Short Story: Self Insert

 by Dawn Sands

Rhea and Emery have always found it difficult to distinguish between love and hate. So when they are stolen in the dead of night by the notorious Kaerfluten, destined to come up against one another in the end… I stop myself. I can’t do this. My lover is waiting on the other side of the stadium, eyes a fiery glint of steel, knife glinting in her hand, preparing to kill me — and all I can think about is how I’d write this down as fiction. 

I was never supposed to be a part of this. I am the author of the books, not their main character. I direct the story from offstage, hiding myself from the action, living adventures only through my self-inserted characters. Maybe trouble always comes to those who try to actively avoid it. Or maybe that is simply a cliché, an aphorism; something drawn from the pages of books and which I must now learn to reject, now that the prisons and arenas of my fantasies are real and the trials of my favourite characters are happening to me.

I draw myself back to the present and attempt to ground myself through the things around me. There is very little to look at. Three paces fill the distance from one blank wall to the other. Tiny slivers of light slip through the shuttered grate in the door — the room’s only ventilation — and the lamp on the wall is dim, a lone candle flickering from side to side behind splintered glass casing. On the wall opposite, my shadow is enormous and distorted, an artificial version of myself, my guardian angel gone rogue.

 Come on, Rhea, I berate myself. You never used to believe in such things before. Why now?

Because when all is lost, we turn to the supernatural to comfort us, to give us even the faintest glimmer of hope that there could still be a way out. Another cliché — but it is true, I reflect. Every single thing about my current situation is completely cliché, and also completely true.

I perch on the steel bench that juts out from the wall, sandwiching myself in the corner of the room. The rungs of the metal dig into my buttocks and thighs, and I bring my legs up to my chin and clutch them tightly to my chest so that my lungs can barely expand. Maybe, if I become my own jailer, the real, claustrophobic, metallic walls of the cell won’t affect me as much. Resigned, I pick myself up off the bench. I pace up and down the room; one, two, three, turn, one two, three, turn. I check my watch: half an hour until I am taken to what will inevitably be my death. I can’t fight. I know the theory; several midnight online searches have taught me that much, but I never expected I would one day wield a sword myself. I never expected to come up in battle against my former lover, look her in the eyes and deliberately drive a blade through her stomach. Emery. Another name straight out of a fantasy novel, just like mine. Maybe we were chosen for this simply for our names, as if they looked at a list of potential victims and decided that we seemed like the perfect candidates. 

Except, of course, that is not how it happened. It is common knowledge that those selected for the Kaerflute Trials are chosen entirely at random. The fact that Emery was on holiday when the Selection took place, and that we were on opposite sides of the world, may have been the greatest coincidence in recorded history, but it was just that — entirely coincidental. Most people, it is said, form a bond of tight friendship over the course of the Trials, and the winner of the final duel often ends up killing themselves afterwards out of guilt and grief. For me and Emery, it is slightly different. I draw my mind back to the blurb I constructed for us: Rhea and Emery have always found it difficult to distinguish between love and hate. We knew each other before we were taken — we were classmates; friends bordering on lovers one day, and sworn enemies the next. Then the day after that we would reunite, embrace, and vow that it would never happen again. The greatest coincidence in human history. It seems strange that such an epithet should be ascribed to me.

Twenty minutes left. A shudder of fear like electricity surges through my bones to my fingertips. I shudder and jam myself back into the corner. I squeeze my shins and press my face into my thighs, making myself as small as I can. My mouth is dry and parched, and my head begins to throb. Slick tears form in the corners of my eyes. I try to drive them away — I mustn’t cry, not on my final day — and begin to rock, back and forth, back and forth. If I were the protagonist of a fantasy novel, I wouldn’t know it. I would embrace all of the past few weeks as a new facet of my life, which has been mine since the beginning, and assume that fantasy and reality have their convergences after all. In the world of cliché, is not reality sometimes stranger than fiction?

Stranger than fiction…

The pain in my head begins to dissipate. I lift up my head and scrutinise my cell once more: the metal walls; the grate; the candle in a shield of shattered glass; my shadow, distorted and unrealistic, an imprint of myself. Think logically, Rhea, I tell myself. This is not stranger than fiction, I realise; on the contrary, my own writing contains situations more contrived than this. But the fact still remains that controversial, fantastical social experiments such as this do not — should not — exist in real life. I grip the rim of the bench as dread descends over my rib cage and seeps into my heart, my lungs, my soul.

I am fictional.

Three simple words, but possibly the most life-affecting ones there are — worse, perhaps, than I am dead, for at least then you would still have had the chance to live in a world where your decisions were your own. My circumstances were so in keeping with the events of a young adult novel because that’s where I was, and where I now remain, bound by the trajectory that my author chooses.

