Page 248 of The Fall

It’s too real to keep ignoring. Too exact, too, like an image burned too long into your retina after the flashbulb goes dead.

This is something impossible.

No! I want to slam a fist through this table. Brain damage, Kendrick, that’s what this is. Get hit by Zolotarev and loop slow-motion through your own life forever. Am I even here? Is this even real? Or am I hooked up to some hospital bed, living out a fantasy life over and over and over again?

This morning, I woke up certain of who I was and where I belonged, but now I’m not even sure if my thoughts are my own or they’re memories of thoughts I’ve already had. Am I living or replaying the past?

This cannot be real; this cannot be happening. The clock does not run backward.

But Iam.

What if Ididlive those two weeks and now I am living them again?

What would it mean if déjà vu was a warning?

And if that’s true, if I slipped forward and then back, then… do I get to keep this version, this slow-built love with Blair, or does it all get ripped away again?

Have I been here a thousand times, every time thinking it’s new? Am I doomed to love him and then lose him, again and again and again, until my mind and my soul splinters and there is nothing left of me to break?

How much of me is memory? How much is reflex?

I knew something was lost to me after waking up in the hospital screaming for Blair, back in Vancouver. I knew something had been burned away, and I feel the same now, like I’m clambering up a spiral staircase and convinced that if I runfast enough I can catch the ghost that I’m chasing. I can catch myself.

Blair’s foot finds mine under the table. I look up and meet his gaze.

I’d walk through fire for the way he looks at me. I have walked through fire, I have crawled on my belly, through the wreckage and the refuse and the ruin, slowly, terrifyingly, beautifully all the way back to him.

And I will do it again, as many times as this life demands. If the universe forced me into hundreds of looping lives, I’d use every one climbing back into his arms.

I focus on him, my point of stillness in a world that has come unhinged.

Hayes snaps his fingers near my face. “You with us, bud?”

I blink. “Yeah.” My fork is frozen in a pancake. “What are you talking about?”

Hayes grins. “Would you rather have fingers for toes or toes for fingers?”

“What?”

“Come on, you gotta choose,” Hollow insists.

“I guess… fingers for toes? At least I could still play hockey that way.”

The debate explodes; finger-toe skates, whether the game would become a kicking sport. I’m not listening.

Ican’tlose Blair again.

I have to find the point where everything split apart. I have to keep us from falling into that darkness.

I’ll memorize every second between now and whatever catastrophe waits for us. I’ll catalog every word, every glance, every choice. And when I find the moment, the decision, the single wrong turn, I’ll throw myself between Blair and whatever tries to take him from me.

I know what it costs to wake up without him. I know how the world turns bleak, how food loses all taste, how breathing becomes a waste. I’ve lived through that emptiness once, and I will not survive it again.

This love I carry for him has been worn smooth by age, deepened by loss, sharpened by the terror of almost. It lives in me, older than this morning, older than this version of us. Every cell in my body recognizes him as home, as necessary as oxygen, as the reason my heart keeps beating even when everything else collapses.

If time wants to play games, fine. If I have to live through every practice, every meal, every conversation twice or ten times or a hundred times, I will. I’ll become an expert in our destruction. I’ll map every path that leads us to ruin until I find the one road that doesn’t.

Breakfast ends. Chairs scrape back. I stare at my fork.