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The timepiece’s guts scatters against the floor and the world decays.
“I’m free,” breathes Stanley, his voice caught somewhere between the soft edges of relief and the bittersweet blade of bewilderment. He falls to his knees as he says it. “I’m free.”
The room, the control room to which every item had its place and purpose, is destroyed; the wall crumbled to dust and monitors shattered beyond repair. Stanley doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, it’s as if he’s without mind, mumbling on and on about his precious freedom.
The Narrator returns to his feet. His jaw still smarts from the room-flying punch and he has half a mind to return the favor, but such acts of violence would be stooping to Stanley’s level, and he’s better than that. Yes, far better. He approaches the other man with caution, but when the floor is a minefield of jagged LCDs and wall debris, stealth is a losing battle. Deftness had never been his strong suit.
He steps on his glasses—his own glasses of all things!—and freezes as Stanley’s head swivels his direction.
The Narrator knows Stanley. It’s only natural based on his station that he familiarize himself with the human’s pettiness and utter disregard for rules, and above all else, his all-consuming drive. That man will do anything, go through anyone, for the sake of indulging his preternatural lust for that ever-elusive so-called ‘freedom’. Even as he watches, Stanley’s hands drag past the broken gears of Time itself to clutch at a jagged piece of glass. His eyes flinty, as if daring the Narrator to come closer.
Yes, this man will do anything for his freedom.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Stanley.” His jaw clicks as he speaks. How annoying. “What good will killing me do? You kill me, and then what? You’re stuck in a world you’ve, on average, never survived past a couple of weeks? How long do you imagine you’ll last?”
Brown eyes narrow.
“Put that down," the Narrator says slowly. "You’re going to hurt yourself.”
Stanley doesn’t put the glass down. If anything, he clenches it tighter until blood drips own its opaque edge. His shoulders are pulled back, legs tense; every part of him wound like a rubber band pulled past its limit. Physically engaging Stanley is a fool’s errand. The Narrator's purpose lies in academic observation, not hand-to-hand fighting, and Stanley has had loop after loop after loop to hone his reflexes; and so he casts his eyes for another avenue. A quick way out, perhaps, because he may be the proverbial villain in Stanley’s story but he is in no way interested in a villain's end.
And then he spots it.
The step forward is his version of instinct; conflicting lines of code rewriting over each other. True to his previous prediction, Stanley springs forward like a predator in wait, pressing glass to his throat.
“Stanley, we need to-”
“Careful,” says the beast holding glass to his neck. “One wrong move and I’ll-“
“Stanley, look down.”
“-cut you up and leave you to rot-“
“Stanley, please. Look. Down.”
“I’m not falling for that!”
“Stanley!” he snaps. “LOOK. DOWN.”
Stanley glances down for only two E̶R̴R̴O̴R̷. One. Two. Then he glares at the Narrator before double taking, shoving them both away from the slowly widening hole in the floor.
No, not one hole. Several holes overlapping each other, eating at the concrete and linoleum and leaving nothing but blue-gray particles to float in the air. The clock, or what’s left of it, has either fallen through or decayed. A few feet away, the metal rod Stanley had tripped over disintegrates into n o t h i n g.
“What the heck is that?” asks Stanley.
“Decay,” answers the Narrator. “The world is decaying.”
Stanley clutches his shoulder tightly, and while the glass is no longer held against his neck, it is still too close for comfort.
“It’s decaying,” the Narrator repeats, “and it’s your fault.”
“What? Just because I broke your stupid clock?”
“It wasn’t a 'stupid clock'. It was an essential piece central to maintaining this world, and many other world's, timeline as we know it.”
“The timeline. Right. The timeline where you killed me again and again and again and again-”
“You killed yourself most of those times!”
Stanley talks over him. “The timeline where you kept trapping me in that stupid little office and wouldn’t let me out even when I begged-”
He might not be a fighter, but he’s not without tricks. He grabs the wrist holding the bloodied piece of glass and twists until the pain forces Stanley to open his hand. The glass bounces on the floor, and before it settles, he kicks it towards the hole. It teeters over the edge and then it’s falling, but before gravity can pull it out of eyesight, it erodes into thin air; small, opaque particles all that remains before that, too, vanishes.
“If you’re done with your hissy fit,” he says, releasing Stanley’s wrist, “we need to leave before all our exits decay away.”
Stanley laughs. It is not a nice laugh. It is harsh, and caustic, and reveals far too much canines. The Narrator positions himself as far away from the hole and Stanley’s reach as he can without leaving the room.
“Leave?” Stanley says. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do this entire time?” His mouth twists, shadows dancing in the depths of his brown eyes. “And what do you mean by ‘we’?”
“Well, I can’t very well stay here, can I?” The Narrator spreads his arms to encompass ‘here’. “My office is destroyed and soon to be reduced to decay, and I don’t fancy falling into tiny particles. I realize that I may not be as physically inclined as you, but seeing as how I have a better idea of this world, and possess a far more level-head, I can guide you. So what do you say, Stanley?”
He offers his hand for a shake, although he knows the human’s too barbaric for such manners. Stanley's emotions have always been easy to read; anger in the furrow of his brows, indignation as he cradles his wrist. The Narrator's gaze flicks towards the expanding hole. The rate of decay is… It's worrying. It inches millimeter by millimeter, not fast enough to outright consume. In fact, according to his mathematical computations, which they always are, the decay can be easily outwalked... so long as the rate of decay stays consistent. But decay is decay, whether it creeps upon you in minutes or days or years, it will consume everything it touches eventually.
But then again, couldn’t that be said for life in general?
“Fine,” Stanley bites out after a moment’s contemplation. He avoids the proffered handshake as predicted and steps onto the Narrator’s desk with complete disregard for the jagged edges and sparking equipment. Then he jumps through the broken hole he created as if it’s nothing, and it’s only a few dusty parkour subroutines which allows the Narrator to catch up as Stanley hops from platform to platform, heading straight towards that gently lit exit sign.
(The lit exit sign seems to be the only light left in the world. The sky is no longer blue. The platforms look grayer than before. The Narrator only allows himself glimpses of the dark void below between hops.)
“Wait, Stanley!” he shouts. Surprisingly, the man pauses, and the Narrator rushes to his platform. Once there, he reaches for Stanley’s arm, but Stanley dodges as he dodges all things; with agility and grace and barely contained anger.
“What?” the test subject bites.
“We don’t know what’s out there. It could be dangerous. Preparations should be made, a gathering of resources. Come with me back to the office-”
“‘We don’t know what’s out there?’” mocks Stanley. “I thought you knew, or why am I letting you ‘guide me’? And I am,” here Stanley stomps forward, chest puffed up like an exaggerated bird of prey, “never, EVER stepping foot in there again, so don’t ask me to if you know what’s good for you.”
“I said I have a better idea of what’s out there. You don’t know what you did by destroying the clock, do you? You just destroyed time itself. Excuse me if that makes things a little unpredictable. Beyond that door could be nirvana or hell itself. We need to-” He makes to grab Stanley’s arm again, but the test subject is quicker, darting back to the platform’s edge and stopping bare of a infinite fall below.
“I’ve already been through hell. I’m not going back. I am NEVER going back.”
He is stubborn. He is stubborn and pigheaded and he looks at the Narrator with wild eyes, as if one wrong move would have him fall back or bull rush the other man from the platform where they’ll fall, fall, fall. Until their skulls fracture and their spines break—not from meeting concrete but the inevitable change in air pressure as they get closer and closer to the bottom—and when they finally do meet the bottom? Arms laying crooked like broken toothpicks, blood spilling out like-
The Narrator closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath.
Focus.
“Then will you wait for me here while I gather supplies?”
Stanley leans back and forth as he thinks it over; a movement so infinitesimal the Narrator isn’t sure Stanley knows he’s doing it. Finally, he says, “I promise I’ll wait here.”
And really, what other options does he have?
“Stay right here,” the Narrator warns. “I’ll be back in-” He reaches a hand towards his breast pocket before remembering—oh yes, the timepiece had been broken irreparably and time as they know it is now nonexistent. Even a glimpse at his internal clock is nothing more than gibberish. Stanley, catching the aborted motion, smirks. Prick. “I’ll be back soon. Do not move.”
He jumps his way back to the office, or what's left of the main building after tearing it apart in an effort to prevent Stanley's escape. Oh, the irony. His eyes dart back at each landing, and Stanley waves each time, smile wide, right where he left him. He reaches the main building and looks back one last time.
Still there. Waving and smiling.
He walks in and then he’s encased in those four walls and shuttered windows—a safety countermeasure that’s backfiring now—and rushes through. He only barely registers the white walls, handless clocks, and destroyed security cameras as he passes.
First, he searches for a container for their supplies. He comes across a bucket sitting under a leaky sink in the bathroom which he dismisses—who would want to carry a bucket for hours on end? An unwell person, that’s who—and considers a few briefcases. Better, but there has to be something more efficient around here somewhere…
He finds the backpack under Employee 432’s desk. Its lightweight, but the fabric is thick and the pack large enough to hold more than a few employee handbooks. Perfect.
From the cubicles, he makes his way to the employee lounge. It’s a rather minimalist room with blue carpeting, two ferns, and five chairs in prime position for ‘lounging’. Not much else to the room, aside from two vending machines in the corner. Usually, these drinks and snacks costs $1 each, but it’s only a matter of pressing a few buttons in the right order to open the doors. From there, the Narrator stockpiles, careful to choose between snacks that are long-lasting and healthy.
Once the bag is fit to bursting, he sits and contemplates. Food. Water. What else do humans need? Sleep, he knows, is important, but a pillow would be too big to fit. The backpack is soft, Stanley could just use that as a pillow.
What else? What else? Entertainment, he thinks, is essential, but Stanley has always been good at entertaining himself when not breaking the timeline...
Oh, hygiene! He doesn’t want to be stuck with a smelly human for the rest of however long they have before the timeline fixes itself, does he? He grabs some toiletries from the bathroom, a toothbrush, toothpaste, etc. There. That should be it, right?
Yet still, a nagging nips at him, as though he’s forgotten something important. Food. Water. Hygiene…
Then it hits him, so obvious he can’t believe he’d almost forgotten.
Medicine!
Yes, medicine is essential for continued survival. It’s one of the reasons humans have gotten this far along, isn’t it? Luckily, he knows quite well where the first aid kit sits. Unluckily, it’s in the closet.
That accursed, accursed closet.
The broom closet is one of the only rooms in the entire building which locks from the inside and without security camera. This means it is Stanley’s favorite room. The amount of loops he’s spent in there refusing to come out no matter how many times the Narrator cajoled, bribed or threatened; the hours and days wasted with no test subject to observe, if he was even aware of the strain he caused the office when he went off on one of his little stints. Of course, the first aid kit had to be in there and not somewhere more sensible, like the employee lounge or the boss' office. (Partially his fault for not relocating it sooner but there had always been more important matters to attend.)
As the Narrator walks into the broom closet for the first time, he can honestly say he does not see the appeal. The air is stale, thick with the smell of bleach, the carpeting shabby and worn, and it's so cramped. Between the metal shelves, there isn’t enough room to do a lap, much less lie about for days on end. What was Stanley doing in here?
Frustrated he even has to spend a lick of nonexistent time in this space, the Narrator grabs the first aid kit, turns the lights back off, and does not linger.
Supplies gathered, he returns to the platforms and looks left. There, his control room floats, or once floated. The pocket dimension's innards are on grim display as corners of his station float away. Even worse, the isolated, levitating platform nearest the control room is crumbling piece by molecular piece. It confirms one of his theories, at least. Namely, the decay can’t be solved by anything as simple as amputation.
No, this is just a matter of space and time.
Inevitability.
With that, the Narrator takes a look to his right, where Stanley had been told to wait. Stanley is no longer there, and the exit door swings wide open on invisible wind.
That little shit.
The world beyond the exit is a gray-brown mix of fossilized trees, scraggly branches, and floating islands; some upside down, right side up, and every angle in between. It’s not the islands which he abhors, or the trees’ fossilization—although he thinks the world would look much brighter if they were alive—or even the branches which have a tendency to poke as he passes. It’s the organization. Spanish mosses stand next to arctic ferns and palm trees next to hundred-years-old sequoias, and don’t get him started on the seaweed. Some of the plants are even fused together in a weird Spanish moss-arctic fern-palm tree-sequoias mix and the clear lack of boundaries only spoke to the world's brokenness. Then the trees that did all this and were upside down! The sky's not even the right color; a sulfurous yellow which would be terrible for the human circadian rhythm. Ugh.
In short, if this place had a manager, the Narrator would be leaving angry voice-mails for their crimes against nature.
But, as they say, c’est la vie. It is how it is. The Narrator is only thankful, as perverse as it is, that the entire world seems stuck in a perpetual snow-less winter. There isn’t any green as far as he can see, and what little fruits or nuts he’s come across is questionable at best. While there’s sound in this forest, the distant chirps of something that might be birds or squirrels or the death throws of life itself, the Narrator hasn’t run into any animals or insects. No sources of water either.
All that to say, it makes catching up to Stanley very easy. The man hadn’t even bothered to disguise his footsteps on the forest floor. He lays in between the roots of a pecan-oak tree hybrid, unhidden; lying slumped like it's his final resting place.
The Narrator walks up to Stanley’s prone, vulnerable form and drops the backpack he’d been touting directly onto the human's stomach.
“I told you to wait for me.”
Stanley groans pathetically. His face is pale and his eyes squint at the Narrator as if dubious of his existence. Time no longer exists, but judging by the other’s state and the Narrator's knowledge of human limits, it’s been at least three days since they’ve seen each other.
Eying the nuts and other questionable edibles surrounding Stanley—the man’s resourceful, at least—he extends his estimation to four, maybe five days.
Stanley sits up and it seems to take all his meager energy. “I’m hungry. And thirsty,” he states.
“I know. There’s food and water in the bag.”
