34. Good August
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
GOOD AUGUST
I’LL BE THERE FOR YOU
It’s the same room. The exact same room, only it’s dark. But the moon’s shining here, a big full moon. The sky’s cut with its glow, reflecting off the polished wood. Everything’s cool and quiet, and I’m all alone.
When I turn towards the place I came in, there’s nothing. No shimmer of atmosphere, no sign that August, and everyone else, are within touching distance. If only they were in this universe.
One-way ticket.
I did the right thing.
I know I did.
My life, my happiness, is not worth all those billions of lives, all those universes they could save.
I did the right thing.
I couldn’t have said goodbye to him anyway. That final kiss would have been the end of that world. We would have broken apart whatever fragile strands of reality remained. Because I would have done it. I would have kissed him and never stopped until the place tore us apart.
I’m weak for him.
I’m a wreck for him.
And I’m never going to see him again.
I don’t know where to start in this world, what to even do. Do I try to find the Shashi of this place, explain any of this to her? What if she’s not here, not at Cambridge, not a cosmologist?
I’m not going to try to find this world’s August. Not even if I could. Because he’s not my August, and I think if I see him, I’m going to break.
And maybe break him in the process.
So I slump down on a desk and stare at nothing, waiting for the sun to come up, hoping vaguely, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I can curl up under one of these desks and sleep here. Imagining that by the time I wake, maybe he’ll have fixed it. That maybe he’ll come looking for me.
But I know he won’t. He can’t. He has to get back to his world. He has to set things right, put everything back in balance. Stay where he belongs.
How long until my being here disrupts this world?
With that thought, some millionth of what August must have been experiencing for years falls on my shoulders. Only this with the accompanying knowledge that I’m no physicist. I’m just a guy who’s somewhere he shouldn’t be. I have no hope of correcting any of this.
And it’s not long until the same thought occurs to me as it did to the other Augusts.
This world needs to be rid of my presence.
I can’t wait here, hoping my interdimensional lover finds his way across spacetime to save me. I have to save this world. This August. So why waste time? Why do any more damage than I had to do to buy them time to save the rest?
I don’t know how I’ll do it. But this lovely room at Cambridge University isn’t the place.
My legs are heavy, stiff when I stand on them again. It’s like my body knows what’s coming and is trying to fight me.
I force a few steps, but even though I know this is right, tears surface.
He’s so close. His world is three steps away.
I know he’s there on the other side of this invisible divide, equally heartbroken.
I know he’ll understand why I did it. I know he will.
But some stupid, desperate, miserable part of me reaches out a hand anyway, thrust into the empty air, as if I could touch him, sense him, let him sense me.
Give him the goodbye I couldn’t stand to give him.
The fingers of my outstretched hand widen, desperate for sensation, for the sense of August, my other half, a universe away but so close. One final touch before I’m gone.
They meet nothing. Nothing but empty air, strewn with particles I can’t see or feel, invisible markers that ruled and ruined my life.
Closing my eyes, I conjure the image of him.
My fingers curl, closing on the emptiness, the loss of my only love.
Then all reality breaks apart as a firm hand takes mine.
My heart flies into my throat, eyes flinging open. His hand’s on my cheek. August kissing me, August pushing me back, his kiss so desperate, so punishing, that I can’t take a breath, can’t fathom that this is happening, that he’s come for me.
“What the hell are you doing?” he snaps. Both his hands grasp my face, and before I can speak, more kisses, kisses I don’t have the strength or wherewithal to fight, that I yield to, slip into, bodily.
This cannot be real.
I’ve gone mad, or it’s some hallucination caused by weird particles…
“Look at me. Are you alright, August?”
My eyes search his, real and alive and terrified. “August… you can’t be here.”
“Did you really think I’d let you do that? Just slip out of my life like that? Not in a million eternities.”
The world crashes in on me. August in the same shirt. August, his hair wild with stress and exhaustion. August, just as I’d left him. Seconds ago. “What have you done? You weren’t supposed to follow me.”
“I love you! I love you too much, and I’m not losing you to some random universe.”
“You can’t be here. This is why I came here—I came to buy you time.”
“And that’s you all over—sweet and true and wonderful, and so good you don’t even know it. But there’s no multiverse without you in it. I’m not putting a thing back, not unless you’re there by my side.”
“August, you cannot destroy worlds for me.”
“I said I would, and I will. I’ll do anything to be with you. Don’t leave me. Not ever again. You’re all the world there is. You’re all the life there is. You’re the only reason I can keep going.”
His tears blend with mine when he kisses me again, and I’m powerless. He can’t mean it. He’s gone insane, surely, with everything that’s happened to him all these lonely years. All the years of searching and failure, all the years of death and destruction. Complete obliteration.
I know what he’s found here, between us, in my arms. I can give him so much love. I can hold him, care for him, put him back together piece by piece. But we are now, and always will be, on stolen time. Someone else’s time. Someone else’s world.
Impossible.
That word has marked us forever.
Only he doesn’t feel impossible beneath my hands. He feels like all the hope and all the dreams I never had. He feels like a last shot at opportunities squandered, the last song of the night, a stolen moment on Primrose Hill beneath the stars.
Running my fingers through his hair, looking into the eyes I’ve come to adore, my own eyes that I never thought I could love this way, I tell him, “We don’t have time. There must be three of us in this world now. August, we don’t have time.”
“I don’t care.” He holds his palm to my cheek feverishly, his thumb tracing my lower lip.
“If I’m going out, I’m going out with you.
I want to die by your side. I want you to be the last thing I see, the last person I touch.
I want to hold you, and the universe will have to tear me to pieces before I’ll ever let go of you again. ”
“Oh, August…” I kiss him, gripping him tighter. “You love me too much.”
