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[The first time.]
Abaddon is unsure of this host of the hotel- a taller, lankier human, commonly donned in blue. This patriarch calls himself “Nathan”, and calls Abaddon a… “buddy”, or a “bud”, more commonly. He had pulled him from the pit of Abaddon’s own making, dusted off the grime from his shoulders, and looked at him with the same initial pity and misplaced kindness most of humanity gives him upon a first meeting.
But that kindness did not fade, even with the dark conjured spells, the screams that shattered glass, the dead mice and squirrels that began to pile on the porch…
This “Nathan” was rather stupid, Abaddon began to think. Stupid and naive.
But stupid and naive are perfect aspects to a follower, Abaddon settles. He commands for food and offerings, and it is given to him- he commands for attention, and attention he has.
He wishes for his scales and feathers to preen in pride, wishes to be again taller than this hotel’s ruler so he may laugh down upon him, rather than the other way around. How condescending it is, to have his hair ruffled, his skin wiped clean of blood, his plate filled every morning. But it is…
Nice.
Or, bearable, that is. For a demon as he to be coddled and cleaned with care.
…Months had gone by, Abaddon presumes- time itself so boring and instantaneous for him- when Nathan began to quiet.
Eggs and bacon in the early dawn were replaced with bland toast and no other figure at the table, even when Abaddon kicked his toast to the ground and demanded better of Nathan. The patriarch in question instead slept in his chair, only awaking for small bouts of sustenance and a cleanse.
And Abaddon… he was angry, confused. He felt robbed, stolen from.
Where was the Nathan that danced with the ghosts in the parlor and urged him to join in the pointless act? Where was the Nathan that pat his head and pinned his imagery of victory to the “fridge”?
He had left, he had returned, and now he had vanished, morphed into something different. This was no cheat day of sloth and sweets, this was other, this was infuriating.
That anger rushed from his little chest to his head, flushing red in fury whenever Nathan brushed off he, Abaddon, dark prince! It festered in his gut as he crawled through the vents for hours on end, or underneath floorboards for long, dust-filled days.
Was it… was it him? Did Nathan grow tired of having Abaddon as his ward, to serving him with attentiveness? Perhaps Abaddon should not have grown used to this after all.
…
When he found Nathan dead, he wasn’t… surprised, per se. Rather, he was disappointed it’d ended the way it did.
He kicked the bottle of pills that had rolled out of Nathan’s hands, and looked up at the vomit and drool dripping from the slacked jaw of his… follower? Host?
Whatever he was to Abaddon, it’d be gone soon and risen again with no physical connection to this plane. Stupid, Abaddon thinks, sitting at the foot of Nathan’s chair and staring at that which is trapped within the magic box, the reflection of his frown appearing when the screen intermittently goes dark. Stupid and naive.
He’ll… miss this, he thinks.
He pops a grape from the side table into his mouth, crunching it hard and imagining the juice was fluid from an eyeball bitten. The sweet flavor ruins the fantasy, but the smell of a rotting body keeps it going.
It’s… comforting. It’s like home.
[The second time.]
A pact was made, a foundational promise- she-mon, demon, always scheming. Between the flood of molten lava, screams of the dying, and the splashes of the Freelings’ corpses and ghosts falling into the core, Abaddon finds it- the artifact to the beginning of time.
The world rewinding and remoulding itself is mind-numbingly boring. He sees the explosions of war, the loudness of revolution, the mocking of it all in themed restaurants. He hides away in tombs and dirt and trees, passing the millenias one after the other with pointless hobbies.
When Nathan finds him again, he’s caught by surprise. His boredom clouded his recollection of the decades, the date of which it’d all fall back into motion, this little blip in time he’d wronged and needed to right.
He looks up at the hotel’s current owner, sees the rising and falling of his chest, smells the blood pumping in his veins, feels the sweat from his palm clasping onto his own small hand- and he smiles.