And given the track record I know authors to have, that trajectory is not looking particularly optimistic.

Now, if ever, would be the time to cry, and yet I find that I do not. An intensely grey sensation spreads across my chest — dull, numb and totally insignificant, as if the knowledge that I am fictional has stripped me of my personality, turned me into an emotionless puppet, guided and controlled only by the words of my author. Does this raise the stakes, or render them entirely arbitrary? Legs shaking, I get up and stagger across the room — one, two, three — and push my fingers against the air vent, standing on tiptoes in the desperate hope that my author might have gifted me a few extra inches in exchange for the illusion of free will. In ten minutes, the guards will come for me, and I must struggle to wrangle my body from their grasp, pelt towards the castle gate and scramble over to freedom. Now an escaped prisoner, Rhea is not just condemned to the Duel — she has a price on her head, and—

I push the thought out of my mind. I have ten minutes; I ought to do something constructive with this new knowledge. Casting my mind back to before this happened, I try to summon to mind the countless writing articles I once read — how to emotionally destroy your readers; how to kill your characters in a way that seems fresh; how to make your readers throw your book across the room in agony. Half of the time, reviews condemn the author for not writing their characters well enough; the rest of the time, they blame the characters themselves for not living up to their expectations. In that case, I suppose I have a share of both worlds. I think of my author, someone who wrote me as a self-insert, perhaps, and is currently sitting in the dark in the early hours of the morning, typing out my story and straining to emotionally devastate her readers with my life. I have five minutes left: if I am merely a puppet, I may as well perform accordingly.

What can I do that will make my readers mourn me?

The door swings open at exactly the right moment, just as my train of thought arrives at its conclusion. Oh, how opportunistic, I think, savagely, to take advantage of my thought patterns to dictate when my story moves on. Am I being too unreasonable with my author over this? Briefly, I shut my eyes, attempting to recalibrate myself, adapt to the new situation, for no one must find out I know the truth. Not yet. Possibly not ever. If I ever unveil what I know, it will have to be at the right moment. Two guards burst into the cell, thick bangles of armour on their wrists and spears slung over their shoulders. In the few seconds I have to scan their appearances, I notice that one is bald and extremely tanned, while the other is pale, his tangled black beard reaching down to his chest. The bald one grabs me by the wrist, his blunt fingertips digging into my flesh, and tosses me out of the room. I collapse on the floor outside, my arm throbbing. An intense pain blossoms in my gut. “Get up,” he growls. The guards are fictional too. Their lives are commanded by the words of the author just as mine are. I scramble to my feet, clutching my stomach. The bearded guard marches up to me and seizes both of my arms, twisting them behind my back. I try not to flinch or cry out; I must go bravely to my death. A metallic click, and he shoves my wrists into handcuffs. The hinge cuts into my skin, a searing pain shooting up my arm. I flex my neck. “Wriggling won’t help you escape,” he sniggers.

“I’m not trying to escape,” I mutter, but my throat is constricted and no sound comes out. 

The guards stand either side of me, one forceful hand on each shoulder, and push me towards the end of the corridor. The corridor is metal too, lit only by the same wavering candles in glass cases that were in my cell. And it is my cell, I realise, exclusively my cell. No one will ever need stay in it again, not now I have moved on and my story is drawing to a close. We pass dozens of cells on either side. I wonder how thorough my author has been in her worldbuilding; has she thought to give me company in jail, detached as we would be by these walls of steel? Or is each other cell irrelevant in her mind, existing simply for decoration? At the end of the corridor, the guards steer me sharply to the left. Another identical corridor stretches out in front of me, the walls lined with bleak, bare candles, a broad pair of double doors right at the end.

“Is that the way out?” I whisper. 

The guard on my left gives an affirmative grunt; the one on my right, the pale one, digs his fingers even deeper into my shoulder, as if it is more likely that I’ll try to escape now I know how to leave. These men are twice as tall and twice as muscular as I am; do they really think I would be able to break free? But then, most YA protagonists would be able to. Maybe, if I tried, I could run…

No, I have to keep in line with what my author planned for me, at least until the final moment. I have no idea how far I am along my documented journey — did the story begin when I was snatched from my home, following me through the Kaerflute Trials, and if so, am I now nearing the end of my tale? Or do all of those events just exist as backstory in the author’s mind? Maybe my written life has only lasted five minutes, and my author intends for me to survive this time round. Either way, I am left to construct my own inevitable death, whether it be now or in four hundred pages’ time, and it is up to me to ensure it is as gruelling for the readers as it can be. 

