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You know how it goes; after all, scientists and poets alike have spilled rivers of ink for it: there is an infinity of you and an infinity of me, on various levels of existence. Each decision that creates a divergence in an event, can and will form a new universe.
In this universe he is an engineer, perhaps because he needs to create in order to understand. He can devise rockets stronger than the hold of gravity, make the most resilient of metals yield. What he can’t do is graph the parabola of her smile, solve for the gravitational force that binds his heart, or quantify the ache that burns raggedly every time he sits by her hospital bed only to hear the hum of ghosts and machines.
He can’t understand, so he creates. He builds a machine to try and save her, to extricate the tangled mess of guilt and self-loathing wound tightly around his sinews.
It’s my fault you broke your arm. It’s my fault the sea was unkind to us, he thinks harshly as he slams the button. Motors whir, and he falls.
What he doesn’t expect waiting for him at the bottom is her – all of her, in all versions of reality, at all points in time. They always meet in a collision, she with her arms open and he with his blind downward tumble – a boy who keeps falling and falling through universes, chasing her Northern Star to a sky where they can finally chart out their happy ending.
i.
The girl is born by the water. Her father is a river god and her mother a nymph; it is in her nature to be at one with the earth and the sky. She grows up singing the songs of birds, speaking in the tongue of gushing winds and rustling branches, and spends her days tending to animals in her wild, lonely home.
It is this version of her that he first meets, and he falls into her life like a hummingbird with broken wings, paralyzed with the desire to leap into flight but unable to, when her tentative gaze locks onto his. She presses herbs against a minor wound on his head, and as the sun bounces off her delicate frame and into his eyes, her name escapes his lips before he knows it.
“Jemma?”
The girl tilts her head and regards him curiously, before waving her hand to gesture a no. “Daphne,” she points to herself and giggles, and god does it remind him of fairy dust.
But this is the wrong universe and he has to go. No matter how alike they look, no matter how silvery she sounds, this is not his Jemma. He gives the girl one last, lingering smile and reaches for the dimension hopper on his wrist, but before he can hit the button –
Blinding light floods the forest. He blinks, confused, but she lets out a piercing scream and takes off running. He follows her, of course he will follow her, because it is their only constant in all the fluctuating universes. It is then that he notices an arrow of lead lodged between her shoulder blades.
Heavy footfalls trail after them, Apollo heaving and choking back tears between anguished pleas in a language so foreign and dusty, Eros’ golden arrow buried deep in his chest. The god of light chases her, but she keeps on running, a nymph caught in a web of petty rivalry and paper-thin ego of gods. Autumn leaves crunch underfoot, and the forest roars. Apollo pushes Fitz out of the way to close in on her. He watches the chase helplessly, her tears flying back and hitting his cheek in hot, bitter drops.
“Jemma!” he cries out, and for some reason the girl turns to him.
But what can he tell her, when they can’t even speak the same language? She looks at him with desperation, and he bites down on his lip, motioning limply to the river. “Peneus,” he says, the only word they can both understand. Call your father for help. It is the only way.
She does. Peneus emerges from the water, tears in his eyes, and one by one his daughter’s legs turn into roots, her hands into branches. Within seconds the transformation is complete. The god falls on his knees by the laurel that was once his love and weeps, wrenching sobs that sound like a lyre’s melancholic tune.
Fitz averts his eyes, swallows the lump in his throat, and turns on the machine.
ii.
It is high noon in Renaissance Florence and the cobblestoned sidewalks shimmer with heat. The few merchants left at the market squint as they warily scrutinize the man who fell from the blistering sky like a ball of fire. Fitz groans and jumps to his feet, only to come face to face with the same chestnut eyes that have haunted him through all of space and time. Now they stare at him with a hint of curiosity, but they are distant – the kind of aloofness you reserve for strangers when you people-watch.
He heaves a sigh; he’s in the wrong universe again.
The girl moves towards him, and immediately two guards behind her edge forward. “Signorina,” one of them cautions, but she holds a hand up to halt them both.
“You’re bleeding,” she remarks, fingers skimming a scratch down his forearm, her singsong Italian not lost to Fitz, whose knowledge of the language is enough to squeeze him by. “I practice medicine. Let me help.”
She takes him back to her place, a palace that imposes its massive towers against a background of one-story shops and tiny townhouses. They make idle chitchat while she bandages him up, and that is when he finds out she is a Medici, a family with money and power sufficient to move mountains and drain seas.
But he knows when you mess with the forces, they don’t give up without a fight, and the Medici family has its fair share of turbulence throughout its existence. “Forgive my ignorance, but what day is it?” he asks.
