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Christian had said no the first time they’d approached him. He’d said no the second time, too.
“I’m busy,” he said shortly, and the bark of laughter on the other side of the phone crackled. The connection wasn’t great out here in the desert.
“What, with your cult?”
“It’s not a—" Christian blew out a sigh. “It’s a church.”
One that had been struggling of late. Things were better now without Lucius. Without the greed, the paranoia, the manic gleam of dream-and-nightmare ideas in those eyes of his. Christian had looked into those eyes months ago and had seen so little of the man who’d started all this. The man he’d fallen in love with.
He remembered the way those eyes had been when they’d first started out. Filled with determination, with courage, with a sort of holy splendor that had drawn Christian like a moth to flame. There had been a divine inspiration in those eyes back then, and Christian remembered thinking that he’d follow them to Hell and back.
And he had. God help him, he had. And he was still breathing hard from the climb back up.
“I still believe in the Power of Positive Mechanics,” he continued, and he wasn’t sure which one of them he was trying to convince. “We’re going to change the world one day.”
“I think you’ve done quite enough of that.”
“Lucius… lost his way,” Christian said a little haltingly, and he wished that this phone were a little older. His fingers itched to wind around a cord again.
Something about — about wires lately. About following—
He shook his head, trying to banish the thoughts that had been pushing into his mind unannounced all too often lately. “We don’t need him, though. With our philosophy, we can—"
“Cut the shit, Garcia. We both know that you can’t do anything without Selig. There’s no such thing as the Power of Positive Mechanics. You were all just following a freak into a place where you didn’t belong. And in case you’ve forgotten, that particular bird has had his wings clipped.”
Christian didn’t say anything for a long moment, his heart beating painfully in his chest. “Then why the hell do you need me?” he asked softly.
They did, and they both knew it. The Charter had promised him that they’d never contact him again after delivering Lucius to them. They’d promised that the members of the church would be safe and that Lucius would be unharmed.
They’d promised a lot of things.
But now here they were, calling him over and over again, cluttering up his voicemail with cryptic messages that he deleted without hearing. They wanted something again, and they both knew that it had something to do with Lucius. If he truly was no longer a threat to the Charter, to the world at large, they wouldn’t be contacting him.
There was a tight silence on the other end of the line, and Christian was pretty sure he’d pissed the guy off. Then, “I think we can help each other, Christian.”
With what? The words lay there at the tip of his tongue, tasting bitter. What could they possibly give him that Lucius could not? Had not? What could they give him that he couldn’t build with his own two hands, free and untethered for the first time in years?
Christian shut his eyes, trying very hard not to remember the way that Lucius had felt under those hands. Warm skin and unbridled enthusiasm. A potential that Christian could taste on his lips every time he kissed him. Fingers tangled with his as they watched a sunset that Lucius had created just for the two of them.
Christian had given Lucius everything, every part of him. He’d withheld nothing. Doubt, after all, was a negative thought pattern. But now that he was having to rebuild the parts of him that he’d left on a beach long ago, he was starting to wish that he’d kept just a little of his own soul for himself.
He remembered building sandcastles on that beach with his mind, tremulous and unstable, and he remembered Lucius’s towering high above his own. Lucius had laughed at his pitiful efforts back then, and Christian had knocked that tower all the way down in a fit of pique. They’d laughed together then, holding onto each other’s hands as they sat in piles of freshly-churned sand, little heaps of effort demolished, and they’d watched Lucius’s waves crash in on themselves in the distance.
There was a metaphor there in those broken sandcastles, Christian was sure of it. But he was too tired to draw it out. He was too tired for metaphors these days.
Sleeping alone kind of sucked.
“What do you want?” he finally asked, feeling exhausted.
“Come to Mendocino,” the agent said, his voice gone oily and coaxing in a way that Christian did not like. “We need your eyes. Your experience.”
Christian frowned. “You want me to go to Lucius’s hometown?” he asked.
“To his house, actually. There’s… an anomaly there. We think your experiences with the Seligs might offer a valuable perspective on the problem.”
Christian’s breath stopped up in his throat. “No. I can’t go see him. I can’t—"
“You won’t. Don’t worry. There’s no one there anymore.”
“What do you mean?” Lucius had told Christian about his family back there in Mendocino multiple times. He knew that his twin sister lived out there, Piper, he thought her name was, and that she had children. He was pretty sure that Lucius’s parents both lived out there, too, even though Lucius talked about them a lot less.
“Just what I said.” The voice paused, and Christian could sense an almost malevolent smile on the other side of the line. God. Christian could sense a lot of things these days. “The Seligs have left the building.”
