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The blissful void of sleep slipped from Jonas like a silent lover in the early hours of a cool December morning. Behind his closed eyelids, a gentle warm light spoke of the current hour of day, and his rousing consciousness brought the rest into drowsy perspective. The sun would begin to brighten the sky in less than an hour, and it would be more than ten years before the twentieth century would dawn.
Winter had enveloped Winden weeks prior. It was the first winter Jonas had experienced that was not yet warmed by the calamities of the coming decades and the cold felt all the more oppressing for it; he was not used to waking to chilled wooden floors, not used to blanketing himself in layers of wool and hand-sewn quilts and underclothing that, though he wished not to admit it, seemed a practical possession now that he had begun to adapt to this new age.
He was also not used to waking to unanticipated visitors in his private bedroom, yet when he opened his eyes, that was precisely what he found: in the dark corner of the room across from his bed, seated in a chair that the sun would soon kiss with its golden morning rays softened by the frosted windows, was a man.
Beneath the warm comfort of his bedding Jonas recoiled like a child from a nightmare, startled not only by this unsettling presence but by the sense-memories of the several similar ambushes that he had awakened to before. All but conditioned to react to the discovery of silent voyeurs—and, in part, honed by his own previous role as such—Jonas cast aside his fright and focused instead on the things he had not known to look for before, but knew to seek out now: information. Details written in posture and expression and clothing, indications of a past or a future that would often only hide in obscurity until the visitor opened his mouth.
But he did not need to say anything to reveal this to Jonas. Half his face flickered warmly in the light from the candle that had been lit on the table near the bedroom door, but even the slope of his shoulders and the curious tilt of his head would have given him away in the darkest of rooms.
The man was not a stranger to Jonas.
He was, however, an impossibility.
“You look different from when I saw you last,” said Noah, leaning forward into the gentle candlelight. His voice was filled with such soft wonder that it was almost as though he had forgotten that his last words had left Jonas’s heart irreparably scarred. “When did you grow that beard?”
The rapid flutter of fear grew heavy within Jonas, and having floated on the buoyant waters of hope it now hardened and sank into an ocean of anger that had filled his heart and mind more frequently as of late, bubbling hot and black in the very depths of him. Though more than a decade had passed since Noah’s departure, there was no part of the man sitting before him that he did not know—a day’s worth of unshaven growth darkened a face that seemed hardly even a few years older than when Jonas had last seen him, and beneath his coat was clothing that looked as though it had been taken out of Jonas’s closet only minutes before. The usual unsettling intensity of his gaze, the once-grating razor edge of it dulled by decades of familiarity, was softened now by a transparently keen interest.
He was waiting for something. He always seemed to be waiting for something.
Jonas righted himself and sat with his back against the cold bedroom wall. The anger that had suffused him was growing increasingly unstable, and he could feel it beginning to lose its shape within him, collapsing into the purest undiluted thing that Noah had left him with all those years ago. Grief. Like the bowl of radioactive material that Martha had left behind, and which now lay inert in Tannhaus’ workshop, too dangerous to be touched and yet useless without adequate provocation. So much less space now did his grief occupy than that roiling anger, yet every single atom of it was as necessary in that quiet state as when the people who sought to manipulate it coaxed it ungently into a whirling cloud of tangible possibility.
A single tear slid down Jonas’s cheek, leaving a quickly-cooling trail on his skin.
“Did you know that I loved you?” he asked. The warmth of his wavering breath dissipated in the cool air, and softened Noah’s flickering features into something that was neither pity nor disdain—the responses that he had feared more than almost any other, and in their absence a second tear fell. The first had been grief, yet this was precisely the opposite.
“I must have,” said Noah after a moment, and it seemed that there was something still on the tip of his tongue that he did not allow to fall. Instead he lifted himself from the chair, and in two steps had crossed the narrow room and closed the distance between them, his face passing beyond the candlelight’s reach and into the darkness where Jonas remained frozen against the wooden wall boards.
