The funeral had been agonizing.
Joyce wept in David's arms, and a few tears even broke their way through the veterans stony façade. Heaviness hung in the air. Heads hung low, eyes on the ground as the casket proceeded towards it's final resting place.
Then again, funerals always were. There were rituals, not for the dead, but the living they'd left behind. Ceremonies for remembrance and grief.
Loss was a part of living, and the pain that came with losing loved ones was as inevitable as the tide, as the turning of the universe itself.
But Max's grief was different. It carried a weight that threatened to make her knees buckle beneath her, and her heart wither and freeze inside her chest.
Her mind was away with memories of a week that had now never been…erased.
None of it had happened, it'd been wiped away in the cosmic winds of time, yet the memories were clear as photographs in her mind.
Sharp rain drops spattering across her hair, wind rippling around her body.
Stumbling through a nightmarish corridor of fractured space time, everyone she knew barraging her with accusations of murder, of selfishness, begging for their lives and cursing her with such venom in their voices
Chloe, standing their like a martyr, form framed by the cracking of lightning.
…the feel of her lips, as they said goodbye for what would be the last time.
Unconsciously, she flexed the fingers of her hand, reaching for the power that could change things, rewrite them. The power that she could never use again lest she bring the wrath of fate down on Arcadia Bay like the vengeful thumb of God. Yet she could never use that power again. It was what had started this whole mess in the first place.
She looked up as the minister began his sermon, though she didn't hear much beyond the first few words. Much as it would disappoint Kate, she had no faith in the power of prayers, of hopes, of calling out to a higher power.
God, fate, the universe, whatever you wanted to call the power that drove the wheels of the universe, was cruel.
After all, it was right when she realized that she couldn't live without Chloe that she learned that she had to.
What god would do that?
A blue butterfly fluttered down from the sky, perching atop the casket.
Max smiled despite herself.
Of course, it would come.
It had come at the beginning, so it had come at the end.
Who are you? She thought, watching it's wings flutter noiselessly. Why are you here? To mock me? What lesson did I not learn?
As if in reply, it took off into the sky, disappearing into the bright sunlight.
It was well after midnight when she stumbled back to her dorm room.
After the service, she'd walked through the town in a haze, heeled shoes blistering her feet.
Kate had offered her company, Warren too, but she'd declined.
Her friends sweet, far more so than she deserved.
The town had been….ordinary, frighteningly mundane. The autumnal oranges and reds of the leaves and the sunlight bathed Arcadia in perpetual evening. Fisherman grumbled back and forth between their nets and boats, bemoaning the dismal catch the late season yielded. People drove to work and kids to the bus stop from school.
Max had thought about stopping by the junkyard, but it was still taped off by the police following the discovery of Rachel's body. Hounds would still be scouring the place for every scrap of evidence they could find, most of which would link the victim to the one gunned down in the school bathroom.
There was chatter about Jefferson and Nathan's arrests earlier that week, whispered rumors between people who only knew the story from second hand sources.
Nathan had confessed to everything, laid out every detail step by step while his older sister had held his shaking shoulders from behind.
Jefferson would rot, and maybe, just maybe, the poor boy would get the help his father hadn't gotten him. She knew he was troubled…but that didn't mean she could forgive him. He'd pulled the trigger, while she'd been forced to sit and listen silently.
The world was returning to normal. It was stabilizing, the mystique of the week that had never been nowhere to be found.
This was what she had saved, what Chloe had died for.
It had to be worth it. The lives of thousands couldn't possibly outweigh a single person. Max knew that.
Then why did she feel so empty inside?
When she finally stepped onto her floor it was already dark, and faint snoring could be heard from Alyssa's room.
She walked the length of the hall to her room, unlocked the door, and entered.
Mind still clouded, it took her nearly five whole seconds to realize there was already someone inside.
A woman in a torn green dress stood at the far end of the room with her foot up on the chair. From the doorway, Max could see several of her small wash cloths had been pulled out of a nearby drawer and cut into long, thin bandages. A long gash ran the length of the woman's pale leg and up to her side, blood spattering the skin and the staining the carpet.
"Shit," the woman cursed, tightening the bandage with shaking hands. "Bitch got me good."
Max stepped forward, mouth opening to speak.
The woman looked up from the wound, and her mouth snapped shut.
It was her own face she saw looking back.
There were differences of course, longer hair down past the shoulders, lines around the mouth that weren't quite wrinkles yet indicated age nonetheless.
"Oh, you're here," the older doppelganger said, voice sounding pained. "Took you long en-"
Lightning flashed across the window, thunder cracking in its wake.
"No!" Max cut her off, stepping back sharply. Wind whooshed outside the dorm building, picking up in an instant to enormous speed. "I stopped this!"
The edges of her sight started to burn away, like polaroid film exposed to open flame. Power flexed in her hand, clawing outward desperately at anything, any shred of time it could grasp.
Abruptly, her older self stood up, shouting words that were lost on Max.
She was already falling.
Her dorm room melted away, and a black abyss opened beneath her, swallowing her whole.