“Are they okay?” Christian asked. Is he okay?
Please, he thought, his heart nearly wringing with the force of it, let them be okay.
“Like I said, Christian. I think we can help each other.”
* * *
When Christian finally arrived in Mendocino, just as the sun’s rays were starting to go golden with age, a fog rolled in with him.
The marine layer, he remembered Lucius complaining. He remembered Lucius holding his hand, those minute lines around his eyes growing deeper as he gazed into the distance. Into the past. He remembered Lucius’s voice gone uncharacteristically soft. Wounded.
He could hear that voice in the back of his mind even now, whispering about a childhood locked away behind closed doors. About gazing out the window into the fog, wondering what lay inside. About being trapped in the marine layer alongside that fog and all resided within it.
Christian swallowed hard and forced himself to climb the steps of Lucius’s childhood home, forced himself not to imagine Lucius’s footsteps with every creak of the porch’s floorboards.
He knocked once, feeling rather foolish as he did. No one was home. The Charter agent had assured him of that. But it still felt wrong, somehow, to walk right in unannounced and uninvited.
Lucius had never invited him here. Not ever.
Christian hadn’t taken it personally. There was a peculiar sort of melancholy that came over Lucius whenever he spoke of this house and the childhood he’d whiled away in it. A darkness in those pretty eyes of his. It hadn’t been a happy time in his life, Christian had gathered. It was the life that Lucius had lived before he’d learned the truth.
Before he’d learned everything.
Despite the silence that greeted his knock, Christian forced himself to turn the knob and let himself in. Then stopped.
Things felt… strange here. Christian took one cautious step into the house, then another. The air vibrated with a noise he couldn’t hear but could sense all the same, and he could feel it like fire in his blood. Like a kiss against the back of his neck.
Christian’s lungs started to ache and he realized that for a moment, he had stopped breathing. He forced himself to breathe out slow, and then breathe back in again.
The air he inhaled, it felt like Lucius and it didn’t. It smelled like the ozone left behind after Lucius opened a portal, but with an undertone of something else. Something familiar and foreign all at once. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“Lucius?” he asked, quiet, cautious. Just barely a whisper.
There was no answer from the empty old house, but Christian felt like he’d been acknowledged all the same. It was an invitation and an invocation, a greeting spiraling down from the multiverse itself, and he finally felt his feet move, unbidden.
He wandered throughout the house, trailing his fingers over family photos and warped wallpaper. This was where Lucius had grown up. Where his father had grown up before him. Where children lived now.
Or had lived.
Christian knew immediately where Lucius had been sleeping. He could smell him there around the sofa, a too-familiar blend of aftershave and despair, and he did not linger in the ghost of his presence.
It was too soon. Too fresh. Too much.
Christian shuddered, tearing his eyes away from the Positive Mechanics binder discarded on the coffee table, and turned toward the stairs instead.
They creaked beneath his feet, an echo of all the footsteps that had come before his, and he paused at the landing. From this vantage point, he could see an abandoned painting by the front window. It was a man from behind, and — no. No, it was a boy.
Christian stood there unmoving, his eyes fixed on the painting. From up here, it was like he was looking down on him. The colors seemed to slide together, sinuous, warping the silhouette, but he could see it just fine. The subtle tuck of a chin. The loneliness of solitude and the fires of genius.
He knew without approaching it that the painting was of the boy they’d told him about. Of Lex. But something about the colors, the movement… Piper had painted it, hadn’t she? Lucius had told him all about Piper, if not Lex. Lucius had told him that Piper'd had a gift of her own. Once. That she’d been able to see past their world into the next, into a thousand, into them all.
Christian gazed down at that painting of Lex, and he wondered what she’d seen when she’d looked at her son.
When Christian looked at him, all he could see was Lucius.
Lucius’s fingers, quick and intelligent and knowing as he’d composed worlds beyond Christian’s comprehension. Lucius’s smile, tipping up at the edges, sly, as he’d torn preternatural understanding from a cosmic symphony they were not meant to touch. Lucius’s eyes, a manic light lit within them. There had been something holy there. Unholy. Both.
Christian stared at the vibrant colors that had made up Lex, and he couldn’t help but wonder if the child had contained power all his own. A fire that, like Lucius’s, was a gift that could not be contained or controlled. One that shone bright like the stars above even as it burned the world to ashes around them.
He turned away from the painting, then, and he went upstairs. It wasn’t meant for his eyes, he could tell. He could feel that much at his temples, pounding as they were with the beginnings of a headache that just wouldn’t go away.
