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I was speaking to one of your students the other day. Young Mr. Strider.

...There were times in our conversation when he reminded me a great deal of Elizabeth Comstock, and occasionally of Booker Dewitt — and sometimes of you.

Why?

[More importantly: what precisely had he said to get Robert thinking of such morbid things?]

What did you speak of?

He's told you of his abilities, I presume? We got to talking about the nuanced differences between parallel universe travel and linear universe time travel.

[It isn't so hard to guess, then, what might have happened. Hadn't Strider told her a little already? Doomed timelines, he'd called it, and she'd meant to ask after it, but then she'd gotten distracted. She'd asked after how he resolved his memories instead, and the point became moot.

But he makes copies of himself. He becomes-- not two people, but merely the same person, split in half, gone back in time to enact and reenact something. Because past me witnesses future me performing a certain action, future me's obligated to go through with that, that's how he'd put it. But what happens if future-him doesn't go through that action?

Strider has watched himself die. That alone would be horrifying, but the question also becomes: how often?]

He told you that he died. Or one of his time-traveling copies did. And you thought of you and I, and what you'd nearly gone through.

...He told me of a time he found himself tasked with disposing of his own corpse. He suggested that was only one incident of many.

Rosie, he spoke of it like it was...commonplace...

[She doesn't reply for a long minute.]

He told me he uses his powers exceedingly often. I imagine such powers come with a large learning curve.

Come home soon.

He bears up like you do. You both endure no matter how the deck is stacked against you.

He doesn't want any condolences. I suspect he'd be irritated to know I'd said anything at all, honestly.

[But what you tell one Lutece, you tell the other. That's how it always is. That's how it'll always be.]

I imagine that he doesn't want anyone to ever see his grief.

[And if the unspeakable had happened, if her Robert had died, she would have lashed out at anyone offering something so petty and useless as condolences. She would have snarled that they couldn't understand, and she would have been right.]

Where are you?

Merely walking the streets. Clearing my head. I suppose I got to thinking about the Dewitt that turned up a few weeks back — the same time as when I arrived.

He was still looking for Elizabeth. I asked him where he intended to take her, and he said to Paris, not to New York. It made me wonder which one he was...not, I suppose, that it would really matter for him either way, in the end.

But Dewitt at least had the choice. A weighted choice, a terrible choice, but still a choice. When Mr. Strider makes a choice that defies what the universe has planned for him, he winds up a corpse.

We can't very well fix every wrong, though, can we?

No. We can't. And most especially not here, rendered human as we are. You'll drive yourself mad if you think we can.

It's hard to swallow, even so.

Do you need anything, before I come back? I've still time to pick something up, if you do.

No.

[. . . ]

Not unless you want some kind of alcohol tonight.

...Now that you mention it.

I'll see you in a bit, with a fine old red — and some bourbon.

[And indeed, as promised, it isn't long before he simply appears, as he tends to do, with a wine bottle in one hand and the bourbon in the other, and a general look of idle dishevelment to the rest of his clothes.]

[Rosalind, on the other hand, looks utterly unfazed. Her expression is coldly neutral. If she's rattled by this new revelation about Strider, she's determined not to show it.

And yet it comes out in her actions: the way she crosses the room so quickly the moment he appears; the way she presses up against him, her hands going to tug anxiously at his waistcoat, trying to straighten him out.]

[Ah. Ah, ah, she's as rattled as he is, by this. And really, this is precisely why he'd compared her to Mr. Strider, precisely why he hadn't been wrong in the slightest in his assessment — because there she is, bearing up like a champion, never letting on about the turmoil she might be hiding within...

And yet he knows precisely what she's hiding. He sees how her fingers fumble at his hems, where ordinarily they might be steady and sure.]

You take such good care of me.

[It's not a coincidence, that that's his opener.]

I refused to let you die. I wouldn't-- I refused to let it be a possibility.

[She still doesn't look up at him, though her hands still against his torso. Rosalind stares down at her fingers, pale against the dark fabric of his clothes, and thinks about how he'd looked all those years ago, pale and splattered in blood as he lay in her bed.

She remembers, too, the two of them regenerating quickly enough to see their corpses. That had shaken her. She'd had Robert at her side, of course, but still: it had horrified her, to see his corpse lying in his coffin.]

I don't know what I would have done if you'd died.

We had no idea it would turn out like that. How could we possibly have anticipated the universe might treat every R. Lutece as the same R. Lutece, indiscriminate and unforgiving...

