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Derek wakes up early. He rubs gritty sleep out of his eyes. The box fan in the window is running low, a white noise Avery can't sleep without. Outside mourning doves are calling. Soft light fills the room, easy on Derek's eyes. Still drowsy, he wonders if he can actually feel sixty-five billion solar neutrinos cascading through each centimeter of his skin every second, or if he's just not quite awake yet.
Avery is breathing slow and deep. He's wrapped in his comforter like a burrito—they share a bed but sleep with separate blankets because of Derek's blanket-stealing habits—face just peeking out between blanket and pillow. Derek watches Avery for a moment. Dark lashes rest on his cheekbones. His mouth's slightly open, breath making a loose thread on the blanket's hem dance.
Moving slow, trying not to jostle the bed, Derek leans over and kisses Avery's face. Right at his eyebrow, gentle enough it won't wake him. Avery's had four ten-hour shifts this week. He needs to rest.
Derek checks his email, drinks his coffee, watches crows hopping around on the sidewalk outside. Then he gets to work on breakfast: quietly chopping bell peppers and onions, throwing it in the pan, measuring out spices. Avery wanders in about the time Derek pours a can of crushed tomatoes in to simmer. He drapes himself over Derek's back. Derek stirs the sauce, then turns around to hug Avery.
"Garlic is the best alarm clock ever," Avery says sleepily. His breath smells like mint toothpaste, though his hair's still a tousled mess.
"How many eggs?" Derek asks.
"Is it bad to say three?"
"Three it is."
While the shakshuka simmers and Avery makes toast, Derek ends up explaining the Columbian Exchange and how tomatoes and peppers from the Americas ended up forming the base for a classic North African dish. He's cracking eggs into the pan when Avery asks which really came first, the chicken or the egg? Derek throws an empty eggshell at him and Avery laughs, catching the shell midair. He's still laughing as Derek lays out in deliberately excruciating detail the circumstances of the evolution of chickens, starting with the earliest true dinosaur.
It's late afternoon. Crows chatting outside, pale light falling through the window to make a yellow square on the floor. Between Derek's perpetual energy loss and Avery's exhausting shifts, fatigue took them both out. They're sprawled on the couch together. Derek taps away at a coding commission, slow and thoughtful. Avery was playing Animal Crossing, but even catching butterflies was too much brainpower. It's then that Avery finally pulls his courage together and says,
"I had a dream last night."
Derek stops. Avery watches him save his work. He closes the laptop and puts it on the coffee table with a soft clunk. Then he looks at Avery. "Tell me."
Avery scoots sideways until he can lie down with his head in Derek's lap. Avery feels slight muscle tremors where his cheek rests on Derek's thigh. It sucks bringing this up now when they're both so tired, but when aren't they tired, really?
"It was really cold," Avery says. "I was by myself, I think, everything was quiet. I could see the Milky Way. Just this whole sky full of stars. Like photos from the telescope, what's the name, James something?"
"James Webb Space Telescope," Derek fills in. "First image, galaxy cluster SMACS zero-seven-two-three, light four point six billion years old—light that began its journey just as Earth was coalescing. The youngest visible galaxies in the field are over thirteen billion years old, nearly the age of the universe itself."
"Yeah, the light felt old," Avery says. "There were a lot of red stars. Kinda...muted. Like someone slapped a blue light filter over the whole sky. And the moon was there but it was, uh, way too small. It was bright red. Really fucking creepy."
"That's the sky of the far future," Derek says quietly. "The moon is moving away from earth. A little more than an inch every year, which doesn't seem like much but builds up over time. Eventually, the sun's life cycle will bring it to the point where it becomes a red giant, far more luminous than it is now."
"...How far in the future does that happen?"
"What you're describing sounds like it's about six billion years from now, give or take a hundred million."
Avery's skin crawls.
He keeps talking anyway. "So...I finally stopped looking at the moon, because it was really fucking creepy, trust me, and I look down and there's this building. Like some kind of castle. The horizon had this red light on it which I guess was the sun, if it's as big as you said it would be? And the building blocked out the light so I could see it. A silhouette. It was the only thing at all, so I started walking. Sort of. It felt like walking in a video game."
