Author's Note: Goodness gracious—a Rosawatts fic from me that's not set in my headcanon-verse and is about a thousand times angstier than said 'verse is overall? It's more likely than you think. Let's just say I had an idea and it would not leave me alone until I got it written.
Disclaimer: I don't own To the Moon.
An Extreme Possibility
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Watts, but your husband didn't make it."
When Eva hears these words from a doctor, a ringing fills her ears, a sound unlike the blaring sirens from the ambulances that had carried Neil and five of their colleagues to the hospital. The sirens were shrill, while this ringing is low, like the buzzing of angry wasps, and the buzzing doesn't stop as Eva stares at the doctor, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline. His mouth is moving, but she can't hear him.
If she's replied to anything the doctor says, she's forgotten it immediately. She hardly remembers leaving the hospital or getting into her car. She can't tell if it's the scent of freshly mown grass she smells coming from the air conditioner or the stink of acrid smoke from the fire that started at the research lab. She doesn't know if the drive from the hospital to home takes hours or seconds.
She parks into the driveway and turns the engine off, but doesn't leave the car. She stares at the house, with its dark red siding and white trim and gray roof, the same house she has shared—had shared—with Neil even before they'd gotten engaged, and she feels a terrible lump form in her throat.
Eva continues staring at that house, and her vision blurs with tears.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Watts, but your wife didn't make it."
When Neil hears these words from a doctor, the only thing he can think of is, No. No, that can't be right, Eva can't be dead, he'd gotten her out of the burning lab, she was breathing the last time he saw her—not well, she had inhaled a lot of smoke, but it was better than not breathing at all—how can she possibly be dead?
No. Blood is rushing through his ears. No. His universe is shrinking to that one word. No, no, no, no, no, no! Denials are spilling out of his mouth before he realizes he's speaking, furious, anguished, desperate denials that increase in volume until he's screaming in the doctor's face, ignoring the man's attempts to calm him down. No, Eva's not dead, she can't be dead, they're supposed to go on vacation for their third anniversary next month, they're supposed to be trying for a baby soon, she can't be dead.
Drowsiness suddenly hits him. What's going on? Is he dying, too? (He hopes so, he really hopes so—at least then he won't have been away from Eva long.) No, he's not dying, he's being sedated. At least, he thinks that's what the doctor did, he can't quite tell with his vision darkening. (Can't he just stay in this darkness forever?)
Some time later—minutes? Hours?—the sedation wears off, and the doctor is asking him if he's ready to go home. He's not, he may never be ready to go home again, but he nods. It's either that or have another breakdown.
It's morbidly comforting to know that she's not the only person who lost someone. The five other people who died—Willis and Roxanne among them—have spouses, friends, parents, siblings, and other relatives who are grieving for their loved ones just as much as she is grieving for Neil. At least she isn't going through this alone.
Still, it's difficult to think of anything other than her loss as she attends her husband's funeral. Through rapidly blinking eyes, she gazes at Neil's body lying in an open casket, so still that she can't even pretend he's just asleep and will wake up wondering how the hell he ended up at a cemetery.
Eva barely says a word when a few funeralgoers offer their condolences, and she finds herself choking on a sob once the burial starts. Someone—Traci, she thinks—takes her hand and gives it a squeeze that she scarcely feels.
Afterward, when it's all said and done and everyone else has left, Eva lingers before Neil's grave, tracing the letters of his name on the tombstone with trembling fingers.
It's morbidly unfair to know that so many other people survived when Eva didn't. How is it that his wife had to die while someone like Robert fucking Lin gets to live? It's a question Neil's asked himself over and over again since it happened.
(And why is he of all people still alive? Of the two of them, he knows Eva deserved to live far more than he does.)
At her funeral, he does little more than stare at Eva's body, whether he's paying scant attention to whatever the officiant is saying or keeping vigil by her casket. If he ignores the fact she isn't breathing hard enough, he can fool himself into believing she's only asleep.
