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The thing is, even though he can’t (as far as he knows) travel through time anymore, there are things about it that Dove just Knows. He’s sure it’s a Sylph trait, the Knowing, just like his urge to heal the bleeding time scars that still fill the world, but it doesn’t make things any less weird for him. Or less horrifying. Dove is a pretty chill dude (he is a fucking liar) so he doesn’t mention the things he knows are coming. It’s vague anyway, nothing he can really put into words, and there’s always the possibility it might change.
How exactly would he even explain the nothingness at the End, anyway? The not-death and the not-living and the not anything? The way time stops on a dime for no reason, shattered to tiny particles too small to sense anymore, too small to make sense.
He can’t quite tell when it will happen. Sometimes it feels days away and sometimes years. Sometimes he can feel the certainty of nothingness on the back of his tongue, seconds from engulfing everything, and then it backs off again, like something unfathomable has changed and given him more time. Given them all more time.
There are lots of things he can’t see about time. He doesn’t know what will happen or why, only that changes occur. Forks in the spiral of timelines that have meshed in and melded and turned into an absolute knot of possibilities. He sees when things end, or rather can end. Because there’s always opportunities for more offshoots. Most of them putter off into nothing, or at least into a something that’s beyond his abilities. He hopes for that because it’s a nicer thought than to think it means death. Death of people or places or possibilities, he doesn’t know, but they all bother him.
Dove is kind of sick of death.
When he looks at people, he can see the timeline they came from and the twisted way he’d woven them into the world they now live in. He can see how many forks they’ve navigated through so far, how many they currently have ahead. He can see when their time will end as things stand right now. Sometimes, he can even see where their time might intersect someone else’s, but that gets confusing with a group like theirs where everyone is so interconnected already.
He doesn’t like looking at Dave because Dave’s timeline ends in five years and has since the first time Dove looked at him after the game ended, after he started being able to Know. They’ve been out for months and everyone else’s timelines shift between at least twelve years and sixty before their end (the trolls sometimes for hundreds of years), but Dave’s doesn’t. Dave’s has not faltered even a second. There are no forks. There are no options. There is only the end.
His own has the opportunity to end sooner (that is his choice, the one he covets greedily and refuses to take off the table), but also the chance to last much longer. It’s stupid to feel guilty about something that isn’t his fault. Whatever has happened or will happen to end Dave’s life is something solely of his design, not Dove’s. It’s stupid to feel, but he does anyway and then is even more frustrated about that.
If Dave weren’t such a dick, maybe Dove would tell him about what’s to come. Somehow the words always get stuck in his throat and what comes out is cruel and angry and bitter instead. Nothing important, just more insults, and then they fight and then it’s over and Dave goes back to whatever it is Dave was doing and Dove goes back to his own and Knows and hates it.
He wishes there were a way to shut it off but the Knowing is a passive ability he has no control over, just like he can’t stop noticing the scars and bleeds of time as the timelines continue to mesh into one another without his direction. He tries to ignore it but then he’ll accidentally look at Dave and he’ll Know and it shatters him to the core every single time. He’s glad he’s homeschooled and that no one that could notice would bother saying anything or would think it was more than just an extension of the animosity between them.
He keeps thinking he should warn Dave. And then he doesn’t. Dove is no hero. He wasn’t even when he was still Dave and he never will be.
---
Dove is at his next fork, one of so many he has available.
He sits on the edge of the roof, staring out over the city. The air is mostly still, sticky with heat that he knows will leave the back of his neck burned. He’s been up here for a while now. Dove’s fingers curl along the corner of the ledge.
It would be easy. So easy.
The possibility is getting more solid than the rest of his track. It wouldn’t take much. The muscles of his arm tense as his fingers firm against the ledge. It wouldn’t take much and then he could just…
Fall.
Dove stares at the street. He wonders why he hasn’t done it yet and he knows the answer is because he won’t. And it isn’t because he doesn’t want to; more because then he would have to choose it.
