Promises are the least of Skov's worries right now.
He's fifteen again and standing outside Aglionby, cursing under his breath. He's gone through this level dozens of times before.
Skov does the calculations in his head. He could be back in five seconds. But.
But.
He doesn't know when he's going to see Proko or K again. Here they are, looking at him with their fourteen-year-old baby faces, not knowing what the next three years are going to bring, and he can't do it.
If Jiang and Swan keep driving, thirty minutes in the mainline, seven years here won't make a difference.
In a second, it's decided. Skov will use this alt as a test run. There are things left to be learned.
Rasmussen and Morris, within five minutes of each other, texted him this morning and four years from now, sending him the same screenshot of Henry Cheng's wall. Rasmussen he might have ignored. He texts Skov ten times a day, blathering on about college this and adulthood that. If Morris is getting involved, though, it means things are going to shit. Skov will use this alt. He'll find out what he needs to know and he'll get out. Simple as that.
The mainline's already fading. This, right here, this feels real.
Proko stands on the other side of K, who's pretending Skov's opinion of their newest member doesn't matter. Morris is too busy fiddling with his phone to care.
"Hey, you," Skov says to the dark-skinned black kid standing next to K, "I just know we're going to be good friends."
Swan sneers. It's the most beautiful thing Skov's ever seen.
And so it begins.
The very first time Skov meets Swan, he is ten and fifteen and he thinks he's dreaming. They become friends for a time, nothing more. Stronger in Skov's memory is a boy with razor-sharp teeth and a smile like sin.
The second time, Skov is ten and fifteen and he still thinks it's a dream. He remembers Swan. Skov knows someone so perfect doesn't exist outside his dreams. He remembers, too, a boy with crooked shoulders and a wild laugh.
The third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, Skov is ten and fifteen and he knows there is something deeply wrong with him. These dreams, they don't come at night. He's losing time during the day. His teachers are asking why he thinks he can just leave class the way he does. That may be how they do things in Hampton, the teachers say, but here in Henrietta, you have to ask permission. Skov says he's sorry, he won't do it again.
He knows he'll do it again.
The seventh time, Skov is eleven and fifteen, and scared. These aren't normal fantasies he's having: fantasies don't include murdered teachers and suicides, and good people falling into comas.
Skov goes to the library and checks out books on lucid dreaming. He reads them in secret in his room, terrified his sister or his mom will catch him and ask questions. Skov tells himself he's dreaming. All he has to do is wake up. There has to be a way to wake up.
When he's twelve and nineteen, he finds it. By then, he's known K and Proko, Rasmussen and Dvorak, Morris and Swan for years, has seen their lives sketched out numerous times. He's fallen for all or most of them, the feelings so jumbled, so tinged by fear and confusion and pain he can't keep them straight. They're not real so it doesn't matter. They're figments of an overactive imagination, too much soda before bedtime.
It's supposed to be, once you realize you're dreaming, you can change the course of your dream or you can wake up.
So why can't Skov do either?
Megan teases him about his recurring dreams. Mom's face grows tight and pinched. Dad works too much to notice.
It's just an overactive imagination fueled by too much caffeine and candy. It's just a cry for attention.
It could be, the pediatrician says, early signs of something far more serious.
Skov stops talking about his dreams. He looks for a way out on his own.
It's an accident, really. In this alternate timeline, K's long dead and Proko's not waking up. Swan's the only one left.
One day, Swan drinks too much, mixes things that shouldn't be mixed, and his breathing stops. Skov's shaking him, feeling for a pulse when everything goes fuzzy.
The next thing he knows, Skov is lying in his bed wearing Spider-Man pajamas. His parents are yelling at him because he slept through his alarm and he's going to be late for school again.
He opens his eyes, stares at the ceiling, and closes his eyes again.
Bum...bum...bum. Bum. Silence. That's the sound of a beautiful man dying.
It makes no sense. It makes every.
Skov is twelve and fifteen when he turns homicidal.
This time around, Skov races through fifteen and sixteen. They're fast, easy.
Gain K's trust so he can keep Swan close. Con the son of a mug, befriend Proko, laugh with Morris. Do it, do it, do it until Swan tolerates him. Swan, Skov figured out a long time ago, is the one who truly matters.
Sixteen turns into seventeen. Skov hates and loves seventeen. Seventeen is the year K ends it. Seventeen is the year Swan trusts him.