Stanley digs in, producing a bag of beef jerky and bottle water, which he uncaps and gulps down heavily.
“I forgot getting hungry and thirsty was something I could do,” he says, pulling at the bag until it pops.
Stanley is filthy. His once white dress shirt is caked in dirt and grass, his black tie missing entirely. There are bags under his eyes and he chews his way through the jerky like an animal, huffing and growling.
Even so, hungry and thirsty and tired and dirty, he seems…happy.
The Narrator may be familiar with Stanley, but he does not understand him at all.
Stanley opens three more bags of jerky before the Narrator has to remind him of such esoteric concepts as limited resources and pacing oneself. He slows down afterwards, but still makes the most disgusting noises while he eats. When he’s finished, he stands, a little less pale, a little more cheery-eyed.
“How did you find me?” he asks.
“Oh,” says the Narrator, voice sly, “I just used the tracking device.”
Stanley’s brown eyes widen. His hand shoots to his wrist, his face, the back of his neck. Dirt-ridden nails dig in until they leave half-crescent moons, dragging across the skin as if mere scratches would ever help if there were any real tracking devices. The Narrator doesn’t roll his eyes because that’s beneath him, but he catches Stanley’s wrists before he can do any more damage to his frail human body.
“There is no tracking device. It was sarcasm. I followed your footprints.”
“Oh.” Stanley’s eyes search the Narrator’s face, eyebrows raised like he can’t imagine a universe where the Narrator sarcasms. Presumably finding no deception,he says, “You’re really mean. Do you know that?”
He lets go of Stanley’s wrists. “I don’t want to hear this from the man who abandoned me the instant my back was turned. Come on, let’s get going.”
There’s a moment in which Stanley says nothing, and the Narrator resigns himself to another argument or fruitless escape attempt. Instead, he’s taken aback when Stanley picks up the bag and holds it out like he expects the Narrator to be his pack mule. “Oh no,” the Narrator laughs. “I gathered the supplies. You can carry it.”
Stanley doesn’t argue and—again, surprisingly—they set off together.
(They don’t discuss their lack of destination. Not yet.)
The world is a dreary, quiet landscape full of butchered trees weighed by bare branches which swing in nonexistent winds below islands that defy gravity and are liable to crash land on them at any second. At some point, the clear path they’ve traveled becomes a bumpy mess of roots, roots, and more roots; the trees so dense and fused they have to squeeze their way past. And if that isn’t enough, the path opens up into rows and rows of cacti and prickly pants and the Narrator finds his new definition of hell.
And of course, Stanley loves it.
He picks off the burs that stick to his clothes and sticks them to his backpack for ‘decoration’. He points out each floating island with vigor and traces their movements with his eyes. When he finds a new tree, he tries to climb it immediately.
“I don’t understand what attracts you to this place so much,” grumbles the Narrator after they’ve finally, finally gotten past the cacti. “There’s no order. No organization. There’s not even a sun or moon! It’s absurd.”
“The chaos is what I like about it,” says Stanley as he sticks another burr to his backpack. “And there wasn’t a sun or moon in the office either. It was just you pressing a day and night-cycle button.”
He has a point, but it’s not like the Narrator will admit as such. He sighs, folding his arms as Stanley’s eyes trace the trunk of a nearby tree.
“Might I remind you we have limited rations and expending energy unnecessarily is a terrible idea?”
Stanley stops eying the oak twisted around a pine tree. “Yeah, I guess so…” His shoulders slump as he walks past, gaze every now and then darting behind him like a child being forced past an ice cream stand. And then, impromptu of nothing, he says, “Hey, what’s your name?”
“What?”
Another quirk the Narrator has come to learn as they’ve traveled together, aside from having the worst taste in scenery, Stanley likes to talk. This is a quirk he knew once, through those first few loops, however long ago they were, but with each successive loop a reticence had crept under Stanley’s skin until the subject had only communicated in huffs and sighs and rebellions. It’d been so long since he heard Stanley's voice that his new loquaciousness is...troublesome to adjust to.
“Your name,” insists Stanley as he hops onto a fallen log and walks along, arms splayed for balance. The Narrator paces beside him on the forest floor, two steps behind. “What is it? Like, my name is Stanley and your name is…”
Anticipation curls in on itself in the silence. He doesn’t know why. Stanley knows his name, surely?
“I’m the Narrator.”
“Yeah, no. That’s a title. A title I'm pretty sure I gave you. What’s your real name?”
“...I’m the Narrator.”
Stanley hums as he walks along. He mumbles N-names under his breath. Nathaniel, Nelson, Nigel, Neil, until he finally says, “I’ll call you Narry.”
The Narrator does not splutter because spluttering is for amateurs with no voice control. “Y- you will not! Narry? That sounds like a name you’d give a contrarian character in a children’s book. If you’re to give me a name, it should be more respectable than that.”
Stanley laughs and it echoes loud across the silent forest. “Narry it is then!”
The log comes to an end and Stanley jumps off with a twist so he lands face-to-face with his travel partner. The sky is a faded yellow and there is no clouds, sun, or other celestial bodies to speak of, but there is light somehow, enough to cast shadows, and Stanley stands in it, dappled.
“You know, you’re a lot different than I expected.”
“And what does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I think I was expecting someone frumpier? Also, for some reason I was imagining you with a headset glued to your ears…” Stanley scratches his jaw in thought. “Maybe a sentient tape recorder?”
“A frumpy tape recorder with a headset glued to its ears? Really?”
“Mm-hmm. Shorter, too.” He holds his palm flat to his chin and smiles. “Like, this short. Maybe shorter than that.”
For some reason, it’s only then that Stanley's words sinks in; the implications of it all. This is the second time they’ve met in person, their first meeting being too brief and anger-fueled and world-ending to count as a proper introduction. And now here they are, having their second proper conversation, and the Narrator looks like a disheveled pincushion.
He straightens up. There’s nothing to be done for the tears in his clothes but he brushes the dust off as best as he can, flinging away a single prickly bur he finds stuck to his back. He tugs at the hem of his suit jacket, hoping it comes across as casual instead of desperate or vain. He isn’t being desperate or vain, he assures himself. He's only interested in appearing professional at all times. Unlike Stanley, he has standards.
“Well,” he says, and it only comes out a tad tetchy, “it’s clear you were very off the mark.”
Stanley laughs again and underneath the laugh comes a high-pitched electrical whine. A bright yellow light shines over Stanley’s shoulder.
The shot comes fast. A straight beam, there and gone faster than the human eye can register. It vaporizes the place they once stood, smoke lifting from a black crater as the thing—a dark cube with two…eyes? Limbs half human, half cockroach legs—scuttles out of the tree line it was hiding behind. Another electrical whine, its yellow and white eyes turning into one big yellow eye, pupils turning into two concentric diamonds, spokes poking out the end like crosshairs.
It’s Stanley who gathers his wits first. He flips the Narrator off from whence he shoved them both to the ground—another shot of yellow vaporizes where they once laid—and then he’s up, dragging the Narrator with him as they zigzag through the forest. Footsteps follow them, uneven-like, as if whatever creature is following them is having difficulty on its mismanaged limbs and the bumpy terrain. Rays of yellow shoot past them but its shots are at too-long intervals. Each moment before a shot, the Narrator’s auditory sensors catch an electrical whir.
“The whining means it’s charging its shot,” the Narrator informs Stanley as they run for their lives. “We need to time this if we want to survive.”
Thankfully, Stanley is very good at timing.
Electronic whir. Drop behind cover. Run. Electronic whir. Drop behind cover. Run. Electronic whir. Drop behind cover. Run-
The Narrator runs for the next tree but the only sounds that follow are an uneven gait with too many limbs. There’s no harsh breathing by his side, no push at his shoulder directing him what tree to hide behind, no tug of his elbow. The Narrator looks back and finds Stanley standing there like an idiot, staring dumbly at his own yellow-tinged encroaching death.
The world tilts dangerously as the Narrator runs back. He grabs Stanley by the wrist and tries to run for cover, but Stanley’s dead weight stops him. He tugs two times before the brunet finally gets the memo and runs. Now it’s his turn leading the charge. Whir. Drop behind cover. But the moment the shot rings through, instead of going forward, he veers left, hides behind a large oak tree, and then veers another sharp right after that.
They disappear behind a larger sycamore and, content they’re not to be found for a little while, he bunches his fist into Stanley’s shirt so hard a button pops off. Then he shakes him.
“What were you doing?” he hisses. Stanley’s head lolls with each shake. It’s concerning. It’s a non-reaction. Stanley doesn’t do non-reactions. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? Stanley, time is gone now. There are no more resets. Once you die, you are DEAD.”
That seems to snap the brunet out of whatever melancholy he’s dipped his toes into. Stanley’s lips turn sharp but there’s a waver in his voice, a lightness which crackles at the edges, like a record player played one too many times.
It sounds a lot like old nostalgia.
“You promise?” says Stanley.
It sounds a lot like hope.
Through the forest, the skittering footsteps sound louder and louder. Their time is up if they’re spotted, and they can’t run forever. So, they can’t be spotted.
…Well, there is a tree right behind them.
“We need to climb.” He places his hands on the trunk and the bark digs into his palms, but the color is off. Next to him, Stanley climbs as well, but it’s clear the backpack’s weighing him down as the plastic bags and bottles crinkle against each other noisily. Yellow light shines through the monotone forest, growing larger and larger.
“Get rid of the backpack.”
“But-”
“Now!”
Stanley drops the backpack and unhindered, climbs the tree like a monkey. Up, up, up, clear out of view for anyone with a limited line of sight. The Narrator follows, only barely reaching the second branch by the time the thing bursts around the corner, its eyes ping-ponging across its cubical face in search of them.
It pauses at the foot of the tree, its yellow eyes taking in the abandoned backpack. The Narrator prepares himself, legs tensed to run, run, run or climb, climb, climb—but then it gazes past the backpack, uncaring, before moving on. It doesn’t sniff around the tree and doesn’t even look up, which means…that it’s intelligent enough to point and shoot, but not intelligent enough to recognize a hastily-hatched escape plan.
Good.
He watches as it leaves, its gait unnatural and gawky, and yet speed unparalleled as it lurches forwards as if sucked by a vacuum in time and space. If there hadn’t been a thousand different places to take cover, if there hadn’t been a tree to climb to miss its eyeline…
They’d have been dead before they could even blink.
Before it leaves his line of sight completely, the being…shifts. The Narrator watches as between the gaps of one tree and the next, the cubed box with freakish limbs stumbles into a hunched-over humanoid, moving as if staggeringly drunk or relying on another person’s locomotion entirely; their otherwise humanoid face replaced by the same eerie yellow light and eyes as the cube.
And then they pass a tree and it’s a cube again. The only hint they were ever humanoid in the human arms and legs that serve as half its locomotion.
Okay then.
“That was Mariella,” Stanley says, voice low. He seems to have cottoned on that the creature is attracted to noise, or else he’s being extra cautious. They both agreed to put as much distance between them and the direction where it went, and somehow found themselves walking under a floating island the size of a small township, roots dangling from the bottom like thick branching ribbons. It casts darkness upon them, one that forces the Narrator to lead with his superior vision.
The burs that had been stuck to the backpack had fallen off sometime in the run for their lives. Stanley hasn’t seemed to notice. Or maybe he no longer cares.
“Pardon?”
“That monster. That whatever. She was one of my… She was one of the people in the office. Just for a second, I saw her and…and what is that? What happened to her?”
“If I had to guess? When the timeline got destroyed, entities could no longer tell each other apart.” He gestures to the trees. Nearby, a banyan tree weighs down a pine tree enough that it’s trunk makes an arch. He doesn’t know if Stanley can see it in this deep dark. “Because they could no longer differentiate from each other and became stressed under the fracture of time, similar entities fused together. Trees, fruits, environments. Humanoids. I believe the only reason we haven’t fused to anything is because we were there when it got destroyed, or that we were the only ones with enough sentience that we could tell each other apart.”
They come across vines and moss they must duck under, and with Stanley’s poor vision, it takes some time to guide him through. When they do get past it, they fall silent, so when Stanley asks, “So what did she fuse with?” It takes him by surprise.
“I don’t know,” he answers after some deliberation. “It’s nothing I’ve seen before. I have some theories, but whatever it is, it’s clearly powerful and dangerous. We shouldn’t engage it.”
Stanley pauses next to him, so the Narrator pauses as well.
“It’s eyes were yellow. Like yours,” states Stanley. Brown eyes slide his way in a glare. “Why is that?”
Stanley had loved his coworkers once. Not all of them, of course. He hadn’t been too fond of Employee 428 or his boss or a handful of other loudmouths who kept taking sick days. There were over 400 employees in the building. It was understandable that he couldn’t care for every single one of them. ‘Within parameters,’ one might say. Human. And Stanley in all his humanity had done what humans tended to do, learned all his coworkers names, their likes and dislikes, their coffee orders, family members; the rhythms of the lives of those he cherished around him.
It was only a matter of time before he realized those rhythms weren’t natural.
It started small. His coworkers began repeating things. Getting details wrong. They didn’t grow and change, not like Stanley did—the same haircuts and same clothes and same rigid expressions. He had tried to change them, to have them grow at the same rate Stanley did, but there was only so much you can do with shadows, and Stanley had started noticing. He didn’t do anything about it at first, everyone had their off days, he reasoned. But, well…It gnawed at the human.
The real kicker, the biggest hint of all hints, was the first death. A complete accident, one wrong step while delivering products to the shipping bay, and BAM.
And when he reset, he remembered everything: his death, the discrepancy between the date on the computer and the one in his memory, the familiar work reports submitted long ago back at his desk, his coworkers introducing themselves as if greeting a new hire…
It went downhill from there. Back then, his policy had been to not intervene. He’d watched, hands far from the controls, as Stanley tried to make sense of his death. The intense interrogation of his coworkers, the meeting room with filled red threads and stolen files. All of his coworkers tried to talk him down. He hoped they would talk sense to him, but he must’ve made their scripts too similar, too uncanny, because it wasn’t long before Stanley was barricading himself into the broom closet, arms full of food and drink. He spent days in there. Days upon days upon weeks.
