Chapter Text
The portal does not dispense Karl where he thought it would. He is not swept away to a previous point in history, but he also does not step into a year yet to come. Instead, it spits him out somewhere between the two.
It’s here where Karl learns that time does not fly. It is not a straight, linear line with a distinct beginning and end, or the carefully calculated cycles of the moon, nor is it the numbers stamped around the edges of a clock.
Time is an endless white hallway.
It divides the past and the future into two neat halves, ends blurring and giving birth to the present. To the left, Karl sees what his mind can only comprehend as a collage of sorts; moving images of times he’s lived through, places he’s visited, people he’s known. Short snippets of his life that bleed and blend to create his memories.
To the right is something similar. He is presented with another never-ending gallery that mimics the first. It reflects the same people and the same locations, but with a key difference. These pictures are unfocused. They start and stop as they please, the faces are fuzzy, the backdrops keep switching out before they’ve fully formed. These events are uncertain. Things that he has yet to witness.
And it’s here where Karl finally understands it. Its name.
This place, this white alley in some other-wordly plane of existence, this amalgamation of recollections and what-ifs, is the midway point between the before and the after. What has already happened and what may (or may never) happen. Reality and illusion.
The Inbetween.
Behind Karl is the doorway that he came through (although doorway isn’t exactly the right word). A still of Sapnap, an arm outstretched towards the portal, lips parted in a final begging request to wait. Karl lifts his hand to meet Sapnap’s, but he curls his fingers into his palm. He can hold him in one hand and Quackity in the other once he’s put this nightmare to rest and everything is right.
The present changes. It shifts as the minutes pass, if minutes even pass in this plane as they do on Earth. The still of Sapnap’s desperation turns to one of him standing at the portal with his hands clutching his shoulders, eyes shut tight. Then it shows him backing away down the dias stairs. Picture by picture, like a slideshow that Karl had once been a part of.
He tears his gaze away and forces himself to face the blinding stretch of infinity. He’s not here to watch the present continue without him, he’s here to change it. All he has to do is find the inciting moment and make sure it goes right this time.
Karl begins down the hallway with silent footfalls, keeping a careful eye on the depictions of the past to his left. They begin recently, showing him and Sapnap giving their final goodbyes to Dream and George, their clumsy attempt to set up camp at the beginning of the night, and Dream’s car pulling through the park entrance. Then, the collage fades into earlier days, things buried so deeply in Karl’s mind that he had forgotten about them. He passes all five of them lounging by the river one summer day, Dream shooting George with a water gun and Quackity dunking Sapnap under the surface. There’s one of him, Q, and Sap sitting on the ledge of a fire watchtower, surveying the sky as the sun paints it in rich golden hues. Sapnap is dozing off on Quackity’s shoulder.
It’s strange to see the five of them. Quackity’s presence in these scenarios makes them feel less real somehow. Ice forms along Karl’s ribs as he realizes he’s grown more accustomed to the dazzling billboard reminders of Quackity’s disappearance than seeing Quackity himself.
More than that, though, there’s an underlying feeling in Karl’s stomach that tells him these memories aren’t right. They’re experiences preserved through the years in this eternal white void, but they aren’t his experiences. Not in the way they should be. He’s there, or he was there, and yet they’re unfamiliar to him. The Inbetween is presenting them to him and telling him, “Look, these are yours.” But they’re not. They just have his name slapped on them.
Finally Karl finds one that he does remember: him and Quackity following the course of the river as it takes them south. Birds chirp in the branches above them. A breeze flattens the grass on either side of the trail. It’s a nice day. Good for camping. If he holds his breath and leans in, he can hear their voices.
“Starting a life together? The whole domestic thing?” Quackity is asking.
“Yeah,” Karl answers. “If that’s okay with you.”
A smile brighter than life itself graces Quackity’s face and he slips his hand into Karl’s. “You know, I think I’d like that.”
