[What did you do that was so bad, so damaging, that everything you've done in total should be erased?]
[He existed, mostly.]
[He walked out of a hospital with his head ducked and his hands thrust in his pockets and his shoulders hitched to his ears and picked up a job and attended college courses like some sort of normal person. And, even worse, he did something unforgivable.]
[He made a friend.]
[He made a friend like Brian, who flashed grins at everyone and was personable to a fault, who encouraged him to audition for a student film with a godawful script and a pretentious-as-all-fuck director, who introduced him to people like Seth and Jay and Sarah, and one by one, each of their lives spiraled into disarray, before they met the inevitable end that they were always going to meet, once he entered the picture.]
[Whether it was consequence or fate or cosmic irony - whatever he chooses to call it - it brought him into contact with the one person who could eradicate him from the story entirely. The one thing that could invite an End so absolute, that it would chokehold the presence in a hospital room at the source, and reduce it all to a world where everything is exactly the same, except he never existed.]
no subject
[He existed, mostly.]
[He walked out of a hospital with his head ducked and his hands thrust in his pockets and his shoulders hitched to his ears and picked up a job and attended college courses like some sort of normal person. And, even worse, he did something unforgivable.]
[He made a friend.]
[He made a friend like Brian, who flashed grins at everyone and was personable to a fault, who encouraged him to audition for a student film with a godawful script and a pretentious-as-all-fuck director, who introduced him to people like Seth and Jay and Sarah, and one by one, each of their lives spiraled into disarray, before they met the inevitable end that they were always going to meet, once he entered the picture.]
[Whether it was consequence or fate or cosmic irony - whatever he chooses to call it - it brought him into contact with the one person who could eradicate him from the story entirely. The one thing that could invite an End so absolute, that it would chokehold the presence in a hospital room at the source, and reduce it all to a world where everything is exactly the same, except he never existed.]
[They asked, and he accepted.]
["You are coming with us, aren't you?"]
[Oh, yes. Yes.]
[He wants that more than anything.]
[He can't quite look at her, eyes flicking shut, his mouth pulling into a grimace that nearly, nearly wavers and breaks - but doesn't.]
I brought something terrible into everyone else's lives.