He had missed Nathan’s breakfasts, and as much as he adored Froot Loops so, he would welcome the satisfying aroma in mornings to come. He had missed a lot of things from so, so very long ago, in another timeline, another world.
When Nathan pulls Abaddon from the pit, he immediately demands what Esther and Ben had called a “pig-back ride”, and grins in victory as Nathan chuckles and sits him high above the soil and upon his shoulders.
But the few months of the hotel being accompanied by Nathan’s heartbeat are so very short. Again, Nathan leaves- for family, Abaddon now knows, having asked this time around. And again, Nathan returns, different. Hollow.
“Human Nathan,” Abaddon calls to him from the doorway, differentiating this Nathan from his dead self. “You have changed and I demand to know why- you will not leave me unanswered.” He asserts with a stomp of his foot.
Nathan turns around in bed, hair a mess and with reddened eyes to accompany it. For the first time in a while, he looks annoyed, angry even, at Abaddon- and he rejoices in this. But the anger doesn’t last long, and Nathan turns back around, avoiding Abaddon’s gaze completely.
“...It’s human stuff. You won’t get it,” Nathan mumbles, and refuses to reply any further to Abaddon.
It’s an effective method to annoy Abaddon into leaving, with a groan and a stomping of feet. He doesn’t know why he feels the urge to know- it’s not like it will matter soon anyway. He’s not stupid- he knows the signs of a wavering soul. He’s a demon, after all.
Nathan lasts two more days before Abaddon finds him slumped over in the chair again, bile on his shirt and the lights off with only the magic box awake.
He doesn’t understand why Nathan would go through with something so pointless, knowing the hotel’s infestation of ghosts and its knack for keeping souls grounded here. He doesn’t understand why this Nathan is something so other from what Abaddon had grown to know twice over.
Abaddon stares at Nathan’s body with a curled lip for a long time, lost within his thoughts and questions Nathan had refused to answer, and he scoffs. He can’t wait for the better Nathan to arrive, and for the rest of the Freelings to come soon after.
He grabs a grape from the bowl on the side table, and bites into it as he leaves the room- it’s sour and soft on one end, crunchy on the other.
He doesn’t want to wait this out for the guest to arrive and find the rotting body. He calls the phone with the only number he knows, that Nathan had tried to teach him, and that Katherine had successfully taught him.
The policemen arrive, ready to bring a lonely child along with the corpse, but Abaddon is already in the lake nearby, enjoying the tightness on his body’s lungs and throat, and the digging of sand into his palms.
[The twenty-second time.]
This is getting tedious. Tedious and annoying and teeth-grindingly maddening.
But every time Abaddon finds himself in that hole, in that pit of his own making, tossing pebbles and sticks for days and night over until he is found, he feels his limbs untense, his strained eyes soften. He just has to wait a little longer now, and he can start the important part again, enjoy it whilst it lasts.
This time, he tells himself, waiting for the sun to reach the sky, this time he will have it all. He will have his powers, and he will have Esther, and Ben, and Heather, and Katherine and… Nathan. He will have it all, he swears it. This time for sure.
Nathan’s face is shaded by the sunlight behind him, but his outreached hand is friendly enough a gesture to put a smile on Abaddon’s face for the first time in many, many eons. He is content this time around to keep a grasp on Nathan’s hand, crunching on dead leaves as they walk.
Abaddon, more and more by each timeline spent, is keener to spend this time he has with Nathan, rather than in vents and graveyards. Katherine does not ruffle his hair the same way, Esther does not softly bump her knuckles to his cheek the way Nathan does to tease him.
And the thing is- as Abaddon has begun to realize- he will miss it. Sometimes, further down in timelines, Abaddon will hope he fails, only for another chance to revisit these infinitesimal moments- and then he chases the thought away as soon as it arrives.
