Archive of Our Own

“Frank? Honey? C’mon, it’s after ten.”

A hand on his arm shook him gently in time to his pounding headache, which spiked in agony as Frank cracked his eyes open and a sunbeam from the window shot into his skull. He grunted and shut his eyes again, turned his face into the pillow so he didn’t puke.

The hand on his arm persisted, shaking him again. “Frank.” Maria’s voice filtered through, disappointment creeping in around the edges. “We promised the kids we’d go to the park today.”

“Ok, ok, I’m up, I’m up,” Frank said. He sat up with his eyes closed and his stomach didn’t hit the escape hatch. “When’re we goin’?”

“Just after breakfast.” She leaned in and kissed his forehead. “You’d better hurry before the kids eat it all.”

With that, she stood again and disappeared out into the hall and down the stairs, calling for Lisa and Junior to eat while the food was hot. Frank took advantage of his solitude to quietly curse a blue streak. Inch by painful inch, he pulled his body out of bed and made it to the bathroom without breaking anything. The face in the mirror greeted him haggardly, circles under his eyes that made him look nearly as tired as he felt. Dull insomnia had been stretching his nights out like taffy, and he’d only fallen asleep for good around dawn. Frank tried smiling; it looked brittle and plastic.

Three excedrins, a hot shower, and some clean clothes made him presentable. He took a deep breath and descended the stairs like going into the belly of the beast.

“It’s my cup! Get your own!” Lisa said, holding the black one with its skull-and-crossbones pirate flag out of her brother’s reach.

Junior jumped for it, thwarted as Lisa stepped out of the way. “You always want the pirate cup.”

“It’s my cup! Daddy got it for me!” Lisa insisted.

“He got me the hundred dalmatians blanket and I don’t care if you use that,” Junior said.

“That’s because it’s super lame.”

“Mom!”

Deftly, Maria got between them and broke up the fight just as Frank sat down, a quick, “Frankie, stop bothering your sister—you have your own special Transformers cup that grandma gave you.” And, “We don’t use that language in this house, Lisa. Apologize to your brother.”

“Sorry,” Lisa muttered, and it was over.

Give me active duty any day, Frank thought, watching Maria with no small amount of wonder as she took the seat across from him and began forking pancakes onto her and the kids’ plates. Frank snagged a few for himself and choked them down with the help of two cups of black coffee. The breakfast chatter washed over him like ocean waves, and Frank tried not to think about the undertow, how much he just wanted to go back to sleep.

Once they located Lisa’s shoes (behind the couch) and Junior’s baseball cap that he’d whine too much without (in the hall closet), Maria packed the kids and Frank into the car and they set off towards the park. Frank tapped his fingers on the passenger side door and watched the streets pass from behind the darkest pair of sunglasses he owned. By some miracle—or, more likely, the tablets they’d gotten last Christmas—the kids stayed quiet for the ride and let Frank’s headache fade into the background static of his overall exhaustion.

The park threatened to bring it back: the heat of the sun overhead radiating off the asphalt under his feet, the shouts of a group of teenagers playing volleyball, the chemical smell of chlorine from a fountain they passed. A few minutes’ walk down the path brought them to the carousel, and the kids ran directly for it while Frank staked his claim on a park bench in the shade before anyone else sat down. Maria joined him, and they watched the gaudy, gilded horses go up and down against the carousel’s mirrored background, Junior doing finger-guns and playing cowboy, Lisa riding the one she called ‘Princess Celestia’—whatever the hell that meant.

God, he wished Billy could’ve made it today. Back in the marines, in his old unit, Billy had acted as de facto interrogator when ops took them too far out to get one official. They all used to say his looks and his charm could get blood out of a stone. He’d have Maria distracted and the kids too enamored by their Uncle Bill to notice Frank drifting and half-awake.

“Frankie, stop that!” Maria scooted to the edge of the bench, poised to spring up. “You’re going to fall off!”

Junior jumped a little, startled at being caught, and stopped trying to hang upside down and took hold of the pole the horse rode on with one hand, pointing to it with the other and a faux-innocent look as if to say, See? Nothing to worry about.

Snorting, Maria sat back again and under Frank’s arm when he lifted it to drape across her shoulders. She watched the kids on the carousel, and he watched her with a sudden swelling of love in his chest that took him off-guard like it always did, like a geyser bursting out of the earth. In profile, she looked regal, like a face that should be stamped on a coin for a whole kingdom to see, for some scholar to discover centuries later and put in a museum. The tiredness that had blanketed him ever since he got back from his last tour didn’t lift, but the pain of it lessened as he kissed the top of Maria’s head and she leaned against him.

After a minute of watching the kids in light-spun silence, Maria ducked out from under his arm and stood. “I’m gonna use the bathroom, that coffee went right through me.” She smiled a little, laughing at herself, and bent down to kiss his forehead. “Be right back.”

She walked off down the path towards the public restrooms, and Frank watched the carousel, the loop of it hypnotic. Stifling a yawn with his fist, he wondered if he could sneak a catnap in when Maria got back, the heat of the day making him drowsy. Frank got to his feet and stretched so he didn’t fall asleep with the kids on his watch—Maria would kill him, and she’d be right to—and went over to the side of the carousel.

They had the place nearly to themselves today, the one other family and their boy a few years younger than Junior leaving just as Frank arrived and asked, “You sick of it yet?” to a giggling Lisa and Junior.

“No!” Lisa said, grinning widely, accompanied by Junior’s, “I wanna go again!”

“Ok, one more time,” Frank said magnanimously. “But that’s it. I don’t need you hurling in the car on the way back.” He doubled over and made hacking noises for the effect, like a cat trying to cough up a hairball.

“Ewwwww!” Lisa shrieked, until the carousel started again and distracted her.

Smiling, Frank turned to look for Maria, and saw her walking back towards them up the path. He raised his hand to wave her over and—

She was on the ground.

Not then, nor at any point after, could Frank remember seeing her fall. Just—she was walking, she was on the ground, and there was a dark pool spreading from beneath her body, and for long, stupid, costly seconds, he couldn’t make his brain comprehend what he was seeing.

Ironic, in retrospect. With all the times he’d seen a dead body.

The sound came again, the sound he hadn’t registered in the first place, gunfire and screaming. His kids, screaming. And Frank was screaming too, trying to jump on the still-moving carousel and grab them, yelling at them to tuck and roll and jump off their horses, and they were crying and calling for him, “Daddy, Daddy.”

“C’mon, Lisa, I got you, I—” Lisa fell into his arms, but she hadn’t jumped from her horse. She flopped limply against him as Frank lost his footing and fell, something wet soaking his shirt from the mess that was left of her head.

He screamed for Junior and saw him there on the floor, his face intact but his eyes glassy and sightless, his face still terrified. The bullets had torn through him, ripping the front of his soccer jersey. Somehow, his hat hadn’t fallen off. Futilely, Frank crawled towards him, still holding Lisa to his chest, and the world stopped.

The bright day turned dark like an eclipse, like evening at noontime. For a hopeful second, Frank thought he was dead, but he looked down and found the corpse of his daughter still in his lap with his son’s laying alongside, and knew he hadn’t followed them. His head whipped around, looking for—he didn’t know what he was looking for. Nothing mattered now.

Movement caught his eye, and he spun towards it. His own reflection stared back from the side of the carousel, and there was something around it, the only light in the rapidly fading darkness. A green sort of glow that surrounded him like some sort of aura.

Without quite knowing why, Frank reached towards it, and the darkness closed in on him like a candle blown out in a windowless room.

*

“Frank? Honey? C’mon, it’s after ten.”

He surged up, gasping like he’d spent too long underwater. Maria started, her eyes wide in alarm and alive—she was alive—and Frank grabbed her and pulled her into his arms.

“Oh!” she said, surprised, but Frank had his ear to her chest, listening to her heart, and he didn’t care and couldn’t speak. “Frank?” she asked after a minute, strained. “Frank, I can’t breathe.”

“Sorry,” Frank said. He relaxed his grip slowly, allowing Maria to extricate herself from his arms.

She sighed and raised a hand to his cheek. “Nightmare?”

Jerkily, Frank nodded. “Yeah. Bad one.” He turned his face to her palm and kissed it. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s ok,” she said, smiled, and kissed his forehead before standing. “Breakfast is almost ready. You’ll want to hurry before the kids eat it all.”

