Who: Marco, Chase, maybe Kiley When: Mid-morning Where: The hallway by Marco's room
The thunder woke Marco up for most of the night, and the usual nonsense with his head kept him up in intervals afterwards. He'd fall back to sleep, until the next crack of thunder, and then there was twenty minutes of mutterings that he knew was just in his head before the process started back over again. Between the disrupted sleep and the sun never coming out, he had no idea what time it was when he finally gave up on sleep. He just knew that when he finally got out of bed, new voices were talking, calmly, saying something about madness and slit throats. Honestly, he was just glad that they weren't telling him to slit his throat, which wouldn't have been so strange for him. He sat on his bed, quietly telling it to stop, but those weren't the only things he was hearing, and eventually he grumbled to himself and retreated to his bathroom to actually wake up and start his day. Maybe find some candles or a bright spot, because the power outage was once again getting to him, and the storm was doing nothing to help his nerves.
He'd only just taken his pills when he noticed the first odd thing. Just a little thing at first, an ant, crawling across his mirror. Not a little one, either. One of those big ugly fuckers, with the wings. Were those even really ants? That wasn't important. He watched it for a moment, before reaching forward and crushing it with his thumb, and though it didn't feel right, he could have sworn he heard it crunch. A quick inspection would have proven that that was wrong, but he looked up to find another ant crawling across the mirror. He reached up to crush that one, only to find this one as part of a line. He hit the mirror a few times, but with every ant he was sure he killed, a handful of new ones started across his line of vision. He was soon hitting the mirror with more and more force, trying to stay ahead of the swarm, which was making him more and more uncomfortable as their numbers grew. He raised his hands up and bashed them against the mirror, and only stopped when a clap of thunder made him jump and cry out.
But his reflection didn't jump. It remained frozen, it's hands raised, slowly crushing the bugs that were, Marco now realized, on the reflection's side of the mirror. Marco felt like all the air left the room as he watched himself pound against the mirror, hands hitting the glass until they bled. And they bled a lot. When Marco felt like he could move again, and do more than stare at the other him, he held his hands out in front of him. His real hands weren't bleeding. They weren't bleeding. He wasn't bleeding. He was fine. He was fine. He took a few gasping breaths, then lowered his hands and looked up at the mirror again.
In the time that he'd looked away, his reflection had caught up to him, and had become his reflection again. He glanced around, looking for the ants again, but there was no sign of them. He raised his hands up to see them in reflection. Still bloody. "What the fuck--" he started to say, but when reflection-Marco opened his mouth, blood flowed down his face. Marco, wide-eyed, stepped closer, trying to remind himself that this was a hallucination, that this wasn't the first thing he saw strange things. But as he took a step closer to the mirror, reflection-Marco's throat was suddenly lined with red. Both Marco and his reflection suddenly stood up straight in shock, but for the reflection, the motion opened the wound across it's throat wide, spraying the mirror and his torso with more blood than Marco could ever remember seeing. A scream escaped him, and he clapped both hands over his mouth to stifle it as he tripped over himself to get out of his bathroom, and out of his bedroom.
He was crying when he hit the hallway, hyperventilating into his hand and trying not to scream some more. You're hallucinating, he told himself, but that sure as fuck didn't make it better. He slid down the wall, eyes still wide and filled with tears, hands still clapped over his mouth, failing to calm himself down. All he could think of was the voices he'd heard earlier that morning, talking about how someone has succumbed to madness, and he wondered if he was getting closer to doing the same.