He burns through it. K knows by now that Skov's telling the truth. He won't live to see August. Skov doesn't tell him about Proko. Things don't improve when he does. K is going out and the guilt or the shame or whatever it is that beautiful psychopath feels over Proko only makes him go faster. Lynch tipped the scales. He didn't start K's descent.
Last time, fate was kind or maybe it was cruel. Skov met Swan late, sixteen, the summer before junior year. Skov scratched his name into the Evo's door handle, so K would have to touch it every time he drove it. As punishment, K took a switchblade to the small of his back and carved "PROPERTY OF J. KAVINSKY", as much a tramp stamp as a cattle brand. It hurt like hell and it got infected. K's eyes gleamed every time he saw the mangled flesh, and Skov felt a secret pleasure when they did.
In that timeline, Skov was all about making what little time he had matter. He smoked pot in the backseat of Proko's brand new Golf, held that precious, ugly boy to him, the one who had been dead and gone for years in the mainline, who had days or months left in this one, and let him think he was high out of his mind because the truth was so much worse and stranger. He forgot Swan and what they had in another time. The Swan in this timeline was indifferent and Skov, in his desperate, fleeting joy, thought that would be better.
It was July 27th in the mainline.
K was dead for real. Skov would never see him grow up.
He died again in that timeline but not before Skov had a piece of him. Not before he knew for certain who was responsible.
This time, he isn't so overwhelmed. It's painful, agonizing, to see the dead walking again. Nothing will change, not for those two. That's a lesson Skov had to learn.
It's not the lesson he needs.
Skov has become friends with Lynch many times. He's joined the tennis team, met the happier, tamer version of Ronan Lynch. There are timelines where, after Niall Lynch's murder, Skov introduced Lynch to K, plied him with alcohol, got him to talk about impossible things.
Skov knows about Adam Parrish. He knows about Cabeswater. He's been to 300 Fox Way and the Barns and Dick Gansey's family mansion.
It's not enough to save K or Proko. It was never going to be. Some things Skov can't change.
"I love you, man," Skov says as he wraps K's hand, time after time. Underneath the gauze is yet another burn, the price of making the unreal real. Skov's gotten good at treating burns over the years. "Don't forget that."
It makes no difference. Nothing ever does.
God or the Devil is punishing Skov, making him relive K's suicide until it's one of the many constants. K will cut his own life short. Proko will die and be reborn. Ronan Lynch will be a bastard. Skov will hate him because hating Lynch is easier than admitting the problem is in K's mind, always was and always will be.
K won't accept treatment. He'll take meds when he feels like it, mixing them with alcohol until he has fucked up dreams about flames licking at the corners of his minds. He has burns in every lifetime. Once he burns up in his sleep, gets swallowed whole by the dragon, and Skov can't- won't- ask him to go to counseling again. There are terrible things in K's mind. Skov doesn't want to save K's life as much as he wants to spare him the misery of it.
But he can't change what he can't change. Skov powers through seventeen and watches K spiral for the hundredth time.
It starts the summer before. No one walks away from their first death unscathed.
Proko used to be K's weather gauge. Proko could charm the pants off anybody. He might not have been gifted in the looks department but he was kind and caring, and up for anything. The forgery never quite manages to capture that charm. There's a little too much K in him, a little too much of the Proko K knew, the one who existed when they were alone, blended with the person K wanted Proko to be.
Swan could never stand the changes. Jiang barely cared.
"If you could change Swan, would you?" is the question K always asks, like asking it will absolve him of the guilt over what he's done and will do again.
"No." Skov doesn't share K's desire for absolute control.
Skov watches it eat away at K, the egomania and the unhappiness as he realizes his creation could never be a true replacement. This is where it starts.
Skov has always wanted to know: did K become a murderer that summer or did he witness a tragedy? Was it all a game, a test of how far K could push the boundaries of what it meant to be truly human?
In the mainline, K never talked about it and Skov never asked.
It's a cosmic joke. Meet the most amazing guy, fall stupid in love, and wait for him to die. You can't go home until he does.
When Skov was twelve and fifteen, he realized he could kill Swan and get it all over with. It wasn't so bad when he was thirteen and a scared kid trying to understand why he had such vivid, recurring daydreams. It was nothing when he was fourteen and did it every few weeks.
