III. Breaking News
I stumbled forward as my brain, thinking it was kneeling, found out it was standing up and losing its balance, managed to right myself, gasped. I was out in the open air. It was still the middle of the day (my connection to the heart helpfully informed me it was precisely 1:43pm). I looked around myself, gathering my senses, and realized I was, still, on the edge of town, on a grassy spot besides the highway. I turned around - there was the black tower of NVZ News.
The red light no longer streamed from its iron-clawed top. The sky was blue once more. For a moment I felt relief - but then as I turned around to scan the rest of the town, my heart sank.
The red aurora still floated over the city, and if anything it had grown thicker. The ribbons of crimson light streamed down to the street, and they moved, giving the entire thing the allure of a hideous jellyfish.
Fast-forward memories replayed through my mind, showing me breaking off from Jonbal, staggering out of the building, falling in the grass unconscious, getting up and starting walking again - had I managed to escape unnoticed? How? It was too fast for me to grasp. I didn't have time to dwell on it -
Phantom words spoke inside my head.
<ViridianSLaughter> Pinging you again.
<TempusFuckit> Vi? I think I just lost a couple hours. Maybe more.
<ViridianSLaughter> Oh.
<ViridianSLaughter> Well.
<ViridianSLaughter> I'm not sure how to put this.
<TempusFuckit> Vi just fucking tell me what is going on
<ViridianSLaughter> Tod Jonbal appeared on a Breaking News segment in which he denounced 'the attempt that has been made against his life' by a 'radical antifa terrorist.'
<TempusFuckit> Oh my God.
I put my hands on my face, pressing my temples, letting out some unholy gurgle of anger and anxiety.
<ViridianSLaughter> And you should know about the rally.
<TempusFuckit> The rally?
<ViridianSLaughter> A spontaneous rally, in your town, in reaction to the 'attempted assassination'.
<TempusFuckit> When???
<ViridianSLaughter> It's happening right now.
<TempusFuckit> WHAT
<ViridianSLaughter> Friend's driving me over. We'll be there as quickly as we can but that's still at least a couple hours. You picked a real bad moment to time out.
<TempusFuckit> You think I don't know that?
<ViridianSLaughter> If anything happens to Alex, I will kill you.
<TempusFuckit> If anything happens to Alex, you won't have to.
Fuck.
I paced about the grassy spot, hands clumping at my hair, trying to make sense of what was happening. The red aurora, the shifting thread, an 'attempt on his life'... I had destroyed Jonbal's physical body. He now existed only within the Astral, sustained by all who held him in their minds as an idea. But he wouldn't be content with that, wouldn't he? The rally… A spontaneous protest likely to turn into a riot… That reeked of hasty improvisation.
The faces. He was going to get everyone in whom his infestation had taken deep enough roots to manifest a second face, and he was going to use their collective energy to do something. Incarnate himself into a new body? Kill me? I had no idea and it didn't matter.
I touched the Clockwork Heart. It was cool, and ticked along peacefully, its steady rhythm a far cry from the frenzy inside my brain.
But I was a wreck. Every muscle in my body was sore, my lungs were burning, my throat was parched dry, The cuts had stopped bleeding and scabbed over but still hurt. I could hardly walk, let alone run, and I was at least half an hour away from the epicenter of that aurora. I patted myself just to confirm what I already knew - a cell phone would ruin the lines of my outfit, so I hadn't carried one with me. And I couldn't feel Alex in the network.
He was probably in the middle of teaching class. Unless things had already escalated past the point where that was possible.
Only one thing to do then.
I looked around until I found the clockwork beetle, returned to its brass sphere form, lying in the grass. I picked it up and shook it, shouting, "Hey! Wake up!"
The hum returned, and with it the first sense of relief since I'd time-skipped myself into this situation. At least it wasn't dormant or out of power. I let go of it as it unfolded its wings, staring at me with its lens.
Some of them were still there, hadn't drifted away as I laid passed out on the floor for an hour and the Timestream shut down.
I laid a hand on my heart, and sent out a wave of unseen light, a pulse reaching out across the Astral, as far as and wide as I could.
he is back he is back he is back what happened send the word what happened is he alright
"I know you're out there, Ticks," I spoke into the void. "Lurking in the dark. Waiting for me to wake up, that you might watch me again. You need me. You love me. Well I am up again now, and I am calling. I need you. No. He needs you. The man I love is in danger, and I barely have the strength to stand. But you can give me that strength. I need your power. We need your power. Feed me. Sustain me. Bring me strength. Do it, and I will show you the face of Prometheus."
Silence, for a moment.
His face.
And they answered. And they came to me. And each voice in the dark was an extra second on the clock of my heart. They piled up, rose up, and the clock started winding back. Strength returned to my limbs a little more with each new dark thing squirming into its seat to watch me. I was still sore and aching and in pain. But I could move.
I grasped time in my hand and bent it. In a moment everything around me, the very wind slowed down, the grass moved out of tune with the speed at which I was moving. I started walking. I accelerated to a jog. And then I was running. Fueled by powers not mine, a blur whom those not touched by the Astral could not even see, I entered the red aurora.
There was confusion in the streets, people standing haggard as the red light descended upon the town. A spontaneous rally, steeped in months of fermenting hate and anger, would be a disruptive event at the best of time - but I could see its trail In-Between, the wake of hazy air and red streams where it had passed, disturbing the mind and making reality a little more dream-like, a little more malleable. People were confused. They could not see the evil in their midst even as it took shape.
