Face-Slapping16 min read
I Was the Substitute—and I Learned How to Break Them
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The scalpel bit into my chest like a cold, indifferent promise. Blood painted the white sheet a furious red. I watched my own ribs open, listened to a voice that was not mine whispering a name into the hollow of the operating room.
"Ezekiel," the man at the table said, as if the name could stitch together what he had torn apart. "I give you the kidney. Wake up, please."
I opened my eyes to bright, clinical white, and a system's voice—thin, mechanical, intolerant of ordinary pity—filled my head.
[Host, accept scenario. Ability: Soul Swap. Skill unstable at first.]
I blinked until the world stopped spinning and memory that wasn't mine slid under my skin like cold water. It told me everything I needed to know.
I was Justine Alexander. I had a brother who had once been my whole world. I had given a kidney to another woman, or so the memories said; or maybe the woman had taken it. My life had been a string of favors and small deaths I wrapped in polite smiles. My name—her name—was like a coin, passed from hand to hand. I had been the substitute. The spare.
A man in a suit came into the room: Ezekiel McCormick. He looked like money shaped into a man—broad-shouldered, ruthless profile, eyes the color of cold coffee. He asked if I was awake. I said yes, and my voice sounded like a borrowed cloak.
"Ezekiel, you're here," I said, using the name that the old memory taught me. The truth was thin and sharp. "I'm fine."
He poured me water. He said he had pushed my schedule back a month and that after the month our contract would end. He said, "Frances is returning."
My throat closed. The man named Frances—Frances Greco—was the white moonlight, the one who had always glittered in Ezekiel's memory like a lighthouse you could not touch. The memory's knot tightened: Frances had returned from abroad; Frances had seen me as an insult, a mockery, an imitation; Frances had been ready to eliminate substitutes.
I laughed when Ezekiel left. The laugh tasted of tin. "Fine," I told the empty room. "Ask me for anything. I'll owe you later."
[Host, Ezekiel has left. This plot segment finishes.]
The system's presence felt like frost in my bones. It supplied plot notes, timelines, motivations. It told me about the audition for The Phoenix Empress—the show that would make or break me. It told me that Frances would come back like a tide and sweep everything in her wake. It described how I would be cast and then replaced, how I'd be driven into a corner, and how I would, eventually, be betrayed into thinking love was something that would keep my brother alive.
"System," I murmured, "how similar are Frances and I?"
[Very similar. High resemblance was the reason host became the substitute.]
I smiled without warmth. Similar enough to be useful. Similar enough to make her envy a weapon.
The first day at the set of The Phoenix Empress was a cold, clean thing. Frances arrived with press and applause. She stepped into the trailer like a sunbeam, warm and staged. The director, Xander Dickinson, had a blue hair streak and an impatient way about him; he wanted the truth of the scene, not spectacle. When Frances saw me, her smile faltered just a inch.
"Hello," she said, honey coating steel.
"Hello. I'm Justine." My hand in hers felt like a challenge.
"You're... good," she said. "Nice to meet you."
Xander, after a long minute, set the terms: a duel. The better actor would take the role of the Empress. The rest of us watched the strings snap taut.
When I stood on stage as the Empress and let a pain I had rehearsed a thousand times bloom into something true, they applauded like it was raining. Frances's face, in the crowd, was a map of moves she would make. I didn't need the system to tell me then what she already promised herself in a head full of bargains.
"You're going to lose," she told me later, soft as poison. "You don't belong to this world."
"Not yet," I answered. "But look at me now."
She hated my face because it was too like hers; she hated me because the idea of another version of herself thriving made the universe small and unacceptable. So she bought trolls, hired black PR, whispered poison into ears of journalists. She told the world that I was nothing but a resource—an actress because a man paid for it.
"What are you doing?" I asked when she blocked me in the corridor.
"Protecting what is mine," she said. "You should know your place."
"I will," I said. "I'll know it when it suits me."
If a woman gives you a reason to hate her, you can either die or learn how to melt them.
They put me in the role of the Empress. Frances did not like it. She began to act.
"You're going to regret this," she told me on the day of the first wrap party.
I let the smile that had killed for me for a thousand roles bloom. "I doubt it."
She planted lies. She hired trolls. A video exploded online accusing me of fake diplomas, of being a gold-digger. Frances's people ran comments like petitions. But the truth is a stubborn thing. A crew member, brave and tired of being purchased, leaked my audition tape; the world saw the truth of the work, and for a moment the net favored me. The applause returned.
