A/N: This was a bit of an experimental fic for me, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I may have crammed a few too many concepts in a less than 3k story, but hey, I loved writing this beyond words (I've basically stopped being productive for this fic). Please Read and Review. The story begins. Enjoy!
indulgence vs practicality: the story of a love affair that never was
Sometimes she has to remind herself that it isn't real.
For now though, she'd rather pretend it is.
Her face digs deeper into the fabric of the boy's shirt (ninety seven percent cotton, three percent nylon, navy blue, low cut- she remembers, she imagined it herself), and inhales the familiar scent of his skin, before pushing up from the bed.
Jason is sprawled out across the sheets, shirt riding up slightly, mouth open and hair spilling endearingly to the right side of his head, strands sticking together and jutting out in little tufts.
(Reyna has an errant thought about the way his hair stuck together with blood staining his scalp and crimson spilling from his lips. She grimaces for a moment before dissolving the image.)
She likes this one especially. The one where Jason is a normal college student and she's his slightly above average girlfriend. Where Jason doesn't have faint lines around his eyes from worry and the blue in his eyes is still clear and innocent, his smile easy and a little less grimace. Where they can pretend love is the greatest risk and heartbreak is a step away from the Armageddon.
She's found a hobby in small talk and meaningless conversation, in creating new people with new lives, and pretending so hard that they're real. She created a girl and her boyfriend the other day (blond with cloudy grey eyes, skeptical) and finds them polluting all of her universes, dispersing throughout all the worlds she's created. She tries hard not to maintain complete control over her creations.
Its harder than she had initially imagined.
She pushes the hair away from Jason's face and kisses he space between his eyes and down his nose. He wakes up and pulls her down for a kiss, and she has to giggle into it, resulting in a rather clumsy clash of teeth.
She closes her eyes for a moment, and hopes, wishes, demands the gods allow for this, just this to be real.
It's always dark when Reyna disconnects and opens her eyes.
She wasn't always in the darkness, she knows. She remembers, vaguely, of a time before that. But now everything is over, and she is alone.
A deep pang resounds through her body, a feeling she has come to associate with sadness, and she inhales sharply, remembering where she had been, or at least where she had pretended to be. Emotions have somehow crept in through the memories installed in her software.
She sometimes fancies that she's God, that in her loneliness, her immortality, her creation, she might have become some almighty entity.
In reality, all she knows is that she is a girl, left in space to continue the legacy of the human race, waiting for someone, anyone, to find her. Sometimes she has the courage to remember that her veins are actually wires and her organs gears and that her brain is actually a computer with thousands of disks.
It was two hundred years when she started to look through files.
It wasn't until two thousand years in that she started imagining. Her first will always be Jason.
Reyna sometimes visits the older universes, the first ones she made, framing situations and events off the knowledge in her computer drive.
She finds that she likes Greek mythology first and Roman mythology next. She finds immediately afterwards that she prefers the Romans: she pretends it isn't because the routine and strict protocol is closer to the strictly practical processes of machinery.
She creates Jason first, son of Jupiter, perfection in the making, all conventional baby blue eyes and blond hair, like a wheat field swaying in the summer sky. She loses control next, fed on by an echo of feelings (she learned about these from the histories, the books) and a nudge of morality. She creates too many people, too many situations, too many emotions. She loses herself in the girl she pretends to be, names herself Reyna for queen instead of the ISM 5006, and begins to genuinely believe that she is flesh and blood, emotions, little hurts, pride, and all.
She soon finds that in this universe, of gods and monsters, sorrow is all that awaits her, and her hands are stained with blood before long, the blood of enemies, and most often the scarlet remainders of friends.
Jason dies before she can stop it. She learns the taste of tears laced with regret and guilt, and the sounds of agony when those you care about are lost.
She doesn't have the heart to bring him back.
Later she finds she can't help but do so.
She begins the next universe on the basis of normalcy, hoping not to repeat the mistakes of the past life. She stores the first in the back of her hard drive, hoping never to find it again.
