🗽

The water on the edge of the Hudson river makes almost no sound as it laps the shores in lazy, tender motions. A trickle of it drips through the cracks in the legs of the wooden pier and branches out in veins; new worlds are created along the edges, drawing ephemeral maps and roads and rivers, all doomed to disappear once the water recedes and the sun burns them to a crisp.

Ginny counts those worlds; she imagines empires raising and falling, leaders propped up and immediately toppled—the rapid succession between end and beginning of civilizations, as quiet as night falling.

It’s a Thursday morning in mid-July. The weather is warm—too warm, in fact, for Ginny’s British composition. Everything is sticky and sweaty and blurry with heat; she’s wearing the lightest flared skirt she could find, a floral patterned number she dug up in her aunt Muriel’s clothing before she made the trip to New York. Something inconspicuous, something to blend in while she waits for him to walk up to her and say You’ve got something of mine .

The crowd on the pier is bustling, rife with people chit-chatting in loud voices and the smoke of cigarettes floating in the air as they wait for the RMS Queen Mary to arrive from Southampton. Despite Ginny’s careful efforts, she looks out of place, out of time; or perhaps it is just the way she feels. No one, in truth, has seemed to notice her.

“You’ve got something of mine.”

He’s snuck up on her—that happens two out of five times, by her count.

She turns around and smiles. “I’m not sure what you’re on about, Sir. We’ve never even met.”

He knits his eyebrows together and his gaze washes over her; time stands still, stockpiled in the ice of his eyes, waiting to be released when his inquiry is over. “I’m quite certain. I’ve been looking for you.”

Ginny whips around and begins walking away. “You must have me mistaken for someone else, Sir,” she says. There will be a fraction of a second, then a hand will yank her back by the arm and she will face him once more. 

“I’m quite certain, Miss.”

His hands become rough, as if fuelled by an impatient rage; he slips them over her waist, down her hips, bone grazing flesh—then, he reaches the locket tethered to her garter, and smiles. “Foolish girl.”

Foolish boy. 

This time, she’s ensured the copy looks as close to the original as possible; Rudy has guaranteed it. He’ll flee with it, never knowing—

“Where’s the real one?”

Again.

🩸

His armoire is stained so dark it looks painted black. Only when Ginny brushes a careful hand over it does she feel the tremor of wood beneath, the threads of time spilled over wood rings, and the distinct smoothness of varnish lacquered over. The burning Italian sun drips through the open window, painting beams over the cramped bedroom of his Cefalù flat. 

Like shadow, he slips behind her, the hot skin of his chest pressed against her back, throwing ripples down her spine. “Looking for something?” he whispers in her ear. His lips caress the fine skin stretched over her cartilage, then spill through her hair. “You’ll be disappointed. I own nothing of importance.”

“Just verifying a hypothesis,” she says through a half-eaten smile before turning to face him. “My conclusion? I was right. I’m the prettiest thing here.”

A darkness, thin as a veil, passes over his irises. “That you are, darling.” Blade-sharp teeth poke through the vastness of his mouth, and he leans down before biting her neck, hard; Ginny yelps in pain, but he keeps her tucked against his frame, a hunter and his deer. “And now, I own you too.” Blood-stained lips find her own; a medley is sung in the emptiness. 

The locket isn't far.

🥤

“You’ve got something of mine.”

This time, she’s led him to a greasy diner buried deep in the bowels of Hell’s Kitchen. She waits, patiently, a soda in one hand, the locket in another.

No trickery, this time. No lies. 

“I tried to sell it, but it’s not worth anything.” She tosses it his way, “Here, you can keep it,” then slurps her soda loudly. 

Tom pockets the locket without giving it so much as a glance, then sits across from her. “How many times?”

“What?”

“How many times have you gone back to take it from me?”

Ginny cocks her head to the side and smiles. “I’m not sure what you mean, darling.”

Again.

🎇

 The end of the world doesn’t come with a crash. Or a bang. It’s as quiet as books collecting dust; one day, the world is buzzing. The next, it has ended. The prophecies of zombies, fungus-virus, and nuclear explosions crumble to dust, never fulfilled. One day, the world is full; the next, it is empty.

Most die; or, perhaps, they disappear. There are no bodies to be found in the aftermath; blood doesn’t soak the walls, matter isn’t splattered in the streets—all there is is an emptiness so wide it swallows up the remnants. For days, Ginny feels nothing but gnawing loneliness in her gut, in her stomach, down in the trenches where once rested feelings of love and longing. She meets no one, hears no sounds, sees no faces. 

The end comes from love. A selfish, impure, destructive love; a love between a man and his own soul. A depraved nature, a corruption so deep it ripped the Earth in two and left nothing in its wake; nothing, except the girl who once carried that soul in her gut.

