Or The Very Best (Narrative)

[Josiah Malkuth]

The door handle clicked as it was turned, but the only occupant in the room refused to budge from his chair. He didn't even look over the book in his hand as the door opened, or as the young collegiate slinked in. His backpack was dumped carefully on the bed, before his feet padded towards the seated figure.

The reader's eyes panned upwards, if only to acknowledge the look of the new arrival. There was just the barest hint of a glare on his features, and his shoulders were tensed unconsciously from past stress. The way his eyes shifted side to side spoke of an internal debate going on behind those confused hazel spheres.

"You are either the worst advice giver of all time," Josiah began with a whisper, before his appearance lightened as he continued, "Or the very best."

Aryn closed the book with deliberate slowness, and Josiah glanced at the visible watch on his wirst consciously to check that this was normal. Placing the book in his lap, the seated reader crossed one leg over the other and folded his hands over the book in a markedly intelligent pose.

The pose actually managed to annoy him with how calm Aryn was being, but before he could voice his consternation, his friend finally replied.

"You knocked on his door?"

His tone sounded as much a rhetorical question as a statement of fact. Josiah regarded him seriously, but all Aryn gave was a blink of his eyes.

"Yes," he returned flatly.

"Did good things come from it?"

Josiah had to mentally review what all had happened after that single point in the time. First there was that most unspeakable night, of dreams made manifest that he still completely disbelieved had happened. Then there had been all those memories that came afterward, flooding his mind with things he shouldn't be able to remember.

Meeting the others had followed, with Cielle teaching him more about an entire world he was oblivious to - to say nothing of the fact that he was now bending temporal events, just by concentrating on them. It all spiraled out from that one key event in time: when he knocked on the door of the person he loved.

That was all.

He knocked just three times.

"Yes," he said at last, admitting it as much to himself as to Aryn. Then, with more strength behind his words, added, "Yeah ... a lot of good stuff happened."

The seated figure's lips curled slightly in a smile.

"I promised you they would."

The look of irritation returned back into Josiah's face.

"How did you know?" he asked bluntly, accusatively. "I'm gay, Aryn. There was a 5, maybe 10% chance that he was gay, too, but you knew, you knew everything would work out between me and him."

"You're a good person," he explained, or tried to explain. "Things have a habit of working out for good people."

There was a moment of silence, and Josiah released some of his stress in a sigh of exasperation before falling backwards to sit on the edge of the bed. His arms crossed to give them something to do.

"You don't actually expect me to believe that, do you?"

Aryn gave a full smile that made both eyes disappear behind his cheeks, light perkily glinting off of his glasses.

"I do, but you'd be right if you said that there's more to this than just that."

[Josiah Malkuth]

"... And?" Josiah finally called him on that last little quip.

"Everything in time," Aryn said proverbially, but Josiah only understood half the irony at that moment. "You did meet Lihat, correct?"

"You saw that?" he shot back, question for question.

"I saw it when it might have been, but not yet was," the fair-haired figure confessed.

It took him only a moment to process the sentence, finding he was rapidly becoming accustomed to the unique grasp of grammar that their perspectives offered.

"You can see the future, too?" he jumped readily to the conclusion that Aryn was guiding him to by mentioning the heavily-clothed figure.

Somehow, he felt like he should be far more shocked than he really was.

"Something like that," was the answer he knew was already coming, and he didn't even need magic foresight to see it.

"And somehow, it just didn't ... cross your mind, to tell me this before?" Josiah pressed with another question while he stood up, and the hint of betrayal started to bleed into his voice when he asked it.

"I was waiting," Aryn tried to reply peacefully, understanding the curious position he had put him in.

"Waiting for what?"

"I told you already," he spoke calmly. "Everything in time."

The emotional roller coaster was back in full swing, and it was currently throwing him upwards again.

"That's not the answer to my question."

"I apologize, but that is all the answer I can share," he said with a slight laugh, scratching the back of his neck in a human gesture to give the appearance of awkwardness.

"I won't tell you what I'm waiting for, for the same reason I didn't tell you I know the future: it was not the right time. I know this is frustrating."

"Of course you know, you can see my future," he interrupted him, his eyes going wide to stress those last three words.

"No," he said with a deadpan look on his face. "I know this is frustrating, because I have had this conversation with many people before you. Most people respond to it in the same way: they dislike the idea that someone close to them can see their future. It makes them feel powerless and vulnerable, even manipulated. Especially manipulated."

"I don't need to have seen the future to know that right now, you're probably thinking about every time I've given you a slight nudge. You are second guessing every moment we have spent together, every word I have ever said. Is that not an accurate assessment of what's going on in your head right now?"

The look on his face was half anger, half begrudging understanding.

"I see the future," he continued. "Quantum physics teaches that the mere observation of an event changes its outcome. This I cannot help. But what I can help is affecting you or anyone else more than is necessary. I do not want, nor intend, to manipulate things to my ends in the manner you are currently thinking of. I am an observer. But that does not mean there are things I do not desire or want to happen. Because of that, patience is required of me. For everything, there is a time. Happily, there are many books to keep me occupied until then."

Josiah had found himself seated sometime in the middle of that, his arms unfolding as Aryn's words covered the internal wound like a band-aid. It was still there, and if he moved wrong, it still hurt. But at least now, covered and cared for, it wasn't so dominating as to distract him from other things - in this case, the truth of what Aryn was saying.

"And you telling me to knock on Gavin's door?" Josiah finally managed to ask. "That didn't count?"

