These Mirrored Dreams
by G.T. Korbin
Content Warning: Manipulation
It’s not about you.
The phrase follows like a shadow. It lingers in the backdrop of his mind, placing a hand over his mouth every time he wishes to speak. Markos always keeps his mother’s words close to his heart, even if their sharp edges dig into it with every beat.
Alex slaps him on the back and suggests with the giddiness of early alcohol and fresh freedom that they should head down to the lake for beers. Their town is teeth-chattering cold on a good day and Markos knows the humidity is going to slip in tendrils under his jacket to drill that frost into his bones, but they just finished their last exam for the semester, and nobody wants to know what he thinks of their plan, anyway.
The group walks down the hill toward the lake, rowdy and excited in that Friday-night obnoxiousness of students. Alex, Jo and Dimitris are at the front, while Eli remains a few steps behind with him, making the space that separates him and his friends seem a little less vast.
Eli takes a deep breath through her nose, loving the cold night air in a way he never could. “You’re not still stressing about the exam, are you?”
“Not anymore.”
The streets are always busy in that spot where the castle ruins come close to the lake, washed in waves of students moving from one place to the next, inconveniencing the steady line of cars on the street.
“Is it about going out?” Eli asks instead because she always knows. “You don’t have to stay. We’ll miss you though.”
He’s not sure that’s true. Eli befriended him at the start of their first year, and it was good for a while, just the two of them, basking in their coexistence. She helped him during the more gruesome parts of their anatomy classes. In return, he made sure she didn’t get caught when she accidentally set the lab bench on fire, because who would have thought that ethanol next to a Bunsen burner could ever be a bad idea?
He was willing to put out as many fires as needed if only to keep this rare sense of belonging close.
Until Alex, sweet and friendly, pulled her into the rest of the group and somehow Markos tagged along as well, in a way that never managed to convince him he was actually wanted.
But it wasn’t about him.
“I promise we won’t throw you in the lake?”
“I didn’t realize that was in question.”
Eli laughs, and it calms some of the turmoil within him, like putting the first tick on a long checklist. Made someone laugh. Check. For two seconds his presence was better than his absence.
“Come on, you’ll have fun.”
He rolls his eyes. “Maybe if you shove me in.”
“Pretty sure you’d die from the filth.”
“Maybe I’ll transform into something more useful.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A flower?”
“In that water? More likely the flower would turn into you.”
Elianna is talented at a great many things, not including persuasion.
The stars are few and far in between, but the full moon casts white lines over the water, on the mountainside in the distance. Alex presses a cold beer into his hands, freshly plucked from the fridge at the nearest kiosk. Somehow, he still managed to shake it enough for it to foam within seconds of opening. Jo laughs as Markos swears, keeping the can away with one hand as it soaks his fingers.
“Next semester I swear I’m going to study from the beginning!” Alex makes a sweeping declaration, met by a chorus of laughter. “I mean it!”
“You say that every semester.” Jo sits on the back of the bench, her feet on the seat.
“Okay but who actually does it?”
“Markos,” Eli provides.
“Yeah, but he never does anything anyway!”
Dimitris and Jo laugh with him, at least until Jo meets Markos’ gaze. His stricken expression snatches away the alcohol-heavy giddiness, letting discomfort spread like heat between them.
“We didn’t mean—”
Markos forces a smile on his face, his muscles rigid. “No, no.” His laugh sounds like crackling stones to his ears. “You’re right. I need to get out more.” Another grating chuckle. Shut up. Shut up.
He does things. He swears. It’s just that most of those things are done in solitude, and not a lot of people (namely anyone who isn’t Eli) enjoy meeting to work on different things in the same space, no matter how much comfort Markos draws from it.
Eli walks over to Alex and gives him a playful smack upside the head. “Mock him after your test results, dumbass. Maybe then you’ll beg him for a study session.”
“Hey, that’s not a bad idea!” Alex turns his way. “What do you think?”
Any mockery in his tone has fled, replaced instead by hopeful admiration, and Markos wants to keep Elianna forever by his side.
