“Have you seen it?”
“Have I seen what?”
“This.”
“I’m not entirely sure what ‘this’ is, to be perfectly honest with you.”
Skye rolled her eyes, “don’t make me regret bringing you here,” she said, fixing a withering look to her companion.
“Of course,” Earl said, flashing a knowing smile, “I bet you bring all the extradimensional travelers here… Wherever, or indeed whenever here is.”
“Actually,” she said, gazing up intently, trying to breach the dark barrier of his glasses with her piercing blue eyes, “I’ve only ever been here alone.”
“Well, now we can be alone together, to see… whatever it is I am supposed to be seeing,” he said casually.
“Cute,” she replied with a sigh.
“I try,” Earl said with another impish smile.
“Tell me, what are you seeing, Mr Grey?” Skye probed.
“Why, it’s…” he stroked his chin in exaggerated contemplation, “it’s indescribable, really.”
“Try” she said, echoing his words with a wry smile.
“Very well,” he acknowledged, “for you.”
Earl regarded the magnitude of the swirling sight before him. He hadn't merely been being coy, it truly was indescribable, incomprehensible even. Well, for a temporally-bound creature anyway.
“I see light… and darkness,” he began, “flickering, pulsing almost. A dazzling array of all that is… this is a universe?” he questioned the slight lady, a stature that belied her place in, and indeed out of, existence.
“Mhm,” she affirmed.
“You know, I’ve just realised how syntactically clumsy the phrase ‘a universe’ is,” Earl said, his brow furrowed.
Skye stole another long look at the dancing chorus of nebulas and constellations before addressing her erstwhile apprentice.
“Of course the people that named it such hadn’t the means to perceive of anything more,” she said, her eyes looking back to him. She might not have caught it, between his dark glasses and her attention on the grand kaleidoscope before them, but the sight of all the lights of existence pirouetting through the mirrors of her eyes hadn’t been lost on him; a rhythmic partner in a cosmic ballroom.
“And yet they could conceive of more, whether through religion or storytelling. As if the human spirit had always yearned for more,” he mused, stoking the embers of intrigue in her cosmic blue gaze. Earl of course recognised that the true promethean fire didn’t simply echo in her eyes, it came from behind them.
“Hm,” she considered sharply, “be careful what you wish for, right?”
“Right,” Earl concurred with an expression partway between smiling and wincing; an acknowledgement of a truth that could both humour and hurt in equal measure.
A few moments passed wordlessly — that is, indeed, if moments were able to pass here at all — as the pair looked wistfully over the universe that stretched before them.
“You know,” Skye said, dispelling the sombre funk that had bequieted them, “I’m not so sure actually that ‘a whole’ has to necessarily equate to ‘the whole’.”
“Huh?” Earl turned to his companion, his demeanour as if pulled from the depths of his dreams.
“Your issue with the term ‘a universe’,” she clarified, again trying to catch sight of whatever feeling was chambered behind his concealed eyes.
“Oh,” he thought for a moment, “it’s not that I don’t believe in the concept of indefinite articles, but, everything is, well, everything. It’s not as if you can have ‘an everything’ now is it?”
“Of course you can,” Skye replied forcefully, “you can have everything in a room or everything in one’s heart or,” she gestured at the sprawling cosmos, “everything in ‘a universe’. Those are ‘an everything’ but they aren’t ‘the everything’.” A satisfied smirk crept onto her face as she closed her argument.
“No,” Earl waved his arm dismissively, “what you’ve done there is narrow the question. If you have to—” he paused, reading the faint hints of glee on her face, “did you bring me here to argue about grammar?”
“No,” she said, savouring the rare opportunity to get under his skin for a change, “but maybe I should’ve, I had no idea you were so passionate about these things.”
Earl smiled, an acceptance of a point conceded in their eternal verbal joustings.
“I’m passionate about many things, Miss Blue,” he said, his cool demeanour returning.
Skye watched the celestial bouquet coalesce for another moment before asking, “have you figured out why we’re here yet?”
“Has anyone?” he replied sedately.
“You know what I meant,” Skye prodded in mild irritation.
“I’m sorry,” Earl said, “I wasn’t aware that I was being tested.”
“You are always being tested, Mr Grey,” she asserted.
“On that we can agree,” he said with a grin.
Skye ignored his latest quip and went back to watching the machinery of being tick away.
“I suppose something is going to happen?” he queried, studying her face for clues.
“Bold prediction,” she said, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear.
“Something that would require us to be at what I’m assuming is an essentially impossible scale…” he thought aloud.
“Essentially,” she nodded.
“Out of curiosity, if one were able to perceive us, what would—”
“Probably a few universe’s worth of mass. Each,” she said, answering his question before he could finish asking it.
“And here I thought I had been watching my figure,” Earl jested.
Skye glowered at him, the vision of a streaking comet playing duplicate in her eyes, “I know that you know,” she said, challenging the taller figure, “stop being cute.”
Earl was taken aback, placing his hand across his chest in pantomime dismay, “stop being cute?” he repeated in incredulity, “would you ask the stars to stop shining?”