He had tried to do his job. He sent employees to try and cajole him out but Stanley was stubborn. To the point the android truly thought he’d never see Stanley again.
But then one day…Stanley emerged from the broom closet, stolen box cutter in hand, headed straight for the cubicles. Employee 432 ran into him first, and it was with a never-before-seen viciousness that Stanley drew him in, pressing the box cutter to his coworker’s neck.
At that point, he had and could overlook many things. Murder was not one of them. So with a press of a button, he let Employee 432 vanish back into storage, and did the same with every other person Stanley tried to hold hostage until there was no one left. And then Stanley had screamed and screamed, eyes full of hatred and mouth full of foam. He’d never forgotten the look Stanley shot the camera then, clutching that box cutter.
And what came after. He couldn’t forget that either.
Stanley’s giving him that same look he shot the security camera back then. It’s more subdued, but the core of it remains; resentment and hatred and that tiny bit of helplessness. They’d been walking for a while and had come across another creature, a different one fused with a different coworker, if Stanley were to be believed. When it was not humanoid looking, the Narrator couldn't tell the difference. They hid behind cover before it moved on, its body flickering as it shifted between man and monster.
The Narrator hadn’t answered Stanley’s implied accusations the first time. This time, it seems Stanley won't let it go.
“As I said, I have some theories.” He had planned to leave it at that, but Stanley’s silence speaks volumes and he finds himself elaborating. “They probably have something to do with time itself.”
“Time?”
“A last defense against those that would harm the timeline. Antibodies or keepers of the peace, as it were.”
“And is that what you are? A timekeeper?”
“…Not exactly.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“Classified.”
He’s balancing a thin line and they both know it. Stanley’s lips twist and his teeth grinds, but he does nothing more. Restraint. Never did the Narrator think he’d see the day Stanley exhibited restraint.
“Can you at least control them like you controlled…” The ‘everyone else in my life’ goes unsaid. The Narrator hears it anyway.
“Without my control room? That’s a non-starter, but even if I had my controls, these…half-shadows, half-keepers—they’re too fused together and if their directive truly is to be a last defense to those that would cause harm to the timeline, then we’re their first target.
Stanley stops walking and drops to a crouch. The Narrator turns on his scanning function, searching for an injury he’d somehow missed, but then Stanley clutches his head and groans, “Time loops. Destroyed timelines. Keepers that want to kill us. None of this is normal. Why couldn’t have the exit just been normal? Why couldn't it have been a real exit?”
Despite himself, he snorts. “You’re a test subject inside a cage inside a cage inside a cage. What would you know of normal?”
The words slip out absentmindedly. The ghosts of secrets they’ve purposefully left unstirred rearing their ugly heads. In the dark, the shadows underneath Stanley’s eyes are nearly invisible, but there, always.
“A test subject, huh?” Stanley lets out a dry chuckle. “Testing what? How long until a man goes insane? Because if so, that's long passed."
The Narrator does not answer. This does not please Stanley.
"And what do you mean inside a cage inside a cage? What, is there no exit? Am I just a rat to you? Am I even human?"
The Narrator does not answer.
"I can't remember my childhood. Who created me? What for? Was it you?” Stanley’s hands clutch around the Narrator's shoulders. “Did you create me?”
An abyss fixed in brown pupils. Carefully, the Narrator lowers himself until they’re truly eye to eye. “Yes, you’re human. No, I did not create you. Everything else is classified.”
He places his hand over Stanley's hands and it's testimony to how beaten Stanley feels that he doesn't revolt as the Narrator gently guides them down off his shoulders and to his sides.
“You’re tired, Stanley,” he says. “We’ve been walking a long time and almost got killed today. Let’s take a break. Go to sleep. I’ll take watch.”
It’s worrying how easily Stanley follows his guidance, placing his backpack on the forest floor and laying his head on it without a single rebuke.
No. Not worrying.
Frightening.
The watch for the first few E̸R̶R̵O̶R̸ is mostly uneventful. It’s not cold or hot here, so there’s no struggle for warmth or anything like that. The forest is quiet still, but ambient noise—tree branches rubbing against each other, the groan of roots—remind him the world is ever shifting. It's worrying to admit but if Stanley weren’t snoring a few feet away, reminding him he’s not alone, the non-silence of the forest would have him running and re-running his debugging program.
He’s contemplating the contradictions in his own preferences when a low whine breaks through the silence.
Instantly, he scans their surroundings. No yellow lights through the gaps in the trees, but a few feet away Stanley trembles. Then he groans, pained. Had an animal sneaked up on him? A bug? Had he eaten something he shouldn’t have?
Another groan. The Narrator curses himself for not keeping a closer eye as he scrabbles on his hands and knees to where Stanley lays. He pushes the brunet from his side onto his back and the man tosses and turns, sweat on his skin and staining the pits of his uniform. No wounds he can spot, but even his superior eyesight can have trouble with the darkness.
“Stanley,” he says, shaking the man’s shoulder. “Stanley, wake up.”
The groans come louder. The tossing and turning rising to a fever pitch. The first aid kit is propped against a tree, having been tossed there after Stanley dubbed it ‘too hard to sleep on’. The Narrator drags it over just in case and keeps shaking until finally, Stanley awakes.
And then the Narrator is lying prone on the ground, Stanley above him, hands wrapped around his throat.
Oh.
Roots dig into his back and he thinks there might’ve been a cactus bur he missed. The pressure on his throat is unbearable, although it doesn’t posses the effect Stanley’s probably hoping for. It certainly doesn’t restrict his voice in any significant way, at least.
“Stanley, what are you doing?”
The grip on his throat tightens and the Narrator reconsiders his previous estimations of their relationship. He had thought they’d been getting along, but perhaps their earlier camaraderie had been a front and this had been Stanley’s plan all along. Pretend at friendship. Get his guard down. Mimic sleep and lure the Narrator in with a faux nightmare before striking the final blow.
Drips of wetness touches his cheeks. Blood? Had Stanley been injured? Had he accidentally consumed something which made him aggressive or hallucinogenic? But then he notices Stanley’s mouth moving fervently, head bowed like reciting a prayer. His shoulders are shaking. A few more drops land on his face like rainfall, hitting his nose, the tip of his mouth, his lips. It’s not blood. It’s tears.
Then the words reach him. “You promised. You promised. You promised you wouldn’t reset-”
The hands around his neck dig deeper, hold closer.
“You promised.” Stanley chokes on a sob while trying to choke the Narrator. “Why did you reset?”
That’s enough of this. He may not have been programmed for fighting but he is not without a few basic self defense subroutines.
He tucks his chin in so Stanley has less of a grip. Then he strikes forward with his left hand, palm up, straight to the other man’s chin. Stanley’s head knocks back, but before he can let go, the Narrator grabs Stanley’s wrist to drag him closer before kneeing him in the abdomen. One pained groan later, and Stanley is slumping on top of him. Taking the opportunity, the Narrator flips their position, pinning down his wrists and sitting on his thighs to render him immobile. All the while, Stanley babbles—
“You promised. You promised. You promised no resets."
—eyes wild and wet with tears. He’s trying to buck him off, but he’s too uncoordinated; his breaths too ragged.
It would be counterproductive to point out he’s never made such promises, so he doesn’t.
“Focus, Stanley. You were having a nightmare. There hasn’t been a reset. We’re still in the apocalyptic nightmare you put us in. We’re still in the forest where we almost died. You were tired and I told you to sleep. You were just having a nightmare.”
The words seem to be connecting, but barely. “A…nightmare?” croaks Stanley.
Sight’s out because of the darkness, so the Narrator closes his eyes and breathes in deep. “Smell that Stanley? It’s the forest. Dirt and trees and grass. The office didn’t smell like this, did it? No, the office smelt like respectable things: toner and ink and coffee.”
Stanley breathes in deep. His struggling slows. Good. Experimentally, the Narrator lets go of his wrists and breathes in a tempo that he vaguely remembers as normal for a human. In for four. Hold it. Out for eight. In for four. Hold it. Out for eight. He repeats this until Stanley follows along. Then he reaches for the first aid kit.
Slowly, he places it near Stanley’s hand. The brunet gasps at the cold metal, fingers curling around the edge.
“Do you know what this is?”
Stanley pats the edge of it, and traces the metal crease where the two halves overlap. Eventually, he answers. “The first aid kit.”
“Yes, it’s the first aid kit I brought along in case your impulsive decision making brings us—or more specifically: you—into trouble. We haven’t had to use it yet. Let’s not start now.”
Stanley’s hands fly from the first aid kit to his face, his hands dragging past the stubble. It’s patchy and prickly to even look at and unseemly as all hell, but it seems to drag Stanley back to the present. Predicting less trouble now, the Narrator removes himself from the other man’s person and Stanley takes the opportunity to sit up.
“It was a dream.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not back there.”
“You’re not.”
Stanley slumps over. “I forgot I could dream, too,” he says with a smile, but he doesn’t sound happy about it. Not like he did when he realized he could hunger and tire and thirst. The smile shakes, and the tears that the Narrator had thought done with revive in earnest.
“I’m sorry. Oh god, I’m so sorry. I almost. I almost-”
“No harm done,” says the Narrator, running a hand along his throat. He won’t bruise and there had been no way for him to die, at least not via asphyxiation. No, the only way he’d been at any risk is if his throat had been crushed, and Stanley wasn’t strong enough for that.
In for four. Hold. Out for eight. In for four. Hold. Out for eight.
The Narrator is fine.
He is fine.
Stanley is not fine. He is staring at his hands as if they are a separate entity, one he has never seen before, and then he is scrambling on all fours in the darkness, away—until his forehead knocks against a tree, and then he crawls to the other side as if achingly, desperately fleeing from the Narrator’s gaze. But in the dark he’s chosen a skinny tree, and the Narrator can see the exact way Stanley curls on himself like the child he doesn’t remember being; see the way his shoulder shake and shudder as he rocks himself back and forth.
This isn’t the first time he’s seen Stanley cry, but there’s a difference between watching from a monitor and watching from less than ten feet away.
“Fuck!” Stanley screams, raw and aching like it’s been ripped from his throat. It echoes in the quiet, and the Narrator nearly trips over a root rushing to slap a hand over Stanley’s mouth. They wait, and when no yellow light shines from the nearby trees, he slowly removes his hand.
Immediately, Stanley hisses, “Fuck, shit, damn, godfucking-” His breaths are becoming labored again like a tidal wave slowly consuming the shore, and Stanley with it. “Fuck, shit, ass!”
The Narrator would’ve reprimanded Stanley’s language if he hadn’t thought it would fall on deaf ears. Instead, when he’s sure Stanley’s sudden word vomit won’t get any louder or breath any shorter, he returns to their resting spot. The backpack is right where they left it and he rummages through, comparing labels in the dark.
Finally, he finds the right one. Thankfully, he’d packed many, although Stanley hasn’t touched a single one. The Narrator can’t blame him. Bottled just can’t compare to home-brewed, or so he assumes, but one had to do make do in the middle of a self-inflicted apocalyptic nightmare.
“Here,” he says, not so much handing Stanley the bottle as much as poking him in the shoulder with it. “Tea.”
Stanley pauses. His eyes are red-rimmed and his tear tracks highlight the dirtiness of his face, but he wraps his hand around the bottle with gentleness. And then he laughs, broken and warped around the edges, but there’s a bark in there that speaks of surprise and therefore genuineness. He uncaps the bottle and drinks it and he stops crying, and that is enough.
If all else fails, thinks the Narrator, you can always count on tea.
Stanley doesn’t want to resume sleeping, so they keep walking. The Narrator takes the lead once more, walking at a sedate pace so Stanley can keep up. Somewhere along the way, the roots from the island become thicker and lower to the ground, intermingling with the treetops to give the illusion of leaves. And then, a little farther in, the roots illuminate, shedding soft blue light into the darkness. Stanley loves it. The Narrator is caught between interest on how the roots glow—it’s not the entire root, but parts of it, seemingly at random—and concern on what’s making them glow. Whether it’s natural bio-luminescence or some sort of radiation gone wrong.
There’s a moment during their walk where the illumination is enough that Stanley no longer needs his guidance and Stanley says, “Wait,” and so he does.
They pause.
He’s expecting further explanation. A ‘I need to rest for a minute’ or ‘I think I saw something’ but Stanley doesn’t explain. Only…stares at him, expression intent as if searching for that which has no words. The Narrator turns to him fully. “Is there something wrong?”
Brown eyes drop, but not by much. His fists clench and unclench. After a few E̸R̶R̵O̶R̸, he’s shaking his head. “Sorry, we can go. Just needed to rest my feet for a minute.”
“If you want to take a break…” he says entreatingly.
But the brunet’s already walking ahead. “No, just needed to get my bearings.”
It doesn’t register until several minutes later: the searching look. The clench of his fist. The drop of his eyes.
‘Oh,’ thinks the Narrator as his hand rises of its own accord. He doesn’t rub his throat, but it’s a near gesture. ‘He was searching for bruises.’
Eventually, the lack of sleep must catch up to him because they’re walking and suddenly the Narrator feels a pressure on his back. He has to turn quickly to catch Stanley before he collapses.
“I think,” he says dryly, “that someone didn’t get enough beauty sleep last time.”
Stanley doesn’t bother lifting his face from the Narrator’s, frankly, filthy suit jacket, his entire weight pressing into the Narrator’s arms. “You’re just jealous I’m better looking than you.”
“Oh, we’re the last two men on earth and the one that’s not me is prettier than me. However, will I cope?”
Stanley lifts his head up, faint amusement dancing across face, one eyebrow poised higher than the other. Blue reflects softly in his brown eyes from the glowing roots overhead.
“That wasn’t meant to sound as flirtatious as it did,” states the Narrator in the ensuing judgmental silence. “It was meant to sound more sarcastic.”