⛧
The rest of the night passes in a haze. Markos lets the alcohol burrow inside him, softening the blow of unbelonging. They drink and whine about the exams and speculate on the next term. They make plans for a Halloween party next month, even though they don’t celebrate it here and make Markos promise to join them.
A phone call drags him away from the group, and as he reassures his mother that he’s fine and yes, this was the last exam and no, he won’t come home for a few days now that he’s done, he walks along the edge of the lake, the water murky and still by his side. The pier is the only part of the shore that’s not protected by railing and in the back of his mind he wonders if maybe he’s a little too tipsy to be walking so close.
When his mother hangs up, a wave of exhaustion washes over him, mixing dreadfully with the guilt that he should be grateful she checks up on him, and the clawing knowledge that she has to do it to pretend she knows what is going on in his life. It’s just not about him.
He looks back at his friends, now far enough not to hear what they’re talking about. Their laughter carries through, blazing and loud, and it makes the tiredness settle deeper into his bones. Buzzed enough to not care, he lowers himself down to sit cross-legged on the edge of the pavement, the lake so close he could reach out and touch it.
Markos leans forward, trying to catch a glimpse of the moss kissing the stone. The moon reflects in the distance, but in front of him, there’s only—
Wait.
Something moves in the water, its shape lost in the murkiness below. His hands slip, tearing his palms with a sudden scratch and as though called by his almost misfortune, a figure blossoms, draped in deep shadows and sticky algae.
Only when it moves with him does he consider that it might be his reflection.
The image grows clearer and his heart thunders louder against his ribcage, for the shape it takes has to be him but isn’t.
The Markos in the water is pale in the moonlight and sharp in the corners the shadows paint on his face. There’s something about that face, an assuredness to him, an easy, cocky confidence that he didn’t know he could hold, and as the real one moves closer, craving for a better look, the reflection smiles, a delighted crescent grin that Markos doesn’t realize he’s mirroring at first.
He’s never seen himself like this—
“You’re going to fall.”
Eli’s voice startles him out of it, and she has to grab his jacket before he can plummet into the lake. Beyond tipsy, he is far too drunk to be sitting so close.
“What the hell? Be careful,” Eli chuckles but the sound is strained with leftover worry. “Why are you sitting here?”
“I—” Scrambling to his feet, Markos sneaks a glance back at the water. Only darkness answers him. “I thought I—” He shakes his head, trying to pull himself together. “I just needed a break.”
Eli’s cheeks are red from the cold or alcohol or both, and the white light makes a halo of her blond hair. “Oh.” The disappointment is palpable in her voice.
Markos remembers the confidence in the reflection that he’s sure he must have imagined; he summons that dream now, hoping his face knows how to mimic the shape he saw. “Let’s go back.”
He doesn’t go near the lake again.
⛧
For about a week, that is.
He writes off the entire haunted reflection as a drunken dream, though he finds trouble shelving it. That perfect non-face of his refuses to be locked in closets with all the rest of the truths he doesn’t want to see.
Still, he doesn’t mean to go back to the lake.
When the new semester starts, Alex never mentions tutoring again, and with their elective classes this year, seeing any of his friends becomes an organizational task far beyond anyone’s reach. About a week in, after four hours of classes and three solitary breaks that felt like another four hours, all he wants is cold air and a chance to clear his muddled brain. If his steps lead him by the water, it’s only because there’s nowhere else to take a relaxing walk. Honestly.
With a coffee in his hands and a scarf around his neck that keeps getting blown all over the place, Markos breathes in the humid air, watching birds fly over the water, the sun bolding the outlines of the mountains. He walks the length of the pier, until his feet hurt and his knuckles ache from the cold. He passes families with children swinging from their parents’ hands. He passes couples holding each other or huddled together on the benches. And though he enjoys being alone, the images around him draw the distance between him and the world, the absence of people by his side tightening a cord around his neck.