This time around, Nathan comments so often to the ghosts about the hotel that they must’ve been dead wrong about the little demon boy and his horridness. The ghosts in question will raise eyebrows and whisper whenever Abaddon draws them together to be placed upon the fridge, or climbs atop Nathan’s back demanding to be ran about.
When Nathan leaves, Abaddon knows he’s not coming back the same. He’s known for a while now, and crawls into the vents, scattering bones to keep his interest in the coming weeks of the other Freelings’ arrival. And when Nathan returns, Abaddon is nowhere in his sight.
Abaddon cringes at the muffled sounds of Nathan’s crying coming from his room, ignores the calls for his name, and sighs to himself waiting for what’s bound to happen.
Occasionally, a ghost will pop their heads into the vents, relaying his position to Nathan. Nathan will call to him, wondering what he’s done, but Abaddon does not want to talk to this Nathan- no, not at all. Not after so very many times of demanding answers, demanding him fixing himself, for it to be futile.
Nathan kills himself only five days after returning. Abaddon wonders why, an indescribable sick feeling in his gut, like when he’s too nice to a stranger for Katherine, or when he overeats on rats and yogurt. Why so soon after, why during this timeline?
And again, just like the past twenty-two times, a bottle of pills has toppled to the ground, the tee-vee playing the same moving imagery, a bowl of grapes on the side table.
Abaddon crawls onto Nathan’s lap, sits upon his knee, and watches the moving images with him. Grapes have long since lost their flavor to him- much too sour like the stench of bile, much too crunchy like the sound of stepped-on loose pills.
“I wish you wouldn’t, sometimes,” Abaddon mumbles, settling in to watch the movie with a sigh. “I don’t understand you.”
The ghosts whisper about the room, but never step into it. Abaddon pays it no mind other than the occasional glare, and when the room goes dark, the tee-vee blank, Abaddon sleeps for the first time in two timelines, only awaking by the scream of a stumbling stranger.
He sprints to the vents before he can be taken. He gnaws on dried up squirrel flesh and waits, and waits, for Katherine to get the call, for Esther’s voice to be the first that echoes through the hotel, for Nathan to come out of hiding in his ghostly form.
Only then do things start to feel… Better.
[The seventy-sixth time.]
It stopped being comforting fourty-four histories ago.
Nathan will rub his hair, carry him into the bath after being bloodied with guts and veins, pat his back at any job well done, but it’s useless to dwell on it now. He doesn’t have the time to dwell on it now.
For every kind gesture Nathan sends his way, Abaddon can only bask in it for so long before his mind is plagued again.
He can’t think of anything. Seventy-six times going back through all of time, and he can’t think of anything to get everything he wants. He wants friendship through the end-times, ruled by him. He wants glory during their adventures, praised for strength and prowess.
And he can’t have it. He refuses to accept this.
Nathan treats him like a dog with teeth always bared- hands up in defense at any hello or how are you, and gently picks up crumpled papers of drawn ideas, all deemed wrong, irrelevant. Even the ghosts wary of his growls and glares, and his time is spent in the hotel pacing and talking aloud in angry mumbles.
But what finally takes Abaddon by surprise, what makes him stop in his spiral, is the fact that Nathan does not announce his leave. He does not announce when he comes back, either.
In fact, Nathan is long dead before Abaddon even realizes it.
A guest walks through the hotel while Abaddon is digging through the closet behind the counter- and clears her throat rather annoyingly.
“Little boy? Do you know who runs this hotel?” She asks, voice preppy and high-pitched and-
And Abaddon recognizes this voice. He snaps his head over to her, wondering where of which he’s heard her, where she’s seen her, and then it clicks.
His eyes widen and he bolts it to The Room- to Nathan’s chair- and he stills.
Nathan’s body is pale and, upon slowly reaching over to touch, is ice cold. The grapes are rotten, the movie long over, the room dark. The entire room smells of death, and as the lady follows him into the room yelling, she gags and doubles over to vomit- only then does she scream.
