disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: this whole fandom, bc like. y'all. y'all.
notes: again, if i've said anything shitty, spray me with cold water and hit me with a stick.
notes2: HOLY SHIT THERE IS ART THANK YOU? i'm actually speechless oh my god i still haven't stopped screaming?

title: strange things
summary: Alex, stumbling through the time-stream. — Alex/Jonas.

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As for me, I'm—

[—rewind; you can't go home, alex. not yet.]

"You know, I've been thinking," Alex tells the ghosts.

That's never a good thing, they say, but it comes out mashed like a badly-rewound tape, sketching over the vowels, a twisted amalgamation of post-war propaganda and Clarissa's memories. It sounds like: tht's nvr-ah ghd thhhg.

Alex is used to it, understands it anyway even though no half-sane person would. She's listened to them so wound-up and wrung-out that there isn't a single mangled sibilant that she won't understand. We were young once, she remembers, and sits on a little outcrop of rock right by the smallest cemetery and Jonas' prone body with her toes in the water, swinging her legs back and forth. It's not a bad loop, really. And the broken observation isn't wrong, so she allows it. "Yeah, not usually."

So?

"So what?"

What were you thinking?

"My mom used to tell me these stories," Alex starts off slowly, drops her head back. It's like one AM, the sky's so black it could put out a candle but for the starkle starkle twink of starlight, and she's settled down on the grassy slope outside of Maggie's mansion. The boat is right down by the water, but she stares through it unseeingly. No one should even be alive this time of night, never mind having conversations with dead people who want to like, eat your soul. "Myths, you know? The first people who built here were the Spanish, but they weren't the first people who lived here."

There is a very deep silence.

"The long and glorious history," she tells them, lips twisting ugly around the words.

She'd not understood, at the start—there were anomalies and then there were anomalies, and that had been an anomaly—but of all of them, this one was… it was personal. Tailored. Meant for her in a way that the others hadn't been. And it didn't really make sense at the time, but Alex has gone through enough loops and played enough games that she gets it now.

Yeah, she gets it now.

"Point for Alex," she says when they don't answer, brushes teal-blue out of her eyes so that she can see them flinch. Satisfaction is a vicious emotion, and she hopes that Colonel Edwards rolls in his grave. "I didn't put it together until now, but a lot more people than just the Kanaloa crew are trapped here, right?"

What makes you think that? they ask, and if Alex didn't know better, she'd say they sound hesitant.

"A lot of things," Alex says. She draws in the dirt the things that are burned into the backs of her eyelids: a submarine, radio frequencies, a soccer ball in impossible reverse motion. Lines, up and down, into a wave. Her nail catches against a pebble. "Four people at Cape Meares. The ranger who hung himself. And Jason sounds a lot like Jonas, doesn't it? Same letters, even."

Feedback's low warning hum settles into her bones.

Alex, one; ghosts, a million. But one is better than zero, and now she's on a roll and she smiles kind of grim, continues. "Radio waves travel forever until they're absorbed by matter or a person. It's the anomalies, right?"

Do not resist, they chatter out. It sounds like: duh ntt ruhsst!

"Oh my god, do not'do not resist' at me. You made me a Jonas. You tried to bribe me with a Jonas," Alex retorts, glaring at the way the lantern-eyed shadow shifts. They don't abandon Clarissa's body so much as they withdraw, hovering in the air behind and around her like a cloud even as they hold her still by a thread. "A copy. And not even a good one! Are you for real, man? Did you honestly think—"

No, they say, a dark bubbling roil. We didn't.

She juts her chin out, eyes dark narrow slats in her face. It's hard not to think of that sticks-and-stones boy, starlight pouring out of his mouth, barely contained in the canvas of his skin. He'd blown away like he'd never been there at all because he was an unreal thing, rotted all the way through.

And Alex has never been in the business of trading away lives.

"You haven't told me I'm wrong," she tells them, almost pleasant.

We—can't, they say. It's distorted, static-ey and cut through with white noise, but Alex makes it out.

"Why not?"

Lies, soldier! It's not good to tell lies!

"I guess not," she agrees, low and far away and quiet, thinking of the string of fairy-lights hanging above her head the first time Jonas had ever kissed her. It's a little funny because if he hadn't, she probably wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation. It's a little funny because it's actually not funny, it's actually kind of sad, and she remembers something that she read once about how easy it is to divert the course of a river by moving just one pebble. Just one pebble, the right one pebble so that the water flows this way instead of that, and suddenly it's a different river entire.

(They don't call it the time-stream for nothing, Alex thinks, a little wry.)

Jonas picked the right pebble without even really worrying about it, and here they are. Figures.

"So I'm right," Alex finally says, turning it over and over in her mind. The Kanaloa crew are trapped, but so are the victims of Colonel Edwards' slaughter; family elders and mothers and fathers and children. Not to mention all of the other lives that the island's taken of the course of the last couple of hundred years, but that miniature genocide was the beginning. Whatever keeps the Kanaloa crew here is the same as what Colonel Edwards tried to kill.

A great ethnic cleansing, the recording had said, and finally something else clicks in Alex's head.