His feet guide him to the bare end of the pier, the one that fails to block him from the water. He takes a hesitant half step forward, half step back. Looks around. Then at his feet. Looks around again.
With a quick curse under his breath, he leans forward, peering down at the reflection.
The wind causes ripples in the water, distorting his image like bad connection on an old television but all that greets him is a two-day stubble he was too sleepy to shave and a set of eye bags big enough to pack for a weekend trip.
Markos sighs. Of course not. What did he expect?
The cold digs in around his spine, making him squirm, and the musty scent of the lake is getting uncomfortable, but his house is too far to walk with a heart this heavy.
A splash of water hits the cuff of his pants.
He yelps in a whirlwind of swearing and scrambles away like the water turned to acid on his clothes.
“I had to get your attention somehow.”
He freezes, the fear like ice down his back. No more words come, yet the trepidation lures him closer, doing the opposite of what it’s supposed to do.
He looks over the edge again.
“Hello.”
His reflection gazes up at him from the murky water. His skin looks a shade too pale in the shadows of the lake, the white tinted blue, but his eyes are a sea-green so bright they make up for all the missing color. They don’t match his own and that might have been the first sign if the non-reflection hadn’t already spoken to him.
Whatever that is, it’s not him.
Markos takes a look around. The pier has emptied of people, chased away by the odd hour. Only the two of them remain.
“Are you going to ignore me?”
The voice is almost his own, in the way he almost recognizes himself when he hears a recording. It echoes double and lags as though pulled back, stretched into a distorted version of itself that’s not unpleasant.
He checks one more time that he’s alone, then lowers himself to his knees to study the peculiar thing. “No?”
“Are you asking me?”
His chuckle is warm and boyish, the kind of sound people fall in love with.
Markos’ chest swells with potential, then dips, heavy in his stomach.
The reflection’s smile falls in return, the change quick and dramatic like switching theater masks. “You don’t like what you see?”
“I like you,” Markos huffs, incredulous, following those green eyes with his own like they could lead him to salvation. “It’s just… I’m not you.”
“Of course, you are.”
His breath stutters in surprise. “No.”
“Yes!” That laugh again. Soft like a kiss to his cheek. Burning like candlelight on a vigil. “This is what you look like. Outside that head of yours.”
He slaps his hands on the pavement, pulled closer to the vision by some unseen force. Markos takes him in, the well-sculpted features, the brightness of his eyes, the charming hint of reddish purple on his lips. The image’s grin blossoms at the attention, lopsided with a confidence that shines on him.
“I’m you. Don’t you like… you?”
His answer gets trapped in a breath, a confession he can’t acknowledge, for it can go either way until it’s heard, each painful in its own cruel twist.
He never gets to test it.
His phone rings loudly in his pocket and by the time he reassures Elianna that he hasn’t forgotten their coffee date, all he finds over the water are his own muddy eyes, drowned in disappointment.
⛧
By the fourth, the fifth time, he stops pretending he doesn’t mean to end up there. He goes on nights that feel like chasing dreams, in hallowed mornings before the world wakes. The reflection is always there, a revelation trapped in algae and shadows, sunlight skittering through its surface, moonshine washing it like a spotlight.
The only thing sweeter than his presence are his words.
Since he’s maybe talking to himself, Markos finds it easy to open up. With the right amount of coaxing and the careful intimacy of being alone at those hours, the vision pries thoughts out of him with the ease of picking flowers. He talks of dreams of making something of himself, of helping people and how scared he is that he’s wasting the best years of his life because he doesn’t know how to not give his goal everything, especially when everything else seems so beyond his reach. He confesses that he knows what love is only in the way he would die for Eli, a relationship that holds no attraction but all the affection he has to give, but how Alex’s dimples when he smiles can make the chaos in his mind fade into silence.
He does not speak of his family, not yet, afraid that this version of him will forgive them before Markos can and sink him into the ground.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he says during one of those nights.
Sitting on the edge of the pier, chill seeps from the pavement into his jeans, but it's the quiet that disconcerts him, his own voice too loud even as he whispers.
