him. He was a faker and knew it. He somehow faked his way into school, tricked his way into higher education using pity and that glib tongue that got him out of more trouble than it should, and now the piper was coming to call.
It wasn't that he was dumb or didn't understand the classes � far from it. He knew the information went into his head somewhere long enough to pass tests and write bullshit papers that won him bullshit grades, but it was all a lie. Ask him what he studied the year before, the previous semester, he couldn't say. It was as if nothing stayed, as if nothing was retained. Six years college, twenty years schooling, twenty-four years alive, what could he tell anyone about it? Nothing. What secrets had he discerned of the universe or human nature? Absolutely nothing.
And yet, it wasn't as if his life was empty. Of course there had been great times. There had been times that sucked: quick fucks in the park, long weekends playing games with friends; cars broken into, stolen, wrecked, road trips, lovers, heartbreaks, experimenting with hash; the shit stuff you're supposed to do while you can get away with it, when the consequences are minor and you can still reform what you're going to do with your life.
But his life hadn't changed � or rather it had all too often. He was on his fifth change of major and not one whit closer to committing to it than he had any of the others. Science suited him no better than computers, art or athletics. He couldn't concentrate on the formulas long enough to make sense of them. He'd lose interest in the reading assignments less than a page in. Book reports and semester projects could be thrown completely together the night before with a six-pack of cold coffee and the occasional hookup. His commitment to succeeding was slowly eroding away and the reason why, he was beginning to realize, was that he didn't care.
His life wasn't shit, that wasn't the problem. It was too easy. It was too empty. He could see where it was going and in the end, for all the ups and downs, successes and victories it'd all amounted to nothing. In the end all he did would come to nothing.
�Fuck,� he sighed. His reflection seemed to share his resentment. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the mirror, the turbine's thrum pistoning its rhythm numbingly into his head. �Fuck.�
The dream kept recurring. He was in the hall again, moving through its decadence like smoke in a glass maze. He'd fallen asleep in that amphitheatre-like lecture hall while taking a test, waking up in the dark with the projector light casting an arctic light over the empty chamber. The university was abandoned, yet wherever he went he kept returning to the quiet spot, to his reclusive washroom deep within the heart of the underground labyrinth that made up the Science wing. Only, instead of a reflection in the mirror it was something like his reflection he was going to see; something very much like him, that looked like him, only not; different but in some inconceivable way.
The first night he didn't notice much of a difference but there were clues. When he smiled his reflection seemed to smile a half-second after it should. When he turned his reflection was likewise delayed, as if played in some strange time-shift, sometimes slower, sometimes faster in trying to keep up. The entire time he couldn't help shake the feeling that it was watching him, observing, seeing through cold, alien, implacable eyes.
The second night was worse. Rather than finding his way to the washroom he was being stalked, finding relief only once he made it inside the chamber with its deceitful mirror. This time his reflection made no shame of hiding its autonomy. It was studying him, that much was certain, yet it was still his face; still the same face that had greeted him back his entire life. How could he not recognize that the soulless stare gazing back at him was his own? And yet there was something different. His reflection's goatee was slightly longer than his should be and spikier. His reflection's limbs seemed to bend in odd places. And then there was the faint earthy scent seeping in through the stagnant smell of urine; a smell of woodland and vegetable things.
The third night he ended up running into the washroom. The Science Hall had turned into a veritable place of omen and foreboding. Lights spasmed, pipes grew thornier shapes, leaflets looked more like leaves dripping off a dark and crumbling cave. In the washroom was peace, however, and safety. Even his reflection's transformations seemed less unsettling and more inviting. Like an expected friend his mirror-self was there waiting for him. It had more bestial aspects to it � longer, hairier ears like those belonging to some farmyard animal and thinner, almost backward-bending legs. His reflection moved independently of him almost completely now which made it seem more like a second person, though still enough of a mimic to throw a chill down his spine every now and again. Still, and despite this, he simply could not deny the burgeoning magnetic attraction he felt seeing himself so animated and yet so different, as if infused with some purpose beyond his current ken.
The fourth night the university was all but gone. In its place was a hedge beset by thorns monstrously high and dense enough to block out the sun. Every now and then he'd come across some industrial implement almost absurdly out of place amidst the foliage yet still reminiscent of the occultish array which permeated the Science building. The machine thrumming was still around yet it was now accented by other sounds, of alien birds calling alongside a stranger host of menagerie. The smell of nature was profound, bleeding at all sides like an oceanic presence equally crushing and intoxicating. Only now, instead of a washroom it was a clearing that Kevin came to with the same decaying mirror suspended ostentatiously in the middle of nothing. It was then that Kevin noticed the dream reflection-self that was not him, and yet at the same time was, had removed itself from the realm of glass and pane.
