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Your ears are ringing.
The force of the hit knocked you down, and you groan once you blink your eyes open. Trying to right yourself up is hell, but you manage to do it, vision bleary and disoriented. You hear the clatter of the fire extinguisher on the ground, and Mark’s boots saunter up to you.
You stretch your hand out to him. “...Mark…?”
“Sorry about that,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. He kneels in front of you, grabbing your left wrist. His grip hurts, and you paw at his chest to push him away. The way his voice sounds…there’s no trace of warmth from before. You had just talked to the older version of Mark in the diner, but any kindness you were hoping to see in him isn’t visible now, not when he’s bitter and resentful and staring you down with cold, cold eyes.
His demeanor is unmistakable. He hates you, and you feel your heart in your throat at the realization.
He’s still talking in that tone. “Couldn’t afford to let you make another mistake.”
Before you know it, he has a pair of pliers that forcibly rips out the warp crystal embedded within your glove, an aborted cry escaping your lips.
Your vision becomes blurry again from the pain.
He hums, voice low with a menacing sense of satisfaction. “Yeah,” he says, holding the crystal in his hand. “Funny thing to say after an eternity of nothing but second chances—”
You reach out for the warp crystal in a last feeble attempt when he grabs your wrist, glares at you with a viciousness that makes you recoil, and orders,
“Don’t.”
As if some invisible string was cut, you feel the tension within you melt away, accepting his bidding without argument. Mark drops your hand, and you feel instantly lightheaded. Then you mentally shake yourself. What was that reaction?
He resumes talking. “You don’t have to keep trying anymore. There’s no time, anyway.” He lets himself grin at the irony. “Another thing I never thought I’d say again.”
His voice is quiet, measured, there’s anger and resentment bubbling underneath. You use the railing to prop yourself up on shaky legs. “Mark—”
“But I’m gonna fix the damage you caused,” he barrels on, ignoring you. “I have a long time to spend rebuilding this machine you broke. A long time over too many lives.”
In the back of your mind, a memory surfaces. It’s of you, Mark, and Lady in her office, and Lady’s asking Mark how he managed to find a warp core.
“No one starts off with tech like this! It would take thousands of years to get something that advanced!”
Your heart starts to crack at the words. How long has Mark been in this room, trapped and going insane rebuilding the warp core? You shake your head. “Mark, I didn’t—I didn’t break it. Please, you have to believe me. You don’t have to do this.”
He kneels in front of the machine and looks back at you. No sympathy, no understanding. Just unadulterated contempt.
Your heart breaks even further.
He positions himself to place the crystal into the center of the warp core, but you can’t let him do this—you muster all your strength to hurl yourself at him.
He lets out a started yelp. “What the hell—?!”
His back hits the railing, his head clanging against the barriers, and the warp crystal flies away from his hand, clattering to the other side of the room. Your forehead smashes against his chin, and you groan in pain before shoving yourself off and clambering over him.
“Captain, what are you—”
You manage to make it off the warp core’s platform, crawling over to the crystal, but he yanks you by your foot to give himself an advantage.
“Mark, let go!”
“No! Not this time, Captain! I have to do this!”
He grabs the railing for purchase, scrambling up to step over you, but you use your foot to sweep his legs out from under him. He barely catches himself, but it’s enough to give you time to pull yourself to the warp crystal and get it under your hands.
“Captain, no!”
He flops on top of you unceremoniously, and you groan under his weight. You know you can toss him around, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have muscle. Mark’s hands cover yours, trying to pry off the crystal, but you clutch onto it for dear life.
“Mark—” you gasp, making fruitless attempts to buck him off of you, “—Mark, you can’t—”
“Captain, please,” and there’s an edge of desperation in his voice, one that breaks his collected demeanor. You stretch your hand further out of his reach, and he shoves his arm under you to latch on, pinning you in place.
You let out a startled yell and flick the crystal away from the two of you again, and this time it clatters to the corner of the room. Mark makes a confused noise, and it’s the distraction you need to hold onto his arm around you and hook a leg around his to flip your positions, putting your weight behind it, so his back is to the floor and your back is to his chest. You move his arm so you can straddle him to pin his limbs.