The house was small, cramped in that way Victorians always seemed to be, but there was such an odd sensation of space packed away between its walls. It felt as if there were rooms between the rooms, hidden away underneath beds and tucked within closets. It felt like it had the first time Lucius had taken him with him on an astral journey. Like space was no longer bound by space. Like potential and freedom crawled beneath the floorboards he stood on, and another world was only a footstep away.
But Christian hadn’t been to another world in a long time. Not since Lucius.
He’d tried, of course. He wouldn’t have been much a leader if he hadn’t. But that Charter agent on the phone had been right, much as Christian had hated him for it.
Christian couldn’t do anything without Lucius Selig.
He’d concentrated the way Lucius had taught him. Had focused everything he had on the positive thought patterns that Lucius had drilled into him one by one. Had done everything he could to manifest those portals that Lucius had been able to call forth as easy as breathing.
Christian had thought back to that day on the beach with Lucius. The little quiver of fledgling power that he’d felt within him. Lucius had called him an acolyte. His protégé. Back then, he’d spoken to anyone who’d listen about the potential that Christian held inside him.
But sitting there alone in Lucius’s old camper, looking through piles of delinquent paperwork and planning the move that had to happen, none of that potential had been enough. The portals wouldn’t come to him, not the way they’d come to Lucius.
Christian didn’t have the imagination that Lucius had. Or perhaps he just didn’t have the greed.
Either way, he’d had to scale back the church of Positive Mechanics for the followers who’d come with him to their new location. There would be no more visits to Portals Bermuda. No astral projections that launched Christian’s heart into his throat every. Damn. Time.
It was a quieter community now. A quieter philosophy. They’d turned their focus inside, where it should have been all along. And if he’d caught his followers exchanging long glances a few times, knowing glances. Well. There wasn’t much Christian could do about that.
Not anymore.
Now the closest Christian could come to another world, outside space and time and the constraints of the fragile earth they called home, was this house right here. The tremorous walls. The space that seemed to sigh between his fingers and the wallpaper. The shadow that lurked just behind him, tracking his movements more carefully than it ever had before.
Christian was not alone in this house, no matter what Agent 35 had told him. He was sure of that, at least, in a way he had been sure of very little of late.
There was a room up here that had been calling to him, he realized, even as he passed its threshold. It was not a voice that he heard, but a sense of invocation that vibrated through the air. It was as if the room itself had been beckoning to him.
A children’s room, decked out in posters and drawings and bright colors that almost hurt his eyes after the dim light of the rest of the house. This must have been where Lex had been living, he thought. Lex and… the other. What was her name? Morgan? That sounded right.
Lucius hadn’t spoken much of his niece and nephew when they’d been together. Christian had gotten the impression that Lucius hadn’t known the two of them that well. Not really.
Not yet.
The thought came to him unbidden, like it wasn’t entirely his own, and Christian kneaded at his temples again. God, his head hurt.
He’d just started considering going back to his car to get some Advil when movement caught his eye. A small piece of paper was sticking out from under the closet door and — it must have been jostled by the wind, right? Mendocino was so damn windy this time of year.
Christian frowned at it. Perhaps.
Either way, he bent so he could retrieve whatever it was that fluttered against the floor. It was a note, he realized, turning it so he could read the childish scrawl.
Read, the note ordered. Entreated. Read everything. Everything is here.
Then, printed much smaller below that, Our lives are written down.
Christian frowned down at the note. It was a request. He could tell that much. For him? For someone else? He glanced around the room. Read what?
There was so much, he realized abruptly. A bookshelf full of children’s chapter books. Journals, diaries left carelessly out on bedside tables. Charts on the walls. Notes on the beds.
Christian breathed in, unsteady. And then, taking a seat on the lower bunk of the bed, he began to read.
The first notebook that made its way into his hands was a record of some sort of scientific experiment. It was scrawled with a child’s hand, all crayon drawings and iffy scientific method, but the words themselves… They made Christian go cold all over.
All relationships die. Either over time or because of time, they all fall apart.
A child had written this? Christian double-checked the front of the notebook, and his heart clenched in his chest. Lex Pastore. Age ten.
A child had written this. Had written of love and death and transcending the both of them. Had drawn up plans for experiments, monstrous experiments, to be carried out against the twins’ pet hamster.
Christian paused, glancing over at the empty cage to his right. Nimsesku. Hadn’t he heard that name from Lucius before? But that didn’t make any sense. How could a hamster be alive for that long?
