"—sure about this?" You again ask the Tord That's Not Tord as he rounds GO again, taking his £200 salary from the bank resting sandwiched between the game board and his gun. A simple Smith and Wesson, not terribly futuristic.

Not that that made it any less terrifying to wake up with its muzzle pressed against your temple, a weather-worn changeling's finger on the trigger.

There's no other word to describe him but changeling, though he has provided a few – "Red Leader," "Tord, from the future," but it's not Tord, not with that faded army uniform and eyepatch and crimson arm and those ugly, ugly keloid scars.

But that silver eye that bores into yours – that you know too well.

(that, and the fact that you recognize the design of his fake arm from the doodle your Tord had shown you a new model water- and dirt-proof, drawing energy from your own body instead of the wall)

(no wonder now why you'd had to practically break his arm to see it)

He'd told you not to fight, not to cry out – your Tord is probably comatose in his lab anyway, and he'll never get here in time. Made you get out, throw on some pants in a cruel allowance of dignity, and asked you what game you'd be willing to gamble your life over.

And since you suck at chess, poker, Jenga, and Dominion, you'd placed your bets on your only other option: Pokémon Monopoly.

He'd laughed at that, a harsh, wheezing sound too much like your Tord's, and made you set up the table, gun still lazily trained at the back of your skull.

Now his laugh has become a small smile and cold, distant eyes, taking in with disinterest all the monopolies he's only one away from completing. Any wrong landing could cost you a quarter your remaining funds, and you've been subsisting mostly by repeating landing yourself in jail. Your body feels light and carbonated, anxiety bubbling under your skin, legs bouncing so hard the table shakes, but he's allowed you that thus far.

"About killing you?" he asks as he slides his tiny silver Jigglypuff across the board. "For the eighth time, no I have not. Although I am willing to hold off a bit after the game if you'll try to pay for takeout with Monopoly money."

"You're gonna make me pay for my last meal, too?" You ask indignantly as you roll the dice. Nope, no doubles, still in jail with him visiting. He takes them up and enlarges his smile.

"I was thinking we would split the check; it's only fair, after all."

A nervous chuckle bubbles up from your chest, bursting on your murmured insult. His eyebrow quirks as you double over, laughing so loud the whole house should've already woken up – but they're not, they're out at dive bars or probably filming more porn in seedy hotels, or blacked out in their chair, drooling all over hentai mags and scribbled equations. Your head thumps on the table as you clutch your stomach, ribs screaming in agony.

"What did you call me?" he asks, moving his piece. "Hurry up, I landed on your Tangela."

You try to speak, but every scrap of air has claws, and honestly it's not that funny, anyway.

Well, in aggregate it is, even though it isn't. "Commie fuck," you finally choke out, lifting your head from the kitchen table. "Gonna murder me and you won't even pay for my fucking Chinese food."

The Not Tord shrugs. "I don't usually carry a lot of money on me."

"Oh, I am aware."

He clicks his tongue in annoyance. "C'mon, darling, tell me how much I—"

"Don't fucking 'darling' me," you snap, and realize with a slice of pain that Tord hasn't called you darling, kjære , or even snuppa in weeks. "I'll take as long as I fucking want to."

"Oh, really?" He's flippant, leaning forward on folded arms, looking into your throwing knife eyes with his own half-lidded. Like you've made one of your usual flirtatious challenges again, the kind that always – do, used to? – end in either physical sex or a very prolonged Street Fighter tournament, for which the physical sex is but a metaphor.

Which pisses you off all the more, of course, and you're tempted to make a grab for the gun again, but the violet bruises all over your right hand warn otherwise.

Not that you should care, if you're going to die anyway. Why not push a little farther and get it over with?

Why not not be a dumb ass for once in your life and try to win him over?

Before you can reply, however, he picks up the dice and rolls for you – snake eyes, freeing your Bulbasaur to move onto his Zapdos. Which, since he owns the other one, means you owe ten times the next dice roll.

Joy.

"Do you want to do it, or should I?"

Breathe, breathe. In, and out. There are some buttons you need to push before he pushes that gun into your mouth.

"What are Tom and Matt like in the future?"