Then he met Swan in the mainline and couldn't do it anymore, not when Swan was real and magnificent and amazing. Skov disappeared for six hours once because he waited for old age to do the deed for him. The next time, a college age Swan turned it on him. He asked Skov to kill him, hands around the throat. A fantasy of his, he said. A longtime one.
What better way to do it than by giving the most important person what he's always wanted?
It's been like that ever since.
Once Swan gets used to him, the animosity becomes a game. Skov will overstep and piss him off and Swan will reassert his boundaries. He doesn't realize they're shifting with each passing interaction.
They're gonna be together. It's just a question of when and for how long.
"I don't even like you," Swan hisses against his skin. They're in Swan's Golf, skipping third period, and Swan's got a hand twisted in his uniform shirt. "You're such a fucking dick."
"You're despicable," he groans as Skov's buried inside him. His long, gorgeous hands are clutching Skov's shoulders and he's panting with every breath. "Absolutely atrocious."
"Why can't you learn to shut up?" he asks as he holds an ice pack against Skov's swelling cheekbone. "Idiot. You can't talk to people like that. What did you think he was going to do, walk away?"
Skov loves the icy tones and the cool glares, the sneers. He especially loves the insults. Fatass, idiot, klutz. Swan has a litany of banal cruelties just for him and it's amazing because they're words.
Swan saves his words for people he likes. People say he's quiet. He is but, then again, he's not. He just won't talk to you if he doesn't think you're worth his time. So words, even insults, are good.
Also, Skov kinda, sorta, maybe likes being stripped down to nothing when he's seven inches deep in the boy he loves.
They never get along at first. Swan looks at Skov and he sees his stepfather. He sees obnoxious Americans, spoiled rich kids, users and abusers.
Skov is alright not being liked. In truth, Skov prefers it that way. There are a hundred thousand variables to life but for some reason, the timelines follow a basic pattern. It's easier to push people away than get close again, especially when he knows this is the real deal. Whatever happens in the mainline, he has to come back to it. If he can just keep Swan from caring, if he can just keep Jiang angry, if he can just stop trying to save K and Proko, he doesn't have to accept the guilt or the anguish when nothing changes.
Almost always, it goes like this: Proko dies and K crumbles, K dies and the forgery goes under, and Swan hews closer to Skov. Proko never wakes up. Eventually, Swan dies and Skov goes back to the mainline to live it all again. Death, death, death. Every event is bracketed by death.
There have been times when he was never friends with any of them. Swan still found him, came to him at twenty-three with suicide and death and murder hanging heavy in the air around him, and said, "I remember you. We were at Aglionby together." And they were and Skov never got to touch Proko or smear burn ointment on K's skin or tell Jiang that a cure was coming, he just had to hold on a few more years.
Skov would rather do it this way. He'd rather be the asshole no one would be friends with if he weren't useful, so fucking useful. If he's going to have to watch them go through this dance, he might as well be close. Just not close enough that they like him back.
God hates him. One day Skov's going to find Him and kick His ass, tell Him fuck this reality-hopping shit, no one deserves to be stuck playing the same levels of a video game for eight cursed-long years. Skov's going to make Him pay for this bullshit, going to make Him answer all the questions he's had over the years, like what happened to Proko? and why does Jiang have to be sick? And what kind of fucked up God makes a child watch the whores around him suffer every time he closes his eyes?
And why, why, why can't I do anything to change the little tragedies, the ones people don't see because they think screw up and loser when they see a group of boys drowning in their supposedly privileged lives?
Skov knew K first. He was there the day Nadezhda Borisova Kavinska and her son moved in. He lounged against Nadezhda's Porsche, watching the movers do their thing, daring K to come out and face him.
"Skov," he said, offering the other boy a hand and folding it back up when K raised an eyebrow. "I live a few streets over."
Skov's heart threatened to beat out of his chest as he stood in front of K and his cookie cutter, 5,000 square foot, brick and vinyl house.
He didn't have a script for this. In every alt, K was already a fixed figure in his life, the middleman when it came to meeting Swan. Skov was banking on this kid who looked so much like the one in his dreams needing him.
"I think you're going to like it here. A change of pace from where you're from but it looks like you could use a change," he told K with a lopsided grin. Trust me. I'm no threat. "If you need anything, let me know. I'll get it for you."
K assumes his father sent him. Skov does nothing to dispel that myth.