Maybe that's why he flips his shit so badly when he realizes she's about to be buried. With his heart violently pounding and his skin suddenly ice-cold, he insists—no, begs—that Eva not be moved at all, let alone be put into the ground. Let her stay, let her stay, God damn it, how is she supposed to breathe down there, let her stay—
It takes two people to drag Neil, cursing and sobbing, away from Eva's body.
She spends the first week and a half after Neil's death at her parents' house. Even with the lab closed for repairs, Eva keeps herself occupied. She cooks meals, runs errands, and helps with whatever needs doing. Her mother keeps saying she doesn't need to do anything, but Eva insists that it's no problem at all.
If she has a task to focus on, even something as simple as getting dressed or brushing her hair, then it's less time she spends just thinking. About Neil, about that beach trip they won't get to go on now, about the children they'll never have, about what will happen when she finally goes home to an empty house and he's not there to fill it with the sheer force of what made him himself.
So Eva keeps busy, keeps her hands and feet moving, until it's late at night and she collapses onto the bed in the guestroom. If she's lucky, she's asleep before she can think to miss Neil's arms around her.
But as he might have put it, she's only lucky about 19% of the time.
He spends the first night after Eva's death in his car, then the following week in a hotel room. His backseat is uncomfortable as hell and the hotel sheets are criminally scratchy, but neither of them are reason enough for Neil to so much as step foot inside his and Eva's house, so he doesn't care as much as he might've.
There isn't a lot to do at the hotel, but he doesn't feel like doing much of anything anyway. He flips through channels on the TV (there's never anything good), drinks all the beer available in the minibar (it tastes like crap, but it's better than nothing), and orders food only when his stomach's demands get too loud to ignore (he only manages a few bites before leaving it in the fridge to rot).
Mostly, Neil just lies on the bed, mindlessly staring at the popcorn ceiling, his mouth awash with the taste of alcohol and his mind awash with thoughts of Eva. Every now and then, he lifts his left hand to look at his wedding ring, a small, metallic bit of proof of what he had with her, and remembers what they were like. How they'd teased and bantered with each other about anything and everything, how even something as boring as setting up an experiment wasn't so boring with her around, how he could sometimes seduce her into having morning sex before they had to get up for work. If he's lucky—which he is about 81% of the time—he dreams of her, alive and well, after falling unconscious, but the hangovers afterward are always happy to break those illusions.
It takes another three nights of sleeping in his car before he's forced to accept that he can't avoid home forever, whether he likes it or not.
Just as Eva expects, the house is far too quiet without Neil's sarcastic comments, bad puns, and near constant chatter in general. She never thought there'd come a time when she would miss her husband talking her ear off, but here she is, wishing he could still ramble on to her about whatever comes into his head.
She also wants to bicker with him again. As she tends to the flowers, fruits, and vegetables in her garden, she wishes he could be outside with her, insisting that tomatoes are vegetables and refusing to admit she's right about tomatoes being fruits. As she runs or fixes instruments, tests hypotheses, or analyzes data at the lab, she imagines him standing next to her, spouting off ridiculous, off-the-wall theories simply because he can and he knows it annoys her. During breakthroughs in experiments, she half-hopes despite herself that he'll be there to kiss her in celebration even though he knows getting affectionate with her in public will earn him a (scandalized, she swears!) scolding.
God, what wouldn't she give to have him kiss her again.
Her—their—bed feels cold, and the scent of Neil on his pillow is painfully conspicuous by its absence, but pragmatism just barely wins out over emotion. Eva knows a semi-decent night's sleep is what she needs to be something above good for nothing at work. It's for that reason alone that, night after night, she crawls into the bed she and Neil shared for years and clutches at his pillow instead of crashing on the couch in the living room.
At least his side of the bed is still here, Eva thinks as she rolls herself into it. To say it's a poor substitute for Neil is an understatement, but at least there's that.
