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“I’m not going to live with it. I’m dead.”
Tori calls out Max’s name and feels it ripped away by the storm, and then —
Soundless.
White.
For a second she’s not sure if she even has a body. Maybe she doesn’t, until that second passes. The void gains edges in that same moment as she looks down to see her feet. It’s still blindingly white, but she can see dark lines, forming corners, creating an enclosure.
What the fuck did Max just do?
She remembers some of Max’s halting descriptions of when she’d fallen through so many realities trying to get out of the Dark Room. Weird, sepia, shimmery edges around everything, like I was still inside a photograph. The boundaries got — they got closer the further in I went. When I went into my contest photo I literally couldn’t move at all. I think I almost broke time.
Well, this isn’t quite that. The room’s solid, and nothing’s shimmering, and it’s so fucking bright it hurts Tori’s eyes. And it was always Max who was trapped in time, not Tori or anybody else. Something she’d had to deal with all on her own, in the end.
I’m dead.
Tori runs a hand through her hair, tears stinging at her eyes. God, what did she do?
Oh. Well, apparently, she’s about to explain.
She materializes directly in front of Tori, but it’s not really Tori’s wife. It’s Max, age eighteen, in that doe print t-shirt and grey hoodie and generic brand jeans, nothing Tori had bought for her. Suddenly, Tori needs to look down at herself, feel the bridge of her nose. Straight. She’s wearing an outfit that’s sixteen years out of fashion.
“Max,” she begins, “What in the name of all fucks.”
Max’s eyes are a bright, shining blue. Luminescent. Tori loves her eyes, but these aren’t the same ones, either. The irises are literally glowing like L-wire. Stars twinkle in her pupils, nestling among nebulae.
“Hi, Tori,” Max says.
“Yeah, hi to you too, what the fuck. ”
“It’s been a while.”
“No it hasn’t, you just fucking told me you were dead, Max, please tell me what the hell you did.”
“Oh, right.” Max laughs. “Yeah. It’s weird.”
“No shit.”
“So I went back to when Nathan shot Chloe. And I stepped in front of the bullet, instead. I kinda hated the universe and wanted to destroy it, so since it had me repairing it, that seemed to be the way to do it.” Max says, holding up her hand.
“Pretty punk-rock, Max,” Tori notes, smirking a bit despite herself.
A wavery image appears beside Max, Max kneeling in front of Nathan’s gun as a doe stares at her. “I let go of time, I died, and then...Then I knew everything.” She grins widely. “I can do anything.”
“Max, you’re not making a whole lot of sense right now.”
“Okay, here, look at this one, this one was the first one I managed to make.” The image beside her shifts. A woman scrubs dishes in the sink of a small but cozy little kitchen, a faded flowery tattoo weaving down her arm. One side of her head sits bare, showing off a nasty scar and an incomplete ear. Long electric-blue hair falls down the other side.
“Is that Chloe?” Tori says with a squint.
“Yes. And...”
Behind Chloe, the door opens and lets in — well, it lets in Victoria. Not Tori, because her nose isn’t broken and she’s wearing some really high-class shit. She dumps a messenger bag off of her shoulders and says...something. It sounds wavy and distorted. Chloe slams her hands down on the side of the sink and turns around, the dip in her tank top showing off a tattoo on her back, two cockroaches crawling through wedding rings.
“We’re—are we together?” Tori says, squinting.
“Mhmm,” Max hums as Chloe gets right up in Victoria’s personal space, shouting in her face and taking her by the shoulders.
“We don’t seem to be getting along that well.”
“Just wait.”
Tori cocks her head to get a better angle, and sees a toothy grin on Victoria’s face as Chloe slams her up against the wall, one hand reaching down and hiking up her skirt, and. Ah.
Max giggles. “That’s foreplay for you guys.”
“How did you—how’d you make that?”
“It’s not easy to explain. I can — I can sort of tug on the strings. Adjust things a bit. It’s easier to do in big chunks, but that actually destabilizes things. You have to do it tiny little bits at a time, fast-forward a bit, make sure you didn’t just fuck up the fundamental laws of the universe. My rewind power was brute-force. That’s why using it fucked everything up. Now I can do things delicately.”