“You sure? Because that sounded pretty flirtatious to me.”
The Narrator takes a step back and laughs as Stanley falls to the floor with a muffled yelp.
They settle quickly. Stanley lays on the ground, head rested on the backpack, and then he’s off to dreamland. Hopefully, a kinder dreamland than before. The Narrator’s prepared himself for several hours of boredom, but midway through a small file cleaning session Stanley calls out, head twisted towards the Narrator with purpose. Dreamland, it turns out, has not been entered at all.
“Narry?”
The Narrator pauses his file cleaning. He does not respond.
“…”
“Narry?”
“…”
“Narrrrrrrry.”
“…”
“Psst. Psssst. Narrrry, I know you’re not sleeping. You never sleep. Narrrrryyyyy-”
“That’s not my name and you know it.”
“Yes it is. You responded,” he says, deadpan, before his voice transforms to something pitched low; a whisper that nonetheless carries the weight of a freight train in these quiet woods. “Hey, hey. You know, I don’t care about the why anymore. Why I was there, why you were there, why the time loop exists, why I was made or kidnapped or whatever—I don’t care about any of it. I just care that it never happens again.”
“Please,” whispers Stanley, “promise me it’ll never happen again. I don’t care if the world is ending or if I’m dying. Please…”
The conversation is so abrupt, it knocks any attempt at forethought flat on its back.
“It won’t happen again,” he reassures. “The clock is broken, so the odds of the timeloop restarting again-”
“That’s not a promise!” retorts Stanley, mouth too sharp and loud for their vulnerable positions. But he’s right. It’s not a promise.
It very deliberately was not a promise.
But Stanley knows better, and he’s desperate. They can both hear it; a man at the end of his rope. “Promise me, please. Promise me…”
The Narrator knows that desperation all too well. Knows what it could do to a man. Knows what a man could do to himself with that desperation.
~~~
“You can prevent me from hurting them, but you can’t prevent me from hurting myself.”
~~~
“I promise, Stanley. No more resets.”
Stanley sighs and it’s like his entire body deflates with it, until he’s lying flat on his back again. The Narrator thinks this is it, no more weighted conversations for today, or forever preferably, but then Stanley raises his hands towards the sky, his expression underlit by a soft blue.
“They’re kind of like stars, aren’t they?”
“Not at all.”
“Yeah,” says Stanley as if the Narrator had just agreed. Prat. “Like, there’s a ton of them and they’re out of reach, and from this angle you can’t tell which ones are closer and which ones are further away.”
“Farther,” he corrects. “Further is for metaphorical distance. For example, ‘He’d do anything to further his own career path’. Farther is for measurable physical distance.”
Stanley snorts, but doesn’t reply.
The Narrator, in an uncharacteristic display—honestly, all this rustic outdoors nonsense has been messing with his CPU—does as Stanley does and tries to see as Stanley sees. He lays himself flat on the forest floor, ignoring the dirt and roots and the way the rips in his clothes tear a little more—it’s already far past ruined, anyways—and imagines. He thinks he can kind of see it when he looks up; an echo of the stars. The dots are a little too big, a little too bright, but they’re scattered in the wide, dark expanse. And when you’ve never seen the stars yourself, he can understand how this can be a suitable substitute.
He reaches his hand out and thinks of constellations and celestial bodies and the sequence of events in people’s life, whether in their control or not, that determine their future. That thing which other people call fate.
He thinks of Stanley’s small voice as he said he no longer cared of the why.
In for four. Hold. Out for eight. (Does this work for beings who needn’t breathe? Isn’t this all just simulacrum?)
“Stanley, have you ever heard of the trolley problem?”
The night is still; the only sounds are the roots as they scrape against branches. It occurs to the Narrator again just how precarious their position is. Even if it was to get away from one of those Keepers, walking under an island several miles long is the pinnacle of stupidity. Whatever power is holding the landmass up can just as certainly drop it down, and then pop! Crushed bones and viscera and robotic parts buried under the earth, too deep to ever be excavated.
It would be a brutal way to go…but at least they’d go together.
The Narrator waits for Stanley’s response. A murmur, a shout, a gasp of revelation. He waits and waits and waits, turning his head to catch Stanley’s expression-
…Only to catch as Stanley opens his mouth to release the most nasally snore he’s ever heard.
Of course.
“You don’t need to eat.”
“No.”
“You don’t need to drink either.”
“No.”
“Can you grow any facial hair?”
The Narrator had thought to bring toiletries: toilet paper, soap, tooth brush and tooth paste, but he had forgotten one important item: a razor. Stanley runs his hand through the messy fuzz on his face and the Narrator grimaces. “No, and thank the timeline for that. I wouldn’t want to look as ridiculous as you do right now.”
“Thanks,” cheers Stanley, like he's just received the highest compliment possible.
They’re silent for a beat. The Keeper had wandered off a while ago, but there’s no such things as being too careful. Stanley clutches the backpack to his chest. It’s emptier than the first day. A lot emptier.
“None of these supplies were for you, were they?”
“No.”
Stanley clutches the backpack closer and rests his cheek on it. He looks at the Narrator with hazy, unfocused eyes; not the eyes the Narrator wants to see when they’re around 20 feet up, sharing the same tree branch. The roots are closer this high up, the lights brighter. The blue from the bio-luminescence makes Stanley’s skin look paler than it is; highlights the shadows underneath his eyes and the hollowness of his cheeks too much.
He closes his eyes and the Narrator reaches out, hand hovering over his shoulder but not quite touching. Ready to catch him if he falls.
“Thanks,” says Stanley, slowly. Sluggishly. He buries his head into the backpack and it comes out muffled. “Thanks.”
“How much food do you have left?”
“Not a lot.”
“These roots don’t give enough light to properly forage.”
“They don’t.”
Silence.
“I read a book once about this guy who gets stuck on a deserted island. He was a doctor and he had some drugs with him, and he was starving so he decided to amputate-”
“I am not helping you commit auto-cannibalism. We’ll figure something else out.”
They find and forage a few mushrooms that look less like mushrooms and more like a ball of nature’s mistake. The Narrator picks a few nuts off the ground but their nutritional value can’t be much. At one point, Stanley tries to climb the roots to find food and almost creates a noose from how tangled he gets. Thankfully, he doesn’t hang himself but does end up injuring another cactus trying to get himself de-tangled.
“You need to be more careful,” scolds the Narrator after he plucks the last of the needles from his skin.
“Says the man who’s responsible for most of my deaths!” snaps Stanley. Vulnerability shows its face in the way he hunches over, scrapes and scratches littered over his bare back, but it’s at odds with the glare in his eyes, the hint of canines in his sneer.
Stanley’s stomach roars and he hunches even further inward.
It’s the hunger.
Just the hunger.
“Well, if you hadn’t gone so off script, then maybe I wouldn’t have had to kill you.”
(The Narrator can’t use hunger as an excuse, but still there is something within which calls for blood of its own.)
The furious red that creeps on Stanley’s face foreshadows an explosive retaliation, but it’s cut at the knees as the Narrator dabs alcohol onto the cuts and scrapes. It’s unnecessary, he thinks, but if it keeps Stanley from throwing another hissy fit.
When he’s done, plasters pressed against his wounds, Stanley huffs and walks off without another word. But the Narrator is quick to keep up, tugging at Stanley’s shoulder.
“What?” snaps Stanley, still so brittle thin.
“Give me the backpack. You don’t have the energy to carry it anymore.”
Stanley grits his teeth but with a shrug of shoulders, the backpack drops to the floor with a thud.
They don’t speak much after that.
“You know,” Stanley starts as they take another break. He sits crisscross applesauce on the floor, chin in hand. He’s not addressing the Narrator but the Narrator is there and there is no one else.
There is always no one else but them.
“I always thought that once I escaped the office, once I finally beat the person behind the cameras, I’d be…I don’t know. I’d finally be living and not just surviving. I’d move to another country, learn a new language, get a job that had nothing to do with offices. And now I beat,” and here he addresses the Narrator with barely a glance, “you, and I’ve escaped the office, but I’m not living. I’m still just surviving. When will it end?”
There is no right answer to that question, and Stanley wasn’t speaking to him anyways, so he keeps his mouth shut.
Thankfully, they escape from under the gigantic landmass before it has a chance to fall and crush them both. By that time, however, the backpack is empty of food and water. With the floating landmass finally behind them, and so much forest in front of them, the first thing Stanley says is:
“We need to split up.”
It is the stupidest sentence the Narrator has ever heard Stanley say. He informs him so:
“That is the stupid sentence I’ve ever heard you say.”
In true Stanley fashion, the man acts like he doesn’t hear him. “I’m out of food and water and this place isn’t exactly teeming with it. We’ve got better chances of finding food if we cover more ground and meet up later.”
“And what about the Keepers? Stanley, you can barely run. I should be there to help you-”
“It’ll be fine! I can hide and climb trees better than you can. They’re attracted to movement and sound, right? I’ll be quiet and hide until they move.”
“And how and when will we meet up if we’re split apart? We don’t exactly have radios and we’re not telepathic…Unless there’s something you suddenly want to confess?”
Stanley clicks his tongue, but doesn’t respond right away. The end of their island journey had led them to a ledge with a decent drop capable of killing them if they’re not careful, but the height gives them a distinct visual advantage. Stanley eyes the newly-appreciated yellow horizon until he finally points to another island in the air. It’s a small thing, rotated 90 degrees and beholden to a single tree. It moves across the sky, steady but lazy, headed west—or what the Narrator can assume is west with no celestial bodies to confer with.
“When that island reaches that tree—” Stanley points to the tree in question, a large coast redwood that sticks out like a sore thumb against the smaller trees surrounding it, “—then we’ll meet up again. Right near the tree.”
It’s not a bad plan. Divide and conquer has been a tactic used for centuries and praised throughout human history. The coast redwood isn’t too far away and if—and this is a big if—the rate of the island’s floating stays the same, then the deadline should theoretically be only a few hours away. The plan is doable, but also runs on a lot of hope.
Hope that they don’t meet a Keeper that kills them on the spot. Hope they’ll be able to find enough food and water for Stanley to keep going. Hope that some other random act of entropy doesn’t strike them down first. Frankly, they’d need a miracle for this to work out. Or a fully-stocked supermarket.
“And if one of us doesn’t reach the tree on time for the deadline? If someone gets lost or injured? We can’t exactly play marco polo with each other, Stanley.”
Stanley shrugs like it’s all c’est la vie. “If someone doesn’t show up, then the other moves on.”
“But-”
“Look, unless you want me to starve to death, then this is our only solution,” and here Stanley adopts the same mocking tone the Narrator did, “Narry.”
And really, there’s no arguing that.
The Narrator digs a few empty bottles from the backpack and gives the rest to Stanley. “Here. You need the first aid kit more than I do.”
Stanley slings the backpack over his shoulder.
Okay.
They were doing this.
“So how do we split up?”
~~~
"When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left."
~~~
“I’m going right,” says Stanley.
He crosses over, and before the Narrator can argue, he’s slipping down the ledge, one careful inch at a time.
And the Narrator can do nothing but watch as Stanley slips further and further away.
The left side of the forest is a veritable jungle: vines and moss hang from bunyan branches; acacias, balsas, rubbers interspersed between the odd maple, oak, or spruce. He tries to be thorough in his foraging, pulling at plants and checking their roots, inspecting what could be rocks on the off chance they’re nuts, climbing trees that look like they produce fruit only to find pine cones. It’s hard work, and it’s made even harder when a Keeper appears through the trees, sticking around like it heard his cursing and decided to vaporize the sound of his voice. It doesn’t ever spot him, no, but there can only be so much foraging one can do when an attacker is on the move.
When he finally forages more than he can hold in two hands, he takes off his suit jacket and cracks a petrified branch off to make a make-shift bindle. Then he makes his way closer and closer to their meeting point, careful to keep eyes on their proverbial second hand.
It’s as he’s getting closer that the Narrator realizes said second hand isn’t as reliable as he’d thought. From the ledge, the tree and island almost looked as if they would collide, but the island itself floats some thirty or sixty feet behind the tree. It shouldn’t be a problem, though. It just means Stanley might be later to meet him than what they’d agreed on depending on his perspective, but he’d come eventually.
By the time he makes it to the redwood itself, all he has to show is a few nuts, questionably edible roots, and five fruits that may be an orange mixed with an apple, or a pear and a weirdly-shaped banana. It’s hardly a day’s rations but he can only hope Stanley has had better luck.
And so he waits.
And waits.
And waits.
And waits.
It’s okay, he reassures himself. Stanley must have a very skewed perspective. That’s all it is.
So the Narrator waits some more.
The island that was their marker sails clear past the coast redwood tree. Even from a near 90 degree angle, Stanley should be able to see he’s missing the deadline. Still, he does not show. The Narrator thinks of what he should do now; the words which carelessly dropped from Stanley’s lips.
Move on.
But how? How does one move on so easily from someone else? How does one spend hours, days, months, years, with someone else—monitoring and talking and protecting someone from their stupidity—and just…move on?
And so the Narrator waits.
Eventually, he wonders if this wasn’t Stanley’s plan from the get-go. It would be in Stanley's nature to fake acquiescence, pretend at hunger and thirst, come up with a convenient excuse—oh woe is me, I’m so tired—and then ditch him at first opportunity. He’s probably laughing right now at having made him the fool. He has half a mind to comb the right side of the forest to find Stanley and show him who the foolish one is—and not because he’s worried! Because the Narrator, emphatically, is not. Stanley isn’t dead and he’s not dying of malnutrition or already vaporized; the only proof he ever existed, a black smear mark on a trunk’s side—but before he can do anything of the sort, there’s a rustle in the underbrush and Stanley is there; walking up and beaming like he hasn’t driven the Narrator to madness with his absence.
“Stanley, where have you been? You’re late!” he exclaims, or tries to because Stanley is grabbing his wrist and pulling him along with such force he almost bites his tongue.