She exhaled in weary vexation, “I’d ask them to cease this relentless performance,” she said, massaging her forehead.
He straightened up, regarding her for a facsimile of a moment, “is that what you think this is? A performance?” he quizzed.
“No,” she said, the burning halos in her eyes threatening to incinerate him where he stood… or floated? Where he was… Is? Either way, she continued, “That’s what I know this is… or have you forgotten who taught you this very act?”
“Right,” Earl said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head, “The Academy was such a long time ago… or, wait,” he scrunched up his face, “can it even be?” he shook his head in bafflement, “you know, one never quite gets used to being beyond time, to being more than just a man.”
“Don’t worry,” Skye smiled up at him, “you’re still just a man to me.”
Earl remained unperturbed by her detraction, returning her smile before speaking, “Well, I suppose there’s an awful lot that ‘just a man’ can do for you.”
Not for the first (or last) time, Skye rolled her sapphire-blue eyes. “He can start by shutting up,” she said. Although she would sooner die than admit it, there was a small part of her that found his persistence almost endearing. A silly part of her, naturally, but a part nonetheless.
Earl considered her demand playfully, “he can,” he said, the corners of his mouth upturned in his trademark smirk, “but I fear he shan’t.”
Skye raised an eyebrow at her counterpart, “Shan’t?” she repeated suspiciously, “I don’t recall teaching you that one,” she said with a grin.
Earl fixed his glasses, “no,” he acknowledged, “but you did teach me that a good agent envisions their own unique palette. A composite of colours shaped by experience, belief, and yes,” he flashed an appreciative smile, “excellent teaching.”
She turned away at his latest flattery, watching as distant lights bent and distorted through gravitational lenses; the inexorability of cosmic forces. A display of laws so inevitable that nothing, not even light itself, could escape their embrace. Nothing, that is, but the pair of pondering humanoids, flitting at the edge of all that would ever be.
“I’ve just never heard you use the word ‘shan’t’,” she said, turning back to her irrepressible colleague.
“Well,” he said contemplatively, “one must always consider their audience, I fear such elegance would be wasted on Agent Brown,” he finished with a telling smile.
Skye chuckled softly, “Rusty does have a unique interpretation of the language,” she affirmed.
The pair resumed their spectatorship of the stellar lightshow, the warmth of their jovial shared experience slowly dissipating alongside the smiles it had purchased. In its place the laden silence crept upon them once more, filling the space between them with its frigid affections. “You know, that’s something else that has always bothered me,” Earl said, refusing to surrender to the unspoken void.
“What now?” Skye questioned wearily.
“If we’re all from different cycles, that is, infinite permutations born of infinite universes, how is it that we all share a language?” he wondered aloud.
Skye considered for a moment, before replying, “Perhaps it’s the case that we exist only in an infinity where we do, and not in the infinite infinities where we do not.”
It was Earl’s turn to roll his eyes, not that she could see it beyond the walls of his glasses, of course. “A shame that we don’t exist in an infinity where our shared language has a clearer delineation between definite and indefinite articles,” he quipped acerbically.
“Hmph,” she looked at him for a moment, “You learn to stop thinking about these things eventually.”
“When?” he sighed.
“Precisely,” she beamed, pointing a finger at her bemused companion. Earl only managed a dismissive groan in response.
“So, tell me, Mr Grey,” she prodded, “using those brilliant colours of yours, what are we here to see?” She watched him intently, the examination a holdover from their time as student and teacher.
“Well,” he said, running a hand through his neat crop of brown hair, “I have an inkling… but it couldn’t be so.”
Skye tilted her head, enjoying the opportunity to put him through his paces, “and why not?” she inquired impishly.
“Because,” he said, now meeting her amused stare with a determined countenance, “that ‘inkling’ is something that we are expressly forbidden from doing.”
Skye baulked at his duteous objections, “Forbidden is such a strong word,” she countered urbanely.
“Yes,” he smiled, “I imagine that’s why they used it.”
She shook her head, a portrait of stellar divergence, “Chromatic Agents aren’t merely selected for their blind adherence to rules, you know, we’re also valued for our initiative and lateral-thinking,” she said, still coaching him as she imagined she would for the rest of time.
“Said the serpent to Eve,” he retorted, drinking in his own amusement.
“Are you calling me a snake?” she bristled, challenging him once more with her infernal glare.
“I’m calling you wickedly temptatious, Miss Blue,” he said with a solid grin and a fluid confidence.
“Hm,” she paused, not allowing a smidgen of begrudging respect for his charm to shame her face, “I did teach you well.”
“That you did… Michaela,” he spoke surely, letting the bombshell skip off of his tongue and between his teeth to its unsuspecting target.
Skye froze, a grasping sensation enveloping her as every fibre tensed for a nanosecond. “How did you…” she started, her porcelain mask of poise shattered by a deep and sincere red; the clarion call to rouse the dormant from sleep. She swallowed hard, a mouthful of complex emotions and entangled histories, as she regained her eminent composure. “I can’t remember the last time that somebody called me that,” she said earnestly, her ocean eyes searching the stars for the solace of stillness.
