Archive of Our Own ^beta

Rhett noticed the first wrong reflection on a Tuesday morning, which irritated him in a normal, grounded way that made what followed even stranger. Tuesdays weren’t supposed to be supernatural. Tuesdays were for lukewarm coffee, half-finished scripts, and Link stubbornly clicking the same pen until Rhett either snapped it in half or left the room. But that morning, the overhead lights were perfectly steady, Link was muttering to himself about the proper texture of a pickle, and the office was aggressively, almost painfully ordinary. Then Rhett looked up.

In Link’s glasses, where the glow of the monitor and the cluttered office should’ve been, he saw a room swallowed in pitch black. No windows, no furniture, just an old industrial lightbulb dangling from a cord and swaying like someone had just brushed past it. Rhett blinked, leaned forward. The bulb kept swinging in the reflection, even though nothing in the real world was moving.

“Hey, dude?” Rhett tried, voice cracking slightly around the edges. “Do you…see that?”

Link looked up at him with a smile that felt stiff, plastered onto his face like he’d learned it from a diagram. “See what?”

“The reflection. In your…” Rhett pointed vaguely, suddenly unsure if he wanted to name the glasses aloud. Link’s grin widened. “You’re imagining things.” But his eyes never matched the smile. Not even close.

The second incident happened during a shoot, right as the cameras were warming and the crew was milling around. The set lights flared bright and familiar, washing everything in a soft, overproduced glow. Rhett was mid-sentence, something about maple-flavored mayonnaise, when he glanced sideways at Link. And froze.

Link’s glasses weren’t reflecting the studio. They weren’t reflecting anything remotely modern. Instead, Rhett saw an empty wooden cabin, lit only by two thick, dripping candles. The walls were carved or scratched, he couldn’t tell which, with looping, repetitive marks. At the small wooden table in the center sat two figures, perfectly still, facing each other like they’d been waiting. They looked like Rhett and Link. But they didn’t move. Not even to blink.

Rhett’s throat closed. His voice cut off mid-word, the kind of silence that made the crew stare. He took a shaky step closer to Link, trying to angle his head and catch the reflection again. But the moment Link shifted, even slightly, the cabin vanished. The lenses went back to reflecting the set, bright and normal, as if the moment had been edited out of reality.

Link tilted his head. “What’s wrong?” His voice was too light, too careful, almost amused. Rhett swallowed hard. “Nothing. Just… forgot my line.” But Link kept staring at him, like he didn’t believe a single word.

Rhett became obsessed after that. He began watching Link’s glasses the way a man watches a locked door he knows is going to open eventually. During breaks he tried to snap photos, videos, anything that might catch the distortion, but every image came out normal, aggressively normal. Ordinary reflections. Studio lights. Rhett’s confused face squinting at the screen.

But when he looked in person, he saw things: moonlit forests with too many shadows, white static rooms where the walls flickered like a broken television, aisles of a supermarket frozen mid-activity, all hollow and lifeless. Sometimes he saw corners of places he felt he recognized but couldn’t name. Sometimes he thought he saw movement, the kind that darted away the moment you tried to focus.

Every time Rhett tried to confront Link directly, Link turned his head away in an unnervingly smooth motion. As if he always knew the exact moment Rhett was about to look.

He started removing his glasses whenever Rhett entered a room. Sometimes he pretended he’d forgotten them somewhere, other times he’d hold them in his hand, gripping them tightly enough that the knuckles on his fingers went white. And some nights, as Rhett walked past Link’s office, he swore he heard Link whispering to himself. Whispering to something.

Once, when Rhett stepped into the room unexpectedly, Link flinched like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t. He clutched his glasses to his chest and whispered, voice trembling:

“Don’t look at me like that.”

The breaking point came late one night. The building was empty, silent in a way that felt wrong, too thick, too expectant. Rhett had come back for his phone charger, but halfway down the hallway he felt something coil around his ribs, tugging him toward Link’s office. The door was cracked open by an inch. Light glowed from within, soft and flickering.

“Link?” Rhett called, voice quiet but strangely loud in the dark.
Link sat at his desk, glasses perched on his nose, staring at the wall. Not the computer. Not a notebook. Just the blank wall. “Hey, man,” Rhett said, stepping inside. “What are you…” He stopped breathing.

In Link’s glasses, the reflection showed Rhett standing behind him, same clothes, same posture. But the reflected Rhett wasn’t expressionless like the real one. He was smiling. A huge, awful, stretched smile that cut across his face like someone had carved it there. His eyes were too wide, too bright, brimming with something hungry.

The reflected Rhett lifted a hand and waved slowly. Rhett’s real body remained frozen, unmoving, numb from fear. Link exhaled a long, shaky breath. When he finally turned toward Rhett, his face was soft, gentle, almost sad.

“He’s been waiting for you to notice,” Link whispered. “He’s so happy you finally did.” And for a split second, for just a blink, Rhett saw the smile flicker across Link’s real face too. Something not-Link peeking through his expression. Something ancient. Something grateful. The lights snapped off. The room went black. And in the dark, Rhett heard two voices breathing, one beside him, one behind him, both wearing his cadence, both whispering into the quiet: “Look closer.”

In the days that followed, nobody questioned why Rhett stopped meeting Link’s eyes. Or why Rhett flinched every time he caught a glimpse of his own reflection. Or why Link now wore his glasses all the time, day and night, on and off camera, polishing the lenses with trembling hands as if terrified of what might fade if they ever stopped reflecting.

Sometimes, in the studio monitors, there are flickers. Brief flashes. Two figures at a wooden table. Just waiting and smiling. And their reflections never look away.