Disclaimer: Sliders does not belong to me.

He is very fuzzy on the details.

It is unlike him to accept something like that - that there is simply something that he does not know that he has no desire to decipher. It is, at least, unlike the him that he used to be. He assumes that he is a new him now - one that has weathered too many storms or fought too many battles or just gotten too lost from what once he was.

He just sort of exists now - fuzzy on the details and all.

He understands enough - more than enough really. How many of the minute details does one need to have in order to understand that one is dying and has no recourse?

He is fairly certain that he has fought against the concept of death before (details of his current situation are not the only thing that are fuzzy). He can recall the details of at least one occasion on which he tried (and failed) to find a way out of a countdown to his demise situation. There are a lot of pieces of what used to be him that are already missing, but his best friend guiding him through that turmoil is one thing that remains with perfect clarity. He supposes, then, that it is only reasonable that she would be the one to guide him through this round of all hope is lost as well.

She, it would seem, does not share his opinion on the fitness of the moment - and in her typical fashion, she is unafraid to make her contrasting opinion clear to him.

"You know there is something that is fundamentally unfair about me being the one that was required to come and play guiding figure for you in your time of need." She sounds annoyed, but she mostly sounds like her (and it has been a very long time since he has gotten to enjoy the sound of her voice in anything other than a dream).

"Wade?" He feels silly even as he speaks her name. It is, of course, her - who else would it be?

"Now he remembers my existence." The eye roll is nearly audible. "I guess out of sight out of mind really did apply, didn't it? You would think that the Professor would have been a better choice for this."

"I don't understand." He knows that his first emotion was pleasure at having her with him here at what he has determined is his end, but he is struggling with the lack of comfort that he had somehow expected that he would be receiving.

"And I didn't understand when my best friend in the world left me for worse than dead without a second thought." She responds. "I guess we all get to be confused."

"I didn't know where you were." The words sound lame even to his own ears - a weak justification that has been worn out by overuse. She does not allow it to go unchallenged.

"We never knew where home was either," she reminds him. "That never stopped us from looking. At least, some of us thought that it didn't. Did you ever even want to go home, Quinn? Or were you just relieved when you jettisoned the rest of us and could go off adventuring in peace?"

The words sting (which he can only assume was the intention behind their utterance). This is not what he thought he was expecting (but there is a part of him that must have been because he can feel it muttering approval in the back of his brain as if there is something in him that does not believe that he should be allowed to pass in peace).

His first impulse is to push back against the statements - to say something not just to defend himself but to injure her in turn (there was a time when the two of them would never have dreamed of using what they knew about each other like that and another time when it felt like the two of them were going out of their way to do so).

Mostly, he finds that he wants to reassure her that it was not like that, but he no longer remembers exactly what it was like. How can he defend himself to himself when he knows which words are just words? The truth is that he does not know the why of the way things unfolded. There is a whole lot of that time - the dark time from which everything about the life they had made for themselves began to unravel - that is nothing more than blank space where something like reasons and excuses used to be (or should have been). There are a lot of things that he cannot explain, but he supposes that it, ultimately, does not matter because she does not seem much inclined to let him express anything on the topic even though she is the one who brought it up.

There is a part of him that feels there is justice in this - he is going to fade away into something left behind and forgotten. He has left behind one too many things (people) and now it is his turn to be on the receiving end of being left. It's poetic or something - that was Wade's forte not his.

"You think that is going to absolve you?" She asks as if she heard his thoughts about fading away.

There is something so judging in the expression behind her eyes (something he is certain that he never saw before when Wade was looking at him). "You actually do." She scoffs. "You think this makes you some kind of a martyr. You just get to fade into oblivion without a care in the world or even a smidgeon of an attempt at rectifying any of your mistakes." She clicks her tongue at him and whispers one word that he has never heard from her - in all of the accusations and insults that have been hurled at him in all of their talks (both real and imagined), she has never before called him out for being a failure.

Somehow, that's the thing that pushes him over the edge. His best friend in the world (or, at the very least, his facsimile memory of what she should be) believes that he is taking the easy way out. As if any of this has ever been anything even bordering on easy.

"What would you know about it?" He finds himself yelling at her. "I'm sick of everybody thinking they get to stand in judgment." Is he letting himself be content to sit here and fade into nonexistence because there is a part of him that is glad that he will never be again the one that people are depending on for answers? What if he is? That's his business. It's no one else's. He won't have to lead or face up to consequences or live with the fallout of things gone wrong. He can just accept that he has failed - that there is nothing worth trying. He can just be finished.

