Work Text:
The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
― Alan Lightman
The first day Emma drops him off at school, Richie looks up at the doors of Hatchetfield High and knows he’s going to die there.
“It won’t be that bad,” Emma says, putting the car in park at the curb. She runs her hand through his hair, attempting to flatten it, but Richie’s bedhead is his always-head and it can’t be tamed. She winces, probably remembering her own days there, only ten years ago now. “Well. You’ll survive it.”
Richie isn’t so sure. Since their parents died in a freak car accident three months ago, he’s been living in Emma’s sorry excuse for an apartment, and survival never seems like a given. It wasn’t a given for his parents. It wasn’t a given for Jane. It almost wasn’t a given for Emma, who came here from an alternate timeline with her not-boyfriend Paul. Finding out she had a little brother in this universe was an adjustment, is an adjustment, but she’s kind and she lets him sleep on the couch, so Richie is inclined to believe her at least a little bit.
“Hey,” Emma says. She blinks at him and leans in, then stops. Richie imagines she’s kissed his cheek and feels slightly better. “Hey. I’ll be here right at two to pick you up. Anyone even looks at you wrong and I’ll kill them.”
Richie nods. He forces himself to open the door, to slide out of the seat, to close the door. He walks up the steps and keeps his head forward. Just remember, he thinks, as he crosses inside; you only have to die once.
For the first six classes of the day, nobody speaks to him, though some jock with dirty blond curls won’t stop glancing at him and snickering. But the jock is nowhere to be found in pre-calculus, so Richie finally sinks down with a sigh, choosing a seat a little closer to the back, where the jock had sat in every class before.
This class is surprisingly varied. Most high school classes are fairly cliquey, with more cooler kids in the lower levels and more nerds in the higher-ups, but pre-calc is half-empty and boasting a mix of the two, plus a few who seem to defy categorization.
Up at the front, a girl with headgear and frizzy curls sits beside a boy in a bowtie and suspenders (yeesh). Behind them, there’s a girl in a crop top and thick eyeshadow, beside another girl who could practically be her doppleganger in a short skirt and pink cardigan. Then there’s the terrifying girl with the rosary by the door, boasting a WWJD bracelet that will probably star in Richie’s nightmares, and, finally, a boy with black curls in a leather jacket in the back corner behind her, doodling all over his desk with a Sharpie.
The teacher clears her throat. Richie tears his eyes from Vandal to the redhead at the board. “Welcome, class,” she says. “I’ve been asked to inform you that Jerry went missing last night.”
Richie looks up. Nobody else seems bothered, though. Vandal yawns.
Suddenly, the half-empty room feels far more sinister.
Noticing his alarm, Crop Top leans over and whispers, “Don’t worry. He’ll come back, just wrong.”
She leans back. Richie’s hand itches for his phone.
“Who wants to answer today’s challenge equation?” the teacher chirps. Headgear’s hand shoots up in the air, followed almost instantly by Bowtie’s. Crop Top rolls her eyes and Cardigan looks down at her desk. Rosary bares her teeth and says, “Miss Mulberry? You can’t put crosses on the board. It’s disrespectful to God.”
Richie squints, but finds no crosses. Maybe he needs glasses.
Miss Mulberry sighs. “Grace—”
“That’s a plus sign, dweeb,” Crop Top says. Grace glares. Richie gets the feeling this is an everyday exchange.
“Stephanie,” Miss Mulberry says.
Bowtie snorts.
“Shut up, Pete,” Stephanie says. “No kisses for a week.”
Pete’s eyes widen.
“It’s fifty-seven squared,” Cardigan says to her lap.
“Very good, Alice!” Miss Mulberry turns to the board and scribbles down Alice’s answer. Headgear pouts. “Next time, Ruth.”
Richie dares a glance at Vandal. Vandal looks up at him and smiles the kind of smile people start wars over.
Richie feels his cheeks burst into strawberries and looks away.
“Who’s the new kid?” Vandal asks.
Miss Mulberry glances at her chart. “Richard.”
“Richie,” Richie says, then immediately wants to shrivel up and die. “I mean—It’s Richie, please.”
“Welcome, Richie.”
“Yeah,” says Vandal. Richie thinks he’s been dreaming of this kid for a very long time. “Welcome to Hatchetfield Hell, Richie.”
After the final bell, Richie finds himself sitting on the front steps of the school, watching the buses leave one by one. It’s nearly three and Emma is still nowhere to be seen.
Just as it rolls over past the hour mark, there’s a tap on his shoulder. “Hey,” Ruth says, sitting down beside him. “You’re Emma’s brother, right?”
Emma’s brother. Feels wrong. “Yeah.”
“Cool. I’m Paul’s sister.” Ruth smiles when Richie’s eyebrows spike up. “Yeah. Surprised we haven’t met before, honestly. Nice to meet you.”
She offers a sweaty hand. Richie pats it. Ruth beams, like this is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for her. Richie gets it.
“Who’s Jerry?” Richie asks. It’s been bugging him all day. There are no missing posters.
Ruth shrugs. “You know how our siblings come from a dead Hatchetfield?” she asks. “Well, ours is dying too. All the Hatchetfields are dying.”
“How do you know that?”
Ruth shrugs. “I was born here,” she says. “Anyone born here knows, because we’re part of Hatchetfield, so when it dies, we die with it.” She looks up at him and smiles. “I’m gonna be dead soon. You too, I think.”
Richie nods. “Me, too.”
A car pulls up to the curb. Paul’s car. Richie recognizes it from date night. “Hey,” Paul says, waving from the driver’s seat. “Ruthie, come on. Hey, Richie. Emma not here yet?”
Richie shrugs. “New job.” Emma isn’t built for baristaing in any universe. “I’m fine.”
“No, get in.”
“I’m fine.”
“Get the fuck in, Richie,” Ruth says from the passenger seat. Richie gets the fuck in.
Paul drops him off at Beanie’s. He insists on walking Richie in, and Emma beams at the sight of him, swaying forward over the counter so Paul can kiss her head. Richie looks away and wonders if Ruth is too hot in the car.
Emma watches Paul leave—more accurately, she watches Paul’s ass. Richie sits criss-cross on the floor behind the counter and spins the fidget ring Emma stole for him from the mall where they had their first dinner out after Richie moved in. “So,” Emma says. “How was school?”
Richie shrugs. Emma doesn’t sigh, or smile, or ruffle his hair or poke his knee or ask again. She just makes him a hot cocoa with extra whipped cream and leaves him alone until the end of her shift.
Richie’s first week of school is relatively uneventful, until the jock—Jägerman, apparently, if Ruth is to be believed, which she usually is—corners Richie by the vending machine where he eats lunch. “Hey, bitch,” Jägerman spits. Richie has an internal freak-out about someone else’s saliva touching his mouth. “Hey. Hey, get out of there.”
Richie crosses his eyes to try to see where the saliva is so he can get rid of it immediately. He’s rewarded for this with more spit, specifically a faceful of it, as Jägerman yanks him forward and shouts—something, Richie’s starting to have a shutdown—in his face.
“Hey! Listen when I’m fucking talking to you, dickwad—”
“Jägerman.” This voice is gentle. Irritated. Getting closer. “Jägerman, dude, you’re gonna be late for football practice.”
Jägerman glares over his shoulder. Vandal stares back, unfazed.
“Football practice starts when I show up,” Jägerman growls. “Whenever that is.”
Vandal shrugs. “Sure, man,” he says. “But do you really think this dweeb is worth your time?”
Jägerman turns to Richie. “Are you?”
Richie, currently incapable of speaking, shakes his head.
Jägerman grins. “‘Til tomorrow, loser.”
Richie squishes himself back between the wall and the vending machine. Vandal stays where he is as Jägerman shoves past him towards the gym. Richie tries to slow his breathing, pressing his nails into his palms and then stretching his fingers out again. He counts the seconds in his head, but even after a hundred and thirty-eight of those have passed, Vandal is still there, watching him.
“You’re not a dweeb,” Vandal finally says. “Sorry.”
Richie doesn’t look at him. Words feel wrong in his throat.
“You’re Richie, right?”
Richie manages a nod.
“Cool. I’m Ethan.”
Richie gulps down as much air as he can muster, then hacks it all back up in a cough that makes him wonder if he’s dying. Ethan blinks at him.
“Jägerman’s a dick,” he says, much softer than before. “And I’m not always gonna be here, so. I’m sorry for the shit he’ll put you through.”
Richie tries not to whine.
Ethan takes the smallest step closer. “Hey. You’re autistic, right? You act like my ex’s kid sister.”
Richie nods too fast, then squeezes his eyes shut. He opens his mouth and something almost comes out.
“Okay, that’s okay. I’ll wait here ‘til you can talk again. I was gonna cut class anyway.”
“I—figured,” Richie chokes out, then smiles shakily. Ethan grins back.
Richie may be just a tiny bit fucked.
The night Emma broke into this version of Hatchetfield, Richie had woken in a blind terror, his dreams drowning in blue shit. The night Richie first met his brother-in-law Tim, he’d stayed up half the night through murky visions of green and the echoing of horrid laughter. Tonight, Richie dreams of a world swathed in yellow, and a great big orange eye beside a pink grin.
He wakes paralyzed, in a pool of what he hopes is sweat but could be blood.
“Help me,” somebody whispers, soft, desperate, terrified. British. “Help me, please.”
Richie finds a loose back door at school and sneaks in and out through it every morning and afternoon to avoid running into Jägerman. It helps that the back door is Ethan’s favorite place to “smoke”, not that he ever lights a cigarette in Richie’s presence. Ruth takes to coming in with him, and with her comes Pete, who brings Steph, and before Richie knows it he has friends. Dumb, annoying, embarrassing friends, but friends nonetheless.
“I have these dreams sometimes,” Richie says one night when they’re all sprawled out on the floor of his living room. “Where these creepy stuffed animals take over my mind and murder me from the inside.”
Pete shoots up. Steph, who had been curled into his side, lets out a string of words Richie wouldn’t even say if he were the last human on earth and punches Pete in the stomach, forcing him back down again.
