"I'm not here to fight you."

Miru stood before the man, her awakened blue eye glowing with powerful energies. She held nothing but anger in her mind and wanted nothing more than to tear him apart, but there was something holding her back. Something was wrong with this man. If she moved to attack him, which she desperately wanted to do, he was prepared to act before any attack could land. She didn't know what he was going to do, but she knew it was something, and being unable to determine what it was gave her pause.

That wouldn't stop her from talking big. "If you're not here to fight, then lay down and die."

He shook his head sadly. "I'm afraid it wouldn't be so easy. No matter what you do to me, I'll be right back at it again in time. You'd be shocked to hear the sorts of things I've already been through, so you don't really intimidate me."

"I'm warning you! This fire will consume you!"

"I've been consumed before. You don't frighten me. I've made my offer, and you will be accepting, if not now, then later. But don't waste my time. If you're going to try and kill me, do it now so we can all move on with our lives."

Whatever it was, it was gone. He held up the folder in his hands, holding it between them, and he no longer appeared to be preparing to react to any attack she made. All constraints gone, Miru did as she was told. The blue energies in her eye flared up, wild coils lashing out and scoring the walls of the small backroom. In an instant, a stream of lethal energy poured out like a jet flame, washing over the man. He vanished in the fire.

Miru pulled the patch back over her eye, then slumped against the wall. There was a pile of white ash in front of her where a person used to be. She hadn't expected to actually use her power tonight, but he'd had to die. It drained her, though, to use her power like that. After a minute of rest, she pushed herself up and opened the door, scattering the ashes across the floor. She was heading home now, to maybe try and figure out or justify in her head why someone would let themselves die like that.

The door closed behind her.

"Adrian? Are you alright?" The dust began to stir, as a radio in the corner of the room crackled to life. "Damn it, it's not gone well, has it?"

---

Outside the nightclub, Miru walked away, back towards her apartment. Her mind was starting to muddle things up, and her heart wasn't helping matters. She just couldn't understand why that man had just stood there and accepted death. It wasn't just fearlessness, he treated death like there wasn't anything to fear at all. How could anyone act like that?

So caught up in her own mind she was that she didn't notice until around halfway home that someone was following her. When she finally noticed, she realized it was the same person who had followed her before when she'd first set out from the apartment building. She took more note of them this time, not exactly excited for a second unpleasant encounter in one night. They were tall, with a large frame hidden under a long coat and some kind of tophat. Some big man, from the looks of it. Well, they wouldn't be any different from the other man, in the end.

A few blocks later, Miru ducked into an alley and waited for the mystery man to approach and try to follow her. She could hear the footsteps drawing closer until they were just before the alley, where they stopped. That was bothersome.

The voice that came from them was light and feminine, catching Miru totally off guard. "I know you're hiding there. I can smell and hear you just fine."

Letting out a defeated sigh, Miru stepped out of the alley. "Okay. What do you want with me?"

"I don't know." The woman, apparently, in the long coat shrugged. "You look just like my friend Lillin, but something smells off."

"Smells?" How could she smell the difference between me and Lillin? "Who are you?"

After taking a few moments to look over Miru's face, the woman nodded. "Hmm, I get it. You're sisters, right?"

Miru held her hand out to ward off that idea. "If you're Lillin's friend, then I think you should forget you saw me. Or at the very least, don't bring me up to her. You've clearly misunderstood our relationship." She had to tread carefully here, or she risked Lillin figuring out how to... get rid of her.

"Mis...understood? I don't understand."

Miru wanted to groan loudly at this woman's inability to capture simple concepts of the very language she was speaking. "Yeah, dipshit, that's what misunderstanding is. I'm not... related to Lillin, per se. We share a body, okay? When she's asleep, I'm awake. Get it? She won't understand, so don't bring it up to her."

"Oh..." Miru let out a sigh of relief that she'd picked up on the situation. "So you share your bodies. Like John and Mary! You're thespians!"

Miru shook her head, then stopped, waved her hands frantically and practically shouted. "No!" She caught herself, lowering her voice and whispering furiously at the confused woman. "No, not like that at all. A-and the word you're looking for is 'lesbians'."

"You don't have to deny it, there's nothing wrong with being a thespian. I'm a bit of a thespian myself."