He wants to be finished. He aches to be finished. He kept going for so long - why can't he just take advantage of the opportunity to quit that has been laid out before him?

"How would you have answered that question a year ago?" She asks as if she has read that last question directly out of his thoughts again. "Two years?" She hasn't looked at him so like his real Wade used to in all the time that she had been talking to him.

"Those were different times. I was different," he insists. "I wasn't . . . ."

"Alone?" She questions. "Trust me, Quinn, I know all about alone. It's not nearly the excuse that you seem to think that it is."

"Why are you here?"

"Beats me," she tells him with a small shrug of her shoulders. "Maybe your hero complex couldn't let you take the easy way out when you still have so much guilt to play with locked up in here. It's not like I volunteered myself for this job."

I'm tired," he tries to argue with her.

"But should you be?" She questions.

"What does that mean?" He demands.

"Why don't you tell me how you got here?" He wants to protest, but it's Wade. If telling her a story will keep her here - prevent the sense of being alone from sweeping over him again - then he'll tell her a story. So, he does. She doesn't interrupt - which is very not Wade. She waits until he gets to the end of the tale before leaning closer to him and whispering one disbelieving word.

"Really?"

That's all it takes, and he is suddenly questioning whether those blank spaces have stolen more from him than even he believed because in the retelling he is noticing more holes than logic and more gaps than reason.

"I don't know - it all seemed reasonable at the time, but looking back . . .," he admits.

"You can't figure out why you didn't ask more questions." She finishes for him.

"I can't figure out why I was doing what I was doing - let alone why I wasn't asking more questions." He adds trying (with very limited success) to try to piece together some sort of rational explanation for everything he just told her.

"Everything just was," she tells him with a smile that seems more full of regret than anything. "You aren't the only one. There were a lot of things that I should have fought against that I didn't." She shares.

"There are things that I should have demanded explanations for that didn't seem strange in the middle of it until I got some . . . ."

"Perspective."

"Yeah." It's his turn to lean closer. "I missed this you know - us, the way I didn't have to always struggle for words because you would come up with them for me. I missed you every day that you were gone even when I didn't know what I was doing."

"Was I really gone?" She crosses her arms and starts to walk away from him.

"What do you mean?" He scrambles after her but she sort of fades away before he reaches her.

"Do you know what the last thing I remember is?" He spins around to find her scowling at him. Her eyes are hard. She sounds detached and clinical. He doesn't like that. It isn't right. "Being so angry at you for pushing me and Remmy into that vortex - for thinking that you could just decide for us that we would leave you behind."

"I don't . . .," he begins, but the truth is that he doesn't know what to say.

"No, let me finish or we are never going to get through this," she insists. "I was hurt and felt betrayed and I was angry. Then, there was nothing." She smiles at him, but it isn't one of Wade's smiles. It's tainted by cruelty - an open desire to inflict pain. "It's just empty. There's nothing there - no emotion, no hope. Everything that made me me doesn't exist anymore. There's nothing there. That's on you, Quinn. That's what happens when you let other people pay the price for your epic failures." He reaches out a hand, but she disappears again before he can touch her.

"My dear boy is that really something that you believe our Miss Welles would say to you?" A voice from behind him intones. He doesn't want to turn around. He doesn't want to deal with all the things he has so carefully buried being drug up again.

"Yes, yes, that would be very ghost of Christmas past of me - if only it were, in fact, Christmas or I were, in fact, a visiting spirit. Use that capacity for rational thought that I know you possess, Mr. Mallory."

"Yeah, Quinn, maybe you should ask yourself some hard questions." It's a different voice entirely, and he doesn't stop himself from turning around.

"You're. . . ."

"The you that fixed your pesky little equation problem?" The other him offers. "In the flesh - figuratively speaking."

"But . . . ."

"Oh no, don't even repeat that nonsense to me. No wonder you needed my help - if that's your normal level of brain function, you never would have sorted things out without my interference. But we know that's not right, don't we? We know you would have gotten there eventually because occasional appearances to the contrary, we are that brilliant. So, you want to enlighten me to when it was that you lost basic math skills?"

"What?"