Even so, I took a détour. Entered a local clothing store and grabbed a scarf and a hoodie off the shelf, wrapped the former around my head and put up the latter. Which would look absolutely ridiculous considering I was still wearing short shorts and stockings, but it was my face I was worried about being seen, not my admittedly iconic ass.
The trail of distorted reality made it easy to follow the rally, and as I ran through the streets, what I had already suspected, the reason I had been so worried from the start, grew increasingly obvious.
They were heading for the school.
They were already there by the time I caught up with them. I turned a corner and emerged into a slow-motion chaos of voices and motion - even with time slowed to a crawl, there must have been at least a hundred people there, all of them moving at once with enough frenzy that it looked like a rolling wave, like a high-speed montage of storm clouds.
The first thing I caught besides the vaguest idea of the crowd were the news vans. Because of course there were some. A national news channel, perfectly ordinary, perfectly bored, the reporter doing his hair while the cameraman tended some issue with his equipment. They were all blissfully unaware of the silvery sheen that surrounded them and all their gear, the bubble of money and power that insulated them from the ambient power - kept them safe, and kept them completely oblivious to how wrong things were going. Another local news channel, the more liberal-leaning one, its ragged and exhausted crew staring haggard at the protest, as if thinking maybe they should do something about it and failing to find the strength. The red aurora kissed them, draining their cheeks of color and their eyes of focus.
And no fewer than three NVZ News vans, crews slathering with toothy grins and shiny eyes, the gorgons cooing into their ears. A cameraman, absurdly, was using an old crank-style of camera, and with each turn of the crank more read threads unspooled from the machine to feed the aurora. Another had his fingers and thumbs in a square frame, trying to judge the perfect plan for his career-making shot. A girl no more than twenty with some kind of 60s housewife hairdo was waving her hands excitedly, eyes gleaming red.
A hundred people wasn't that many, in the grand scheme of things. But relative to our town, and gathered on such short notice, it was big. Most who would look at this crowd could see at least one acquaintance, if not a relative. And it would only grow bigger over time, as the red tendrils reached out and pulled those whose symptoms had been weak enough to not succumb to the call immediately.
There were only a handful of signs, the crowd gathered too hastily for much preparation. That didn't make things better. They were all angry, faces twisted and red with wrath, and they had nothing to brandish to signal this wrath but their fists and whatever object could be found at hand. So they held up fists, and bricks, and sticks, and they screamed, and the gorgons of iron and plastic and wires writhed at the back of their skulls, hissing and shrieking and whispering commands. Their heads were wreathed in flickering particles of red light.
They were on the parking lot in front of the school, only the narrow band of lawn cut through by a concrete path separating them from the wide, red-brick body of the school building itself. A handful of resource officers stood across that lawn, hands on their belts, looking nervously at the crowd. They were likely the only reason the crowd hadn't crossed that invisible moat to press themselves against the doors and windows of the classrooms, and none of them looked particularly happy to be there, or indeed eager to stand up to that crowd if pushed. I could see streamers of red light stretch out towards two of the cops, likely trying to get at some budding gorgon-head behind their ears. They would fold soon, that much was obvious.
they are many can you handle them he is invincible he is already tired you cannot fight this many he has to they stand between him and prometheus our power is enough our power is not enough he is only human
"Fuck 'only human,'" I snarled, "I am Tempus Fucking Fugit."
Eyes were turning towards me at the back of the crowd. People were so overtaken by the Astral that they were beginning to see me. I could see the tension in their eyes, the fearful excitement - that crowd was buzzing with the forbidden thrill of protesting a school, the place where their own children were having class right now, knowing they were probably scaring the hell out of them but hoping they were scaring the teachers more. That it was a school was probably the only reason the crowd wasn't in majority armed, and even so there were a few guns there, though still holstered.
Bravado aside, I couldn't take on a crowd of a hundred at my peak, and however much power I was channeling I was still in a wretched state. So I ignored the protests of my body and, once more, pushing against layer after layer of missed and distorted time and physical exhaustion and the burning sensation of too much occult power passing through my physical body, I opened my arms, and once more I grabbed and pulled still the hands of the universe's clock.
Silence fell.
In movies they sometimes depict space as a place of silence where the sounds of one's body fill the world. Every breath taken inside the space suit is as loud as a cry. Every step like a boulder falling. Every rustling of fabric like a spaceship about to tear itself apart. And every move is slow, deliberate, weightless. You can jump a dozen feet up, but it will feel like a feather's slow descent, not the mighty bound of a giant.
That's how I felt crossing the distance between me and the crowd. The colors of the world were off, the sky looked like a bruise, and every step seemed to take an age. But I did cross the distance, eyes fixated on the nearest electronic head with its beady lens eyes. I reached it, and raised my hand, and put it on their shoulder.
There was a gasp and a tug as a human body felt itself pulled into the frozen time, an experience completely alien to it, mind and body struggling to adjust to a world without air where they needed no lungs to breathe. I pulled them towards me and the hideous head was gone, and I was staring at Claire from the store, dyed-blonde hair disheveled, eyes wide and staring into my hood and scarf with no sign of recognition - then she opened her mouth to scream into my face so loud it hurt.