“Sorry, but you have to see this,” huffs Stanley, hurried and breathless. Not good signs.
It’s hard to catalog the injuries of a person dragging you along, but the Narrator tries. There’s no new rips in Stanley’s clothing as far as he can tell, and there aren’t any bloodstains. Although at this angle the front of his shirt might be leaking petrol for all he knows. It’s not until he’s glaring a hole between the other man’s shoulder blades for any sign of injury that he realizes he shouldn’t be able to see those shoulder blades in the first place.
“Stanley, where’s the backpack? And slow down, we’ll attract attention if we move too fast.”
Stanley lets go of his wrist and slows, but with the momentum of having to catch up with the incessant dragging, they nearly crash into each other. Stanley catches him with a smile and the pure joy in his eyes throws the Narrator for a loop.
“Don’t worry,” he says, clear excitement ringing through the air. “I left the backpack back there. C’mon, I’ll show you.”
“Show me what?” cries the Narrator, exasperated. “Use your words, Stanley!”
What Stanley wants to show him should be classified as a miracle. The Narrator doesn’t believe Stanley’s ramblings at first, but then the mattered tangled of roots flattens into a genuine path, and wooden posts pop up, separate at first, until they get closer and closer, becoming low wooden fences. And then they are venturing uphill where an entire building pokes up from the earth, surrounded by actual greenery which looks soft to the touch, and the Narrator has no choice but to believe it.
It’s a rest stop. Or, it looks like a rest stop. There’s a clearing out front with picnic benches, although most of them are upside down, sideways, or halfway into the ground. To the right of the building stands a large oak tree, about 70 feet tall with an octagonal gazebo sticking out. A tire swing hangs ominously from the top branch, too high for practical use but otherwise harmless.
The inside looks decent, at least. It’s an open plan house with wood panel flooring and painted-white walls. Stanley gestures animatedly as he gives the grand tour and the Narrator finds himself ducking and dodging lest he get an arm to the face. There’s a living room with a couch, an off-white springy rug, and a glass coffee table; all sitting opposite a small TV boxed into a mini bookshelf. Farther in sits a kitchen, moderately stocked with home appliances, a small ceiling light, and-
In the corner of the room, behind a small, scratched-up dining table spills in yellow light. The Narrator’s breath catches in his throat—had a Keeper gotten in somehow? Were they compromised?—before he realizes:
“There’s a hole in the ceiling.”
“Yeah,” Stanley waves his hand. “We can patch it up later. Look at this!” He throws open a cupboard revealing cans of soup. He throws another one open to reveal a thermos, packets of hot chocolate, and cans of spaghetti sauce. “Food! Rations!”
The Narrator takes another glance at the dining room table. Five open cans sit on the table, as well as a well-used can opener. The cans all look licked clean. There is no expiration date he can see, but then again, what did expiration dates mean when time no longer exists?
“At least I know why you were late,” he says dryly.
"And look, water!" says Stanley as he turns on the kitchen sink and starts slurping down the water which pours down.
“Honestly,” the Narrator says as he rushes to turn the faucet off. Stanley rises from the sink, dripping water onto his chin and his shirt front. “You don’t know where that water’s been. It could be contaminated. There can be brain-eating amoebas eating your tiny, tiny brain as we speak.”
“It’s only the water I’ve had besides vending machine sodas and tea. I’m thirsty. Sue me.”
Ignoring Stanley’s dramatics, the Narrator fusses with the knobs. “How does this even work? Where does the water come from?”
Stanley shrugs, as unhelpful as ever.
With a sigh, the Narrator assigns himself the honorable duty of inspecting the house. A task Stanley should’ve performed if he weren’t so easily distracted.
He starts with the kitchen appliances. There’s a stove, a microwave, a fridge, and a blender. He opens the fridge and cold air blasts him. He presses buttons on the microwave and it does the beepy-beepy. When he turns on the stove knobs, all four stove tops heat up. The attached oven works as well. The blender he doesn’t turn on, if only because he’s afraid of how loud it might be. What attention they might attract.
“Where is the electricity coming from?” he asks when he flicks the lights on and off, watching as the round flat light over the dining table do indeed turn on and off.
“There’s a generator downstairs,” says Stanley, having watched the Narrator’s inspection without lifting a finger.
“There’s a downstairs?”
“Yeah. Next room over.”
The Narrator rushes to the open archway Stanley points towards, and yes, just as Stanley said, there’s a split-level room with a wall-hugging staircase on the lower level. There’s also two doors on the left, but he ignores it in favor of investigating the basement below.
There’s not much to the basement below. A generator chugging along, like Stanley stated, using some kind of complex setup the Narrator is reluctant to touch, and several shelves of rations that could last Stanley months if not years, which is another miracle in and of itself. Other than that, there’s gardening equipment, pipes which stick out of the wall and lead elsewhere, a sewing machine, and several other paraphernalia he doesn’t have the expertise to mess with.
All in all, a normal-looking basement if one could forgive the fact it looks more like a survivalist bunker than a basement. Although, it still doesn’t answer the question of where or what this place is. It's too small to be a rest stop but there are picnic benches outside. Curious. The Narrator, having seen enough for now, ascends the stairs only to find Stanley rubbing a towel across his hair.
A very clean Stanley.
Well, not his face. The bottom half still sports that hideous overgrown stubble but it’s been groomed at least, and the faint scent of watermelon wafts from his skin; his torn and dirtied outfit has been replaced by comfortable looking pajamas. The bottoms have a bunny pattern on them.
“There’s a shower!?” exclaims the Narrator.
“It’s a combined shower and bath,” Stanley answers cheerily. Cheeky bastard.
“You could have mentioned that earlier.”
“Oh, but Narry, you were so concerned about the water~”
“Oh, sod off! And where did you get the clothes?”
“The master bedroom has a small closet.”
The Narrator marches to the door on the left and yanks it open. Inside lies a plain bedroom with a twin bed and small dresser. Two windows stand either side the bed overlooking the forest. The sulfur yellow sky serving sickly reminder that this place, however ‘normal’ is anything but. “That’s the guest bedroom,” Stanley says.
Grumbling and ignoring Stanley’s laughter, the Narrator opens the right door. Inside is a little more appropriate of the master bedroom. Queen-sized bed, overly puffy duvet, large dresser, larger single window overlooking the apocalypse. There’s closet doors to his right and what he, calculating the dimensions of the room and the distances between the two doors, assumes is the door to the bathroom at the left.
“I call dibs on this bedroom,” calls Stanley as he beelines to the closet.
“As if you need to. Need I remind you I don’t sleep? What would I need a bedroom for?”
“Still call dibs,” says Stanley.
The Narrator ignores him in favor of focusing his attention on the closet. The clothes inside range from t-shirt and jeans casual to country rustic and nothing in between. That is to say, there isn’t a single suit or formal wear and the closest he can find is a graphic tee with a tux design printed on top. The Narrator represses a shudder. Disgusting.
Despite the abysmal taste of casual wear and a complete lack of formal wear, he does find acceptable choices of winter wear, i.e. sweaters, turtlenecks, and cardigans. On a whim, he chooses a dark brown knitted sweater and a pair of black trousers, and then makes his way to the glorious, long-anticipated bathroom.
The bathroom is a little bigger than he expected for such a small abode; wall-to-wall counter with two sinks and a full-length mirror, the aforementioned shower stood opposite, and a toilet next to it. Not opulent by any means, but not as dinky as he’d expected and definitely a sight for sore eyes. There’s a door opposite the one he entered which, judging by the house’s layout, connects to the guest bedroom.
He shuts the door behind him and peels his clothes off, grimacing at the way the fabric sticks to his skin, but finally, it is time to shower.
Getting the days', or maybe weeks', worth of dirt off is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because cleanliness is next to godliness, as they say, but watching the water go brown and dirt cake the side of the tub is an experience he never wants repeating. When he’s done with the shower, after having used some sweet-smelling body wash and soap, it’s to the realization that, for the first time in a long time, he actually feels good. As if the shower had washed away all his past transgressions to create a New Narrator who had experienced high waters and come out the other side more experienced, hardy, and all around unbreakable.
Of course, Stanley had to spit on any such notions the moment he exited the bedrooms.
“Booo,” boos Stanley. He's on the couch, twisted around to watch the Narrator's approach. “Boooo.”
“Stanley, what are you doing?”
“I’m booing you.”
“Yes, I can see that. Any particular reason why?”
Stanley jumps over the couch—really? Wasting calories on athletics mere moments after having recovered? Typical. “Your hair.”
“What about my hair?”
“You slicked it back.”
“Yes, that’s how I usually style it.” He stands a little straighter and ignores the fact the knitted sweater he’d chosen is a little too long on the sleeves. “It makes me look professional.”
“It makes you look fussy.”
“It does not make me look fussy,” fusses the Narrator.
“It does. Fussy Narry,” Stanley sings like a child in kindergarten, “Fussy Narry, fussy Narry. Narry is a fussy fusser. Narry-”
And then, horror of all horrors, Stanley tries to mess up his hair. The Narrator dodges his first attempt, but Stanley is persistent, and before he knows it, a half-hour spent in front of the mirror fighting cheap hair gel is wasted, and Stanley is grinning in victory.
Truly, this is the worst timeline.
They decide to sleep there for the night. Or not-night, as it were. True to Stanley’s word, he lays claim to the master bedroom and so the Narrator enters the guest bedroom and waits.
And waits.
And waits.
He gives a cursory rummage to the room’s dresser, the only furniture besides the bed, but it’s completely empty.
Sick of waiting, he wanders the house again. He checks every nook and cranny, the basement, the living room, the kitchen, the guest bedroom. There’s not a clock in the entire house, nor any way to tell the date. No watch, no alarm clock, no calendar. The only thing that comes close is the microwave and it doesn’t give the time. When he tries to microwave a cup of water for two minutes, the numbers glitch as it counts down until eventually turning off on its own. The number never reaches zero.
He turns on the TV and all there exists is static.
It’s maddening.
They stay in the house for another sleep cycle. Then another. Then another. Stanley eats the meager food the Narrator foraged out of politeness before he goes on a taste-testing binge with every single unique can he can find in the house. Some of the cans have tuna, or soup, or peas or okra or some other bizarre food item, but most are military rations which he eats with gusto. The Narrator keeps careful note of Stanley’s reactions to the food and water, but aside from a stomach ache those first few days—gorging when you’d been nearly starving is never a good idea—they seem safe.
“What do we do now?” asks the Narrator once his travel companion no longer looks like he belongs on death’s door. His skin has returned to its healthy pallor, the bags under his eyes lessened, and his hair has returned to its natural fluffy state instead of the tangled, stringy mess it had been before. After a day of scouring, new, much-needed supplies waits on the living room table, ready to be packed at a moment’s notice.
Stanley glances up from the book he’s reading. The Basics of Botany, the front reads in a rather atrocious font. What is that? Comic sans? Whoever designed this book should be fired.
“What do you mean?”
“What do we do now?” repeats the Narrator. “Shouldn’t we be moving on?”
“I mean,” says Stanley slowly. He dog-ears the page he’s on and closes the book like he’s reluctant to part, “we don’t have to go anywhere, right? There’s literally nowhere to be. Why don’t we just…stay here a while?”
“You want to stay?”
There’s an answer present in the way Stanley won’t meet his eyes—the slope of his shoulder—and it’s odd, isn’t it? The Narrator is used to Stanley doing whatever he wants, head held high and mouth set in a stubborn line as he runs head first into danger, but this is not that reckless Stanley. This is a more vulnerable Stanley. The one who hides in the broom closet when the world becomes too much for him and mourns past shadows. Stanley glances up from under the weight of a thousand time loops, and a voice echoes in the Narrator’s mind.
‘I want to live, not just survive.’
So they stay.
The first requirement of staying is patching the hole in the roof. There are Keepers outside and who-knows-what-else lurking out there. If they want to stay for more than a few days, then they need to ensure they’re not vulnerable to attacks. Stanley agrees, of course, but also points out any construction work would probably generate enough noise to attract Keepers anyway. He’s right. And so the Narrator puts it upon himself to come with a solution. It takes some thinking, but in due time he finds rolls of tarp, scissors, and duct tape. They can patch the hole with the tarp, and while it’ll be a shoddy job, it’s better than leaving a hole in the roof.
Satisfied with his findings, he emerges from the basement and searches for Stanley to tell him of his plan…
…and doesn’t find him.
He searches everywhere: the living room, the kitchen, the two bedrooms, the bathroom. He even goes back into the basement on the off-chance they’d somehow passed each other without realizing. Finding no one, he calls for him, ignoring the way his voice box crackles, and does not feel relief when Stanley’s voice eventually calls back from the kitchen.
Or, more specifically, the hole in the kitchen’s roof.
“Stanley,” he hisses, staring up at the yellow sky framed by broken wooden boards. “What are you doing up there? They’ll spot you.”
“No, they won’t,” says Stanley in the same way gambling addicts say, ‘oh, I’ll win the next one for sure.’ His head pops over the hole like a whack-a-mole. “Their line of sight’s too low. Besides, we’re repairing the roof, right? If we’re gonna repair the roof, then shouldn’t we be on the roof?”
And well…that makes a certain amount of sense.
“How did you even get up there?”
“Climbed onto the counter and shimmied my way up. Come on, throw that stuff to me and get up here.”
He says it as if it’s easy, which it probably is for the man who can back flip off a floating platform without looking. The Narrator throws the roll of duct tape at Stanley’s face. Unfortunately, the brunet catches it before it can hit said stupid face. The Narrator throws the scissors in a decidedly gentler manner.
“Okay,” he says, holding the roll of tarp to his chest. “I’m going to get a ladder.”
He scours the entire house a third time.
There is no ladder. There is a stepping stool, but it is not tall enough to reach the roof.
“Come on,” cajoles Stanley with the biggest shit-eating grin on his face. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little shimmy.”
