The Liaison Line’s economy class was, interestingly enough, more like a business class on a plane than the cramped, crowded groups of carriages with too little standing room and too little seats one would expect. Perhaps this was due to its long distance travel, and how it went from the South of France (Montpellier, specifically) through Paris and across the Paisible Bridge (which, at points for the trainline, was more of a long bar of metal than an actual bridge) into Brighton and then onto London. The train line, of course, went both ways, and as such, one Jenet LaCroix found herself on the train, returning home to London from her stay in Paris.

All of this was pondered by Jenah, or Jen, as she preferred to be called, as she sat in her train seat with Silas by her side. Jen was thirty years old, worked in a small, hole-in-the-wall cafe, and was, at this moment, gazing silently out the window and scratching Silas’ ears. Silas, for his part, curled up quite comfortably and simply purred at the affection, not deigning to grace his friend with anything more as he, too, gazed blearily out the window.

She hummed to herself, and an old lullaby her mother had once used to put her to sleep, and tried not to ogle at the ocean and all its many dangers and the people it had claimed, appreciating the sky for just a moment. Everything was silent, and the sky was clear, the lack of any light other than that on the train that slowly dimmed behind her as it slipped into its more accommodating settings meaning the stars were fully visible and vibrant. She tried picking out any constellations that she could not recognise, and then gave up upon remembering she did not know any, but that did not stop her from imagining her own. Silas meowed impatiently as her hand stilled, so distracted she was by the stars, before 

At exactly sixteen seconds past 5:19AM, the train would arrive in London, and Jen would exit, suitcase full of black clothes clutched tightly in her hands. But for now, she simply sat and watched the ocean speed by, not allowing anything to break through this moment, even when, in the business class carriage behind her, a woman opened the door to her private room and fell through onto a beach.

***

“You want me to what?” Gary’s eye twitched, something he’d found it had been doing quite often since he’d been kidnapped by an omniscient asshole of a woman who didn’t care for boundaries and he’d subsequently become dependent on caffeine and conspiracy theories. “I refuse to work with that -- that -- he doesn’t have a nose!”

Said man without a nose, Crow, scoffed. “Wow. I have a giant burn scar up the left side of my entire body. Why not use that as an excuse not to work with me too?”

“This isn’t about you, you oversized burned chicken nugget.”

“If Blue wasn’t here, I would feel no regrets burning you to a crisp and dragging you back from the Afterworld myself just so you could experience the pain again.” Crow trilled quietly.

It was at this moment that Gary realised that maybe, just maybe, insulting a man he had deduced to be a God from some alternate universe was a bad idea, but, fortunately, nothing ever seemed to come of their arguing than a mutual distaste, and there were apparently more powerful people than him currently present (see the omniscient woman in the next paragraph and passed out child sprawled across the couch Crow also currently occupied) that were much more dangerous that could stop Crow with hardly any effort.

Aral simply sipped her tea loudly, easily getting both of their attention without waking the sleeping child on the couch nearby. “Getting back to the briefing, I’m sending you both to a multiverse to pick up a Fragment who, if we don’t, will do some terrible things.”

Gary let out a snort. “What could they possibly do that would be so bad? You said that most Fragments were just normal people from their worlds that were imbued with the ‘Fragment-ness’ by chance, right? Honestly, this is insane.”

“Yes, but this is one of the rare exceptions. Blayze, the Fragment you will be retrieving, in her universe, was a chosen one. And before you ask your idiotic question, yes, you two are objectively the best to retrieve her out of all the other scenarios.”

“And how do you know -- wait, don’t answer --”

“Because I’m omniscient and therefore, not an idiot.”

Crow made a quiet half-laugh, half-rasp, and remaining infinitesimal amount squawk. Gary simply fumed in place, somewhat worried that his mug -  full of coffee and… some other liquid from a different world - would shatter in his grasp under the weight of his stress. Aral simply placed a clipboard on the coffee table in front of them all, and Crow had to then awkwardly maneuver himself around the sleeping child against his shoulder and made various sounds of exasperation and pain. This time, it was Gary’s turn to snicker.

Aral passed Gary an identical clipboard. “These will tell you exactly what to do, when to do it. They will work flawlessly if you follow them, which you will, because you two aren’t as big a pair of idiots as you could be. However, there is always the small chance that you do not, in which case you will almost guaranteedly die.”

There was dead silence between the three companions, before Crow broke it. “Again?”

***

The garden is pressing against the back of my eyes.

I can feel it there, as my breath shortens and my vision tunnels outwards. It begins emerging around them, vines and golden wire fences creeping from them into my sight, and I’m retreating into the garden despite my attempts to resist. There’s something gathering at the edges of the roof I sink through and into the garden, the water trying to break through the stained-glass ceiling rimmed by gold supports. It’s then that I realise I’m falling, hitting a bush and tumbling out the bottom of it with a yell.

I grit my teeth, turning to one of the scenes floating in the air and grab it by the edges before I fall, crawling up to it to try and get through, but the pain of my fingers being stepped on and I’m forced to let go and simply watch the scene unfold above me as I fall, emerging out of the garden with the scene imprinted in my mind.

I groan, and get back to work. The tears teasing the edge of my eyes never spill, instead leaking into the garden and falling, dripping onto me in fat droplets more like sheets of water that you’d have poured out of a bucket. My hands are simultaneously reaching out through the air to grasp at another scene to stop my fall, and gently tap tap tapping away at a keyboard as I blankly copy paste the same information from one point to another. This time, however, I manage to find purchase and drag myself into it, my body literally kicking and screaming against it as I fall forward and into the eyes of someone else, for just a moment, before I again tumble back out of my own head. I suck in a breath, and I’m back in the room, my fingers still on the keyboard. I release the air trapped in my lungs, and as I do, everything comes back into focus.

