Max couldn't believe her eyes, or maybe she could but simply didn't want to, for she was standing in the dead center of the tornado that threatened to destroy Arcadia bay. The chaotic force of nature seemed to destroy everything in its path, yet inside Max barely even felt a breeze. Instead of darkness and chaos, events flowed around Max in rapid succession, as if she were looking directly into past events instead of traveling back to them herself.
"Oh God," Max said to herself, covering her mouth as several memories poured back into her skull, or maybe they had been there all along and she had simply forgotten them.
She could remember standing here before, hundreds of times before, and here she stood once more. She was the center of it all, all the chaos around her was because she wanted to save Chloe Price. Maxine Caulfield had ripped apart the very fabric of time and space, in a single instance of desperation, to save Chloe Price. She had defied the very laws of nature, forever to repeat the same five days, each loop erasing any memory she had, as punishment for her selfishness.
"Chloe," Max whispered, reaching out to an event as it passed not five feet in front of her but it might as well have been five miles away from her.
Then the tornado vanished, the viewings of the past vanished, and Maxine Caulfield was left standing amongst a sea of bright colors. She could see everything spinning, her mind was opened to the turning of time itself, she could see suns burn and galaxies die. Time itself flowed around her in colors unimaginable and Max understood it all. No one had ever witnessed time itself, no one was ever meant to, so of course a single girl, from a single aspect of the universe, would end up doing the impossible.
"Kate," Max could see Kate, every path she could ever possibly walk down, every fate she could possibly ever have.
Time itself was at her fingertips, the machine she had broken was fixed now, Max had become the piece that was broken. Max realized that time wasn't really cause to effect, that was just something people came up with to try and bring reason to something that had no reason. Then she was back on the lighthouse hill, standing next to the still living Chloe Price, staring out at the raging tornado that had come to wipe the slate clean.
"Holy fuck," Max could hear Chloe whispered, the familiar emotion of fear in her eyes, as she glanced at Max to see if the smaller time traveler knew what was going on.
"I can't remember how many times I've watched this scene," Max said, her unusually calm eyes never looking away from the vortex of her own crimes.
"Max?" Chloe asked, unsure as to what her friend could mean.
"I remember it all now, I remember the first time that I broke time itself, to save you in the bathroom. Each time I went back, without any memory of any of this, as the universe tried to right what I had done wrong. There are rules to the forces of nature, rules that no one could, or should ever break but it's taken me this long to realize something," Max continued, now clearly freaking Chloe out even more than the tornado was, as she turned to look up at the blue haired punk girl.
"Max, you're freaking me out here," there was a look in Max's eyes, something seemed wrong about it and it sent a shiver up Chloe's spine.
"The laws of time are mine and they will obey me," Max's hand suddenly shot out, a motion she had done trillions of times before, and Chloe actually saw what Max had only ever witnessed when she traveled backwards in time.
The tornado froze, like when you pause a dvd or something, and everything was completely still, bringing about a beauty that could only be captured by standing inside a still picture. Chloe looked on in amazement, mesmerized by what Max had now considered normal, and watched as everything slowly began to reverse, everything except for them. The reverse began to speed up, to the point that it was going night and day faster than Chloe could even blink, and then it suddenly stopped. It was still sunny out, no signs of the tornado having ever showed up in the first place, and they both still stood on the cliff overlooking all of Arcadia Boy.
"Max, what did you do?" was the first thing Chloe asked, her mind still not able to wrap itself around the fact that she actually just time traveled.
"I brought us back, to the very beginning of where things began going wrong in this town, and I'm going to do what I should have done a very long time ago," Max explained, her eyes glowing an almost mystical gold for a moment before she swiftly turned around and starting walking down the hillside.
"What do you mean? Max, what are you talking about?!" Chloe shouted as she ran to catch up with her partner in crime and time.
"The date is April 22, 2013. What happens today Chloe?"