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fan_flashworks2018-12-31 01:02 pm
m_findlow) wrote in fan_flashworks2018-12-31 01:02 pm
Entry tags:
Self Portrait Challenge: Torchwood: Fanfic: Facing the truth
Title: Facing the truth
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 3,059 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 249 - Amnesty and Challenge 11 - Self portrait
Summary: Jack discovers that perception and reality are two different things.
When Jack woke, he felt confused. He slowly turned his head left and then right, unsure if he'd died or just been knocked out cold. All around him were the familiar features of his modest star cruiser, a ship that had served him well now for several years, allowing him to hop back and forth across the galaxies when the mood took him. One thing he couldn't stand was being tied down, or relying on anyone else to get around. There'd been a few run ins with the Doctor, but he still refused to do anything about Jack's wrist strap. If anything, he was convinced it was less effective than before the Doctor had interfered. Having his own ship was a much better proposition these days.
He pushed up out of the pilot's seat, hearing his neck and lower back pop audibly from the effort. Had he crashed? Had he been caught in the orbit of some high density asteroid? He couldn't remember. Through the small windows of the ship he could see only dense blackness. Not a star in sight. He frowned at the diagnostics on screen. They too made no sense. He wasn't in flight, but how had he landed without crashing? It was all very mystifying.
'This is what you get for taking a shortcut, Jack,' he chastised himself. 'Could've used a local star map, but no.'
He'd just been itching to move on. The fastest route was the uncharted one. The local shamans on the planet he'd just left had warned against it. Bad spirits out there, they said. He laughed them off, highly superstitious as he'd found them to be. Jack didn't believe in spirits or ghosts, and certainly not ones that lived out in the depths of space.
He walked to the back of the ship, through the small sleeping area, past facilities for washing and cooking, and into the storage hold at the back. He pressed a button on the panel by the door, first checking for breathable atmosphere and relative air pressure. The panel lit up green. 'So far, so good,' he muttered. He activated the ship's door, stepping out into the inky black. A few steps away from the ship and it disappeared from view like it was enveloped in a black fog. He retraced his path back, but where the ship had once stood, now it was gone. He reached out and tried to feel for it in the dark, but his hands met only empty space.
He spun around, alert and on edge. Peering into the blackness there was nothing, yet something drew him inextricably forward, one tentative step at the time. There was something there, beyond the dark. He could feel it as surely as the pulse of his own beating heart. Forward and further forward still, until suddenly the blackness dropped away all around him, like someone had pulled down a curtain, revealing the truth.
What a strange place, he thought, taking his first look around. Everywhere he turned, the walls and floors, even the ceiling high above him, were covered in reflective mirrors. There was a strange silver glow around the space. Though he couldn't say where it came from, the shiny surfaces all around caused it to rebound endlessly, casting a shimmering light everywhere all at once. How it had previously been consumed by darkness he couldn't fathom.
As he fixed his gaze on the mirrored surface, he became disoriented by the vision. Each mirror reflected the one opposite, above and below, creating an illusion of endless and infinite mirrors, like worlds within worlds. A hundred versions of himself stared back at him over and over again until they disappeared into a pinprick point somewhere off in the far distance. Looking down at the floor he saw a deepening pit of reflections. He blinked, and then held his eyes shut, trying to dispel the dizzying sensation of being suspended over that bottomless pit of imagery, reopening his eyes and keeping them faced forward. He reached out and pressed a hand to the surface, feeling it cool and smooth beneath his palm. Not an illusion, then, he reasoned.
What was this place? he wondered. He remembered the halls of mirrors at the funfair when he'd lived on Earth. There'd been mirrors that made you look tall and slim, others that made you appear short and fat, and other still that seemed to warp your body in all directions, both flattering and unflattering. How he and his love interests had laughed at their reflections, going from one mirror to the next to see what it would reveal. Tall, fat, curvaceous or misshapen, every lover Jack had ever had said the same thing. No matter how the mirrors projected his image, he was still the most beautiful being they'd ever seen.