It was when the snow came that the world turned on me.
The director yelled "Action" and the cameras rolled. The scene was supposed to be the Empress confronting her betrayer: heartbreak, oath, a collapse into the world and pain so real it left the set stunned. The props were sharp and the makeup heavier than usual.
"Cut!" Xander shouted, not because the scene failed but because I had given him something he had not expected. The crew stood in stunned silence. Frances's expression was two parts bile and envy.
After that, Frances did what she always did when the market turned against her: she staged catastrophe. She crafted a moment where it would look like I had grabbed a razor and hurt her—hurt herself in a way that would be easily framed and easily weaponized. She called photographers. She staged cries. Her image of fragility would beat mine for public sympathy every time.
I knew, even as their cameras clicked, that Frances loved melodrama more than truth. She would die for a more beautiful scene.
The night she staged herself bleeding, the plan in her head was perfect: reel in the cameras, call in the emergency, watch the hate turn towards me.
"Help!" she screamed, and the actors nearby rushed. Her hand clutched at a knife that had never wanted to cut real flesh. She closed her eyes and let her throat make the right noises.
I watched from the doorway, a silent figure. Frances's voice was a perfect thing; she was teaching the room how to make men bow.
They took her away. The flood of hatred turned like a storm; the trolls ate me. My feed filled with knives and pleas and frantic accusations. I was accused of everything: betrayal, envy, violence I had not shown. They posted photos, blurred and sharpened, and the world turned against me again.
The system spoke in my head. [Alert: Host has been framed. Passive Soul Swap may activate. Recommended: gather evidence.]
I had one recording. I had the voice of the woman who had blessed herself with tragedy. It was a crude tape, but it would do.
Ezekiel, meanwhile, had left me to the ice of the world and his own concerns. I was his second, his indulgence, the shade that filled the corners of his nights. The timing had been perfect: Frances returned like a comet and he took her as his orbit again. She wanted a ring. He wanted light. I wanted my brother alive.
I was carrying secrets heavy enough to crush me. My brother's name—my reason—was called Suan in the old memories. He had been hurt, sold into research, saved at a cost. My last act, the one that had hollowed me, had been giving up a kidney to someone they called by a different name. How the pieces fit I did not yet know. But I did not have time to lament. There was a life to salvage.
They "arrested" me on the words of the cameras. I was dragged into a van—black, heavy, with no windows—and when they took the blindfold off I found myself in a house that shimmered with wealth like frost. It was Ezekiel's—his private villa. They locked me in a room and told me he wanted answers.
"Ezekiel," I said when he stepped in. He moved like a man who had grown used to possessing people.
"Did you do this?" he asked, not looking at me. His voice was a blade. "Did you hurt Frances?"
"I didn't," I said. My voice cracked. "I have a recording."
He wanted to believe her. A man tends to see what he needs to; his choices make him blind to certain truths. He took my phone and listened. "You're accusing her of self-harm," he said, disgust and fear flickering across his face.
"It was a setup," I said. "I can prove it."
I had the tape, and I had something else: a thief's instinct. I pushed the phone into his hand and told him where to find the rest.
He listened, and the color in his face changed like weather. He deleted the recording from his device. He said he could not let Frances's reputation be destroyed. He could not, in his mind, allow himself to have been wrong.
So they sealed me in a basement. They told me to be silent and I had only the system's voice and my own teeth to keep me company.
[Host, inventory reveals: explosive device from post-apocalyptic world. Use with caution.]
It seems the system feared boredom. It gave me a pack that would make walls into dust. I was not naïve. I set a plan with the little technology I had. The pack glowed white under the low light and I let iron and nerves do the rest. I blew a hole big enough to crawl through.
Ezekiel ordered men to bring me back. They failed. I ran until my lungs burned.
The next morning, a flood of emails landed in every newsroom across the country. The same recording, the same raw truth: Frances had faked her wound. The trolls had a fit. People blinked, and the world tilted in my favor for a second that felt like a miracle.
The scale of public reaction was dizzying. Comments erupted.
"I knew she was playing victims," one wrote.
"This is unbelievable—why would she do this?" another asked.
Some still insisted the tape was fake. Others sent messages of apology and regret.
The tide had turned, and when a tide turns it throws up the things hidden in the sea.
Frances's reaction to the proof was the first thing I noticed: at first, a fierce, contemptuous smile. Then confusion. Then denial.
"Fake," she said into her microphone. "This is manipulated. A forgery."