"That's not what- Shut up!" Miru lost her temper. "Shut up! Shut the fuck up, you fucking idiot!" She lunged forward to grab the woman, intending to drag her into the alley and end her. Lillin never had to know. She clapped her hand over the woman's mouth to keep her from screaming.

The woman's face didn't feel like it should have. First of all, it was fuzzy. Second, Miru could feel sharp teeth in her mouth, far more than a normal person should have. Third, she could also feel the woman's nose under her hand, and it felt less like a human's nose and more like a cat's.

The hat fell off her would-be victim's head.

Miru stared in horror at what could only be a tiger's face. It didn't look exactly like a tiger, it still looked rather human in some respects, notably the long hair draped over the woman's shoulders, and there was a feminine look to it that no real tiger could pull off no matter how much they tried. But the fur, the ears, the nose... that wasn't human.

"What... what the fuck..." She pulled her hand off and backed away, unable to form a full thought in her head.

Rix sighed and scooped up her hat, putting it back on in case anyone else saw her. "Well, you're definitely not Lillin. She knows about me already." She held her hands out towards Miru, closing the distance between them, hoping to be able to somehow calm her down. She needed to deescalate the situation. "Please, just-"

"Stay the fuck away from me!" Miru reached up and tore the patch from her eye, unleashing a storm of energies that lit the street up with a wave of bright blue light. The flaming tide slammed into Rix, but everything else went nowhere close to how Miru had hoped.

Rix pulled her hat down off her head and held it in front of her. The lethal energies from Miru's eye streamed into the hat, harmlessly disappearing into some other time or place. Letting go of her hat and leaving it there, Rix twirled around to the side and pounced, intent on stopping Miru from trying to blow her up a second time.

Miru blinked in surprise, stopping her attack, and turned to see Rix reaching out for her. A split second later, Rix's hand wrapped around Miru's face, and Miru felt herself being forced onto her back. While Rix had been careful enough not to slam Miru's head into the sidewalk, Miru couldn't think straight enough to be thankful for the lack of a concussion. Her face felt like it was on fire, and her sight was starting to black out as blood covered her eyes.

She did the only thing she could do, with her face having been mutilated by the claws of a tiger. She screamed.

Rix pulled her hand away, seeing her mistake. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to-"

Miru pulled herself together long enough to fix Rix with a glare. She couldn't focus enough to unleash a continuous stream, but a short burst was possible. The blast hit Rix in the chest and sent her careening across the street, crashing through the front door of an apartment building on the other side. Miru rolled over and pushed herself onto her knees, then grabbed her face, trying in vain to stem the flow of blood that was now running through her fingers and down her arms and neck, staining her shirt collar. She had to get home.

Lights were already turning on up and down the street, and people were starting to come out to see what all the noise was. Surely they'd heard the scream, let alone the calamitous explosion of Rix crashing through a door. Standing, Miru ran into the alley. She would have to take the long way back home, which meant more time before she could clean her cuts.

It was only a few minutes later that she crashed through the door of her apartment, scattering empty food cans across the floor as she staggered to the sink. She fumbled with the tap for a few precious seconds before the water finally began to pour out into her hands. She rinsed her hands off quickly, getting the dirt and blood off, at least a little of it, before cupping her hands to fill them with water. She plunged her face into the pool of water. She let the bloody water splash into the sink and run down the drain as she propped herself up against the sink with her hands. It hurt, bad, and it was taking everything she had just to keep from screaming or crying. She'd probably end up doing both at the same time if she let herself break.

Once she'd stabilized her breathing, and was sure she wouldn't faint, she got some more water and repeated the process, washing her cuts to the best of her meager ability. Once she was sure she'd done just about everything she could do, she finally allowed herself to look up at the mirror hanging over the sink.

She sucked in a gasp. She had never been under the illusion that she was exceptionally pretty, but this was a major mark. If it became a scar, there would be nothing for her romantically ever. Her forehead had a gash going straight up, and another two such horrific lines just barely missed blinding her, one running along the length of her eye just above the eye, and the other just under. Two other lines went down, tearing smaller lines into her cheeks. There was not actual hole in her cheeks, which was about the best thing she could think of about the whole mess. The five lines all came together in the center, on the bridge of her nose, and they were already starting to bleed again.