"Holy shit, this again?" He makes another grab at the dice, but for once you're faster. Holding them hostage against your heart. "I've told you, Edd, they're fine."

"Sorry Icare about my friends, unlike you."

"Of course I still care about them!" the Not Tord fires back. "I care about all my secretaries."

You can't even fathom Tom working under Tord and not having been lobotomized, especially when any game involving him ends with either you or Tord getting beaten with the board nine times out of ten, but it does ease you that tiny bit, to know they're at least safe.

"You're not yourself, back in my time," he continues, sounding rung out and lightly cracked. "No, you're not doing too well at all. I've started letting you escape to try and keep the game going, but you don't have much bite left in you anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you haven't broken into my chambers and berated me for patronizing you like that – and since I embedded a tracking device in you while you slept – no, no not yet, many years from now - I also know that you're not dead, you just haven't tried. You can understand why I think that's a huge red flag."

You nod slowly.

"So honestly, you should be thanking me, for coming back here and having mercy on you before you can let yourself sink so low."

Your heart sinks, face a harsh rictus. Of course any sympathy from him is self-serving; you don't know you're expecting anything your Tord would do for you.

"I'm starting to doubt you're really Tord from the future," you say and throw the dice – 12. Damn. "The Tord I know would never let me die flaccid, first of all."

He laughs loudly. "Aren't you hard, Edd? I am!" As he snatches your money out of your hand.

And now you've got him where you want him. "It's kinda hard to keep it up when I'm getting fucked like the proletariat."

A big, nostalgic smile.

One wrong space and you're finished.

You feel sweat running down your forehead, but the Not Tord has the audacity to say, "This is the most stress I've felt in a long while," as he lands on one of his own Pokécenter-laden spaces. "Sure you don't want this get out of jail free?" He asks, flipping the scarlet card over in his fingers. "Consider it a gift, from me to you."

You shake your head. "What would Marx say if he saw you playing this?"

The Not Tord shrugs. "'Cool game, how do I play?' He probably wouldn't say that, realistically, but I like to imagine he would."

"I also don't think Marx would be into bondage, but—"

The Not Tord reels with silent laughter. He nearly tips his chair back too far, but swings forward and pounds his fist on the still-shaking table, frame shaking with barely-suppressed laughter. "Oh, I haven't thought about that in so many years." The night Tom had made some comments about potentially finding Tord's published Marx/Engels/Reader erotic fanfiction online, and Tord had taken that as a challenge. How he managed to write fifteen thousand in one night without dying of caffeine overdose, you still don't know.

But it's working. You don't remember what exactly what you're aiming for is called – well, it's called not dying, but its scientific name – but you're hoping it's working.

"Laughter is the antidote" – that was the director of Re-Animator , one of the first movies you and your Tord watched over and over again in high school, from a magazine interview he'd let you flip through as you two bumped around his room, pretending to do homework.

"Well," his voice draws you out of your memories, "I think Marx could also appreciate the concept of the magic circle. If religion is the sigh of an oppressed creature, then stepping into the circle is like taking off your coat."

You stare at him blankly, quietly. You honestly don't even remember whose turn it is anymore, but you let him anyway, both of you visibly delighted as he's forced to pony up a hundred.

"The circle," he explains, "by which I mean the magic circle, is essentially the idea that play exists in its own separate world, whether physical or constructed." That nostalgic smile on his lips stretches, growing crooked. "I didn't truly understand that until I realize how I felt around you. Like…" He sighs as your hand stills, the dice falling dully out of your hand. "Like I'd stepped outside all my responsibilities for a while. Like everything inside me could finally be quiet."

You think back to your childhood games, of the hundreds of times they would lapse into rib-stabbing, on-the-floor-defenseless laughter for no real reason at all.

You're both silent, and you realize he hasn't looked up from the table in a long time. You slide your Bulbasaur across the board and throw some money at him; you don't count how much, and neither does he.

He harshly scatters the dice across the table. "Until I left." You open your mouth to ask, but he continues, "The battles were magic circles for a little bit, but then battles became war, and then war became yet another part of the routine." He reaches across for your hand, but you draw it away without thinking. A flash of pain across his face. "It's been so dull without you, darling."

