Chapter Text
The night is warm enough to sit out back in the garden well into the night with only a sweater around the shoulders. A scary portent of climate change perhaps, but a blessing for two old fogeys plagued with rheumatism and all those other little ailments of age.
“You just never get used to it, do you?” Brian breaks the silence that’s been lying comfortably between them like a well-worn old blanket. “I feel I should, after all this time, but…”
“No. It just doesn’t stop feeling wrong.” Then Roger shakes his head, frowns at himself. He’s not a sentimental one. “Which is bullshit. Everyone dies. It’s how it is.”
“And yet.”
“And yet.” There’s no point denying it.
Silence stretches between them once more. Again it’s Brian who speaks up first. “Do you ever think about how it would be if you could go back? If you could save him somehow?”
Only every single day of his life. “Sometimes,” he admits.
“If you could go back... if you could save him, somehow... would you do it?”
Why is Brian asking him these things? This is not what they do on a night like this. On a night like this they sit and they drink. They don't talk. All that there is to say on the matter has been said years ago, a hundred times. “’Course I would”, he grumbles.
“No, I mean, really." Brian sits up and turns towards him, elbows on his knees. "If the Doctor landed here right now in his Tardis and offered you to come back with him – would you do it?” Brian’s eyes are dark and intense in his pale face.
“Yes, but...” Roger shrugs. What on earth is the matter with Brian? But it seems important to him, so Roger decides to indulge his friend and thinks about it seriously for a few seconds. “Yes. But I wouldn’t even know how. I mean. What could we do? Lock him up in a cupboard all through the late 70s and 80s?”
Brian shakes his head. “I don’t know, Rog. I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking that... I’ve been thinking that if we’d have been there for him more, maybe...” He trails off for a moment, taking a deep breath. “I think we lost him long before he got sick.”
Roger swallows hard. Of all the things he doesn’t want to think about, that is one of them. “It was a disease, Brian. A horrible disease that he got long before any of us could realize how dangerous it really was. It’s not our fault. It’s not his fault, either.” The words are stale like cardboard in his mouth. They both said them too often over the years.
Brian’s voice is very quiet. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Yeah. I know.”
"Do you remember that time in Munich when he was in a really bad way? Well, we all were, but..."
Roger just raises eyebrows.
Brian's smile is a little sad. "Right, got to be more specific. It must have been around the Works recording, winter '83 or '84. Miserably cold and dark. We were in such a foul mood, just venting at each other, constantly threatening to walk out and quit the band and at some point it just broke out of him. ‘You all have family, wives, children...'"
"'…what have I got?' Yeah, that was..." That had been awful.
"I think he felt that way for a long time."
Roger sighs, scrubs a hand through his hair. He hates dwelling on these things. "Yeah, I guess." He looks around. "Have we got any more beer?" If Brian wants to talk, he'll need some fortification.
Brian ignores him. “So would you”, he asks again in that irritatingly pedantic manner of his. “Go back, I mean. If you had the chance.”
Roger throws up his hands. “What, go back to relive the best time of my life and save my best friend’s life in the process?” He shakes his head. “Nah, I’d rather sit here with you, nursing my arthritis and complain about young people these days.” He laughs. “Of course I’d fucking do it.”
“You promise me?” Brian holds out his hand. He looks completely serious, like Roger's answer means the world to him.
Roger narrows his eyes. Something is going on. Something weird that he’ll probably regret in the morning. He hesitates for a second, then he shrugs and shakes Brian’s hand. What’s the worst that can happen, really? A fruitless, exhausting exercise in what-ifs that’ll leave them both worn out and miserable by the morning.
Brian gets out of his chair. "There's something I've got to show you."
“Holy fuck!”
Brian stands by in silence, waiting patiently for Roger to get over his little meltdown. To be fair, Roger has been going on in that manner for a good ten minutes.
“Tell me you're not serious, please?"
"Very serious", Brian says for the fifth time and looks at his watch. "Look Rog, can we move on?"
"Move on to what?" His best friend has just gone round the twist. Completely mental. Or set Roger up for an elaborate joke, which... no, not Brian, and not on this date.
"To the part where I explain what we're going to do with it."
"With your..." Roger takes a deep breath. "…your time machine." Saying it out loud somehow makes it worse.
Brian looks like he's having a migraine. "I never used that term."
Yes, Brian's term had been so complicated it had taken Roger five whole minutes to get that his best friend was trying to tell him he built a time machine.
In his garden shed.
"The machine doesn't produce or manipulate time as such, it..."
