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He thinks about her nails. Sage green. Thinks about it more when she reaches her middle finger up to get an eyelash. She has an uneven streak that hasn’t dried yet. It’s strange how both girls don’t seem to share the same eyes despite their similarities in features.
Lucy fidgets with her hair more. Eyes incredibly focused especially when she chews on his food.
“It tastes different,” she tells him. The burger leaves a sheen on her upper lip.
Quinn kinda wants to reach a finger out and trace it. He clenches his hand.
“Different how?”
“You won’t get it,” the girl huffs softly, but clearly means no harm by it. She’s just honest. He hasn’t had another point of reference to compare the burger to. Out of the two of them, only one has travelled through time and knows how the place changes its recipe. “It’s like, chewier.” She supplies, still trying to clue him in.
Quinn can almost picture the texture in between his teeth. He continues looking at her, at those round, moonlit eyes.
“Chewy is not a taste,” he jests and hands her a napkin.
She doesn’t oppose.
Lucy sulks, like he has just asked her which came first: the chicken or the egg. “You just don’t get it.”
He doesn’t, Quinn thinks, but he’s getting there.
You don’t have any freckle, he says once.
Must I? Lucy blinks. Her eyes look lost, pages away from the book on her lap.
It’s their shortest conversation. He closes his mouth.
“Sweet Video is going out of business soon,” she claims one day, easy, inspecting a DVD case between her hands. Sometimes Lucy looks at things as if she is investigating the state’s largest secret. Her random fortunes no longer surprise him. “In ten years, people will start renting digital versions of films. Actually, if you’re anything like my friend’s dad, you’d end up paying for four subscriptions at once.”
“Well, good thing I don’t plan on working here for the rest of my life,” he gives her a shrug behind the counter, double-checking everything before closing up. The keys jingle in his back pocket when he walks. Pauses. “Subscriptions?”
“Yeah,” Lucy nods, “you know, big corps greed and all of that.” She makes a gesture, drawing waves with one hand. “We don’t really own anything to our names in the future. There are only loans.”
Quinn sighs. That doesn’t shock him either, but it’s still depressing as heck. He wonders what his future self has signed up for.
“Welp, if you do like that particular DVD, I can put it on my tab.”
“It’s Terminator 2,” she wrinkles her nose. Her nails are already peeling, or maybe she picks them off. He hasn’t really noticed any destructive habit she possesses, outside of her wants to save the world. “I’d rather not spend our night thinking more about the complications of time travel, I think.”
“Our night?” He tilts his head.
He has never watched movies with anyone else before, but they can start now.
She’s taller than Summer. Which means he has to look up instead of down, and Lucy doesn’t fret easily so there is no need to brace himself for the impact of her reactions to shocking scenes. They watch the movie on his family’s boat. He hasn’t changed out of his uniform when she asks him to sit down.
When she looks up from the screen, finally, their eyes meet.
It’s comforting to see her smile and he gets why that particular scene makes her happy.
“They made it,” Lucy says. “Even with all the odds.”
For a moment, she shines against all the fairy lights. That, probably is the only point.
Quinn nods. His voice doesn’t cut past statics.
“Yeah.”
By the end of her journey, she stops accusing him of things when he shows up to the rescues, a page rather than a knight and he keeps thinking about the bruise on her elbows from slamming open doors and closed windows.
When the killer comes, it’s the other sister that he jumps to protect.
His body shields Summer in oblong angles. It’s Lucy who has nothing.
The Sweetly Slasher laughs and Quinn doesn’t know if he would die for love. He doesn’t even know if it’s still love that he feels. On the other side of the room, next to the time machine, Lucy stands alone, all the way to the back. He used to be able to mistake her for another in the dark. He can’t now.
It’s odd.
She is not scared when she launches at the man in black and shouts at Quinn to leave the room alive; and he adapts because he’s getting good at this thing where he reads her and he becomes less of a problem to her existence. Summer rubs at her wrist from where he grabs. They’re both emptied of conversations when the big bang happens and he doubles over from throwing up instead of seeing stars.
“What happens now?” The wrong sister asks.
He blinks.
Like she said, Lucy’s life is loaned from another’s death.
In the end, nobody in the future owns anything, not even their own lives.
Four minutes from midnight and “do you—did you love me?” Summer asks under the sky. She probably feels like she needed to break the tension somehow. Or maybe she’s scared to death that he’s going to end up like that paradoxical psycho who spent years chasing her down, and killing her sister in the missing beats.
“No,” Quinn says.
His stomach twists at the dots on her face.
Time is starting to fix itself in the shreds of his clothes, his palms are healing from the cuts and he begins to lose sight of the events of past days. Something feels wrong, still. He stares at Summer and there are too many stars across her cheeks. Quinn wants to pinch at his own insides to remember better, but he fears losing more.
“I don’t… I don’t think it’s love that I feel. Not that.”
The boy confesses eventually and his words become a void.
Summer lets out a sigh. Her mouth opens for a second, but chooses otherwise. Maybe he’d have to work for her trust from now on, like how T-850 clumsily did in the last instalment.
He’s okay with that.
He’ll do much better, with time.
Which comes first, the girl he spent his life dreaming about or the girl who makes him feel alive?
Which matters more?
When Lucy comes through her grand return, he buries himself in her neck. She smells likes autumn and the smoke of a firestorm. She squeezes him back as well. Her nailbeds dig into his skin, freckles of sage green are still peeling, and they’re bloodied, but they’re hers and he can care less about anything else.
There is nothing else he needs to do.
Quinn gets it now.