“Now, what were you saying about ‘blind adherence to rules’?” he said, his smirk growing wider than spacetime itself, “something about displaying initiative, am I correct?” he prodded further, daring the dam of her chagrin to break.
“You are full of surprises, Mr Grey,” she sighed, a subtle admission of her demurring respect.
“You have no idea,” he said mischievously.
Skye exhaled, “I won’t denigrate you with how, but I would ask you why,” she looked to him, carefully awaiting his response.
“Would you?” he staked cheekily.
She closed her eyes for a moment, keeping a lid on the simmering beneath her surface, “why?” she restated through gritted teeth.
“Well,” he said, scratching his chin, “you know my original name, so, I figured that it would put us on a more level playing field. After all this time spent beneath you… so to speak,” he finished audaciously.
She huffed, determined to press on undeterred through his rhetorical minefield, “have you ever considered that we’re both happier when you’re beneath me?”
“Oh, have I,” he beamed with delight.
She let out a defeated sigh, she knew that trying to pin him down was like trying to nail smoke to the wall. She had taught him well. Earl noted her acquiescent posture.
“I didn’t mean to antagonise you,” he said, studying her closely, “you can call me Zach if it makes you feel better.”
“No,” she shook her head dismissively, “I was just caught by surprise, you were only doing what you’ve been taught.” She stopped for a second as she considered his friendly offer before continuing, “and, no, I shan’t, Mr Grey,” she reassured him with a playful smile, “one of us has to maintain the decorum and professionalism expected of us.”
Earl met her smile in kind, but with faint notes of relief and maybe something a little more profound beneath the practiced masquerade.
“Would that be the same one who has dragged us to the end of time, in flagrant violation of Academy rules?” he enquired pointedly.
“An end of time,” she corrected, briefly wiping away his perpetual grin, “and, yes, it would,” she asserted, daring him to press her further. When no such objections came, she finished, “at least you know where you are.”
“Actually,” he perked up, the smirk returning, “I know when I am. I’m currently struggling with the concept of where.”
Skye turned her attention away from the quasars and galactic filaments and up at Earl instead, “I find it cute that you still make the distinction,” she said, with a touch of sprightly condescension.
“Do you?” he pressed, “What else do you find cute about me?”
“Well,” she pondered, choosing her targets carefully, “I could go for your youthful exuberance, or your quaint wordplay, but,” she straightened up, scanning him assiduously up and down, “I think the thing that I find cutest about you, Mr Grey, is your hitherto laboured-under delusion that your amorous act is going to wrongfoot me.”
“Who’s acting?” he fired back, unbothered by her call out.
“You are, Mr Grey,” she said absolutely, patting his shoulder in a patronising manner.
“Hm,” Earl regarded her carefully, “so, this is the end of a cycle?” he asked, changing the subject as he looked over the reality laid bare before them.
“Mhm,” she affirmed, brushing stardust from her hair.
He paused, the sharp lines of his face wrinkling in a kinetic display of rumination, “Cycles being circular in nature…” he muttered ponderously.
“I wasn’t aware that they taught geometry at The Academy,” Skye teased, her ruby lips pulled into an impish smile.
“Perhaps you can teach me this then,” he said, fixing her with an assured look, “Where, exactly, does a circle end, Miss Blue?” He watched as her amusement gradually shifted into cogitation, her elegant features hardening in purpose; the steel beneath the silken visage.
“Or begin, for that matter,” he added, watching with quiet admiration as the gears turned in her radiant mind.
“It depends on where you begin drawing it from,” she finally said resolutely.
Earl raised an eyebrow in consideration, “yes, but who’s holding the pen?” he probed.
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” she answered blithely.
He sighed, reacquainting himself with the familiar climes of epistemic bedrock. “We flutter beyond space and time, spanning infinite cycles of existence and yet we still can’t answer what is perhaps the one question that all sentient life yearns to know,” he said, the flavour of his words somewhere between frustration and despondency.
“Perhaps we ought to start picking up pens of our own,” she said, extending him a glimmer of hopeful agency.
Earl smiled, not with the usual surety but with a bittersweet percipience. “Sadly,” he began, turning a softening expression her way, “I fear we are only another utensil in this cosmic stationery set.”
“Then,” she said, her eyes flaring with the accelerant of discernment, “who is holding us?”
Her question brought back a warmer character to his expression. “Hm. Quite,” he said, fixing his gaze over an indefinite distance.
“I find it comforting, in a way,” she said, “that not even we are beyond parameters, beyond definition.”
“Does such a classification make it any easier?” he pressed.
“It’s not what I am that troubles me, Mr Grey, it’s what I am not,” she confessed, the turbulence in her eyes spilling the stern questioning of more lifetimes than one could ever imagine.
Earl afforded a subdued snicker, “I know what you aren’t, Miss Blue,” he said confidently.
“And what’s that?” she asked, raising an eyebrow in suspicion.
“An adherent of rules,” he smiled, disarming her suspicion and readied ire.
“Well,” she said, the mischief glittering in her eyes like the field of stars enfolding them, “they do say that rules are made to be broken.”
