"I don't understand."
"You wouldn't," his one-step-removed self responded. "In the times you've gone back, all you experience is setting off Creation. We watch as it happens before the cycle begins again, and we learn a bit each time." He paused, his lip flap showing off some lower teeth in the still gloomy brightness. "I understand most because I've been literally physically closest."
Jon's body was burnt, his brain hurt, and nothing made sense to him any more, so he stopped trying. "You said you could make this stop, before-" Before you sent another me back to be the mother of my dearest friend he wanted to say but his brain couldn't process that. Try again. "What do we need to do?"
Other Jon and the hundreds behind him nodded. That would never stop being creepy. "We need the stablest paradox of all. For that, we all need to absorb the stone's power and re-enter time as other someones."
Jon nodded just to get this over with. He wanted to die. He wanted to be in his proper bedroom with his mom and his memories of his dad and his brother and sister and have school in the morning.
Other Jon continued. "We must touch the stone, all of us at once."
Jon lifted a raggedy hand. "First, no, it's exploding." He pointed at the center of the frozen flaming light that was killing them without letting them die. "Second, we can't all fit around it. Third, IT'S EXPLODING."
Other Jon smiled. His lower lip fell off altogether.
"I'm Rick," a pleasantly deep voice said from just above her.
Katarina looked up. A boy, a young man really, looked down at her with the hint of a hopeful smile. "This is a library," she whispered, looking back down at her notes. College could be infinitely easy if she wanted, but she wanted to live a normal life -- well, as normal a life as possible -- from here out, and that meant leaving the good and bad of her past behind.
She heard a chair slide gently across the carpet. "So I should whisper up close?" Rick asked, with a lopsided grin.
Three years before, she'd had no interest in boys, but despite herself, she couldn't help noticing he was pretty good looking, with a slightly unruly head of hair and good arms and shoulders. She shoved that observation down good and hard. "So you should leave," she said.
"I'm in your organic chem class," he said, which made him one of over 200 people she did her best to ignore while getting droning lessons on carbon bonds from a part-time professor. "We could form a study group."
"Let me guess," she said, resigning herself to not getting any work done and not noticing the hint of a smile on her own lips. "A group of two?"
He smiled even bigger. It really was a great smile. "It's just a study group," he said, with a gentle wave of his hands. "It's not like I'm asking you to marry me."