"Mark, for the love of—" you stop, looking down at him in curiosity. Mark is breathing heavily, and he’s looking up at you with an odd expression.
"What?" you ask, panting from exertion.
As if it was never there, his face hardens, but even though the room is dim with the soft light from the walls, you can still see how the beginnings of a flush rise high on his cheeks. “Nothing.”
You make a face. “What is it.”
“I said—” in a sudden burst of strength, he slips his fingers from under your hold and uses the momentum to turn the two of you over, so he’s the one on top, in between your legs. “I said nothing.”
You’re starting to get annoyed now. You need to talk to him civilly about this whole situation, but you can’t do it when he’s this worked up.
“Look, you can’t go back, Mark.”
“You can’t order me anymore, Captain,” he hisses. You try to wriggle out of his grasp, but to no avail. However—
You feel something pressing into the inseam of your thigh.
Your eyes snap down to where the two of you are connected. You can’t mistake it for anything else, so your eyes flick back up at him and—
He’s breathing heavily. You shift your thigh a bit, and his eyelashes flutter, face slack. Oh.
It’s a sight you’d never seen before.
You know Mark is a handsome man. With the amount of loops the two of you have gone through together, you’re well aware of this fact. An image of a universe where Mark shows up to your door as a lifeguard with nothing but tight, red swim trunks and a visor on his head flashes behind your eyes, and you have to resist the urge to grind back against him.
But…
It’s a sight you’d very much like to see again.
So you do, and he lets out a slight whine. You ignore the part of your brain that tells you that this isn’t the right time, but you also have a desperate need to see him wrecked underneath you.
You also don’t want him to think about the warp crystal, but. It’s the furthest thought from your mind right now. Everything at this moment boils down to the point of contact between the two of you, your gaze trained on the faces he’s making.
“Fuck—”
Mark lifts his hips away from yours, and you hook your thighs around his waist, keeping him pressed against you.
He looks up at you with a glare.
Warning bells in your mind go off, telling you this is a bad idea. Out of the many questionable choices you’ve made in this entire journey so far, what’s one more?
You lock eyes with him and grind.
The glare melts away, and his eyelashes flutter shut again. You keep grinding up against him until you feel his grip on your wrists weaken. You slide your wrists away and run your hands up his chest, down to his waist, and up the breadth of his shoulders.
He shifts and his hardness presses right against your sex, and you muffle the cry that slips out.
His eyes snap up to you. His pupils are blown, flush riding high on his neck, and you think you've never seen a better sight.
He ducks down to kiss your jaw.
He leaves a trail of kisses down to your collarbone, and he bites. You moan, and, as if spurred on by it, starts sucking bruises on your neck. You end up clenching your thighs around his, your fingers grasping for purchase on his shoulders, and he pulls away. You let out a whine, but he hoists you up and shoves the captain's blazer off of you.
It's when he starts unbuttoning your shirt that you get with the program and begin unzipping his flight suit. You push the top half off his shoulders the same time he gets your shirt unbuttoned and he shoves you down, pulling his turtleneck over his head. You have a moment to appreciate his body—the muscles, the warmth, the vertical scar that reaches down to his navel—before he ducks down and trails kisses from your collarbone to your nipples. A high-pitched mewl escapes you when he wraps his lips around one and sucks, licking his tongue around the bud.
He pulls and nips gently with his teeth, making the area puffy, and he shifts over to the next one, playing with the recently abused bud with two fingers.
You kick off your boots behind him and shove the rest of his jumpsuit off with your feet. He reaches down between you and flicks the button of your slacks open, stripping you of both pants and underwear.
Soon, you were both naked, flush against each other, and your sex rubs tantalizingly against his, earning a loud moan from both of you.
A litany of fuck bleeds from your lips, and he rises to capture them in a wet, open-mouthed kiss. Tongues slide against one another, and you feel his hand caress down between you to play with your hole.