Earl recoiled, shaking his head in perturbation, “‘they’ being the simple and insipid,” he blustered with a primordial distaste, “I mean, honestly, have you ever heard a statement so vacuous and trite?” he sighed, venting some of his indignation out into the inky void of nothingness, “In the countless realities that I have crossed, I have yet to come upon a worse idiom than that necessarily fallacious, puddle-deep nonsense.”
Skye couldn’t hide her delight at his latest lexical outburst, “I knew you’d like that one,” she beamed up at him.
“Words matter,” he said sincerely, tempering himself with sheepish concession, “they mattered in life and they matter even more now, beyond life.”
She twirled her mouth in curiosity, surprised by his sudden earnestness. “An interesting theory,” she considered, “but why would they matter more now?”
“Because, Miss Blue,” he turned, facing her fully, “we are bigger than existence itself. Neither time nor death can reach us, but words, words still can,” he spoke passionately, gesturing at his heart.
She regarded him candidly for a moment, feeling the slow dripping in her soul; perhaps the first drops of admiration in her well of practiced coolness.
“Is it too late for me to change my selection for your cutest attribute?” she jibed, suffocating his earnestness with a playful smile that drew from him one of his own, though, as Skye could note, with an alluring hint of embarrassment.
“I would also like to amend a previous statement,” he said, swallowing his shame at the latest scored point, “upon further reflection, I have discovered that you do indeed possess some serpentine qualities,” he finished with a relocated composure and impudence.
“Shut up,” she said, aiming a spirited swipe at his shoulder, the first genuine chortle wrenched from within her against her will.
That moment of human warmth drifted, the pair linked in their amiable sentiment; an indelible tether, connecting their smiles. A tether that would be pulled taut, as the chittering whispers of what remained unsaid began to swell once again.
“Why are you so concerned with us violating this rule, anyway?” Skye said, now in the winter of their warm moment.
“Well, I did find the risk of death somewhat compelling,” he replied coolly.
“Hm, I wasn’t under the impression that we could,” she mused.
“Be compelled?”
“Die,” she clarified staunchly.
“Even if we removed these?” he turned his left arm up at the elbow, flashing the ornate timepiece adorning his wrist. At a glance, it may have appeared as merely a slightly large wristwatch, but upon further inspection one might notice that behind the glass swirled a sight much like the one that now faced them. In lieu of a clock face, inside ticked a microcosm of existence; a universe in — or at least by — the palm of your hand.
Skye looked down at the byzantine embellishment on her own left wrist, momentarily drinking in the colours before speaking, “I don’t know about death, per se, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“If not death then what does happen?” Earl pressed.
“Well,” she began hesitantly, “supposedly, if you remove your Q.E.D. outside of the PRISM, your atomic structures would simply come undone, and you would disperse like dandelion seeds upon the wind.”
A smattering of concern troubled Earl’s handsome features at this latest novel information. “You know, that sounds an awful lot like death to me,” he offered pointedly.
Skye simply smiled up at him, “You of all people should know that homonyms are not synonyms,” she teased.
“Hm,” he conceded her point with a pained smirk, “and what about witnessing the end of a cycle? Need I worry about the integrity of my atomic structures?”
“I shouldn’t think so, no,” she replied calmly, “though the risk of death is non-zero, I find it unlikely.”
“And how can you be so sure?” he said inquisitively.
“I’ve been here before, remember?” she reiterated, jogging his memory.
“Right,” Earl nodded acceptingly, before a disquieting consternation rumbled across his face, “but you couldn’t have known that the first time… why would you have come here if there was a risk of death?” he spoke, raking her with a look of confusion and concern. Without saying a word Skye turned sharply away from him, the tether severing, shielding her from his gaze as the realisation hit him like an infinite parade of semi trucks.
“I’m sorry,” he spoke quickly, sombrely, “I didn’t… I’m really sorry, Skye.”
“Why?” she said piercingly, whipping a look over her shoulder, her striking blonde bob framing her pained expression sharply. “Did you pluck me from the life that I knew and foist this tormenting eternity upon me?” she interrogated with fiery melancholy. The worry lines etching into her face sent tremors of angst roiling through his soul, but in his alarm another kind of realisation hit him, this time like a knowing pat on the shoulder.
“I made my choice, Skye. Please hand that guilt back to me. You needn’t carry it any further,” he said softly, trying to infuse within his words an assuaging balm.
She stared at him, a troupe of emotions parading across the comely ground of her face. First came surprise, cutting jolting shapes as it passed the baton into the wistful arms of reverie. This emotion twirled as did the gears in her head, processing the astute implications of her one-time student. Finally, bringing up the rear was the familiar, traipsing figure of mild annoyance, who greeted her indifferently and let it be known.
“It annoys me how perceptive you are,” she said, turning back towards him.
“I noticed,” he smirked, switching seamlessly between neat sincerity and his usual frustratingly clever affect.
Together they watched the flickering lights of existence, the reluctant amusement born of his quip slowly fading amongst the light of distant stars.
