Work Text:
Mark lives and dies infinitely in the twitch of a hummingbird’s wing.
Which is to say, pretty fucking fast. Honestly, he’s gotten used to it now: the thrum that pulses through his veins, the vacuum chill of the wormhole, the dizzy memories that slide through his mind like sludge when he wakes up back in his pod. It’s almost soothing, the repetitive steps—
Soothing, he thinks irately, if not for the fact the universe is pulling itself apart, and he’s helpless to stop it.
Going through the wormhole is the only option he can think of; and hey, he tells himself, if the Captain is willing, then he’s sure it’s the right call. The Captain hasn’t led him astray yet, have they?
(Well. Other than the wormhole part. Other than… whatever Lady said. About this being the Captain’s fault. About all of this being the Captain’s fault.)
(Has that happened yet? Had that been in the past, or the future? Had the Captain, this Captain, been through that timeline already?)
(Does it matter if they have?)
“Captain, oh, my Captain,” Mark salutes half-teasingly, half-earnestly, “what do you say we… take another trip down memory lane? Except, uh— It’s a wormhole that tears us apart and redistributes our atoms across space and time before piecing us back together to put us back in our pods. How about it? Sounds like fun, right?”
The Captain arches a very nondescript gray eyebrow. They don’t look impressed.
Mark’s expression turns puppy-dog-esque.
(There’s something about living and dying, living and dying, dying and being pulled back to life by a stronger power, that makes him feel nostalgic. He can’t quite put his finger on it.)
(Something about a house. Something about lightning. Something about unfairness.)
The Captain sighs, throws their hands up, and promptly gives in to Mark’s tugging on their sleeve, turning to follow him.
And hey, Mark’s nothing but a talker. He knows how to get what he wants, and he knows how to please people that might be upset by his decisions. So he beams at his friend, pushing as much cheer and flattery into his voice as he dares: and by the time they get to the warp core room, all systems still working at one hundred and ten percent, the Captain is grinning, albeit reluctantly. Because they’re not an idiot, they know who they’re dealing with.
Flattery, both of them know, gets you everywhere.
“I’ll jump first, this time,” Mark says eagerly, and then groans at the Captain’s look, “no, no, look, you went first last time, so it’s only fair I get my chance now. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up saving you from dinosaurs again. Oh, or maybe that volcano. Remember that, Captain? The weird blue planet with the volcano we melted in?”
The Captain scoffs, and it’s then that Mark remembers that oh yeah, he hadn’t been the one doing the saving in those situations. With a sheepish duck of his head and a wince, memories of being snapped up in a dinosaur’s teeth to being burned alive by lava bubble up in his head, probably never to leave again.
Hey. At least he can say he’s ticked “dying in an active volcano with his best friend” off his bucket list.
But both of them come to an agreement, and, yes, Mark gets to jump in first. Whooping in sheer excitement, trying to ignore the slowly rising nausea pooling in his gut at the idea of yet another horrible death, he offers a grin to the Captain, and steps in backwards.
Their face is the last thing he sees before the blue warp light consumes him, sending him off with a nervous smile.
Maybe that’s why he ends up where he does.
He actually has no idea where he is, at first. He crashes unceremoniously into what seems to be one giant room of one very giant house, with one very giant mirror in front of him that stretches across the length of a short wall. Everything around him looks dusted with age and with exhaustion: everything looks tired, in this room, and he feels the weight on his own shoulders, like he’s slowly being pulled inside out by a force bigger than him.
Breathe, Mark. His eyes clamp shut as he picks himself off the floor, grimacing as the world tilts around him for a moment. You’re a big boy. At least it’s not another volcano.
…Maybe another volcano would be preferable. Because he opens his eyes, and the first thing that comes into focus is the Captain.
And so sue him, he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. He’s an engineer, sure, but no maths or science or engineering course could have prepared him for the sight in front of him. Struck dumb at the sight of his Captain, his friend, staring back at him, wide-eyed, behind a mirror, Mark can only step back, jaw dropping.
“You’re— What?”
Because this is the Captain… sort of. This is the Captain but frightened and younger, this is the Captain but undone. Mark has never seen his friend this way before: eyes wide and dilated, saturation faded, face puffy from crying and blood seeping down from their head. Their neck sits at an odd angle, their bloodied fists sliding helplessly down the thick sheet of glass they’re stuck behind, and Mark is struck with a thought—
This can’t be the Captain. This can’t be his Captain.
