Chapter Thirty-Six – "Some Answers"
Previously: The Satin Slayer a/k/a Alex Cambias, Sr. burst into Zendall's condo, taking them, Lily, Doctor Who and Zarf/Zoe prisoner, at which point Zarf/Zoe stopped time and Spike, mysteriously unaffected by the time-stop, started crying.
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A long time passed. A really long time. I mean, an amazingly long, long, LONG time. Actually, since he was outside of time, no time at all had passed. But that wasn't how it felt to Zach Slater. To Zach, it felt like it took forever for him to race to the nursery and pick up Spike, who was whaling like there was no tomorrow.
"Take it easy, little man," he soothed him. "There's no time left for tears." Or probably for anything else, he thought, taking him back into the living room, where no living at all was currently happening. He had to think, he thought. Why couldn't he think? What was it that crazy shemale from outer space had said to him? That Spike was his son? That he had committed suicide in Vegas years ago? That meant the memories that Kendall had theorized were implanted were real. But how could they be real?
"What are you talking about?" Zach demanded, when he had returned from the nursery with a no longer crying Spike. "How could Spike be my son? How could I be dead?" "And why is Spike cooing in my arms? Why isn't he as frozen as Kendall, Lily and dear old Pop?"
"I think we should tell him," Zach/Zoe said to Doctor Who, who nodded slowly in agreement. "Sooner or later he's bound to remember anyway. And Zartz, Zift and Zetz must be on their way here. They've got to have picked up our thoughts by now. They're stupid, but they're not deaf."
"We're not stupid," the orange throw-pillow on the sofa piped up.
"And we're certainly not deaf," the red throw-pillow next to it joined in.
"So there!" the purple throw-pillow which was between the other two throw-pillows exclaimed, not knowing what else needed to be said, but wanting to hold up his end of the conversation all the same.
"It's official," Zach murmured to nobody in particular. "I've gone stark raving mad." Absently, he kissed Spike's forehead. "Sorry, little man. I meant to be there for you always. I didn't mean to go nuts." Helplessly, he looked at his still frozen wife, as she confronted his madman of a father whose arms were still raised in fury as if they still held the Uzi. They held nothing, of course. Zach had taken away the Uzi from him the instant time was stopped. "At least I got that done before my mind went."
"It's always about you, isn't it?" the orange throw-pillow demanded testily, as if reading Zach's thoughts. Which he was.
Wordlessly, Zach stared at the talking throw-pillows.
"Zach Slater, meet the Galioscians," Doctor Who said. "Aliens. Extraterrestrials. Them. You know what I mean."
Zach was fairly certain that he had no idea what Doctor Who meant. Nor did he care. Crazy or sane, he wanted the answers to his questions.
"Of course you do," the red throw-pillow commiserated. "And you deserve them."
"Nobody deserves them more," the purple throw-pillow elaborated pointlessly. "Well, maybe Kendall does. But at this moment in non-time, she's in no shape to hear them. Or anything else."
Frozen Kendall stared angrily at frozen Alex Sr., as if illustrating the purple throw-pillow's pointless point.
"We chased you through space and time in order to give them to you," the orange throw pillow sniffed.
"To give WHAT to me?" an exasperated Zach demanded.
"The answers," Doctor Who answered. "Think, Zach. You know everything already."
"I do? No, I don't. Do I? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?"
Zarf/Zoe snapped his fingers and the puzzling memories played themselves out for Zach once again.
Zach Slater had just thrown Rendall out of his office so they could go to the hospital, find Erica and get the hell out of his life. He felt enormously weary. Or was he bored? He sat down heavily at his desk, opened a drawer and took out the gun he kept there. "For emergencies," he had joked to himself a long time ago. Well, what was this, if not an emergency?
He put the gun to his head and smiled. "You win, Father. See you soon, Michael!"
He put the gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, his head exploded and time stopped.
Zach opened what was left of his eyes and tried to make friends with this new body There wasn't much left to make friends with, however.
"I better clean up this mess," he thought, putting Slater's head back together and wiping away any tell-tale blood that had dripped onto the desk and floor. "There! That's better! Good as new." He felt himself grinning. "Actually, better than new!"
