Drabble short for Bellflower, prompt: "Seimei. Gentleness, perhaps, the calm part of looking into your own reflection and curiousness about the distortion when it's touched in any manner. Even lightly."

Bronze is a metal which Seimei knows well for mirrors. Impurity is what grants the material such clarity; mixed with tin and polished clean, bronze can shine in a near-perfect echo of its surroundings. The world it reflects is just a little bit warmer, a little bit richer. A little more filled with hope. Bronze makes mirrors which tolerate no coldness in their depths. They take in the brittleness of a winter sky, and offer back clouds which are suffused with promises of golden sunlight waiting nearby.

Metal is sturdy; it will not break if you drop it, and is far more stable than a bowl of water set out upon a table. There is glasswork wrought by masters overseas, they say, merging sand and metal into surfaces of indescribable vividness - but the road is long, and glass is fragile, and Seimei does not mind the kind of light that bronze brings into his life.

He isn't greedy. Even without an additional coat of gold or tin, his mirror gives him the quality he needs. Its size is extravagant - wider than both his hands together, side-by-side - and he renews its polish yearly. Burnished cranes curl along its back. He saves it for spell work, keeping its energies carefully purified and tempered, balanced precisely between all five elements so that it can be swayed towards any direction at a moment's notice.

He is lucky to have a mirror of such fine quality - and extraordinarily so, to have more than one.

He keeps his second as a personal self-indulgence, in his rooms where it is less prone to being stolen. His shikigami often sneak into his quarters anyway to try and use it for their own needs. They slip in and out with unnecessary caution, as if they fear punishment for their daring, even though he would offer up its services in a moment if any single one of them actually asked.

But it's the privacy which they crave, as much as the reflection itself. Alone, safe, they study themselves with no one else around to watch them, whispering to their own self-perceived flaws. They paint their lips and pull up their hair; they check how the angles of their kimono lap against their necks, and make faces at themselves in order to evaluate each smile and frown. Sometimes, they even remember to cover the mirror up again with a cloth when they are done.

Seimei cannot fault them for their whims, not when he uses his mirror for the same purpose.

When each morning comes, and dawn is still yawning along the edges of his estate, Seimei paints crimson lines along his eyes. Two curves for each side, top and bottom, like petals gracing his face with inhuman vitality. The habit is an old one, older than he is. He had continued it without even knowing why - only that he had woken to life with clothes already on his back and paint already aging on his face, and there had been no reason he could see in his newfound amnesia to stop.

Gradually, a few impressions had eventually trickled through the murk of his thoughts, as if painted back into existence with each new day: his mother's fingers on his chin, her patient lectures on how to make each brushstroke appear seamless. She had used her own beni bowl to teach him, sacrificing the precious safflower that had been intended to color her own lips red.

His memory is scattered even now. But in the mornings when Seimei reaches for his pigment, he remembers her a little more clearly, and the comfort of it warms him faster than the sun.

You will need to practice until it becomes part of yourself, my son. Her words remain faint, no matter how hard he tries to recall them. So much about his past is little more than a series of shadows playing across paper screens. We'll only use the brush for this, not your fingers. The lines must remain elegant. It will draw attention, particularly at court, but you will catch their notice either way. Better they look to your eyes than anywhere else.

Is this like the paint that Uncle talked about, Mother? At the performances with all the dancers? He thinks he had been proud of himself that day for paying such close attention; it is hard to remember, seeing it from so far away, like watching another child wriggle with excitement. It is not his memory. Not really. He is merely being allowed to see it.

Yes and no. She had set down the brush. It's a new style of acting, so we can take advantage of that. This will be another one of our games, Seimei - one of the important ones. If someone asks, you'll tell them it's from human theater, and nothing more. Now, imagine yourself painting your lips. It will be expensive, but so is dying, she had added cryptically, a hard, bitter line firming her mouth. You must know how to do this on your own, when I am gone.

When you are gone, Mother?

She had looked at him, then. The bitterness had swum up through her face and into her eyes. In his mind, she opens her mouth and speaks.

