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Levi stared into the mirror, and the mirror stared back at him. So honest. This was who he was now, huh? Still here. Still alive.
He raised a hand and laid a finger on the dark circle under his right eye, prodding lightly.
Well, maybe slightly alive.
He let his hand drop.
He stared into his own eyes, rather hesitantly, not really caring for whatever other truth another glance would bring. Dull grey, narrow. The color of a rotting pile of trash, the shape of fading hope. Somebody once said his eyes looked like knives: grey and glinting sharp, slim and tapered at the ends, with looks that could kill.
Somebody?
Isabel, was it?
Levi shook his head resolutely. No. None of those thoughts today.
But it was too late. He saw again the severed head, the empty lifeless eyes staring at him, the limp body unceremoniously crushed. The casual violence of it all washed over him again, making him retch before he could get ahold of his thoughts and shove them back behind the door he had worked so hard to build.
He forced himself to meet his eyes in the mirror again. Steady, now. None of that shit again.
He tried to untangle his brows, to look like he was more at ease, but the best he could do was giving himself a stern look. There was always a hint of a frown between his brows, and he had never been able to get rid of it, much to his annoyance. He wanted to look all right. Well, perhaps there was something to be gained from looking angry. At least it wasn’t the frown of concentration he’d get from holding himself together.
I should stop pitying myself too, he sighed.
He reached for his comb and started tidying up his pitch black hair. It fell in two sheets of curtain over his eyes, softly gleaming. He thought maybe he needed a hair cut, it had gotten a little too annoyingly long. But he sort of needed the way it hid his eyes from plain view.
His hair done, he started putting on his shirt: a pristine white button down, neatly pressed. The corners of his lips quirked up a bit as he admired the clean whiteness of it. Few things in life were more satisfying to him than spotless white.
Next was his cravat. White, but not nearly as pristine, not by a long mile. This one had an oldness to it, the feeling of fading, but it meant to him even more than a pristine white shirt. It was the only piece of his mother that he had left. In the days after she died, as he was forced to stay in the room with her slowly rotting corpse, he somehow had the thought to cut a piece of the dress she was wearing. It was always too long for her, but she hadn’t the money to take it to a tailor for adjustments, and somehow never did that herself either. He wanted to fix it for her, even though it was too late.
He then tied the cut piece of cloth around his wrist, and somehow managed to keep it save with himself throughout his childhood. On the day he left the Underground, he began tying that piece of cloth around his neck, using it as a cravat, after the fashion of well-positioned Aboveground men. He thought his mother must have loved to see the sunshine. Perhaps she wouldn’t have died if she’d only gotten the chance. So since that day, he had brought her on him, the piece of her he had left.
With the cravat tied neatly around his neck, he reached for his jacket next. This one still felt weird to him. Light brown, with a big pair of wings emblazoned at the back, and smaller ones on his right breast pocket and upper arms. The Wings of Freedom, they called the symbol, but every time he looked at it he couldn’t stop thinking about the price this so-called freedom would demand him to pay.
He pulled his light grey pants up his legs, tucked his shirt in, and tied a belt around his hips. His socks and knee-high black boots came next. Then he looked at himself back in the mirror, eyes sharp and frosty.
A soldier, that was what he was now.