Frank watched her back as she left, her body whole and unblemished. Closing his eyes, he listened to the muffled but recognizable sounds of his children’s voices carrying through the house. God. He ran his nails across his scalp, breathed out shakily. It’d seemed so real. Even now, the dream didn’t fade as he dry-swallowed excedrin for his headache, showered and dressed. It stayed present as a memory, haunting him as he made his way down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“It’s my cup! Get your own!” Lisa said, holding the pirate cup out of Junior’s reach.

The sight of it froze Frank in the doorway. Just like in his dream. “Junior, you’ve got your Transformers cup. Stop bothering your sister,” Frank said quickly, afraid of what they might say next if he didn’t, of how the scene might play out.

“But she always gets the pirate cup,” Junior pouted.

“I’ll tell you what. If you’re good, you’ll get one for Christmas,” Frank said. “Now, sit. Both of you.”

“Yes, sir,” they chorused, slinking over to the table, and Maria smiled at him in gratitude.

That’s different, Frank though t as he sat down, shaking off the déjà vu. See? That’s different.

Halfway through her pancakes, Lisa launched into a long-winded explanation of the show she’d been watching, something called My Little Pony that Frank thought he just might put on the next time he had insomnia. Not to be outdone, Junior started in loudly about the latest Transformers, proclaiming that giant robots were much cooler. Maria headed them off at the pass before the conversation could become an argument, reorienting it towards what they’d learned at school that week, and Frank listened like he hadn’t bothered to the last time.

No—there hadn’t been a last time. Frank swallowed his coffee a little too fast, singing his tongue in the process. Focused on the brief spot of pain and told himself again, there hadn’t been a last time.

He cleared the table and told Maria he’d take care of the dishes as she cajoled and wrestled the kids into appropriate outfits for this weather, hunting down their clothes from various parts of the house: “And Lisa, where are your shoes?”

“Did you check behind the couch?” Frank heard his own voice ask, then held his breath and watched the water stream from the faucet and down the drain.

A beat, and Maria said. “Got ‘em. Thanks!”

It played over in his head as Maria drove and the kids sat quietly in the back on their tablets. Junior had his baseball cap on; Frank didn’t ask where he’d found it. Frank gritted his teeth, bringing on another wave of his headache like an aftershock. Jesus, he must’ve seen Lisa kick her shoes back behind the couch when she took them off after school yesterday, and they’d argued about that damned cup more times than he could count. He really should get Junior his own, and then the kids would have to find something new to fight over, at least give them some variety. Frank smiled a little at that thought the rest of the way to the park.

The sun shone hot, the fountain smelled of chlorine, and Frank didn’t look at the teenagers playing volleyball as they passed them. It was summer; there were always kids playing volleyball. If Billy were here, Frank could talk to him about it or at least talk around it and get it out of his head—but Billy wasn’t here. Frank shook his head and followed Maria and the kids up the path, so intent on catching up and talking his stupid brain out of the start of its spiral that he didn’t notice the carousel until the kids were running towards it.

He took an abortive step after them, mouth open to call them back, and stopped himself at the last second. No point, when it’d just been a dream, a freakishly vivid dream that still hadn’t faded, that threatened to make his throat close up in panic at the sight of his children riding on the carousel where he so clearly remembered holding their dead bodies.

“Hey. Are you ok?” Maria asked, her hand settling on his shoulder and her fingers gently digging into the muscle.

“Yeah.” Frank forced it out, forced a smile. “I’m fine.”

Maria peered at him a moment longer, her brow creased in worry. “Ok,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “You watch them for a minute, I’m gonna use the bathroom.” Smiled, and added, “That coffee went rightthrough me.”

And before Frank could stop her, she was gone, and he was torn between her retreating back and his children laughing on the carousel. Maria must’ve said that before, he thought furiously, desperately. She’d said it before, and it’d gotten lodged in his subconscious, and she just so happened to say it again now. Just effect following cause, his mind remembering it differently in response to what she said.

If he hadn’t been looking, Frank never would’ve seen him, didn’t even realize he’d been scanning the area until he caught sight of the man half-hidden behind a tree. Something about him rang with horrible familiarity, his military posture, the bulge of his jacket to hide the gun in his belt. Like the war on the other side of the ocean that Frank thought he’d left behind. The grass under Frank’s feet and the park around him turned to sepia and desert sand in a snapshot second as he started towards the man, snapped back the next.

Halfway between the carousel and the treeline, the man went still as he seemingly noticed Frank’s advance and stepped back into shadow. “Hey!” Frank called, jogging towards him as he turned tail and ran deeper into the trees. “Hey!”

But the man was already gone. Shaking his head, Frank looked back to the carousel before Maria returned and found he’d left the kids unattended, and then he saw her walking down the path and moved to intercept.

This time, he heard the gunshot. Earth-shattering, impossibly loud, it echoed in his ears. He still didn’t see Maria fall. Just, one second, she was waking, and the next, she was on the ground in that dark pool of liquid he didn’t want to define, and Frank knew this part, remembered what came next. He ran for the carousel in slow-motion like the air had turned to water, his mind a litany of no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no—

Screams cut out suddenly. Frank saw it all from the distance where he uselessly ran, like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The mess where Lisa’s head used to be. The bullets tearing through Junior’s back and exploding out of the front of his soccer jersey. A scream tore out of Frank’s chest and throat, one that he thought should’ve split him apart.

He ran, but the carousel grew no closer, sitting there like a painted set background and fading along with the park around it. As it grew dark again and the green light began to glow around him, Frank held on to the one solid thought he had while everything else went formless and shifting: he’d known that man, the one who’d run from him, recognized his face half-burned and massed with scars. A face from across the mess hall, sleeping in a cot not so far from Frank’s own, a fellow marine in his old unit.

Gosnell.

Frank fixed the name in his mind with everything he had as the green light surrounded him and threw him again into the black.

*

A blink, and he jerked awake, his body stiff as sleep paralysis and his heart beating so hard he could feel it in the tips of his fingers and toes. Frank breathed out shakily, watching the play of early morning sunlight across his bedroom ceiling and willing the dream (dreams?) to fade back into that half-forgotten place dreams go on waking. They didn’t, but he forced his lungs to draw in air and his body to relax until he could pretend they did.

Maria lay at his side, asleep. Frank rolled over and pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead; she didn’t even stir. God, she was beautiful. His throat swelled shut and his eyes stung, and Frank got out of bed as gently as he could, made it into the hall before the dry sobs of his panic attack hit.

Part of him hovered detached, like watching himself from above. You are having a panic attack, it announced to him, mechanically dispassionate. Frank dug his nails into his palms and breathed slowly, in through his nose, out through his mouth. Counted backwards from fifty. By the time he’d finished, he could breathe again, and he ran a yet-unsteady hand over his face.

The sight of Lisa’s partially-closed door threatened to plunge him back into the drowning fear. Slowly, like checking and clearing a building back in Afghanistan, he moved silently towards it and peered around the corner. Lisa lay asleep in her bed, the Jurassic Park sheets pulled up to her chin. Frank’s vision blurred as he looked at her, and he wiped tears away from his eyes, stepped back into the hall before his shuddering breaths could wake her. Recovered—at least, recovered enough—he checked on Junior and found him on his back in his Star Wars pajamas with the covers kicked off. Frank watched his thin chest rise and fall for as long as he could stand, trying not to see the places where the bullets had ripped through.

Residual fear and the still-present, still-too-vivid dream wouldn’t let him sleep, and Frank thought he’d rather belly-crawl under a mile of barbed wire rather than let Maria see him like this. He retreated to the kitchen and filled a glass of water from the tap, drank half of it in one go and set it down on the counter, where he braced his hands and bowed his head, squeezed his eyes shut. He saw the carousel like a goddamn movie playing in high resolution and opened them again. Hell, maybe Curt was right and he should see the VA about getting his head shrunk, maybe that’d—

Curt. The memory of someone from his old unit jogged another, the face he’d seen in his dream. Gosnell. Rage gripped him with breathtaking speed in that he literally couldn’t breathe for a good few seconds past his need to find Gosnell and—Jesus Christ. And what? It wasn’t the guy’s fault he’d appeared in Frank’s fucking dream. He rubbed at his temples and sighed.

“Frank?”

An unfamiliar voice, a man’s voice, shot him through with adrenaline and alarm. Frank spun around in half a second, grabbing a knife from the block as he went, raising it to slash and stab at the intruder.

The stranger’s appearance saved him, bizarre enough that it gave Frank the barest moment’s pause and allowed the other man to avoid the knife. He backed up with his hands raised, hands clad like the rest of him in a dark red suit that looked like some sort of body armor, and his mask...his mask covered most of his face, save for his mouth, and had little devil horns poking out from the corners of his forehead.

