“Hey, old man,” My doppelganger snarled. “Shut up. And get lost. You’ve done your part.”
“Come now, you are my true son –”
“Get. Lost.”
With two words, my father’s form vanished. Melting away into black smoke that departed from a sudden breeze. My reflection clicked his tongue, shaking his head.
“Gods I hate that fucker. Now, where were we?” Glowing red eyes locked on my form. “Ah, yes. Dealing with you.”
He tossed me against the toilet seat, slamming his foot into my chest with a vicious, terrifying fanged smirk.
“Who… are you?”
“I’m you, idiot. Who else would I be?”
“That’s not possible – I’m me.”
“Oh, we want to talk about impossible things now Mr. I-Fucked-A-Tentacle-Monster?”
My lips pressed tightly against each other. “You’re not me. You can’t be me.”
My doppelganger sighed. “Listen, whether you like it or not, I’m you. The part of you that you don’t like to admit exists. The hornier, angrier, bloodthirsty part of you. The you that has all your fears, worries, and anxieties. Your grief, frustrations, sorrows and regrets.”
“W-what?”
“Back home on our world, basically I’d be nothing more than a mound of repressed memories and emotions that you should have ironed over with a shrink. Except, we’re in crazy-land Alamir, and because of that, rather than just being your psychological hang-ups and unresolved PTSD –”
“I don’t have any unresolved PTSD.”
“Riiiight.” He said. “Anyway, as I was saying, rather than being your psychological hang-ups – I instead gained what you call… sentience. Or is it consciousness? Or sapience? Fuck me if I know what this is called.”
“So, you’re… a split personality?”
He smacked me over the head. “No, idiot. I’m you. A part of you. We’re two halves of the same individual, not a separate identity entrenched within a single mind.”
I rubbed my head. “You don’t have to hit me.” I took in another deep breath, trying to wrap my head around it all. “If you’re me – and I’m me… how does that work?”
“I’m guessing it’s because of the name Zlosta gave us. It allowed this to happen.”
My brow furrowed. “Our name?”
“Janus, dumbass. We’re Janus. Think. Duality. Janus in Roman Myth had two heads. Except, for us, rather than having two heads, we instead got our mind partitioned into two halves. The naïve, ambitionless, I-just-wanna-live half that’s you, and then there’s me, the half that’s going to keep us alive.”
“Really,” I said dryly. “You’re going to keep us alive? And where have you been?”
“In the background, genius.” My doppelganger snarled. “I was there when we pushed aside our body dysmorphia from being turned into a worm. I was there when we kept bay our terror from being swallowed alive by a snake. When we buried our guilt from killing the Kadulja. I was there to prevent us from shaking in our boots every time we thought about Hoplite and his ability to make black holes. We’ve seen a lot of shit that should have driven us insane, but we haven’t lost it yet, and it’s not because of our shitty Insanity Resistance skill, it’s because we took every single threat to our sanity and tossed them into a box and locked it away. And I’ve always been the motherfucker holding the damned box.”
I didn’t have any words to say. There wasn’t much I could say. The silence stretched, as I stared at him, me – my other half. Us? We? I didn’t know that were the correct terms to use.
“What do I… call you?”
“We’re Janus. Together. You and I.” He said, before sighing. “Though it’ll get confusing if you refer to me as that when you mean to refer to yourself. Calling me Dark Janus or something would just be stupid. I’ll go by Sunny.”
“Sunny?”
“We’re keeping in line with the theme of twos. Sun and Moon. I’m the one who wants to fuck shit up and get shit done in the light, and you’re the one who wants to live in the shadows in peaceful obscurity. Together, we find balance. Yin and Yang. Light and Dark. Peanut butter and jelly. Tits and ass.”
“...really?”
“Can you sit there and tell me that they don’t make a great combo.”
I sighed, running my hand down my face. “I can’t believe my other half is such a…” I pressed my lips together. “What was that about, with father being here?”
“That’s not on me. This is our mind, Janus. While we’ve been able to toss almost everything in a box, now and again, that bastard manages to find a way to slip out through the keyhole. I managed to make him scram this time… but… well, he’s always going to be there, casting his shadow over us.”
And there’s nothing that can change that… is there?
‘Not to my knowledge.’
I blinked. You can… read my thoughts?
‘They’re our thoughts, Janus. Our.’
“This is going to take some getting used to.”
Sunny removed his leg from my chest, shrugging casually. “Think of it as having a cool roommate. The exact opposite of the one we had in Sophomore year.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“I hated that douche. Spilling soda on our laptop, two-timing his girlfriend in the shower, turning the roll of toilet paper the wrong way –”
“Didn’t he still go on to become CEO of his mother’s tech company?”
Sunny nodded, growling. “The fact that an asshole like him got a happier ending than we did is proof that that the system is broken.” He smacked his fist into his palm. “Speaking of broken systems, there’s the Nightscripts and Antediluvian Hieroglyphs. Then there’s also Oblivion’s little gift – the Daily Task System.”
“What about it?”
“We’ve been underutilizing them. The Antediluvian Hieroglyphs are Alamir’s command consoles. Cheat codes. If we have the right codes and know how to use them, we could become invincible. We need to experiment further, and drill Erzili