“We’ve all had those dreams,” Ruth says sleepily, her face half-mushed into a pillow. “Mine are mostly of the blue guy. Pete’s are all in pink.”
“Mine are green,” Steph mumbles.
“Purple,” Ethan pipes up from the couch. “You’re probably yellow, then.”
Richie feels a chill lodge itself in his spine. “How do you know that?”
Ruth pokes his cheek. “I told you, numbnuts. Hatchetfield is dying. What do you think’s killing it?”
“I thought you were joking,” Richie says.
Ruth blinks at him like he’s stupid. Richie kind of feels like he is. “Our siblings came here from another dimension,” Ruth says, “and you thought I was joking when I said this whole place is dying?”
“We’ve already established that Richie’s an idiot,” Steph deadpans. “More importantly—”
“We came here to study and we haven’t even started Miss Mulberry’s homework,” Pete says. Steph shuts him up with a kiss. There’s enough tongue that Ruth starts shouting.
Ethan keeps watching Richie.
“Last night was different,” Richie says. “Last night somebody spoke to me.”
Pete scrambles away from Steph, climbing over her for Richie. “Spoke to you?” He grasps Richie’s wrists. “Who was it? What did they say?”
Richie shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “They said—He said Help me.”
“He?” Pete’s grip is starting to bruise. Ethan leans forward on the couch, reaching for Pete’s shoulder. “He? Oh my god, did you say he?”
“I’m so confused,” Ruth mumbles.
Pete drags Richie up from the floor. “Did he say anything else?”
“No,” Richie sputters. “He was—He was British?”
Pete staggers back, letting go of Richie’s wrists. Steph pushes up to her feet just in time to catch him. “Petey,” she says. “It’s okay,” and Pete bursts into tears.
Richie looks at Ethan, whose mouth twitches up at one corner. “People go missing every day,” Ethan says. “As far back as we can remember. This is the aftermath.”
Ruth touches Richie’s arm. “This is what happens,” she says, staring at Pete’s trembling hands, “if we ever get anything close to an answer.”
Richie glances up at the clock. Emma won’t be home for another hour. “I’ll tell you if I dream anymore,” he says. “What’s his name? Who have you lost?”
“Owen,” Pete gasps, voice wet and cracked through with grief. “My grandfather.”
Ethan stays the night after Steph takes Pete home and Emma drives Ruth back to Paul’s. Richie takes him out on the fire escape and hands him a Rubik’s cube.
“Everyone born in Hatchetfield is born wrong,” Ethan says. “I’m sure you know this. But before this was Hatchetfield, it was just a lonely old woods full of lonely old people, and then the Russians came and built a base here, and that’s when the world ended. The first time, anyway.”
Richie looks out over the town and imagines it gone, replaced by trees and mountains and little huts full of crazy people who burn odd women. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re not supposed to. None of us are, really.” Ethan twists the Rubik’s cube with a violent crack. “But back in the sixties, a man was killed here, and somehow that brought the evilest of evils here.”
Richie tugs one of his legs up to his chest, letting the other hang over the edge between the rails. “People are killed everywhere. What was so special about this guy?”
“Nothing, really,” Ethan says. “Except somebody loved him.”
Richie looks at him. Bathed in starlight, Ethan is the shadow of a dream, something Richie could swear he remembers but loses when he grasps for more. “How do you know all this?”
Ethan nods over the city, out towards the hills. “Old Man Mega,” he says. “He lives just out there, where they hung the Lady Ashmore five hundred years ago, back before Hatchetfield was Hatchetfield.”
Richie almost laughs. “What, is he mean?”
“No,” Ethan says, like it isn’t funny at all. “No, he’s sad. So sad that everyone in this town is born sad with him.”
“I think I’m missing a lot of pieces here,” Richie mumbles. His shoe falls off and lands with a very loud clang on the trashcan three stories down, sending a few cats yowling off into the night.
Ethan’s arm creeps around his shoulders. “Ask Pete sometime. He knows the most of it.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” When Richie looks at Ethan this time, he’s close enough to see the shine of black in his eyes.
“Because,” Ethan says. “I want you to be one of the ones who lives.”
Emma gets home just after Ethan leaves. She spots Richie on the couch and makes a beeline for him, wrapping him up in her arms.
“What’s this for?” Richie asks, frowning into her shoulder.
“I just miss you,” Emma says into his hair. “You’re my baby brother and I miss you all the time.”
“That’s kind of just what growing up is,” Richie says. “Missing people you used to know would stay forever.”
Emma kisses his head and pulls away. “I’m sorry you have to know me like this.”
“I’m sorry you have to know me.”
“I love you,” Emma says. Richie looks away. “No, really, Richie, I do.”
Richie’s eyes flick towards the empty fire escape. “If Paul hadn’t survived, what would you have done?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Emma says. “They would’ve killed me no matter what.”
“But would you have let him?”
Emma stares at him. Searches his face. Seems like she’s trying to memorize the lines of his smile, the spark of his eyes, before they go flat and dead. Before love kills him too.
“Yes,” she says, finally. “Yes, if Paul had died, I would have let him kill me.”
Richie nods. He hears her, but he also almost doesn’t. Emma curls her hand around his shoulder. “Baby,” she says. “No matter what, I will always fight my way back to you. Even if Paul starts singing and tries to rip me apart with his perfect hands.”
Richie stands. “I’m going to bed.”
“Okay,” Emma says. “Sweet dreams.”
“I’m here,” Richie says, spinning around in a yellow void of nothingness. “I’m here, I came to help you. Are you Owen?”
Somebody cries out. Richie reaches towards the noise, but finds only pink cotton candy dotted with orange eyes.
“Owen,” Richie says, desperate. “Owen, I came to get you out. I came to bring you home.”
“There is no home anymore, once you’ve been here.” There’s a giggle, and the whole place flashes green. “There’s nothing at all of you, once you’ve been here.”
Richie feels something drop onto his head. It drips down, down, down, until he sees blue dangling in front of his eyes. “Where’s here?”
“The End,” says the nothingness. “1961.”
When Richie walks into class the next morning, another desk is empty. “Girl Jerry,” Ruth whispers to him when she catches him looking. “Went missing last night.”
“Did they find Boy Jerry?”
“We never find anybody,” Alice says. “My ex Deb went missing last year. I still don’t know where she went.”
“The sky eats people,” Pete says, as if this is a perfectly normal thing to say. “Don’t go outside when it rains.”
Richie thinks he’s kidding, but the next time it rains, school is cancelled and the windows fog up with blue. When they clear, there’s a melted body in the street. The memorial for Miss Mulberry is small.
Friday nights are now family dinner nights. Emma drives Richie over to Paul’s, where they settle around the table with him and Ruth and Alice and Bill and Pete and Ted. There’s always an extra empty chair, but tonight, Steph sits there, right next to Pete, her hand in his on top of the table.
“So,” Bill says from between Paul, his life partner, and Ted, his soft sleazeball of a boyfriend. “What’re you kids up to in school?”
Alice slams her glass down on the table. “It’s Hatchetfield, Dad, we’re just trying not to die.”
Bill wilts. Paul clasps his hand over the table and Ted touches his shoulder.
“We’re making rainbows in chemistry class,” Pete offers. “Mixing different chemicals and stuff—”
“Pete, sweetheart, no one cares,” Steph says.
Ruth frowns. “I care. We never do anything fun in biology.”
“It’s school,” Richie says. “We never do anything fun ever.”
Bill picks at his broccoli. “Well, forget I asked, then.”
If Ethan were here, he’d probably say something about the missing Jerrys, but Ethan isn’t here, because he’s not Richie’s boyfriend. Richie looks at his mostly full plate and thinks of yellow and pink and orange and blue and green. He makes up his mind and takes another bite.
“Have they heard anything new about Deb?” Ruth asks.
Alice shakes her head.
Richie leans into Emma. “If I ever go missing, promise you’ll care,” he whispers. “Promise you’ll notice and put up missing posters.”
“I’d break the earth open for you,” Emma says. “Now eat your peas.”
Old Man Mega’s house isn’t the monstrous, hulking mansion Richie expected. Instead, it’s a tiny cottage with painted shutters and a well-tended garden. Richie walks up to the door and knocks.
A tired old man with a beard opens up. Richie blinks at the gun against his nose.
“You selling cookies?” Mega asks.
“No.”
“Selling Jesus?”
“No.”
“Selling Republicanism?”
Richie wrinkles his nose. “No.”
The gun lowers. “Alrighty then, come in.”
Richie closes the door behind him. The inside is even more confusing—it’s bare like a safehouse, except for the kitchen counter, which is covered in cooking supplies. “Do you cook?” he asks.
“No,” Mega says, limping for the hallway. “But my partner did, and I never quite kicked the habit of buying him shit.”
“What happened to your partner?”
“Dead.”
“How?”
“Shot.”
“Who shot him?”
“Me.” Mega collapses into a chair in the living room, picking up the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the chairside table and taking a good long swig. “Let me guess. You’ve been having dreams.”
Richie nods. “There’s somebody in them,” he says. “And he always asks me for help.”
Mega sighs. “You think it’s Owen,” he says. “Everybody always thinks it’s Owen. But Owen’s dead, kid. I should know. I carried his body home and I buried it right out there in the yard.”
Richie very carefully does not think about the singular patch of daffodils at the head of the six-foot-squared empty patch on the lawn. “The voice in my dreams is British.”
Mega downs the last of the whiskey. “So’s Wiggly.” He throws Richie a pitying smile. “It’s all right. I always think it’s Owen too.”
Richie tugs at a loose strap of wood on his wicker chair. “How’d all this come from one death?” he asks. “It’s not like you’re the first person to kill the love of your life.”
Mega huffs out a laugh. “I made a deal,” he says, tipping the bottle towards his mouth and frowning when nothing comes out. “My soul for his.”
“You’re still here.”
“Yeah,” Mega says. “But my soul’s down in hell with him.”
Richie looks around the living room—funny name, for a widower’s dwelling. The curtains are all drawn, and the only lamp on is dim. There’s no television, no phone, no computer… The house is stuck in time, like its prisoner. Richie forces his eyes back to Mega and says, “My name is Richie, and I love a boy named Ethan, and I don’t want him to go missing before I get to tell him.”