"Brian, for the love of God, shut up, please." Roger takes a deep breath. "Alright. Let's pretend for a minute that I'm taking this seriously. How on earth would you even manage to build something like this?" Whatever the thing actually does, it looks impressive. A lot of time and thought must have gone into it.
Brian shoots him a disdainful look. “I read. I thought. I did a lot of maths. For 30 years. Then I called John. And we spent the last five years building it.”
“What, John?” Roger hasn’t seen or spoken to him in ages. Have he and Brian been collaborating all this time? Without even mentioning it to him? “Where is he?”
“Home.” Brian fiddles with his ring. “Don’t take this the wrong way, it’s got nothing to do with you. He’s just a bit… I saw him maybe five times in all those years and we’ve barely spoken a word that wasn’t technical jargon.”
Roger takes another walk around the machine. “Look, Bri, it’s not that I don’t trust you, but… this whole story sounds just a bit bonkers. Two eccentric old codgers building a time machine in their backyards?” And then electrocute themselves trying to go and use it, he adds mentally. The papers would have a field day.
“Oh no”, Brian says, grinning widely, “it sounds completely bonkers. But there’s more to us than being old and eccentric.”
“Oh yes, let me see: arrogant, conceited and convinced of their own genius?”
“Clever”, Brian says. “Creative. Dedicated. And obscenely rich. Well, I was. Before I started on this insane project.”
“Expensive?” It looks welded together from scrap metal and discarded 90s computer sets with cables and wires sticking out everywhere.
“Do you have any idea what an hour of computing space on Summit costs?”
Roger doesn’t even know what Summit is. He shakes his head.
“I’ll spare your sanity and not tell you. It’s all done anyway.”
“Brian, is this whole tour just your long-winded way of asking me for money? Are you broke? Because you could have just said, it’s not like…”
Brian grimaces and waves his hands about until Roger falls silent. “Oh stop it. I’m not starving. And even if I were, it shouldn’t matter after tonight.”
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Roger sits down a three legged stool covered in old paint splashes and stretches out his bum leg. There are certain kinds of conversations he shouldn't have to have at his age. “Is this your final goodbye before you take off for Pluto?”
Brian looks at him for a long time with his deep, knowing eyes. “Not me”, he says.
One second. Two seconds.
"No."
"Yes."
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m dead serious.”
“You want me to… You want… Brian, what the fuck?”
“It sounds crazy, I know, but I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking this through.”
“I bet you have.”
“It works. It really does. I can show you the equations if you like.”
“Yes”, Roger says. “Please, show me the equations. That’ll be tremendously helpful.”
And then Brian actually shoves a binder, three inches thick, under his nose, full of numbers and symbols and diagrams as if any of that would make any kind of sense to a normal human being.
“I was being sarcastic”, he yells, batting Brian away. “I don’t know what any of this means!”
“It’s not that difficult. Well, the quantum mechanics is a bit tricky, but I can walk you through it if you…”
“No. No, I do not want. I… Jesus Christ. I want another beer.”
“Only got ginger ale out here, I’m afraid.”
Roger downs half a bottle in one go before he speaks again. “Brian. I love you, right? You’re my best friend. And the smartest person I know. But how do I know you’ve not just gone off the deep end?”
“Hm. You can’t, can you? You could take me to a psychological assessment but those are terribly easy to beat, I’m afraid.”
Roger does not want to know how Brian knows that.
“The problem is that I can’t demonstrate it to you. It doesn’t work like that. Because the moment I do something to change the past, the future adjusts and we won’t remember we ever changed the past.”
“Okay.”
“But we can do a thought experiment.” Brian is beaming.
“Oh god, can we please not?” He’s read a number of Stephen Hawking’s books (well, started to read them anyway) and he’s only ever been willing to follow those for a few pages. Sure, it all starts out simple enough with twin astronauts and whatnot, but then they all start talking about naked singularities and models of entropy and Roger decides it’s not actually worth the trouble. Give him morally complex dystopian sci-fi any day, but leave the actual Astrophysics to the people with the weird hair.
“See that beetle over there?” Brian points at a small black bug scuttling along the floor. “If I sent it back, say two minutes in time, what do you think would happen?”
“It would... vanish? Into the past?”
“Ah, but things don’t just vanish. They can’t! It’s against the Second Law of Thermodynamics!”
“So what?” As far as Roger is concerned, laws are a bit of a nuisance. It’s not like they’re compulsive or anything.