The touch seems to transcend time. Karl can all but feel Quackity’s fingers sliding across his skin to intertwine with his own, the way he squeezes Karl’s hand for a heartbeat and rubs his thumb along the side of his index finger. The sensation is there, but only just. It beckons Karl to reach out and make the feeling real, to hold Quackity once more—
The tips of his fingers collide with something cold, not quite solid but still tangible. It sends a shocking vibration through his limbs as if he’d been electrocuted. He rips his hand back, but what’s done is done.
The image changes on contact. It falters, the peaceful valley scene warping and its colors seeping into duller shades. Grainy lines stripe up and down across the memory as it glitches and sends them back to the beginning. Quackity drops Karl’s hand to rush off toward the river bank. They crouch and wait, exchanging words that Karl can’t hear, before continuing on the path.
He hardly dares to breathe watching their forms walk down the trail. Now, he thinks, it should have happened now. But they never join hands. Instead, his past-self is left to follow as Quackity leads them further down the path.
His lungs give up and Karl drags in a breath of stagnant air. The static lines and grayish tones still persist, a dark spot among a splattering of color. Glitched and damaged. All from a tap of Karl’s fingers.
Frustration wells up in his chest. So that’s it, then. In his attempt to fix the past, he causes the very mistake he came to prevent. Maybe it was wrong of him to tamper with it in the first place. Maybe this is the way it’s meant to be and there’s nothing he can do about it. It was always their fate to be ripped away from each other, and for Karl to cause the rift. Fate is not easily persuaded to deviate from the path it sets out for them. They were doomed from the start.
But his skin still tingles with Quackity’s touch from all those years ago. His lips still buzz with the warmth of Sapnap’s kiss. If they are anything to Karl, then surely he would do what he had already failed to and go against time itself to bring them to each other.
And they are his everything.
Fate is not easily persuaded. So Karl will simply command it.
He paces up and down the hallway, feet unable to remain still, as he hatches a new plan. For whatever unknown reason, his memories cannot be altered outright. Fine. He’ll have to work around it somehow. What he needs is to find a method of forcing past events to play out the way he wants. A method of controlling time, in a certain sense. Of course, Karl has learned by now that something as unknowable and chaotic as time cannot be controlled. It does the controlling. He’s seen this in the way it pauses at random, repeating itself over and over with no clear direction or purpose, sending him into the past on a whim—
Sending him to the past. There’s his method.
All night, Karl has been at the mercy of the Inbetween as it forced him to relive his experiences like they were happening for the first time. But he was still aware, if only for a short period, that these were things he’d already done. He still remembered. Perhaps it isn’t too far-fetched to think that he could retain a message of some kind. Or a warning.
Karl halts in his pacing to find himself standing amidst his recent memories. The events of the night echo around him. Briefly, he wonders if it were his feet that brought him to this point or if the white void he stands on is really as stationary as he’d thought it to be. Whichever it is, this spot is as good as any.
It’s an early moment: he and Sapnap trek through a sea of thin, white-barked birches toward a distant watchtower. They speak through strained, awkward mumbles, avoiding the other’s gaze as much as they can. Karl nearly trips over a downed tree.
He’s got his recipient, now all he has to do is figure out how to deliver the message. There’s no reason why his past-self should be able to hear him through the Inbetween, especially not if he hadn’t heard his own voice at any point in the night. No doppelgangers either, so visiting his counterpart doesn’t seem to be an option.
Karl presses his hand against the invisible surface experimentally. Like before, it flickers and repeats. He sees himself trip again. But there is something different that Karl hadn’t felt at first. It was almost as if he could feel the memory giving way under his weight, like a flimsy door with broken hinges. Maybe if he can push hard enough, that door will snap.
He leans forward with more force. The unseen glass bends inward beneath him, though not nearly enough to let him in. Behind his hands, Karl can see the effect his interference is having. The memory has looped once more and grown fuzzy, the edges distorted beyond recognition. Piercing guilt stabs through him to see how much damage he’s causing, but he can’t stop now. With one last heave, the surface gives in and Karl crashes into the past.