They don't become friends. Skov's not even sure K likes him all of freshman year. But K had been banished to the boondocks and Skov was useful, even before K realized what Skov could really offer him.
He points K towards people. K doesn't ask how a freshman knows the names and backstories of each and every one of their classmates, just accepts that Morris and Rasmussen should roll with him. Skov shows him the fairgrounds, the drag strip, the lake. He gets K what he wants before K knows to want it.
And K conquers. He carves out his own portion of Henrietta. He's not afraid to look outside Aglionby for companionship. Their little group grows. Skov fades to the background and lets Proko take his rightful place. K's side isn't where Skov wants to be, anyway.
He's waiting, biding his time.
Proko, you see, is the catalyst.
It's his death and resurrection that turns K's idle stroll on the path of self-destruction into a dead run. It's his death that makes Swan turn from the both of them, horrified for the one and disgusted by the other, straight into Skov's arms.
It's not always that way. There are times when Proko lives. There are horrible lifetimes where K doesn't care and Proko's death is nothing and he doesn't come back.
So often, Skov wants to apologize to Proko for introducing him to K, for what he has done and will do to him. Every time, he remembers the way Proko looks at K, like happiness is his name on K's tongue and completion is K's hand on his shoulder. K isn't simply the worst thing that will ever happen to Proko: he's the best, too.
Spring of sophomore year, when it's not too late to tell Proko to make a run for it, Skov debates telling him to refuse K's offer to spend the summer with him.
The alts don't determine the mainline. Two times he's lived before. He could live again. It's a narrow hope but it's a hope.
Skov doesn't tell him.
That summer, Danylo Prokopenko, the first, the original, disappears without a trace.
The six of them are lying on the side of a grassy knoll. It's November but the day is hot and gorgeous, a welcome break from the autumn chill. When K said they were going, no one argued.
Dvorak keeps poking Rasmussen in the cheek with his bare foot. He snickers when Rasmussen swats him away.
Dvorak's been AWOL for a year in the mainline. In this timeline, he's still around. Skov can't say it's an improvement.
In the mainline, Proko ran Dvorak out of town when he started treating Jiang like something to be pushed around rather than a person. There was probably more to it, something to do with Dvorak's wandering hands and treatment of the public school girls, but that simple story is what Skov chooses to believe. Skov's not entirely sure what happened to Dvorak after that. There's a very real possibility he's dead and by Proko's hand, no less. Swan doesn't think so (it's not gracious- he's just not interested in entertaining the possibility K and Proko found a way to scrub psychic residue from their auras), but there's a reason that guy was K's favorite.
Jiang and the forgery are sitting next to each other. They're both holding a piece of grass between their hands. Jiang looks at Proko skeptically. Proko blows on his grass, making an loud buzzing sound.
K, flat on the grass a few feet from them, pulls a cap over his eyes. He fingers a green pill, ready to dream them a new diversion.
Swan is rubbing sunscreen into his arms. Skov would offer to do it for him, except they're not at the point in this timeline where that'd be accepted. It's no big loss. They'll get there eventually.
"Isn't the whole point of being black that you don't need sunscreen?" Proko asks. He tosses his abused grass stalk to the ground, already bored with it. Jiang keeps trying and failing to make his vibrate.
Swan gives him the middle finger and keeps applying.
The sun feels like heaven. Warm and humid but not overbearing like where he spent the first ten years of his life, at the mouth of the James River and the elbow of the Chesapeake Bay. The summer's there were so humid the air was more water than oxygen.
It smells like honeysuckle. As a kid, Skov always had difficulty telling the difference between honeysuckle and azalea. He wouldn't know which one he had until he tasted bitterness or sugar. There's very little azalea in Henrietta and a whole lot of honeysuckle.
The grass underneath him is rough and scratches at his skin. It's warm. Everything's warm. Skov could drift off and forget the mainline even exists, that reality where Dvorak and Rasmussen, Proko and K are gone. Where Jiang's dying and Swan wants to.
This alt is pleasant. It's got its flaws but it's nice overall. K hasn't started fixating on Lynch yet. Proko has nothing to be jealous of. Swan gives him the time of day.
"Skov?" Swan asks but Skov doesn't feel up to talking. This day happened second for second in the mainline and he wants to savor it.
A cloud must have passed in front of the sun because it's suddenly cool.
Skov cracks one eye to find someone leaning over him. This is new.
"Do you feel it?" the forgery asks, Proko's familiar, hypomanic glint in his eyes. K didn't leave that out this time.