"Makes sense," Derek says. He's staring at the wall as he listens, one hand resting on Avery's shoulder. "It was a dream."
"Yeah." Avery takes a deep breath and goes on. "It wasn't just one building. It was a whole city. Ruined mostly, a lot of walls were gone. I kept going and I didn't see anybody, it was totally abandoned. I mean, I felt like I was being watched because it was so fucking creepy, the moonlight made everything look spookier. I felt safer in the dark if that makes sense? Like the moon couldn't see me. Which is silly, the moon can't see like that." Avery pauses. "...Can it?"
After a second, Derek says, "Let's not talk about that."
"Uh," Avery says. "Um. Okay. Anyway. Uh, I kept hiking, and I think I was probably near the city center. There was this...cathedral, temple, something, it was a pyramid but the top was missing and the sides were all fucked up. As soon as I saw it I—"
"Wait. Go back, tell me more about the city," Derek interrupts.
"Right. Okay. It was weird," Avery says. "Like those Dr. Seuss books from when I was a kid? Lots of weird wobbly shapes and stairs that went nowhere. Towers but they were mostly just kinda broken apart. There weren't any lights in the doorways. No plants, I didn't even see any dead trees? Just a lot of, um, nothing."
"Six billion years from now, Earth won't be able to sustain plant life," Derek says. "Life as we know it now will be entirely extinct."
Avery reaches down to the floor and grabs a pillow that fell off the couch, shaped like an otter. It's dark brown and has cheerful yellow glass eyes. He hugs it tight. It feels a little better to be holding something when Derek says shit like that.
"I mean, it makes sense, the stairs didn't look like they were made for human feet," Avery says. "I tried going up one flight to see but they were too tall and way too skinny. It felt like I was trying to climb a hill, I didn't get up very far. The ruins weren't built for humans, I guess. Do you know...?"
"No. The King didn't know what would come next, if anything at all. Evolution is driven by so many factors that even the prediction of a god would be doomed to failure. If some new species succeeded humans in building cities on Earth, then they made it there through their own evolutionary path."
"Kinda sad that we don't know," Avery says. He hugs the otter pillow tighter. "I think that would be cool."
"It would," Derek says. He sighs. "So. The cathedral-temple. You went inside?"
"Yeah." A siren wails by outside and Avery pauses to let it pass. "It had a roof which was nice, the moon wasn't glaring at me in there. Lots of pillars and carvings. A lot of them looked like those mandala coloring books, but they made me dizzy if I looked too hard. And I saw a lot of bug pictures? Not ones I recognized but they had, you know, a lot of legs and stuff. Bugs. Maybe ants, but they were, um, really fucking weird ants."
"Invertebrates will be the last animal life to go extinct when the time comes," Derek says. "The latest date for that would be something on the order of nine hundred million years. If your dream took place six billion years in the future, and the city was built by some kind of advanced invertebrate civilization, then the latest date of its construction would have been five billion years prior. I have no idea how it would have lasted that long."
"That's...really big numbers," Avery says. His voice comes out small. Scared.
Derek squeezes his shoulder. "I'm sorry. Ignore that, tell me about the cathedral."
"Yeah," Avery says. He makes himself take a deep breath. This is the scary part for him, worse than huge spans of time and extinction of life and the sun turning into a red giant. "There was an open space under a dome, which was a little bit broken so more light got in. I could see some stars too. And there were these two, uh, statues standing in the middle. Human-shaped statues which was really weird after the rest of the city, I didn't want to go near them."
"Did you?"
"Yeah, there was nothing else to see, so...kinda didn't have a choice." Avery stares at the wall. The statues are so clear in his head it's like they're right here in the room. "They were facing each other. It was like if someone drew a person from someone else's description, without ever seeing a human before. The arms were the wrong length and stuff like that but they were definitely human. One of them was carved out of this green rock, I don't know what kind. Kinda looked transparent where the light hit it. The other one looked like it had armor on. There were, uh, gold flecks on the armor, like it used to be painted gold."
Derek doesn't say anything.