He leaned forward and closer to the nearest section of mirrors, giving them a winning smile. He clicked his finger and pointed at the Jack smiling back at him. 'A few little crows feet around the eyes but you've still got it, tiger,' he told himself, admiring the face that virtually never changed.
He began to wander the mirrored hallways, exploring at first, wondering where these pathways would lead. They twisted and turned at strange angles, always giving the impression that he was moving forward but in circle, never able to fully establish just how big the space was, even by counting his steps. He eventually grew accustomed to the way the mirrors taunted with his spatial awareness, able to stop himself before he inadvertently ran into one of the walls that curved around him like a lover's embrace, unable to tell reality from reflection.
He expected at some point he would reach some inner sanctum, and though the corridors of self imagery continued to twist and turn, he was finally rewarded for his patience. Though it was difficult to tell he'd enter a much larger space, the uninterrupted wall of silver lead him inside to a bizarre view. The room must have been approximately spherical because the reflections in here were different here. Rather that facing himself, his reflection stood to each side of him, and then again further off in the distance again and again. It was like standing in a field with a thousand versions of himself, all idly milling about. Having so many of himself to keep him company was somehow comforting since he was clearly alone here.
Once he'd gotten to grips with this new scene, he noticed the one other thing in the view that wasn't himself. To one side of the room - and it took him a while to find the tangible original and not its dozen reflections - was a small wooden stool, on top of which sat a book. Jack picked up the worn, leather bound tome and ran a hand across its rough surface. As he did so, a pencil that had been sitting next to it, rolled off the stool and tumbled to the floor with a tiny wooden sound that mysteriously didn't echo the way he expected.
He flipped open the book, finding nothing but blank, unbleached pages. It wasn't much of a book, he decided, until he remembered the pencil lying prostrate near his boot. Not a book but a diary, perhaps? He flicked pages from front to back, finding them all empty, before shutting the book closed and seeing the tiny inscription on the back cover. "The face of truth will set you free."
Jack chuckled. 'I'm gonna need a lot more books and pencils if you want me to write my memoirs,' he said to no one in particular. It amused him that he was talking to an empty room. Though his image was replicated countless times, his voice had a flat quality to it, as if the room absorbed the sound, stealing it away.
Jack sucked in a breath and let it huff out through his nostrils. 'Where would I even begin?' he asked. When the room didn't provide him an answer, he picked up the pencil, flipped open to the first page and began writing.
"I was born on the Boeshane Peninsula, on the planet Artrus in the year 5023..."
As soon as the pencil marked the page the words he'd written disappeared.
'Well, that's pretty pointless. I promise it gets better. Lots of adventure and sex later on.'
He tried again but the words merely soaked into the pages, leaving them just as unblemished as they'd begun. Annoyed, he tossed the book back on the stool. 'You don't wanna play, then fine.'
He continued wandering around the halls, certain there must be a way out of this maze of mirrors. Eventually he saw something that wasn't his own reflection. There was a skeleton sat askew on a wooden stool, just like the one in the central chamber. Its rictus grin taunted him from all directions as it leaned at an unnatural angle, like it had fallen asleep sat there and never woken up. He knelt to inspect it closer, finding something clutched in its bony arms. He prised away a rotten leather book. He carefully pulled open the cover, finding pages were filled with drawings. Page after page, the same face kept appearing, simple at first and then more and more refined as the book wore on. Suddenly the book's final words made sense. It didn't want his story, it wanted his image.
'What happened to you?' he asked the corpse. He suspected he knew the answer already. The poor creature had made a hundred attempts perhaps to draw his own likeness and in the end he'd died here, unable to free himself.
Jack forced himself further down the passage, finding yet another skeleton. Another book. More faces. And again. More skeletons, more books. The place was full of the dead.
Jack shook his head. That wasn't him. He wasn't going to die here. He stood up and marched purposefully back the way he'd come, finding himself back in the centre room. He picked up the book and sat himself down on the stool, gazing up at his face reflected back at him, and began to draw.