“Frank, it’s me,” the man said like that was supposed to mean something.

Squinting in confusion, Frank didn’t lower the knife. “Who the fuck are you, and why the fuck are you in my house?” he asked quietly, knowledge of Maria and the kids upstairs lowering his voice; he didn’t need them running into this.

The man recoiled like he’d been slapped. “Oh. You don’t recognize me,” he said, and, like resignation, “Of course you don’t, you’re here. Ok.” His hands went to his mask and lifted it off.

Red hair, blue eyes, the latter cloudy and unfocused. A face like the kind you’d expect on the cover of a magazine. Frank felt a surge of annoyance at his own surprise—he just hadn’t thought someone who dressed like that would look that good.

“Hi. I’m Matt,” the man said. “When I was a kid, I got some chemicals splashed into my eyes that blinded me and enhanced my other senses. Have you heard of the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen?”

“Uh.” A little, come to think of it. Here and there in the news. “Yeah?”

“That’s me,” Matt said, casual as you please, like it didn’t even cross his mind Frank could call the police and report him breaking and entering.

Pins and needles started to dance down his arm from holding the knife up; Frank lowered it. “Ok, Matt. You’ve got about ten seconds to give me a real good reason not to throw you out on your ear.”

“I know what’s happening to you. You’re stuck in a time loop,” Matt said. “How’s that?”

The relief of the acknowledgment, of hearing it from someone else, made Frank want to cry. He set the knife down on the counter before he dropped it. “A time loop,” he repeated.

Matt shrugged. “Yeah.”

“You know that sounds like something from the fuckin’ Twilight Zone,” Frank said. “Shit, you’re probably—I’ve gotta be drugged or something. I got in an accident, I’m in a coma, and—”

“Frank,” Matt said, cutting him off. Something about it held familiarity, like he was used to having Frank’s name in his mouth. “We don’t have time. I can only be here at the top of the arc, when the loop resets. If it goes on…” he trailed off, bit his lip. “You need to stop this.”

“Stop what?” Frank asked. “I’m not doing anything.”

But Matt went on stubbornly, said, “You are. You keep going back. It wouldn’t keep happening if you weren’t.”

“What are you—shit,” Frank swore, anger like a rising wave in his chest. “You son of a bitch. I just watched my family die twice and you’re telling me it’s gonna keep happening and this is somehow my fuckin’ fault?”

“No! No, it’s not your fault,” Matt said quickly, almost before he’d finished. “Someone is doing this to you, but every time you go back, it’s your decision. That’s what he wants.”

“He? He who?” Frank asked, flashing back to Gosnell and all the branching possibilities if that hadn’t been a dream.

For a second, he thought Matt wouldn’t answer. He opened and shut his mouth a few times, then said, “Someone from another dimension who wants to destroy this one.”

The absurdity of it startled a laugh out of Frank’s throat. “Jesus. You’re serious.”

“Frank, listen to me. Every time the loop resets, it’s going to get worse,” Matt told him with quiet urgency, giving the words more force than if he’d shouted. “You need to stop this.”

“How? How do I stop it?” Frank asked desperately, ready to beg and bargain and give everything he had if he just didn’t have to see it again.

“Break the loop,” Matt said, and before Frank could ask what the fuck he meant by that, he tilted his head like a dog, like picking up a sound too faint for Frank to hear. “I’m almost out of time. Please try to remember.”

Which brought to the forefront the things he didn’t, how this stranger knew his name, talked to him like a friend. “How do I—?” know you, Frank didn’t quite get out. The room dimmed like the sun dipping below the horizon, even though it was barely an hour past dawn. “Are you gonna come back?” he asked instead, grasping at even this dubious sort of help.

“I’ll come back,” Matt said, the world fading to dark around him, until only his voice remained. “As many times as it takes.”

*

“Frank? Honey? C’mon, it’s after ten.”

He was in bed again, Maria’s hand on his shoulder. Frank kept his eyes closed against it, against the renewed pounding in his head, and all he could think was, not again, not again.

The hand rubbed down his back, and Maria sighed. “We promised the kids we’d go to—”

“Maria?” Frank asked, before she could say the word park. “Will you lay down with me for a minute?”

He felt her hesitate, the hand go still. “Frank, I’ve got breakfast on.”

“Please. Just for a minute,” he said.

Another second, and she settled down onto the mattress next to him. Frank rolled over and held her in his arms gently, not like the last time, when he’d squeezed too hard and had to let go. He tucked his nose into the crook of her neck, smelling in the scent of that lavender soap she used.

“I had a nightmare,” Frank said.

She hummed a little, intoned concern. “What about?”

“War. You and the kids were there. I don’t want to talk about it,” Frank told her. He rubbed his thumb between her shoulder blades and knew dream or not, he couldn’t do this again. He couldn’t see that carousel without trying to break it to pieces with his bare hands.“Maria, I can’t go to the park today.”

Her body went stiff against his, hardened in frustration that leaked into her voice when she spoke. “We promised them, Frank. How many times have—?” Maria stopped herself there, continued, “You know it’s not good for you to just sit inside all day.”

“I know, I know,” Frank said. He ducked his head and kissed her collarbone. “I couldn’t sleep again last night. I think I got maybe three hours, and my head is fuckin’ killing me. If we go to the park, I’m gonna end up with my head in a trashcan, and I don’t want the kids to see that.”

“Ok,” Maria said, hugging him to her chest. “Go back to sleep. I’ll take the kids.”

She moved as if to stand, but Frank grabbed her before she could, hoped she couldn’t feel the rapid speed of his pulse. “Wait. You don’t have to—what about the museum passes?” Frank asked frantically. “We still got those?”

“You want to go to the museum?” Maria asked dubiously, pulling back to look at him.

“It’s inside, it’s air conditioned, and it’s quiet. I think I can handle it,” Frank said. “And you know Lisa loves the dinosaurs. I don’t want to disappoint them.”

“Ok,” Maria said, lighter this time, and kissed him. “Breakfast is almost ready. You’d better hurry up before the kids eat it all.”

In the bathroom, three excedrins and a hot shower. Back in the bedroom, clothes. Downstairs, Frank kicked Lisa’s shoes out from behind the couch and moved Junior’s hat from the hall closet to the coffee table, made it into the kitchen to find the kids and Maria already sitting down. The pirate cup sat in front of Lisa’s plate, Junior drinking orange juice out of the Transformers cup Maria’s mother had given him, and Frank hadn’t heard them argue about it. Then again, he hadn’t been listening.

Break the loop, Matt had said. Phantom and figment, his apparition and warning lingered as they finished breakfast and loaded the kids into the car, as they headed out towards the museum. Frank closed his eyes behind his sunglasses and tried to untangle the mystery around him. Everything else came from pieced together bits of Frank’s past and anxiety, but Matt was new, his face too real and vivid to be solely the product of imagination. He was new, and yet—

They arrived at the museum before Frank could finish the thought. As they passed through the halls, he watched Maria and the kids more than the displays. Lisa’s eyes lighting up in the dinosaur hall, gaping at the T-Rex skeleton until Maria dragged her away. Frankie watching the animatronic reproduction of a mastodon and giant ground sloth in silent fascination. The history of plant life always caught Maria’s attention, and Frank distracted the kids with an improvised game of rock-paper-scissors so she could stay there longer, reading the signs and placards.

No shadowy figures lurked in the corners or behind doorways. The war didn’t touch this place. By the time they left, Frank had half-convinced himself the park and the carousel and Matt had simply been the products of an unusually clear and horrific nightmare. Walking out of the museum and into the sun, he almost thought he could smile.

Something tugged his sleeve. “Daddy, can we get hotdogs for lunch? Please?” Lisa asked, looking up at him plaintively.

"Hotdogs!” Junior exclaimed, turning to each of his parents. He put on his best polite voice and said, “I want one!”

Following the trajectory of Lisa’s pointing figure, Frank saw the hotdog vendor on the corner and exchanged a glance with Maria. What the hell. Hotdogs were cheap.

“Ok, we can get hotdogs,” Frank said, hugging Lisa and Junior to his side and chucking as they cheered.

“But we’re having a salad with dinner tonight,” Maria added, and they started down the steps.

A car idled on the curb outside the museum, all shiny black and tinted windows. Frank didn’t notice it until it was too late, until the doors opened and the men stepped out, four of them with ski masks and semi-automatics. Through the eye holes of one of them, Frank thought he could see the burnt-skin aftermath of an IED blast.

