Originally published on AO3 10/02/2017.

The Witness was believed because he promised a story that ended with something other than death.

The Witness is dead and his mother is alive and she knows this truth: every story ends in death.

"Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever."

― All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr , 2014

London, 1891

Snow blankets the filth on the streets and wraps the early morning in an otherworldly silence. A blank gray sky, a crisp scent of possibility on the air. Cassie wraps a wool cloak around her shoulders and steps outside to lift her face to the pale rays of sun, and breathes deeply, the cold air stinging her skin.

In the rented room Cole sleeps under the influence of a tonic she bought from the medic up the street. Simple herbs, nothing she couldn't recognize, just something to keep the nightmares at bay. She doesn't take it herself: Cole wants to forget. Cassie remembers things that haven't happened, and tries to grasp them before they disappear like wisps of smoke in the air.

She sees her grown son's face in her dreams, she tastes her own blood on her tongue, she smells the acrid odor of musket fire, she traces the shape of scars on her own undamaged skin—events that haven't happened, or haven't happened yet . In what yet? Maybe unravelling time has unravelled her sanity as well.

In her dreams she stands with her son in the house where he should have been raised. Sometimes he's grown, sometimes he's a child, but she's always the same. 1959. She picks Queen Anne's lace off the edge of the road that runs past their land and smoothes its small petals under her palm. Look, Athan. Look how beautiful. She dries the flowers between volumes of poetry. She traces pictures in the dust that gathers on the shelves Cole built.

She wakes from her dreams slowly, like pushing her way to the surface of deep water. Struggling, thrashing to remember who she is, and where she is, and when. For a few moments it feels like she is no one, a nameless voice shouting into the void of a senseless universe—

Then she becomes aware of something—maybe Cole's ragged breathing, or the dance of sunlight through soot-darkened glass, or the ache of an old wound in her shoulder. And she is conscious again, returned to herself, the Cassie who travels through time, the Cassie who is still alive, in spite of it all.

Oh, the instinctual, inextinguishable desire to stay alive. To get out of bed in the morning and eat and drink and fuck and bear children and fight tooth and nail to keep them alive, too—this primal desire Cassie understands and hates in equal parts. She sees it even in this London where she's come to reside—Charles Dickens' London, not Jane Austen's—with manure carpeting the streets and soot thickening the air, and the slums full of people whose eyes dart away to avoid hers—even in this London, people can't give up the burning gasping passion to stay alive , whatever measly bit of life they might have.

Sometimes Cassie thinks she's been fighting for so long she's reduced herself to something more animal than human. Darwin's survival of the fittest, playing out in in her own damned soul.

Sometimes Cassie thinks she could stop the turn of the universe, if that was her only way to keep herself and hers alive.

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

— The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkein, 1954

Washington D.C., 2013

From her vantage point the Potomac is a dark vein pulsing slowly under a pale skin of ice. She doesn't have much time—and isn't that a sick joke—but she stands for a moment in the frigid wind, looking at the silent river and the gray city. It seems to sleep under the dark clouds, as though it's waiting for something. Waiting to be woken up. Cassie turns and retraces her steps into the heated back hallway of a Holiday Inn, snow slipping off her boots and onto the faded green carpeting.

Her father used to say she was born in a good era of history, usually in response to her asking for money. Automobiles! Sanitation! Portable telephones! The Backstreet Boys! Count your blessings, sweetheart, that you were born in 1980 and not 1880. Maybe he had the soul of a Victorian in the body of a 20th century man—whatever the reason, he taught her to can vegetables and skin rabbits when her other friends were eating Dippin' Dots at the mall. It's 2013 by the calendar on the desk of this cheap motel room she's broken into, it's nothing-time by the calendar in her head, and Cassie shudders with wishing she could hear her father's voice again.

He's dead now. Dead nearly a month already by the calendar on the desk. Some hotel guest had been crossing out the dates and Cassie absently touches the X over the day he died. She will have gone back to work already, begun revising her presentation on disease preparedness. Aaron will be tiptoeing around her and bringing her dinner every night, prodding her to eat with a gentleness she hadn't predicted from him. She's never met anyone named Cole, she has a bright career ahead of her, and she doesn't believe in fairy tales. It's a good time in her life, considering her father just died.