Jonas did not shrink back from his approach. As Noah sat on the edge of the mattress, Jonas cast aside the shield that was his bedding and reached out and felt Noah’s warm fingers grasp his wrist; making neither an effort to draw him in nor to ward him off, Noah held Jonas’s hand and in quiet acquiescence allowed Jonas’s trembling fingertips to draw nearer, and then to brush against his cheek.
He was real. Not a dream, not a memory, and not a profane mockery of his past as the last familiar face to come to him in this accursed age had been. Jonas had grown accustomed to the tricks his memory often played on him, sawing away at the fraying rope that was his hopefulness and determination, and the memory of all the things Jonas had not been able to say and all of the things that he had once hoped for and forgotten were sparking to life beneath his skin now, alighting and whirring and beginning to shake free the cobwebs that had been built atop the ruins of his regret after more than a decade of dormancy.
“I knew you would come,” Jonas whispered. “I thought it would be different, that it would be Adam you went to, but now… we have the material, the machine… this must be the way. This is how we can escape.”
The weight of Noah’s body had depressed the edge of the mattress and now, with their bodies so close together, their combined mass drew Jonas and Noah nearer still, daring each of them to attempt an escape from its gravity. The air around them had not felt so electric since the moment the god particle had split open—not a few months prior, when Martha’s gift had proven itself one of the most crucial missing pieces of his plan, but years before, when Jonas and Noah had stood shoulder-to-shoulder, watching a dormant particle of unfathomable cosmic power succumb to their combined efforts.
He had bent time to his will before—they had, together—and together they could again.
He would not make the same mistakes again.
Noah’s fingers shifted. His palm covered Jonas’s hand, cradling it to his cheek, and Jonas closed his eyes and exhaled in rapturous joy and leaned in until he felt Noah’s breath drift warm and sweet over his lips.
“Jonas,” he heard, and when he swayed in close and pressed his lips against Noah’s there appeared in his mind’s eye a brilliant, blinding flash of light not unlike a lightning strike, and in the darkness that followed came a dawning sense of the very catharsis that he had spent the vast majority of the last several decades of his life chasing, rushing up now to meet him like an immense wave of force.
The near-imperceptible part of Noah’s lips and the sound that accompanied it seemed more a soft gasp than a lovelorn moan. But Noah did not recoil, and so Jonas kissed him again, cradling his face in one hand and seeking already to draw nearer the unfamiliar yet welcome warmth of him with the other, eager to convey with his ardent touch all of the sentiment that his failing voice could not.
In the flickering, unnatural candle-light on a cool December morning, Noah turned his head until Jonas’s mouth slipped away from his own, and he held Jonas’s wrist with warm, reassuring fingers and murmured into the sunless dark:
“I’m sure that he loves you. But I’m not yours to keep.”
Still near enough to brush noses, Jonas met Noah’s gaze, and though he could not find those things in Noah’s eyes that he had feared he also could not find the things there that he had hoped to see. There was neither rejection nor acceptance, neither pity nor sympathy. There was only a truth offered, spoken with all the sincerity and reason that Jonas recognised and held in a hand that felt to him now like a stranger’s.
Information. There was not simply a single detail that Jonas had missed. His unfailing hope had blinded him, but it was not the only sense he possessed. Now his heart, a caged bird beating itself helplessly against steel bars, drowned out almost all other sound, and the world that had been distorted for those few precious moments by the fractured lens of his desire now sharpened with nauseating clarity into the truth: that the Noah Jonas had encountered in his youth, the Noah Jonas had hoped to see one day walk through the warehouse doors, stepping into place alongside Jonas as time would ever have him do, was not the Noah who sat with him now.
Noah, who had never sought to avoid his own destiny, would not have traveled to a time over a decade before his own birth simply to grow old, as Adam had. He would not have traveled to this place from which no man could escape unless he had the means to.
The Noah he knew would not have the means. But another, one that he did not know, might.
