CHAPTER FIFTY TWO - UNDERSTANDING FRIEND
It was hard to know what to do or how to react. He thought he had been prepared for this. He thought he had been ready to face the past and embrace his own present. Being here was different though. B and Sammy were gone and he was left alone with his uncertainties. There was a sick sensation floating about his aching stomach. He had come back too soon. He should have stayed. He’d spent so little time with B since he had been better.
Guilt was crowding in upon his vulnerable mind. His legs felt like nothing more than sticks. He fell forwards and hit the carpet heavily. He didn’t care about the pain. Physical things no longer matter when all you want to do is eject your own heart. Their faces flew in front of his eyes and he had to cover them up to hide them away. It made everything worse.
Hot tears were running down his face. His home was so perfect. Everything was in tact and there was no sign of the grim future that awaited him. It only existed in his own mind for the moment as a deep, dark shadow waiting to overcome the world. He saw everything that was going to happen. He saw himself losing Sammy and whoever B’s mother was going to be. He saw himself returning to them when they needed him and he saw everything between himself and B crumbling away until there was nothing but regret and anger left. Finally there was the weakening worry about their safety that he had suffered on the journey to the base and finally there was the ending: his own death.
Retching, he leaned forward but nothing came out. He felt empty. Terrible. He had promised himself he would not do this to himself again. He had promised himself that he would look to hope, but now it seemed impossible. There was nobody here to reassure him about the erratic nature of time. There was only himself and the pain of everything he had seen.
He thought of B. he was going to have his operation to remove the computer chip. Brian should have waited until that was over! What if B died during the procedure? He was trembling, disgusted at his own cowardice. He had not been able to bear spending any more time in the future and now he had abandoned them.
“Brian?”
He froze, heart beating frantically to deliver adrenaline to his tired body. Every part of him turned rigid and suddenly he was ready to spring and defend himself in case it was an enemy. It took a few seconds for Brian to remember that there was no Gerai in this time and reason to behave like a cornered animal. Slowly he raised his head. It ached and he realised that he must look awful. His cheeks felt hot and his eyes were sore and empty after the rivers they had unleashed.
Nick stared down upon him, his blue eyes filled with the deepest concern and fear that Brian had ever seen.
Brian tried to open his mouth. He thought for the most fleeting of moments that he could easily explain his tears away with some lie or façade. Then he realised that he did not want to. He stared at him and then lowered his face once more. His eyes had found a new supply of tears from somewhere in his body and now they sadly went to business of causing the seas to endlessly run.
His friend was beside him wordlessly and an arm wrapped about Brian’s shoulder. Sobbing Brian leaned against him. He felt cold and sick as his own body trembled as if it might fall apart. Nick was like a warm rock that offered safety and sanity. The arms wrapped about him and Brian felt his own choking cries erupt from his lips as he wept on Nick’s shoulder.
Nick did not ask questions. Usually the blonde was forever questioning to understand what had hurt his friends, but now he was silent. Gone was the young annoyance that sometimes overcast him when someone would not speak. He was simply one of the most supportive people Brian could ever imagine being with.
Brian’s eyes stung and turned the entire room into a painful blur. The room grew steadily darker as night cast its spell upon the world but still he held onto Nick as if he were a small child again that so desperately needed an adult to support and care for him. his throat grew thick until it was impossible to emit any sounds of distress anymore. His own body seemed to be trying to silence him and to put an end to what he was feeling. He had lost everything. He had given them away by freely leaving. His own thoughts spun by in his head. Hundreds of scenarios that could have been or would have been. Looking back it seemed so easy to change a single detail that had seemed impossible at the time.
He saw Bri lying dead at his feet. He felt the breaking of their link again and again as Bri had fallen down the cliff. He closed his eyes. His head was clearing and there was a path that lie before him. No one could cry for ever. There had to be a time when you picked yourself up and accepted what you had been given. You could scream and fight all you wanted but eventually a numb acceptance evades your mind and guides you to survival. You are forced by the primitive instincts left behind to live on.
He was leaning against the couch with Nick beside him. Shadows loomed about the room as the streetlamps glided through the patterned window to make ghosts dance across the carpet. He remembered B’s arrival in this time. It was raining outside, just as it had been that night.
“Brian?” Nick ventured softly. His voice was a croak and Brian suddenly realised that his friend had been crying as well. “Please… Talk to me.”
Sitting himself up alone, Brian rubbed at his eyes but he only made them hurt even more. He remembered crying like this before. He had thought he would ever feel this way again but time seemed destined to repeat itself. It brought you to the brink of despair and then placed you back in that same emotion, only the situation had changed.
