Time Waits (Part 19) (FINAL)

The Seeler household, after twelve years of marriage.

Author’s Note: It’s been a long road, but we’ve finally reached the end.  I’ll have a retrospective up later this week.

Story Codes: M/F, Rape, Bondage, Humiliation, Slavery, Violence, Snuff, Fantasy

 

Chapter Thirty Five

Life was good.

Even after so many years, Christine’s tongue was still the best way Jordan knew of waking up. Her technique was as familiar as an old pair of shoes, and as warm and comfortable. After several minutes of lovingly sucking on him, she gulped down the same breakfast of semen and urine that she’d had nearly every morning of their twelve years of marriage. Twelve years according to the calendar, but more than twenty for Christine, and closer to thirty for Jordan by his own reckoning. Even after swallowing literally dozens of gallons of his hot cum by now, his wife couldn’t completely suppress her shudder of disgust when his load first hit her tongue, and the sight inspired him to feed her a second one before he was ready to get out of bed.

Their life had fallen into an easy and pleasant routine over the years. She did everything he asked, without hesitation or complaint. After her first and only suicide attempt six years ago, he’d spent almost an entire year making her kill herself multiple times every day. Usually with the gun, but he’d varied the game as time went on. Sometimes he had her stab herself in the heart with a knife, or knot a noose around her own throat, or smash her own skull in with a hammer. There were even a few days spent making her come up with ways to kill herself with her bare hands. By the time he’d gotten bored, something truly had died inside of her. She rarely spoke these days, except to make the kind of entreaties that she was expected to make, and usually had a vacant look in her eyes. Christine didn’t show much reaction to anything anymore, so he was fond of going out and finding new women with more satisfying responses to things he liked to do, but she was still the most beautiful girl in the world to him, and his cock could never stay outside of her for long.

Jordan’s back was acting up, so after his breakfast he rested in his recliner and watched television while his wife tended to him. She bounced on his cock slowly, careful to stay hunched down so as never to block his view. They both knew that he liked a long, relaxing fuck in this position, so she rode him as gently as any woman ever had for her lover, creating steady waves of pleasure that lapped at his brain while he caught up on some shows. Whenever he started getting worked up, he’d grab hold of her blond hair, which had grown past the small of her back by now, and give it three quick tugs. That would immediately transform Christine into a wanton whore who eagerly fucked herself on him while begging him to feed her cunt with his thick cream. Once he’d granted her request, she would become placid and calm once again, kneeling to suck him back to life.

The age difference between them had never been more pronounced. Jordan was pretty sure that he was in his late forties or early fifties by now, and while Christine wasn’t much younger mentally, physically she was barely past thirty. They almost resembled father and daughter more than husband and wife. Lately he’d thought about his age more and more. He could rewind everything but himself, and that fact was starting to catch up to him. He’d enjoyed his wife for decades, and would for decades more, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that it wouldn’t last forever, that he was closer now to the end of his life than the beginning. He couldn’t complain too much; it had been a life well spent, filled with everything he could have ever wanted, and the idea that his wife would still be young and supple when he finally passed away of old age was merely another perk of it.

Not that she’d still be alive when his time came. He couldn’t stand the idea of her getting to regain some semblance of a normal life once he was gone, so once his health had deteriorated too far to have much fun with her anymore, he’d finally grant her wish and let her die. He’d already told her all about that on their official tenth wedding anniversary, when he’d shown her the companion plot he’d bought as her anniversary present. He’d made her kneel in the open plot and give him a slow, sloppy blowjob to show how happy she was that even in death, he’d get to own her forever.

After three loads of cum and four piss breaks down her mouth, it was time for lunch. Like breakfast, the meal was absolutely exquisite, and he enjoyed it so much that he fed the cook a few small scraps. He chewed each thoroughly, savoring the taste, then spat the mush out onto his hand and let her lick it off. Actual food was as rare as ever for his wife, and she ate the soggy, chewed up bits of his lunch with something that approached genuine enthusiasm.

