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Your name is Calliope, and you have been a number of very strange things in the course of your particular existence.
A hatchling raised by an alien in a wasteland. An exceptional case, a cherub able to communicate directly between its two selves. A fan of trolls and a friend to humans. A dead girl in a neatly-tied pocket of safe, safe nothingness. The secret to saving the multiverse, the key to your other half’s destruction.
And then, suddenly: an incidental existence from a less-important timeline. And the strangest thing of all: loved.
But now, in your after-afterlife on Earth C, so flooded at times with love that you marvel that your body, not meant for this alien emotion, can even bear it—now, you find yourself fixated on your other self. The Calliope from the timeline that mattered,you’re your role. The you who succeeded, and the you who never knew love at all.
You have experienced a great number of uncomfortable situations in your life, but looking into her face stands alone among them for its particular quality. Her presence gave you a sense of distance as swift and unexpected as vertigo, and of closeness just as sickening.
You normally see your face only in mirrors, in pictures, and on your former body-mate and the monster that he became.
Not that he wasn’t a monster to begin with.
Not that you aren’t, either.
But you have never felt your own monstrosity with more aching clarity than in her eyeless stare. She felt so unlike what you had strived and hoped to become, cold like space’s vast sprawl, with nothing of its potentiality and vibrancy and yearning. Not your opposite, like Caliborn, but your absence. A you who was an absence of everything you had come to recognize as yourself, except that hard green monster face.
What would Roxy get, you wonder, if she pulled the nonexistence of your unified Self from the void? Can a Self that makes sense of the two of you exist, or would Roxy come up short?
You’ve hinted at these musings to her, in tiny bits and pieces. But one day when the two of you are backs-down in the grass looking up at the stars (which are finally becoming familiar), you wander into your thoughts a little farther than you meant to go, and absently, you find yourself asking, “How can she and I be the same person?”
Roxy’s shoulders shrug beside yours. “You just got dealt real different hands, I think. It’s not like it’s the weirdest thing we’ve seen!” She laughs.
It’s certainly not, and you know that Roxy has seen worse and weirder than you yourself. Yet still. If the two of you are so different, and she is the one who succeeded, who saved everyone, who mattered—
“Maybe it’s the power of love and friendship. Maybe all you needed was a ravishing gal pal to swoop in and crack that exoskeleton into a cute lil’ smile, huh?”
—is your existence a fluke? A waste of potential? Or just one of the big cosmic mistakes that someone made along the way? It would be too grandiose to think that her success, as she was, was designed to cleanly backlight your own equally brilliant uselessness, but you must admit the thought is tempting.
“Hey,” Roxy says, nudging you with an elbow. It pulls you back out of your head, a little. “Cherubs usually have to grow up all alone, right? I grew up all alone, no other humans, just me and a bunch of chess guys. And like, if I hadn’t had those chess guys… I wouldn’t have had any idea about helping others or sharing or looking out for each other when I finally did meet other humans, and I would have fucked everything up, probably, before I figured it out.”
You’re not sure where she’s going with this, so you keep watching the stars and wait for her to keep talking. She chuckles on the ground beside you, sliding her fleshy hand into yours, seeming not to give a thought to your sharp claws and whether she might prick her skin on them.
“What I mean is, if I had grown up totally, totally alone—or worse, with an evil twin that I had to literally kill to survive? That’s like super messed up, Callie. And if it happened to me, I would maybe go the ‘heart of ice ruthless and efficient magic assassin in the night’ kinda route. And now we know, if it came down to it, you could too. We just happened to luck the fuck out, you know?”
That certainly flips your perspective on the issue. You feel less alienated from yourself, but other discomforts are already taking the old ones’ places.
“I am glad,” you say slowly, “that we didn’t have to do that.”
“And that,” she says, rolling towards you and propping up on her elbow, “is exactly the point.” She leans down and lays a noisy kiss on your forehead. You put your hands over your face, bashful, but reassured and warm.
Maybe you could forgive yourself for becoming a monster, under those circumstances. Most importantly, this new idea still affords Caliborn no excuse whatsoever for his monstrous acts.
You turn your neck and touch your forehead to Roxy’s shoulder. “You are strangely good sometimes at making me feel better.”
You may not be the most important version of yourself, in the end. But you are the version that was dealt a better hand in some significant sense, because you are the version that survived. Small and unfinished and unworthy as you are, maybe that counts for something.
And love, love certainly has to count for something. You haven’t figured out what yet, but it is so electric and compelling, and you think sometimes that you were never really alive until after your death.
Roxy springs to her feet. “Jane’s gotta be almost done cooking by now. You ready to go, babe?”
You smile and reach up to take her hand.