“So what?! It’s a fundamental law of…” Brian recollects himself, remembering who he’s speaking to. “A fundamental feature of nature. Of reality. It cannot be broken.”
Roger shrugs. “Alright.”
Brian glares at him, like he’s expecting a little bit more awe. Then he decides to move on. “The thing is, when I send something back, it’s not like in Doctor Who. The beetle itself doesn’t actually move. It simply goes back to being the beetle it was two minutes before. Same time, same place.”
“And then three minutes later it gets picked up again and put in the machine and sent back? But then it would be stuck in an endless loop.” Oh god, why is even debating this? That’s what spending time with Brian does to you. Messes with your head.
Brian claps his hands together. “Yes, very good. But that doesn’t happen. Because it can’t happen. Time always moves on. The beetle can’t vanish. Thermodynamics, remember?” He looks very excited. And altogether mad. And Roger is alone with him in a darkened garage, miles away from the next neighbours, with lots of sharp and electric implements lying about. Not that he’s actually worried, Brian couldn’t hurt a fly even if it deserves it, but maybe it is time for them to get back to the house. Maybe it's time for a chat with Anita. Does she have any idea what her husband has been up to?
“Brian…”
“If I sent that beetle back, two things would happen. First, the beetle would still be in here, and second, we wouldn’t have sent it back.”
“We wouldn’t have sent it back?”
“No. The loop, remember?”
“Brian, this is... Are you sure you don’t have any beer here? I’ll settle for whiskey, too…”
“No, listen to me, please. This is important. As I said, there cannot be an infinite loop. So, the past would have changed its behaviour in a way that would have prevented me from changing it in the first. Like, maybe the beetle would have run in the opposite direction. Or maybe there’d be a power outage at the wrong time, or I had a heart attack or...”
“A heart attack?”
“It’s just an example. Look, what we call reality is really just probabilities in the quantum field. There is no preordained future as a mechanistic worldview would suggest. Of course, some futures are more likely than others but–”
“Yeah, I get it.” He doesn’t, not really, but Brian won’t stop until he says he does so this saves everyone a lot of time.
“So there might be some loops. Lots of them, even. The bug would be picked up and sent back again and again until", Brian pauses dramatically until he's sure he has Roger's full attention, "it finally hits on a reality in which it isn’t. And then time goes on, because it has to. And our reality, the one we live in, would adjust accordingly, without us even being aware.”
Roger barely manages to hang on to that thread. “So maybe you did send the bug back?”
Brian laughs. “Maybe I did, yes.”
“And if you tried it again, it might give you a heart attack?”
“I never should have used that example.”
“But that’s important. You’re saying that one way time protects itself is to kill what threatens it.” God, he can barely believe the things that come out of his mouth.
“Time is not a person, Roger. It doesn’t have murderous impulses.”
“Metaphor, Brian. I’m using metaphor.”
“The thing is, a heart attack is just one of many, many possible outcomes. Very unlikely on one hand – pretty much assured on the other.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Have you heard about multiverse theory?”
“I spent a good part of the 70s getting drunk with you in pubs. Of course I have.” Also, he’s watched more than his fair share of sci-fi. He thinks for a moment. “So you mean that there is always one universe in which you have a heart attack.”
“Yes. And you too.”
Roger needs a smoke. As he lights up, Brian gives him a disapproving look but is too caught up in explaining his mad theory to protest.
“When I send something back, there’s a split. There’s one universe where I do it. And there’s another universe where I don’t do it. And the universe where I do do it eventually rights itself, by creating a different reality in which I didn’t do it either.”
“So the time travel deletes itself?”
“Yes!” Brian beams at him like he’s a dog who’s just managed to fetch a stick the first time. “That’s why there are no paradoxes.”
“Alright, alright, I get it.” Not really, but he doesn’t want Brian to go through all that again. “So how on earth can you possibly know all that?”
“I thought about it a lot.”
“But…” Roger stops and massages his temple. His head hurts. “Look, if what you told me is true", which it isn't, it's insane, he adds silently, "you’ve never actually tested the whole thing. Or you might have, but not in this universe?”
“That’s correct.”
“But you want to put me into this... mad machine!” He points at the massive construction of wires and scrap metal with what looks like a 1920’s style cockpit in the middle. “And because time doesn’t want me all up in her business, she might just decide to zap me, put an end to it right then and there!”
“John and I have checked the wiring hundreds of times. There’s no danger of you being zapped.”
“There are lots of ways to kill a man in his seventies, you know.”
“All highly unlikely. Besides. I have tested it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m me.”
