Chapter 14

As morning shone its way through darkness of night and spread warm sunrays dancing on the tip of roofs, Sean was awoken from the most satifying slumber he ever had, contributing partly to the tranquilizer they had been intoxicated with the night before. With Daniel still snoring senseless by his side, he tenderly unlatched their interlocked fingers, a bit surprised that neither of them had broken the contact through the night, and scrambled to his feet as lightly as he could. The boy turned and whined a bit at the loss of warmth, but didn't seem to be otherwise bothered by his brother's departure, so Sean was free to go.

His first destination was, without a doubt, the window outlooking the giant castle he had seen the last night, and like the previous endeavour, he was not even close to disappointed with the view.

Namaria had always been a place of such breathtaking beauty that Sean couldn't imagine ever being anywhere else his entire life, or at least adoration and love for his world in their shared memories told him the other couldn't. Its magic ran even in the air, in the very brimming life force of nature, charming mortal eyes into getting lost within these blue-green shade of flora. Say all they want; no one could deny the fact that the sight of the early sun showering white rays on curling vines and glittering dews of the long night's condensation was a wondrous feast of the eyes, granted by God only to those with the appreciation of the view, the leisure of time and the peace of mind.

They were much alike, him and the other; always prefering the early dawn of day, but could simply not bring themselves to get up the extra 5-minute's early to welcome it. They both had a thing for art, as glimpses of him carving delicate details into blocks of wood would suggest. The work was messy, sloppy and unpracticed, but he knew the other enjoyed the mere time spent working hard on turning a clump of figureless matter into actual sculpture, the sentiments not exactly different from his pride whenever he accomplished a sketch. And the uncanny similarity, was no matter how poor of a job he'd actually done, either Daniel would always comment on it being the coolest thing he'd ever seen, and either of them couldn't help but feel ridiculously giddy over it like a loyal canine being praised after it retrieved the stick.

But since long, the work had evolved into something more than just a stress-relief pastime or an extra set of skill. It had become passion, no less intense or profound as his own capacity for love, and much, much more earnest than his entire social life altogether. He was always living inside of himself, making good use of his mental space to entertain his dull mind, and never did he really find the interest to spike up a conversation anyway. It wasn't even his introvert behaviour; he knew many with actual anxieties who reached out more often than himself; it was just simply him, to the brutal honesty of his eccentricity, but still something as true to him as was his own nature. And now that he had another perspective on life to view from, his assumption was just restrengthened once again, that Sean Diaz, whichever reality he came from, would never be part of the crowd. That he had easily accepted long ago, upon first picking up the sketchbook his father had bought for him, upon first letting himself be lost within rough lines of charcoal pencil and letting his mind roam free at its own will. To him, it was upon picking up a shard of pencil to inscribe blocky initials, upon sitting down on a tree stump and carving an image into its rough bark.

And to either of them, it was okay. They did not have the constant need to be surrounded by others, and solitary had always been the way of their lives.

Though Daniel was an entirely different case. His Daniel had been a naughty gremlin since he was born, and never once in the 9 years of his life that Sean had seen him content with just sitting around doodling nonsense. He was always one to go out and enjoy the day, while he was secluded under the shadow of the porch, and watching him from afar Sean felt something closer than it could ever get to envy. The boy was always carefree, more so than he himself was by that age, and definitely more than him as the 7-year older. While he was always melancholic and moody, irritable with even the slightest of frustration, the boy was energetic and active, never one to keep a feud for longer than a day or two. The two of them were as different as chalk and cheese, so much that their father sometimes wondered out loud if they were made of the same genetic makeup, but they all knew there was no place for doubt, not when their outer appearance matched one another so perfectly. They'd both inherited the most from their father, the skin, the hair and even the eyes, but there was always something distinct inside him that resembled Karen more than he had cared to give her credit for.

She'd disowned them when she left, he'd declared, and it was final. He had stamped the lid over and sealed the box, before throwing it away entirely and promised to himself never to even spare her a thought again, because she didn't deserve it. No mother would abandon their own children to the hands of a hard-earned mechanic, forcing him to raise them both by his very bare hands. He wouldn't have any mother like that, he'd determined, and since then he'd thought of her as no one but his genetic donor, even less significant than a delivery boy who had at least fulfilled their job keeping them updated on daily press release. The moment she walked out on them, she had also torn apart his heart as well as the last bond holding them together. She was gone, and that was it, no more to the story than there was metallic elements in water.

