A/N: hey everyone! happy wednesday...i mean tuesday! yes i broke the schedule and posted a day early. i won't get time to do this tomorrow so i figured a day early is better than a day late lol i would like to thank everyone who has engaged with this story so far, from reading it to reviewing to favouriting, etc. it is really so appreciated. i often have moments of wondering if i should try to write original stuff rather than fanfic but somehow i'm always drawn back here lol i think it's because sharing in a fandom is so fun. i have been considering trying to write more oneshots for other fandoms like mandalorian, the boys, captain america. this has always been my hobby but seeing engagement is a real boost and i love that some readers discussed their feelings on the new season with me! seems we all agree: klaus is to be protected at all costs hahaha.

i hope you will all continue to like the story. apologies in advance for angst and mystery, trying to keep up with UA's normal format of layering up the drama and clues before the reveals...

finally i would also like to thank halifax - i can't DM you personally but please know i saw your review and i am so happy you checked on this story to see i'm updating! i hope you will continue to enjoy it as much as i enjoy putting angst into astrid's life... ;) wishing you well too halifax! :)

and to you all a happy healthy week!

Number 8

"number eight"

afterimage: six

Dawn yawned across the floorboards, yellow-pink. Its colours were harsh, as harsh as the sirens that had signalled the start and end of the training drills we endured as children. I scrunched my eyes tight against all that colour and turned into the wrinkled shirt that Five wore, because I was still lying sideways on the sofa with my head in his lap.

I rose, simmering meaner than those cats in the alleyway. What I had needed was full, undisturbed, dead sleep. Instead I had suffered patchy black splotches of half-thought, which clung like wispy threads around me.

Five woke as soon as I stood up.

He slouched to the kitchen in search of coffee, patting blindly around the cupboards. I headed for the bathroom for a shower.

Beneath the showerhead, I felt myself rebirthed through scalding heat that pounded against fresh cuts and flowering bruises from the fight at the Consulate. The drumming of water sounded like hundreds of Commission agents storming the hall outside.

I turned off the faucet.

Steam fogged up the glass in patches. I braided my hair again, finishing it off with the ribbon that had turned damp on the rim of the sink. Elliott had opened the store. Even in the bathroom, I heard chatter of customers rumbling below.

Stepping out into the hall, the chorus of the televisions grew louder. I watched the cold blue colour of their screens splash against the wall. I wandered toward the railings of the staircase. They flashed gun-metal silver as I leaned against them, taking in the scattered clients chatting below.

There was something surreal about standing in another era, as if I had accidentally crossed through the back-lot of a movie studio with props and costumes rolling by on rattling carts. Five and I had gotten used to it. It had added that unreal quality to our lives.

Killing had been a difficult thing for us at first, but we had gotten used to it, like we had gotten used to everything else. I suspected it was this detachment to the changing timelines around us that made it seem simple, in the end, like we were characters in a show.

Soon, all those actresses down there would peel off their beehives and wipe away their thickened eyeliner. Soon, the actors would follow, and take off their old bowler hats and loosen their dickie-bows.

Soon, they would all swivel around their heads to look up at me and say: Sorry, I forgot my line. What was I supposed to say next?

One of the televisions below seemed to malfunction, choking on the staticky lines rippling across the screen, until a single word flashed and flashed, filling up all that blank space: ARGO – ARGO – ARGO.

It fell into a loop: ARGO – ARGO – ARGO – ARGO – ARGO…

The railings, which had seemed to warm beneath my skin, turned cold again. I stumbled back. The faces milling about below had become blank ovals, without definition.

Even Elliott was no longer among them, though he had been there seconds ago. He had blended into a mass of blurred colour. My eyesight had suddenly worsened. I rubbed at them as if that might do something, but it remained a splotchy world around me.

The metronome of my own heartbeat fell out of rhythm, suffering a stuttered pause. But I could still breathe and look around and not collapse, which made no sense.

There was a figure at the top of the staircase, on my right. He held his arms across his chest. His face, too, was a rounded splotch of nothingness.

His voice flowed like water, slick and cool. "He sent you away. So, do us all a favour for once and stay gone."

I asked, "Who are you?"

"Cute," he said. "Are we really gonna do this again?"

The television crackled and settled back into a gameshow with sparkling colours, like nothing had happened at all.

In my chest, my heartbeat returned to its normal rhythm and the faces around me sharpened. I saw features. I saw more than cold ovals.

From where I stood on jelly-like legs, it seemed only a few seconds had passed. Elliott was still chatting with customers and some advertisements on the televisions had not even ended, picking up almost immediately from where they had been before I had entered that strange trance-like state.

I felt shaken, pale-faced, touching my cheek to find it coated in a light sweat.