By the time lunch was over, his back wasn’t bothering him as much, so Jordan pushed her up against he wall and fucked her ass. It was almost magical how well her asshole had retained its tightness after thousands of hours of hard use. She was an anal expert several times over by now, and knew just how to clench and shimmy and relax to turn her guts into a warm, filthy heaven for his manhood. Any outside observer would have mistaken the eager way she swiveled after each load to take him deep into her throat for consensual enjoyment. But he knew better, recognizing the misery in her eyes as she set to work sucking her shit off of him so that he could ass fuck her some more.

He was debating whether he’d rather send Christine to the kitchen to start prepping dinner, or go for another round with her ass, when his wife gave a wet cough that left drops of blood on her hand. Both of them stared at it, then Christine coughed again, and significantly more blood came up. Her limbs wobbled, and then she collapsed into a heap on the floor.

“Get up,” Jordan said irritably, and gave her a solid kick that made her cough blood again. “Must have done some internal damage sometimes in the last few days. Get to making dinner, and I’ll return us to last week after I eat.”

Christine shook her head weakly, and an expression appeared on her face. He’d barely seen any expression on her at all in the last few years, and this one he hadn’t witnessed in decades: a real smile. “No,” she rasped. “It’s finally over. I did it…” She closed her eyes and let out a long, relaxed breath of air.

Then she died.

Jordan gave an annoyed sigh. “There are two movies coming out next month that I’ve been waiting for, bitch,” he complained, and kicked her corpse hard enough to make something in her body crackle and snap. “Now I’m going to have to waste time on this bullshit instead.” That was one of the few disadvantages to his situation: sometimes having to wait for things to occur in “real” time. He gave her another kick that destroyed her face, then grabbed a handful of hair and pushed them back a couple minutes.

They arrived to her on her knees, suckling on his dick. Jordan gave her a sharp slap across the face. “Where does it hurt, slave?” If he knew where she was injured, he might remember how they’d done it. Nothing made his cock harder than his wife in pain, and there were plenty of ways he’d indulged himself recently, too many to easily identify what could have killed her. He could recall at least half a dozen different ways he’d killed her via internal bleeding in the last year.

Christine shook her head again, and that smile reappeared. “Everywhere, you son of a bitch,” she breathed happily. “Every single part of me hurts because of you.”

Jordan was stunned by the way she’d addressed him. She’d never once talked to him like that, even before they were married. Rage quickly rushed in at her lack of respect, but she was already starting to cough again. Before he could even consider how to punish her, she was gone. “Fucking waste of time,” he growled, and pushed them back a full day.

His wife hung from the ceiling by her arms, her stomach covered with fresh welts. “Is this how I did it?” Jordan asked angrily, waving the cane in his hand. “Puncture a kidney again or something?” He was more than half tempted to kill her right then and there as a lesson in manners.

She laughed. Christine actually laughed at him. “Do you know the worst part of being married to you?” she asked, her tone light. “That you turned out to be so much stupider than I ever thought you were. Were you ever smart in the first place, or did I just get confused by the nerdy interests and the social awkwardness?”

Jordan shook with anger, and he began beating her with the cane, swinging with enough force to break bones. He’d cracked half her ribs and fractured both legs by the time he stopped, and her smile had never wavered. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” he snarled. He felt tears coming to his eyes, and quickly wiped them away, trying without success to do the same with the hot shame inside him. He hadn’t felt like this since high school, since before his life had completely changed. She wasn’t ever supposed to be able to look down at him like this! No one was!

“Stupid Jordan Seeler,” Christine said. “Danny was a real piece of shit too, but God bless every time he knocked you around. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.” She spat some blood, and then gave a him a look of utter fearlessness. “It’s poison, Jordan. And you can’t stop it.”

He sneered at her. That was what had her acting like this? Another pathetic suicide attempt? He’d make her fucking suffer for this one, that was for sure.

Jordan pushed time back two weeks, and didn’t take her with him. If he couldn’t just beat the arrogance out of her, he’d erase it instead.

He was laying in bed, and she was riding his cock while her hands played with her tits for his amusement. She stroked her nipples and then twisted them hard as she bucked, rolling her hips against him and making fake moans of pleasure. There were already two loads of semen plastered to her pussy walls, and if history repeated itself, there would be three more before he called it a night. Her dinner afterward would be as much of it as she could scoop out with her fingers.

“Who am I, slave?” he asked her, still mentally seething.

“You are my husband and my master,” she said automatically and meekly. “There is no one in the world I love and adore more than you.”