Abaddon ignores her. He stares at Nathan’s corpse, and slowly but surely, he crawls onto the arm of the chair, Nathan’s arm knocking back over into his own lap.
Abaddon’s lip quivers, eyebrows furrowed in anger, and he cannot fathom why he feels so wrong. He leans forward onto Nathan’s shoulder, an acidic stench filling his nose, but he buries his face into his shoulder anyway, hugging the limp arm attached to it.
He missed it.
Every time, he had been there when the body was warm. He watched the show with him, ignored the bowl of grapes with him. And it was nice, those few silent hours, acknowledging time was moving forward as it should.
And Abaddon… missed it.
Red and blue lights flicker outside the hotel’s windows, and Abaddon bares his teeth at the men who enter, daring them to take Nathan. But his body is feeble, and Nathan is taken indeed, along with Abaddon himself.
He tolerates the room with soft-spoken suited-up people with their boards and clasped hands, pitying him, talking down to him so horrendously. He quite literally bites off the hand that tries to feed him one morning, and by the time he makes it back to the hotel, he had missed Katherine, Esther, and Ben arriving too.
This next time, he’ll get it for sure.
…He hates this timeline.
[The ninety-ninth time.]
Abaddon is so very tired, and so very angry. He just needs to get this right, and then he can finally stop. And oh, how he wants to stop so very badly.
When Nathan finds him this time, he is not flicking pebbles and twigs in a made-up game to pass the time. He is curled up, asleep, still with a furrow in his brow through his dream.
“Oh,” Nathan gasps quietly to himself, slowly lowering into the pit. “Poor kid…”
Abaddon is carried gently out of the pit and set upon the grass for Nathan to kneel next to him, and host onto his back into a piggy-back ride- Abaddon, still fast asleep, unconsciously burrows his head into the crook of Nathan’s neck, grumbling.
The ghosts look utterly bewildered when Nathan walks back through the hotel doors, carrying the infamous demon child fast asleep upon his back. Abaddon is laid to rest in a soft bed, tucked in with a comforter, the ghost occupying the room shooed out for the time being.
When Abaddon awakes, he is warm, and when he awakes, Nathan’s snores nearly lull him back to slumber. He is confused on how he’d gotten to this room, how Nathan had already found him- he did not remember the walk over here, nor did he remember ever willingly sleeping.
He looks to the side of the bed- Nathan is slumped over in a desk chair, arms crossed and slouched. The sight unnerves Abaddon until he sees Nathan shuffle in his sleep, snores interrupted with a snort, and his eyes flutter shut in relief with a sigh.
He doesn’t have time for this. This is why he doesn’t like to sleep- he misses things. Important things. He… he missed out on holding onto Nathan’s hand when he’s pulled out of the pit- on a tour to a hotel he already knows front and back, on his first bowl of Froot Loops at the kitchen table.
Abaddon stares again at Nathan, at the rise and fall of his shoulders, and feels like screaming. He’s so sick of feeling like things are out of his control.
There is an uncontrollable burning feeling in his throat that makes him feel like his old demonic self is crawling his way through his esophagus and biting and breathing flame from his lungs.
Something drips from his eyes down onto the pillow, staining it a deep crimson. Once the liquid falls from his face, it does not stop. The burning in his throat makes him gasp for air, an unfamiliar and strange bodily reaction, for Abaddon needs not for the oxygen on this planet, nor has he ever.
The hiccups and gasps from himself awaken Nathan with a jolt, who fiercely blinks his eyes and looks around the room swiftly in confusion. When his eyes land on Abaddon, his jaw goes slack, his eyes wide with horror.
He flails, placing either hand on Abaddon’s shoulders and lifting him up from the bed. He yells in concern and fear, wiping blood from the demon boy’s eyes, only serving to smear it around his face further.
The gesture only serves to make Abaddon feel as though he is being torn apart from the inside; he has not felt a pain like this since a cross had been burned into flesh.
