Chapter Text
You want to sense that this timeline isn't alpha. You want your internal clockwork (always clicking and whirring no matter how much the lady doth protest) to jar, to come loose, to fail to catch. You search desperately for the feeling of wrongness in you, the sicksweet relief that would come with knowing something had failed and perhaps you were stranded (again) in a doomed timeline. You ache in a manner you wouldn't if the world was just. You hurt in all the right ways, which makes the horror of this moment all the more absolute. You want it to be wrong. You want it to be wrong so much.
No matter how stubbornly you wish, no matter the mental acrobatics you attempt, the rightness pervades you like slow poison, invading your limbs with sticky wet tenacity. It is vile. It does not simply feel vile; it is, with the same objectivity with which reality itself simply is. The whole world dry heaves around you, the green-purple pall of infection shading everything.
Or maybe that's you. Maybe that's your pallor. If there is a difference, you are not sure it matters.
Because Jade Harley is dead.
There aren't any loops. You checked three times in the span of the instant it took you to identify those ruby red slippers. If you were going to save her, you would have already done so. You don't know why you haven't, and worse, you don't know why you can't. There must be something. Anything. The senseless whackadoodle horseshit going on around you doesn't help in the slightest. All the shouting and the bickering, the Super Saiyan power ups and the tests of wit, fade into so much useless chaff. A distant part of your mind remarks rather stupidly that it's like your ears are ringing. All you can hear is a single tone, the clear bell-ring grief that rules your core, and all else is muffled and indistinct.
Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead.
That's what does it. You're not sure how you manage - maybe it's a god tier thing heretofore undiscovered - but you get her out from under there. Almost immediately you wish you hadn't. Her body is a circus of gore, flattened in ways that are cartoonish and all the more macabre for it. It is ghastly and awful. You fight the urge to vomit and taste bile anyway.
"I wanted the grimbark to go away," you murmur, numbly, to no one. "Not like this." You scoop her into your arms, and each and every way her pulverized bones crunch and squelch, perversely, sends new waves of nausea rocketing through your system. You want to throw up. You want to die. You want her not to be dead, you want this to stop being real right this second. God. You always hated blood. You hate more the way hers almost blends into your clothing, red on red on red on red.
You had missed her so much. And in ways that you're not even sure you fully understand but which throb like old scars, you know you never even really got to see her again before she died.
John, you think. Rose. Shit. They're going to be so fucking upset.
As if you yourself are not. You feel wet warmth trickling down your face and you decide you don't want to know if it's your tears or her blood. You're genuinely not sure which would be worse.
There are matters requiring your attention. You feel them pressing in on you with fussy impatience, as if your mourning is an inconvenience to the flow of the narrative. You don't give one flying donkey shit about narrative at the moment. Slowly you come to your feet and you cradle Jade Harley against your chest and you press your forehead to hers and you weep with the sort of bitterness you were sure you had forgotten how to feel.
But it turns out that seeing the people you love die never gets any easier. And the sense that you, personally, if you had just moved faster, planned better, done it right, could have prevented this from happening still remains. The sense of culpability is ingrained into you like muscle memory, like breathing. Sometimes you realize it's there. You actively sense it and control it in part, but even when it's far gone from conscious thought it is always still there, thrumming within you beneath your diaphragm. Guilt is the last muscle that will atrophy when you finally lie down and stop.
You are shaking. She is still. In defiance of all the screaming desperation tucked carefully beneath your skin, she is still.
In your mind you superimpose a question over the world:
