Leave Behind Everything You Know
ninav
Summary:
Sean was standing in front of him before he realized it, yelling something. Maybe at Daniel, maybe at dude-with-a-gun, probably something stupid like "wait!" or "stop!" He was so nervous he didn't care, so nervous that all of his years on the run dissolved into nothing. He lifted his hand without thinking because maybe he could grab the gun, maybe he could stop it before something bad happened, maybe-
Like that, he was back to where he was before the intruder walked in, Daniel staring at his phone like he was before, everything just as it had been a few moments ago.
What the fuck?
(Sean has time travel powers au. Of sorts.)
Chapter 1: Continue Walking the Path of Your Life
Notes:
Title comes from "Breathe" from In the Heights.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
11th of October of 2023
It happened when Daniel was about to get shot because of course it did.
Life in Puerto Lobos had never been easy. One of the first things they had noticed, mere hours from their arrival, was that as much as Dad had a property, over time it had become home of local pandillas. They came to discover that pandillas were groups of drug dealers or thieves or whatever, that committed crimes not because they had to, like he and Daniel had (or at least, hoped they had), but because they could. Because they wanted to.
(Or maybe not, a small part of his brain that he couldn't shut up no matter how many years passed said, maybe they just didn't know any better, maybe all their lives were one big crime they couldn't escape, maybe they had no choice.
Bullshit, he would respond to his own worries, everyone has a choice).
So, they had arrived, tired and anxious about the future ahead of them, only to realize Dad's house had a pandilla inhabiting it. It had been just what they had needed at that moment, truly.
Sean had been so tired then that he hadn't tried to stop Daniel from using his powers to kick them out, right there, under the strong Mexican sun. Hadn't even tried to say something while he did. He had just leaned against the car and smoked one of the cigarettes Karen had given him not so long ago.
The pandilleros had ran terrified away from Dad's house, as he stood there smoking. When Daniel eventually came out, his face showing just how tired he was, too, Sean let him collapse into his arms. Ran his hands through his little brothers' hair and whispered that they were safe, that it was going to be okay, that they were home.
(Because they were. The house was theirs from that point and on, it was home. Sean and Daniel's, forever. He had liked the sound of that then, of not having to run anymore).
It took a while for the sentiment to truly settle in, though. They spent the first few weeks sleeping on the same bed, just like they had on the road, both a little terrified of waking up and finding the other one wasn't there, gone without so much as an explanation.
The place was filled with Dad's stuff, which also took a while to get through. Every box was a teary afternoon, too many memories for them to continue. Some had his things from high school, like the posters he probably displayed in his room, or the clothes he must have used when he was Sean's age. Others had things from his parents, the grandparents they never got to meet. Those boxes were filled with the things he probably had to look at and take away himself, the same way his children would have to do not enough years later.
The hardest boxes to get through were the ones with photos on them. Photos of an Esteban Diaz the hadn't met, an Esteban that was young, carefree and determined, an Esteban that hadn't hesitated to hit the road when it called. Or photos of when he was even younger, when he was closer to Daniel's age than Sean's. Those were the ones that made Daniel sad the most, the ones that truly seemed to make the realization that Dad was dead hit again and again.
Sean wasn't sure if they ever managed to empty all the boxes. Time went on and they managed to get on, to build lives for themselves. It took almost a year for Daniel's Spanish to get good enough to get him into school (because there was no way Daniel wasn't finishing school. Not after everything that had happened, Daniel needed that sense of normalcy as much as Sean needed to know at least one of them managed to get that damned diploma).
Sean also spent their first year in Mexico learning. As it turned out, Grandpa Diaz had actually been a mechanic, just like Dad had insisted he had been. And not only had he been a mechanic, but he had left a few books behind and a garage big and crowded with tools enough for him to realize what he was going to spend the rest of his life doing. Not that he minded. Working as whatever in Mexico would always beat being arrested in the States.
And so the years passed. They learned to live together, learned to settle down, for once. There was arguing, tears, and confusion. There were pandillas never leaving them alone, telekinesis outbreaks, and boxes full of photos they couldn't get through. But with every fight came talking, and understanding. They were stronger after every time, just like Brody had promised they would be on those first few days of what became the rest of their lives.
They were good if Sean could say so himself. Daniel did great in school, both in and out of the classroom (his Spanish had gotten so good it was impossible to know he had spent the first ten years of his life not speaking it). He had friends, went to parties and there were girls he liked. His brother seemed to have found a constant sense of calm that managed to ease his nerves every day a little more. It managed to convince him that things were actually okay, that he wouldn't wake up one day to cops taking his brother away, ever. He had some sort of peace, once and for all.
Meanwhile, Sean focused on the more practical side of things. His two main priorities after making sure cops weren't after them, had been to 1) learn how to actually be a mechanic and 2) get the neighbors to like him enough to be trusted with any cars.
(That part had turned out to be surprisingly easy once word got around that Esteban Diaz's children had settled in, because Ay Marta, puedes ver al padre en los ojos de sus hijos, es precioso.)
Lyla visited sacredly every summer ever since she had turned eighteen, and talked to both him and Daniel at least once a week without a fail. Cassidy, Finn, and the crew dropped by every summer as well, to hang out with them for a while and marvel at just how much everyone seemed to be growing.
(There still was a part of Sean that was maybe a little in love with both of them. Or so he thought, at times. He couldn't see himself having crushes, not after everything. It felt distant as if crushes were something for the Sean from before, all the constant responsibilities that he had not allowing him to have them. So, every time summer came and the crew came back, he would find himself in a comfortable limbo between attraction and simply enjoying their company.)
But things were good for them, for the most part. Friends, family, love. A home. Clean names. Safety, for the most part.
So, when Daniel was held at gunpoint and did nothing, Sean just about lost his shit.
He could tell something was wrong from the second dude-with-a-gun walked into their garage and Daniel didn't do anything, because he would usually be using his powers against intruders like him the moment they stepped on the door. Those were the only instances where he was free to use them in whatever way he pleased, and he knew it.
But he wasn't doing anything. He was just standing there, staring at him, looking just about as terrified as it got. And, oh fuck, what if his powers weren't working? Maybe he got caught flying low and now he couldn't defend himself and fuck, why had they trusted his powers so blindly?
Sean was standing in front of him before he realized it, yelling something. Maybe at Daniel, maybe at dude-with-a-gun, probably something stupid like "wait!" or "stop!" He was so nervous he didn't care, so nervous that all of his years on the run dissolved into nothing. He lifted his hand without thinking because maybe he could grab the gun, maybe he could stop it before something bad happened, maybe-
Like that, he was back to where he was before the intruder walked in, Daniel staring at his phone like he was before, everything just as it had been a few moments ago.
What the fuck?
He went to close the garage door almost on automatic, his first thought unsurprisingly being to get Daniel out of trouble.
As he was closing it, he was pretty sure he could see dude-with-a-gun approaching, looking very malo or whatever. Before he could even try something with them, Sean shut the door with a slam loud enough to get Daniel's attention.
"You good?" Said his brother, eyes not leaving the screen.
IthinkIjustreversedtime.
He didn't say that, of course. He didn't say anything at all.
That seemed to be the wrong move because Daniel's worry only seemed to increase. He actually put down his phone, which probably meant he was mere seconds from losing his shit, too.
Daniel's hand was on his shoulder. "Is everything alright?"
Sean was frozen on his ground, staring at the closed door without seeing.
"Yeah," he responded automatically because the last thing he wanted to do at that moment was to worry his brother. He wasn't even sure what had happened, anyway. "I thought I saw something, but it was nothing'"
Daniel still didn't look convinced. Maybe it was because he was smart, or maybe because he had been living with Sean as his only fatherly figure long enough to just know when he was lying to his face. "You know you can talk to me, right?"
Sean scoffed at that.
"Hey, I'm the parent here, right? He finally turned around from the door and faced the concerned look in his brother's expression. "I told you I'm fine. Now go text Gabriela back, or she'll think you forgot about her"
Daniel's ears went red, because Gabriela is just a friend, shut the fuck up Sean, but he did as he was told. Without another word, Sean went upstairs, into his room, locked the door, and only there lost his tremendous shit.
It had probably been nothing. Maybe the joint he had smoked a few hours prior had had a very shitty late effect or something. For all he knew, dude-with-a-gun could've been going somewhere else to terrorize people in any of the other houses, the way pandilleros liked to do for some fucked up reason.
But he was sure he had seen it. Could almost still feel the fear of seeing Daniel held at gunpoint, looking mortified like he hadn't seen him in a while. Could still feel his arm stretched between his brother and the gun. Could still feel how time went back. And all of a sudden there had been no gun, no dude, no fear.
No fucking way.
He picked up a glass from his nightstand and dropped it to the floor, watching it shatter. He could almost hear Daniel beginning to yell what the fuck was that when he lifted his hand and practically saw the glass go back to the nightstand, go back to being a whole as if nothing had happened.
For a moment, it felt like everything was still. The glass left unshattered. Daniel, unaware, texting downstairs.
Sean, losing his fucking mind.
Notes:
I'm stillbeautifulthings on tumblr 3
Chapter 2: Eyes on the Horizon
Notes:
Title comes, once again, from Breathe from In The Heights.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
They never got an explanation for Daniel's telekinesis, not really.
Over those eight months, they met many people who, one way or another, got to know about the powers. Chris. Claire and Stephen. Finn, Cassidy, and Jake. Everyone in Away. A cult of white people who swore to be true Catholics or whatever. So many people, so many different reactions, and yet it never stopped amazing Sean just how hard they all tried to make it about themselves. Some more than others, of course, but it was like the second Daniel showed them the powers he stopped being a kid, and he became something else. A blessing. A sign from God. A one-way ticket to becoming a millionaire. An enigma. A way to make history. A proof of faith.
Sean only saw him as a kid though. A kid that was growing up way too fast, a kid that was his responsibility. For Sean, Daniel didn't gain worth the moment he showed he could move stuff by just looking at it, because Daniel was already worthy from before. That was what Dad had always taught them and what Sean had tried to inculcate in Daniel from the moment he could: to family, you should be able to be whoever you want to be and still be worthy of their love, appreciation, and even praise, sometimes.
He couldn't look at his little brother and see a future accomplishment, or money, or a God that had neglected them. Because when he looked at Daniel all he saw were his eyes, always looking up to him as if after everything he still held all of the answers.
He supposed that was all the proof of faith he ever needed.
So, one day, after they'd made it to Puerto Lobos, Sean bought himself a beer and Daniel a soda. He sat his brother on the beach and asked what he wanted to do about his powers, assured him that whatever direction he wanted to take was okay.
"I still want to use them," he had spoken after thinking it over, whilst looking at the sea. "Sometimes. I wanna use it to like, reach for stuff or whatever, and if someone wants to take over the house again or something, I want to protect us, but- "
He went quiet for a while, and Sean let him find the right words, as he took sips of his beer and stared at the ocean. Daniel was still shaken up from everything that happened at the border, (and later with the pandilla), if his constant nightmares were anything to go by, but his powers were still precious to him. Something only he could do. Something he could use for good.
"I don't want anybody else to know about them. At least until we know people here are good, you know?" Daniel was sitting on his good side, so Sean didn't have to turn too much to see him. He was thinking about Lisbeth: it was clear in his expression, in his eyes, in the way his brow furrowed in something in between anger and confusion.
Sean was angered to no end by the fact that there was nothing he could do against Lisbeth. That even after they left her behind in another country, Daniel still could never escape her. Could never escape the small version of her living on his brain, the small voice she had given him without asking that spoke nothing but doubts and fears into his already troubled mind.
"I know, enano" was what he ended up saying, as he wrapped his brother in a hug. He didn't know how else to communicate how sorry he was, sorry that Daniel had to go back to that camp bleeding and alone, sorry that he got his ability to trust taken away from him so dramatically, sorry that he hadn't been there to stop it.
Daniel seemed to get it, though. Because if Sean's hug said "I'm sorry", his said "It's okay"
So, they never went looking for answers, never tried to find the source of whatever made him so special. It seemed like a great idea at the time. It seemed like a great idea for years and years. It seemed like a great idea until Sean found himself staring at a glass that wasn't broken, wondering why the fuck they had never even bothered to find answers to Daniel's fucking telekinesis.
The rational part of his brain knew why. It was because he respected Daniel, respected whatever his desires were, respected his growing up process, and would have done anything to ensure him the peace Puerto Lobos had given him.
But maybe if they had the slightest idea of where Daniel's power came from, then maybe he would understand a little better what the fuck was going on with him at that moment. Maybe he wouldn't be so lost, staring at a perfectly normal glass without a single crack on it and feeling like he was on the biggest, weirdest, most realistic dream he had ever had.
Sean didn't let himself freak out at first, though. He needed to be sure it was real.
He smashed the glass again. Reversed. Smashed it again. Reversed and the glass was still there, intact in an almost mocking way. Tried to smash it again but it went against his foot, sharp glass cutting through his skin. Reversed before he could yell, and all of a sudden, the pain went away and his foot was intact, just like the fucking glass was.
He stared at the skin that was bleeding mere seconds prior and allowed that new, incredibly heavy feeling to fall on him. Briefly remembered that that was what he always did, through those eight months, and later in Puerto Lobos: follow whatever his gut told him to do in a bad situation and only let the weight of it come crushing on him after he was way behind return point.
Crossing the border. Running out of that hospital. Scaping the crime scene that had become of his house, of the only home he had ever known.
It had all seemed justified, then, on the second it took him to decide where their lives would head to from that point. The only way was forward, the only option to keep running, to try his damn hardest to get both him and Daniel safely to Mexico. To peace. To home, once and for all.
His decisions would come crushing on him, though. Late at night, as he failed to sleep. As he fixed cars and tried to remember when his life had turned into what it was. When he watched Daniel and realized how little he looked like a kid, knowing it was his fault. They came like a crushing weight that he only managed to shake off on the run.
But he had no reason to run and hadn't had one for many years. He was at the end of the line; had been for a while. All he had focused on for the previous six years had been trying to get stability for him and Daniel, to make good use of the money they had (the one they made with the garage and the one the pandilleros had left behind, all kept away in a safe).
But most importantly, he had focused on letting Daniel be whoever he wanted to be. All he wanted was for him to have the opportunities Sean didn't, be as much of a good role model as he could be, after all that had happened.
He really thought they had found peace. They got visits and letters from family and friends, more than they ever had before. They were loved in the neighborhood. They had a job and school. They had each other, for as long as they could. Sean really thought the craziest part was as over as it could be.
As much as he struggled to sleep at night, as much as every single decision he made on those eight months haunted him like an old ghost, and as much as he struggled to find joy in fixing cars, he thought he was done. Thought that what he had was as peaceful and as good as it got for him, the end line and nothing else ahead.
The non-shattered glass on his nightstand said otherwise.
He had no idea how it, whatever the fuck it was, even worked. How far back could he go? Was it only for fixing up glasses and stopping bullets, or could he actually change the past?
4th of July 2017. 24th of February 2017. 28th of motherfucking October 2016.
The possibility was enough to make him go dizzy. It excited him and terrified him so much it made it hard to breathe. Maybe he had just reversed time too much trying to break that glass.
So, he decided to lay flat on his bed and let the possibility of it all run over him, its weight not crushing but lifting Sean high enough for him to do what he hadn't done since the moment he picked his tiny nine-year-old brother up and went on the run.
He looked back to the road behind him. Wondered how to fix it.
Sean woke up to the sound of his name being yelled.
"Sean! Dinner's ready!"
Right. He must've had fallen asleep while staring at the roof and letting everything sink in, like the middle-aged man Daniel swore he was.
It was Daniel's turn to do dinner that day, and as he went down the stairs, Sean thought that that was something he never did when he was Daniel's age. As much as he helped Dad when he could, there were things he believed children shouldn't have to do on their own, cooking being one of them.
But Daniel had a different reality to work on. Had a better understanding of family that Sean could've imagined him ever having before everything went down. Sean knew he could lean on Daniel as much as Daniel knew he could lean on Sean. Daniel did chores when Sean cooked, and the other way around. Sean fixed cars and got them stability, and Daniel made sure to protect that stability from any pandilleros that still wanted to begin shit.
They were a duo. Sean wondered and feared how much him reversing time could change that.