You gasp, shaking as he teases, and he pulls away from your mouth with a pop to put his face between your legs, and you slowly ease yourself up before you feel the lick on your hole.
It’s slow at first, and the breaths you take in aren’t enough to prepare you for when he licks harder, a finger pressing at your hole and sliding in. You reach down to thread your fingers in his hair, the soft strands enticing you to tighten your grip. Using his spit as lube, he works his way up to two, then painfully, three, and soon he’s thrusting in and out of you, mouth on your sex, and you feel the tell-tale sign of an orgasm building up.
You press a hand against your mouth to muffle your cries when you come, and he surfaces to rip it off of you, face illuminated by the blue-purple lights of the warp core room, and says,
“Let me hear you.”
Shakily, you nod, and he leans back, shifting your legs further apart so that he can slip his fingers out and line the head of his cock at your entrance.
He goes unbearably slow.
You hiss when the head pops through, and you feel him fill you inch by inch until he’s flush against you, arms bracketing your head and staring at you with hazy wonder. His eyes roam over your figure as if it’s the last time he’s ever gonna see you, and it tugs at your heart for reasons you can’t quite parse.
“Move,” you whisper, hands sliding up to cradle his face, “please, move,” and he nods.
You haven’t had sex in a long time, and they were few and far in-between when you were out doing missions. Even then, they weren’t anything meaningful—just something quick to get each other off. It’s nothing as intimate as looking into the eyes of someone you’d wholly trust with your life and to take care of you the way they are right now.
You can’t quite remember where you are. You don’t remember how you got here. All that matters is the two of you moving against each other, breaths mixing and noises melding. Mark leans back on his feet and manhandles your legs so that each one is over his shoulders, and he leans forward to fold you in half, his cock reaching deeper inside, and the air is punched out from your lungs when he starts hitting a certain spot.
“Oh my god,” you gasp, and you feel his lips slide to your ear, nipping at your earlobe.
“You like that?” he breathes out lowly, and it fucking riles you up and you can’t help but moan aloud in response. It’s a different fucking side to him. “You like when I fold you over like this? Fuck you as close as I can?”
Your throat is dry. “Yes—”
“Making all those pretty noises for me,” he fucks each word into you. “I bet I could do anything and still make you cry like that.”
Your words are incoherent, gibberish nonsense. Your head is filled with lust-induced cotton, your hands scramble for purchase, and your second orgasm is just around the corner.
“But I won’t do all the work.”
He halts in his thrusting, and you whine in protest. He twists you both around so that he’s the one laying on the floor and you’re on top. Your greedy eyes take their fill, and you don’t miss the smirk that graces his lips.
“Like what you see?”
It was probably more of a rhetorical question, but you nod slowly, fingers tracing the scar on his abdomen. It starts at his sternum and ends just above his navel. You wonder, for a moment, what happened to him in the time before you met, but you’re soon taken out of your head when he thrusts once, trying to get your attention.
“Hey. Stay with me.”
His fingers settle on your thighs. You shift on his cock in an impatient manner, whining again, and he gives you a light slap. “You’re gonna show me exactly how much you want my cock.”
You blink and clench your walls around him, earning a grunt. He furrows his brows and orders,
“Ride.”
As if on autopilot, you plant your hands on his chest and your feet on the ground. You lift your hips up and down tentatively, but soon enough, you’re using him as leverage, fucking yourself on his cock with abandon.
It’s not long until you angle yourself and you find that one pleasure-filled spot that has you seeing stars.
You start moving your hips down faster, and he meets you thrust for thrust, fingers clenched around your waist. You lean down, slowing your movements, and leave a trail of open-mouthed kisses along his neck. You suck a particularly hard bruise right below his jaw, and he lets out a stuttered moan.
You find his lips, tongue asking permission, and he lets you in, lets you swallow him whole.
Without pulling out, he sits up and slips his hands under your thighs. He stands and lifts you along with him; the ease of how confidently he does it sends another dizzying wave of pleasure through your head and down your sex.