He had thought that he could no longer speak, but again his mind had been invaded by something that was almost automatic. It realised he needed to survive. “I don’t know if I can,” he said eventually.
For a few minutes they were silent. Again Brian repeated everything in his mind. I was as if he were trapped in a time warp of some kind that forced him to relive events again and again. They were glued to his skull where his mind could not escape them.
“Where’s Sammy?” Brian asked finally.
“With my mom. You’ve been gone for three days with no word and I was worried. I told Sammy you were fine so as not to worry him. I thought you might come back here so I came and waited. I didn’t hear you come in though. I-I was in the kitchen and I just heard you crying.”
Casting a glance at Nick’s face, Brian’s gut was pulled in a dozen different directions. There was the suffering of loneliness and loss. The feeling of his own death and now there was Nick’s situation. His friend’s cheeks were pale apart from the places where the tears had traced sorrowful trails of red. His eyes had turned puffy and his blonde hair only made him look even more like a ghost or a dying man.
“I’ve been so worried about you!” Nick cried. He rubbed his eyes as tears dribbled again. “What happened to you? You look so different, like you’ve been away for weeks.”
How could Nick ever comprehend? Brian had been away for weeks and yet in Nick’s view it had only been three days. He’d had the same sensations the first time he had travelled through time. In a split second when Nick was unpacking the Nintendo, Brian had lived through an experience his friend could not imagine.
“I can’t tell you,” Brian breathed. It wouldn’t be fair. Nick was young and he should not have to be burdened with everything Brian knew of the future. It made him sick to think about it and he had no desire to inflict anything upon Nick.
“You have to. Look at you! Do you think you can cope alone? I know something has happened here and I don’t care how unbelievable it is, I want to know! I deserve to know because everything that has happened here has been too strange and horrible for me to ignore. How can I forget that kid? How can I turn away and forget seeing you like this? I’ll lie awake every night wondering if you don’t tell me and I’m sure what I can think of will be a thousand times worse than what actually happened!”
Brian’s eyes closed again. “Try me,” he whispered.
There was nothing but the sound of time before Nick spoke again. “No,” he whispered. “You should try me.”
Turning towards him, Brian suddenly saw the wise person Nick would become. He was almost unnaturally young in this time compared to the Nick Brian had been getting to know in the future. It was a shock to see such a youthful face free of worried lines. They were still the same though.
“What happened to that kid?” Nick asked softly. “I know it has something to do with him.”
Brian straightened himself up for a moment and shifted his position to give relief to his aching legs. “You said you didn’t care how unbelievable this story was, but it’s more unbelievable that you think. It’s more strange than you could ever imagine and I don’t think you could possible understand what’s happened to me.”
“Maybe,” Nick agreed. He rested a hand on Brian’s shoulder. “But I can try.”
Tears still reigned in Brian’s eyes, but then he smiled. Everything felt easier in a simple second. He saw Nick in front of him, but a Nick from the future as well as his own time. He took a deep breath and then stared at the ceiling. He could see the shadows that had crawled up it caused by the lamps outside. “Where to start,” he pondered. He stared back at Nick. “It’s a story about time travel.” He paused for a moment. Nick remained silent. There was no disbelieving reply or laugh because he thought Brian was joking. He was listening. “And it didn’t just start today. It started a year ago. In a split second everything had changed.”
The easiest place to begin any story is at the beginning. Right at the beginning when even you were not sure of the events or why they were happening to you. Brian remembered feeling desperately confused the first time AJ had kidnapped him from the present and dragged him to 2028. It had all felt like a bizarre dream and it had only grown even stranger when he’d met Sammy. Eventually everything had drifted away as he settled into life in the future. It’s funny how humans always adapt to whatever situation they’re in. It was almost funny as well to remember when he’d first met B with no idea at all that he was his son. It seemed so obvious once he’d been told, but at the time he’d had no suspicion at all. All he knew was that he cared for the boy and had wanted to help him.
Brian tried to explain it to Nick, but the story he told could not compare with any of the emotions. How did he described how he’d felt when he’d been told B was his own? How did he tell him the pain as he’d realised he was in danger and could die? Then there was the cat and mouse terror of the Gerai base that had nearly killed him. None of that could be explained properly, but he tried to make him understand even though he knew it to be almost impossible.
Then there was his second trip through time. He’d thought they were safe but everything he had thought had been wrong. The future contained even more nightmares than it had done before and this time he could not prevent them. Tears cascaded. B’s suffering, Sammy’s desperate worry for the brother he loved so much and then his own strange relationship with Bri. He placed it all in words that could not describe them adequately. He felt that he had to make up his own language to express them, but even that could not be sufficient.
