CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
The blood was coming out faster than he could stop it.
Ives had both fingers pressed into the wound on his throat and it didn't matter. The blood just pushed around them and kept going. He could feel his pulse in his neck — hard and fast at first, then with longer gaps between each beat, like a clock that was running down.
His legs were still working. He was still on the sled. But the information coming from his legs was becoming less clear by the second, like a radio signal losing its tower.
Rhea was saying something above him. He could hear her voice — the sound of it, the panic threading through it — but the individual words had stopped arriving in order. His brain was doing its own version of triage and specific words had been moved to the bottom of the list.
He turned his head.
The man with the shotgun was six feet from Silva.
He was walking slowly. Double barrel, freshly reloaded. His body language said he had done this kind of work before and had no particular feelings about it. Silva had tried to get up and her legs had given her nothing and now she was sitting in the snow with her right arm hanging wrong at her side and her back against the slope and nowhere left to go.
Her right hand was stretched toward Ives.
She wasn't thinking about it. Her arm had just gone out because it was the only thing left to do and the body will reach for anything when it has run out of options.
Ives looked at her face and felt something happen in his chest that had nothing to do with the bullet.
He had seen that exact expression before.
Not on her.
On himself.
The first time was when he was twelve years old and he watched a man with a knife step out from between two parked cars on the street where his mother was walking home. He was ten feet behind her carrying her shopping bag because she had said it was too heavy. He watched the man say something to her. He watched her shake her head and try to walk around him. He watched the knife go in twice, fast, the way it happens in real life and not in films — no build up, no sound, just two quick movements and then his mother was on her knees on the pavement and the man was already walking away.
Ives ran to her.
But the ten feet between them was the longest ten feet he had ever covered and when he got to her and got down next to her and put his hands on her he already knew from the way she looked at him that this was not something his hands could fix.
He had been twelve years old and he had knelt there on a pavement and felt completely outside of time. Everything slowed to almost nothing. He could hear individual sounds — a car horn two streets over, someone's television through a window above them, his own breathing. He watched a drop of blood travel from his mother's side down the pavement stone and find the gap between two stones and disappear into it. He watched that drop and couldn't move. Couldn't scream. Couldn't do anything except be completely and totally aware of every detail of what was happening while being completely unable to change any of it.
That was the first time.
The second was years later in a room he did not let himself think about by name. Jason had brought two of his friends. Ives was fourteen and had made the mistake of being somewhere alone that he should not have been alone. He remembered the door closing. He remembered the smell of that room — cigarettes and something chemical underneath it. He remembered the specific way time had stretched out — the way each thing that happened felt like it lasted forever and also like he was watching it from somewhere outside his own body at the same time.
He had survived it by going somewhere else in his head.
Afterwards he spent three months reconstructing himself into something that could walk through a school corridor and eat breakfast and do homework. The reconstruction took that long because he had to do it carefully — you could not rush it or the whole thing came apart again. He had never told anyone. Not because he didn't want to. Because the words for it didn't exist in any arrangement that felt like it could survive being said out loud.
The third time was the bridge.
Standing at the railing of the bridge that night with nothing — no home, no family, no way forward that he could see. The photos still circulating. His name attached to things he had never done. The weight of all of it so total and complete that it had become almost peaceful. He had looked down at the water and felt the same stretched-out stillness. Every detail enormously clear. The sound of the water. The cold of the railing under his hands. The way the city lights reflected on the surface below.
And then the phone had pinged.
All three of those moments had the same quality. Time didn't stop — that wasn't the right word for it. It stretched. Every second became enormous. He became aware of things at a level of detail that normal life didn't allow especially an invisible weight that seemed to pervade such circumstances like the tragedy itself was a palpable thing.
A mental state were situations could be experienced as physical phenomena.
But it didn't matter, he had never once been able to throw off that weight nor free himself from those nightmares.
He could only experience it. Fully. Helplessly. With total awareness and zero ability to change anything.