You automatically wrap your arms around his neck and your legs around his waist, squeezing your walls around him, and he stutters in his movements as he makes his way to the wall.
“Fuck,” he snarls, thrusting once for good measure.
You let out a high-pitched moan as he picks his thrusts up again. The two of you find a rhythm where you meet each other when he thrusts up and you thrust down, and a slew of incomprehensible babble comes out of your mouth. It takes a few moments for him to hit that spot again, and suddenly you’re calling out his name, pleading.
“Mark, Mark, Mark—right there— ah! Right there!”
His lips latch onto your neck, and he starts sucking and biting, running from the juncture of your neck and shoulder to the underside of your jaw. He moves one of his hands from your thighs and places it between the two of you, using his thick fingers to play with your sex. Your moans increase in volume, and he slows down his pace. Your eyes are screwed shut in pleasure, but you open them to find his intense gaze on yours. His eyes are wide and his jaw is clenched in concentration. His brow is lined with perspiration, and you can’t help but think about how you’re the only one to see this, in this moment and time, and how badly you never want it to end.
Maybe he doesn’t want to either, and that’s why his thrusts have started becoming intermittent. Instead of a hard, brutal pace, he slowly pulls out until just the tip of his cock remains, then fucks it right back into you, going deep, deep, deep. He slows his fingers, too, and time the motion every time he thrusts back into you.
You move one of your arms from around him to cup his face, and he leans into it, eyes never leaving yours. You pull him closer for a kiss and it’s the kind that burns a fire inside of you. It’s the kind that you liken to molasses with the way the two of you move, mouths and tongues sliding in tandem. It’s the kind that tightens your grip around his shoulders, wanting more and more of him until you become one. It’s the kind that makes him move his hand from between the two of you and back behind your thighs to hold you better. It’s the kind that makes you feel everything all at once and crave for so much more.
He kisses you how he’s fucking you, slow and deep, and the pressure builds in your lower regions, and you see stars when you come again, your walls tightening around his length. You clench your toes when you ride out the wave, and you gasp in his mouth, his lips shifting to press on your cheek.
You feel your thighs shake and your arms limp in exhaustion, but he still holds you up. He’s close, with the way his thrusts are getting more and more erratic, and he lets out a groan when he empties himself inside of you.
The two of you don’t move for a few moments, catching your breath, before he lifts you to slowly pull out. You wince at the loss and the telltale drip of come. But then—you have a brief, fleeting sense of panic that he’ll drop you on the ground, so you wrap yourself around him and cling tight.
He stills, briefly, but, essentially, he hugs you back, and he lets your legs slide to the ground. You lean against the wall, but your arms are still around his neck and you peer at face, waiting to see what his next move is.
He surprises you by pressing a soft kiss on your forehead.
Your arms go slack, and he shifts to kiss between your eyebrows. The tip of your nose. Your right cheek, then your left. The corner of your mouth. He parts his lips, and you part yours to let him in.
The kiss is much like the one from earlier—only this time, it settles in your heart and warmth trickles down your neck, your stomach, and all the way to the tips of your limbs. It’s not slow, and it’s not fast. It cradles the very soul of your being, and you never want it to end.
But it does end. He pulls away, and you chase after him. He stops you by cradling your face in his hands, and he looks…
Sorrowful. Remorseful. You search his expression for any trace of regret, but there is none.
(You don’t think you could have taken it if he had his way with you like this and regretted it.)
He rubs his thumbs over the apples of your cheeks and slowly, he slips them off.
He reaches for your clothes first. He grabs your undergarments and helps you into them, then puts the undershirt over your head. He lets you use his shoulder so that you can step into your slacks, and he buttons up the shirt, making you decent again.
He gets dressed methodically, and it feels wrong to admire his body now, so you avert your eyes and tamp your mouth down to a flat line.
Then he heads over to pick up the crystal, and in your state, you don’t realize that it’s what he’s doing.
You stumble over to him, an arm out to stop him, but it’s too late—he’s placed the crystal in the warp core, and a familiar blue light emanates from the machine.
God, where did it go wrong? You just wanted to talk him out of this.
