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Nothing makes him want to jump back and change everything more than a squirming, cooing, pukey pile of motherfucking babies.
He's not stupid, no matter how much he wants to think he is right now. He's fully aware of what he's done. It's just more manipulative crap, just another loop in a godzillan gordian knot shitstorm. Knowing what he knows about the flux of time--the whole convoluted trainwreck mess of it--he can spot a moment of kairos from fifty paces. He's in charge of timeline management for a reason, after all. No one's neck slips into the noose of temporal imperative quite like his, because no one understands it quite like he does.
This always has to happen. He could filter through a thousand parallels and it would never change. Someone always has to be here to hit these buttons.
Part of him wishes it could've been Lalonde. She'd love this crap, all cold and clinical, concrete results from concrete data and this plus that is thus. She'd get to have her journals filled with crisp, pristine black ballpoint ink: The Effects of Human Cloning on the Developing Psyche; The Definitive Argument for Nature versus Nurture. He can imagine her now, hunched over her desk with her mouth twitching into a satisfied, catlike grin. She'd have a fucking field day.
Or maybe she'd just break. It's gotten hard to tell with her.
And it doesn't matter now, anyway. What's done is done. He could slip back a few days, prod her into the Veil, get her to hit the buttons, but it'd just be laying down another thick layer of Machiavellian horseshit. And he's fine with it, in a kiss the mat and count to ten sort of way; there's a kind of clarity that comes with getting suplexed by the mandates of a stable time loop. Maybe that's why he doesn't bat an eye as parental roles and blood ties get swapped like spit. So Rose is actually his sister. So his brother is actually his father. So nothing is what he thought it was.
So fucking what. This game is going to have to do a lot better than that if it wants to surprise him anymore.
A weariness settles into his bones right around the same time a baby decides to sit on his shoes and tug at his pant leg. (The two could be unrelated, but at this stage, he just can't bring himself to believe in coincidences anymore.) He takes a deep breath, rubs the bridge of his nose, and wonders what giant cosmic douchebag is laughing at him now while he plays babysitter.
"So which one are you?" He hefts her up and awkwardly holds her at arm's length, brows lanced down in a cocktail of disbelief, discomfort, and intense scrutiny. It strikes him then that he really has no idea what half his friends look like. He can puzzle his way through his own family tree-sized pile of infants easy enough: there's himself, noted by the shock of ginger hair and watery, brown-eyed indifference; there's his bro--shit, his dad--by extension, climbing on sensitive equipment like he's running for the baby olympics; and from there, he can figure out that the two little blonde girls are Rose and her mother--his mother too, Jesus Christ his head hurts--but fuck if he can tell the difference between them. And forget the rest of the kids. He'd completely lost track the second he turned his head.
This one doesn't have hair so much as she's engulfed by it, a shaggy, strawpaper mess of black Inca curls that seems to consume her in waves. Her eyes, watching his lips move with rapt attention, swirl a milky green that reminds him of strings of...well, jade beads. Christ. It's no wonder his faith in coincidence has been ground to a fine, bullshit powder; he can't so much as sneeze without providence handing him a handkerchief embroidered with his initials.
He already knows it's her before she blows an impressive spit bubble in a late response, but it really only helps to cement her identity. "That was equal parts unhelpful and mildly retarded,” he says. “You're definitely Jade."
She gurgles.
He tucks her into the crook of his arm like he thinks is the proper way to carry a baby, and drops down onto a slate-grey bench nudged haphazardly against the back laboratory wall. Knowing what he knows, it's hard to look at her; he's holding one of his best friends simultaneously long before and shortly after she's dead. Four months gone and here she is again, just a little more compact and flaily. There's no subtle surreality here. This is some straight up Salvador Dali crashing headlong into Doctor Who shit.
For her, four months ago and thirteen years from now, she'll choose to broadcast her final moments to him. He remembers it in sharp, sobering clarity: it'll be okay, Dave; you'll fix this; I know you're blaming yourself right now and it isn't your fault, it was never your fault at all, you couldn't have known, but you know now and you'll change it; gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG].
Seconds from fiery disintegration and she was comforting him. It almost makes him laugh, if it didn't make a hard, bitter knot in his stomach first. He's had four months to get intimately acquainted with the mechanics of time, and four months of only Rose to talk to, so it was inevitable that the two would cross paths eventually. She knows time as a straight line, with existence scattered like buckshot along it; he knows better, but he'll never tell her any different. The first time he folded that line like origami, the realization came to him in a throbbing sort of ache behind his eyes.
Everything is always happening. Jade is always with him in those last minutes, just like she's always here right now. John is always marching through the door to meet his grisly, screaming end. Dave is always hitting these goddamn buttons. If it ever stopped, then how could he ever go back? Nothing is set in stone. Everything is in flux. Everything is always happening.
He's here at her creation and he was there at her destruction, and he's the key that locks the loop. He's the one who sends her back to live it all again. It's always happening. What's the whole fucking point if all it does is piss him off?