�I've been waiting for you,� a far too recognizable voice purred somewhere beside his ear. Kevin froze as a dark shape stepped out of the briar shadows behind the floating mirror-pane and into view.
It was him, or at least what his reflection had been turning into. It wore his clothes, the same chiseled features, yet torn patches in its trousers revealed more goatlike features. A short, stubby tail for one, the unmistakably soft, floppy ears poking out through a wildly spiky set of sideburns, short, brownish curled horns and, from the torn off legs of its trousers, two unmistakably goatlike legs. The only thing not goatlike were the short fangs that seemed to act as extensions of his twisted reflection's canines, both upper and lower, glinting out of its mouth whenever it grinned, which Kevin noticed was more often than he ever did.
The most unsettling aspect of his mirror-self made flesh, however, was the uncanny magnetism it somehow seemed to exert over him even from a distance. Kevin had in his own life indulged in more than his fair share of seduction and could thereby tell when someone was falling and falling hard, but rarely had he personally felt as he did now in the presence of his autonomous, alien self so potently and full of heat. And yet, some strange portion of his mind thought, why not? Narcisissm is, after all our first and greatest love. Why shouldn't my dream-self be the ideal lover I've always wanted?
�Poor, sad and pathetic doll,� his mirror-self said advancing, �Lost, empty, aimless and hollow. Left to nothingness by a capricious, amoral god. Don't even know the good thing you got, you squander it all.� In the darkness of the clearing Kevin had backed up against the hedge, thorns pricking his thighs as he squirmed away from the dangerously lustful being. �Gods I fucking hate you.�
�It shoulda been you,� the reflection continued, �Raped. Beaten. Mutilated over and over again for no reason. 'Stead you get the good life here, among the ignorant. You get a life. You got my life.� The reflection leered closer now, his hot breath seeming of woodsmoke and verdant green things. Kevin shivered back, attraction raging in his veins as strongly as the fear and anticipation telling him to run.
�Well guess what?� his satyr-self asked unbuttoning his shirt, scented breath dancing down the curled fur growing there.
�I want it back.�
It didn't hurt so often now. At least, it didn't hurt so long. And he couldn't deny that he not-so-secretly liked it, looked forward to it even, even while he was crying, sobbing into the turf of that alien thorn forest. Even while his dream-mirror-self was calling him names, cursing him, hating him, biting him, fucking him he could sense the lust in that voice, the envy. It craved this as much as he did, filling his dreams with that ravening pain as surely as it filled his body with its seed over and over again, riding him raw, beating him bloody.
Sometimes there were chains. Sometimes he was blinded, or choked. Sometimes, even, his mirror-self was gentle, caressing him almost as soon as he caused pain, stroking each mark the strap left, brushing his lips across his flesh to intensify the sensations of heat or cold that would inevitably follow.
Sometimes, even, his mirror-self cried. In the middle of the rape, while it was happening, hot tears of base vengeance would splatter across his back or chest, whichever position he'd been subdued into that night, complementing the salty semen that would seep from his tortured ass throughout the whole of it.
Cries of pain mixed with moans of need and the ever-prevalent throbbing motors of the dream-briars amidst their fevered, animal rutting. As one moved so did the other, sliding out hard and slamming in fast to feed the hot and hungry darkness. It became ritual. It became rhyme, filling him. And it came, oh it came, again and again. The hot seed spilling within him became lubrication for the next penetrating abuse, and the next onward till his mirror's slime slipped out bathing them in its cream.
It became cycle and expectation. The dream-nightmares of wanton rape at the hands of his own perverted self. It became obsession. And then one night his mirror-self did the unthinkable. In the midst of its passion it kissed him, as if it were no longer rape, as if it were consensual sex between two lovers. And then the rape-dreams stopped.
Had that been an end to it Kevin might have driven himself mad. He had failed out of the University, unable to keep obligations, unwilling to see his projects through. He might have very well ended himself.
And then he found out his mirrored dream-self was real. The leering satyr-him with insatiable lust was real, flesh and blood and a dose of magic, oh yes. Oh he'd find him, Kevin would. There'd be a long discussion the two of them would have - of dreams, of wasting, of failure and lust. Of who was the real Kevin.
Then, Kevin grinned, then they'd see who'd rape whom.
- 1
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Lifeless