It had not been a memory. It had been real. It was happening.

It had been so intense that it seemed this boy had truly been standing in front of me. He had not been some fogged-up image breathed through the astral realm. How was that possible?

I turned right around and rushed for the kitchen, then the bathroom, then the bedroom, seeking out Five.

I huffed in frustration, turned back for the kitchen and ran into what felt like a brick wall. It was such an intense force that it made me stumble back with a ragged gasp of pain. I cupped my nose between my hands, watering eyes scrunched together against an onslaught of burning pain.

My eyelids fluttered open to find Allison in front of me.

"Good job, Luther," she said. "First time you see Astrid since we landed in Dallas and you almost break her nose."

"It was an accident." Luther was sheepish. "Sorry."

She and Luther had come into the apartment through the alleyway.

I stared, wide-eyed. "How are you both –…"

She shushed me and murmured, "Hold still."

She closed my mouth by grasping my cheeks and angling my head, leaning close so she could examine my nose. She wore a flowery perfume that matched the floral pattern of her skirt, clasped tight around her slim waist with a wide belt. Her blouse was lilac and buttoned to her collarbone, its lapels parting to reveal a delicate necklace which winked gold and held a small heart-shaped locket.

The skin of her throat bore no scarring from Vanya having slit it open, so that only the fact that Allison had changed her hair suggested time had passed at all between us. It was black in colour, glossy and gleaming beneath the gaudy kitchen lights, with a beautiful purple clip pinching her bangs at the crown of her head.

"Seems fine," Allison said, stepping away from me. "A little swollen, maybe."

"Great," I said. "Now would you mind telling me how you're –…"

Crackling particles swirled and rolled together, like synapses sparking. Five dropped cleanly into the kitchen through the portal he had created, stepping through the staticky ring of fuzzing blue left behind him.

It seemed he had heard what had happened and had come to check for himself that my nose was not broken, gently grasping my chin and guiding me sideways, into the misty light shredded through the blinds of the window beside us.

He had come from the alleyway, too. I saw the strands trailing behind him.

Allison, unaware of the portal, turned and walked through it. Little clots of bluish light clung onto her like cobwebs, drawn out in long watery threads that were plucked and torn away the further that she went. She leaned against the jamb of the arch, arms firmly bound across her chest.

"I already checked her out, Five."

"And I'm double-checking." He straightened, his hands falling from my face. "Not broken."

Allison scoffed. "Told you."

I started, "You're –…"

Diego emerged from the stairwell. "What happened?"

"Luther almost broke Astrid's nose," Allison answered.

"Good job, dumbass."

"You're…"

For the third time, I was cut off mid-speech.

Luther threw his arms up in surrender. His cheeks were red.

"Oh, come on – it was an accident. How was I supposed to know she was gonna turn around so fast?"

Klaus wandered into the kitchen as if he had been here all along, nudging me aside with his hip to rummage around the cabinets. He glanced between us, eyebrows raised.

"Did I hear you broke Astrid's nose? Good job, Luther."

Luther deadpanned. "Why does everybody keep saying that?"

"Hey!" All five of them turned to me, surprised by the outburst. I quickly added, "I just – you're really here. How the Hell are you here? And where is –…"

"Hey."

Vanya stepped through the doorway. This time, I had not been interrupted. Instead I had trailed off at the sight of her. She had filled the silence with her words and a meek, half-hearted wave.

There was something different about her that I tried to figure out. It was her height, I decided. But if she had stood against the doorway of my old room, in the old house, and let me measure her, I was sure that she would have matched the height she had been in the old timeline.

Because here she had not grown an inch.

She simply stood tall, taller, her shoulders raised, her gaze meeting mine without hastily flicking away afterward. It was childhood that had shrunk her down and made her small. She had grown.

She smiled in a wonderfully radiant way, too, which brought out the lines around her mouth, laughter lines, lines I had never seen before, because she so rarely laughed around us.

She showed a strange youthfulness I had never associated with Vanya. Her smiles had almost always been timid and fleeting, before, offered like apologies for some unknown, unspoken offence.

She looked at me and said, "I'm guessing something weird happened between us too, right?"

"Sort of." I smiled, shrugging at her. "Some childhood trauma and an apocalypse. Nothing major."

Her lips twitched. "Right. Totally normal."

We fell silent, staring at one another. There was a disconnect. She could not remember a thing about me. I remembered everything about her. Only this was not quite Vanya like I had known her.

Somehow it felt much like it had earlier, when I leaned against the railings and stared at all those people, who had seemed like actors to me. Only this time, I had crossed the back-lot and stepped into the sitcom in which they were all characters, and everyone had learned their lines but me.