“It’s okay, you know,” he broached the anxious silence, looking to the living portrait of composure beside him.
“To die?” she said, the haunting in her heart audible in her typically stoic words.
“To feel vulnerable… unsure,” he said gently, a reservoir of concern stashed behind his dark glasses.
“It’s unimportant,” she said, with a dismissive shake of her troubled head.
“It’s human,” Earl pressed.
A pained look contused her prepossessing face, “But I’m not,” she protested softly.
“Sure,” he conceded with a sigh, “Skye Blue isn’t… but Michaela Summers is,” he searched her eyes for acrimony but found only a dizzying array of emotions instead, “and last I checked, it’s still her heart that is beating inside of your chest.”
Skye gathered herself for a brief moment before speaking, “You know my last name now too?” the familiar admonishing tone rang in her voice, though she hadn’t been able to completely mask the warming sensation in her still-human heart.
Earl’s smile returned, welcoming the opportunity to be back in her crosshairs rather than have her be the quarry of dread.
“I know your middle name as well, if that’s worth any extra points,” he said, flashing an angelic smile.
“It isn’t,” Skye shot back, with a passive aggressive smile of her own.
“It’s very pretty,” Earl continued.
“I didn’t ask,” she said definitively, slamming the door shut on his latest angle of approach.
Skye stole another long look at the terminal performance of the heavens as she thought of a way to steer the conversation back away from such vulnerable territory.
“Isn’t it incredible?” she said perkily, looking back at Earl and gesturing to existence, “Does it not steal your breath and leave wonder in its place?” she enthused, hoping to redirect his annoyingly adroit attention.
“Oh, absolutely,” he agreed, his voice oozing with cosmological confidence, “and the universe isn’t bad either,” he concluded impudently, his shrouded eyes locked onto her as the words rolled off of his argent tongue; as did Skye’s cerulean eyes in response.
“I know you aren’t talking about me,” she challenged.
“You know, false modesty is just a more convoluted form of narcissism,” Earl chided smugly.
Skye grumbled beneath her breath, “I liked you better when you were a timid little thing that could hardly muster a word to me,” she fired back, choking once more on his temerity.
“Is that so?” he teased, “What was it about me cowering beneath a desk whilst you saved my life that worked for you?”
The usually unflappable lady sighed, becoming animated as her frustrations swelled, “It’s not about always being brave, or having the cleverest thing to say! Sometimes it’s just about being—”
“Human?” Earl finished her sentence, stopping her impassioned entreaty dead in its tracks; he was practically glistening in self-satisfaction.
Skye wanted to scream but all that her conscience would allow her was a begrudging and defeated sigh, “Sometimes, Mr Grey, I fear you are too clever for your own good.”
Earl graciously received her backhanded compliment with a gratified smile, “Well,” he started, “should my atomic structures indeed disaggregate, I hope you’ll lay that epitaph on my headstone.”
Skye shook her head, “what would we even bury?” she chuckled.
“Your feelings for me?” he offered sharply.
“Okay,” she said abruptly, her amusement rapidly venting out into space, “let’s just observe silently from now on.”
Earl mimed his lips being zipped up and regarded the interminable beauty before him. Though, of course, he wasn’t watching the dying lights of this existence’s ultimate act; his disguised gaze was locked firmly on her. Like a stellar mirror, she radiated with the light of being. He watched her features glitter; a polaroid, a parallel. Thoughts swirled in her head like dreams of nebulas, embers of starfire flickered in her eyes and a feeling like gravity brought him a surety, a sanctuary… and a knowing smirk. Any moment now, he thought.
The feelings that he had been watching simmer on her face finally boiled over as she sighed sharply and turned to face him. There it is.
“Are you really going to watch the end of time through sunglasses?” she said with a palpable, if performative, vexation, shattering her own imposed silence.
“It might be bright,” he said urbanely, stoking the hot streaks in her cool glare.
“Take them off,” she demanded.
“Oh, now I get it,” he said smugly, pushing up the offending glasses.
“Get what?” she questioned crisply.
“Your game,” he beamed, “first you take me to some secluded place like a disused railway line or the edge of existence and then you start demanding that I remove articles of clothing. I bet you had this all planned out, didn’t you?”
Skye’s incandescent azure eyes had now entered what could best be described as a death spiral, jettisoning rings of her displeasure around them.
“You know,” she said, looking up into his tickled lineaments, “I never thought that I would miss being beholden to the vacuum of space but here we are.”
Earl simply returned her a prideful smile as she turned back to existence in time to witness a patch of stars extinguish, blinking into the black like burnt-out Christmas lights. “It’s starting,” she said, with a firmness a touch above a whisper.
“I thought it was ending,” came the typically glib response from over her shoulder.
“If only…” she muttered beneath her breath.
“Will it be fast?” he enquired.
“Imperceptibly,” she affirmed.
“Hm,” Earl pondered for a few moments, dividing his attention between the slow creeping void at the far end of space-time and the slender stellar core stewing with nuclear fusion but a few paces from him. “If even the end of a cycle can’t kill us, then—”
“I didn’t say that it couldn’t kill us,” Skye interrupted him, “I just said that it probably wouldn’t kill us.”
