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“Maddie, wait.”
Maddie halted, her hand millimeters from the sphere. She looked at Caspian, the love of her life, and felt the lump in her throat throb. As many lifetimes as she had monitored, she’d never before pulled a Caspian into her world. Having him here made her feel…raw. Vulnerable, in a way that was both old and new.
“What is it? If you’re going to declare your undying love for me again, that’d be sweet, but kinda pointless with the imminent memory reset,” Maddie smiled at him, feeling far less put together than she sounded.
Caspian smiled, too, but his was far more genuine than hers.
Maddie’s heart was both singing and splintering. It’d been over a hundred thousand years since she’d seen that smile directed at her.
“Not quite,” he said, taking her outstretched hand and pulling it away from the sphere, to his chest. Maddie felt her breath hitch. “Maddie, I want you to take a second. Think this through.”
She felt her brow raise of its own volition. “Caspian, time doesn’t mean anything to us anymore. We can think as fast or as slow as we want. I’ve spent literal ages thinking this through.”
He blew out a heavy breath of exasperation. Maddie scowled. She opened her mouth to defend herself, but Caspian beat her to the punch. “Maddie, do you remember how I told you that you helped me crack Integrity? Do you remember what you said?”
Maddie barely had to think. “I said that life is sustained by other people.”
She watched in fascination as Caspian’s eyes crinkled as he smiled at her again, somehow more warmly than before. She hadn’t forgotten they did that, but she was still struck by how he was doing that with her.
“Exactly,” he said, snapping Maddie out of her trance. “You can spend as much time thinking as you want, but you won’t get anywhere all alone.”
She could feel her face pinch. She hadn’t made so many physical expressions since…forever, basically. It almost hurt.
Caspian laughed, bright, free. Eighteen. “Don’t look at me like that. You were right.”
“Caspian, I don’t have the flaw. Why are we even talking about this?” Maddie demanded impatiently. “It doesn’t matter anymore. We can both just reset, start over. Don’t you want that?”
“All I want is to be with you,” Caspian replied. He turned her hand over and started tracing meaningless shapes into her palm. His mouth flattened, his face falling into his default neutral expression. “But Maddie, don’t you see? We’re both here, and all the people you, uh, we love are, too. Why not try going forwards instead of backwards, for once?”
An intense wave of fear gripped Maddie, and she seized Caspian’s hand with both of hers in a vice-like grip. “I’m not bringing them here to, to become gods or whatever. No way. Living forever is not all it’s cracked up to be, I promise.”
Caspian covered her shaking hands with his free palm. It wasn’t warm, since they weren’t in human bodies, but it was real in a visceral way no embodied human could ever experience.
“Maddie,” he said quietly. “Listen to me. You’re trapping yourself. You don’t have to choose between everything and nothing.”
“What other choices are there?” She spat bitterly. “You heard SafeSurf, or whatever it’s calling itself now. If we stay here, we…ascend, or something.”
“I’m not saying we should stay here. Maddie, you taught me how to live as myself, and the answer wasn’t to build myself up from scratch. It was to grow and be influenced by other people. Stephen never met you, but I did. And that’s what stopped me from becoming him.”
“I love you, too,” Maddie chuckled wetly. When had she started crying?
Those eyes crinkled again. “I love you, Maddie. And that’s why I don’t want to lose you, even if we will find each other again. I don’t want to be trapped in an endless cycle of reaching for you just for one of us to slip away again.”
“I’m not the one that leaves,” Maddie snapped hotly. “I’ve dedicated everything to making sure everyone stays with me—”
She broke off with a gasp, trembling all over. Caspian pulled her close, squeezing her tight. Maddie returned the hug, gripping him fiercely. She felt like she was shaking apart, and that Caspian was the only one holding her together.
“I’m over 117,000 years old, and somehow you’re the zen one,” she complained, ignoring the thick quality of her voice.
Caspian rubbed her back soothingly. “What can I say? Dying puts a lot of things into perspective.”
“All I do is put things in perspective.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t died.”
“You’re eighteen,” she pulled away, huffing a breath. “God. All this time, and you’re still eighteen.”
Caspian snorted. “Our relationship has always been super weird, even without the age thing mixed in. I’m still struggling to cope with the fact that my girlfriend’s thirty-five and that we have a son who is two years older than me.”
Maddie laughed, playing into it. They had eternity; blissful ignorance could wait a little bit longer. “That’s what you get for knocking up a fourteen-year-old. You’re lucky we were already on the run, Mr. Sexual Predator.”
“You kissed me!” Caspian protested. “Also, I died, like, two hours later!”
For the first time in over a hundred thousand years, Maddie laughed. Heartily, fully. She laughed so hard she felt tears in her eyes.
“God,” she whispered reverently. “I’ve missed this. I’ve missed you.”
Caspian squeezed her again. “I’d like to say the same, but for me, it’s been less than a year since this whole thing started.”
Maddie immediately sobered up. “That's why—“
Caspian shushed her. Like, put his literal finger on her mouth, shushed her. Maddie’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline.
“Maddie, stop. Just, stop. Things are weird, yeah, but that’s okay. We can keep moving forward.” Caspian pressed his forehead against hers, closing his eyes. “You don’t have to be fourteen anymore. You found your answer. You can let go.”
Maddie sniffed. “I’ve never been good at letting the things I love go, or moving on. In case you didn’t figure that out already.” She waved a hand behind her at the endless rows of spheres before burying her face in his neck.
Still holding onto her, Caspian floated them through the satellite, to the room he emerged from. He came to a stop at the sphere that held his world. The one he’d fought for, the one he’d died in. The one Maddie had saved him from, time and time again.
Maddie looked up, and he could see in her eyes that she’d figured him out.
“Caspian, if we go back, I can’t relinquish control or else Dave would die, and my dad would disappear. We wouldn’t be able to start over and, and just…go to dinner.” She looked into his eyes, trying to convey the enormity of this decision to him.
In response, Caspian kissed her. Long, gentle, sweet. He kissed her till her head spun, and she ran out of breath, which, for two computer programs, was quite impressive.
Eventually, he pulled back. “I don’t want to forget. I love you, all of you. I’ll follow you wherever you go, but I’d rather live together like this than become another copy of myself. I know I’d still be me, and you’d still be you, and we’d probably end up back here again, but…why go through that? Everything is perfect here, now. You made it perfect. You’d still have to live with your pain, and I’m sorry for being selfish and asking that of you, but you wouldn’t be alone anymore. We can spend as long as we’d like together.”
Maddie froze. She…she hadn’t thought of that. For all her talk about thinking of the sim worlds as real worlds with real people, it had genuinely never occurred to her to just…join one.
Wow. I’m a hypocrite to the end, huh? She mentally berated herself.
Still gaping like a fish, she said, “You…you're right.”
Caspian smirked at her. “Don’t look too surprised. It does happen, sometimes.”
Maddie laughed, then cried, then laughed again. Caspian held her through it all, grinning in that soft, subtle way of his. “Is that a yes?”
“Oh my god, yes, you ass,” she sighed happily, before recapturing his lips. They moved against each other, with each other, before Caspian broke it off.
“Ready, Ms. Goddess?” He murmured against her mouth.
Maddie took a deep breath.
Then she let it go.
“Ready.”