"I made pasta!" Daniel declared when Sean appeared in the kitchen. "You know, I think this closest any of us have gotten to the original one."
Sean raised an eyebrow "We'll see about that"
Managing to get Dad's pasta a la Diaz just right had been a debate topic ever since they settled in Puerto Lobos. None of them had ever bothered to learn the recipe, given that it was right there, all the time. But, a lot later, when they finally started cooking proper meals for themselves, like, real meals, they began missing it.
The first time it was brought up it was by Daniel, a week or so after they had settled into the house. Sean had been putting together a grocery list with Daniel's help, for the first time in his life. He had suggested adding pasta, because he didn't know what else to put, and Daniel had said it would never be as good as Dad's.
(That led to them crying and holding each other all afternoon, thoughts of grocery lists forgotten. Sean thought that that was the first time they truly let themselves grieve the death of their father, the loss of everything they once knew. Afterward, he felt lighter than he had in what felt like lifetimes).
So, they eventually decided to try cooking pasta until it felt like Dad's, even if they ended up never getting it right. Sometimes they would do it together and sometimes not, always varying the recipe and writing it down. They eventually got a notebook for it, and then it really became a thing.
"And?" Daniel asked after Sean took a bite.
"Good. Like, really good. I still don't think it's there yet, though," Sean tried to think of a good reason why it didn't feel like the one. "I think it needs more pepper maybe? You're better than me at species, man."
That got Daniel into a rant about species and which ones were best like he was some kind of forty-year-old amateur chef. It made Sean smile, how passionate he managed to maintain himself about the things he loved, after everything. It still wasn't enough to get his mind out of the time controlling thing, but it got close.
He had no idea where to begin analyzing what was going on with him. It felt as if he could reverse time for the rest of his life, shatter a million more glasses, and it still would feel like some surreal thing that couldn't possibly be happening to him.
But it was happening to him.
And as Daniel continued his rant, Sean could not help but let his thoughts wander back to what had caused the whole thing. Was it just the universe playing tricks on him? Was there a scientific and complicated explanation behind the whole thing? Was it in his blood, linking him to Daniel in a way nobody could've suspected?
Or maybe it was God. Maybe not the God of the people in Haven Point claimed to worship to justify their fucked-up worldview, but maybe some God. A God that was playing dice, a God that wouldn't speak back to them, unless-
"I need to go."
Daniel, who had been in the middle of discussing why oregano was overrated looked at him as if he had gone mad. He probably had.
"What? Where are you gonna go? It's already dark."
"Church."
"What?"
It came out of Sean without his permission, a thought he hadn't even begun to process presented in front of his very confused brother. But it made sense, too. As much as he didn't want anything to do with organized religion, maybe there he would find the answers his brain couldn't come up with.
Daniel was still looking at him, though. He looked not only confused but betrayed under that. Like he couldn't believe what possibly would make Sean run into the arms of a God that had only caused them pain before telling him what was wrong.
Sean couldn't bear to look at it. So he lifted his hand, and just like the glass, Daniel was back to normal, continuing his rant about species of all things.
It was a thousand times more surreal than watching the glass break over and over, in a bad way. It felt like he had silenced his brother, somehow. As if his concerns and betrayal were nothing but an easy-to-fix mistake.
He still needed to go to the church, though. It felt as if his body was aching to go, to stand on the quiet chapel of Puerto Lobos. Even if he couldn't figure out why exactly he needed to go so badly, the urge to go was so loud it blurred out every other thought.
He didn't dramatically stand up when he tried again, though. Instead, he pulled out his best oh shit I just remembered something face and gasped, cutting Daniel's rant again.
"Fuck. I just remembered I have to go to Claudia's."
"What, right now? It's already dark."
It was so close to what he'd said last time that it nearly took Sean's breath away. Luckily, he had seven years of experience of putting a good face for Daniel whilst everything else crumbled.
"Yeah, I forgot to give her keys back, and she said to go after dinner, didn't I tell you?"
The lie came so easily it made him feel shame. But Daniel seemed to buy it, given that he said nothing else as Sean left the house, leaving his barely eaten dinner on the table to grow cold.
The chapel wasn't far from their house, but in the few minutes it took him to get there he couldn't manage to think about anything else than getting to church already. He had no idea what he would accomplish going there, didn't know if God themself was going to show up and speak their wisdom or whatever. But he knew he had to go, just like he knew he had to run away, all those years back.
He got into the chapel, empty of anyone else but him, and sat in one of the stools. Wondered why the fuck he was there. Tried praying, immediately stopped. Started looking around, wondering what he was trying to find. The chapel echoed the silence in his mind, offering no consolation to the confusion he was feeling.
The place didn't have too many decorations on it, so it wasn't weird that a painting of the Virgin Mary at the end of the hallway caught his eye. He got closer to it, his eye scanning the portrait as if it was the most interesting thing to ever happen. He felt captivated by it, almost like she was looking back at him, her sad eyes looking through his eye straight into his soul.
But then her eyes started sparkling. Turned blue. Began shining a blinding light.
And like that, Sean realized he wasn't even close to being done with the craziest things to happen in his life.
Notes:
I'm stillbeautifulthings on tumblr 3
Chapter 3: Dream of Endless Summer
Notes:
Title comes from "Everything I Know" from In the Heights.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Before Haven Point, Sean had only been to a church once in his life, back when he was not older than ten years old.
Dad had been going to church for a few months, back then. He had started going right after Karen had grabbed her things and left them, or at least that was what Sean's foggy memory recalled.
(What he did remember was the bitterness that was beginning to form in him, that infuriating feeling that only got sharper whenever the subject of his mother was brought up. For six years, it would only get worse, making him blame his mother for any and every problem he faced).
Looking back, Sean supposed Dad went to church to find some sense of calm, or maybe peace, that would allow him to let go of that same bitterness that seemed to be choking his eldest son. To find it in himself to forgive Karen, even if she had given him nothing worth his forgiveness.
Sean would only find it in himself to forgive her once the road had stripped him from any familiarity, from any sense of calm. He would only see the appeal of the love his mother was offering when he had absolutely no one else to turn to, only once he understood the worth of having someone capable willing to help you.
But Dad hadn´t needed any of that to forgive Karen and move on. Just some hours alone in his room after bedtime and going to church every other Sunday.
(Or maybe he had been chasing an entirely different feeling, maybe he had been trying to feel like he was in the chapel in Puerto Lobos again. Maybe he had been trying to remember how his life was when the path of his life was open and wide before him, no mistakes yet, no commitments, nothing but hope, and a desire to see as much of the world as he could. But maybe it was something entirely different, and his reasons for going to church would remain one of the many questions Sean could never ask him).
The point was that one of those Sundays, Sean had asked if he could go to church with him instead of staying with Andrew because he really disliked Andrew. Plus, he had reasoned in his child-brain, he had been so bored that day that anything else had sounded better than having to watch TV near Andrew's bad-smelling ponytail, hoping two-year-old Daniel wouldn't begin crying for no reason like he always did.
Dad had seemed amused, the way he always seemed to be with Sean's ideas. It was maybe because even then Sean was a little reserved with whatever came into his mind, only speaking things out loud when drawing them failed. It was comforting to know that, even after everything, he was still like that. That there were bits of himself time and pain hadn't been able to take away.
Always one to make sure people were comfortable, Dad had asked Sean if he was sure. Had told him he would have to be very quiet at church, and then during the service, and also never leave his side, ever.
Sean had agreed, because he didn't want to spend the afternoon with Andrew and because he liked going out one-on-one with Dad. And so they went.
The first thing he remembered noticing was how cold the church was. It had been as if all the summer warmth of the outside had been sucked out of the air as soon as they walked in. Sean had wanted to ask Dad about it, but there had been something about the church that told him to stay quiet. Like he shouldn't disturb whatever was going on there, like in a test or a museum.
There were angels painted on the ceiling, and Sean spent the entire service looking at them. He remembered being mesmerized by how pretty the colors were and by how distant the painting felt, as far as if it was in the actual sky. It was beautiful and remote, just like those memories would eventually become.
The chapel in Puerto Lobos hardly ever got as cold as that church, because in Mexico it was impossible to keep any place cold for too long. If the church in Seattle had been all high roofs and marble, the chapel Puerto Lobos resembled something more like a big cabin, homey in a way that took whatever made the other one striking and threw it away.
It didn't have anything great about it, nothing that made it intimidating or imposing. It was just a fancy house. One that neither Sean nor Daniel had shown any interest in visiting, not until that night.
And it felt imposing at that moment. Because Virgin Mary's eyes were shining, and everything was too bright to see, and all his brain could think of was an endless loop of what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fu-
For a single second, he couldn't see anything, the light blinding him entirely. And then the chapel went back to being like it was before, for the most part.
The first difference Sean noticed was that the temperature seemed to have gone several degrees down, making the place feel as cold as the church in Seattle had felt. But maybe weirder was the fact that everything seemed to be glowing somehow, blue light coming out of everything and giving the place a weird atmosphere. It felt like wearing sunglasses indoors, the colors different from what he knew they were.
At first, he was too busy taking all of that in to look at the painting of the virgin again. But when he did, he realized with a special kind of fear (the kind he reserved for only the most fucked up things that had ever happened to him) that she was gone. The background of the painting was still there, making it look as if she had simply gone out and was soon to return.
Still staring at the empty painting at the end of the chapel, he wondered once again how much the joint he had smoked that morning had truly affected him. But it couldn't have been that much, could it? There was an important difference between the effects of weed and LSD, and Sean, who had never had an interest in finding it, supposed something like what he was living would probably align itself more with the latter.
Maybe it really was God's doing, his brain was saying, rational thought as gone as the missing Virgin. Maybe God had given him powers for whatever reason and had sent the painting of the virgin to explain it to him. A biblical scholar would've told him that that didn't make sense, that wasn't how God worked, but Sean had never had an interest in befriending biblical scholars, and so it made sense to him.
He turned around, looking for the Virgin Mary and unsurprisingly not finding her. However, there was a woman, sitting in the middle of the altar looking straight at him, straight through him.
Until that moment, Sean thought he had lived a pretty crazy life. His dad had been unfairly shot. His brother had telekinesis. He had been on the run eight months jumping on trains, trimming weed for a living, walking through desserts, and breaking in through borders. He had come to live in a country he had never set a foot on, had pushed through to build a life in it, and had been haunted by pandilleros on top of it. As recently as that morning, he had discovered he could reverse time. And still, somehow, he felt like just looking at her was the wildest, weirdest thing to ever happen to him. It was so weird there was no way it wasn't a dream, no way she was real, but also no way he could make up someone like that.
The woman in front of him seemed timeless as if she was at any point between twenty and one hundred. She was wearing the same clothes Virgin Mary had been wearing, a big, blue, really old dress that seemed to fade into the floor and made it look as if she was floating. That was where the similarities with the Virgin ended though. Her hair was dark and untamed, reminding Sean of a night without stars, of trying to look through where his left eye should be. Her skin looked like porcelain, white and glowing, making her look not-so-human.
But that was not what Sean noticed first, because the first thing anyone would see in her would be her eyes. They were too big, too blue and too bright, resembling something like a lantern. They were also staring at him, in a way that left his blood cold and his body on alert.
She reminded Sean of a character he would draw, something otherworldly that went beyond his understanding. Maybe when it was all over, he would sit down and try to draw her from memory. Maybe then it would truly sink in how weird everything happening to him was. But he had some more important things to think about at that moment.
Was she the reason that everything was glowing the same shade of blue as her eyes? Was she the reason there was no warmth in the air, everything cold to the point where he felt his soul could freeze? Was she actually sent by God, somehow? Was she the reason for the things beyond his understanding?
She made Sean want to run the other way. To go as far from the chapel as he could and make sure that Daniel was okay. To never look at those eyes ever again, eyes that seemed to already know him anyway.
But he had tried running a million times, and never once had it worked how he wanted it to. So he took a step closer.
"Who are you?"
His voice came out with an echo, for some reason. As if he were speaking through water, talking to someone who felt further than they actually were. He remembered those angels in the church in Seattle, as out of reach as whatever that woman was felt.
She scoffed at him. The sound was somehow as distant as it was clear, and it briefly reminded him of the way Daniel would scoff at him sometimes, all bark and no bite.
"Is that the question you want to ask right now?" Her voice was low and a little raspy. She didn't have any sort of accent, making her sound even less human. The only thing he could trace to her tone was a slight mockery. "I'm sure a lot is happening in your mind right now, Sean Diaz; you surely don't want to add more to your plate."
He sat on the floor, in front of her. Ran a hand through his face, pinched the bridge of his nose. Closed his eye. Maybe, he thought, still clinging to that irrational hope, he would open it and wake up to realize that everything in front of was nothing but the weirdest of dreams. There would be no dude-with-a-gun, no time-reversing, no frozen chapel, and no lady with bright, blue eyes. Just his room, his garage, and his somewhat normal life.
When he opened his eye, the chapel was still glowing, the woman still there. He wanted to cry. He didn't, though. There were questions he needed to be answered if his life was going to be like that. Run first, then let it come crashing down on you. And if he couldn't run, if he wouldn't run, at least he would get something out of whatever the fuck his situation was, before it became too much for him to handle.
The woman, whoever or whatever she was, wasn´t Virgin Mary, and definitely hadn't been sent by God. But she was his only chance, it appeared, to understand what was going on with him.
"Did you have anything to do with what I did? With the dude at the garage?"
A smile. Her lips were barely visible from the glow of her eyes, but Sean could tell it was a smile. Maybe she was smiling because he didn't ask why she knew his name or something else that she probably wouldn't have responded to, anyway. Whoever she was, Sean had a feeling she didn't like wasting time.
"Didn't take you long to figure it out. Yes, that was me; it's usually me when things like that happen. And before you ask, no, I had nothing to do with what happened to your brother".
Maybe in another universe where he hadn't dealt with racists at every turn, religious cults, and people kidnapping him, all while he was still sixteen, her comment would've angered him. As it was, her mocking tone just vaguely annoyed him. He didn't like the way she had said "your brother", and maybe on a less tiring day, he would've fought her over that. But at that moment, all he could bring himself to do was to sigh and try a different angle.
"But you had to do with my thing, then? Having had dealt with many we-do-things-my-way people before, Sean opted to keep his tone light without letting it come off as naïve. It was the best you could do in those situations if you actually wanted to get answers. "What are you, some kind of bored god going around and making people reverse time? Trust me, nothing is interesting enough in my life to be worth that much effort"
She laughed then. As much as Sean didn't find it amusing, he was starting to get curious about what her deal was.
(He was still toying with the accidental hallucination theory in his head though).
"' Some kind of God' is as close as humans can come to comprehend me, yes" she started pacing around the room, the dress still giving the floating-like effect. As she did, Sean realized it was longer and more detailed than the one Virgin Mary wore. It made it seem as if she had looked at the design someone had painted centuries ago and decided to add her own notes. "I am the passage of time. I control intertwining timelines from different universes, in essence. Make sure everything goes according to some sort of plan. What you see and hear is the manifestation I use whenever I have to speak to a living being, like yourself."
She paused, maybe to give him time to let everything in.
Only that he couldn't do that because his brain was stuck in the "passage of time" thing. He was lucky he was still sitting on the floor because such a weird concept would've probably made him take a lot of awkward steps back. He desperately didn't get it. Was she like the ticking of a clock? The reason seconds moved? Was she the fucking seconds?
He asked her that exactly.
"I control the seconds," was her response, the smile never leaving her face. Like he was a kid in kindergarten, adorable and stupid, needing the most basic things explained to him. Maybe he was, in that specific scenario.
"I don't want to confuse you too much; it wouldn't be productive. But time is fluid. Messy. Things would go wrong in ways they shouldn't, without me. I don't fix human's mistakes, don't get it wrong. I just make sure everything stays in the right place. That different timelines don't get mixed up and that time travelers don't cause too much trouble"
"Travelers? As in like, multiple travelers?" He asked, trying not to sound too desperate about what her answer might be. Not that he cared that much, anyway. It would have been refreshing to know there were people out there going through the same things as he was, (the way that hanging out with the crew every summer was refreshing), but it wasn't something that would've really made a difference.
Sean had spent several years keeping Daniel and himself afloat, with no real help but his own. Time reversing or not, he would be fine by himself. And even if he wasn't, he would find a way to be (which was what ended up happening most of the time, anyway).