"That's why you can't keep me," she says, breathless with sudden realization. Her blood pulses in her veins and she looks down at her brown hands, her brown ankles, her brown knobbly knees beneath her jeans. "That's why you can't control me, isn't it? Why you can't possess me like you do to everyone else. Because I'm—I'm already part of that heritage."

The ghosts are as quiet as an empty church.

(They said that about Jonas once, his soul is as quiet as an empty church, and Alex drew it into herself then, hating everything because it hit right too fast and too close right between the ribs. She kept it in her chest all this time, all these loops, awful and burning. She pulls it out, shoves it at them like a brand. Who's quiet as an empty church now?)

Because suddenly, suddenly so many things make sense.

Why they can't hold her. Why she keeps going back to the start. Why there was even a start in the first place; why Alex isn't out of place in her bright red jacket. Why her relationship with linear time is tenuous at best, and why sometimes the island feels like home in a way that nowhere else does. Why even when she says take me instead—and god, she's said take me instead so many times—the world still resets. Alex never wanted to be a martyr, and so she isn't.

"Go ahead, have me," only works when they actually want you.

And it's not like the ghosts don't know that; they just don't want to be forgotten. The universe is an empty void that'll eat you alive if you let it. It's the space between seconds, lives half-lived, sailing away across stars and being trapped beneath a hundred metric tonnes of seawater.

People are always dying, but this is different.

This is personal.

"People died on this island," Alex says, "and you can't control me because they are me."

The ghosts breathe in.

Alex thinks: yeah. It always does come down to the blood. It's not like it was for Maggie and Anna, because neither Maggie nor Anna really belonged to this place; the radio school was just another offense in a long line of offenses, the Kanaloa explosion just more blood spilled, and so Maggie didn't get to save Anna.

But Alex gets to save Jonas.

Alex gets to save Michael.

She kind of raises her head to look at them, a little up and a little to the left, but looking at the ghosts is hard. They don't—really have a face? A seething black mass of glowing eyeballs isn't really a thing anyone wants to be, but especially Alex. There are only so many times a person can handle the implosion of everything they've ever known and loved before they break for good. Alex doesn't look at Clarissa, because Clarissa can be awful, but she doesn't deserve this.

No one deserves this, not even the ghosts.

"Look," Alex says,

Sit still. Bear fruit.

"You know I can't. It won't work. We're just gonna keep doing this, but we're not getting anywhere. It's gotta stop, man, this isn't healthy for anyone!"

Alex

They look at each other for a long time, girl and ghosts echoed back and forth over the four bodies between them. It's a spectrum: from Jonas to Ren to Nona to Clarissa, and Michael out of time just as much as Alex is. The ghosts don't want to leave, but they don't want to stay, either. It's scary!

Alex breathes in. She has one more card to play.

"Do you really want to do the same thing to me that Colonel Edwards did to you?" Alex asks them, even as she wonders if they've even thought about it like that. Treat people the way you want to be treated. It was drilled into her as a kid by teachers and parents; anyone she respected liked to throw it around when she went down kicking and screaming, and Alex went down kicking and screaming more than she likes to think about. It's stupid because that's not how it works, that's not how it works by a long shot, but it's—it's something.

And Maggie's notes had said that the ghosts had regressed to something like childhood, a place where games make sense when nothing else does. Alex gets it, has seen it and lived it herself. The ghosts want to play: they don't want to be forgotten. And the fifties were even more sugar-coated sweet than she likes to give that decade credit for. Radio waves and ear-worm soup-can jingles; of course they're going to want to play games, they don't know anything else.

A brittle old proverb, shitty as it is, might actually do the trick.

(Alex thinks of Hangman scribbled out on a chalkboard, and handprints, and the anomalies—how many people have died here? How many? How many was she related to?)

No, the ghosts murmur, flickering in and out. They're in the in-between space, neither all the way into the world nor sunk back into the void. The gates shimmers behind them, flashes the ocean floor, flashes the explosion, flashes a blood-soaked beach and sunshine off the water.

Alex doesn't ask them why they're doing it. She gets it, really, seriously, she does. She gets the whole, like, thing.

No one wants to disappear. No one wants to be forgotten. Time is unforgiving, and dead is dead is dead.

"Do you honestly think I'm ever gonna stop thinking about you?"

You did, they say, before.

Alex doesn't deny it. She did forget, or she was starting to, at least.

Before.

But that was then and this is now, and Alex knows her own self. She knows her own self and she knows the ghosts, and she knows the anomalies. She knows the stories and the games, because all those things make up who and what she is. She's cut herself to pieces, made herself unreal, but maybe it's time to stop that.

"You can't have my friends. They're dumb and sorta awful, like, most of the time. But I love them. I'm not going to give up," Alex tells them, stomach dropping to her toes and mouth pulling weird because she's said that before, she knows she has. She can't say it's quite a frown, even as the loop destabilizes and begins to make that sketchy badly-rewound-tape, nails-against-chalkboard sound. It claws across Alex's ears, and she grits her teeth.

We know, they say, and that's different because it's not neither will we, which is kind of standard, at this point.

The loop shatters.

Reality falls away, and Alex opens her eyes to the dark.

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tbc.