The memory skips there, and then fades. Seimei frowns at his face in the mirror, but no matter how much he struggles, he has never been able to see more.

You must have remembered this as well, he thinks towards his own reflection, resting his fingers against the metal rim. Even warmed by bronze, his expression is dour; he looks like the very same man he would like to address. Dark Seimei never lost his memories. The other onmyōji would have always known why their mother had instructed them to take up the brush.

Yet, perplexingly, Seimei has never seen anything other than a dark mask framing the other man's face, like a pair of wings in waiting. Instead of the blush of safflower, Dark Seimei dyes his skin with the deep blue of yin, so vivid that it falls headlong into indigo and loses itself in its own richness. It is a strange concession for the man to make willingly. Blue is the color of stage villains, reserved for characters who have become withdrawn, sullen, worn down into atrophy by the unfairnesses of the world. Red is the color of heroes - which Dark Seimei would like to call himself, a champion of spirits and their world. And such a strong design too, blooming out from the eyes without any subtlety, like ink exploding in fountains across the skin. Red is a whisper on Seimei's face; indigo is a shout on Dark Seimei's, a scream of outrage, a roar that refuses to be overlooked in favor of polite decorum.

Dark Seimei had every opportunity to claim ownership to that memory of their mother, taking it away from Seimei by virtue of simply knowing why. He could have worn that crimson triumph without caring if he looked like a copy. He could have looked -

Dark Seimei could have looked just like Abe no Seimei, if he had wanted to.

If he had wanted it.

When Seimei had first stared at his own reflection, he had seen a stranger looking back. Over time, he had eased into the awareness of his face, his body; there had been no reason to fear his own appearance. Dark Seimei would never have that freedom. Whether in his own mirror or a still pool of water - or even in the glitter of another person's eyes - Dark Seimei would always see the face of the person who had wanted his entire existence annihilated without any chance of mercy or acknowledgement.

Painted red, Dark Seimei would look exactly like the man who had loathed him enough to cut him out of his very soul.

There are small differences. The hair, of course. Their spiritual auras. The anger in Dark Seimei's eyes - or so Seimei hopes. But apart from that, everything else is arbitrary, added and erased with a sweep of the hand: lips coated purple for nobility, rice powder to turn one's skin even paler, a mixing of courtly beauty and stagecraft that brings the performance into every room.

A performance was all it was supposed to be. So Seimei had imagined.

But the more that he looks at his own face now - mouth gone flat with shame, jaw tight - the less he can pretend. He had been as easily fooled as everyone else. He had glanced at Dark Seimei and only thought the words, what are you trying to show, instead of what the man had been attempting to hide.

Seimei's hand stirs against his leg. In the bounded circle of his reflection, his eyes narrow in thought.

He hesitates for only a heartbeat longer, and then reaches for the water dish. His motions are slow for another reason: he listens with half his attention on the corridors beyond his room, alert for any incoming visitors. His shikigami are all polite enough to announce themselves before coming in, and willingly grant him his private hours - but sometimes they are well-meaning, and sometimes they need things, and all of them know that he will never turn them away.

Thankfully, only silence fills the air. Any spirits staying in his estate must be out in the gardens, or occupied on their own tasks; there is no sign of anyone else nearby.

In the stillness, Seimei wets his fingers and then keeps them poised, droplets slipping off his skin as he studies the glistening beni bowl with its inner shell of iridescent green. Powdered rouge would have been easier to procure, but there had been a comfort in following an older pattern: he had always thought, wistfully, that if he only behaved enough like Abe no Seimei, mimicked the same style of life, then sheer unconscious habit might lead him back to everything he had lost.

Ignoring those same guidelines now, Seimei touches the luminous, glistening belly of the bowl. The dragonfly's gleam melts into brilliant red beneath the violation of his damp fingers, dried safflower blooming to life. With clumsy strokes, he daubs the benibana recklessly over his face, feeling out the curves of his cheekbones, of his jaw, his lips, sweeping the pads of his fingers in slow arcs as if shaping his face out of fresh clay.