🌊

The Cubserviès waterfall is lodged deep within the Montagne Noire, hidden beneath coniferous trees, towered over by the Sambrès plateau. It channels several streams that converge to form the Rieutort River, the water of which plunges into rock fissures—like translucent veins over jagged skin.

Ginny relinquishes her costume, all those fabrics she brought with her to blend into another time, another culture, and slips into the water. Everywhere she goes, everywhere she’s gone to since this journey has begun, the sun has scorched her skin and blistered her to the vein. Grime and sweat have become second nature to her; they leave an iridescent film on her skin and shimmer white and grey when the light touches her just right. 

He’ll be here in a few minutes. Just long enough for her to cleanse herself and brush off the oil-stained slicks painted on her pores.

This is where it begins: so far away from the end. Here, in the trenches carved by God’s deft hand, the end of the world is looming with its dark tendrils and its thirst for a half-man’s soul. Here, Tom brings the sole possession he’s ever truly cared for, the one he will not be so careless as to protect with others’ will and knowledge, the one he will ensure lives on forever should the others come to harm, and he dips it into the darkness. If it dies, the world dies with it.

Five more minutes.

“How many times?”

Ginny whips around, too shocked to think to hide her nudity from the ice in his eyes.

“This is so inappropriate!” she cries out, but they both know it’s an act.

“By my count—and I believe it to be a conservative estimate—it’s been seven hundred times.” He unbuckles his trousers and sheds them along with his underwear and polo to sit by her side. “I should kill you now, really.” The waves in his voice slice through her skin; it’s death by a thousand cuts. 

“One thousand, actually.”

Death by a thousand ripped time-threads; death by a thousand stabs of the time-needle.

He hums gently. “Impressive. I usually catch on by the third or fourth time.” With pursed lips, he adds: “It almost makes me want to let you live. Such power,” a hand in her hair, “such magic,” lips on her cheek, “such might.” 

She’s never been able to resist him for long; there’s a trace of him left in her, a black streak painted over her golden heart. When he touches her, she remembers the tenderness, the swirl of his words, the way he embraced her with ink and caressed her with cotton-soft pages; she’s never felt as loved as she does by him. Deep down, she knows what he loves is what he left in her, the eldritch mark he printed inside her—she knows he loves himself first, and her never.

But it’s all for naught. She’s spent years  walking through the debris of a dead world, looking for a way back to her family, to her habits, to the sound of sizzling eggs cooked in a buttered pan by Mum, to the clickety-clack of Dad’s inventing shed, to the booming laughter exploding out of Fred and George’s throats. She’s looked, but she never found. 

When Tom fucks her, it’s the closest she knows of love. Corrupted, blighted love, but love all the same.

“Don’t come looking for me again.”

He abandons her by the waterfall, his locket coated in darkness.

Again.

🍊

That night, honey light slips over the horizon; the turquoise waters of Mazzaforno beach ripple gently against the sand, little mouths guzzling with putrid hunger.

Ginny twists the chain of her Time Turner between her sore fingers and contemplates abandoning; they will never know, because they’re all dead by the time she will dig up this relic, hammer it over in Dad’s shed, and rip herself from Time. 

She lets the chain slip—quicker than falling sand—around her wrist and rifles through her bag for an orange; she’s never tasted anything like those she found here, in Sicily. Ripe and liquid and molten and sweet.

“You could stay here, you know.”

She doesn’t acknowledge him—she knew he would be here, because those are the only places she knows to go to. Those he’s left his mark on. 

“Aren’t you even a little curious to know how I’ve found you out?”

Ginny bites once more into her orange; juice spurts out in acidic drops, leaving a faint stain on the sand below her. The pulp invades her mouth: barracks of it between her teeth, armies beneath her tongue.

“Does it matter?”

He laughs quietly. “Not really, I suppose. You were always doomed to fail.”

She picks at the skin of her skeletal orange slice and stares out the horizon. “You’re never going to let me go. You latched onto me when I was just a girl, and you’ve made of me your monster.” A cold breeze sweeps past her; her hair, she notices briefly, is the same shade as the skin she’s meticulously picking apart. “I was never destined to be your end. You were always going to be mine. From the moment you stepped into my mind and played Russian roulette with my feelings.” Behind her is a shadow so wide and so long it devours her silhouette. Fitting, she supposes. “I could stay. Or you could kill me. I gather this is always how it had to end; your locket could never truly destroy the world as long as I was around.”

Two hands of ice slip down her shoulders, then her back. He frames her with his body until she’s just a pretty painting for him to have. The pulp of a finger pushes her hair to the side and caresses the scar he’s left on her neck with his teeth.

Then, she feels the cool metal of a pendant slide over her thoracic cage and hears a clasp behind her neck.

It’s not her Time Turner. That, he waits until her guard is down, until her eyes pore over the golden locket, and he rips from her. He breaks. A crunch beneath his boot as sand meets sand again, as glass returns to birth, as the world ends all over again.

“I’ve already told you, darling. I own you now.”