“Mark,” you inject as much authority in your voice, hoarse as it is. You clear your throat, and try again. “Mark. Listen to me.”
“Not this time, Captain.” His voice is quiet, but it rings out over the hum of the machine. “You know, distance and time are the same thing from different perspectives. That’s all these universes are, just different points of view. And this machine didn’t just bridge a tunnel through our universe. It was bridging all of them.”
He looks down at the console, working his fingers (those same fingers that were just in you) over the buttons and levers. “And you destroyed it.
“I can’t undo what you’ve done. Not here, anyway. Or, at least…” his eyes glint in determination, “not now.”
He pulls the lever, and the warp core engages.
He walks around the console back to you, and you hold onto the railing, shaking your head. “If I could go back, if I could try again, if I could stop you before any of this even started—” he leans in close, inches from your face— “maybe I could save everyone.”
You shake your head. “You can’t go back,” you whisper. Unbidden tears start to form at the corner of your eyes. “You can’t. You can’t save everyone like this.”
Mark furrows his eyebrows at you. “I—”
“Warning. Paradox detected.”
He turns to the warp core in alarm. “What? What the hell does that mean?”
“Temporal lock unstable.”
You sidestep around him to the console, hands hovering over the buttons and trying to figure out what to press to turn it off, when you realized—
The warp crystal.
You hurry over to the machine, ignoring Mark’s grab at your wrist and his cries about how you’ll destroy everything when the warp core makes a whining noise, as if readying for an energy burst.
And burst it did.
The beam of light shoots upward, shattering the wall to pieces, and in its stead is a wormhole that proceeds to consume everything in its vicinity—
Including Mark.
With a panicked yell, he starts rising and rising, and you grasp his arm as you ground yourself to the platform railing, curling your leg around a post. You manage to keep him in place, but you can’t hold on for much longer. You need to get that warp crystal out of the machine.
Mark clasps your hand with both of his. “Captain! Don’t let go! Don’t let go!”
You shoot him a glare, your hold slipping on the railing. “I’m trying not to!”
Something dawns on his face. You don’t like what it bodes. Your fears are confirmed when he says, “Wait. Wait! Let me go.”
You give him an incredulous look. “No!”
“Captain, please, I can fix this!”
“No!” you order, but he shakes his head.
“Look, I don’t know what you did—”
“And I don’t know what I did either!” You pull him down so that your face is inches from his. “I don’t know why I’m being accused of something I didn’t even know I did!”
“I know you didn’t mean it,” he says, and you yell in frustration— he’s not listening. “But I have to stop you. Please! This is the end of everything!”
You shake your head. “No, it isn’t! The solution isn’t to stop me!”
“No—I can go back and try to save everyone! I can save us,” he emphasizes, and his expression is so earnest. “We can—we can make things work between us. If I figure out how to stop you, then we could have a good life! We can grow old together! But I can’t do that unless you let. Me. Go!”
You close your eyes, the pain as sharp as a knife. We can grow old together. You want it—
No matter what he says, you have to heed what his older self told you. You open your eyes, steeling yourself. “He told me not to!” You scream back at him, reaching for the warp crystal. “He told me not to let you go back!”
“Who did?!”
“You!” You manage to grab the crystal, ignoring Mark’s desperate pleas. The only logical thing is to throw it back into the black hole and—you pray to any god listening out there that you’re right, that you won’t fuck everyone over with this one simple action.
You let the crystal be consumed, and for a moment, there is silence.
Then—
The blast from the force of the black hole collapsing is enough to knock the both of you down.
“Alert. Paradox resolved. Para…dox re…solved… Para…dox reee…soooooolved…”
“What have you done?”
You whirl around to see Mark staring at the warp core in devastation. The machine powers down, no longer useful, and Mark turns to you with the same unadulterated resentment he had before. You don’t know what face you’re making, and you hope you’re not about to cry, because your heart can’t take seeing him look at you as if you’re the root of why this happened in the first place.
And you’re so afraid, because—what if you are? What if not letting Mark go back in time was the single biggest mistake you’ve done?