“Well, either way,” he said, straightening his collar, “it begs a question.”
“You beg too many questions, Mr Grey,” she asserted.
His incipient smile loosed a nascent chuckle, “The questions beg themself, Miss Blue,” he said calmly, “It’s you that I am begging.”
“Then you might beg harder,” she fired back.
The incipience of Earl’s smile had bloomed into maturity, stretching ever wider, “Would it help if I got on my knees?” he asked, the devilish flicker in his eyes barely contained by his dark eyewear. Skye looked over her shoulder at him, painting him up and down with sapphire perspicacity.
“Maybe later,” she said coolly, brushing a final lingering streak of blue over him before casting her head back towards the concluding spectacle of being. “But, please,” she said, “do make whatever adorably pedantic observations that you were going to.”
“Happily,” he said, taking a step forward, “as beings beyond time and space with unfettered access to an infinite number of realities and an indisposition towards mortality, how does The Academy prevent us from simply absconding with our own destinies? Clearly, the rules and guidelines are, well, lacking,” he dangled the word with relish, hoping that she might bite. When she didn’t react beyond a subtle shake of her head, he continued, “A deeply concerning thought, to be sure. Can you imagine the untold havoc that a rogue Cyclewalker could wreak on the fabric of existence?”
“Officially,” she said, still not bothering to look back at him, “the screening process makes it inconceivable that a Chromatic Agent could ever desert their post. The Academy scans an infinite number of cycles to ascertain your capacity for dereliction.”
“Reassuring,” Earl said, stroking his chin, “and unofficially?”
“Unofficially,” she said, turning to face him, “they don’t. Or they can’t,” she offered a sympathetically reticent look before continuing, “either way, the truth is that if a Cyclewalker was to ‘go bad’, as it were, then there is very little that The Academy — or anybody else for that matter — could do to stop them. They could be in any corner of existence at any moment in time.”
“Hmm,” Earl mumbled ponderously, his mind grappling with one of the many fraught truths of being beyond the bounds of mortal man.
“Why?” Skye asked perkily, “are you thinking of skipping out on us?”
“I would never,” he stated with a gasp, clutching his figurative pearls. The indignation might’ve been feigned but the sentiment was unwaveringly sincere.
“I know,” she smiled up at him, “who do you think did your screening?”
“And yet I still find ways to surprise you, Miss Summers” he said with glee, stepping forwards until he was alongside her.
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said, acknowledging his presence at her side with a brisk lookover, “once you’ve been through the PRISM, you are no longer subject to the constricting rules and patterns of a given cycle; you exist beyond existence, as it were,” her firewater eyes swelled with intensity as she added, “and if you address me as anything other than Skye Blue again, I’ll rip your Q.E.D off myself and dance around in the streaming veil of dust that was once Earl Grey.”
His eternal smirk was unhindered by her threats.
“It’s always stripping with you, isn’t it?” he spoke languidly, stepping in front of her, his back to existence. “First with your demands and now with your threats… I do hope my presence isn’t causing any long suppressed human desires to stir within you.”
Skye couldn’t believe the audacity of this man, not only had he uncorked a lifetime’s worth of existential anxieties, now he was even spoiling her view of the end.
“Why are you so desperate to cling onto this biological stockade? A veneer of mortality, for what?” she raged up at him.
“For this,” he said as he gently cupped her hand in his own, lightly pressing two fingers from his other hand into her wrist and feeling the soft throbbing beneath. “And this,” his words came delicate and earnest as he tenderly placed her enveloped hand against his chest, right over where his heart lay. Earl took a deep breath, one that she could feel between her fingers as his chest swelled. Then, with a fluid motion, he grasped the limb of his sunglasses in his right hand and cast them out into space, watching through naked eyes as they vapourised into a small cloud of smoke before dissipating into the swallowing void of forever.
Skye found herself taken aback, of all the devils that she had pictured populating his eyes — Impertinence, for sure. Irreverence, absolutely. Maybe even some juvenile prurience — she found now only an endless sea of sincerity, and the better angels of innocence sailing therewithin.
“To think on one’s pulses…” he ventured softly, “that thrum you can feel… what would you call it, if not humanity itself coursing through our veins?”
She could only look at him for a moment, her mind trying to find purchase amongst the viscous sentiments pouring from his ardent heart; a heart she could feel thundering in her palm as he finished his plea. Truth be told it was a sensation that quickened her own pulse, if but momentarily.
“No,” she said with a shake of her head, wrenching her hand away and severing the connection, “whatever humanity you and I once had died in the PRISM.” Her face was a graveyard, with eyes that welled with the promise of showers to come; downcast before the downpour.
“Then I suppose it was Skye Blue the dutiful Chromatic Agent that ran all the way to the end of time, searching for a way out,” Earl countered intensely, the challenge rippling in his sepia eyes. Skye was floored by his gall, the nascent storm clouds of tears that had been gathering in her eyes turned scalding with indignation.
