How do you defeat a perfected version of yourself?
You don't.
You just run.
.
.
.
.
At the start of my novel, I had created two unique characters. One was the protagonist, and the other...
Was Artemis Snow.
Two versions of the same person.
Me.
I was fourteen when I realized I had a problem... A disconnection from reality that made me different from everyone else. A feeling of isolation that bred a disturbing loneliness which no one could ever bridge.
That was why I created my main character that way, a character that was everything I was not. A perfected me if you will, or rather, what I considered a perfected version of myself.
Artemis, on the other hand, was the very opposite. He couldn't even be considered a proper villain or even a mob; he was a disposable character whose role was to serve as a connection between the main character and the heroine. I never created him to be more than that. He was an oddity, everything about him was the opposite of the protagonist, so yes, he was an imperfect me, but the best definition of myself—a version that didn't TRY to blend in, a version that was horribly WRONG.
That was who I woke up as.
THAT Artemis.
On that day, and from that moment I looked at that mirror, the only thing I saw was my death.
I was going to die.
No...
I was DOOMED to die.
It's like being the actor of a movie, where the character dies at a certain point.
You can't change it.
It MUST happen for the story to proceed.
I wasn't an optimist, never was one. The thought of 'This is the worst possible situation, but let's look at the bright side...' was, in my opinion, sheer stupidity. Thinking about the bright side of a bleak situation just sounded foolish to me. If the world was ending, then, fuck it, let it end. We all die one day anyway, so dying now just meant I left early. Why lie to yourself and build false hopes you know deep down will never come through? 'One day things would get better'—it won't. The earlier you accept that and change your mindset and approach, the better. That was basically my mindset. I preferred dwelling on the negativity since doing the opposite always led to a worse outcome. Come to think of it, I might have had a thing for pessimism. Even as Jake, I was never once optimistic about anything...
I was a lost cause, someone you wouldn't want to be near during a tense moment.
So staring at that mirror and letting it all sink in, the sadness I felt vanished and I just accepted it—not like I could change anything anyway. I didn't even know why I reacted so much in the first place. Perhaps it was knowing I had died and left my family, knowing how they would feel about my death, or just the fact that I died. I couldn't tell, maybe it was just a reflex action from just knowing I died. I didn't care at that point. From that moment, all I wanted... was to see my creations come to life.
To witness Atlantis for myself.
To witness the world I created.
...I did witness it.
Just that things were a little out of hand.
I knew I would be hated.
But I didn't expect the hate to be that much. I created Riley to be the embodiment of everything that was bad. All horrible personality traits meshed together into one person. But I never really detailed out his life, and that ended up as background information... So many enemies, barely any allies.
All the major characters hated me, even the protagonist himself.
In fact, it felt like he just genuinely wanted to hate me for some reason. But I didn't mind it. I just watched the work of my hands come alive every day with a smile on my face. I was entirely passive, letting the story play out as it would. I never intervened in plotlines or even tried to act out Riley's role in this whole story. I just became a spectator. But, with time, things started to get weird as a certain character began reaching out to me on their own accord...
A character I had written with Emy in mind.
She didn't approach me for the reasons one would think. No, she did so with an ulterior motive—she wanted to kill me. I knew that. After all, I created her. I knew her more than she knew herself... Or at least I thought I did. She was a character Riley had once harassed when he was younger, one of the major reasons he was so hated.
Her approaches brought me a lot of attention, most of which was trouble, even more enmity from the protagonist, whose hatred for me just kept growing even when I was not doing anything to him. She seemed friendly, exactly like Emy did, but unlike Emy who I couldn't read, I knew what she wanted. Well, I thought I did, but with time it stopped making sense. The only thing young Artemis did was force a kiss on her when they were younger—that was about it. If I had at least followed his original script, she would have had a reason to go to these extremes. After all, in the main story, Riley was a SIMP for her character, going through unspeakable lengths to have his way with her. That should have at least been a valid reason for her to hate to the point of going through all this, but I didn't do that, which made it all increasingly worrying what was happening. Was the story changing to bring about my inevitable death since I had gone astray from the original plot? That was the only explanation.
The problem was that, as time went by, I began noticing something... I was... not as apathetic as I had once been. At first I ignored it, but with my increasing interactions with the characters, it became more clear that I had somehow gained more emotional receptivity than in my past life. I felt pity, compassion, sadness, smiled, laughed, even cried when I didn't want to. I even came to realize why I had cried when I first woke up in this world... It was because I had become like everyone else.
I had become what I always wanted to be.
More human.
That was when it all began.
That was when I began to open up, to intrude in the plot I once promised myself not to be a part of. I think it was... hope. I didn't want to die anymore. For the first time in my life I was optimistic. This situation was bleak, but I still tried to salvage myself. I helped, saved many, slowly made friends... In a way, they were my children, at least the children of my mind. Every character, or at least the major ones, were written with someone I was once close to in my past life, so it wasn't hard. I just had to try. With time I stopped running from Amelia. I knew where it was going, I knew what she would do once she had me where she wanted... But I chose to do it anyway. After all, just like I had felt for Emy, I felt that way for her as well. Maybe I saw Emy in her, after all I had written Amelia with her in mind. So I took the risk, a risk I never took in my previous life.
With time I made genuine connections, people I came to trust, and people who trusted me regardless of my past. But the protagonist wasn't one of those. I wanted to be friends with him as well. After all, he was me... in a weird sense.
But he never liked me, not for once. He didn't even bother to hide it. It was clear his hatred for me was beyond ordinary...
...but I couldn't figure out why.
Hah.
Maybe it was because of Amelia.
Who knows.
I don't care anymore.
It no longer matters.
In the end I was right, it was always better to be negative. I should have never been hopeful. No... I should have never trusted them. I should have found a life for myself outside the plot. I never needed to be among them... I was never meant to be in the first place.
THEY betrayed me.
All of them.
They left me there to die, even Amelia... They used me.
*Sighs.*
It really is the worst kind of feeling to be betrayed by the ones you loved the most...
...maybe it would have been best if I never came to feel emotions this clearly. At least it wouldn't have hurt so much.