The cloud of lights around her head was starting to form another face, overlain on top of hers, a broad face with a receding hairline.
I had no idea if what I was about to do would work. I had no idea it wouldn't kill her. That's why I hadn't tried it before. But at this point, all I had was a desperation play. So I grabbed her head by the side (as she started haphazardly grabbing and clawing at my face, and I reached around with my other hand, and I dug my fingers into the spit tissue between skin and metal, and I ripped her other face off.
he kills he kills he cannot kill are they human still do they count do they not count why does he not kill humans what is a human where is the limit will she die doesn't he know her
Blood ran down between my fingers and living metal writhed against my palm; Claire screamed bloody murder, her face contorting in pain, and I held her head, watching, hoping she wouldn't just bleed to death or that her brain wouldn't dribble out between my fingers.
But no. She was in pain, obviously, and she was bleeding a lot - the way you bleed from a scalp wound, not the way you bleed from a hemorrhage. And her eyes flicked from side to side, confused, her mouth wording questions as to what the fuck was happening.
So I released her, her body freezing mid-stumble a second after leaving my hand, and without even looking at it I tossed the torn face to the ground and smashed it with my heel.
"I could have solved this from day fucking one," I shouted into the silence, "I could have just lobotomized these things out of them. Couldn't any of you fuckers have said so?!"
we didn't know we didn't know we swear we don't know how you work we are sorry i am sorry we are sorry i am sorry i didn't know it always manifests differently you must understand We are sorry.
I grabbed the next closest person, a short, stocky man with a blonde moustache and a shaved head; he too started visibly as I pulled him into my timestream, and I immediately plunged my hand in between the writhing, wiry hair of his second face, tearing it out of him - blood and lymph and stranger fluids stretched between his scalp and the gorgon, and it resisted for a moment as vein-cables stretched - then snapped, and the head was gone, and I released him before he could do no more than gasp in pain. The medusa was trying to bite through my palm, so I threw it to the side where it froze in the air, and put a knife through it.
I looked at the man's clean-shaven head. Where I had feared to see rent flesh, cracked bone and an exposed brain, there was instead only red irritated skin and a few bleeding spots arranged in a rough circle.
I could have solved this entire time. Fuck me.
It didn't matter. I could still solve it now. Step by step, walking on the moon with no space suit, fueled by nothing but the power of the Audience to sustain my exhausted body. I grabbed the next man in the crowd and - this one actually reacted with lightning speed, the jolt of the transition to frozen time going unacknowledged; he just felt someone grab his shoulder and instantly turned on his heel and threw a punch. Thankfully I managed to duck under the blow and immediately let go of his shoulder, leaving him frozen off-balance; I whipped about to be at his back again and when I touched him again I had my foot in front of his leg. He toppled with all his weight and, grabbing the face with my fingers, I let gravity do the work of tearing it out of him. I threw it down and another knife after it.
he can do this he can do this he can do this glory glory glory glory glory
I moved on to the next, and then the next, and the next, bodies frozen in time mid-fall behind me, droplets of blood hovering in the air. Breathless and sweating.
You're hurt.
I looked down, vision swimming a little. The fabric of my gloves was wrecked. My nails were broken and bloody from digging through flesh and metal, the skin of my fingers split at the ends. They felt painful and numb at the same time. It didn't matter. Just had to keep going. A dozen down; maybe ninety to go. Maybe a hundred.
I grabbed the next man and the moment he was there, inside my stream, I knew something was wrong. I tried to grab his head and he turned to me and there he was - staring at me over this pasty bearded dude's face, a holographic overlay of red and blue, Ted Jonbal grinning at me.
"Glad to see you with us, Mike," he said, his voice distorted with static.
I didn't think. I pulled his head in and slammed my forehead into his nose so hard I made myself see stars; the image became scrambled, the man behind yelling in pain, and I took advantage of that window to rip the second face out of his scalp.
My skull was pounding, the world around me flickering, the same pressure as I had felt at the TV studio rising.
No, not now. I wasn't done. I wasn't-
And then the world snapped, I gasped breathlessly and stumbled forward, and a dozen faces were turning to look at me with baffled stares rapidly red-shifting into anger and hatred as six bodies hit the ground behind me, crying out in pain and confusion.
And the gorgon heads whispered in unison, "This is him. This is the killer. And now he's come for your children."
Someone punched me in the face.
I didn't even see it coming. I was completely out of gas, barely standing on my own two legs, and some middle-aged lady screeched and threw a hook at me and I couldn't dodge it, I just took the hit, stumbled two steps back and tried to gather my bearings. In the time it took me to do that a guy in a red hat rocking a moustache swung at me with his cardboard sign, hitting the side of my head and making my headache blow up like dynamite. I threw a blind punch to ward off anyone else, and a screaming old woman in a pencil skirt tackled me at the waist. We both went down hard, rolling on the ground, and I punched her in the ribs and knee'd her in the gut, finally getting her off of me. The moment I tried to get up, I was kicked in the face and went back down.
I rolled away from the following stomp, and in one motion drew two knives and swung them around me. There was a cry, a little blood. Not much. But as I blinked the tears of pain out of my eyes, I'd at least cleared the space around me. It was posturing. Even as the crowd pulled back, I was on one knee, panting, hands shaking, and I knew I couldn't even stand up anymore.