“Where else would you be?” The vision asks, crossing his arms like leaning on a windowsill.
He rearranges the earphone he’s wearing, on the off chance that someone sees him talking into thin air. He’s still not convinced anyone else can see or hear him. He should be more concerned about that.
“Well, my… friends are out tonight.”
“But you’re here.” He doesn’t judge. The voice is downright pleased, and he pulls off the slight whine in his tone in a way Markos would never achieve without sounding like a petty toddler.
“I’m here.”
“Why, love?”
Markos startles. It’s only a word, a pet name, yet it brings forth what he won’t let himself consider. It’s a vision in the water. It shouldn’t be shedding so much warmth with its affection nor should Markos let it ease the sting of the cold night.
“Hey.” The mirage tilts his head when he doesn’t reply. “You can tell me anything.”
“I—” Don’t want to leave this. “I just…” I want to be—
“What is it?”
“No…”
“Say it.” His voice echoes in the water between them. It drags the words out of him like a spell, lured by the subtle charm he can never seem to replicate, the familiarity he radiates. That effortless beauty of him.
“I want to be loved.”
So beautiful.
“Look at me,” the vision asks, as if he has done anything but. “Don’t you love me? Aren’t you loved?”
“You’re not me.”
“I am.”
Marko’s heart clenches. “No—”
“I am how I see you.”
No, there’s no way.
The vision grins at his approach, even as he himself gapes. He takes in the renewed line of his features, shone in angles he’s never seen but look at home on his face, and when the image reflects the adoration building in his stomach, he can almost believe the reflection sees Markos like this, for why else would he look at him like that?
“Love. Speak to me.”
“I think you’re beautiful,” Markos whispers, then bites down hard on his lip. Right at the spot where his reflection is grinning.
The vision expands as if it’ll break out of the water and catch him, and Markos holds his breath, poised forward as though to meet him halfway—
A hand grabs his coat and pulls him back like a baby kitten.
“Dude! What are you doing?”
Alex’s voice shakes, matching the look Eli wears behind him to perfection.
The pull from his daydream rattles him as violently as an actual dive in the lake. “Why are you guys here?” Fog swirls around in his head, an emerging hangover to mark mistakes he doesn’t remember making.
“Um, saving you from falling in the lake? What are you doing?”
The anger carved into Eli’s scowl aches, but the sweetness of the vision lingers still, an analgesic to soothe the pain of hurting her.
“Are you okay?” Alex adds, trying to ease whatever is unraveling between them.
Markos looks at him. A dimple prods through from Alex’s hesitant smile and Markos wants to touch it, draw out the smile longer, deeper. When he meets his eyes, however, the confusion has left no place for affection, and he misses the gentle adoration his vision granted him.
Alex is truly gorgeous, but he never sees him like he’s worth anything.
“I’m fine. You didn’t need to come.”
“Oh, okay. We’ll let you fall in next time.”
Markos glances behind him at the water, and he must look at least somewhat wistful because Alex gapes at him. “Dude.”
“What?”
“We haven’t seen you in weeks,” Eli responds. “When we do, you’re always distracted. I know all your silences, Marko. This isn’t you.” She looks down, sneaking a glance at Alex as though this conversation was never supposed to reach outside the two of them. “Where do you go?”
“Eli—”
This obsession of his was never meant to touch anyone else. Elianna is the last person he ever wants to harm, the only person who might genuinely be able to see him and have him resemble anything like the image he sees on the water.
“Please, talk to me. This is the second time I see you try to take a nosedive. In the lake. The same gross lake you wouldn’t get near because it smells.”
Her soft chuckle is an invitation to calm the tension between them, but he can’t find it in himself to laugh.
“I wasn’t going to jump. I was looking for something.”
“For what?”
A version of himself he liked, mostly.
“Listen. Something… odd is going on. Come here, look at this.”
