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One month, six days, eight hours, and ten minutes have passed since you, Mark, and the rest of the Invincible II crew had landed on this planet, your home away from home. Its resemblance to Earth was uncanny and, at first, made you and Mark feel like you were leading your crew right into a trap. "It's the illicium on an angler fish and we're all about to get chomped," in Mark's words. But, once you'd stopped thinking like that and let yourself relax, its familiarity was comforting. However, it now made you a tad sick to your stomach with nostalgia on the quieter nights where you could hear yourself think. It was rarely completely silent, what with you and your crew working ‘round the clock to set up the beginnings of a civilization. You didn’t mind the noise, though. The idle sounds of Gunther’s barking laughter (mixed in with the mildly worrying occasional gunshot), Celci softly, but firmly giving orders, and Burt waxing poetic about one thing or another were what lulled you to sleep. And man, did you need sleep after all of… that.
You hadn’t even had time to process that, nor talk to Mark about it. With both of your hands full, the two of you hadn’t had a chance to talk at all about anything that wasn’t work related.
It’s fine, you’d think. We have to put the colony first.
Except, it wasn’t fine. It was anything but fine. Mark was your best friend, and you missed talking to him for more than a few minutes at a time. It began to eat away at your sanity, weakening your will to work. On a particularly quiet night, while you laid on your back on your cot, your eyes closed but mind kept awake with thoughts of Mark, you decided that you'd had enough. You opened your eyes and, without looking, plucked your walkie-talkie from your nightstand and clicked it on.
“This is Cap to Mark. You there? Over.”
You stared at your walkie-talkie for a good 5 seconds before it crackled to life. “This is Mark, I’m here. Is everything alright, Cap? Over.”
“No.” You sat up to swing your legs over the side of your cot. “Can you come over? Over.”
“I’m on my way. Over.”
You clicked your walkie-talkie off and set it back on your nightstand. Mark’s tent was right next to yours, so it wouldn’t take long for him to get here. Sure enough, he ducked under your tent flaps less than a minute later. He was barely clothed, wearing only a white tank top and a pair of black boxer briefs. You wondered if you’d just woken him up, but he hadn’t sounded tired when you’d called him just a few seconds ago. Like you, he’d probably been up for hours.
The sight had you cracking a smile. “You could’ve put on pants.”
Mark looked down at himself, like he hadn’t noticed his state of undress, then looked back at you with a sheepish grin. “Oops?”
“It’s fine. Get over here.”
Mark walked over and sat next to you, leaving a little room for Jesus, like he didn't usually hog your personal space as if it were his own. It unsettled you. Perhaps he was still harboring guilt from the previously mentioned that? During the few interactions you'd had with him, he'd seemed normal, though you should've known better. After all, it wasn't exactly easy to forgive yourself for, say, the unfathomable number of lives you'd ruined and people you'd killed, even if it was just the multiverse's biggest oopsie.
Yeesh. You both needed so much therapy. Too bad you didn't have any licensed psychiatrists on crew.
“What’s the matter, Captain?”
You looked at Mark and saw the concern written across his features. It sort of made you want to throw up, but you swallowed the bile back down your throat and opened your mouth to speak instead.
“I wanted to talk about the… incident… that happened about a month ago."
Mark's brow raised, his eyes widening to match. You'd have thought he was simply surprised if it hadn't been for the blatant terror shining in his irises.
"Captain, I —"
"Ah, ah, ah!" You rushed to interrupt him. You already knew what he was going to say and you wanted to pull the brakes on that train of thought. "Don't say a thing. Not yet, anyway. I'm not mad at you, okay? I'm not. I'll admit, I was at first, way back when we were in the Warp Core, but I forgave you after I got a chance to think. You were just doing what you thought was right, same as everyone else. I can't exactly fault you for that."
"But, but —"
"Shhh." You put a finger to Mark's lips. "Shush. I know how you feel, alright? I know."
You moved your hand to rest it on your thigh. “I have these… memories, I guess I'd call them. They're little more than brief flashes of grotesque images, a nauseating feeling, and guilt. A lot of guilt."
You had to avert your eyes. Looking at Mark was too much for you to handle right now, especially with what you were about to say next.