Skov doesn't. He wishes he did.
Back home, he's got a poster with all his guesses. One day, he's going to find a city without a ley line. He's going to take Swan there and their lives will be easy.
"What does it feel like?"
Proko grabs Skov's hand and presses it to his chest, over his beating heart.
"Like this," he says.
"You know?" Skov asks. He feels the warm throb of Proko's heartbeat and the sharpness of K's eyes on his neck.
"I do." Proko grins. "And you know what?" He stands up, flinging his arms out. "I don't give a fuck!"
Skov grins with him. He's glad this forgery is content.
"Proko," K says, patting the ground next to him. "Come here."
Proko goes without hesitation. The first Proko could never refuse K anything. The forgery is no different.
In this timeline, K is careful, almost gentle with the forgery. Why he couldn't be like that in the mainline is anyone's guess. It warms Skov's heart and hurts like nothing else because this moment doesn't matter to anyone but him. The mainline's waiting and it's a meaner, crueler version of this. There Proko's dead and the forgery might as well be. There K wasted his affection on someone who was never going to return it.
Love him, he thinks at K as his heavy eyes slide closed. Proko slings one arm over K's chest and tucks his head under K's arm, aware, incredibly, that, in a moment, he, too, is going to sleep. Cherish him. Forget Lynch. Live.
Let him die happy, just this once.
Because nothing else changes. Skov used to hope he could do one small thing, make one little change, and it would butterfly out into a new future. That's not how it works. There are a handful of changes and that's it, the story stays the same.
Love him.
Skov has dreams that he's successful. He yells at K to stay alive, you bastard, live! and K does. The forgery grows up instead of languishing in a hospital bed. K lives. He makes a name for himself. He and Skov drift apart like people do. They have lives.
But dreams don't become reality, not Skov's dreams. He wakes up in the mainline and K's gone, the forgery's unconscious, and Ronan Lynch, the bastard, is barely affected.
They saved his life. They helped him. They killed for him.
Did he really think K needed to take care of that hitman personally? Skov could have done that. Proko wouldn't have thought twice.
Skov knows it isn't right but he won't forgive Lynch for his part in K's suicide. If it could be called a suicide.
Was it a suicide?
It's been clearer before. Overdoses, bullets to the brain, poison. Quick, relatively painless. Pain isn't one of K's things.
Why would K choose fire? Fire was what waited at the edges of his dreams, ready to consume him. Get in, get out. Like a thief who knew he was always on the verge of getting caught.
What if it wasn't a suicide this time? What if it was a duel to the death and Lynch emerged victorious?
It's a little of both and a little of neither, Skov knows. He's tired of knowing, though. He'd love for life to be a mystery again, instead of a collection of possibilities he's seen before.
There's one constant: he wants Lynch to pay. Lynch might not be responsible but he isn't blameless, can't be blameless.
Skov won't accept that he's blameless.
Skov hates the end of junior year.
"He's never going to be with you," he tells K in June when he's feeling bitter and cruel. Time is ticking and Skov doesn't want to face the inevitable. "You need to accept that."
They get in a fight, two dusted teenagers trying to draw first blood. K splits Skov's eyebrow. Skov doesn't even leave a bruise.
"Do you feel better?" he asks K while the doctor finishes stitching up his face.
"No," K answers.
Skov almost doesn't want to go to the party on the Fourth. He's been so many times, though, it would feel strange not to. It's different every time, a little bit. The same result, just a different execution.
He ruffles the forgery's hair and tells him he'll see him on the other side. Skov pretends he doesn't have enough Kavinsky in him to know what that means.
"Cheng's got the hots for you," he tells Jiang one muggy September afternoon. It comes off as disingenuous. Skov still wants to say it. Jiang has been a mess across every timeline he's known him; they all have. Skov doesn't actually know if Cheng wants Jiang in this alt. All he wants is for Jiang to take the chance and realize someone, somewhere wants the whole package.
Skov isn't that person but, goddamnit, someone has to be.
It was never going to be Proko. Jiang's got to know that. Proko belonged to K from the moment they met. Proko and Jiang were sweet on each other, innocent and gentle. Proko had a nurturing bent and Jiang said Proko reminded him of a younger brother back home.