He wails and screams, the edges of the room’s windows cracking, the lamp aside the bed flickering. It is a full body thing, the shuddering and seizing accompanying the cries.
He is so… angry. He is so angry and sad and he is a failure, and he is maddened by these feelings. Why can’t he have both? Why can’t he stop going back again and again, losing again and again? He hates this- he hates, he hates, he hates.
He screams this out to the world, to Nathan. And the grips on his shoulders loosen, and are replaced with a rubbing hand on his back, with a presence beside him sitting on the bed. Hands hold gently but firmly onto his wrists when he tears at his scalp and eyelids; a soft whisper shushes him as he roars.
How easy this would be if Abaddon could abandon this world altogether. How EASY it would be if he could die in this accursed BODY-
“Stop that,” Nathan’s voice cuts through, tight. “Don’t ever say that.”
Abaddon looks up at Nathan, teeth biting through his lip enough to bleed, face red and smeared with blood, eyebrows furrowed. And Nathan… he is staring at him with wet eyes of his own.
“Please,” Nathan reaffirms, voice softening. “Don’t say things like that.”
Abaddon lets his head fall down, and is silent for a very long time- long enough for the bloodied tears to halt and the tight burn of his throat to fade some.
He thinks to himself in this silence, that he has no time for tantrums like this. He has planning to do, perhaps for the rest of time, and for time after that, and after that- if his track record is anything to go by.
He collects himself, enjoying the rubbing up-and-down on his back that Katherine will do whenever he gets sick from niceness. But it does not distract from the ugly feeling still curdling inside himself, from the thought sticking in his head that how is Nathan the one to tell him this?
He bites his tongue and says what Nathan wants to hear most.
“Okay,” He says, voice hoarse and lying.
“Okay,” Nathan replies.
Time moves forward as always.
…
Nathan is gentler, in this timeline- his hair-ruffles and humor is softer, secluded. He takes the time to wipe up Abaddon’s bloodied face after forest meals with a sponge bath, rather than holding him out far away and dropping him in a tub. He will sit next to Abaddon for breakfast, rather than across, bumping elbows and rattling on about the day.
It is… strange, indeed. Sometimes it’s infuriating and babying, but other times it’s enjoyable, memorable, grounding, most of all. It’s a break.
When Nathan leaves snacks at the edges of the vent grates, when he takes the time to make a closet into Abaddon’s own “nest”, it makes Abaddon wish… Well.
It makes him hope this time’s the charm.
When Nathan gets ready to leave for this timeline, Abaddon knows he won’t return the same. He sighs heavily, knowing what’s to come- but Nathan again takes Abaddon off guard.
He asks if Abaddon wants to come with.
A family visit, he tells him, to comfort his sister and niblings in a tough time.
Abaddon stares wide-eyed at his guardian, unnerved. It was… Katherine, this whole time? And Esther, and Ben? They had been the ones to spiral Nathan following his leave?
He doesn’t know what to make of this. For so long, he’s stewed in fury over knowing nothing of this leave- perhaps that Nathan’s soul had been siphoned of its energy, or his happiness eaten by a sprite. For so long, he’s decided it’s not even worth it to ask.
Abaddon stares at Nathan’s packed suitcase, then back up at his face.
“No,” Abaddon tells him.
Nathan leaves with a wave and pat on the cheek, telling the ghosts to take good care of him, and telling Abaddon to call if he needs him back.
When Nathan closes the door behind him, Abaddon calls out his name quietly.
He does not come back.
…
Things are too strange, now. Nathan has returned, but he is not gone anymore. He carries a sadness in his face as before, but he still sits with Abaddon at mornings, does not waste away in his bed or chair, does not cry alone in his room staring at medicine bottles and his phone.
For a while, it makes Abaddon rejoice. This can be fixed, yes! When the other Freelings arrive, Nathan and he can rejoice together in a “group hug” for once, can eat breakfast all together for once, can-
Oh, but then Abaddon remembers. Remembers that Nathan’s leaving and changing and dying stem from that family itself.