It’s a familiar scenario, being trapped inside this video tape-like world. Time is frozen, save for a few noisy grain lines running through the air and the unsteady flickering of the birch trees’ eyes. There is a new addition to the oddities of his surroundings: the doorway from which he entered. Although it’s less of a doorway and more like the portal that brought him to the Inbetween, a perfect rectangle pulsating with glowing white energy. Completely out of place in any normal birch forest, but this night has been anything but normal.
Karl wildly searches his surroundings. His past-self and Sapnap are nowhere to be seen, as if this is the one freeze frame in which they weren’t present. Damnit. How is he meant to send a message to someone who isn’t there?
Then, something grows heavy in his pocket. He fishes out the mysterious object to reveal the pocket knife Dream had given him in the bunker. Of course— a carving. Karl kneels down to the ground, knifepoint poised over the one spot he knows he’ll look at— the fallen log blocking the path. He digs the blade into the soft bark, etching a few short words in crude and jagged lines. Tell Q the plan. Simple enough, but it gets the point across.
With his mission complete, Karl steps back through the doorway. Exiting is far easier than entering and he reappears in the Inbetween’s endless halls without obstruction. He rushes back to his and Quackity’s riverside walk. He has no idea how long it will be until his intervention takes effect. Surely it would be instantly after his visit to the past is over?
But when he arrives at the damaged memory, it’s still just that: damaged. Repeating and glitching every time it reaches the most important part.
Panic rises in Karl’s throat. It didn’t work. No, no this has to work. It’s the only chance he has. Another message, he thinks. He’ll send a second message to a different moment, and everything will be as it should.
Karl runs through the hall this time, shoes hitting the white floor without sound, until he is back at the most recent events. He picks one at random and throws himself against it. The surface resists his efforts at first. He pushes once, twice, four times, and it finally gives out, spilling him onto cold concrete floor.
The IBT station is as deathly quiet as it must have been for the six decades that it lay unattended, but Karl knows that he and his friends are standing in the room, rifling through leftover documents and arguing about what to do next. Like the birch forest, he is alone and without a way to communicate to his past-self. There are no trees here to whittle a note into, but the long table offers up a thick black marker that will suit the job nicely. He scans the room until he finds the perfect spot— a tall stack of filing cabinets. Any writing on its rusted metal drawers will be so obviously out of place that it will draw the necessary attention. He uncaps the marker and glides it across the metal in big letters, spelling out Don’t let Q leave.
That should do it. It has to do it. Karl tosses the marker onto the table and exits through the portal. He’s already prepared to rush back to the riverside when he realizes that the portal has not brought him where he expected it to.
He does not step into a formless white corridor. Instead, his feet find purchase on the creaking and splintering wood of a fire watchtower in the middle of a pine forest. Summer warmth dances on his skin for the first time in— well, he’s not sure how long. The sun is performing a balancing act on the horizon, lighting the sky in pastel shades as it descends into the evening. Or maybe it’s dawn. It’s difficult to tell.
Karl hardly has a second to adjust to his new surroundings when he hears a voice, soft yet bright. “Hey.”
And there he is. The very man for whom Karl is commanding fate.
Quackity sits on the edge of the platform, legs dangling over empty air and hands pressed into the wood behind him as he casually follows the sun’s path with his eyes. He doesn’t even look up at Karl when he greets him, like he’d been expecting him for a while.
“Do you remember how the three of us would sneak away from camp to come up here every year?” Quackity asks. “We’d watch the sunset, sometimes the sunrise if we could wake up Sapnap early enough. And we’d always bring a few bottles of whatever Dream bought from the convenience store on the drive up.” He chuckles without giving Karl a chance to reply. “Who am I kidding? Can’t remember it if it never happened.”