It was me, now, asking what my line was.

There was Five, seemingly the protagonist of this sitcom, who started to tell them about Reginald and the Majestic Twelve and then Klaus talked about his cult before Luther told us about Ruby and soon the squabbling started like it always did and I watched them all, wondering if the walls around us would tip over if I touched them, and if the floors could be pulled away and the furniture rolled to another storage-room someplace.

Because we were all together again, bickering about whose fault it was that we had ended up where we were, passing blame.

It was Luther for having messed with Jack Ruby and Diego for having spouted off about the assassination of JFK and Allison for delving into the civil rights movement and Klaus for his cult and Five for bringing us here in the first place, and Vanya – well, Vanya had been living on a farm.

And I thought if I only turned around and walked out into the alleyway and looped the block a couple of times, I would come back and find them reciting the same lines they were saying right then, in that moment. I would not be missing. I would not be missed.

Why did I feel myself on the outskirts?

Like a member of an audience sitting on the side-line, and my own laugh adding to that canned laughter all around. I looked between each of them like they were strangers and felt myself to be a stranger too, like my clothes suddenly did not fit and never had, and my hair had a curl that it never had before, and my shoes were too big.

There was something wrong. There was something wrong with me.

I should have been overjoyed that we were all sitting together again; that we had found each other again.

Yet I felt impatient, annoyed.

Because I wanted something else. I wanted someone else.

"We are not killing the old man, Diego. Luther, would you listen to me for a second?"

Five followed after Luther, who had stood from his chair, but turned back briefly to look at me, his face exasperated, holding out his arms to appeal to me.

"Astrid," he called, "I could use a little back-up here. Are you just gonna stand there?"

In the kitchen, the radio crackled and rang.

Luther stalked off, forcing Diego and Five to chase him, staggering into some different set out of sight, into some other story that was a page ripped from the script of mine. Theirs was the A-plot. I was hanging onto the B-plot, or perhaps I had slid even further into the C-plot, because the story continued without me.

I stepped forward in shoes that were not mine, and I looked into the kitchen through eyes that were not mine, and I thought that the world was about to tip sideways and throw me into the astral realm again.

The radio was humming. It was quiet, minimal. I would have missed it, had I not been listening out for it.

Then there was a weight on my shoulder and I turned around to face a man with scraggly hair, smiling at me.

For a few seconds, I had not recognised Klaus.

His eyes narrowed at me, head cocked. "Astrid?"

There had been a vacuum around me that suddenly popped. A torrent of words came rushing back to me. I had not been listening to what had been said and still I understood, in some vague measure, that Diego wanted us all to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Five cared more about finding Reginald, solving the riddle of this butchered timeline, and Klaus had been asking if I wanted to join him and the others for tacos.

I had absorbed it, all while falling out of frame.

"No, thanks," I said. "Not hungry."

Allison grabbed her purse. "You sure?"

The sensation of standing in a sitcom lingered, and I sought out the edges of the set where it spilled off into a darkened spot.

I said, "No. No, go ahead."

Before Klaus could leave, though, I grasped his arm and held him in place.

"Is Ben here?"

Klaus wrinkled his nose. "Yeah. Why?"

"Just wondering."

Sunlight blistered through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the store below and captured dust in flashing mites, shimmering gold. Alone, my vision blurred, looking at them as they stepped out into the street. I wilfully smudged the world around me in that light, allowing my eyes to wander.

I had asked for Ben, without even fully acknowledging within myself that I would need to slip out from my body if I wanted to speak with him.

Five would think it too dangerous.

But I was alone.

I felt alone.

I had lost my footing, forgotten my lines, stumbled out of shot. I was not here.

The story continued without me.

So I went into the kitchen first, to close the cabinets that Klaus had left open. I put away the bag of pretzels he had been eating, because Elliott would have been obliged to do it otherwise.

The radio found a station. It played a song and I could not bring myself to switch it off. The song was typical of the sixties, crooning baby and honey and sugar. I wanted sound to stuff up this emptied space, which bothered me and had me scratching at my arm for no reason at all, had me pacing and thinking and worrying.

Finally I went into the living area and sat on the sofa, shedding my body as easily as if it were an old coat. I remembered the old days, when I had spent hours in Pogo's study trying to figure out how to leave my body.

Ben was sitting in an armchair, head turned away.

"That's dangerous, Astrid," he told me. "You should stay in your body."

"I wanted to see you."

He said, without looking at me: "Do you think they'll ever see me?"

His question sobered me. He had lived on the margins for most of his life, now. How much longer could he cling onto this world through Klaus? There was a selfish part of me which wished it would be forever, if only so we could be together, in some small sense. If he went to the astral realm, would I find him there?

