Chapter 38: Chapter 27.1: It's Not Me, It's You

Harley woke up in bed, after a long night’s sleep. She checked her phone. Against all odds, it was December 20th again. But as far as she could tell, there hadn’t been an apocalypse yesterday. Harley got out of bed and looked at Botley.

“World blow up while I was sleeping, bud?”

Botley shook his tiny head from side to side. He knew even less than she did.

After a long day waiting for an apocalypse that never came, Harley had finally gone to bed, leaving Lee awake to watch for a midnight apocalypse -and deal with the headache that resulted from the clock ticking over while still conscious. Harley set out for the breakfast meeting. Leanne was already sitting at their usual table, looking confused.

“Hey, giant lady,” Harley said. Leanne didn’t acknowledge that. “You notice any doomsday?”

Leanne shook her head. Harley fetched her breakfast and stewed in silence until Lee arrived.

“Heyo,” Harley said. “How’s the headache?”

“Manageable, thank you,” Lee said. She sat down and rubbed her temples for a second before continuing. “The real problem is our missing apocalypse.”

“You didn’t see anything?”

Now it was Lee’s turn to shake her head. She had spent the previous night watching the campus, waiting for an explosion, a giant monster, an inter-dimensional rift, or anything else that might pass as an apocalyptic event. There hadn’t been so much as a spark.

“Huh. Maybe there just...wasn’t one?” Harley said, hazarding a guess.

“Unlikely. There were classes yesterday,” Lee said. “There’s always an apocalypse when class is in session. Perhaps it was something small and easy to miss.”

“Like a couple days ago when it was just me that died,” Harley said.

After a short delay, Leanne punched the table so hard Harley’s pancakes bounced off her plate.

“What the fuck,” Harley demanded, narrowly dodging splashing droplets of syrup. “What are you-”

Leanne pointed emphatically towards one of the empty seats at their table. It took another second for her meaning to sink in.

“Oh, what, Vell?” Harley said. “What about him?”

Leanne continued gesturing to the empty seat.

“I don’t know what you’re worried about, Leanne,” Harley said. “You know how it goes. Vell shows up last, then we all recap stuff for him, and then we start doing stuff.”

In spite of Harley’s assurances, Leanne still felt like something had gone wrong. She clenched her fists for a second trying to figure out how to express her point in hand gestures. Leanne settled for pointing to her wrist, and then pointing at Vell’s empty seat again.

“What, did you give Vell a bracelet or something?”

“I believe she’s referring to a watch, Harley,” Lee said.

“Who the fuck wears watches anymore?”

“Not the point,” Lee said. “I believe the implication is that Vell is late.”

While many elements of the looper’s lives were chaotic, some things followed a steady routine. Just as Harley had pointed out, Vell generally showed up to breakfast meetings last, but he also showed up to breakfast meetings at a consistent time. Leanne had been the first to notice that he was about ten minutes late.

“Maybe we should go knock on his door,” Harley said.

Leanne nodded in agreement. She stood up, turned on her heel, and took one step before stopping in her tracks. She sat right back down as Vell shambled his way towards their table. He gracelessly dropped his bookbag to the floor, slumped into his usual spot, and put his head in his hands. His hair was a tangled mess, his clothes were wrinkled, and his eyes were cobwebbed with red veins. Harley also got the sense that he’d been crying recently.

“You okay, Vell?”

He shook his head.

“So, uh...yesterday’s apocalypse was just you, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Vell sighed. His voice came out ragged, like he’d been screaming.

“So,” Harley began. “You look pretty messed up. What got you? Demon? Angry ghosts? Zlydzen?”

Vell looked up with red eyes and spat out a single word, his voice a cocktail of bitterness and disappointment in equal measure.

“Joan.”

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After a long day of waiting for an apocalypse that had never come, Vell allowed himself to relax and spend some time with Joan. He always felt slightly uncomfortable doing dates on the first loop, since Joan would always forget, but he had his ways. He’d talked Joan into taking an “early night” in her dorm. She’d thought he was being flirty, but Vell just planned on actually falling asleep. Much to Joan’s disappointment. She’d had big plans for the night. Vell’s sleepiness didn’t entirely ruin her plans, but it did alter them.