The house screams Eva. In the kitchen is her favorite red mug. In the bathroom are her toothbrush and the towels and rags she picked out. A whole closet is full of her clothes.
Reminders of his wife are everywhere, even in the front yard where her garden, now full of dead and dying plants, is located. Neil can't ignore them entirely, but he can at least avoid the worst of them in their bedroom. It's why he spends his nights on the living room's couch, because there's no way in hell he's sleeping in his and Eva's bed, and no, he doesn't care that the couch isn't conductive for a good night's sleep.
There's quite a few things Neil doesn't care about nowadays. His job is one of them. He goes to the lab, yes, but only because he's getting paid. Without Eva, what does experimenting with subatomic waves and particles matter?
Without Eva, what does anything matter?
Neil is drinking a scotch late one night, six weeks after Eva's death, when words like "multiverse" and "alternate selves" coming from the TV register in his brain. He jerks himself out of the alcohol-fueled dozing he'd been in only seconds ago and turns the volume up on the remote, his eyes transfixed on the screen.
It's a documentary, he quickly realizes, about the theory of multiple alternate realities, the idea that there's a possibly infinite supply of universes that exist alongside this one. If the multiverse theory is true, it means that every possible outcome of every possible event exists in its own universe.
It means that there's at least one universe where the fire at the lab never happened, or even if it did happen, there's at least one universe where Eva never died.
It means that Eva could still be alive.
The documentary goes on to talk about how the multiverse theory is purely hypothetical due to its lack of testability, but all Neil can think is, Like hell it can't be tested.
For the first time in weeks, he's got something to care about.
When Eva visits Neil's grave—which she does about twice a week—she always brings flowers to place in front of the tombstone. Whether it's out of sentimentality or a desire to, even now, show off how much she knows (which is stupid of her, of course; it's not like her husband is even here to listen to her), she only buys flowers with specific meanings. So far, she's bought roses for love, calla lilies for marriage, and chrysanthemums for fidelity.
(She never buys peonies. Peonies mean healing, and although some days aren't as bad as others, putting those flowers on Neil's grave feels too much like lying.)
She's gotten into the habit of talking to the tombstone as if it's Neil. She talks about work, about the flowers she's brought, about how much she misses him—anything to fill the silence of the cemetery. Anything to feel even the tiniest shred of connection to him.
On this particular visit, during a lull in the all too one-sided chat, Eva lets her gaze wander down to her left hand, where her wedding band shines from its place on her ring finger. Cooking and showering are the only times she takes the ring off, but even those relatively brief periods feel too long. She can't imagine there'll ever come a day when she takes it off and never puts it back on, like a snake shedding an old layer of skin. If she did that, she suspects some part of her will be as dead as Neil.
"Eva!"
She nearly jumps out of her skin at the sound of her name. Was that...? she thinks, her heart racing. But no, that can't be. Except...that voice—it sounded just like—!
"Neil?" She turns around, but there's no one behind her.
Eva exhales sharply, belatedly realizing she'd been holding her breath. Of course there's no one behind her. Of course she didn't hear what she thought she heard. She'd just been thinking about Neil and her mind called up his voice—that's all there is to it.
Even so, it's several seconds before her heartbeat is back to normal.
It takes almost a month and a half of near-constant work and research, but construction on Neil's inter-dimensional machine—a tall, metallic half-cylinder with a dome on top, a plate on the bottom, and empty air in the middle—is complete. If he can manipulate certain quantum entangled atoms in just the right way, it ought to lead to a rip in space and time, which will hopefully allow him a glimpse into another reality—hopefully a living Eva's reality.
He tells himself that he'll only look. He just wants to see that there's another universe where Eva is alive. Just one look, and it'll be enough.
But that changes when "ought to" and "hopefully" become "will" and "certainly" about three weeks into testing. After hours of flipping the machine's switch and getting miniscule, rapidly disappearing tears at best and nothing at worst, finally a hole is torn.
And Eva is on the other side.
