Jane looked at Older Jane with skepticism.

"It's true," said Older Jane. "You saw it for yourself. Even four out of the five worst Darias in the multiverse loved us on some level."

Jane frowned and she felt the old hurt and anger rise up, surprising her. The words were out before she knew what she was going to say.

"Then why the hell did she believe me?!" she shouted, stepping back. "If she loves me so damn much, why did she start going out with him?"

Older Jane folded her arms. "Maybe because she thought she wasn't ever going to see you again. Maybe because she was desperate to find some manner of support in the whole damn mess."

"Stop giving her excuses!" Jane yelled back. "It was a shitty thing to do!"

"Yes, it was," Older Jane confirmed. "It was incredibly shitty. But you weren't talking to her. And even when you did, you made her so scared of screwing up and so damn grateful you were talking to her again, she took you at face value."

"How the hell do you know that's what happened?"

Older Jane's expression went cold. She held up one hand and began counting on her fingers. "'Rule Number One, you can keep dating Tom, but I don't want to hear about it. Rule Number Two, you ask if I want to hang out with you and be prepared to take 'no' for an answer. Rule Number Three, if you betray me again, and I mean in the slightest little thing, we are done.' Sound familiar?"

Jane stared at her older counterpart. "This has happened before," she whispered.

"In far, far too many universes," Older Jane sighed. "I'm not making excuses for Daria. She didn't have to get in the car, she could have slapped Tom across the face after the kiss and gotten out. She could have done a lot of things differently. She made a horrible, terrible mistake, and she knows it.

"But," Older Jane sat back down on the log. "We did what we always do. We ran. We tried to avoid talking about it, or thinking about it, or dealing with the problem. She even gave us an out, remember? In the library?"

"She said she'd stop dating Tom if that's what I wanted," Jane said quietly. She walked over and sat on the log next to Older Jane. "I dug my own hole here, didn't I?"

"No," Older Jane said. "You aren't responsible for Daria's actions. You were hurt, and you were justifiably angry about that. You tried to cope in the only way you knew how. It just didn't work."

Jane looked down at her feet. "I missed her so damn much. And I didn't know what to do."

"I know," Older Jane said kindly. "Let me ask you this. Do you actually forgive her for what she did?"
Jane considered this for a moment, then looked up. "Yeah. I do. But, I just don't know if I can trust her again."

Older Jane nodded. "I had that problem too. And I didn't have an alternate universe version of myself trying to help me work through it at the time."

"How did you work through it?" Jane asked.

"A lot of sleepless nights trying to figure out how to fix things, now that I knew I actually did want to fix them. I realized that I didn't want the best friendship I ever had to be broken up by something as stupid as the two of us getting caught in a fucking love triangle. Way too cliché for me."

Jane chuckled. "I can see that."

"But there were a couple of other things I realized. The first was knowing that Daria, for all her book smarts, is reeeeeeally dumb when it comes to interacting with other people. You saw how she got when we joined the track team."

"Yeah," Jane replied. "And when we started going out with Tom."

"That jealous streak is something she's going to work on as she gets older," Older Jane said. (LIAR! echoed a voice inside her head.) "But, that led me to the other realization."

"Which is?"

"As someone wise once said," Older Jane turned her head and looked Jane in the eyes. "She's a teenage girl, not Nelson Mandela."

Jane blinked as she recalled telling Daria the same thing during her contacts crisis. Older Jane kept talking.

"You're both still teenagers. You're going to do some pretty dumb shit. You're going to hurt each other, whether you mean to or not. This was bad, yes, but nowhere near as bad as it could have been. You saw that."

"Yeah," Jane said, remembering the worlds where Daria had attempted or even succeeded in killing herself because of her guilt.

"Again, I'm not here to convince you to stay friends with her," said Older Jane. "That's not the point of this visit. The point is to remind you that, whether you stay friends or not, no matter if you eventually drift apart because of life or whatever, Daria is always going to love you. Even if you don't love her back. Maybe especially if you don't love her back."

Older Jane stood up and put a hand on Jane's shoulder, causing the younger girl to look up at her.

"You're going to be okay, kid," Older Jane said with a smile. "No matter how things play out."

(You are such a bitch, said the voice in Older Jane's head.)

"Can I ask you something?" Jane asked. "If it isn't going to, you know, unbalance the universe and unravel the fabric of reality?"

"Yes, the United States actually DID go to the moon," Older Jane replied with a smirk.

Jane laughed, then her expression turned serious. "Do you love your Daria?"

Older Jane paused for a moment and gave Jane a gentle smile. "With all my heart and soul. I gave up everything to stay with her after Judith. And I mean everything."

"How so?"

"Judith destroyed our home universe," Older Jane explained. "After my Daria became the Worldhopper, she restored most of the universes Judith wiped out. But when it came to our universe, she had to make some changes. See, the Worldhopper's job is to stabilize every universe, everywhere. That means she's got to be constantly moving from world to world.

"So to spare her family pain, on our home universe, she rewrote everything. Officially, Daria Morgendorffer was never born in that universe. Her family has no idea she exists."

"And because you decided to go with her," Jane breathed. "That means…"

"I don't exist there anymore, either," Older Jane finished. "We have no home, only the Omniverse. Even if, someday, I decide to stop travelling with her, I still won't be able to go back to my home universe. I'll have to find somewhere I can fit in without upsetting things too badly."