"Then why did you leave?"And why do you talk about my future self like I'm dead?

"It felt like I had to. And maybe I didn't, but we'll never know how it could have turned out, now will we?" You ask why he can't just talk the Tord here into staying, but he shakes his head. "I am very certain it wouldn't change anything that matters. In three months from now, I am going to leave all of you. I am going to tell you a month before it happens, and you're going to make me promise to write." He slides his piece onto one of your spaces, but you don't dare interrupt. "And I'm not."

You wish you could believe your Tord wouldn't do that.

The lump in your throat swells around the word, because some part of you realized how much it explained when this older, broken Tord woke you up with the cock of his gun, and now that part is growing too brazen to ignore. "Why?" you asks, and you hope it's less desperate to his ears than in your own.

"Because," he continues, worrying his stack of yellow bills in his hand. "—Well, first, it was partly because I was busy immediately. But I think even back then that if I wrote to you and heard all about how much you missed me – or worse, how much fun you were having without me—I'd rush back. So I put my blinders on and refused to stop looking forward. Life is too short for regrets."

"And yet you time-traveled here to play Pokémon Monopoly before you kill me."

The smile is back, stitched on haphazardly. "A very astute observation. Though the Monopoly was your idea. Now, are you going to roll?"

You do and get sent straight back to jail. "No," you say sternly before he can even reach for it.

"I'll give it you for free."

You shake your head. "What happens to me in the future?" you ask as you hand him the dice.

A dark cloud rolls over his face. "You lose your laughter. Just hollowed out your personality with a melon baller. And I know it's my fault, but it's still not the outcome I truly expected. Believe you me, Edd. You're…" He shakes his head, and you want to ask him to look you in the eyes, but you don't. Tord's never liked eye contact, anyway. "Like I've said, I don't recognize you anymore. You didn't replace it with anything fun; you're just boring. It kinda -" He sniffs, smiles, scratches his face. "It kinda ...not hurt, but also did simply watching you sleep" (wait, how long were you watching me sleep?) "because you were smiling. Don't give me that look; there was no Shinji Ikari shit going down."

He laughs at your agonized expression. "You haven't done that in a long time, too."

Eight spaces, onto another of his own properties. You roll; thank god, no cigar.

His voice takes on more knowing fun as he says, "And the Edd I knew would have killed himself before he could become such a humorless fuck."

"No," you reply, "I'd go back in time and build an army of my ancestors to then go forward into the past and kill my past self. If I can't be funny anymore, I can at least be overdramatic."

He laughs, a warm sound ruined by how the obvious years of smoking can't take the familiarity away, and finally levels his gaze at you.

It's your Tord. There's no doubt about it.

You're shaking before you even realize it and he's simply watching you, curious and sad and maybe even a little amused.

Who can say? Clearly you don't know him at all.

In retrospect, the fact he's been slipping from you over these past few weeks, not replying to texts, slipping from your bed too early for the company of equations and scrap metal, falling asleep during your movie nights and covering his workbooks with his whole chest whenever you try to steal a glance were probably red flags.

You want to ask, but you don't. You're not going to show him any more weakness, so you'll privately be the biggest coward to ever walk the face of the earth instead you're laughing again, hollering to the sky because you're going to die shot by your time traveling ex-boyfriend over a game of monopoly and isn't that just the stupidest thing you've ever heard?

"God what time is it?" He twists in his chair to check the clock above the doorway. 12:47, without either of you realizing it. Had he really only woken you up two hours ago?

The Not Tord stands, cracks his neck and pockets his gun as your heart stops beating.

Wait. Pockets his gun?

He sighs heavily and stares at you for a long moment, expression unreadable. He comes around to your side of the table, wincing as you sink into yourself. "Don't run, or I'll shoot," he says, which makes the hydraulic presses in your brain shriek.

"I thought you were gonna shoot me anyway." Bold last words, Edd.

He shakes his head and takes your hand in his as the other goes into his coat pocket, a flash of red in the outskirts of your vision as he raises your hand to his lips.

And kisses it. Softly.

"I love you," he breathes against your skin, the first time in so long that Tord's said it first; " Happy anniversary—