The first attempt wasn't great. It had been years since he'd committed anything to paper using only his own hand. He'd been quite good at drawing once upon a time. Half a century with limited photographic technology had honed his skills, sketching all manner of things for reports he'd filed as a operative at Torchwood. With a few more rough sketches, he found himself slipping into a comfortable rhythm, the sound of the pencil scratching the page as his eyes flicked up and down from subject matter to paper and back again.
By the time he'd reached a drawing he was happy with, having consulted his reflection hundreds of times, picking out the tiny nuances that he normally barely noticed, he waited for something to happen. He searched for a passage that hadn't been there before, but now he found the room was closed off on all sides, its mixture of oddly shaped mirrors projecting back every version of himself imaginable, but not allowing him to wander further.
Frustrated, he sat back down and began again.
After endless hours, his back ached, his wrist ached and his fingertips were smudged black, yet his pencil was just the same, never growing dull or shorter. More and more pages began to fill with faces - smiling, unsmiling, pensive, stern - drawn in obsessive detail, but still he was trapped inside.
He didn't want to do this anymore. He was sick of staring at his reflection, trying to capture himself on paper. When he looked hard at the image in front of him, he noticed the cold indifference in those eyes, the obstinate stiffness of those lips, the staunch, unwielding jawline and the creases formed by a thousand frowns. He was tired and hungry, eyes dry and sore, his temper sitting on a knife's edge and his head pounding from the relentless visual overload. This wasn't a game anymore. He lay down on the cold mirrored floor and closed his eyes, grateful for the reprieve.
When he awoke, he couldn't be sure if he'd been asleep two hours or ten hours. The chronograph on his wrist strap was equally confused. Time seemed to move differently in here; sometimes it felt like hours had flown past, maybe even days, and other times it was like time itself had come to a standstill. How he knew that he couldn't say, but there was something that tingled very deep inside him, like the time vortex was trying to nut out the problem for itself, sending him messages and questions for more information so that it could make a proper determination.
Eventually he knew he'd have to begin again. He wandered around the room, trying to understand what it was that was being asked of him before settling back down with the book in his lap. When he tired of attempting an accurate likeness of his own face, he began to doodle - nonsense at first, then images of places he'd been and things he'd seen. Sandy shores from his childhood, the first spiral galaxy he'd ever laid eyes on, a Dalek, a blue police box, a silvery monolith with water running down its surface. He sketched faces of friends he'd abandoned, lovers he'd lost, and strangers he'd known only for a day. Anything to avoid the task at hand.
Starvation eventually weakened his body, and his mouth was as parched as a desert. He lay down and let death take him. Then he returned and was forced to begin anew.
He tried again and again, and the book filled more and more, but its pages never ended just as his pencil never tired. His reflections laboured on as he did, but no matter how he tried, the image was never right. Loneliness ate away at him, and his reflections became his enemies. They were watching him, judging him. Though he threw his fists at the walls, and then the wooden stool, the mirrors refused to break.
He slept, died, drew, but none of it brought him any closer to salvation. The hundred Jack Harknesses that kept him company became his prison guards and tormentors.
His attempts to create the perfect self portrait became darker and angrier, the eyes colder and meaner, the mouth almost a snarl. Every bad memory of his long life came back to him and fueled the fire inside him as his hand tried to expel the feelings. The pencil, sharp as ever, punctured the page with an angry tear and he flipped it over, intent on starting again.
The thing he began to draw this time looked nothing like him. It was jagged and brutal at the edges, like it was made of razor sharp blades or glass. The eyes were deep slits in the centre of an undefined shape, though wicked and slanted, and defined more by their lack of detail than the surrounding chaos that housed them. They glowed with a malevolence and a threat of terrible violence. The harder he pressed the pencil into the page, the blunter it finally became, the grey turning to black and black subsuming into an unrepentant darkness. The creature he fixated on creating was not like anything he'd ever seen or known. It had no mouth except for a vicious hole, marred by ravenous looking fangs and a long forked tongue that lashed out, trying to force its way out of the page. Calling it a monster was too kind. It was like something from the very jaws of hell itself.
