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The beautiful thing about Time and Space was that the two of them were very intimately connected. Gain control of the one, and you likewise gain control of the other.
Dave Strider, as he liked to assume on his good days, had gained control of the one.
The boy – man – knight walked out from a shadow onto the pavement. The sun, as he could see, was setting – a pleasant surprise. Dave had always quietly liked the sunsets, a fact he never told anyone; back in Texas, the sunset was the one time of day when it was neither too hot to be daytime or too cold to be night, and that was the most harmonious compromise he had ever seen. Dave had entered into the timestream from somewhere on the meteor, as he’d done many times before, never allowing anyone to know. It was a long trek, back about eight months and God-knows-how-many lightyears across the universe, on Earth. Even the coolest kid of all got nostalgic sometimes.
He bullshitted some outfit up to hide his god threads, while out of physical space, on the way there. The temporal jammies would be hella sweaty out here.
To be perfectly honest, Dave hadn’t come out to watch the sunset, or the sunrise, or even just watch the clouds move across the sky (a sight he once thought he’d never see again). There was no talking to John or Jade or Rose, because that would probably splinter the timeline in ways he didn’t like to think about. So what reason would he ever have to come out to the corner of some random building on a warmish-coolish Earth evening?
Well.
Dave Strider didn’t know. Psychoanalysis was never his thing.
But maybe if he did, he would find that if only for a moment, watching a destroyed sunset in the future corpse of a dead world made him feel free.
Maybe there was some way to fly like a bird, away from the meteor, away from the Space. Maybe there was some way to change Time to save his planet.
But if he’d ever come to this conclusion, he’d soon realize that there was no way to escape Space. There was no way to change Time. Or at least, if there was, Dave Strider couldn’t do it.
He was just a god. What did he know?