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Toby Domzalski dies at approximately 7:21 PM, on the 21st of July, 2021. Rubble crushes and breaks, and his organs suffers enough trauma that he can only spare a few, final moments of parting words. The human body is a fascinating thing. So perfectly designed, so disastrously put together. The culmination of thousands of years of evolution, and it shatters under even the shadow of a single wrong touch.
Toby Domzalski’s hands go cold. Jim Lake Jr. screams his throat raw, his victory all but forgotten, and utterly falls apart.
Jim Lake Jr. wakes up at exactly 7:00 AM on the 23rd of December, 2017. He wakes up and tears himself from his bed running, all but throwing himself out of his bedroom and into his home, into a boy that had died in his arms just minutes earlier.
Time sings and pulls and wraps around the universe. Jim Lake Jr. crashes against Toby Domzalski and the score reaches a crescendo. A clock ticks, an amulet dings, and daylight hums.
This is the happiness Jim Lake Jr. desires. This is the ballad of a boy running from and to fate, hand-in-hand with another, from start to end.
TIme and time again, a drowning soldier grabbing for a lifeline. A destiny that burns and breathes, filling his lungs and crawling up his throat.
Like a lonely titan holding up the world, he grips onto this warmth for dear life.
It goes like this:
Time is a funny thing. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea of space, with position and direction. Because you cannot go back in time without knowing where you are at any given moment, where you were and where you will be.
They say time is like a river, but time also sings and beats in sync with the universe, with the ever-going expansion of the molecules and atoms that make up the matter of everything. Time can be recorded, but it cannot be seen—not unless you trace the path of every atom and molecule that has ever existed and every place it’s every been.
It is the sequence of events from past to present to future. Your past was once your present, your present was once your future, and your future will be your present. Time is a song that continues and goes on and on, never-ending and telling the story of everything that has ever been and ever will be.
Time is Jim Lake Jr.’s greatest enemy—time is what he fights against, fights against inevitability. Because it will come—his future has become his past, and it writes the outline of what will be his new one.
He learns this the hard way—learns what it’s like to feel warm blood splattered and staining his fingers, what it’s like to hold in a gaping wound and beg for it to close even knowing it never will.
Jim Lake Jr. learns that when they say the two of us at the start and the two of us at the end, that it is destiny. That Toby Domzalski will fall and his lifeblood spills and his soul is stamped out into naught but wind and memory, and he will do it all for him.
The Amulet falls, singing, the sound an echo that crashes into his ears and his mind, and he clutches it to his chest as a scream tears out of his throat and he falls apart.
He crushes and crumples time and bends it to his will, light refracting and blinding the universe and forcing it back, back and back and back, back to the morning of December 23rd, 2017.
Over and over, until he gets it right.
“I’ll be a hero,” Jim once told Toby, by a swingset that will long since be destroyed by the time he picks up that Amulet under a bridge. “I’ll have the greatest adventure of all time! We’ll fly to space, we’ll see the world, we’ll beat every villain in our way!”
He remembers how Toby smiled, all awkward and pretense clunkily wielded in how he childishly posed and huffed, chest puffed out. Bravado emanating out of him with all the sincerity of a young child, not knowing the worst of the world just yet.
“Then I’ll protect you! I’ll be your sidekick.”
“‘Cause it was the two of us at the start,” Jim begins.
“And it’ll be the two of us at the end,” Toby finishes.
It’s a normal February day when Toby turns to Jim and asks, “Do you ever think about how mortal we are?”
He stutters, and his eyes flicker and shutter as he processes the question, wondering where it came from. Wonders what it means, wonders why Toby is asking him. Wonders why he can hear time’s song, ticking and flowing in his ear, wrapping around his best friend and caressing him like a mother would her child.
“No,” he answers honestly, because his own death has become something he has forgotten how to be concerned about. Has learned to consider it just a possibility to avoid, an ending that he doesn’t want. “Why are you asking?”
Toby shrugs, the motion dragging his shoulders against the wall he’s leaning on. Sunlight frames the shadows on his face perfectly, baby fat that he could never quite get rid of highlighted in gradients of peach and brown and orange.
He opens his mouth and says, “Sometimes I dream of you close to death. So I step in, and I take it from you. I die in your place.”
Samsara does not stumble and neither does Jim. He does not falter when he replies, steely, “I won’t let that happen.”
Toby does not reply verbally, except for another shrug and a turn of his head.
The moment ends, and time sings and sings and sings, and Jim wants it to stop but it doesn’t, even as it feels like it mocks him. Mocks him for his lies.
Because Toby is always good at being there at the last moment, the last second savior—time cheers for him whenever he does. But time only sings sadly when Jim tries, because Jim always fails, falls, faltering, only able to do something after the fact.
Never able to save Toby from himself. Something Toby has always done for him.
Jim is good at lying, these days, but he can never lie to himself.
Jim Lake Jr. wakes up at exactly 7:00 AM on the 23rd of December, 2017.
He tears himself out of bed, and says,
“I’ll do better this time,” and he feels like he’s about to fall apart at the seams but he doesn’t care. He picks himself up and walks out that door, down those stairs, and meets his best friend with the best lie on his face and the worst lies in his words.
