Who chosethis.
The face in the mirror hasn't changed.
I reach up slowly and grip the edge of my mask. The leather is warm from my skin, the straps familiar under my fingertips. I've been wearing it all day. Put it on this morning out of habit, the way you put on shoes or brush your teeth.
The straps release.
The mask comes away and my chest goes cold and tight.
For years, the glimpses have been accidental. Quick enough to look away, to file underalready knew thatand move on.
This is different.
One side could belong to anyone. Could belong to Nash. That's the sick joke of it. Half a face that works, that people might actually want to look at, and then the other side that belongs in a medical textbook or a horror movie.
My gaze crosses the bridge of my nose like stepping off a cliff.
It's worse than I remember.
Or maybe it's exactly as bad and I'd been softening it in my head, letting memory blur what the mirror won't. The skin isn't skin anymore. It's white where failed grafts are thin enough to show bone, pinker where the nerve damage keeps blood too close to the surface.
The cheek is gone, torn away into a freakish grin. The worst part, maybe. The teeth. The visible jaw hinge and muscles flexing when I clench. All the teeth on that side exposed, what remains of my lips on that side pulled into a grotesque snarl.
Even right now, happy for the first time in my fucking life, I look furious and dangerous. Evil, even.
And, fuck… the eye.
I'd forgotten how wrong it looks with both sides visible at once. It just stares, lidless and unblinking. The pupil is permanently blown, a black void ringed by the same blue as the other side.
It can't close. Can't narrow or do any of the thousand small things that make an eye lookhumaninstead of like something pinned open on a dissection tray.
I force myself to keep looking.
Forty million people have already seen this. Screenshotted it, shared it, made memes out of it, written think pieces about it. They blurred it in the thumbnails because showing it uncensored was too disturbing for casual scrolling.
Content warnings.
Trigger warnings.
Viewer discretion advised.
All for my face.
But my hands are steady on the counter.
That's new.
Before, catching a glimpse of my reflection would have sent me into a spiral that ended in a shattered mirror and bloody knuckles. The leaked photos almost put me in a grave. I sat in the mud at Nash's headstone and seriously considered doing what the fire didn't finish.
But the world saw my face.
And my world kept turning.
I'm still here.
A hand brushes my arm and I don't panic because I know who it belongs to.
Bells appears in the mirror, already in her stage whites. The rabbit mask is pushed up on her forehead, her choppy platinum hair swept back from it, long enough now to be wild. The triple mark on her throat—mine, Phoenix's, Raf's—is visible above the neckline of her t-shirt, the three overlapping bites covering the crescent scar that used to own her.