Kenny is having a bad day. Really he's been having a bad twenty-eight years. Well, okay it doesn't work like that, because time as humans remember it isn't rigid and concise and the memories easily blur, the days lost to stand-out moments and jumping out at the odd triggers of sight and smell or the occasional word. And he doesn't feel as though he's lived twenty-eight years, not really. He's just been allowed to live fourteen different years, twice-over. Or he's had fourteen years of a different life downloaded into his brain. It's difficult to say, really.

Maybe the Kenny in this timeline has a single set of memories and then, this afternoon, he woke up with two. Or maybe he has lived a life with two less-than-normal human parents, and as soon as Paradox dropped him into this timeline, new memories and feelings sprung into his mind like they had rumbled through from an invisible IV drip, re-gifting him with four par-...no, it's too soon. Kenny can't think about that, about how 'family' has re-formed from three people into something wider and a little more broken.

Flat on his back, he glances over at Coraline and flinches at the way Maltruant digs his clawed hand into her chest. With a sick feeling, he watches as the bandages flutter up round it like the rising exhalation of a last gasp, curving to form a ballooning rib-cage of paper, so much less bloody than any cavity a mammal could produce. The fraying ends flap out like broken bird wings, jerky and sporadic, wittling down into stray snaps of ribbons as they darken in their distress to resemble dirty toilet paper.

It's strange, but before this, before everything, the only eyes he recalled as family were brown and green in colour. But now, staring into Coraline's wide and frightened purple ones, he feels anger pound into his veins. And he feels a little like Exo-Skull himself as he remembers her sneaking him cookies through the gaps in the banisters at Grandma Sandra's and the way she let him play Tarzan on her, springing out a very wobbly jungle of grey streamers and paper ferns from her outstretched limbs.

And perhaps it doesn't matter if he actually lived through those memories or not. Or if he can think of her as a sister and not a stranger. Because she needs someone now to be the hero for her.

The doubts fly from his mind and he whirls round, fighting the pain of the bruises lining his arm as he yanks out the new Spanner suit Paradox has given him, and tugs it free from the crates he'd stuffed it behind when they first arrived.

He can do this. He's learnt how to make sacrifices.


'Do you know when I was...urgh, conceived?'

He feels grossed out just asking it, but even so...

'If you truly mean it about wanting me to live,' he tells his Dad, 'remember it. No, don't; because you won't. Remember the week, calculate back from my birthday and tell them' – he nods toward Rook and Ben with his head and spreads his finger to point to Ben's phone, the one where the voice of a younger version of his mother has been drifting out. '-Tell them. So they can tell Azmuth. And if they really, really, can't let me die – let them use IVF or whatever the best mind in five galaxies can come up with to bring me into theirs.'

There's confusion then. And reality is warped away from it, everything flickers and rips, like paper torn by uncaring fingers, shavings of his life falling away into the emptiness. And then Paradox grabs his hand.

'There was very brave,' he tells Kenny as they bask in their own very white pocket universe. 'Very brave indeed.' But his expression, when he meets Kenny's eyes, is grave. 'But now that you've made this decision, you're going to have to be even braver. What you're going to carry around inside you will make you lonely. Lonelier perhaps than your father has ever been. If you slip and tell them of what their lives once were –'

'They'll think I'm crazy,' Kenny mumbles, trying to blink away the tears. 'Or else they'll believe me automatically and feel really bad about it.' He sniffs, then sputters. 'Don't mind me, just got something in my eye.' He rubs at his face with one hand, trying not to watch his fingers shake before him.

'We're on the cusp of something,' Paradox tells him quietly, 'Things are rearranging themselves and Maltruant's endless time-loop must be reset. And yet in the future he must still succeed in stealing both the Dwarf Star and the Anihilaarg – and the younger version of your father must still stop him in a certain way.' He looks down at the head of his cane and smiles secretly to himself. But it's a smile Kenny won't soon forget, because the ends of it, each wry crinkle of the surrounding cheek muscles, fail to reach his downcast eyes and change the emotion there.'It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that one of the reasons this universe is so diverse is become Ben smeared as much of his alternating DNA over the Anihilaarg as it was imploding. Without it...who knows how certain evolutionary paths would have stayed?'

He sighs. 'Ideally I should still ask you to be Chrono Spanner one last time for the sake of the universe. And perhaps it isn't fair of me to ask it of you. But only you can decide.' He gives Kenny a searching look. 'But as for afterwards...I can let you forget, you know. Time can be cruel in its firmness but sometimes it can unbend enough to be kind. And if I try, I think I can let you forget and allow you to reawaken in your new life, the same fearless Ken Tennyson – but with a different sort of family.'

'No.' Ken's voice is small and strong and when he raises his face he chooses to make his next words louder. 'No. I want to remember the Ken Tennyson I was before. It's not right that no-one remembers. And you feel the same way too, otherwise you would never have created Vacuity Village and allowed those other lost people to live.'