Somehow, I manage to clear my head enough that the vines and golden fences only rim the outside of my eyes, not creeping to everything else, I manage to release a breath as I try not to let the woman’s yelling push me back over the edge.

***

The silence was tense as Crow and Gary walked towards the hospital from the field they’d been unceremoniously dumped in by the strange… portal? Wormhole? It looked like a door, so… yeah, let’s go with that. They’d been unceremoniously dumped in a field by the Door to the Cafe, and slogged through mud together in tense silence that only comes with working with someone you don’t know and you are ninety percent sure hates you.

Amun would like this place, Crow mused to himself. The hospital is far enough from any cities to have almost no light pollution, the night sky a sublime mess of constellations he can both recognise from his own world and ones entirely different, unique to this one. Yet the location was still central enough to be reached by the government employees with relative ease whenever they needed. Crow shivered at that. His universe was no perfect utopia, but at least he’d never had to deal with anything as similar to this, otherwise he may have ended up regretting what he’d done more than he already did.

Now wasn’t the time for such thoughts, though, as he glared down at the clipboard in his hand, following its directives.

Three steps forward, one to the left, turn in that direction, pull out his phone, message the first two contacts he sees, six steps left, there. Just above his head in the wall of the hospital was a vent the perfect size for a fully grown man to sneak through. Why they’d have such things in a facility full of dangerous patients such as this one, Crow did not know, but what he did know, based upon the clipboard he was now tucking under his arm, is that although it was sealed shut quite effectively, that it would give way quite easily to fire.

“How convenient.” Gary voices both of their thoughts as Crow squawks out a scoff, sending him a rude gesture as he removed the red hot burning pain please no grate from where he’d crudely cut it out using a blast of fire from his fingers not unlike a blowtorch.

“You’re welcome to go first.” He clucked, gesturing to the rapidly cooling metal.

“No, thanks, I’d rather not end up looking like that.” Gary’s tone was snide, as he used his hand to gesture dramatically and sarcastically to Crow’s entire being.

Crow trilled, already climbing into the vent. “You’re just saying that because I’m so incredibly sexy and it makes you want to kiss me.”

Gary was silent as he followed his companion, and Crow silently preened, knowing he’d won this battle.

Crawling through the vents was a tight squeeze for both men, being fully grown, but they still managed to be able to shimmy through them and get into the building with minimal noise apart from some vague squeaking and their breathing.

Crow grumbled to himself. “Can you keep it down?” he hissed. 

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was making so much noise! If anyone needs to quiet down it’s you.”

“Shut up.” He’d come upon a grate beneath him, one that had been pointed out by the clipboard. Given his current predicament of being inside a vent, Crow was unable to pull the clipboard out and see what he was supposed to do, so instead he settled for simply lying in wait and listening to the two people he was able to make out beneath the vent.

It was then Gary chose to remind him he could not remotely read minds or even subtext. The other man shoved Crow’s foot quite harshly, causing his center of gravity to shift, and the God then found himself tumbled to the ground in between the two people, Gary staring in horror before retreating quickly.

Crow stared at the two doctors as he gripped the clipboard tightly beneath his jacket, burning it quietly against his skin and struggling to ignore the pain.

“Hello there. Sorry for dropping in so suddenly.”

***

Gary scuttled back as fast as he could after Crow had fallen through the vent, struggling to maneuver himself silently to access the clipboard. The result was a scuffling that looked like he was trying to do the worm in slow motion, failing miserably, and perhaps having a seizure. Eventually, after about five minutes of wriggling, he managed to extract it from where he’d stored it under his shirt, staring at it intently.

“Ah, shit.”

And he began to struggle through to follow its instructions as the smell of smoke rose up from beneath him.

***

You step towards the figure, wary yet, in some deep, forgotten part of you, there’s excitement. Finally, after all these years, it’s happening. You’ll finally understand why everything happened, why you read those stories, why you solved those codes and talked to those people and what it was all for. No longer are you the passive Observer, you are the implied active participation at the end of the word, the constant paradox of active and passive found in a word such as this. The -- well, you hesitate to call it a garden, the shifting space of golden railings and twining vines of rose bushes interspersed with shattered slivers of scenes and paths leading in and out to them, all converging, after a lengthy wander, to this central platform -- 

Stop. No. Rewind. You’ve done this before. This is all new. The silhouette turns, and you can see a crudely drawn face, a smile slowly dipping into a frown as it reaches for you, reaches for help.

Someone grabs your shoulder, pulling you from the danger that has begun to creep towards you as the world echoes. You try not to scream as agony rips through you where from the contact of hand to shoulder, ripping the world apart, incompatible like oil and water, if both were the same substance and identical. There’s someone in front of you. You grab their shoulder to pull them back, away from the danger as the world echoes. You try not to scream as agony rips through you where from the contact of hand to shoulder, ripping the world apart, incompatible like oil and water, if both were the same substance and identical.

I’m not letting you in.

Please. You want to help. You want to help. This isn’t finished.

You can feel yourself ripping apart, into shreds - into yourself, again, separate, yet connected. Various individuals sprawl, separately, outwards.

…

What?

You wake up on the ground, in a completely gray room. There is a table in front of you, and two doors on opposite walls, one to your left, one to your right.

Your story has begun. Welcome back.

***

When the two men stumbled back into the Cafe, Crow wearing a dirty hospital gown and Gary carrying an unconscious teenage girl over his shoulder, Cal was already hurrying towards the two with a wet rag in her hands to try and begin cleaning them, but instead Crow promptly dropped to the ground, unconscious, Gary literally threw the teenager at Aral, who caught her with ease, and the girl woke up and began screaming.

Aral hissed. “You’re all imbeciles.”