"Travelers as in like, people in other timelines that have managed to travel through time before me stopping them. If I picked you out it's because the people on this timeline haven't figured out how to travel yet, likely never will," she paused, looking briefly lost in her thoughts. Sean wondered whether she had thoughts, and that was a whole can of worms he definitely didn't want to go around opening.
"There was that girl, though," she continued. "The only other time traveler in this universe. She had her powers given and taken away by me, though. The same way I gave you yours."
There was something odd in her tone. Not a bad odd, though. It reminded Sean of that day Daniel had arrived home looking all smug and proud, refusing to tell him what had happened.
(He had gotten Gabriela's number; Sean would find out after days of annoying his brother into telling him. That would begin their six-month-old discussion of Oh my God boys and girls can be just friends please stop talking Sean and As someone whose best friend is a girl, and as someone that can tell the difference between just liking someone and being into someone, I am begging you to cut the crap and ask her out. The discussion went as recently as that morning, right after Sean's world had decided to yet again turn around in a complicated, overtly confusing way).
If she hadn't been an eternal deity of some kind, it would have been funny that she sounded like a teenager trying to be serious. As things were, it just made Sean increasingly worried about his near-future
"Can you tell me why, then?" He decided to try again with the whole getting answers bit, maybe more direct ones that time. "Like, what am I supposed to do with the whole, time-traveling thing? Cause I'm a little lost."
"Yeah, you usually are." She sighed. Sean must have given her a confused expression because she actually bothered to continue her explanation "I've tried this before. In other timelines, universes, whatever you want to call it. It takes you weeks to figure out how to make the powers work in the way you want them to. You even tell your brother most times, which also makes you lose time. So, I thought I'd step up and help you, see what happens".
Sean really, really, wanted to ask why she cared enough about him to give him powers multiple times, across different timelines. Why she cared enough about the whole situation to present herself to him, as risky as that probably was. How she gave him the powers in the first place. He didn't though. He got a feeling he wasn't getting any more answers out of her. He also got a feeling that wouldn't the last time he saw her, so.
"Help me do what?"
That got her attention if how she stopped pacing was anything to go by. She looked at him, sparkling blue eyes back on him, just as intense as they had been the first time.
"What you've always wished you could. Go back to October 28thof 2016"
And if it was a dream, Sean suddenly never wanted to wake up.
When they stepped outside, the first thing he noticed was that all of Puerto Lobos seemed to be stuck in the same blue glow the chapel had been.
"Did you freeze time or something?"
She nodded. "That's why our voices sound a little distant. This is a little groove in time I can make, where everything stops except for whoever or whatever I decide. This is the only place I can manifest myself in a physical form. When time starts running again, I'm back to being a presence."
Sean got it enough for him to understand what was going on. He didn't think about it too hard though, because the whole "going back to being a presence" thing sounded like nothing but a migraine to him.
They started walking back to his house, exactly where she had told him to go. As he tried to focus on anything but the fact that he was somehow existing in a frozen spot in time, about to do something that filled him in equal parts with fear and hope, it occurred to him that he didn't have a name for the eternal deity walking by his side. Figures.
"I don't really do names," she said when he asked, her voice sounding distant even though she was right there, in that weird way he supposed he would have to get used to. She wasn't walking, he realized, as much as her dress was moving swiftly across the pavement without making a sound. He tried not to think about how ghostly she was. There was no point. And besides, he would much rather be stuck with her, whatever she truly was, than with half the people he had met on the road, so.
"Other entities do," she continued, not realizing how Sean was still staring at the point where her dress met the floor, waiting for feet to pop up that never would. "Things like 'Wind' or 'Seas' or whatever. In one timeline though, I introduced myself to your brother, and he called me 'Lady Time'. She sounded fond of the memory, which was something Sean would've never imagined an eternal being could be. "It's the only name I've ever liked".
"Lady Time it is, then," he said, because the thought of a Daniel Diaz from another timeline saying something his Daniel would probably say, too, was simply too much for him to process at that moment, maybe ever.
They made it to the house in silence, unless Lady Time could hear the way his heart was turning with anxiety.
When they eventually arrived, he did exactly what she had told him to do, back at the chapel. Went to his room. Picked up his sketchbook, the one from all those months on the run. The one he kept stored on the prettiest box he could find, tucked away like it was a precious historical artifact. For him, it was, if he was being honest.
He was going back to where he had come from when the sight of Daniel, who was still in the kitchen, stopped him dead in his tracks. He was obviously frozen, so he didn't see his older brother sneaking around. Sean still stopped though, almost by second nature, to look at him. Daniel was sitting on the counter, looking at his phone. There was a frown on his face, and Sean couldn't tell if it was because of something on the phone or if he was worried about him coming home.
It took everything in Sean to not call quits on that very moment, the fear of Daniel being left all alone, somehow still existing after what Sean was about to do too terrifying for him to keep going.
But he had to. It was what they had always wanted. The one moment that changed everything, that destroyed their days and haunted their nights. The one thing they both always wished they could go back and change. He owed doing it to Daniel as much as he owed it to himself.
He hugged frozen Daniel, tightly. Ran a hand through his hair. Tried not to think about the possibility that that might be the last time he got to do that, at least like the way he had been doing it for the past seven years. The last time he got to hold him, the last time he got to be big brother, the last time he got to call himself a part of the best duo that had ever existed.
He tried not to think about how the entire relationship he and Daniel had built over the years would change with what he was about to do. Tried not to think about how nothing had mattered more than Daniel for years and years, and it might not anymore, from one second to another. Tried not to think about how the decision he was making was another one that might come to haunt him when he couldn't sleep, how he was mere minutes away from letting go of everything he knew.
So instead of thinking, he swallowed hard and focused his undivided attention on the embrace he was giving his brother. He hoped Daniel could feel it, somehow. That he knew that no matter what happened, he was on his side.
"I love you, enano" he whispered to his brother's hair, just like he had millions of times. Only that Daniel wouldn't hear it, maybe never would again. He let go before he could regret it, and like that he was out of the kitchen, and on the outside, where everything was still frozen.
"Well?"
"I've got it."
Lady Time nodded. Watched him as he opened the sketchbook, as he searched for his last note before everything went down.
OCT 28th 2016
HALLOWEED PARTY ERICS
-BRING SHIT w/LYLA
-TXT JENN
-BE COOL
He almost laughed at the seriousness he gave to something so stupid. At how his brain used to work, what his priorities felt like. He knew it wasn't fair to past Sean, but he had never felt as far from that carefree sixteen-year-old as he did at that moment.
"Whenever you're ready, time traveler"
He nodded briefly. Then focused on the page, allowing the memories to come crashing into him, taking him back to the worst day of his entire life. Closed his eye, and he could almost feel it, what his room was like, the way the light came in, the smell of the grass, how everything in Seattle felt like a piece of home for so many years.
When he opened his eyes, he wasn't in Mexico anymore.
Notes:
I'm stillbeautifulthings on tumblr 3
Chapter 4: Promises for Me To Keep
Notes:
Title comes from "96,000" from In The Heights.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
As he opened his eyes, he realized two things, both of which managed to send a shiver down his spine that might have been fear or might have been excitement, probably something more like hope. First, he could actually see through both eyes. Second, from one moment to another, he had stopped being on a Mexican beach and was in what appeared to be an American classroom.
The first fact distracted him from really noticing the other one for a few minutes, mostly because his reaction was to immediately close his eyes again. His left eye being, well, not being, was something that, as unpleasant and distressing as it had been, he had gotten used to over the years. Having only his right field of vision was his normal, and it took a while for his brain to accept that there was a new normal from that point and on.
Eventually, he managed to pull himself together enough to open his eyes again, and that was when he noticed the other confusing and stressful fact: he was in a school, as a student.
Sean had ended up going to school multiple times over the years, but never as a student. He had walked and picked up Daniel from the one at Puerto Lobos a million times until he turned fourteen and decided he was too old to be walked to school anymore. Other than that, Sean had had his fair share of parent-teacher meetings, and sometimes even been there to cheer Daniel on competitions and presentations.
A few times, and only a few, he had minded feeling like the youngest parent there. But it was something that came with the package of taking care of your brother fully, the package he had taken without even thinking that day.
"Today." His brain chanted, and the feeling of maybe-fear-probably-hope came back at full force.
He had gone over the day thousands of times in his head, over the years. He had thought about it from start to end, every detail that had seemed dull at the time gaining more worth and notability as he got further from it, further from the entire life it had contained.
That meant that he knew where he was. He was in his last period before lunch, American history. They were watching a documentary, only that Sean hadn't been watching it. Sean had been doodling in his sketchbook, had only just finished the to-do list current-Sean was looking at, the same dumb list he had held outside of his house in Puerto Lobos, seven years in the future.
He passed the page. There was nothing but white pages, a story that had yet to be written.
Fuck, he felt as if he was possessing someone.
He remembered that version of himself as a dream, like a past life that couldn't stand further from who he was. He supposed that even if nothing had happened that day (today!) he would still feel the same way. He wasn't sixteen anymore, he was twenty-three. It had been seven years since he'd had to sit at a desk and watch a documentary on the founding fathers he wouldn't remember as soon as he stepped out of the classroom, doodling to pass time and thinking about parties.
But it was what Lady Time had said would happen." Focus on the page, and you'll be back to the moment you drew it. You'll have a couple of hours, then. Should be enough to do what you want to do."
"Why my sketchbook?" He had asked, still in the church, feeling dazzled that something so simple could fix his entire fucking life.
"Whatever holds memories works. Photos, drawings, souvenirs. It's easier with images, but the object needs to be tied to a specific moment in time. That's how you travel there."
He wondered how long it would've taken him to figure that out on his own. Days? A week? Months? Never, leaving him forever haunted by the possibilities of an ability he didn't understand?
Sean looked around the classroom, then. That was when the realization hit that it just couldn't be a dream anymore. Everything was way more detailed than he remembered it. The walls. The documentary playing as background music to his mind. Every single person in the room, looking more real than what Sean could ever conjure up in his mind. He didn't even remember the name of most people sitting around him, let alone what their faces looked like.
There was something on his desk that hadn't been there when he originally lived through that day. It was a ring, with a blue sort of gem thing sitting on top of it. There was a note next to it, written with a blue pen, in his handwriting.
"Time stops when you think of me"
Sean almost snorted. Suddenly, everything went back to feeling like a dream, too ridiculous to be happening to him.
(He still put the ring on, though. Just in case he really needed her).
He wanted to get the day moving, but the fun thing about American high schools (or any school, he supposed) was that time seemed to slow down, time traveler or not. The lecture still had half an hour to go, and Sean almost regretted making Daniel sit through hours of something similar to it every day. Almost.
His boredom drove him to look around the classroom, trying to remember anything about the people he was sitting with. There was a girl he did a group project with, once. A dude that used to pick on him in middle school until Dad came and bothered direction enough for them to do something about it. There were a few girls and fewer boys he'd had crushes on at multiple points in time, although he only saw some of them as crushes looking back.
Sean could recognize what he saw in them back then, even if they all looked like children to current-him. The girls with their soft hands, pretty smiles, and long hair. The boys with their defined jaws, beautiful eyes, and strong backs. Things that made him turn his eyes away, face burning for reasons beyond him.
He thought of Finn and Cassidy then, and some of his neighbors, and the extremely rare occasions when a client caught his eye. The attraction he felt for people, regardless of gender, was something he never gave much thought to. He just liked them, their eyes or their smiles or whatever, and then moved on with his life. He was too busy with everything else to pursue relationships, anyway.
Sean had explained that to Lyla once, in that window of time after the California crew had left town but she was still in, lingering a little longer. They had been lying side by side on the beach behind his house, afternoon sun warming Sean up, giving him that feeling of calm he would spend the rest of the year quietly chasing.
"Are you coming out to me right now?" She had said, turning her head from the sky to look at him properly.
"I hadn't come out to you already?" He had asked in return, turning to look at her, too. They had stared at each other for a brief second before exploding into a fit of giggles loud enough to make Daniel go see what the big deal was.
("Just for the record, I already knew," she would tell him later that evening, after the sun was gone and Daniel was away in his room. "I've known since you ditched me as your pair on the sixth grade to do that science project with cute-eyes Brian." Sean would laugh then, and simply say "I mean, he did have cute eyes").
He wondered where Lyla was at that very moment. Back in the day, they both had each other's schedules memorized, that way it just happens when you are friends with someone for so long. He didn't remember anymore, but the thought made him realize that there was no way he could go from school to his house with her anymore. She would see right through him, because she knew him better than he knew himself, probably. His only consolation was that, had the roles been reversed, he would've noticed something was wrong with Lyla as efficiently as she would with him.
He spent the rest of the lecture thinking about what he was going to do once it was over, which was something that, if he actually were sixteen and in school, he would probably be thinking about too. Only that, instead of wondering if he would take the bus home, he was more worried about managing to not give out that he wasn't actually sixteen.
If he was being honest, the problem was that it all seemed so distant. He didn't know what sixteen-year-old Sean was like, how he reacted to the world, what he saw on it. He had the general picture because he was still the same person, but the details got blurry, if not lost. He didn't remember what it was like to just exist, no real responsibilities other than school and his job at a fucking Z-mart.
"Does it ever get old?" one of their neighbors, Marta, had asked him one day after they had spent an entire afternoon eating cerezas and whining about life "To be a single parent to your own brother?"
His answer had come after maybe a bit too long.
"I don't remember how not to. It's been me and Daniel against the world for so long now, that's the only life I know how to live." Marta had nodded, understanding him in the way only old people seemed to. He mostly tried to not think too much about the implications of that.
Sad truth was, Sean had gotten to a point where he had forgotten what being a kid was like. What it felt like to worry about dumb things, listen to music too loudly, and make the world fade away by closing your bedroom door.
The world didn't just fade away for him like it used to. He couldn't just neglect responsibilities as he would with homework, because someone had to carry the house. Someone had to work, to clean, someone had to keep trying to guess Dad's secret pasta recipe that was never a secret in the first place.
He had spent the past seven years pushing himself to grow up as fast as he could. And on that moment, like a cruel twist of fate, he had to flawlessly act like that kid he had buried so deep he worried he might have drowned.
Much for time travel, right?
But then the bell went off and his thoughts went to ruins with it. As everyone put their stuff in their bags, he realized he didn't even know where to go. Sean felt as lost as he did when he had slept under that bridge, that very first night of what became the rest of his life.
He had no idea what that Sean would've done after the bell rang. No idea how he would react if someone tried talking to him. He felt like he was living on the skin of a version of himself so strange he couldn't recall anything from it. Like he was wearing an ill-fitting costume and going on stage for a play he hadn't rehearsed for.
Only that hey. He had all the time in the world to rehearse, really.
Overcome with a new sense of confidence, he ran to the bathroom and locked the door before anyone could get in. Closed his eyes, sighed, and stared at the ring on his finger.
It took him a few tries to get what he was supposed to do with the ring. Eventually, he discovered he just needed to rub it, as if he was taking imaginary dust off it.
Because when he did everything went still, and then the world glowed blue.
Lady Time didn't look very impressed to see him. She was giving him a smug look, one that said "I know something you don't". Sean couldn't help but be reminded of Daniel, who sometimes seemed to be convinced that at sixteen, he knew everything there was to know. (Daniel could probably pretend to be sixteen-year-old Sean better than twenty-three-year-old Sean could, but he wasn't going to feed into that though).
He briefly wondered how old Lady Time was, or if she could be old. After all, she did seem to act like a teenager, given how often she reminded him of Daniel. Was she like the mother of creation? Or more like a young adult that had only lived half of eternity? Whatever that meant, anyway.
"You called?"
Sean sighed, his mind regretfully going back to the present.
"Yeah. I like, really don't know what to do right now. I know you told me to act like this is the first time I'm doing this, but I don't think I can do it."
Admitting to not know something wasn't something Sean had ever been ashamed of doing. Dad had always valued honesty first, and so had taught him that it was okay that he didn't know things, that there was nothing wrong with asking questions. "How else would you learn?" Dad would say, and Sean had never had a reason to question him.
He had been shy until he couldn't afford to, though, so he didn't go around life asking strangers questions. But he had never felt shame in not knowing. Only a desire to learn, that went from drawing to fixing cars and just about anything in between.
