#being edgy and tagging

faces look ugly, when you’re alone

the spirit possessed me once more and i wrote this. my first proper chop top bit. maybe i’m giving him more credit than he deserves, but i’ve been thinking about him a lot. warning for mentions of injury and y'know, the plate.

Chop top doesn’t look in the mirror anymore.

Not that he did much before anyway. But more than he does now.

Now he can’t stand the sight of his reflection, how gaunt he’s become, his patchy hair that he can’t stop pulling and the raw skin around the plate that he can’t stop picking at.

His head could have healed, if only he’d stop scratching. Now there’s nothing to loose; how much worse could he look?

Bobby had never been vain, not really. No, he’d looked good, good enough to get the girls he wanted and the boys he pretended he didn’t. Long hair and cold eyes were enough to pin him as just “good-looking”, if nothing else.

They tried to show him, in the hospital, the bandages wrapped tightly around his skull. He’d barely made it, comatose for so long they thought he wouldn’t. But he’d woken up, a dull numbness pressing against his brain that made him want to go back to sleep. He didn’t look, squeezing his eyes shut when they thrust a vanity mirror into his hands.

The new name made sense.

When he got home, the gauze still in place over his mangled and stitched skin, he turned the mirror around in his bedroom. He painted something on the back of it. Something that could reasonably be called a self portrait, though it looked nothing like Chop. It looked like Bobby.

Eventually, when the compulsion had rooted itself too firmly in his brain and he’d scratched so much that the metal of his plate shone through his mutilated skin, he smashed the mirror.

Shards scattered across the floor, beneath his feet as he stomped on the glass.

Drayton heard the commotion and came running, broom in hand. It hit Chop first before making it to the ground, sweeping up the silver fragments. Drayton asked what the hell was going on. Chop said he didn’t know, which wasn’t a lie.

The mirror went into the trash and was never replaced, the empty space on his wall filled with magazine clippings.

He thinks, in his more lucid moments, that perhaps he doesn’t look in the mirror because, when he doesn’t, he’s still Bobby. Or at least, he can still pretend to be Bobby.