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Somehow, he lived.
Despite all of it, Timmy managed to cling tight to the life he’d been chanced with.
Even when he shouldn’t- strapped down to a hospital bed, tubes and wires coming out of every orifice, heartbeat barely faster than a leaky faucet, his brain locked down to its barest functions and body reduced to something weak and painfully mortal as it struggled to heal him back from the brink of death the old fashioned way.
Even then he persevered.
Agnes always found herself amused at the number of futures that still had Timmy in them. It’s as if his chaotic tendencies were a natural defense against death- like being random made him slippery to probability. It made him hard for most of their siblings to look at, but Agnes’s far sighted time vision allowed her to perceive his billions of timelines with no more headache than the rest of her time vision gave her.
Agnes took a deep breath, lavender and smoke filling her senses as she tried to follow the vision, but every few moments a strange blur would appear and smudge her brother out of sight.
Timmy had mentioned a “blank spot” in the time streams- a strange phenomena she’d never seen anywhere else, and one he’d emphatically insisted was his- and true to his word, a resounding 50% of the futures where he lived past childhood contained the strange blur. A ridiculous percentage given his penchant for being unpredictable.
The beads on her bracelets clacked against each other as she shifted the lock of his hair in her hands, trying to get a better look. It was strange. The blank spot moved enough to be recognizable as an animate being, and though Timmy lay completely incapacitated, the being never took advantage of his weakened state. Not only did it refuse to put him out of his misery, but it refused to leave. Any time the blur would clear up, it would swiftly return to once again obscuring her vision of her brother. Willingly returning to his side over and over again, almost like it was… protecting him. Maybe it was stupid?
Suddenly the flames in the bowls around her flickered, alerting her to a visitor in the present.
“...Are you looking forward on purpose?” Brad stood -visibly perturbed by her behavior- in the wooden door frame to her room, looking down at her position on the floor. Agnes sat in the center of her circular snow-berbett fur rug, four metal bowls with various burning herbs and woods placed around her and Timmy’s bright blue hair tucked between her palms. She glared at him, daring him to question her; Brad's perpetually tired face wilted even further, carving lines like canyons into his otherwise young features.
“Whatever, just- come on. Dad wants both of us to attend his stupid meeting again,” he sighed, rubbing his hands over his face as if he could simply scrub away the exhaustion that had been baked into him from years of being spread too thin.
Agnes rolled her eyes. “Dad can suck my tits,” she declared but stood up anyway. The moment her knees had fully straightened, blackness overtook her sight- brain sloshing around in her skull like someone had scraped out her meningeal tissue with a melon baller and swapped all her cerebrospinal fluid with pain soup. The sensation would have sent her crumpling back to the ground were it not for the dark-toned arms that caught her around the waist, holding her up.
“What the fuck is a tit?” Brad asked, casually supporting her entire weight until the soup had fully leaked out of her ears and her legs got their shit together enough to do their job.
“You’re a tit.”
She flicked his forehead and he laughed.
She was glad he still remembered how.
~~
“Why do you look forward on purpose anyway?” Brad asked, because of course he would. For her, it was about control- for him, it was just a reminder of failure. He looked into the future for hope, for confirmation that all his efforts to keep them alive wouldn't be in vain; he never said it out loud, but she could tell each time he did that he never got the answers he so desperately wanted. It left him twice as desperate to avoid looking altogether, a Fibonacci sequence of avoidance and exhaustion that grew exponentially as the years passed and the sunk-cost fallacy dug in its teeth- until both of them ended up putting the same amount of effort into achieving opposite results. Her with her rituals and habits and routines, him with the abject desire to never see anything other than what's in front of his nose ever again.
“The visions will come whether I want them to or not. Better to induce them when I have the means to deal with the pain than let them take me by surprise.”
He hummed, shifting to take on more of her weight as they walked to the meeting room. Her left side had been bothering her lately so he’d let her lean on him. “Does that work for you?”
She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders and turned her gaze to the floor. “To an extent…”
“Oh, wow- that’s not vague and cryptic at all, thanks,” he quipped but didn’t press any further.
