The vortex spat out, back into my body, and I could feel Henry still hugging inside the crystalline world as I leaned against him.
I pressed my palms against my eyes to suppress the emotional turmoil over this fucked-up situation.
Here I was, able to lean on him, yet he was all alone there. Fuck. I hate myself, this situation, and that I conjured up his past self in the first place.
Even if I would have lost my mind completely, I wished it were only a few days for him and months or years for .
FUCK!
Henry nibbled at my ear.
"Did he—did I do sothing?" He asked with a slight growl.
"No." My voice ca out more choked up than I wanted to admit.
"Your present self is just going crazy with loneliness, and I fucking hate the fact that I can’t do a thing about it."
Not for now.
This shitty ability had turned useless, and that’s all because of the even shittier giant.
If you give the power, then LET USE IT PROPERLY, GODDAMN IT!
I still don’t know how I even turned up inside this crystal world?! But I know it was his fault as well.
"Don’t worry about him. He will survive it." Henry advised nonchalantly, apparently not feeling for his present self’s misery, not even a bit.
"Fuck," I cursed. Should I tell that dumb dog not to be so cruel to himself? What even is this damn situation?
I could hear the commander talking to the office guys and the child not far away, repeating what I had said to Mr. Aslan, the others translating it for the woman to understand.
I closed my eyes, imagining the letters that I held with foreign hands in the dark room lit by moonlight, while Henry held onto inside this foreign body.
Please. Please. I need these letters, no matter what they contain.
I conjured them up, and it worked.
"Haaa." Naturally, it would.
There was no reason to fret over sothing like this; it was child’s play for my shitty ability.
I could take things out of the past I had witnessed, and I had witnessed the mont Henry put the letters in Patrick’s hands, holding onto them while looking at them, plainly and clearly seeing that they weren’t mine.
Still, I breathed a long sigh of relief, clutching onto the envelopes as if they were my lifeline. I didn’t want to give them out to the others; I just wanted them right here in my hands instead.
There were three envelopes, one of them really thick, which I hadn’t noticed before.
I took the envelope on which was written ’Past Henry’ and reluctantly gave it to the dog behind before fighting my way out of his embrace.
"A letter from your future self." I told him and finally managed to get a few steps away.
First, I looked at the letter for the commander. I opened it, wanting to know what the present Henry had to say to him.
’I took good care of your family. Take good care of mine—Kenny. I saved a file on the computer in your office, explaining what we know about the parallel worlds and portals. Look through it, and use the information.’
That letter was written by soone who seed absolutely sane and appeared legitimate.
Did I worry too much about him? Was the dog still okay?
A bit moved by what he wrote, I put the commander’s letter in my pants and looked at Henry still sitting against the tree, seeing him frown at the letter he had received.
"Selfish bastard." He mumbled before acidifying the paper in his hands, together with the envelope.
I raised my eyebrows, curiosity nearly killing . I should have read that one beforehand as well.
"What did he write?"
Henry’s eyes t mine, and although he was still grumpy, it was as if his mood lifted just by looking at .
"I will tell you later." He answered, unhappy again, so I had to let it go.
I finally ripped open my envelope, with ’Kenny’ written on it with red ink.
I was a bit surprised; the first page only had bullet points about the recent things happening on their side. All in all, it didn’t even take half a minute to read through it.
Fuck, what did I expect?
Did I really expect a cringy love letter?
No fucking way... but there were about forty or so more pages besides the first one anyway.
I read through the first page again.
He wrote about constant electricity blackouts since the lightning disaster and that because of that, energy was saved during the nights in the whole country. Absolute darkness at night because of that. Apparently, people had started to seldom venture out at night long before that, due to the constant dangers from either the climate or people who had gone crazy because they thought (and were right about) the apocalypse being near.
The police and military had also long since given out a curfew.
Instead of light, these two forces were patrolling the streets after darkness—if you ask , I’d say they made that asure to keep people from suddenly getting sucked into portals for at least half the ti of a day, or they need the energy they save up with this for sothing else.
Stores, restaurants—everything—had to be closed by the ti the sun set, with the exception of hospitals, which could only use light for operations or ergencies.
This setting really felt sowhat apocalyptic.
Furthermore, Henry wrote about their training having intensified again; the first few people had already signed their lives away for ’the mission.’ He wrote it like that, not saying what ’the mission’ exactly ant.
I still held onto my bet that they want the center people to mine in a parallel world for natural resources. Well, the center surely was not wasting any ti.
That was it.
I turned the page, but there was nothing on the other side, and the next page in the stack was a blank, empty sheet of paper.
I grabbed the empty paper and took a look at the one behind it, which was full of black ink.
At first, I didn’t really recognize what I was staring at, but it didn’t take that long.
My na—it was my na written down with black ink hundreds, or thousands, of tis on that piece of paper.
’.....KennyKennyKennyKenny.....’ The page was so full that the only white visible there was because of the different sizes of the letters.
I turned the page around, and it was the sa on the other side, only that he had written my na mirrored there so that neither text would shine through the other side of the paper.
The next page was the sa, and when I turned it around, once more a bunch of ’ynneK’s stared back at .
The next page was the sa.
The next page was the sa.
The next, the next, the next...
I didn’t count, too imrsed in taking in what I was seeing, but there were approximately forty pieces of paper, both sides counted, adding up to eighty pages.
"If you grin this pervertedly at sothing my future self wrote, this self—right here—won’t be happy." Henry’s voice sounded a bit twisted.
"He is you, and you are him; shut up." I said hoarsely, only now registering that my heart was beating out of my chest and that my hands were trembling so much I could hardly read each of the ’Kenny’s and ’ynneK’s.
The last paper had the mirrored side first, and at the end of the page stood sothing other than my reversed na.
I stared at the mirrored sentence, spellbound, my brain not registering what it said, but my trembling hands not moving to turn the paper around to read the properly written sentence on the other side.
I just felt my blood rush through my body and the thrumming of my heart as my eyes traced the last line from right to left, again and again.
.denodnaba fi citsillab nrut lliw dog sih htiw evol ni god A
em evas ;yrruH
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