Mega’s brittle smile falls and dies like Owen. “Trust me,” he says. “Telling him won’t save him.”
“I know,” Richie says. “So tell me what will.”
Mega shakes his head, closing his eyes. “Nothing,” he says. “He was born here. He’ll die here. You can love him, but this town is a trap for lost souls, and none of us are going anywhere.”
Richie stares at the silver wedding band on Mega’s finger. “Why haven’t you killed yourself?”
Mega curls away from him. “What do you think I’m doing here?”
When Richie gets home, Ethan is on his couch. “Your sister’s at her boyfriend’s house,” he says. “And I got worried.”
Richie sits down beside him. “Did your ex-girlfriend go missing?”
Ethan nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Just after her kid sister died.”
“What killed her?”
Ethan kisses him. “Dreams.”
School is cancelled half the days of every week. Enough of the teachers are gone that they can’t keep up with classes, so the nerds take to home school and everyone else celebrates with underage drinking. Not Richie, though. He can’t look at a beer the same after meeting Mega.
“So,” Ethan says, the two of them lounging by Steph’s pool, “you met Old Man Mega.”
Richie shrugs. Ethan kissed him three days ago and they still haven’t talked about it. Ethan hasn’t let go of his hand since.
In the pool, Steph is treading water beside Pete’s inflatable donut, craning her neck for kiss attacks whenever Pete stops his sciencey monologues long enough to take a breath. Ruth sits on the pool steps with Alice, who’s halfway done threading Ruth’s unruly hair into a thousand tiny braids.
“He’s nice,” Richie says. “He says it’s not Owen. But the dreams are getting worse, and I think maybe I’m losing my mind.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“No, I mean my mind is going away and I can’t find parts of it anymore.”
Ethan lets go of his hand. Richie ignores the desperate terror all over his face and walks into the pool, swimming for the farthest corner from Ethan’s chair. Ruth smiles at him. “Hey, almost-brother.”
Emma bought a ring for Paul yesterday. Richie’s hiding it in his sock drawer. Ruth is figuring out the safest, least blue spot in town for Emma to get down on one knee.
“Hey, almost-sister,” Richie says. “Does Old Man Mega have a name?”
“Curt,” Ruth says. “I found it in a letter in his house, the one time I went.”
“You’ve been to his house?”
“We all have,” Alice says. “When somebody’s grief curses an entire town, you’ve gotta ask them how to love like that.”
Richie doesn’t want to love like that. Richie wants the kind of love that survives, not the kind that perseveres.
Pete drops out of his donut and paddles across the pool towards them, Steph following just behind. Ethan, seeing the slow edge of gathering, jumps into the deep end and swims over, wiping chlorine out of his eyes.
“What happened?” Pete asks.
“He went to see Old Man Mega and he says it isn’t Owen,” Ruth says helpfully.
“Richie’s losing his mind,” Ethan says, even more helpfully.
Steph looks at Richie. “Do you think it’s Owen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” Alice says, “maybe you should ask.”
“Owen,” Richie calls into the yellow void. “Owen, I’m here. I’m here to bring you home to Curt.”
The yellow flashes pink.
“Owen isn’t here,” somebody giggles. “Owensy Woensey isn’t anywhere anymore.”
“Fine then,” Richie says. “I want Curt Mega’s soul back.”
The pink hisses into purple. “That’s ours,” someone else says. “That’s ours, we already ate it all up and you can’t have it.”
“When?” Richie asks. His legs tingle and he looks down to see them turning green. “When, tell me when.”
Blue drips from his mouth. “We already told you,” it says. “The end of the world.”
Math class has a sub now. He doesn’t teach them anything, just puts on a movie and lets them rot for an hour. Richie sits beside Ethan and notes Grace Chastity’s empty seat.
Ethan notes him noting it and takes his hand. “She’s fine,” he says. “Lost her V-card to Max Jägerman last week and now they won’t stop fucking wherever they can manage it.”
Richie wrinkles his nose. “Gross.”
“Yeah.” Ethan kisses his hand. “Hey. I—”
“I know.” Richie lets go.
Ruth glances at them over her shoulder and doesn’t say a word.
After class, she corners him at his locker. “You look different,” she says. “You look different and I don’t like it. What’s wrong with you? What happened?”
Richie touches her frizzy little head. “Will you go to the end of the world with me?”
“Where’s that?”
“1961.”
Ruth looks at him for a long time. “I’m bringing Pete and Steph,” she says finally. “And you’ve gotta bring Ethan.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“For the same reason you won’t bring Alice,” Richie says. His chest tightens as Ruth’s face falls. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Ruth’s feelings for Alice are the worst-kept secret in Hatchetfield. Even Alice knows about them, though she’s never said a word about it, because she’s at least kind enough for that.
“It’s okay,” Ruth says. “Fine. But we’re telling them where we’re going. And Paul, and Emma. I’m not letting us become just another dot on the graph of Hatchetfield’s tragedies.”
Richie thinks of telling Emma and something comes alive in his stomach and starts gnawing at the pink skin of his intestines. “Okay. I’ll tell her.”
“Good.” Ruth looks over her shoulder. “When do we leave?”
“No more questions?”
Ruth blinks at him. “Since when do we have answers?”
Ethan sneaks into Richie’s room that night through the window. Richie sits up in bed and opens his arms, and Ethan sinks into him like he’s coming home from war. “I hear you’re about to do something stupid,” Ethan says. “Take me with you.”
Richie shakes his head. “No,” he says into Ethan’s curls. “I know I only met you a month ago but you’re one of the most important people in my life and if you die I’ll kill myself, so no.”
Ethan pulls away just enough to look at him. “You’re gonna live,” he says. “You’re gonna live, because I’m gonna live, and I’m gonna love you until there’s nothing left of me.”
“What if there’s nothing left of me?”
“As long as I’m here, there’s something left of you.” Ethan puts his hand over Richie’s heart. “When I lost Lex, I thought that was it. I thought I was never gonna make it on my own, without her. But then I came to math class for the first time in six months, and there you were.”
Richie kisses his head. “I’m not going anywhere.” His heart pounds with the lie, and he knows Ethan feels it, because he frowns. “Ethan. I think I’ve been looking my whole life for you.”
“And if I go missing?” Ethan’s terrified smile is only a few inches away now. “Richie? Will you look for me then?”
Richie cups his face. “My whole life,” he says. “It’s yours. Here or not.”
Ethan cranes his neck. Richie meets him halfway. Worlds are born and worlds die. Richie tastes ash in his mouth and pulls away.
“You can’t smoke anymore,” he says. “You can’t die on me.”
Ethan pulls him closer. “I love you,” he says. “I love you.” He kisses Richie’s cheek. “I love you.” His jaw. “I love you.” His nose. “I love you.” His mouth. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Richie closes his eyes, and Ethan kisses those too, blessing them dark and quiet. Richie says, “You make me wanna exist.”
Ethan settles his head over Richie’s heart. Richie falls asleep holding him. In the morning, his bed is empty. The sheets are still warm.
The walk to Old Man Mega’s is longer this time. Richie brings flowers from Emma’s garden and doesn’t knock. There are three newspapers on the doorstep. Richie picks them up and brings them inside with him.
The table holds a very cold, very sludgy cup of tea. The liquor shelf is empty, all the bottles in the trash and the alcohol poured down the drain. Richie sets the flowers down beside the cup of tea and ducks into the living room, finding it barren.
“Mr. Mega?” he calls. “Curt?”
He searches the whole downstairs, but finds nothing. When he climbs the stairs, it’s into darkness. He thinks of Old Man Mega taking this walk every day on arthritic knees to a bed that’s too big for just him and his heart aches.
The bedroom door is closed. There’s an envelope taped to it, and a note. Owen My Love, the envelope says, in the event of my death. The paper is old. Very old. Old enough that Richie thinks Owen was probably still alive when it was written.
The note, on the other hand, is new. Not even dusty. To whoever finds this, it says, don’t open the door. I’m behind it but I’m not me. I went away. I finally found Owen again.
Richie touches the door. He presses his whole palm against it. He spreads out his fingers and he tries to reach across time. “Curt?” His voice breaks on the unfamiliar, far too forgotten name.
His other hand creeps towards the door knob. Something jingles. Richie looks down to find a chain wrapping around the knob. Hanging from it are two rings.
Richie steps back. He clutches the envelope to his chest and lets the note flutter to the floor. He pulls out his phone and dials Emma’s number.
“Emma? I think—”
“Oh thank god,” his sister breathes. “Come home. Come home right now.”
Richie scrambles down the stairs, careful not to crumple the envelope. “What’s happening? I just found Old Man Mega—”
“What? What do you mean?”
Richie throws open the door, sprinting down the path. “He’s dead, Emma. I think he killed himself.”
Emma sucks in a breath. “Oh, Richie…”
Richie keeps running, but nothing in town seems out of place. Nobody’s singing. Nobody’s killing each other. Everyone is just going about their day as if nothing extraordinary has happened.
“What happened?” Richie asks, slowing to a walk. “You’re scaring me.”
Emma chokes on something like a sob. “Richie,” she says. “Richie, baby, Ethan’s missing.”
The sky is grey. Ruth comes over and burrows herself beside Richie in his bed. Paul stays out in the living room, trying to hug Emma out of her panic.
“Pete and Steph are out looking for him,” Ruth says, petting Richie’s hair. “I think Bill, Ted, and Alice are searching too. We’ll find him, Richie. Don’t worry.”
Richie knows better. Nobody who goes missing here ever comes back.
“I’m so happy it’s not Alice that went missing and I know that makes me a terrible person,” Ruth confesses to his shoulder. “And I’m even happier that it’s not you, because you’re my best friend, you know, and if you died I’d be devastated.”
Richie traces nonexistent patterns on his ceiling with his eyes. He wonders if there are ceilings where Ethan is.
“I wonder what made Old Man Mega kill himself,” Ruth says, and Richie wonders if she meant to utter that out loud. “I’d think if you were ninety-something, you’d be close enough to let it happen on its own. I mean, if he wanted to die so badly, you’d think he’d have done it ages ago.”
