Work Text:
It's the little things that stick with Jonas, afterwards - haunt him, even. Things that catch his eye and make a cold shiver of abject fear run its fingers up and down his spine, make it so that he can't quite breathe properly for hours later. Things like innocent piles of rocks. Innocent games of hangman. Innocent little melodies or tunes that seem far too familiar somehow.
…static.
Everybody has different coping mechanisms, really. Ren makes half-hearted jokes about the whole experience. Nona gets all quiet and uncomfortable about it until the subject matter changes. And Clarissa just straight-up walks away from any conversation that involves talking about it, because no matter how much the island changed them all, she's still Clarissa.
But Alex - well. It might be just because she experienced more of it than the others - more of it than him - but Alex, she just gets it. Really gets it, on a deep and astounding level. She'd rather not talk about it either, really; but if it's necessary - if it's a particularly bad day for him or even if they’re just messing around together for whatever reason and it's especially late at night - she's the perfect person to spill his guts to. To talk to about the disturbing dreams that he’s been having, on-and-off, even several months post Edwards Island; to tell about the near-panic attack that he nearly had in English Literature over an off-handed conversation about NATO phonetic codes - she's the perfect person to talk to because he knows that she'll understand, and she probably has worse stories to share. He should probably feel bad that he gets some kind of relief out of feeling that she’s worse-off than him, really, but… for some reason, he never does.
And these conversations happen at the weirdest times. Literally the weirdest.
Like (for example) if they happen to be breaking into Camena High School's filing room at 11:30 at night in order to seek out and change Jonas's last chemistry test - well, apparently committing felonies at midnight with your step-sibling is the perfect time for unconventional bonding over shared supernatural trauma. Who knew, right?
“Sometimes I feel like this is the best timeline,” Alex says as she digs through the backpack that she was carrying for the two of them, looking for the rest of his lock-picking tools. “Crazy, right? I mean, considering.”
“The best-? – oh, right.” Jonas looks up from where he’s been trying to jimmy open the lock to the school janitor’s entrance (which was agreed upon, during their brief half-hour planning session for this entire venture, to be the best way to get into the school during the weekend). Alex doesn’t often talk about the whole ‘time loop’ thing. From what he’s gathered, it’s something that she doesn’t like to think about either – the idea that, at some undefined point in the near future, she’ll be tugged backwards through time and thrown into the whole horrifying island adventure all over again. He doesn’t know if it’s better that he can’t remember the loops – not really, not the way she can.
He supposes he should be grateful, really, that she’s bothering to help him with something as minor as a bad chem test result. (Although, you know. It was really bad.) That she even bothered to suggest it at all, even when they both know that it won’t really matter in the long run. But Alex is just like that – doing things just for the sake of it. Going on ultimately purposeless scavenger hunts all over an empty island to read letters that she’s already read a million times before; seeking out weird radio frequencies just so they can sit together on a bench and listen to them in silence. It’s the little things that are important to her.
“I mean,” she continues, and she finally finds the tension wrench she’s been looking for, and hands it to him, “there’s a million ways this could have ended.”
Jonas’s eyebrows raise. He takes the tension wrench, starts fiddling with the door lock with renewed intensity. “A million?” He doesn’t know much about time loops and the butterfly effect or whatever it is, but that doesn’t really sound right.
“Not a million,” she amends. “More like, uhmm – thirty or so? Or maybe I’m getting that wrong. It’s hard to keep track, you know?”
“Not really,” says Jonas, who really doesn’t. “But, I mean, you’re probably the only person on Earth right now who does. ” He twists left, then right, and then left again. The door clicks open, and Alex grins and bounces.
“Nice work!” she says, and helps him pack all of the breaking-and-entering equipment back into the backpack, before zipping it neatly up and slinging it over her shoulder. “That was five minutes, tops. I’m impressed. My brother’s a master criminal – who knew?”
“Ha, ha,” he says, without barb. “Look who’s talking, little miss Grand-Theft-Auto-When-I-Was-Fifteen.”
She sticks her tongue out at him. “You said you wouldn’t bring that up!”
“Well, if you will tell me embarrassing childhood stories –”
She punches him lightly on the arm, and he punches her back, and their laughter overlaps as they hurry inside the school together, casting glances over their shoulders to be sure that they aren’t being watched.