But then again, as accurate as that statement was, it couldn't really be applied to reality, as their own drinking water was already diffused with many types of mineral, and the purity of water could only reach as high as the exact temperature of its boiling point would allow inside an artificial environment of a laboratory, both impractical and unnecessary. He might force himself to abhor the woman all he wanted to, but he could not change the boy's mind. Under all the gruff layers he had worn to protect himself from the cruelty of her abandonment, he knew deep down he would always be the 7-year-old who had awoken each night to the muffled sound of arguments raising from their dad's bedroom. The boy who had so recklessly cut his own fingers fumbling around with sharp objects, eliciting a firm reprimand and a soft kiss to the forehead when she'd applied a band-aid to his bleeding wound. The boy who had cried on his first day to school, prompting her through his act of tears and careful-timing fits to take his hand into hers and walking him to school by herself, while the other 6-year-olds looked from the window of the school bus, jealousy apparent in their eyes.

Above all, he would always be the boy who had cried and begged for his mother to stay, and in his desperate last attempt had unleashed the biggest fit ever, even audible to their neighbors who were sleeping in the comfort of their own walls a good few yards away. The boy who had howled at the moon with sharp shrieks of his meaningless sob in the darkness of the night, at his mother's shrinking form, at his father's strong arms holding him back from running after her, at his own helplessness to keep her with them, and at the sorrow reflected by an entity inside him, that he had yet to know was his symbolism creature of the feral wilderness.

His wolf, more than the metaphorical sense he had always refered to, was something as true, corporeal and tangible as the blood rushing through his veins. It was the inner beast he always had to conceal for the sake of himself and his dearests, because like its namesake, it was any bit as carnal and predatory as a real creature of the wilderness would be to anyone beyond its immediate pack, anyone it considered not family.

It had awoken that night out of the agony, anguish and heartbreak, resurrected from a fading line of blood with the loss of a fellow pack member, a family, only to fell dormant again until long, long later, when another loss of family aroused it from slumber, when it finally took over for good, bringing them away from the edge of civilization back to primordial ways that bore much more familiarity to itself. He himself would never be as bold and daring enough to bring them both on a roadtrip to an aimless drift on the road, but the animal within him, frightened enough by the stone thrown from the hands of man, could be arousen with its natural instincts, to resist the smell of roasted meat offered on outreached hands to turn tails and slither back to the safety that the woods provided. To go back to the ways of its ancestors, and the ancestors before that, living their life on the run, up against the never-ending opposition from the harsh law of survival battling for their own place in the wild, and at all times within the confinement of their own pack.

Because Daniel would always be bigger a priority than anything else to him; that wasn't even a conscious thought, but an unspoken law inscribed on his skin, inherited through generations of evolution, and forever branded at the forefront of his mind as the utmost important task of protecting the smallest, the weakest, and the youngest. It wasn't even his choice; the love of the older brother had already settled that within the first few days, he was quick to learn, and that lesson he could never forget. That Daniel was, would be, and always would remain, his biggest concern, joy and love. The center of his fugitive life, one might even say.

But he wouldn't object to that, not now, not after learning of his other self and the true extend of what he was capable of. Because knowing that, they could keep away from him, from them, and their territory. Were they to trespass, he could not hold on to the beast for long before its overwhelming urge became one with he himself as the feeble person, and that would be his breaking point, his journey of no-returning, to a destination called too-far-gone.

He knew his obssession with keeping the boy safe tethered dangerously on the edge of paranoia and abnormality, but the beast wouldn't be conquered until its drive were met, and he himself could not force the instinct back down after it had spiralled too much out of control. He had lost so much of his family and his life that the beast simply wouldn't concede, not even for another inch of its territory, and whatever remained inside of its grasp it would cling on to fiercely, fight for viciously, and fend off as ferally as it could. It was protective not because it was greedy, but because the world was unforgiving, and it was only too eager to take the blow until it just had to return bite-for-bite, growl-for-growl, and blow-for-blow.