While emotional analysis was far from Joan’s strong suit, even she could tell that things between her and Vell had been strained since the Kraid incident. She knew she had to bridge that gap, and prove to Vell that he could trust her. Luckily for Joan, she knew a perfect was to prove she could be trusted -by doing something untrustworthy and not getting caught.

Joan rolled over in bed, pressing herself against Vell’s back. She took a minute just to appreciate the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing. She envied his ability to sleep so peacefully, just like she envied so many things about him. His vast array of seemingly effortless academic triumphs, the ease with which he made friends, his ability to somehow be ready for any situation -all things that had made Joan attracted to Vell, but also jealous of him.

The jealousy gave her the spark of motivation to cautiously stretch out her hand, reaching for the wrist he wore the illusion rune bracelet on. The bracelet that hid the supposed scars around Vell’s waist, scars that Joan could make a show of accepting and easily earn her way back into Vell’s confidence. Carefully, quietly, holding her breath all the while, Joan tugged at the strands that tied it tight around Vell’s wrist, confident that she could explain it away as the bracelet slipping while he slept.

Vell was woken sharply, not by a tug at his wrist, but by a sudden spasm of motion at his back. Joan practically kicked him out of bed as she pushed him away.

“What the fuck,” Joan screamed. Vell bolted awake, scrambling to get his limbs in order and then managing to stand and look around the room in a panic.

“What? What is it?”

Vell’s first assumption was that the apocalypse had caught up to him in his sleep. He was right, but it would take him a moment to realize how. He scanned the room looking for danger in the form of a ghost, demon, or zlydzen, but all he saw was Joan, staring at him aghast -and clutching his illusion bracelet in a clenched fist.

A moment of silence entangled them both. Vell looked down at his waist, and lifted his shirt slightly, revealing a fragment of the circular scar around his midsection.

“Oh.”

To his surprise, Joan simply sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose.

“I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot, I’m an idiot, I’m an idiot…”

Joan repeated herself a few more times and then got out of bed, clutching her temples all the while.

“Right age, right location, right body type,” Joan mumbled to herself. “Mysterious scars around the waist, how did I not see this?”

“Well, the odds are kind of astronomically low that this would happen,” Vell said.

“Fucking right,” Joan said. “So.”

Joan released her ironclad grip on her head and looked at Vell. There was an energy -and a hunger- in her crimson gaze that Vell didn’t like.

“This explains a lot.”

“Hopefully, because I kind of don’t want to recap it all,” Vell said. He’d been killed and resurrected as a child, and Joan had been obsessively researching him ever since, and unintentionally becoming a supervillain’s patsy in the process. Everybody knew that and there was no point in recapping it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Joan demanded. “You looked me in the eyes when I told you how hard I’d worked to find you, how much of my life I’d poured into this research.”

“Well, I was, uh, kind of worried that anything I told you, you’d tell to Kraid-”

“Why? Why would I do that? I wouldn’t need to tell him anything, I’ve been using him-”

“No, Joan, you haven’t,” Vell snapped, taking his turn to interrupt her. “He’s been using you, do you get that? He knows who I am, what this is.”

Vell gestured to his lower back, at the mysterious rune that Joan had been hunting half her life.

“He ran his experiments on me years ago, and he got nothing. He’s just been using you to try and get a second chance. And this whole time, that you, you know, you think you’ve been one step ahead of him, he’s been ten steps ahead of you, okay?” Vell continued. “Do you see how hard it is to actually, like, trust you, when you’re getting manipulated that easily by someone that evil?”

With every word, Joan’s eyes narrowed and her lips pursed tighter. By the time Vell had finished she had a deep scowl on her face.

“I am not being ‘manipulated’ by anyone,” Joan hissed through gritted teeth.

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“Look, Joan, it happens, he’s tricked me plenty of times too,” Vell said. “Probably more often than even I know, honestly. I’m, uh, starting to be more and more certain he’s the reason I can never find an instruction manual or a handbook anywhere around here…”

“Okay, you know what, no, no more talking about Kraid,” Joan said. “He has nothing to do with this.”