“And who are you?”

“Worthless trash that no one else in the world cares about,” she answered. “The only reason I’m not rotting in a landfill like I deserve is that you are generous and loving enough to find use for this lowly garbage you blessed to be your wife.”

They were the same sort of answers that she usually gave, but he wanted to make sure. He slapped her across the face, then drove his fist into her stomach. She accepted the violence without making any attempt to defend herself, still fucking herself on him, and all he saw in her eyes was that familiar vacant expression. Good. “Get off of me, slave,” he ordered. “You’ve earned yourself some heavy punishment.” Jordan resolved to spend the next few weeks making sure that even thinking about killing herself would make her scream in terror.

A spark of life flickered in her eyes. “Did it happen?” she whispered. She must have seen something in his reaction, because suddenly, as though a switch had been flipped, she was beaming, not looking at all like the obedient slave she’d been just moments ago. “It did, didn’t it? When?” she asked eagerly. “Days? Weeks? How soon do I get to say goodbye to this ugly fucking face of yours?”

Jordan all but screamed in frustration and struck her again. “You bitch!” he shouted. “What the fuck is going on?!”

“You don’t get your way anymore, that’s what’s going on, you pathetic man child,” Christine told him. There was no sign of vacancy in her eyes anymore; she looked more vibrant and alive now than he could ever remember seeing her. She laughed, a trickle of blood leaking from her split lip, and then she spat right in his face. He stared at her in shock as her blood and saliva dribbled down his cheek. “God, do you know how long I’ve had to wait to be able to tell you how I really feel?” She stretched and yawned. “I haven’t felt this good in years! I must have already told you, right? I took poison.”

“And you think I’m going to let you take it again?” he asked. Jordan felt absolutely wretched. For so long he’d felt confident and in control of everything, but suddenly it was like the last few decades had never happened, and he was still just the powerless little nerd that everyone made fun of. “Guess again, cunt. I’m going to tape that whore mouth shut. From now on, the only time it’s open is when my cock is wedged in it. We’ll see if a couple years of that can teach you to-” She laughed again, and the humiliation of it made his insides twist and churn.

“Have I already told you how stupid you are, Jordan?” she asked. “If I did, it bears repeating. I’m not going to take poison. I already did, ages ago. I knew anything normal and you’d just rewind like the save scumming bastard you are, so I found a special, slow acting kind. One that takes years to have an effect.” Her smile widened. “And it’s finally about to.”

Jordan tried to force himself to calm down. He hadn’t been this riled up since the day she’d fucked up his marriage proposal, but learning the cause of her attitude change made him feel much better. “That’s your plan?” he asked scornfully. “That’s why you’ve decided to beg me to think up new ways to torture you to death? I must have fucked your brains clean out at some point. Yeah, you’ve got two weeks left to live. Your sister only had half that in my basement, and look how she turned out. We could keep repeating these two weeks for years, you stupid cunt. Hell, I could just back up further and keep replaying the entire year. As long as I’ve got you around to hurt, who cares what the calendar says?”

“Exactly,” she said, and there was no more mirth in her anymore. She gave him a hard look, her eyes filled with a strength that he’d been certain he’d fucked and beaten out of her long ago. “If you want to keep torturing me, you have to rewind. You want to go back to the start of the year? Great. Means our next door neighbor forgets how you chained her to our bed until she agreed to come here and cheat on her husband every time you asked. Means that waitress you raped half to death just because she got your lunch order wrong gets to go on living the life she was meant to have. Means all those innocent women suffering with the memory of horrible “nightmares” about being tortured by an ugly freak get relief. All that misery you’ve spread for the last year vanishes.’

“So I’ll do it again,” he growled. “And just for you, I’ll make sure to be extra fucking vicious this time around.”

“And then you’ll have to reset it again when I die,” she answered, undaunted. “And again and again and again. Are you starting to get it yet, Jordan? Is anything sinking into that tiny brain of yours? I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing it for them. You don’t get to hurt anyone else anymore. Not permanently. You’re trapped here with me, you son of a bitch.”

Jordan felt like he couldn’t breathe. This… this fucking cunt thought she could control him? Thought she could tell him what to do? “Then I’ll just let you die!” he roared. “You won’t have to wait for the poison. I can kill you right here!”

