The character of Evan McCulloch belongs to DC Comics. No copyright infringement intended.

Mirrors

He was eight years old and he had just seen himself for the first time.

He had seen his face before, of course. It wasn't like he had never seen a mirror before. But this was the first time he really saw what it reflected, in the still water of the creek where he had just drowned Georgie. He couldn't look away. The boy had stopped moving long ago, no more bubbles of air in the water, and his hands were numb from the cold, but he kept looking at his own face in the water, smiling at what he saw.

Himself, like he really was deep down.

He was twelve and crouching at the windowsill, looking at his reflection in the dark window. Outside was nightfall, pitch black, and he was alone.

The other children kept whispering about him, when they thought he couldn't hear. They knew. They had always known. They knew he was the last person Georgie ever took, and they knew he came back alone. They knew, but they never said anything. No adult ever gave a second look at the skinny little gap-toothed boy sitting on his own and staring at his reflection in a hypnotic haze. Nobody cared that much about a missing orphan child, anyway, and nobody cared to ask the other little orphaned children about what happened to them in the cover of darkness. Four years had passed, and the other children still whispered about him, but they mostly avoided looking at him. Maybe they were thankful that he had done what they never had the strength to do, but if they were, they never told him so. He never asked, either.

He was a bit like a ghost. The real him was caught on the other side of that glass, and he just needed to find a way to get him out.

He was sixteen and half asleep on a bench at a bus station a few miles away from Kirkcaldy. The buses had stopped going for the night, but he wouldn't have the money for a ticket anyway. He would try hitch-hiking, in the morning, and if that didn't work he would keep walking.

He was curled up under his jacket and stared at the reflection in the station's window, blurry from the rain hitting it like bullets. He smiled. The person in the reflection, blurriness aside, looked so much more real than the teenage boy on the bench in the actual world.

He didn't have a place to go since leaving the orphanage, but he didn't want to stand still. He had a need. He needed to be on the move, on his way to… somewhere.

He was twenty and he was in the third rented room this month, in the bathroom, staring at his sweaty face in the cracked mirror. It was a rough city, Glasgow was, at least for someone like him, but he had found that he liked it that way. The TV was one in the other room, reporting about the robbery. The knife he had used was already at the bottom of the Clyde River, the mask and gloves stuffed into his bag, and the cash in his pocket.

He was waiting until morning, and then he would move on. He was like a shadow; nobody ever noticed he was there.

Only a reflection remained.

He was twenty-four and had just killed another man. He was in the driver seat of a rented car, waiting for the sirens to die down. Then he would cash in the payment, return the car and disappear until the next time somebody needed his services. It might not be the life he had expected when he came here, but that's life for you: nothing, and then you move on.

He caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. The eyes of a murderer. For a second, the reflection absorbed him, and he wondered why he thought he could see things moving behind him, inside the glass. Dismissing it as the result of stress, of one too many hits in too few days, he tore his eyes from the reflection and started the engine.

But as he was driving, his eyes kept going back there, like he was looking for something that was… almost… there.

He was twenty-six and the sky was red. He was in a bar in Birmingham, and he was getting pissed. If the world was ending – and it seemed bloody likely – he had decided to go out fucking drunk out of his mind.

There was panic in the streets, and he felt like he should be scared, but he wasn't. He felt dejected. Defeated. He had spent such a long time looking for something, and it seemed he would die without ever finding out what it was. Well, on the plus side of things, it probably wouldn't matter for much longer, unless the masked blokes and lasses who called themselves heroes found a way to stop the end of the world.

There was a mirror next to the counter. So, of course, he looked at it. There was nothing more interesting to see. A bleeding sky, a dying world, his own bloodshot eyes and pallid skin. In the reflection, it was all twisted and warped, like a completely different world. Maybe a world that would survive.

He was twenty-eight and he stepped inside a mirror for the first time. He left reality behind, never looking back. There was nothing to return to, anyhow. Just the misery of everyday existence. Who wanted that, when they had a way out? He sure didn't. Never had.

Inside the mirror, he found himself.

He found a future.