Time seemed to slow. Frank jumped in front of his family and drew in a breath that he never got to release into a scream. The world exploded into gunfire, shattering loud. Some of the rounds hit Frank this time, and he was falling onto the bodies of his wife and children, into blood and viscera, into blackness and that ghostly green light.

*

His bedroom ceiling, just after dawn. Maria asleep at his side. Frank covered his mouth and escaped into the hall again to fall apart. Hands on his knees, he heaved out his breaths until they returned to something approaching normal. Like the last time, he nearly balked at the door to Lisa’s bedroom, and like the last time, he found her and Junior sleeping peacefully in their beds.

In the kitchen, Matt already waited, leaning against the wall with his devil-horned mask sitting on the table. Frank wanted to throw it in his face, but he filled a glass of water instead and drank half of it at once, like even he had some patterns he couldn’t escape. Still, it fortified him enough to face Matt, his ridiculous good looks and his equally ridiculous suit.

His eyes didn’t focus—if you believed him, they couldn’t—but his attention seemed to reorient towards Frank. “How many times is this now?”

“Three,” Frank told him, the word torn out. “I’ve watched my family die three times, and I don’t think I can—” He blinked away tears, leaned his head back so they didn’t fall. “I need to know what you know about it. Please.”

“I know you can’t keep doing this,” Matt said. “And Strange says you’re the only one who can stop it.”

"Strange?” Frank asked. Part of him wanted to laugh—yeah, this whole thing was pretty goddamn strange.

Matt’s mouth went thin. “That’s right, you don’t—he’s a sorcerer. Kind of the sorcerer.”

And Frank did laugh, hysteria bubbling out of him. “A sorcerer. A sorcerer. There’s a fuckin’ sorcerer now?”

“Frank, we don’t have time for this,” Matt said snappishly, then sighed through his nose. “Dr. Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme. You’re stuck in a time loop, and he sent me back in time to get you out of it.”

“Ok,” Frank said, easier to humor him than keep arguing. “Are you a sorcerer, too?”

Matt laughed in surprise. “No.”

"Then why ain’t this, uh, sorcerer here if he’s the expert?” Frank asked.

"Because you have a better track record of listening to me,” Matt told him, and before Frank could ask, moved away from the wall where he leaned and gestured for Frank to follow.

He did, and they stepped together onto the back porch. “What does the sky look like?” Matt asked.

“What?” Frank squinted at him in confusion. If anything, seeing him in daylight sank him deeper into the uncanny valley.

“I can’t see it. I need you to tell me,” Matt said, then, “It’s important, Frank.”

So, Frank looked up. “It’s uh, normal, I guess,” he said. “Blue, a few clouds.”

“Ok. It’s not too late,” Matt said, nodding sharply like approval. “But I don’t know how many more loops you have before things start to crack.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know, exactly. You’ll know when you see it, and I really hope that you won’t,” Matt said cryptically. He frowned and half-turned like he’d heard something. “I don’t have much longer. You need to stop it.”

Desperately, Frank nearly reached for him as the world around them dimmed, for something to hold onto. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“Frank, you’re the most resourceful and the most bullheaded person I know. You’ll figure it out,” Matt told him with a confidence Frank wished he felt in himself.

His hand fell on Frank’s shoulder, and Frank leaned into it and the modicum of comfort it provided before it and everything else disappeared.

*

“Frank, honey? C’mon it’s—”

“I know, I know, I’m up,” Frank said quickly, sitting before she could finish the sentence; he thought he’d scream if she did.

In the half-lit bedroom, the lights of and sunlight creeping through gaps in the blinds, she looked fragile. Or maybe the memory of how easily bullets cut through her body would do that. Frank lifted a hand to the side of her face and swiped his thumb across her cheekbone.

She turned her face to his hand and kissed it. “Are you ok?”

“Just a nightmare,” Frank said. “And about three hours of sleep.” He withdrew his hand, let it drop down to his lap. “Maria, I can’t do the park today.”

“Frank, we promised the kids,” she reminded him, but even her disappointment felt like the warmth of a fire on a cold night, knowing she was alive enough to give it to him.

“It’s just the people, and being outside, and I can’t do that today.” Frank hugged his arms around his middle. “I’m not ok, Maria.”

The disappointment turned to worry in the lines of her face, pinching her forehead and the corners of her mouth. “I know,” she said softly, kindly, and offered him a small smile. “I’ve just been waiting for you to say it.” Leaning in, she kissed his forehead. “Get some sleep. I’ll take the kids, and we’ll talk about this—”

"No,” Frank said, grabbing her arm before she could get up. Too hard, and he let go. “Please, can you stay home today? You and the kids? Listen, I’m gonna call Curt tomorrow, ok? I’ll call him tomorrow, and we’ll go to the VA on Monday and we’ll see about finding someone for me to talk to. I just want to spend time with you today.”

And Maria smiled again, wide and real, and kissed his cheek. “I think the kids will like that.”

They did—or at least Maria had quashed any argument by the time Frank took his three excedrins and his shower, put on clothes, and made it into the kitchen. He imagined her voice, firm but gentle: “Be nice to Daddy. He isn’t feeling well.”

True to form, the kids said their “Good morning” in unison and ate breakfast quietly, then went to brush their teeth in get dressed without any of the usual fuss. Frank spend the afternoon on the couch with an arm around each one and Maria’s feet propped in his lap, The Lion King and then The Road to El Dorado playing on the TV without him seeing either.

Kids being kids, they got restless after the second movie, Junior climbing over Frank and trying to crawl along the back of the couch, Lisa hanging backwards off the cushions. Maria stood and stretched, twisting back and forth at the waist, and then bent down to kiss him. “I’m gonna make dinner,” she said. “Think you can keep them busy?”

"Yeah, of course,” Frank said. He looked out the window at the dappled sunlight shining through a tree, and his heart skipped. Even the thought of playing catch with them in his own backyard smothered him under the implicit threat. He got Junior off the back of the couch—“you can’t play back there, it’s dangerous”—and got Lisa to sit up.

Once he had their attention, Frank put on his serious face and looked at his kids wide-eyed, looking at him back. “There’s something I’ve been trying to figure out, and I’m wondering if you could help me.” He paused for effect. “So, the problem we’re facing here is whether or not we can build a pillow fort that will cover the entire basement. What do you think?”

“I think we have to test it,” Lisa said just as seriously, biting back a smile.

Junior was already up, running for the stairs. “I’ll get my pillows!” he said.

“I’ll get the winter blankets!” Lisa announced, running after.

In the basement, its windows small and its concrete walls holding them in, Frank could almost breathe easy. He helped the kids move the couch they kept down there to use as the central point of the structure and then watched them build towers of pillows to drape the blankets from. Rummaging around in a storage bin, Frank returned with a string of holiday lights to snake under the fort and give them something to see by. Maria wouldn’t be too happy with the mess, he knew, but she’d forgive them if he promised to get it cleaned up.

The door creaked open at the top of the stairs. “Dinner’s ready!” Maria called down.

Frank moved to crawl out from under the blankets, but Lisa took his wrist and held a finger to her lips, Junior clapping a hand over his mouth to hold in the silent giggles shaking his body. What the hell, Frank thought. He hunched down so the top of his head wouldn’t disrupt the outline of the blanket and waited for Maria to get closer.

"Lisa? Frankie? Honey?” Maria started down the steps, reached the bottom and hmphed. “So that’s what you’ve been doing. Ok, I know you’re in there somewhere. I didn’t hear you come upstairs.” Gingerly, she began walking around the edges of the fort. “I swear, you’d better not be trying to scare me—”

Leaping to his feet, Frank roared like a monster from the kids’ movies while they shrieked with laughter and Maria shrieked with surprise as he wrapped her in the blanket and pulled her underneath. “You brat!” she said, extricating herself from Frank’s arms as the kids rearranged the covers that made of the fort’s ceiling, but she smiled as she said it and let Frank kiss her.

“This is nice,” Maria said, not what Frank had expected. He looked at her under the soft glow of the lights, struck by a bolt of the stunned disbelief he’d felt ever since the first morning he’d woken up next to her, at how beautiful she was, that he could be so lucky.

And Frank just had to kiss her again, Lisa’s “Ewwww!” and Junior’s “Gross!” not enough to deter him in the least.

For a moment, Frank forgot the time loop and Matt and the memory-dreams of their deaths. His family sat around him, his wife in his arms and his children under the fort they’d built, in the basement of their house with dinner warm and waiting for them on the floor above, and Frank thought suddenly, fiercely, that he’d do anything for them. He’d play ball with Junior and read Lisa the book she was too old for before she went to bed, he’d go to the VA and go against nearly every grain of the marine culture that forbade showing weakness and be a better husband, the kind his wife deserved.