"How many worlds has it been, Quinn? How may worlds have shown you just how long the Kromaggs have been pillaging their way through the universe, but you still opted to believe that we were somehow responsible for their ability to do so! Do you always go searching for more guilt to pile up on our shoulders? Or did you just want to add some extra that you were okay admitting?" The other him was suddenly slamming his hands against the top of a desk that had randomly appeared between them.

"I did not set the wheels in motion for you to have a chance with our girl for you to spend a year pretending that you couldn't be bothered to remember that you lost her." The other man was yelling.

"What are you talking about? " Quinn demanded in confusion.

"Now he has questions," the other him threw up his hands in exasperation. "Look. I'm not here to make you feel better about your life choices. I'm here to remind you that you still have choices to make."

"That's easy for you to say." Quinn wasn't particularly convinced that it was a good retort, but it felt like an appropriate thing to say.

"Yeah, it is easy for me to say," other him agreed. "Do you know why? Because I'm not the one who decided to take my exit stage right and leave my mess to be everyone else's problem."

"That is not what happened. I didn't choose this."

"Really?" He was getting tired of the new voices popping up from behind him.

"What now?"

"Don't get mouthy with me, Q-Ball. Last I checked I'm still out here every day doing the best I can. We can't all kick back and take the sit back and let it ride train."

"I didn't just give up!"

"Oh, so I'm home then?" Rembrandt questioned. "The multiverse is safe? Everyone got their happy ending?"

"Everybody doesn't get a happy ending!" Quinn found himself yelling. "The world isn't safe - no world is. There is no such thing as safe! And I got you home once - as I recall, it didn't do anyone much good, did it?"

"Oh, come on, other me. Let's be honest. You were pretty happy with how it worked out for you. Don't you remember? You didn't have to be plain old Quinn Mallory - lost slider, loser of friends anymore. You got to be something bigger - something special. You had a destiny; you had a cause. You had a reason to walk away from your failures and start over with a clean slate. You didn't even bother to ask the right questions because you didn't want to examine things too closely. You jumped at the chance it gave you."

"Stop saying that! That is not how it was!"

"You didn't go trekking off to find a "brother" you had never met who you had no reason to believe was in immediate danger instead of going after the best friend who you knew was in trouble - more trouble than a younger you would have left a complete stranger in? Don't tell me - it wasn't like that, right? You keep insisting on that, but it keeps coming up. This is your mind. You might want to ask yourself why it is that that particular wavelength seems to be on repeat."

"A fair point, Mr. Mallory. Loath as I am to give my agreement to the class disrupting interloper, he would appear to have rationality on his side in this instance. Have you examined why this particular item is such a sticking point? I believe we have all addressed with you your issues of guilt. Have we not told you that our sliding was our choice?"

"Not me."

"My apologies, Mr. Brown, but I believe you and Mr. Mallory had made your peace with the unintentional inclusion of yourself on our journey."

"Don't forget the loss of a prized possession."

"Really, Mr. Brown, I do believe you made a more recent decision to reenter as it were the realm of sliding."

"Yeah, well, options were limited at the time."

"What do you people want from me! I'm sorry, okay! How many times do I have to say I'm sorry for setting this whole thing in motion?"

"I'm not looking for an apology." Wade was back. "I'm not worried about what you have done, Quinn. I'm worried about what it is you are doing now - what you are not doing now."

"Just tell me what you want from me." He was nearly begging.

"What do you want for yourself, Quinn?" She asked him. "Is this really what you want? Oblivion? Apathy? Leaving the unresolved unresolved? To leave Remmy to be the last man standing - to have to carry that weight on his shoulders? To forget the people you love?" She was directly in front of him, but he was petrified that she would disappear again if he reached out his hand. There was no cruel smile. There were no hard eyes. It was just Wade the way he remembered her from back before everything went wrong. "Is that what you want?"

"I'm tired."

"That's not what I asked."

"I'm scared I'll fail."

"Are you a scientist or not, Mr. Mallory?" The Professor demanded. "Failure is merely another mechanism by which we learn."

"Are you ready now?" Wade asked him. The others had all disappeared.

"Ready?"

"To blow this popsicle stand?"

"What is it I'm supposed to do?"

"Wake up."

"I don't know how."

"Well, no one said it was going to be easy." He frowned at her. "You have to want it, Quinn. No more half-hearted resignation masking. You have to be all in - are you?

"Can I fix any of this?"

"Quinn!" It was pure, unadulterated Wade exasperation and he reveled in getting to hear it again.

"Okay! Okay, I'll be all in - I can do that. Then what?"

"Fight."