She can't help recreating him again, molding his features, framing his morals, his hopes, his dreams. He isn't the Jason Grace, only a copy of the original, of a boy who never became a man due to a destiny too great.
Its hard to remind herself of this when he kisses her hard and she can taste the nostalgia of a lost life on his lips.
She thinks that maybe over time, after all the lives she's lived, she'll become numb to the sensation of death, of he hurts and falls in life.
It burns more each time, so much that when that visionary college boy fades into an old man and eventually, into nothing, she is erupting and burning, melting away like the remains of the earth, burning from the core out.
She meets him next in the universe where she is a hired assassin, wielding guns twice her size and fooling the rules of gravity. She read about it once, in a thriller novel, red lipstick and black paint staining the covers in her mind, and she's sure to include all the facts and even a bit of fantasy- it's her universe after all. She finds him with a gun held to her chest and a foolish smile on his face.
"Gotcha."
She can only love him more when the bullet passes through her chest.
Miles away, a ship approaches. Another survivor vessel.
Reyna does not know.
Does not understand that earth may have been destroyed but the human race refuses to die.
The ship crew approaches, waste basket in hands.
Another Information Storage machine, in case of the human race's ultimate destruction in the End of Earth. Useless now. They begin to carry it (her) back to the ship for dis-assembly.
Reyna does not know.
(yet)
Reyna finds another version of Jason in the streets of 30th century Paris.
By now, her universes have become tangled, melding into one another and reflecting each other. The streets are mangled, the air thick and olive colored as oxygen dispensers whirr loudly in the background. Reyna coughs. It seems obligatory.
Jason sells gears and gadgets on the streets, initially created by his friend Leo (son of Hephaestus, she remembers), all snarky comments and suave compliments as he tries to sell a chunk of metal to Reyna, a sunny smile on his face. She refuses as politely as she can, but decidedly doesnt leave the spot. Or his side. Or this world.
She starts to help the selling of the gadgets, adding a sort of 'antique' spin on it, gears and pieces fitting together, as Leo put it, 'as if she'd been there when they were built in the first place.' She doesn't have the heart or the nerve to joke about how the information concerning the entire history of earth is stored in the folders in her memory drive.
They're lying on a pile of antique newspapers, the pages crinkled and words blurring (Jason collects these, thinks they're significant for some reason), when his eyes cloud for a moment and he turns to her with a strange look on his face.
"Hey."
Reyna prys her eyes open. She'd been trying to sleep.
"What do you want? This had better be good- not that I'd expect you're brain to be capable of anything of that sort."
Jason makes a face before continuing, turning a left over gear in his hands.
"Do you ever think that... that maybe, there's like another life out there, like there's the shadow of another world in the back of your mind, so close you can almost grasp it, constantly-"
Reyna's head shoots up.
"What?"
Jason pauses.
"I- never mind. It was stupid anyways."
Reyna only nods and closes her eyes again.
The swooshing sounds of the crew taking swathes of cloth off as they enter the ship fill the artifical air, the Information Storage Machine in tow. In another part of the ship, a man sits in front of a screen, typing formulas, furrowing his brows, and wiping the sweat of his forehead in frustration. His cobalt eyes reflect the blue of the screen, numbers flashing in his irises, as he leans back.
He's sure any other self respecting scientist would call him an idiot. Piper, his kindly wife, constantly consoles him and reminds him that she will always support him, regardless of whether or not this works. He knows its only code for 'It's okay if you fail, because I already know you're going to.' Time travel is for the dreamers, the visionaries, the, well, the idiots really. But he believes in it, beyond a shadow of doubt, that its possible. The formulas are there, the evidence is their, the execution-he grimaces. He's very nearly there.
He finds he has an affection for old technology, especially the initial Information Storage Machines, with their smooth edges, almost egg shapped for speed and strength. They are the best surviving articles from the End of Earth, in near perfect function even thousands of years later. He has recreated many, hours spent on useless craft, combining pieces from different machines, combining and experimenting.