Karl has become an expert at adapting to strange situations these past handful of hours. In truth, the sudden switch in settings doesn’t even faze him, nor does Quackity’s quiet appearance. It’s the finer details that make him wary. The way Quackity acknowledges his own absence from their lives, the slight hitch in his voice that almost sounds like static, his blurry outline like he’s not all quite there. It mixes on Karl’s tongue and comes out in the form of wavering words.
“Are you… is this—”
“Real?” Quackity finishes. He pulls his gaze away from the sky to meet Karl’s eyes. He looks tired. “If you want it to be.” He snaps his fingers like he’d suddenly remembered something. “By the way, the answer to your last question is no.”
“My last— what?”
“Oh, right.” Quackity lets out a self-conscious laugh. “You haven’t asked yet. Sorry, that’s my fault.”
The fact that he already knew what Karl was going to ask and his odd mannerisms tells Karl that it doesn’t matter what he wants. He would do anything for this, to be here on a perfect summer day with Quackity at his side, to let his shoulders drop and throw down the weight that’s been growing on them since the second they arrived in the park. But he’s not here, and neither is Quackity. It isn’t real. He can’t even pretend.
Quackity sighs through a defeated smile. “I know, I know, it’s confusing trying to figure it out. Are we actually here? Am I really him?” He shrugs. “Honestly, are the details that important?”
Karl’s eyebrows scrunch. “Wait, how do you—”
“Know what you’re about to say?” Quackity shakes his head. “Because you’re predictable, Karl. And stubborn. You’ve been warned over and over, but you just can’t leave it alone, can you?”
Karl feels a miniscule pinch in his heart. “What are you saying? You want me to let you go? You want me to give up and leave?”
“Yes.” The bluntness of his response sends Karl back a step. Quackity continues, “But I can’t make you do anything. In the end, it comes down to you. And your choice is always the same.”
“I— What? I’m confused.”
“I know.” Quackity turns to face him and crosses his legs neatly on the wooden boards. “I don’t know how much longer we have, so you better hurry up and ask me your questions.”
Karl wonders how Quackity knew something was on his mind, but he keeps that to himself, not wanting another vague answer. He moves closer, only to look down when he hears crunching under his feet. The wood has turned to a mixture of soft sand and dirt, water tugging at the granules. The sun is peeking over the river where they had walked side by side and planned their shared future. Quackity, now standing and turning a smooth rock over in his hands, doesn’t seem to notice the new environment, so Karl doesn’t bother pointing it out.
“Can you tell me what happened to…” You? Him? He stumbles over the pronoun. “You know. After… everything happened?”
Quackity tests the weight of the rock in his hand. He tosses it across the river with a flick of his wrist. It skids on the water’s surface a few times and plunks down to the muddy bottom. “He went exactly where he said he would. ULN. He’ll be starting his junior year next week. Things are going pretty well for him.”
The rock reappears in Quackity’s hand. He fumbles the throw and it slips from his fingers into the water. “There was an accident. His plane… it never landed.”
He makes a flinging motion with his hand, but nothing leaves it. “He just vanished. Like everything else in this world, he ceased to exist the moment he stepped out of these woods.”
Karl blinks. The river is still, not a ripple breaking the top to betray a fallen rock’s landing. “But which one is it?” he asks. “Which one is the real answer?”
“All of them,” Quackity replies. “And none of them. Or whichever one you like best. It doesn’t matter.” He leans forward. “Do you understand?”
Karl tries to make sense of it in his head. Quackity is safe and— and dead, but not safe and not dead— “I think so,” he relents after a dizzying minute.
Quackity laughs. “You don’t. That’s okay, I don’t know why I expected you would. Maybe one of these times you’ll finally get it.”
An exasperated huff leaves Karl’s lips. “Q, you’re not making any sense.”
“I know.”
