You drive for hours.
No sleep.
Whenever you sideswipe a car or a railing or a cop tries to pull you over, you REGRESS. More difficult in a moving vehicle, but nothing you can't manage. You've REGRESSED in worse situations.
You blink. You rub at your eyes, and your fingers come back red.
Come on.
Keep it together.
It's dark, and you're on a winding road, one side lined with dense pine, the other descending into darkness. You need to find your way back to the highway.
You find yourself losing focus, your grip slackening on the wheel. You're tired. All this anger, this constant anger always flaring hotter and hotter—it's exhausting.
You close your eyes. Open them. Slowly. Close them. Open... them.
Something darts in front of your car, and you swerve across the road, nearly slashing open the siderail. You risk a glance back over your shoulder.
What the hell? Out here, what would that— a deer? It was a deer, right?
No. It was shorter, stouter, close to the ground.
You shake your head.
Blood pools in your mouth, beneath your tongue. You swallow, feel your empty stomach contract.
Your skin prickles. Your vision blurs. You hit your head against the steering wheel, jarring yourself awake.
Keep.
It.
Together.
0-0-0-0-0-0
It's morning.
People in the streets, moving rubble, digging through wreckage, moving sandbags. Construction equipment. The smell of burning diesel fuel. The constant beeping of oversized vehicles backing up.
You stand on the sidewalk, arms crossed, watching. A piece of paper blows across the street, catches onto your boot. You look down, and a face looks up. Missing person? You're not surprised, given recent events. You kick the paper away.
You go to the local school, see the ambulances parked outside in the lot. You stick your head in the auditorium. Your eyes run over the cots, but... no, he's not here.
You wander the town for hours. You must look lost; a girl with blue hair who says most of the out-of-town volunteers are at the shore.
So you go.
You're at the waterfront, and the salt is thick in the air. Odd. There was a place here—the Whale Duo Diner, something like that— that you all ate at, once. Now, it's just splinters and broken glass.
You look to your left, and someone else is looking at the ruined diner.
You turn, your body facing him entirely. You turn, and the world turns with you. Day becomes night becomes day.
He glances aside, sees you.
You stand only ten feet apart.
How you had planned for this. You had it all ready, wound up and coiled oh so tightly. The exacting, cutting insults, the rising monologue that would reduce him to anguish, stormswept people would gather with hands covering their mouths in awe to hear you speak. A second storm, one from which Arcadia Bay would never recover. There would only be a smoldering crater, and you.
Nothing.
"Damien."
"You found me."
If you could kill with force of will, he would've been ash on the pavement.
You two stand there, staring at each other. Above you, the gulls wheel. And then...
"So, how are you?"
"Are you fucking kidding me?"
He rubs the back of his neck. He's gotten thin. Pale, too. "Yeah... okay, got me there. But we... you and I... we have a lot to talk about, don't we? So let's walk." He gestures to the beach.
You stand there, seething.
"Last words before you kill me," he says, and there's no humor.
You nod stiffly, and you walk, shoulder to shoulder, like old times.
0-0-0-0-0-0
It had been a strange storm.
Some buildings were flattened, others untouched— sometimes right next to each other. Pavement and piping had been ripped out of the ground in some places. Leaves and blades of grass were found embedded in cement and steel.
The wind and rain were there and gone in just a few hours.
"I was sure I was gonna die," Damien says, hands out in front of him, gesturing upon an invisible canvas. "It was just chaos. Absolute chaos. This massive pine tree almost ended me—" You kind of wish it did— "but then this girl comes outta nowhere, pulls me out of the way." He laughs, an empty and echoing sound. "She couldn't have been more than sixteen."
You say nothing. You've been walking for twenty minutes now, but you can't bring yourself to speak beyond a few words. You've said everything you've wanted to say to yourself, to your bathroom mirror, to your empty room. Repeating the words... is somehow false.
"I thought it was fate, in a way," he says wistfully. "Fate, destiny, a shitty call from the Oracle at Delphi. I run from you and dive headfirst into another storm."
Silence. You both stop and look at a beached whale, its carcass now a feasting ground for a seagull horde. The eco-activists probably found something else to wring their hands over. You watch as the birds bicker and shriek over shreds of blubber.