…Does that mean they will never come to the hotel?
That thought bites at Abaddon, gnawing on the back of his mind for first, a few days- and those span into weeks.
The guest that would find Nathan’s body comes and goes with a week-long stay, and is celebrated with an ice-cream carton just for Abaddon, as Nathan proclaimed. Abaddon begins to like the events of this timeline less and less, and miss the rest of the Freelings more and more.
For as much as Nathan spoils him, it’s getting lonelier as the days go on. What if the cult appears when Abaddon has not even met everyone else yet? He won’t be able to protect them from the apocalypse when they’re not even here.
Abaddon drifts away from Nathan, wanting time to move forward as it should, but not wanting to relive the sick feeling in his stomach when it’s he who leaves Nathan to his… ideas.
But as careful as he tries to be, as he can be, it cannot last forever.
It was a slip of the tongue, really- truly, it was an accident. A misinterpreted thought.
“Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?” Abaddon wonders aloud one morning at the table, and then realizes what he’s said.
Nathan is very, very quiet, dropping his fork that had been ready to deliver a bite of homemade pancake into his mouth.
He looks hurt beyond measure, and both carefully blank at the same time. He asks Abaddon what he had said, and Abaddon refuses to speak, running off to the vents in shame, abandoning his own plate.
He feels… cowardly. He doesn’t like it.
Abaddon… doesn’t know what to do. He hugs onto his collection of bones and an empty ice-cream carton above the parlor, waiting for Nathan to call for him.
Nathan does not. He retreats to his room, no word uttered with any intent for Abaddon to hear.
…
When Abaddon crawls out of the vents the next morning, there is no one left in the hotel to wipe the budding blood from his eyes. He climbs upon Nathan’s lap, clings to his shirt and stains it red.
Crying, Nathan had called it.
Weakness- a weakness only Nathan has witnessed. A weakness that only Nathan will witness.
Con Air plays at low volume from the television, providing the only light source in the room, illuminating the image of a hundred billion-year-old child and his guardian.
No guest finds the rotting corpse- no policemen shout around the building, or take him away. Katherine does not call, nor does anyone else.
The one who finds Nathan’s body with Abaddon still clinging to it, is Nathan.
“Abaddon?” His ghostly visage calls out, horrified and sickened. “What happened?”
“...You choked on grapes during movie time.” Abaddon mutters, continuing the lie told a hundred times over.
He hates this timeline.
[...And after the Decision was made.]
A calmness has settled in his vessel’s bones, a hundred timelines of stress settled with a mind finally made. Not just a blip after all, not after reliving it so many times over- maybe once, it’d been considered so, but now it is more.
He supposes that his heightened attitude, his absolute relief palpable on his face, is noticeable in leagues. He knows they did not believe him, per se, irritating as it was, but he knows the cogs are turning in their heads.
But there is no more need for explaining it- it’s over, after all. He’s chosen friendship.
However, although he can breathe a pleasant sigh at the end of this promise, there are still questions he would like answers to- that he needs answers to. And those answers lie within Nathan and his ghostly self.
“Nathan,” Abaddon greets him the day after, peering over the arm of his chair, startling him out from his… odd positioning of sleep, phasing halfway through the back.
Nathan flails and snorts, yelling about how he doesn’t sleep- it makes Abaddon smile for a moment, their small habit shared.
“Oh- Abaddon, bud, hey!” He greets, rapidly blinking the sleep from his eyes. “What- uh, what’d’ya need? If it’s about yogurt again, I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Kathy-”
“Why did you kill yourself?” Abaddon interrupts.
Nathan’s face immediately falls, taken aback.
His mouth opens, no words coming out, and shuts again as his expression turns to contemplation.
“...Why are you asking, Abaddon?” Nathan asks quietly. “I don’t think it’s anything you have to worry yourself over.”