The brass beetle was flying frantically, trying to catch an angle of me that didn't look like I had the shit absolutely beaten out of me, which was unfortunately impossible. In this, it was fighting its own battles with the NVZ camera crews, who were hungrily running about the edges of the scene, cameras rolling to get the best shot of my bruised-red face, of the brand of the steel-toed working shoe that buried into my ribs. The sitcom housewife reporter had completely forgotten her script and was instead hooting and hollering, pumping her arms in the air, wire-snake hairs fanning out like a halo behind her head.
One of the news crew spotted the brass beetle as it was coming at a low angle, and lunged. He didn't really seem to understand what he'd just done or what he was holding, just staring at it surprised into the lens, and the Audience echoed in cries of distress. At the back of his head the gorgon whispered, this is a camera, record this historic moment, this is your big break, done the life of a staffer, film his execution to the void and all the worlds, and he nodded. The beetle buzzed and shook and tried to wrest free, but it had never been meant to have much strength; the man lifted it up and pointed its lens at me.
get up get up get up please get up please get up tempus tempus tempus tempus get up get up
It took me a moment to realize that the world was still off-color even now that my powers no longer held time still. The sky was dark in the middle of the day, the red aurora the only light from heaven. The air clung too greedily to my skin, making it grow damp and itchy. The crew was moving in erratic fits, ebbing and flowing around me as they penned me in, surrounding me with hateful eyes, screamed slurs and slurred screams.
"It's not really my fault," said a voice that was all voices, algorithmically composed out of the chorus that surrounded me, as Ted Jonbal's holographic ghost flickered into existence between the bodies of the crowd. "I'm not doing anything they don't want, you understand? The world is so harsh and complicated and they want it to be not their fault, so I provide them with a reason. I help them. I shape an order they can believe in, with clear moral lines and unambiguous enemies, and it is a relief to everyone. Even you, Mike, my boy. Even you desperately want to stop thinking I'm the reason all of this is happening, and not acknowledge that really, it's their fault."
I thought about Claire at the store. I thought about the gas station. I thought about the thoughtless comments before it had all begun, and the spark of interest in their eyes when they'd first heard someone suggest The Queers were part of This Whole Thing.
"Are you really trying," I said through halting breath, "to make me feel like my anger at these assholes for being bigots is the same thing as their hating me because they're bigots?"
"Bigots this, bigots that," Jonbal exclaimed, drifting between bodies as a flickering ghost, here one moment, there the next, patting a cheek or clasping a shoulder, "c'mon, Mike, you can't just label all of Red America this way! Have an open mind, for God's sake!"
I didn't answer at first. All my strength was focused on keeping my arms up and holding my knives, as if that would matter if a dozen people decided to start beating me up all at once. Eventually I turned my head slightly - there, on the ground, Claire from the store was standing up, clutching her bleeding head in her hands, and looking around confused and increasingly horrified, muttering, 'What's going on? What is this? Where did the sun go?'
I had known Claire as a blandly apolitical woman. She'd never shown any particular reaction when I occasionally made mention of 'my boyfriend' to her. But she'd had some concerns, that she'd occasionally voiced, a bit hesitant, about 'those protests' and 'this gender stuff' and one day she'd heard someone say that she was right to have these concerns. She'd felt that special hit of dopamine some people get the first time they're told, 'it's okay, you don't have to just unquestionably accept that your son is a girl, nobody reasonable would. And when you think about it, maybe Timmy is confused about liking boys too, it's all this gender ideology stuff floating around in the air.', It turned out her fears were valid, and that felt good, and that felt right, so she sat down to listen some more about how right she was to be worried, and by the time the gorgon had been growing out of her head and was whispering suggestion to her, she'd been feeding it for a while.
"...I am 'Red America,'" I said, turning back to the crowd and the figure moving within it, the human wall edging forward inch by inch as anger overwhelmed fear. "I live here. You're the one pushing me out."
"But you don't have to be pushed out, Mike, son," Jonbal said, grinning.
I blinked, staring up as his shape became more coherent, his hands flickering into a solid three-color cartoon hand with a big cartoon cigar in it, of which he took a puff that sounded like static and smelt like burnt copper wire.
"Straight, cis, white, a man," Jonbal said, counting on the fingers of his hand by clutching them around the cigar, "nobody's gotta be all of those things at once, you know? Sure, it's better if you meet them all, but Mike my boy, three out of four ain't bad!"
The crowd was staring at me now, their eyes strangely focused. Most of them were still confused, lost in a haze, one of the news crews filming the sky slack-jawed; but every time Jonbal came up to one of them and patted his shoulder, mussed her hair, adjusted their jacket, they seemed to come down to earth and focus on me. And more were coming, trickling one by one into the Astral-tainted field, drawn by the pull of the crowd like a star's gravity.
Tod Jonbal stabbed his cigar at me, and said: "How about a podcast?"
I stared at him with my blandest possible expression.
"Your audience is literally out of this world," Jonbal said, puffing out a cloud of star-spangled smoke, "but you can't monetize it, can you? We can. Not 'we' as in NVZ, of course, I mean the parent company. There's far more to this than this shithole station in this podunk little town, you get me?" He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, as if encompassing the sky. "YouTube. Cons. Podcasts. Book tours. Now you're our hook into the void itself. We could reach across the stars, turn this shit galactic. We could make you a star. We could make you rich."