It was a question that seemed to fascinate Lex as well, and only minutes after beginning his reading, Christian no longer questioned whether or not Lex had some of Lucius’s fire in him.
That boy had been the whole damn matchbook.
And Lucius, his Lucius, had been the one to light the first match. Christian felt his fingers trembling as he turned page after weathered page. Lucius, he thought, what have you done?
Lucius cannot get his gifts back. He never will. Sorry, Uncle Lucius.
And that, that was true. Christian knew that better than anyone in all the worlds. He had been the one to take them, after all. Or had at least been the one to hold Lucius down while the universe made its cut.
What had Lucius done to try and get them back? What had he sacrificed? His morals? His family? His humanity?
Christian swallowed. He’d told the child about some sort of experiments. That much was clear. And those experiments, like the ones that Lucius and Christian had spun together on their own, had turned out very, very poorly indeed.
After Lex’s notebook, the rest was easy. There were so many books in this house, and the clocks never inched forward another minute. Their words were lost in the fog, and Christian was lost with them.
He read Morgan’s plant journal, feeling her soft whispers ruffle his hair like the winds of Viridian Heights, and he puzzled through Lucius’s mother’s dream-soaked memories. Nicolae’s notes, musical and scientific both, thrummed against Christian’s eardrums, waves against the rocky Mendocino shore, and when he closed his eyes, he could see the thin red lines of a laser harp that lived on in an imagination that was not his own.
And Piper — Piper — he read through her diary, each page leaving paper cuts against his heart as he lay back against pillows that had not been used in a long, long time. He squinted to read blood-red words in the dim light of their bedroom, so focused on the curve of them that he didn’t realize he was crying until the ink began to run.
They’d known. They’d all known, hadn’t they? That something wasn’t right with Lucius. That something was broken in him. That the light in him could only stream out fractured, splintered as it was through shards of broken dream-glass. The gift he had in him, the power, hadn’t been the one that had been intended for him. It had been thrust upon him with a violence that his young body had only barely been able to withstand, and he had emerged from that fog forever changed.
Lucius had been spread out across the multiverse since the moment his father’s ill-fated experiments had spiraled out of control, and he hadn’t found peace until he’d been able to venture out and track down all the lost pieces of him, one by one, universe by universe, and slide them back into place. His power had grown with every jagged piece, every last crystal, and he’d been drunk with the power of it. The headiness of the self-knowledge that had been forbidden to him for his entire thrice-damned childhood.
Jean and Emerson both, they’d locked Lucius’s selfhood away with a key that he would not retrieve until it was far, far too late. Piper had watched them do it with a terrible, jealous love that she would not come to understand until the two of them had already gone their separate ways.
“They all fucking knew,” Christian whispered to himself even as he traced the maze of words and ideas that even Piper seemed to have trouble following to their inevitable conclusion.
Lucius had followed them farther than anyone else in this world, and he’d gone mad with it. With the knowledge that everyone had tried to keep from him for as long as humanly possible.
Lucius wasn’t human, though. Not anymore. Not entirely. None of them were in this house. And eventually, “humanly possible” hadn’t been nearly enough.
Christian read Piper’s words and imagined them vividly. The beauty that had come with her gift, a million possibilities radiating out like the sun’s last gasps, and the darkness that had enveloped her once that sun had set. Once her gift had left her.
He read about her hours in the bath, lost to a world that had already passed her by, and couldn’t help but see parallels in the way she wrote of Lucius nearly becoming one with her couch.
Christian felt around inside him, remembering those powers that had almost, almost hatched under Lucius’s watchful eye, and he wondered what it would be like to feel them grown to fruition. What it would feel like to have them then wrenched away for good.
Forever.
“I knew, too,” Christian murmured. And he had. He’d known what losing his powers would do to Lucius, and he’d done it anyway.
It had been necessary. It had been vital. But Christian, coward that he was, had left before Lucius had woken up. He’d known somehow, intrinsically, that the look in Lucius’s eyes, gleam-less and shine-less and light-less, would break him. He’d known that he’d be able to see the hollowness in him, that space where space had been, and that neither of them would ever forgive him for what he’d done.
Piper had never forgiven Lucius for the loss of her own powers, and he hadn’t even taken them on purpose. Christian had no such excuse.
It hurt to read Piper describe the person that Lucius had become after Christian had left him. A husk of a man frantically playing a shell game with what few followers he had left, with himself, trying to convince them all that things weren’t over.
That he wasn’t empty.