He knew he never should have allowed his mind the freedom to think, to brood and to get lost within his musing like he had just so arduously snapped out of, but stuck in the middle of a foreign reality, there really wasn't much Sean could've done, not until Daniel would wake up, at least. But then another thought hit him, and he realized moments like these were all the reason why he had taken up such a time-consuming and mind-numbing pastime of drawing; the picture was still perfectly framed across transparent window, and if he could just get a grip on some paper and a pen-

"Looking for this?" The voice of someone had startled him into an accidental yelp, but fortunately Daniel wasn't a light-sleeper, as his rest remained undisturbed. The stranger came from a backdoor from behind them totally escaped his peripheral vision, and it wasn't until he had swiveled around on his heels that he'd recognized her blue hair, gathered into a messy low ponytail that cascaded to shoulder-length. By the time he had put a name to her all-too-familiar face, she had already stopped short in her advance, an arm reaching out hesitantly, open palm offering what he was completely not expecting as opposed to the weapon he'd pictured: a book.

"What is this thing supposed to mean? What evil schemes are you plotting this time?" He asked first, wary of her facial expression, paying attention to even the slightest twitch of a muscle to read her intentions underneath this friendly masquerade. He marvelled over the amount of control he had mustered over such a short time, seeing as he still hadn't jumped at her upon realization of who she was, and likewise she could read the same sentiments off her face mirroring his own.

"Seriously? Dude, you don't get to beat people within an inch of their life and then ask them that when they came back with a peace offering. Where's your manner? Like, is that how the education system had become these days? Kids." She sighed, wiggling the proffered items on her hand as if trying to make them more appealing to his eyes, but her eyes remained trailed to his hands, he noticed.

"I lost control the last time, but even now I am barely restrained. With just a wrong move, and I will apply fatal measurements-

"Oh, come on! Seriously? I thought you had enough of the whole tumbling around and beating me to death, but clearly someone is more adept at holding grudges than me myself. Whoa, I'm impressed." The woman fake-gasped, but Sean could not let his guard waver for a second. With a quick swipe, he took the book from her hands.

To realize, it wasn't so much a book as it was a notebook, and one with its cover printed in various vibrant colours, another certainty that it couldn't have been made with Namaria's outdated method of black-and-white printing. The lines of words printed on the front page was in a language he did not understand, but instantly knew was not from Namaria. It was a notebook from his own reality, he'd recognized, and the words registered in his mind after some difficulty, as he recalled Lyla showing her some Asian alphabetical characters, this one very much alike the language "Vietnamese".

"How did you-

"Get the notebook from the other timeline? I always kept one under layers of clothing at all times, thank God for Max's habbit of stuttering over words whenever she rewound and was in a rush, but anyway, I figured you could do with something to blow off some steam." She replied, nonchalant, and was almost walking away again when his hand shot out to hold hers at the wrist.

She had refered to the time-rewinding girl as Max, not the Empress, and her hair wasn't braided into dreadlocks; that much told him what he needed to know. But just to be sure, he had to ask a final question.

"Are you Chloe Price?" He had hidden the underlying question well, but the other Chloe would instantly see through it and call him out on not addressing her properly by her ranks.

"What kind of a question is that? Who else can I be?" She'd replied, her body tense at being grabbed by surprise, but the tension in his own body had already been undone.

"You are not General Price, but Chloe, the original one from my timeline." It was a statement, but the way he had said it made it more like an accusation. He was breathless and his reply rushed, but in his hazy mind events were starting to piece together again.

She raised her brow at his question, eyes incredulous. "What do you mean your timeline-

But she never finished her own question, freezing mid-sentence when she noticed something was amiss. Giving him a second look over before slapping a hand over her mouth to prevent a gasp threatening to slip out, she came to the same conclusion herself.

"Oh my god, the scar isn't there, how could I not notice that? Stupid Chloe, stupid, stupid Chloe. You aren't him-him, you're him, the boy all over the news; you're the one from Seattle, isn't it?"

Great, the first Chloe he could stand to be in the same room with without going savage, and their first impression was of his endless scepticism. The second, as it would seem, was of a boy who murdered a cop, and Sean sighed, mentally bracing himself for another vivid retelling of the story for someone else.

He didn't brace himself for Daniel waking up that exact moment to see their hands intertwined and coming to a ridiculous conclusion of himself, though.

"Yuck! After you everything you've done to each other and you still could hold hands? What, am I like, the only person here who hasn't gone so desperate to put common sense aside?" He stormed off, leaving two very confused people staring at each other for a whole minute, until he scrambled to his feet on hot pursuit of the boy and she doubled over in breathless hysteria as she laughed her own head off, ridiculed by the misunderstanding and the boy's account of their so-called "relationship".