“You’re not him,” Jonas whispered.
“No,” said the man who was not Noah, and in the dark well of gravity between them the shape of his mouth became wistful and rent the very fabric of Jonas’s soul. “Not yours.”
In the depths of those once-healed wounds, now raw and open, rose humiliation, like thick, black bile, climbing faster than any tide pulled by any moon. Then came the anger. Cold, unyielding, a mass of emotion collapsing swiftly and destructively enough to destabilise everything else contained within.
Fresh tears welled in his eyes, and his fingers, so close to Noah’s neck, trembled still from the memory of that betrayal.
“You’re… from her world.”
“I am.”
“Why are you here? Why did you come?”
“You’re the saviour,” said Noah, seemingly impervious to the razor-edge of Jonas’s words—as though the shape of them only cut his own tongue, and did not seem to penetrate this stranger who wore Noah’s skin. “Or so I’ve heard. The saviour of both worlds. I wanted to meet you for myself.”
It took less than a second for his words to seep into the cracks in Jonas’s logic and to seal them watertight. He did not exist in that world, the parallel world from which Martha had come, shattering his understanding of all that he had learned and forcing him to rebuild his plans from pieces that could not possibly fit together. But that version of Martha had known him—had known, at least, some version of him that had traveled there, that had left his world behind and inserted himself like a contaminant into a world that had never known him. Just who that version of Jonas had met in his time there and precisely how far his corrupting touch had spread, it was impossible to guess.
Only it wasn’t. They were all dead. She had told him as much, pleading for his assistance. Her parting gift had been the very substance that offered any hope of escape in the first place.
This Noah who did not return his affections and yet did not flee from them–the man from a time indeterminate in a different world, who might have been poisoned by the very presence of that other Jonas decades, or possibly only minutes ago—was decidedly not dead. But if on that fateful day Martha had told Jonas the truth, and if the world from which these strangers who wore the skin of Jonas’s most beloved companions was destined to be destroyed, then this Noah who could not possibly have loved Jonas back, yet who sought him out across worlds and times both unfamiliar and perilous, would likely not survive much longer.
Questions and possibilities that had once crept like shadows around the periphery of Jonas’s mind, kept at bay only by the synthetic lightning-strikes of Tannhaus’s apparatus, now loomed ever closer. There was so much that Jonas did not understand about that other world and his place in it; now, faced with this man who could not possibly have known a version of himself from this other world, yet who spoke with a certainty that reminded Jonas strongly of the friend he had known and loved for so long, all of those fears and suspicions and curiosities had been reanimated, and danced now upon the walls of his whirling mind.
Jonas and Martha, an analogous force. Noah, an obedient and steadfast accomplice of both. The Noah Jonas knew had believed in paradise. Had believed, ultimately, in Jonas.
If this Noah could hold that same faith in Jonas in a world where Jonas did not even exist, faith enough to cross not only time but the barrier between worlds, to seek a saviour who did not know him, yet held his life in his hands nonetheless, then it was possible that this man—this unanticipated visitor, once a stranger, now a symbol of infinite possibility—could be of even greater use to him than the Noah Jonas called his own.
“Let me help you,” Jonas whispered. He drew back his hand, and without contest altered his grip, wrapping his fingers not around the bare throat that his hand hovered so near but around the hand that had supported his own for so long. Noah’s gaze flitted only momentarily in the direction of this change, and snapped back with the sharp focus of a recoiling rubber band as Jonas leaned in closer. “Let me show you that you haven’t traveled here for nothing. We can save your world. Together.”
He squeezed Noah’s fingers in his hand, and Noah’s lips parted, welcoming the promise that Jonas offered into his lungs. His eyelids drooped as though entranced, and his gaze fell languidly and with sincere interest upon the alluring shape of Jonas’s mouth, and for that single instant in time Noah was the very same man that Jonas had longed to promise paradise to.
He wasn’t, of course. Not Jonas’s.
But for now he did not need to be.