He doesn’t deign the obvious taunt with a response. Dragging a chair over, he stands on it and then…stands on it some more. “How am I meant to climb onto the counter? There are cupboards in the way.”
“You have to maneuver around them.”
Tentatively, he puts one foot on the counter. It’s a good thing he’d cleaned his shoes earlier or else there would be muddy footprints on it. How unsanitary. Not that shoes on the counter, thoroughly cleaned or not, is sanitary. They’ll have to clean it later.
He tries to put both feet on the counter without bouncing off the cupboard and sending himself backwards—and he succeeds! Very precariously does he succeed, grabbing the edges of the cupboards and digging his fingers in.
Carefully, he hands off the tarp to Stanley.
“Okay, now what?” he asks. The ceiling follows the shape of the roof, triangular and slanted at a degree that would, theoretically, be easy enough to pull himself through if he had the required upper body strength.
He does not think he possesses the required upper body strength.
“Now take my hand,” says Stanley, arms reaching out.
The Narrator reaches back.
It’s a tough pull. The Narrator is heavier than he looks—“Are you calling me fat, Stanley?”—and the wooden boards scrapes against his gut, but eventually the Narrator is on the roof, and the first thing he notices is Stanley’s footwear.
Or lack thereof.
“Where are your shoes?”
“Downstairs,” he answers with a shrug. His bare feet seem to have no trouble with the shingles, although it looks like it would be rough to walk on. But walk Stanley does, to the center of the roof, and it’s then the Narrator notices the park bench sitting parallel—half of its legs missing like it had been cut off. He doesn’t know how he hadn’t noticed a park bench sitting atop the house when they first arrived, but then again, he’d been rather preoccupied at the time.
Stanley sits not on the bench, but behind it, planting his bare feet on the bench’s back. It doesn’t move an inch even as Stanley puts his entire weight on it, most likely glitched to the roof due to the timeline’s breaking, but a spike of anxiety shoots through the Narrator nonetheless as he imagines the park bench crashing to the ground and attracting more Keepers than they can handle.
“Sit,” says Stanley, privy to none of his spiraling thoughts. He pats the spot beside him and leans back, and the invitation so casual, the Narrator can't help but find himself accepting. He sits by Stanley’s side, careful to lay his feet nowhere near the unmoving bench. The roof’s shingles are abhorrent even through the soft cotton barrier of his trousers.
This high up they can see the trees' tops, not that there's much to see. In the distance, taking up most of the skyline floats the island they’d been trapped under; a curtain of roots brushing against the trees below. This far away they can make out the dense, verdant jungle atop the floating island, at odds with the grey, leafless trees below.
Nearby, smaller islands float by on a rotation, as if the gigantic island is pulling them in with its own gravitational pull.
“The view is gorgeous, huh?”
The Narrator breathes in deep. Next to him, Stanley brushes a little closer; a warm presence, untethered and unafraid.
“Yes, it is.”
After some pestering from Stanley’s side and stubborn digging-in-his-heels from the Narrator’s, they forgo the tarp and decide to make a trapdoor and a ladder to the roof. Stanley constructs the trapdoor in the basement while the Narrator keeps careful watch for Keepers overhead. None come. The ladder is a little easier to make, if only because they decide not to attach it to the roof and instead prop it beside the kitchen door for whenever one of them needs roof access.
Installing the trapdoor is admittedly, nerve-wracking but somehow, despite all their worry at hammering in the open air, a Keeper doesn’t find them. Stanley says it’s due to his expertise at hammering quietly while crouched with the living room’s throw pillows taped to his arms. The Narrator thinks it nothing to do with expertise and everything to do with luck. They’ve gotten extremely lucky so far.
So far.
When the trapdoor is successfully installed, Stanley returns to his seat above the park bench, and opens a cold bottle of water. “Who do you think this place belonged to?” he asks.
The only reason the question doesn’t throw him for a loop is because the Narrator has been asking himself the same question from day one. Between the clothes in the closet and the carefully curated book collection in the living room, it’s clear someone lived here once. There's no signs of obvious abandonment; nothing missing from the house—no obvious gaps in the bookshelves or pantries or closet—but there also wasn’t anything personal. No diary or post-it notes or sun-stained picture frames.
It was as if one day, the owner had simply up and vanished, and with them, every trace of who they were.
“An outdoorsman,” he answers, thinking of the clothes in the closet. “Maybe a forest ranger.” He thinks of the gardening equipment in the basement. "Or a gardener. Maybe both."
“Where do you think they are now?”
The timeline is broken. Items fused into each other in unnatural abominations; the house surrounded on all sides by a forest infested by half-human, half-monsters that shoot first and ask questions never. It makes the answer simple.
“Long gone.”
The plastic bottle in Stanley’s hand squeaks in his grip.
This is how they divide the chores: Stanley does the dish-washing because he’s the only one who eats. The Narrator does the laundry because Stanley doesn’t know how to handle an iron. They both do the cleaning, dividing the rooms between them, although Stanley prefers the basement so he can pretend-sing into the broom without interruption or observation, and the Narrator prefers anyplace that isn’t the bathroom for obvious reasons.
They don’t talk about their attempts to cook.
“What are you searching for?” Stanley asks.
Since the guest bedroom has no clothes in it whatsoever, Stanley had graciously offered to divvy up the master bedroom’s closet. He’d laid claims on most of the outdoors-y clothes: coveralls, garden gloves, jeans; and most of the casual items: loud graphic tees and that hideous tux print, which is just as well, because the Narrator wants nothing to do with those.
What’s left over is respectable if not…missing a necessary accessory.
“Have you seen any glasses lying anywhere?” asks the Narrator. “I’ve already searched the kitchen and the living room, but I haven’t found a pair.”
The sound of pen and paper stops. Somewhere in the time they’d moved in, Stanley had taken a liking to writing. When he wasn’t eating, showering, or sleeping, he was head down, scribbling in an abandoned notebook.
His head pokes into the closet, ink stained across the bottom of his palm and one side of his cheek. “Do you even need glasses?”
“No,” answers the Narrator honestly, “but I’ve worn them for so long that I suppose I’ve gotten used to them. Plus,” he tugs at the green coat he’d decided to wear today, shoulders back, head held high. “I think they make me look spiffy.”
In retrospect, the Narrator can understand how Stanley found his statement funny, but maintains his choking-on-his-spit laughter was over the top and unnecessary.
One day Stanley walks into the bathroom with his facial scruff and then walks out with a mustache. A twirly mustache. Which he twirls.
It’s only a shame that the bathroom is conjoined. It makes his plans for trapping Stanley in until he shaves off the monstrosity a near impossibility.
There is nothing the Narrator can do but ask, “Why?”
To which Stanley replies, with all his rebellious wisdom, “Why not?”
From then on, it’s like a revolving horror show. First, it’s the mustache, then a goatee, then he shaves himself until there’s only sideburns, then he tries the absolute worst of all facial hairs: a soul patch of all things. And on and on and on. It’s only a blessing Stanley isn’t a fast facial grower, although it is a double-edged blade in that the Narrator grows accustomed to his various facial whims before another takes its place.
“Do you think I’d look good in a ponytail?” asks Stanley one day when, for some reason, he opens the bathroom door. The Narrator, laid on his bed reading Oscar Wilde, is not impressed with the invasion of privacy. The bathroom door leading to Stanley’s bedroom, the Narrator notes, is firmly closed.
At the Narrator's lack of a response, Stanley hums. "How about a manbun?"
And with that, the Narrator lifts from his bed and closes the door on Stanley's face.
He returns to the bed and re-opens his book but despite holding in his hands the wonderful world of Wilde, the question lodges itself in the Narrator’s mind. In a month, the average human grows approximately half an inch of hair. For something as long as a ponytail or a man bun, Stanley would have to grow his hair out for at least a year and a half, if not more. Can he manage to keep it for that long? What does a year mean, in this world without time?
Would they even last that long?
Stanley becomes comfortable. One would think a comfortable Stanley would mean he’s at less risk of endangering himself and others, but one would be dead wrong. While the Narrator is busy reading an old dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby, Stanley wanders off. The Narrator only notices halfway through the book, and from there he is upturning the entire house, peeking under the couch like Stanley’s hidden himself between the beige carpeting and the couch’s legs. But then, Stanley is entering through the front door, and his piss-poor excuse—‘wanted to take a walk’; as if!—is laughable at best.
The Narrator tries to keep an eye from then on out, but Stanley is a tricky devil and he wanders off more and more for longer intervals, returning at his own whim while clutching strange fruit and seeds, head-to-toe covered in dirt and tracking mud in the house. One time, the Narrator prepares himself to follow Stanley for miles if need be, but Stanley’s apparently two steps ahead. It isn’t long before the Narrator becomes hopelessly lost and has to retrace his own steps back. He tries a second time and Stanley leads him to a tree with a "Lost Losers Go Here" sign wrapped around its trunk.
Finally, he’s had enough.
“Here,” he says, shoving a shovel into Stanley’s hands. One might take the shoving, along with the narrow-eyed glare and imperious tone that accompanies it, as a threat. Not Stanley.
“Thanks,” he says, hands wrapping around the carbon steel handle, “I really needed one of these! Where did you find it?”
“Under the inflatable raft in the basement, which you would have found if you’d organized—no, nevermind that. I want you to carry it with you when you wander off. It’s the closest thing we have to a weapon here and you really need to be more careful.”
Stanley rolls his eyes. He walks off without another word, shovel in hand. Rude.
“And take the first aid kit with you!” he calls.
Stanley’s retreating back raises a thumbs up.
It takes far too long for the Narrator to register Stanley’s previous statement. He blames it on the inevitable lag he always gets when dealing with the brunet’s stupidity.
“Wait, why do you need a shovel?”
The Narrator has taken to resting. They’re safe, or as safe as they can be in this world without time. The house has four walls and curtained windows which prevent them from being seen, and unless they have a full-blown, dishes-thrown-at-the-wall argument, they’re unlikely to be heard. So yes, resting.
He doesn’t need to rest; hasn’t rested a single second since…well, he doesn’t think he’s ever rested, but there are internal cleaning programs he can run while offline—deleting temporary files and the like—and it feels…good. Or, helps pass the boredom that inevitably bites at his heel, at least.
Sometimes though, his thoughts are a little too loud in his head which no cleaning programs can solve. Insomnia, as the humans call it. Stanley has these nights too, he knows, filled with nightmares and anxieties, but Stanley’s body will drag him to sleep eventually. The Narrator has no such luxury.
So when the boredom is inescapable and the insomnia unwavering, he busies himself. Sometimes he’s cleaning the house or reading a book or walking around the house’s perimeter. Sometimes he’s drawing shapes into the dining room tables, testing out protocols and subroutines he’s had rare occasion to use, to check if they still work—or constructing towers out of a deck of cards they found.
And sometimes, he’s waiting to hear the start of Stanley’s snores before slipping into their shared bathroom, pressing his back against Stanley’s door and sliding down until he’s sat against the cold tile, counting the inhales and exhales and the moments in between.
And every time, he’s gone before Stanley wakes.
It turns out the reason Stanley wants a shovel is the same reason he’s been collecting the rare fruits and nuts. He wants to start a garden. He drags the picnic benches—the ones not stuck to the ground—to the corners of their ‘property’ and flips them to their side in an attempt at fence making. Or, a better fence than the short, wooden ones they already have. Then he begins digging little holes in a spot he’s designated as ‘trees’; planting acorn-pecan seeds in one hole, and cherry-banana seeds in another. After covering them back up, he waters them with a bright green gardening can that, as far as the Narrator was aware, was previously a mere decoration on the living room bookshelf.
It’s afterwards that he finally shares his writing with the Narrator. “See,” he says as he points to hasty diagrams and scribbled categorizations of foreign plants. “I’m going to plant the trees in the back corner here—hopefully I can get some cuttings for a section in the front there—and I’m searching for ways to make compost, but it’s a little hard because everything’s so dead-“
Pages and pages of plans fly by. The handwriting cramped and messy like Stanley had never learned how to write between the lines instead of on top of them. It’s a wreck of disorganization and misspellings and atrocious mashed-up names like ‘chernana’ or ‘aporange’—and yet, it’s clear Stanley’s taking this seriously.
But there are obvious flaws to his plan. Flaws the Narrator can’t help but point out.
“Stanley, there’s no sun. How do you expect them to photosynthesize?”
He’s wearing one of those wide-brimmed gardening hats and the front of his coveralls is already so dirt-caked it’ll take at least two washes to get out. Stanley blinks and stares at the sulfurous sky like if he searches hard enough, he’ll find the sun hidden in its expanse. He finds nothing. “Well, there’s no harm in trying, right?”
“There is, actually. If a Keeper spots you, then it’ll spell the end for both of us.”
Stanley waves him away. “That’s what the picnic bench barricade is for.”
“There are gaps in them. Large, vehicle-sized gaps.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“’Careful’ would be not having a garden at all. This is foolhardy at best-”
“Why won’t you let me have this one thing!?”
The shout echoes, louder than even Stanley had anticipated, judging from his wide eyes. They still, waiting…
And then they hear it. Skittering feet.
Stanley races to the door and yanks it open, allowing the Narrator passage before he rushes in, closing and locking the door behind him. The Narrator drops the window blinds in time to glimpse the familiar inky darkness emerging from the trees. His fingers reach out, pulling at the closed blinds enough to peek through. Stanley, next to him, whines as the Keeper crawls over one of the picnic benches like it’s nothing.
“I told you,” whispers the Narrator.
Stanley does not reply.
The diamonds in the Keepers’ yellow, bulbous eye dart to and fro. It stays in the front yard long enough that they go stiff from crouching, too afraid to move from the window lest the creature somehow catch their movement, but eventually, after shifting and growing and shrinking its limbs no less than five times, the Keeper leaves.
Stanley shudders out a breath as one last human limb leaves their line of sight. The Narrator finds he hadn’t been breathing in the first place.