Piper wasn’t wrong, exactly. Their church, beautiful and holy as it had been, had become a cult under Lucius’s greedy eye. He’d seen the money, the power, the knowledge, and the more he’d consumed, the more ravenous he’d become.
The church hadn’t been enough to fill him, in the end. Neither had the portals.
Neither had Christian.
Piper’s diary confirmed the worst of his fears, the ones that had slowly crept up on him as he’d read his way through the floor. As he’d paged through abandoned family albums. As the music in his ears became harder and harder to ignore and pain painted the backs of his eyes.
Lucius had done something terrible. Christian wasn’t sure what it was, couldn’t be sure, but he’d set this all in motion somehow. Piper and Nicolae seemed convinced of it, and Lex’s own journal seemed to hint at the nature of it.
Lucius’s powers had been gone, sliced away with dispassionate Charter knives, but Lex had been so bright. So colorful. Bursting with a potential that none of them fully understood, not really.
Except Lucius.
No one understood potential like Lucius did. No one else looked out into a discordant void and saw only an empty canvas. Piper painted her ghosts, haunting as they did every plane of existence all at once, but Lucius made them real. There was a sort of necromancy to his art, a reeling of ghosts from all the worlds into just one crystalline plane.
Lucius had made paradise. And then he’d destroyed it. He’d seen the potential of the multiverse, just like he’d seen the potential in Lex.
And he’d destroyed it.
Christian’s breaths came quickly now as he tried to wrap his head around it. What Lucius had done to Lex. And then what he’d done to try and bring him home.
The ironic thing was that Lucius had brought this discordant family together just as surely as he’d sewn bits of universes into one beautiful, tangled, quilted resort. The family had been united in fear and hatred and anger, mostly toward him, but they’d been united all the same. Piper had described them all seated around a dining room table that had been unused for decades, and she and Lucius had walked into the unknown hand-in-hand.
Christian was pretty sure that they’d hadn’t returned the same way.
There was only one place left up here, an old study that made Christian’s stomach go cold every time he walked past it. He wasn’t sure what was in there, but he had a pretty good idea.
The music that filled his ears got louder, more discordant, as he approached the study. It was like — like music played with an instrument composed of imaginings and dreamstuff only. An instrument that had not been invented yet, that would never be invented, not anymore. It was like he could hear every ethereal note on an AM radio station that he couldn’t quite tune in his head. It crackled, buzzed, tempted those secret parts of him into life. The parts of him that only Lucius had been able to touch, before.
Christian could feel them squirming inside him now, pecking at the inside of a shell that suddenly felt so, so fragile, and he’d never been more afraid in his life. There were things in that office to read, he was sure. Things that he could never unread. Things that he had to know nevertheless, with that terrible, awful hunger that he’d never been able to sate in Lucius.
It tore at him now, scratching at old-new-young-old eggshell, and Christian shuddered with his hand still on the door. Lucius had lived with this every day, hadn’t he? Had felt this desperate need to explore, to find, to tear, to know, and maybe even he had known that it would consume them all one day.
Christian swallowed hard, and he entered Emerson’s study.
It was all there. The experiments that had torn his Lucius from this world into all the rest. The experiments that had put the fear of God, such as it was, into Emerson, and had caused him to put all these ideas to bed for the rest of his life. The fear, the dread, the shame that had caused him and Jean to hide what he’d done. To hide Lucius.
Christian finally understood the magnitude of one small hamster, solitary and infinite, and he understood what manner of creature had shared his bed for so many years. Lucius had been a charlatan and a prophet, a magician with real powers who nevertheless excelled at sleight of hand. A teacher. A student. An explorer that could never quite shake the loss that dogged his movements. Lucius had been a god. He’d been a weak, pathetic little man.
Lucius had been everything. He had been Christian’s everything.
Lucius could be every single thing all at once, because Lucius, like a spotted little hamster before him, had become a singularity. Emerson, whether on purpose or by accident, had drawn all the universes together like folds of a ragged old cloth, and for the briefest of moments, he’d passed a needle through every world all at once.
Lucius had been that needle, and in that moment, he had breathed in the sunlight of infinite skies. He was where the multiverse came together. Where the universes met. A vertex. The apex. He was all.
And God, Christian had loved him. Lucius had glowed with the light of a thousand suns and had recreated them as best he could with clumsy human hands. He had been everything and nothing all at once, a shadow thrown by the light of the Anomaly, and Christian had loved him desperately for it. His strength and his weakness. His foresight and his blindness.
Christian had loved him. Loved him. Would always love him, and maybe never really had. It was like time was collapsing in on him there at Emerson’s old desk, like all the possibilities and moments, before and during and after, were folding together again and all Christian could do was breathe through it.