But you remember the words of his old self in the diner. How he pleaded with you to tell his younger self that. How you tried, at every avenue you came across, to warn him of it, and how it all went wrong regardless of what you did.
“You destroyed it. You destroyed everything.” The menace in his voice is enough to make you take a step back, and he moves forward, angry and bitter and raging. “This was our last chance to fix things and now it’s gone.”
Your hands are out in a placating manner, but you know it’s fruitless. “Mark.” Your heart leaps in your throat, and you will yourself not to cry in front of him.
“I spent an eternity in hell rebuilding this stupid machine, and YOU THREW IT ALL AWAY!”
“I told you,” your voice quivers, “that I couldn’t let you do that.” Something wet trails down your cheek. You blink fast, and the tears come down harder. You failed anyway.
Mark’s trying not to cry either. “I don’t know if you’re evil or just stupid, but if I’m not back there to fix it—”
And the realization comes to him.
He takes a shaky breath. You don’t move.
“If I’m not back there… If I’m not back, then, the warp core is not back…? ”
He moves to the console, inspecting it. He’s shell-shocked.
“I thought—I thought… I thought I rebuilt it because you destroyed it. Unless…”
He looks up, and something dawns on him.
“I built the warp core? I sent it back?”
You let out a small gasp, your eyes widening.
If Mark built the warp core…if he went back and the machine was with him, then…time loops again. You would have woken up in a cryopod with another timeline waiting to be massacred. When would it have ended? Would it have ever, had you let go of him?
Was this what the older Mark was talking about?
The Mark in front of you is scared. You feel it too, what with the burden of all of those lives across the multiverse weighing on your shoulders. He feigns a laugh, and it’s an all-too familiar sight.
“I built it.” He laughs humorlessly again. “I built it.”
His face scrunches up. He’s crying. “It was my fault.”
You grab his wrist gently and pull him into your arms. He finds purchase in the crook of your neck, and you hold onto him. You have no intentions of ever letting go.
His sobs rack his body, and you guide him to sit on the platform, letting his head press against your shoulder. You rest your cheek against his hair, and you sniffle. “Mark, you didn’t know.”
His hands wrap around your torso, and he clings, clings, clings. “Captain…I’m tired. I don’t know when the last time I slept was.” As if his strings were cut, he collapses. “I don’t know if I’ve slept at all. Have you?”
“It’s alright,” is all you can say. You don’t know the last time you slept either. The two of you have been pushing the brink of exhaustion. The closest you got to some sort of relaxation was probably…well. Earlier.
Those aren’t the kind of thoughts for the moment, though.
He pulls back. You wipe his face, the soot from the blast mixing in. “I’m really sorry, Captain.”
You swallow the lump in your throat.
“I thought the only way to stop this was to stop you, but…I didn’t listen. I was so dead-set on trying to make sure the warp core worked so that I could stop all of this from happening in the first place… But it was me. It was me.”
You shook your head. “I had some fault in it too. It wasn’t all you. You couldn’t have known. I was just trying to save everyone, and I ended up hurting you in the process.”
He shrugs. “I guess I lost hope.” He leans and rests his forehead against yours, and you savor the proximity. “But you didn’t. You never did.”
The walls of the warp core room begin to shake. You’re not as alarmed as you thought you would be. In this space that the two of you have made your own, you don’t fear anything.
Panels from the wall start to fall down. The ship’s deteriorating, and you can only estimate how much longer you have with him.
“Not if I had you,” you cup his cheek, and he rests his hand against yours. “I never lost hope because I knew I always had you.”
He lets out a shaky breath. “Captain, I—I need to tell you—”
You shift your thumb to silence him. “Don’t worry. You can tell me all about it later. I’ll be right there when you wake up.”
He pulls back slightly to look at you. He must recognize how serious you are and nods. “So will I.”
You meet him in a close-mouthed kiss, and you will the universe—rather, the multiverse—to let the two of you meet again in the next life.
He’s the last thing you feel before the explosion takes over.