Work Text:
Picture this. There’s a gun in your hand and your finger is on the trigger. Somewhere, somehow, a cosmic protractor measures the angle between it and your temple. You are the sun that has dimmed. The universe is inside you. The bullet is inside the gun.
It is the bullet. It, like you, is fated to change the world tonight. You are the bullet and the bullet is the universe and the universe is the gun and the gun is in your hand. Your finger is on the trigger. Light years away, a star explodes and time freezes. Here, in your father’s study, something implodes and you hear time rush in your ears. Time, at this moment, is both fleeting and endless.
On one side of the universe, a coin is flipped. It lands on heads and you pull the trigger. The bullet hesitates before it leaves, it too feels the anchor holding it back. You are the bullet, and the bullet is now bounding towards your skull. You can’t see it, but it is coming, and you can feel it rush by the time in your ears.
You blink and an eternity passes by. You close your eyes and when you open them again, no time has passed at all.
The coin flips again, taking the universe with it. It’s tails, and you are no longer in your father’s study. You are no longer who you were. The universe is contained in the cramped dorm room you share with your roommate at Welton Academy. On the other side of the universe, you are now a child of seventeen, tucked in bed after an exhilarating night.
You feel the absence of a star, somewhere in the galaxy, and it coats your chest like tar. You don’t have a gun in your hand but you can feel one present somewhere. Maybe in your room, maybe in the universe. Your finger twitches as a trigger is pulled. A star explodes and you sleep through it.
The universe rushes in through your closed window and settles on the radiator. In the heat, it boils and bubbles and crackles. As the universe spills over, someone enters your room with tears in their eyes.
An indecisive coin finally chooses heads, and the gun in your hand is no longer just empty weight. The bullet is somewhere between the gun and its destination and something twitches inside you. For a moment, the coin bounces, and the bullet disappears. But it comes back soon enough. The bullet pauses and something tells you to think.
The universe slips out from under your feet and you trip and fall. You don’t land on the carpet in your father’s study, but rather in a hazy memory that convinces you that before you were a shell with a universe inside it, you were a person. There is a him and a them and an us that you recognise. They leave as instantaneously as they came, and you find yourself upright again, in your father’s study.
A something lands on a somewhere with noiseless impact. It could be you hitting the floor of your father’s study, but that hasn’t happened yet. The universe holds out on that, and it has frozen you in place as it watches a coin land on tails.
You're asleep again. In your dreams, you see a universe. You blink and it turns into a gun. There's a hand holding it, and a finger on a trigger. In another universe, it isn't a dream, and you're really standing in a room with him holding a gun that holds the universe. In yet another, it isn't happening at all, and the universe rests peacefully while you sleep dreamlessly.
This universe meets you in the middle, and gives you a dream. While you dream, the planets twist and turn. They find themselves permanently displaced as the bullet leaves the gun and settles in the heart of the impossibly small universe you're stuck in. It weighs much more than any bullet ever has before, and you can feel it dragging you down with it. Your dream isn't real, but the universe is, and so is the bullet, and so is the weight.
The universe returns, for a moment, to the gun and its holder. The scene remains as it was in the dream ( his dream), except this time you are him and he is you but the hand holding the gun is neither yours nor his. You think it might be your father, but it isn’t. It’s far too big, far too encompassing, and far too convenient to be your father. It might be his, but he is asleep.
The bullet tears through whatever had been holding it in place, and completes the rest of its journey with ease. Destiny is undeniable, it whispers in your ear as it makes contact with your skull.
The bullet hits your temple. Bullseye. The bullet hits the universe. Straight on the target. Between this moment and the next, a multitude of stars die and a multitude are born. Impact. The bullet hits your skull and it hits the universe and a small crack grows and spreads until the universe and your skull shatter into infinities of infinitely small pieces.
Picture the universe, now broken into fragments, with each shard expanding until it forms a universe of its own. There is no longer the universe but rather, a universe, one of many. Inside you, your skull is broken too, but the pieces don't grow. Each one is too small for the universe it must now hold, and they must compress themselves to fit into their new shells.
There is a pause. The universe takes a moment to recollect itself and you are stuck in limbo. Your thoughts are leaking out onto a carpet or maybe into your bloodstream and somewhere in the dripping line of red is him. Maybe it's a memory, maybe it's a dream, maybe it's a concept. It’s sleep. It’s someone sleeping.
In another shard of your fragmented skull, you are asleep too. There is no gun and there is no bullet and there is no crack. Somewhere in that universe, a star is born just as one dies in yours. A birth makes up for every death and you are asleep through it all. In that universe, you dream in technicolour.
The shard flies through the window at Welton Academy as the coin flips again, and its sharp end pierces you in the gut. Someone is speaking to you, and in another universe, this is just a nightmare, because you are asleep and so is he. And in another, you never have to witness this, real or imaginary. But, unluckily for you, you are stuck in this universe, unaware but still feeling all the alternates fracturing around you.
The coin is tossed again, and there is no death and no life. There is no universe and no stars. There is no gun and no bullets. There is no bed and no Welton Academy.
On one side of one universe, when the coin lands on heads, you are Neil Perry, with a gun that has just been shot, feeling the planets shift when the bullet rushes past them.
On another side, when the coin lands on tails, you are Todd Anderson, sleeping through the shift, an hour away from being woken up to words that taste like the bullet that tore the universe apart.
In another universe entirely, after a coin refuses to land flat and instead finds itself stuck spinning in circles, you are someone else entirely. Still Neil Perry, but without a bullet in your head or the universe in your bones.
In yet another, as the coin falls through the line that separates it from all the other coins, you are Todd Anderson but you'll stay asleep until the next morning.