I said, "I think so."

His eyes glittered hopefully. He inched forward on his seat. "Really?"

"Sure. Reginald told Klaus that he was capable of more than any of us realised," I said. "If he tried, maybe he could summon you and make you corporeal, on your own."

Ben fell back. "If he tried," he repeated, scoffing.

"At least we can see each other," I said.

"You wanna know something funny?" His gaze had fuzzed. "I used to think about all the things you and I could talk about if we saw each other again. And it was always the mundane stuff, you know? Like, sitting on a bench in the mall with you, waiting for Klaus to pick out the boots he wanted and then eating a whole bunch of churros 'til we puked; or that time we got those matching fake tattoos, you remember those ones you press against your skin and dampen so they stick? Always the mundane stuff. Because that was all I ever wanted. It's still all I want."

"When I started losing memories, the mundane ones were the last to leave," I said. "But you never recognise those moments when they're happening. And when everything falls apart, you realise they're all that ever mattered."

"I remember asking you once what you would do after the Academy was over," he said. "Make up your mind yet?"

I smiled. "Five and I thought we would run away somewhere and find an apartment for ourselves."

"Could still happen."

"I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"I think a part of him likes feeling needed," I said slowly. "Feeling like the Academy needs him, like the world needs him. I think he likes disasters, deep down. He likes fixing and solving and making things right. But he tells me that he wants what I want, because I think he wants to want it, if only for me."

"And you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you still want those things? To run away somewhere, find an apartment?"

It made my eyes sting, to confront the simplicity of what he asked then.

Because all I could say was: "I don't know."

Ben understood, if only because he was the only other being in this world that could understand what it felt like each time to reach out but not touch; to speak but not be heard; to exist but feel inconsequential.

It was worse for him. He had no comatose body waiting for him in a bed, in a lonely room in a lonelier house, a body entrenched in wires linked to machines that kept him breathing, with an unsteady heartbeat and a spotty memory.

"What would you have done? If things were different," I said.

He laced his fingers together and rested them flat against his stomach, slouched in his seat.

"I don't know either," he said honestly. "When we were kids, it seemed so easy. But I guess if I had another shot, I would want a nice, boring life; boring friends, boring old house, boring job. Sometimes when I'm around – when I'm around Jill, I imagine what it would be like."

"What would it be like?"

He snorted. "Come on, Astrid."

"I'm serious. What would it be like?"

Ben sighed. "She likes the open road," he told me, "so I never thought she would want to settle down anywhere. But I heard her say once that if she ever had to pin herself to a map, she would pick a place like San Francisco, so maybe that would be it for us. She always wanted to help people, ever since she was a little girl, so she would look for a job like that. I would take any nine-to-five gig I could get, so long as I got to go home to her. Sounds stupid, I know."

"It sounds wonderful, Ben."

If the quirk of his lips had meant to be a smile like mine, it never quite made it.

"Yeah, well, I can only ever talk about maybes and what-ifs."

"It could happen."

"It could," he said. "But maybe this was what was always meant for me."

"You're wrong. Things will work out."

"How can you believe that?"

"Because I have to believe it," I said. "I have to believe that the others will see you again, and that you'll get another chance, and that we'll save the world from another apocalypse, and we can have that normal, boring life we always wanted, because if I think about anything else, I –…"

Even though I had trailed off, Ben nodded. "I get it."

"Pogo told me that Hargreeves never quit. We were born to keep trying."

"He always knew what to say. I miss that about him."

"Yeah. Me too." I cleared my throat. "I miss everything about him."

"Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah."

"They'll see you again, Ben," I told him. "It'll happen. It has to happen."

Ben smiled, but he did not believe me. I saw it in the scrunch of his hands against his pants, and his eyes flitting away.

"Sure," he said. "It'll happen."

We were quiet for a little while, sitting in the golden sunlight filtering through the windows, which neither of us could feel, and which neither of us noticed. We were watching each other, playing an unspoken game of maybes and what-ifs for a life neither of us had gotten to live.

I glanced at Ben. He was still looking away.

"You know Pogo probably understood that things never work out right for us. I'm not sure why. But even after all the other times things went sideways for us, a part of me really believed it would be easy to find you at the hospital," I said.

"For what it's worth, we probably wouldn't have been on time anyway. Klaus ate this weird sandwich he got from some guy at a gas-station and it made him puke his guts out. We didn't get there until five-thirty. Place was surrounded by cops."

"We probably should have left a little wiggle-room, time-wise. Two-thirty was a little bit optimistic considering Klaus is the least punctual person I know."

"Two-thirty?"

I noticed how he scooted forward on his seat.