She laughs a little. “How hard did you fall, signore? It’s the 25th of April, 1476.”
The cogs in his head turn, and he pales.
The following morning, she prepares to leave for High Mass, but he is at her door. He tells her not to go because her family is conspired against and will be slaughtered, does nothing short of getting on his knees and begging her, but she doesn’t relent.
“Why should I trust you, you who is just a stranger that fell from the sky?” she challenges. Her brows furrow and her forehead creases and it’s just so inherently Jemma that he has to clutch his chest to keep his traitorous heart from leaping out.
Because I love a girl, and she’s you. She’s you in another reality. And in this reality you are her, just like all of you that have ever existed, you are a walking and breathing invitation to be better, to love, to give, and to care. That is who she is, who you are at heart, and I’m doomed the moment I started jumping across dimensions because I know I will love every version of her there is, and that means I will love you. You’re dying in a hospital bed somewhere, somewhen, and that is enough heartache for me as it is. So please don’t die in this here, this now. At least let me have that much.
“Because why should a stranger who fell from the sky lie?” he says simply.
Days later, as the conspirators are banished from Florence and the mob jeers, she finds him alone in his room, staring bleakly out the window.
“You’re planning to leave, aren’t you, signore?”
He turns to her. “There’s no more reason for me to stay.”
“And there was a reason before?” she asks.
“It would seem so.”
She nods. April recedes, and May follows. The air crackles with a promise of the last spring shower. She breathes in, feels the rain easing its way into her lungs, and murmurs, “thank you. The Medici owes you. I owe you.”
“I just want you to be safe. I did what I had to do,” he replies honestly.
The corners of her cherry mouth lift a little to form a tender smile. She stands on tiptoe, brushing her lips lightly against his cheek. “Until we meet again.”
As soon as she closes the door behind her, he is gone.
iii.
After Florence he comes back to his own universe, and for a while the cloaking device keeps him busy. But even as his prototype works and he sends the blueprint off for Mack to duplicate the technology, his mind is still plagued with the image of her – her in a forest by the river, her in a Florentine palace, but always, always in danger.
It isn’t until late one night, when May stays behind to help him with some blood analysis, that he – caught in one of his tormented thoughts – accidentally clenches his fist so hard he breaks a vial. May pulls each piece of shattered glass out, and he lets her, the silence occasionally punctuated only by a hiss that he fails to stifle.
“You do realize eventually you have to start talking, don’t you Agent Fitz?” May pipes up.
“That’s rich, coming from you,” he chuckles.
May’s face remains expressionless. One by one, glass clanks against the metal tray. “I don’t mean small talks between you and me right now. I mean whatever’s been bothering you in that genius head of yours, you gotta let it out.”
“Yeah, well, I’m terrible at expressing myself, and everyone’s plate is already full as it is.”
She just shrugs. “Mine’s not.”
He stares at her. The coal in her eyes has been set on fire, and now it burns with a warmth that melts even the strongest barrier between them. A shaky exhale escapes his lips. “You know about my – uhm – side project, right?”
She nods. “How’s it coming along?”
The last piece of broken glass is out. He flexes his hand and grimaces. “Not well. Instead of time-traveling I’ve been jumping between universes. And I keep seeing her.”
“Who? Simmons?”
He manages a sad smile. “There are a billion worlds out there, May, where she’s alive, and a billion more where she’s dying. Right at this moment there are hands growing cold and blood being shed and they are all hers, and that is a knowledge I shouldn’t have discovered, because knowing so does nothing but imposing a persistent yet ironic sense of helplessness and heroism. I know I can’t save all of her, but as soon as I jump into her world, she starts existing, she starts being real, and I cannot let her die.”
“Fitz, please don’t tell me you’re gonna start hopping between worlds just to swoop in at the right moment and save the girl,” May is solemn as she wraps gauze around his hand. “You said it yourself: you can’t save all of her. So how do you know when to stop?”
“When I find the right reality.”
“And where is that?”
“It’s a universe closely paralleled to ours, only it runs on another timeline, one that’s a few months behind us. If I can just stop the pod incident from happening…” he trails off, swallowing the ending to that sentence, and it slits his throat as it slides back down, settling like a deadweight in his guts.
May heaves a morose sigh. “There are too many worlds out there. Why attempt the insurmountable?”
“Because I carry my love for her with me across dimensions.”
iv.
All of this comes pouring out at the worst possible time, inside the lonesome, wrecked robotic scraps of what pass as a Jaeger staggering along the shore, while slimy amphibious aliens called Kaijus swarm the Pacific.