"I'm already a star," I spat, "and I've seen what rich does to people."
"Mike, I'm being serious here," he said, pausing in his tracks, flickering image growing steadily more solid from the tip of the cigar down his arm. "There comes a time in every man's life where he has to sell out and settle down. This is your opportunity. There's a narrow window here when real America is looking for more diverse voices, to better represent its rich tapestry of people. You obviously know how to market yourself. You've got a brand, you can keep it with you, or we can make you a new one, easy as that," he said, snapping his fingers. "We can have a book out second financial quarter and you won't even have to write it. We got people for that! We got people for everything."
I couldn't say a word. The enormity of what he was saying, of the deadly fight and the protest turned into incipient riot and the school still so close, and he was pacing across the plaza, among the still and staring crowd, talking marketing and financial quarters.
"You got true potential, Mike. I thought this'd be a one off, but you could make it to prime time if given enough time." He smiled as if we were both in confidence with each other. "Only thing is you'd have to lose the g- boyfriend, I'm sorry, I don't want to be insensitive. But you'd have to lose him though. Gay, trans, and brown?" He guffawed as if the statement itself sufficed as a joke. "What did he do, tick as many boxes as he was allowed on the I'm Special card? No, Mikey. We can find you a nice white business manager husband, or we can put you up with some rich lesbian and supply you with Latino poolboys if that's more your thing. Maybe even a trans guy, long as he's the right color, we can bluff the audience, 'when you think about it is it really gay if he used to be a lady,' same shit I was serving you earlier. You follow me?"
I blinked. I hadn't said a word in a good five minutes. It hadn't helped me recover my strength, not really. Too much power had burned through me, and the Audience was too fascinated to really help. I didn't have the strength to stand, or fight, or do anything.
So I just said:
"My boyfriend is gonna kick your ass so hard."
"I very much doubt that," Jonbal said with a grin, before exhaling one last puff of smoke, and with that puff of pixels his entire holographic body vanished into pixelated smoke, and I could feel his presence stretch all around us, all through the crowd, the air grow denser, and then…
A red-faced man huffing and puffing angrily at the front of the crowd froze up, his eyes going wide, and he reared his head with a howl of pain as the gorgon spread its wire-snake hair and tore itself out of his skull. Then the same happened to the woman on his left, and the one on their right, and confusion spread through the crowd as more and more of their numbers clutched their heads in agony and snarling, hissing faces pushed their way out of their body, falling apart as they stretched out into the air, long threads of blood, hair, skin and electronic fragments pulling together into a vortex. There were cries of panic from those still self-aware enough to realize something unnatural was happening, even if they couldn't quite see or understand it, and those ran; but many more instead stood in their place, staring it rapt fascination as the vortex pulsed and tightened beat after beat, until it finally began to fully merged into the figure of a man, a hideous golem made out of broken computer junk and bodily fluid and fragments.
And that substance merged and blended together until, when it descended and its feet touched the ground, it was with a leather shoe; and Tod jonbal stepped forward, looking perfectly human, save for his eyes which were the reflective black of a turned off TV screen.
"Ah, but it feels good to be back in the field."
What the fuck.
it was his purpose
do you not understand
he meant for this to be he meant to free himself from the shackles of his flesh he meant to spread himself to so many minds so he could escape his studio he meant to be free
"So long spent in studios," Jonbal said, adjusting his red tie and hand-brushing his hair. "Away from the real story, the real people. I feel like a younger man."
The crowd, still nearly as big as before but looser now, more scattered, were staring at him wide-eyed, and none of them spoke or moved, as if teetering on the brink of rejecting whatever fever dream they were going through as mere hallucination or embracing their new reality. Now that they were more spread out I could see the school again behind them - and the resource officers who had been making a half-hearted attempt at holding the line; one of them was now handcuffing the other two who struggled weakly, probably tased or knocked out, and the last two had fully joined the many and looked with deep joy as jonbal moved through the parting crowd.
He flexed his right hand, and a microphone appeared in it.
"This is Ted Jonbal," he said gleefully, "the voice of America, here on the ground in front of Thomas Jefferson High School, where a group of local citizens protesting the school's curriculum have cornered the infamous Blue Ripper…"
this is a terrible nickname wait isn't he supposed to be recovering from an assassination attempt it should at least be the blue reaper wait do they know about tempus i thought his existence was secret i thought he was hidden i don't understand anymore i like blue ripper
I didn't have enough breath to answer the confusion and fear in the Audience's voices. Jonbal wasn't really broadcasting "to" anyone, except perhaps reality itself. Here In-Between, where meatspace became pliable and moldable, he was trying to weave a narrative into existence, so that when the world sobered up and police came to find why an impromptu protest had ended in the lynching of a young man in a weird outfit, they'd find that I was in fact the 'radical leftist terrorist' behind the alleged murder of a local restaurant owner. The nickname, lame as it was, would be picked up by the news and treated as if it had been popular all along.
Jonbal was walking in front of the crowd, their eyes tracking him, expressions unfocused, straining to process the world around them.
"How about that podcast offer now, Mike?" he said grinning.
"Please just kill me already," I said wearily.
"Fair enough!" he said, coming up to a man in his forties, one of the taller and larger of the crowd, the kind who naturally drew all eyes. "Sir," he said, waving the mike in front of his face, "are you aware that you may very well stand on the cusp of American history?"
