Chapter Text
I could feel Big Friend, warm, where my heart should be. Uncomfortably warm. Like a flush of embarrassment, like shame. She didn’t seem keen on intervening-- just comforting me as the cops raided the break room.
“So.. are you gonna read me my rights, or what?”
“You aren’t being arrested,” the cop grunted. She was a little taller than me, with rough teal skin and dark feather hair. At least, that’s what I could make out, behind all the beige tactical gear she sported.
I waited patiently for her to explain exactly what this situation was meant to be as she snapped another pair of handcuffs on my wrist. Her partner, a regular, human man, set up an explosive on the break room floor. I could feel time, moving slowly around us, slower than it should’ve been. I wasn’t a big fan of Time or her bureaucrats or the cops that followed them-- but they weren’t really fond of me either, as far as I could tell.
I cleared my throat, trying to get her attention away from typing into her watch and back on the important subject: me. And her job. But mostly me.
“Then what is this?” I demanded.
“You’re being confiscated--” she picked up the handcuffs from the ground and re-locked them, unphased. Like all things at the TVA, they had been specially designed to resist every form of magic in the known and unknown universe. But wiggling out of them wasn’t magic. Well, maybe to Houdini.
“I’m busy.”
I didn’t want to go. But I knew better than to resist where the universe pulled me.
“We just need a chat with your supervisor-- I’d read her her rights, but I didn’t think she could-- you know--” she gave the signal for her partner to arm the device, and then finally, finally looked at me, “--hear me?”
Supervisor-- my Big Friend had been called many things-- people did not usually shoot for “supervisor.”
“Do you want me to drive?” Big Friend offered, from within. Her voice was gentle and sincere. I knew she pitied me. I hated it.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so,” the cop said. She shoved me through the glowing, holographic door that had appeared in the fridge.
I landed face first into a familiar carpet. The TVA was looking as beige as it always had-- even if their time-cops had new uniforms and faces, the interior design was always the same. People in every shade of beige sat in beige chairs behind beige desks, with off-beige papers and marked with dark beige pens in front of them and in their beige computers.
One beige man looked up to see me brush the beige dust off my clothes and started a beige groan that got enough attention to turn the office slightly off its color. They scowled at me and set down their work in a ripple all down the endless cubicles, as far as the eyes could see-- or at least as far as their eyes could see me.
So, they remembered me.
The cop walked me up to a big desk, snapped on another pair of handcuffs, and pushed my head down onto the beige wood-laminate. Usually, something I would’ve enjoyed! Except that she was a cop.
A beige man was looking almost green as he reached a small scanner into my ear.
“Don’t you think you should identify me before you abduct me?”
“Please don’t talk to me,” he said, holding back tears of disgust as something squelched. I was curious whether it was just layers of tissue or if I really did still have a brain. I assumed the former. There’s no way my Big Friend let me keep my brain-- too much valuable real estate up there! Is the head where the soul is? You think after all these years I’d know-- but it'd only been a couple centuries since I learned the head’s where the thinking’s at.
“You have a brain,” Big Friend said. I ignored her.
“Oh, don’t be shy,” I tried to console the clerk. “This can’t be the first time you’ve stuck a fork into someone’s brain. And I assure you, it can’t kill me. My, uh, supervisor not only provides dental, but brain insurance, too. And she’ll never let me collect, if you know what I mean.
“I really don’t,” he grimaced, pulling the scanner back out.
“Me neither!” I said, twisting back out of the handcuffs and reaching for his glasses. I put them on, curious if they held secret information-- like some kind of fancy scanner that could point me to an exit. Unfortunately-- and unsurprisingly-- they only held an uncomfortable high prescription. “Fuck, your eyesight’s awful. You want me to fix that for you?”
“No, tha--”
“Nah, let me do something for you! Come on!”
I snapped the glasses in half. He wouldn’t need them!
And for the first time, the beige man saw things as they really were. As they really, really were. He saw the TVA, but beyond it, too. He saw me and all the things that lived there. He saw the cop, and all the things that had died there. All the things buried there. The office, no longer beige, but infinite. He looked around and realized how many infinities surrounded him. Stretching upwards, outwards, and beyond words, in directions indescribable. His eyes seemed to wilt, revealing something else inside him. Revealing everything.
I think I might’ve overshot 20/20.
“Infinity…” he mumbled, clutching his face. He gasped and coughed, but he didn’t scream. To him, there was enough time to process it. “...infinity…”
The cop started to lead me away-- somehow getting the handcuffs back on without my notice. Others ran to the sides of the beige man, leading him down, the other way, twitching and muttering the whole way.
“He’ll be fine.”
