Mismatch 8
Crossover fanfic; Obey Me x Tokyo Debunker .✦ ݁˖
Author's Note:
─ I feel like I didn't picture Solomon's personality that well in here, and I'm also not satisfied enough with how I deliver MC's monologue in here and how they face the problem that arose, but I gave up this time. :P
─ 4.7k words
─ Taglist; @gulaaren-123, @luckytyrantgalaxy, @rosebell0, @ash0-0ley , @tacharie , @strangehottubgathering , @miyanaranagikenmal-intp @help-whatdoimakemyusername
(please dm me to be added or removed, ty)
─ MASTERLIST [ Mismatch; (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) | (5) | (6) | (7) | (8) ]
"I'll be honest with you," he said quietly. "I already know you're not the MC we know."
Her entire body stiffened. For a moment, she genuinely forgot about the pain.
The words seemed to pass through her without meaning anything, and then their meaning caught up all at once, leaving her chest so tight that breathing suddenly required conscious effort. Her fingers released the blanket only to grip it again almost immediately, and she shifted backward on the bed as though creating another few inches of distance between them might somehow make the conversation less real.
"What...?"
Solomon didn't move toward her.
He didn't reach for her, didn't try to stop her when she instinctively shifted farther away, and didn't raise his voice when he continued. His expression remained stern enough to make it clear that he wasn't joking anymore, but there was still something unmistakably gentle beneath it, as though he understood that frightening her further would accomplish nothing.
"You—" Her voice caught, she swallowed and tried again. "You already knew?"
"Yes." The answer was so simple that it frightened her more than hesitation would have.
She looked toward the door. The movement was small, almost unconscious, but Solomon noticed it immediately. His eyes followed hers for only a second before returning to her face.
"You don't have to run."
She froze. "I wasn't—"
"You were thinking about it."
She looked back at him, unable to decide whether she should deny it or simply remain silent.
Solomon gave her a tired little smile. "Honestly, if I wanted to exposed you, I wouldn't have waited until now to tell you."
The statement made her pause.
He was right. If he had intended to expose her, he could have called Lucifer. He could have told the others. He could have asked questions in front of everyone at the House of Lamentation. Instead, he was sitting beside her in an infirmary room, speaking quietly enough that nobody outside could hear.
That didn't make her feel safe. But it made it harder to believe he was trying to trap her. "I don't understand."
"I know." Solomon's gaze softened. "That's probably the part you're having the hardest time with, all of this."
She lowered her eyes. He waited until she looked back at him before continuing.
"I wasn't completely certain this morning."
Her brows drew together. "This morning?"
"The first time I spoke to you in class, I thought something was strange, but strange isn't exactly rare around here." A faint smile touched his mouth. "People forget things. People get sick. People have bad days. And considering Asmodeus told everyone you'd been looking awful since yesterday, there were plenty of ordinary explanations."
She remembered that conversation. The joke and the magic lesson.
"But then you agreed." She stared at him, waiting. "The magic lesson."
Her breath caught. Huh?
"I asked whether you'd forgotten about our lesson later, and you said, 'Of course.'" His expression became faintly amused despite everything. "That was when I became suspicious."
She frowned. "But why?"
"Because you shouldn't have agreed." She stared at him in confusion. "Not because there was anything wrong with the lesson itself. There simply wasn't one scheduled."
Her thoughts stopped. "What?"
"There was never supposed to be a mentoring session that afternoon." The confusion must have shown plainly on her face, because Solomon's expression softened further. "I was teasing you."
She could only stare. "You were... joking?"
"Pretty much." A faint, almost apologetic smile appeared. "I wanted to see whether you'd remember enough to realize I was joking."
She had thought agreeing was the safest answer because refusing would reveal that she didn't know what he was talking about. She hadn't realized that the very act of agreeing had told him something was wrong.
Solomon watched the realization settle across her face.
"You didn't ask what time the lesson was. You didn't ask where we were meeting. You didn't complain that I'd forgotten to tell you the location." His voice remained quiet and matter-of-fact. "You simply agreed."
She looked down, the embarrassment barely registered beneath the fear. "So you knew because I answered wrong."
"Not exactly," Solomon said, shaking his head. "That only made me suspicious. The healing spell is what convinced me."
"Why?" she asked, her fingers tightening.
"It tried to heal you," he said simply. "And you already know what happened."
Her breath caught as the memory returned—the warmth of his hand against her cheek, the strange sense of relief that had spread through her body, and then the sudden, horrifying sensation of something twisting violently beneath her skin. She could still remember the way her entire body had seized around the pain, as though the spell had reached somewhere inside her and immediately been turned against her.
