MAKI

Maki wasn't herself when they went back to their dorm room. She'd kissed Honoka with an authority she'd never felt, whispered words she never would have said before, used her fingers as if she were playing an instrument. Maki had felt the pulse again once, while lifting Honoka's shirt off, and she'd moved with the energy, caressing Honoka's collarbone to the beat of the invisible music, kissing the hot rosebuds of her breasts, and Honoka rewarded her with moans and shivers, and big vulnerable eyes that told Maki she was in control.

"You're mine." Maki said. "Spread your legs for me, darling."

"I'm yours." Honoka said, as she opened herself up, her expression soft and desperate. "Completely yours."

"You'd do anything I say, right Honoka?" Maki spiraled around Honoka's clit with her fingers. "Anything at all?" Her fingers moved faster, up and down across the wet bead, the way she'd done it when… Maki got an image of a different, naked Honoka in a nice apartment, in a nice bed, Maki's face below her thighs.

Honoka nodded, putting one hand to her mouth, stifling her moans.

"Tell me you'd do anything." The presence was at the surface, Maki couldn't push it back. Honoka was flowering under her touch, dewy with nectar and responding to each minute shift in pressure. Her body was trembling, she was so close.

"Let me know you mean it." Maki whispered.

"I…" Honoka whimpered. "I really…."

Maki rubbed faster. "You really?"

Honoka cried out, biting onto her hand, and Maki felt a rush of liquid warmth on her hands. "Good girl."

There was a silence. Honoka usually immediately clung to Maki, after she'd came, but Honoka held herself apart, to Maki's surprise, and shifted off of Maki's fingers.

"Honoka?"

Honoka looked up. For a second Maki saw a different expression, a bitter and proud expression, nothing like the pliable,submissive girl she'd seen a second ago. "Are you sure that's what you want, Maki?" She said, voice cold and distant, with her legs dangling open now almost defiantly.

"Yes." Maki kissed her. She stroked Honoka's hair, how long had it been since she'd seen Honoka's hair? "I don't care what happens."

"Of course you don't." Honoka returned the kiss, and it was a different one, kissing lighter and less urgently. "Where are we going, Maki? What are you trying to do?"

Ask her for the machine, the voice said. Ask to see it. Tell her you need to test the machine's apparatus.

"I…" The machine? The apparatus? Dazzling moments rushed to her mind's eyes, that made no sense to her. What the hell was Maki doing? What the hell was Honoka talking about? "I don't…"

Maki managed to silence the voice as she lowered her head to Honoka's core, and Honoka responded in a rhythmic thrust, half riding Maki to Maki's internal beat. When Honoka was spent and slipped her fingers inside Maki from behind, thumb circling her clit, Maki knew they'd done this before, a long time ago, and that Honoka had remembered how to work the wild full-body orgasm out of her, the kind she'd never had in this lifetime, the kind she'd once had from expensive toys and years of practice.

"So you want me to do anything?" Honoka growled, in her ear, as Maki felt the bright sensation fill her.

"I…" She couldn't think. Not with this heat building up all over her body, with Honoka's fingers deep inside her.

"I've already done anything, Maki." Honoka said. Her fingers kept the steady, deep rhythm, pounding out the invisible song Maki heard. "Can you ask for any more?"

When Maki opened her eyes, the Honoka looking back at her was the young Honoka she'd known, and the presence had cleared out, for a moment. Honoka looked sad, tired. Young.

"Honoka…" Maki didn't know what the hell just happened. "Was that… I don't know what that was about."

"I can guess." Honoka said. She'd bundled up into separate blankets, not touching Maki. "How much do you know, Maki?"

"I don't know. Not much." There's another woman inside of me. "Things happened in the hospital."

Honoka murmured something, and there was an awkward silence.

"What did you mean, do anything?"

"I wish I knew."

"I would do anything." Honoka whispered. There were tears in her eyes. "I really would."

Maki wanted to reach out, to hold Honoka, but feared Honoka would pull away. "I would, too. Do anything, for you."

"Anything?"

"Yes." Maki looked at Honoka with stinging eyes. "Absolutely anything. I love you, Honoka. I… feel like we've been through so much together. Even things we don't remember. Like we're connected somehow."

Honoka gave her a small smile. "I think we are." She moved a little closer to Maki, taking her hand. "I love you too, Maki. I need to tell you some things. I might need your help with something. But let's get a shower first, okay?"

The shower looked different: bottles cluttered up the shelves, there was a toothbrush and toothpaste, an empty energy drink can. Maki's expensive bodywash hadn't been touched, but Honoka's bright citrus gel was nearly gone. Honoka looked different too, not just the bags under her eyes and unwashed hair, but something harder and stranger to the set of her mouth and the furrow of her brows. Older, scalded, alchemized.

Maki didn't remember the last time she had a real shower, it was pre-accident. The smell of the shampoo caught Maki off guard, her throat caught for a second, as she dug it into her roots. Pre-accident.

Honoka wrapped her arms around Maki, as if she were thinking the same thing. "I missed this. Your fancy shampoo. I missed you."

"You're allowed to use my shampoo." Maki whispered. "You're my girlfriend."

Honoka held her for a long time under the hot water.

"I think I could perfect the design of the machine, if we got a stronger concentration of the meteor. I think it would be possible to go very far back or forward. It wouldn't be an entirely local effect, it could spread out across an area. I think it could have other effects as well. More space than time."

Maki nodded. This was what her other self wanted. But for what?

Maki listened to herself talk of equations and rhythms and technicalities. It was possible, she told Honoka. They could do so much, they could see so much, they could become so much.

Honoka listened, interjecting with observations and practicalities. She seemed just as serious as Other Maki. Why? Maki wanted to say. What happened? What aren't you telling me? Don't, Honoka, she wanted to say. We don't need to do this. We just need to leave.

Why do you want this? Maki asked herself. She looked out the window to the pale navy of near dawn. Snow was building. What could possibly be worth this?

In a timeline that doesn't exist, the Other Maki said, there is a self of yours that can no longer play music, can barely use her hands. There is a self that withers away in her father's hospital, under his critical, ceaseless gaze, more patient than provider. You never find love, you never return to music, you don't even publish a remarkable scientific paper. You are only your father's doll. There are even selves that never join u's, that never even meet Honoka and everyone else. There are selves in which you are a mediocre idol, a divorcee, a scandal. There are timelines where you almost touch true greatness, but it is ripped away from you at the last second.

Maki saw another woman in her mind's eye. A flat, dull woman with dead eyes and an unflattering sweater, sitting at a table listening to a redheaded man talk about fundraising. A woman that shied away from anyone who looked at her, that never interacted with beautiful women, that turned off music when she could and walked away from music when she couldn't. There was a woman who married a doctor who ran a different hospital, who sneered at her surgeon career.

These timelines do not exist, Maki, because I made sure that they did not happen.

Maki wasn't even sure she believed herself.

A sudden pain went through Maki's hands. Her skin was flayed. The raw heat, the blood, the sheer brute force of the ten-pain scale energy doubled Maki over.

The apparition of Herself loomed over the bed. She was Maki, but her expression was wholly alien, someone who did not truly exist in this world, but whose face belonged to a different timeline. Who was this person? Was this person always inside of her?

This is happening. The woman said, and left, with a flash of green light that restored Maki's hands to working.