He’s not afraid of sharing his secret with her, and though Alex and he are not close… well, maybe he will like the person in the water enough to see what Markos could be. The three of them look over the water, while Markos ignores the hold Eli keeps on his sleeve.
The vision is gone. Only his blurry, lifeless reflection remains, wrinkling in the ripples of the surface.
“It’s… gone.”
“What is?”
“There was something. In the water.” An acrid taste stirs up in his mouth, talking about the beautiful person as if he’s nothing but an oddity haunting their lake. “He looked like me. But… not quite.”
Eli peers over, the concern etching deeper into her features with every nonsense word he speaks. “Your reflection?”
“It wasn’t my reflection! Not really. He talked to me. He…” He loves me. “He’s beautiful.”
A bark of laughter comes from Alex, lost for air too quickly to break the tension between them. “Look who’s suddenly confident! That’s the spirit!”
“No! He was me, but-but better! Perfect!” He conjures the image of his vision in his mind, remembering all the ways he fills the frame of him where Markos himself falls short, and maybe Eli is right. Maybe he doesn’t care about being here when there’s a much better version who could be roaming the world instead. One that would never hurt his best friend so. One who would tell Alex how wonderful he is.
A version of him who could claim things to be about him.
“It would be amazing…” He whispers, eyes still on the water.
She’s already shaking her head as she asks, “What would?”
“To be like that. To be… perfect.”
Eli steps between him at the lake, effectively forcing him away. “You’re plenty good already.”
“It’s not enough.”
“For whom, Marko? You’re good enough for me.” He goes to protest but she cuts him off, not done after weeks of ignoring her. “I don’t know what daydream you’ve been chasing but it’s not worth it if it makes you talk like this! Even if what you’re saying it’s true, why…"
The harshness of his gaze steals the rest of her words. “You don’t believe me.”
“I… I want you to be okay.”
“I’ve never been better. He sees me, Eli. He understands me.”
“The… reflection?”
He flinches, irritation building cracks upon his dam and before he knows it, they’re breaking, spilling truths he shouldn’t allow himself to say. “He makes me feel—like I could be something, you know? Don’t you get it?”
“And how does he make you feel about who you are now?”
He frowns, uncomprehending. “He looks like he sees me.”
“You said he doesn’t look like you. If he loves you, he should see you for who you are. Not some imagined version.”
“Eli—”
“And if he doesn’t see you, or he doesn’t love you until you’re ‘better’,” she spits out the word, “then he doesn’t love you. Not like I do.”
Any protest is extinguished, coming out as a soft breath, a sigh to mark the blow to his heart. “Eli,” he whispers, at a loss, but she backs away for the last time, placing herself out of reach.
“Just… make sure this image of yours doesn’t drown who you are now.”
Markos watches her walk away, Alex trailing behind her like a sad puppy, and even before he met a reflection that showed him who he could be, he never felt quite as worthless.
⛧
It’s not that Markos is avoiding Eli on purpose; except he definitely is. Though never one to hold a grudge, what he does refuse to relinquish is embarrassment, letting it fester instead like an infection, poisoning himself and all the relationships he has.
He’s not mad at Eli. But he sure is afraid she might be mad at him.
Barred by his own stupid mind from talking to his best friend, he ends up doing the one thing she doesn’t want him to do.
When Eli doesn’t approach him when they pass by in the hall, the vision grins at the sight of him.
When Jo tells him he looks a little sickly, the vision looks even more stunning in the moonlit water.
When Alex’s arm around his shoulders grows tense, Markos’ fingers touch the edge of the water, finding his reflection splaying out his hands on the other side as if to mirror him.
Eli’s absence aches like a wound, and as he wanders the streets like he’s missing a home, Markos’ steps lead him to the pier again. The vision welcomes him like he belongs here, so he lets himself cry. And when he finally decides he needs to talk to her, he needs her, and the vision tells him to stay, after all the times he found himself lost in the comfort of his own eyes looking so happy, Markos forgets about everything and just—
—stays.
⛧
He doesn’t know how long he’s been there.
