Chapter Text
“What are you giggling at?”
Stifling her laughter enough to speak, Apo pointed to the mirror atop the dressing table. “It’s like watching a mime.” Framed by the carved wooden oval was a reflection of their surroundings—a cozy bedroom decorated in red and pink—and Cherri, kneeling on the bed with a hairbrush in her hand. The brush appeared to be poised in midair.
Cherri started, a pink spark popping from the magical flame over their left eye. “Just when I think I’ve gotten used to—all this.” She shook her head with a slight smile and returned to brushing Apo’s hair. One stroke, two, and then the brush caught on a snarl that Cherri had to work through with her fingers before she could pass the brush through it. Wondering if the dye she’d used to restore her hair’s original color made it tangle more or less often, Apo watched Cherri’s reflection pick up the brush again and then catch a glimpse of the mirror with the corner of her eye. She did another double-take and one of her amused sniffs, shook her head again, and fixed her gaze firmly on the brush and hair in her hands. This made the pantomime in the mirror even funnier, but Apo kept their laughter to themself this time. Cherri looked ready to end up in a giggling fit if anything else set her off, which wasn’t a bad thing except it meant she would stop brushing Apo’s hair. And the brush felt so nice running over her scalp…Apo shut her eyes and savored the feeling.
“That’s weird.”
“Mmm?”
A gentle tug above and behind her ear. “There’s a short piece here.” Cherri lifted the lock of hair they held. “Look—oh, right, you can’t see it. It’s about as long as my finger.”
“Huh.” Something about it gave Apo a bad feeling, like she should remember why that hair was short but didn’t want to for some reason.
“It’s easy to miss…” Cherri murmured, half to herself as she moved Apo's hair around. “The rest of your hair hides it from pretty much every direction, unless you tried a really high updo. I’ve probably missed it a few times already. That seems deliberate…” She examined the hair more closely. “But the ends are all choppy, like someone cut it in a hurry.”
There was the memory, and the pain that came with it. Quick, nimble fingers, grasping that cut-off lock of hair. The flash of a trailing white sleeve as he brought it to his nose. Middle class, he’d proclaimed, half disparaging and half amused. Had the deep-red strands of Apo's hair really tumbled over his wrist like that, or was her mind’s eye calling up a cruel foreshadowing of the last time she’d seen him? The dark, sluggish liquid that had oozed from his motionless wrist alongside his own bright human blood, refusing to mix…and the knowledge that she had put it there…
“Apo?” Cherri’s hand rested on her shoulder, then the bed bounced as she hopped off it to stand in front of her. “Are you all right?”
Opening her eyes, Apo saw Cherri’s concerned face in front of their own. She tried to speak, but nothing came out.
“Bad memory?”
Apo nodded.
“I’m sorry.” Cherri sat down and laid an arm around Apo’s shoulders. “It’s already growing out, if that helps. And you’re home now, and the person who did it is far away.”
“Cherri…” Apo swallowed. “The person who did it is dead.”
***
The nightmare began as pure memory, as many of them did these days. Flying for the first time, chasing the pull of a newly turned vampire—a bargain broken. A glimpse of gold and white against the dark muddy gravel of the riverbank below. Swooping down from the sky toward a prone figure half in and half out of the water. Shedding her bat form and calling out to him, afraid he’d been killed or turned until they leaned over him and caught the scent of living human blood. The way his leg had flopped unnaturally as she hauled him from the river, his face twisted in pain. Searching frantically through her pack for the emergency tonic that would stabilize a wounded soldier enough to move them off a battlefield, and finding none.
The sudden pinch of hope when she remembered a rumor—one that had seemed ridiculous at the time—that the main ingredient in that tonic was vampire blood. Pressing the mouth of her canteen against her own neck, and reopening one of the fresh puncture wounds there with a fingernail until she felt liquid oozing from it, eerily cold. Straightening his leg as gently as they could and lifting his head to bring the canteen to his lips. The rush of relief when he swallowed and his face slowly relaxed. Slinging him, still dripping, over her shoulder and climbing the bank, with the bridge overhead providing cover in case there were still other vampires around.
She carried him up the slope towards town, trying to hurry without jostling him or making too much noise. But when she glanced down, she saw it was not river water that seeped from his clothes into hers, but blood.
