Work Text:
In the seconds following the shot, all Kim could see were spots from the flash of the gun’s muzzle, and all she could hear was ringing from the bang, but she could smell the blood immediately. She didn’t care about any of that for long though, didn’t even care about the cartel drug lord standing in her living room, not when she saw who came in next.
A second silhouette appeared in the darkness Lalo had just emerged from. However, as it got closer, the shadowy figure took on an undeniable tint of Hamlindigo blue.
Howard stepped into the light. He kept his eyes fixed ahead and smiled his tight smile. He didn’t acknowledge the body — his body — on the floor, except perhaps by refusing to look down.
“Kim, Jimmy,” he said, nodding to each of them in turn, “I can’t say it’s good to see you two again.”
Kim looked back and forth frantically from the man in front of her to the one on the floor.
“Don’t worry about him,” Howard said dismissively, “he wasn’t going to go on to a life worth living.”
“No arguing with that,” Jimmy thought, remembering the last he’d heard of the Howard on his home world.
“Well Howie, you weren’t shitting me,” Lalo chirped happily, cocking his head at a sharp angle to look down into his victim’s open eyes, then back to the perfectly identical pair blinking beside him. “So, I’ve held up my end of the deal, now, my friend, let’s talk about the future!”
“I believe our agreement included, ahem, disposal services,” Howard responded uncomfortably, straightening his tie.
Lalo let out a sigh of mock exasperation and threw his hands up in an exaggerated gesture of surrender, “Whatever you say, boss.” He unceremoniously grabbed the body by the ankles and dragged it toward the front door. “I’ll see you guys in bit, save a beer for me,” he said with a wink on his way out.
Two years ago, when Jimmy first told her his story of clone worlds, billions of light years apart in time and space, Kim’s skepticism hadn’t lasted long. Either he was telling the truth or he was an oracle: until now everything had happened almost exactly as he said it would. Even with the deviations their Sandpiper scheme had created, history outside of the New Mexico legal community seemed unaffected. Besides, she’d wanted to believe him. It was a relief after all the time she’d spent speculating about his strangeness. Inter-spaciotemporal travel was easier to swallow than any other reason she could come up with why, for example, he’d watched the towers go down on September 13th with no reaction save for a nonchalant “close enough” muttered under his breath. But physically seeing proof in the form of a very much alive Howard standing next to the one she’d seen shot dead moments before…all she could do was let herself drop onto the couch with a thud and put her head in her hands.
“You know, I keep a journal, make sure to jot down a sentence or two every day, been doing it since I was in high school,” Howard said, tapping his breast pocket. “On this day in my world — and I bet in yours too, Jimmy — I stayed late at the office going through Sandpiper deposition transcripts, drove home, and slept on the couch,” he paced toward the window and stared absently down at the parking lot, “The moment I wanted to go back to, the moment I came here for, was mundane, insignificant: Cheryl came downstairs when she heard the door that night. Saw me getting undressed, and she reached out her hand, and then…nothing, she pulled it back, went to bed. I’ve been obsessed with returning to that moment because I had a thousand options in front of me: I could have grabbed her hand and pulled her toward me; said everything I felt; gone upstairs after her; called her name…but, like a puppet, incapable of acting on its own, I just stood there silently and watched her go. When I set out, it was to find that very point in time again, and seize it the way I should have.”
He turned around to face them with his hands clasped behind his back, “Clearly, that moment doesn’t exist here. You two destroyed it. You destroyed it and now I have to step into the life of a ruined man.”
“Why don’t you go hop back in your spaceship then Howard, I’m sure in another 10 or 12 billion years you’ll be able to find a planet where you can grab your wife’s ass,” Jimmy taunted.
Kim wasn’t listening. She was fixated on watching this new Howard (well, technically speaking, old Howard) pace around the room, picking up and examining anything that caught his interest. His movements were identical to the man she’d worked with, and more recently against for the past 13 years. It comforted her. This wasn’t some hollow, Invasion of the Body Snatchers doppelgänger; it was Howard.
Of course, he couldn’t be exactly the same. Time changes a person, and depending on how you counted, this Howard was either years or eons older than the one he’d had killed would ever be. This thought sent a wave of guilt over Kim. Everything she’d done had been to punish Howard for what Jimmy said he would do. Cutting Jimmy out of the Sandpiper settlement on a contract technicality, dissolving Chuck’s scholarship fund to funnel the money into HHM’s coffers, having her blacklisted at every firm in New Mexico — the man they’d torn down hadn’t done any of it yet, and, always doomed by being at a desirable point on he and his counterpart’s shared timeline, he never would have. These were always going to be his last days, she and Jimmy had just made them miserable.
“I gotta take a leak,” Jimmy declared, storming off to the bathroom.
He turned the faucet on and let it run, looking in the mirror at the crow’s feet around his eyes. Howard had timed his trip well; he was still the 40-something version of himself that he was replacing. “How’d he pull that off?” Jimmy wondered, irritated. He’d never heard of an Earth-type world figuring travel out before 2024, and this Howard couldn’t have come from anywhere special; he was the spitting image of the version Jimmy had known, right down to the smell of his hair gel.
2024…a lousy 20 years had kept people like Chuck from spreading their lifetimes across a billion times that. He’d have been a perfect candidate for early trials: admittedly some delusions of grandeur but not on a “try to kill Hitler” level, no kids, no timeline-critical discoveries or inventions — although if anybody could find a way to link the development of light speed travel to a regional bank merger, it would be Chuck. Hell, it wouldn’t even be that much of a stretch, considering who'd backed the R&D.
He shut the faucet off and slicked back his hair. He’d left Kim alone out there long enough. He took a deep breath, started instinctively rehearsing how he could argue that this whole thing qualified as an assisted suicide in court, and walked out to rejoin his houseguests.