"My spell didn't fail," Solomon continued. "That's the important part. It took hold at first, which is why you felt better. But then something pushed it back."
She stared at him. "Like my body rejected it?"
"No." Solomon shook his head, his answer quiet but immediate. "It wasn't your body rejecting the spell. The magic itself was forced backward."
Her fingers tightened around the blanket. "Forced backward?"
"It went in normally," he explained, watching her carefully, "and for those few seconds, it was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. Then something inside you interfered with it. The spell was reversed before it could finish, and when the magic came back, it struck you instead."
Her hand moved instinctively toward her back. "But why would that happen?"
"That's what I don't have an ordinary answer for."
There was no teasing in Solomon's voice anymore.
"Magic has rules," he continued. "Different people use it differently, and there are certainly things that can interfere with a spell, but even unusual magic still exists within the framework of this world. A healing spell is meant to recognize the person it's being cast upon, enter the body, and restore what has been damaged. It can fail if the spell is poorly executed, if the injury is beyond what the caster can treat, or if something else is interfering with it."
His eyes settled on hers. "But it doesn't normally turn around and attack the person it's supposed to heal."
She felt a chill creep slowly down her arms. "So what does that mean?"
Solomon was silent for a moment.
"It means," he said carefully, "that whatever is happening to you doesn't seem to belong to the rules of this world."
Her stomach twisted. She immediately thought of the mirror. The room that had apparently belonged to her. Or rather, to someone who looked exactly like her.
She had spent so much time trying to convince herself that there had to be a simple explanation, even if that explanation was ridiculous. Perhaps she had somehow possessed another girl. Perhaps there had been an accident involving magic she didn't understand. Perhaps she had simply been mistaken for someone else.
None of those explanations had ever made complete sense.
But they had been easier to hold onto than the possibility that she herself had become something outside the rules of this place.
"Then," Her voice faltered. "Is that why my back hurts?"
Solomon's expression changed slightly. "Hurt? You feel pain, even now?"
She nodded. "It started before I woke up here. Or at least, I think it did. I remember being in pain before everything went dark, and since then it hasn't really stopped. Sometimes it's barely there, and then suddenly it becomes so bad that I can't stand it."
She hesitated, lowering her gaze. "It was already hurting even before you used the spell."
Solomon watched her for a long moment, his expression unreadable in a way that made her increasingly uncomfortable. "That’s—…, I don't think the pain is something your body simply happened to develop after you arrived here."
She looked at him through the lingering haze in her vision. Her breathing had finally begun to settle, although every deeper breath still brought a faint reminder of the pain waiting beneath her shoulder blades.
"Then what is it?"
"I don't know yet." The honesty in his answer caught her off guard.
He looked genuinely thoughtful as he considered her, his gaze occasionally drifting toward the place where she'd been clutching her back.
"There is something I'd like to check," he said eventually. "If you're willing to let me."
Her fingers tightened slightly around the blanket. "What?"
"Your back."
The request made her hesitate. Of all the things she had expected him to ask after everything she'd just told him, that had not been one of them. "My back?"
"The pain began there, didn't it?" His voice remained calm, almost conversational, but there was a seriousness underneath it now that hadn't been there when he'd first entered the infirmary. "And whatever I tried to do made it significantly worse. If there's something connected to the pain, I'd rather know what I'm dealing with before I try anything else."
She stared at him for several seconds, uncertain whether agreeing was actually the sensible thing to do.
The thought of allowing anyone in this strange world to examine her already made her uncomfortable, especially when she still couldn't decide how much she could trust Solomon. He had been kind enough, certainly, and he had asked permission before using magic on her, but kindness did not erase the fact that she had known him for less than a day while he apparently knew the person whose life she had somehow been dropped into.
More importantly, she had already reached the point where refusing every offer of help was becoming impossible. She needed to know whether there was something physically wrong with her before the pain became unbearable again.
"I think it might tell us something." There was something about the way he said it that made her nervous again, but she finally nodded.
"All right," she said eventually. "But, don't do anything."
Solomon's expression softened. "I won't."
Solomon moved around the side of the bed, giving her enough time to adjust herself before carefully asking her to turn. She hesitated again before doing so, pulling the fabric away from her back as much as she could without completely exposing herself. The movement made the lingering pain stir beneath her shoulder blades, and she instinctively winced.
"I'll be careful," Solomon said quietly.