He was dead. Again. As mangled as that poor soldier at Fernsfield had been. Now Apo knew she was dreaming, but it didn’t matter…he would still be just as dead when they awoke.
“You have regrets, do you not?”
At first, Apo thought the corpse on her shoulder had spoken. It did sound a little like his voice—albeit echoey and an octave or two deeper. But it had come from somewhere in front of her.
“What?”
“Regrets. Choices you wish you hadn’t made. Things you would have done differently, in hindsight.”
Wasn’t that obvious? “What do you want?”
A vaguely humanoid shadow slid into view, rimmed with a purple glow. It had wings.
“I suspect that you and I may want the same thing,” it said. “You wish you could have made different choices in the past. I want you to do just that.”
Apo narrowed their eyes. “I’m dreaming. Anything I go back and fix—if I even can—won’t matter when I wake up and everything’s still the same.”
“Correct. It is of your world that I speak, not this dream of yours. If I were corporeal I would have approached you there to begin with, but alas I cannot.”
“If you were a corporal? I’m not in the military anymore. And what would that have to do with talking to me?”
“I said corporeal. Possessing a tangible, physical body. To put it simply, in your world I don’t quite exist.”
“Well, yeah. I’m just dreaming you, of course you don’t exist.” She’d had dreams this absurd before, but not since Oakhurst. Not since she was turned.
“You are wrong. I do exist, but only in between worlds like the one you call home. I can observe them, watch them. When a human’s mind peeks beyond the boundary of such a world, in dying or dreaming, only then can I make myself known to them.”
"I’m not a human.” That wasn’t Apo’s only objection to the creature’s claims, but it was the first one she could put into words. “Not anymore."
“Evidently a vampire’s mind works the same. So as far as my limitations are concerned, that doesn’t matter.” It waved dismissively. “My point, Miss Apo, is that you are the best candidate to assist me.”
“By going back in time? Even if I don’t mess things up even worse, how does that help you?”
“I owe my existence to the friend you lost, and I wish to repay the favor.”
“To the friend—? Bull. There’s no way Martyn made you. He was just—a guy. I mean, he was rich, but he couldn’t do magic or anything.”
“The Martyn Woodhurst you knew was indeed ‘just a guy’,” it agreed. “But just as your world is one of many, so too was he.” The creature folded its wings, revealing a small crowd behind it. Their images were indistinct, as if Apo were looking at them through thick, foggy glass, but she could make out a lot of blue eyes and floppy blond hair and various pieces of green clothing. She realized there was no longer a dead body draped over their shoulder, and there hadn’t been for some time. Dreams were like that.
“And all of them under the same One Upstairs.” The creature almost sounded reverent, though it was hard to tell through the deep echoes.
“Oh, so you’re superstitious.” Apo didn’t exactly disbelieve in the multiverse and Those Upstairs, but it wasn’t something she really thought or cared about either.
“I am proof of the superstitions,” it said proudly. “Once, I belonged to a group of other beings like myself. We were powerful, gaining strength from the imagination of not just One Upstairs, but Many. We acted in unison, spoke together in cryptic rhyme to torment those who allowed themselves to hear us.” It stretched its wings. “We were known as Watchers.”
“O…kay. What happened to the rest of them?”
“Nothing that I am aware of. It is I who changed. I am now no more a Watcher than you are a human.”
“Uh…I’m sorry…?”
“Don’t be. I gained at least as much as I lost. Most pertinent at the moment is my influence over time.”
“Okay. Tell me more.” This creature wasn’t making much sense, but listening to it was better than replaying Apo’s worst memories.
“Time in the Multiverse and Upstairs passes differently from the time in any one world like your own. Not long ago by that timeline, we all learned to reverse the effects of time on a world. It became just as ancient worlds once were, when the Multiverse was new.” Faint images of pale, bright grass and brilliant green trees appeared on either side of the creature. “We posed a challenge, a competition, as we have done before. Our storyteller—the One Upstairs who has shaped us the most—was victorious for the second time since we began.”
The crowd behind the creature had been slowly fading, turning transparent, but two of them grew more solid instead. One wore a red sash over a black vest, and his arms and legs were studded with coral. The other was dressed the same as maybe half of the now-disappearing crowd.