Together they approached the large wooden doors of the meeting hall. Brad stepped away from his sister in a vain attempt to not damage her pride in front of their father- as if the monster wasn’t more than capable of seeing her weakness in their immediate past. Pride was a thing Agnes had long since learned to keep for herself, though distance from her friend did have other benefits.
Together the two pushed open the stupidly fancy wooden doors, walking past the stupidly ornate sculptures that not even the dusters had time to give a shit about and into the fire lit den of the meeting room. Plush velvet chairs -that should have been more comfortable given how fancy they were- lined the clear crystal table, with a small handful of nobles already seated and ready to begin.
And it was together that they walked around to the front of the table and took their seats in front of the king.
The meeting room had a lower ceiling than most of the other rooms in the palace, and had always looked oddly modern to the children. Not that Agnes would ever be caught complaining about the meeting room -the large fire and low ceilings meant this was the warmest room in the mountain, a fact that her cold hands and aching bones appreciated even on the worst of days. Behind her, the King sat on a throne of blankets and pillows; having long since outgrown his chair, he now opted to flaunt his status by being the only one who was allowed to be relaxed and comfortable, which was a fact that her cold hands and aching bones did not appreciate. Were it not for the deep rumbling of his breath, she could have mistaken him for a decoration, his body still and eyes unblinking as his gaze lingered heavily on each person present
“Aiyark’e’ilytka,” the king spoke; even at its quietest, his voice shook the room and made everyone’s hair stand on end.“You will go first.”
A long and slender woman with dark freckles littering her face stood as she was acknowledged, bowing low at the waist as the King gestured for her to speak.
“Amen to the lord. The pipes from his majesty's palace to our island are becoming corroded. A sediment buildup has been recorded in several tanks and we believe someone may be illegally taking water.” Thin fingers meticulously lay a collection of papers out across the crystal tabletop, each one depicting a skillful topographic rendition of the island she’d been privileged to control, how the plumbing system was laid out, and where issues were being experienced, as well as a list of the minerals found in the sediment deposits. Agnes had to bite her tongue to hold back an amused snort at the substance composition notes scrawled in the margins of that last page- maybe it wasn’t all that funny, but humor is hard to come by in the palace and she could appreciate the dedication it must have taken to contaminate an entire island’s water supply with what basically amounted to the chemical approximation of backwash.
“I trust you bring this to my attention for more than the sake of highlighting your own failure,” the kind rumbled in warning.
The freckled woman pushed a nonexistent stray hair behind her short ears and back into the tight bun she wore on her head. “Yes, your grace. As many of his majesty's stationed soldiers have fallen to the stone sickness, I pray you may lend us a few more hands to capture the rogue, and in the event of capture I would ask if his majesty prefers we kill them ourselves or if they are to be made an example of?”
A contemplative hum rattled the stone floor beneath them as the king's eyes spun slowly. “The being you seek is a female child. You have the best chance of catching her at sunrise in five days. Bring her to me and we will host her execution publicly.” A dry laugh fell past his sandpaper lips. “Perhaps I will let my youngest eat her alive.”
“Amen to the Lord,” the freckled lady tilted her head to the side as a sort of formal bow and then turned her attention to the Nobel clockwise to her.
“Amen to the lord,” he started, tilting his head to the side. Pale splotches of colorless skin dappled his face and tight curly hair -though whatever color it had been had long since faded to gray with old age. Poor guy, impotence was a tough blow to the ego. “As lady Aiyark’e’ilytka suggested, the stone sickness is becoming more prevalent on the coast as well. With not only his majesty's soldiers, but the fishermen as well have become paralyzed in their off season. I pray his majesty allow us correspondence with his scientists to prevent further decay of his tools.”
Agnes yawned.
A third noble clicked his tongue. “I don’t see why you need a whole team of scientists to reveal an obvious truth. Your men are bored- you should be hosting rallies and competitions as we do on my island.”
The white-haired man rolled his eyes. “Yes yes, you have plenty of free time to play games since you exterminated the feral Klykolians from your island, but as I have said-“
“Have you considered letting your weak cull each other? Throw the sick to the feral and simply be done with it.”