Jack stared hard into the mirror. He saw it now, perfectly and without alteration. This was the real him. Gone was the strong chin, those stormy blue eyes and that disarming smile. All of that had melted away, like the waxwork mask that had been held in place, hiding the demon within. This was who he really was. All the darkness and horror and the shame and sin, the selfishness and the hatred, the arrogance and self loathing, manifesting its true form on the paper in his lap. Finally he could exorcise that false facade he'd used to win over everyone he'd ever met. They'd been right to be terrified. The thing on the page was scaring even him.
He tore it from the book and slammed it up against the mirror. 'Is that what you wanted?' he yelled. 'Take a good look. There's your monster!'
The wall beneath his hand began to ripple and then, like it was made of fine satin rather than glass, the walls flowed to the ground like water, disappearing and plunging him back into that suffocating darkness. Jack, feeling suddenly unbearably weak, fell to his knees, and a different kind of darkness consumed him.
He woke with a gasp and a flail, disoriented as he reached the closest object for purchase whilst the world continued to shape itself around him. He felt cool metal beneath his hands and looked down to find them gripping hard to the armrests of his seat. In front of him was the familiar console, spread out with its buttons and lights. He was back on board his ship. But how? He couldn't remember. He recalled the room of mirrors disappearing and the darkness, but nothing more. Had he perhaps fallen asleep at the helm and dreamed the whole thing? The black smudges all over his hands suggested otherwise. The thing he'd drawn came unbidden to his mind and made him shudder. The face of truth. That demon that lived inside him. He shook himself and studied the telemetry of his ship, comparing it to the readings from his wrist strap. Months had passed but his ship hadn't moved an inch despite being at full power. By his calculations, it should've run out of fuel weeks ago, leaving him stranded with no oxygen.
'Bad spirits,' he muttered, staring out in the starry vista. Those stars hadn't been there before, that much he remembered. Only the darkness.
He recalibrated the ship's course, turning back the way he'd come. What else lay out there in the unknown would remain that way. He had plenty of time on his hands. Going the long way around was a far better option.
When Jack woke, he felt confused. He slowly turned his head left and then right, unsure if he'd died or just been knocked out cold. All around him were the familiar features of his modest star cruiser, a ship that had served him well now for several years, allowing him to hop back and forth across the galaxies when the mood took him. One thing he couldn't stand was being tied down, or relying on anyone else to get around. There'd been a few run ins with the Doctor, but he still refused to do anything about Jack's wrist strap. If anything, he was convinced it was less effective than before the Doctor had interfered. Having his own ship was a much better proposition these days.
He pushed up out of the pilot's seat, hearing his neck and lower back pop audibly from the effort. Had he crashed? Had he been caught in the orbit of some high density asteroid? He couldn't remember. Through the small windows of the ship he could see only dense blackness. Not a star in sight. He frowned at the diagnostics on screen. They too made no sense. He wasn't in flight, but how had he landed without crashing? It was all very mystifying.
'This is what you get for taking a shortcut, Jack,' he chastised himself. 'Could've used a local star map, but no.'
He'd just been itching to move on. The fastest route was the uncharted one. The local shamans on the planet he'd just left had warned against it. Bad spirits out there, they said. He laughed them off, highly superstitious as he'd found them to be. Jack didn't believe in spirits or ghosts, and certainly not ones that lived out in the depths of space.
He walked to the back of the ship, through the small sleeping area, past facilities for washing and cooking, and into the storage hold at the back. He pressed a button on the panel by the door, first checking for breathable atmosphere and relative air pressure. The panel lit up green. 'So far, so good,' he muttered. He activated the ship's door, stepping out into the inky black. A few steps away from the ship and it disappeared from view like it was enveloped in a black fog. He retraced his path back, but where the ship had once stood, now it was gone. He reached out and tried to feel for it in the dark, but his hands met only empty space.