That argument is more convincing than it has any right to be.
“And because of… echoes.”
“Echoes?”
“Yes. When you go back, there are echoes from the former future. Emotions, images. Not memories, obviously, because it isn’t about your past, but traces of your alternative lived experience. And when I think about going back – having gone back – it…" Brian shrugs. "It just rings true.”
“So what does it feel like? I mean, you have to come into yourself, into your past being at some point, don’t you?”
Brian nods slowly. “It’s like... Have you ever meditated?” Brian doesn’t wait for him to answer. “No, stupid question, of course you haven’t. But you know when you’re lost in thought or fantasy? And then something happens to bring you back into the present, into your own body? Like that, only 10 times stronger. A bit disorienting.”
“Are you sure you didn’t just have a spoiled piece of soy steak or whatever it is you eat these days?”
Brian doesn’t dignify that with an answer. Instead he says: “Of course, I’ve only gone back a day or two. I think. 44 years might feel a bit more… intense.”
Roger stares at him. “You’re serious. You actually, seriously think you’ve gone back in time.”
“Yes.”
“Goddamn you.” Roger laughs and shakes his head. “Alright, so tell me this. Why haven’t you gone back and saved him then?”
“Maybe I have tried. Maybe this is loop 15 or something.”
“Is that why I’m feeling so old?”
Brian laughs. “I doubt it.” He puts the tips of his fingers together. “Thing is, if I did, it obviously didn’t work, because otherwise I wouldn’t be here, with the machine. There wouldn’t have been a need for it.”
“But...” Roger tries to keep up with the logic. “But maybe we’re just in the parallel universe where you didn’t. And it worked in the other.”
Brian shrugs. “Possibly. But I don’t think so. Because I don’t think it can be me.”
Right. Roger almost forgot that he’s supposed to be the beetle. “Why not?”
“What could I have done, really? Even if I hadn’t married, didn’t have kids, I never could have kept up with him. I never could have been... what he needed.” He takes a moment to collect his thoughts. “If I went back, I might have a vague sense of what is coming, a feeling that I have to protect him. Echoes, remember? But what would I do with it? I mean, I’d still be me, fundamentally, so I’d probably just start to lecture him – and we both know what effect that would have.”
The opposite of what it’s supposed to do. “Couldn’t you try to find Jim a few years earlier? Get them together a lot sooner?”
Brian rolls his eyes. “It’s what the Doctor might do, yeah. Because he can plan these things, he’s fully aware of who he is and what he’s trying to accomplish. I wouldn’t be. I would be...”
“...the same clueless guitar nerd you always were.”
“Only with a vague sense that I’m failing my life. Well, more than I did anyway.”
Yeah, best not revisit that quagmire. “What exactly do you think I would do”, he asks, genuinely curious. “Because I’d just be the same reckless womanizing egomaniac I've always been.”
“I can’t answer that for you but...” Brian looks to the ground as if he’s bracing himself for something. “With you I can see a different version of events sometimes. Always have, even back then.” He looks up at Roger. “Don’t you?”
Only every night before he goes to sleep and every morning when he wakes up. “That’s... Jesus, Brian why are we talking about this? It’s… I never...” He shakes his head.
“Ah”, Brian says softly. “I had wondered.”
Roger gapes at him. “Are you kidding me? Jesus, no we never... no. No.”
“Okay.” Brian spins an empty bottle of ginger ale between his fingers. “But did you want to...”
Roger gets up so quickly the stool clatters to the floor and his hip snaps painfully. “I’m not talking about this. How dare you... fuck you!”
“Sorry. Sorry, that was out of line. Forget it. Sit down, please.” He rights Roger’s stool for him and waits until he sits back down. “I’ve just been thinking a lot about when it all started to go wrong. And that was when all of us, not just me and John, but you as well, got families and just couldn’t be with him as we were before. I mean, think about the summer of ‘79. You two were hanging out all the time, going to Wimbledon together, attending all the hippest parties... and then one year later, Felix was born and... well, you did what everyone would have done, you spent time with your family.”
“Not enough”, he says with a rueful laugh.
“Yeah, I know all about that. But that was the time when that really shitty string of boyfriends started. When Prenter took over. When the coke wasn’t just an occasional indulgence anymore. When things started spinning out of control. And I can’t help thinking that what he really would have needed at the time was… someone by his side. Someone he could trust. Someone who could keep up with him, who wouldn’t be afraid to lock horns with him, but who wouldn’t try to cage him either. And there’s really only one person I can think of.”