“He has a lot to do with this, actually,” Vell said. “There’s, well, there’s a lot going on, and we can’t really ignore any part of it-”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Joan snapped. “I want to talk about you, and why you lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie about anything. I told you I didn’t want to talk about this-” Vell said, gesturing to his waist. “-but that we could talk about it later, when I was more comfortable. Later just turned out to be, well, a lot later, since you regularly hang out with the worst human alive.”

“That’s-” Joan started and then stopped. She couldn’t even claim it was a lie of omission, since Vell had made it very clear he was omitting something, and she’d accepted that. Joan bit her lip and wracked her brain for another point of protest. Vell took the initiative when it came to complaining.

“Look, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t fuck up a few things here, but what did you do to my bracelet?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Joan said. “It just...came untied.”

The silence that followed made it incredibly clear to Joan that she had fucked up. Vell had a habit of assuming the best in his friends, but in this situation there was only one assumption to make.

“Just came untied,” Vell said. “The knot I specifically chose because it wouldn’t come untied easily, just came untied, near your hand, while you were awake, and staring at my lower back.”

Joan looked at the small strip of cord in her hand, and the now useless rune engraved on it. She contemplated two very different courses of action, and settled on one quickly.

“Weird things happen around you, Vell,” Joan said. Neither Vell nor even Joan believed it for a second. Having been caught lying before, Joan expected the usual shouting. Instead, Vell, simply turned and grabbed his phone and other belongings off the bedside table.

“We’ll talk about this tomorrow,” he muttered under his breath.

“Why is that your go-to, why is it always waiting?”

“Because I like to think about things, instead of making impulsive decisions, Joan,” Vell said. “I am sorry if my attempts to be rational, considerate, and patient are upsetting you. They usually have the opposite effect!”

“I’m not just talking about this,” Joan said, gesturing between the two of them. She then pointed down at Vell’s waist. “I’m talking about that. How much work do you think I could’ve done if I’d known about that all this time? How much closer could I be to saving lives with the miracle you’re trying to hide?”

“None at all, and not at all,” Vell said. “You wouldn’t have accomplished anything, Joan. Your buddy Kraid already tried it. It so far, uh, beyond you, beyond anybody, it’s pointless to experiment on. Okay? I’ve been spending years researching it just to try and find a starting point-”

“Stop assuming I’m stupid,” Joan said. The venom in her voice sailed over Vell’s head as he shoved the last of his belongings into his pocket and turned towards the door.

“I didn’t say you were,” Vell said. “But there are some things even you aren’t smart enough-”

The first brush of icy cold against his face cut Vell off mid-sentence. The second silenced him more literally as the frigid band sealed tight around his mouth, then coiled around his limbs. An all-too familiar green fire flared in the dark room, sparking from Joan’s fingertips. Her fiery fingers twitched, and Vell spun in place. Another tendril of cold flame lifted the back of his shirt, giving Joan a much clearer view of the rune she’d been hunting her whole life. It struck her as odd, how it seemed so bright without actually giving off any light.

Decades of simmering rage reached a boiling point. Joan’s fist tightened around the soulstone in her hands, and the black fire entangling Vell burned a little brighter as she stared at the mystifying rune. So many people had called her crazy for seeking it out. Then Vell and Kraid had made the mistake of thinking she wasn’t smart enough to accomplish her goals, but now the object of her obsession was within reach. Now she had the chance to prove them all wrong.

She had the chance, but she certainly wasn’t going to.

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“So,” Vell said. “How long have you been practicing dark magic?”

They’d never gotten a chance to discuss Joan’s practice, since without an emergency to force her hand into revealing it, Joan adamantly denied the fact she was a dark magic user. Vell figured he might as well ask now, since he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Not long,” Joan muttered. “As evidenced by the fact that you can talk.”

Joan flicked her wrist and refreshed the flow of magic around his bindings. She didn’t bother redoing the one around his mouth. What little dark magic she’d picked up from Kraid apparently wasn’t enough to keep Vell contained. She’d never been much for magic. Vell sighed as he felt the bindings of green fire refresh. In retrospect, he should’ve kept his mouth shut. With any luck, the magic might’ve faded entirely and given him a chance to escape. Vell continued to hover in midair, with not much else to do but stare at the room.