She felt a burning anger rising up inside her. Her hands gripped the edges of the sink harder and harder, trying in vain to crush the cheap metal it was made from. When that failed, she turned away from the sink to take out her rage on the only thing that would have a meaningful response. The mirror on the other side of her room.

Miru's fist struck the mirror on the wall with a loud crack, and a spiderweb of lines formed across the shiny surface, startling the sleeping person on the other side of the mirror. Lillin jumped up and nearly fell out of bed. Miru watched, feeling her entire body heating up with fury, as Lillin stumbled to her feet.

She needed Lillin to wake up. "Hey!" Lillin looked around the room in stunned silence for a moment. "Over here, bitch!"

Lillin turned to the mirror in her room, seeing the figure on the other side. The mirror was broken, splitting up the image framed in it. Miru's body appeared like it had been shattered and was only barely hanging together. Lillin gasped when, in several parts of the image, she could see blood running down Miru's face.

"What happened? Are you... are we okay?"

"No, we're not fucking okay, Lillin. Look at me!"

She looked, stepping up to the mirror and reaching out to touch it. It was basically destroyed. So was Miru's face. "How did this happen?"

"Don't ask me, this is your fault, you fucking bitch! You did this to us!"

Something occurred to Lillin. "But you're... in my mind..." Was this some kind of mental scarring? She didn't feel that mentally scarred, except from an obvious sniper-related incident in her past. She reached up and touched her face, where the scars were. She felt nothing but smooth skin. She wasn't injured. That meant it was all inside her mind somewhere. "I don't know... how this affects me. I'm fine."

"What? What the fuck did you just say to me?"

If Miru had been a real person and not just some hallucination or alternate personality in her head, Lillin would have been concerned about her tone. But at this moment, she was just glad to find that the damage to Miru's face hadn't come from something that was a real injury. "Oh my God, that's such a relief, I thought something had happened to me."

"Hey! Stop fondling your ugly face, you little shit! Pay attention! What affects me affects you, understand?"

It didn't matter how much Miru shouted at her, this difference between them told Lillin something she'd desperately needed to know. "This is good. We can go our separate ways now. I don't feel any pain. It's all yours. You don't have to stay in my mind. I can forget you now."

Something snapped in Miru. "Listen here, bitch. You'll never be rid of me." In the mirror, Lillin watched in horror as Miru reached down and picked up a shard of glass that had broken off of the mirror. "We may not be the same right now. My face is a mess." She lifted the shard up to her face.

"Miru, stop. You don't have to-"

"I'm the one with both eyes. Maybe that's why we're still so far apart. Let me just change that."

"No!" Lillin pressed up against the mirror, buckling it, but she was unable to reach through to stop Miru from plunging the shard into her eye. The scream that ripped through the room was horrific. Lillin recoiled and covered her ears. "No, please stop!"

Miru pressed her freshly bloodied face up against the broken mirror. "Come here, Lillin. I want you to feel this."

Reluctantly, slowly, Lillin approached, trying not to look at the mess that had replaced Miru's eye. "Why... why did you..." She stopped. It still didn't hurt. She still didn't feel anything at all. "No... you're not real." She looked up to face Miru. "You need to go now."

The cruel smile on Miru's face vanished. "No..." Lillin turned her back to the mirror. "Hey! Don't look away! I'm in control here!"

"Not anymore. It's my body. My mind. I'm in control."

"I'll show you who's in control, you stupid bitch." Miru stepped back from the mirror and drew back her fist, driving it into the barrier between them. The loud crack made Lillin jump around to look back at her mirror image. Miru grinned. "You want me gone? Let's go together."

"Wait, wait, what are you doing?"

Miru punched the mirror again, drawing blood from her hand. "I'm doing what it takes to break through to you."

"Stop this. Hold on. Wait!"

"No." Miru hit the mirror again, and her hand went through, breaking through the glass into Lillin's room. She grabbed Lillin's shoulder and pulled her into the mirror, slamming her into it. Then she pushed, smashing her way through the mirror and into Lillin's room. "Let's go out together, sister."

Miru dragged Lillin, still dazed, to the window.