The sun and the moon have melted into the same vague light, existing past his point of perception. All he knows is the reflection on the water, the world that might exist where he is beautiful and soft and kind, where he smiles like he means it and he didn’t break his best friend’s heart.
“What are you thinking of, love?”
Markos gave up on sitting or standing a while ago, and stays instead splayed out on the pavement, head on his elbow, watching the water.
“Nothing. Everything.” His lips barely move. “I’m surprised no one has told me not to lie down so far.”
“They can’t see you, love. Not while I’m here.”
“No?”
“No.”
His stomach pangs at the thought though he can’t figure out why. Maybe he’s hungry. How long has he been here?
“Eli saw me.”
“She was looking for you. She knew what she wanted to find.”
If he doesn’t see you, he doesn’t love you like I do.
“Are you crying?”
Markos doesn’t feel the tears running down his face, though his sight blurs with guilt. “I need to talk to her.”
“You don’t need her.”
“I do.” He can hear the whine in his voice, even as it comes in tatters, cut up on the way out of his throat. “I love her.”
The vision doesn’t move, not even when the water around him shatters in waves, something stirring in the lake despite the absence of a breeze. “You’re being silly. You can’t love her. Not like you love me.”
"Is that bad?" He asks because the vision is right. It's not the same way. Elianna is a woman; Markos can never love her the way he gazes after Alex, and she can't look at him the way the vision does. But she’s family and home, and she's meant to last more than any daydream a man can promise him.
Markos feels the sob crackle at the spot in his chest where her absence eats at him, and with the last of his effort he tries to push himself to his elbows, then his knees.
"Love?"
His head spins, his fingers drawing lines on the gravel to ground him.
"You’re dehydrated."
"I'm— "
"Let me help you. Come closer."
Markos blinks at the vision that rises higher. The water swells with its presence, lifting for a second before his face can break the surface.
That's not possible, is it? He's a reflection.
"Come on, it's only me."
Confusion guides him over the edge, barely holding onto the last bit of pavement. His back is bent over toward the water, head stretching downward as if to meet his vision halfway.
"That's it. It's just me. It's just you."
He pauses, a breath before touching the surface, startled by the idea that because this is him, he's not going to hurt him, for who has ever hurt Markos more than himself?
The hesitation doesn't save him.
The vision breaks out of the water. Hands—his hands, but fingers joined in webbing—cradle his face. A pale forehead, chilled like the dead, presses against his own.
Markos gasps, and the vision's smile stretches on his lips, gentle, pleased, before it breaks. Into razor sharp teeth and a mouth open large and unhinged.
The last thing Markos knows is a dip of gravity when he's plunged into the thick water. Then it's all dark, dark and a profound sense of loss that hurts more than the piercing pain.
⛧
It's three weeks later that Elianna walks across the shore, limbs tucked close to her chest, an oversized scarf obscuring most of her face, daffodil-yellow and obnoxiously bright. She looks down at the water and catches a glimpse of a face she hasn't seen in a month, a face she knows is gone to her forever.
He doesn't look more perfect than before. He looks as sad and lovely as he always was, tinged with an underlying wrongness that betrays him, a cockiness Markos thought beautiful, but it only tells Eli it wants something.
"Why do you look like him?" She asks, her words cold like the first layers of ice that are starting to form this late in the year. "Why not a 'perfect' version of me?"
"Because you don't need that. He wanted to love himself. You want your friend."
She flinches at the sound of his voice, and she wants to run, hide as far away from the otherworldly thing that's not him, it's not.
She has to ask.
"Could you help me find him?"
The shadow smiles for real now. "Come closer." Its teeth glint under the moonlight.
"I'll show you where he is."
G.T. Korbin (she/they) is queer SFF-H author from Greece, currently living abroad to work in medical research. When they're not writing, she likes to yell at fictional characters in video games or try to bake, both with similar success. Her short stories have been previously published in the NoSleep podcast, Andromeda Spaceways, and various anthologies, such as UNTHINKABLE by Haunt Publishing (2022).