Her managers lined up with lawyers. She called journalists. She cried on camera, eyes blown wide, as if the world were cruel to her. Her followers pressed their palms to the screen in anger at the accusations.
Ezekiel's damage control—if that was what he wished to call it—was different. He had a different sort of rage: one that tasted like iron and paper. He hated being wrong. He hated being manipulated. And Frances... he had taken her hand and placed a commitment ring on it. For his sake and hers, he chose silence, protection, and then—finally—revenge.
I did not expect his next move. Neither did Frances.
It happened at a gala—an industry awards ceremony that glittered like a constellation. There were chandeliers, camera crews, VIPs in three-quarter length furs and tails. Frances arrived in blush silk. She smiled like a woman with everything to lose.
I sat at a table in the corner. I had been asked to attend as part of damage control that had backfired into notoriety. I had a little black dress. I carried nothing more than a pocket camera and a patience born of winters.
Ezekiel stood when he wanted to and the room obeyed. He stepped onto the stage to accept an award for philanthropy. The band began to play. He reached the podium, and for a heartbeat the crowd gave him their breath.
Then the screens flicked. The big LED behind him changed from blue to a scene that would become history.
"Turn it off," Frances hissed. "Who did this?"
Ezekiel's voice, flat and cold, filled the hall. "Watch," he said.
A recorded evidence package—lawyerized and tidy—played across the screens. It was a mosaic of Frances's dirty deals: photographs of her sending young actresses into rooms, messages arranging bribes, bank transfers, secret chats in which she signed off on character assassination campaigns. There were photos of Eve—no, Frances—meeting with men behind closed doors, and there was, threaded through it all, footage of Frances writing orders to a man whose name was clear as a bell in Ezekiel's files: "Make her fall apart."
"How—" Frances's face drained.
The hall hummed with the shuffle of breath and the scraping of chairs. Toasts died in throats. People raised their phones automatically like soldiers with rifles. The crowd reorganized into a single organism: attention turned into a blade.
The evidence kept coming, documentary, decisive. Lawyers on the screen read aloud contracts. "Here," said a well-known investigative journalist, and then the audio played the exact moment Frances had ordered a staged injury: her voice, recorded in her own email to an assistant, saying, "We need pity. Stage it. Make it look like a collapse; make it look like she couldn't take the fame."
Her mouth opened. "You can't—"
"Turn the mic off," someone hissed from the audience.
Ezekiel stepped down from the stage. He walked toward her like a man walking through glass. The cameras followed him; the world held its breath. In the center of a room of six hundred people, he caught up with her.
"Frances."
She straightened. "Ezekiel, this is—"
He tugged the microphone away from the podium and used it like a gavel. "Explain."
She smiled, brittle with the effort of a person who rehearses panic. "This is defamatory. I will be—"
"Explain," he repeated, and the word landed like a verdict.
She began with denial. "These are forgeries," she said. "You can't print this. This is—"
Ezekiel pressed the mic into her hand. "Here—say it. Say to everyone in this room that you did this."
A hundred camera lights sharpened into stabbing points of white. The crowd leaned forward. A hush smothered the chandeliers. A dozen journalists took a breath and clicked record.
Frances's denial shrank and grew frantic. "This is a setup. I'm being framed!"
"By whom?" Ezekiel asked.
A ripple of low laughter passed across the room. The wealthy and powerful like melodrama served cold; they liked to watch when one of their own trashed a reputation.
A young reporter raised his hand. "Frances, do you deny the transfers?" he asked.
"No!" she cried. "I—" And the word tore like fabric as she realized the transfers were dated, labeled, and matched with submitted receipts from her own lawyer.
It went in stages. At first she was incredulous. Then she flicked through a sequence of emotions: fury, disbelief, bargaining, hysteria.
"You're lying!" she said, voice raw. "This is illegal—"
Ezekiel's next move was surgical. He stood very close and used a voice only she could hear.
"If you're smart, you'll tell the truth now."
She laughed then. It was a trembling sound. "You'll do what? Send me to the press? You love me—"
A hundred people watched as her bravado disintegrated. She tried to backpedal. "It was for my career! You don't understand! I'm—"
"Admit it," Ezekiel said.
The reporters pressed their mics forward. The cameras zoomed in on her face. "Frances, did you pay people to attack Justine? Did you coordinate fake injuries? Did you order the physical attack on her brother?" asked a reporter who smelled blood and had a podium to climb.