Christine shrugged. “If that’s what you do, then at least I’m free.” Her smile returned, and there was a nasty edge to it this time. “But we both know you won’t be able to leave me dead. Because behind all the empty sex, Jordan, you’re a sad, lonely little child who has no one to keep you company but me. The only way you know how to get attention is by literally raping and torturing people until they agree to pretend to love you. You’re actually kind of amazing, you know: you have the power of a god, and you still manage to be the most pathetic person I’ve ever met.”

Jordan didn’t remember hitting her. Everything was a blur, and by the time he came to his senses she was already just a bloody mess, and he was still sobbing. He wiped away some of his tears, then rewound another week.

He was sitting at the breakfast table, and Christine knelt between his legs. She gave a startled squeal when he grabbed her hair and yanked her up, then slammed her face up onto the table. “When did you do it?!” he screamed in her face, throttling her with one hand while she kicked and gasped.

Despite her agony, she still managed to smile. “I’ll… never tell you… you stupid… ugly… motherfucker…”

Jordan froze time and stalked away. For hours he howled and yelled and destroyed things, until he finally started feeling like himself again and could think about the problem rationally. He could just go back a few years, but if even that wasn’t far enough back, and she was able to lie and pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about, he’d have gotten nowhere and she’d be laughing behind his back the entire time. And if he went back too far, he’d just end up giving her the idea for it, and then he’d have to spend the rest of his life watching her to make sure she didn’t try it again. More importantly, jumping back randomly would be like letting her win. No, the way to end this was to go straight to the source. He’d find out when she poisoned herself, he’d stop her, and that would be the end of this. All he had to do was get her talk, and that wouldn’t just be easy. It would be fun.

He was feeling much better when he let time unfreeze. She still had that smile on her face, but he saw it falter slightly when he dragged her over to the stove. “Do you know one of the reasons you’re a goddamn idiot, slave?” he asked her. “Because you think that you’ve already seen the worst I can do, and that after all these decades you can take whatever I have to dish out. Let me show you exactly how wrong you are.”

**********

Christine was still screaming when he brought her back. “Didn’t you smell nice?” Jordan asked. “Maybe next time I nail you to the stove and cook your tits, I should try seeing how you taste. Hell, that could be my dinner every night from now on. Our dinner, I should say; I’d be happy to share your titflesh. Unless you’d rather chat about the poison?” When she shook her head, he held up the nail gun. “No problem, slave. Plenty of other things to nail you to.”

“It’s really a shame I can’t bring photos back,” he told her a few minutes later. “You looked hilarious enough when I nailed your tongue to the faucet, but when I turned on the hot water? I mean, you heard me, I nearly laughed myself sick! And when your belly started to bulge from all the water… I just have to watch that again. Let’s get started, slave.”

A little while later. “You always hear horror stories about putting a hand in the blender, but words really couldn’t do it justice, right? You died before we got to do the legs though, so we’ll start with them first this time.”

Christine was a dumb bitch, but even she couldn’t fail to learn the lesson he was imparting. He’d always been a little easier on her than he was with the other girls, careful not to break her too far. He saw now that he’d been far too lenient with her. So he gave her a taste of how much sadism he was truly capable of, and just as he’d known it would, her facade of strength crumbled almost immediately, revealing the whimpering, pathetic slave hiding inside.

“When I tried to kill myself!” Christine howled, less than half an hour after he’d begun torturing her. “I did it when I tried to kill myself!”

His wife sobbed brokenly, without a trace of her earlier attitude. The sight made Jordan feel much better. This was the real Christine, the one he knew and loved. “The day you shot yourself? When exactly did you do it?”

“The… the gun was never meant to work…” she said, cringing away from him. “It… it was just a decoy. I took the poison just… just before I pulled the trigger…”

Jordan let go of her. He didn’t waste time gloating. He just pushed, beginning the six year rewind without hesitation. He didn’t bother bringing her with him; she didn’t deserve to know that her plan had succeeded even temporarily, or that he’d had to force the truth out of her. He’d just show up and foil it like he always did, and let her wonder how he’d known. Maybe it would teach her a little respect.