"Man, this Sean and Daniel is much, much more fun than the other." She swiped her tears of laughter into the sleeve of her shirt and sat cross-legged, watching the family drama unfold before her eyes as if she wasn't the unwelcomed intruder, which in her own reasoning she wasn't.

"So that was how you ended up with the scar?" Max concluded, and he nodded grimly, his hand subconsciously brushing over the length of its rough texture.

"It was really painful, but he had to cauterize it, and the hot brand was the only thing we had while it was already infected, so I get that. Besides, I was out of it for most of the time, mostly due to the fever, so I really don't remember much." He forced his tone to be level and unwavering, but she didn't miss his brows trembling subtly, almost escaping her perception. Almost.

"So… now that the two of you were on the road, what next?" She asked quickly, to which he responded eagerly.

"We were lucky to encounter an abandoned flightship on our way, one happened to be containing food and supplies for transport. We stocked ourselves full and took a much-deprived rest in the shelter of its warm interior from the raging storm outside, but it took off with us still asleep inside."

"Wait," she pointed out, "I thought you said it was abandoned?"

"Yeah, that was our assumption, but turned out it wasn't. So when we woke up sometime after the take-off, we really couldn't do anything else but to sit still and wait for it to land." He shrugged, in that completely unpertubed manner only a 9-year-old could possess when discussing about such a horrific event. "According to Sean, air patrols don't bother to check every cargo shipments, so we escaped the country with no trouble."

"But don't you miss it? Leaving the only place you've ever grown up at? Putting behind all memories and strings attached to your only home?" She asked again, voice raised out of disbelief. She had such a hard time leaving Arcadia Bay the first time around that hearing about another's departure from their only home so easily just boggled her mind.

"Nah, not really. As I said, I was 6, I didn't have that much ties with the land, and most of my memories… they weren't happy." He said simply, but she understood. It was one thing to leave a childhood friend whom you loved above all else, but an entirely different matter to leave the country where everyone had been turned against you, where you watched your own family slaughtered before your own eyes and had to live off the roads for weeks because nobody could help them, or risk being caught as an accomplice to the declared traitors.

"I still don't get it," she resumed her inquisitive musing, "how can she make everyone heed her commands? If she was so much a tyrant like what you've said, shouldn't the civilians… rebel, or something?"

"No, that's not how it works, not in our world at least." He met her eyes, his own a black abyss of desperation as he spoke. "In Namaria, every country has a leader, an Emperor or Empress, and they are the highest leader of a nation; either everyone follows them, or they can be condemned as traitors to be publicly executed. The only way to overhaul an Emperor is to kill the previous, no other alternative, and they left little to chance when they infiltrated our castle by themselves that night."

So it was true, her assumptions; their home, the castle, was no mere residential property. It was the kingdom of the Emperor, of their father, and as such he always had a target painted on the back of his head. His life was in constant risk all the time, as such a transition of power is inevitable, thus his time was limited, and being the rightful descendants of his direct lineage, the boys' lives weren't easy from the beginning.

"Wait, if your father is-was the Emperor, then doesn't that make you… royalty?"

"Yeah, we were the princes of Burian for as long as I can remember, but fat lot of good that did when the first thing she'd done upon claiming power was to put a 5000-grand's bounty on our heads." He grumped, and she understood, the accuracy of her assumption. Being of royal bloodline led to little else than their own hardship, and he despised it judging by the venom dripping from his words.

"But were your life… I dunno, happy? Before all the drama, I mean." She pushed, and he vented a shaky breath of air.

"I'm not sure… maybe it was, to them, talking all day long and not really doing anything else, but it wasn't what I call 'fun'. They were mostly entangled in their own business, so I hung out mostly with Sean all the time. We only shared daily meals together, but that was about the gist of it." Then, as an afternote, he added. "I know they loved us, and I loved them, but they just had such a weird way of expressing it. I guess having the burden of the throne on your shoulders can have that effect on you." He shrugged, and she found herself sympathizing. Nothing about the throne wasn't political, and a topic as diplomatic as that held no interest in a 6-year-old attention span.

"So, back to your runaway. The ship brought you across borders and safely out of Burian, so what next? Where did it land?"

He smirked at her, prompting her to do a double-check, even a triple-check, just to validate that the incredibly smug grin on his face wasn't of a cheshire cat but a young child. "You tell me, how exactly do you think are the odds of us landing just in the heart of the Resistance?"

"Resistance? What's that?"