"Astrid," he said slowly, "we agreed to meet at four-thirty outside the hospital. The note we found said you would be in the hospital at four-fifteen - that gave you fifteen minutes to get back into your body and get out of the hospital to meet us."

"I woke up in that hospital at two-fifteen, Ben. I remember the clock. I saw its hands move."

He leaned back. It was maddening, that doubt clouding his eyes, morphing his face into confusion. I wanted to scream it: two-fifteen, two-fifteen, two-fifteen -...

"We were standing in that bedroom," I told him. "In Colorado -..."

"We weren't in Colorado. We told you we were in California."

I let out an incredulous laugh. "Ben, you said Colorado. And the time we agreed on was two-thirty, because I woke up at two-fifteen and -...and I'll prove it to you. Elliott said he had it written down. I just need to find the note. He wrote it - …"

I slipped back into my body and rushed around the room, pushing aside little scraps of paper and dumping out cardboard boxes. I hurried around, opening drawers, closing them, checking pockets, patting down the padding of the sofa in case the note had fallen there.

Finally I found it wedged in Elliott's old jacket, still hanging on the stand.

It was there in plain, unforgiving blue ink: Parkland Hospital, November 16th, 4.15p.m. - Room 104.

Four-fifteen.

But I remembered the clock in that room. It showed two-fifteen. I had thought that it was right.

Why had I thought that it was right?

I sat against the sofa and slipped out of my body.

Ben called gently, "Astrid?"

I looked at him, shame-faced. "I - I remember what the clock said, Ben."

"You got confused," he said. "That's all."

"I'm not confused. I'm not. I know what the clock said."

"But in the room you know we said four-fifteen."

Out of the blue, Ben winced and clapped a hand against his ear. It made me forget all about that note. He shimmered like the dust. I was frightened, sure that he was fading in his own way.

"Ben?"

"I'm fine," he said quickly. "This happens when Klaus goes too far. He sort of – pulls me with him, I guess, no matter how hard I try to stay. I'm sorry, Astrid. I wish I could stay with you."

There was a marble lodged in my throat, making it hard to swallow. I wanted to hold onto him and tether him to me so that Klaus could not pull him away even if he tugged and twisted that rope stretched between them.

I scooted forward, reaching out to him. He tried to grab hold of it, but Klaus was not there, and so our hands blended like smoke. I could not feel him. But I tried and he tried, because that was what Hargreaves did; tried and tried and tried again.

Then he vanished, so suddenly, so immediately, that I felt myself hollowed out with a different kind of grief, much like what Five must have felt each time I had faded on him.

My hand fell away.

So I was alone, again.

The radio switched off.

The apartment was silent.

Without Ben around to distract me, I could only think about how messy the apartment was after I had thrown everything around looking for that note, which now burned my skin through the lining of my pocket.

There were dishes soaking in the basin. I stood and grabbed a trash bag, picking up the papers and snacks that the others had left lying around. I swept the tiles in the kitchen, scrubbed the dishes, chased off dust-bunnies nesting beneath the sofa.

I smoothed out the bed-sheets in the bedroom. I fluffed pillows. I turned, bumping against the opened drawer behind me.

Reginald's diary peeked out through the gap in the drawer. I had stuffed it in there earlier, when Lila had come into the room while I was speaking with Five. I pulled it out. I had never thought to look at those two weeks I could not remember, when I had been staying with Elliott.

I flipped to the start of November.

There were scattered mentions of galas, charities.

On the twelfth of November, though, he had written one word: Eight.

I put down the diary as if it had burned me. My eyes fell on two cardboard boxes. Suddenly I remembered what Elliott had said in the kitchen.

I found everything you asked me for, by the way. Left it near the dresser in the bedroom. Took a whole lot of digging.

Greedily I ripped open the boxes and rifled through the piles of maps, newspapers and magazines. I took them all out, laying them around me, in neat rows like Pogo had taught me to do with the parts of dismantled pocket-watches.

At the bottom, beneath the maps, were a pile of pulp magazines, with slick, illustrated covers of spaceships and vibrant planets. The titles were typical; Tales from the Red Planet, Beyond the Dark, Alien Encounters. All of them had been published throughout the forties and fifties.

None of it seemed to matter until I flipped through the pages and noticed a name.

Arthur Harrow.

The name struck me like three sharp taps of a bell. In my chest, my heart stuttered as if it were a fuse in a trip-switch, and his name was an overcharged current that blew out my circuitry.

Where had I heard that name before? I imagined its letters in front of me, traced the haughty arch of its capital, followed the dipping valleys of the surname, until I remembered sitting in a car while Luther drove and Five pushed a book to me, his own skin pale and sweaty from having drunk himself stupid in the library.

Arthur Harrow had written the book about the astronaut.

He had also written a significant amount of stories throughout these magazines.

Then I rifled through the maps. Elliott had plenty of them pinned against his cork-boards. Only these maps were more detailed, showing the streets of Dallas and colour-coding its neighbourhoods. I located the alleyway where I had landed, following its line out into the street, noting each corner and bridge and store marked on the map.

Then I noticed it.

There was no street named Argo.

I scooped up the maps and a handful of magazines, along with the diary. Then I stood, blindly fumbling for the door. I had to tell Five.

I bumped against the doorframe, dropping everything in my hands. I stopped, looking down, stooping to grab it. I rushed forward, tripping on the wooden bump of the threshold.

The room seemed to tip forward with me, like a cartwheel.

I stumbled as if falling through a portal, dropping into a room aglow in the smouldering warmth of tiki-torches; its lighting was so dim that my eyes strained to make out shapes emerging through the undergrowth of faux potted palm-trees and gaudy tea lights strung along a bar, its awning made of what seemed like withered straw.

Like in the store earlier, the faces around me seemed to have been painted in watercolours, their pigment buffed out with the tip of a brush so damp that all traits were blotted out.

Around them, though, there was a haloed outline of astral energy simmering outward, like there had been in the alleyway around Lila, Diego and Five.

Behind me, elevator doors were smacking together in loud, violent bursts that terrified me. It was the chiming, too, that unnerved me, like a bell struck over and over, over and over.

My hands were empty. The diary, the magazines, the maps - they were all gone.

One of those misshapen figures moved toward me, coming ever closer. He looked like the figure atop the staircase.

It's him, I thought. He's come back. He's coming closer.

I was frustrated by him, irritated that he had not answered me before. When he touched my arm, I pushed him off.

I asked, "Who the Hell are you?"

The tiki-torches flickered. The thrum of the doors clapping together had been buried underneath the thundering crash of blood in my eardrums, because I finally found balance after feeling as if I had fallen from a great height, from a ledge on a housing project somewhere.

The blurriness cleared. The watercolours swelled in their vibrancy.

I saw what I had not seen before.

It was Five in front of me.

The astral light around him was gone. I could not confuse things anymore. His eyes were wounded, his mouth parted as if I had punched him hard in the gut. He had never looked so hurt in his life. It staggered me to witness it, knowing that he had taken beatings and knife wounds and even bullets during missions, suffering one punch after another.

Yet he was destroyed most by only those five words.

I understood that feeling, felt it too. It was raw, hot agony that rushed through me before regret chased behind. It was like he wanted to touch me, but he was afraid I would shove him off again.

He swallowed. He was so ashen-faced. He lowered his hand to his side.

I was seared clean-through with embarrassment. I could not bring myself to look at him again, and so I looked behind him.

The Academy stood in front of me like they had been leaving, heading for the elevator, before I had come into the room and blocked them.

Then there was Reginald, at the head of a rounded table.

I had never seen him so unsettled either, his mouth agape, his monocle limp against his chest. It had popped off in his surprise. But he collected himself immediately.

In his typically cold manner, he said, "Explain yourself at once."

"Astrid."

It was Diego who called to me, his tone gentle and purposefully light-hearted, a contrast to the tension that blanketed the room.

"How about you knock off the stuff with the doors, huh? Gonna have to use the stairs otherwise, and it's a long way down from here."

Tendrils of astral energy seeped between the doors of the elevator and forced them to smack together. Dumbstruck, I realised that it was me causing the chime of the doors.

The elevator rattled. Its ropes were tugged and yanked, so that the elevator itself bucked like a child shaking a jar.

It settled into stillness as soon as I understood that I was controlling it, which ended that shrill chiming. I turned back, still drowning beneath great tides of shame for having found myself in this room, without knowing how it was that I had even gotten here.

"What was that stuff you were saying?" Klaus asked.

"You think it has something to do with Vanya?" Luther added.

Vanya turned sharply to him, wide-eyed. "What?"

"Well - you're living on a farm,," Luther bumbled. "And barns are on farms, and Astrid said something about a barn, so…"

"Gee, guys, I think Luther figured it all out," Klaus said sarcastically.

"You should sit down, Astrid," Allison spoke up. "You look pale."

Reginald growled out, "I ordered you to explain yourself. What the devil did that mean?"

Beneath the silver wink of his monocle, I shrivelled. I had fantasised so often in childhood about standing up to him. I had planned each sharp-wit word and scalding insult that I could muster, practising how it would sound, dreaming of his shell-shocked face when I would speak back to him.

But each time, each time he stood before me in reality, I curled and clammed up. I crumpled underneath him, tasted cotton on my tongue, fumbled out one word, perhaps even two glued together, in a timid half-whisper.

I had thought myself stronger than that, especially after all that had happened to me, to us.

He asked, "Do you understand?"

Then it came, the timid half-whisper, croaked out: "I understand. I –…"

It was all I could manage before tripping over my tongue, struggling to put together what it was I wanted to ask: what happened, how did i get here, why are you all looking at me like that, what did i say, what did i do –…

Five grasped my wrist, avoiding my hand, as if my wrist was a mere extension, something unintimate, unattached to me. He saw it, that I was falling apart, and that Reginald had turned his silver to me.

Five spared me the pain.

The world was sucked into a vacuum again, wadded up like it was drawn on a piece of paper and spat out, unfurling, on the other side of a portal he created. He had taken us to the parking-lot outside of a large building. He stood terribly still, though his chest heaved, and his eyes followed the edges of a puddle beneath his shoes, 'round and 'round.

"Five –…"

"I need a minute." His tone was strained. "Just – give me a minute."

"I remember, Five," I said. "I remembered you. Of course I remembered you."

He was not able to bring himself to look at me anymore, apart from rapid-fire glances, as if ensuring I was even there at all. He paced, footsteps smacking between one puddle and another.

When did it rain?

It was such an airy thought that my heart clenched, because it was something I would have asked myself in the last apocalypse, returning from another fade, looking around myself and marvelling that the scenery had changed, when before I had recognised it so well.

"What did I say to him?" I asked. "To Reginald?"

"You said 'I see a barn axe fall'."

I stared at him. The words meant nothing to me.

He saw it.

He was pacing, pacing and pacing.

"I never should have left you alone at the apartment. You told me you were fine, but I sensed it, here in my gut –…" His hand dug into his stomach, bunching the material of his shirt, like he wished to dive into his stomach and pull out that ball of dread knotted tight within him. "I never should have –…"

"When?"

Five rounded on me. "What?"

"When did I tell you that I was fine?"

"After I came back to the apartment," he said. "Luther and Diego ditched us. Allison, Klaus and Vanya ran off too. It was just us."

From what I could recall, there had been no gap. Five had gone after Luther and Diego. He had not come back.

I said, "Reginald wrote my name. In his diary, he -..."

"I know, Astrid." He cleared his throat and ran his hands over his face. "I know he wrote your name. Twelfth of November. I know. You told me. You told me about the boxes you found in the bedroom and about Argo. I know, all right -..."

He had cut himself off, and came to a sudden halt, hands raising to run through his hair as his head tipped back. He was exhausted.

My mouth closed. What more could I say? I had forgotten.

"What time did you meet me at the hospital?" I asked him suddenly.

He frowned. "Four thirty."

"I thought I was there at -..."

"Two-fifteen. I know. Klaus told me. You thought you saw them in Colorado. It was California."

It meant Ben had told Klaus, and Klaus had told Five. It embarrassed me that they had all been talking about me, likely with those same worried faces, trying to reassure one another that I had simply gotten confused.

Five turned away from me.

All the anxiety that I had felt that morning blossomed, but its stem had thorns that caught in my windpipe.

It was another fading.

It had been barrelling right toward us ever since I had fallen out of that portal and found myself separated from my body. It was there that all this trouble had started. But there had been a slowness to the fading that had come before. It had been like those puddles, which had started out with only a few droplets falling, coming together, making something larger.

The droplets had fallen for the fading too, forming a little pool, one which widened and widened until now it was an ocean.

This fading had come so brutally fast. It slammed against me, like the elevator doors had closed on either side of me.

But how come I could remember everything else? How come I said strange things? I had never done that before.

"Something is wrong," I said.

"Really? Something?"

"Screw you, Five. You think sarcasm is gonna solve anything?"

"Right, because we were so close to an answer before now."

"We would be a lot closer if you took this seriously."

His temper was flaring up even more than mine.

"Are you kidding me right now? I have been the only one taking it seriously. I have done nothing but run around this city trying to make things right. Matter of fact, I am the only one taking it seriously, the only one doing anything. Diego is hung up on his little crackpot conspiracies about JFK, Vanya thinks she should just stay on that goddamn farm and you're pretty much –…"

Useless.

Five sealed his mouth shut before it could slip out. But I had known it was coming, sensed it in my gut like he had sensed it, and filled in the blank for him. If not useless, then he could have taken his pick from a long list: messed-up, dead-weight, a burden.

He had surprised himself, unaware of the resentment that stewed within himself.

Neither of us had talked it out like we should have done.

"Maybe we can fix this ourselves," he said. "Forget the old man. He never did anything for us anyway. We could go back to the Commission. I know, it sounds like a bad idea - but if we could find Theo and get another watch -..."

He was talking, constantly talking. It washed against me like a wave and continued rippling onward, away from me. I had been made numb, made mute. I could not quite comprehend what had happened, from the gentle calmness of the night beforehand when we had slept on the sofa and then this sudden, upturned present in which I struggled to understand how I had gotten to this parking-lot with him.

And I was still snagged on what he had almost said, and which still echoed as loudly in my eardrums as if he had said it.

And he saw it.

He was seeing it each time he dared check I was still standing beside him, like I might have faded between each breath he drew. It was riling him up, agitating him, this one-sided conversation. He cracked the bones of his neck by rolling out his shoulders, seeking movement once more, anything that would blot out the silence between us.

He swallowed. He had been hoping for answers, something that would solve the endless stream of numbers fizzling up in his head.

He liked fixing things. He liked solving them.

He liked disasters.

He asked me, "Do you remember what we talked about in the alleyway before I left?"

Like a blank white sheet, I was cool and empty. "No. I don't."

Finally, he deflated, like that answer had taken the wind from his sails. It was an apocalypse weighing his shoulders down like that. It was the end of the world sketching itself in the agony of his eyes.

It was me.

I was his biggest disaster; his boulder, his one true, irreparable mistake.

"Okay," he said.

"It's not okay."

I had said something similar in the apocalypse and so had he and we stood so far away from that point that something should have changed.

But here we were.

"I know," he said.

"What did we talk about?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters. What did we talk about?"

He hesitated. "You told me it was true," he said. "What Diego said. I'm the worst thing that ever happened to you. And you could do better - better than me."

"I said that?"

"Look," he said, "I have something I need to do. It'll only take a little while."

"Wait – you can't just leave. I couldn't have said that."

"We were arguing. It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters! Five, I remember," I said. "Everything else I remember –…"

"I'll find you later."

"Five –…"

My hand slit through a radiating oval of blue light where he had been, because he fled from me through a portal and all that was left behind was its blue wisps whirling around my skin, casting a gentle glow like that of bobbing fireflies.

It was unfair. I remembered more than he thought. I remembered skating rinks and a warm, yellow-lit study and rust-coated roundabouts. I remembered.

But he had looked at me like I was already gone.

I was an afterimage to him, nothing more than a smudged reflection in a puddle beneath his shoes. I was fading.

And maybe this was what was always meant for me.

x

Climbing the stairway to the apartment, I felt as if my shoes had been filled with concrete. I wanted nothing more than to flop against the bed and rest, but not sleep, for sleep seemed an unattainable thing to me then. Resting would be enough.

The door choked on the rust that had clotted between the hinges. It shuddered open.

Rather than the normal waft of coffee in the kitchen, I recognised a distinctly copper scent that hung in a fat, metallic cloud: blood.

I coated myself in astral armour, creeping further into the hall.

There was a body laying underneath a white sheet, reclining on a chair.

It was Elliott.

Painted on the floor below, in his blood, were the words: Öga för Öga.

An eye for an eye.

Slowly, I replaced the sheet and stepped back as if I balanced on stilts. I had been unsteady all night, teetering, barely finding grip on the tight-rope which rippled beneath me like the plucked chord of a violin.

I sat down on the sofa. It seemed like all that grief was sloshing around in my stomach, little splashes darting up into my throat. Tears dampened my cheeks, sniffles came out, albeit muffled behind my shirt which I used to dab away the wetness.

But then I started scrunching all that grief into crumpled-up balls, just like pieces of paper, to toss aside, like Reginald had taught us.

The truth was that I had enough practice in cutting out grief and continuing onward, so that soon enough, the tears had dried into my cuff, and the sniffling had ceased. I needed air - cold, brittle air, the kind I would never quite find in Dallas.

I descended the stairwell, once around its bend, one hand gripping the cold railing for a lifeline.

The cool warmth of the night lapped against me. It was welcomed. I leaned against the brick-wall, staring at the knot of my shoelaces.

Luther had shown me how to tie my shoelaces. He had crouched in front of me, angling himself to let me watch him grasp each lace and wind them together like a magician revealing his secrets.

I remembered that. I remembered it for now, which was a realisation as bitter as the bile in my throat. But I remembered it.

"Tough night?"

I flinched at the sound of this new voice.

The Handler stood at the other end of the alleyway. Her heels clicked against the ground. She clasped a jade cigarette-holder, its colour teased out by the streetlights overhead.

Astral energy fizzled anew within my palms, but it hardly deterred her. She inhaled another drag from her cigarette and blew a wobbling ring toward the clouds, cocking her head at me.

Her lips stretched in a garish smile.

"Did you miss me, Eight?"

x