He spun around, alert and on edge. Peering into the blackness there was nothing, yet something drew him inextricably forward, one tentative step at the time. There was something there, beyond the dark. He could feel it as surely as the pulse of his own beating heart. Forward and further forward still, until suddenly the blackness dropped away all around him, like someone had pulled down a curtain, revealing the truth.
What a strange place, he thought, taking his first look around. Everywhere he turned, the walls and floors, even the ceiling high above him, were covered in reflective mirrors. There was a strange silver glow around the space. Though he couldn't say where it came from, the shiny surfaces all around caused it to rebound endlessly, casting a shimmering light everywhere all at once. How it had previously been consumed by darkness he couldn't fathom.
As he fixed his gaze on the mirrored surface, he became disoriented by the vision. Each mirror reflected the one opposite, above and below, creating an illusion of endless and infinite mirrors, like worlds within worlds. A hundred versions of himself stared back at him over and over again until they disappeared into a pinprick point somewhere off in the far distance. Looking down at the floor he saw a deepening pit of reflections. He blinked, and then held his eyes shut, trying to dispel the dizzying sensation of being suspended over that bottomless pit of imagery, reopening his eyes and keeping them faced forward. He reached out and pressed a hand to the surface, feeling it cool and smooth beneath his palm. Not an illusion, then, he reasoned.
What was this place? he wondered. He remembered the halls of mirrors at the funfair when he'd lived on Earth. There'd been mirrors that made you look tall and slim, others that made you appear short and fat, and other still that seemed to warp your body in all directions, both flattering and unflattering. How he and his love interests had laughed at their reflections, going from one mirror to the next to see what it would reveal. Tall, fat, curvaceous or misshapen, every lover Jack had ever had said the same thing. No matter how the mirrors projected his image, he was still the most beautiful being they'd ever seen.
He leaned forward and closer to the nearest section of mirrors, giving them a winning smile. He clicked his finger and pointed at the Jack smiling back at him. 'A few little crows feet around the eyes but you've still got it, tiger,' he told himself, admiring the face that virtually never changed.
He began to wander the mirrored hallways, exploring at first, wondering where these pathways would lead. They twisted and turned at strange angles, always giving the impression that he was moving forward but in circle, never able to fully establish just how big the space was, even by counting his steps. He eventually grew accustomed to the way the mirrors taunted with his spatial awareness, able to stop himself before he inadvertently ran into one of the walls that curved around him like a lover's embrace, unable to tell reality from reflection.
He expected at some point he would reach some inner sanctum, and though the corridors of self imagery continued to twist and turn, he was finally rewarded for his patience. Though it was difficult to tell he'd enter a much larger space, the uninterrupted wall of silver lead him inside to a bizarre view. The room must have been approximately spherical because the reflections in here were different here. Rather that facing himself, his reflection stood to each side of him, and then again further off in the distance again and again. It was like standing in a field with a thousand versions of himself, all idly milling about. Having so many of himself to keep him company was somehow comforting since he was clearly alone here.
Once he'd gotten to grips with this new scene, he noticed the one other thing in the view that wasn't himself. To one side of the room - and it took him a while to find the tangible original and not its dozen reflections - was a small wooden stool, on top of which sat a book. Jack picked up the worn, leather bound tome and ran a hand across its rough surface. As he did so, a pencil that had been sitting next to it, rolled off the stool and tumbled to the floor with a tiny wooden sound that mysteriously didn't echo the way he expected.
He flipped open the book, finding nothing but blank, unbleached pages. It wasn't much of a book, he decided, until he remembered the pencil lying prostrate near his boot. Not a book but a diary, perhaps? He flicked pages from front to back, finding them all empty, before shutting the book closed and seeing the tiny inscription on the back cover. "The face of truth will set you free."
Jack chuckled. 'I'm gonna need a lot more books and pencils if you want me to write my memoirs,' he said to no one in particular. It amused him that he was talking to an empty room. Though his image was replicated countless times, his voice had a flat quality to it, as if the room absorbed the sound, stealing it away.
