THE KNIFE

Blood pooled under my fingers. My knife had gone in clean—deep between the ribs, where I knew the heart should be. I felt Vaughn’s body shudder against mine, his breath sharp, broken.

And yet… he was still standing.

He exhaled a slow, shivering laugh. “You always miss the heart.”

My stomach twisted. “What?”

He lifted a hand to his chest, pressing into the wound. Blood seeped between his fingers, but he didn’t seem to care. He should be dying. Instead, he was looking at me like he expected this. Like he’d been waiting.

I stepped back, my pulse hammering. I had spent years chasing this moment—tracking him, hunting him, hating him. And now, as I stood in the dim light of this empty alley, my knife still wet with his blood…

I realized something was very, very wrong.

Vaughn smirked. His lips moved, but his voice came from behind me.

"How many times have we done this now, Rei?"

I turned.

He was there, standing behind me, whole and untouched.

The Vaughn I had stabbed was still in front of me.

The world shuddered, like reality itself had taken a breath.

Then it shattered.


---

THE TRAP

I woke up somewhere else.

The city was wrong. Empty. A skyline full of buildings with flickering lights, shifting between existence and nothingness. The sky was cracked—splintered, like something had punched through it.

Vaughn was already there, waiting.

He wasn’t bleeding anymore. He wasn’t even hurt.

I clenched my fists. “What the hell is this?”

“This,” he said, gesturing at the fractured world, “is what happens when you try to kill something that cannot die.”

The words crawled under my skin.

I had spent my life hunting him down. Why?

Because Vaughn was my enemy. Because he had ruined me. Because I needed him dead.

But standing here, in this place that should not exist, something was unraveling inside me.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Vaughn tilted his head. “That’s the cruel part. You never do.”

I shook my head. “Stop talking in riddles.”

Vaughn exhaled, looking almost… tired.

“We’ve been here before, Rei. Dozens of times. Maybe hundreds. I lose count.” He gestured between us. “You hunt me down. You stab me. We end up here. Then you forget, and it starts again.”

Lies. It had to be lies.

But then he stepped closer—so close I could see his eyes. My eyes. Exactly the same.

Something was tearing at the back of my mind, scratching at a memory that wasn’t mine.

Or was it?


---

THE HORROR

I staggered back, shaking my head. “No. No, you’re not—”

“I am,” he said simply.

Vaughn wasn’t my enemy.

Vaughn wasn’t even real.

He was me.

Not a twin. Not a clone. He was me from another timeline. And somehow, someway, we had been colliding—over and over again.

"Two versions of the same person can't exist in one reality," he murmured. "So the universe does the only thing it can do."

It keeps bringing us here.

And it forces us to make a choice.

My hands were shaking. My mind was spiraling.

This wasn’t possible.

I had lived my life hating Vaughn, blaming him, hunting him. But if he was me—

Then I had spent my entire life trying to kill myself.


---

THE FINAL CHOICE

“You already know how this ends,” Vaughn said, voice almost gentle now. “Only one of us gets to leave.”

I knew he was right.

The world flickered, reality thinning at the edges. The longer we both existed, the more unstable everything became. The walls cracked. The ground trembled. The air was splitting apart.

It was him or me.

But how do you kill yourself?

I stared at him. At the exhaustion in his eyes. At the same fear that was burning in my chest.

I had spent my life chasing him, blaming him for everything. But what if I had just been running from myself?

Maybe I didn’t hate Vaughn.

Maybe I just hated the person I had become.

Vaughn watched me, waiting.

I lifted my knife.

The world screamed.


---

MIRRORBOUND

Instead of fighting, we stepped toward each other.

We merged.

The pain was instant. Like something inside me was being ripped apart and stitched back together at the same time. My mind fractured, memories colliding, breaking, rearranging. I was drowning in the weight of a hundred lives, a hundred choices, a hundred versions of me that had stood in this place before.

And then—

Silence.

When I woke up, I was someone else.

My memories were scrambled—two lives fused into something new.

I didn’t know if I was the version that won or lost.

I only knew one thing.

I was the only one left.


But as I stood there, breathing in a world that felt both mine and foreign, a whisper coiled through my mind—a voice that was not mine, yet was me.

This isn’t the end.

The thought chilled me. Because deep down, I knew… the cycle was never truly broken.

I could feel it—something shifting beneath my skin, memories I had no claim to flickering like dying embers. Vaughn was gone, but his presence lingered in the hollow spaces of my mind.

Had I won?

Had I lost?

Or had I simply become the next version doomed to repeat this?