"In one memory, I overworked you to the brink of insanity and you suffocated me to death with my own pillow. In another, against Celci's advice, I blew up the ship before it could blow up on us, as if I were trying to, like, assert my dominance over it. In another, I sent Tyler out of the airlock into the cold, unforgiving vastness of space because of another memory of him actually being a murderous Wug in disguise. I don't think that Tyler was a Wug, though."
You shuddered as you recalled his crystalized corpse flipping weightlessly among the stars. "I have so many memories like this, memories of doing terrible, horrible things to the people I care about, just for the hell of it. Like watching my close friends and subordinates die over, and over, and over again wasn’t real. It was all a game, and I was winning. I know that I didn’t kill you, though — not on purpose, never on purpose. Not you, not Celci, not any member of the crew. But if these memories aren’t mine, then whose are they? And why do I have them?"
You dropped your head into your hands, digging your fingers into your scalp. Tears pricked at your eyes as you sucked in a shaky breath. "It doesn't make any fucking sense. Am I crazy?"
"Captain, hey." Mark's voice was soft, like he was talking to a frightened child. "Listen to me. You are not crazy. Even if you were, I think it's only fair that you would be, considering the actual craziness of being stuck in a cyclical hell where your only options are to dive into the next circle of it or die."
Mark placed his hands on your shoulders. The weight of his palms was comforting. That, mixed with his reassuring words caused you to start to relax. A little crazy never hurt anybody, you supposed, though another memory disagreed with you. A gun, a bullet piercing through flesh, the words, "it was all a joke!" —
"I have a theory," Mark continued, cutting into your thoughts. "Engineering may be my forte, but I have dabbled in other areas of study. Biomedical engineering, quantum mechanics, and, coincidentally, the multiverse theory."
You peeked through your fingers. You knew Mark was a geek (you meant that affectionately), but you didn't know he was that much of a geek. "Seriously?"
Mark nodded, a smile starting to spread on his lips. "Part of that theory is that if you happen upon a wormhole, once you enter it, a sort of mitosis thing happens where a part of you splits off to wander down a separate path than the one you took. If you enter it again, another part of you splits off, and a part of the original copy splits off as well. The more wormholes you enter, the more you's it creates. Make sense?"
Hesitantly, you nodded. "Yeah, I… I think I get it."
"So, you are correct. You didn't kill me or anyone on the Invincible, but an alternate version of you did in an alternate universe, and since they are you, you share the same memory."
You shook your head as you tried to digest what Mark just said. God, you never wanted to see another sci-fi movie ever again. This shit was so ridiculous, it was almost comical. Almost.
"That's… what the fuck?"
As much as that raised several more questions, you felt a headache coming on and decided to put a pin in this for later. You did feel a smidge better, though, now that you had one answer instead of zero.
You scrubbed your hands over your face, then dropped them onto your lap with a sigh. "You know what? It's fine. I mean, no, it's not fine. I don't know if I'll ever feel fine again, but it's fine for now."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive. I've talked about myself for long enough." You looked at Mark, saw the worried gleam in his eyes, and put on a small smile for his sake. "I want to hear about you."
"Me? What about me?"
"I'm not the only one hurting here, Mark. I know you are too, far more than I am."
"I…" Mark found the wall of your tent to be very interesting all of a sudden. "Captain…"
"It's okay if you're not ready to talk about it yet."
"No, that's not it. I've been ready to talk for a few weeks now. I just…" He looked back at you and you were taken aback by the sudden tears in his eyes. "I'm so sorry, Captain, for everything."
"Mark —"
"I wish I could apologize to everyone across every universe who I've hurt beyond repair, whose lives I've ended. I know that it would mean nothing, a million sorry's couldn't undo the damage I've done, but I just wish…"
He trailed off. When he spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. "I wish I could do something."
If you were a cartoon character, your heart would have literally shattered into a thousand pieces. Since this was reality, it only did that in the figurative sense. You didn't have the words to comfort him, and even if you did, you weren't sure that anything that you could say would help. So, you did the next best thing: you spread your arms and gestured for Mark to bring it in. You watched what little resolve he had crumble into dust before he brought it, hard. You held in a squeak as he squeezed at least a year off of your lifespan. You quickly decided that you didn't care, however, as you felt wetness on the side of your neck and heard Mark's stuttering cries. He could squeeze 8 more years off your life for all you cared. As long as it helped him feel better.