“Then can you give me a straight answer instead of this cryptic shit?” Quackity makes a broad go ahead gesture. Karl takes a slow, deep breath. “I did what I came here to do. Well, sort of. Plans had to change, but I did what I could. I left warnings for myself. So did I fix it, or what?”
What little hope there was playing on Karl’s heart dissipates when Quackity rolls his eyes. “I don’t know,” he admits in tight words, as if he’s tired of saying it. “If I figure it out, I’ll let you know. But you’ll find out sooner than I will.”
“That’s not a very straight answer,” Karl says through gritted teeth.
“Well, it’s as good as you’re gonna—” Quackity cuts himself off with pursed lips. “No, yeah, you’re right. Sorry. But there’s only so much information I can give you, you know?”
Karl shakes his head. “No. I don’t know.”
Quackity closes his eyes. “Yeah, that tracks.” He brushes his hair away from his face and looks back up. “If you want, I can tell you what’s going to happen. Not that it’ll be of much use to you for very long, but still.” He tilts his head forward. “Do you want that?”
Karl gives a hesitant nod.
“You’re going to fuck up,” Quackity says plainly. “Not by forgetting, because you didn’t forget. You’re right about that. You’ll fuck up by letting him go. And then you’ll let Sapnap go, and Dream and George, and then one day you’re going to want to try again.”
“But that already—”
“You’re going to try your hardest. You’re going to do everything you can to fix it, and you’re going to tear your life apart trying to make it alright.”
It sounds like he’s going to continue, as if this is not a complete thought, but he leaves the sentence where it is. “And then what?” Karl prompts.
Quackity does not respond. And that is response enough.
“Time’s up,” Quackity says.
Confusion barely has a second to form words on Karl’s lips before he hears an echoing ring. The humming bass blossoms into his head like an old enemy coming back to taunt him. “What’s happening?” As he says it, the whole world blinks out for a moment, their surroundings turning gray and dotted.
“Time’s up,” Quackity repeats with a gesture behind Karl’s shoulder. A rectangular portal, like the ones Karl had used to traverse his memories, waits patiently on the riverbank. “You’ve been here too long. The Inbetween’s becoming unstable. If you don’t leave now, you could get stuck.” The corner of his lips curl into a knowing smirk. “Then you’ll never know if you fixed your problem.”
The margins of Karl’s vision become bent and twisted. They are standing on springy grass in front of a low-burning bonfire at the campgrounds. Karl extends his hand to Quackity. “Come with me.”
A sharp laugh cuts through Quackity’s teeth. “I can’t.”
“Please, Q,” Karl begs. “All of this time traveling crap, all of this risk— I did it for you. I can’t leave without you.”
“Karl,” Quackity says in a warning tone. “You’re going to run out of time.”
Karl doesn’t move. He stands still with his arm outstretched.
Quackity’s shoulders drop. “I told you, I can’t. Trust me, it won’t work. Besides, I’m not the one you’re looking for and you know it.”
Karl’s arm falls limply to his side. He’s right. This isn’t Quackity. No matter how much he wants it to be or how well he’s fooled himself into believing it is. The bass is growing louder in his skull. It’s time to go.
He stops as he reaches the doorway, turning back to look at Quackity. Even if this isn’t him, if it’s some mirage or illusion drawn up by the Inbetween to mock him, he wants to drink in every last inch of Quackity’s likeness. Karl is forgetful, but he’ll be damned if Quackity isn’t the one thing he will never forget.
“I’ll tell Sapnap you said hi,” Karl promises.
Quackity smiles at him. A little lopsided, amused, something like pity stitched into the corners. "You won't."
And Karl crosses the threshold.
The Inbetween is falling apart.
Time fades and glitches in a similar fashion to the damage Karl had inflicted on his own past. The future is bleeding into itself, creating a deformed swirl of colors that dull and flash at random. Some of the uncertain events go completely black and disappear entirely.