“No,” he whispers. “I love you just the right amount.”
My heart’s so full it could explode. It’s wrong, all of it.
From day one, this has been wrong. But it’s felt so right to me.
Even now, some stupid part of me believes we could get out of this—refuses to accept our assured destruction.
Because in all the universes, it makes no sense that we’d come together for no reason.
Love like this can’t just happen. It can’t mean nothing.
It can’t be inconsequential when it feels like everything.
“You fucking idiot!”
The sound breaks us apart. August reels back just in time for me to see Assassin August flop down on the floor, his hands still tied behind his back.
Before I can react, Jon appears out of thin air. “Okay. Now there are three of you.”
“Four!” the August on the floor shouts. “Now there are four of us! And just how long do you think this new world is going to last with all of us in it?”
“I don’t care.” Jon shrugs. “Stick your heads together and figure it out.”
August raises his appalled eyes from Assassin August. “Jon, what did you do?”
“It wasn’t my fault!” he protests, then addresses me. “Your boyfriend punched me, then he jumped straight through. I couldn’t stop him.”
“You had it coming,” my August rattles out. “But what the hell is he doing here?”
“I wasn’t about to abandon you.” Jon’s eyes warm on me with a love that’s still there, still plain to see. “Told you I’d be there for you, baby.”
A laugh rips out of me, gallows humour again.
August on the floor rolls over, clambers onto his knees. “He pushed me through, the idiot!”
“I’m not an idiot.” Jon grins. “I know exactly what I’m doing. You’ll do the same thing here that you were doing there, only this time you have weeks to do it, right?”
“No!” Assassin August cries. “What if there’s no Shashi here to get that supercomputer login?”
He shrugs again, bracelets jangling up his wrists. “Ask someone else for it.”
“What if there’s no supercomputer in this universe at all?”
“Well…” His smile fades a little. “I hadn’t thought about that bit. Not yet. But—”
“What if space is different? What if there is no supermassive black hole? What if the physics work totally differently here and you’ve just blown our one shot at fixing this?”
Jon tsks his tongue as though Assassin August is being totally unreasonable. “Shashi will fix it. She’s fine back there. And now you’re here, she has even more time again.”
As the words drop from his mouth, all our stomachs drop too, the sound of her voice ringing through the air. “No! Stop! We can’t go!”
“Pop like a grape in the microwave!” Amber comes into view, two arms working hard to pull a third into this reality. “You heard him! I don’t want to pop like a grape in a microwave!”
“Let her go, Amber!” August on the floor scrambles forward.
It all happens so fast, his shoulder shoving into her, maybe in an attempt to break the contact, but all it does is push Amber off balance.
She goes tumbling backward, August and I leap forward to catch her, but she’s falling fast, and her full body weight yanks Shashi through, knocking Jon to the ground, all of us landing in a heap on the floor.
There’s a mad scramble for stability, everyone trying to find their footing amongst a tangle of Augusts, one of whom can’t do a thing but roll into everyone else with his hands restrained.
Shashi claws her way out of the mess, clambers up, then turns a full circle, searching the room. “Where’s the portal?”
I hate to be the one to say it, but someone has to. “It’s gone. You can’t find it from this side.”
“No. No, no, no! No, this is not happening.” Her hands fly out, searching the air as if she could rip a hole back through with her bare fingers.
“It’s fine,” Jon says helpfully. “We’ll open another portal with the clicky thing whenever we need to.”
“The clicky thing?” Assassin August snaps, voice thick with disbelief. “You mean the particle accelerator?”
“It’s pretty straightforward,” Jon drawls. “And here’s me in a room full of geniuses, being smarter than you all.”
“Jon’s right,” Amber agrees, holding my hand to steady herself as I pull her up. “Just click the clicky thing, and we’ll move on.”
“You can’t just click the clicky thing every time there’s a problem,” Assassin August seethes, his rage barely under control. “Do you even know how powerful that device is? The damage you could do?”
I attempt to calm them all down, even if I can barely put two thoughts together in the chaos.
“We’re not going to keep clicking it. Next shot’s the correct one.
We’ll head straight for that baby universe.
I mean, I did try to aim for that direction when I opened this one.
But Jon’s right. You’re all here now, and this has bought us some time.
Less time than we’d like, with four Augusts in the world, but enough time to figure out where we need to go, surely. ”
“Need I remind you there are also two Ambers, two Shashis, and two Jons?” Shashi reminds us anyway, and sharply.
“Oh yeah, that’s a good point,” I concede. “Okay, so a little less time again.”
My own lovely August stands tall, his hand running down to the small of my back in a delicious show of support.
“It doesn’t matter. We don’t need much time.
We’ll locate the closest supermassive black hole, and we’ll blow this place and all the others the fuck up.
In a good way. Let’s do this. Jon, hand me the clicky thing. ”
“Hand you the…” His head flies fast to the blank space from which we all tumbled into this world. “The… What do you need?”
“The clicky thing.” August’s hand shoots out, palm up and waiting. “Pass it over.”
Jon’s eyes lock with mine. It’s like I can see his soul drip down through his feet, sliding away, taking all the colour from his face with it.
August sees it. He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. He swallows hard. “Amber, did… did you think to…”
“I didn’t want to… um…” She blinks twice. “Pop like a grape. I was in a hurry.”
Face ashen, August stays remarkably calm. “Shashi, please tell me you grabbed it on the way through.”
Lips pressed so hard they all but disappear, she only shakes her head.
Then we all stand statue-still, stuck in an alternate reality that’s already collapsing somewhere in its distant reaches.
I think my beloved speaks for all of us when he mumbles out a quiet and resigned, “Fuck.”