Archive of Our Own ^beta

We had somehow made it to the end of this ‘dungeon’, facing a lot of opposition on the way, but now we were finally at its heart. Given how everything prior had been laid out like a theatre house, it was unsurprising that at the end lay a grand stage, and atop that stage meekly stood a figure. It looked exactly like me. Kasumin and Rina had already told me about her, it was my Shadow, Shadow Shizuku.

“I am the shadow, the true self.” Her voice was almost as unenthused as her posture. I began feeling confident. Maybe taking her down wouldn’t be so hard.

Kasumin scoffed and challenged my Shadow: “Is that all? I was expecting something more… theatrical.” A spark ignited in the Shadow’s eyes and I could feel the confidence I had bolstered waning.

With a grand motion of the arm, the spotlights were ignited, a boisterous audience materialized in the chairs surrounding us and, now holding a large umbrella, the Shadow hoisted herself in the air, keeping herself afloat. The pose she struck was daring, exuding confidence and her expression revealed a wild enthusiasm. “Welcome to tonight’s show, everyone! I’m Shadow Shizuku, the true self! I’m looking forward to being your ideal heroine and nothing else!” She added a wink to the end of her sickening monologue. Those words… the insolence!

“Shizuko, don’t listen to her! She’s just trying to-”

However, I interrupted Kasumin in my rage: “How dare you use my lyrics against me?! You don’t know the first thing about what went into them!”

“Then tell me! Pray, what is there to you when there is no one else to project themselves onto you? What are your ambitions? Your passions? Your dreams? Who is the real you?”

Rina spoke to me this time: “I was told similar things, but they’re not true. You know this-”

However, not even the calm and collected Rina could get through to me. I scrambled for my words in order to combat these lies: “I-I have passions! I’m… I’m passionate about being a school idol a-and… about being an actor!”

A devious smirk grew on my Shadow’s face. “Ah yes! The passion of an actor! The passion of wanting to be literally anyone, other than yourself! I don’t need to spell it out for you, do I?”

The retort stunned me, I was at a loss for words. Desperate, I covered my ears and cast my eyes down. I screamed: “Stop this, please!” As if they had never been there, the lights, the audience, the props, they spontaneously disappeared, leaving only my Shadow behind on the stage, as expressionless as before.

“As you wish.”

The silence left in the wake of the cheering audience was deafening. Could she be right? Was this who I really was? No, it couldn’t be! I thought back to all the times I had practiced at the school idol club, for Kasumin-

with Kasumin of course!

And my dreams of becoming an actor were very real! I loved getting lost in the mind of a character and portraying them as accurately as possible. I had adopted so many roles in the past that I was so proud of, I…

When was the last time I acted as myself…?

Plagued by a maelstrom of thoughts, I threw my arms to the side of my body and pushed my way past Rina and Kasumin, who had been guarding me. “If you can be whoever I want you to be, then stop pretending to be me!”

“I can’t do that. I am you and you are me.”

I gritted my teeth and hissed at my Shadow: “You’re a spineless coward! No one could ever cheer for someone like you! No one would ever call you their ideal heroine! You’re not me!” Sensing I’d misspoken, I quickly brought my hands to my mouth, but the damage had been done. Kasumin and Rina had warned me about this.

The devious smile from before returned and grew even wider. The figure exploded in a gooey mass and slowly took form again in the shape of a featureless mannequin with four arms, each holding a mask made to look like an expressive face.

---

I woke up. My TV was displaying the cast of Persona 4 facing off against a boss: Shadow Kanji, a tough fight. Maybe I shouldn’t play games this late into the night…

Later that day, at school, I thought back to the dream I had and I compared it to the events of the game I had been so enthralled by. At the end of each fight, the character would make amends with their respective shadow and come to understand it. Would I be able to do that with mine? Before long, the words the teacher was saying faded away in the background and I continued last night’s dream in a daydream.

---

“If it’s a fight you want, it’s a fight you’ll get!” the mannequin yelled, as it brought the hand holding the mask with a happy expression to its blank face.

“Nico, let’s show this fraud a performance it won’t quickly forget!” A twintailed spectre with her hands on her hips and magnificent white wings springing from her back, appeared behind Kasumin, who herself brandished a cute staff.

“Miku.” Similarly, a second spectre materialized, with bright blue twintails instead of jet black ones, and a futuristic-looking mask over her face that could cycle through lots of expressions in the blink of an eye. She wielded a microphone stand, as Rina pulled out a laser pistol. The latter pulled out her board, flipped it to an expression of determination and said: “Rina-chan board says: bring it on.”

What followed was a spectacle of a battle, as each mask imbued my Shadow with different powers, be that strong magic attacks when it was angry or healing powers when it was frightened. Kasumin and Rina relentlessly attacked the thing with cutting winds and bolts of lightning, until eventually they had beaten it into submission. It ultimately took its original form again, my form. It was my Shadow after all.

Because of how hard my friends had fought for me, I knew that I couldn’t let them down, but there was something else that had been nagging at me. If my Shadow truly represented my deepest insecurities, then was she really as evil as she pretended to be, or did she just lash out in fear.

I approached her. She was battered and bruised and glared at me from a crouching position. I was the one who started talking: “I… I can tell you’re scared.” Her brow temporarily unfurrowed as she broke eye contact. She wasn’t convinced yet though. “I can tell, because… I feel the same way.” Kasumin put her hand on my shoulder and Rina nodded slightly at my words.

“Who is the real you...?” Earlier, my Shadow had said those words as a sneer, but now, they carried a kind of defeated genuineness. She truly wanted to know.

I took a deep breath and answered: “I don’t know… and that’s scary. Sometimes I want to run away from it all and become one of the characters I play, because that would be easier.” The pleading look in my Shadow’s eyes turned dour, dejected. “But… that’s not why I became an actor.” Her eyes sprang to life again. “I became an actor, because I wanted to learn who I really was. I thought that if I kept playing all these roles, meeting all these characters, that I’d find part of myself in them.”

“Then…” Her next words got stuck in her throat, but I knew her well enough to be able to predict what she would say.

“I won’t abandon you. This fear is… natural and I believe it will remind me of what I am searching for. So let’s not fight anymore. Let’s search for the answer together.” I firmly took hold of her hand with both of mine and in a flash of light, my Shadow disappeared, giving way to my persona, an elegant lady with a ballroom dress and theatre masks for hands. However, unlike my Shadow, her face was as expressive as the masks. “Audrey…” I whispered.

---

I was jerked out of my trance-like state by Kasumin, who was shaking me by the shoulder with a concerned look on her face. Apparently class had already ended and I had missed all of it, but I felt like I had learned something even more important than quadratic equations.

“It’s not like you to daydream during class, Shizuko. Is everything okay?”

It took me a while to find the right words to reply, but eventually, with a satisfied expression, I said: “Yes, we’re okay.”