In this universe she is a ranger working for the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. At twenty-seven, with two Ph.Ds. and Academy-level combat skills, she is the best pilot in the Jaeger program, a program on which humanity hinges, in hopes of defeating the Kaijus. The Jaeger she controls with her co-pilot Quake has the highest kill counts amongst their ranks. They are undefeatable.
That is, until a category five Kaiju splits open the head of their Jaeger and tears her friend away. Quake bleeds dry and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Without a co-pilot, she manages to stab the monster with her Jaeger’s spear. It gurgles before hitting the water, and she goes limp in the cockpit, hot tears streaming down, burning her cheeks; she and Quake still shared a neural connection when her friend was killed.
Then Fitz falls down from the sky.
Rubbing a bump on his head, he takes in the surroundings. His mouth forms a hard line when he’s finished. “You’re not supposed to pilot alone. The neural load can kill you.”
She just gapes at him. Ignoring her, he scrambles to what’s left of the right-hemisphere control. Her eyes grow frantic. “No! What are you doing?”
He blinks. “Trying to pilot this thing back to shore with you.”
“I can’t have a stranger inside my head. We haven’t even been tested for drift compatibility yet,” her voice shoots up an octave in panic.
“Oh trust me, we are drift compatible.”
And then they are in the Drift. Every memory, every thought, laid down in its crudest and purest form for the other person to see, clouded only by a dreamlike haze. Images swirl around him before flying past just as fast, and in front of him is her entire life. He sees what she sees and feels what she feels.
For all the bloodshed she’s seen, the way she remembers and thinks is extraordinary. Her world is a kaleidoscope of colors. This butterscotch tranquility of her childhood amidst the endless stretches of corn field. This nighttime stillness of a laboratory, the air tainted cobalt blue – the color of Kaiju blood. This red searing agony for the death of a friend…
Her world is splintering now. The Drift is almost over. He chances a glance at her, wondering to what depth she has dove, and hoping against hope that she will emerge unchanged from the desolated wasteland that was once his subconscious. She wears an unreadable mask, only one eyebrow is quirked a little.
Left hemisphere synchronized and calibrated. Right hemisphere synchronized and calibrated, the auto-command system pauses. A plethora of statistics floods their holo-dash, but one number is steadily rising. She shifts in her suit and glances at him.
Drift compatibility at 97%, it finishes.
“Told you,” he flashes her a grin. She returns it with a tight-lipped smile, and together, they bring the Jaeger safely back to Shatterdome.
As he’s trying to disentangle himself from the cables, she looks up slowly. “You’d better go, Agent Fitz. Go before they start questioning about your presence. You have other versions of her to save.”
“You,” he stares at her, aghast. “You know?”
“I was in your mind. Of course I know,” a muscle along her jaw twitches. He ducks his head a little and fidgets with his dimension hopper to avoid her eyes, the rushing blood turning his cheeks rosy. Her expression softens.
“One last question though,” she interjects, and he looks up, “suppose you do find the reality and save her. Then what? Forgive me if I’m wrong, but if you prevent her injury from happening, aren’t all the universes that exist as a result of that injury gonna collapse?”
He gives an infinitesimal nod, keeping his gaze trained on the patch of sky just above the hole in her Jaeger’s mangled head. Past the hangar door, the sea murmurs its tales of birth and death to an open sky. He inhales, and his lungs fall heavy with the stories it tells, as they cling onto salt-tanged winds rushing in from shore. “All those realities will cease to exist. All the people in them are erased from cosmic history.”
“And that includes you,” she states simply.
“Yes.”
She puts a hand on his shoulder, but says nothing. In the silence, the whispers of lapping waves are suddenly thunderous. He touches her hand once, his lips quivering, and reaches for the machine on his wrist.
v.
He finds her again in 1832, in the empty backroom of a café in the heart of Paris, asleep on a table where her medical notes are mixed in with pamphlets advocating an uprising against the monarchy. He is so relieved, he forgets they don’t speak the same language. So when he shakes her awake and she blinks the sleep away, the words “excusez-moi” escaping her lips decidedly French, he stops dead. He doesn’t know French.
“Don’t go to the barricade,” he ventures in his mother tongue, almost helplessly.
“And why shouldn’t I?” she shoots back in accented English. He glances at her notes and her clothes. She is rich, educated, exactly the kind of revolutionary who’s willing to die like a martyr because life for them hasn’t been the slow death.
So he tells her about the revolt that nearly missed becoming historic, about the blood that trickled between the cracks of Parisian sidewalks when the barricades fell, all because the people they were fighting for couldn’t care enough to join in. When you are the wretched and your next meal is a luxury you can barely afford, it’s hard to think about words like “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
She listens, and when he’s finished she merely thanks him for his warning. He’s shown out of the café by the barmaid.