Richie shrugs. “I think he wanted to die so badly he felt like he had to live,” he says. “I think maybe he thought that staying alive was the punishment he deserved for what he did.”
Ruth nuzzles closer. “What did he do?”
“He killed Owen,” Richie says. “Shot him in the head. I think something went really, really wrong back then. I think maybe the world ended and everything fell apart and Curt’s been holding the whole universe together for years and a few days ago when I came to tell him Owen was trapped he just sort of lost the last hope he had left.”
Outside Richie’s door, there’s a horrible wail. Ruth jumps, but Richie doesn’t even blink. He lives with Emma and he loves her. He knows her cries like the cut lifelines on his palms.
“You want to save them, don’t you?” Ruth whispers. “You want to fix it.”
Richie thinks of the ring in his sock drawer, the one made for the man out there holding his sister. “I just think,” he says, “that if it were Emma, and she’d lost Paul in that other world she came from, she’d be just like Curt. And she wouldn’t have anybody to help her.” He rolls over and curls around Ruth. “I want to help him.”
“Hm.” Ruth kisses his shoulder. “You’re a better person than me, then.”
“No, not really,” Richie says. “Just sadder.”
There’s a knock at the door and Paul pokes his head in. “Hey,” he says, soft as cookie dough in the microwave. “Everyone’s called it a night, but Ruth and I are gonna stay over just in case… Well. Just in case.”
He leaves, closing the door behind him. Richie pushes away from Ruth and off the bed, walking to the dresser and pulling out the ring box. He walks out into the living room and presses it into Emma’s hand.
“Ask him,” he says. Paul blinks between them, frowning. “He’s it, Emma. There’s no moving on from him. He’s your Owen.”
Emma closes her fingers around the box. She looks up at Paul, who looks back. She reaches out her hand, and he takes it.
Then she sinks to one knee.
Richie thought with Ruth beside him, the dreams would be quieter at least, but instead, they roar, wrapping him up in pink and purple and yellow.
“You told him,” somebody hisses. “You told him and he sucked himself dry and now he’s out of our reach. You ruined our fun.”
Richie doesn’t say anything. Green flashes through the sky and, reminded of Emma’s apron, Richie leaps for it, crashing into nothing.
“Stupid,” the mist shrieks. “Stupid, stupid, stupid! You took from us. Now we take from you. We take and we take and we take. Stupid little Ethan is never going to see the light of day again, never going to hold you, never going to put his pretty little mouth on yours—”
“I’ve come for Owen Carvour,” Richie shouts into the storm.
It drops him into the void. Even falling, Richie knows he isn’t dying just yet.
“I’ve come for Owen Carvour,” he says, steadier this time. “You took him, forever ago. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but I know he’s here, and I want him back. I’m taking him back.”
The quiet stretches out, colors stripping down to black; endless, awful black. The kind of black that swallows up every last light inside you.
Then, “Do you want to make a deal?”
I would have let him kill me. “Yes.”
Suddenly there’s a face. A beautiful, sunken, grief-stricken face.
Owen Carvour raises a gun at nothing. “That secret died the night you left me for dead.”
“No it didn’t,” Richie says. Owen looks at him, a spark catching fire. “Nothing in Hatchetfield ever really dies.”
A rainbow cascades through his blood. “Midnight,” it says. “The gym. You have one day.”
“Who are you?” Owen asks. “I don’t know you. You’re not one of them.”
“I’m Richie Perkins,” Richie says. “And I’m here to fix your story.”
Emma has a backpack she keeps in the hall closet from her destroyed dimension. It has her old IDs, pictures of her old family, and a black book. Richie pulls it from the bag and sets it on the table. He makes pancakes and tops them with berries and butter. He brews coffee and pours it into her WORLD’S BEST SISTER mug. Then he sits down at the table and he waits.
When she emerges from her bedroom, it’s without Paul. She stops in the doorway at the sight of the black book, and her whole body shudders as she presses herself back against the wall.
“Why,” she says, in the voice of dead men walking, “is that there?”
Richie has read it four times in the past four hours. He knows all their names now, the Lords in Black, and he knows they aren’t kind and they don’t give anything for free.
“I made a deal,” he says, “with a Lord in Black.”
Emma collapses down against the wall. “You did what?”
Richie forces himself not to wince. “I made a deal with a Lord in Black.”
“Which one?” Emma pushes to her feet on shaky legs and sinks down into the chair next to him, gathering up his hands and squeezing hard enough to hurt. “For fuck’s sake, Richie, which one? Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Richie says, because he doesn’t. “I need to get Owen back.”
“Owen?”
“Owen Carvour,” Richie says. “Curt Mega’s husband. He’s trapped in the nothing, and nobody deserves that. Nobody, not even the most terrible people.”
Emma lifts her hands to his face. “Richie, baby,” she says. “Owen Carvour’s been dead a long, long time.”
“No,” Richie says. “He’s been alive a long, long time, and that’s so much worse.”
Emma pulls back, standing up and heading for her purse. “Well, I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
Emma stops. “Richie.”
“Emma,” Richie says. “Emma, I love you. You’re my big sister and my favorite person and I need you to be okay—”
“And how do you think I feel about you?” Emma bursts, throwing her arms out. “God, Richie, I—” She laughs, running a hand through her hair. “I buried our parents. I buried Jane. I won’t bury you, okay? I won’t bury you.”
If I go through with this, there won’t be a me left to bury. “You won’t have to.”
Emma rushes back to him, wrapping him up in her arms. “What was the price?” she rasps. “What did you promise them? Tell me it wasn’t yourself. Tell me it wasn’t your soul.”
Richie clutches her back. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know, they just sort of—agreed.”
Emma laughs. “Oh, god.” She holds him tighter. “Oh, god, you stupid, stupid boy. I love you. I love you so much. Please don’t go away from me.”
“I won’t,” Richie says into her shoulder. “I promise.”
He leaves her a note and his favorite manga. Inside the cover he writes, Thank you for being my sister.
Then he locks the door behind him, and he heads for Old Man Mega’s.
“I don’t get it,” Pete says. “What are we doing here?”
Richie slips the letter into Old Man Mega’s mail slot. “We’re trying to save his husband. I don’t want him to drink himself to death and bring Owen home to nothing.” The lie comes off his tongue like chocolate and tastes like dirt.
Steph shifts a little closer to Pete. “If we don’t manage this, Mega’s gonna kill himself anyway.”
Too late.
“Then we’d better succeed,” Ruth says. “Come on. There’s only twenty minutes to midnight.”
They make it to the high school with five minutes to spare, slipping into the gym just as the clock strikes twelve. There waits a man in yellow, a man who looks enough like a twisted version of Old Man Mega that Richie worries Owen may break down at the sight of his real husband. Tinky smiles through teeth as sharp as talons. “So,” he says, “you’re the boy who promised to fix my pet’s story.”
Richie steps just in front of Ruth, but Steph places herself in front of even him, keeping Pete behind her too. “I’m the boy who will,” Richie says, and Pete adds, somewhat uselessly, “We’ve come for my grandfather.”
Tinky laughs. “Oh, I know what you’ve come for,” he says. “But stories can’t be fixed, foolish one. Especially not ones that have already ended.” He leans forward and Richie feels the world spin. “Games won can’t be unplayed.”
“What do you want?” Steph asks. “You said you’ll give Richie a day to fix the end of the world. What’s your price?”
Tinky grins. “All of you, of course,” he says. “Sixty years is a long time. If you save Owen Carvour, he’ll leave with Curt Mega, and none of you will ever be born.” He giggles. “I’ll let one soul go in exchange for ten thousand.”
“My soul,” hisses nobody, and then Blinky is there too. “Don’t forget I won it.”
Nibbly pops into existence beside her. “You won it? I was the one who crawled into that silly boy’s bones and slurped his soul right up from his veins.”
“I created Chimera and got that blasted spy to join it—” says Pokey—
“And I’m smarter than all of you, so it’s mine by default,” says Wiggly in a bored, half-gone voice. He grins at Richie and Richie feels his skin crawl, because he knows that face.
“Hello, Richie boy,” says Wiggly. “Like my new look?”
Richie stares into his own eyes. “Why do you care about me so much?”
Blinky smiles Ruth’s smile. “We get bored,” she says. “You’re a good story.”
Pete leans into Steph. “Wouldn’t it be a better story with a happy ending?”
“Depends how you define happy,” says Wiggly. “We measure it in blood.”
Tinky giggles. “Can I give him what he wants now?”
Blinky sneers. “Sure, Tinky. Start the story.”
Tinky preens. “Once upon a time,” he says, “there were two spies in love—”
“And then it all went to shit,” Wiggly says. He bares his teeth and snaps his fingers. “Good luck, children. Nighty night.”
“No—” Richie lunges forward—
And falls, and falls, and falls.
It smells like bananas.
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
— Toni Morrison
“Richie. Richie. Richie, for fuck’s sake, wake up.”
Richie follows Ruth’s voice towards the light. When he comes to, she’s grasping his arms, dressed in a hideous red blazer and pencil skirt. Her headgear is gone and her teeth are crooked and Richie loves her so much he’s bursting with it.
“Hey,” Pete says from a few feet behind her, wearing a full brown suit, complete with bowtie. He’s clutching Steph, who’s dressed in jeans and a red blouse. “Hey, Richie? You need to get up.”
A woman says something in Russian. A man answers in broken Russian, and Richie hears the click of a gun’s safety going off. He wants Ethan.
“Who are you?” the man says. “Start talking.”
“What he said,” says another man.
Richie scrambles up and leans into Ruth, who holds him back so tightly he can feel his bones bruising in her grip. “I’m here for Owen Carvour.”
The second man drops his arm. The first man’s face crumples and he turns away.
The woman’s gun is still raised. “Owen Carvour is dead.”
“He will be by tomorrow,” Richie says, “if you don’t let me help you.”
The first man looks up again. “Who are you?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Richie says. “It can’t matter. But you’re Curt Mega, and you’re about to kill the love of your life, for real this time, and I need you to not do that because if you do then you’re going to kill yourself and the Lords in Black are going to take my boyfriend away forever.”
