Work Text:
“My wife is alive,” Julie said. He hadn’t meant to: he’d intended to ask Scar to pass the salt, because eggs without salt made for a lousy breakfast (and it should be odd that he could think things like that again, when mere weeks ago, having fresh eggs at all would have been an unimaginable luxury).
Scar passed him the pepper. “That is incorrect.”
Julie shook his head. “We’re living fourteen years in the past. That means people who were alive then are alive now. Right?”
Scar passed him the sugar. “That presupposes this world is real, rather than an elaborate illusion. Regardless, the borders of this world do not extend past the city limits.”
Julie felt that ‘regardless’ did a lot of work. On the other hand, at least Scar seemed willing to engage with his central argument. “What if we could extend them? You heard Alice. He’s already moved over 35,000 people here. They all have homes, jobs. This world is growing. If more people come in, don’t you think it would grow even more?”
“Your statement seems based on very little evidence,” Scar said, passing him a fork. (Julie already had one.)
Julie swallowed. He’d started this morning feeling comfortable, he thought. He’d woken up and he had told himself, this is not so bad and then he had checked himself, because he wasn’t in Ostia to live a life that was ‘not so bad’. He wasn’t in Ostia to get comfortable, or to look at Scar and think … things he probably shouldn’t be thinking.
“Indulge me,” he said.
Scar passed him a spoon. “By your logic, you yourself would also be out there. I cannot imagine meeting your past self would end well.”
“Hey! I was a great guy back then, and I’m still a great guy now,” Julie said. Kizuna would still be alive too. Maybe if Julie met him again, they could talk. Well, they had talked plenty already, of course, but back then, Julie had never imagined Kizuna would …
“According to my database, any human meeting a past version of themselves would cause irreparable damage to the space-time continuum, thereby causing an immediate and fatal termination of this reality’s existence,” Scar said.
“There’s a way the world can end that isn’t fatal?”
Scar passed him a knife. “Certainly. Such an event occurred approximately fifteen years ago.”
Julie considered. Personally, he felt his world had ended when Kizuna had killed his wife – or perhaps a little earlier, when she had died for the first time. It had ended a second time when he had watched a gravekeeper lay his daughter to rest.
From a certain point of view, Julie supposed that world ending events were rather common and indeed rarely fatal.
“Well,” he said. “It was just an idle thought. But never mind then. Can you pass me the salt?”