Inside the school, it’s dark and empty. Abandoned. Strange, distorted shadows fall everywhere, making Jonas shiver despite himself. Thankfully, Alex has brought a flashlight – not the same one that she brought to the island; this one is much heavier, more powerful, and it gives off a great deal more light. She switches it on, sweeping the beam from wall to wall. It helps, but honestly, it’s still more than a little creepy.
“Huh,” says Jonas. “I’ve actually just had a thought.”
“Oh yeah?” Alex’s face is currently obscured in shadow, so he can’t actually make out her expression, but her tone is almost a bit too light.
“Fuck this.”
She laughs. “Yeah, this is a bit…” She wiggles the flashlight from side to side. “…a bit. You know. Milner-ish.”
“It really is.” Jonas shoves his hands into his pockets. “Maybe we should just, you know, leave? It’s not like my chemistry grade is really that important.”
Alex is silent for a long moment, and he can practically feel her indecision. “I mean, if you want to leave,” she says eventually, slowly, “I wouldn’t blame you at all. But I’m going to do this whether you’re there to help or not.”
That’s the other thing about Alex. She’s stubborn. If she’s got it into her mind that she’s going to do something – getting the last scoop of Rocky Road ice cream from the freezer, getting four other kids off a haunted island in the middle of nowhere, breaking into a school in the dead of the night – she’s going to give it her best effort. No doubt about it. And, whatever it is that she’s put her mind to, there’s a distinct possibility of her succeeding.
“If you’re staying, I am,” he says.
She’s startled into another laugh. “I – all right, Jonas. That’s great. You don’t need to go all anime protagonist on me.”
“Anime protagonist? Me? Are you kidding? You’re the one with the blue hair!”
They stand there in a dark corridor, giggling over this stupid comparison, and, as they remember where they are, that giggling dwindles off into an awkward silence.
“This place really is super creepy,” Alex admits, glancing around.
“I know,” Jonas agrees. “I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to be.”
She angles the light up so they can both see each other, and they share a glance. “Speedrun it?”
“Speedrun it,” he agrees, and they take off at a run, dashing down the school corridors. The contents of Alex’s backpack are jingling and Jonas is a tiny bit faster than Alex is, so he keeps having to slow down a bit every so often so she can catch up. She’s holding the flashlight as steady as she can, but it’s still bouncing around like crazy.
They both know where the records room is, even in the darkness – they planned this out just well enough for that to be a certainty. But apart from that, this entire plan was more along the lines of well, let’s just try this and see what happens. It’s a bit like tuning a radio without knowing where you’re going to stop.
They’re both panting and high on adrenaline already as they reach the first flight of stairs, and they don’t stop there. It’s not exactly what you’d call fun, because there is definitely an undercurrent of terror and déjà -vu and oh god what if it’s right behind us, never mind what ‘it’ is. But there’s that familiar feeling between them now, the same thing that they had when they were dashing around the island running from ghosts and time loops – the sharing of a unique experience, the knowledge that they’ll be able to joke about it and say things like, wow, can you believe that we ever did that afterwards and rag on each other about how stupid the whole thing was.
Right now, lit only by a wildly swinging beam of light held by his brilliant, weird, amazing step-sister, Jonas is running like all the ghosts of Edwards Island are hot on his tail.
They practically screech to a halt just outside the records room, and Alex rattles the handle like he’s running late to class and not entirely sure if this ambiguously open classroom is the right one or not. It is, predictably, locked tight.
Jonas unzips the backpack again, tugging out his tools before Alex can even begin to take it off. Alex is panting heavily from the mad dash, and says, “Hey, slow down there, cowboy.”
“Thought we wanted to speed this up, ” he shoots back, and picks the lock in record time.
They squeeze past each other into the records room. Jonas closes the door while Alex clicks on the light, bathing the room in dull yellow. The room isn’t that big, really, but it’s lined floor to ceiling with shelves containing boxes and boxes of student records. Tests, report cards, detention slips – the works. It probably should be just as, if not even more , creepy than the rest of the school at near-midnight, but for some reason the enclosed space seems a lot safer than anywhere else at night. It’s like the feeling of security from throwing a blanket over your entire body to keep the monsters away, even though you know logically that a thin sheet of fabric isn’t going to keep anything other than your cat from getting to you.
“Huh. Old-school,” Jonas says.
“Yeah. For some reason, our school isn’t that keen on digitizing all of this.” Alex casts a glance around the room, taking in what’s probably close to thirty years’ worth of school records. “Wonder why.”