Suddenly Agnes’s head throbbed. A harsh shift in the probability of their futures, caused a pain to bloom under her eyes like a swollen artery, as the noble man genuinely considered the suggestion. With a loud groan, she threw her head down to the table, clutching and squeezing at her skull in a feeble attempt to curb the pain. She felt the way all eyes turned to her, but couldn’t shake the visions of wild Klykolians seizing the town. Throwing the sick to the wilds wouldn’t cull them, it would cure them. Many would turn feral. Too many.
“Don’t…” she croaked out. “Don’t do that.”
Behind her the room groaned, fabric and beads rustling as the king leaned towards her. “What do you see my child?”
Already she could feel the vision slipping away, its clarity fluxed in and out as it’s probably waxed and weaned in response to her outburst, she tried to hold on to it but even when it was right in front of her eyes it was blurry. The vision slipped entirely out of her grasp, but the pain remained. A pulsing migraine she was likely to be stuck with for the rest of the day.
“Fuck I don’t know. The fact that tossing food to your enemy is a bad idea,” she grumbled.
The king only hummed. “My son, you will look to confirm her sight.” He gestured to Brad, the latter of whom already had his arms crossed in defiance.
“Uh, no I will not. And you cannot make me.”
Brad was promptly lobotomized. The faces of the nobles pinched though they tried to remain unresponsive as the king pulled his claw out of his son, blood pooling down the young prince's face as his brain slowly stitched back together. This was, after all, not an unusual sight for them. Though for the non-regenerative Klykolians, the casual violence of the royal family was rarely ever palatable.
The last of Brad's flesh melded together and yet his body remained limp. His head lulled back unnaturally and his mouth hung open. His crossed arms fell away and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. Agnes tried to stifle her giggle as he croaked out his best walking dead impression and then proceeded to gag on his own spit.
“My son, you will stop this now.”
“No shut up, I'm dead.”
The nobles merely rolled their eyes but the king was less than amused.
With one large hand he reached forward and crushed his son's skull. “This meeting is adjourned. We will try again next week,” his voice dripped with the same disappointment that painted his council members faces.
Brad's head fell out of his fathers hand like a crumpled tin can, blood gushed out from gashes where skull had pierced brain and his body crashed to the floor.
One by one the nobles silently gathered their things and left them to their family squabble. The copper-green fire crackled and filled the otherwise silent room.
“You’re going to stay until he heals,” the king noted to Agnes.
“What gave it away?” She spat.
Her fathers eye ticked as he looked through her futures. Whatever he saw must not have bothered him too much as he rose to leave regardless.
“You will not do charcoal vandalism on the walls,” he declared and lumbered across the room.
“Tch. You don’t know that.” But he did, and she knew he did.
Stopping in the doorway he turned back and pointed at them. “You should consider mating him. He will give you strong children.”
Agnes paid him no mind. He knew she’d consider it about as much as she did every time he suggested she carry on the family tradition of incest; which is to say, not at all, but he was compelled to keep planting that seed in their minds anyway.
He closed the door behind him and left his two children to their own devices in the meeting room. On the floor next to her Brad groaned loudly.
“Holy shit he’s gross. That bastard couldn’t pay me to fuck you.” His head was almost completely reformed but he was content to continue laying on the floor. Exhaustion clung to him like a second skin.
“No matter if we do or don't, it doesn't change my future any. M’still dead no matter what,” she said plainly, her arms crossed.
A frustrated sigh slipped from Brad. “Aggie-“ but nothing else came.
She felt bad, constantly reminding him that there was nothing he could do about her fate, but he needed to face it.
Over the years the king had fathered around 20 children, four of which had yet to hatch and were basking in the luxury of being tended to by alien servants who actually had maternal drive. When Brad and Agnes were first born, their grim futures were so translucent against the things that worried their toddler selves in the present, they were barely even aware of what they were looking at. Perhaps just dust in their eyes. But with every sibling that came after them the visions of their death not only grew clearer, but more plentiful as well. The palace was quite literally a dog-eat-dog world. To most, power meant security. Many of their siblings believed that the closer they were to inheriting the throne the more powerful they could pretend to be, and the less likely they were to get culled. Though many of their siblings did not possess time-vision strong enough to confirm those suspicions; that did nothing to make the target on her and her brothers backs any smaller.
