cosmic sidestep - their multiverse part 20
[Part 1], [Part 2], [Part 3], [Part 4], [Part 5], [Part 6a], [Part 6b], [Part 7], [Part 8], [Part 9], [Part 10], [Part 11], [Part 12], [Part 13], [Part 14], [Part 15], [Part 16], [Part 17], [Part 18 (sidebar)], [Part 19]
--
“Do you know me?” Isaac asks, watching with faint dismay as the small, skinny boy devours the plate of food in front of him. Lucien is closer in age to Luca, but in the places were Luca is soft, Luce is harsher, more abrupt and more than a little feral. He’s distrustful in a way Isaac has never known Luca to be and Isaac finds his chest squeezing uncomfortably in anticipation of his answer.
Luce pauses mid chew and squints at him balefully. “No? Am I supposed to?”
That hurts a little. Isaac isn’t sure where to proceed from there and he glances sideways at Luc for guidance. Luc stands close by, frowning as he watches Luce scrape the bowl clean and then try to lick it. Without speaking, Luc plucks the empty bowl from Lucien’s hands, ignoring the kid’s whining protests, then replaces it with a new one.
Luce is delighted.
“Who was your father?” Luc tries once Luce has scoffed a few more mouthfuls. “Your… biological father,” Luc clarifies, avoiding Isaac’s eye and Isaac experiences that same sickening roll of his stomach.
Luce pauses only long enough to frown before going back to his meal with a shrug. “I dunno. Never met him.”
“Your mother?” Isaac tries instead, recalling only a fraction of a second too late that a mother might not be in the picture. His thoughts go unbidden to Mason before shutting the door firmly on that as well. If he and Mason existed in whatever reality Lucien and Rion comes from, he’s sure neither of them would have let the boy out of their sight.
And that leaves only one other explanation he doesn’t want to speculate on.
Luce puts the bowl down slowly. His brown eyes dart around the room. “I don’t have one of those either. There’s only Rion. Just Rion and….”
The boy trails off, eyes widening slightly before he makes a dramatic shrug and hunches back over his bowl to eat more. Isaac doesn't need to look at Luc to wonder if the other man caught that too and it's Luc that picks through the words unsaid.
“And who?” Luc probes, this time catching Isaac’s eye briefly. “You sounded like you were about to mention someone else.”
Again, Luce pauses mid chew before he answers. Isaac can’t help but wonder if the kid has been coached, but something tells him he already knows the answer to that.
“No,” Luce says, a fraction of hesitation shadowing his answer. He huddles protectively over his bowl but it seems now he’s lost his appetite. It’s almost like he wants to say more and is suddenly miserable that he can’t. Then his dark eyes snap up and the kid is suddenly defensive. “I wasn’t gonna say anything!”
“No, you were,” Luc insists mildly, almost warmly, like he’s trying to share an inside joke with the younger boy. Luc shifts closer, his previously stiff stance loosening as he leans in and smiles at Luce. The same megawatt smile Isaac realizes he hasn’t seen on either Luca for a long time now. “-You were going to say something else.”
It’s a little jarring, Isaac notes distantly. The contrast of years between them. Luc, with his broader shoulders and straighter spine, tamed curls and a reined in countenance that he owes to his years in the Alliance, vs Lucien. Lucien, who looks barely old enough to be doubt digits, his clothing tattered, messy hair and vibrating with anxiety. Yet again, Isaac feels like he’s looking at two sides of a coin – two sides of a coin, a swap of fortunes, born in worlds so far apart. There was some old argument about nature vs nurture that he didn’t have the spare thoughts to dwell on.
Luce shrinks back, eyes dark and sullen and… Isaac’s skin pricks. There it is, the same hostile, stubborn little spark he’s all too familiar with.
“No!”
“It’s alright,” Isaac tries to interject gently. “You’re not in any trouble here-“
But it’s too late. The boy has already leapt up and pushed back from the table. The metal chair tips back, crashing against the floor with a loud clatter. “Rion,” Luce yells, voice panicked and frightened and the man in question is there before anyone else can think to move.
“Told you we should have shoved them in the brig,” Mason says quietly against his ear a few moments later as Rion rages and carts off his boy protectively towards the cargo bay.
--
Later Luc gives Isaac a wan smile. They’re both tired but Luc is trying hard not to show how much this has messed with him. It’s messed with Isaac too.
“Don’t take it to heart too much. Maybe I was the lucky one, the anomaly. I mean, look at Luca.”
Isaac isn’t convinced. It bothers him there’s no other *him* out there, guiding Lucien, that in their world, they never met. He had been increasingly convinced that whatever fates are out there, his and Luca’s are intertwined. There’s something that feels viscerally wrong that he exists in a world where only Blake fucking Ryan is the boy’s only guide.
“But why us,” he’d asked Mason one night in the early hours, cradled against Mason’s augmented body. It had taken him far less time than he expected to adjust to being the little spoon and he relished being close to the phoenix. Their quiet moments together were single handedly the only thing keeping him sane this far out in the black. “Of all the people, all the possibilities-“
Mason stroked his arms, stroked the hair at his nape and kissed his temple with soft lips. “I don’t know. It’s pretty crazy, probably a bit egotistical to think we’re something special and the fate of the galaxy rests on us.”
“Isn’t it just,” Isaac had snorted dryly.
Mason rolled him over to brace himself above him, a comforting weight against Isaac’s lower half. The phoenixes eyes glittered as he looked down at him. “But you know, I’m not sure I care the reasons why, Zac. All I know is that I have you… and it seems like I have you in every life and that makes me happy. I don’t know if we’re the universes favorites and I don’t care – as long as I get to have whatever time left with you.”
And Isaac had kissed him then, and there hadn’t been much talking after that.
“I can’t say I understand any of this,” Isaac says now, pinching his brow tiredly as he stands at Luc’s side. “But it seems like you’ve kicked something into motion.”
“Me?” Luc laughs softly but there’s a hollow edge to it. “I didn’t make the rift.”
“No, but you went through it.”
Luc raises an eyebrow and looks pointedly at him. Isaac feels the weight of that look and something about it reminds him so startlingly of Mason that it almost takes his breath away. He can see it sometimes, the echoes. The same gene pool this Luc had been built from even if there's little left in the man he loves.
“Well, if you really want to get picky, technically it was you who went through first.”
Isaac finds himself snorting again. “Not me. I’m smarter than that. I don’t go looking for trouble.”
“Says the man with a contingent of super soldiers on his ship,” Luc mutters but amusement winds through it. “Floating around out here in the ass end of the galaxy. Why did you get picked for this assignment anyway? Who did you piss off?”
Isaac thinks of Hackett, of the reapers, of how the floor of his world dropped out of him when he had heard of Arcturus station blowing apart, the decimation of humanity’s birthplace and all the other worlds like it.
It sits like a lead weight on his chest and lately, it had been becoming almost too hard to breathe.
“Put Zeus on them,” he orders abruptly, turning on his heel. “I’ve played cards with Blake Ryan. The man knows how to bluff.”
Luc nods, his mouth twitching. “Yes sir.”


















