making ocs is so funny, especially when you get so attached to some and not to others?? it’s like yes these people live in my head and I love them. I love that one the most though.
“The heart, however grown savage, still beats for two.”
— Joseph Brodsky, from “A Part of Speech”
2051
Vedran closes his eyes and takes a deep, slow, gentle breath. There's a wedding ring in the palm of his hand, one hung on a simple silver chain. Among the other travellers, he waits his turn.
(Traveller, he'd written in his journal last night, addressed to the love of his life, You'd find that funny, wouldn't you? That they call us travellers. I wish I could tell you, really tell you, the way I used to. But I'm going to fix that, I promise, I promise, I promise—)
"Vedro."
His supervisor's voice cuts through his thoughts, and he says— "It's time."
Vedran closes his hands over the ring one more time. He brings it to his mouth, presses a kiss to it, and then puts it around his neck. He tucks the ring into his shirt, over his chest, and follows the man in front of him. (I'll see you soon, Simon. My heart, always, is yours. I promise, I’m doing the right thing.).
2021
Vedran looks into his own eyes, thirty years younger, and threatens himself with death, thirty years early.
"Get out of here. Leave, never come back, and never speak to him again," Vedran tells himself, out behind a bus station. The snow howls, it's dark out, and he feels like he's part of that storm, his heart lost somewhere in the 2040s, never to be retrieved. His younger self looks up at him, shaking, eyes wide.
"I—"
"You love him. I know. That's the point," he tells himself. "Never come back. You come back, you die. He dies. Understand?"
It's one thing to look in the mirror; it's another thing to look at his younger self and see that he was once capable of being truly, desperately afraid.
2021
Vedran knows where to find Simon— a man of routine, it's always been the same. It had begun here, that little morning coffee ritual, even after all these years. First, he goes to the coffee shop and gets the same coffee and the same pastry. He eats the pastry there while he reads his book. After that, he walks to the library to study. Vedran watches from a distance, hot tears slipping down his cheeks in the cold Alaskan autumn.
(For all the preparation we did, I never really prepared for what it would be like to see you again, Simon, I'm sorry. You would've laughed at me, I know you would, back in the way you used to when you were younger, before we understood each other.)
Today is different, though: today, his best friend Vedran does not meet Simon at the library. Today is the first day of the rest of Simon's life in a splintered, safer timeline, because he will never see his best friend again.
(His best friend and husband, thirty years older, quieter, sadder, sits on a bench nearby. He watches quietly, smoking a cigarette, and wipes the tears from his eyes— happy, sad, relieved, everything at once.)
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