How foolish she was! To believe her life was stable, manageable—determined by her own choices! Even if Cole had never popped into her life, human civilization would be ravaged by disease and reduced to mere survivalism in less than ten years' time. Around 2012 or 2013 she'd read The Road and cried into her five dollar latte, regarding it as a work of art instead of prophecy—did she not see how fragile it all was?

A small part of her wishes she could warn herself, wherever that other Cassie is in this city right now. It sounds like an essay question—what advice would you give yourself, if you could go back in time?

(Get seriously into martial arts. See a good therapist and deal with your emotional shit. You're about to run out of time for things like that. Take a scalding hot shower every day—twice a day. Go lay flowers on your parents' graves. Go hear an orchestra play a concert and listen to every note. Do it all—every bit of life you can soak up while you still believe living is inevitable.)

That other Cassie believes herself to be a good person. This Cassie, sitting in a hotel room while she waits for Cole to return, knows better now. She met a refugee once, when she was still in med school, who told her that the impulse to violence was an unfathomable thing. You never think you can kill anyone but that primordial impulse lives within you. You can kill and if your circumstances demand it, you will. At a loss of what to say, Cassie had reminded him of her medical vows. He said, vows don't mean much, at a time like that.

Cassie gets it now. Cassie has two guns in her coat pockets and a knife in her boot and she knows what it feels like to make someone bleed. To take a life, instead of saving it.

It's 2013 right now. Her father is dead in every sense. Athan is dead in some sense, in some when—maybe not this when, but it doesn't matter, because in the time that's actually ticking away, he has died. Can she measure time by the ticking forward of her own experience?

Is that the true unfolding of history, not the sweep of civilizations across the globe but infinite little swells of glory and grief in one person's soul?

"A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points."

— A Wrinkle In Time, Madeleine L'Engle, 1963

Former New Jersey area, 2046

In the early morning the sky looks as it always has: a gradient of blue sweeping across the dome, a rosy blush seeping into the edges, and a smattering of stars winking out one-by-one, as if they too must fall asleep.

Once upon a time, in another life, she read that some ancient civilizations believed the earth rested within a swirling cosmic ocean, the dome of the sky separating the ocean above from the ocean below. Others held that the earth was balanced on the back of a turtle as it swam through the stars. Cassie sits in rustling weeds and listens to the silent groaning of a dying earth and wishes she believed in the things people used to.

Before this—before time machines and armies—before the future interrupted the past—Cassie believed only in the steady work of her own two hands and the inevitable triumph of human ingenuity. Now—whenever now is—she craves turtles in cosmic oceans, serene Buddhas ushering her into sublime nothingness, Jesus Christ rising from the dead: anything, anything to believe the world ends with more than a whimper.

The moment thins. A needle of pain breaks the skin of her heart as the line of golden sunlight crawls over the horizon. She wanted a life other than this. Once upon a time, this life of hers wasn't even a possibility—but here she is, staring into the apocalypse, and the sun keeps rising. Indifferent sun god, caring nothing for human civilization bleeding out below him. Behind her stands a crumbling building where one woman discovered how to unravel time. In a hundred years, the building will be rubble: Cassie has seen it for herself. And the sun will keep rising, and rising and rising and rising, until there is no one left to see it anymore.

A figure on the horizon, darkened by the burning sun behind him. She knows the man is Cole but for a second he is a stranger, stalking through melting snow and dying earth, the only sign of life in this god-forsaken world, his breath a white mist in the air. For a second she is the only woman in the world, the first woman of the earth, and he is unknown. Man making his way to her. As inevitable as the ticking of time.

Then he is Cole: haunted eyes, rough hands, unrelenting life. He is walking toward her and he will give her a child and he will go to the ends of time to give her a world to call home. Has done it. Will do it. What's the difference anymore?

Is the earth dying, or is it beginning?

Cole is walking towards her and Cassie is sitting in weeds and snow. Their son is grown and dead.

And they are still living.

end.