She makes a bubbly kind of noise and a thrashing grab for his shades, which he intercepts with ease. “I swear to god, if you make a habit of this,” he warns, an empty threat; she giggles at his expression, at his tone, at color and movement. He admits, it's sort of humbling the way her tiny hand wraps full around his finger.
“Jesus, you are so small. I feel like I'm going to break you or something.” The whole situation smacks of his childhood, trying on his brother's--goddamnit, father's--clothes, shoes his feet couldn't fill and jackets that swallowed him up. He needs about ten more years under his belt before any part of this stops being awkwardly paralyzing and ridiculous.
He scoffs at the thought. This is ridiculous? He's sitting ass-deep in babies in a genetic bioengineering laboratory on a meteor in a meteor belt in a fucked up game world; he feels the ebb and flow of time like he's made of it, fans through threads and splits them and forms them as easy as birthright; he has a floating douchebag puppet ghost following at his heels half the time, a planet full of steampunk lava bullshit, and an autonomous Harry Potter chess game playing out in the center of the universe. Talking to a friend as an infant seems goddamn apple pie normal in comparison.
May as well take advantage of the moment while it presents itself.
“So, uh,” he starts, bites his lip, and his shoulders shake with a defeated sort of laugh. “Sorry about the whole death thing.”
She stares at him.
“You said it wasn't my fault, but hey, wouldn't you know,” he continues, free hand gesturing to the mass of monitors and the console that throbs with light. “Looks like it is. And someone has to take the blame anyway. May as well be the guy who can fix it, right?”
It's funny how he can see so much of her teenaged self in her even now, as he watches the exact moment when her attention span snaps and she makes another grab for his glasses. He lets her this time, makes no move to stop her, just looks at her out of the corner of his eye.
"Christ on a fucking carousel, don't lick them,” he snaps. “They're dirty as hell. Do you have any idea how many nouveau douche faces have worn these shades? At least two, counting me. Fucking quit that."
She doesn't fucking quit that. She pulls them all the way off and wastes no time in stuffing half a lens in her mouth with a gleeful little look on her face.
"Yeah, okay. You can keep them. I'll just make a new pair,” he concedes. He's always had a tempered tolerance for her weirdness, and it's kind of a relief to know that she was just born with it. Either way, taking them from her now requires a quiet, cold cruelty he hasn't worked his way up to yet. Maybe in a few more months.
(Rose will probably pitch one of those once-in-a-planetary-alignment apocalyptic shitfits of hers when she tries to get in contact with him and can't--and he can't blame her. He's all she has left. Even still, she can hold her damn horses until he can remedy the situation in a way that doesn't end with a squalling baby.)
“Are you done getting drool all over my crap so I can tell you a secret?” he asks her, fully rhetorical, but she kicks her legs and giggles around a mouthful of glass and metal anyway. “Yeah? Okay. Then just between you and me, if I have to go back and pull John out of his denizen's lair myself, I'm going to just beat the shit out of him. And then brofist and hugbump or something. I'm actually not sure which one I'd do first.”
He leans his head against the wall and presses his fingers into his eyes, feels his muscles relax for the first time in weeks. There's a kind of freedom in this; Rose might be onto something with all her crap about catharsis. “And I'd probably want to see you once John gets his lazy ass in gear and brings you into the Medium. You know. Just to see how you're adjusting. Maybe show you how to not suck at this game.”
He's spewing bullshit now and he knows it, but that's what makes it feel pretty good, this little moment of self-deception. He's personally not going to make it to her planet; he fully realizes it. There's no place for him in the proper timeline, so he'll do his part, untangle this impossible fucking fifty car pile-up, and then he'll pass the torch. After that? He has a tickle of a notion, but there's that tentative part of him in the back of his head, a niggling electric shock of fear that walks hand in hand with survival instinct. He'll only know if he's going to jump that cliff when he comes to it.
“The whole thing kind of freaks me out,” he admits. “I don't know what's going to happen. Just that it's changing. It's all changing. You were right, Jade. I'm going to fix this.”
And he's fine with it, in a kiss the mat and count to ten kind of way. It's a small price to pay to make everything go the way it's supposed to.
She coos at him and he manages a rare smile.
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TT: I've been trying to message you for the last hour.
TT: Where have you been?
TG: okay
TG: well
TG: this is usually where youd see me lay down some obnoxious nagging spouse jokes
TG: but im not really comfortable with that anymore
TG: seems kind of inappropriate
TT: This is an interesting development.
TG: you dont even know the fucking half of it
TT: Enlighten me.
TG: id rather save it for later
TG: but heres the story
TG: i found a lab in the veil
TG: then i lost my ishades
TG: the end
TG: good story
TT: You lost them.
TG: yeah
TG: apparently babies fucking love them
TG: thats really all im going to say about that
TT: Babies.
TT: Alright.
TG: i thought youd be more upset about the whole not answering your relentless bitching thing
TT: I was, but the absurdity of your excuse is almost soothing in a heartfelt drunken rambling way.
TT: Babies. Honestly. Why would I find this funny?
TT: Am I going insane?
TG: yeah probably
TG: but its cool
TG: im getting there myself