Neil lunges forward in an instant, drinking in the sight of his wife like a man who's found an oasis in a desert. Her back is to him, her black hair as long and soft-looking as he remembers it, and all he wants to do is touch that hair. No, he wants to touch her, kiss her, hold her in his arms, reassure himself that she's real and can't be ripped away from him again.
How could he have ever thought that just one look would be enough?
"Eva!" he exclaims, actually reaching out his hand, his heart filling fit to burst—
But the portal closes before his fingers can touch anything, leaving him to swear in a bedroom that feels even emptier than it had only a few seconds ago.
Her sister thinks she should start dating again. Eva thinks she's gone insane.
"It's been only four months!" she protests. Her voice is louder than it should be, considering that she and Traci are at a coffee shop, but she's past caring if she attracts stares. "That's not even half a year since Neil died! What the corncob are you thinking?!"
Traci raises a hand in defense. "Hun, I didn't say you should elope with the next guy you see. All I'm saying is it'd be nice if you went on a date sometime, got outta the house more often."
Would you feel that way if Aaron was dead? The question is on the tip of Eva's tongue when, a few tables down, she catches a flash of opaque glasses and short brown hair and suddenly can't breathe.
In the space of a blink, the man is gone—as in, vanished without a trace—and she wonders if maybe she's gone insane, too, if she's now hallucinating her dead husband.
When Traci asks if Eva's okay, all she can say through the tightness in her throat is that she's fine.
His mother thinks he should start dating again. The very fact that she's his mother is the only thing that saves her from Neil telling her to go fuck herself. As it is, he tells her over the phone that it's still too soon to be thinking about getting a new girlfriend, and Terri insists that Eva wouldn't want him to be alone forever, and besides, she wants grandchildren some time this century.
Neil says he'll think about it, but it's only to get his mother off his back. Even before he started his inter-dimensional project, he knew there'd never be another woman after Eva, and now that he knows a living Eva exists somewhere in the multiverse, the idea that he could move on with someone else is even more unthinkable.
He hasn't tried talking to her again after the first time he tore a hole into her universe. At present, he's focusing on finding a way to get portals that can last longer than two seconds. So far, messing with the atoms has led to portals that can last four seconds at most, which he guesses is an improvement, but not nearly enough time to have an actual conversation with an alternate version of his wife.
Right before the latest portal closes, Neil sees Eva look straight at him, and a thrum of excitement runs through his body. It's not the same as if she called out to him or touched him, but at least it's something. At least now she's aware of him.
Whether she's gardening, leaving work, visiting his grave, or anything else, Eva sees Neil—or at least a man who looks like him—multiple times over the next few weeks.
She knows she's hallucinating—she knows that—but those brief moments when she glimpses (what she imagines is) her husband seem so real that a small—tiny, really—part of her wants to believe that somehow Neil's come back from the dead.
The far more rational side of her knows it's ridiculous. People who die stay dead, and not even Neil can—could—change that.
Eva turns away from the most recent hallucination of Neil (did he always look so thin?) and continues heading to her car, ignoring the feeling that she's being watched.
It's something akin to a miracle once Neil manages to get the machine to maintain portals for five minutes straight.
The best part is being able to see Eva for longer than a fleeting glance. He looks at her as she gets dirty from tending her garden and thinks she's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. He stares at her as she does something as mundane as walking and wishes he could watch her forever.
He also wishes prolonging an open hole into the space-time continuum wasn't taking so damn long. If he had it his way, Eva would've been in his reality weeks ago.
Having her permanently back in his life can't come soon enough.
Eva involuntarily grips her bottom sheet and screws her eyes shut when—just like that day at the cemetery—she hears what sounds so achingly like Neil's voice.
"Hey, Eva."
Maybe it's because her first birthday without him—the morning of which she began by sobbing her eyes out, something she hasn't done in a while—has come and gone so recently. Or maybe it's the way her mind has chosen to make him sound—so cheerful and casual, like he hasn't been dead the last six months. Either way, auditory figments of her imagination are the last thing she wants to deal with.
