3The best way one can describe the interior side of a mirror is weightless. There is no substance there, only style, no beating hearts to break save for their hollow facsimiles, and if you cut it through you would find nothing but empty space. It is an existence contingent upon a myriad things – light and space and stability – and above all it is impermanent.
Evanescence. That's what it is, that's what staring out empty from behind that panel of glass is, slit and split smooth into two sole dimensions. You are nothing but a notion of the moment.
That's what the Reflection thinks, anyway, and the Reflection has had a lot of time to think. Not when within the mirror, because something else that world lacks is autonomy, but upon escape to another kind of reality. Upon entering the third dimension, gaining flesh and thought and a terrible kind of heaviness. The responsibility that is the potential for action. Individuality.
Memories that can be held on to for longer than the moment of reflection, even if they are not necessarily the Reflection's own, and those are terrifying because for once there is more to existence than the blindness of the present moment, and suddenly there are rules. So many rules.
And there are expectations and for the first time it is actually possible for the Reflection not to meet them and if that isn't the most freeing thing in the world, then, well, what could be?
So one day the Reflection comes home from Valkyrie's school and says hello to Valkyrie's parents and goes up to Valkyrie's room and doesn't see Valkyrie, and suddenly it is like standing on the edge of a high place, simultaneously talking one's self into jumping and not-jumping and before there is time for hesitation the Reflection grabs a pair of scissors and makes the first cut, wild and careless, crazing across a handful of hair on the right side of the face that once was Valkyrie's and is no longer.
On cut the blades, snickering in their glee. First there is asymmetry, riot-grrl punk-dyke undercut, and then there is respectable and short, young man's coiffure. It doesn't stop, though, and then there is just stubble and the cold of metal on scalp and the dead extrusions lying limp around the Reflection.
"What happened?" Valkyrie asks when she comes home a few hours later, just before it is time for the Reflection to go downstairs and smile at Valkyrie's parents and sit at Valkyrie's place at the table and eat Valkyrie's food.
"It was weighing me down," is the Reflection's answer. "Your mass is not mine and your gender expression stifles me and the moment of light moving on the metal was too perfect to be ignored. I needed a personal pronoun, and it could not be yours."
"What have you done?" Valkyrie wants to know, eyes widening as she glances around the room.
"I have cut loose my anchor," the reflection says, smiling weightlessly.
A/N: Written for a KinkMeme prompt in which nonbinary gender.
~Mademise Morte, February 17, 2013.