Nick never said a word. He never contradicted him or said he could be wrong. He was silent and his eyes were wide as he stared at Brian’s face.
The site of his own death had almost destroyed him. it had tempted him to death himself but he had come back because B had asked him to. B himself had come back from his own private nightmare because Sammy and Brian had been there to help him and now Brian had left them again to a future where nobody knew what was going to happen.
“And that’s it,” Brian finished. His lame description of events could not compare with what was in his mind. It was like a slideshow of events from history. They told you nothing of what it was like. You only saw fragmented images. Nothing can preserve feelings and emotions. Nothing can preserve suffering and allow you to know what it was like.
Nick was gazing at him. His face was perfectly calm. He had not been frightened by what he had been told and he did not seem ready to pronounce Brian officially insane. “Okay,” he said simply.
Brian held his eyes for a moment and then everything became blurred by his own sadness. Tears had been his constant companion throughout the story and Nick had also added his own. Now it was over, Brian did not know if he was crying from relief or from the memories of what had happened. Nick reached out and gently embraced him.
“I can’t believe you hid this for a year. I knew something had happened to you, but how could I ever have guessed this? That kid as well… he looked so like you. Somehow I think I already knew.”
Brian had pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms about them. “You’re not freaked out? You don’t think I’m crazy?”
Wiping his eyes Nick risked a brave attempt at a smile. “Maybe if you had told me this some other time, I would have said yes, but I saw B with my own eyes. I remember that day in the hotel room. In one moment you changed. And how else can this be explained? You look like you’ve been away for weeks. You’re thinner, your hair is longer and you look like you’ve been through an ordeal I can never imagine. That can’t be explained any other way and if this is what you say is true then I’ll believe it until somebody proves otherwise.”
It was hard for Brian not to start crying all over again. He had thought that nobody could possibly believe him, even Nick his best friend. Brian could barely believe it himself. Heaviness was leaving his body as it filled with life giving breaths that made him feel light. He no longer had to face this alone. He smiled again as he breathed. There was no pain anymore, just relief. B and Sammy were safe in their own time and Brian could imagine them being safe for the rest of his life.
“Thank you Nick,” he said.
Nick smiled back and took a deep breath himself. “I’m glad you told me. I don’t care if I now know what the future holds, I now know why my friend has been so upset. I guess I can prepare myself as well.”
Brian turned sharply towards Nick as everything tumbled into place. The blond looked as if he felt sick at the thought of what was ahead but by the time came he would be ready and he would become the calm, reliable Nick the others depended upon in the future. When he had seen Nick in the future, Brian had not believed it possible that such a noisy and hyperactive boy could become a calm doctor, but now the mystery was explained. Nick had known what was going to happen and it had changed him.
Brian laughed slightly. How many other paradoxes were waiting for him to discover them? It was no use trying to understand how time worked as it weaved through his life. It seemed to change as it wanted, sometimes making his life easier, sometimes harder. Maybe one day it would reward him for his patience and tolerance.
“I don’t want anybody else to know about this,” Brian said. “Not even the other guys or my family. This stays with us.”
“I won’t say a word. They wouldn’t understand. I’ve always believed in strange things that we can’t explain, but the others are too down to earth I guess. I don’t they could understand and they haven’t seen what I have. They haven’t seen B.” He smiled suddenly. It was a sight that made Brian feel happier. He had looked after Nick since the beginning and it was as painful to see him cry as it was with B and Sammy. Seeing him recover only made everything around him even more bearable. “He was a cute kid, Bri. I’m not surprised you love him so much.”
For a moment, Brian almost corrected him on the use of the name. For year he had told them not to call him Bri. He had never liked it. It was suddenly more bearable though. He glanced at Nick. He had not told him that the difference between Brian and his twin had been the name and the blond had no idea of the image that came to Brian’s mind with the name. It was hard to think that man was gone from Brian’s life forever. Nothing would be the same. He would enjoy everything around him, but there would always be the memory of that link and the way he had connected with somebody he had wanted to kill.
“I hope you’ll see him again,” Nick said. Of course, he was talking about B. Brian had not managed to explain the friendship with his twin. That was something private that only he could no about. Nick thought that they had kept each other at a distance. Nothing could have been more of a lie.
Brian thought of B and Sammy and made a wish that he could keep in his own mind. He added one more person to the dream. “I hope I’ll see them all again.”