She could feel his attention moving over the skin of her back, and despite herself, she became acutely aware of how quiet the infirmary had become. For several seconds, he said nothing. She could feel his stare moving over the marks left by the pain, and the silence made her increasingly aware of every breath she took.
"Have you always had that mark?"
She frowned slightly, glancing over her shoulder as much as she could without turning completely around. "What mark?"
"The one near your neck."
His tone was so casual that for a moment she thought he was referring to one of the faint marks left behind by the pain. She lifted a hand instinctively toward the back of her neck, fingers brushing over the skin beneath her hair.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Right there," he said, and this time she could hear something change in his voice. "Just below your hairline, a mole."
She hesitated before pulling her hair forward and touching the place he had indicated. Her fingers found nothing unusual. The skin felt exactly as it always had. "I don't have any mole there."
Solomon's expression was hidden from her now, but she heard the quietness that entered his voice. "You don't?"
"No." She turned slightly farther, enough to look at him properly. "At least, not that I know of. Why?"
He didn't answer at first. Instead, something seemed to click into place behind his eyes. He looked back at her face, then at the small mark on her neck, then back at her again. When he spoke, his voice had become quieter.
"Nothing," he said at last, though the word came with enough hesitation to make it clear that it wasn't really nothing. "I don't want to jump to conclusions yet."
She stared at him for another moment before finally asking, "Does that mole matter?"
"By itself? Not really." Solomon's gaze returned briefly to her face. "There are plenty of people with moles in places they don't pay attention to, and I wouldn't make a theory out of something that simple."
His tone remained deliberately casual, but then he added, "What matters is that you don't recognize it."
He could see that she was beginning to worry again, because his tone softened almost immediately. "Don't look so frightened. I'm not saying something terrible has happened."
"Then what are you saying?"
"I'm saying that I'm starting to wonder whether the problem is more complicated than you simply being sick."
She already knew that, but she still didn’t understand what any of that had to do with a mole—or with the pain in her back, or with whatever was happening to her now. Hearing him speak as if it all connected only made her feel more lost.
Solomon studied her for another moment before asking, "Can I see the rest?"
After a moment, she nodded and let him examine her back. Solomon waited until she was comfortable before looking more carefully at the skin along her back. His attention lingered beneath the nape of her neck, then moved lower.
The moment his eyes settled there, his expression changed again. This time she noticed. "Is there really something wrong?"
He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he looked at the purple mark beneath her nape.
It wasn't simply a bruise. It was too deliberate, too clearly formed beneath the skin, its shape resembling the petals of a spider lily. The edges seemed almost too precise to be something caused by ordinary injury, and the sight of it made Solomon's earlier confusion settle into something much more serious.
“Have you been under a curse?”
The question was so unexpected that she almost turned around. “I—”
She stopped herself, suddenly unsure whether answering honestly was wise. Solomon's voice hadn't carried any accusation, but the question itself was too precise to be casual. He wasn't asking whether she felt strange or whether something had happened to her recently. He was asking about a curse as though he had already seen enough to suspect one.
After everything that had happened since she woke up, another lie felt exhausting. The answer came quietly. “Yes.”
Solomon didn't respond immediately. She heard the faint rustle of fabric as he shifted his weight, but otherwise the infirmary stayed silent. His pause made her more aware of how exposed she was, sitting with her back turned to someone she had only properly spoken to that morning.
“What kind?”
Her fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the bed. “I don't know if it has a proper name here.”
“That wasn't what I asked.”
There was no harshness in the correction, but there was enough quiet firmness to make her realize he wasn't going to let her avoid the question simply because she didn't know how much she should reveal.
She swallowed. “It’s Kyklos.”
Solomon didn't interrupt, but she noticed from the slight shift in his posture and the way his gaze sharpened that he didn't actually seem familiar with Kyklos, even if he was clearly attentive and willing to listen as she explained it.
“Kyklos...,” Solomon’s gaze remained steady, though a faint crease formed between his brows. “I've studied a great many curses, including some old ones that have almost disappeared from common magical practice, but this isn't familiar to me. ”
That admission seemed to sit heavier than anything else he had said so far.
“Oh.” Her voice became quieter as she continued. “Well, I don't even know much about the theory behind it. I only know what it did to me.”
"Then I probably won't be able to explain it properly," she said quietly. "I don't know that much about it myself."
"Tell me what you do know."
For several seconds, she said nothing, trying to decide how much of her life she could possibly explain to someone who came from a world where demons, angels, and sorcerers apparently attended the same school.
Eventually, she let out a slow breath. "I was a normal person before all of this."
Solomon's expression didn't change.