"It was us, Derek," Avery says. "Our fucking avatars. A slime and a knight. And I looked up at them and they didn't have faces, they had the fucking sign. Hastur's sign. The Yellow Sign. Where their faces were supposed to be!"
"The—"
Avery sits up. He clutches the otter pillow to his chest. "Is it dead?" he demands. "Is it actually fucking dead, or is the King still here?"
“No,” Derek says, “and yes. It's dead, and it's here, and it's not dead and it's not here.”
“What the fuck.”
Avery looks like he's about to start crying. Derek’s head throbs with pain. He pushes forward, ignoring the otter pillow’s sweet yellow eyes. “If I died during the merge, it would have died too,” he says. “But I didn't die. I lived, so it didn't die. Still, I'm the wrong vessel. My mind was too corrupted for Hastur. It can't do anything, not really, it can't talk to me or make me do things. It’s…pinned, like a butterfly on a board. I'm the pin. Holding it in place. It can watch, it can flap its wings and maybe there will be a tornado in China or a new civilization sixty-five million years in the future because the butterfly effect is real, but here, now, it can't do anything. It can't hurt you. Or me.”
“The headaches?”
“It's not causing those. That's the brain damage and the knowledge.” Derek smiles without feeling an ounce of happiness. “It really can't do anything except watch.”
Tears are streaking down Avery’s cheeks. “You told me,” he says thickly, and sniffles, “you, um, you told me about the physics thing. Observing something changes it just by looking. Or whatever. So if it’s watching, then—”
“For all practical purposes, in our lifetimes, and in the lifetime of Homo sapiens as we know it, that observer effect doesn't matter,” Derek says. He reaches out for Avery and Avery flinches back. Derek lets his hand fall. “In hundreds of millions of years, watching might do something. Will do something, if your dream is an actual vision of the future. But here, now, I promise—”
“Why didn't you tell me!” Avery breaks into horrible sobs. He scrubs at his face with his sleeve. Derek watches without moving, his eyes burning with an onslaught of tears. “Why the fuck—you could have said, you—”
“I thought it didn't matter! I didn't know you’d have a dream, or—I’ve been putting the pieces together myself, it's taken time to understand what was going on! I didn't lie to you, Avery!”
Avery points at the yellow square of light on the floor. “Is that it!? Is that the fucking King!?”
“Yes!” Derek wishes he could get up and walk out but he’s fairly sure he’ll topple over if he puts his feet on the ground. “Yes, it is! The yellow is Hastur, it's always Hastur!”
“It’s—you fucker, I can't, I can’t—” Avery rolls off the couch, dropping the pillow, and stamps into the kitchen. Derek hears Avery’s fists hitting the counter, slam slam slam, and then uncontrollable sobs. He tries to get up, to follow, and almost falls into the coffee table.
All he can do is listen, and wait, and watch the otter’s yellow glass eyes watching him.
When Avery comes back, twenty minutes later, he just stands in the doorway. “I don't know what to do.” His voice is hoarse. His eyes are red.
“We don't have to do anything,” Derek says. “It can't get—”
“Not about the King,” Avery says. He takes a shaky breath. “About anything. Any of this.”
Derek gets up. He’s wobbly and getting vertical sends a knife of pain right through his head so violent it makes his vision go rainbow at the edges, but he ignores that. When Derek holds out his arms, Avery stumbles right into them. His arms slide around Derek, too, hands pressed flat to Derek’s back.
“You don't have to decide what to do right now,” Derek says. “I’m sorry I didn't tell you about this sooner. I should have, I didn't think it was important because any consequences are so far in the future, but—”
“It's okay,” Avery says, muffled, into Derek’s shoulder. “I’m not mad at you.”
“I wouldn't blame you if you were.”
Avery shakes his head. “You think on a whole, um, different scale of time. I think about tomorrow, you think about two million years from now.” He squeezes Derek tight. “I forget sometimes.”
“Okay,” Derek says. He closes his eyes and finally exhales. The tension unwinds from his shoulders. Most of his muscles feel like they're made of jello. But Avery isn't showing any signs of moving, so Derek doesn't move either.
The yellow light rests on the floor, silent and watchful.