Her expression didn't change after the admission, glowing eyes somehow making him feel dumb. She didn't respond either, for that matter. He wondered, not for the first time, what she got out of the whole thing. Was it some kind of celestial life goal for her? Would she get an award or something for giving him powers?
As confusing as it was, she was helping. At that point, all he wanted was to be done with the entire thing as soon as he could, save Dad as fast as possible. So, if an entity that claimed to somehow be the passage of time was offering long term help, well, that was more than he had gotten eight months on the run. Sean was already used to dealing with smug teenagers, anyway.
He tried a different angle.
"Look, I could go out there and play pretend or whatever," he made a gesture with his hands at that, though he wasn´t sure what it was supposed to mean. "But I'm sure I'm gonna fuck it up somehow. And that'll have consequences, right? Mess up your timeline and complicate everything for no good reason."
The smugness left her expression and she moved her hair to the side like the situation was somehow managing to stress her as well. The movement was briefly distracting, because her hair was as dark as death, and there was something weird about it. Looking at it made him feel hopeless, sad, and irrelevant in a way he usually only felt when watching the news.
He looked away and the feeling disappeared as quickly as it came.
"I mean, you usually do fuck it up," he was surprised to hear her curse, but he supposed extremely stranger things had happened. "You go around all confused and scare people off, or your friend notices you. Most of the time you just ditch and wait inside your house, though. Can't blame you. The American high school system is a nightmare, I think it was developed by the concept of Stress".
Sean couldn't tell if she was being serious or not, so he chose to not process that. Instead, he focused on his immediate problems and ignored his more complicated long-term problems, the way he had come to discover most people did.
"Right! So, isn't there a way for me to just skip through the whole school thing? Get right to the point in time I want to be in? I mean, that's kind of the whole point of time travel, isn't it?"
"I know what time travel is, Sean," she answered in an almost condescending tone, "I'm the reason it exists, so."
Sean was about to point out what she had said the previous night (Had it been a night or just a few hours? who knew, really) about humans discovering time travel in other timelines, but before he could she closed her eyes and stood still.
The glow of the Time Groove they were in seemed to dim slightly with her eyes closed. Sean looked at the bathroom he was in, and with no better options, sat on the disgusting floor, waiting for her eyes to open again. He kept getting distracted by the glow of everything. It was all so surreal. Two days ago, he wouldn't have believed he would ever go back to the States, let alone sit on the dirty floor of his ex-high school bathroom, and yet there he was.
He was supposed to be done with the whole "adventures" thing. All he wanted was to fix things, save Dad, and go home. He wondered what would be waiting for him, what would become home, but he really couldn't imagine anything. He supposed nothing could be worse than arriving at his new home only to realize it was full to the brim with pandilleros, and he had already done that, so.
If he was being completely honest with himself, the fear that had left him with had been one of the hardest ones to bury. He had spent years suppressing the urge to grab his things and brother and go deeper into Mexico. Scared that the cops or pandilleros would find them, desperate to keep running a race that would bring no end or satisfaction, just burning limbs and tiredness.
But Daniel liked it in Puerto Lobos. Liked the people, liked the school, and liked the beach, and Sean couldn't just take that away from him. So they had decided to stop running and settle down. Even if the feelings of fear and anxiety never left him, he managed to live with it.
And yet you jumped at the first chance to change things an unknown voice on his head said. Makes you wonder how well you were managing it, doesn't it?
It didn't make any difference to think about that then, he reasoned when that doubt came. It was too late, anyway. So instead, he passed time looking at the bathroom stalls, wondering how they were glowing with blue light.
Sean was busy doing that when Lady Time opened her eyes. She looked at him like she had figured something out, smiling genuinely. It made her face look less human, but he wouldn't have dared to say that out loud.
"I figured a way to keep the timeline intact without you having to live through this."
He rubbed the ring again, and suddenly nothing glowed and he could hear everything clearly, like coming out of a swimming pool. When time started again, he did exactly what she had told him to do. First, he texted Lyla to tell her that he was feeling a little sick, but would still be going to the party. Then, he made sure the bathroom was still locked.
After that, he climbed through the window and ran to the house he used to live in, so long ago.
His sixteen-year-old body was a lot more awkward than his normal body, but it did have more energy and regular track training to its favor. That mix of factors made the experience of running to the house both easier and extremely weirder.
As he ran, he wondered if any of the neighbors could see him. He didn't remember any of them, except for the one he did remember. It would be very inconvenient for that Sean to have to explain why he was running to his house hours before school ended. He didn't think anybody was home at that moment, though. Most people that lived in the suburbs worked nine to five, and there was no reason to be home at one in the afternoon.
Or so he hoped.
When he finally arrived at the house, he stopped running so fast he almost tripped. He felt as if his lungs were being ripped apart, his heart coming crashing down and his insides tying themselves to weird knots. Everything inside him seemed to be yelling something that sounded like holy motherfucking shit, this used to be my house.
It didn't scream home like he thought it would, not as much as it screamed good memories. Sean looked at the house, noticing for the first time all the things he took for granted then. How big it was. How well kept it was. How everything seemed to be quietly messy, every object there seemingly knowing its place in the universe. The porch didn't look destroyed, as he had last seen it, but rather like a place where he could sit with his best friend and enjoy the quiet.
A single tear came out of his eyes, and he allowed it to fall. Then he cleaned it and took several deep breaths like he had learned to do over the years when it all became too much. He surrounded the house until he was in front of the closed garage as he did so, focusing only on his breaths and not on the terribly familiar house. When he felt like he could breathe again, he rubbed the ring.
Lady Time smiled at him, the blue glow of everything surrounding her.
"Do you trust me, Sean?"
"Sure."
What was there to lose, right?
She grabbed his hand. All he got to think about was that it was very cold, and then everything got too bright and, fuck, it felt like he was being sucked by a motherfucking vacuum cleaner, what on the actual-
The sensation went away as quickly as it came. When he looked around, he was standing in the same position he was before, only that there was neither Lady Time nor glow and the sun was a lot lower than it had been.
Right. Fast-forwarding. That, like most things that had happened over the last twenty-four hours, made just enough sense for him to not question it, as long as he didn't think about it too hard. If he could reverse time (which he had no interest in doing at that moment), then fast-forwarding was not too far-fetched.
He slowly snuck around until he was in front of the door again, thankfully unnoticed by any prying neighbors. The late October quietness made it so that, from where he was standing, he could hear Daniel and dad bickering. Just listening to them made it incredibly hard to resist the urge to freeze time to completely lose his shit, right there, in front of Lady Time's judging eyes.
It was all so real. It was all too much.
Dad being dead was maybe the most absolute truth of his life. Dad was dead, so that cop had died. Dad was dead, so they had to run. Dad was dead, so he had to take care of Daniel. Dad was dead, so they lived in Puerto Lobos, to try to honor him somehow. Dad was dead and Sean's life had never been the same afterward. It wasn't something that he liked, but it was a fact. It was something undeniable, something he had learned to live with.
Only that at that moment, he wasn't. He hadn't died yet. Everything Sean knew was nothing but blank pages on his sketchbook, a story that had yet to be written.
His story was yet to be written. For the better, he hoped, looking at that house where nothing bad had ever happened. Where no cop had shown up for no good reason, where nothing had blown up, where no one had died. The story would be re-written for the better.
From where he was standing, Sean could see the back of the kid that had picked on Daniel and fucked up his life that afternoon. It took all the self-control he had picked up on over the years not to go there to kill him with his bare hands. He supposed that as much as sixteen-year-old Sean could be difficult sometimes, killing someone would be too out of character. Besides, he had something to do that was incredibly more terrifying than committing murder: he had to see his family again.
When he opened the door, the first thing he saw was Dad. He was standing there, alive, like that day was just like any other day and not the 28th of motherfucking October 2016. The worst day there had ever been. The day his life took a turn straight into the worst possible outcome.
No, Dad was standing behind the counter, smiling at him as he crossed the doorstep like it was any random day. Like he was just seeing his son like he did every single day, and yet it still somehow brought a smile to his face.
It was definitely too much.
Sean's brain did a funny thing. From one second to another, all the incredible waves of anxiety, the blood rushing through his veins, and his heartbeat only increasing, went numb. He was still there, at the entrance to the house, but it was like he wasn't there, there. Like his mind was floating to the ceiling. Like his brain had said, "You know what? Fuck this" and just pushed him out of control.
He could kind of hear the sound of his own voice, responding to Dad, playing along with him and Daniel. But his mind was somewhere different, only vaguely aware that he was losing control at an increasing rate.
He was in a forest, somewhere in the northwest. His hands were freezing, and he was wondering how long they would have to keep living like they were. His hair was growing, he was on his grandparents' house, but something was burning the fucking church he was in, not that he could bring himself to care. He was in California, getting high and pretending to be a teen again, only that no, he was in Arizona, looking at the dessert and feeling himself getting used to only having one eye, but again, he was really on a bus, heading who knew where and holding Daniel, telling him everything would be all right. Wasn't he always?
One single decision. Not letting Daniel come to play into his room. That was all it took for all those memories to happen, all those people to be met, all those life decisions to be made. Just one single thing needed to be done differently and everything else ceased to exist.
Only that he wasn't in any of those places. He was in his living room, the one home he had ever known, and everything he thought he was remembering was nothing but empty pages, a story only he remembered.
"You good, mijo?" There was enough worry in Dad's tone to make him remember why he had traveled back in the first place.
A smile. What else could he offer?
"Why wouldn't I be?"
Lady Time couldn't exist, per se. She only existed when time stopped, was only visible when she wasn't doing her job.
But the truth was she hadn't been doing her job in a while.
All it took was a simple question. For her mind to spin, for her to wonder as she had never done before (like she didn't think she was capable of, before). One single "why?" and there she was, giving random humans in their random timelines what they could only assume to be powers of some sort, just to see what they would do, how they would act. Over and over and over. And yet she thought her current attempt would manage to be the one.
If she were doing her job, she probably wouldn't be able to focus on a few people at the time the way she was doing. But then again, she was never too good at her job in the first place.
So she watched the eldest Diaz go through what she always saw him go through. Stay in his room. Cry, maybe. Go find an excuse to talk to his dad. Hug him as tight as he could, as soon as possible. Play with his brother without going outside. Patiently wait for the cop car to pass.
Only that, when he looked out of the window that time, for the smallest of seconds, she was there to smile at him. And all she wanted was for it to be the one. For it to actually work, for him to allow himself to have what he so obviously wanted.
Then the cop car passed. And just as he was looking through the window, time froze again.
And then it sped back seven years into the future.
Notes:
I'm stillbeautifulthings on tumblr 3
Chapter 5: From a Dream I Can't Remember
Notes:
Hi! This fic has been significantly edited, and if you were reading from before this update (28th of October of 2020) I highly suggest you go re-read the first four chapters. The plot is the same, but they've improved a lot (if I say so myself) 3
Title comes from "Hundreds of Stories" from In the Heights.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
One second Sean had been lying in his childhood room bed, Daniel playing somewhere in the house, eyes closed as he listened to the cop car leaving. Then, the next one, he was in an entirely different position and place, having had materialized fuck knew where.
The first thing he noticed was that his face was buried in what appeared to be someone else's t-shirt. The sensation was extremely disorientating, so he just closed his eyes and decided to worry about it later.
For a while, all he could do was close his eyes and breathe, tell himself that it was over and that he was okay just like he had done over a million times in his life. (Huh. Maybe he hadn't done that in that life. He had no idea what to do with that though, so instead, he continued to focus on sitting and breathing and on nothing else).
Other than the obvious, gigantic fact that he had just appeared somewhere without doing as much as blinking, there were other things to be noticed about himself. For one, he was pretty sure he was on his twenty-three-year-old body again. He felt slightly taller, and gone was the sensation of being in some weird hell of limbs and sweat.
As he continued to take in his surroundings, he realized he was sitting on what appeared to be grass. That might have meant that he was in a park, or maybe at a festival, or maybe somewhere entirely different that he could not have guessed if he tried. Sean didn't want to open his eyes and figure it out, though. All he wanted to do was keep his eyes closed and pretend like he hadn't just taken another incredibly big decision he probably could not take back.
There was no way around the fact that he was leaning on someone's back, though. He was curled upon himself, his head leaning against somewhere near the point where the stranger's shoulder met their neck. Their back was broad, but the shoulder a part of his cheek was resting in was squared, the bones slightly poking him.
In its still confused manner, his brain managed to make two decent assumptions without having to open his eyes: one, he had probably been sleeping in the stranger's back; and two, it was probably a man. He tried not to think about what it could imply to be sleeping on some man's back, and utterly failed.
Eventually, the person shifted around to look at him, and he was forced to open his eyes. And so, the two functional eyes he somehow still had begun working on trying to understand exactly what he had gotten himself into.
The first thing he noticed was that it was indeed a man. He was a little lanky, his hair was brown and curly and his face was covered in freckles and splatters of paint. He looked like the most typical art student one could think of. Sean immediately thought that he was beautiful, although he seemed a little naïve. They must have been the same age, but Sean felt that the boy in front of him was a lot younger than him, somehow. He definitely wasn't the type of person he would've noticed back in Puerto Lobos, that was for sure.
"Babe, you alright?"
For a split second, his brain short-circuited. In all twenty-three years of his life, no one had ever referred to him as babe before. There had been Finn in California (and later on in Puerto Lobos) with his constant and various terms of endearment, but over the years Sean had learned that that was just his personality and didn't necessarily mean anything by it. That "babe" was different though. It was a stranger that, as far as Sean was concerned, he had never spoken to before, who for some reason was going around letting him sleep on his back and calling him babe.
It took him aback, that was all. When he managed to internalize that new, bizarre information enough, he realized the boy was still waiting for an answer.
"Uh, yeah, you just woke me up. Haven't really been sleeping well lately."
He seemed to buy it. Sean, who had never actually been to college, assumed it wasn't precisely odd for a student in his early twenties to not be sleeping well. At least, the boy didn't say anything else as he grabbed his hand and helped him stand up, muttering something about how he needed to stop working so hard every day.
Sean wasn't listening though. He was looking at the place they were in, because holy fucking shit. He and his apparently-now-boyfriend weren't just college students, they were in their fucking college. It was all big, intimidating, and old, with grass for the students to lie on, classes for them to go to, and halls for them to walk through. It made Sean feel small in a way he couldn't describe with words but left a bitter taste on his mouth regardless.
He never got far with figuring out what exactly he wanted to do with his life, let alone college. His options were always wide, and Dad had never pressured him into getting high grades or making any decisions he knew he wasn't ready to make. It could've been art, or sports, or maybe something with science, but he never got to narrow it down. He was in the middle of toying with the idea when his life flipped upside down and suddenly college was the last thing on his mind.
The idea of going to college eventually came to mind, a few years down the road. But it was for Daniel, of course. They'd had long chats on whether or not Daniel wanted to go. As much as they loved Puerto Lobos, there was only so much it could offer, and his brother deserved to go further and do good like he truly wanted to.
If anyone had spoken to Sean about college at the age of fourteen, he would've probably shrugged without interest. But even then, Daniel got it. He understood why it was important for him to do something like that. You could do something with state colleges, and there was a good one just an hour away from Puerto Lobos. Daniel could live on a pension for the week and go home for the weekends. Or they could move there. They could pull it off, that was for sure. If they had managed to get themselves birth certificates and ID's whilst being the most illegal of immigrants, they sure as fuck could pull off Daniel getting a good shot at life.
(The getting ID's thing had been nothing but pure luck if he was being honest. About a month in, they had decided to tell Monica, their neighbor who had helped and fed them from the second they had arrived because she just knew they were Esteban's kids, the truth about everything except for Daniel's powers. She had been so moved and angry at the end that she had gotten them the papers herself. "As a treat after everything you've been through", she had said with a wink. Sean never got to know how she did it, but hey, he didn't mind good things happening to them for a change).
So, when Daniel was fourteen and Sean was twenty-one, they had gone to visit colleges nearby. When Daniel had inevitably asked why he didn't want to try college too, he had said he was both too old and too busy for it, meaning it for the most part. Besides, someone needed to run the garage for them to eat and live, and Sean knew there were more ways to be successful and happy in life than having a diploma.