"That happened?" Zach asked weakly, trying once again to fathom the unfathomable. "How could that have happened? I'm alive. How could I have committed suicide all those years ago cleaned up the mess, and went on as if nothing had happened to me?"
And then he knew. The knowledge flooding through him with a force that nearly knocked him down. Sensing a disaster in the making, Zarf/Zoe took Spike from him just before he tumbled out of Zach's suddenly numb with shock arms.
"I don't come from Earth. I come from another planet. I'm not Zach Slater. I took over what was left of Zach Slater's body and life when he killed himself in Vegas."
"Bingo," exclaimed the orange throw pillow.
"I come from Galios III," Zach heard himself remember.
"Galios IV," the purple throw pillow corrected him. "There are still gaps in your memory, Zach, but you're getting there."
Where was he getting?
"How long have you known?" he asked Doctor Who, trying not to sound as accusatory as he felt.
"From the beginning," the Doctor revealed. "But I had to go through with the charade until it was safe for you two to return to your original reality."
Zach was well and truly bewildered. "It's safe now? How is it safe now?" He looked over at Kendall for emotional support. "No help there," he thought.
"Your Nemesis has been exiled, so I suppose it's safe," Zarf/Zoe supposed.
"I dunno," Doctor Who differed, "she might come back. It wouldn't be the first time."
"Exiled sounds good," Zach said, not knowing exactly which Nemesis they meant.
'She'll return," the orange throw-pillow predicted gloomily.
"We returned," the purple throw-pillow reminded him.
"And we were stuck in a maximum security intergalactic gulag," the red throw-pillow elaborated.
"Don't remind us, Zartz!" the other throw-pillows begged.
"You're lucky we don't hold grudges, Zach," the purple throw pillow said, not sounding much like it wasn't holding one.
"You were responsible for the years we spent in Hell," the orange throw-pillow mused. "Can you blame us for returning the favor once, thanks to you, the opportunity presented itself?"
Zach came to full attention, his mind suddenly in complete focus.
"You three are responsible for what happened to me and Kendall?"
Their silence was all the answer he needed.
"To stay together, you and Kendall needed to skip town until it was safe for you to return, Zach," Doctor Who observed. "But neither of you needed to be given amnesia and stuck in different realities. That was our friends' contribution."
The throw-pillows were bouncing around the couch in malicious glee.
"Why Kendall?" Zach challenged them. "Why take your revenge out on her? She had nothing to do with what happened between us!"
The orange throw pillow shrugged, which was quite an unsettling sight. "Kendall is everything to you. What better why to strike back than to put you two into different worlds? How could we pass up the opportunity to completely devastate you?"
Zach grinned unmerrily. "You three never change, do you?"
"Actually we change constantly," the purple throw pillow took issue. "You wouldn't believe whose bodies we've been inhabiting lately. Besides you two, I mean."
"You mean, after Kendall and I recaptured our bodies?" Zach asked archly. "You've been inhabiting other people? Anybody I used to know?"
"I told you already, Zach," the Doctor reminded him. "Actually, I told your answering machine. Our friends took over the three people closest to you and Kendall. Other than Spike, of course."
"It doesn't matter who they took over," Zach said to himself. "They're throw-pillows now. And throw pillows they shall remain!" As soon as he could figure out how he could manage that, of course.
Meanwhile Spike was squirming in Zarf/Zoe's arms. He didn't like being taken away from his Da-Da, now that Da-Da was being everything Spike had yearned for in a Da-Da. He cast a worried look at his Mommy. Why wasn't she moving? Was she even breathing? Or blinking? And why did the frozen old man look so angry? He wished he could say something to her that would make her move. And he would have, if he could talk. But the months being raised by parents who weren't really who they seemed to be had taken their toll on Spike. They had taken care of him in their fashion. But they tended to his needs without warmth, without caring, without love. Little wonder the only word he could say was "Da-Da". And he had only begun saying that when Zendall, the real Zendall had returned.