The fork passes. The possibility closes. He won’t be falling today. He’s not sure feeling disappointed is the right response but then Bro’s calling him from the hatch access door and Dove gets up carefully to go with him. They’re supposed to go to some bullshit family counseling thing Rose’s older self orchestrated and he doesn’t know how she got Bro or big Dave to agree to it but they’ve made it clear he has to go.
He knows he’ll hate it.
----
He’s right. He is so incredibly right. And now they all know.
----
Dave has four years, ten months, eight days, three hours, forty-six minutes, and twenty-one seconds to live. As Dove stares at him from across the table, he watches the seconds count down. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…
“That is totally not a word,” Dave grumbles at the scrabble board.
Eleven, ten, nine…
“Do you want me to get out a dictionary?” Dirk’s all challenge and haughty superiority.
Four, three, two…
“If you’re allowed to make up words then sicknasty totally counts.”
Four years, ten months, eight days, three hours, forty-five minutes, fifty-two seconds.
“That’s only a word in the colloquial use sense, not because it-”
“You could argue that colloquial use makes it viable,” Hal suggests and Dave beams.
An hour ago, Dirk had thirty-six years, eleven months, twenty-two hours, nine minutes, and twelve seconds. He’s up past forty now. Hal’s sitting at exactly twenty-eight years, four hours, one minute, thirty-eight seconds, but he’d been down to eleven years a few days ago.
Three more minutes of Dave’s time is gone, steady and sure like a metronome. Dove’s stomach twists and he feels like he might throw up.
“Are you serious? No. I refuse to accept ‘cameltoe’,” Dirk complains as he glowers at the board.
“The internet agrees with me,” Hal says in his defense and resolutely refuses to remove his tiles.
Four years, ten months, eight days, three hours, forty minutes, thirteen seconds.
He can’t do this. Dove gets up without explaining anything and goes back to his room. They can finish the game on their own.
----
Dove isn’t allowed on the roof by himself anymore because they know about the choice he’s not letting go of and they like to think they could stop him if he took the chance. The only time he gets up there is in the wee hours when Bro’s sleeping off a late night and just before everyone gets up for school. He ghosts up to the roof access stairs and doesn’t let the door close all the way because the latching mechanism is loud as shit and sure to wake someone.
There’s a breeze tonight but it’s not much and it does little to cool the warm night. Morning. Whatever. It’s exactly four thirty A.M. but Dove’s sleeping schedule is so fucked up he’s stopped trying to label time for himself anymore.
He sits on the ledge.
He’s at a fork.
It’s not that falling would be the easiest way to do it. There are plenty of weapons in the apartment. Hell, he could walk in front of a bus if he wanted. He’s not even entirely sure that he comes to the roof for the opportunity to fall so much as the opportunity to pretend, for a little while, that he’s a sprite again.
When he’s up this high, looking down at everything, he can pretend he’s flying.
If he fell and the wind buffeted up against his body, he could pretend he’s diving.
Dove leans. His fingers are tight on the ledge, keeping him steady, but he only has one hand to do it. He could slip and fall and not even mean it. He could…
His balance pitches. He starts going over. And in the split second it takes him to decide whether or not to wrench himself back over, the opportunity to do so is gone. His heart stops a moment and then he closes his eyes and lets it happen.
A thick arm scoops him up before even a second has gone by and then he’s flung back onto the roof proper. He hits the gravely concrete with a grunt, rolling a time or two. He starts pushing himself up and hears Bro coming at him.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell, kid?” Bro says and then he’s dragging Dove up to his feet with an iron tight grip on his arm. It makes him feel suddenly small and fragile. He doesn’t know what to say, how to explain, because he hadn’t really meant to, he’d just…
He hadn’t really meant to, but…
He doesn’t know. All he knows is that the fork has passed and he’s still alive and Dave only has four years, nine months, thirty days, twenty hours, four minutes, and forty-six seconds and he doesn’t even know it. If Dove were a better person, he’d tell him so Dave could make sure to do everything he wanted to do before the end, but he’s not. He’s a terrible one and he’ll take it to the grave.
He wishes there were a way to give his time to Dave. Then, at least one of them would be able to make good use of it.