(That's another thing: Jiang's stories never add up. His father's a politician but there are no Jiangs who hold that position. He has a younger brother but his country would never allow him to have a younger brother. There was never anything between him and Henry Cheng but Jiang won't talk about it and Cheng looks at him like a jealous ex.)
Kavinsky was never threatened by Proko and Jiang. He even wrote that innocent, schoolboy crush into the forgery's personality. Jiang picked up where they left off.
Definitely never going to be Proko.
If he knew more about Jiang, Skov might be better suited to help. The problem with Jiang is Skov doesn't know him, not like he knows the others. He met him in the mainline before he met him anywhere else.
Jiang might have been around before, an unnoticed background character. Or he could be an occasional passerby. Aglionby, Henrietta, America are just possibilities for Jiang. More often than not, they're just that, possibilities. Not realities. He isn't tied to this place.
When he does appear, the timelines are stranger and kinder.
Maybe Jiang's more. Maybe he's just human.
Mostly, he belongs to Cheng. Sometimes he joins Kavinsky. Sometimes he doesn't. Often, usually, mostly, he's Cheng's through and through.
Regardless, he's a happy sign. This reality will be better than the ones that came before.
It says something that better is not the same as good.
With Jiang's appearances being so infrequent, Skov doesn't learn to trust him. He doesn't understand Jiang, his motives, his desires. His loyalties. He's come to see Jiang as neither a threat nor an ally. Neutral hedging on comrade.
As the mainline continues, Jiang becomes someone Skov wants to see thrive. He becomes someone whose health, success, happiness is unbearably important. Jiang struggles. He trips and he falls, sliding farther behind every time he goes down, and this is a game Skov's never won before but, goddamnit, he's going to win now.
For all that Skov wants to see change, there's something terrifying about getting this close to someone you haven't met a hundred times over.
Skov calculated it once, all the time he's gained and lost. One week. That doesn't sound like much, just one week gone from eighteen years of mainline life. Try living it. Skov's family likes to talk about the trip they took to Venice, the one where eleven-year-old Blake disappeared for three hours and nobody could find him. They searched for hours, fearing he'd wandered into a canal and drowned. They found him in the I Frari, staring at Titian's Assunta. He was right where they left him. Where he had left them.
One week, lost forever.
One hundred forty-seven lifetimes gained.
Lifetime is a loose term. Most of Skov's "lifetimes" have only lasted a decade, age fifteen to mid-twenties. Twenty-two to twenty-four is the sweet spot. Some have lasted well into middle age; a few into seniority.
Thirty-five have only lasted a few minutes, the amount of time it takes to find a weapon and end an elegant boy's life.
One hundred forty-seven lifetimes and Jiang's only shown up in five of them.
Have you ever met someone so good at what they do, so perfect, that they lose touch with reality? They're at the top of their field, no one can do what they do, they are a god of their own making, and they just lose it.
Skov's no stranger to psychosis, drug-induced and -managed. The mind can be incredibly cruel.
The things Skov's destroyed could have been blackmail for centuries. Photos, letters, printouts of emails, all of them forgeries. He could have taken Dick Gansey down a hundred times over.
It wouldn't have been real. That matters to Skov. When you run with dreamers and you're half a dream yourself, reality starts mattering a whole lot.
K and Proko fall hard the first time they meet, every time. It doesn't matter how it happens- Skov introducing K to the kid whose family stands behind his at Holy Redeemer, K offering a cigarette to the Ukrainian boy who knows a handful of Bulgarian, Proko bursting into their lives with a fist and a busted lip- the end is always the same. They're magnets, perpetually drawn to each other and never any easier to separate. They fight because only a saint wouldn't fight with K but Proko returns every time, apologetic, and K doesn't hesitate before taking him back.
All of this makes the forgery that much harder to understand.
Skov understands why K made him. What he doesn't get is why K needed to make him in the first place. But he doesn't ask because that's one truth K will never tell and he spends dozens of lifetimes wondering. Every alt is different but Proko-and-K, K-and-Proko aren't one of the changes.
The forgery's wrongness gets to K. None of them have ever been perfect and Skov's come to the conclusion perfection isn't something K is going for. He means to change Proko. Skov, given the chance, would never rewrite Swan. That's not the way he wants things to go.
But it doesn't matter what Skov would do, it matters what K does. When half of him cashes in his chips, K fills the emptiness with an incomplete forgery and it doesn't make things right. He neglects the forgery, chases after another dreamer, and dies in despair, just another tragic queer love story.