Karl breaks out into a full-on sprint, ignoring the temptation to glance back at the riverside and check if his attempts were successful. As he runs, the floor underneath him begins to break as well. It turns from white to a stretched visual of the campsite at dusk, then the sunless abandoned bunker, then an empty control station. The garbled images disorient him, but he forces himself to focus on the end of the passage.
Only his destination remains constant. The slideshow that forms the present grows closer and clearer with each step. Karl can see Sapnap standing in front of the gray machine that houses the failsafe. He waits over the black button with its glass casing, watching the portal with a tense expression. Karl is less than ten feet away when everything— the white hallway, the kaleidoscope of recollections, the portal’s opening, even the air itself —ripples.
On cue, Sapnap surges forward. He flings open the glass casing and balls up his fist. Something close to a sob wracks his body. Panic lights in Karl’s chest. “Sapnap!” he calls. He’s so close. “Hold on!”
But Sapnap cannot hear him. He brings his fist down on the black button and the present vanishes, Sapnap along with it.
Karl collapses at the newly formed rift between the past and the future, barely too late. His skull vibrates with the cacophonous screeching of the Inbetween as it shuts down. “Dammit,” he grimaces, chest heaving. “Stubborn bastard.”
Not Sapnap. No, Sapnap did what Karl wanted him to. He didn’t wait for him. It’s Karl who’s the stubborn one. Quackity told him he needed to leave, that if he lingered, he’d be stuck, but Karl had to stay a little while longer, didn’t he?
He did.
The Inbetween is falling apart. White void becomes white noise. Karl’s uncertain future is gone, leaving an aching chasm of pure nothingness in its wake. His past is disappearing, too, blinking out like faulty television screens. As his memories fizzle from the void, they fizzle from his mind, and Karl can’t quite remember what they had been in the first place. He stares at a replay of the final kiss he shared with Sapnap, grasping onto the scene with as firm a mental grip as he can manage, until he realizes that he can’t place the other man’s name.
Karl’s own outline blurs alongside the destruction. If he looks hard enough, he thinks he can see the static of the floor through his arm. That incessant humming in his head sounds less threatening and more welcoming the more everything fades. It brings a meandering question to the forefront of his mind: is this death? Or is the slow process of being erased from reality something else entirely? Whichever it is, Karl won’t have to worry about it for much longer. The world— well, his world —is ending, and he’s the only one here to see it.
But Karl only feels peace throughout his deteriorating form. It’s okay. Because maybe his ending won’t be the happy reunion he’d been hoping for, with his loved ones around him (Karl desperately wishes he could remember their names), but there is a chance, however small, that the reunion will still happen. He may not be there, but they will be, and they’ll be happy. He closes his eyes and sees his friends’ dissipating faces, safe and smiling and whole.
And as the world ends, Karl smiles.
Time does not fly. It jumps and skips and stutters; it pulls you back to memories that you had forgotten and throws you forward just as you start to remember them; it breaks and shatters into a million tiny shards and leaves you to pick up the pieces; it bends and warps until you cannot tell the difference between the things that happened and the things that never did; it sputters out and dies and drags you along with it.
And then, without warning, it restarts, and you are back at the beginning.
But it does not fly.
“How’s he doing? Is he okay?”
“I think he’s waking up.”
“Karl? Karl, are you alright?”
A newfound lightness swirls in Karl’s head, like a massive pressure had been released. He peels his eyes open to see George’s concerned face looking back.
His friend’s whole body relaxes in a sigh. “He’s awake.”
A bump beneath Karl jostles him and makes him aware of his surroundings. He has been strapped into the backseat of Dream’s car, George beside him and Sapnap in the passenger seat.
Sapnap turns as far as he can, reaching a hand back towards Karl. “Oh thank God,” he breathes. “I thought I told you to stop passing out on me.”
“Sorry,” Karl mutters. He glances out of his window. The sun is perfectly split in half over the trees, dusting the asphalt of the road in warm light. A stark contrast to the abysmal despairing darkness that has gripped the park throughout night. “How— what happened?”