“Christ on a bike, Bri.” He rubs his hands over his face. His eyes wander over to the ominous machinery that takes up most of the space in the shed. “You… you really want to do this, don’t you? You actually expect me to sit in that weird little machine of yours and let myself be sent back to… where exactly would I go?
“I was thinking around late ’77. It’s when we just started drifting apart. John and I were both already married and you and Dom were getting serious as well. The US tour that year, I think it was the first one where we all spent more nights apart than together. And looking back, I think it hit him hard.”
The mention of Dominique sets off another path of thinking in Roger’s head. “Wait. If I go back and – I can’t believe we’re seriously discussing this, but I’ll try to ignore that for now – and, say, for some reason something happens so I never meet Debbie, and we never have children together…”
“That is one possible outcome, yes.”
“Are you out of your mind? Do you seriously think I’m going to sacrifice my children? My wife… alright ex-wife?”
Brian has been trying to cut in from the very beginning. “Jesus, Rog, calm down. Of course not. Nothing will happen to your family. Do you really think I would have suggested this otherwise?”
“You said: reality adjusts. So if I don’t have Rufus and Lily and Lola – what exactly will happen to them in this world?”
“Nothing. Because it never will have existed.”
“If you think even for a moment that that is an acceptable answer this is the last time I have spoken to you.”
“Rog.” Brian’s voice is very soft. He waits until he has Roger’s full attention. “Remember. When you decide whether or not to go, there will be a split. In one world you will go back in time and, yes, this reality will adjust. That might affect your family, but it might not. We don’t know that.” Before Roger can butt in, he quickly continues. “But in the other world, you will stay here. You will go home and be with your family and your children and all will be as before. Both these things will happen, one way or the other.”
“So it doesn’t even matter what I do? Then why am I even here? If everything’s going to happen, what does it matter how I decide?”
“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.” Brian shrugs. “On the other hand: everything.”
Roger balls his fists in an effort to stay calm. “Brian, I’m this close to having you institutionalized, so could you please…”
“I mean, philosophically speaking, it doesn’t matter. Both versions are equally true, so there no reason to fret. On the other hand: this decides which version of events you get to live. Which gets the spotlight. Imagine your reality as a maze of diverging paths. The paths all exist and you’ll walk all of them. But you’ll only remember one.” Brian rubs his fingers over his lips, thinking. “Of course, another version of you will remember another path but, in general…”
“Brian.” He puts his elbows on his knees and looks Brian directly in the eyes. “If I agree to this crazy thing, which...” He shakes his head. “Promise me, you promise me nothing will happen to my family.”
“I swear it.”
“There won’t be a reality in which you vanish me in the time machine and I get caught in some loop or kill my own grandfather or whatever, and you’ll be locked up in an asylum and my family will never know what happened to me?”
“That is the one thing that will not happen. It’s impossible. As I said, the Second Law of…”
“Yeah, shut up. If I hear that one more time I’ll sock you.”
Brian bites back a smile.
Roger eyes the machine again. It really doesn’t look very confidence-inspiring. “I can’t believe I’m actually considering stepping into that thing.”
“It’s not very comfortable, I’m afraid. But the travel itself takes no time at all.”
“How long do I have to decide?”
Brian checks his watch. “Half an hour.”
“What?!”
“Well, I don’t think we have to keep it strictly before midnight, the actual date isn’t that important, but…”
“You want to do this tonight?”
“Yes. What did you think?” Brian looks honestly puzzled.
“That I’d have some time to think about this mad scheme? Because you had 30 years to get to grips with the idea, I had all of an hour!”
“Seeing as I’m the brains and you’re the brawn of this operation, that seems alright to me.”
“I won’t even have time to say goodbye to my family!”
“You said goodbye to them before you came here, didn’t you? And…”
“Why.” Roger puts his hands on his hips. “Just give me one good reason why it has to be tonight.”
“Echoes.”
“Echoes?”
“Yes. The echoes will be strongest tonight. We’ve spent an entire evening reminiscing about him, the memory is etched into every cell of your being. If you want to have a chance of changing the past, you have to go tonight.”
“How can you possibly know that.”
“It’s based on a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. It has been predicted by Albert Einstein and experimentally proven and…”
“And you’re a die-hard romantic who just wants it to be tonight.”
Brian presses his lips together. “It’s a very elegant proof.”
“What do you do if I just walk away?”
“Burn this whole thing to the ground.” He nods at the machine, at the shelf in the corner that's stuffed to the brim with binders full notes. Thirty years of work.