What did I do wrong? She thought as the darkness swirled around her.
She'd let Chloe die. The storm should be gone. Hadn't the universe gotten what it wanted?
Apparently not.
Apparently, the universe wasn't done torturing her.
An eternity later, she landed.
She stood in a fractured corridor that stretched into the horizon, the lighthouse beacon high just above it.
Shakily, Max started walking.
Just as before, she passed numerous diorama like arrangement. Photos made three dimensional along the path, memories brought to life. But this time…they were blurry.
Like before they were her and Chloe, but pixelated, half forms and barely recognizable.
Scenes of them together, ones she both and didn't recognize, filled the lane. Of them in various positions and outfits, in locations ranging from Blackwell, to her parents house in Seattle, to a brightly lit art gallery.
"There's no escape, is there?" she whispered.
Her wanderings eventually brought her to the cliff beside the lighthouse.
"You made it."
Seated on the bench was the older Max. Her leg had been fully bandaged, and her hair had been tucked back, showing the jeweled earrings dangling from the lobes.
Max hesitated.
"Why are you hear?"
"I'm not here to shove all your mistakes down your throats, if that's what you're thinking," said the older Max, edge of her lip twinging upward.
"So," Max said, slowly walking forward to stand beside the bench. "You're another me, then?"
"The same you, actually," her other self corrected. "The one you met was a figment of your mind. Your own doubts coming to haunt you. "
In the distant black void, thunder clapped.
"The same me," Max repeated, staring out at the sound of the noise. "What do you mean?"
"I'm who you're going to be, at age twenty-eight. Call me Maxine, by the way. I use that name professionally, and it makes it less confusing. I remember all of this from your point of view. Those were my memories you just passed. Couldn't see them, because you haven't lived them yet. Don't want spoilers, do you?"
"….Can I ask about the dress?" Max said in a light attempt at levity. Anything to alleviate the fact that she hated everything about this.
"I was at a gallery opening. Things got…messy. You'll find out what soon."
There was a long silence.
"But why are you here?" Max asked again, voice cracking. Tears were building behind her eyes, threatening to spill across her cheeks. "I stopped this! Chloe…Chloe's gone. Why is the storm still here!?"
"Because it's more complicated than that, kid," Maxine replied. "This isn't over. It's just another layer. Yeah, the storm came because the force driving it wanted Chloe to die. But that's not enough."
"What do you mean?" Max was breathless at this point. She didn't even try question the woman's identity, her from further down the timeline. She'd grown numb to being shocked at things like that, and to be fair, the Maxine looked exactly like her. Same skin tone, albeit weathered by more years, same expressions and quirks of the face that she saw in the mirror. "How can that not be enough?"
How could the life of the girl she loved not be enough.
"Because, Max. It wants you too." Maxine stood and paced to the edge of the cliff. "It doesn't just want to eradicate Chloe. It wants to eradicate anything that could stop it from doing so. You, me, we're the only thing that can."
"But why?" Max repeated for what she knew must have been the umpteenth time. "Why does the universe want her gone so bad?"
Maxine quirked an eyebrow.
"I never said anything about the universe, Max. Far as I know, the universe is either neutral or apathetic to all this. No, what's trying to kill Chloe is something else entirely. Don't ask me what, you'll have to figure that out for yourself."
Max took a long shuddering breath. Every part of her body, mind, soul, wanted to collapse from sheer exhaustion.
"Then why are you here?" she asked.
"The same reason you are," Maxine answered with steel in her voice. "I love Chloe Price. Enough to rip space and time to shreds. "
Maxine lifted her right hand, flexing power that distorted the air around them just slightly. Her face scrunched up, perturbed.
In that moment, Max noticed her fingers for the first time. They were callused and heavily worked, stained by development fluid and everyday wear and tear.
What she noticed most was the ring on her left hand.
"You need to go back to the beginning," Maxine continued, saying nothing about what she just implied. "Start over from the bathroom. Save Chloe."
"Isn't that what started everything? Using my power to save Chloe?"
"Get creative. You have more to you than this power, you know. Time travel isn't all that can stop a bullet. All the memory of this last week will stay with you. Use it. The next step will present itself eventually. Sorry that isn't very helpfuk."
A thousand images danced in the air around them. Memories of the week she'd lived, photographs of the possibilities, of every permutation of every choice she'd made.
"Alright, I'll do it."
She would do anything if it meant saving Chloe.
Maybe that made her selfish, tearing at the fabric of reality like this for just one person.
But those moments flying around her, kisses and laughter and simply being together….that was worth it.
It had to be.
Reaching into the pocket of her dress, she retrieved the blue butterfly photo.
"What will you do?" she asked Maxine, fingers creasing the edges of the polaroid.
"Try to put a stop to all this," she gestured to the void, and lightning cracked.
A bolt of red lightning stood out amongst the rest.
Max looked down at the photo and started to focus.
"Don't worry though," Maxine added as the world started to shift around her. "I have a way home when all this is done."
She looked up just in time to the photo Maxine held between her fingers.
Her and Chloe, and a laughing little girl.