"I wasn't born with some strange power, and I wasn't looking for anything supernatural. I was just going home one night when I got caught in something involving an anomaly." Her fingers moved unconsciously toward the purple mark. "That's when I saw Kyklos."
She paused, remembering the first time she had seen that eye and the terrible realization that had followed. "It cursed me."
"And what does the curse do?"
Her throat tightened. "It turns me into another Kyklos."
Solomon's expression became more serious.
"Eventually," she continued. "Not immediately. It happens gradually, and I have a limited amount of time to find a way to stop it before the transformation is complete."
She didn't need to explain every detail of the investigation that had followed, but once she started, the words seemed to come more easily. She didn't know why she was telling him, perhaps because Solomon had already discovered enough that hiding the rest felt pointless. Perhaps because, for the first time since waking in this world, someone was actually looking at the problem instead of simply asking whether she was feeling better.
"That's why I went to Darkwick. I became a student there because they had people who knew about anomalies, and I thought they might be able to help me find a way to break the curse before it was too late."
Solomon remained quiet, listening without interrupting.
"The mark appeared because of the curse," she added. "It's supposed to keep growing." His eyes moved toward it again.
"That explains why it's so deliberate."
She glanced back at him. "What do you mean?"
"It doesn't look like an injury." His voice had become more analytical now, but not detached. "It isn't behaving like a bruise, and it doesn't resemble a wound caused by physical force. Whatever placed it there intended for it to remain."
She nodded slowly. "That's what I was told."
"And you said the pain started before you arrived here."
"Yes."
"Then the curse came with you." The statement settled heavily between them.
She turned her head slightly, as if she only realized what her curse marks imply now. "I think so."
Solomon was quiet for a moment. "If this curse is attached to you rather than to a location, that would make sense."
She looked down at her hands. "That's what I've been afraid of."
Solomon's gaze returned to her. "Why?"
"Because I don't think I came here normally."
He waited.
"I was at Darkwick. There was a mission." The memory returned with such clarity that her chest tightened. "There was a place filled with mirrors. I saw someone standing on the other side of the glass."
Solomon said nothing.
"She looked like me."
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"Exactly like me."
She looked toward the infirmary window, though there was nothing outside that could help her find the right words.
"I thought she was my reflection at first, but the room behind her wasn't the same. She was somewhere else. Somewhere bright. There were people around her, and it looked like an ordinary place." Her fingers tightened around the blanket. "Then everything broke."
"The glass?"
"Yes." She closed her eyes for a moment. "I remember Lucas. I remember Kaito. I remember the explosion." Her voice became quieter. "Then I woke up here."
Solomon remained silent, and she continued before she could lose her nerve.
"Everyone here thought I was someone they already knew. They called me by my name. They knew things about me that I don't remember doing. There's a room prepared for me. There are clothes that aren't mine, photographs of a girl with my face, and people who apparently have memories with me that I've never lived with."
Her hand slowly moved back toward her neck. "And now you tell me there's a mole here that I've never had."
Solomon's gaze followed the movement. "Exactly."
She looked at him.
"That's why I thought maybe I'd somehow taken over her body." The words sounded absurd when spoken aloud. "I thought maybe I possessed someone who happened to have the same face and name as me. I didn't know what else to think."
A possibility he couldn't immediately dismiss, given what she had just described—less like simple possession, and more like displacement between two identical lives.
"I don't know whether that's possible," Solomon admitted. "I'm not even sure what mechanism could have caused it. But you've given me two separate pieces of information that don't fit a simple possession."
He gestured faintly toward her neck. "Her physical body has something you don't."
Then toward the curse. "Your curse, meanwhile, remains attached to you."
She felt a strange chill move through her.
"I think we should consider the possibility that what crossed over wasn't merely your consciousness."
She looked at him, unable to make herself speak.
"The soul," he said quietly. "If the soul is what remained attached to the curse, then it would explain why the curse followed you even though the body you're occupying belongs to someone else."
Soul.
A soul meant there was another person involved.
Someone who wasn't merely a body she had accidentally occupied, but someone who had her own thoughts, her own memories, her own relationships, and her own life that had continued somewhere beyond the moment when everything had gone wrong.
She slowly lowered her gaze toward her hands. "They're not just memories, are they?"
Solomon watched her carefully. "What do you mean?"
"The people here." Her voice was quieter now, but the more she spoke, the more the thought seemed to solidify inside her. "Their memories of me. The room. The clothes. This school. Everything."
She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry.
"If this were just some illusion created by whatever happened in that mirror hall, then none of it would have to be real. But it is." Her fingers curled against the blanket. "They actually know her. They remember things she did. They remember things I never experienced. I thought this is a simply hallucination that mirror trap me inside."