“And I notice you kept all that research you said you threw away,” Vell said. Some of the notes and resources Joan had gathered to help her apparent experiment were all too familiar.

“You don’t need to talk,” Joan snipped.

“Well I don’t really have a lot else to do, except, you know, float and make noise,” Vell said. “I could, uh, whistle, if that’d be better.”

“It’d be worse, actually.”

“Okay,” Vell said. “Guess I’ll just keep talking. Nothing else to do.”

“You could at least say something helpful, and tell me more about the rune,” Joan said. “I have months of possible research time to catch up on.”

“Hold on, do you actually still think this ends in you making some kind of scientific breakthrough?” Vell asked. “Somebody’s going to notice I’m missing in like eight hours or so.”

Halfway through preparing a scientific instrument to scan Vell with, Joan froze in place. She tried to play it off as a moment of confusion about where to find her next tool, but Vell had learned her quirks. Most of them, at least. That momentary freeze was a clear sign she’d been caught off guard.

“Okay,” Vell said. “I understand that you got put in a pretty high-pressure situation, and you made a snap decision. It’s not too late for us to talk this over. You can let me go-”

“I knew what I was doing,” Joan snapped. “And I know what I’m doing now! I don’t need eight hours to prove that I’m right and you’re wrong.”

“What about this is proving anyone wrong? All you’re proving is that you’re willing to do horrible things to get what you want.”

“You think I want this? You think I want to hurt-” Joan started and stopped herself from going too far down that road. Her grip tightened on the table and the tool she held. “I’ve never gotten anything I wanted from this fucking project. I’m doing this because people need it. Because there are millions of people who deserve the second chance you got.”

Joan took a deep breath and relaxed her vice-like grip on her tools. One of the handles appeared to be bent from the strain.

“This is personal for you, isn’t it?” Vell asked. He could see it written on her face -not just the determination, but the exhaustion, and above all else, the fear. Joan had the look of a woman fighting a lifelong battle she was no longer certain she could win. She froze again as Vell spoke the words, once again confirming she’d been caught off guard. Then her brow furrowed and her grip tightened, the renewed focus in her red eyes confirming she intended to press on despite Vell’s insight.

“Just shut up and let me work if you’re not going to say anything helpful,” Joan said. She returned to her tools, this time with a feigned calm that kept her from bending anymore handles. The continued, if unintentional, challenges to her ego coming from Vell only strengthened Joan’s ill-placed resolve.

“Look, Joan, I genuinely have nothing useful to say to you,” Vell said. “I’ve been studying this since I was twelve and I still don’t even know where to begin.”

“Okay, and what exactly have you done, so I can rule it out?’

“You know, the normal stuff, comparative analysis-”

“Comparative analysis? You have a rune that can undo death on your back and you’ve been searching for look-alikes?”

Vell tried to shrug, but couldn’t, due to the dark magic holding him in place. He settled for shaking his head disdainfully.

“You have to work with the fundamentals,” he said.

“Oh, that is so like you, Vell,” Joan said with a roll of her eyes. “Slow to start absolutely everything. What are you so afraid of?”

After a few moments of silence, Vell looked at Joan, then down at the black fire which restrained him, and then back at Joan.

“Well, this, for starters,” Vell said. Joan didn’t have a rebuttal for that one. “Also, you know, dying again, unleashing overwhelming magical energy, cursing myself, angering whatever mysterious entity put this rune on me in the first place, all the usual risks of tampering with unknowable cosmic forces.”

Joan, who had been halfway through scratching down some preliminary notes, paused for a second. She had failed to consider most of those aspects -though upon considering them now, they were quickly dismissed. In Joan’s mind, even the greatest cosmic unknowns could not compare with her intellect.

“Then why not ask for help? You’re at school with the greatest minds on the planet, Joan said, referring mostly to herself.

“Well, again, this,” Vell said, nodding his head, as much as he could, towards his restraints. “Also, general terror and fear. This might surprise you, but people don’t always react positively to finding out I’m technically a corpse.”

His words fell on deaf ears. Joan was past the point of no return already, so she focused on her work, preparing herself as much as she could for the experiments to come. Vell continued without regard for her apparent apathy.