So he says their name, uncertainly, hesitantly, and watches recognition and horror fill their gaze. And that’s when they begin pounding on the glass again, slamming bruised knuckles against the mirror, and they write, on the mirror, they write with the blood from their broken hands—
You, the Captain writes, and they’re sobbing, in anger, in hatred, in betrayal, you. You did this. You.
“Wow, hey, no no no, I didn’t— Okay, I guess I did get myself here, but I didn’t do—“ Mark waves his hands nervously at the mirror for lack of a better word. “What the hell happened? Did something go wrong?”
He’s not even sure they can hear him. Through the mirror, through the shattered shards that make up their wispy reflection, through the bitter tears flooding their face. If they can hear him, they don’t answer — maybe they think he’s bullshitting, maybe they think it’s obvious — instead, they write again:
You. You. You.
Body moving on its own, Mark stumbled closer to the mirror, presses his fingers helplessly against the glass, watching his own face’s reflection twist in uncertainty and in upset. “Look, it’s okay,” he says, trying for brave, “we’ll get you out of there. We’ll get you out, so just you dry up those tears, Captain, and get ready for me to… come up with… a plan. Which you know I always have. I totally have a plan to save you. Uh-huh.”
There’s an uncomfortably helpless feeling gnawing at his chest and lungs, burning, boiling. Because he thinks he’s seen this before, in the same way he vaguely thinks he dreams about dating the Captain, in the same way he vaguely thinks he dreams about pulling off a heist with them. In a far-off lifetime, one where he’s not him-Mark, but still Mark, and the Captain is still the Captain—
Except they aren’t looking at him with that same half-exasperated, half-amused stare he knows. They’re slamming their hands against the mirror, and they’re crying, and they’re trying to get out, and all he can do is stand and watch them.
You, you, you. Their hands shake. I despise you.
Me. Mark’s hands shake when he lifts them to the mirror, cringing back from the Captain’s flinch. They think I’ve done this.
“Ca—” The usual easy title feels wrong on his lips for the first time. Wetting them hesitantly, he presses his hands earnestly against the shattered glass, ignoring the way blood beads up from where his hands snag the fragments. “It’s going to be okay. I don’t lie. I never lie. It’s gonna be just fine. Trust me.”
Maybe it’s the wrong thing to say, or maybe he’s seen too much. Maybe it’s just not entertaining enough for whatever asshole god is controlling their twisted, fucked-up wormhole adventure, because before he can see his Captain’s response, the cracks in the mirror glow bright blue, and the telltale tugging behind his navel that means he’s about to plunge back to his own time and world. Behind the blue glow, the Captain looks terrified and confused, and Mark can only offer them his most earnest and reassuring look to counteract the pounding in his heart.
“Hang on, Captain!” He calls over the rush of wind. “Just hang on, you’ll be alright!”
Maybe it’s a lie. Maybe it’s not. The mirror shatters, fragments upon fragments thrown into the gushing wormhole, and Mark yelps as he’s tossed like a ragdoll into them, tiny shards scratching at his face and forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut. The wormhole yanks him along as if he’s nothing, roughs him up, and the mirror from the manor with the Captain’s reflection follows, the millions of shards biting at his body like they’re trying to pull him apart, skin him alive, pick him to pieces and figure out who exactly he is: which Mark, across all the universes and timelines, if he’s their Mark — and time and space is so funny like that, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t really know anything anymore. The wormhole, the manor, the Captain, has left him scrabbling in vain for the scraps of identity he has left. Across the universe, across all universes, he sees himself, and he sees one million iterations of himself, in one million different lifetimes. And across all universes, across all versions of him, he sees one Captain.
Just the one. They’re all the same. Always by his side, always silent, always watching.
And when Mark staggers out of his cryo-pod, crusty-eyed and newly-scratched from the mirror, he sees the same Captain, his Captain, always the same across every universe and time. The one constant, across space and time.
It’s staggering. It’s overwhelming.
But they grin when he suggests jumping in again, and he knows that no matter what, the Captain is still his best friend, and maybe, despite the deaths and the consequences and the exhaustion gnawing at them both, the Captain’s friendship is what he needs to get through this.