“How dare you!” she thundered, jabbing an accusatory finger into his chest, “I can’t believe that you would—”
“It’s not an aspersion,” he pleaded desperately, redirecting her stabbing hand into the encapsulating warmth of his own grasp, “it’s a declaration of profound respect.” His normally straight posture had become bowed as he met her eye level, straining with every fiber to communicate the affecting tremors of his soul.
“How can you say that?” she said tremulously, “a respect for what? My faltering heart, too weak to carry this burden?” The further shakes of her embattled head loosed a few tears from her eyes, she wasn’t just uncorked; the bottle had shattered entirely.
“The day that we first met,” he said stoutly as he produced a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and offered it to her.
“What about it?” she questioned, gingerly taking his offering and dabbing at her watery eyes. Earl could feel a wavering in his being at the sight of her distress, one that he could not abide.
“Do you know what the first thing that struck me about you was?” he asked with gentle determination. He could see the embers of fire glowing in her eyes again, threatening to evaporate the remaining tears.
“I swear to god, if you say my—”
“Your poise,” he said, interrupting her with ultimate conviction, “the way that you carried yourself, you were practically gliding through those aisles with preternatural calm, completely unmoved by the abounding gunfire…” Earl trailed off wistfully, living in the sacred memory, “an angel in a DIY shop, of all places,” he finished with a warm and appreciative smile.
Her vivid eyes softened as she began, “Earl, I—”
“Oh, and yes,” he interrupted, “it would be remiss of me not to also mention that the posterior angle is a very flattering one for you.”
The heat in her eyes flared up once again, burning like a pinwheel against the black as she rolled them.
“I hate to ruin the illusion for you but I knew that those bullets wouldn’t harm me; there’s no courage absent fear,” she said solemnly, dousing his temperate passion with cold reality.
“But that’s exactly my point, Skye,” he pleaded, “at that moment in time, I couldn’t have imagined a scenario more fearful, an act that would require more courage, but… I understand now. It wasn’t gunfire that you faced down with unerring grace, it was the weight of existence. Of every existence.” Earl shook his head sympathetically, disbelievingly, as though he could scarcely comprehend the conviction that she had shown. “To stand beside you now,” he continued, “to feel the keen sting of all those doubts in your heart… there aren’t enough universes in existence to hold all the respect that I have for you.”
Skye held with the stillness of a winter’s morning, the sincerity in his voice rippling through her like a stone cast into her placid waters as she tried to maintain her collected surface tension.
“You should have been given a choice,” she said softly, the regret playing an eerie harmony in her tone.
Earl placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, “I was,” he said, trying to absolve her with all of his might, “and I made it.”
“A real choice,” she said sombrely, laying her hand gently over the one he had placed on her shoulder, “how could you possibly have turned down immortality and the ability to exist beyond time? If only you could’ve understood what that really meant…”
“Immortality?” Earl laughed for what felt like the first time in a long while as a weary smile crept onto his face, “Miss Blue, you are the most brilliant entity that I have ever known and yet you still can’t see what’s standing right in front of you. What is that if not irrefutable proof of humanity? I didn’t give up the life that I knew, the ability to ever see my mum or my friends again, for immortality. It wasn’t for the opportunity to become Earl Grey, dashingly handsome and devilishly clever Chromatic Agent. No,” Earl shook his head and looked deep into her eyes before finishing, “I gave up that life for you, Skye.”
“For me?” her mind reeled as she tried to process. She had been well acquainted with his charm offensive and ceaseless flattery but this… this was something different altogether, something that went clean through the armour of Skye Blue and lodged into the heart of Michaela Summers.
“From the very first moment that I saw you, I…” Earl trailed off, his normally stoic and purposeful body language had become loose and emotive, “I was nobody. Before you, before The Academy. Just a dorky kid stuck in his dead-end job in his dead-end town. You know,” he said, pulling his lips into a pained smile, “it’s not just that I didn’t belong… it’s that I never knew that I could.” Earl swallowed back some of his embarrassment before he said, “And then I saw you. Through the barrage of munitions and the terror in my eyes, glimmering past the wheelbarrows and lawnmowers. From that moment on I knew, wherever you went… that’s where I belonged,” he smiled down at her, watching as she swirled and synthesised new light and emotions in her entrancing eyes. “Of course, little did I know that that vow would come to include whenever you went but here we are, alone together at the end of, well, space and time both, I suppose… and despite the non-zero risk of death, there is nowhere, or when, that I would rather be,” he finished emphatically; within Earl Grey at least, the humanity was very much flowing.
Skye remained deeply adrift in the sea of her mind, grappling with the uncharted waters she found herself in. She couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen this, not in his screening, not in his training. Sure, he was clever (and god did he know it) and even poignant on occasion, but his sincerity was overwhelming; an attribute that she hadn’t even realised that he possessed.
“You felt all that in a moment?” she asked, searching the deepest recesses of his brown eyes for any hint of a coming punchline, any flicker of flippancy, but finding none. “You made such a life-changing decision based on a feeling? On nothing?” she pressed further, the eons of cynicism swarming the incipient fever like antibodies.