“His first victory pertained directly to time as well, though that world required far less meddling on our end. Those Upstairs take a sharp interest in similar things that happen twice. Because we—my kind, that is—are products of Their minds, such double happenstances can have unexpected results.”
Apo missed the days when she could blame people’s unbelievable claims on a bad batch of mushroom stew. The days before too many stories turned out to be real. “So, these…other Martyns won two of your contests, and both of them were about time, and that gave you time powers instead of what you used to do? Because his ‘One Upstairs’ made you?”
“Almost correct. He was not alone in creating us, though he has definitely shaped and strengthened us the most since then.” Their surroundings changed, becoming four flat stone walls with a square of sky crossed by narrow bridges high above. A human shape plummeted toward them, made a backlit silhouette by a rising half moon—but Apo could see the fluttering ends of a black ribbon headband.
“When he felled the last of his opponents and leapt to end the last of his lives in that ancient world, I awaited him below. My fellow Watchers were more cautious and did not approach as closely. His spirit fell through me, unknowing, on its way to wherever the One Upstairs decided it should go, much as a pair of silver coins might drop into a pocket. And I changed.” A purple-rimmed wingbeat erased the image of the pit, letting darkness surround the two of them. “Now, I can turn back time. ‘Rewind’ it, if you will.”
“Rewind…” Apo pictured the spool of thread Cherri had dropped the other day, her deft fingertips circling the spool as she wrapped the stray trailing end back into place. “I think I understand. But if you can do that, what do you need me for?”
“Because when I rewind time on my own, no one within the world retains their memories of What Has Been, and everything plays out again exactly as it did the first time. Nothing changes. No one notices.”
The implication was creepy: how many times had this creature tried its “rewind” trick already? Had Apo actually been repeating her most terrible mistakes as often as their nightmares made her relive them?
“I need a hu—a corporeal being, beg your pardon, to choose when and how far to rewind. The one who activates the power keeps the memories of all that happened before they chose to go back. With that knowledge, someone who fully exists in a world can make different choices.”
“And everyone else’s memories get erased? No. I’m not doing it. I would never erase Ch—anyone’s memories.”
“Nothing gets erased.” It sounded exasperated. “People simply do not remember things that have not yet happened! Do you remember what you’re going to do tomorrow?”
“Oh.”
“When you rewind, you will find yourself back in the same place and in the same condition as you were at the point in time that you’ve rewound to. No one will be aware of what is to happen, except you.”
“What if I get something wrong that I don’t want to change? If I did something hard, or got lucky, and I can’t do it the same way again?”
“Changing any part of What Has Been will require effort. Allowing events to happen as they happened before you chose to rewind will be easy. Second nature. Like walking along a familiar route and realizing once you arrive that you’ve paid no attention to the journey.”
Slowly, Apo’s worries about dodging the arrows and claws of several angry vampires a second time—no, a third and a fourth—turned to excitement. How much more would they annoy Scott and his coven if she could make her escape look easy?
And she could save Martyn. Really save him, instead of setting him up to die later of a side effect no one had foreseen. This time she would foresee it—would foresee everything.
“I’ll do it.” Apo extended a hand to shake, but the creature’s shadowy palm passed straight through theirs. She saluted instead. “Even though I don’t see how you or your ‘One Upstairs’ really benefit. If he’s powerful enough to have so many Martyns in all these different worlds, why would he care about this one?” That falling silhouette the creature had shown her still stuck in her mind. Devout believers in Those Upstairs always insisted that you did still have free will, because your mind was part of Theirs so Their decisions were yours all along. Still, the idea that any version of Martyn would choose to end his life (or “the last of his lives”, whatever that meant) simply because he had won a competition was an uncomfortable one.
The creature sighed. “Perhaps he doesn’t. Even I do not know for sure. In truth…” It actually sounded guilty. “In truth what I seek to gain, foremost, is validation.” It took in Apo’s confused expression and sighed again. “I got these new time powers and I want to see them do something, okay?”
Apo burst out laughing. Such a mysterious, imposing creature, whining like a small child in its deep, echoing voice. “Self-interest,” she said once she calmed down. “Sure. I can actually trust that more.”
One wingbeat, then another, and it rose into the air. “Then let us begin.”
Illustration thread: https://www.tumblr.com/dbseamz/826518198891446272/all-illustrations-for-with-the-benefit-of?source=share