Her defenses, once a great wall, crumbled. For a time she tried to lie, but the transcripts, the bank transfers, the emails were a ceiling on the lies. The crowd began to murmur like a sea.
"You have all the evidence," she whispered. The words were breath. Then, in the way people go from shock to the primitive urge to survive, she began to change tactics: deny, then bargain.
"No—no. I never—"
Ezekiel placed a hand against her mouth—not violent, impossibly controlled. "Tell them," he said.
She looked out at the crowd. Her voice, when it came, came thin and broken like glass. "I...I did it," she said. It was barely there.
The first sound from the audience was a single intake of disbelieving air. Then the room erupted.
"Shut up," warned one guest. "This is madness."
Cameras clicked. Phones recorded. Social media lit. People who had once sipped champagne beside her now formed a ring of faces full of curiosity and judgment.
She tried to blame things on stress and misinterpretation. "I was under pressure. I was terrified of being forgotten. I made terrible decisions. I am sorry." The words had no weight; the crowd wanted more than a simple apology.
"How could you?" someone shouted.
Ezekiel had saved his worst for last. He reached into his jacket and produced a small envelope. He handed it to the main journalist. "Everything. Every payment. Every order. Everything she used to break other women's lives," he said crisply.
The journalist opened it, and the documents spilled like pale bones. They were incontrovertible.
Frances's composure blew apart. She began to plead. "Please," she said, crawling toward a chair as if the ground had betrayed her. "Please. I didn't mean—please."
Her voice changed. The arrogance drained away. She became human, a person reduced to no more than a shape of need.
The crowd's reaction morphed. First came the stunned silence, then whispers, then the slow, rising tide of judgment.
"How could you?" murmured someone I knew from an ad agency.
"I can't believe this," another woman said, recording on her phone.
"She lied to us all those years," said a man in tuxedo, voice carrying. He sounded betrayed.
Someone laughed, sharp and ugly. Another person started to clap, a single, cruel clap that quickly multiplied.
"You're a monster!" called a voice from the back. Then others echoed, louder.
The applause was mocking, not warm. It was the sound of a society that loved entertainment and much preferred spectacle to nuance.
Frances crumpled into a kneel and the knees carved into the marble like a confession. Her silk skirt pooled around her. She put her hands out like a beggar.
"Please," she said in a small child's voice. "Please, Ezekiel. Please—don't ruin me in the papers. I'll do anything. Forgive me."
People in the room took out their phones. Someone broadcast the scene live. Hands shook as they captured every moment; the images would be cut into the top ten clips of that week.
Her face changed in the span of minutes: from coquettish and composed to hateful to small and repentant to feral. She tried bargaining, asking for deals, for leash agreements, for private settlements. "If you don't—"
Ezekiel stepped forward and the room leaned with him. "No," he said once. "This is public. Let everyone see."
She became frantic. "No—no—I'll pay you—"
"Stop," Ezekiel said, and the word knocked her back into silence.
The crowd's reaction was a silent drum of betrayal and glee. Reporters whispered into mics; a woman in the front row announced she had turned in evidence to the police. People took pictures, slow and methodical. Some applauded; others just watched, mouths open.
Her face—so practiced in smiles—collapsed. She crawled forward and clutched at the hem of Ezekiel's suit as a child might at a parent's sleeve. Her lips trembled as she mouthed the single word, "Please."
He turned his face away. The hand that had adored her now withdrew. The photographers' flashes turned her into a ghost.
The final act of the scene was terrible and glorious and public: Frances got to the end of her repertoire. She shouted, "It's not me! I don't remember! They made me do it!" and then the voice faltered into a sob.
Her mask fell away. She was reduced to pleading, the sophisticated machine of her career now a writhing coil of human need. The power she had built—networks of favors, financial leverage, social alliances—slid from her like water.
Someone in the audience recorded the moment she hit her knees, the silk of her dress dirty with public dust, and the video spread like a bloom. People who had once sent her gifts now whispered in disgust. The applause rose and fell like a verdict.
She begged. She cried. She tried to stand and failed. She begged for forgiveness and for private settlement, for salvation and for a way to hide. Her throat worked; she wanted to invent a new story. The cameras loved her most when she had nothing left.
"Please," she said finally, so small that it might have been swallowed by the chandeliers. Her voice was a broken thing. "I'll do anything. Please—"
People began to murmur; then a woman standing at the edge of the room said, "She should face the law."
Someone else added, "She should be banned from the industry."
The chorus was loud, righteous and hungry.