He had carried that paralysis with him ever since.
Even after the Wheel. Even after the penthouse and Zeke and Isolde and the order and the armour, all of it. He had built everything on top of that frozen twelve year old on the pavement and the fourteen year old in the room and the boy at the railing. Not through it. On top of it. The paralysis was still there underneath everything he had become. He had just gotten better at not touching it.
Now here it was again.
Silva's hand stretched toward him. The shotgun barrel at her face. His own heart stopping between beats.
Death was already here. He could feel it.
Feel his lungs fold.
Feel his blood turn cold.
Feel his muscles become limp.
Feel his consciousness slowly weakening.
But this felt off, an overwhelming amount of Déjà vu fell on Ives Rothschild.
For some reason, Death was too familiar.
'I've been dead before.'
And then the vault opened.
He had no better word for it.
Inside were memories of other lives, other hims who experienced the reality of death without reset.
Across the multiverse of iterations of himself perishing in increasingly horrifying ways.
From Simple accidents or being a bystander in one major calamity to him being hunted down by the cabal.
One stood out like a sore thumb, it didn't just beckon to him. It swallowed him whole.
He found himself in his own wedding. A full adult possibly in his late thirties with a modest uneventful life, here he was about to tie the knot with a woman he couldn't recognise.
Then it came, the rumble of the earth. People burst into the hall without warning and enacted a massacre. Soon Ives and his bride were on the floor facing eachother, both with holes in their heads. She was the first to go but for some reason before he could the world ended.
The rumble earlier was just the warning the giant had arrived, something happened somewhere and now the world was degenerating, eating itself alive.
Ives could only see the walls break apart revealing a black sphere devouring the horizon.
He had seen this before — in the spatial aberrations on the cliff when Beelzebub activated his device.
Ives entered and watched as time lost all meaning.
He watched as his form and that of the corspe behind him stretch into literally infinity as the boundaries between moments collapsed.
Without this distinction, everything resembled a mosaic sludge as the causal flow contracted on itself stacking the versions, positions of things on itself in one unholy horrifying image that hurt to look at.
The resolution of the universe was coming undone and soon everything stopped appearing as corporeal objects but as distinct trails of waves pulsating, shifting and overlapping in this decaying void.
Somehow the environment inside the singularity created the perfect condition to experience this not just visually but as one of such waves.
One with countless underlying waves which propped it up against the bombardment of other waves outside him.
Everything had a wave, an excitation in the cosmic background and Ives could feel his with such clarity it was terrifying to imagine.
Each thing had its own version of the wave. Its own particular frequency. A signal that said — I am here, I am real, I exist in this causal sequence, this moment belongs to me.
He felt his own wave clearly. The signal his existence was broadcasting.
This was their signature upon space time itself.
A powerful pulse erupted ahead, the resolution dragged even more and this time it exposed the signature of Reality itself. The unique wavelength that Reality itself rode on.
It was the immaterial stream that comprised the cosmic background they all existed in, it conveyed not just space and time but the degree to which something was real. Not whether it was present. How stamped into reality it was. How much the universe had committed to it being true.
The environment inside this singularity had contracted spacetime enough for this wavelength to become concentrated enough to be experienced with obscene clarity.
This was the wave Beelzebub's machine had been interfering with all along.
This was what the aberrations defiled by simply existing.
This was what he was made of.
Death was not written on him right now. It was a conclusion being proposed. There was a difference between those two things and he could feel that difference physically — the way you can feel the difference between a wall and a door even in the dark.
This version of Ives saw an opportunity in the final moments before the world he knew fully ceased, Ives pushed against this reality not with his hands but with the wave projecting of his will.
The intensity of his very existence clashed against the almost nonexistent wave stream of his universe and like a wet sheet of paper it gave way.
His will became reality.
.....
"I won't die!" Ives said to himself as easy as you would narrate what is happening before you.
Not a leap of faith but simply him handpicking his own experience and interaction with reality.
His body had long since lost function and yet it moved.