Skov's real fucking tired of those.
"If he ever hurts you," Skov says, timeline after timeline, "come to me. I'll give you an out."
"What if I don't want an out?" Proko asks, fingers picking at the grain of his chinos.
"The question you should be asking," Skov says, "is what if you can't come to me?"
Proko smiles and there's too much understanding there. There's always too much understanding between the two of them.
"Would you save me from him?" he asks Skov. If Proko is K's loyal right, Skov is his sinister left. Proko does K's dirty work because K asks. Skov does it because morality and him don't have much to do with each other. "From myself?"
Skov's not smiling when he says, "Always."
"When he hurts you," Skov amends the first time he's alone with the forgery, timeline after timeline, "I'll set things right."
"Is that a promise?" the forgery asks because now he knows what the first Proko didn't. K has hurt him before and he'll hurt him again.
"You know it."
Every week after the Fourth, Skov gets in his car and he drives. It's more than a little nerve-wracking traveling so far along a ley line, but Skov goes because the forgery's earned it.
There's science behind talking to coma patients. It's supposed to help with recovery. Keep them alert. Give them hope.
There's no hope.
But Proko might be alert in there and Skov's not leaving him to rot just because he can't talk back. So he swallows his fear and he gets in his car, and he drives. He sits in an uncomfortable chair next to an unresponsive patient and he talks his ass off because, goddamn, lying in a bed this long is a torture in itself.
Skov never runs out of words but, sometimes, he stops thinking about what he's saying. His mind drifts and he remembers things he's kept under the surface, guilt and remorse, and anguish. Some lifetimes, it's not his fault Proko meets K. Some lifetimes, it is.
This is one of them.
Here's a secret that's not really a secret: if there were no K and no Swan, Skov and Proko might have been.
That relationship would have been happier, more stable, more loving than what either of them ended up with. But a life without K and Swan isn't a life either of them would want, and this whatever between them remains as full of possibility as it is empty of probability.
Still, the emotions linger. Skov never forgets how he's loved Proko before and how close he is to loving him again, and Proko never forgets there's someone who's promised to catch him when K falls.
Skov caresses Proko's cheek. It's the sort of touch that would have a conscious Proko turning towards it, moaning softly, an infinite temptation.
This Proko doesn't as much as move. His chest rises and falls. The heart monitor beeps. He is a statue lying in this bed.
Skov's stalling.
Don't ask Skov to do something for you. He'll do it. Maybe not exactly as you imagine, not as fast or as thoroughly but he'll do it. And there's some things you can't take back.
Skov's got a reset button on life. Why would he let these things bother him?
They bother him.
He leans over and kisses Proko's forehead.
A few more things need to fall into place. Then, Skov will finally be ready.
"Not today, sweetheart," he says. "Soon. Just- give me a little more time, okay?"
I didn't forget.
Skov thinks about relationships a lot. The ties that bind people together, how they repeat or don't across the alts and the mainline.
Skov, you have to remember, is not hurting for time. He doesn't try to notice what he does. Run through a level enough times, you start remembering shit.
Shit like K and Proko, K and the forgery, K and Lynch. Shit like Jiang and Cheng.
Skov wasn't lying when he said there's a timeline where Jiang dies at forty. Skov just never got around to telling Jiang the rest of the story.
It's the great tragedy of MP Cheng's life. After his husband passes, he never remarries. There's a walk for awareness held every year in the man's honor.
The reason Skov didn't tell Jiang all this the first time is because there are some things people need to figure out for themselves. Until Jiang is ready, he doesn't need to know how entwined his lives are with Cheng's.
Because maybe they're not. Maybe the five times Skov's known Jiang are the outliers.
Five times is still better odds than none.
Swan doesn't care what Skov does in the alternate timelines. That's Skov's reality, not his.
But he likes to hear about the end, his own death. He even told Skov once, in a perfect echo of an alt Skov's never forgot, how he wanted it: hands around the throat, squeezing the air and life out of him. Giving control over completely. Trusting Skov to do it the way Swan wants.
He's done it ever since.
Twice, Proko doesn't die. Skov never finds out what happens to him when he does. It's tragic, whatever it is, tears K apart like it would any decent person, even a first time murderer.
K is happier in those timelines. Not happy enough to live but happy. He's a better, nicer person. He looks at Proko like he adores him.