"You wanted assurance, on the biggest gamble of your life to date. I gave you it. You had no reason to even believe I was right. But you trusted me. What you did after that was entirely your choice."

The moment passed in silence as Josiah reflected on the truth of this.

"Jo ... do you still trust me?"

[Josiah Malkuth]

If you think there are only two ways in which Josiah could have responded to that situation, then you have no idea all the variations currently passing through his mind and into Aryn's sight.

When possible futures finally came into line with present actualities, Josiah's words rang with hollow strength.

"I don't know. I just ... don't know."

Aryn nodded understandingly.

"Fair enough."

A twinge in his heart brought a sad look on Josiah's face. He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it when the words felt insufficient in his mind. Aryn just looked at him, giving a nod so slow and so slight Josiah barely realized he had done it. There was assurance in his eyes.

"You can see the future," Josiah said again, though it sounded like he had wanted to add 'If' at the beginning of that sentence. "So you know ... I want to say sorry."

"Yeah," he stated simply, looking like he was about to laugh.

"But you also know ... I can't apologize for how I feel. I want to. I should... I shouldn't feel this way, but I do... Apologizing would just be..." he struggled for the word that was on the tip of his tongue.

"Superficial," Aryn finished for him.

"Yeah," it was his turn to say now, and an intangible connection seemed to be falling back into place, like a game of Perfection. The timer had run out, everything had been thrown into the air ... and the pieces came back down in slow motion, fitting in the exact slots they were supposed to be in. They only had to give them a little nudge in free fall.

A brief thought slipped into his mind, questioning whether Aryn had known what he meant, because they were friends, or if he had looked into the future to a time when Josiah himself would have given the answer.

And then he kicked that idea's ass so hard it went flying out the window, screaming all the way down.

Cause it didn't matter, whether Aryn saw it, or if Aryn figured it out. It was all the same in the end. Aryn knew him, probably better than anyone. Wasn't that how friends were supposed to be?

"Aryn? ... Thank you."

The seer glowed happily.

"You're welcome, Jo. You're welcome."

[Josiah Malkuth]

"So ... where do we go from here?" Josiah asked tentatively.

"You already decided," Aryn replied with a teasing tone and knowing grin. "Though you'll decide again, in about five seconds."

The brown-haired one's face scrunched up as he thought, turning back to memories and internal conversations past. The answer wasn't hard to bring back up. Talking with Cielle had left a strong impression about the secret nature of the world, and there was one place that seemed at the center of it.

"Japan," he said, sounding annoyed at what he presumed was going to be Aryn's latest game. "Are you going to do that often?"

"Maybe. It depends on my mood," he joked, giggling at his own joke. The moment passed first to silence before he added more seriously, "What will you do about classes?"

"Well, if I'm right, I don't think I have to worry about missing classes anymore... or being late, for that matter. If I'm not right ... well, figuring out how this all works right now is registering a little higher on my list of priorities. Fail to mark the right answer on a piece of paper, or irrevocably harm the time-space continuum... yeeaaah, I'm going to Japan."

[Josiah Malkuth]

The flash lit up the room like a passing car, and the camera whined a little as it spit out a stained image of the wrench where it lay upon the bed. Josiah compared the image to the tool, then uncapped the pen to write down the exact date and time on the lower half.

Leaning to the left, he opened the protective sticky page of the scrapbook and set the picture at the end of third and last line on the sheet. He checked each one a final time before sealing it up and turning it over to the next page. A slightly proud little smile tickled his face as he considered it again and moved to his desk to gather the next thing he thought he might need.

The book-reading Aryn looked across the top, only partially fazed by the other's packing. What few belongings he had were already safely tucked away in a backpack near his feet. It was then the book went a little ways further down, himself smiling as he asked, "What are you doing?"

Josiah turned, holding a pair of scissors and the camera. He had just been about to respond, and rather excitedly at that, when his features instead played the confused.

"Why do you ask questions, if you already know the answers?"

The seer shook his head, chuckling under his breath.

"Because in another ten seconds, you were going to ask if I was going to ask. I thought I'd save us the time," he conceded. Three seconds later, Josiah playfully groan-laughed at what he recognized as an all-too-horrible pun.

"It's a cheat sheet, for the future," he explained at last. "I figure I've moved myself through time and space, and I know I can manipulate other objects besides myself. With some practice, I'm hoping I can figure out how to do the former, to the latter. I figure photographs like these could be, I dunno, my focus - the exact time, the exact place, the exact visual of what it is I'm looking for and where I'm looking for it."

Josiah picked up the scrapbook, proudly leafing through it before holding it up for Aryn to see. "It's like a chronological address book. I figure I can do same thing for places, in case I want to go back or something. I'll make a few shots around town before we leave, just to be on the safe side. Depending on how that works ... it might be best if I use those as one-shots. It'd be kinda awkward if I ended up traveling to the same place I traveled before, and ended up seeing myself at another time."

Aryn nodded along, content to have played the straight man in the conversation so as to allow the other to get out what he wanted to say. A little encouragement from his side wouldn't hurt though.

"Crossing your own timeline does tend to complicate things unnecessarily, and - in some cases - can be downright dangerous. You're wise to plan around that now. That said ... a chronological address book ..." Lips grinned upwards to make his point. "Duct tape. You'll want to take photos of a lot of duct tape. You have no idea how useful that can be to a time traveler."

"A traveler," Josiah beamed at the word repeated. It stood out and played around on his senses like a good wine.

"Yeah ... I'm a traveler now..."