The two first born children. Brad, the first born in general, though he was born to a Klykolian concubine, and Agnes the first born pure royal blooded child. Four generations of incestuous breeding for strong powers had given their family god-like abilities over their citizens, but left them with weak minds and/or frail bodies. Twenty siblings nearly in constant fear for their life, with unimaginable abilities and smooth brains.
There was no way they were getting out of this alive.
At least, there’s no way Agnes was. However faint, there were a small number of futures where Brad escaped, but never with her, not for very long anyways.
Suddenly Brad hissed and groaned, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hand, flash-banged by a vision of his siblings. “Fuck fuck fuck-” his voice nearly broke with the weight of his exhaustion. “Someone is gonna take Bob’s calculator and he’s gonna open a black hole in our kitchen if I don’t get it back, or stop it.” Like a soldier making his final stand -a final stand he would make many more times after this- he pulled himself to his feet and trudged towards the fight.
“Just let it happen,” she whispered at her brother's retreating form.
This whole place deserves to burn.
Though… She couldn’t fault him for his will to live.
~*~
In stark contrast to the meeting room, the food hall was enormous.
The ceiling was one of the tallest in the entire castle, supported by monumental pillars which served as a climbing scape all too often, and stretched high enough that even on a cloudy day, sunlight could filter through the pastel glass windows. The bone lamp -as the kids called it- hung ostentatiously over the table. A gaudy chandelier made from thousands of rib bones, supposedly given to the first king as a sign of devotion by the group that would later turn into the royal cult, but currently a hammock for their youngest sibling.
Angnes sauntered into the food hall shortly after Brad, her migraine pulsing furiously at the increase in noise.
“I don’t care that you hadn’t done it yet! Your future vision is good enough you should have better forethought than to even be thinking about it!” Brad shouted, with one of their more mischievous siblings caught in a headlock.
“You can’t arrest me for fucking thought crimes!” Mark shouted, clawing and pulling at the arms around his head, just shy of being strong enough to pull them off.
A few of the other siblings sauntered around like NPCs, with nary half a shit to give about the run of the mill wrestling match. Bob sat atop the long table, happily stimming away on the keys of his calculator; no one knew exactly where he got such an alien item from, and there was no way he knew either given how random his portals were. Luke was braiding twigs into Jimmy’s hair, the latter of whom was in the most heated debate a nonverbal person could be in with a wall. Dean, Clark, Betty and Clark were at the far end of the table drawing, the alien siblings always came up with the weirdest pass times, and as far as she was concerned no one else was doing anything noteworthy.
“Imbecilic isn’t it,” a disgustingly sugar voice chimed from her side. “With all their foresight one would think they’d have the capacity to direct themselves with more decorum.” Kyle brushed his hair behind his stupidly long ears and straightened his back. “I must say, you conduct yourself quite eloquently despite the-“
“No one likes a kiss-ass but dad, baby face.” She glanced back down to where Brad and Mark were wrestling, thankfully neither of them were seriously snarling, and Agnes felt content to let them be. Mark still got his entertainment and Brad got to blow off a little steam.
Agnes turned about and walked back down the hall.
With each sibling their chances at living to adulthood got smaller and smaller. Brad’s ingenious plan had been to try and get everyone to be friends, that maybe if there were enough alliances everyone would have a better chance at defending themselves and it would be harder for anyone to tip over the first domino of death. And while he did have the right window of opportunity for the whole forming bonds thing, it was still infuriating to watch.
The bastard children struggled to form more than one bond each, which left Brad nagging and trying to force friendship on them in unnatural ways. Of the truly royal sibling she was the only one who’d hatched with her wits about her. Timmy could talk unlike Bob and Jimmy, but he was barely 4 years old, still in the phase of life where his only two modes were sleeping and bouncing off the walls. The alien sibling managed to get along well enough. Their brains were built different, built with a better innate capacity to bond. Except for Kyle, who’s attempts at contriving alliances often came with that slimy kiss ass tone. Though she could hardly blame him, even amongst the alien siblings he was one of the weakest, second only to Dean who possessed zero powers of any variety.
Agnes felt her shoulders relax as she left the noise behind her, perhaps a little too excited to return to her soothing herbs and soft blankets.
Though any excitement was harshly jaded by the sound of small bare feet padding along behind her.