A high, piercing sound split the air, making them all jump. “Is that the fire alarm?” Maria asked rhetorically as it continued, then scrambled for the edge of the blanket. “I was sure I turned the burner off—ugh!”

Her last word turned into a cough as she lifted the blanket and smoke billowed in, smoke that couldn’t be from something as small or simple as a pan left to long on the stove. Frank threw the rest of the covers off and pulled the kids roughly to their feet. Through the open door at the top of the stairs, orange flames licked up the living room, and Frank could smell it now. The bite of kerosene in his nose.

“Come on!” he shouted, dragging them over to one of the too-small windows he hadn’t opened since moving into the place, trying to wrench them up as the smoke grew thicker and the kids and Maria coughed.

Desperately, Frank tried another window, an attempt he knew was useless even before he saw the beam of a flashlight in his backyard like someone was checking to make sure this took, even before the smoke choked him so badly he collapsed onto his knees next to Maria and the kids struggling to breathe.

At least I don’t have to see it this time, Frank thought, the last one he managed as the green light grew up around him and shoved him back into the dark.

*

Sunlight shifted its pattern across his bedroom ceiling. Maria slept at his side. Out of bed, into the hall before the panic attack hit. Check on the kids—sleeping, unaware. All of them blessedly unaware of the thing shredding Frank from the inside out.

This time, he didn’t bother with the glass of water. Nothing was going to steady him, make him more prepared for this. He stalked into his kitchen and right up to Matt, waiting exactly like he’d been the last time, in that stupid body suit of his save for the mask sitting on Frank’s table.

“I tried,” Frank said without preamble. “I’m trying to change to change things, break the loop like you said. We went to the museum instead of the park, and they shot us as we were leaving. We stayed home, and they burned our fucking house down.” He rubbed at his eyes so the tears didn’t fall, continued, “I don’t know what to do.”

“God,” Matt said quietly. His throat moved as he swallowed. “And you still don’t know what’s causing it?”

Frank shook his head, covered his face with his hands. “No. They die, I wake up in bed like nothing ever happened, and then it starts all over again.”

“Does anything happen after they—I’m sorry,” Matt said. “I can’t imagine what this is like for you, but I’m trying to help.”

“There’s this—” Frank dropped his hands to his sides. “Right before everything blacks out, there’s this, this green light. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Maybe,” Matt said. “Where does the light come from?”

Thinking about it hurt like nails hammered into his skull, but Frank closed his eyes anyway, tried to picture it. “I don’t know,” he said after a minute. “Kind of from everywhere.”

“Ok.” Matt ran his fingers through his hair, leaving whorls of it sticking up, and Frank had to resist the absurd impulse to smooth it. “If it happens again, do you think you can try to get away from it?”

“I can try,” Frank said, trying not to climb too far on hope lest failure plummeted him again into despair. “Do you think that’ll work? Will it save them?”

Matt flinched a little like the question had hurt. He turned his face to the side and didn’t speak.

“If I stop this, will my family be safe?” Frank asked again, and at his continued silence, “You said—you’re from the future, right? You know me there?”

“Yeah, I know you,” Matt said, something about him still wounded. “Better than just about anyone.”

The answer etched itself all over Matt’s face, but Frank couldn’t keep the question in. “What happened to my family, Matt?”

“Please don’t ask me that,” Matt said, agonized.

Frank slammed his fist down on the table hard enough that the devil mask bounced, didn’t even think of Maria and the kids upstairs until after he’d done it. A sneaking suspicion told him that no matter how loud he was, they wouldn’t be able to hear him.

"God damn it!” Frank shouted. “You can’t help me, can you? Shit. You can’t help me,” he said again. “Why the fuck are you even here?”

“Some events are so pivotal that entire realities are structured around them,” Matt said. “Your family dies because that’s what happens. That’s what always happens. They die, and you live, and I would do anything to change that, but I can’t, Frank. I can’t.”

A tear slipped down Matt’s cheek, and he wiped it away. “Every time you go back, every time you try to save them, it breaks the universe a little. And if you do it too many times—it won’t save them. They’ll be destroyed along with everything else. I’m not here to save them, Frank. I’m here to save everyone else in this reality. Including you.”

“No,” Frank said, the only thing he could say, the only thing he could think. “No, that’s not—” He had to get out, away from Matt and the horrors he spoke into the world. Stumbling back, Frank fled through the rooms of his house and ended up on the porch again, clutching one of the support beams that held up the roof.

The sound of footsteps followed him, and Frank turned to see Matt at his side, turning the devil mask over in his hands. Morning sunlight made his hair look like fire.

"This is hell,” Frank said. “This is hell, and you’re the Devil, and I—Kandahar. This is for Kandahar.”

“Frank, you don’t deserve this,” Matt said. “It’s not happening because of what you did over there. Some things just are.”

“I can’t accept that,” Frank said brokenly.

“I know,” Matt said. He reached out as if to touch him, then seemed to think better of it, his hand falling back at his side. “I’m sorry.”

The slow pull of darkness almost came as a relief.

*

“Frank? Honey? C’mon, it’s after ten.”

Like an automaton, like a puppet on springs, Frank shrank away woodenly from her hand on his shoulder, unfolded himself from the bed and stood. He stared down at the carpet beneath his feet. Its off-beige color pushed up between his toes like desert sand.

“Frank?” Maria asked behind him, concern that he could picture on her face.

If he looked at her, he would shatter. “I’m gonna shower. I’ll be right down,” Frank said. He walked stiffly into the bathroom and shut the door.

He waited for the rustle of Maria’s clothing as she stood from the bed, for the creak of floorboards as she stepped into the hall, to Lisa’s door opening. Then, Frank slipped out of the bathroom and pulled on the first clothes he found, grabbing his shoes to walk silently downstairs.

The keys dangled from their hook by the front door. Frank clutched them tightly so they wouldn’t jangle and alert Maria, opened the door as slowly as quietly as he could, and stepped out into the brightness of the day. Eyes narrowed, Frank hissed at the spike of pain the glare sent through his head, wished for his sunglasses and the bottle of excedrin sitting uselessly up in his medicine cabinet.

But he couldn’t risk going back for either. Any second, Frank expected the front door to open, for Maria to demand exactly what the fuck he thought he was doing, but he reversed out of the driveway and got around the corner without so much as a flicker of the house’s curtains. The headache persisted as he drove, a jackhammer inside his skull, but he wouldn’t have to worry about it much longer.

At the park, Frank got his feet in his shoes and ignored the shouts of kids playing volleyball, the chlorine of the fountain, the heat of the sun overhead. His head ached and his stomach lurched, and he kept going because he needed to keep going, determination keeping his feet moving through the grass and his empty stomach from puking up bile. The war came back to him and all his skills with it, speed and stealth. He circled around to the back of the clearing that housed the carousel, moving fast and silent from tree to tree.

Expecting him from the other direction, Gosnell never saw him coming. Frank got him in a sleeper hold and kept pressure on Gosnell’s neck until his body went limp. A quick scan of the surrounding trees revealed no additional threats; they were alone, but Frank didn’t trust that to continue. Frank deprived Gosnell of the two firearms and three knives he carried and dragged him deeper into the trees. There, he bound Gosnell’s hands with his own belt and slapped him awake.

“Why are you trying to kill me?” Frank snarled, pressing one of Gosnell’s blades to his throat.

Gosnell laughed, bravado in the face of death. “So, you know. Russo’s gonna burn for this.”

That nearly got Frank where Gosnell wanted him—distracted, easier to overpower. He shoved that betrayal aside to deal with later and focused on the one in front of him. “What the fuck did I ever do to you?” he asked, pressed the knife harder until a line of blood appeared on Gosnell’s throat. “Tell me!”

"Kandahar,” Gosnell spat out. “The things we saw. The things you did. You think you can just walk away from that?”

“Jesus, Gosnell, we all did shit over there. We had our orders,” Frank said, digging for more.

“Yeah, we had our orders, Castle,” Gosnell said, spitting out his name. “Problem is, you stopped taking them.”

And Frank had heard enough. He slit Gosnell’s throat in one smooth stroke and stepped away from the body, watching it twitch as it bled out. Frank stuck the knife into a tree and pulled his phone out of his pocket.

Billy Russo answered on the third ring. “Yeah?”

He couldn’t be in on this, Frank thought. His kids’ Uncle Bill, Frank’s best friend. “Bill, you gotta help,” Frank said. “Someone’s trying to kill me.”