His time machine (he doesn't like calling it that; sounds tacky) sways uncertainly as the ship turns, its opening beckoning invitingly. Hesitating for a moment, he reaches for the three foot tall ISM 5006 and, in a sudden burst of inspiriration, starts the information download.
The bulk of human knowledge and history was initially stored in the ISMs in case of disaster and the eventual end to the human race. They travel through space at a relatively slow pace (perhaps 60 to 70 mph), waiting for any life out their to find them, and discover the remnants of earthly knowledge and understanding. Four billion were sent out at the End of Earth. The one's found today are still in near perfect condition.
The perfect experiment.
He calculates the place and time to send it, to find it within the next five minutes should it move at an average pace of 65 mph from earth beginning the year earth burned from its core. Typing rapidly, he sets a date and location.
Hesitating for a moment, he leaves his own signature. An imprint of himself within the information in the machine.
He imagines that perhaps he'll be renowned and remembered if anyone were to find it. Jason Grace, creator of the first time machine. He scoffs. How ridiculous.
He inhales as he lifts the relatively light machine into the crevice of his largely circular time capsule. He presses the button and it makes a loud zipping sound as it disappears, leaving only the air and a painful hope.
Reyna doesn't actually remember her creation. Only her purpose: to spread the knowledge of the former inhabitants of Earth. These days, hands interlaced with Jason and heart skipping with young love, she begins to forget.
The next time she arrives at a new universe, Jason is, awkwardly enough, her adopted cousin. She supposes its a bit scandalous to be falling in love with him, but its her own universe, and she tweaks the rules of morality just enough.
In this one, they all have wings. Reyna doesn't understand where they came from, only that Jason's are white and majestic, like those of a great bald eagle woven out of the feather's of a dove,
The race after school as children, and Reyna has to smile at Jason's foolish grin and consequent teasing when he wins.
Its around now that she starts to notice something is wrong.
It's a bit of an out of body experience, as she feels the front of her open, to reveal the gears and computer screens within. She has half the mind to yell STOP and run away, when she realizes for the first time in a long time, she is incapable of such a thing. Even so, she tries to use the force of her mind to stop their ministrations, as she feels her gears being undone, her wires being cut. Please, please, please-
"Stop!"
Jason rushes a bit haphazardly into the room. The leader of the Outer Space Analysis and Discovery Divison (OSAD), Percy Jackson, looks at him a bit skeptically.
"What's up, Grace? We just pulled in another of these ISM things. Relatively newer one by the looks of it."
Panting slightly from running, Jason pushes a strand of blond hair out of his eyes.
"I-I need it...for an...an experiment."
"Hell of a strange experiment by the looks of it. Then again, I shouldn't judge. My girlfriend looks at old buildings for a living."
Jason rolls his eyes.
"And you basically just pick up space junk."
Percy mockingly glares at him.
"You wound me, Grace. Have fun with you're ISM." He shoves it towards Jason, but even before that, Jason can tell. It's his.
He smiles as if he's found the very essence of life, and Percy looks at him for explanation. Jason is too busy staring at his ISM to respond.
Its his. Everything he's ever searched for, time travel, the understanding of the universe, its his. He smiles and turns the ISM on, allowing every piece of information to spill out in a waterfall of knowledge.
A love story told in tens of thousands of perspectives is not what he expects.
Reyna does a quick scan of the area.
What she finds takes a moment to process.
Its him, in glasses and white lab suit, blue eyes glimmering like the ocean beneath the summer sun, and for a moment, she feels found.
Jason Grace, in all his glory and dorkiness, in all his brave exploits and hilarious failures, has never been so tangible, so beautiful before her.
This for some reason, feels real.
And even if it isn't, if her love for him has made her delusional, if every life she has lived with him has made her stupid with emotion-
She can pretend.
What even did I just write. I dont even know whats going on anymore. I realize this was a weird kind of Machine! Reyna x Jason fic, and now I'm questioning my sanity. oh well. Hope you enjoyed regardless of how confusing this was. Please read and review, it really does make my day when you do. Thanks for reading!