Skov prefers it when Proko doesn't live, for Proko's sake and his own. The aftermath is more methodical. Easier.
In this alt, he doesn't live. His friends mourn the loss even as they're forced to accept a new, imperfect version of him. It doesn't last. K's fragility makes itself known soon enough. He goes out in a blaze of glory and takes the forgery with him.
Skov goes underground and his mouth tastes like acid. He's only done this a few times. He hates it, the claustrophobic feeling and the cold rock. Someone's dying down here, and it's not always just one person.
The sickest part is it's not going to be Skov. There is no easy out for him. His time here ends when Swan's does. Not before, never before, no matter what.
Skov remains unharmed while he watches a boy he's known for years fall with a crack, blood billowing out like smoke on his clothes.
And Gansey lives. He reanimates unholy like Rasputin, as despicable and as impossible to kill. Skov curses Lynch and his good fortune as he attends another memorial service. All he needed were a few more years. Then everything would have worked out.
Skov's learned his lesson. He wants his out.
He won't take it.
Instead, he punches Lynch the day school starts up again. The woods can't do much to him here. It begins and ends with Swan.
"Do you even know what you did?" he asks as he spits blood on Lynch's shoes. "You're cursed. Who's gonna be next, Lynch? I fucking hope it's you."
Lynch breaks his jaw. The woods put him in traction.
Life goes on.
At eighteen, Skov slips cyclobenzaprine into Proko's IV and watches him breathe his last. He pretends to panic when the nurses rush in and slips out before anyone can catch him. He's done this too many times to get caught.
It'll all be over in a few years. This will be a short timeline. He just has to wait. Run through the last few levels. The differences are spinning out, larger and larger ripples.
Swan's still around. It's been many lifetimes since Skov's lost track of him. Skov has to know how much longer he's stuck in this circular hell, this circular heaven, this second chance that becomes, every time, the same story told just a little bit differently.
He needs, more than anything, to know when he gets to go home.
Swan is phenomenally beautiful. Skov is not. And, yet, he's the one who gets through.
Skov wants to drown himself in Swan, just shut out the world and be. He wants to fuck him into oblivion, until the thoughts run out of Swan's head and all that's left is the pleasure. He wants Swan to want him for more than just the sex, but hell if he doesn't love the sex.
It's exquisite even when Swan's strung taught, when he won't let Skov touch him the way he desperately wants. Skov wants to make those elegant toes curl, wants to see those long hands grasping, clenching in sheets. He wants to make Swan cry out, gasp, and shudder before collapsing, spent and exhausted.
If Swan would just let go, just give Skov control for a little while, he could make him feel so good.
Skov's patient. Swan will come around. He always does, even when Skov reins himself in and lets Swan choose his own path.
It's not hard, leaving Aglionby behind. When two of your friends die and a third disappears, you don't cling to friendship. You let it go and you pray you forget.
That's how it should be. That's not how it goes.
Every time, Swan finds him. Months, years, decades in the future, it doesn't matter. Eventually, he comes up to Skov at a kegger, at a reception, at a bar, and he says, "I know you" like he's greeting an old friend. His eyes are a gorgeous jet, his teeth white as ivory. He is stunningly, immeasurably perfect.
Every time, Skov looks at his friend, his lover, his everything, and he can't bear to push him away.
He's eighteen and twenty-two when he finds himself in bed with Swan. It's familiar and not at all comfortable. This is it. This is the day Skov's going home.
It should be easy by now.
It's the hardest thing in the world.
"Are you sure you want this?" he asks Swan, his hands wrapped around his lover's dark throat.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
"Yes," Swan hisses, fire in his black-brown eyes.
Skov squeezes until there's no more air and Swan's body goes still.
He comes to in the backseat of his RX-7. Jiang stares at him from the passenger seat. His eyes look a little feverish, as though he's been staring at Skov's spot for a while, waiting for him to reappear. Skov would feel bad, except he's the one who has to live like this.
"Did you have fun?" Swan asks. "You were gone a half hour." It doesn't sound like he cares.
Skov tells himself that's a good thing. They're right on track. He tells himself he doesn't want Swan to care right now because caring means trust and trust means asking for things no one should ever ask for.
"I killed you," he tells Swan. He's always been too honest with Swan, subconsciously trying to push him away. "Hands around your throat and everything."
Swan smiles wide and full of teeth and Skov knows he fucked it all up again.