"So Kendall and I had to leave this Pine Valley because we weren't safe here for some reason," Zach was summarizing as Spike continued to stare with concern at his frozen Mommy. "Who was threatening us? This Nemesis person whom you say has been exiled?"
Doctor Who nodded. "There was a gigantic interdimensional plot to destroy Zendall. You may have noticed in all the other Pine Valleys you visited that Zendall were more at each other's throat than in each other's arms."
Zach had noticed that. So had Kendall.
"Except for that last Pine Valley," he recalled. "The one where we weren't ourselves. I mean, we were each other. You know what I mean."
"That Pine Valley was next on her list," Zarf/Zoe explained. "That Zendall was due to split up before Kendall delivered Spike. Your Nemesis was all Rendall, and everybody knew it."
"But we're still together in this reality," Zach pointed out. "Why didn't she get around to splitting us up here before she was exiled?"
"Because we saved the day," the orange throw-pillow explained not too modestly.
"Were I you, I would refrain from telling him precisely how you saved the day," Doctor Who advised.
"We mated," the red throw-pillow revealed nonetheless. "Well, not all of us, but Zift and I did. It was brilliant. We all knew it was a foregone conclusion that The Idiots in Charge would get rid of your Nemesis in time. The ratings were plummeting. We just need to stall. We needed a reason Zendall had to go on a few months longer. Some kind of new wrinkle in your storyline. We gave it a lot of thought. Knocking up Kendall seemed the best way to go."
At which point Zach dove on top of the red throw-pillow fully determined to beat the stuffing out of it.
"Zach, we did it for you!" the red throw-pillow lied, trying not to giggle as it deftly avoided Zach's grasp by flying off the couch and heading for the ceiling. "It was a completely pure and selfless act!"
"It isn't as if they enjoyed it," the orange throw-pillow reported. "You didn't enjoy it, did you guys?"
"It was disgusting," the purple throw-pillow recalled. "I have no idea why humans engage in such behavior."
"Survival of the species," the red throw-pillow guessed, still concerned about his own chances for survival as he flew willy-nilly around the room, Zach right behind him with dismemberment still very much on his mind and in his heart.
"Look at it this way, Zach," the orange throw-pillow proposed. "It was a win-win-win situation. Zendall got to survive, Spike got to have a little brother or sister and Zift and Zartz got laid."
For his part, Spike had taken a break from struggling away from Zarf/Zoe while watching his Da-Da chasing the red throw-pillow all around the room. His gaze fell on the still blonde girl with the frightened expression on her face. "Why doesn't she move?" he wondered. "And why doesn't Mommy and that angry old man move?"
Sighing, Doctor Who wandered into the kitchen, found a broom and handed it to Zach, who knocked the red throw-pillow to the floor and kept him pinned there.
"We don't know why you should be so upset," the purple throw-pillow said quickly before his confederate could be finished off.
"You're next," Zach said evenly, taking aim at the hapless throw-pillow with his left foot.
"You're back in your own reality," the orange throw-pillow pointed out. "This is your happy ending. Why stomp on Zartz? Is that what Kendall would want you to do?"
"Definitely," Zach knew, looking again at the Love of All His Lives and remembering everything they had been through together.
Spike was looking at her too. Why wasn't Da-Da helping her? He was looking straight at her! Why was he playing with that silly pillow instead of doing something to help her? Why were all those strange people in the room letting her stay frozen? Maybe none of them had noticed! He had to tell them! But how could he when he couldn't talk yet? "Save her, Da-Da!" he thought desperately. "Leave the stupid pillow alone!"
"Listen to the kid," the stupid pillow in question implored Zach.
"Don't you dare read my son's thoughts!" Zach snarled, hating the throw pillows with all that was in him.
"He's still playing with the silly pillow!" Spike thought in despair. Who would save Mommy? Nobody seemed to notice or care except for him, and what could he do? He couldn't even talk! He couldn't even --
"Move, Mommy, move!" he cried out at the top of his lungs. "Move, Mommy, move!"
Time started.
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Time started? Well, that should speed things up a bit. Wonder what happens next! (And WHEN it will happen! Just kidding!!)