The second man holsters his gun and darts forward. “Help me tie them up,” he says, throwing Curt a rope. Richie doesn’t fight the hands around his wrists. Curt stares. “Come on,” the second man snaps. “We can’t talk to them here.”
Curt doesn’t move. The woman puts a hand on his shoulder, her gun still trained on the second man.
The second man looks up. “Curt,” he says. “Love.”
Curt snaps awake. “Give me some rope.”
Richie’s head flashes purple. Angry. He shakes his head, reaching up for it, but his bound hands can’t cover both his ears. Ruth pushes away from Owen and grasps Richie’s head, pressing hard. “It’s okay,” she says. “Everybody shut up! It’s okay.”
“You don’t get to ruin our story,” the purple hisses. “We pushed them so carefully. We cut the strings and retied them. You don’t get to come back here and fuck it up.”
Richie squeezes his eyes shut. He thinks he hears Pete’s voice in his ear, thinks he hears Steph shouting, but only one person can pull him from his head, and his sister isn’t here.
Then the small hands are pushed from his ears and big hands take ahold of his head. “Whatever the voices are saying,” Owen says, “they’re lying.”
Richie tries to focus on his voice rather than the purple shrieking. He’s being watched; he knows he’s being watched. He wants Ethan. He wants Emma. Emma, Emma, Emma. His anchor, Emma. His favorite person, Emma. Emma.
“Kid,” Owen says, hands steady over Richie’s ears. “You’re safe. Nothing can touch you.”
Richie opens his mouth. Emma’s name catches in his throat and stays there.
“New plan,” Owen says. “Curt, you still got our safehouse?”
Keys jangle.
“Good.” Owen slowly pulls his hands from Richie’s ears. “Remember, kid—nothing’s hiding under the bed.”
It takes Richie an hour to come back into himself. He passes out sometime on the ride out and wakes up in a strange bed in a strange room. Ruth is in a chair by the window. Pete and Steph are whispering in the corner, so tangled up in each other Richie isn’t sure whose legs are whose.
“Where are we?” Richie rasps. “Is it still 1961?”
Ruth rushes for him. “Yes.” She crawls onto the bed beside him and collapses on top of him like a puppy with no concept of personal space, which is all puppies. “The other man is Owen. He took off his skin mask and Curt cried for an hour.”
Richie buries his face in her hair. “If we do this there’s no Hatchetfield,” he says. “If we do this there’s no us.”
Ruth shrugs. “I don’t think that’s really a bad thing.”
“Don’t say that.” Pete looks up from Steph’s face. “Don’t say that, Ruth, god, don’t ever say that.”
Ruth shrugs again. “We’re not that important.”
“They aren’t either, not really.” Steph touches Pete’s face and he looks at her again. “We just decided they were.”
“Well, they did create a whole town out of grief—” Pete turns his head at the knock. “Hello?”
Curt opens the door. He doesn’t look any of them in the eye. “Owen says he’ll talk to the nerdy one.”
Pete, Ruth, and Richie all look at each other. Steph starts inspecting her nails.
Curt sighs. “The one who hears the voices.”
Richie sits up on the bed, Ruth sliding off him. Curt holds out his arm and Richie ducks under it, letting himself be led out and down into a familiar living room. There’s books on the shelves instead of alcohol, and the bare-boned walls are now littered with photos and sketches of Curt and Owen. Richie glimpses the door to the kitchen and the rocking chair where he sat sixty years from now, and he looks down at Curt’s hand, where a silver wedding ring sits.
This is Old Man Mega’s house.
Owen sits at the card table—that’s new—with the woman from earlier, who holds her gun steady at his head. “Hey,” Owen says with a lopsided smile. “So. You hear the voices too.”
Richie sits down in the rocking chair he claimed in the future. Present? Future. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Owen’s eyes glint with something Richie almost recognizes. “Hm. Don’t you?”
“Owen.” Curt sounds tired. He slumps against the wall like he can’t hold himself up anymore. “Owen, would you just talk, please? I’m trying to save you.”
“Oh, like you did four years ago?” Owen snaps. “Shut up. You don’t get to talk to me. Not after what you did—”
“What he did was mourn you for sixty years,” Richie says, shooting up from the rocking chair and placing himself in front of Curt. “Saved the world from you, then punished himself by living another half a century without you. Shot himself dead when he realized maybe he’d doomed you to a far worse fate. So don’t you dare blame him. Don’t you dare call him the liar here.”
Owen’s face is flat and cold. Richie searches his eyes, but Owen doesn’t blink, his body stiff and unmoving, like an abandoned doll. Richie curls his fists, feeling his spine straighten into battle mode, but Curt has no such reservations. He crosses the room in three long steps and drops to his knees at his husband’s feet, and he takes Owen’s ring-adorned hand in his.
“Ten years ago I promised to love you for the rest of my life,” Curt says, “and I will keep that promise no matter what you’ve done, to me or to the world. Now, you don’t have to love me back. You don’t have to save me either. But I value your life, Owen, even if you don’t. And I will catch you, even if you let me fall.”
Owen grips him back, though he doesn’t seem to notice the curl of his fingers. “You killed me,” he whispers.
Curt smiles, pressing their foreheads together. “I know you didn’t survive your death,” he says, “but I didn’t survive it either.”
Owen smiles. Leans in. “Love…”
Curt cranes his neck.
Their lips touch.
Owen’s jaw unhinges into a bloody smile, his eyes flaring pink.
Richie tugs Curt back just in time. The woman empties her clip into the being that isn’t Owen, and Richie drags Curt back towards the room holding all his friends. The woman chases after them as the Owen-shaped thing lunges for her. Richie gropes for the door knob—
A black hole opens up in the living room and a blond man comes tearing out, holding a blade of pure light. Not-Owen shrieks and backs away, crashing through the windows and disappearing out into the world.
The man turns towards Richie and glares. “Richie Perkins,” he says. “You’re under arrest for fucking with the timeline.”
The blond man sends them off with other men in black, everyone separated except Curt and the woman, whom the blond man calls Tatiana. The two of them are taken somewhere else, while Richie and his friends are led to a hallway of interrogation rooms, each of them brought into a different one and locked inside. Richie sits there for two hours, well-supplied with chicken fingers and curly fries, before the door finally opens and the blond man walks in.
“General John Macnamara, at your service,” he says, closing the door behind himself and flicking his unlit cigarette into the trashcan in the corner. “Have you been fed and watered?”
Richie blinks. “I’m not a plant.”
Macnamara sits down across from him. “Sorry for the wait. We only just found the body of Owen Carvour. He’ll be brought in and detained momentarily.”
Richie stiffens. “Body?”
Macnamara tilts his head. “Are you aware of Nibblenephim?”
Richie nods. “Nibbly.”
Macnamara wrinkles his nose. “Nibbly. Sure.” He threads his hands together in front of himself. “You made a deal with a Lord in Black to get to 1961. As a result, we believe Hatchetfield has ceased to exist.”
Richie looks at his hands. “I’m still here.”
“Yes, we’re still figuring that out.” Macnamara leans forward a bit over his arms. “Which Lord did you make a deal with?”
“Tinky.”
“T’noy Karaxis. Interesting.”
“Is it?”
“He doesn’t usually make deals,” Macnamara says. “Leaves that to Bliklotep. Tell me, do you dream of… Tinky?”
Richie shrugs. “I dream of all of them,” he says, and tries to ignore the way Macnamara’s eyebrows rise. “Am I going to jail?”
“What was the price?”
“Huh?”
“The price, kid, what was the price.” Macnamara looks like he’s really itching for another cigarette—at this rate, one rolled from Richie’s skin. “The Lords in Black never help for nothing.”
Ethan. “Hatchetfield,” Richie says. “They’d take Hatchetfield, and I’d get to save Owen Carvour.”
Macnamara looks over his shoulder at the two-way mirror. “Not a very fair deal, was it?”
“I didn’t really care, at the time,” Richie says. “I still don’t, if I’m honest.” He sits up a little straighter. “Have you found any of the missing?”
Macnamara frowns. “Excuse me?”
“The missing,” Richie says. “My boyfriend’s gone, and his ex-girlfriend, and half our classmates. The Lords in Black took them. Where were you then?”
Macnamara’s face loosens. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
Richie searches his eyes. “Ethan Green.”
Macnamara nods. “Green. Green, Green, Green…” He pushes back from the table. “Excuse me a moment.”
He leaves the door open behind him. Richie stares at it, registers he isn’t handcuffed to the table, and immediately darts out the door.
The hallway is freakishly empty. He tries the other doors, but they’re all locked, and Richie can’t risk shaking a door and alerting some army person to his whereabouts. So he creeps down the hall, sticking close to the cement walls and hoping nobody turns the corner right then.
For a government base, the place seems deserted. Richie would wonder if it was only Macnamara if he hadn’t seen at least twenty other guys on the way here. All the hallways are shadowed and lead to vault doors, until finally he finds a set that swings like the doors to operating rooms.
He presses his ear up against it and listens for something, anything—
“What are you doing to him?” Curt’s voice cuts through. “Why is he—”
A cry pierces through the air.
Richie falls through the doors.
An agent has him at gunpoint in an instant. Curt, who had been standing at the glass window on the lefthand wall, suddenly snaps to attention and draws his weapon. “Let go of the kid,” he says, low in his throat like superheroes do in movies. “He’s with me.”
“You have no authority here, Mega,” says the agent holding Richie. Richie feels oddly safe anyway, his eyes wandering towards the window… and through it to Owen, strapped down on a table with his eyes glowing pink.
“Drop. The fucking. Gun,” Curt growls.
The agent snarls. “Drop yours—”
“Both of you holster your weapons or I’ll lock you up too.” Macnamara comes calmly through the doors, trailing somebody behind him. “Xander, Mr. Perkins can go anywhere he wishes to go. I’m giving him clearance.”
The agent holding Richie lets go. Richie reaches for his own throat, feeling for bruises, only to drop his hand when he realizes who’s standing beside Macnamara.
“Hiya, baby,” Ethan says with an awkward wave and even more awkward smile. “Sorry for—”
“Shut up,” Richie says.
