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It is less than fun to have your "self" torn apart and stitched back together with new parts. When you can feel yourself unraveling and tying knots around other strings and being snipped and retied and cut and put in a pretty little mangled, patchwork bow...it is not a fun experience.
Michael Shelley knew this better than anyone.
At least he would, if Michael Shelley still existed. No, he was long gone, fed to The Distortion and shredded to bits and stitched and pieced and glued and twisted and-
And now there is only Michael.
*
Gerry stared. "Care to elaborate? Obviously you don't have to, but..."
Michael could sense the curiosity, it oozed from him like blood in cold Russian snow.
He was not supposed to tell the truth. It was never supposed to tell the truth.
The truth was fond of Gerry, however, and slipped out anyway.
*
Sannikov Land did not exist. It did and it did not, for nothing is truly nonexistent yet Sannikov Land was.
It was for the greater good, she said. He was going to save the world.
Gertrude Robinson let nothing spill from her faucet of a mouth but lies. Michael Shelley was the sponge to soak it all up. Gullible, he was. Sweet and shy and gullible.
He did not know what was coming, for he soaked up her lies until the very end.
Snow and sharp air bit his cheeks, his nose. Pink like candy floss and flowers and fluorescent carpeting lining endless halls. For as unreal as Zemlya Sannikova was, the weather did not seem to catch the memo.
She gave him a map. These halls were not supposed to be traversable, yet she'd captured every twist and turn on flimsy paper. She had a map and The Distortion did not know how. Michael Shelley did not know what he was doing. The Distortion did not know what Michael Shelley was doing, but it knew what Gertrude Robinson had done.
The door shut behind him, and did not reopen for...for...
*
"I am not quite sure how long he was in there for," Michael murmured. He laughed, though there was really nothing to be laughing about. It sounded like sheet metal, like a migraine.
Gerry placed one of his hands over Michael's, eye tattoos and spiral markings intertwining.
"That's fine."
Gerry's hands were always warm.
*
The cold of Sannikov Land leaked into the halls, though it stopped at some point. There was no solid way to tell, as time did not exist. "Some point" was the best Michael Shelley could get, and the best he ever would.
He wandered, and wandered, and someway somehow that map was correct. It should not have been possible, but possible also does not exist. There is no such thing, and there is no such thing as impossible, they swirl together and drip from underneath the door, from the paintings, from the mirrors.
The crumbling of Michael Shelley's mental state started at some point. Sooner more likely than later, as no one can resist for long. His mind peeled and stretched, twisting in on itself and crying out in agony.
The Distortion found itself mimicking that agony.
Michael Shelley wandered some more, and as he deteriorated, the strangeness of it all began to catch up with him. The Distortion wanted to watch, that is all it ever wanted to do. It was not a being of want, no, but it was also a being of lies. So it wanted. It wanted to crack the poor man's mind into crystalline slivers that reflected every colour of the rainbow, and then some.
It succeeded, but in the process it shattered itself.
At some point, Michael Shelley cracked too hard and he dissolved into unpossibleness. He was, and The Distortion was, and then The Distortion was and he was not.
Michael Shelley does not exist.
In his place, he left torture. He left twisting and crumbling and distorting. He left The Distortion to swallow up his remains and vomit him up into a newer form.
It hurt.
Sometimes it still does.
You never fully recover from being bent so hard you snap, and you never fully recover even when those pieces are haphazardly glued back together.
Michael Shelley no longer exists.
Only Michael, now.
*
"I'm going to kill her."
Michael stared, then burst out into technicolour giggles. "You're going to kill The Betrayer? You're going to kill Gertrude Robinson?"
Gerry nodded firmly, leaning into Michael's side. It hummed appreciatively, blues and purples spotting across his face. "Didn't trust her much from the start. Guess this explains why."
The Distortion grinned wide, displaying far too many teeth. "I would quite like to watch you do that."
Gerry glanced up at it, meeting ever-swirling eyes. They made him a bit dizzy, but he didn't really give a shit. He gave it a lopsided grin. "Oh yeah?"
"Mmmmmmhm. I think it would make me very happy."
As if to prove his point, tendrils of his hair curled gently around Gerry affectionately, pulling him in a bit closer. Gerry snickered, laying on Michael's chest. "Hey, if I kill Gertrude, you gotta do me a favour too."
Michael raised an eyebrow, wrapping his many-jointed arms around the goth. "What would you like, Bookburner?"
Gerry smirked up at it. "I want you to kill Jurgen Leitner, that stupid motherfucking son of a bitch."
"The crusty old man?"
"That's the one. Hate him, and I haven't even needed to meet him. You have no fucking clue what I want to do to that ugly prick."
Michael's grin grew wider. "Do tell."
And so he did.
*
Michael Shelley was gone, and The Distortion had spent a long, long time making sure they were separate. They are not the same, never will be, never were.
Michael thinks that Gerry made it a bit easier for it. To handle the splitting and twisting and pain that still lingered at the edges of his being.
There is calm in madness, sometimes. Gerry was the only one to ever bring out that calm.
Michael Shelley is gone, and Michael couldn't be happier.