Karl removed the ear buds and placed them neatly on his desk. His olive-green eyes looked with satisfaction upon the pages he had written. He would love to have Darcy read those, though he had only just begun. He looked up at his square mirror, which he had chosen to hang just above his desk. What had been once a handsome face now looked back at him with utter ugliness: Cuts and scars everywhere, from his forehead all the way to his jaw. A terribly-cut hair that no barber he had gone to managed to fix. Glassy, drained eyes, that seemed to have lost the spark of life. Even his fingers, which he was using to feel those very scars, were cut up pretty badly, most of his nails cracked and broken. At only twenty-three, Karl looked like an old war-veteran.

When Quinn came into the room, he heard something break. Karl’s back was facing him, with glass shards all over, and a lot of blood.

“Dude, what the fuck?” Quinn rushed to him, alarmed.

Still sitting at his desk, Karl had his head in his bloody hands. Quinn saw that he was crying too. The tears seemed to stumble across his facial scars and fall clumsily across his jeans. He placed a compassionate hand on his friend’s shaking shoulder, and said nothing.

“My life is fucked... I’ve become so ugly.” His voice was full of bitterness and contempt. He was gritting his teeth so hard, Quinn worried he might break some of them.

“This will probably just sound like some empty bullshit, but Karl, your face isn’t your entire life. You just need the time to slowly recover, then you’ll learn to accept it.”

“Easy for you to say,” Karl brushed his friend’s hand away, his bushy eyebrows knitted in anger. “You’ve got it all, Quinn. You got the face, the body, the girl...”

“What girl? I just told you I only have someone I am crushing on. And my face looks more like a woman’s anyway. Do you know how many lesbians approached me just to be disappointed I am a dude?” Not that Quinn cared about them, or about anyone at all. He just wanted to bury himself in Darcy’s arms and sleep for an eternity. “Besides,” he added, feeling himself drift away in his fantasies, “some girls dig scars; I know at least a few that would be more than willing to_”

“I don’t care about other girls!” Karl exclaimed, now standing up. His nails were digging deep into his already-wounded hand. “I just want Darcy! But she fucking hates me! I bet she’ll hate me more if she sees this ugly fuck face.”

Quinn pursed his lips. Pretending was painful for him. But how could he tell him, when his friend is already this hurt?

“... You should forget about her...”

Karl grabbed his collar and slammed him against the wall. He was furious. Quinn did not resist.

“How can you even say that? Darcy is what saved me from that hell-hole. If it hadn’t been for her, do you think I would have survived 14 fucking days of torture? HUH, QUINN?”

“I understand, but the Darcy you cling to and the actual one are different. You don’t even know her.” It pained him to add this, but he really needed to keep her away from Karl’s grip. “...You’d be disappointed.”

“You understand? Oh, the fuck you do! What do you understand, huh?” Releasing him, he violently ripped open his blouse, revealing a heavily-cut chest. The sight was so horrifying that Quinn had to avert his eyes away.

“Oh yeah, you understand, my ass! You can’t even look at me, for fuck’s sake, you, my fucking friend. Do you think Darcy would even glance my way?”

Stop saying her name, jerk.

“I am sorry... that was insensitive of me.” Quinn heard the sound of a belt being opened, and glanced back at Karl, who was unbuckling his pants. With one swift pull, he was naked, with all of his lower body just as wounded, all the way to his genitals. Quinn held back his urge to throw up.

Karl’s bloodshot eyes stared penetratingly at him. He was breathing heavily and his limbs were trembling.

“What... do you.. know?” His voice cracked. “I’d kill to have your life, Quinn.”

Darcy was reading on her bed. The book in her hands was called The Eyes of Death, a fantasy detective story that had death as a literal character. It had a pleasant twist to it, Darcy thought. Death was the main character and not the antagonist, a trope one wouldn’t normally expect. He is trying to track down whoever kept taking lives without his permission. She had reached the middle of it, where Death falls in love with a human man whose life he is supposed to take. She shut the book as soon as the word ‘love’ was mentioned. Her brain was instantly showered by memories of Quinn’s smiles, fingers, and lips; and her heart panicked at the recollection. Flustered, she placed the book by her nightstand, and hugged the pillow that Quinn had used when they talked. It didn’t smell like him, but she liked to think that it did.

After their strange hug, the two had agreed to keep their relationship a secret, a suggestion that Darcy had made. Quinn had been reluctant at first; feeling conflicted about wanting to freely be with her while somehow keeping it from Karl. Darcy had told him that it could not be helped, since the whole Karl thing was already creepy enough. They couldn’t predict how he would react were he to find out that “his object of obsession,” (Darcy’s words,) was “stolen away from him,” (also Darcy’s words.) Quinn had protested against that phrasing, claiming that she wasn’t Karl’s in the first place for him to have stolen her.  This had made Darcy smile, for he had fallen right to her trap.

“Who said I was talking about me? I am not an object, remember?” She had argued back, and Quinn pursed his lips shamefully. He then apologized, saying that he had not meant to correlate her with Karl’s object of obsession. He had rushed to make his point that she did not belong to Karl. As Darcy turned off the lights, she thought about how she had felt secretly happy at Quinn’s jealousy. It was a surprisingly boyish side of him, since he usually acted all grown up. She fell asleep to the thought that he was actually really adorable.

That night, she dreamed of the two alter egos in Karl’s untitled novella. She would forget it in the morning, but in her dream they had names: Karl and Quinn.