They continue the argument in the more soundproof basement, surrounded by food rations and the overwhelming stale air. The argument turns into a fist fight, one long-time coming. Stanley clocks him in the jaw again. He kicks Stanley’s feet out from under him. They tussle on the filthy floor, getting their clothes dirty and almost upending an entire shelf of rations on themselves. The fight ends when they draw blood, Stanley clutching at his nose and the Narrator staring at the red on his fist like it’s the first time he’s ever seen it.
(It’s not. Not by a long shot.)
They don’t talk for a long time afterward.
Stanley continues his garden, regardless.
He’s perusing the shelves for something to read when Stanley comes up from behind, peeking over his shoulder. He does this at times; calls it ‘friendly curiosity’. The Narrator calls it as he sees it: silent observation in the hopes of obtaining new teasing material. He still hasn’t let the spiffy glasses thing go yet.
“Have you read any of these before?” Stanley asks. The Narrator places the book he’d been looking at, a young adult romance novel with far too much incomprehensible teen slang, back on the shelf. “Before we came here, I mean.”
“No.”
“No?” The human's voice rises in pitch, buoyed by incredulity. “You’ve never read any of these before?”
Again, he answers, “No.”
“None!?” Stanley squeaks as he pulls at books; popular ones, the Narrator notes, Shakespeare, Agathie Christie, Jane Austen, Stephen King. With every book the Narrator shakes his head at, Stanley’s voice climbs higher and higher like his entire world is falling around his ears.
Tactfully, the Narrator doesn’t mention his lack of reading had been due to doing his damn job. Although perhaps he could’ve picked up a book every now and again, knowing what he did now. He also thinks it pertinent not to mention that without having read any of them, he’d known the plot of almost every book on the shelf the moment he’d spotted them; part of his popular culture data package installed to aid him in making the shadow coworkers more life-like.
Before he can explain this, however, Stanley is crying out, “You don’t know what happens in Cinderella?” as he picks up a thick tome of compiled fairy tales.
“Of course I know what happens in Cinderella! Honestly, Stanley, I might not be, technically speaking, well-read, but I’m not uncultured.”
“Oh yeah?” There’s a challenge in Stanley's voice, a spark in his eye. “Tell me the entire plot.”
The Narrator puts a hand on his hip. ‘We’re really doing this?’ the gesture says.
His housemate flaps his hand, palm face down. ‘Go on,’ the gesture implies.
Okay. He’s doing this.
He’s reciting Cinderella to Stanley in their house in the destroyed timeline.
Sure.
“There was once a girl named Cinderella who lived with her father, her wicked stepmother, and her two rotten stepsisters. One day, her father died, leaving her with said stepmother and stepsisters. Under their harsh rule, she did all their chores and took on all their abuse. She was, essentially, treated as a slave.”
“Uh-huh.”
“One day, a missive went out to everyone in the kingdom. The prince was in search of a bride and so the king invited all the eligible ladies of the kingdom to a ball at the castle.”
“Uh-huh. Correct so far.”
“Corre- Stanley, I know the story. You don’t have to test me on whether or not I know Cinderella-”
“You’re only, like, a third of the way through though. You might mess it up. Continue.”
“I might-? Fine. The two stepsisters were excited but Cinderella was not allowed to go, and so she wept. She had resigned herself to staying at home, but then came along her fairy godmother. She fixed Cinderella a beautiful dress and turned mice into horses and a pumpkin into a beautiful carriage, but it came at a catch. The fairy godmother warned her. ‘You must leave before zero hundred hours or else-’”
“Wait. Hold up. I’m sorry,” interrupts Stanley. He leans in, his eyes crinkling with mirthful disbelief. “‘Zero hundred hours?’ Who even says that? She turns back at midnight.”
Rather peeved at the interruption, and for having his knowledge unnecessarily tested in the first place, the Narrator sputters, “Plenty of people say zero hundred hours!"
"Oh, yeah? Who?"
"The military, for one!”
“And who else besides the military?”
The Narrator sniffs. “Several countries in Europe and Asia, I’ll have you know.”
Stanley hums like he’s considering it, but then shakes his head. “No. It’s either midnight or 12 AM. Pick your poison. But in this specific case, it’s midnight because no one would say 12 AM in a children’s book.”
“Firstly, the original Cinderella was not suitable for a children’s book. Secondly, zero hundred hours is a perfectly adequate term for this scenario-”
“Why not twenty four hundred hours?” interrupts Stanley. “That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“She turns back once it reaches a new day. She resets because so does time. The clock always resets to zero, Stanley.”
He says it blithely, waiting for another carelessly witty response from Stanley, but the rejoinder takes too long to come. The Narrator glances sideways only to find Stanley’s smile has dropped; the playful air soured into old hurts.
“I always liked Alice in Wonderland better,” he mutters before shoving the book back and turning on his heel, shoulders hunched.
Against all possible odds, it starts to rain. There are no clouds in the sky; hasn’t been a single one since they’d entered this strange world, but without any warning the world goes dark and it starts drizzling, tapping against the roof and the window pane while Stanley is on another one of his self-imposed gardening errands. The Narrator does not panic when Stanley doesn’t immediately walk in two minutes after the rain starts. He also does not panic when the downpour becomes violent in its intensity, lashing against the house with a howling fury and making the lights flicker before the generator kicks in.
(Is Stanley okay? Did he find someplace to seek refuge under? Is the rain safe or does it burn at the skin? Where is he? Stanley hasn’t gotten sick, not yet, but there’s always a chance and he doesn't know how to care for a sick human, not really. The only medicine they have is a small bottle of Advil, almost half empty.)
It was times like these that the Narrator seriously considered the benefits of getting Stanley chipped.
When Stanley tumbles in, he is soaked to the bone and smiling like he’s been hit by cupid’s arrow. He gets two steps inside before the Narrator throws a towel to his face.
“You’re soaking wet.”
“I know, but did you see the rain outside?” Stanley says. As if the Narrator could look outside and see anything but rain. He toes off his shoes and leaves them muddied in the basket near the door. “Isn’t it great?”
The Narrator takes the dirty shovel from Stanley’s hand and props it against the basket. Then he pushes Stanley through the house, past the living room, past the kitchen. He stops them both outside Stanley’s room.
“I drew up a hot bath. Take it and come to the kitchen when you’re done.”
“Uh, okay?”
With a nod, he leaves Stanley to it. He returns to the front door, wipes the track of mud away, and throws a towel under the shovel. Then he goes to the kitchen and pulls out the hot cocoa—there’s no tea in the house; the Narrator double and triple checked—and turns the stove back on to warm up the soup he made when the rain first started.
By the time Stanley comes out, the soup is properly heated and the hot cocoa is only a little lukewarm.
“Eat. Drink,” he instructs, pointing at the pulled-out seat. Stanley sits, his skin a healthy pink from the hot bath. He takes an experimental bite of the soup and stares forlornly at the hot cocoa.
“I was trying to ration these,” he says, sotto voce. “There are only so many packets left, you know.”
“Just eat your soup.”
Stanley does, and the Narrator is content to leave it at that, but then there’s a drip, drip, drip onto the kitchen’s wooden flooring, and the Narrator tuts. “Stanley, you haven’t dried your hair all the way.”
“It’s dry enough,” states the human wreck that is his housemate.
“Honestly, Stanley, what will you do without me?”
He goes to grab another towel from the bathroom and returns, circling around Stanley and spying his pajama collar, already damp from his wet hair. Ugh. He steps up, towel raised—
—and pauses.
What is he doing? What was he about to do? Dry Stanley’s hair for him while he eats soup? That’s not-
…but he’s already here and Stanley saw him come in with the towel. He must have noticed the Narrator circling behind him, and knows what he was about to do, but he hasn’t protested yet.
Carefully, gently, he lowers the towel to Stanley’s wet head. When no protest comes, he starts rubbing the towel back and forth against silky locks.
Stanley doesn’t protest, only grabs more hot cocoa to drink. The rain patters against the roof; a gentle, steady rhythm. At some point, Stanley leans back into his ministrations. The rain keeps pouring.
It’s…nice.
The rain lasts for half a week’s sleep cycle and Stanley, miraculously, doesn’t become sick, but he does sleep more soundly than he ever has. The Narrator doesn’t know if it’s because of the sound of the rain, or because of the darkness the rain provides, but he’s glad. Stanley deserves the rest.
They pass by each other in the kitchen and sit in the couch for hours without a word. The Narrator half-expects being forced in such close proximity without an escape would lend itself to something like claustrophobia, but then Stanley and him are playing goldfish on the glass coffee table, or playing word games in the kitchen, or else reading books next to each other in their pajamas, and it isn’t claustrophobic at all.
Dare he say, it’s cozy.
The rain falls and falls and it doesn’t let up. At some point, Stanley becomes convinced he has to save his precious plants from over-watering by going into the storm and placing a tarp over them. It’s a nice sentiment, but the Narrator puts his foot down. Not catching a cold the first time was sheer luck. If Stanley goes out in this weather a second time, life will not be so kind.
Still, Stanley is worried about his plants, shoving the horrid Basics of Botany book into the Narrator’s face as he points at all the little ways plants can die: from root rot to fungus to sub-optimal oxygen levels, whatever that means—which is how the Narrator finds himself setting up a tarp tent in the worst downpour imaginable.
Never let it be said that he’s never done anything for Stanley.
The rain lets up a few E̵̝͑R̷͈̍R̷͇̀Ơ̶̧R̶̝̅ later. He doesn’t actually see it retreat from whence it came—one of the rare times he decided to rest—but he knows when Stanley noticed because Stanley decides to inform him by shoving a pillow to his face, shouting “Get up, the rain’s stopped! Come outside with me!”
“What?” says the Narrator as his cleanings programs cut themselves short. Stanley stands in his doorway, vibrating like an excited child on the day of their first field trip.
“Come on,” whines Stanley. He darts in and grabs the Narrator by the wrist until he stands. Then he’s dragging him through the house, out the front door, and into the garden.
The green garden.
The very, very green and lush garden that’s still wet from rain, the tarp he’d set up over Stanley’s planted trees still valiantly holding on, although he can admit he’d done a rushed job of it.
And beyond that, the forest surrounding them is vibrant. No more bare branches or empty canopies; the forest bursts with green leaves; rounded, sharp, jagged, pointy; giving the skyline a softer outline while flowers dot the ground in rainbow color. It’s almost as if spring had come, although he can’t sense any discernible rise or drop in temperature.
Stanley coos at the new saplings in his garden as if a doting mother. Then he darts back inside and comes back out with a backpack, scissors, his notebook and pen, and a shovel. He hands the backpack and shovel to the Narrator.
“Come on!” he says before walking into the woods.
“Where are we- Wait up! Stanley, where are we going?”
The ground is muddy and puddles litter every few feet in all directions, making the Narrator regret his current wear. His trouser’s legs are a little too long and already dirtied at the hem, and his socks squelch every time he takes a step. Stanley doesn’t seem to have such problems, dressed in familiar coveralls and a pair of wellingtons he wasn’t aware they owned.
Going through the forest, Stanley pokes and prods at the greenery, jotting items down and giving fruits for the Narrator to carry. The flora that holds his interest most seems to be the flowers. They’re all in full bloom, even the ones that really have no business to, and Stanley makes notes of them all before pulling out his scissors. He hands the cuttings to the Narrator to put in the bag. That's his purpose for this trip: glorified bag holder and bodyguard. Well, there are worse things to be.
He's resigned himself to following Stanley around with green branches poking into his sides when something low to the ground catches his eyes. He crouches to touch the stamen, the dewy petals, fingers tracing the sudden juncture where pink turns to white. The flowers are soft against his hand. Had he ever held something so soft in his hands before?
He can’t quite recall.
“What is it?” Stanley asks, crouching next to him.
“A pink hibiscus and a chamomile fused together,” he states. He removes his hold and his hand comes back wet with dew. “Individually, the flowers make good tea. I wonder what it would taste when it’s fused like this?”
From the corner of his eye, Stanley hands him something and on instinct, he takes it, almost placing it in the bag before he realizes he’s been handed the scissors. Stanley makes a snipping motion with his hand.
“But I don’t know how to take cuttings,” the Narrator states.
Stanley rolls his eyes but crouch-walks forward, hands held out expectantly. “Here, it’s easy. I’ll show you.”
And Stanley does. He shows him where to cut and explains why, and soon enough he has a cutting of a hibiscus-chamomile flower that he doesn’t quite know what to do with. They both stand as he stuffs it in the backpack with the rest.
“So,” asks Stanley at length, “what else makes good tea?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you like tea, right? Let’s gather some tea plants up. Make a section for it in the garden.”
It feels a little like a joke. The garden which he’d argued with Stanley over, shed blood, however small, over, and he was offering him a spot? “Are you sure? It’s not like I can enjoy it. I don’t drink.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll enjoy it for you. Come on, tell me if you see any.”
There are flaws to Stanley’s words. Namely, the fact that he doesn’t think Stanley knows how to make tea from scratch, or the fact that as someone who was vehemently against the garden, he shouldn’t have a section at all, but he’s familiar with Stanley, his stubborn drive above all, and so he obliges, pointing out any and all tea-related plants he can recognize.
The backpack is full by the time they return home and it takes him four washes to get the dirt stains out of his pants. Stanley arranges the cuttings on the living room table, uncaring of the dirt which still clings to its roots and falls to the carpet, and forces the Narrator to sit with him so they can plan the tea section of the garden together.
They plan for hours. Stanley wants the flowers nearer the front of the house. The Narrator points out that if they’re too close, they might be accidentally trampled. Should they section it off? How should they rearrange them? How do they take care of flowers with the exact opposite needs of the flowers they’re fused to?
Halfway through an impassioned speech on the benefits of proper tea, the Narrator feels a pressure on his shoulder. It is with shock, awe, and barely restrained contempt—typical, Stanley once again cutting him off when he’s just gotten his momentum—that he finds Stanley asleep on his shoulder.