The man's eyes turned to Jonbal's face, blinking, fog pulling back as he processed the words.
"...'msorry?" he said.
"Today the American people is finally Pushing Back. This is truly a turning point. Are you ready to seize the moment?"
"How- how do I do that?" the man said, words coming out slowly.
Ted Jonbal smiled. "Take this," he said and the man instinctively opened his hand and received the offering before looking down and seeing what it was.
A brick.
The man looked up at jonbal in confusion, and the news anchor smiled reassuringly, tapped his shoulder, and nodded his chin at me.
"You know what to do."
"But…" the man started. Looked at me, breathing harshly, raspy breath drawn from burning lungs, on my knees, the hoodie fallen at some point leaving my eyes and my sweat-beaded forehead and my perfectly coiffed hair above the hem of the scarf. "I can't…" he started, but didn't finish. I could see the gears working in his mind as he pulled up memories of 'antifa' and 'black block' people on the news in 'riots,' same scarves over their heads, projecting his fantasies of social collapse and rampaging barbarian hordes. But I guess I was white enough for him to hesitate.
"Come on," Jonbal said genially, hand clasped firmly on the man's shoulder as the entire crowd focused on him and the brick in his hand, as if he had become their lodestone. "You've read the Bible. 'Let him who is without sin throw the first stone,' remember? That's you, pal. That's your call to action. Aren't you pure? Aren't you one of the Chosen? It's up to you to throw that first stone, and then a hundred more will follow!"
The man turned to me. I didn't have anything to say to him. His steps had already taken him to this place. He had not thrown away the brick the moment it had been handed to him. Someone might have held his hand but he had still chosen to follow. The gorgon had ripped its way out of his skull and he still listened to its voice. It didn't matter if he threw the rock or not; he was already the kind of person to hold it.
He opened his mouth to say something, and then didn't; instead he took a hesitating step forward, and slowly lifted the brick in the air.
"You'll be prime time one way or another, Mike," Jonbal said, grinning at me. "If not as the host, then as the headline."
i can't watch this he's gonna make it he's gonna be fine right he's just luring them into a trap he's gonna be fine can't you see he's helpless please i don't want this to happen
"Oh, shut up," I whispered. "Every time you plug in to watch us… you know this might happen. You know this might be the last time you see us. It's part… of the thrill, isn't it?" I chuckled darkly. The stone rose higher in the air. "It's what makes it fun. All of you better stay glued to your fucking screen… and watch the payoff."
I stared at the man in defiance, and he shook - but Ted Jonbal's hand was on his shoulder, and his confidence asserted himself, and there, the brick was held back, his arm tensed, he was going to throw it and then the dam would break. I sighed.
Maybe with the last of my strength I could manage to throw a knife before the brick hit me, take him down with me. If nothing else, I still had spite.
Look up.
I blinked.
I looked past the man with the stone.
The doors of the school were open.
The cops laid limp and unconscious on the lawn.
There was movement. I looked up to the sky.
He fell, like lightning, from Heaven.
He grabbed two men's heads as he came down and slammed them into the ground with the force of his fall, landing on his knee, and they didn't get up. The man holding the brick instinctively tried to hurl it at him, and he caught his arm, squeezed his wrist so hard it broke; the man's scream of pain turned to a squealing whimper when he was kicked in the dick, and he fell, breathless, holding his crotch.
The brick hit the side of Jonbal's head so hard his flesh rippled, briefly reverting to a mesh of meat and electronics, and then he was kicked so hard he went flying, rolling like a tumbleweed down the plaza. The crowd stepped back in shock and fear.
He.
"Alex," I whispered in awe.
He turned to me and grinned.
"That hoodie looks awful on you," he said.
He was on fire. Every seam in his body was alight, his arms, legs, and neck floating loosely, separated in segments connected by golden flame. When he spoke, fire curled out of the corners of his mouth, and his eyes shone like tiny suns. Just being near him felt like standing before a raging bonfire - only one whose flame could never hurt me.
My brain could hardly process what was happening anymore. Fully half of it was busy dealing with the deafening chorus raging in the space occupied by the Audience.
He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He-
"It's him!" howled a woman, pointing at him, "It's that teacher!"
"Shut the fuck up, Linda!" Alex yelled, "Your husband is fucking the school nurse!"
The woman choked on her own scream of outrage, but next to her Mark from the liquor store, a pot-bellied but muscular man with a shaggy gray beard, started running straight at Alex, roaring: "You won't have my children, you twisted little dy-"
Alex slammed his hand over his face with enough force to stop him dead in his tracks; Mark's eyes went wide between the fingers clutching his head like an iron vice and Alex lifted his entire body into the air, then threw him twenty feet away, knocking down five people like bowling pins.
he is cooler than you spoke one of the shadows.
"And I'm the only one who can have him," I whispered back.
This proved to be the last straw for the loose, half-stunned crowd that already had a good tenth of its number lying on the ground in various states of injury, and who were starting to sober up enough for their mind to catch up to how none of this was how reality was supposed to work. They screamed, turned, and ran away in a mad scatter.
"Oh that's fucking typical," I groaned, "I take down a dozen people with time stopping powers, but you take out one guy with blunt force and suddenly everyone's running in fear for their lives."