And so Daniel had one of the most important days of his early teens and decided he wanted to study psychology ("To help other people that haven't had it easy" he had said, pride in his still tiny eyes, making him come close to losing it right and there). Sean had tried to stay out of his way, collecting university pamphlets and letting Daniel ask questions. There was a small voice in his head wondering how he would've reacted to the whole process, but he managed to ignore it. That had been Daniel's special day, after all.
It seemed like he finally had the chance to find out.
They were in some kind of campus, the kind you saw in movies, with big patches of grass and old buildings, filled with twenty-somethings studying or getting stoned, or both. As much as he objectively knew he had as much of a right to be there as the rest of them, Sean still felt out of place. He didn't feel like a normal, dumb, young person, and the impersonating feeling he'd had when he was in his sixteen-year-old body came back awkwardly.
Could he get used to it? To being that new version of himself?
He supposed they were walking somewhere, him and the boy who was holding his hand, but he was too busy looking around to bother trying to figure out where exactly. It wasn't like he could have guessed. Universities were different in Mexico than in the States, it appeared, and so he didn't have any reference to know where they could be heading.
"You good?" The boy asked again. Sean would ask for his name, but he supposed that wasn't the wisest course of action. If someone who was his boyfriend woke up one day and had to ask what his name was, Sean would worry, and he supposed the boy would too. "You haven't talked in a while." He added when Sean didn't respond.
"Yeah, but I just remembered I left something in my dorm," he lied before he could come up with any better excuses. "I'll see you later though?" He added before the boy could try to go with him. He needed some time to take everything in without worrying about giving out the fact that he had time traveled himself there.
"Yeah, sure." He didn't sound entirely convinced, but not confused, either, so Sean considered it a win. Just as he was about to turn around and leave, the boy kissed him on the lips, briefly, and then he was gone. Sean's heart did a funny thing.
It had been years since the last time someone had kissed him. Like, years. He was pretty sure that Daniel had gotten more action than him, as grossed out as the thought made him feel.
He had been busy. Taking care of telekinesis and cops and pandilleros and time travel and a teen. He wasn't even sure who the last person he'd had a crush on was, because he never allowed crushes to linger in his head. Because it was something childish, to have a crush on someone. And from the moment he had woken up in that hospital, eye gone and Daniel missing, he had realized he could no longer pretend to be a child. Even if he still was, back then. He needed to take responsibility and worry about what mattered. And so, he had been busy and not having crushes for six years.
But he wasn't busy then, it appeared. Because while he had been too worried about life to even think about dating, other-timeline-Sean seemed to have pulled his act together enough for him to be actively dating someone. Even if he was busy with college (studying what?) he still had time to just chill on campus, fall asleep in his boyfriend's back, walk hand in hand with him, and casually kiss him like it was nothing.
It was probably second nature to other-Sean. But current Sean didn't even know the boy's name.
He decided he needed to stick to what he had said he would do and find his dorm. It turned out to be extremely easy, given that the room number was written on a key in his pocket and there was a map of the school right next to where he was standing.
All he could think about on the way to the dorms was how weird it was to see through both eyes. Sure, he'd had his full vision ever since he had turned up in that classroom, but only then, having had a moment to think, he could truly appreciate it.
Losing his eye had been no fun, having his depth perception fucked over even less, but he had gotten used to it. Learned to live with it, over time.
There were some kids that lived two houses away from them that absolutely loved Sean's eyepatch, back when he actually wore it. They swore that he was a pirate. Whenever he and Daniel were visiting their parents, (because everybody in that small town wanted to adopt them, apparently), Sean tried his best to tell them pirate stories. Those kids and their genuine excitement over something that had been so painful for him were how he finally made his peace with his missing eye (as much as one could do with something like that, at least).
He supposed that he was feeling something similar to how a person that always had problems with their vision felt when they wore glasses for the first time. Like everything was too perfect to be real, and there was no way everyone just saw like that all the time.
When he eventually made it to the dorm building, it all went down like a blur. Entering the building. Trying to figure out exactly where his room was. Climbing some stairs. Finally, finally, being in front of his dorm. He felt like his body was frozen, his hand almost crushing the key.
If he knew himself one bit (he did), then whatever was behind that door was going to be the personality of other-Sean in its brightest, most representative form. He tended to do that, to leave bits and pieces of himself wherever he went. Once they had settled into Puerto Lobos, one of his biggest comforts had been witnessing how the house slowly stopped looking abandoned and started looking like it was Sean and Daniel's. Their new furniture, Daniel's toys that he eventually left behind, Sean's drawings left in almost every space, and the general mess of being lived in gave the house a new life as much as it had given them one. So, it was only fair to assume other-Sean would've done something similar with the space he had been given.
He opened the door and found he was right, for the most part.
The place was definitely what other-Sean had decided to highlight from both the outside world and his own little one. There were pictures, posters, and drawings on the walls, the last ones taking over the main part of one of the walls. He mostly focused on those for a while, because his room in Puerto Lobos had a wall that was filled with drawings, too. It was almost relaxing, to know he wasn't an entirely different person from the one that lived there. That there were things no timeline-change could erase, things that came from somewhere deep inside of him.
But even looking at the one thing that seemed to tie him to who he was in that timeline, he could notice some major differences. For one, other-Sean was objectively better than him. He didn't feel any jealousy, really, (Could you be jealous of yourself?), only the feeling of distance from other-Sean getting bigger and more obvious.
Even with that put aside, it was clear that other-Sean had put time and effort into making his hobby a craft, his drawings showing thought-out designs of what he could only assume were comic book characters. There was passion, and dedication, and a lot of hard work put into the drawings that decorated other-Sean's walls.
And it was what he would have done, right? What he had wanted to do. To make art something that could lift him up as a person, make his creativity something he could live off.
In his timeline, the previous one that was, Sean had used his drawing abilities to cope. To handle what was being handed to him, to ground himself, and understand what was going on in his life. His precious journal, the one that had brought him there in the first place, was full of drawings of the people and places he got to see over those eight months. It was rare to see made-up characters there because he mostly used to keep track of the very real things going on in front of him.
Sometimes he would look back on that journal, for a different reason every time. To check details, to reminisce, to remember, and to look back at how far they had come. If a stranger were to look at those pages, they would find Sean's soul in every page, the very essence of what made him (and what could break him) present in the entire thing.
Could he still do what other-Sean had managed to? To pick up the thing he had used to cope for so many years and make something out of it, the same way Daniel was making something out of himself with schoolwork and college dreams? Could he continue where other-Sean had left off, with his technique and his drive, and finish college? And what would happen afterward?
The drawings left him feeling touched in a bad way, but at least he could see something of himself in them. The rest of the room seemed to have nothing he could relate to.
Sean didn't recognize a single band on the posters. Most of his clothes were layered and looked like they had been made for fall exclusively. That was odd to him because nobody owned cold-weather clothes in Puerto Lobos, not unless you were insane, willing to waste your money or an abuelita. And even if you were an abuelita, you would wear a traditional chal, not whatever hand-knitted-secretly-H&M thing he seemed to be pulling off.
He then tried looking at the photos on the walls because he really wanted to avoid having to dig deep into who other-Sean was. That could wait. He would rather stare at a selfie with Lyla of a prom he didn't remember attending to than having to do that.
But other than Lyla, he didn't recognize anyone. Apparently, he was very cheesy when he was in love, given the absurd number of pictures of himself and the boy in various locations. The other pictures were mostly group shots with other people he presumed to be classmates he didn't recognize, which was starting to drive him insane.
With everything he didn't recognize as his own, he felt less like a person and more like a ghost possessing a body. There was nothing in that room but things he didn't remember owning, pictures of himself smiling next to people he had never met, and drawings he could never have drawn. He needed some kind of proof that it was him, that there wasn't an "other-Sean" that was different from the Sean he was. Even if everything seemed to be telling him otherwise, he still decided to start looking for something familiar, something that could also be his.
He eventually found a photo of his family on the desk. For a second, and all he could do was look at it, because oh, fuck, everything was too much again.
It was a shot of what he assumed to be his high school graduation. Daniel was on his right side, smiling and poking his tongue out to the camera, definitely not older than eleven. Dad was on his left side (his blindside, not too long ago), his arm surrounding him like he could not be prouder of his son, not on that moment or ever. Looking at both felt like two different stabs to the heart. Sean could not have said which one hurt more.
It was unfair because he deserved that life. He deserved to have a pretty room in a nice college, making friends, and having a boyfriend. He deserved to be able to think about his family occasionally, when his eye caught the picture on his desk, not worrying about providing or taking care of or any of the things that had become daily routine subjects for him over time.
He deserved to have the worst part of his life be exams. He deserved petty arguments with his brother and shouting at his dad because he also deserved to be immature. He deserved to realize on his own where his mistakes were and deserved to learn like every other person. He deserved to not know what grief was, to not even be able to phantom it, because everyone had always been there and they always would be. He deserved better than the tears strolling down his cheeks as he stared at his father on a picture of a memory he didn't have. He deserved better than what he had. But people so rarely got what they deserved. He thought he had made his peace with it, with everything that had happened.
His shaking hands and wet cheeks would've probably begged to disagree if they could speak. Because there was no peace to be found in his breakdown, no peace to be found with every decision, with every blind step. Only running, wishing he could run, and summers that always ended too quickly, leaving him emptier and lonelier than he had been before.
It took a while for him to stop crying. When he did, all he could do was try to clean his snot and feel stupid, which was what he usually did when he had breakdowns. At least that one wouldn't wake Daniel up. He stared at the wall, without seeing. Took a deep breath. And then, finally started trying to figure out who other-Sean was, for once and for all.
The first new thing he noticed was that there was an envelope on top of the laptop on his desk. Was someone sending him letters there, too? They mostly used letters back in Puerto Lobos, because texting still felt too dangerous, and there was only so long they could use their landline for if they wanted to be able to pay the bills. But there? There, where there was a cellphone sitting on his pocket that felt way heavier than it actually was, heavy the weight of all the answers he didn't want to be answered? Why would he need letters there?
Sean's wondering stopped as soon as he opened the envelope and saw the same blue ring that had appeared on his school desk, staring back at him. There was no note that time around, though. Not that he needed one, anyway. He put it on, knowing exactly why it had been put there.
Seeing it did bring out the very valid question of the time travel thing. Did he still have the power? After all, he hadn't saved Daniel from a pandillero in that timeline.
There was a single glass of water sitting on the nightstand, right next to an alarm clock and a lamp. He actually snorted at it, the whole situation gaining and losing seriousness like it was a rollercoaster. It was all so ridiculous. Out of all the things that had changed, it appeared that only the stupid, meaningless ones had stayed through to that timeline.
He didn't think of anything as he reached for the glass. Only the same feeling of wondering he'd had the first time around. Will it break? Will I stop it? echoing quietly on his brain.
Sean dropped the glass. It shattered, loudly. He lifted his hand, and as if he had just woken up from the weirdest of dreams, nothing happened. Nothing at all, other than the floor getting wet and the glass becoming fractures of what it used to be.
Losing the powers didn't cause anything in him, because half an hour ago he had done everything he could have ever wished to do with a power like that one. There weren't any long-term goals that he could achieve through time traveling that he hadn't already tried. Maybe having Lady Time by his side at all times had made it easier for him to cope with everything. Maybe it was the fact that living next to Daniel for seven years had made any superhero-desires die inside of him without so much as a protest.
The point was that he didn't feel much about losing them. All he could do was pick up the glass pieces and try not to cut himself.
(He supposed he could still use the ring, though. It could only be there for one reason, or at least that was what he thought. And if he was right, then he would only be able to use it once. He tried to ignore that thought, and failed).
With the glass and powers out of the way, he got into actually learning who other-Sean was, and walked to the computer sitting on his desk. Guessing the password was easy because it was what he would always use, back then (his birthday, written with words). He didn't get much out of it, other than he was an art major (which he had already guessed from the drawings, so); that he was in his last year in college (that did make sense, given that Lyla, who was just a year older than him, had finished college the previous year. She had actually left her graduation party early to go into the airport and fly to Mexico, much to Sean's delight).
He was also apparently a promising student, according to his teacher's emails and the fact that he apparently had a very successful art blog, with like, proper pieces. Some of them were pictures from the ones on the wall, some of them were digital pieces, but they were all good.
Sean looked around the room, then. From the clothes on the floor to the art supplies on the desk (and on the floor as well). He took in the general messiness of the space, the pictures on the wall daring him to dig deeper, to find the answers he so desperately needed.
He pulled the phone out of his pocket and unlocked it with his thumb, thank God. He wondered if he would have the nerve to actually call anyone, to seek answers. Did he even want them, at that point? Would they bring him peace, the way nothing else had?
The phone laid on his hand and the ring on his finger. The fate of those blank pages lingered between them.
Notes:
As much as I am sorry for letting this fic sit incomplete for so long, I'm very proud to announce that it's entirely written out and edited, and the next chapters will come out very soon (like, the next few days soon). This second half is my favorite part of the fic, and I'm very excited about it seeing the light.
I'm stillbeautifulthings on tumblr! 3
Chapter 6: What We Went Through
Notes:
Title comes from "Paciencia y Fe" from In the Heights.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Back in Puerto Lobos, Sean didn't own a cellphone.
They had eventually evolved from payphones to a proper landline, but an actual personal cellphone had seemed too risky. Those things knew more about the owner than they knew about themselves, and Sean had decided he could live without one. Daniel owned one though, although he wasn't allowed to have any social media presence.
Off-the-grid, some people had called them. But Sean wasn't going to go around taking risks that weren't necessary, especially when most of what he did with his phone had been listening to music, anyway. He could do that with multiple other things, he figured. Just another sacrifice on his list.
Sacrifices. Someone could've said most of his life was one big sacrifice, and Sean could not have entirely disagreed. He was aware of all the things he did to keep Daniel and himself safe, aware of how much he gave without ever asking for anything in return. Then again, he was also very aware of things that had no point in being thought over, like how different his life would be had Daniel never been in the picture.
It wasn't like he indulged too much in those thoughts. Daniel wasn't to blame for the things he couldn't control, especially not for his powers. They were something that had just happened, and if the knowledge Sean had acquired from Lady Time meant anything, it was that there was nothing Daniel could've done. It was out of his understanding, and apparently always had been.
So Sean didn't blame him, but there was a small part of him that wondered. It wondered quietly through all those sleepless nights he had spent trying to understand how cars worked. It wondered through long work hours that allowed for very little sleep at night. It wondered every time he had to add another sacrifice to the list.
It wondered whether everything he had done had been worth it. And sometimes, when the night was quiet and the bitterness he would feel refused to leave, it wondered what was in it for him.
Because Daniel would eventually leave, maybe become a psychologist or maybe not, but he would leave. And Sean would be left with a house that would be too big for him and a job that he still wouldn't like.
Was it sustainable? He couldn't help but wonder at every turn, every time he realized his happiness was the last of priorities. As the years had passed, he had slowly started to realize that no one else would fight for his happiness if not him, because no one else could. It was up to him to do something, to ask for help. And maybe, if he had ever learned how to do that, he would've had. Instead, he had bottled it up so deep that when given the chance to change everything, he had taken it without hesitation.
The phone felt heavy on his hand. Wasn't the opportunity it offered what he had always wanted? The only way out that wouldn't hurt anyone. Was there another way, that wasn't the one in front of him?
The first thing he noticed on the unlocked phone was other-Sean's background picture, which was a shot of him and the boy from before, his boyfriend. They were on a beach somewhere, smiling at the camera with their arms wrapped around one another.
Maybe it was California, he thought as he squinted at the background and ignored his own smiling face. There was something funny about the thought of him going on a road trip to California for the sake of it. Maybe in that timeline he had gone to have fun with his friends in a cabin somewhere, worries about running away or making a living far from his mind. Or maybe it wasn't California, maybe it was a completely different place, one that he had never been to before.
He could tell they weren't in Mexico though, even with the limited background the picture offered. There was something about the beaches there that you definitely wouldn't have found anywhere else in the world, let alone the States. Something about how the water was bluer, how the sand was whiter, and how everything seemed to slow down. Something that could only happen in his backyard with his friends, who had also never been to college, as they sipped beer and watched the sun go down.
"I can't believe this is all yours, Sean." Cassidy had said on one of those summer nights when she and the rest of the crew were visiting them in Mexico. At one point, Sean had been afraid that everything that had gone down with the failed heist would break them apart. They hadn't only lost their jobs that night, they had also gotten themselves arrested. Sean could only imagine the tension that must've created, how easily something like it could break a group like theirs apart.