Piper had seen the ghosts. Lucius had resurrected them. But Christian, all he could do was be haunted by them, and all the choices he had never made.
The truth was there in Emerson’s desk, but it had not been written by his hands. No, Christian found truth in a crisp, well-typed binder. The truth, such as it was, had been typed by a Charter agent’s hands.
And Christian had been a fool.
The need had been there, for his betrayal. Christian knew that was still true. Lucius had still been driven mad with the potential of his own power. With the stars shining down on him from a thousand worlds. Stars only he could see.
But he knew now that he had been manipulated, too. That the Charter had had their own reasons for wanting Lucius’s light stripped away from him. And Christian had helped them. He’d torn beauty from the world, from all the worlds, and he’d given it to them to destroy.
Christian descended the old family staircase, the wooden banister smooth beneath his numb fingers. Lucius hadn’t been paranoid at all. The Charter had been watching this family for generations, and Lucius had felt their eyes so keenly in a way that Christian had never understood. He’d been right, though. He’d been right. The Charter wanted to extinguish the light of love and hope and creativity wherever they saw it, terrified of its inherent unpredictability, and they did not yet seem to understand that all those things were intrinsic to the human condition.
To the human heart.
Christian’s heart beat painfully with the love that he’d been trying to forget for all these months. With the light that Lucius had lit inside him. The one star that Christian could see, too.
Lucius’s mad genius had torn this family from its moorings, and their combined powers had torn this house from its very foundation. Had torn a rift in the universe that the Charter was desperately trying to sew back together.
But they weren’t nearly so skilled with a needle and thread as the Seligs had been.
Christian could feel the tap, tap, tap of a beak against shell, and he knew that what he contained scared the Charter, too. What they all contained. It was a piece of the Anomaly, just a tiny shard compared to Lucius’s radiant crystal, but it glowed in him just as surely as it did in the rest of them. As it did in every person who’d showed up at Lucius’s seminars full of a power they could not begin to understand, but that Lucius had promised to shape in his own image.
He was closer to Lucius’s light than he was to the rest of humanity, perhaps, but Christian couldn’t help but think that they all had a little bit of a glow. Soft. Warm. Full of so much potential.
Christian sat down on the couch, drenched as it was in Lucius, and he reached out for what he was most afraid of.
It hurt. It hurt, seeing Lucius’s handwriting. It hurt to hear his voice echoing out of an old iPad, and it hurt to read his notes. It hurt to read the love letters that Lucius had saved for all this time, all this goddamn time, and it hurt to read the Charter correspondence that Lucius had never shown him. It hurt to see the way that Lucius’s beautiful, unique voice started to deteriorate as all that potential finally caught up to him.
The potential for light. The potential for darkness. The potential for an unfathomable rip in everything they had always known.
It had happened anyway, hadn’t it? The exact thing that Christian had been so damned afraid of. Lucius had gone too far. Had reached for too much. Had drawn the universes in too tight to ever, ever escape from. He had destroyed — destroyed everything.
Which meant that Christian had destroyed Lucius for no reason. No reason at all.
Christian traced his fingers over the hearts that Lucius had written around his own name, the last traces of a romance that Christian had thrown away, if Lucius hadn’t thrown it away first. He watched the way that his name went from something holy, something reverent, in Lucius’s planner to something reviled.
Christian deserved that, probably. He deserved a lot of things. He deserved the emptiness that he felt inside now. The humiliation that he felt every time he had to admit to their followers that the powers Lucius had seen in him had never come to fruition. The loneliness he felt every time he had to sleep in a bed that was far, far too large for just him. Too cold. Too empty.
What would he have done, if the Charter hadn’t approached him? Would he have sailed off the edge of the universe at Lucius’s side? Or would he have found another way? Would the Anomaly have swallowed them both whole? Or would Christian have been able to coax him back out eventually?
Did I make things better? he wondered, Or worse?
Was his support what had sent Lucius spiraling toward infinity, too fast for any human hands to catch him? Or had his weight helped steady the boat they were both in? If his powers had finally blossomed under Lucius’s hands, would his aid have slowed their descent or quickened it?
Could I have stopped this?
That way led to madness, Christian knew, but it was impossible not to wonder. It felt arrogant to even think it, to imagine that his power might have been enough to keep Lucius from throwing himself off the edge of the known world, but… that was a negative thought process, wasn’t it? How many times had Lucius held his hands in his and told him that he was beautiful? Powerful? Perfect?
