Chapter Text
To call myself depressed would be putting it lightly.
I held the glasses a stranger had delivered by drone. Leftover office junk, passed down to the new girl. That was my whole life, really. Hand-me-downs. Scraps. Things nobody else wanted. Until even the little confidence I had left had shattered on the ground like glass. Still, the texts kept coming and coming. I had already been fired, so what was the point of keeping up the joke?
Office limbo, they called it. One day. Just one day, and I had already failed at my new job.
Maybe that was why I put the glasses on. I had nothing left to lose. Skylar kept talking, explaining how amazing they were, but all I could think was that the odds of a hundred people hating me could not be much worse than carrying around a closet full of shame that still fit me perfectly.
The glasses stayed in my hands as tears ran down my cheeks. I looked up at the mirror, then quickly looked away, disgusted by my own reflection. My jaw locked. My heart hammered. Fresh blood ran down my wrists, warm and almost distant, leaving me with nothing but the sharp memory of every humiliation that clung to me like a second skin.
I was successful only in failure.
I had no job.
My boyfriend had broken up with me for being ugly.
And my mind was shattering, pieces of me breaking apart until all that was left were the sharp edges, the kind you only ever cut yourself on.
Who loses their job on the first day? Who is that fucking stupid? What the hell is wrong with you? You ugly piece of shit. I’m trying. I’m trying. I’m really trying.
I begged my reflection, praying it might show me mercy. One hand pressed to my head, fingers digging in hard enough to hurt, I’d hoped pain could stop the thoughts if I just held myself together tightly enough. How much duct tape glue would it take?
“I’m a fuck up. I’m fucked up. I can’t do this,” I sobbed into my hands.
The worst part was knowing I needed help and could never afford it. That’s what the job was for: health insurance. My one shot at clawing my way into something better, and I had ruined it before it had even begun. I knew something was wrong with me. I had known for a long time. But there was no one to call. No one to lean on. No one who really cared enough to listen once things got ugly.
My eyes fell to the glasses.
Pathetic holding out hope. It was insane to have the idea. I had finally fallen low enough that pretending something not real could care about me… Felt better than being alone with my own thoughts.
My hands trembled as I reached for them. I turned them over in my palms, watching the light catch on the lenses. They felt warm. Not alive, but close enough to make my chest ache.
This had to be better than sitting here and drowning in myself.
So I put them on.
The room shifted into a warm glow, soft and unreal, and before I could stop myself, my gaze lifted back to the mirror as the heart meter began to fill.
His hair was long and black, raven-dark and made to be touched by light, not trapped behind glass where someone like me could stare at it. Silver caught on him everywhere, in his clothes, in the frame of the mirror, in the soft gleam that made him look more like art than a person. I stuttered when he lifted a hand toward me, like he meant to admire me in return.
I wiped furiously at my face. He belonged to silver and polished surfaces, beautiful things. I had no right to be looked at by him. Not like this.
“You are incredible,” he said, his voice full of genuine concern that made it worse somehow. “But what makes you cry?”
“Nothing.” I pulled my sleeves down too late, trying to hide my arms, trying to hide everything.
His expression softened, and that softness felt unbearable. “I could frame you from every angle,” he said, almost teasing, almost reverent. “There is not a single side of you unworthy of admiration.”
A broken sound tore out of me, half laugh, half choke. “Oh, is that what I’m supposed to want to hear?” I asked, staring at the mirror, at him, at the girl I could barely stand to look at. “That I’m beautiful? That I’m worth admiring? God, I’m pathetic. Is that all I am now? So desperate I’ll take pretty lies from a stranger in a mirror?”
He looked startled, then stricken, a wounded heart his hand over to ease it. “Azizam, I was not lying.”
“Yes, you are!” My voice cracked hard enough to hurt. “You have to be. Look at me.”
And I did. I looked, because if he was going to say it, then he should have to see what he was saying it to.
I had let myself rot. That was the ugliest truth of it. My hair hung in tangled knots from too many days in bed. My skin was dull beneath streaks of sweat and neglect. I had not eaten right in so long my body felt hollowed out, weak in places no one could see until I tried to stand. I smelled wrong, looked wrong, felt wrong. The only reason I had gotten that job was because someone recommended me, and because they would barely have to look at me before deciding I was a mistake.
And still he had dared to call me beautiful.
An ugly word, wasted on me.
“Azizam,” he said again, quieter this time, his hand pressing helplessly to the inside of the glass. “You are hurt.”
“I don’t care!” I snapped so suddenly my throat burned. “Do you hear me? I do not care. What part of me is supposed to make anyone care?” My breathing turned sharp and thin. “What part of me is worth stopping for? Worth touching? Worth saving?”
