#owlygem

He keeps having dreams about broken glass.

Broken glass and the bang of a vacuum popping, heaving inward like when [[he’d]] sucked in [[his]] gut to be funny. Cracked plastic and warped metal and split wires and broken glass and broken glass and broken glass and broken glass–

He quit sleeping a while ago.

The sleep deprivation probably isn’t doing him any favors, but his head’s so fucked already that it probably can’t make things much worse, either. It’s fine. 

Even if it’s not fine, he doesn’t care all that much. Everything sucks so thoroughly and so constantly anyway that it all melts down into a long gummy blur without any particular misery making an impression over the others.

And then this jackass shows up.

Shows up wearing [[his]] clothes.

As if he doesn’t already attract enough attention just by standing two heads taller than every other Addison, he has to play dressup too.

At least when Spamton had done that, it hadn’t been a dead man he’d been imitating.

At least [[he’d]] stolen just as much right back, until they’d started smudging together at the edges, started looking more like a matched set instead of two assholes trying to out-do each other at being the other asshole.

Honestly, it feels good to be angry about something specific for a change, instead of just the rotten sum total of what he’s been reduced to.

So when Mr. Counterfeit shows up in his back alley for a little mission trip or private circus or whatever, Spamton let’s him fucking have it.

Showing up in the first place isn’t the end to the audacity from Wannabee, either, because of course it wouldn’t be. Dressed ‘like what?’ he asks, and his oh-gosh-oh-gee cluelessness sounds almost genuine. Like his jacket’s not color-matched down to the hex-code and his tie isn’t flapping around in the breeze like [[he]] always used to insist on.

“I don’t know why I even came here,” Pantomime eventually whines.

Get in line, pal!

“When I heard about you, I felt pity for you!”

Yeah, well. Get in line for that, too.

“But I shouldn’t have bothered!!!”

Spamton barely hears the rest of what gets snarled at him. Copypaste’s lips peel back from his teeth into a shape that technically resembles a smile in the same way that a grimy puppet scuttling around in the trash technically resembles a rising star. Claws prick through the fingertips of his gloves as he grabs at nothing and lavender sparks of electricity spit off of him.

It’s just like–

No.

It looks just like–

No.

He looks just like–

NO no no nononono there’s no way.

Spamton can’t get goosebumps anymore but he feels them crawling over him anyway, like a full-body phantom limb.

There’s no fucking way. He knows there isn’t.

But he doesn’t know it well enough to make this not be happening, and not well enough to stop himself from asking the pitiful, horrible question that he already knows the impossible, horrible answer to.