“Our feelings are not nothing,” he countered firmly, “if The Academy wanted machines then they would build machines. Why go to the trouble of recruiting humans, if our humanity is such a hindrance?”
Skye baulked, how dare he make cogent points betwixt his impassioned pleas; he was making it so difficult not to feel.
“Humanity doesn’t survive the PRISM, we have to be something more,” she contended, struggling to tell in her heart whether she was truly trying to convince him or merely herself.
“Then why are we here, Skye?” he threw his arms out in exasperation, “Why would you bring me here? Training? Academy policy? Or something far simpler?” he shook his head, freeing a bemused smile, “Why would I follow you to The End? And why would I stay until The End, and beyond, if not at the behest of my yearning heart?”
“Think, Mr Grey, don’t feel. We must become as nothing,” she continued her protestations before adding with a sad shimmer in her eye, “you said it yourself, we are merely utensils.”
“Nothing isn’t what you think it is, Skye,” he entreated with unwavering belief, “that day, in that office, under that desk. Do you know what I was thinking?”
Skye shook her head, “what were you thinking?” she said with a downtrodden spirit.
“Nothing,” he said with a bittersweet lilt, “I knew that I was going to die and yet all that I could think was absolutely nothing. No life flashing before my eyes, no profound revelations… just the complete absence of being.”
Skye was still trying to hold back the turning tides in her eyes, refusing to yield to whatever warmer currents were flowing through her. “What’s your point?” she asked bitterly.
“To feel nothing isn’t bravery, or even cowardice. Nothing is just… nothing. And it will swallow us all if we let it.”
As he finished his statement, he stepped out of her vision, leaving her eyes wide at the sight before her. The infinite lights of existence had now become viscerally finite. They had been embroiled so long in the machinations taking place inside of them that they had paid no heed to the ones happening on a cosmic scale around them. The hungering void that had been steadily eating its way through the fabric of spacetime had accelerated from the slow dimming of stars into an obsidian monstrosity, with darkened tendrils that stretched all around them. Where once had been fields of stars, preponderances of planets, quasars, quarks, everything between; where fires once burned and life twinkled with possibility, now only scant islands of dying lights peppered the infinite abyss.
Skye could feel the breath hitch in her throat, she had seen it before, but… not like this. Before she had welcomed the coming end, hoping that the soothing darkness would finally quell the mechanical gnawing of her tempestuous soul. But now… the image was inverted. This time, with him, she didn’t want to embrace the nothingness, she wanted to hold on to something, to light, to life.
Earl, who had taken his place beside her once more, broke the weighty silence, “For as scary as that is,” he gestured over the doomed cosmos before them, “the most frightful nothing resides here,” he crossed a fist over his burning heart, “and it can swallow you up faster than any amount of time travel could ever fix.”
At last, the long forecasted showers finally came to her ocean eyes as she could no longer stem the tide of doubt, guilt and grief that eroded her.
“You swim in this,” she managed through tear-filled eyes, “how?”
“Time ends… but we shine on, Miss Blue,” he said with his biggest, most reassuring smile. Skye could feel the faint beginnings of a smile of her own.
“And if you don’t like it,” he started playfully, “it’s only forever.”
Her budding smile blossomed into a sincere and profound laugh, even with the tears still meandering lazily down her face. It wasn’t merely the shared suffering that they enjoyed, it was that she knew that he would always be there, ready to lend a stupid joke or a silly little bit of wordplay, no matter the circumstances. It was a sunny thought, one that drove away the nothingness in her heart. For the first time in an eternity, her heart was filled with something.
“Thank you, Earl,” she said, the candor evident in her wavering voice.
He smiled at her warmly, “I only did what you taught me to do. I built my own palette… it just so happens that blue is my favourite colour.”
Skye returned his smile, swallowing back some of the emotional overrun and finding her feet once more.
“You know,” she said, a little strength returning to her voice, “I wasn’t lying,” she patted his shoulder, “It really is terribly cute how hard you try.”
Earl offered no riposte, accepting her shot with a sheepish grin and a downward glance.
And so their attentions resumed on the dying throes of an existence that once held untold lives and stories and that now only they were left to witness.
“You asked me something earlier,” Earl spoke, breaking the penultimate silence.
“Hmm?” she looked up at him with those same inquisitive blue eyes that had burned a watermark into his soul.
“You wanted to know, if all we are is pens… that is, some utensil in an existential pencil case, who is holding us?” he recalled, drinking in the invigorating curiosity that she beamed with.
“Who indeed,” she confirmed.
“Well, I think I know now,” he said surely, extending his open hand to her, “we are,” he spoke with quiet determination as she took his hand into her own. She looked up at him, her face awash with sweetness and adulation.
“Don’t you agree?” he said with all the smoky confidence and impudence that Earl Grey was made from.
“I do,” she said through a wide smile, “I just thought that you would like to have the last word in the universe.”
With amusement dancing across his face, Earl simply nodded wordlessly and gave her hand a comforting squeeze, before looking back to the dimming embers of what had been.
No more words left to be spoken, no more worlds left to turn, the two humans merely held close and braced for The End.