“Frank? Shit,” Billy swore. “How did—where are you?”

All the wrong questions, and Frank’s blood ran cold. “You knew,” he said, horrible certainty. “Are you in on this?”

“No, Frank,” Billy said plainly. Didn’t even bother to deny it. “I’m sitting this one out.”

"But you knew, Bill. You knew.” Frank leaned back against a tree, looked at the sky through the branches. Still blue, even with the world ending. “It ain’t just me. Did you know that? They’re coming for my family, Billy. My wife, my boy, my little girl. God, they love you.”

“You made your choices, Frank,” Billy said, flat and angry. “I can’t stop what’s already in motion, and they will kill me if I try.” A sigh crackled through the line. “I didn’t want this.”

Frank spun and punched the tree, knuckle-splitting impact. “Why, damn it!?”

“Well, you know our colonel,” Billy said. “Schoonover always did want us to be thorough.”

Which meant—Frank nearly dropped the phone in his haste to hang up and took off through the trees at a run, tripping over roots and the edge of the path as he called Maria. The phone rang, the silence between each ring big enough to hold galaxies. No answer, and Frank knew he was too late even as he reached the car, even as he peeled out of the parking lot and sped down the road.

Green light began to glow around him. Try to get away from it, Matt had said. And if he did—he thought of his wife and children safe and sleeping in their beds, of them dying in his arms. If he did, he’d never see them again.

Clenching his jaw until it hurt, Frank stepped down on the accelerator, drove into and through and with the green light and the black nothing that followed.

*

Frank woke on his back, his bedroom ceiling bathed in early morning light. From there, things fragmented. Maria, asleep. Hall. Panic attack. Lisa’s door. Lisa, sleeping under her covers. Junior, snoring softly with all his sheets kicked off. Downstairs. Kitchen.

Matt’s back, slammed into the wall.

"Tell me how to stop this,” Frank ground out between his teeth.

“You know how to stop this,” Matt said, face drawn and in pain that wasn’t from the grip Frank had pushing into his pressure points. “I’m sorry it’s not the way you want.”

Digging his hands into Matt’s shoulders, Frank pulled him away from the wall only to slam him into it again. Matt made no move to stop him, his body like a rag doll and his head colliding with the drywall in a smack that nearly made Frank wince in sympathy.

He seethed, got right in Matt’s face. “No, that’s—that’s bullshit, Matt. Why them? Why do they have to die?”

“Because of who you become,” Matt said, and like that spurred him into action, twisted away from Frank’s arms. Before Frank could close in on him again, he unzipped the top half of his suit, yanked his arms out of the sleeves, and let it drape around his waist like the petals of a dying flower.

Underneath, he wore a black t-shirt with a white skull design staring out from its chest. Frank didn’t recognize it—if anything, it might’ve reminded him of Lisa’s pirate cup—but the sight of it felt like stepping into a dark room and knowing the vast, cavernous size of it from the echo of your footsteps on the floor, the shape of it too vast to comprehend.

"You get your revenge, Frank. You kill everyone who had a hand in the deaths of your family, and after that? You don’t stop,” Matt told him. “The people you’ve killed, the people you’ve saved—each one changes the course of countless, countless events. Take all of that away, all at once, and the universe can’t handle it.”

Horrified, fascinated, Frank reached out and brushed his fingers against the design on Matt’s shirt. Frank felt the heat of his body, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, and something flashed through his head like an electric jolt. Gunfire and smoke, and Matt in his suit and that stupid devil mask, throwing his club around instead of a real weapon and—it faded, and Frank jumped back like he’d been burned.

He backed away from Matt, from the future he didn’t want and couldn’t stand, the one without his family in it. “If the universe can’t exist without—” He couldn’t even say it. Frank shook his head. “Then maybe it doesn’t deserve to.”

"Frank—” Matt said, but the world was already fading again, his outline an afterimage as the dark swallowed them.

*

“Frank? Honey? C’mon, it’s after ten.”

Her hand on his arm, shaking him awake. Frank reached up and covered it with his own. “I know. Gimme a minute,” he said. Holding onto it, he sat up and drank her in, the brown of her eyes, the bow of her lips, all the things he’d fallen in love with.

Maria blinked at him, a frown tugging at her mouth. “What is it?” she asked.

"Nothing,” Frank said, kissing her. “Just looking at you.”

"Ok.” Maria smiled and kissed him back, once, quickly, and stood. “Breakfast is almost ready. You’d better hurry before the kids eat it all.”

The rest of the morning played around him like a tape on repeat. Three excedrins. Shower. Clothes. The kids’ argument over the pirate cup, which Frank put a stop to just to see Maria’s gratitude, for a few extra seconds of peace. Lisa’s shoes behind the couch, Junior’s hat in the hall closet.

Car keys. Frank lifted them off their hook while Maria was still rounding up the kids and herding them out the front door. Once they were all in the driveway, he hit the fob and the car unlocked with a flash of its headlights.

"I’ll drive,” Frank said with easy confidence and got in the drivers’ seat to head off any argument Maria might offer; he hadn’t driven much since he got back.

But she only shrugged in indifference and took the passenger seat. Frank let out the breath he’d been holding and checked the rearview, the kids already on their tablets. Turning to Maria, he asked, “What was that Italian place we liked? Can you see if they’re still open?”

"You’re thinking about food now? We just had breakfast,” Maria said, good-natured grousing. Still, she took her phone out and began searching.

So, only Frank watched the road as he turned away from the park and headed towards the highway. He drove with his knuckles whitening on the wheel, gripped it hard enough at the single red light he encountered that he thought either it or his fingers might break. A few, furtive glances showed the kids still absorbed in their tablets and Maria answering a text, and she didn’t notice their surroundings until he turned off the exit.

With the car’s increased speed, her head snapped up and then to Frank in confusion. “Frank? This isn’t the way to the park.”

"I know. Trust me,” Frank told her.

"Where are we going?” Lisa asked, her attention called by either Maria’s words or the highway out the window.

Junior looked up next and gasped in excitement. “Are we going to the beach?” he asked—they’d driven up to Cape Cod a few summers ago, and he’d loved it.

"Maybe,” Frank said, forced a smile. “It’s a surprise.”

He could feel the look Maria gave him like the point of a knife. She waited until the kids got bored of the road and bent their heads towards their tablets, then leaned into his space. “Frank, if you don’t tell me where we’re going right now—”

"I don’t know,” Frank said in an undertone before she could finish. “Somewhere safe. I know how this looks,” he said, before she could tell him. “But I need to do this. Please trust me, Maria.”

In his periphery, she shot a worried look towards the kids, then to him, then leaned back in her seat. “You’d better have a damned good reason,” she said.

Frank drove north and west, away from the city and out of civilization. Trees grew up on either side of the road. “I’m hungry,” Lisa complained three hours in, followed by Junior’s, “I need to use the bathroom.”

The gas gauge dipped low; they have to stop soon, anyway. “Ok, ok, hold your horses,” Frank said, full of false cheer. “How about you help me find a place to stop for lunch?”

"There’s nothing out here,” Junior complained as he turned towards the window.

Lisa scoffed and said, “Read the signs dummy. See? That one says there’s a McDonald’s in eleven miles.”

Turning in her seat, Maria said, “Lisa, don’t call your brother names.”

"Sorry,” Lisa muttered, oblivious to the thin thread of fear Frank could hear in his wife’s voice.

He hated himself for putting it there, but—Maria, lying on the path. On the steps of the museum. Choking on smoke in the basement. Dying alone the last time, with him too far away to reach her. Frank steeled himself and stepped down on the gas. She thought he was crazy—fine. A small price to keep her alive and safe.

"Uh, Mom? Dad?” Lisa asked suddenly. “That car’s getting really close.”

The fragile ice of their escape cracked, sending Frank plunging into freezing depths and dread. He looked to the side mirror just in time to see the headlights as it side-swiped them and nearly forcing them off the road. Frank swerved back at the last second, Maria swearing and the kids screaming, and pressed the gas pedal all the way down.

In the rearview, the black car course-corrected and sped to catch up. To the uninformed, it looked like a regular, black sedan, but Frank’s trained eye knew the bulletproof glass and armored exterior, the kind of nondescript thing sold to rich assholes and foreign royalty who had to worry about getting kidnapped or killed. He looked around desperately, the road abruptly empty and clear of anyone who might help them.

“It’s the car,” Frank realized, thinking out loud. “There must be a tracker on it somewhere. That’s how they keep finding us.”

“Who!?” Maria demanded, rounding on him. “Who the hell is that?”

