Karry had summarily tossed them out of her apartment after it had became apparent that Oasis didn’t have the first clue about how to plan a heist. They’d dithered a little, taking the long way back home, but it was becoming more and more evident that they couldn’t avoid returning to their apartment any longer.
The sun had gone down, long shadows stretching over beautiful Toronto. Despite the cold rain earlier, the night was warm, with a pleasant breeze coming down the avenue to play with their hair. The smell of something delicious was floating in the air. Someone must have been cooking some barbecue, taking advantage of the last few good nights of the summer.
Warm yellow light spilled out of the doorways of small bars, voices and decades-old pop music mingling together to form what had been, for years now, the background soundtrack of Oasis’s dreams. They’d never expected to live this again. As they wove around young people crowding the street, they suddenly remembered that late september meant that classes had just started. It had been so long, and they’d lost track of school years after they’d graduated.
Were they graduated, now? They tried to count their age backward in their head, and then gave up. Alice would know. Their cousin had once know everything that there had been to know about their life, up to and including their secret superhero identity.
Boy, had she given them a earful when she’d found out, though. Then she’d called in all of their other cousins to come and also yell at them, before helping them design a better outfit than “re-purposed halloween costume”, as she’d called their old suit. They chuckled a little at the memory, and then sighed.
Every time they closed their eyes, still, they could see her. Her face, pale in death. Her small hands, crossed over her chest. She’d had no grave, for there had been no one to dig her one. Oasis had laid her to rest in the lake. They didn’t even remember why; it had felt right at the time. Alice, with her pale eyes and long mermaid hair, had always seemed like she should have a watery grave.
She’d been too young. So had them. So had all of the world.
The paint on the door to their apartment was peeling off, and Oasis no longer remembered the code to get inside. They’d slipped in the front of the building just fine on the heels of a neighbour (which they also didn’t remember), but now they were confronted, more than with anything else today, with the reality that it really had been that long. Thirty years since they’d last lived here. They took a step back and looked up at the door number again. They… had lived at number 306, right? Not 206?
They bit their lips. Funny things, memories. Oasis could remember the PIN for Karry’s private elevator keypad perfectly, but had no idea what the address of their own apartment was. Should they knock? Alice was surely inside, she rarely left the apartment and the studio she’d set up in her room, but….
Well, here was the rub. If they knocked, then probably Alice would answer.
Alice.
Their cousin, their sweet baby cousin. The one they’d helped raise, and then who had moved to Toronto with them when they’d both left home for college, and who had fought the end of the world by their side. Who had died in their arms.
A sob bubbled in their throat and Oasis had to turn away and slide down the wall. They buried their face in their hands, fear and grief and guilt overtaking them. They hadn’t cried for years, not since the Tyrant had destroyed the world. They hadn’t had the time, consumed as they’d been with their search for a way to go back.
And now, they were inches away from their goal. From seeing Alice again, alive and beautiful and alive. And a stupid four digit number was keeping them from her. A chuckle broke through their sobs, then another, and before long Oasis was wailing something that was a confusing mix between grief and elation and it was painful.
And liberating.
But mostly painful.
And then the door opened behind them and they fell backward.
“Oh shit, Oasis, are you alright?” squawked their cousins’ voice, and then rough hands were grabbing them and pulling them up to their feet.
“Where were you? What happened?” Her face was pale, her hands shaking, and Oasis was suddenly paralysed, staring open-mouthed and in sheer awe of her.
Her hands were all over their arms, her gaze roving the hall looking for the source of their distress, and Oasis couldn’t help it. Overcome with a new wave of emotions, they folded like a deck of cards in her arms, grabbing her shirt and falling to their knees.
“Oasis!”
Through some feat of force, she managed to manoeuvre them inside the small apartment, bombarding them with questions all the while.
“No, but seriously, where were you though? Your manager called, like, seven times! You didn’t show up for your shift, and then you didn’t come home, and I was worried sick! Was it superhero business? You didn’t even have your sword! You should have called!”
She sat them, awkwardly, in a kitchen chair. Falling to her knees on the cold linoleum floor, she tried to peer at their face, but Oasis could barely see her through their tears. They reached out with trembling hands and grasped her face, another sob ripped out from their throat at the surprise and elation of being able to touch her.
“You’re here, you’re real,” they babbled, before they just couldn’t take it anymore, and had to close their eyes. It was too much, too soon. She was like the sun, bright and beautiful and piercing in her sudden presence after the dark of their life these past few years, and they had to shield themselves from the radiance of her lest they be overwhelmed.
Gently, they tilted forward until their forehead touched hers, and tried to breathe through the pain.
Alice continued to speak to them, but her voice was muffled, seemingly coming from far away. The pain, too, seemed suddenly more distant, and Oasis hummed a little and felt it echo in his chest, but slightly misaligned, as if their entire body was trying to exist in two places at once.
Numbly, they wondered if that was how video game characters felt when they clipped through the floor. Like someone made a mistake when they programmed you, and you had to go through an entire cut scene existing slightly to the left of where you ought to be.
After a little bit, the feeling of disconnect receded, and Oasis blinked dry and unfocused eyes. Alice’s voice came back first, and then the feeling of her hands rubbing their cold arms. At some point, a mug of water had appeared on the table. She was still kneeling on the floor, but now she was peering at them worriedly, and her voice eventually trailed off to silence when she noticed them checking back in to reality.
“Oasis?” she asked, hesitantly. “What happened?”
There really was no way to break that news with anything reassembling tact, so they didn’t even try. They swallowed twice, and then croaked out: “I just time travelled. I’m from the future.”
A series of expression crossed Alice’s face, all of which they were too tired to even try to read. Maybe Alice would accept the idea of time travel readily; their lives were already so goddamn weird. Or perhaps she would have a million questions; which seemed like the more rational reaction. Either way, they hoped that she trusted them, at least, enough to know that they would never lie to her.
Eventually understanding settled in her eyes, then dread.
“I’m dead in the future, aren’t I?”
They bit their lip and nodded, immensely relieved and grateful that they wouldn’t have to say it. She was always so smart, their cousin. Her mind ran miles an hour, and she noticed everything.
It was Alice’s turn to look a little unfocused, and so Oasis gathered her hands in his and held them while she tried to adjust to this new idea. She frowned, opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. After a minute, she sat back on her heels, and hung her head.
“Am I the only one who died?” she asked, looking up at them from under her fringe and voice muffled with reluctance.
Oasis sighed, a long breath of air that carried many untold years of anguish with it. Surprisingly enough, with Alice holding their hands in their dingy kitchen in 2017, they suddenly felt a little bit better. A little bit less burdened. So the words were easier to say when they came, their voice a little stronger.
“No. It was everyone. The entire world.”
But while it might have been easier for them to say, it wasn’t easy at all for Alice to hear. Her face closed off, and she got to her feet, her hands slipping from theirs.
She grabbed the mug of water on the table and drowned all of it in one go, and then turned toward their cupboards.
“I need a drink.”
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