Relief smiles on Sapnap’s face. “The failsafe worked! It shut down the Inbetween and fixed the loops, and Dream got the car working.”
“I helped,” George butts in.
Karl frowns. “But I was in the… and you—”
“You passed out in the bunker,” Sapnap says.
“Sapnap had to carry you back to the car,” Dream adds from the driver’s seat.
Karl looks up when he feels someone touch his hand. Sapnap is leaning around his headrest and squeezing Karl’s fingers. “But we’re okay. Everything’s okay.” His voice is low, like the words are only meant for him.
George slumps against the back of his seat. “Yeah, that was certainly… something.” He winces. “Sorry for dragging you guys out here. I didn’t know it would be such an absolute nightmare.”
“No,” Sapnap says. “I’m glad you did. Sure, it was a shitshow.” His eyes flash to Karl. “But not everything was bad.”
“Speak for yourself,” Dream says, completely oblivious to what Sapnap is referring to. “I can’t wait to go home. We’re definitely never coming back here.”
“We can find a different camping spot next year,” George agrees. “I want to forget that any of that ever happened.”
Next year, Karl thinks, a warmth spreading through him. There’s going to be a next year. He sees the events of the night flash in his mind, every tense word he shared with Sapnap and the few vulnerabilities in between. He sees the days he was forced to relive with Quackity and cherishes them, even if one is worse than the other. He sees the vast expanse of time sprawling out before him in an endless void.
And he wants to remember it forever.
Quackity. Karl’s final exchange with him (or what had appeared to be him) comes back in a flash. “Oh yeah, Sapnap. I had something to tell you. It was a message from Quackity.”
Sapnap frowns, confusion tugging at his lips. “Quackity?”
“Yeah, I saw him in the Inbetween,” Karl says. “At least, I think I did. He said to tell you—” A loud droning noise erupts in his ears and cuts him off. He draws in a hiss and winces.
“What?”
The sound fades. “Nothing,” Karl says. He struggles to recollect his thoughts. “Quackity said… he…”
Even if Karl could remember what he’s trying to say, pop music blasting from the radio drowns him out. It’s one of those songs of the summer that radio stations play over and over again. Sapnap raises his voice to be heard over the music. “Turn it down, Dream, this song sucks ass!”
Dream has one hand on the steering wheel and one covering the dial. “I like it, I wanna hear it!”
“Dude, this song has been playing literally all summer. We heard it when we left! Change the station or something.”
Karl tunes out the argument as George yells at the two to shut up. He can’t help but feel that there’s something nagging at him right under his skull. Almost like some kind of pulse. Hadn’t he been doing something important? He tries to think back to what he had been saying, but the words escape him. Typical.
Bits and pieces of the others’ conversation float toward him. Karl does his best to block it out, but the alternative isn’t any more appealing. If he doesn’t listen to his friends, he’ll have to be alone with the giant, dazzling billboard reminders of why George invited them here to begin with.
Sapnap breaks away from the argument to mumble under his breath. Karl watches him through the side mirror as he turns his face to the window, the sun painting his skin red in its descent. (Which is another thing that puzzles Karl— he could have sworn it was dawn a few moments ago.) Does Sapnap even want to be here? George probably had to bribe him to get in the car.
Karl can’t really blame him, though. It’s going to be a little weird having all of them together after so long spent apart. Well, not all of them.
“Right, Karl?” George is asking.
Karl snaps his gaze away from Sapnap. “What?”
“Everyone’s going to get along and have a good time tonight, right?”
“Uh, yeah,” Karl agrees half-heartedly. “Right.”
George gives a single satisfied nod and everyone falls into what must be the millionth awkward silence of the day.
Karl hopes, for the sake of all their sanity, that he’s right. If something goes wrong and nothing changes, he’s certain this night will never end.