He’d never gone back anywhere near that much before, and it took more than an hour of relative time. He spent the first few minutes fuming, trying to decide exactly what he’d do to his wife when he arrived. And then he realized the perfect method. A way to put that bitch in her place, permanently. It was a shame to undo the last six years that he’d spent breaking her in, but that was okay. This time, he was going to do it right.

By the time he arrived, his bad mood had vanished completely. He was going to enjoy this.

He was back outside the study, where he’d waited to surprise her. Christine was right behind the door in front of him, her gun freshly loaded. Last time he’d just removed the clip, but this time he’d—

There was a loud, angry noise, followed immediately by many more just like it in quick succession, and Jordan flinched in surprise. He had no idea what had just happened, but there were holes in the door and… he looked down at himself and saw four growing red spots. He stared at them, mystified, and then the pain hit him like a physical wave, and he collapsed to his knees, screaming in agony. The world around him froze, but it didn’t change what he was feeling. He rewound time a few minutes, but it didn’t undo what had happened to him. He was back on his feet, but he was still in in more pain than he’d ever been in his life, still shrieking, the red spots still growing.

Jordan’s legs gave out and he tumbled to the ground. Lying on his side, he saw the blood run down his body and begin pooling on the floor. He’d been shot. She’d shot him. The bitch had shot him! The door to the study opened and Christine appeared, still holding the gun. The moment she saw him, she fired. This time his powers kicked in like they were supposed to, but they didn’t help. The bullets were frozen right now, but he still had to move away from them, and he found he couldn’t push time back at the moment, the pain and terror in his head making his control slip away from him. Even his ability to hold time still was wavering.

Unable to stand, Jordan crawled slowly forward towards Christine to escape their trajectory. Every movement was agony, and he left a bloody trail behind him as he dragged his broken body across the floor. After a minute his hold on time vanished completely, and he screamed as one of the bullets struck the back of his leg.

He reached a shaking hand out to Christine. “This… this isn’t right,” he wheezed. “I’m… invincible…” He sounded pitiful even to his own ears. He grabbed at her ankle, and she kicked his hand away.

His wife looked down at him, and let out a breath. All the tension in her body seemed to go out with it and she slumped back against the door frame. “Not always,” she breathed. “When you rewind, there’s a moment after, a tiny fraction of a second, where your powers don’t work. That’s how I bit you that one time, because we’d gone back a whole month. I could only hope that longer jumps meant more of a delay, but even years would mean barely seconds to work with. Not enough time to do anything, not unless I could convince you to come to an exact time and place where I was already ready and prepared to kill you.”

Christine crouched next to him. “How long did it take before-” She shuddered. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Did I figure out how to make the lie about being poisoned for years sound believable? I must have, right? Or did I just make you too mad to think straight?”

Jordan’s head was spinning, and he felt confused and feverish. This wasn’t really happening. It couldn’t be happening! “You… you were poisoned…”

His wife nodded. “Once enough time passed, I’d look for an opportunity to poison myself with anything I could find. Then it would just be a matter of keeping my story straight beforehand, no matter when it came up. And acting like myself again. That was always going to be the hardest part, to make myself smile and laugh like I wasn’t the weak, terrified slave you’ve spent years molding me into. But it was necessary. If I got you angry enough, made you rip the lie out of me, you’d come shooting back here to the moment it happened to punish me, just like you always do.” She set the gun down carefully. “Today was never about killing myself, Jordan. It was about killing you.”

Jordan was cold, and he hurt. Wet tears ran down his cheeks. “Help me…” he begged, pawing at her feet. “You… you have to…” He coughed and felt warm blood run down his chin.

“No,” Christine said, softly but firmly. “No, I don’t. You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore. Never again.” Her tone remained calm, but there was fire in her eyes. “Did you know that I used to care about you? I thought you were this sweet, shy boy with a good heart. I once thought I could even love you. But you couldn’t let me be a person, could you? Couldn’t let me have a choice about being with you. So you stole that choice from me, tried to reduce me into an object instead of a human being. You made me do things that I never imagined possible, things that I hated, things that made me hate myself, things that I can never take back. You hurt me, and you hurt my family, and you ruined everything I loved just because you could. Just because you were too much of a fucking coward to risk rejection.” Her voice turned hard, and her eyes burned. “But you know what else you did, Jordan? You lost.”