Ethan shuts up.
Macnamara crosses between them for Xander, curling his hand around the man’s shoulder. That’s when Richie notes the matching rings on their left hands.
“Hatchetfield is a gateway to what Christians call Hell and us educated folk call the Black and White,” Macnamara says. “It’s not safe for anybody to stay there, much less an entire town. However, if we evacuated everyone at once, the Lords in Black would notice, and then we wouldn’t be able to save any of you.”
Richie can’t tear his eyes from Ethan. “So you’ve been taking people. Bit by bit. Until there’s none of us left.”
“Our agents even out the numbers,” Xander says. “When we get one of you out, one of us goes in. So far we’ve managed to evacuate about a thousand of you.”
“People go missing every day,” Richie whispers. “Ethan. Hug me, please.”
Ethan surges forward and wraps around him, crushing Richie to his chest. Richie grabs him back, burying his face in Ethan’s shoulder and squeezing his eyes shut. He wants to ask about Emma, but he’s terrified there won’t be an answer.
“This is okay?” Curt’s voice breaks on the last word. “They’re—They’re in love and that’s okay?”
Richie pulls away from Ethan. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, Curt, it’s totally okay. It’s always been okay.”
Curt swallows. His whole body shudders and slumps as he turns back towards the window, pressing his hand to the glass. “That’s my husband,” he says, as if the words are new but the sentiment is ancient. He laughs. “That’s my husband, and you’re killing him.”
Macnamara steps away from Xander to stand by Curt’s side. “Do you know who the Lords in Black are?”
“No. No one has explained a damn thing to me since I got here.” Curt curls his hands into fists. “Three hours ago I thought my husband was dead, and I’d killed him, and now I’m here and he’s there and I can hold him except I can’t because you won’t let me.”
Macnamara hovers his hand over Curt’s shoulder, but doesn’t touch him. “That’s not your husband,” he says, “not right now. For one day a year, a god named Nibblenephim can possess a human and walk the earth among us. Fortunately for us, this means that for twenty-four hours, he’s bound to a mortal body, so we can keep him contained. Unfortunately for you, this year he’s chosen your husband.”
Curt presses his hand against the glass. “Get it out,” he whispers. “Get it out. Get it out!”
Owen lifts his head behind the glass. His pink eyes blaze so hot Richie could swear he sees steam.
“Owen,” Curt says.
Owen gasps, convulsing so violently the straps draw blood. “Love.”
The voices in Richie’s head screech. He doubles over, bending into Ethan, who holds him fast. “Richie? Richie, baby, what’s wrong?”
NOT THE DEAL, the voices hiss and shriek, roaring over each other. WE GAVE YOU A CHANCE AND YOU GIVE US HATCHETFIELD. STUPID STUPID STUPID. BAD BAD BAD—
A shot rings out.
Richie whirls around. There’s an orange haze over his eyes. The glass of the window is broken, a bullet stuck in the middle with cracks spreading all around it. Richie glances around to find the smoking gun only to feel its heat coming from his hands.
Ethan is still holding him.
“Son, hand me the gun.” Macnamara inches forward with his hands up, eyes darting between Richie’s face and the gun in his hands. “It’s all right. You didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Not yet,” Richie says in a voice that isn’t his. “Not yet, but I’m going to, if you don’t lock me up and strap me down like him.”
Curt laughs, dropping his face into his hands. “Fuck this,” he says. “Fuck this, why me? Why us? All we’ve ever done is—”
“Love each other,” Macnamara says. “You loved each other no matter what they threw at you.”
Curt looks at Owen. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a story,” Richie says. His eyes hurt but he can’t close them. “A good story. We’re bored. You’re so boring. We want a good story.”
Xander moves towards his husband, clutching Macnamara’s non-dominant arm. “Don’t the best stories have happy endings?”
The thing in Richie’s body hisses. “Then the story is over. Then we’re bored again.”
Curt’s eyes soften. “Bored isn’t so bad,” he murmurs. “Not if you’re with your person.”
Richie feels his skin begin to bubble. “Em-ma,” he stutters. “G-Get m-me Em-m-ma.”
The world bursts into yellow stars.
The dreams are violent now. Rather than colors, there’s a black void with five neon thrones, each occupied by a human shape dressed in what Richie can only describe as a nine-year-old’s fever dream. Richie stands at the center of the semi-circle, eyes darting back and forth among the gods.
“Richie Perkins… Richie Perkins, Richie Perkins, Richie Perkins…” Wiggly laughs, pushing up out of his throne. “Our little troublemaker. Tell me, do you know what we do to troublemakers?”
“Skin them,” says Blinky.
“Eat them,” says Nibbly.
“Trick their families into killing each other,” says Pokey.
Tinky raises his hand. “Oh! Oh! We collect them.”
Wiggly rolls his eyes. “Shut up, please, all of you.” He grins at Richie. “Tinky’s right, though. We put them in his toybox for safe-keeping. Ted Spankoffski spent a bit of time with us… Not that we cared much. More importantly, you took our favorite toy. Our beloved Owen Carvour…” Wiggly laughs like death does when lost souls try to make deals. “We had so much fun with him! And then you came and fucked it all up. Little Richie Perkins and his heart of pure, worthless gold.”
Richie doesn’t dare speak. He imagines Emma holding his hand and tries to stand a little taller.
“You know, the original timeline, mmm, we had it all exactly how we wanted it.” Wiggly takes a creaking step forward. “Pokey created Chimera, Nibbly possessed Carvour and said all the worst things we could think of, Blinky made Mega pulled the trigger, and Tinky ensured time dragged on slower than usual wherever Mega went.” Wiggly leans forward and bares his teeth in Richie’s face. “And I, well.” He licks his lips. “I moved the banana peel.”
Richie juts his chin out like Emma does whenever she’s mad. “I’m going home.”
Blinky giggles. “Like us you are.”
Wiggly sighs. “Hell is a place, so we can’t be a stand-in for it; also, it’s not real.”
Nibbly gnashes his teeth. “Yeah, get your shit together, Blinky.”
“Nibbly, shut the fuck up,” Wiggly snaps.
“I’m going home,” Richie says again. “I survived Max Jägerman. I can survive you.”
Wiggly tilts his head. “How brave… How stupid. We’ll make sure you’re remembered.”
Pokey frowns. “No we won’t.”
“No, we won’t.” Wiggly lunges—
Richie wakes up.
Richie used to have this dream, before his whole family died and Emma came back from another universe to love him, that he and Ruth and Pete would move away to somewhere less murder-y and be happy little queerplatonic soulmates together. Then Pete met Steph and those dreams imploded, but Richie wouldn’t have it any other way, because Steph is like a whole other sister he gets to keep forever now.
Still, he thinks of it sometimes, when he’s lonely. Like now, in this padded room with his whole self strapped down, rainbow blood dripping from his eyes. He can see it in the mirror on the wall, the one he knows people are watching him through.
He’s been awake for five hours and he hasn’t said a word, and no one has come through the door.
Finally, just as they reach hour six, the knob turns and Owen Carvour walks into the room.
“Richie, right?” He closes the door behind him, but not before Richie glimpses the ten or twenty guards outside, Macnamara among them. “I’m sorry you’ve been in here so long. Curt and I’ve been trying to get you out, and your sister’s here yelling at anybody who’ll listen.” He smiles slightly. “You’ve got a terrifyingly loving family there.”
Richie stares at him, studying the lines of his face. Owen looks tired, and old, and sad, but his eyes are brown and his hands are his.
He’s wearing his wedding ring.
Owen comes to the table and touches Richie’s hand. “Do you still hear the voices?”
Richie shrugs. “I think I’ll always hear the voices,” he says. “But I’m not listening anymore.”
Owen nods. Then he starts to undo the straps around Richie’s wrists.
“Do you get to go home?” Richie asks. “I did all this so you’d get to go home.”
Owen doesn’t look at him, now unbuckling Richie’s ankle restraints. “I don’t know. This isn’t 1961. If we don’t go back, I don’t know what’ll happen to you.”
Richie sits up. “Well, you were gonna die that day anyway,” he says. “So your kid was probably already born—”
Owen frowns. “My kid?”
“Yeah.” Richie blinks. “You’re Pete’s grandfather, right?”
Owen frowns harder. “Pete?”
“My friend, Pete. He looks just like you, except you’re cool and he’s a loser.”
Owen shakes his head. “I don’t have any kids, Richie.”
Richie moves over so Owen can sit beside him on the bed. “Yes you do,” he says. “Yes you do, because your grandson is one of my best friends in the whole world and he’s half the reason I came back for you in the first place.”
Owen smiles at him. “What’s the other half?”
Richie looks down at his hands. “My boyfriend Ethan disappeared and Curt killed himself and I figured if I was gonna die anyway I might as well die for somebody else.”
Owen glances towards the mirror. “Curt told me it’s okay, in your world,” he says, so softly Richie almost doesn’t hear him. “That I could call him my husband and nobody would say a word.”
Richie nods. “Yeah. I mean, some people might, but they’re the ones who would get shunned for it, not you.”
“That’s nice.” Owen sniffs. “That’s, uh… That’s really nice.”
“It is.” They sit in that silence for a few seconds, but they feel like hours. “You know,” Richie says, finally, “you could stay here. In 2023, I mean. You and Curt could get married, like for real, and you could stay here with Pete and Ted and be a family.” He looks up through his bangs. “And I could see you, every day. And we could brave the voices together.”
Owen smiles at him, grief-full and aching. “No, kid. I don’t think so.”
Richie struggles to keep his hands where they are, to not reach out and shake this man who feels like a father somehow. “Why not?”
“Because I—Because I fucked up, you know?” Owen lets his head fall back so he’s looking at the ceiling. “Before Nibbly took ahold of me, I made him promise Curt would survive. I should’ve been more specific. I should’ve remembered that Curt’s life is mine and mine is Curt’s and if one of us dies the other doesn’t live, because sure, he survived in your timeline, but his life ended with me.”
Richie knows that. He’s the one who found the note on the door—
“Oh.” He reaches into his jacket and pulls out the envelope from what feels like a lifetime ago. “Curt left this with his suicide note. It’s for you.”