Jane looked at her older self, her expression sad. "Do you regret it?"

Older Jane shook her head. "No, I don't. I weighed the options. Return home and live my life, but without Daria in it anymore and probably never seeing her again, or give up everything and stay with her. I decided I didn't want her to be alone. Not again."

Jane nodded and looked back down, staring blankly at the fire pit. "I don't know if I could do that."

"No one's asking you to," said Older Jane. "Just remember that, no matter what you decide, she loves you and she wants nothing more than for you to be happy. Even if that happiness means she can't be part of your life anymore."

The older woman stretched her arms behind her and let out a groan of exertion. "Well, kid, time for me to hit the trail."

Jane looked up. "What? That's it?"

"Yeah," Older Jane replied. "I told you, this isn't about whether or not you decide to be friends with her again. This was about making sure you understand that she'll love you no matter what you decide. That's how important you are to her. And I think you've gotten that point sufficiently driven into your skull."

"Yeah," Jane said. She sat up a little straighter. "Yeah, I think it has. Thanks."

"No problem. If you don't mind a little more advice…"

"Invest in Amazon?" Jane interrupted with a grin.

Older Jane laughed. "Seriously though, take these next couple of weeks, and really figure out what you want from your relationship with Daria. And if you decide to move forward, maybe sit her down and the two of you have a really long talk about what you both want out of the friendship. I know neither of you like to let your guards down that much, even with each other. But it'll help. Trust me, I know."

(Oh yeah, you know all right. You two-faced asshole.)

Jane got to her feet. "I think I will. I kinda do want to make this work."

"Good," said Older Jane. She gestured back toward Ashfield. "You better get going before they send the dogs out."

"Yeah, thanks." Jane said. She frowned. "Um, is this the part where you erase my memories or something?"

"Do I look like I'm wearing a black suit?" Older Jane asked, spreading her arms. "You know how weird this is, and you also know nobody's going to believe you. I think the secrecy is pretty well assured."

"Yeah, or maybe I'll wake up in a few minutes and discover my damn cabin mates left the windows closed while they were painting and this has all been a hallucination caused by paint fumes."

"Maybe. Have a good life, kid," said Older Jane, turning and beginning to walk away. "You deserve it. Adios!"

Jane kept her eyes on her older counterpart, expecting her to vanish suddenly, but it never happened. Older Jane rounded a bend in the path and disappeared from view. Jane considered following her, but didn't act on the urge. Something special had occurred today, and she got the feeling trying to find reasons for it wouldn't be a good idea.

She turned around and headed back toward the main compound of the colony. She was actually hungry for the first time in a long while, and lunch was about to be served.

Older Jane emerged from the tree line onto a scenic lookout which offered a view of Ashfield spread out below it. A woman in her late 20s was there, long brown hair moving in the slight breeze. She wore jeans, a green silk blouse, a black sport jacket, and a pair of well-worn combat boots. She turned her head as Jane approached.

"Did you talk to her," Daria asked, looking at her friend over the tops of her glasses.

Jane frowned. "Never make me do something like that again. I felt like shit the whole time."

"I know. I'm sorry," said Daria. "But she'd never talk to me, not at this point in her life."

"I know," Jane sighed. "I'm not mad at you. I just hate this part of the job."

Daria nodded. "She needed to know though. It was important."

"Yeah, yeah. To preserve this universe, I know the drill."

Daria shook her head. "No."

"No?"
Daria looked back out over the art colony. "I just wanted her to know how much she's loved. She's going to need that knowledge soon."

"Why this Jane? What's so special about her?"

Daria shrugged. "Call it a hunch."

"Since when do you get hunches? You just know what needs to be done and we do it."

Daria sighed and let her eyes relax. The bright multicolored pattern of lines and angles that formed the structure of the multiverse danced and gleamed in her vision, invisible to everyone but herself. She smiled to herself as one line in particular suddenly shifted direction and began moving at a 45 degree angle relative to its original trajectory.

"I don't know why we needed to be here," Daria replied after a moment. "But I know it was the right thing to do."

"Okay, if you say so," Jane said. She had long been accustomed to the half-answers Daria gave when trying to explain how she knew what to do wherever they went. Jane looked down at the colony herself, imagining where her younger counterpart was at that moment. "When is it going to happen?"

Daria closed her eyes. "About two hours from now. She'll get the news later tonight."

"She is going to be okay, right?" Jane asked, concern in her voice. "I mean, she's me and all."

"She should be," Daria answered, eyes still closed. "It'll be a hard road for her though."

"No shit," Jane muttered.

Daria opened her eyes. "We're done here. Time to go."

Jane sighed. "This sucks."

"Like I said when we were here before," Daria replied. "Life sucks no matter what, so don't be fooled by location changes."

Jane let out a snort of laughter. "Can we grab lunch before we go? That restaurant in town was pretty good as I recall."

"Do they have cheese fries?"

Jane rolled her eyes. "She has phenomenal cosmic power, the entire Omniverse at her fingertips, and she still refuses to try anything new for lunch. You're still a pain in the ass, you know that?"

Daria put an arm around Jane's shoulders and pulled her close. "Maybe, but I'm your pain in the ass."

Jane returned the gesture, giving her best friend a sideways hug. "Wouldn't have it any other way, amiga."

There was a flash of blue-white light, and they were gone.