He lies and lies and lies, and keeps on walking and moving to a beat and countdown only he can hear.
(Toby Domzalski dies at approximately 7:21 PM, and Jim Lake Jr. wakes up at exactly 7:00 AM. A difference of 12 hours and 21 minutes, over several years.
Time continues to sing, and Jim Lake Jr. continues to march to the beat of its rhythm, never once stumbling.
And Toby Domzalski sits there, center-stage, the star of the show. Only to Jim. Only for Jim.)
It goes like this:
The last Titan falls. Jim Lake Jr. embeds Excalibur into the final member of the Arcane Order, ancient blood and magic spilling out of the gaping wound, dying and disintegrating into nothing. Nothing worth looking at, nothing worth thinking about, nothing worth celebrating. A final enemy ended. A primordial being slain.
Jim Lake Jr. cares for nothing but only that it is over.
And it is. At least, it should be. Time sings and cheers, his feet moving and legs swinging to its rhythm, and there is only one other person that knows how to hear it. Who is the conductor, even as he doesn’t realize he is the one conducting, hands and fingers splayed in the air and wand flicking up, down, and around. Over and over.
He refuses to wait for the dust to settle, doesn’t care that he already knows what he’ll find. Heart already shattered in his chest and throat tired of screaming and grieving.
After all, against Toby Domzalski’s gravity, the only thing capable of destroying him is himself.
He finds him, still alive against all odds, half his body crushed by flaming, smoking debris and ashes. Taking it in, hands over the last exposed parts of his belly, fingers weakly feeling at torn fabric and thread now dirty from the smog.
“Toby,” Jim says, and he begs. “Don’t die on me. Not this time. Not again.”
Toby turns his head to him, smile weak yet unflinching, green eyes piercing his soul. Never straying from his face.
He laughs, in spite of it all, in spite of everything, in the face of the death’s door. “Now what do you mean by that, Jimbo?”
“I’ve done this before,” Jim confesses before he can stop himself. “Again and again. A dozen times, maybe—”
“I know.”
The words silence him, and he believes Toby in an instant.
“How?”
“How,” he says, sounding amused, before coughing. Fighting the end coming for him. “Well. I don’t know. It was just a feeling, I think. You always looked like you were walking to your doom, but you were confident. Like you’d done it a thousand times.”
“It feels like I have.”
Jim sits himself down by Toby’s half-buried body, Excalibur forgotten as it clatters to the bare, worn ground. Scorched, exhausted, cynical—he feels broken as he sits there, forehead placed against Toby’s, and sighs.
“It was for me, wasn’t it?”
“...yeah.”
A confessional booth, Jim the sinner and Toby the priest, the one he’s sinned for. The one he’d destroy time for.
“Okay,” Toby accepts, simple as that. “I’m sorry.”
“I know. You’ve said that before, too.”
“Oh.”
Toby closes his eyes. Jim panics, until Toby chuckles, choking and coughing again, and he can see that he’s becoming more and more pale with every second.
“Before I go—before you—could you answer a question?”
“Okay.” His armored hands tremble as it clutches Toby’s. It’s growing colder. He can hear the choir growing louder and louder.
“You love Claire,” Toby says, but it’s more like a statement than anything.
“Yeah. Why are you—”
“And yet you’ve done this all for me. So. Do you love me?”
A pause. A moment, stretched into eternity. Jim cannot answer. Cannot simply say, “Yes”, because somehow, that isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to explain everything. It isn’t enough to explain why Jim keeps coming back, over and over, if Toby is gone, even if Toby is the only one dead and all his friends are alive and Claire is glowing beautifully by his side, because somehow none of it matters if the one person he promised to fight all of life’s adventures with isn’t there.
So he answers with a kiss. It is soft, chaste, bitter and tarred with dust and smoke. It is brief. It is terrible. It means everything. It means nothing at all.
It feels like a sin, cardinal and unforgivable. It is not something he can take back, ever. The thought, the feeling, the act, will stay with him forever. A regret tattooed into his very being, wretched and bloody and wrong and yet alive.
Toby laughs when he pulls away, laughs and laughs and laughs, weak and grunting, chest rising and shaking with the force of it. He laughs until he stops, coughing once more, and says,
“That was my first kiss. And I guess it’ll be my last.”
“Toby,” Jim starts, but Toby finishes.
“Thank you. I love you too, Jimbo. Thank you.”
Time sings in his ears, and it is deafening. Tears are flowing down his cheeks.
“Kiss me again, okay? Before you kiss Claire. I don’t want the next Toby’s last kiss to be the same as this one.” Toby’s eyes flutter, dying, and if he could still do it, they would be full of tears, too. “Sorry. That’s so selfish of me, trying to make you choose. But will you?”
“...I will,” he promises, and Toby Domzalski dies with a smile on his face.
“See you next time, Jimbo.”
Everything roars, tides crashing and the world turning wrong and wrong and wrong, and Jim Lake Jr. finally, finally lets himself fall apart.
Jim Lake Jr. wakes up at exactly 7:00 AM on the 23rd of December, 2017.
Time sings and its choirs harmonize, and he marches to the tempo. Until the end. Until it starts all over again.