The strands of his hair are pale. The pigment is scarlet: the color of vitality, of righteousness. But cast in the bronze of his mirror, Seimei can fool himself with its shadows. With his clean hand, he tilts the metal disc on its guide rope, leaning back on his heels and angling his weight on the cushion, until the glossy richness of the surface finally reflects the right angle, and he sees - just barely - the image of Dark Seimei looking back.

With stained fingers, Seimei lifts his hand gently to his own cheek. He watches himself touch the person in the mirror, studies the puzzled furrow of their brow as they hesitantly wonder if they should feel wary or not. There is a vulnerability in the other's face, a hope that is already half a step away from retreating. He cups his palm against their skin. Doubt flits across their eyes.

The sudden shuffle of footsteps passing outside his room booms like a charge of horses. Startled, Seimei jerks upright, losing his grip on the mirror's rim. The weight of its heavy mass sends it swaying backwards, casting glittering reflections across the room as it tilts crazily in its wooden brace.

Whoever it is walks on. Quiet drifts back over his corner of the estate once more. Seimei's heartbeat - fast and hard in his chest - finally begins to calm.

He exhales slowly, and lets the worry drain the rest of the way from his nerves. There's no cause for him to be concerned - not for himself. But his shikigami will recognize what he's doing, if they see him in this condition: they are smart and quick and clever, and most importantly, they watch him keenly out of love. Some of them might be kind about it. But others have no love for Dark Seimei, humans and spirits both - Hiromasa, Kohaku, Inugami - and they would be the ones to speak up first, if only out of concern for Seimei himself. They would turn Dark Seimei's appearance into a joke, seeking to wipe away any worries they might think Seimei might be harboring; they would make light of the man's decision, reducing Dark Seimei's reasons down to a petty desire to simply look different, like the overexaggerated protest of a child rolling about and wailing on the tatami.

Seimei steadies the mirror in its brace, allowing it to come naturally to rest. Light wavers over its surface, diffused even further into golden twilight from the paper screens of his room. Methodically, he dips the small handcloth into water, and then briskly rubs at his face without giving himself time to waver. Blood rushes to his skin with each rough scrape. Only once he's certain he's been washed entirely clean does Seimei finally lower his hands, and study the results.

His eyes, unguarded, look back at him in the reflection: they are soft, hazy holes in his face. His skin is flushed pink from the force of its washing. This is the face that both of them see when they are alone, before it becomes hidden with the dawn; it belongs to no one, not even to Abe no Seimei himself.

His first impulse is to leave himself bare. It might spare Dark Seimei a small portion of grief to not be reminded of his origins whenever they meet. But such a hasty decision might only make it worse for all of them, and if there is anything Seimei has learned by now, it's the cost of assuming that his actions are without consequence. Even now, he floats adrift among so many lives that he's been dropped into, and every time he turns around, there's a flicker of some new sorrow that he should have known about all along.

More importantly: if Dark Seimei is the only one of them who paints his face, then he would become even more alone.

After a moment, Seimei reaches for the brush. He dabs it in the water, presses it to the glistening sheen of the bowl. He outlines the shapes as their mother had taught him, dragging the brush's tip like a lover's kiss against his skin. The upswept corners of his eyes seem so subdued now, easily hidden within Dark Seimei's broad mask - and perhaps that is how his counterpart begins each day, the same scarlet lines bleeding over their boundaries until they spill in paired waterfalls all the way down to his jaw. Blue would come next. Both pigments would mix together in wet layers, colors blurring until they produced that midnight indigo: so dark that no one would ever think to search it for red.

His twin has already charted the course. Seimei can do the same. He can practice until it becomes part of himself as well. As Dark Seimei hides the past behind paint, he can hide Dark Seimei in turn, creating the excuse his twin requires with every fresh brushstroke.

Seimei can look like his namesake. But he does not have to be like Abe no Seimei, not completely.

Neither of them do.

He completes the last coating of red with a turn of his wrist, and sets the brush down carefully with a click, balanced like a bridge across the bowl. The echo of himself looks back, softened by bronze. His face is once more his own - no, it never has been, but now, at least, it is Seimei's choice.

He is lucky, he thinks, to have so many mirrors.