And maybe it would've broken them, had they not been so tight-knit from the start. Penny, Hannah, Finn, and Cassidy had no one else to hold on to but each other, and no failed plan or broken law would break the bonds that tied them. Still, it was a relief every year when June rolled around and the four of them appeared in Puerto Lobos in a rented car, bringing nothing but good vibes and awful Spanish with them.
But that night he couldn't have known that it was going to become a tradition to see them every summer. Back then, in 2018, he was still shocked that they had managed to make it into the country, let alone expect them to be back the following year.
Penny, Hannah, Cassidy, and Sean had been sitting around a firepit they had made on the beach behind his house. They were all sitting in fallen logs as if they were chairs, except for Sean, whose head was half resting in Cassidy's lap, feet almost touching the fire. They had been quietly passing a joint and staring at the ocean until Cassidy had spoken.
(Finn, Daniel, and Lyla were still on the water, enjoying the bit of sun there still was. They were playing, it appeared, their yells and laughter adding to the sense of calm Sean was feeling).
"It's not ours as much as it's just taken without asking, but…" He trailed off, looking up at her.
Cassidy was beautiful. In his head, that had stopped being something that turned his tummy into butterflies and had turned into something more of a fact. The sky was blue, they lived in Mexico and Cassidy was beautiful. Sean had recently decided that he didn't want to do anything else with those feelings. Just, some people were beautiful and caught his eye, and that was that. He could lay his head on Cassidy's lap or fall asleep on Finn's shoulder, and it didn't have to mean anything else, not if he didn't want it to.
His life wasn't empty without a relationship, regardless of what every movie ever tried to claim, not then and not several years down the road. For all the problems that he had, his dating life was not one of them. He was happy loving and being loved, he thought as Cassidy ran her hands through his hair. At that moment, he was content.
"But if it was your dad's, doesn't that make it like, half yours automatically?" Pointed out Hannah, whose hair had grown longer and seemed to finally like Sean for reasons beyond him. Maybe it was because they were all getting older, and he had proven himself to be worthy of their trust. Maybe it was because he was letting all of them stay in his house for free.
He smiled at her instead of answering, because the house was probably legally not theirs, and at that point, he had nothing figured out. He wouldn't be able to begin the paperwork to actually own the house until he turned eighteen, something he hadn't even bothered to look up at the time. He smiled at her because at that moment he didn't know much, other than that life was rough but at least he had his friends, who had come all the way to his house on the beach to pass a joint and look silently at the landscape with him.
His vision went back to the beach, where Finn and Lyla seemed to be getting along well enough for two people that didn't know each other the week prior. They were playing an absurdly complicated splashing game with Daniel, who looked like it was the happiest moment of his life, laughing and smiling like he was still a kid and like he didn't know, too, that the world was hard and the house wasn't theirs.
Cassidy began trying to braid his hair. Penny passed the joint to Hannah, who took it. Lyla and Finn were just a few feet away, within reach for him to go and spend time with them. And for a second everything was good for the wolf brothers, who would one day own the house and grow their roots in the place their father had called home once, long ago.
But at that moment, all they had was the beach. It seemed like enough, then.
His gaze left the phone to really look at the ring sitting in one of his fingers. It was a simple silver band that upon close inspection he realized was actually two lines of metal intertwining, to the point where he almost couldn't tell where one ended and the other one began. It made him think of words like "fate" and "destiny" and managed to give him a little sense of calm.
What really stood out about the ring was the center stone, though. It was the same shade of blue as Lady Time's eyes (which he could safely guess had been completely in purpose). It reminded him of something other than her eyes, though he couldn't tell what.
Outside, the sun appeared from behind some clouds, and the room was momentarily filled with light. The diamond caught the rays of sun coming in through the curtain and the refraction of the light covered the floor and walls.
As he twisted the ring in his finger and watched the fragments of blue light it projected on the walls change, he thought about choices. How much of his life had been caused by choices? Most of it he obviously couldn't have predicted, and even less he'd had a chance to choose. Every choice he had ever made had mixed with the chaos of the universe, followed no order, and produced unpredictable results, he reasoned. Like the light going through the diamond, intentions changed in their way into becoming actions.
All those years, he had been giving everything his best intentions, his best shot. Even when things backfired, and when it went all wrong in ways he couldn't have guessed, his only comfort was knowing he had always been trying his best. Even when he didn't know what would happen the next second. Especially when he didn't know what would happen the next second.
He twisted the ring, and the blue projections changed. One thing had needed to be different, just one, and there he was.
As his eyes focused on the ring, he realized that the shining precious stone reminded him of Daniel's old nightlight, the one he had gotten and used for a few years in Puerto Lobos.
They had bought it sometime in February of 2018, not even a year into living there. The previous night, Daniel had had a nightmare, his first bad one after things had settled down. He hadn't said anything as he slipped through Sean's door, just touched his arm and motioned for him to move over.
Sean, who had woken up as soon as the door opened, also didn't say anything. He just allowed Daniel to climb into the bed with him, hugging him as he fell asleep. And whilst Daniel began to dream again, Sean's brain could not stop thinking.
All he wanted was for his brother to be safe. And that went beyond the theory of being safe, the one that made him work on a job he hated. It was also about those real moments when school or work didn't matter because all they needed was each other and the promise that the next day would be better.
But even if he somehow managed to become the best big brother in the entire world, he realized that night, nothing he ever did would be enough. Daniel had been damaged by the road in ways none of them completely understood. Daniel, who never had too many friends at school, who considered their dad to be his best friend. Daniel, whose puppy eyes and good intentions had charmed every good person they had met in those eight months. Daniel, who had to grow up way too fast, who had to raid a house full of pandilleros at nine and understood the significance of going to college at fourteen.
Sean had bought a nightlight for him and promised no one else but the two of them would know about it if he didn't want them to. What else could he have done, then? There was no way to spare Daniel of the trauma. Even if they had been able to afford a therapist, how could they understand what living with telekinesis was? How could they help? How could anyone help?
He would hold on to the memory of Sean and Daniel, half asleep, holding each other, the best duo in the world. But the pain would linger too, in more ways than he could've thought it would, back then.
Blinking away the same tears of impotence he had all those years back, Sean decided to look at the phone again. He knew, somewhere deep down, that if he saw Daniel being alright in that timeline, getting through high school and being a normal teen, then it would be over for him. All those years, all he had really wanted was to see Daniel grow better and be better. He had put his life on the line countless times in his brother's name and would do it again if necessary.
But when he found Daniel's contact, (who was simply saved as "brother"), all he found was the picture of a teen that was incredibly similar to the one he had left frozen in their kitchen. His hair was slightly different but other than that they could've completely passed as the same person.
Huh. Maybe Daniel had done a better job at healing than what he had given him credit for.
Sean decided to continue scrolling through the contacts, see what else he could find. Most of them were people he didn't know (he was sure that if he took the time, he could connect the people on the contacts list with the ones on the walls, but he didn't want to take the time, so). Lyla was a welcome continuity, and he briefly got a glimpse of the contact labeled as "Dad" before deciding to scroll past it, but there was one contact he was missing.
It wasn't like he expected other-Sean to keep ties with Karen. After all, he only had agreed to forgive her when he realized how lonely it could get, how much an adult that believed in him could mean. If other-Sean had never had that necessity, then there was no reason for him to have her in his life. It still stung a little, though.
Being an American citizen who had briefly been to prison and was highly involved with a case of minors running away from the law, Karen couldn't easily get out of the States. So, most of the time their communication with her was based on phone calls and letters, which was fine by Sean, and had eventually become fine by Daniel as well. They never saw her, except for the one time that they did.
She had shown up around the fourth year they had been living in Puerto Lobos, without so much as a warning. Just, one Saturday morning they had been having breakfast when a truck had pulled up outside their house, and then their mother was there.
(Sean would later learn that she had just passed through the border, not too many questions asked. She had planned to go through right before the guard's shift ended, so he wouldn't doubt her "I-must-have-forgotten-my-documents-back-at home-I'm-such-a-forgetful-woman-with-no-bad-intentions" excuse. The fact that she was white had probably helped too, although she didn't mention it. It was probably for the best, Sean figured).
Daniel had been very excited to see her, and Sean had been happy too. As much as they got along with the neighbors and their friends came by every summer, it got lonely sometimes. He would deny it, but their mom making the effort to actually communicate with them that time around warmed his heart. It was good to know they still had a family that cared about them, after everything.
She stayed for the entire month of March, helping Sean with the garage and Daniel with his homework. They would have dinner together and go to the beach afterward like they were just another regular family. Sometimes Sean would pretend that they actually were, that he didn't have any major responsibilities because his mom was there to worry about that. It wasn't true, but it made him feel better.
One night, after Daniel had gone to bed, he took Karen to his room to show her his drawings. For a while, she had silently stared at the sketches in the walls, her fingers lightly tracing some of them. Eventually, she had turned to look at him, nothing but pride in her expression.
"These are really good, Sean," she had said, and he almost started crying right there.
"Thank you," he had said instead, because he was a grown-up and he wouldn't cry over one of his parents giving him positive feedback, not even if he wanted to.
It wasn't until the next afternoon, when they were smoking on the back porch after closing the garage early, that she brought up the drawings again.
"You know, there was something Joan wanted me to give to you." Her voice sounded fond as she said it, which reminded Sean of the long-lasting bet he and Daniel had on whether Mom and Joan were just friends or they were really close friends. Sean, who believed in the former, augmented that Mom had said she was done with love after her marriage blew up. Daniel, always more hopeful, would point out rock-solid arguments like the way Joan had looked at Mom in Away or the way Mom talked about her in her letters. Over the years, they had raised the stakes to ridiculous amounts, but never once had they thought about asking their mother about it, not even when she visited. Sean suspected that if they ever got an answer, it wouldn't be because one of them had questioned them about it.
"I wasn't sure if you would want it, really," she continued, oblivious to what was happening in her son's head. "But after seeing your drawings last night, I couldn't not give it to you".
"It" had turned out to be a full-on tattoo machine that looked more expensive than three months' worth of bills. Sean had stared at it in disbelief, his brain not catching up to what he was supposed to do with the gift.
Two summers prior, Cassidy had taught him how to make stick-and-poke tattoos. It only seemed fair, she had said as she had taught him using an apple as a canvas, given that he had let her tattoo him all those years back. By that summer's end, he had become fairly good at them. The next summer, he was good enough that everyone on the crew had agreed to let him tattoo them, even Lyla.
(Daniel had begged for a tattoo back then. Sean had denied it to him though, mostly because he was twelve at the time).
And at that moment, as he stared at the brand-new tattoo machine, tears did manage to fall down his cheeks. "What does she think I should do with it?" He had asked softly, once he had finally taken the gift from Karen's hands.
"Well, that's the fun part, isn't it? It's up to you."
"Up to you" had turned into a hobby he loved as much as drawing, tattooing his friends over the summer and himself when no one else was around, small things in his arms and legs.
He looked at the body he was in at that moment, other-Sean's body. For all their similarities, Sean could not find a single tattoo. And with something as simple as that, his mind was made up, and he let the phone fall into the bed.
The skin he was in wasn't his. He was inside a body that didn't tell his story. For all the scars that that body didn't have, for everything he hadn't suffered there, there were tattoos that it was missing, too. Tattoos that his friends had made, tattoos he had made himself of constellations, animals, and flowers. He didn't know what story the body he was in told, and that was the point.
He couldn't call that-timeline-Dad and ask him how his life was going. He couldn't go on dates with that random boy that other-Sean loved and pretend that he knew him. He couldn't study the life of the person whose skin he was wearing and pretend that it was his, because it wasn't.
That small, dreamy college dorm wasn't his. The people in those pictures weren't his friends. The person listed on the phone on the bed as "brother" wasn't the Daniel he had raised from age nine and onwards.
He was sure of it because in his life, in his actual, real, life where bad and unfair things had happened to him, he had still managed to find good. For every racist asshole that had made the road harder, there had been good people giving them shelter and love. For every punch Sean took along the way there had been someone willing to clean his wounds and give him comfort. Good and bad were not things that could be measured, but looking back he realized that for every horrible thing there had been a good one, just not what he would've imagined.
Sean's life was his own because of everything that had happened to him as much as it was for how he had reacted to it.
His attention focused on the ring, still catching the light. He was all of them, he realized then. The light, the diamond, and the projections of light, all of them made him who he was. And who he was wasn't half bad.
He rubbed the ring. And for the last time, the world glowed blue.
Notes:
I'm stillbeautifulthings on tumblr 3
Chapter 7: When You Find Your Way Again
Notes:
Title comes from "When You're Home" from In the Heights.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
"Over here," said an all too familiar voice, somewhere out of his line of sight.
The first thing he noticed was that he was back in some version of Puerto Lobos, the college dorm gone as if it had never existed at all. More specifically, he was on the sidewalk that faded into the beach, the sun setting, no other people in sight.
Some version, because it was definitely not the actual place. It might have looked like it to someone who wasn't too familiar with it, but to Sean it was clear he wasn't standing in his home-town. The details, like the sidewalk he was standing in, or the houses at the other side of the road were off, too perfect to be the real thing.
(The beach was odd in that way too, but it took him a second to realize that because that part of the landscape was on his left side, once again his blindside. Something stung in his heart when he noticed that, and had he been less sure about his decision, doubt would've found its way into his mind. As things were, he just felt a little hurt).
If the small details hadn't been enough to know he wasn't actually in Puerto Lobos, there was also the fact that everything was glowing with that blue light that reminded Sean of nightlights and the projections of light going through the ring he was still wearing. Everything looked blue as if he was looking through a filter. He found he no longer minded that, not really.
"Come on! I don't have all the time in the world," she obviously did, but Sean wasn't in the mood to argue with her.
He followed the sound of her voice to Carola's shop, the one her parents had built on the beach to hopefully attract tourists back in the eighties. Carola was their neighbor, and one of their friendliest ones as well. Sean and Daniel had spent countless hours in the back of her wooden shop, where there was a balcony that offered a great view of the beach. There were chairs and tables there, and it made the little beach-shop feel more like a café.
There he found Lady Time, who had changed her Virgin Mary dress for one that was more beach-appropriate, (if still as ghostly, given how it disappeared into the floor). The dress was a lighter shade of blue than the one she wore before, which would've given her a lighter air had she not been frowning at him like she was. Her arms were crossed, but the furrow in her brow reminded him more of a teenager than a goddess, or whatever she was.
Her expression didn't change as he sat down in front of her, but he didn't feel any fear. Maybe he should've had, all things considered. But for reasons beyond him, he trusted her. Maybe it was because she hadn't tried to kill him at any point since he had met her. Maybe it was because she had seemed so genuinely interested in helping him through the whole thing. Maybe it was because she was frowning like Daniel did when Sean wouldn't give him money.
"I don't get you," she said, at last, tone more confused than angry.
"What is there to get?"
She gestured vaguely at him, leaning back in her chair. The gesture could've meant a million different things (and Sean suspected they all applied, given the circumstances). After a moment, it became clear that she wasn't going to elaborate, not immediately at least. He decided to try another way.
"Where are we? I know this isn't actually Puerto Lobos, so, where?"
Lady Time sighed dramatically and broke her silence.
"This is not the real Puerto Lobos because it's not real at all. Your consciousness is here, but you are not. It's the only way we can properly talk, and I felt like making it in a place that was familiar to you would make things easier." Her frown had disappeared, her tone only leaking tiredness. That and the way she was sitting with her back completely on the back of the chair reminded Sean of some of the abuelos on the town, too tired to pretend to be anything they weren't. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered how something that wasn't alive could be tired.
He nodded instead of voicing out any of those thoughts. For some time, both of them stared at the blue-glowing beach, empty like Sean had not once seen it. The meaning of what she had said seemed understandable to him. His consciousness being somewhere and his body somewhere else had to be the least weird thing to happen to him ever since he first reversed time. For what it was worth, it was relaxing to be back in Puerto Lobos, even if he wasn't.
He spoke eventually, though, because he really wanted to know what was going on.
"So what do you want to talk about? Is this about me getting cold feet? Because I promise I had my reasons to."
