Marbles

A/N: I wrote it for the GTP event that we organized for VAMB's tenth anniversary. Many thanks to QS for helping me with it and letting me bend some punctuation rules.

You can guess the characters and quite a few episodes here. The answers are in the second chapter.

Children play in the park. We come here often; it's one of my favorite spots. Past, present and future whirl around us ad infinitum as red falling leaves, never quite alighting onto the mirror of the frozen pond. The children laugh, and young grass stalks shoot out of warm earth around them.

They sit in a circle, colorful marbles strewn in the middle. It's my son's turn, and I watch him pick one marble. It's remarkable for a sphere of glass – green patches on the oceans of blue, with creamy white tufts on one side – but my eyes refuse to linger on its intricate details and return to my son's profile instead. I see one chubby cheek and innocent eyelashes, and my breath catches in fascination and awe when I think of all the havoc we'll wreak together. He smiles and throws his marble in the air. Children around him clasp and cheer while he scrambles to collect some of the marbles from the ground. Then it's the next boy's turn. I lean against a tree's petrified bark and let my attention wander for a mortal moment.

Explosions ripple across a ship. The sheen of sweat and grime on a female's bare shoulders reflects the sparks from the overloaded console. The determination to persevere or to die is clearly readable in her eyes and it almost makes me wail in boredom. Fierce, valiant warriors come and go, changing oh so little on the grander scale – all of them being but grains of sand in the hourglass of the Universe.

The ship shudders again. She grabs for a blurry railing but misses, and her head slams into the torn metal. She doesn't notice the cut on her cheekbone but I can taste her blood now.

There's something about it that warrants a second glance at its source's primitive mortality. The flavor is what stops me short: there's no trace of predictable adrenaline in it.

Warm sun sparkles in my son's thin hair. I lose the feeling of time and his locks darken and curl around his noble, slightly-arrogant features. He has my lips; they quirk just like mine. I blink, and he's again a toddler with a handful of colored marbles.

I settle for one more look at her – just to confirm her ordinary nature and move on. But then I lose focus, and fragments flash behind my lowered eyelids. I let them permeate my senses before the morbidity of this sick fascination fully registers. Then it's too late.

…The air in the valley sizzles with static charges. She kneels in the shadow of a rock and cradles a crumpled shape. A rogue tear escapes her burning eyes and I catch it before it falls, savoring the saltiness of her guilt. I immediately yearn for more – almost ready to twist and bend realities for yet another drop.

…Her lifeless hair brushes the brittle bulkhead with rare movements of frosty air. I breathe on her fingertips. Sparkling crystals melt and encrust her again an instant later. Even now these delicate fingers wield unspeakable power over the weave of time. Uncountable lives will be eliminated in her name without a trace – she seems to be a natural at this game I've mastered.

…She wears so very little beneath that creamy silk robe. I whirl her and hold her so impossibly close that I can taste her sparkling indignation. It remains the only time she can see the unguarded gleam in my eyes – because if I don't admit it to her, I won't have to admit it to myself.

From now on, I watch covertly. The Universe must work hard for her tears, and I collect every one of them. But there is something so very special before the perpetual cycle begins anew. I savored the scene uncountable times, just because I could make each time feel like it was my first.

Dead fingers stroke her defiant chin, and I taste her parched lips when the Queen leans closer to kiss them. They grow colder by degrees, blood circulation being substituted by streaming data, and when the Queen breaks the kiss, the Collective is afraid. And I'm proud.

My son throws his beautiful marble into the air and rushes to collect as many from the ground as he can. He's happy and confident, and his chubby fingers hold too many shiny spheres in the end to catch his favorite one safely. It bounces and falls to the ground, shattering against a sharp stone.

The laughter freezes mid-air, falling to the ground as snowflakes. The time slows down and the children stare at the small sphere as it falls apart in a myriad of sparkling particles – each somebody's dream, now never to be fulfilled.

I'm by the circle in a blink of an eye. The leaves of past, present and future whirl around us and I catch the beautiful marble before it falls to the ground, its ocean of blue safe now in the confines of the glass. The children watch me with silent disapproval – it's not our nature to intervene. I ruffle my son's hair, trying to show them that I've done it just because it was his favorite.

But when I return to my spot by the dead tree, I still taste her humanity on my lips and accept quietly that it might have rubbed off onto me, just a little.