“Okay, so the tests for my class should be, uh…” Jonas turns back and forth, trying to get a handle on the filing system. “…over… there, maybe?” He points at the section labelled with the current year.
Alex starts to nod, but then shakes her head. “No, no, hang on. I’m pretty sure they’re organized by graduation year. It’d be the next one over.”
Jonas just shrugs. “All right, you’re the boss.”
“I am,” says Alex cheerfully, and leads the way over to the set of shelves in question. “You start at the top; I’ll do the bottom. Shouldn’t take longer than half an hour, if we’re fast.”
They begin pulling out boxes from the shelves systematically, and rifling through them. If it looks like the box they’re currently working through has nothing to do with chemistry, they set it aside and move onto the next.
“So, uh,” Jonas says a few minutes into this endeavour, “what did you mean by ‘best timeline’? You know, when we were talking before.”
Alex takes a moment to respond.
“Yeah,” she says. “Right. I was just thinking about… well, in some timelines, I ended up saving Michael, right?”
“Right,” says Jonas, even though she’s literally never mentioned this before.
“And that’s great and all, and it’s – it’s wonderful to see him again. I love him so much. Loved him so much – miss him a lot. Except…” Her fingers hesitate over the lid of the next box for a brief second, and then she sighs and opens it. “I don’t know, man. You’re never quite the same in those ones.”
“Me ? ” Jonas asks, so startled he nearly drops a box on his foot.
“Yep. Apparently, if Michael doesn’t,” she swallows audibly, “you know, drown at the lake, it means that I end up doing all that island stuff with him, instead of you. And you’re not my brother anymore, because my parents never get divorced if Michael doesn’t die. And we don’t get to know each other, ever. I mean, I do – I remember everything – but you never do. And, I don’t know – that just feels really, sort of, wrong.”
“Oh,” says Jonas, kind of stunned.
“I’d hate it if we never got to know each other,” she says. “You’re my brother. I don’t want to lose that, just for the sake of bringing back somebody –” Her voice cracks a bit, but she ploughs onwards. “- somebody who’s already dead.”
“Step-brother,” he reminds her after a second.
“Nah,” she says, and grins up at him. It’s a bit watery. “Brother. Definitely.”
Silence falls for a few minutes, only broken by the shuffling of papers.
“Alex?”
“Yeah?”
“I hope you figure out a way to end the time loops,” he says.
She stares at nothing. “Yeah,” she says after a second. “Yeah, so do I.”
Jonas is so distracted by the whole soul-baring conversation that he almost doesn’t notice when his chemistry test is literally in his hands.
“Hey!” he says, surprised. “I found it!”
Alex hurries over to look, and she ends up peering at it over his shoulder. “Twenty-two percent,” she reads, and looks up at Jonas. “Oof, buddy.”
“Not to worry – here’s one I prepared earlier,” Jonas says, pulling out the fake chemistry test that they had put together before setting off – with a much-improved score of 77%. It’s not a perfect replica, but it’ll be enough to fool anybody checking for mistakes. Which they will be, hopefully, come Monday, when Jonas prods them to.
Alex switches the papers – the failed version goes into the backpack, soon to meet its untimely demise at the hands of their mom’s paper shredder – and then they put everything back the way that it was when they first entered.
They race each other through the school once more and down to the janitor’s entrance, but this time it’s a lot more laid-back. They call out to each other in whispers, laugh at shadows, swing around corners with an unnecessary amount of drama. They’re no longer running from some ancient, unthinkable terror – they’re just two teenagers messing around in a school at night. Being stupid, acting their age. It’s nice to be normal for once.
They lock the door carefully behind them, and head out to the car, which Jonas had previously parked one street away for convenience's sake.
“What time is it?” Alex asks as she slides into the passenger’s seat.
Jonas presses a button on his watch. The bright blue LED time display lights up, and he squints to read it. “Two minutes to midnight.”
“Cool,” she says. “D’you think Taco Bell is open this late?”
He gives her a sideways look. “We’re getting fast food at midnight?”
“Dude, we just pulled off a successful school heist,” Alex says, muffling a yawn. “If there’s a better reason to buy and consume celebratory trash food at ungodly hours of the night, I’d love to hear it.”
Jonas considers. “I mean,” he says. “We do deserve it.”
“Damn straight we do.”
Jonas grins and starts the car. “You’re paying.”
“Aww, come on. You’re mean.”
“I’m broke, is what I am.”
And as they drive out of the school parking lot and into the night, the clock strikes midnight.