Agnes sighed. There was a reasonably high chance Timmy wasn’t actually following her; he just happened to be walking down the same hall.
She stopped. He stopped. She started walking again, and low and behold her shadow persisted.
“Tilymy,” she started turning half way towards Timmy. “I’m going to sleep. I am not playing any games.”
“Duh, I know that!” Timmy announced, crossing his arms. “You never play fun games anyway.”
He trotted up closer to her. “I wanna sleep too but the uh… the brain meat says, or no- I get the feeling that if I had stayed in the bone lamp the baggening would have will happened.”
Agnes felt her veins nearly pop out of her head. “Just say you saw a potential bad future.”
“But I didn’t see it. I just felt it.”
“… like anxiety?”
He shrugged and all she could do was sigh. “Come on Til’Teckt, lets go-“
“SHORT CUT!!” Timmy grabbed her arm and threw both of them through a portal and straight into his room. They landed on his bed luckily enough but that did little to stop Agnes’s stomach from turning over and she willingly puked on her little brother's floor. “Mmmm Rorschach-core.”
“You… fucking… dick head,” she panted. “Get bagged for all I care. They’re gonna shove you in a sack with rocks and throw you in the river with the giant water centipede and I’m gonna laugh!”
Timmy didn’t pay any attention to her bitching. Perhaps he knew she was too tired to move herself back to her own room. Perhaps that was part of his plan. No -she though as she watched him pull out a draw and up-end it- that would be giving him too much credit.
“Man, no matter how many times I fix it, those strangers always come and mess up my piles!”
Agnes lay on her stomach on Timmy’s freshly made bed, her arms dangling limp over the edge as she watched him. “You mean the servants? The ones who come and clean?”
“Yeah, strangers. Maybe if I…” Timmy trailed off verbally and physically, making his way towards the closet door and giggling as he violently ripped all his formal wear off its hangers. She watched with both a vindictive joy at the destruction of the pricy garbage their father insisted on, and a sense of envy for how little Timmy feared the consequences of this action.
Timmy was the youngest, despite being a pure royal blood, he was extremely low on the ladder of who the king gave a shit about. Theoretically that could change if he started to show signs of being able to control his powers beyond impulse and if a few other siblings didn’t make it, but Agnes couldn’t see any futures like that.
Their time was running out. As soon as one of them was killed the war would begin. Everyday the chances of the first domino falling grew like a tumor in the heart of the palace.
Suddenly Timmy jumped back on the bed, his tinny hands gripping the audaciously large pillows. “Ok come on bag lady,” he said as he hopped off back to his closet cave, more like a goblin than a prince. The tattered shreds of cloths, blankets and newly added pillows made for a strange looking nest. One that Agnes could only look at disparagingly and yearn for her fur rug. “Aggie Aggie Aggie Agnes Angie Angle Ankle Abracadabra!”
“Oh my god shut up I’m coming.” She pulled herself up and felt her body nearly tear apart in protest. Agnes shuffled the short way to the closet and collapsed into the nest of torn up fresh laundry. Apparently Timmy’s laundry had been done recently enough that the clothes were still ever so slightly warm to the touch, and smelled clean. That combined with the small room did make for a warm and cozy hiding spot she did have to admit.
She watched as Timmy closed the doors, only the smallest crack of light entering in through the bottom, and the sounds of the palace muted to almost nothing. Timmy yawned wide and she couldn’t help but copy. “You make good breathing when you have a me blanket,” Timmy thought out loud to himself as he crawled to lay on top of his sister. His head rested on her stomach, not obstructing the movement of her rib cage but still a firm and grounding weight. Her hand came up to rub at his hair, and sleep began to drag them both down.
It was a shame Timmy was having trouble with Brad's friendship plan. Young Klykolians are supposed to form bonds with peers to fend off the cannibals but no one was close enough to Timmy in age for their minds to be as open to bonding as his was. Despite living a life free from responsibility he was still stuck having to steal away everything he wanted and needed.
That’s probably why he portaled me here, she thought, her eyes unable to stay open any longer.
“You’re my favorite,” Timmy’s voice slipped through the sleepy haze.
Her hand squeezed at the back of his head. “You’re not so bad yourself.”