Always/Never

Chapter 5 / Past-Self Extravaganza

CW: Brief mention of suicide

"What's wrong?" my past self asked as she let me into the room that used to be mine. "You're sulking, and your face looks pale, and you should sit down. Don't pass out."

"What's wrong?" I let the door slam behind me. Dragged a hand through my hair. And stared at my fingernails as if my hands were outside of me, a browser extension that hovered in the corner of my awareness at all times, but that I only noticed when focusing on the tiny icons brought me back to Earth. The question set me off in more ways than I could parse.

I scrubbed my face with my hands, doing a back-and-forth zip line across the room. It was the only route, like the track field outside her window that I kept seeing in every reflection—through the window, in the glass of her handheld mirror sitting on the desk, in the laptop's camera. The glare of the screen formed a mise en abyme, a looping world within a world, me refracted a thousand times.

Rory stared at me in the glass, and I stared at her. I blinked to clear my vision, only she was really there. I couldn't get her out from behind me.

"This is so strange," I said. "Do you think I'm not supposed to be here? The simple fact that I am defies some universal law. How can I even speak to you? How does approaching you not open up some rift to swallow me whole, and fold me into you?"

She shrugged. "I can be on TV and in another room. I can act in a movie, and I'd be two people at the same time."

"That's not... the actor exists in real life. The character doesn't. Between you and me, neither of us is being cast through a screen."

"According to who?" She pointed at the laptop. For a moment, my reflection wavered as a car outside rolled up to the driveway, its beams shooting through the glass and combining with the sun to erase us both in the dusty, fingerprint-laden surface. It was gone quickly, the tires grinding against the gravel. Voices rose to match it in mottled protest at the cloud of dust it had no doubt kicked up. "You got out of a dryer machine. You're not in your timeline. I am."

"Am I here, or aren't I?"

"How am I meant to know? You're a couple of cells and tissues. What makes you any amount more me than the desk behind you? Than a bouquet of sunflowers? We share DNA, meaning we share a code. But you can't be me. Not right now. We're... atoms rearranged into some semblance of the same shape, electrons forming similar shells, but... even if you've made yourself look like me, that doesn't mean we've got the same everything."

"Am I here, or aren't I?" My voice grew more strained. I reached out to put my hands against her chest. Like either of us expected the world to explode into nuclear fission because we touched. It seemed wrong somehow to place them anywhere. Taking the hands felt too out-of-bounds, but so did feeling her heartbeat. My heartbeat. Except that it was outside of me, slightly out of pace with my own, that now sounded much louder, much more persistent than it had before. It was nothing like how I imagined having a sister would be like, but like seeing a ghost. "At the end of this, what happens to me? When you become me?"

"If," she said.

"That's almost worse."

"Why?" She backed away, her eyes darting across the room. Her gaze settled on the window behind us, briefly, though it returned to me and the door. "Are you... do you mean that if I don't become you, you'll die?"

That was a possibility. It had to be. She didn't want that to happen, did she? Was it murder if I killed my past self, or if my past self killed me? Suicide? Could I die if I'd never existed? Could I stab myself? Did it matter who did it? Would that separate her from me, and force me to truly become her sister, as if I always had been?