The next day, he sneaks into the barricade on Rue de la Chanvrerie. The first wave of attack leaves several people injured. She’s holed up in a dingy room inside a wine shop, tending to the wounded with alcohol from bottles that someone has taken a swig from.
“Mademoiselle, run away with me,” he beseechs, tipping his stolen newsboy cap off so she can see his face. “The National Guards will bring out big cannons tomorrow at noon. Nobody will survive.”
“No,” she answers.
“We can escape through the sewer system,” he insists. “Please run away with me.”
She turns her head away.
Come twilight, the young revolutionaries silently pass around what little food and drink they have, their gunpowder-stained shoulders slumped as they sit on broken pieces of furniture. The leader in red stands tall on top of the barricade, shouldering a musket, his golden hair shimmering in the last daylight. His speech does nothing to lift the heavy fog of despondence that clouds the audience.
Fitz lowers his cap and leans back against the wall. She finds him anyway, and hands him a near-empty bottle of absinthe. “They are losing their spirits,” she comments, almost to herself.
“Are you?” he asks as he takes a sip, but she just shrugs. He continues, “you don’t strike me as a rebel. Do you honestly believe that overthrowing the king will bring a better future?”
“I believe in saving lives,” she murmurs. “That is the only reason I’m here. I grow up with these boys. I will not sit around while they bleed to death on the pavement.”
He downs the rest of the bottle and squeezes his eyes shut to keep the tears at bay. In this universe or the next, some things will never change.
As noon inches closer, the National Guards grow restless. Men who venture outside the barricade to gather supplies are shot at for fun, and her makeshift infirmary nearly overflows with the wounded. He gets squeamish when he sees blood, but he chooses to stay and help her. She gives him an unfathomable look before returning to a man’s bleeding thigh.
The first cannonball hits when they are just finishing up their work. He grabs her by the arm, drags her away, and to his surprise, she goes without a fight. All around them, the barricade splinters and crumbles, shards of wood falling out like the tears of men whose arms shake under the weight of a musket.
He climbs into the sewer first and holds out a hand to help her in.
Screams and loud gunshots all blend together. Someone cries out in pain. She closes her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” her mouth reads, and she slams the manhole cover back in place.
“Jemma!” he wails, banging hopelessly against the grating, although he knows that’s not her name and she will not listen. No matter who she is, she can never listen to him over the thumping of her too-large heart.
Her back turned to him, she marches straight into the chaos. The barricade is overrun, National Guards flooding the wine shop to flush out the last of the rebels, and one finds her digging out a bullet from someone’s torso. The guard raises his sword.
She falls and lies sickly still. Red pools around her like a blossoming flower, until the flower wilts and someone throws her on a cart to be wheeled away, one more building brick to the tower of corpses.
Fitz keeps his eyes open the whole time.
vi.
There is a monster locked up in the basement, and it is neither dead nor alive so long as no one checks up on it. So when Fitz opens Vault D to see the monster still very much alive, his vision turns a violent crimson and he launches himself blindly at it.
It’s your fault, says a kick to the side. You made her into this, screams a punch to the throat.You killed her, bellows a fist that makes his nose crunch. Ward takes each blow without retaliation, and when Fitz stops to catch his breath, panting and blinking away his frenzied rage, Ward simply pushes him off his chest.
On the cold cell floor, Fitz finally lets months of frustration and anguish rip himself apart, as he curls up and weeps like a child that he is and that this life doesn’t allow him to be. The man who was once his friend sits cross-legged beside him in silence, his sorrowful eyes trained blankly ahead.
Vulnerable, lamenting, Fitz tells him about the machine, the could-have-been’s, the what-if’s, the time he tries not to let her die and the time he sees her dead. And, amidst the stale darkness that clings to his hoarse voice, he mourns a girl upstairs who’s alive but not living.
“Your problem, Fitz,” Ward speaks up when everything falls silent, “is that you get so caught up in being the hero who’s willing to die to protect his heart, you forget sometimes the hero is also the one who soldiers on even with his heart ripped out.”
vii.
He doesn’t listen to Ward, of course. Since when did he take advice from a traitor? So he keeps on going, keeps on saving every version of her that he possibly can.
Take the well-lit way home.
Don’t board the Titanic.
Avoid that chemical.
Look out for that car.
Often times he succeeds, and she lives. But there are times when he watches her die, and he comes back kicking and screaming until the lab is a withered wreck. Several more weeks pass, whispers around the Playground say Coulson is considering taking her off life support.