"Two months," you growl at last. "Two fucking months, Damien."
"I know. Long time for a vacation. And I didn't even write. Some friend I am, huh?" He tries to smile, only gets about halfway there. He scoops up a windblown seashell, turns it over in his hands idly. "People ask why I'm here. I say I'm a writer."
"Huh."
"Yeah. They ask what I'm writing, and I say—I say it's a book about a time traveler."
A glacier passes through you. "Funny."
He shrugs. "It was all that came to mind." He tosses the shell from hand to hand. "Couldn't think of a better reason to explain why I was living in a motel for a month, or why I ate every meal at a diner. You know—that one we used to go to. Place got wrecked."
You don't say anything.
"You know, the owner—I don't remember her name—she remembered me. Crazy, right? That was—what, five, six years ago? And after a fuckin' hurricane she remembers my face. Crazy."
You keep your hands in your pockets as you walk. You don't know what to do with them. One hand wants to strangle Damien. The other hand wants to beat him to death. They can't find a compromise.
"I, uh, helped with the cleanup. Moving broken stuff. Before that, I gave some kid CPR. Paramedics said he would've died otherwise."
You know he wants a response. You give him none.
"It didn't..." his face contorts into an alien expression. "It didn't feel good. They said I saved this kid's life, but it felt like... felt like I hadn't."
0-0-0-0-0-0
You keep walking. Damien keeps looking over at you. You don't look back. Why bother? You know what he looks like. You know what expression he'll be wearing. That combination of concern and expectation and that slight hint of challenge in his eyes.
Why say anything? You've both gone over this a hundred times in your respective heads, miles apart, him in a motel and you at home. Imagining how this would play out. And now here you are.
You walk.
It's just you and Damien and the lighthouse out here. Sounds of town are distant, people like specks of color on the far shore.
So you walk.
And walk.
And then:
"So... how's the daytrading going?"
"Shut the fuck up."
His mouth twists. "Not good, then."
That does it. You round on Damien, stopping him. You feel your eyes go wide, your entire self open. "I found him. I fucking found him. I found him. You buried him like an animal. The—the—the field! Our field! Where we—we—where we rode our bikes as kids! I dug and dug for hours—days!—and I found him. I found Kurt."
Saying his name is like being born. You shudder, feel yourself compress against your own bones. There. You said it. Two months of silence, and you finally said his name. Kurt.
Kurt, Kurt, Kurt.
You waver, there; flicker in and out of frame. Are you falling? You feel like you're falling. Like you're looking up, and see yourself and Damien standing on a sandy street.
Damien steps back, lifting his open hands. "It was an accident—"
You take a step forward, teeth bared. "Like fuck it was!"
"It was! But you couldn't turn it back—"
"Fuck off! Fuck right off! Blaming me? Me? I didn't pull the trigger!"
Damien keeps looking around—for witnesses, maybe. Or for help. Keeps looking anywhere but you. "I couldn't—I—what would I say, then? To the police? 'My tripping-out best friend accidently got shot in the middle of the night over some pills, mistakes were made?' They'd keep investigating, and—"
"And what?"
"And find out about you!"
You shake your head. Slowly. "Don't. Don't pretend this is about me, you fucking murdering sack of shit."
"It is about— look, Kurt was in a bad way, we both knew that, he knew that, we didn't mean for him to get shot—"
"We? You can't even say you shot him!"
"... But if an outsider looked into everything we'd been doing? The daytrading, the fantasy sports, the gambling— all that money? Who would call that coincidence? Who would find out? I didn't know what they'd do to you!"
"You don't know what I'm going to do to you," you grind out.
"... You think I left you for dead."
"Think? I know! I would black out and wake up, no idea who I was or what year it was— for days on end! I—"
"I know, okay? I know. I stayed with you for days. I didn't abandon you! I—every time, I'd tell you who you were, where you were, what happened. Sometimes it was like you had forgotten the day before. Sometimes the year before. You asked once if we were skipping class, like we were back in high school. Your brain would reset every—"
"Then why run? Why leave me?"
Damien looks sick. "You told me to run."
No. "What?"