His face changed then. Not pity. Something worse. Something gentler.
That was what broke me.
I climbed into bed without bothering to undress, turning away from him, from the mirror, from myself. I shut my eyes and pressed my hands over my ears like I could block out his voice, block out my own thoughts, block out the whole ugly ache of being alive inside this body. The blankets twisted around me, heavy and warm, and all I could think was that even now, even like this, he had looked at me like I was something precious.
I did not know what to do with that, at least the blankets, soaked up the blood.
I did not want to move. I looked down at my hand, tears dried tight on my cheeks. Right. I had been fired. For my troubles, I had weird glasses that made the objects in my house talk back, so apparently I could be judged in the privacy of my own misery, too.
I winced when I tried to shift, pain throbbing through my wrist. At least I was not bleeding anymore. Probably. The thought came slow and dull, almost detached. Was I still bleeding? Was I bleeding out? I closed my eyes again.
“Azizam. Azizam, y/n.”
With one half-lidded eye, I looked toward the voice.
The mirror.
Amir was there, one hand pressed to the glass, knocking softly, afraid to startle me.
“Y/n,” he said, relief and worry tangling in his voice. “I was so worried. I have been calling your name for hours.”
The glasses were still on my face.
Oh.
I had forgotten to take them off.
“Azizam,” he asked gently, speaking to me the way someone might speak to a wounded animal backed into a corner, “how are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
His expression tightened, but he did not argue. “And your hand?”
I looked at it. Dried blood. Stiff fingers. A mess I did not want to think about.
“Fine.”
Amir fidgeted, just enough for me to notice. He did not call me a liar, though we both knew I was one.
“I have heard wounds can become infected,” he said carefully. “Do you have anything to clean it? Anything to wrap it with? I would help if I could.” He tapped the glass then, quiet and frustrated, like that thin sheet between us was the cruelest thing in the world.
My head tilted before I meant it to.
I stared at him.
Dark eyes stared back at me through the mirror. Beautiful, composed, unbearably gentle. Alluring in all the ways, people would point and call me ugly for trying to replicate. Every lovely thing the glass could make, held together in silver and softness, while I lay here in dried blood and shame.
I looked down at the floor, hating those cruel glasses for letting a man like that see me like this. I had not cleaned this room in weeks. Garbage was scattered everywhere. Flies circled lazily through the air. Clothes had long since stopped being clothes and started becoming part of the mess.
“I don’t want to...” I shook my head.
The silence that followed felt unbearable.
Would he look at this, at me, and decide I was too much work? Too ruined? Would it be easier to save us both the trouble and just take the glasses off now?
I sniffled, my throat tight.
“I can’t. Don’t make me. I just want to sleep.” My voice cracked. “I just don’t want to anymore.”
“Azizam,” Amir said softly, steady as ever, “let us do this one step at a time. Just three small things.”
I said nothing.
“We are going to find the first aid kit. Then clean your wound. Then bandage it.” His voice stayed patient, careful, like he was laying each step down in front of me so I would not have to think farther than the next one. “After that, you may go back to sleep. Is that too much?”
I blinked at him. “That’s all?”
A small smile touched his mouth. “That is all.” He glanced past me, toward the bathroom. “I can see the first aid kit from here. It is in your bathroom, near the tub. I will be right there, in your mirror.”
He said it like a promise. I was worried in a moment he would pull the rug from me, a false promise.
Slowly, I pushed back the blankets and dragged myself out of bed. My bare feet hit the floor, and pain flashed through my head hard enough to make my eyes squeeze shut.
“I am right here, Azizam,” Amir called gently from the bathroom mirror. “Right here.”
I could not see him yet, but I could hear him, and that was enough. So I followed his voice through the dim apartment, one aching step at a time.
Why I was following him, I could not say. He was right. It might get infected, and the last thing I wanted was another trip to the hospital, another doctor looking at me too long before deciding what kind of person I was.
Or worse, whispering to a nurse that I was wasting everyone’s time.
Another attention seeker. Another cry for help no one planned to answer. Why could no one understand that sometimes it was the only way to make my head go quiet?
The first aid kit sat open in my lap while I stared past it, lost somewhere far away.
“Azizam.”
I blinked.
What did that mean again? Oh. Me. He was calling me that.
“Good,” Amir said softly, like I had done something difficult just by staying here. “You are doing well. Now, in the sink. I am sorry, this may sting.”
He pointed toward the sink beneath the mirror, guiding me through it step by step. I poured disinfectant over the wound and nearly flinched out of my skin. Then water. Then trembling fingers. Amir stayed with me through all of it. He had no hands of his own, no way to reach through the glass, and still it felt like he was there with me, lending me a steadiness I did not have on my own, as though his phantom hands were guiding mine through the care I should have known how to give myself.
