The Future Isn't Set

Jude sat beside the courtyard fountain, waiting for Xarrah. Things felt calmer then they had in a while, but it felt like the calm before the storm. There was always something happening. Always something new and distracting that threw him for a loop. Sometimes those things were good. A lot of the time they were bad. And now Jude just hoped that the big thing happening was him moving into his own place.

Wasn't that enough?

He'd texted Xarrah, hoping to talk about LK, but he hadn't really told her why. He didn't even know if she knew about LK. Maybe she'd met her. Maybe she hadn't. But if she hadn't, Jude didn't want to have to explain that one over text messages.

What was up. That was... a question, honestly. Jude reached up, running his fingers through his hair, and then just jumped right into it.

"I don't know if you've run into her yet," Jude said, "but there's a Dani from another dimension here. They were from Halcyon, and they jumped to their Manta Carlos, and they're like... older than us, even. Early 20s? They go by LK, and I've seen them around the community center a fair bit. I'm not sure if you've run into them."

New. He supposed he was new to the island, but that wasn't really what was bothering him. He couldn't really be bothered by that part without being hypocritical. After all, hadn't he met the himself from this world? LK was more or less the same thing.

"No, it's not that," Jude said with a small wave of his hand. "I guess it's... well, her. When I cut off Xavier, I made the conscious choice that, even with all that, I'd be there for Dani. That I'd support her, no matter what."

His lips pressed into a thin line, and he stared down at the ground.

"What does it say about things that in her world, I... just didn't? It feels like it already happened here. Like things are already decided."

Would he be effected if Xavier had died? Normally he'd say it was impossible to know, but the truth was that he'd already, in a way, started to live that path. He'd already believed Xavier was dead. He'd already dealt with it.

And he hadn't cared nearly as much as he should have. It was strange, because it didn't weigh on him, and the lack of weighing on him was, in a strange way, weighing on him itself.

Jude sighed. She was right, and he couldn't know what his other self had or hadn't done.

"I don't know," Jude said. "She didn't really... react to me. She knew who he - who I was, but nothing else." He was a non-entity to her, in other words.

There were, realistically speaking, a lot of things going on. Jude was a myriad of problems, of things stacked one on top of another. All his troubles from home. His father, his career, his friends. The end of his world. His arrival on Manta Carlos. The loss of Rory's friendship. Gaining Gabe's. And now everything that had happened with Xavier and his sister.

"A part of me wanted her to be," Jude admitted. "I wanted to... to be there for everyone who came over from Halcyon. There aren't many of us, and I wanted us to be like an extended family. Only everyone has their own lives, and I guess it was just a... a reminder of that."

He'd seen Dani as the little sister he'd never had. One he wanted to be there for. Only he didn't seem to be of any particular importance to her. Someone she knew, but didn't have any strong feelings towards. She'd treated him even more casually than he treated people he knew from class, and he struggled to imagine that the Jude of her world was really important to her.