Jack sucked in a breath and let it huff out through his nostrils. 'Where would I even begin?' he asked. When the room didn't provide him an answer, he picked up the pencil, flipped open to the first page and began writing.
"I was born on the Boeshane Peninsula, on the planet Artrus in the year 5023..."
As soon as the pencil marked the page the words he'd written disappeared.
'Well, that's pretty pointless. I promise it gets better. Lots of adventure and sex later on.'
He tried again but the words merely soaked into the pages, leaving them just as unblemished as they'd begun. Annoyed, he tossed the book back on the stool. 'You don't wanna play, then fine.'
He continued wandering around the halls, certain there must be a way out of this maze of mirrors. Eventually he saw something that wasn't his own reflection. There was a skeleton sat askew on a wooden stool, just like the one in the central chamber. Its rictus grin taunted him from all directions as it leaned at an unnatural angle, like it had fallen asleep sat there and never woken up. He knelt to inspect it closer, finding something clutched in its bony arms. He prised away a rotten leather book. He carefully pulled open the cover, finding pages were filled with drawings. Page after page, the same face kept appearing, simple at first and then more and more refined as the book wore on. Suddenly the book's final words made sense. It didn't want his story, it wanted his image.
'What happened to you?' he asked the corpse. He suspected he knew the answer already. The poor creature had made a hundred attempts perhaps to draw his own likeness and in the end he'd died here, unable to free himself.
Jack forced himself further down the passage, finding yet another skeleton. Another book. More faces. And again. More skeletons, more books. The place was full of the dead.
Jack shook his head. That wasn't him. He wasn't going to die here. He stood up and marched purposefully back the way he'd come, finding himself back in the centre room. He picked up the book and sat himself down on the stool, gazing up at his face reflected back at him, and began to draw.
The first attempt wasn't great. It had been years since he'd committed anything to paper using only his own hand. He'd been quite good at drawing once upon a time. Half a century with limited photographic technology had honed his skills, sketching all manner of things for reports he'd filed as a operative at Torchwood. With a few more rough sketches, he found himself slipping into a comfortable rhythm, the sound of the pencil scratching the page as his eyes flicked up and down from subject matter to paper and back again.
By the time he'd reached a drawing he was happy with, having consulted his reflection hundreds of times, picking out the tiny nuances that he normally barely noticed, he waited for something to happen. He searched for a passage that hadn't been there before, but now he found the room was closed off on all sides, its mixture of oddly shaped mirrors projecting back every version of himself imaginable, but not allowing him to wander further.
Frustrated, he sat back down and began again.
After endless hours, his back ached, his wrist ached and his fingertips were smudged black, yet his pencil was just the same, never growing dull or shorter. More and more pages began to fill with faces - smiling, unsmiling, pensive, stern - drawn in obsessive detail, but still he was trapped inside.
He didn't want to do this anymore. He was sick of staring at his reflection, trying to capture himself on paper. When he looked hard at the image in front of him, he noticed the cold indifference in those eyes, the obstinate stiffness of those lips, the staunch, unwielding jawline and the creases formed by a thousand frowns. He was tired and hungry, eyes dry and sore, his temper sitting on a knife's edge and his head pounding from the relentless visual overload. This wasn't a game anymore. He lay down on the cold mirrored floor and closed his eyes, grateful for the reprieve.
When he awoke, he couldn't be sure if he'd been asleep two hours or ten hours. The chronograph on his wrist strap was equally confused. Time seemed to move differently in here; sometimes it felt like hours had flown past, maybe even days, and other times it was like time itself had come to a standstill. How he knew that he couldn't say, but there was something that tingled very deep inside him, like the time vortex was trying to nut out the problem for itself, sending him messages and questions for more information so that it could make a proper determination.