"You came to, once, and looked at me. Your eyes were clear. Lucid. You said you turned it back—turned it back from a week later, and that you would kill me in a week if I didn't run. You told me to go. You told me!" He's shaking. Then he laughs. It sounds like knives are caught in his throat. "I bury one friend, and the other tells me I'm a dead man walking. Of course I ran! Wouldn't you?"
"Bullshit," you utter.
"That's why I ditched my phone. So you couldn't track me. So by the time you found me, you'd be ready—"
"Ready? For what?"
His old self-assurance, his old confidence; you see it slowly seep into his lines of his face. He stands a little straighter. Damien looks upon you like you're a demigod. "To turn it back. Turn it all back. Before Kurt got shot. Before—before all of this." He grabs you by the shoulders. "Get it now?"
You could vomit. But something keeps the blood down. "I can't go back. Not that far. Not—"
"That was then. You could go back thirty days at most, right? You must have gotten better since then. You kept on being able to keep going farther and farther back. So now—"
You shake your head. "All of our back-and-forth those months ago burnt me out, Damien. I can't go back more than a day. Two, at most. A week would kill me. I... I'm all burnt out."
His mouth opens, closes. He lets go of you and you stumble back slightly, but his arms remain outstretched, petrified. They finally drop to his sides.
He turns and stares at the water.
You stare at the water too. The lighthouse looms over you both.
"Kurt," he whispers. He's shaking, now. Slowly pulling into himself.
"Why here?" you snap. You can barely stand this. You want to go. You never want to see this ocean again. You want to never see anything blue again. Let the sky be black, for all you care. "Why Arcadia Bay? Did it have to be a place I'd only figure out from a single, stupid fucking conversation?"
He's not listening. He just stares out into the waves.
"Did you... take his body...?"
"It's still in the field." It's just a body. An 'it.' Not what used to be one of your best friends. Keep telling yourself that.
He nods numbly. "Okay."
He turns, faces you. He looks at you a while, and you look back into his unfathomable eyes. He reaches behind his back and draws a pistol.
You immediately grab for it, wresting it out of his hands with a grunt. He stumbles away, holding his fingers.
"Not loaded," he mutters. You pull the slide, check the chamber, and he's right. Sig Sauers don't have safeties, after all. "I thought about it, you know. Killing myself. Bullet in the brain. Outrunning fate at the speed of sound. Then I thought about killing you—me, just sitting in that motel, waiting for you to kick down the door. Our old wargames made real. But—" He grins mirthlessly— "why bother? You can fuckin' rewind time. I can't kill you. No one can. I've probably already tried, haven't I?"
You don't give him the satisfaction of knowing.
Damien, with a long, suffering sigh, gets onto his knees.
You just look at him, there. Down there, kneeling.
You want to say he looks defeated. Vanquished. You want to say you stand over him like a conqueror. A vassal before a lord. A supplicant before a god.
But that just isn't the case. He just looks done. Like an old man who's thrown light into the darkest corners of life and saw what he didn't need to see. Like an old man who had to bury his best friend.
"Like this, huh?"
"Yeah," he murmurs. "Like this. I... I thought about it. Gave it a lot of thought. Lot of sleepless nights. Things fell this far. This is how it should go."
"Like Kurt."
Damien shrugs. A tiny, faraway gesture. "It's only fitting."
"Yeah." Don't think.
You take a deep breath. Don't think.
Nothing else to say. Don't think.
You rack the slide of the pistol. Don't think.
"Life is cruel, isn't it?" he asks.
"Our lives, maybe," you intone, aiming between his eyes.
The gunshot is lost to the waves.
You watch as he falls gracelessly forward.
You watch as the blood pools around his head.
Your breathing quickens. The thoughts overtake you. You clutch at your head. You're... you're warm.
You grit your teeth.
"Life is cruel, isn't it?" he asks.
You just look at him.
And look.
He looks back.
"Fifteen minutes."
Confusion cuts through the sagelike resignation on his face. He blinks. "What?"
"Just... fifteen minutes longer," you say. You clench your fist, not letting him see the red gathering beneath your nails.
He gazes up at you, eyes blank, at first. Then he nods. You extend a hand, and he grasps it. You lift him to his feet.
So for fifteen minutes, the two of you sit on the beach of Arcadia Bay, shoulder to shoulder, looking off into the ocean.
Remembering a better time.