"Go away," she says, pressing her face into Neil's pillow as if it'd be enough to block out her delusions.
There's a pause, then the voice goes on, still in that cheerful tone. "Well, that's pretty rude. And after I spent all this time wondering how our reunion would go."
Eva jerks her head up, her breath hitching. Reunion...? Her heart skips several beats at the word. So it's not enough to see Neil wherever she goes—now her mind is telling that tiny part of her what it wants to hear?
"I really am going crazy," she mutters.
"Wait, what? No!" The voice now sounds panicked. "No, Eva, you're not crazy, I swear it's me—"
Damn it, why does it have to sound exactly like him? Why does it have to sound so real?
"—well, okay, it's not the me you know, but it...uh, kinda is?"
"'Kinda is'?!" Eva blurts out before she can stop herself, not knowing whether she wants to laugh, scream, or both. She whirls around in bed and comes face-to-face with—what else?—the hallucination of her husband. "The Neil I know is dead!"
"The Eva I know is dead, too." His glasses have slipped down his nose to reveal his eyes—exactly as vibrant a green as she remembers them. He smiles softly, tremulously. "But here we are."
Whatever Eva was going to say is forgotten as she truly looks at the man for the first time. The Neil she married had always been on the lean side, but the Neil before her is clearly underweight—his face is far too gaunt, like he's nothing but skin and bones. Behind him, she can—impossibly enough—see the exact same wall and the exact same bed as the bedroom she's in, and the entire scene, for lack of a better word, is framed by a thin circular line of white light.
Either she's having the world's most bizarre hallucination, a theory that's becoming less probable with every second that passes without him disappearing, or...
"You tore a hole into space-time?" she finishes out loud, hardly believing her own ears.
"I've been tearing holes into space-time for almost two and a half months," Neil says, his smile becoming more playful as he pushes his glasses back up, "but who's counting?"
"But how?" Eva demands, staring at him incredulously. "The many-worlds interpretation is impossible to test!"
"Not anymore, hun. Turns out that messing with quantum atoms long enough can lead to discovering your spouse is alive in another dimension."
Neil is now grinning from ear to ear, but Eva's mind is still reeling with the implications. If all of this—the portal, the alternate universe, Neil himself—is truly real...then...then...
Then this other version of her husband has outdone...well, himself with this level of recklessness.
"You've been breaking the laws of physics," she asks, "without any consideration for how the multiverse could fall apart?"
Neil shrugs. "Eh, scientific breakthroughs require great risks," is all he says, which she can only assume is his way of saying no. He steps sideways so that she now has a good look at the alternate bed. "So, wanna hop through?"
"What?!" Eva exclaims, flinching as though she's been burned. "Did your Eva dying make you go crazy?"
Neil gives a start at her reaction. "Hey, hold on—" he begins, no longer smiling.
Eva interrupts him. "If ripping space-time apart hasn't caused an inter-dimensional catastrophe, fine, but how do you know that nothing bad will happen if I step into your universe?"
He opens his mouth, then closes it. "I don't."
"You don't," she repeats, shaking her head. "So it's never occurred to you that, at best, I could have my memories overwritten with your Eva's or, at worst, the multiverse could decide to correct the anomaly by having me drop dead?"
"That is not gonna happen!" Neil snaps, stepping back to his original position to glare at her. "I'll tear the multiverse to shreds first!"
"Neil, you don't know anything like that won't happen."
"And you don't know anything like that will happen!"
Eva supposes he has a point, but so does she. What does Neil expect her to do? Jump through a portal on the slimmest of chances that it'll result in them being together again without any complications?
But isn't this what you've wanted since he died? that tiny part of her asks.
It is—of course it is. But the risk...
A moment of silence passes before Neil sighs, his face softening. "We've got eight minutes left before the portal closes. Anything I can say that'll change your mind between now and then?"
Eva doesn't answer.