“I’m sorry,” Frank told her, the only thing he could say in the face of their pursuit. “I should’ve never joined the marines.”

She started to say something else, but Frank didn’t hear her. The black car closed in again, the passenger side windows opening—

“Get down!” Frank shouted, slamming on the breaks so the car flew past them just as the first bullets whizzed out. He risked a glance at the rearview, saw Lisa out of her seat belt and unbuckling Junior’s, terror and tear-tracks on his face as she pulled him off the seats and onto the floor.

Next to him, Maria fumbled for her phone, for help that wouldn’t get there in time. “Get in the back with the kids,” Frank told her, snatched the phone away and tossed it in the back seat when she continued to tap at the screen. “Go!”

“Goddamnit, Frank!” Maria said, her voice pitched high in fear, but she crawled through the gap in the seats like he asked, covering the kids with her body.

All Frank had to do now was make sure they didn’t need that protection. He pressed down on the accelerator, rolled down his window as he sped towards the other car on a collision course. Retrieving the pistol he’d tucked into the waistband of his jeans, Frank watched and waited. He’d only get one shot at this.

Time stretched and slowed. Frank breathed in, breathed out. Took aim, and fired right into the car’s tire, the Achilles heel, the only vulnerable point. It spun wildly, and Frank barely managed to avoid it as it flipped over and over and landed on its top just off the road.

On his own, he’d stalk out of the car like the specter of death itself. He’d drag them out of the car, each and every one, put bullets in their head to make damn sure they weren’t getting up again. Everything in him screamed to do it now.

Quiet sobs brought Frank back. He looked to the rearview again, to Maria and Lisa and Junior huddled on the floor, and that was enough. He peeled away from the armored car and the stretch of road where they’d nearly died. Murmuring reassurance Frank could only half-hear, Maria got the kids into their seats and buckled up again, shimmied back to the front and dropped into the passenger seat with a shell-shocked look Frank knew all too well.

“Is it over?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “We need to ditch the car. Even if I can find and remove the tracking device, the damage will be too noticeable. I’m probably going to have to steal one.”

Maria opened her mouth like she wanted to argue, closed it again and nodded. “Ok,” she said. “Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Just when he thought he couldn’t love her more. Frank blinked away the tears blurring his vision and took a hand off the wheel to take hers. “Just stay with me,” he said, begging her to do it and the universe to let her.

“Daddy?” Junior’s small, trembling voice came from the back. “What’s wrong with the sky?”

Like Matt said, Frank knew when he saw it. Black streaked across the deep blue of the summer afternoon, night intruding on the day, except no stars showed through those gaps. Only void.

“It’s ok,” Frank lied. “Don’t worry about it.”

Frank stepped down on the accelerator as if he could drive away from the black streaks of void and nothing, but he couldn’t outpace the sky. The rest of the world, the trees and the road and the billboards they passed, still held their solidity if he looked at them head-on, but they shifted in the corner of his eye, black and flickering like the sky above.

Between that, and Maria’s hand still gripped in his, Frank never saw the semi truck coming. Its horn blared out a them from his right, from an intersection that shouldn’t have been there in the middle of the fucking highway, and Frank didn’t even have time to try to avoid it. He barely had time to gasp before it was on them, the front crashing into the side of the car in a deafening shriek of metal.

*

Consciousness grayed out, but didn’t fade completely. Frank came to looking at his own feet, his face hot with the blood rushing to his head. Upside-down, just like the armored car that had tried to run them off the road.

He turned, needing and dreading to see Maria, if she was alive—and found the passenger seat empty. Craning his neck, Frank looked for the kids and saw no trace of them in the abandoned backseat. Panic threatened to crawl up his throat, but Frank forced it down. Focused on the issue at hand. Unbuckling his seat belt, he lowered himself down to the roof of the car and pulled his legs up to his chest. The door opened on the first kick.

Outside, Frank emerged into the park, on the path by the carousel. The sight of it nearly dropped Frank to his knees, but he still had a job to do. “Maria?” he called, looking around the park. “Lisa? Junior?”

And then he saw them—and himself. The first version of this day rose like a vision out of the creeping tendrils of void, like a television in a dark room. On the park bench, the other Frank sat with Maria, watching the kids as they ran to the carousel, passing Frank without seeing him and jumping up to pick out their horses. He started towards them, and a figured stepped into his path.

“Hi, Frank,” Matt said, clothed in his devil suit again, the mask covering his face like it could shield him from the end of the world.

“I thought you could only be here when it resets,” Frank said, trying to push past him.

Trying being the operative word—Matt took him by his shoulders, and Frank suddenly didn’t have the strength to move. “The cracks are big enough now. More things can get through.”

“Are you still trying to make me stop?” Frank asked.

Matt let go, stepped back. “At this point, I don’t know if I can.”

“Then why the hell are you still here?” Frank asked. “It’s the apocalypse to end all apocalypses. Why do you keep coming back?”

“Saving the world isn’t enough?” Matt crossed his arms—like he had something to hide.

And Frank had just about had his fill of secrets. “No, you said a sorcerer sent you. A sorcerer. You. Why you?”

“Frank—” Matt tried to say, but Frank still had his gun.

He pointed it in Matt’s face, and blind or not, Matt seemed to know. “Tell me,” Frank said.

“Ok,” Matt raised his hands, placating. “I know you can’t remember me, and this isn’t going to make sense, but I”—he paused, drew in breath—“Because I love you.”

“God,” Frank said. His legs gave out, and he dropped to his knees in the grass. The carousel spun like it would go on forever, and Frank hoped it would.

Matt crouched down next to him, and Frank didn’t have to ask what kind of love he meant. It was all over his face, that too-pretty face that Frank would fall in love with and betray his wife for, someday after she and their children lay cold in the ground.

“I could give you reasons, Frank,” Matt said. “I could tell you to do it for all the other families that won’t exist if you don’t stop this. I could tell you that your family wouldn’t want you to do this, that they’d tell you the same thing if they could. And I’d be right, and that wouldn’t work. So.” Matt reached out and took his hand, and Frank let him. “I’ll tell you this. There is a man from an alternate version of reality. He thinks his version of reality should be the only one there is, and there are others, Frank. There are so many others. Ones where your family lives and is happy and you and Maria grow old together.”

Then let them exist, Frank wanted to say, but he couldn’t speak.

"And this man, he knows you,” Matt continued. “He knows your stubbornness and your drive, and he’s using you as a template. Your family doesn’t live in his reality, and he’s going to kill every version that does. Over and over, until there’s none left.” The grip on his hand grew tighter. “I know you’ll never roll over, sit back and let it happen. That’s not you. But you can do something better, Frank. Stop him. Save them.”

"How?” Frank asked, the word torn past his strangled throat.

Oddly, incongruously, Matt smiled. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before.” He reached up and tapped the chain around his neck. “Use this.”

"My—my dog tags?” Frank asked blankly, stupidly, cupping them in his palm.

"Frank. Those aren’t your dog tags.”

And when he looked down at them, they weren’t. He held a carved pendant featuring an eye that stared back at him, faintly glowing green. “What is this?”

"The Eye of Agamotto,” Matt told him, and pointed up to the sky. “You should be able to see him now.”

Past the blue and streaks of dark, past the park and his family and the collapse of everything, Frank did. He looked ordinary. A man, just a man. All this was just one fucking man. And men—

Men could be killed.

Reality moved around him, like swimming through water. Frank was at once in the park with Matt, on the bench with his family, and in the space between dimensions. He didn’t give the man time to speak. With all his strength and desperation and pent-up rage, Frank punched him in the face.

Over and over, the impact of his fists bruised and broke skin, then bone. Frank didn’t stop until the man lay limp. Looking up, he saw a gap behind him like a doorway, real daylight shining through in comparison to the dim twilight of the in-between place. A groan came from the man who’d made Frank watch the deaths of his family, unconscious but not dead, Frank’s hand twisted in his shirt collar the only thing holding him up.

It’d be so easy to kill him. To take his head and twist it until his neck snapped. His mind screamed for him to do it, but—he looked to the spill of light from the doorway. Somewhere over there, another Frank Castle existed. And Frank would bet the man he’d beaten unconscious had fled to the in-between place for a reason.

With his free hand, Frank held the pendant, glowing green through the gaps between his fingers. Stars and planets sped past through the doorway, space and time, the great expanse of a whole universe. But Frank only needed one thing in it.

Down on the world below, an alternate Frank stepped over a pile of corpses and wiped blood off his face. More of it spattered across the bullet-riddled Kevlar vest covering his torso and the pattern of the skull emblazoned across its front. He looked up, and Frank met his own eyes going wide in surprise and then narrowing in suspicion.