"Babe," Alex said, golden flames wreathing his face like an angelic halo, "you do everything you can to look hot, not scary. This is 100% on you."
"The scary is subtext, people should see me use my powers and-"
The roar that cut me off didn't feel like it was coming from one throat. It felt like it was coming from everywhere, from all around us, from the lingering bands of light of the aurora that had mostly been absorbed into Ted jonbal's body; like it was screamed out of a hundred TV screens and echoed out of a thousand more smartphones.
Ted Jonbal slowly stood up from the ground, thick red veins protruding on his forehead, TV screen eyes shining, suit straining over surging muscle.
"This is what I get for playing nice," he said, dusting off his jacket and adjusting his tie. "For reaching across the aisle. For being tolerant. Well, you want to spurn the gifts of Ted Jonbal? Very well. Gloves off."
He rolled up his sleeves, and energy crackled around him, red and blue lightning arcing around his bulging arms, and images unfolded around him, one two, three heads of light stretching out around his body like an aura.
"-groomers coming to steal your children from their cribs-"
"-hard-earned tax-payer dollars funding useless gender studies degrees-"
"-I'm just asking questions here, son, ain't no need to get emotional about it-"
"More like masks off," Alex said, cracking his fingers and stepping forward to make sure he was between me and Jonbal. "Leading a mob to my school in the middle of the day, terrifying my students, trying to kill my boyfriend, that your idea of gloves on?"
"Compared to what I'm about to do to you?" Jonbal said, bracing his knees. ""Yes, yes I do."
He reached for his collar and tore off his tie, which scattered away into red motes, and with his shirt open, took a breath, and jumped. The ground cracked under his feet, and he soared ten, twenty feet into the air, crimson light gathering around him forming an aura twice as big as himself, surrounding him…
An image of his own face.
He fell on us like a boulder and Alex held up his arms. Red light and golden flame collided in a cascade of sparks and lightning, and Jonbal's fist hit Alex's palm, and for a moment they were frozen there like a still picture, before gravity reasserted itself and Jonbal's feet hit the ground.
"I gave you a chance! I gave you an in!" he roared, throwing another punch that hit Alex's other hands, the two men pushing against one another like bulls locking horns. "All you needed was a little compromise! But your kind knows nothing but entitlement and pride! Well I got news for you, kid: you'll never beat America in a contest of pride!"
The red aura that had engulfed them both collapsed inwards into a carcan of light encasing Alex's body skin-tight, freezing him in place; with a cry of triumph Jonbal pulled his hands out of Alex's, stepped into his reach and punched him in the face, knocking his head back a foot and scattering the light shell.
For a heartbeat Alex stood there, his head inclined to the side, his cheek red, Jonbal sneering as he stepped back again and raised his guard up. Then he turned to him, rubbing his cheek, and said:
"You hit like my ex on her sixth month of estrogen."
I could physically see the glitch in Jonbal's brain as it tried to process what he'd just been told. In that moment of vulnerability Alex lunged with a golden arm, fire bursting at the seam midway up his forearm like a rocket punch, and struck him square in the jaw. He hit like a thunderclap, a blow hard enough to make my ears ring, and Jonbal went down. The Audience's cheers nearly deafened me.
"Now that's a fucking punch," Alex said, cracking his knuckles as he stepped towards the prone Jonbal.
Crimson and blue light flashed from the man's body, bursting across the place, and Alex stopped, hesitating. Jonbal roared again, punching the asphalt in anger - and again with a second fist made of red light, and again with a third of blue light, cracking the ground. New bodies were manifesting, budding out of Jonbal's torso, hardlight constructs flickering on each side of him as he stood up.
"I am more than one man," he growled. "I am the thousand voices of the true America, of cold, hard reality, and it's calling and telling you: the dream's over. Time to go home and fall back in line."
"Ted, my friend," Alex said, "that's where you're wrong. We're both plugged into the Astral. We're literally making our dreams come true."
"Yes…" Jonbal said, thoughtful. "The source of the contagion. And without you, order will return!"
He charged like a bull, heavy steps shaking the ground, hands held forward in a tackle, splinter bodies hurling their fists at Alex.
He stood his ground, rooting his feet, bracing his knees, and receiving every blow with a parry and a counter. But it was too much. Two phantom Jonbals splitting at his waist combined their attacks with the true one, delivering a six-armed onslaught from multiple angles, and gradually Alex was driven back, step by step, until all he could do was bring up his arms in a boxing guard to try and weather the storm.
"You don't get it, do you?" Jonbal roared in rhythm to the rain of blows. "I am Ted Fucking Jonbal! I give order and meaning to the world! I take the random chaos of facts that's reality, and I arrange them into a narrative! A story! Without me, there's nothing but static and the hunger of the void! I shape the world! And to do that, to gather people together, there has to be a border! There has to be within and without!"
you have to help him he can't he has no more strength he has to can't we give him more he has channeled more than his body can handle he has to trust in prometheus do it come on get up you can do it
Guttering flames of power still shone at the back of my soul, but they were right. I had reached the limit of what my body could handle. Channeling more energy might as well have been refueling a broken car.
But as I watched Alex fight, heedless of his opponent's strength, uncaring of what limits had been assigned to him by others, taking out and replacing every part of his car that he found unsatisfactory, I thought, fuck limits.