"Guess not." He reaches out towards something she can't see—presumably some mechanism on his device. "Well, goodnight, Eva."
"Wait!"
"Huh?" Neil drops his hand, looking back at her.
"I...I just want you to know that..." Eva's voice trails off. There's so many things she can say, now that she's actually talking to him, alternate version or not, rather than his tombstone. She can say how much she's missed him since the day of the fire. She can say that her not walking through the portal doesn't mean she's stopped loving him. She can even say that he needs to take better care of himself before she jumps into his reality to smack him, consequences be damned.
"I still wear my ring," is what she ends up saying.
Neil smiles at her again. "Yeah, I know." He lifts his left hand, and her heart thuds in her chest at the sight of the plain silver band on his ring finger—the same as the one her Neil had. "Same here."
In all the months he's spent on his project, it's never crossed Neil's mind to worry about what could happen as a result of Eva walking through a portal.
No, that's not true. Of course it's crossed his mind—he simply didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to have come so far only to lose his wife all over again. He didn't want to imagine her collapsing onto the carpet, dead seconds after crossing over into his reality. All he wanted to think about was getting her back, and if it meant being willfully ignorant about the potential cost, so be it.
That Eva might not want to step into his universe at all is another thing Neil's refused to think about. If anything, some part of him was hoping she'd do what he would've done in her position and leap through the portal without a second thought. But then again, if she'd done that, he guesses she wouldn't be Eva.
Even now, after Eva has made her reluctance and objections loud and clear, he can't bring himself to think too deeply about what might happen if she later decides to cross over. If he does, he'll be tempted to give up on the whole thing, just give up and waste away at home until he dies, and he can't give up now.
He can't give up while he has a sliver of a hope that Eva—the alternate version of his wife who still wears her ring—could change her mind.
The next couple of months are spent extending the portals' time limit and using that time to talk to her, mostly about what their universes have in common. Neil already knew that their wedding bands, job, and house are all the same, but he also learns that they have the same wedding date and the same (well, same-ish) garden in the front yard. Eva's Neil died on the same day and in the same way as his Eva, and they're buried in the same plot in the same cemetery.
With so much the same between their realities, it's easy to believe nothing world-endingly horrible will happen if Eva comes into his universe. He can only hope she ends up believing it, too.
It's a nice thought to have—that she can simply take a few steps and she and Neil can pick up where they left off—when she lets herself think it.
The idea of waking up to him every morning again, bantering with him again, working with him again, living with him again...well, it's a beautiful idea. A tempting idea. And if everything he's told her about his reality can be believed, then the only major difference between their universes is which of them died. With their worlds being so seemingly alike, walking through Neil's portal ought to be as easy as going from the kitchen to the living room.
It sounds good. It sounds perfect.
It sounds too perfect to be true.
"So," Neil asks one night, grinning, "do you have a secret stash of chocolate I totally didn't know about over there, too?"
From where she's seated at the foot of her bed, Eva snorts in amusement. "It wouldn't be much of a secret if I told you, would it?" She then sobers. "We still don't have any idea if inter-dimensional travel is perfectly safe, you know."
On his side of the portal, Neil rises slightly from where he's lying stomach-first on his bed. "I'm looking at the only way to test it right now," he reminds her.
"And if it all goes wrong?"
"Then at least neither of us will be alone this time."
Eva feels her heart squeeze at that. She and Neil haven't exactly discussed the day of the fire in exhaustive detail, but if she hadn't been with her Neil when he took his last breath, she can't imagine it was any different for him and his Eva. She supposes that's what Neil's whole scheme boils down to—for better or worse, he doesn't want to be alone.
She's become very familiar with that feeling. Still, is wanting to truly be with her husband again for even an instant worth the possible inter-dimensional fallout?
"But what if it all goes right?" Neil continues when she doesn't say anything, his voice somewhere between earnest and pleading. "What if you walk through and nothing happens?"
"Neil, we don't—"
"Know that, yes, I know," he cut in, nodding. "You know what else I know? That our realities are almost exactly the same."