You hugged an arm around his waist, your other hand tangling in his hair. It wasn't long before you'd started crying as well, the tears that had threatened to fall before now streaming freely down your face like twin waterfalls.
The two of you sat there for a long while, just holding each other and weeping. After what might've been an hour later, both of your cries trailed off into quiet sniffles. Mark's grip on you loosened (your ribs thanked God for that), but he didn't let go of you. You idly twisted the hair at the nape of his neck, careful not to tug it.
This is oddly intimate, your horrid brain (un)helpfully supplied. You hoped Mark couldn't feel your skin heating up through your clothes.
"Hey, Captain?" Mark's raspy voice broke the silence.
"Yeah?" Yours didn't sound much better.
"How've you been sleeping?"
You shrugged a shoulder. "Not great. Some nights I sleep, some nights I don't." There was more to it than that, but you didn't want to worry Mark any more than you already had. "You?"
"Pretty terribly. Ever since we've landed here, I've had a nightmare every night, without fail."
"Every night?" You echoed. Mark's hair tickled your neck as he nodded. "Can I ask what about?"
Mark hesitated for a second before responding. "You. Occasionally, it's Celci, or Gunther, or someone else, but most of the time, it's you."
"Me?" You felt like a parrot, but you couldn't help it. You had a feeling you knew the answer to your next question, but you had to ask it. "What about me?"
"You, dying — either because of me, or some outside force that I can't control — in my arms. Always… always in my arms. Always." Mark's hold on you tightened. "I wake up in a cold sweat every time, my heart feeling like it's about to explode, gasping for air like I'm dying. It takes an hour of convincing myself that you're still alive while taking deep breaths for me to fall back asleep."
Mark chuckled, but there was no humor behind it. "Actually, right before you called me over, I'd just woken up from a nightmare. You saved me an hour of panic, so, thanks for that."
"Mark," you started saying, then stopped, realizing that you, again, didn't know what to say. You tried again. "I'm sorry."
"It's okay. It's not your fault."
"That doesn't make it okay. You shouldn't be having to go through that every night — and don't you dare say that you deserve it, or I'll deck you. That's something I'd only wish upon my worst enemy, and you are far from that. You're my friend, my best friend." Even if I want us to be more than that. "Got that?"
"I got it."
"Good."
You took Mark's cheeks in your hands and tilted his head back until you could look at him properly. His face was flushed from crying, eyes still wet with tears, and this close, you could see the bags under them. You bet you looked much the same.
"Tell you what — the next time you have a nightmare, come to my tent. I don't care if I'm asleep, wake me up. We can talk it out, or we can just cuddle, like this, until we pass out. How about that?"
The beginnings of a smile tugged at Mark's lips. "Okay, Captain."
Seeing Mark smile for the first time in over a month melded the broken pieces of your heart back together. Without thinking, you leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. As soon as your lips left his skin, however, you froze. Your skin, on the contrary, grew very warm. Mark looked just as shocked as you felt, his own flush darkening.
"Sorry," you blurted out. "I shouldn't have done that."
"It's okay. I don't mind." Mark muttered something under his breath that you couldn't hear.
"What was that?"
"Ah, uh, I was just saying that we should go to sleep. It's really late now, you know, and we've got a lot of work to do tomorrow."
You know damn well that's not what he'd said, but you didn't push. He was right, you both needed as much rest as you could possibly get.
"Yeah…" You sighed. "You want to crash here?"
Mark tried (and failed) not to look too relieved about not being kicked out. It was cute. "I'd like that, yeah."
"Alright. Big spoon or little spoon?"
Mark ducked his head, but you caught his shy smile. "Little spoon, please."
"I was hoping you'd say that. Now, get off of me, you big oaf."
Mark's chuckle was genuine this time as he rolled off of you to lay on his side. You snuggled up behind him, circling your arms around his waist and tangling your legs with his. He wiggled around for a second before you felt the remaining tension melt out of him as he exhaled deeply. You closed your eyes, grateful for the silence for once as you began to drift off.
"Oh, and Captain?"
"Hm?"
"Thank you."
You smiled against Mark's neck. "Any time, Mark. Any time."