“I miss you,” Christian whispered, fully aware that there was no one there to hear it, and it was an admission that he’d been holding back from himself for months. He wasn’t supposed to miss Lucius. He wasn’t supposed to miss the ravings of a madman, of an arrogant sonofabitch who had ruined everything the two of them had ever worked for. He wasn’t supposed to love him. Not anymore.
But he did.
He hadn’t been lying back then in that shitty little motel room. He did love Lucius. He did want what was best for him. He did want Lucius to build himself back up like a phoenix from the ashes. He wanted the version of Lucius that reemerged to be deserving of every dream they’d spun together.
He’d wanted them to meet again.
But now Lucius was lost and Christian would never, ever see him again. Lucius had walked into the void feeling utterly alone, and he’d walked in believing that Christian hated him. Hated what he’d become.
Christian turned to the last page of Lucius’s planner that had any writing on it, and he stared at the words that were written there in the most familiar handwriting in the world.
You killed Lex. He was right to leave you.
“No,” Christian murmured. If there was one thing he’d learned from all this, it was that they were stronger together. They were all stronger together. And if — if he’d just talked to him. If he’d managed to pry him out of that dismal little camper. If the two of them had gone for a walk on the beach again, hand-in-hand as Lucius pointed out the constellations he’d installed like paintings in the cosmos just to make Christian smile.
If he’d looked those Charter agents in the eye and said no.
Christian hadn’t trusted Lucius, and to be fair, there hadn’t been much there to trust at the end. When the agents had shown up confirming all his worst fears, Christian had believed them. He’d believed in some interstellar police force more than he’d believed in Lucius.
More unforgivably, he’d believed in them more than he’d believed in himself. More than he’d believed in his own ability to fix what the two of them had fucked up. More than he’d believed in the innate power he’d always had within him. More than he’d believed in that connection between the two of them, the one that had always connected them through every world in the multiverse, through every star in the galaxy. That had sewn together their hearts indelibly.
Christian had always had a needle of his own, hadn’t he? And he’d dropped it on the sand on that beach, abandoned there with the rest of what had always made him him. With his power and the perfection that Lucius had always seen in him.
With his potential.
He’d been the one who’d reached out to Lucius. Who’d confessed his feelings. He’d been the one who volunteered to be Lucius’s right-hand man in this horrible, beautiful cult that the two of them had created. He’d been the one to build sandcastles with his mind.
He’d been the one who’d run away when Lucius’s mind had begun to scare him.
Maybe that was the most terrifying thought of all. The idea that Christian had power just like the rest of them, but that he’d abdicated his responsibility to it. Because if he had power, too, then maybe he’d been able to use it. And maybe he should have.
Maybe none of this would have happened if he hadn’t been weighed down with his own stupid negative thought processes. Maybe then Lucius wouldn’t have surrendered to his own.
He was right to leave you.
It was too much. The silence in the house was as loud as the music thrumming in his own ears, and the smell of Lucius that still lingered called out to the parts of him that he’d kept carefully tamped down since the moment he’d realized the two of them were going too far.
Christian put his head in his hands and he wept.
It had been a long time coming, a river of emotions and memories and power that he could no longer keep dammed up with hesitation and fear, and it rolled out of him like thunder on the horizon. Like the crashing of the waves against the rocks.
He sobbed, sobbed for the life that he’d lost and the life that he’d given up. For the love that he’d consigned to the void and the worry that maybe he’d never had to at all. For the power within him that he’d never trusted enough to let flourish, not when Lucius was right there carrying them both.
Christian sat there at the singularity at the heart of all worlds, and he cried until nothing at all was left. Until his face was scorched with hot tears and a void had been created inside him where they had all been stored.
He sat there, feeling wrung out and sore and dry as the desert they’d made their home, and he did not move when he felt the couch shift beside him.
He was not alone in this house. He’d known that already.
“It’s not too late,” a voice said from beside him. It was small and soft about the edges, the words too old for a voice so young. “Time is a circle here. It’s never too late.”
Christian didn’t say anything. Maybe, after reading thousands upon thousands of words all at once, he simply had no more left.
“Come upstairs. I’ll be waiting.”
Dully, he watched as a shadow flitted up the staircase. He could hear its soft footfalls, but there was nothing at all making the noise.
At this point, nothing scared him more than anything else.
But still, still. Christian found himself rising to his feet. Found himself turning away from wallpaper stained with the sins of a family’s past. From the most comforting and distressing scent in all the worlds.