“But I have,” Abaddon asserts, climbing up to sit on the arm of the chair, perched like a bird. “I meant it. I’ve lived through this world’s history a hundred times over. I’ve lived through… events. A hundred times over.”
Nathan stares, horror dawning upon his face as his expression drops further, a mixture between sadness and disbelief.
“This isn’t some prank? You didn’t- Abaddon.” Nathan shudders. “Tell me I didn’t kill myself while you were here- a hundred times.”
“But that would be lying,” Abaddon tilts his head, leaning against the back of the chair. “I just want to know… why. You knew you’d become a ghost, surely.”
Nathan’s breath hitches as he inhales, and he finally looks away from Abaddon to face the television, staring at them in it’s reflection.
“I don’t remember it, Abaddon. I can’t answer your question entirely,” He says quietly, after a moment of silence. “I just… Sometimes, I’d have bad days. Still do. It was a mistake, what I did, and- and I wish I hadn’t.”
Abaddon does not reply at first, soaking in Nathan’s words. He understands, in a way, that turmoil, and longing for death- but not like he’d seen of Nathan. He wishes he could remove this skin from his true self, accomplish renewed life upon death, but to cease his own existence is incomprehensible.
He hears Esther and Ben shout as they’re chased out the door by Katherine, on their way to school, and hears the ghosts begin to walk about in the absence of the three.
“I have one more question,” Abaddon hums, picking at the loose threads of the chair. Nathan turns to him, face exhausted.
“...Sure, bud. What is it?”
“Why the grapes? And the- ‘movie’,” Abaddon stutters. His brows furrow as he stares at nothing. “You’d have a bowl of grapes on the side table, you’d have the same Con Air on the tele-vision, you’d always be sitting in this chair.”
Nathan sighs, and laughs without mirth.
“...Ah. I’ve always… wanted people to have this- this idea, of me. For when I did die.” He hums. “I guess it’s hard to explain. I guess that’s why I wished Kathy’s lie… wasn’t one. Dying doing what I love, and all. I wanted to.”
“...You’re right,” Abaddon replies. “I don’t understand that. I don’t think I… understand you, Nathan.”
Nathan does not respond, only smiles bitterly at him, glancing at him for a moment. Abaddon furrows his brows and frowns, pulling his knees to his chest. He wishes he could lean against Nathan, one last time.
“But I will forever be grateful to have you, dear patriarch.” He announces, resting his chin atop his knees and meeting Nathan’s gaze. “And your breakfasts will be missed. It was… what made revisiting it all worth it, sometimes.”
Nathan’s shoulders drop in surprise, eyebrows rising. His expression slowly shifts into something warmer, yet something sadder. He reaches a hand out, but stops, remembering it would make no contact.
“...I’m glad to hear that, bud.” He says, sniffling.
Abaddon scratches at the chair, clipped nails sinking into it.
“I watched it with you every time, you know,” He admits. “Or- almost every time. The movie. The Con Air. After you were… done.”
“Oh, Abaddon.” Nathan sounds horrified.
“I still don’t understand it,” Abaddon interrupts whatever spiel Nathan would go on. “...Perhaps you can talk about it as it plays, like Ben will do. …And show me how to use the ‘remote’.”
They indeed spend the rest of the morning and afternoon experimenting with the remote, the DVD player, and the “wi-fi”- and when Katherine comes home with a to-go coffee cup in her hand, she turns the movie on herself, despite the two’s assertions that they could have figured it out themselves.
The movie still doesn’t make much sense to Abaddon, even as Nathan narrates the whole thing, excitedly points at the screen during his favorite scenes, and even as Katherine comes to join them and criticize it (with love, she says).
But it’s… enjoyable. Livelier than it had ever been before. It eases the festered guilt, the anger, the strange sadness that’d cultivated through hundreds of billions of years of rewinded timelines.
…He thinks he’s made the right choice, after all.
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