Solomon didn't interrupt.
"And this place..." She looked toward the infirmary window, though she couldn't see much from where she sat. "It's real too, isn't it? As real as my own world"
"From everything you've told me, there's no reason to assume otherwise."
The answer should have reassured her but it made something inside her chest sink even further. Because if this world was real, then the girl who belonged here had to be real too.
She remembered the mirror, the impossible room beyond the glass. The bright streets and the people moving through them as though nothing strange had happened.
She had thought the girl standing there was simply another version of herself trapped behind a reflection that refused to behave properly. She had never considered what it meant for that version of herself to actually belong somewhere.
Her breathing gradually became shallower. "So if I'm here..."
She stopped, the words suddenly felt too frightening to finish.
She looked at him, her expression tightening with the realization that had begun forming before she could stop it. "If I'm here right now," she whispered, "then where is she?"
Solomon's expression became still.
"If our souls really switched, then she didn't just disappear, did she?" Her voice trembled despite her attempt to control it. "She would have ended up somewhere too."
Her stomach twisted. "She would have woken up in my world."
The thought struck her with such force that she had to look away. Darkwick—the familiar academy, the corridors she knew by memory, the people she trusted, Lucas, Kaito, and the others. Her world was still there. It had to be. And if the other MC had somehow been thrown into it—
Her chest tightened painfully. "What if she woke up at Darkwick?"
Solomon remained silent.
"What if she opened her eyes in that broken mirror hall and everyone thought she was me?" The words came faster now, each possibility feeding the next before she could stop herself. "What if Lucas found her? What if Kaito was there? What if they tried to talk to her and she didn't know who they were?"
Her fingers began trembling again. "What if she thinks I disappeared and she trapped in my place forever?"
The room suddenly felt too small.
She could picture it too easily. A girl with her face waking up in a world she didn't recognize, surrounded by people insisting they knew her, being asked questions she couldn't answer, expected to remember a life she had never lived.
The exact same terror she had been experiencing since opening her eyes.
Only now she was imagining someone else suffering through it in her place. "She'd be just as frightened as I am."
The realization came out almost broken.
Solomon's expression softened. "Probably."
She closed her eyes. For the first time since waking in this world, the fear inside her shifted into something else.
Guilt.
Because somewhere, possibly right now, there might be another girl wearing her face and standing in her world, looking at Lucas and Kaito with the same confusion she had felt when Lucifer and the others greeted her that morning.
Someone who might be asking the same questions.
Who are you?Why do you know me?Why does everyone think I belong here?
Her eyes opened again. "And she would be me."
Their lives had been exchanged.
She looked down again, her thumb rubbing unconsciously against the edge of the blanket. "I thought I wanted to go home."
Solomon's gaze remained on her.
"I still do." Her voice became quieter.
"But if this is really what happened..." She hesitated, struggling to put the thought into words. "Then going home doesn't mean leaving someone else's life behind anymore."
The realization settled heavily inside her.
"It means getting her back too."
For several seconds, Solomon said nothing. Then his expression softened into something almost thoughtful. "That's a much more complicated problem."
A weak, humorless laugh escaped her. "Of course it is."
She looked toward the window again, imagining a world she couldn't see from here and another world that suddenly felt impossibly close.
Two lives, two girls, the same face and the same name, but different memories and different people waiting for them, and somewhere between them was the invisible boundary she had crossed without ever knowing it existed. A line that now felt less like a mistake and more like something deliberate, as if both of them had been placed on opposite sides of a world neither of them was meant to see at the same time.
For the first time, she stopped thinking of this place as somewhere she had been accidentally trapped. It was a real world, a real life.
And there was another version of herself living in it.
The thought frightened her more than any demon she had encountered that morning.
Because monsters were easier to understand than the possibility that somewhere beyond this room, another girl had opened her eyes in her world and was now living her life just as unwillingly as she was living hers.
She slowly drew a breath, though it did little to ease the tightness in her chest. "I need to find a way back."
Solomon nodded, seeming intending to help her until the end. "We'll find out what happened to both of you."
She stared at him for several seconds before giving a small, unsteady nod.
For the first time since waking in the House of Lamentation, the thought of returning home no longer felt like the only answer. Now there was another question attached to it.
Who was going to bring the other girl home?
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖ .tbc
Warning: Tbh, I'm still not finished with all the episodes up to the latest update, so I actually have little information to go on while making this (please forgive me if there's any OOC; have mercy). Word count: 4.667