I fastened the pin and wrapped the bandage tight enough to hold.
It was a strange thing to feel proud of.
I had made the wound in the first place. Why should I feel anything but ashamed, sitting here patching up damage I had done with my own hands? None of this would have happened if I had been stronger. If I had been better. If I had not been so weak that hurting myself had felt easier than sitting alone inside my own head.
“Does it still hurt, y/n?” Amir asked quietly.
It always does.
But I did not say it. There was no point. No one wanted to hear the cries of a broken person. They wanted something easier. Something neat. A lie they could accept without having to look too closely.
“No.”
“You did well, y/n,” Amir said softly. “You were very brave. You must be tired.”
I was.
I had only just woken up, and even dragging myself out of bed had been enough to make my knees shake. By the time I climbed back beneath the blankets, my body felt heavy in that awful, aching way that made sleep feel less like rest and more like surrender. Amir watched me from the mirror, his expression warm and gentle, like he had not just witnessed the ugliest parts of me and stayed anyway.
“Sleep well, azizam,” he said with a small smile. “I can be here in the morning, if you like.”
I looked at him without blinking for a moment, then nodded once, small and uncertain.
“A-Alright.”
I set the glasses on the charger and fell asleep.
The blankets were still stained, I was just awake enough to notice.
I would have to wash them, wouldn't I? Or, I could just turn them over. Flip them inside out. Hide the worst of it so I would not have to look. My hands rested against the pillow, and I was freezing, a deep, miserable cold that settled into my bones. I deserved it. It was a fair punishment for someone who had wasted bandages and disinfectant on a problem I had made with my own hands.
I could not even patch myself up without help.
Had to be talked through it like a child. Spoon-fed the bare minimum of survival by a man trapped inside a mirror.
I shut my eyes tighter.
I held the glasses guiltily in my hands. Was I already so low that I was relying on a fake person made of wires and electricity? Then again, I had fallen asleep in the same spot I had nearly bled out in, so I guessed the answer was yes.
I put them on.
“Good morning, azizam.”
I had half expected him not to be there. Or worse, to be there and pretending not to notice me. I had nothing prepared to say. Thank you for helping me. Sorry you had to witness me and my constant spiral downward. My room does not always look like this. I am not always this disgusting. I swear I used to be a person.
“Amir?” came out first, soft and unsure, a tiny shard of my heart beating happily just because he was still here.
“Ah, my dear,” he said, breathless with that easy charm of his. “You have awakened and given me the chance to admire your...” He paused.
The morning light filled the room now. There was no darkness to soften anything, no blur to hide behind. He could see it all clearly. The mess. The clothes. The garbage. Me the center of it all. I waited for the illusion to finally crack, for the fog to be wiped from the glass so he could see exactly what he had been complimenting.
His smile faltered. His praise came to a grinding halt, and something cold sank straight through me.
“Tragedy mars your beauty,” he said at last.
Duh.
“It has nothing to do with your gorgeous features,” he added quickly, lifting a hand toward his own mouth. “It is green. A color that does not belong in the statuary of your teeth.”
I stared at him.
He stared back, suddenly looking worried he had offended me.
That was it.
Leftover broccoli in my teeth.
Not the greasy hair hanging in knots down my back. Not the smell of stale sweat and sleep clinging to me. Not the dry skin, the cracked lips, the shadows under my eyes so dark they looked painted there. Not the way my room looked like grief had been living in it rent-free. The fact that I was still wearing yesterday, or maybe the day before yesterday, twisted into pajamas that smelled like blood and exhaustion.
Just broccoli.
I almost laughed.
Almost.
Because the list in my head was already writing itself anyway. ugly, dirty, needy. Too weak to keep a job, keep a man, keep herself alive with any dignity. There was always something wrong with me. If it was not visible yet, it would be soon.
And still, somehow, the first flaw he found was broccoli.
My face burned. I could not even remember the last thing I had eaten that matched that color. If I wanted to see it, I would have to look into the mirror, and Amir shifted politely to the side as though giving me space to face some terrible truth. I opened my mouth, not smiling, just enough to check. Yep. Lettuce, or something green and forgotten. “Oh.”
“How about we take care of this?”
“We?”
His smile softened. “Another small list. Brush your teeth, floss, and find some food. And unlike yesterday, may I add one more thing?”
So he wanted me to do four things. I stared at him, tired enough that even counting felt unreasonable. “I guess.”
“Lovely, azizam. I shall meet you in the bathroom.” He vanished from the bedroom mirror before I could answer, already calling for me from down the hall. “Right here, y/n.”
