Mirror
It’s… peaceful. Black and dark and never ending, yet peaceful all the while. Like what you imagine drifting through the sky would be like. Soaring through the clouds, not caring where you’re going. It’s like this for a while. You don’t know the exactly how long this time is, but it seems pretty long.
After this long while, a light starts to appear in the midst of the blackness. It’s so faint you can hardly make it out at first, but it soon becomes brighter and brighter. Like a frog in a pot of boiling water slowly being heated up, it doesn’t bother you at first until you realized you’re being blinded, blinded by this light. You try and close your eyes, but they’re already closed…? Either that or you can’t move, can’t do anything, but it doesn’t matter because soon the light bursts and you open your eyes.
The first thing you see is your reflection. Reflected in the mirror is your face, tired and worn, looking like you haven’t slept in days, and that’s probably true. But that’s not the only tired you’re experiencing. You’re tired of your father. You’re tired of having to get up everyday and be subjected to his will. You’re tired of having to put on a fake smile everyday, reassuring anyone like Alphys who asks you ‘Hey, are you doing okay?’ or Papyrus who asks ‘Has it been worse recently?’. You’re tired of having to say, ‘no, i’m fine, it’s all okay.’ even though it’s really the opposite of okay. You’re tired of this. You’re tired of living like this. You’re tired. You’re tired!
You punch the mirror in front of you, immediately causing it to shatter into millions of shards. Glass sprays everywhere, and your first thought is, ‘thank god no one’s home right now.’ Your second thought is that you’ll be in so much trouble for this when your father comes home and finds out you broke the mirror in the one bathroom in the whole house.
Looking down at your hand, you realize it’s still covered in glass. You brush the small fragments of pieces off with your other hand, and take a closer look at the damage done. Small cuts line the bone, and you figure the only reason your hand isn’t in a lot of pain right now would be from the adrenaline rush you just experienced. Unfortunately, your adrenaline is starting to wear off as the seconds tick by, so you make full use of your hand before it hurts to much to grab anything.
Quickly taking a small dust pan and broom from under the sink, you start to clean up the rest of the shattered glass on the floor. It’s relatively quick work, what with adrenaline still pumping through you, but your damaged hand is beginning to feel the full extent of its injuries.
You dump the broken pieces from the pan and into a small trash can, and you can only hope the cheap garbage bag doesn’t break from the glass piercing through it. Fortunately, you’ve been granted some luck today, as when you tie the bag up in a knot at the top and throw it in the corner of the room, no large holes are present from what you can tell. Your dad’s not going to be home until later tonight, but you still have to remember to hide the bag full of what used to be the mirror. That and, oh, just the little thing of finding an actual mirror to replace the one you broke.
That emotional breakdown will have to wait for later though, as your hand probably should be bandaged up right about now. Going yet again underneath the sink, you grab a roll of bandages and start to wrap up your hand. It hurts… but somehow in a good way? It’s hard to describe, but it's a sort of distracting feeling, you guess. When you feel the pain, it’s all your mind can focus on. And it also offers a feeling of… something. Something that’s not nothing. And of course that doesn’t really make sense, but it also doesn’t make sense that you… like it? Just a bit.
And it’s different from when your father hits you and beats you because, hey, look. You push down into one of the deeper cuts on your hand and it stings. You’re in control of this pain. You can choose how much or how little by how hard you press and that’s just it. You’re the one in control. (You’ve gone insane, haven’t you?)
You try and shake yourself out of your thoughts. You can think about that later. Right now you have to go into town with the little money you have of your own, and try to find the exact same mirror that you broke. Yeah. Focus on that right now, and not the fact you want to punch another mirror just to get the stinging sensation of glass digging into your bone again. Focus.
...The memory fades out, leaving you back in your peaceful state of black bliss for a few moments, but it’s not long before you’re facing yourself in the mirror once again.
The spare nail you found somewhere in your room hovers above your chest, tightly clenched in your hand. Your shirt is off along with your sweatshirt, both crumpled in the corner of the bathroom where you threw them. Dark circles line your eye sockets and you look away from the mirror in favor a looking at your fairly smooth ribcage. Yeah, a few bumps and cracks from your father and other various injuries, but other than that, it’s clean.
Are you… really going to do this? The thought seemed so preposterous at first, but your mind just kept going back to the pain. How… good it felt? How good it felt when that mirror broke and embedded itself into your hand. And well. You’re obviously messed up in the head, your father even said that right to your face. You’re not normal. You’re wrong. So, it’s a deserved pain like your father’s beatings, but one you can control as well.
You take a deep breath. Looks like you’re doing this. You gently press the tip of the nail into the bone of your ribcage. You breath out, and push the nail as deep as you willing to go right now, and drag it across your chest. It… hurts, yes, but not as much as you expected. You pick a clean spot and do it once more, and again, and again, each time willing yourself a little harder, a little deeper.
It feels good, well not good, but it’s nice, as much as you hate to admit it. You have to stop though, because your hands are shaking to much to hold the nail still because of your excitement and anxiety over what you just did.
You place the nail down on the sink, and take a moment to survey the damage. Scratches, that’s really all they are, line a small area of bone along your ribcage. It’s not much, really, but it helped. And maybe next time you’ll be able to dig deeper.
...Blackness covers you vision yet again until you’re facing that damned mirror once more.
You’re looking… worse for wear. The circles around your eyes are even bigger and darker than the last memory, and with your shirt off once again, you can see the surplus of grooves that now mark your chest.
By now, you’ve grown used to this. Each time going a little further, a little deeper. It certainly doesn’t help that your HP is lower than is used to be; you’ve almost fainted a few times by losing too much.
But it’s like an addiction, no, it is an addiction. But by now you’ve grown so used to it, so used to wanting it and doing it, that it would be alien to not act on your urges. That and the simple fact: you deserve it. First off, you can’t even please your own father, so much so that he has to resort to measures he shouldn’t have to go to. Every mistake you make earns a punishment that’s definitely deserved, but the problem with you is that you make too many mistakes. You’re just punishing yourself for the ones your father won’t. Like when you fail to protect Papyrus, who could never do anything wrong, from your father’s cruelty.
So, you cope. Cope in a way you know is completely unhealthy and nonsensical, but hey, it’s helping you. And you don’t really care if it’s dangerous and will lead to problems later in life, because you don’t care about later in life. You can’t see yourself later in life. The only thing you’re good for is protecting Papyrus, even though you fail at that most of the time, but you try. And once Papyrus grows up and is able to leave your father and become independant, your life really doesn’t have a value. Doesn’t have a purpose.
And doing this is the easy way out, but it doesn’t really matter in the long run because you don’t matter.
You feel another sting as once again you swipe the nail across your chest.