It was Kurt who had the idea first.
Well, no, maybe that's not true. But it was Kurt who said anything about it, and that's what counts.
Going back, then going forward. In your head, you went through a whole battery of names-rewind, recapture, retrieve, relapse-but REGRESS is the one that shone like a beacon upon your shoreline. You never told Damien or Kurt, of course. The REGRESSION belonged to you and you only.
So you tried, carefully. Minutes, then hours, then days.
And you would come back.
And they would be amazed, even if Damien tried his hardest not to be, at this inexplicable miracle.
A miracle that would absolve the three of you of bills and tickets and rent and dread.
A miracle that reveals to you all so much more.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You look at your phone.
See your reflection in the screen.
You've already done this once before, in a different time, a different instance, back when rage was the only thing moving your limbs.
Now, you don't know what's moving them.
Enough pacing. You sit on your bed, rock back and forth a few times. Ground yourself. Anchor.
You swallow-and breathe-and dial the number.
It rings.
You grip your bedsheets.
And then-
"Hey."
... Did Helen know your fucking number?
"Hey," you say, blinking away the shock. Why would she... ? "It's been a while."
"Yeah." A pause. The sound of movement over the line. "It has. Like, a few years?"
"Maybe," you say, knowing damn well it's been exactly four years. "You doing okay, out there in the world?"
"Surviving." Flippant, airy, with the slightest of bite. She's changed-you can feel the ripcurrent underneath her voice-but some things remain. "You know how it is. Nine to five, taxes."
"Yeah, pretty much." You had recited this conversation, over and over again. But it's falling apart in the face of... her. "I, uh-well, to make a long story short, have you heard from Damien recently? He took off a while ago, and usually I let him do his thing, but-"
You feel it before she speaks. A hardness that reaches across space and closes your throat. "No. It's been... half a year, or so. Something like that. He's busy, I'm busy. You know how he is."
Hang up. REGRESS. Just don't- "I don't know where he is. Kurt, too. They just up and left, and I-"
"Listen," Helen says, "I don't know. I can't help you, and-I've got to go. Good to hear your voice again."
And she's gone.
And you are now the only one left.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You look at yourself in the mirror.
It's not so hard to do, anymore. You don't like like a ghost clinging to a forgotten body. You look just about human, again. Your skin not so grey, the circles under your eyes not so deep, your face not so gaunt, ribs not so stark. You can sleep for more than three hours at a time. You don't trail off in mid-sentence, or find yourself brushing your teeth twice.
Sarah was the one who made you notice.
"You don't look like an addict anymore," she observed.
"Well, thanks."
"No, I'm serious. You look... better." She leaned down to look closely into your face, her eyes narrowed. "But you still need to take care of yourself."
You look human, again. But you feel different, on the inside. Not less human, and certainly not more-but different. Not any more real, or less real, or good or bad.
It's like the prism that was your life has been jostled, just slightly, and now all light and shadow and sound is foreign to you.
You decide to let the prism rest, lest it decide to move further.
0-0-0-0-0-0
You go back to the notes.
The notes you and Damien and Kurt penned over candlelight and nootropics. Time and space and matter and metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of ignorance.
You page through them, barely remembering ever written them. Formulae, equations, diagrams, models. All pure speculation, distilled into something that could be mistaken as understandable, as solid.
The great human want of order.
You set the papers to the side, frowning as they slide over one another and scatter over the table. Fuck it.
Instead, you turn your eyes to the journal-an utterly mundane looking thing. Mundane enough that it would escape your notice.
Fuckers knew you too well.
You had tried to push it out of your mind, but you couldn't. You had been sleepwalking. Sleeptalking. But not randomly-there were always patterns.
Spirals.
Water.
Fire.
But why?
Why didn't they tell you?
The writing-Damien's scrawl-smudges under your fingertips: "Doesn't remember anything."
And then, Kurt's: "Rewinding without telling us?"
Damien, again: "Sleep-rewinding?"
Kurt, once more: "Talked about a dog again."
You push the notebook away violently, jerking back, almost falling out of the chair.
Keep reading. You have to keep reading.
So you do.
"Doesn't remember a dog."
"Definitely remembers. I see it. It's the eyes." See what, Kurt?
"Lie to us?"
"Maybe not on purpose."
"Subconsciously?"
"I don't know."
"No shit."
0-0-0-0-0-0
You lay on the grass, staring up at a blue and empty sky.
The storm in Arcadia Bay. Climate scientists says that it couldn't have been detected, a once-every-hundred-thousand years kind of phenomenon.
But Damien ran right into it, of all places, at the right time.
You press your fingers against your eyes. The sun burns through your closed lids, anyway.
0-0-0-0-0-0
There you sit, once again.
"I don't understand."
The DOG looks at you.
"Maybe I can't understand. Not... not really. Maybe... this is beyond me. Beyond what my mind can grasp."
The DOG looks back out to the horizon.
You wish, briefly, that this puzzle would drive you to insanity, that not knowing would pull your brain into knots that tore. But... no. You simply did not know, and there was something so incredibly whole and simple about not knowing.
"Do you understand?"
The DOG doesn't look at you. Just at the singular point on the edge of sight, where a thin spindle of smoke still rises.
"I thought..." you furrow your brow. "I thought you did. But maybe... maybe you're trying to understand too."
Silence.
"Come and see," you murmur.
Silence.
"Come and see," you say again.
Silence.
"Come and see."
Louder.
"Come and see."
Even louder.
"Come and see!"
Shouting.
"COME AND SEE!"
Thundrous.
"COME AND SEE!"
Deafening.
... But only for a moment, before silence returns as if it were always there. There is no echo. No disturbance in the feathery ash between your toes.
You sigh, deeply, through your nose. You sit down. There's nothing to smell but the usual curiously clean smell of what you think is ash.
The DOG lays its head on your shoulder. Heavy like lead, like guilt. Light like sleepless dreams.
You both sit there, watching the final thread of smoke curl away into nothing.
0-0-0-0-0-0
So, according to Sarah, she and Cassie and Aaron and some of their other friends go out on the mountainside to look at the stars and the moon and meteorites burn themselves up in the atmosphere. And you decide to go along because you have nothing better to do with your life. You all take turns lugging the telescope, juggling red-lensed flashlights and star maps, tripping over stones and roots and stumbling through the tall grass.
But you look up, and there they are.
You watch them fall and burn in white streaks across the black expanse-but it's not black, it's blue and yellow and red, the colors of things beyond right here and right now.
You realize that you could REGRESS.
You could force those falling stars to no longer be falling. To stop, suspended in heaven, and reverse-back to wherever they came from.
There are tens of them falling, now.
What is Sarah feeling? Cass? Aaron? The rest?
What did humans before you think, watching that blazing fire fall from the night sky?
Did they feel awe? Helplessness? Fear of that great unknown?
Because you don't.
You breathe, quick and shallow, feeling something swell hot and hellish in your chest. For you know you could fling those stones back into the void, as children fling stones across a lake.
In the darkness, no one can see your eyes glisten.
But when you reach your fingers out tentatively, Sarah's hand is there to catch yours, warm and secure.
You breathe.
You breathe, and let the stars fall.