"How am I supposed to do anything," I said, straining to push myself upright, to rise to my feet on wobbly legs, a knife falling from my hand as the strength to hold it failed me but still holding on firmly to the other, "with the garbage power you guys are sending me? I guess I'm gonna be doing this one with muscle power alone."
One step. One step at a time. Shaking leg and shaking foot and shaking knee, one step, then another, as the cheers came in and the shadows gathered around me like a cloak and the Audience prostrated themselves in my name, and the power trickled into my worn-down flesh.
"And we give you the opportunity to be within, we give you the codes and the keys and the compromises, and you spit in our face! You think you can stand without? You think you can smash the border and make your own meaning? You can't! When you push against the world, sooner or later it pushes back!"
Jonbal's fists finally found a weak point and slipped past Alex's guard, hitting him in the chin. It was a bad blow; I saw his head recoil and he didn't adjust his stance in time to avoid the next hit, and then the fists were pounding at him, blow after blow after blow raining down faster than any human opponent could have struck, and then Alex was down, prone on the ground, and jonbal fell upon him. The red body's hands clasped on Alex's left arm, pinning it to the ground, and the blue body pinned his right, leaving him completely exposed as the 'true' body of Ted jonbal rained punches down on his face.
"And that's… why it has… me… To put things back into their place."
He paused, breathless, bloody fist held up over his head. Underneath him, Alex breathed harshly, his face bloody and bruised. But in that moment's pause, even though he was still pinned down and unable to move, he spoke up:
"Ted? There's… something… I want you to know."
Jonbal narrowed his eyes.
"What?"
Alex racked his throat and spat out a bloody phlegm, then slowly turned his battered head to jonbal, staring at him with one half-shut eye:
"I can see your hairline implants…"
His fists shot out. Golden flames stretched out between the seams of his left and right arm, one hand cutting off at the wrist and the other halfway up the forearm, flying horizontal with the ground before curving back around, golden flames propelling them like two falling stars as they slammed on both sides of Jombal's head at the same time with a terrifying crack.
"...and I fully support your choice to undergo gender-affirming care."
Jonbal staggered backwards, his grasp faltering and his body doubles flickering in and out of existence, and Alex brought his knees up to his chest and kicked. Both feet hit Jonbal square in the chest with bone-breaking strength and lifted him straight off, fully scattering his holographic splinter-selves and sending him reeling, whirling about on his feet trying to keep his balance, and as he turned around,
he came face to face with me.
"We love that for you," I said.
And I drove my knife through his heart.
His eyes went wide in surprise and disbelief; he stared straight into my tired face, from which the scarf had long slipped, and whatever he saw in there, it seemed to fill him with a strange kind of wonder.
"I am an idea," he whispered weakly. "You can't kill… an idea."
His eyes glazed over, his body went limp, and he fell, slowly, like a tree.
He had scattered into a bloody pile of hair and electronic components before he hit the ground.
I stood staring down at it the entire time it took for Alex to get up and walk up to me, just to make sure it wasn't fusing back together into some third, even worse Jonbal iteration. But it wasn't. It was just junk.
I heard the footsteps close up to me, and felt the familiar hand on my shoulder. I turned my head, and there he was, smiling brightly, hazel eyes shining even through thee bruises.
"You okay, babe?"
I took a moment to think about that, and blurted out:
"I'm sorry. This is all my fault."
"Okay," he said kindly, "let's talk about that later. Right now, let's just be glad we're alive."
"I…" I started, and then: "Okay." I closed my eyes, breathed, and he pulled me to him - embraced me, and all the tension and fatigue seemed to bleed out of me as I relaxed in his arms. The golden fire didn't hurt, it never did; it just made me warm.
Then I heard a faint buzzing sound, and I remembered what I was doing here; I pushed off his chest slightly, so I could turn around to face the brass beetle with his arm still around me.
"Smile, Alex. You're being watched by a few thousand thirsty Cthulhus."
He took it in stride, grinning easily. "Hi, guys. Hope I'm everything you hoped for."
He is the most beautiful man in the world.
"You're never showing up on the Timestream again," I said darkly. "All my love to you, but they will absolutely start wanting to see you more than me and we just can't have that."
He burst out laughing, and pulled back gently, making sure I was able to stand straight.
"Well, if this is going to be my only appearance, let's make it a good one. I am Tempus Fugit's boyfriend: ask me anything."
"In a second," I said, looking up. Nothing remained of the crimson aurora, and the darkness that had swallowed the world was fraying. The Astral was pulling back, and meatspace reality reasserted itself. We needed to not be here anymore. I could already hear human noises - cops would be here, people with smartphones, whatever had happened here would reshape itself back into something that would make sense to a mortal observer. "We can start while we're on the way. Let's get ourselves home first, yeah?"
He nodded.
"Yeah."
But as he said that, his gaze briefly turned distant. I followed it and saw what he was looking at - the school. From this distance, with the darkness lingering, I could hardly make out anything behind its windows. But he probably could. He knew the place well enough to know what would be there. And if I squinted, I could catch a glimpse of children, pressed up against the windows.
I think a little girl was waving.
"Come on," I said as gently as I could, and I took his hand in mine.
With the Astral pulling back, reality became pliable again. I could simply borrow hours from the future. So I did. I exhaled, and time crawled to a stop, all sound and motion frozen still.
For all the world but us.
As long as I held on to him, he was here with me.
We started the long walk home.