Eventually he knew he'd have to begin again. He wandered around the room, trying to understand what it was that was being asked of him before settling back down with the book in his lap. When he tired of attempting an accurate likeness of his own face, he began to doodle - nonsense at first, then images of places he'd been and things he'd seen. Sandy shores from his childhood, the first spiral galaxy he'd ever laid eyes on, a Dalek, a blue police box, a silvery monolith with water running down its surface. He sketched faces of friends he'd abandoned, lovers he'd lost, and strangers he'd known only for a day. Anything to avoid the task at hand.
Starvation eventually weakened his body, and his mouth was as parched as a desert. He lay down and let death take him. Then he returned and was forced to begin anew.
He tried again and again, and the book filled more and more, but its pages never ended just as his pencil never tired. His reflections laboured on as he did, but no matter how he tried, the image was never right. Loneliness ate away at him, and his reflections became his enemies. They were watching him, judging him. Though he threw his fists at the walls, and then the wooden stool, the mirrors refused to break.
He slept, died, drew, but none of it brought him any closer to salvation. The hundred Jack Harknesses that kept him company became his prison guards and tormentors.
His attempts to create the perfect self portrait became darker and angrier, the eyes colder and meaner, the mouth almost a snarl. Every bad memory of his long life came back to him and fueled the fire inside him as his hand tried to expel the feelings. The pencil, sharp as ever, punctured the page with an angry tear and he flipped it over, intent on starting again.
The thing he began to draw this time looked nothing like him. It was jagged and brutal at the edges, like it was made of razor sharp blades or glass. The eyes were deep slits in the centre of an undefined shape, though wicked and slanted, and defined more by their lack of detail than the surrounding chaos that housed them. They glowed with a malevolence and a threat of terrible violence. The harder he pressed the pencil into the page, the blunter it finally became, the grey turning to black and black subsuming into an unrepentant darkness. The creature he fixated on creating was not like anything he'd ever seen or known. It had no mouth except for a vicious hole, marred by ravenous looking fangs and a long forked tongue that lashed out, trying to force its way out of the page. Calling it a monster was too kind. It was like something from the very jaws of hell itself.
Jack stared hard into the mirror. He saw it now, perfectly and without alteration. This was the real him. Gone was the strong chin, those stormy blue eyes and that disarming smile. All of that had melted away, like the waxwork mask that had been held in place, hiding the demon within. This was who he really was. All the darkness and horror and the shame and sin, the selfishness and the hatred, the arrogance and self loathing, manifesting its true form on the paper in his lap. Finally he could exorcise that false facade he'd used to win over everyone he'd ever met. They'd been right to be terrified. The thing on the page was scaring even him.
He tore it from the book and slammed it up against the mirror. 'Is that what you wanted?' he yelled. 'Take a good look. There's your monster!'
The wall beneath his hand began to ripple and then, like it was made of fine satin rather than glass, the walls flowed to the ground like water, disappearing and plunging him back into that suffocating darkness. Jack, feeling suddenly unbearably weak, fell to his knees, and a different kind of darkness consumed him.
He woke with a gasp and a flail, disoriented as he reached the closest object for purchase whilst the world continued to shape itself around him. He felt cool metal beneath his hands and looked down to find them gripping hard to the armrests of his seat. In front of him was the familiar console, spread out with its buttons and lights. He was back on board his ship. But how? He couldn't remember. He recalled the room of mirrors disappearing and the darkness, but nothing more. Had he perhaps fallen asleep at the helm and dreamed the whole thing? The black smudges all over his hands suggested otherwise. The thing he'd drawn came unbidden to his mind and made him shudder. The face of truth. That demon that lived inside him. He shook himself and studied the telemetry of his ship, comparing it to the readings from his wrist strap. Months had passed but his ship hadn't moved an inch despite being at full power. By his calculations, it should've run out of fuel weeks ago, leaving him stranded with no oxygen.
'Bad spirits,' he muttered, staring out in the starry vista. Those stars hadn't been there before, that much he remembered. Only the darkness.
He recalibrated the ship's course, turning back the way he'd come. What else lay out there in the unknown would remain that way. He had plenty of time on his hands. Going the long way around was a far better option.
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