Paradox pauses. And then his face breaks into a wide and very genuine smile. 'Well done, Kenny. You've finally learnt. All the different people we are in our lives, all the people we've been and could be; they're important, no matter how many of them time seeks to erase.' He sobers. 'I only wish I could have let you keep the ones closest to you.'

He brings his hands out, palms up, and a new suit appears within them, elegant and lean.

'Dude,' says Kenny unimpressed, 'take it to the silver screen. No one's impressed with your stage magician tricks anymore.'

Paradox throws back his head and laughs.


Kenny whirls, lands a boot in Maltruant's face and jumps away, letting the momentum carry him back to the floor even if in the inside he's crying at just how hard Maltruant's face feels beneath his boot. But still, no time to let bruises heal when you're trying to be a hero.

Maltruant obviously believes so too, because the next moment he's casting shadows over Kenny's form in the way oh-so many creepy villains have tried to do over the years, but when he inevitably flings the teenager away from his chest, Kenny lands impossibly on a spare space cruiser behind Maltruant's hulking back. Which...is not something that usually happens. There's usually some basic gravity at work, or a general adherence to the rules of simple physics, no matter how much crazy stuff is going down.

Kenny lets a breath escape his teeth. Because, oh great. Maltruant's obviously using his time manipulation powers to play with him the way a cat does with a lively mouse. Good thing then that unlike a cat, Maltruant doesn't possess teeth sharp enough to pierce any of the nerves inside Kenny's suit. Huh. On second thought, does Maltruant even have any teeth?

Kenny grits his teeth and peers through his visor. His head is spinning and Maltruant is doing...something. Fiddling with both the Dwarf Star and the Anihilaarg. He sees something flash, a portal opening, black spinning out into a star-shape against a grey wall, and then Eon and a Time Beast are charging through. It's all Kenny can do to push himself forwards at a run, to stretch one leg out in front of the other and grab Coraline before the Time Beast skewers her with its horn.

And...he's an idiot. Because this isn't the kind of sacrifice he needs to pull. He stares down at Coraline, feels more than sees her whimper, and then, without pausing to think, he unwraps his green scarf from around his neck and drapes it over the large hole in her chest that her bandages are still struggling to cover. The edges are crisp, blackened, as though Maltruant's fingers were sizzling pokers, searing against all which serves her as skin, and Kenny wants to hurt him badly for that.

'I'll be back,' he whispers. 'I promise.'

And then he vanishes.


He crashes into a table, upsets a few smoothies and hears Ben exclaim something. He shakes his head, sees the blue of a sky freed from a parasol overhead, and hears ringing in his ears. And then his Dad's younger, leaner fingers are on his shoulders, hoisting him up as Rook's large hand wraps around his arm.

'Spanner! What happened? You look – I mean I can't see your face, but if I could, you'd probably look terrible.'

Kenny takes a moment to breathe. Things have both happened and not happened; a lot of his excursions as Spanner remain the same, with the only visible discrepancy being the way he took Animo back to the future to see his Dad standing there alone, his Mum nowhere in sight. Which makes sense in a way; all of those occurred before Maltrutrant started trying to rebuild the universe, before Ben made the decision to pursue Rook instead of Kai, though he's making assumptions here and there's no guarantee he'll ever get Paradox to fess up as to what really started this whole stupid chain reaction in the first place.

'Hey,' he chokes out, 'the future calls. Oh, and the entire existence of the universe as we know it.'

Well, not 'we' anymore, he thinks. Just 'you.'

But it's as though Ben can hear the pathos in Kenny's thoughts, because he lets out a crooked smile. 'Hey man,' he says, cockiness firmly in place, 'You know I'm always game.'


Kenny arrives back in time to see Malrurant grab hold of the reins and charge off back to what is presumably the beginning of the universe.

'Go!' he urges, thumping the side of the time-cycle. 'Go, go, go!'

He's a little annoyed to then see Paradox suddenly appear and give him a quelling look before stepping over to rap at Ben's window and tell him something that's probably terribly important.

For once, Kenny doesn't quite care. He's left something terribly important on the floor. He flops to his knees beside Coraline, stupidly certain for a minute that's he's going to find blood on his scarf. Of course he doesn't; but he is relieved to see that her bandages have woven together into some semblance of a chest once again beneath his scarf. And then Coraline's eyes flutter open.

'Boo,' she says weakly.

Kenny takes her hands and holds it, feeling the rough linen of her fingers thread between his own with the smooth dexterity of something with no bones. And it occurs to him frighteningly that if she were to weaken, he wouldn't be able to register any kind of pulse point. Because how do you give CPR to a living mummy?

He sits that way for a long time, waiting for their parents to find them, long after the Ben and Rook of the past have gone.


'My poor little zombie,' the Ben of now, of the present, coos. He wraps Coraline up in his arms like she's a doll, his fingers mindful of each wrinkle in her papery folds and the sound of his nails, when they meet her skin, makes a soft scratch as though doubling up for the nib of a pen.