Owen’s eyes spill over like the waters of Babylon. He takes the letter in his hands with a kind of reverence usually reserved for holy water and he presses it to his mouth, his eyes fluttering shut.
“We each wrote one of these back when we first got together,” Owen whispers. “Before we even married. We knew we could die at any moment and the other probably wouldn’t be there or even told, so we wrote letters, and we took them with us everywhere. When I died, mine was in my pocket, so MI6 could deliver it to him. Instead, Chimera took it and burned it, and Curt never got my true last words for him. Lived his whole life with You’re going to be the death of me ringing in his head, followed by the cracking of my bones against the ground.”
Richie thinks, stupidly, about going even further back in time just to save that letter.
Owen opens the envelope, careful not to rip it. He pulls out three letters—one dated from 1950, one from 1957, and one from 1961.
Owen’s lip wobbles. “Could you go find my husband, please?”
Richie nods. He slides off the bed and heads for the door, closing it behind him. Macnamara stares at him, his eyes a bit shiny, then raises his hand in a salute.
“Good man,” he says.
Richie ducks his head. “Take me to Curt Mega, please.”
December 15th, 1950
My dearest, Owen,
When you die, it will kill me, so don’t. Stay here forever with me in this house, our house, and call me your husband when you hug me from behind and kiss my neck, soap suds on my hands. Kiss me until I forget I’m doing the dishes. Do the dishes with me. With me, with me, with me. Let your whole life be with me.
I won’t pretend not to know we’re biding our time. Every day is a lucky win, not a guarantee, and one day I’ll lose you, whether it’s me going or you. Please, please, God, let it be me.
If you’re reading this letter in an empty bed, know I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. The stars sing your name. Even blind, I could find you by the sunshine of your smile. My whole body broken, I would claw my way home to you. God himself could tear me from the earth and I would pluck every feather from my wings and rip those bones from my back, pretend to be human to fall back down to you.
Forget the poetry. I’ll always make it home to you, even if I don’t make it home. I’ll find you again. Wait for me, sweetheart. Live for me.
Ever yours,
Curt
July 13th, 1957
come back please come back please please please i can’t do this without you please Owen please
Dear husband,
Death has done anything but parted us.
Forgive me,
Curt
November 18th, 1961
My Owen,
I’ll see you soon, my love.
Coming home,
Your Curt
Macnamara leads Richie with a hand on his shoulder, down winding hall after winding hall. Most of them have no doors. For the first time, Richie wonders where exactly they are.
“When you join PEIP, this place becomes your home,” Macnamara says, either because he’s a mindreader or because the silence is starting to scratch at him. “This compound sits at a fixed point in time. We monitor the timelines from here, unable to fuck anything up since we don’t interact with the timelines. Until, that is, people like you come along and fuck it up for us.”
Richie keeps watching his feet. One step forward, another step forward, one step forward, on and on and on. “We don’t mean to.”
“No, you mean to fix it, but people’s lives aren’t playthings. Sometimes they go sad and they can’t be fixed. Because nothing ever really goes wrong, Richie. Everything works out exactly as it should. Sometimes things just get sad.”
They turn another corner. Richie looks up. “If things work out exactly as they should, then it’s impossible for us to fuck anything up, because that means we were always meant to come back and save them.”
Macnamara frowns. “What time is it?”
Richie lifts his watch. “Uh, 9:17?”
Macnamara stops. Richie stops with him. Macnamara puts his hands on Richie’s shoulders and looks him straight in the eyes.
“Richie,” he says. “How would you like a job?”
Curt is holed up in an interrogation room, which Richie finds odd, but not as odd as Curt’s choice to sit curled in the corner like he’s hiding from something. His eyes aren’t closed, but Richie gets the sense that he’s not seeing anything anyway.
“Your husband’s back,” Richie says. “Like, really back. Himself and everything.” He walks over and slides down the wall to Curt’s right, so Curt is facing him. “He asked for you.”
Curt keeps staring right past him. Richie wonders what he sees. “It doesn’t matter,” Curt says, sounding like a smoker on death’s door. “He’s committed every crime under the sun. They’ll lock him up and they’ll kill him and I’ll have to pretend they’re not killing me too because I’m not allowed to be a widower if my husband’s a goddamn traitor.”
Richie shrugs. “Technically I’m a traitor to the universe and the US government just offered me a job.” He smiles. “They’re stupid like that sometimes.”
“Most of the time,” Curt says. Finally his eyes look at Richie rather than right through him. “I like it in your time. Nobody looks at me when I say Owen’s my husband. They don’t draw their guns or cuff me or start screaming terrible things. I don’t wanna go back to the way things were.”
“I get that.” Richie lolls his head towards the two-way mirror. “But maybe things are only the way they are now because people like you lived back then. Because you forced the world to see you, to see us. To make room for us to be who we are.” He looks back at Curt. “You pay the price so we don’t have to.”
Curt almost smiles. “You make me sound like a parent.”
“You’d be a good one.” Richie scoots a little closer. “Seriously. You’d make a really good one, Curt.” He looks at his feet. “You remind me of my sister. And she’s… Well, she’s an awesome parent. Even though she shouldn’t have to be.”
Curt sits up a little straighter. “You said my husband was looking for me?”
“Yeah.”
Curt pushes to his feet, reaching down a hand. “I’m ready.”
Richie doesn’t really remember the way back, but he figures if he wanders aimlessly long enough, he’ll end up back where he started. After all, isn’t that how the hero’s journey works, or whatever?
(Okay, so he didn’t pay much attention in English. Sue him.)
After about half an hour, they turn into a hallway Richie recognizes. It’s empty save for Emma, who leans against the wall with her arms crossed and one of her legs bent. She glances at him, then looks away again, biting her lip.
“I know you knew I was here,” she says. “Were you ever going to come say hi, or, I don’t know, say sorry for leaving in the middle of the night to go back in time to save some sad fucking spy who died sixty years ago?” She waves at Curt. “No offense.”
Curt waves back. “Your brother’s nice.”
Emma raises her eyebrows and huffs out a sigh, falling forward. “All right, sure.” She walks over to Richie and curls her hand around his shoulder. “You are grounded. For-ever. You are literally never leaving the house again.” She tugs him in and kisses his cheek, hugging him tight. “And I love you so, so much and I’m so happy you’re okay ‘cause if you weren’t I was actually gonna kill you, not gonna lie.”
Richie presses his mouth into her shoulder. She smells like their mom’s old perfume. “I know. Sorry.”
Emma kisses his head one more time before pulling away. “So, you’re Old Man Mega,” she says, offering Curt her hand. “I heard you made a deal with a dark god and that’s how my fuckhead brother got the idea into his head to do the same.”
Richie frowns. “I thought you loved me.”
“I can love stupid things,” Emma says.
Curt scratches the back of his head. “Yeah, I, uh—I made a deal with the, uh—the purple one.”
“Blinky?” Richie steps away from him. “Blinky’s the one who kept me from saving you.”
Curt looks away. “I promised him my soul,” he whispers. “My soul for Owen’s.”
“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.” Richie turns and sprints down the hallway. (Okay, he speedwalks.) “Both of you are fucking idiots.”
“What? What!” Curt chases after him, Emma not far behind. “Oh my god, wait up, please, I’m—oh, fuck—”
Richie skids to a stop once he rounds the final corner, staring at the padded bedroom door he slipped out of nearly an hour ago. He rips the door open and stomps in, startling Owen, who’s still sitting on the bed clutching Curt’s letters. “Richie? What the f—”
“Did you make a deal?” Richie stops a foot away from him, his fists curled at his sides. “Did you make a deal with a Lord in Black? More specifically, did you make a deal with Nibblenephim?”
Owen swallows. “Yeah.” His crooked jaw sets. “My life for Curt’s.”
“You moron,” Curt gasps, bursting through the doorway. “You fucking moron. We agreed to never make those kind of deals for each other.”
“Hypocrite,” Emma says behind him.
Owen’s head snaps up. “Hypo—Curt! What kind of deal did you make? Who the fuck did you pay for me? What did you pay for me?”
“His soul,” Richie says, the words rumbling low in his throat. “Problem is, that’s you.”
Owen’s face crumples. “Curt.”
“Owen.” Curt rushes forward and wraps around his husband, hugging him tight, fisting his hands in Owen’s shirt and hair. “I love you. I love you I love you I love you—”
Owen sobs. Curt kisses his head, once twice three times, holding him closer and closer. “I’m sorry,” Owen cries. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”
Curt kisses him. “You’re here,” he says, wondrous. “You’re here, don’t be sorry, you’re here.”
Emma snakes her arm around Richie’s shoulder and leads him from the room. As she closes the door behind them, Richie hears the voices whisper, “Traitor,” and he smiles.
July 7th, 2023
My Owen,
Love of my goddamn life—welcome home.
All my love,
Your Curt
With the Lords in Black preoccupied with a few dumb teenagers and two even dumber spies, Macnamara has managed to evacuate the whole of Hatchetfield, which was, somehow, miraculously, right where it had always been, as if it had never been gone at all. Richie mingles in the breakrooms of PEIP with all his classmates, missing and never missing alike. He’s met Ethan’s ex-girlfriend now, and she seems to have no problem with him, though she does look enough like Grace Chastity to freak him the fuck out.
Ted hasn’t let go of Pete since he came through the portal with Bill and Alice in tow. Steph sticks close to her boyfriend, her hand wrapped in his. The first time Alice laid eyes on Ruth, Richie thought maybe whole universes were being born there, but then she’d closed them as Ruth’s lips met hers and Richie had looked away.
And then there was Paul, right behind them, Emma’s ring on his finger. Ruth found him first, tucking herself into his side, while Emma only stared, eyes wide and shining, as if to move would be to dispel the ghost of the love of her life. Paul moved for her, pulling her in soft, kissing her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, her mouth, her hair. Whispering, “Okay. Okay. Okay, okay, okay.” Emma held him gently, like a dead world in a god’s hand, loving him back to life.
Richie hung back from it all, safe under Ethan’s arm.