As we approach the double doors, the guard on my right shoves them open, and the corridor widens out into a round arena, the sun beating down on what could be the last scene I ever see. The ground is dusty and hard, the sun glaring off it into my eyes. Stalls tower up in a ring all around me, like a Roman amphitheatre, and though they are vacant I imagine the readers of my author’s novel filling every one, watching the action scene from above. At the opposite end of the arena, Emery stands exactly as I pictured her — silky black hair tied up in a ponytail, glinting blue eyes, sword. I take a deep breath. Though I don’t look the part, I know for a fact that I am stronger than her, and if I pay proper attention, I should be able to beat her. I wonder what Emery thinks of her chances of survival.

Swooning slightly as the guards untie my handcuffs, I step out into the arena. My eyes skirt the perimeter, scanning for exits, but they find none. A sword is thrust into my hand from somewhere beyond my peripheral vision. Emery strides towards me, and I step tentatively in her direction, my hands slick with sweat, fumbling with the sword hilt.

“So, the time has come,” says Emery, with a cinematic twitch of the eyebrows.

“The time has come,” I reply. My voice trembles. Come on, Rhea. Muster up your strength, and you could come out on top…

I glance up into Emery’s face, tracing with my eyes the features that were once so familiar to me. The sweep of her eyebrows as they quirk upwards; the creases in the corners of her eyes; the thin, grim line that is her mouth as she prepares to strike, but which I know once spilled delightful secrets, splitting open into a beam of joy. Merely a second could compel those features to spring back into her face, merely a second in which I could tell her my — our — vital secret, and we would envelop each other in the kind of hug that we used to share, determined to give our story a happy ending. 

But then I recall everything that has happened since we were last in love, and remember that authors do not want to write happy endings. The tale of Rhea and Emery will forever be regarded as a tragedy, albeit possibly not in the way people will think. What can I do that will make my readers mourn me?

I take another deep breath, straightening my spine, fixing her in the eyes. It is a gamble, but one I am willing to take. “I’m not going to fight you, Emery.” My voice is completely firm.

A brief reaction, a narrowing of the eyelids; nothing more. “Why?” she scoffs. She dons her posh, authorial voice, the one that was funny when we enjoyed each other’s company, but which now grates at something bitter inside me. “Because we were lovers in some distant timeline?” 

I don’t want to lie, but I let one break forth from my lips anyway. “It’s not a distant timeline,” I say. “Not for me. For me, it’s present. In my mind, we’re still together. And I can’t bring myself to sacrifice my one true love. Not for some social experiment, not because it’s my destiny, not because it would allow me to escape this place in peace. Not for anything.”

Emery’s eyebrows quirk, but not in the gentle, comical way that I’ve seen them move before. This is scepticism lined with malice; this is the conclusion of a battle of ten years; this is the end, and Emery knows it, and I know it too. From the perspective of the readers, Rhea is helpless, blinded by love for the woman who would — and will — kill her in an instant. 

“In that case, then,” says Emery, “I suppose it makes my job a lot easier.” She raises her sword above her head. “I’ll miss our talks, Rhea. I’ll miss the times we used to have. But I will not miss you.”

“I一”

“I’ll replay them in my head; I will experience them all over again, those games, those talks, those stories we used to tell. But when I relive them, the face of my lover will not be yours. It will be completely blank, replaced by someone who means nothing to me or to anyone, who has no capacity to let me down.” She swings her sword down towards my skull. “And I will wash you from memory,” she says, “time and time again, Rhea Waymar, until I have wiped you off the face of the planet and not a single soul will know this day even happened.”

The last thing I see is the callous smirk on Emery’s face, before something explodes within my skull, an obliterating pain echoing in my head as my thoughts deteriorate, as I crash towards the ground, and every sensation in my body ceases to be.

Everything zooms out. My character arc has come to completion — though not in the way my author intended, not even in the way I intended, in the end. Blindly, I watch as Emery glances at my body on the floor and marches to the exit, sword over her shoulder, thus concluding eternally her ordeal with the lover who spited her. She is not dead, as she expected she would be after this encounter, but perfectly, wonderfully alive. She does not know she is the villain of the piece. She does not know that as she fades out of the arena, she will not have the chance to wipe her ex-lover from history, that her author will pay her no more heed. She does not know that the end of my tale means the end of hers. And as my dwindling consciousness falls away from the scene, I can hear the readers in the stands sobbing for the girl whose love for her enemy was so strong that she allowed herself to die that the villain might live. I can picture the face of my writer, gaping at the self-insert character she moulded at one in the morning and realising that the tragedy she has written is not what truly took place.

For I died not to save the villain I could not fall out of love with, but so that my real-life counterpart could write an ending she would be remembered for — and thus, in my death, do I immortalise myself, too?