His muscles. His brain. His nerves.
That didn't matter, the Ives that existed now was no longer bound by such limitations.
The environment within the singularity granted him the opportunity not just to perceive the underlying nature of the cosmic background but to learn how to directly influence it.
His first feat was on himself, turning his will into a force that could survive the death of a whole universe and even countless other timelines.
These memories weren't an accident, he was finally connecting the dots he didn't realise he could see.
Despite not being in the singularity he saw it, the world as he saw it then.
The waves as he remembered them especially that of his own, excitations of ambient cosmic forces flowing and interacting upon the cosmic background and that of reality itself that determined what objectively was and wasn't that pervaded all things.
This was the manifestation of his will within that collasping void, the door he had opened followed him across previous worlds.
Ives Rothschild was different.
The rain of iron beads was mere nanometres away from Silva's face, there was nothing that could save her now.
'Let's do it'
To what Ives had become, there was no boundary between what could and could not be accomplished.
His wave expression of his will conveyed his command, suddenly he moved while the world was still stuck in a single frame of time, Ives matched his physical speed with that of his perception. A feat that required to push against the weight of the world itself, the forces acting on his body in this state was immense like trying to run while carrying a boulder but that pain didn't affect him in the slightest, he ignored it.
Empty space felt like thick sludge.
Every particle of air had resistance now. The sound dropped below hearing. He could see the shot from the shotgun barrel — an actual visible cloud of individual pieces of metal spreading outward in a slow cone toward Silva's face. He could see each pellet separately. Could see the air moving around each one.
He reached out and closed his fist around the cloud.
The resistance was enormous. Each pellet pushed back with the full weight of physics insisting it had somewhere to be. His arm shook. He pushed harder and the pellets ground against his palm and he held them anyway.
He turned his body and found the second attacker in the tree line on the right. Rifle raised. Aimed at the point in space where Rhea's head currently was.
He threw the cloud at the other attackers stopping the advancement of the other bodyguards.
He did not watch what happened. He was already crossing the six feet to the man with the shotgun.
The man was made in the image of someone designed to kill.
Even in the thick slow state he was in, his hands were coming up and his weight was shifting because his body had spent years training itself to respond to threats. His body was doing its job. But this was a fight he couldn't win.
Ives took his gun from him and threw it aside, locked his right hand around his neck and then gave full blows with the left.
Ives hit him.
There was no technique in it. No training. He poured out all his repressed anger and pain in each strike.
Just everything he had been carrying since he was twelve years old on a pavement watching a man walk away from his mother. Everything from the room. Everything from the bridge. Every morning on his aunt's floor. Every time Curtis laughed and every photograph Luke posted and every day he had been alive in a world that treated his existence as optional.
He hit him with all of it.
The thickened air made each blow land with a weight that normal physics would not have allowed, Ives allowed himself to return to the normal flow of events.
….
Rhea felt a strong push and Ives was no longer with her, a defeaning bang and the attackers fighting against the guards where killed in a spray of bullets so powerful it could pierce two feet of reinforced steel.
Then another gust of air, Ives appeared in front of Silva holding the headless body of her attacker.
"How?" Silva questioned if she was still alive.
"Ives!" Rhea shouted and ran to Ives, she checked his neck and the bullet wound was non-existent but Ives no longer resembled the man she knew.
His eyes held a dark omnious gaze that could make someone fall into the abyss but Rhea was unbothered.
She smiled tearfully,
"Thank you, Saviour." Rhea chuckled slightly after saying this and Ives' expression softened. He held her face and stroked it.
"It's my duty to protect you. Don't worry."
The Bodyguards arrived, they too having witnessed the supernatural event take place didn't know what to make off it and Ives wasn't willing to explain.
He went to Silva and picked her up in a bridal position helping carrying the disillusioned girl down the remaining slope. While others struggled not to sink in the snow Ives moved with unnatural ease.
In his arms cradled like a child, Silva asked.
"You're like her. Aren't you?".