Her gaze went back to him, blue lights focused on him. It was surprising how quickly he had grown used to that; all things considered. It appeared that years of making it up as he went had made him really adaptable to change.
"This is not about the fact that you got cold feet this one time, Sean," the sound of her voice pulled him out of his thoughts. She sounded defeated in a way she had never come close to appearing as before. "This is about the fact that no matter how many times I try this, how many different variations of this I make, you always get cold feet.
Sean didn't know how he was supposed to respond to that. So, instead, he just blurted out a weak "Why?" When she didn't respond, he added "Is it something I did? Is it something you did?"
"You wouldn't understand." Was her answer, sounding dismissive and tired. The tone reminded Sean of the responses he would get when he was a child and would ask Dad when Mom was coming back.
"Explain it to me," he pushed because he was no longer that kid that couldn't take harsh truths.
She sighed, her eyes never once leaving his face as if she was making sure he could take it. For a second there was silence, and then she began doing exactly that.
"The universe, as far as I know, works with entities. There's one of us for every aspect of how everything works, one of us for each and everything humans could not understand even if they tried to. There are the obvious ones like wind and light, but there's also more complicated stuff like death, culture, memory, that kind of thing. We can manifest ourselves like I am doing right now, and we obviously can interact with one another, but not in the way you would think. We are eternal, so we can´t exist in the way humans do. Are you with me?"
Sean nodded. Surprisingly, it felt less like an information overload and more like putting one of the final pieces in a puzzle, the picture finally starting to look like the one on the box. It was nice to know there was some sort of explanation for the things happening in his life, even if he could never understand its complexities.
"I know I told you I was The Passage of Time, but that wasn't really true. I'm technically the connection between multiple timelines. I only began existing once humans figured out how to jump from one timeline to another, so I'm one of the younger entities. We obviously can't be young, but you know. I'm more recent than most".
That explained so much about her, he thought. It explained why she seemed to act like a teen rather than something more majestic or ancient. He chose not to comment on it though, given how not-easy it was to keep up with the entities thing as it was.
"I control every timeline there is, that's my job. There are infinite versions of reality where things go different in every way you can imagine. When you time travel, all you do is jump from one timeline to another; that's what you've been doing since the start of this. Nothing you saw wasn't real, it was just from somewhere else." She paused, likely expecting him to confirm that he was following.
That information was relieving, in a way. To know other-Sean existed, and was somewhere out there living his life without too many worries. Even if he was out of reach, somewhere where Sean would never see him again, it was good to know that he was real.
"I still don't get how any of this concerns me or my family, though." Was what he responded because he really didn't. Why, out of millions of people, had they been the ones to have to deal with all of what she was saying?
She lifted her hand as if to say she was getting there.
"So one of these entities communicates to me, or comes up to, or however you want to understand it as. Let's me know he gave a kid in some universe powers, telekinesis and whatnot, and wants to see how that affects him. Don't ask me why he chose your brother out of everyone in the world, because I don't know. Luck of the draw, and all of that.
Anyway, he comes up to me because I'm the only one who can manage that, I'm the only one capable of altering timelines and running experiments on how people behave. And you know, maybe if things had been different, I would've said no. I generally don't do this kind of thing, monitoring humans. That's why you are the first and only person I've ever talked to." Lady Time broke off for a second, seeming pensive. "Well, not you-you. Another version of you. I've actually gotten to meet four versions of you and one version of your brother."
She had mentioned that back in their way from the chapel, when he had asked her if she had a name. It still slightly took him aback, though. One alternative-Sean had been enough for him, thank you very much.
"But I had screwed up on your timeline, recently." She continued, getting his attention back. "I gave this one girl time travel powers, just to see what would happen."
"What happened?"
Lady time let a laugh out, like a bad parent being asked where they thought their child went wrong. "What didn't happen! It turns out I completely underestimated how much one tiny human was able to create and destroy. But that's not the point. The point is things went so south with her, that when this other entity came to me and challenged me to run as many scenarios as I could with the boy they had given powers to, I couldn't say no. But when we started doing that, we began noticing some patterns in your behavior, across timelines".
Considering how little other -Sean had had in common with him, that was surprising. "What patterns?"
"Oh, I think you already know," she waited for a second for him to guess, and then she continued. "Every time your father died and that explosion happened, you always did the same thing. Every time, you picked your brother up and you ran. No matter the context, or what we changed, if your father and the cop died, your first instinct was to protect your brother and run. Always.
And so we began thinking, and that was where this other entity challenged me. And I should've said no, I know I should've, but they are older than me, and I had already screwed up once."
She stopped like she didn't want to tell the next bit. But Sean had not gotten that far to get half-assed answers. So he motioned for her to continue.
"The idea was to wait a few years after everything was settled and see if we could drive you to a point, somehow."
"What point?" The question came out of him before he could process it, but he didn't take it back. The answer to every question he had ever asked was right there on that fake beach, staring back at him with apologetic and excessively bright eyes. Like the eyes of every friend they ever made on the road and in Mexico after they listened to their story. Like Karen's eyes in Away, seeming so sorry for everything they had been through. Maybe like his own eyes, when he had looked at Daniel and explained that he wouldn't see Chris again in a long time.
Lady Time looked at him with a sadness that made him feel small. Like a lost child, or like a sixteen-year-old that lost everything from one second to another. Maybe he had never stopped being that kid. Maybe that kid was the essence to who he was, and that had been why other-Sean had seemed so distant.
Her voice interrupted his thoughts.
"We wanted to know if there was a way to get you to hate your life so much you would hate it enough to want to change your past and stay there." She said it fast, like that would minimize the hurt, like ripping off a band-aid.
"And?" He asked before he could think better of it, his blood frozen inside of him.
"You never did. No matter what, if you could you always went back. Always. And I'm talking about other versions of you that have had it worse than you, believe it or not. You've chosen prison over staying there, more than once. So that's what I want to know, that's why we're here. I want to know why you never stay in that life I know you want."
In any other circumstances, he might have been shocked to receive information like that. But the sensation of disconnection from other-Sean was still lingering in his mind, even if he was back in his own body with its tattoos, scars, and one functioning eye. No wonder other versions of himself, versions similar to who he was had not managed to stay, either.
"Do you know why I decided to go back? Because of my tattoos." He decided to say, because it was true and because he didn't know how else to explain everything he had been feeling since he had appeared on that different timeline "My body has a lot of them, and that one didn't. That was when I realized."
She motioned for him to continue, clearly interested.
"A friend got me my first tattoo when I was still living on the road. And when I eventually started getting scars, later on, it made me feel good to know that that tattoo was there. Like, life could mark me, but I could also mark myself. I dunno, it made me feel like I had some agency when I very much didn't.
Eventually, I started getting other tattoos in Puerto Lobos. Stick-and-poke ones at first and then actual, real tattoos. I made everything from shapes to constellations and some flowers, too. And it made me feel like I was in control, gave me some sense of calm.
Anyway, the body of that other-me didn't have a single tattoo. Or any scars, for that matter. And I just knew, you know, that I could never be that person. Cause that wasn't me."
As he spoke, Lady Time never took her eyes off him. She listened very intensely, fixing her posture in the chair and giving the obvious impression that she was taking in every word. When she eventually spoke, she did it in an almost calculated tone, like she wasn't sure what reaction she would get out of him.
"But, and don't take this the wrong way, you obviously didn't like your life. And it's understandable! You had all that growing up to do in so little time. So why not stay there? Try out that different skin?"
Sean thought about the implications of that sentiment for a second, of her implying that he hated his life enough that surely, he would want to change it. If he was being honest with himself, that was probably what he thought too, when he traveled back.
But after having seen what was behind the curtain, after seeing with his own eyes what would've happened without the cop or the explosion, he knew better.
"Do you know what 'querer' means?"
It was a rhetorical question, given that she probably knew everything (or just a lot more than him). But she didn't know what his motivations were to say it, that was clear by the way she kept staring at him, like he was the sole focus of her attention. Her eyes should've been blinding, but something about the glow of the place prevented that from happening.
"It's a word in Spanish," he continued after a beat of silence. "Sometimes it can be translated to 'want' but that's not really what it means. It's like a middle point before love. So like, when you tell a person 'te quiero' it means you're definitely beyond liking them, but maybe you don't love them yet. Or maybe you do, but saying you love something is a lot more extreme because we have that middle point, you follow me?"
She nodded at him; her brow furrowed like maybe she was actually taking in new information. Or maybe she was just understanding more of how his thought process worked, which she had said was what she wanted.
"Some horrible things happened to me, probably when I was still too young to fully understand them. I've been through hell and back and I've faced decisions with no good outcome that still haunt me to this day. But I don't hate my life. I never could. Even if things turned out for the worse, or even if something had happened to Daniel," his throat went slightly tight on that last bit and he paused before saying the next part, the important one.
"I don't think I could ever hate my life, ever. Because when bad comes to worse, at least I have it. At least I get to wake up and live another day and another, and I get to watch the beach and I still have Daniel there with me.
I don't love my life, Lady Time. It's full of injustice and things I wish I could take back. Pero la quiero." A few tears fell before he could do anything to stop them, and he breathed. It never stopped surprising him, how much just breathing helped.
"La quiero. And it doesn't have to be perfect or even be good, but I think there's a reason you've never met a version of me that could live in another skin. I think that ever since that moment when Dad died, I became thankful for everything I did still have."
Lady Time nodded, and suddenly there was a handkerchief in her hand. She handed it to him without saying a word, and he thankfully took it. There was nothing but the sound of the waves crashing into the shore for a few moments, as he cleaned up his tears and avoided looking at her, something like shame rising in his chest.
Seven years and he could not recall the last time someone had seen him cry.
"But you're hurting still, aren't you? She eventually broke the silence to say, her voice sounding concerned. "You know what I think? I think you should use this as a learning experience. I think you need to heal."
Sean took in her words.
No one had ever told him he needed to heal before. It had been years since the last time anyone with any authority had looked at him and said "you need help". It had been common when they had just arrived in Puerto Lobos, neighbors kindly helping them with everything from food and bills to their documentation. But over the years, the actual adults there had learned to see him as more of an equal, rather than a kid who needed helping. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that, in most ways, he was a parent like most of them.
So no one had told him something like that in a while. And thus, he had stopped worrying about himself. Every day was just about work, worrying about the house, and worrying about Daniel. The only time he let loose was in the summer, but even then, he was always the mother of the group, worrying about everyone having somewhere to sleep and not getting too high.
But if he stopped to really think about it, he realized he couldn't remember the last time he had felt fully content with his life.
"How could I?" He responded, suddenly feeling like crying again. Once he had begun, it was hard to stop. "Heal, I mean. I have other things to worry about. Fuck, I don't even know how I would do it".
Lady Time seemed to not know what to say. Every moment of her silence felt like a stab to the heart, because if she didn't know then who would?
He wanted to ask her if he was beyond repair. He wanted her to tell him how to be happy, how to stop with that endless circle of almost-happiness. He wanted detailed instructions on how to heal because it wasn't like he hadn't tried. He wanted to stop running, for once and for all. He wanted to rest but didn't know if he still had the capacity to.
"I'm not going to find peace, right?" Was what he said, instead.
For a moment she didn't answer, gaze fixed upon the ocean. Sean wondered how human she was, how much she could feel or think. Was she concerned for him, if she could be? Had she somehow managed to grow attached to whatever he was, across every timeline she had seen him in? Could she feel pain, on his name?
Because she said she had met him four times before, but it was anyone's guess how many times she had tried to give him powers and to allow him to have another chance. There was something nice about that feeling, about being cared for. About having someone wiser than you worrying about you and guiding you through the things you couldn't understand.
Maybe looking for a therapist would not be the worst thing in the world, if it felt anything like what he was feeling at that moment.
"I don't think peace is something you find," her tone was still passive when she eventually spoke, if less calculated than before. "It's something you make. You accept everything that's out of your control and work on what is. Humans live and die so shortly that they really have no other choice. You can't afford to get stuck if you want to lead a good life. At least that's what I've gathered from doing my job, from seeing people jump from one timeline to another. You need to truly accept things, and move on."
And that made sense, didn't it? That was the reason he couldn't stay on the other timeline in the first place. He needed to work looking forwards, to make something out of what he had and not what he wished he did. Maybe he could learn how to improve himself, how to live without sacrificing himself in the process.
"I think I should make something new of the family business," he responded, even though she hadn't asked that. It made sense in his heart. "You know. To work on what you said. I think I need to make it something that makes me happy and also pays the bills."
She finally turned to look at him, the carefulness gone, something more like excitement coming off her. "What would you work on?"
"Oh, I don't know," he definitely did know, but he didn't want to jinx it by speaking too soon. "I've got a few options. I'll have to go back and see."
Sean was surprised to find how genuinely excited he was. He wanted to go back and tell Daniel about the idea bubbling through his brain, wanted to see the looks on his friends' faces when they found out. For the first time in what felt like forever, he was looking forward to working on something.
"So your mind is made up, you're going back," Lady Time's voice sounded happy, as if she had finally solved a very long, very confusing puzzle. He supposed she had, in some way. "Do you want to relive it yourself, or… "
And that was the tough bit, wasn't it? Him going back meant going back to the timeline where Dad was dead. Where he didn't go to college and where he was responsible for carrying a house and raising a child. For all the good there was bad, and so on.
Sean thought that maybe he could go back and try to get Dad's pasta recipe, so they could finally settle on what species it had. But that wasn't the fun of the game, he realized. The fun was guessing, the fun was finding ways to make it feel like Dad was still with them, even if he wasn't.
Maybe he could've gone back to say goodbye to Dad, but he had already tried that. It didn't make the hole in his chest shrink in any way. If anything, it made it worse, more tangible and painful to bear. Borrowed seconds wouldn't bring him back from the grave, nothing would.
Just because he accepted how October 28th, 2016 had to go didn't mean he wanted to see it.
"Can you just send me back to my timeline?"
He didn't have to explain himself any further. She seemed to understand, based on her simple nod. She stood up from her chair.
"Let's go, then."
He didn't have to ask what she meant, because there was only one thing she could mean. He stood up from his chair as well, and then they were walking out of the shop and towards the beach. She stopped walking once she reached a point in the sand, and Sean stopped in front of her, making direct eye contact.
It hit him then that he would never see her again. For better or worse, his life was probably going to be very entity-free from that point and onwards. Would she remember him, afterward? Did entities have memories, the same way humans did?
"Anything else to say?" She had her hands in her hips and her dress disappeared into the sand, just like it had in the streets of actual Puerto Lobos.
He wanted to say thank you somehow, wanted to thank her for the chance, and thank her for bothering with him that long. There were no words to explain his gratitude, not for changing the past but for showing him where he was hurting. Nothing would be the same after he went back, and that filled him with hope.
Even though they were still in her weird groove of time where everything was distant, she felt close. No longer like the angels in the church of that church, but like Dad sitting right next to him, quietly taking care of him as he looked up at the ceiling.
"I will remember you, after all of this. The least I can do." He settled for saying, simply because it was true, and because he found no other words to express what he was feeling.
She smiled at that. Then, she held out her right hand.
"Are you ready, Sean?"
And in that second, he knew exactly what would come next. He imagined himself back at the Puerto Lobos chapel, so different from the church in Seattle but so close to home. He could feel the relief that would course through his veins as he ran home, could almost see the odd look Daniel would give him before he crashed him into a hug.
He could feel all the explanations he would have to give on the tip of his tongue, could feel tired from the sleepless night he was about to have. And hopefully, they would cry and talk about all the things they should have talked about long ago.
Sean couldn't wait.
And just when he was about to touch Lady Time's hand, he heard her whisper. "You should pick up drawing again. For real, this time. Begin there."
Then, he touched her hand. One second the world was blue and cold, nothing existing but her glowing eyes and frozen hand.
The next one, for once and for all, he was back home.
Notes:
I'm stillbeautifulthings on tumblr 3
Chapter 8: Illuminate the Stories
Notes:
Title comes from "Finale" from In the Heights
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
11th of April of 2025
A year and a half later.
It hadn't taken much convincing for Sean to agree to give Daniel a tattoo for his 18th birthday.
It had only been fair, considering that Sean himself had gotten his first tattoo at sixteen. For years he had postponed it, arguing that he wasn't that good at making tattoos to begin with and that it was one thing to make not-so-pretty ones for their friends and himself and an entirely different one to make them for his brother.
