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Rachel Duncan wakes up at 4 in the morning and spends the first few minutes of her day blinking at the ceiling.
No. That’s not quite right. Rachel Duncan is dead.
The woman that wakes up at 4 in the morning and spends that first few minutes of her day blinking at the ceiling is somebody else. She’s thought about choosing a new name a few times after Rachel Duncan died. A name that sounds soft and rolls off the tongue easily. Not a name that sounds like white and glass and smells like chloroform and alcohol and blood and that-
But no name sounded right, and even though Rachel Duncan was a name that made her skin crawl, she kept being Rachel.
In her own apartment, at least.
Not that it’s really hers. She hasn’t really owned anything in a long time.
Hmm. Then again, maybe she has never owned anything, ever.
There definitely never was anything that really belonged to Rachel Duncan. But Rachel Duncan is dead now.
Rachel is very tired of the circles her thoughts have been running in the past few months. She presses the palm of her hand against the lump of plastic that fills out the space in her head where Rachel Duncan’s eye used to sit like a festering wound.
She lets out a dry and brittle laugh. Yes. That had certainly belonged to Rachel Duncan.
Rachel doesn’t make tea once she’s gotten up. She sits on the edge of her bed and puts her fingers on the sheets. They’re always stiff, somehow. They always feel like they’ve just been washed, always smell like washing powder, and nothing else.
This sensation of clean and sterile is something Rachel remembers from the time when Rachel Duncan was still alive. Even now, Rachel’s fingers are itching to scrubs over her skin until it’s pristine, and there’s not a single moment she doesn’t want to tear down the soft pink wallpaper in her bedroom and paint every surface white. To straighten her back and feel. Well. Like freshly washed bedsheets.
The feeling makes the space behind Rachel’s eye itch. It’s so familiar she wants to throw up, but that’s not more concerning than anything else.
And it’s not like Rachel Duncan had ever felt truly clean, either. So it’s fine. It’s fine.
Behind her eyes, Rachel Duncan gets up from the bed and hurls a wine glass full of formaldehyde against the wall. The stains on the wall makes the pink look darker. Rachel Duncan is breathing heavily.
Rachel takes a long breath. And takes another breath. She keeps breathing until the Rachel Duncan in her head dies again, ready to wake back up as soon as the space where her eye used to be starts hurting again. Like a phoenix.
Rachel gets up from the bed on shaky legs. She straightens the fabric of her pyjama.
She bought it a few months ago. It’s too warm for the season and Rachel has trouble sleeping in it. She tries her best to keep thinking that the material is the farthest away from thin and light and colorless silk.
It’s a mint green. Rachel is still too much of a coward to look at any brighter colors. She tells herself that’s fine as well. It’s fine.
Rachel walks over to the window. She sits down on the ledge and puts her hand on the glass.
Rachel Duncan would never touch the glass. Rachel Duncan would never touch anything. The thought of leaving stains, of leaving fingerprints, would make her shudder. She had seen her own fingerprint so many times, on billions of screens and in files and all with a different number. Why give them different numbers? They’re all the same. And none of them are Rachel's.
Ah. She’s slipped again. How clumsy. How foolish.
They all were the same. None of them were hers. No fingerprint was ever Rachel Duncan’s, and Rachel isn’t sure if that is because she’d never leave them anywhere, or if she’d never leave them anywhere because they weren’t hers.
She doesn’t remember. She smears her fingerprints all over the window until she can hardly see outside anymore. There’s wounds on her fingers that Rachel tells herself are healing.
The sun is starting to rise behind the smudges on Rachel's window. When Rachel watches the sun goes up, it's always through smudged and stained glass. People keep recommending a big window to let in a lot of light. They say it keeps the darkness away, and that's true. Always has been true. But darkness isn't what Rachel is worried about.
When the reflection in the window catches her eyes, it doesn't look anything like Rachel Duncan. Rachel Duncan would always see herself perfectly in the polished windows. She'd adjust her pose, brush some hair out of her face, align her fingertips in gentle ways that hid her nails and the red and angry marks. She would give herself a smile, make sure it's as cold and calculating as possible. She'd turn away, and face business with people that look at her and see property.
The image in Rachel's window doesn't look like this at all. The reflection doesn't look like Rachel Duncan.
It also doesn't look like Janika Zingler.
Or Alison Hendrix.
(Alison, who brought Rachel Duncan a dead man's head and made her lose her composure, and who now lives with her children in her house and doesn't even think about that anymore-)
Or Camilla Torres.
Or Katja Obinger.
(Katja, who is dead)
Or Jennifer Fitzsimmons.
(Jennifer, who is dead)
Or Elizabeth- Beth Childs.
(Beth, who is dead, and she didn't even die of the sickness that her father put in her lungs)
Or Sarah Manning.
(Sarah.
Sarah, who broke into her office and hit her in the face and who she brought into her daughter's sweet and pink prison cell and who she stabbed, and hurt, and terrified next to her mother's half rotting almost-corpse and who always made it out, who always kept surviving, and who ended up being the one to kill him when she should have gotten to, and who now lives, with her daughter and her brother and her sisters and with things that are hers, all those things that belong to her, and she doesn't even think about her, and-
No. No, no. Those are all things that happened to Rachel Duncan.
Rachel Duncan. Who is dead.)
No. The reflection doesn't look like anyone. Not like a ghost, haunting her, always in the corner of her eye. It doesn't look like any of those things. It doesn't look like anyone.
Rachel leans back and looks away from the not-reflection. She makes a fist with her left hand, the one where the skin has scarred the most, and hits it against the glass, over and over again. It doesn't break the glass, doesn't even crack it. All it does is smudge it a little more.
When Rachel pulls her hand away, the knuckles are bleeding. She has a good, long look at it. She wonders what kind of notes the men with the clipboards, the men that live in the walls, will make at the sight of this. She makes a fist again, and hits the window some more.
No. Stop. Wait. She doesn't do any of that. The hand that does these things, the hand that's bleeding and shaking, isn't hers at all. It's Rachel Duncan's.
Not that it ever truly belonged to Rachel Duncan, of course.
Rachel had thought about buying things, nice and little trinkets to fill her apartment. A plant, maybe. A little something to put next to her bed.
She hadn't. She's been living here for months, and her apartment is still blissfully empty. It's like no one even lives here.
Rachel isn't sure if she'd consider herself living here. It doesn't exactly feel like it, but that doesn't mean much.
Living or not, haunting or not, Rachel's apartment is empty. Nothing here that she owns. Nothing here that she doesn't own.
The sun has gone up. Rachel looks down at her hand. Her fingernails need trimming. Another proof that Rachel Duncan is dead; her fingernails never would have been anything but pristine and perfect. Rachel Duncan wasn't the only one that would make sure of that.
But Rachel Duncan is dead, and nothing else matters. Rachel Duncan is dead. Rachel's fingernails need trimming. And Rachel Duncan is dead.
If only she'd finally, finally leave.
Rachel looks out of the window one last time. Then she gets to her feet.
She leaves the image in the window that doesn't look like anyone behind, and forgets about Rachel Duncan's ghost until the next time it rises behind the empty space where her eye used to sit before she dug it out.
Like always. Like a phoenix.
Rachel's day begins.