He followed the shadow up the stairs, and wasn’t surprised at all to find himself back in the twins’ room. All the twins. All at once. He could sense their shared history in that room. Their shared trauma.
And at the center of it was one little girl, sat down on the bottom bunk of the bed and staring up at him with a solemnity that seemed unearned on her young face.
“Morgan,” he said, and his voice rasped in his throat.
She nodded once in acknowledgment. “They’re all gone, you know,” she said.
“Except you.”
She nodded again. “I was under the stairs.”
An in-between space. That’s where she’d been hiding that night. And it was where she was still trapped to this day. In between. “Where are they?” he asked.
She looked at him, then, and Christian had the queerest feeling that she was seeing something entirely different than he was. “Somewhere I can’t follow,” she said, soft. “But you can.”
He stared at her. “I can?”
She pointed toward her closet, the same one that the note had come from, and he could see now the soft glow beneath its door. It was a familiar light, and his heart ached at the sight of it.
“He’s waiting for you,” she said, quiet.
“No,” Christian whispered. Hushed agony. “He can’t be.”
She stared up at him with those big blue eyes of hers. “Granddad thought that, too. I told him to talk to Uncle Lucius, but he didn’t do it. He thought that Lucius could never be fixed. But they’re together now.”
“In the Anomaly?” Christian asked.
Morgan shrugged. “In somewhere.”
Christian looked at that soft, comforting glow from beneath the closet door. It felt like the hall light when you’re small and alone and scared in the darkness of your room. A narrow, comforting strip of light that let you know that you weren’t alone. Not really.
It’s not chaos. Agent 86’s last words wriggled into Christian’s mind unbidden, and he shuddered against the longing that flooded him.
He wanted that. God, he wanted that. To walk through that door and feel Lucius’s light on his skin one more time. To feel the light that suffused them all. But…
“I gave him up,” Christian told her softly, an admission that snaked its way up and out of the guilt that had lay at the pit of his stomach for far too long. “I don’t belong here anymore.”
“He understands,” Morgan said, brushing away his long-held admission like it was nothing. “He understands everything now. Don’t you feel it?”
And Christian remembered the suspicions that Piper’d had about her daughter. That Jean had had as well. The empathy that flowed through her, like she was the riverbed for their thoughts and emotions. No. A flowerbed suffused with their roots.
Morgan watched him as he figured things out. Waiting.
“I don’t—“
“Shh,” she said, and held her hands out to his. “Don’t you want to feel it?”
He did. God help him, he did. He could feel the threads that had connected him to Lucius for all those years hanging limply at his side, not connected to much of anything anymore. He’d give — God, he’d give anything to feel a tug on the other end of them one more time.
The house was watching him, too, now. Was waiting. It had been breathing this whole time, Christian realized, and he hadn’t even noticed until that breath caught in its hallways, its doors, its portals as it waited for him to make his decision.
They were all here, he realized, dizzy with it. They were all still here. Lucius and Piper and even that bastard agent who’d drawn him into all this. They were all right here in this house. They breathed in together, and the house itself breathed back out.
Slowly, haltingly, Christian laid his shaking hands in Morgan’s still ones. Her hands were so, so tiny against his, but in them, she held the entire fucking world.
He could feel it.
Tears, tears, happy tears and sad ones, tears of joy and death and birth and anger—
A breath, a sigh, a heartbeat that pounded in time with his own, in time with the pulsing beat of strings laser-thin and full of stars—
Knowledge, great and crashing and forbidden and theirs, whimsy and understanding and sharp, sharp knives of comprehension—
In and out, in and out—
Chaos and light, order and darkness, a spiral up and down and infinite, infinite—
Light.
Christian’s breath caught in his throat.
light light light light LIGHT catching color brightness warmth
a kiss a sigh blood running hot sand beneath your feet
the stars the sun a gleam of heartbreaking understanding
light
Christian let go of her hands, and her eyes were full of pity and longing and joy. She could see everything, and soon… soon, Christian would too.
He could feel it, the broken remnants of shell inside him. It was all sharp points and rough edges, but he felt scraped-new where it brushed against the softest parts of him.
Something had emerged. A shard of something much greater.
The Anomaly.
“It’s not chaos,” he whispered, and Morgan nodded sadly.
“It’s time to go,” she said.
“Yes,” Christian agreed. “He’s waiting.”
“They’re all waiting,” she countered, like that wasn’t the same damn thing. Now and always.
Christian turned from the little girl, knowing full well that she could not follow, and he opened the closet door.
Light. Light. And a thousand whispers that called his name.
He whispered one back like a kiss, and then he stepped inside.