The cop ignored me and kept dragging me through the hall. I was choosing not to pull up a bookmark on his soul, to see if I was lying or not. I just watched his shaky steps leave deeper imprints in the carpet. I let my heels drag.
“If you feel guilt,” Big Friend said, “Act. You can fix anything. Return him to normal.”
She was bluffing. Trying to push me into practicing or helping people or-- whatever her angle was these days. Even if I fixed his sight, he would still remember what he saw. It would be better to let him keep it, and try to live with it, than to rationalize it in memory.
“There’s no angle. Guilt can be a good emotion. You may be my Little Friend, but you’re still pretty big to them.”
“Oh fuck off.”
“We just need to talk with your boss,” the officer said. Her smile was more like a grimace, but it was clear she was trying to get me to do something. I almost wanted to help her-- she had gotten the interrogation room with the comfy chairs, after all. I was handcuffed to them-- but still! It was almost relaxing here!
“I don’t know what you want me to do-- it’s not as easy as it looks. I can’t just summon her at will. She’s very busy, you know,” I lied. “I can leave a message if you can make it worth my while, you know? Even someone as affluent as me needs something every once in a while. It’s not all fun and games and such-- there’s some work involved with my position, unlike some people--”
“That’s great,” she interrupted, not listening to a word I said. “Because I really just wanted to talk to you about how great I think trees are--”
I suddenly remembered a deal I had made, with Big Friend, many, many, many years ago. An agreement that, when boring subjects that she liked came up, she could take the wheel. But how had the TVA known?
“And fungus!” she pretended to gush. “And beetles! And crabs! It’s all just so fascinating--”
And then I was gone.
The back seat isn’t so bad.
I mean, kind of horrifying that I see myself acting, almost in third person, totally disconnected from my soul. But it’s comfy. It’s home. Although, I actually hadn’t redecorated in a while, so it still looked like the house I lived in a couple years ago. Nostalgic, although the view outside was different. The only thing on the beyond these windows were trillions and trillions of souls, stuffed wall-to-wall in my soul cavity.
Big Friend says my mom’s side had really big souls and my dad’s side had compact ones. I’ve got a small soul, with all the space needed for a big one. The best of both worlds. I’ve got room for company in here-- and my Big Friend needed some extra room to store her things. A match made in fucking heaven.
Took me centuries to figure out she did it on purpose.
I was so innocent-- so naive-- to believe that I was a stroke of luck, a needle in an infinite haystack that the universe found to store her extra energy. But I know how easy it is to hold a soul in your hand, how easy it would be to twist and shape it the way you wanted. There’s no miracle. And there’s no heaven. Just her.
It’s not so bad though, all things considered. Immortality. Power like few can dream of. And my roommate’s not even that bad.
Most of the time.
Seeing myself shake with excitement at the sound of fungus was worse than having a chopstick in my brain. I almost pulled the privacy screen, just to keep from seeing it. Watching that pure, genuine grin-- I felt like I hadn’t done that in years. Curiosity kept me around. I pushed a pile of batteries off the seat and nestled into watch.
“You’re looking for Brun--” Big Friend started. “--What did you call her? Variant 47-80-92? I don’t see what this has to do with beetles, Enna.”
“I told you,” the officer said, returning to her cold, uninterested demeanor. “Call me C-107.”
“Have you checked Sakaar?” Big Friend asked, with all the condescension of someone asking if you’ve checked between the couch cushions. Everything missing always ends up on Sakaar.
A stranger’s soul-- a replica, since the real one was being used right now-- floated up from behind me and I could feel Big Friend’s focus turn to it for a moment. It was a pretty decently sized soul. Not human, but pretty close, considering how outnumbered we were to bacterial and bug souls.
The woman didn’t seem happy. Sweat on her brow, scanning left and right, looking into the unknown distance. And if the TVA were after her, it was only going to get worse.
“Lots of lost things end up there,” Big Friend said. “Things that can be found again. There is so much more that I can help you find, Enna.”
Big Friend reached for the cop, gently, slowly, trying to untangle her soul from her mess of a mind. And the cop pushed my hand away, unflinching.
“It’s C-107,” she growled. “And I think we’re done here.”
“If you’re sure. We could go back to talking about the crabs again! You seemed interested before--”
“I really do think they’re wonderful,” the officer said, unenthusiastically. She collected the remaining handcuffs off the chair, and snapped them back on my wrists, and walked with me roughly towards the door.
“Thank you Enn-- Ah! C-107, I mean. If you won’t take your name or memories, is there anything? Longer legs? Better sense of smell? Honeycomb?”
“Honeycomb?” she asked, stopping by the door.
“Alright! Here, have some honeycomb. Fresh! Delicious!” The officer's pockets were suddenly filled and dripping-- and I could tell from here that she was already dreading trying to do her laundry.