When he saw her lift the manhole cover into the sewers William took a deep breath, exhaled, and looked on as Laura slowly and uncertainly stepped down onto the ladder.
As she began to descend, closing the opening behind her, William steeled himself and waited the requisite amount of time before he followed her and did the same.
He thought he was being quiet on the way down but Laura was waiting for him at the bottom of the ladder, her arms folded and expression calculating and triumphant.
"I was right," she said. "I do remember you."
William thought again of Jeremie, frantically shouting through the phone just minutes ago to keep her away, keep her from finding the lab. Do whatever he had to.
William took a step toward Laura and tried not to think of how his own expression must look right now, his tired resignation in her arrogance's reflection. A shattered remainder of what he'd been. Once upon a time.
He walked up to her and she was a slip of a girl compared to William. He considered Jeremie's request. William knew logically, he could hit her. Threaten her. Try to convince her that what she somehow knew was not the truth.
"Laura," William said instead, already knowing he could bring himself to do none of these because memories of screaming girls that had been his friends splintering into code by his hand and he would not be that awful thing again.
"Laura, don't do this," he repeated instead, and his tone was warning but his voice cracked on the words near the end. "Go back to the school."
He knew already that Laura would not go back.
He hadn't, after all.
William watched with his stomach sunk into his knees while Laura looked at him and analyzed silently. She smirked at him and a swell of nausea hit William, when he thought of how he must have been just like this, the first time he came to this place on an invitation.
(She had no invitation. But she was here anyway, somehow. William wondered if she dreamed and believed in destiny, like the old him had.)
"I remember now," Laura told William confidently, gloating in it. "I remember the rest of it. This is the way to the lab, isn't it?"
William thought of his once-recurring dreams of fighting alongside the girl he loved on a bridge against some violent force.
He thought of flashbacks far more current that sometimes, if he was lucky, stayed in the realm of nightmares. Sometimes now they hit him randomly, out of nowhere. Not dreams. Not visions. Memories. What became of him.
What she wanted.
"Laura," he said, tone hollow and nearly pleading. Remembering the vindication he had felt, that she must feel, yet then also the hell and then the nightmares upon nightmares and all that had been really memories that came after.
And especially now because that thing was back.
She didn't know. He hadn't known.
She didn't know.
"Don't go there," he said with a crooked, failed attempt at a smile. "You don't know what you're doing."
Laura simply turned on her heel with another infuriating smirk, striding off down the passage. She called back to him, "I know exactly what I am doing."
And William had to close his eyes to steady himself before inhaling, exhaling, and trailing after her. After the ghost of a decision he wished so desperately, every morning, every time he felt static, or a presence hungrily watching him from the outlets, that he could take back. But he could not.
William had made his decision then and it would haunt him now and so he would fight, had to fight, to get back the same peace of mind a girl like Laura took for granted.
And he couldn't bring himself to hit her, either, for all he didn't want this nosy girl joining that fight. No matter whether violence now was the lesser evil. It was wrong, and what was the point? She'd come back later on her own.
So William followed Laura in silence thinking despondently of the arrogant pretty-faced fool he'd been, and hoped it wasn't too selfish of him to wish that if he couldn't knock the damn memory of a secret out of this girl by force then maybe Aelita could.
Before someone or something far worse got the chance.