“So you can fast-forward now, too?”
“I can do anything.”
“So...that, how’d that happen?” Tori asks, pointing at Victoria and Chloe apparently just going at it.
“Oh, I died in the bathroom instead of Chloe.”
“Uh, throw that one out, thanks, that’s shitty.”
Max laughs. “I kind of thought so, but I liked watching it play out. It was pretty rough on you guys at first, but it’s not the worst reality I’ve made.”
Tori glances over at the image. “Uh, that’s getting kind of distracting.”
“Oh, right! Sorry.” Max waves her hand and the world is blank again, aside from the two of them, staring into each other’s eyes. Tori can’t help it. She’s really beautiful, in her godly hipster way. Tori approaches her, tentatively, and reaches for a hand.
When they touch, the void around them explodes into sound and imagery, and Tori’s overwhelmed instantaneously, shouting and speaking and whispering and explosions and supernovas and blood and gunshots and—
Max pulls her hand away. “Sorry, sorry!” she whispers as Tori hugs herself and shakes. “My bad. Haven’t done this yet. Let me just...”
She reaches out and tugs on something invisible, then lightly brushes Tori’s cheek with her fingers. Nothing but soft skin. Tori breathes out. Okay.
“Why’d you bring me here?” Tori asks as Max takes her hand and squeezes.
Max bites her lip, like she used to do. Still cute. “Well, um. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to decide how much I want to change. How I want everything to play out. Well, I haven’t, technically, I guess, I’m kind of...outside of time?”
Tori gives her a blank stare.
“Look, if you think it’s confusing hearing it, try living it,” Max sighs. “The thing is...whenever I make a new world, I get all the memories of that Max. And it makes things hard. I love so many people, so many different versions of people. Any choice I make is going to destroy most of them. So I’ve just been building and building and building, and making the problem worse, and I’m just...I had to get someone else to help me. And you deserve to be the one. You’re the one who was with me when everything shifted.”
“You want me to choose the world we live in?” Tori asks, astonished. “But—”
“Yes,” Max interrupts. “You’re the one who’s been hurt the most by this...this power something trusted me with. I want you to be the one who makes it all real. I can collapse the timelines anytime I want, fade into them, and I can choose to forget I ever did it. It’ll just be what is real, then.”
“So...what are my options?”
“Well, we’ve got a lot. My favorite one is where the most stressful thing that happens at Blackwell that year is a photography contest,” Max says. “But...that one’s kind of weird.”
“Weird?”
“I had to do a lot to make it happen right and long story short, Jefferson’s a hot dog.”
Tori laughs and leans down to kiss her. She gets a lungful of stardust. “You’re so bizarre.”
“You have no idea, Tori.”
Tori runs a hand along Max’s arm. “Do I have to choose now?”
“I mean, we have to eventually. This — what we’re inhabiting right now — this is not stable. By any stretch. I’m kind of in total control of the entire universe so that this can happen and that means that things only work when I want them to, which isn’t really—basically there’s no Earth or stars or galaxies or anything. It’s not a real reality, and managing it is kind of hard,” Max explains.
“But...” Tori smiles at her idea. “Can we stay for a little while? I want to see all the stuff you’ve made. All of it. Otherwise, how can I make an informed choice?”
Max grins. “You know, I was hoping you’d say that. One sec.”
With a glance, the two of them are suddenly surrounded by a reality. A studio apartment with the blank void beyond the balcony, a bed to cuddle in, a massive television screen on the wall.
“Think this’ll work?” Max asks.
“I think it will.” Tori kisses Max again and feels the warmth of forming stars. “I like the bed. I gotta fuck the goddess before I go, too.”
Max smirks. “Should have known.”
“Hey, it’s me.” Tori kicks off her shoes and hops into the bed, snuggling up against the headboard as Max holds up her hand and an image of Max and Victoria appears on the TV, still. Max crawls in beside her.
“Okay, so in this one, you and me are working at this magazine together...”