That argument had eventually fallen when, after some events concerning time travel, Sean had decided to transform the garage into a tattoo parlor.
That had actually been the part of his story that surprised Daniel the least. The whole time-travel, entities thing had taken up most of their all-nighter conversation, in which his brother had come up with some questions Sean could answer and a lot he couldn't.
(Daniel had seemed interested the most in the idea that Lady Time had gotten her name from him. Sean had expected more resistance to the concept of time travel, but then again, he was talking to the kid that could still move objects at will. It was almost to be expected for him to be as used to that kind of thing as he apparently was).
When he reached the end of the story, (as far as he could tell it, anyway), he communicated to Daniel that he was planning on becoming a tattoo artist. It was the first thing he had thought back in the fake-beach with Lady Time, and it seemed appropriate. His declaration was met with pride and excitement from his brother, but definitely not surprise.
And so, he began working on becoming a serious, full-time tattoo artist. He took several online courses,(that Daniel helped him sign in to), and used everything from fruits to the leftover animal skin from the local butcher shop to properly practice until he was sure he could make more than doodles on actual humans. For six months, he devoted himself solely to training for what he wanted to become the rest of his life.
Before, he would have said that even if he wanted to make a change like that, he could not have afforded to. Thankfully, it turned out that they had way more people on their side who were willing to help them support themselves than what he had accounted for. Their grandparents, their mom, and about every neighbor they had befriended over the years were willing to help them out, and Sean was more grateful than what he could've put into words.
They all believed in him when he told him he was changing business, that in six months he would manage to transform the garage into a tattoo parlor. He wanted to make a living out of something he loved doing, and everyone seemed to understand that. And as much as he hated living on the scarps of others, it was good to be able to focus solely on getting better at his craft.
The getting better bit hadn't been fun either. It turned out that "doing something for the sake of it, to vent out his emotions and move on with his life" and "doing something to support himself" were entirely different ways of doing something. And so, for the first time in his life, he was doing art "seriously" (not that he hadn't been serious about it before, just less aware of some details like proportions, anatomy, and not accidentally giving strangers tetanus).
It was frustrating at first, and then later on as well. Even with his years of casual practice with the tattoo machine, anything more complicated than the doodles he had been doing before took a lot of failure and effort to be done right. After hours of practice, his eye would start hurting, and then he would have to lay with it closed and do nothing until he could work with it again.
But he kept going because he had made a promise to himself that he would. He had promised that he would finish that project, that he would open the tattoo parlor. If not for anyone else, then for himself and his happiness, for his future. Because that was the point of the whole thing. To care for himself the way he had been caring for others, no matter how many trials and errors stood between him and it.
So, for six months he learned in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion, that at the end of the day was still one step forward. He completed his courses and used up every surface that remotely resembled human skin to practice, trying out everything from lettering to complex drawings.
When the six months ended, Sean found himself being better at tattoo art than he had ever been at anything before. Six years of forcefully fixing cars had nothing on six months of putting his mind and soul into art, it turned out.
He still wasn't as good as he would've liked, definitely not as good as any of his online teachers, but he was getting there. That was the fun part, at the end of the day: getting better. He had his whole life to get better at it, and for the first time, that was a concept that excited him.
Once the parlor had officially opened (Wolf Tattoos, a name that they had spent an entire afternoon painting over their old sign), he found himself with a new, different problem: setting up a clientele that would actually keep the business afloat.
At first, all of his clients had been their neighbors, many of whom had kindly agreed to have their first and only tattoo done as long as it meant supporting him. Sean appreciated the kindness, but Puerto Lobos was a small town and there was only so much its aging population could do to help him sustain a business like his.
But then Daniel had stepped in, setting up social media accounts for the parlor and updating them with pictures of every new design he did. He made it his personal responsibility to manage those accounts, talk to interested people online, and set up appointments without so much as a word from Sean.
(Some risks regarding their online presence were worth taking, he supposed).
And so the business grew, and by the time the summer of 2024 arrived he was having appointments made months in advance. People came from all over Mexico to get one of his original designs, most of which he made for and with the specific person he was working with. Clients loved the results as much as they loved the quietness of the beach, the inversion of adapting the garage into a proper, hygienic tattoo parlor paying off.
(Karen had actually been the one to pay for most of the renovations. Sean didn't know how, and preferred not to ask. His mother's ways were mysterious, or so she liked to say. In reality, it had probably been that Joan had given in and sold some of her pieces to pay for the renovation. Or that was what Daniel said, anyway, still proud about having been right about their bet concerning Mom and Joan. Karen had sent one picture of Joan kissing her cheek, and it had been enough to give Daniel bragging material for years to come).
That summer had been one of the busiest ones of his life, but also one of the happiest. Between managing the parlor and making sure their ever-welcome visitors were comfortable, he always had something going on that required his attention.
Credit where credit was due, the crew had been nothing but supportive of Sean's business change. Cassidy had been ecstatic and said "the student becomes master" multiple times through the summer, mock pride letting show how truly impressed she was. Everyone else had been just as proud, with varying degrees of actually showing it (The scale went from Hannah, who had simply said "cool man" with a hint of something like pride in her eyes, to Finn, who had almost knocked him to the ground with a hug of excitement after Sean showed him around the parlor).
Lyla, who actually had graduated college to become a lawyer a few years prior ("too many fucking injustices up in the States, Sean. Someone needed to do something"), had cried as soon as she had seen the changed sign. She had just started crying like that was a regular thing she did and thrown her arms around both brothers at the same time, drawing them in for a several-minutes-long hug. Not that any of them minded.
Overall, the tattoo parlor had been an actual success. And sure, maybe fixing cars made him more money, but he didn't remember being as happy as he was working as an artist. He supposed that was part of what Lady Time had meant when she said "begin there" before dropping him back to his timeline.
And so when Daniel had eventually begged for a tattoo as his gift for his 18th birthday, given everything he had done for the business, he couldn't say no. Besides, he had been honest with him and not gotten a tattoo anywhere else, not even when Sean knew he could've had. If anything, it was an award to his loyalty.
So there they were, Daniel sitting in the tattoo chair, looking at him with the same face he would back on the road every time Sean bought him candy. Extremely excited, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing was real.
"Right." He said at last, once the ink was ready and there was no other reason to postpone the inevitable.
"Right," his brother echoed, sounding as excited as he looked." Go on then." He gestured towards his inner elbow as he said it, where he had decided he wanted the tattoo.
"Are you sure about this?" Sean asked for what was probably the millionth time. Just because he used his body as a canvas and had his entire left arm filled with mostly-meaningless doodles it didn't mean that he wanted that for Daniel as well. He was going to be a therapist after all, and he needed to look responsible (even if he wasn't).
But his brother's mind was made up, so much in fact that he didn't even justify Sean's question with a response. All he did was frown at him and extend his arm further into the chair, the implication clear.
With a sigh, he covered his arm with the stencil until the design stuck, and then he took a second to stare at the lines, marveling at how genuinely pretty the tattoo was going to be. Then, the machine came to life and the first needle dropped, and Sean began working.
As he began the outline of the tattoo, he realized how much more delicate he was with Daniel than with any other person. He was softer with the machine, stopping briefly whenever his brother winced and making sure that he was okay before continuing.
It was a cliché, but it was hard for Sean to see Daniel as a proper eighteen-year-old and not the nine-year-old kid he had carried over his shoulders on the road to their grandparent's house. It was crazy to think about how much he had grown up over such a short period of time. It was even crazier to think that Sean had been taking care of him all those years.
He liked to think that he had been there for all of it, but that wasn't as much truth as he would've liked to believe. For every time Sean had been there for him, there had been trials Daniel had had to face alone, either because he physically wasn't there or because they were things no one else could face for him. Ghosts too old for such a young boy chasing him down, and as much as Sean had helped where he could, Daniel had ended up growing up almost in spite of himself.
If he was being completely honest with himself, Sean hadn't noticed how much everything had affected Daniel until the night he came back from his time-traveling adventures. He had been aware of Daniel's nightmares and understood to a degree how hard things had been for him, but it wasn't until a particular point in his story that it truly hit him.
He had been recounting the bit of the story where he left the church when he had looked over at his brother and realized there was something sad in his expression. At first, he thought he was seeing things that weren't there, given how well into the night they were at that point (the description of Lady Time on itself had taken them at least half an hour). But no, Daniel was full-on avoiding his eye and doing that pout-thing he did whenever he was upset.
"What's the matter?" He had said, breaking off his comparison of Lady Time and the virgin Mary.
Daniel continued to avoid his gaze. "Oh, nothing. Go on."
But it clearly wasn't nothing, and Sean was not beyond a little pushing to get the truth out of his younger brother. So he pushed.
"It's just," for a moment Daniel didn't say anything else, probably trying to find his words. Then, like a dam breaking, he began spilling everything out.
"You really traveled out of here, didn't you? Like, I get it, I miss Dad every single fucking day too, but I wouldn't you know, change everything just to get him back. I don't know, Sean. Do you really hate it here that much? Cause I like it here. I like Mexico so much more than I thought I would. And you're here, so you didn't actually stay there but, I don't know. Is it selfish that I wouldn't want you to leave?"
He had begun crying as soon as he mentioned their Dad, and by the time he was finished he was full-on sobbing, tears streaming freely through his face. And it was so hard not to see him as that little kid he had been all those years on that moment, as his sobs echoed quietly through the room.
So Sean did the one thing he was sure he knew how to do. He went across the room and held his brother tight against his chest, running his finger through his hair.
"God, enano, no. Of course it's not selfish," he separated himself from Daniel a little to look at him properly in the eyes. "This had nothing to do with you. I should've talked about it with you. It wasn't fair of me to just go. I was scared and confused, and just did whatever I felt was right at the moment and I regret it deeply," he paused to make sure Daniel was understanding every word of what he was saying. "But I'm here now. And I swear to you I'm not going anywhere".
And he had meant it. And a year and a half later, there he was, carefully tattooing Daniel and feeling happier than he had since that fateful October afternoon, almost a decade prior.
As he finished the outline and began working on the actual design, he was invaded by the same thought that had been haunting him ever since the previous summer had ended: Daniel was in his last year of high school before going off to college.
Because yeah, sure, parents in Mexico were way more attached than parents in the States and didn't just send their kids off to college to never see them again. Usually, a kid would stay home until they finished their degree and could properly make a life for themselves, sometimes even after. But the closest university campus was still hours of driving away, and they had already decided Daniel would stay in the nearby town for the week and come back on weekends.
So Sean would technically still see him. But after having spent almost his entire life living with Daniel (and almost nine years of it being just the two of them) he would've been lying if he said he wasn't going to miss his little cub. They were a good team, and Sean would've probably saved himself a lot of the time-traveling business trouble had he actually spoken about it with Daniel first.
Just as he began with the finishing touches, Daniel gasped loudly. He was lucky Sean didn't have the machine on him at that moment, because after having spent the entire time in silence, the noise made him jerk his hand.
"Lady! Come here, girl!" Daniel exclaimed excitedly as the stray they had adopted over a year prior made her way into the parlor. She was a relatively big black dog, who was at least a quarter of a retriever (but anything else was anyone's guess). What she was, though, was attention-seeking, and Daniel never hesitated to give it to her. Not even when he was having a tattoo done, it appeared.
"She can't, Daniel. The ink in your arm?" He sighed, because of course something like that would happen.
Through most of the time they had lived in Puerto Lobos, Sean and Daniel had not adopted a single dog. A lot of strays had found their way into their house, but Daniel had never asked to keep them, and so they didn't. Sean, who assumed it probably hurt too much to have another dog after Mushroom died as suddenly and tragically as she did, could not blame him.
But after that sleepless night of talking (and the subsequent two days Sean had spent actually sleeping) something shifted in the air. They began saying things when they needed to, and when they didn't, too. Things that hurt, but also things that made them laugh and share nostalgic smiles.
So, when two weeks after everything had calmed down another stray found its way into their door, Daniel had actually asked to keep it. And Sean didn't say no, so.
"She's a girl!" He had seemed so genuinely excited at the stray that Sean's heart had begun beaming.
"What should we call her?" Daniel had said, looking over his shoulder to his brother. And Sean, who didn't believe in coincidences, stuck to his promises, and had noticed the surprisingly bright shade of blue of the dog's eyes, had simply smiled and said "How about Lady?"
And so Lady was her name.
Once Sean finally managed to get Lady out of the way (much to Daniel's protests), he began with the actual finishing touches. It was a simple design, really, and so it didn't take long. A few colors, some finishing lines, and then it was done. The machine stopped buzzing and there was a beat of silence as both brothers stared at the design in Daniel's skin.
Two weeks prior, once Sean had finally agreed to give Daniel the tattoo for his birthday ("And not one day before!" he would exclaim with mock seriousness), they had gotten into deciding what the design would be. At first, Daniel had been relaxed about it, claiming that whatever was fine.
But Sean insisted on him finding something that truly meant a lot to him because he wanted it to be special. He might not have been the best example of it, but tattoos really were something you couldn't take back. Once you had one, you were stuck with it for good.
The decision had ended up being made three days before Daniel's birthday, when he finally admitted he didn't have any clue as to what the design should be.
"It's not as if every single tattoo you have has some deep meaning behind it, anyway." He had said, plopping down into their couch. The action was pretty much one big way of saying "I give up!" without actually using the words. Sean found it amusing, although he didn't tell that to Daniel.
He had tentatively sat down beside him, like approaching an angry animal. "Well, not all of them. But some have more meaning than others".
That had caught Daniel's attention the way he knew it would. "Which one has the most meaning?" He had asked, eyes darting up to give him a hopeful look.
Sean had pointed to a spot in his inner left arm, the one that was filled with doodles. Just below his inner elbow was the first proper tattoo he had ever done to himself, after getting used to the tattoo machine.
It was the shape of a running wolf. It looked as if it had been caught mid-run, more like a picture than a drawing. Sean had spent a week working on it, on the outline and the details that made it look serene in its run as if it had somewhere to go and time to get there. Looking at it helped him calm down, sometimes. It reminded him of his place in the world, of the reason he did things.
And as he and Daniel stared at the matching tattoo sitting on his brother's arm, he felt tears come into his eyes. It was a cub running on the same spot he had his own wolf. Daniel's version definitely had more attention to detail, though, a testament to Sean's growth as an artist in the time between the two pieces.
As he silently reached for cling film to wrap it up, there was a vague feeling lingering in the back of his mind. Something about fate, and scars, and getting to choose what marks you. Something about deciding who your people are and where your loyalties lie. Something that made him feel warm inside and like things were going to be okay.
But he didn't focus on that. He focused on wrapping up the tattoo and then letting Daniel's arm go.
His brother very delicately retreated his arm from the chair for closer inspection, seemingly lost on the design. He lightly traced the shape of the cub with his fingers, from its paws to its ears, and then a chuckle and a tear escaped him at the same time.
"Do you like it, then?" He asked softly, even though he already knew the answer.
Daniel made a fond noise. "I like it a lot, Sean."
And the next moment they were hugging like they had thousands of times before, only that maybe not. Maybe they had never hugged with those emotions before, and maybe they never would again. Maybe there were infinite ways to give hugs and say nice words, infinite ways to love that they would spend the rest of their lives looking for.
Daniel was leaving for college, but he was taking all the love of almost a decade and more with him, on his skin. And when Daniel left, Sean would be alright, even if he would miss him every day. Because he had things waiting for him, people to meet, things to do, and tattoos to make. His future looked bright ahead of him, if a little blurry.
Because it had all turned out okay at the end. For all the bad there had been good, and maybe some more extra then, for good measure. Wounds turned into scars and he began healing slowly, piece by piece. Every day the scars hurt less, as present as they were. But they were going to be okay, he was sure.
And as he's standing there, holding Daniel with all the love he has to offer, he feels peace.
Notes:
So this is it. After beginning this fic back in January, I'm proud to say I finally managed to finish it. Life is Strange 2 has meant the world to me and is one of those stories that will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. I wrote this story as a way to give Sean proper closure, and as I finish this fic I realize that it gave me closure, too. Thank you so much if you made it here, it really does mean a lot. And if you need to hear this, you will find peace. Maybe just not the way you expected you would.
As usual, I'm stillbeautifulthings on tumblr 333