Hm..
That’s new.
The feeling of warmth on his side, someone grabbing him by the wrist to drag him elsewhere, garden planning. It’s all new.
The Narrator lets Stanley rest a while more before he grabs a throw pillow and gently eases Stanley off his shoulder and onto the couch proper. Then he grabs a blanket from his room to lay over Stanley’s sleeping form.
Stanley gives him the honors of planting the tea cuttings. He borrows one of Stanley’s jeans, t-shirt, and garden gloves for the job and follows Stanley’s instructions to a T. Dig a hole, kneel, place cutting into hole, cover it up, water it. He does this seven more times and each time he feels an ease flow through him, a sense of calm that washes over everything else.
Is this what Stanley feels when he gardens? Is that why he started it? Is this how the earth is meant to feel; like your life is as pliable as the dirt beneath your fingertips if only you shaped it and gave it room to grow?
The Narrator doesn’t ask and Stanley doesn’t answer.
One day, the Narrator wakes and the house is empty. This isn’t unusual. There’s a map of the forest on the fridge, pinned by two bird magnets. It’s crudely but lovingly drawn, relying on landmarks like the big sequoia tree or the place where the arctic ferns form a half-star, but it’s understandable enough. When Stanley is venturing, he usually places a note next to the map where he’s going. There’s no note that morning and the garden outside is empty, so, the Narrator reasons, he must be on the roof.
The ladder under the trapdoor confirms his suspicions, although Stanley has a terrible habit of not moving the ladder even after climbing down. Still, he thinks he hears movement up there, but doesn’t bother venturing up—Stanley will come down when he’s done planning his day or eating breakfast. Instead, he tends to the laundry and cleans the living room. But when that’s done and Stanley still hasn’t come down, he climbs up.
The first thing he spots is Stanley. He is sitting on the park bench, expression morose in a way the Narrator hasn’t seen in a while. It makes something in the his core ache to see Stanley so bent inward.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
Stanley jerks his chin forward and the Narrator follows his line of sight until his eyes are filled with the green and yellow horizon.
Or, half the horizon.
It hits him then, how much of a fool he’d been. How much of a fool they’d both been. How could they have forgotten? The reason why they’d been forced from the office in the first place, the reason why they’d walked for so long, only stopping for rest and meal breaks and nothing else…
The island, the gigantic landmass they had spent days under a lifetime ago, worried about food and water and when they’d next see the yellow sky, is reduced to a mere sliver of land. Green-brown particles float in the air as it’s slowly eaten away. Beyond that, there is nothing. No yellow sky or ominous black hole. Just a persistent, all-erasing white. Blank.
The world is decaying.
It’s impossible to say from this far, but he swears he can see the individual specks of glowing blue roots as they fade away.
The decay has caught up to them.
“We were running out of rations anyway,” mumbles Stanley. They both know it’s not true.
It’s time to move on.
The decay is far enough away that they decide to spend one more night for preparation’s sake. The Narrator wishes Stanley a good night’s rest as he promises to take inventory from the basement. He hears Stanley scream himself awake no less than five times before Stanley decides sleep is not coming and descends the stairs to help.
From there, it’s a disorganized mess. They have two backpacks to carry and too many supplies to count. It’s agreed Stanley should carry the first aid kit and most of the food and the water while the Narrator stuffs his with whatever else they need. But what else should they bring? A nature guide to ensure Stanley doesn’t accidentally eat anything poisonous? A change of clothes in case theirs get ruined? Should they bring or leave the thermos behind?
It’s such an ear-scratching mess of too many choices that they stay another day to solve it.
(They’re procrastinating. No…Worse, they’re lingering.)
The Narrator looks at his room and sighs. Books lie on the bedside table waiting to be read, clothes folded into his dresser, a pyramid of cards carefully balanced atop. It’s clear he’s gotten attached. Stanley’s room is worse though, glimpsed in between Stanley scurrying in and out, trying to figure out what to keep and let go. Drawings litters wall, books on the bedside table, a plant sat in an old paint can on the windowsill; primed for nonexistent sunlight…
In for four. Hold. Out for eight.
They’ll be fine, the Narrator assures himself. They always are.
When they leave, Stanley wears a blue hoodie, a button down shirt, black trousers and his old office shoes. He’s bare faced again, and the look should shave ages off his appearance but the black bags under his eye do more than it’s share of compensation. His backpack is full, and the Narrator doesn’t ask what’s in it. As long as he has his first aid kit, food and water, then it doesn’t matter.
They leave first thing after Stanley wakes up. By this point, they can spot the decay through the gaps in the trees. The Narrator gives Stanley the shovel. “For protection,” he says.
When they leave, only one of the saplings in Stanley’s garden has bore fruit. An apple-pear combo that bends and almost snaps the branch it hangs off of, too heavy for the little sapling to bear.
The walk onward is mundane for the most part. They walk until they can’t see the decay and then they walk some more. They take breaks. They bed down when Stanley gets sleepy. They move on. Repeat and repeat again. They run into some Keepers and they dodge them until they move on, and then they move on.
But then, in the middle of a small clearing, the Narrator spots someone sitting on a large root, their face turned the opposite direction, and before he can warn Stanley, the brunet is bursting forward.
“Hello?” he says like a total idiot. The someone turns their face and bright yellow lights shine through the trees as the humanoid body flickers into a Keeper.
They break out into a run.
The Keeper gives chase, shooting beams of bright yellow lights and leaving smoked flora in its wake.
Did the Narrator call the clearing ‘small’ before? That was a lie. The clearing was large, too large to take cover properly and going on for what-seemed-like forever. Small copse of trees provided some cover but not enough to trick the Keeper. It was gaining quickly.
In the distance, a white light shines. He almost veers away from it on some programmed instinct, but thankfully Stanley’s instincts are better.
“An exit!” Stanley yells.
The Narrator almost doesn’t believe it, but yes, in between the gaps of trunks lies an exit half-embedded into the ground, surrounded by mossy stone and half-choked by vines. Stanley’s the faster runner, but he is bogged down by his supplies and the shovel, and so it’s the Narrator who reaches it first, yanking the door open and letting Stanley pass by before closing it behind him—
—Only for two human arms to shoot out and grab the door before he can. Yellow light illuminates the Narrator’s world and for a second, he swear he can feel his imminent death in the raised air between them; electronic whir, diamond crosshair—changing to another symbol too fast to register—then-!
A bag hits the Keeper and it staggers back and, with far too much shaking, the Narrator shuts the door close. Stanley, in a display of quick wit, pushes his shovel through the door’s handles, and then they’re standing there, catching their breath in an entirely new world.
“‘Hello’!?” hisses the Narrator once it all sinks in. He whirls in on Stanley, pushing his finger into the other man’s chest. “You see a Keeper in the wild that hadn’t noticed us, and you say ‘hello’!?”
“I thought-”
“And did you just throw your bag at it? The bag with the first aid kit!?”
Stanley scowls. “You’re welcome by saving you, by the way.”
“You wouldn’t have had to save me if-!”
The door bangs. The shovel rattles in its place. They quiet.
“We need to move on,” says Stanley, walking forward bare-handed. Vulnerable.
“I thought,” says Stanley, later, in the ruins of an old building that’s seen better days. “I didn’t recognize them so I thought…maybe they were different. I mean, I know- knew pretty much everyone in the office, so I thought maybe they were like us, you know? Maybe we weren’t alone.”
“But we’re not alone,” says the Narrator. “We have each other.” He reaches out, ready to pat his friend on the back, but Stanley only huddles further into himself. He retracts his hand.
He had been very careful to give Stanley his privacy when he was packing his bag. There had been a small book Stanley carried with him everywhere yet tried to hide; brown leather cover; waterproof-thick; cream pages pressed with flowers and jammed with botany facts.
He wants to know. Did Stanley leave the book back at the house to be disintegrated, or had he sacrificed space for food and water to bring it along, only to throw it away to save the Narrator’s life?
Which answer is worse?
Does it matter, if the results were the same?
The world they’re in is nothing like the world before. Gray concrete slabs and skyscrapers looming over them in impossible curves; stairs that lead nowhere; fire exits that are unreachable; horizontal windows. The sky is a pink-purple ball that emits dust motes like glittering miniature stars.
It’s beautiful.
It’s deadly.
The outside is full of open spaces so wide and long that if they ever encountered a Keeper, it’d be better to just jump off whatever platform they’re on—because oh yeah, they need to also parkour from platform to platform, as if the world wasn’t deadly enough—and hope the land on the bottom is more merciless.
So they don’t stick to open places. They move from building to building, hideout to hideout. Somewhere along the way, they pick up a long pipe which the Narrator insists on carrying around, if only to not make Stanley slower, and it works.
For a while, it works.
They find a remnants of a glasses store. Or some place that hides glasses behind displays cases, and because Stanley think it’s funny and because the Narrator genuinely wants to replace his missing glasses, they make it a hideout. It’s not the most structurally sound building—two holes in the corner and roof—but most of these buildings aren’t structurally sound. It’s the apocalypse. They make do.
Stanley goes on a supply run. He comes back, scares the Narrator into almost hitting him with a pipe, and then has the nerve to say the supply run was a dud. Then they argue. It’s the hunger. It’s the resentment. It’s the loneliness. It’s thousands of resets and rebellion bubbling to the surface.
Unfortunately, either because they’re too emotional or they had gotten used to the relative safety of the that house, they get too loud. Yellow light shines on them from above and with it, a familiar whine.
Stanley pushes him out of the way. Stanley gets hit by a shot. Stanley begins glitching, as if turning back to the start; short hair and white dress shirt and black tie, and then he is lying on the floor, cornered. The Narrator tries to save him with a chair to back of the Keeper’s head but it rips the chair in half. Suddenly, he is the one being chased, flat on his back, cornered.
Above him, there are two eyes. One eye. A diamond which transforms into a gear—
~~~
Even as he watches, Stanley’s hands are dragging past the broken gears of time itself-
~~~
His hands shoot forward before he can think twice. An electrical surge travels through his entire body and into his arm. When he blinks the yellow haze from his mind, the Keeper is gone and in his palm lies a small gear.
A small gear with the same electrical energy as the clock.
The Narrator breathes out acrid smoke. Black synthetic polymer reveals itself as his faux-skin flakes away. Gear. Time. Clock.
A few feet away, someone groans in pain, and everything else falls away.
Stanley.
He puts the gear in his pocket and rushes over to the other’s side. The display case behind Stanley’s head is cracked and Stanley himself looks frightened, eyes wide and breath unsteady. The Narrator takes the backpack and rummages through, uncapping the thermos as Stanley lifts his shirt to pour water on the wound. Then he grabs the supplies, small bits of gauze he had the forethought to bring which he uses to patch the wound. When that’s done, he sits next to Stanley, head thunking uncomfortably against the display case, and says, “Shit.”
“Did you know you could do that?” asks Stanley when the adrenaline starts wearing off and all that’s left is bone-deep tiredness. He makes a gesture with his hand and makes a little jitter motion, like he’s shocking somebody.
“If I did, did you think I would let you throw away half our supplies? Or come at it with a flimsy chair?”
“Touché.” Brown eyes take in the black and yellow of the Narrator’s hands. “So what are you?”
Something in the Narrator demands he say ‘classified’. He swallows that down and lifts his lips into a smirk. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Stanley laughs. In the Narrator’s pocket, the gear pulses like an alive thing. He imagines what he’d say to explain it.
‘Yes, Stanley, I received a gear from one of the Keepers. It has the same look and feeling as gears from my clock. Do you remember? Your hands brushed against one when you almost tried to kill me.’
‘Stanley, I think that means these Keepers are made from parts of my clock.’
‘Stanley, that means I can potentially fix the clock. I can do it. I can fix it and take us all the way back to the start. I can reset.’
He breathes in and out. In for four. Hold. Out for eight. He clenches his fist around where the gear thumps like a second heartbeat in his pocket, and keeps his mouth firmly and irrevocably shut.
They take a rest and then move on, keeping it slow in deference to Stanley’s injury. Later the same day, they find another exit. Stanley in all his excitement for a new, more exciting world, yanks on the door's handles, but for some reason it won’t open easy. The Narrator is ready to join him when the gear in his pocket throbs. It’s the only warning he gets as two Keepers crest over the ledge.
He gets to Stanley but it’s too late.
The warm blood pours in thick rivulets from the human's chest and down his chin. The pain from the missing arm doesn’t even register except for the fact that he cannot use both hands to put pressure on the wound. After several months of surviving together, Stanley dies in the mere blink of an instant, his form flickering from the Stanley in the office to the Stanley of today, clutching at the Narrator's sleeve, and then he lets go and he is dead.
He is dead.
He is dead.
An electric whine sounds behind him. Five Keepers stand a distance away, more than the Narrator has ever seen in one place. The gear in his pocket thrums like a beacon. He charges.
Electricity is in the air and he can taste it. He calls a rod to him and throws it and it hits a Keeper, but so too does a Keeper hit him, slicing off his left leg. He tumbles ass over kettle onto his side and then lights shine above him. Another gear above him. His hand shoots out. Electricity doesn’t curl around him so much as arc, and everything explodes.
The Keepers are dead. The rest of the gears whisper to him how to go back, how to make them into one, how to rebuild time anew. Against broken rubble, Stanley lies dead in a pool of his own blood, a mere few feet away from a brand new world; denied to him.
“Let’s go back,” a voice whispers in the Narrator’s ear. It’s the same voice which always says ‘classified, classified, classified.’ “Let’s go back to the start. Let’s go back to zero.”
There’s trolley car and there are tracks. He can hear the car careening down the wrong path. (But is there even a right one?)
"The clock always resets to zero."
The Narrator closes his eyes—
“Please forgive me, Stanley.”
—and wills time anew.
Stanley is crying when he walks into the office. His eyes are wide and wild, full of familiar desperation. He only says two words, raw and hoarse like he’s still choking on blood.
“You promised.”