“It’s pretty common, actually,” Vell continued. “My grandparents won’t talk to my family any more, half the friends I tell cut me off, my first girlfriend called me a monster, and, oh yeah, my most recent girlfriend tied me up with dark magic and is going to kill me with an experiment.”

“You get sarcastic when you’re angry, you know that?”

“No, I don’t,” Vell said, sarcastically.

“Hah, very funny,” Joan grumbled. The brief stories of Vell’s past had almost shaken her resolve, but she was not ready to back down just yet. She made a few more hasty scratches on her notes and grabbed what appeared to be a metal rod. Joan twisted one end of it, causing a spike to emerge from the other.

“Uh, Joan,” Vell said. “What is that?”

“Just an arcanometric analyzer,” she said, all too casually. She did track Vell’s eyes eventually, which were staring with great concern at the metal spike. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. You’ve had a shot before, haven’t you?”

“Well, no, actually.”

“Exactly! And it’ll be just like -wait, you haven’t?”

“I don’t really get sick,” Vell said. Joan was dumbstruck by that for a moment.

“All the more reason I need to do this, then,” Joan said. If Vell’s rune acted as a universal vaccine on top of a way to resurrect the dead, all the better.

“I mean, the needle is not the problem,” Vell said. “That thing’s supposed to take a sample of magic from my body, right?”

“Yes. It’ll be almost completely painless, don’t worry.”

“That is not the issue, Joan,” Vell said. He tried to gesture with his hands and found himself stymied by the magical restraints. “You have no idea what kind of magic you’re dealing with, or in what amount.”

“So tell me,” Joan said.

“Are you not listening to me? I couldn’t if I wanted to, I don’t know either!”

“Then this is what we have to do to find out together,” Joan said. She turned the metal rod to the side, to expose a Kraid tech logo carved into the shell. “Say what you will about Kraid, he buys me nice things.”

Joan strolled around Vell, towards his back, and lifted the hem of his shirt to expose the rune again. She stopped to stare at it, and contemplate how the rune seemed to be staring back at her. The paradoxical lightless glow of it baffled her. But not for long, she thought. Soon all of those secrets it held were going to be hers. She held out the spiked rod to display it again, then pulled it back and reversed her grip on it, holding it like a dagger. The irony was not lost on Vell that she was about to literally stab him in the back.

“This thing is designed for analyzing the unknown, so its rated for ten peta-Pratchetts, across all magical spectrums,” Joan said. “That’s as much magical energy as the entire planet generates in five years. It’ll be fine.”

Rather than fill Vell with dread by warning him the prick was coming, Joan merely jabbed the needle into his back. He twitched slightly at the jab -and Joan jumped backwards as the readout on the scanner jumped immediately from “0” to “WARNING”. That bright red notice of her failure lasted about half a second before the screen fizzled out completely, and a shimmering spark of octarine lightning shot out of the malfunctioning scanner.

“Oh shit,” she mumbled. “Vell, I’m-”

She never got the chance to finish her sentence.

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Silence hit the table like a lead brick as Vell finished recounting the previous loop’s events. Harley had been expecting some act of recklessness or stupidity from Joan, not an intentional act of malice. Even if the apocalyptic failure was unintentional, she’d made the choice to essentially kidnap Vell -her own boyfriend- and experiment on him against his will. Harley had very low expectations for Joan and she’d still disappointed to a heartbreaking extent. The low expectations at least dampened the blow for Harley, and apparently Leanne as well, who looked disappointed but not surprised. Lee, and especially Vell, were taking the betrayal much harder.

“Well,” Harley began, after the silence became too much to bear. “This is fucked.”

“Yeah, a little,” Vell said hoarsely. “You know what the worst part is?”

Nobody dared to try and answer that question. In the end, the question got answered for them.

“There you are!”

The deathly silence deepened as Joan sat down in the seat next to Vell, leaned on his shoulder, and then kissed him on the cheek. As far as Joan knew, she and Vell were still a (relatively) happy couple, with nary a murder or kidnapping between them, much less both.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Vell wondered if he was the first person to ever have to dump their own murderer.