Then one night, while Fitz resumes his usual place by her bed to do some light sketches of a new design, her EEG readings begin to spike. He rushes to take her hand. His calloused fingers wrap around slender ones that are so pale blueish veins are showing. Her eyelashes flutter, and the room crackles with hope.
“Please wake up, Jemma,” he whispers like a prayer, brushes her hair back, and presses a kiss on her papery forehead. “I’m so tired of running between universes. Please give me a reason to stay.”
It takes a few more hours of nothing but fluttering lashes for him to realize she is going to do just that, and a few more to realize it is, in fact, in Morse code that she’s blinking. He whips his sketchbook out and starts to write.
3 words, repeated over and over.
.-.. . - — . -.. .. .
Let me die.
viii.
Fitz sits alone in the lab, toying with his dimension hopper, but his mind is worlds away. Tomorrow they will pull the plug. Tomorrow she will be gone. In all the months since he first got the machine up and running, he has seen her die a few times, and each time it has felt like an exploding bullet lodging its splinters into his chest, but he lives by latching onto the knowledge that his Jemma is still breathing back home. Now, even his Jemma will soon be dead, and he wishes he never had a heart in the first place. Maybe then the exploding bullet wouldn’t hurt him.
But he does have a heart, and as long as he’s alive it will keep beating, each throb driving the splinters deeper, deeper still, until dying becomes the kinder alternative. He isn’t Ward. He can’t choose to simply rip his heart away and soldier on. Besides, his heart isn’t even his to begin with. The traitorous thing beats for her, bleeds for her, and he gave it to her the day he found out it momentarily stopped working when she plunged out of the sky.
So, with a hand over his chest, he fires up the dimension hopper.
ix.
He’s in the corner of some storage, blinking in confusion, when he sees them rush in and slam the door shut to keep Ward out. The cold of panic seeps into his blood. He only has a mere minute before the pod is ejected.
Then they are falling. He can barely hear their scream over the voice in his head. Save her, it roars. Save her.
So he does. He jumps out and wraps his arms around her to try and cushion the fall. In her fear, she doesn’t realize there are two of him; her eyes are so tightly shut. They land, and his vision fades to a dull black.
He is shaken awake by his alternate-self, who regained consciousness first and is now gaping at him, left arm bent at an odd angle. While he helps the other him set the bones and put his arm in a cast, he explains everything.
“So what is gonna happen to you?” his younger self asks.
He holds out his hands. The skin has turned almost translucent, and he feels a bit light-headed. “I think I’m beginning to fade from existence,” he replies.
The other him stays quiet. For a while only her level breathing and the hum of the ocean fill in the silence.
“Do you regret it?” he finally begins, shifting his broken left arm in its cast a little. “Erasing yourself and everyone else from history for her?”
He rubs his stubble and laughs. “You’re me. Of course you know the answer.”
“Well, true. And I’d say I would never regret it. But it’s easier for me to just sit here and speculate, when I’m not the one making the hard decisions.”
“Don’t weep for me, golden boy. I will live on within you,” he quips. The effect on his hands has spread, and his entire arms are now transparent. “She will wake up soon. When you two finally figure out a way to escape, give her the oxygen, okay? You’re a lousy swimmer.”
“Aren’t you gonna tell me how to get out of this damn thing?”
“You’re a genius. Figure it out yourself.”
“Wow, I really am an arrogant arse,” his alternate-self mutters.
He recedes to a dark corner and watches the two of them from afar as she slowly regains consciousness. It is strange, like an out-of-body experience, hazy and sort of chimerical, but then again he is already woozy from his gradual dematerialization. They talk logistics, the other him with all his math and calculation, and she with her sheer happiness at not dying.
It almost pains him to watch, how beautiful it is to be alive with her.
He can’t see his body now. He tries to flex his fingers, but he can’t even feel their presence. His nerve endings have disappeared. What remains in this pod is only his consciousness.
They’re discussing life after death, and his other self is talking about drowning, the idiot. He is always so literal, so blunt, so rough at the edges. She comes along and suddenly he finds beauty in the ethereal, the temperate. He wakes up each morning thankful for another day to live, to care.
“I’d like to think about the first law of thermodynamics,” she says, and here at the bottom of the ocean she seems to glow, like a half-moon poised above this worldly chaos, “that no energy in the universe is created, and none is destroyed.”
My sun, my moon, he thinks as he begins to flicker in and out of existence. How many lives have we lived? How many you and me have been forged from stars? And in how many worlds out there have I loved you?
“That means that every bit of energy inside us, every particle, will go on to be a part of something else.”
Doesn’t matter. Somewhere, somewhen, they will tell the story of us, one where you and I get our happy ending. Space is boundless and time is infinite, and I will love you for just as long.