(When they throw themselves into the warp core wormhole this time, they hold hands. It does nothing to stop them being ripped apart by the force, but Mark knows he’ll find his way back to the Captain again.)
(In the moment before their hands are parted, he swears he feels the cracks of the mirror in their grip, swears their hand is like glass. Fragile. Breakable.)
(Ancient.)
—
“Did you ever… see anything?” He asks when they’re settled on the new planet, long after the wormhole, long after the end of the universe and the warp core and his own mistakes. “In the loops?”
The Captain shoots him a look. The Look. The kind of Look he’s become familiar with that means duh, obviously, what do you think, dumbass?
“I was just curious,” he complains, but there’s a desperate reflection on his mind that leaves his usual dramatic whining subdued, “I saw some stuff too, you know. I saw a lot of things.”
His friend pauses. When they tilt their head to tell him to continue, they look hesitant, like they’re not sure they want to know.
Mark’s not sure he wants to tell. The memories of the manor don’t really leave his head, in the same way none of the realities do: but this one sticks out, for some reason, leaves him waking up in his bed in a cold sweat and heading through to the Captain’s room to check they hadn’t become a mirror in their sleep. It’s a different sort of reality, a not-so-alternate universe, he thinks — and so he takes a breath before continuing, letting the silence between them dissolve in the dusty morning air.
“I saw… a house,” he offers, and some silent grief weighs on his friend’s shoulders, “a manor, with a mirror. And you… were in the mirror. And you were upset. You were… mad. At me.”
The Captain turns away. Their face is tired, their body hunched. How many lifetimes have they lived? Mark wonders suddenly, for the first time. Outside of the warp core, outside of the wormhole and the Invincible II and the life they currently lead? How many times had they been through life? How many iterations of Mark have they met?
And how many iterations of them has he met? Has it been as many as he’d thought? Or have they all been the one person; has every version of the Captain he’s seen across the thousands of universes been his Captain, in a way he hasn’t been any of their Marks before?
From the tremble in their lip, it seems like the latter. Mark swallows, shuffles closer to them, suddenly somber.
“Captain?” He asks, quietly. “Did— Did I… Did I put you there? Did I do that to you? The mirror thing?”
No. The Captain grabs his arm tight, mouths the word in horror. When they turn round again, their eyes are misty with remembrance, but firm. No. Not you. Not you. Never you.
Their signing is desperate, earnest. But the Captain in the mirror had sobbed the opposite. You, they’d howled at him silently, voice stolen, you, you did this, you, you, you. And it hadn’t been him: not him, not engineer-him, not this-him, but it had been a version of him. He can tell, just from the Captain’s exhaustion. And he remembers being tired, remembers asking when they’d last slept: and he remembers not getting an answer, because the real answer is too painful, the real answer is too sad.
So he asks again now. The Captain had held him when he’d been tired: it’s his turn to do the same now.
“Captain… when was the last time you slept?”
The edges of the Captain’s lips turn up, exhaustion turning their amusement cynical. They lay their head on Mark’s shoulder in answer, and now that they’re this close, he can see the cracks from the mirror. Tiny thin speckled scars, minuscule little lines, splaying all across their skin, too minute to see from far away.
But they’re closer, now. And he’s closer. And he tugs them closer gently, lets their eyes close while they lean against him, and, when their breathing begins to even out, he examines their closest hand, tracing the shatter-scars from the mirror until they disappear up their sleeve. Mark has his own scars, ones he’s familiar with (the welts from engineering school mistakes and the breaks from childhood that never healed right) and one’s he’s unfamiliar with (wounds from the warp core, scars from deaths he barely remembers). But he focuses now on familiarising himself with the Captain’s hands — bare, for once, pulling off their gloves after a long day of hard work — and on memorising every inch of the mirror-fragment scars that line their hands and arms.
Maybe it doesn’t matter which universe he’s from, and who the Captain is. Maybe their past, his other selves, the rest of the universe, maybe it doesn’t need to weigh on him so heavy. Because the new planet is thriving, the people safe, and despite everything almost ending, nothing’s really changed.
He’s still Mark. And they’re still his Captain. For now, that’s enough. It’s always enough.
And no matter what universe he finds them in next, he knows he’ll follow them to the end of it without hesitation.