"'Almost' being the keyword here."
"'Almost' might be enough." Neil gets up from the bed to step in front of it, pinning Eva with a steady gaze. "It just might be what makes the multiverse not freak out about you being over here. 'Cause if you're the same Eva, why should it care?"
"You mean besides the obvious?"
Neil pauses, and Eva can almost see the wheels in his head spinning. "I swear I'll bring you right back if anything happens."
You better hope you have the time for it, in that case. She doesn't say it out loud, but he must see the doubt in her face, because a note of desperation creeps into his voice.
"You know I'd never let you die a second time."
"Of course you wouldn't!" Eva says at once. "It's just..." But she stops. What else is there to say that she hasn't said already?
For a moment, all Neil does is stare at her, and then he looks down, exhaling slowly. "Y'know, we'll never know what could happen if we don't give it a try." He looks back up at her, holding his arms out and smiling hopefully. "So, whaddya say? Fingers crossed for a happy ending?"
Eva's eyes focus on this alternate version of her husband, optimistic despite how wrong everything could go, and she feels her heart beat faster. This man—this stupid, audacious, brilliant man—is willing to defy every known law of physics if it means they can be together again. How many times in the last eight months has she wished to have Neil back? And now, here he is, not offering any guarantees or certainty, but only a hope, only a ghost of a chance that they can return to the life they had before.
She realizes now that she has two options. She can either argue with him about the likelihood of success until the portal closes, or she can get up from this bed and step into his reality and into his arms.
Before she has time to second guess or change her mind, Eva gets to her feet and walks towards Neil.
She doesn't stop until she's out of the bedroom in her universe and into the one in his.
Neil doesn't waste any time—once Eva has crossed over, he closes what little distance remains between them and pulls her into his arms.
She starts a bit, but returns his embrace, and he buries his face into her neck, right at the spot where her pulse is throbbing, and a chorus of angels singing can't compare to that sound. Her body feels warm, her hair smells incredible, and dear Lord, this is actually happening, Eva is real, Eva is here, Eva is alive—
A choked sob escapes from his throat.
"Neil?"
He pulls away from her just enough to look at her face. Her brown eyes are clear and shining with unshed tears, and a shaky smile has spread across her lips. She hasn't had a seizure, a nosebleed, a migraine, or anything else that could indicate the multiverse attempting to correct an anomaly. She's still here, she's still right here, and he lifts a hand to stroke her cheek—had her skin always been so soft?—just to confirm what he already knows.
Her tears spill over, and suddenly she's kissing him, her mouth urgently pressed against his and her hands tightly clutching the front of his shirt. He kisses her back with equal fervor, his arms wrapped around her waist, hoping she knows without being told how much he's missed her—how much he loves her.
Their kiss deepens, his hands start to wander, and her moans set him ablaze in a way he hasn't felt in months. So lost are they in each other that neither of them notice when the portal closes.
They make it to their bed and are out of their clothes in what feels like no time at all. From there, it's soft touches, impassioned kisses, and breathless whispers of each other's names as he makes love to her. Afterward, they stay wrapped up in one another's arms, neither of them willing to let go.
It's not even a minute into the afterglow before Eva abruptly sits up, breaking their hug, and exclaims, "Oh, my God!"
"What?" Neil asks, following suit. "What could possibly be wrong right now?"
"I just remembered I'm off the pill."
The way she says it—and after everything that's happened: the past eight months, him finally convincing her to come into his universe, the sex—is so hilariously serious that he can't help laughing.
"Neil!" Eva snaps, but then she's laughing, too. Whether it's at him or the absurdity of worrying about something like that in this moment, he doesn't know, nor does he much care.
And as they settle back down in bed, with her head on his chest and his arms back around her, all he knows and cares about is that, from now on, they're going to be just fine.
They'll make damn sure of it.
Author's Note: Now, if you'll excuse me, I do believe Impostor Factory is calling my name. :D