Lifting the yet-unconscious man, Frank tossed him through and at the other Frank’s feet. “Happy hunting, Frank,” he called out, and willed the doorway to that reality shut.

As he turned back to his own, Frank remembered something Matt had said, about other realities, ones where his family didn’t have to die. Dimensions surrounded the in-between place, endless like a hall of mirrors. Frank held the glowing, green pendant, and he looked at them.

And he saw.

*

Something stiff pushed against his back. He lay flat again, and for long moments couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes. Then, Frank smelled the leather of the couch that supported him, heard the creak of it when he moved. He opened his eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling and a room around him cluttered with objects he didn’t recognize.

Plus one thing he did—Matt, sitting in an armchair alongside the couch. At the sound of Frank’s movement (plus the increase in his heart rate and his breathing that Matt’s sensitive ears could always pick up), he turned his head towards him expectantly. All Frank could do in that first minute was look at him, his red hair falling over his forehead and the apprehension on his face, dressed in the lower half of his devil suit and one of Frank’s shirts. He recognized it now, the contrast of the black material and the white skull printed across the chest.

“Frank?” Matt asked.

Reaching out, Frank took his hand in reassurance. “Shh,” he said. “Just let me look at you.”

The memories rushed him like a tidal wave. The first time they’d met, Bang, Frank’s warning shot cracking against Matt’s mask. Matt and his stupid morality and the way he wouldn’t stop saying Frank’s name once he’d heard it, wouldn’t stop following him around the city and standing in the way of him and his revenge, Matt who he still saved from the police like Matt saved him later, from the Irish mob. All the years since, after everyone who had a hand in his family’s deaths lay in the ground and Frank still wouldn’t stop and Matt wouldn’t stop trying to make him, all their fights and screaming arguments and the times Frank woke up in jail.

The night in Frank’s safehouse, stitching a shallow cut on Matt’s chest and lecturing him about how he needed to trade his billy club in for a real weapon, the way it brought them too close and the air went heady and Matt kissed him first. How quickly it led them into bed and their mutual awkwardness after, Matt pulling on his suit and nearly pulling his stitches, and how it didn’t stop them. They’d crashed into each other like a car going downhill with its breaks out, unable to slow down and barely able to steer, throwing Frank into Matt’s bed often enough that pretty soon, he’d stopped sleeping anywhere else.

He raised Matt’s hand to his mouth and kissed it. “Hey,” he said.

"Are you—are you back?” Matt asked guardedly.

"Yeah.” Frank sat up, still holding his hand because he didn’t want to let go. “Where are we?”

"In the Sanctum Sanctorum. Strange’s house,” Matt explained. “I wasn’t even gone ten minutes. I ran out to stop a mugging around the corner, and by the time I came back…” He trailed off, continued, “You were unconscious on the floor, and the air stank of magic. Do you remember what happened?”

Frank wished to god that he didn’t. “Before or after I got mindfucked and stuck in a time loop?” he asked, a little sharply.

"I’m sorry,” Matt said, cringing. “I meant before.”

The last thing Frank remembered: the tilt of Matt’s head that meant he heard something, the speed of him dressing in his devil suit. “No,” he said. “Who was that guy? From the other dimension?”

"Strange says he’s a problem, but I don’t know his name. Did you—?” Matt shifted uncomfortably. “Did you, uh—?”

He smiled nastily so Matt would hear it in his voice. “I thought I’d let the Frank from his reality handle it.”

"Ok,” Matt said, nodding in acceptance. “For the record, I wouldn’t have blamed you if—”

"Oh, good. You’re awake,” a new voice said, and Frank snatched his hand away from Matt’s as they both jumped to their feet to face the ghostly apparition Stephen Strange.

"Can you not astral project around me?” Matt asked testily. “You know I can’t sense that, and it’s very disorienting.”

A hint of a smile twitched at the corners of Strange’s mouth. “Very well,” he said. Behind him, a portal appeared in the air, and his body walked out of it to merge with his spirit form.

Fuckin’ show-off, Frank thought, and didn’t bother to hide his distinctly unimpressed look.

"Well. Seeing as you’re on your feet and the world hasn’t ended, I’ll hazard this was a success,” Strange said. “I’ll just be taking this.”

With surprising speed, he took hold of the pendant that Frank didn’t realize until that very second still hung around his own neck. He let Strange lift it oft and suppressed a shudder at the sight of that staring eye.

For his part, Strange surveyed it calmly. “You’re not from here, are you?” he asked, half to the pendant and half to himself. Closing his eyes, he muttered something complicated and moved his hands in a way that drew symbols in the air, and the pendant vanished.

"Is it gone?” Frank asked.

"It’s in a pocket dimension until I can figure out what to do with it,” Strange replied. “Don’t worry—I won’t let it hurt anyone again, and I’ve added a protection spell around you as an added precaution.”

The hair on the back of Frank’s neck stood on end. “I don’t want your—”

"Thank you, Stephen. For everything.” Matt said over him, cutting him off and leaving Frank to glower in silence.

“Matt, you just helped save the universe. I should be thanking you. Both of you, I suppose,” Strange said, raising an eyebrow in Frank’s direction as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “Now”—he clapped his hands together once—“I have a second Eye of Agamotto to deal with, and I imagine you’d like to go home.”

He waved his hand, and a portal opened sudden and stomach-lurching beneath their feet. Before Frank could even shout in surprise, he landed on the couch in Matt’s living room and the portal spun shut over their heads. Even so, Frank flipped it off for good measure, just in case Strange could see.

"Goddamn magic tricks,” he bitched, leaning back against the cushions. Then, he looked at Matt’s shirt, and Matt’s hand that he’d been holding. “I guess Strange knows?” Frank asked. “About, uh, you and me?”

“Who do you think told me I was wearing your shirt?” Matt asked with a playful half-smile. “I wasn’t exactly quiet in getting you there. I think everyone knows now.” He shrugged, added, “I’m ok with it.”

They sat for a minute in silence, in Matt’s apartment that sometimes, on quiet mornings with Matt asleep in his arms, Frank dared to think of as theirs. Tilting his head back, Frank listened to the traffic outside and water running through a neighbor’s pipes and stared up at the off-white of Matt’s ceiling.

"Lisa used to have this pirate cup, y’know, with the skull and crossbones on it,” Frank heard himself say. “Her and Junior were always fighting over the damned thing. Had to promise I’d get him one for Christmas just to get him to stop. I forgot about that,” Frank confessed quietly. “I forgot how Maria used to twist her hair up when she was cooking. I didn’t know how much I forgot.” He closed his eyes, took a second to breathe. “Are you gonna ask me if I’m ok?”

"No,” Matt said immediately. “I know you’re not.”

Yeah. He hadn’t been in years. “My family died, and I couldn’t save them,” Frank said, simple and brutal as that. “Nothing that ain’t happened to me before. And I—” Outside of that in-between place, back in the real world, he could scarcely put it into words. “I saw them. The other realities, the ones where they lived.” He smiled like pushing the muscles of his face through broken glass. “I always wondered what they’d look like—the kids when they grew up, Maria when she got old. Now I know.”

"Frank, you—you can’t go there,” Matt told him.

Sighing, Frank slipped his hand into Matt’s and intertwined their fingers. “I don’t belong there.”

"I thought you’d—I don’t know,” Matt said, his expression pained when Frank looked at him. “Don’t pretend you’re fine if you’re not, I couldn’t stand it if—”

"Hey.” Frank said to stop him. “You thought I might self-destruct. I’m not,” he said, promised. He shuffled closer, leaned his body against Matt’s side. “I love you, y’know. I don’t think I say it enough.”

"Frank, you don’t have to—”

"Yeah, well. I am.” Standing, Frank crossed over to the tall windows lining Matt’s living room and looked out over the city, over the streets and buildings of Hell’s Kitchen that Matt loved.

After a minute, Matt followed him. Frank draped an arm around his waist and kissed his temple. He never could quite decide what Matt smelled like, all his soaps and detergents scent-free so as not to assault his sensitive nose, but Frank knew he liked it, the warmth of Matt against him, his hair tickling Frank’s nose. If Frank were a romantic, he thought he might say Matt smelled like sunlight.

What are you looking at?” Matt asked him, dropping his head to Frank’s shoulder.

"Just the sky,” Frank told him.

Matt made a noise in his throat, considering. “What’s it look like?”

"It’s blue,” Frank said and turned to kiss him. “Not a cloud in sight.”

***