Gwen stands over his shoulder as he kneels and looks as though she wants to hit him. 'Ben! You can't call your daughter a derogatory name like tha-'

But Coraline, her eyes glowing up at the man holding her, reaches out with weak paper fists and arranges them into struggling fingers to form the long straggling droop that takes over many an actor's during a zombie movie. And then, almost as a throwaway action, she growls out a mindless 'arragh,' as though eating a brain is very much the only thing she wishes to do right now.

Gwen rolls her eyes up to the ceiling.

'You are fighting a losing battle,' Rook informs her semi-gravely, though his lips are twitching slightly. His hand comes up to lightly grasp Coraline's arms before they have time to drop and he folds them gently within his long fingers. He makes for a strange picture, Kenny thinks, splashed out against Ben's side like this, his long legs curving and arcing round to from a sprawling puddle beneath Coraline's weight. Messy, and very different from the neat, tight hugs he's seen his Mum and Dad share. 'Coraline has as much of a mind for respecting her culture as Ben does for watching the history channel.'

Coraline whimpers then and the joking tone which had helped lift the lines of Rook's face into something light and almost happy, abruptly drops and he ends up staring down into the unhappy glimmer of her eyes with dismay.

'Ben,' he says urgently. 'I believe-'

'Already way ahead of you,' Ben mutters. 'Hold tight, darling.' And he shifts the weak shape of her head into Rook's waiting palm, the ends of her hair peeling from his fingers like wet fruit skin, almost shearing off a piece of her face alongside it. Ben's face becomes even more grim at the sight of this and his arms cross to form the familiar flash of light that has remained unchanged throughout every timeline, his shape and shadow becoming thin and flexible without the human bones to shape their contours. The next second, waving tendrils of paper, thicker and stronger than the weakly waggling lines arching up from his daughter, race round to tighten over her shaking form.

Snare-oh doesn't frown as she quivers at his touch, but the paper spills from his arms a little faster, falling like folds to wrap round and through the gaps in Coraline's body like the thread suspended in the movements of a sewing needle does. When he's done, she looks a little clunky, her chest swollen and the thin, graceful lines of her bandages swallowed up by the thicker ones he's given her. Then there's a slight tearing sound as Ben's bandages pull off and divide, small pieces of himself still wrapped around Coraline.

'The best medic for a Thep Khufan is another Thep Khufan. In a few days, what I've given her will help meld with her system and fall off-'

'Exactly like a scab!' Rook breaks in excitedly, all of him lighting up in what Ben dubs as 'geekish glee.'

'Yes, dear,' says Snare-oh in a slightly mocking voice. 'Exactly like one.'

'Heh,' Kevin limps up to them, wincing slightly as his mouth tries to break out into a grin. 'So now that that's done and dusted; how's it feel to be a proper mummy to your little girl, Ben?'

Now Gwen looks as though she wants to whack Kevin instead of Ben. But she still obligingly whisks up a platform of mana for him to claw his way onto before he manages to lose his balance and falls.

Ben sighs then as, with a flare of light, he escapes his 'mummy' shape and turns back into his human one. 'He's never going to get tried of that joke, is he?'

Rook shakes his head. 'I believe not, dear.' He bears his teeth in a shaky grin as Ben glares at him half-heartedly in response.

And Kenny's not used to what happens next; or at least part of him that remembers isn't. For Ben runs his hand over Coraline's scalp and Rook's hand repeats the motion on the other side, their fingers smoothly gliding up to join in the middle, before they let out a slow, soft set of smiles at each other. Kenny promptly turns away, and sees his mother in the corner, her husband's claws hooked over her shoulder in such a gentle way that he can barely see the creases they push out of her sleeves beneath.

He...Paradox is right. He is in a lonely place.

'Kenny?'

He turns, pulled by his Dad's voice. And is surprised to see the tentative smile being offered to him.

'Want to go get a pizza on the way home? Or a Chinese? It's been a long day.'

Kenny tries to smile. 'How about some chilli-fries?' he asks brightly.

And it's worth it, just to see the long, slow slide of long-suffering disgust pass over Rook's face.


Notes: Just one more chapter left.

And did I screw Kenny up for life? I screwed Kenny up for life.

Still, considering some of the fates befalling alternate versions of his father in Omniverse, he got off lightly. Kinda.

Sorry for making Paradox sound too much like Doctor Who sometimes. But we all know that that's basically who the writers want him to be.

And finally, apologies to Duck (guest), but your sentences were such a 'mess' that I could barely understand what you were complaining about. All I got what was that you didn't like the fact that I jumped from one scenerio to the next with little to no explanation. Unfortunately that's just the way this story unfolded - I wanted a bit of confusion thrown in there, because time is unraveling and resetting itself and it's causing a lot of problems. And I have no idea what you meant by 'others walk with others.' I apologise if English isn't your first language and that's why you can't verbalise your complaint properly, but I honestly found what you were saying to be really hard to understand.