“You wouldn’t at least try it yourself?”
“No.”
Roger thinks for a moment. “But there’s one reality where you do.”
“Yes. But it won’t be this.” He looks down at his hands. “I realize I’m asking you to do something I won’t do myself. It’s not because I value the life you lived any less than mine. It’s simply because I can’t see myself doing much good, for anyone. You know I’ve struggled with many of my decisions, and of course I’ve thought about going back and... and fixing things. Not getting married at the worst possible moment, not having children when the touring schedule was still so heavy or right when my marriage was falling apart...”
“Not giving up your research for Rock ’n’ Roll?”
“Not that. Never that.” Brian smiles. “I might create a life in which I live up to my own standards a bit more. But I can’t see myself saving him. Or righting any other big wrongs. And if I have one chance of using that thing, I want it to make a splash.”
“You know, and I hate to be noble and all, but... aren’t there even worthier causes? Killing Hitler?” He just throws out the first thing that springs to his mind.
Brian gives him that look that says ‘Could you at least try to work with me here?’ He lists off the reasons it wouldn’t work one by one. “I’d have to find a contemporary of Hitler, someone who’s still alive, who’d believe me, who’d be willing to go back, who’d be in a position and the right mind set to do it. What do you think, should I just advertise for the job on Facebook?” He shakes his head. “The person who goes back is still fundamentally the same as they were then. All he’s got are a few faint memories, echoes, to guide him. It’s not like he’s suddenly a man on a mission. Besides. Who says that killing Hitler would prevent the Holocaust or the Second World War? Maybe his second in command was even more ruthless and a better strategist. What if this would cause the Germans to win the war?”
“Yes, okay, I…”
“I’m not finished. Remember, even if those atrocities are prevented in one world, they still happened in all the others.”
“One world saved, though.”
“Yes, but...” Brian hesitates and collects his thoughts. “This whole crazy idea only got started because of him. It was just a fancy at first of course, a distraction to help me get through my depression, to give my mind something to do except tear itself to pieces. It took me years to get to a point where I thought that this could really work. But I never would have started on it if it hadn’t been for him. It feels wrong to use it for anything else.”
“Such a romantic.” He’s always been like that. A brain almost too big for his skull and the softest of hearts constantly derailing its logic.
Brian looks like he’s got a toothache. “Maybe”, he grumbles.
“So what do you think will happen to you?”
“To me?”
“Yes. When I go back and change history and reality adjusts?”
“I’ll wake up in whichever reality you created. I hope it’s not going to be a nuclear wasteland because you’ve accidentally started World War III.”
“What do you think it will be?”
“Hopefully, I’m going to be with the three of you, locked in a shouting match because you’re all too pig-headed to realize that clearly our new song needs more guitars.”
Roger grins, but it’s painful and wobbly and there’s a pressure between his eyes. He turns around, hands balled into fists and takes a deep breath. “God, I hate you”, he whispers before turning back around. “I’ll do it.”
He wishes he’d had a drink or five more. It’s always easier to make a fool of yourself when you’re drunk. But now he awkwardly lowers himself with creaking joints into Brian’s weird machine in the full possession of his mental faculties. He feels ridiculous. He feels scared. He feels ridiculous for feeling scared, because there’s no way this crazy pipe dream is going to work anyway. It’s like when he played at being a NASA Astronaut with his cousin Carl when he was ten: lying cooped up in a ‘cockpit’ of chairs and blankets, feeling the excitement rise as Carl started the countdown, wondering if the boosters would ignite, if he was going to die in a blazing ball of fire. Of course, then as now, it’s not actually real.
But still.
He thinks about his children, his grandchildren, about Sarina. Would he meet them again? Would he recognize them if he does (no, of course he wouldn’t, that’s not how this works). Would he miss them, somehow, would he miss this life?
Would anything change at all? Or would he fail and watch Freddie die all over again?
“You ready, Rog?”
Brian is pushing several buttons on a console and then the whole thing roars to life. Rogers heartbeat shoots up and his hands dig into the armrests of the seat. Oh man.
This is insane. Absolute bat-shit crazy. This is New Orleans 1978 all over again. But they had a great fucking time then, didn’t they?
And it won’t work anyway. There’s going to be a lot of excitement, maybe a rain of sparks, and then he’ll climb out and spend the rest of the night promising Brian he’ll never breathe a word of that embarrassing episode ever again. And then they’d get horrifically drunk.
He nods.
Brian nods.
Then there’s nothing.