"Basically, after the Empress established her tyranny, she brought a small army to wage wars all over Namaria in hope of conquering more lands, Burian being only the first of her big ambition. At the sight of her feeble force, they all underestimated her, at least until they woke up in the middle of night, their nation lost, defense breached and kingdom on fire." He retold, and twice in a row she couldn't help but admire the other's effective use of their gift. "No country could stand up against her knowledge of the future, so the rest either flocked together into the Resistance union, or be dominated entirely, joining as one into her ever-expanding empire."

"And you landed in, let me guess, the place where Resistance is strongest?"

"Pah, not even close." At his flick of a hand, she was taken aback for a few moments, before he continued explaining. "We landed in a country already overran by Burian soldiers. As it turned out, the flightship we were in was transporting supplies to the army, and they wasn't too thrilled to unload the cargo finding half already consumed by the same 2 runaways that had escaped the country only a few days prior." He stopped to take a gulp of water, reminding her that her own was dry before she had even realized it, too enthralled by his vivid account of their journey. "So they captured us, and that was the first time Sean went through torture."

She waited for him to start having another emotional breakthrough, but the heartbreaking sobs or the flow of inconsolable tears never came. His face was as neutral as it could possibly get when a battle-hardened warrior relive the greatest battles they've fought, and after she had stared at him for what seemed like an eternity he only shrugged. "What? Something on my face?"

"You said Sean faced torture, but why aren't you…"

"Freaking out? Crying? Bawling my eyes out? Throwing a fit?" He offered when she trailed off with hesitance, and to her surprise he was thoroughly unaffected by the memory. "Nah, we're floating in the middle of nowhere in an unstable magical bubble created by hope, so I really couldn't drag myself down that path again even if I wanted to. Besides, it wasn't really as horrible, that time, compared to the time when… the time that General Price… the later time." He finished lamely, but his avoidance of the topic was intentional; he was trying to steer clear of the actual traumatic event, so for the sake of the story she forced her own lips shut.

"They never really let me see what they did to him, and he never uttered a sound louder than a whisper that sometimes I wondered if they really was torturing him behind those closed doors. Though the blood was quite a haunting sight, and I think it was watching him laying limp on the stretcher with blood splattered all across his body that activated my power." As if to display, he reached out with his hand, and with some difficulty maneuvered their sphere to a zig-zag flying pattern.

"Wait… you thought he was dead, and the power just… came out of nowhere?" Max asked, remembering her own awakening.

"Nah, I saw him breathing shallow, laboured gust of air. But I feared he wasn't going to last a day longer with the rate they were going, and so I had to do something. The next thing I knew the bound strapping me down was pried free from the wall and they were hanging in the air with their necks strangled." He spoke quickly almost as if to hide the shudder that ran across his body at the last word, but she noticed it anyway.

"Strange… when I first manifest, I was trying to prevent the murder of Chloe as well." She'd said instead of calling him out for it, and she heard him swallowing an invisible clump in his throat, relieved. "I'd say our powers have something to do with… helplessness? The feeling of powerless, maybe?"

"Yeah, makes sense." He'd brushed it aside, and that was final. He wasn't comfortable retelling the story anymore, so she let him proceed at his own pace, providing him time to come to terms with the events himself while reverting to her own silent musing.

Their backstories… they were radically different, but still entirely similar in a manner. They were both driven away from their home, both went through the panic rush of losing the one they loved – even if she didn't know it was Chloe at that time – and in the end, they both emerged victoriously, at least from the first impression of things, anyway. Yet, he'd found a way to keep using his power to protect his brother and keeping them safe together, she wondered if there was anything she'd missed. A crucial step in playing superhero that made the difference between fucking up every timeline and not, perhaps a far shot, but still worthy of an endeavour. If she could just learn from his story, whatever it was that was preventing her from achieving her goal, perhaps, just parhaps, she could go through it once and for all, securing the fate of both Chloe and Arcadia Bay in her own hands.

"So, I think storytime's over for today. I don't know about you, but all the power made me tired. I'm gonna take a 5, and I'll suggest you do the same." He suggested first, and she complied, the 2 of them twisting and turning until they ended up in a position most comfortable that the tiny bubble of space allowed, before she gave up to the exhaustion gripping at her consciousness. Beside her, the boy was curling in on himself, hands on elbows and knees pulled up to his face, and soon enough she could hear his breath evening out as well.

While they both drifted aimlessly through the flow of time and space, nobody noticed the long, disfigured scar disappearing off the length of his cheek without a single trace left of its existence.