Now, Richie sits with his boyfriend and his best friends in the cafeteria, surrounded by the entirety of Hatchetfield. Curt and Owen sit alone in a corner, at least a hundred feet from any other tables. Tatiana sits with them, though she seems to be more interested in Hatchetfield’s residents than either of the men beside her.
Richie doesn’t realize he’s staring until Ethan touches his shoulder, jolting him out of his reverie. “You okay, baby?” Ethan asks, and Richie nods, though it might be a lie.
“Hey,” he says. “If we could go live in a better world together, would you? Or would you stay in the world as it was, because that’s home and you don’t want to be as sad as Steve Rogers after he lost Bucky Barnes?”
Ethan looks at him and smiles. He brushes his thumb along Richie’s jaw. “I think you already know the answer to that, sweetheart.”
Richie turns back towards Curt and Owen. They’re leaning into each other, tired but together, and Richie aches for them, all the time lost, all the time wasted, all the time left to spend. “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t think I could leave Emma.”
Ethan nods. “You know, Curt Mega’s mom is still alive in 1961.”
Richie looks away. “Yeah. I know.”
That night, Curt and Owen return to 1961 with Tatiana. The next morning, Macnamara comes to the barracks and throws his arms out wide.
“Hatchetfield is safe,” he says, with a grin like Nutella on toast. “You can all go home.”
Richie leaves through the portals with everyone else. He settles with Emma and Paul and Ruth in a new house, and Pete and Steph come over every day after school. Ethan takes him to prom. Jägerman and Grace Chastity get arrested for public indecency, expelled from Hatchetfield High, and carted off to Sycamore. The rain smells fresh and sweet and doesn’t hurt to walk through.
Emma makes him breakfast every morning. Richie sits at the counter with his pancakes and coffee, and he thinks, It’s too quiet.
He doesn’t dream anymore.
A year after Curt and Owen’s departure, Richie is pulled out of school by John Macnamara. The general is smoking in the back lot of the school, holding a letter in his hands. “Called your sister to get you out early. Had to get this to you.”
Richie takes the letter. “You could’ve at least waited until lunch. Is the world ending?”
“No. Thanks to you, this world won’t ever end. Not again, anyway.” Macnamara takes a drag. “Probably.”
Richie turns the letter over. It has his name scrawled across the front, but no other identifying information. “What’s this?”
Macnamara stamps out his cigarette. “The Carvour-Megas wanted to say thank you,” he says. “And that you’re always invited to dinner. After all, you’re best friends with their grandson Pete.”
Richie frowns. “Owen said he didn’t have kids.”
“He didn’t, not when you found him.” Macnamara looks at him like Richie has all the answers in the universe, which he definitely doesn’t. “Turns out, your timeline has always been a peculiar shape, because you were always meant to go back and make it that way. Owen and Curt faked their own deaths, retired to America with Curt’s mother, and adopted a young boy named James Spankoffski.”
Richie nearly drops the letter, scrambling to catch it before it’s ruined on the muddy pavement. “Adopted?” He thinks of Pete’s dad, of James, kind and funny and a little stupid, and, now that he thinks about it, strangely averse to bananas. “Oh.”
“Yes, adopted.” Macnamara twists his face into what could almost be a smile. “Because of you, Owen Carvour lived long enough to be a father. Because of you, Hatchetfield is just a normal, boring town.”
Richie wouldn’t call it boring. It’s Hatchetfield. It’s still fucked nine ways to Sunday. But it’s home, and it’s here, and it’s got all the people he loves.
“Well, thank you,” he says.
Macnamara nods. “You know,” he says, “that job offer’s still open, if you ever want it. I respect any man in this world who still wears a watch.”
“I can’t hear the voices anymore.”
“Can you hear yours?” Macnamara asks.
“Yeah.”
Macnamara stuffs his hands in pockets and wheels for the hills. “Then you hear all you need to.”
Richie watches him go. He doesn’t know how long he stands there, but soon a bell startles him back out of his head. Footsteps come up beside him and a small hand folds into his.
“You know,” Ruth says, “I never wanted a brother, ‘til I met you.”
Richie looks at her. “What about Paul?”
Ruth shrugs. “He’s wonderful, and I love him.” She smiles up at him. “But I chose you.”
Richie kisses her head, blinking too fast. “Do you think I’m special?” he asks. “Or was I just the only one stupid enough to end the world for the chance that two idiot spies could live happily ever after?”
“Yes,” Ruth says, and Richie laughs.
The skies open up and cry. They could go inside, Richie thinks, the way normal people do when it rains, but instead, he turns his face up to the clouds and smiles, because for the first time in their lives, they don’t have to.
He twirls Ruth under his arm. She’s all but a shadow in the fog. This is forever, Richie realizes. This is where they cease to be characters; this is where they become people.
This is where they put the world down.
January 27th, 1962
Dear Richie,
Sorry it took so long to write you. Turns out faking your death is a lot harder than it looks in the movies.
We’ve settled in at our safehouse, which is now, for all intents and purposes, just a house. Cynthia, of course, is well aware of everything and doing her damndest to keep us out of harm’s way. We should probably be worried that Chimera will come for us, but Tatiana has been taking out their bases one by one. We’ve had a few scares, but they’ve all turned out to be bunnies eating our plants. On an unrelated note, Owen now hates bunnies.
No I don’t—
Yes you do, sweetheart, and that’s okay.
They’re menaces, Curt.
Yes, yes, dear. Anyway.
One of the compounds seemed to be some sort of training facility. Inside we found hundreds of kids, and we managed to return them all to their parents or find them adoptive families throughout the EU. But this one kid, James Spankoffski… Polish. Bespectacled. That’s not a word. Yes it is, shut up Curt. Shy, sweet… and in need of a home. Luckily, you gave us one of those to share.
We know we won’t see you for awhile, but we wanted to tell you we were all right. Hopefully help you sleep a little easier. Owen says he can’t hear the voices anymore, and the dreams have stopped, but sometimes he sees in pink. He wonders if purple is haunting you. Wants to say that if it is, he’ll kick its ass.
We’ve included a picture of James, so you know the face of the third soul you saved. We hope you’ll get to meet him one day. We hope we’ll get to see you again. You’re an honorary grandkid. So if you ever want to stop by and say hi to your favorite old spies… Our door’s always open.
(Metaphorically. We have the highest security available on the black market. Pretty sure our house is more secure than the White House and Buckingham Palace combined.)
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We love you. Live a long, happy life, Richie. We owe ours to you.
All our love,
The Mega-Carvours
P.S. If that Jägerman kid ever messes with you again, we will calmly and sanely ruin his entire life.
Richie folds the letter back up and stuffs it in his pocket. The safehouse looks different than it did a week ago, when all this started. Now there are flowers in the window boxes and lining the path. The door is painted red and the whole house is dark blue, dotted with painted stars. It’s like Van Gogh tripped in and made the place its own sky.
Behind him, Emma coughs. “This casserole ain’t gonna eat itself, Richie.”
Richie blinks, turning around. “Respectfully, Emma, I don’t think anybody else is gonna eat it either.”
“Fuck you, I can cook.”
“Paul can cook. You can microwave.”
Emma sticks her tongue out at him. Then, seeing his face, she softens.
“You don’t have to be scared of these people, Richie,” she says. “You already know them. They just have wrinkles now. Because of you. Because of you, they got to grow old together.”
“I know,” Richie whispers. “I know, I know, it’s just—That’s why it’s terrifying. Because they’re old. Because they can die now, because they will die, soon, and I just—I just found them. I just found them, Emma, and I’m about to lose them.”
Emma steps up to his side, nudging his shoulder with hers. “Not now, you aren’t. Not yet. We all lose people, Richie, that’s life. But first we love them, and right now? Right now it’s your time to love them.”
Richie reaches into his pocket and feels for the letter, rubbing the worn paper between his fingers. Behind it he feels the thicker cardstock of Paul and Emma’s wedding invitation. “Hey, Emma? I’d go back in time and end the world for you, too.”
Emma smiles. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Emma nods. “Right back atcha, kid.”
When Richie was thirteen, a few years before he lost his family, his parents would go for each other’s throats like wild dogs wrestling over a meadow mouse. His Emma would go outside with a joint, but then she’d see him watching her and she’d stamp it out, coming to the balcony door and coaxing him out of his pastel prison. She’d put her arm around his shoulders and he’d bend down to meet her, because even then he had a few inches on her, and she’d walk him all around town until the sun was about to set. They’d sit criss-cross on the floor of the local comic book shop sipping on slurpies and laughing about the world they thought they’d grow up into versus the one they had.
Once, his Emma stole him a little LEGO Batman in pink fairy wings and a tutu. Richie had that Batman in his pocket when he got the call that his Emma had died in that car accident with Jane, and he’d held it so tightly in his fist that the red imprint of the now-useless superhero stayed for days. He’d moved into Pete’s basement with Ruth and he’d talk to that Batman at night, asking it why it took his sister away.
Now, a year later, another Emma watches him grow up, and that same old fairy Batman sits in Richie’s pocket over his heart. Richie is alive and mostly whole and standing on the steps of forever.
“I’m right here,” his new Emma says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
It’s a half-lie. Everyone has to leave sometime. One day Richie will reach for her hand, and she won’t be there to reach for his.
Today, though, she holds on tight.
“You’re okay,” Emma says.
“I’m okay,” Richie says.
Emma smiles. “And okay is wonderful.”
Richie looks up at the house. “Okay is wonderful.”
Emma squeezes his hand. Richie squeezes back. Then he lifts his arm, and he knocks on Old Man Mega-Carvour’s door.
Owen opens up, Curt right behind him. Their spotty, wrinkled faces light up. They reach out for Richie, and he reaches back.
Not now, Richie thinks. Not ever.
The yellow in his head blinks to life and laughs.
That’s right, Richie, Tinky says. Never ever ever.
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
— Terry Pratchett
SaphDragon494 Sun 07 Sep 2025 10:32PM UTC
Comment Actions
wrenkitchens Mon 08 Sep 2025 08:03PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ravenpuff99 Tue 09 Sep 2025 12:54AM UTC
Comment Actions