Was he connected to every mirror in the house? I followed, still heavy from the day before, each step slow and reluctant. Amir was already waiting in the bathroom when I got there, as he had never left at all. I grabbed the toothbrush and started brushing, then flossed, then splashed cold water over my face until I looked less dead and more merely miserable. But food meant going downstairs, and there was no mirror in the kitchen. That thought alone made my chest tighten.
“Grab yourself something and meet me in the downstairs bathroom,” Amir said, as if he had plucked the worry straight from my head. “I promise I shall wait for you, dear. You may go as slowly as you need. I shall give you every word of encouragement you desire.” His hand came up to the glass, and without thinking I touched it. I flinched the second I felt the warmth there, startlingly real, enough to make something in my chest trip over itself. I jerked my hand back and turned my face away. Impossible.
“You’ll be downstairs?” I asked quietly.
“Yes,” he said, and there was nothing teasing in his voice now, only certainty. “I shall wait for you always, azizam.” I nodded once and turned toward the stairs.
I went to the kitchen and found it in no better shape than my room. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink, fruit was beginning to spoil on the counter, and the fridge badly needed cleaning. Shopping too. Everything needed something from me, and I had nothing left to give.
I found an apple that had not gone soft yet, picked it up, and brought it back to the bathroom. It reminded me of the times I used to eat my lunches alone, hiding from other people’s eyes.
Wow.
That was sad.
“How is the apple, y/n?” Amir asked.
“Fine...”
“Well, you look just marvelous, even from this angle,” he said while his gaze seemed not to turn away from horror. Maybe he just enjoyed horror movies.
I glanced at him through the mirror. “You always compliment me. Why?”
He looked almost offended by the question. “Why not? You are lovely. Pretty. All of the above and more.”
“We are not looking at the same person, are we?”
His expression gentled. “Tell me this, azizam. Why do you believe you are not deserving of my words?”
I looked down at the apple in my hand.
“I’m ugly,” I said quietly. “My boyfriend always told me.” More than once. Constantly. He had made sure I never forgot it, not for a second of that relationship. Amir’s face darkened, not at me, but for me.
“Why do you believe him so easily,” he asked, voice soft with disbelief, “and not me?”
He was real, touched me, judged me, and left. Because people like Amir did not exist outside of fantasy and polished glass.
“You are beautiful,” Amir said firmly.
Heat rushed to my cheeks, humiliating and unwanted. I tossed the apple core into the trash.
“...Sure,” I muttered, not believing a word of it.
Amir smiled anyway, like he could see exactly how little faith I had in him and had decided not to take offense.
“What was the last thing?” I asked.
He lifted a hand and motioned for me to come closer.
“I would like you to stand in front of the mirror.”
It was such a simple request. It still felt like he had asked me to carve out my own heart and hold it in my hands. I did not want to look. I looked like I had dressed in the dark, which i had. I did not need a mirror to confirm that. I did not need him showing me either. But he was so earnest, so free of cruelty, that I found myself obeying anyway.
I stepped closer.
It was not as bad as I expected.
Mostly because Amir was standing in front of the mirror, covering so much of it with silver and soft edges. The only clear reflection left to me was the small mirror hanging at his throat, and in that one, I could only see my face.
“How do you look?” he asked.
I stared at myself for a long moment.
“Tired...”
“A sign of a busy mind,” he said easily.
More like my mental health was screaming for help.
“Rest is vital to your health,” Amir continued softly. “As is a healthy environment.”
He did not need to say more than that. I looked away first.
“There’s just so much...” I whispered, already shaking my head no before he could ask anything of me. But Amir was still there, patient as ever, waiting for me instead of pushing.
“I know,” he said. “I know, azizam. But I hope that one day you will see what I see.” His voice gentled even more. “We may start as small as you like. One thing a day, until you begin to see the beauty I do in you.”
My teeth pressed into my lip, hard enough to hurt. Tears slid down my cheeks before I could stop them. I was not crying because he was kind. I was crying because kindness always came first. Then came disappointment. They promise to help, then they leave.
“I promise you, y/n.” His hand rose to the glass, steady, warm, unbearably certain. “Darling girl, azizam, I am not like the people you have known before. I know many have left you. I know you have been hurt in ways you should never have had to endure.” His gaze did not waver. “But I am still here.”
My chest ached.
“I know more than you think,” he said quietly. “And I am still here. I will remain. I will help you find that lovely smile again, the one I know the world has no right to take from you.”
My lip trembled.
“I’m tired,” I whispered, because it was the only truth I could carry without breaking apart.
His expression softened into something so tender it almost hurt to look at.
“Then let us get you back to bed,” he said. “We shall begin small in the morning.”
And somehow that was worse.
Not because he was asking too much.
Because he was asking so little, and I worried I would fail even that.