[It's a sort of oblique way of trying to say that it wasn't her fault, and it takes him another minute to try to work out why it is he feels as though he even needs to say that at all. But it's something he'd said to Dave the other day, too, hadn't he? One becomes conditioned to respond with action — and so a failure must therefore mean a lack of action, a personal failing that might have been prevented.

They couldn't have prevented the universe. They couldn't have avoided what unfolded, and still managed to be together. And anything in the world, any world, had been worth being together at last.]

...You're the only one who would've missed me. Before my debut, I didn't even exist to anyone save you.

No one else mattered.

[And it might sound incredibly arrogant to say that, except it holds true both ways. There isn't a person in the world, in any world, that matters to Rosalind as much as Robert does.]

. . . I was so scared to touch you at first. Do you remember that?

I remember...Dewitt, charging down the alley, throwing everything into chaos. He lunged for Comstock, of course — I leapt through in the confusion. Then they were fighting, the tear was unstable...you were yelling...

[He hesitates.]

In all of it, I think even I didn't notice at first how things were going hazy, there was so...much.

[...]

You took my arm. You were frightened, I think? You had my arm as though you were afraid I might be pulled away, the way Dewitt and Comstock were fighting over the girl.

Yes.

[She was terrified of so many things that night. She was afraid Comstock would betray her once he'd gotten the baby, and shove Robert right back through to deal with a furious Dewitt. She was afraid this was all some kind of dream, that he wasn't really there, or it wasn't really him. She was even afraid for the baby, caught in the struggle between two men. God knows there are universes where Elizabeth hadn't--

She's not going to think about that now.]

I took your arm, and then Elizabeth came through, screaming and bleeding. We bandaged her, and Comstock left, and you--

[She laughs breathlessly, entirely without humor.]

You bloody well exploded. You started bleeding out on me right then and there, and god, Robert, there was so much of it. You must have lost at least a pint in the lab, and then by the time I got you to the bed . . .

I didn't know what had set it off. I didn't know what was wrong, and you kept muttering in your sleep, and--

I thought perhaps that was what had done it. Touch. Or-- or something else, or both, I had no idea what any of it meant. And I was never so afraid of losing you as I was that first night.

I don't remember much of that at all — though I suppose it's no great surprise, considering. Did I help with Elizabeth? I truly don't...

[He shakes his head slightly, eventually punctuating the lack of a thought with a shrug to match.]

I remember you would sing. Those moments were clear. The rest...I hardly knew up from down, I think. Although once I seem to recall finding out the hard way — I tried to get up for something and fell, didn't I?

You thought you were late to the atom.

[She takes the bottle of bourbon from him. Grasping his hand, she leads him over towards the couch.]

I'd left to go buy us more food. I came back and you'd collapsed in the hall in a pile of blood. I thought--

[She shakes her head. She'd thought the worst, of course. The one time she'd left, Robert had seen fit to get up, and Rosalind thought she'd never forgive herself for it. She certainly hadn't left the house for the next week or so, too terrified of what might happen.]

You told me, when I put in the IV. Let me up, you told me, I have to talk to Rosie.

...Ah. Yes...of course I would've gotten up for that.

[Of course he would've. Likely it'd come to pass from a rare moment of lucidity — perhaps she'd left a gramophone playing to help center him — and he'd realized he was laid up in bed. Bed would've led to the connection of oversleeping, of having somewhere pressing to be, and what could possibly be more pressing or more urgent an appointment to keep than their nightly rendezvous?

No, he must have been terrified. There isn't much he's able to recall concretely about the things that had passed through his mind during the ordeal, but he remembers clinging to the thought of her. He remembers clinging to the thought of Robert, too, but of course he knows by now why he'd been confused about that.]

You didn't let me up, though, naturally?

Of course not.

[She sits on the couch, waits for him to do the same, and then leans over, resting firm against him. Her head presses against his chest, and she sighs softly to hear his steady heartbeat.]

I told you that it was only six o'clock, that you and Rosie weren't due to talk for another four hours. Eventually you settled down and fell back asleep.

[It's somewhere shortly after the point when her head comes to rest against him that he realizes they have no glasses, despite being satisfactorily armed with red wine and bourbon both. But then, on a night like this, perhaps glasses are overrated — or so he thinks rather grimly, as he sets his bottle of red aside and decides to definitively start forgetting with the assistance of the bourbon.]

I was quite the oaf, I see, when I wasn't wholly possessed of my senses.

[He sighs, though, softly.]

But we did make it, somehow.

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