At that moment, I realized the punishment that had to be meted was not only legal; it needed to be social, total, humiliating. If you had used power to prey on others, then you would have your claim to power stripped away in the most public theater you had once adored.
The rest of the night blurred: Frances escorted away, her publicist crying in a corner, footage already clipped for social channels. Lawyers argued. Journalists chased down leads. The world, which had adored her, turned its face away: you could not love a woman who fed you lies.
In the days that followed, the revelations widened. Frances confessed, denied, and then clutched the last threads. She called for private settlements and got none. Her agencies dropped her. Brands cut ties. Her name turned into a parable.
I watched the fall with a quiet that was almost religious. I did not dance on her ruins. I had no appetite for blood. I had wanted only to clear my name and get my brother home.
Ezekiel stood at the center of it all, his face cut by the regret of what he should have seen earlier. He had been blind to small cruelties; he had loved an image. Now he moved to make right what he had broken.
"Did you ever love me?" I asked him one evening when the dust settled and only the ash of the scandal cooled at our feet.
He looked at me—really looked—and the answer in his eyes was a slow, terrible confession. "Yes," he said. "I thought I loved an idea. I was wrong. I didn't see you."
My hand found his. I had been the substitute, and perhaps never would be more than that in a boy's tidy heart. But a substitute role can be the only lever you get in life.
"Will you fix it?" I asked.
He stood and made a promise in the quiet way of businessmen. He did not sing or kneel; he signed papers and made calls. He found my brother and had him brought back from the research lab that had sold him as a body to science. He set up a trust, he funded treatment, he made amends by the only language he had learned: money and presence.
Then, quietly, I left.
I packed a bag and walked away from the mansion and its chandeliers and the tricky, kind hands that had once held me with the possessiveness of a collector. I wanted to keep the few things I had won for myself: a small apartment, a little garden patch where I could grow beans, the knowledge that I had outlived a season meant to break me.
Ezekiel followed, not with vows I could not keep nor kisses I could not return, but with a calm insistence. He came to the small markets, bought hard bread, and made me tea in mugs that did not match. He listened when I told him of the times I had given away my oxygen to save another.
"Stay," he said one rainy afternoon, as thunder jacked the sky. "If you want to."
"Not forever," I told him. "Once my brother is well, I will go."
He frowned. "And leave?"
"I am not anyone's shadow," I said. "I loved someone who turned out to be an idea. Who will want me when there is no performing left? I will want myself."
Ezekiel smiled the faintest smile like an apology and left the decision to me.
The system stayed quiet. Soul Swap pulsed once like a warning light and then dimmed. The strange power that had let me wear someone else's life like a borrowed dress had not made me more tender. It made me cunning.
Months later, at the hospital, my brother opened his eyes and said something like my name, or maybe he only mouthed the memory of it. He improved. He laughed like he had the right to. He choked on tears like a man newly given a life.
As for Frances—she lost everything that matters to a public woman: contracts, awards, friends. She tried to buy absolution and found there was no auction for a conscience. She had to sit with the knowledge that she had hurt people who would never walk away from the damage.
Once, at the cafe by the river where the lights made the water like glass, I lifted the red paper parasol I had brought from the south. The system hummed one last note: [Host, skill stabilized. Good performance. Ending optional.]
I laughed. "Fine. I'll stay a little longer," I told Ezekiel, who had come for tea and stayed for longer than a minute.
He took my hand without asking, and this time when he looked at me, he looked at the actual person whose body had withstood more than anything he had bought. The light that used to belong to Frances had been a kind of theft; now, in a strange, reconciled way, it glowed back on someone who had never been a substitute for anything but hope.
"There is a list of things I promised," I said, smiling, and handed him a tiny sheet of paper I had kept for myself.
He read it aloud: "Be patient. Bring good soup. Don't sign anything without me. Let me go if I say so."
He laughed until he cried, and then he kissed my knuckles like a man who had learned something about restitution.
The last thing I did before I walked away that night was click a red umbrella shut and put it in the corner. It was small and bright and useless against storms if you chose to defy them. But it was mine.
I closed my eyes and felt the world align for a moment where justice was not perfect, but it was present and fierce.
And when I finally spoke, it was neither a promise nor a vow. It was a sentence I owned, not borrowed.
"I will live like I am not a substitute," I said. "And you will see what that looks like."
He watched me with an honest and difficult face. "I already do," he said.
The parasol's tassel brushed the table like a soft clock. In its tick, there was a memory of an old system voice and a new, stubborn life I had decided to keep.
The End
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