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“Can I ask you somethin’?”
Duck is hunched over, arms crossed and elbows on his knees. He tugs at the cloth on his shoulders and keeps his eyes on the ground.
Duck Newton was never someone who left his apartment often, wasn’t someone who asked others for help. His brain didn’t think like other people did and no one ever did say anything that he needed to hear, anyway, now did they? Duck always talked to himself, always worked things out in his head, always knew the answers about himself before people could even begin to ask the questions. All Duck needed was brain and a voice. Except, apparently, tonight.
Indrid hadn’t been too surprised to see Duck at his door, of course, but Duck still felt like an intrusion. Just because Indrid expects all the unexpected, doesn’t mean he don’t feel much about it, y’know? Maybe. Maybe maybe maybe. What would Duck know about what Indrid feels about being Indrid in a moment that’ll need an Indrid?
What would Duck know about knowing what he’ll know in a moment that’ll need knowing?
Indrid closed the door quickly behind him, and Duck watched the few snowflakes that followed him as they quickly melted into little dots on the carpet of the winnebago. That’s gonna be me, ain’t it? he thought to himself as Indrid kicked over empty cups and pulled up his couch. Someday I’m just gonna be a snowflake in some sweaty winnebago.
“What do you want to know?” Indrid asks back, hands behind his head as he leans back, staring at his ceiling.
“Be honest with me.” Duck starts bouncing his leg. “How many- In how many futures do I-”
“Die in? You’ll always die eventually, Duck.”
“Right, right. No, actually.”
When Indrid raises his eyebrows, Duck knows it’s not from surprise.
“You finish this question a lot of different ways. Hundreds, hundreds of ways you ask this question and hundreds of ways I give you the same answer.”
Duck just sighs, presses his fingertips into his closed eyes. “Is it so wrong- is it so wrong to just... know? To just wanna? Is it wrong of me to just have an answer to it?” Duck moves his hand over his mouth, feels his lips against the heel of his hand. “To just wanna? To just wanna? To just-?”
“Duck.” Indrid sits up, holds his hands together. “I see an infinite amount of futures. I see an eternity of time. You... you’re in all of them, all the time, all of the time.”
“But am I happy?”
He looks up, glances into the small gap between Indrid’s eyes and his glasses, sees his long, slow blink.
Indrid slouches. Duck doesn’t know what this means and, very suddenly, he is very, very sad.
“There are very many where you are not. There are very many where Kepler begins to mean nothing to you anymore. There are very many where everything begins to mean nothing to you anymore. There are very many where you live to be old and when you are dying is when you realize you’ve done nothing but reach desperately your entire life to feel anything. There are very many when everything means too much and you feel it in your heart that that everything does not include you.” Indrid stands, and smooths out his shirt. He wipes at a stain, absentmindedly. Nervously.
“There are very many where you learn that destiny wants you alive more than you ever will.”
Duck looks up. There are no tears in his eyes, no shaking in his hands. His breathing barely gets any faster. But he feels his chest tighten, feels his blood travel from his ears to his nose, from his shoulder to his fingertips. Barely any faster, he knows, but his veins ghost his skin.
“Yeah?”
Indrid opens his fridge, pours a mug of eggnog and a glass of water.
“Yes.”
He hands the glass to Duck and gestures to the floor. Duck slides from the couch, both hands around the glass and Indrid sits next to him, their backs resting on the edge of the cushions.
“But there are also many where you have more happiness than you ever thought was even allowed to be felt.” Indrid shifts to face Duck, his eyes hard to see behind the glare of his glasses. “There are so many where you learn that happiness does not exist to be stored, but to be spent. There are so... Duck, when I see these things, I see them as bright as they are likely. Whenever I see you in my head, whenever you exist in the futures I watch, you smile. You smile very often. Sometimes I think it’s hard for people to notice because, well, you don’t really smile with your face, do you? But you smile with your hands, and with your speech, and with the way you look up at the sky, and with the way you listen and think and blink and move and-” Indrid stops and brushes his hand over his chin. “And those are the ones that shine. Those are the ones where you fulfill your destiny and it doesn’t feel like the loss of a burden, but rather are a realization of what it meant when the world chose you. And the world chose you, didn’t it?” He sips from his mug.
“But is it just destiny? Is all of this, is it just so I save the world?”
“I don’t think you understand.”
“I know I don’t fuckin’ understand. Let me understand, alright?” Barely any louder, but he feels the chords in his throat rumble with every syllable.
Indrid lays his mug next to him on the ground and sighs, soft and quiet and so hard to even know what it means because, god, everyone’s just got their own definition for when it’s sighin’ time and what that sighin’s gonna mean, don’t they?
“Destiny is what’s keeping you from dying, yes. But you are what’s keeping you alive.” Indrid leans in closer, so close Duck is scared he’ll touch him. “Duck. All these futures exist but almost none of them are true. You have to make them true. Will you die sad? Will you die angry? I can see them, the thousands where your last words are hateful to the world. But even stronger -” he lifts his hand “- even brighter, I see you die happy and not because you told yourself that you would, but just because you are. Destiny does not control who you are. Destiny does not control how you feel. Destiny does not decide where your life ends and your death begins. Destiny is just a pull, just a push. It’s a force of nature.”
Duck closes his eyes, ignores Indrid’s hand hovering so close to his face.
“You don’t know those things. You don’t know any of that. You can’t read minds.”
“I can read you.” And Indrid places his hand on Duck’s cheek. It’s cold and Duck prepares to feel that slimy twist in his stomach, that gross grease that covers every nerve in his body. But he doesn’t. He just feels the cold against the rest of his warm face. He just feels Indrid’s faint, fast pulse slip from his fingertips into his skin. He feels how Indrid’s blood buzzes, the same way his does when his mind is overrun with thoughts and feelings and things he refuses to accept that he doesn’t know about himself. "I can read you because I know how you think. I want to know how you think."
But Indrid is good. This buzzing is good, he decides, because Indrid is good.
“I want you to realize that your future does not touch you; it doesn’t touch you at all in the same way that you touch others’.” Indrid runs his hand down from Duck’s face to his neck, from his shoulder to his hand. “Your future will never touch you, can never touch you, because by the time you get there, it’s already the present again. Let it be the present that you want it to be.”
Duck lets his eyes flutter open and already staring at him is Indrid. His face is so close that he can see past his own reflection in the lenses and look at the soft curves that wrinkle Indrid’s eyes, look at the few spots in the creases below his brows. Looks down to their hands between them, nods.
“I wanna be happy.”
“Then be happy, Duck Newton.”
And you know what? he thinks, I think I will.