No. Anger rose up in him, and he let it give him strength. She wasn’t going to get her way. He wasn’t going to allow himself to die here. She was a stupid, worthless fucktoy, and he was a living god. “You are mine…” he swore, forcing the words out. “And I will… make you pay for this…”

This wasn’t how his story ended.

Jordan pushed time harder than he ever had. The world blurred around him, but his own dying body remained unaffected. He kept going, putting everything he had into it. It hurt in a way it never had before, a mounting sense of heat and pressure in his head. He endured it. He could endure anything for the sake of his revenge. The pressure and the heat grew and grew the more he pushed, until it felt like his head was about to explode. But the pain didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except fixing this.

His skull cracked, and then shattered. His brain was on fire, hot enough that his eyes began to boil in their sockets. His world shrank into nothing but pain and darkness. He felt the agony, heard his own screams, tasted and smelled his own roasting flesh. And still he pushed, driven by raw anger. Raw need. Raw purpose. He would fix this. He would fix this or tear the entire universe apart trying.

The universe yielded first.

His head healed. His wounds closed. It hurt more to undo the injuries than it had to receive them, but he almost didn’t notice the pain through his sense of triumph. As he kept going, his gray hairs darkened, his back pain disappeared. All the aches and pains and compromises of age melted away as he pushed, until he was a young man again. He could never remember feeling so healthy and full of life before. He laughed. He had done it! He had conquered time!

The bullet wounds were long gone, but he barely remembered that he’d ever had them. What was happening was far more important than merely undoing a fatal injury. He had gained immortality. The inevitable end of his life no longer loomed before him. There would be no end. He would never have to stop, and the entire world was his to play with.

Back to the beginning, he decided. Back to the start of it all. Eighteen years old in high school, with a virginal Christine and a bitchy Rebecca and an oblivious Helen. Clean slates to play with again for decades more, and when he was ready he’d rewind it all. He would do this again and again, forever. His life, the world, the entire universe, reduced to a circular existence where he could do anything he wanted, as long as he wanted. One day, thousands or millions or even billions of years from now, after he’d enjoyed everything that life possibly had to offer and grown bored of it all, he would allow the universe to move on without him.

But for now, time would just have to wait.

*********

Jordan was standing in the middle of the road, staring at a frozen truck bearing down on him. Here it was: the start of it all, the moment he’d first activated his powers and saved his life. After this, his life and those of everyone around him had changed forever. And they would change again. The first time around, he’d been a naive child, but now he knew what he was doing. And this time, he decided, he wouldn’t be nearly as merciful. No more skulking in the shadows, hiding his powers and erasing memories. He would make the entire world recognize him as a god.

He wouldn’t be able to do it overnight, of course. He’d have to start small. Work his way up, demonstrate his abilities, teach people to fear him. But time was no longer an issue. There was no one who could stop him, and he could try again as often as he wanted. So yes, this time around he would be a god, just because he could. Perhaps, if people were smart enough to see reason, he’d even be a benevolent one.

Had he been touching Christine when he rewound? He couldn’t remember. If he hadn’t, they would have a lot of catching up to do. He would let her live forever just like he did, bringing her back with him on every loop. For what she’d done to him, she deserved no less than to suffer endlessly. To endure an eternal hell where all her pleas for mercy went unanswered. He would turn her into the most miserable, most tortured, most pathetic soul in existence. And he already had more than a lifetime’s worth of ideas on how to do it.

Eager to get started, he stepped away from… he stepped… he…

He couldn’t move.

His body refused to obey him. Jordan tried to look down at himself, but his head was unresponsive as the rest of him. He couldn’t even move his eyes or blink, forced to stare at the truck that had been meant to kill him. Jordan was as frozen as the rest of the world, something that had never happened to him before. He fought against it for a few moments, and then gave up. He would just have to release time, and then get out of the way before the truck could hit him.

But time didn’t respond. That sense of it in his head, the weight that had become more familiar than his own face, was gone, and it wouldn’t come back no matter how often or how hard he reached for it. It took some time, but eventually fear began to trickle into his head. If he couldn’t resume time, if he was stuck here in this single frozen moment, then… then… he redoubled his efforts.

This world outside of time had always felt like home to him. It was his secret safe place, where no one else could go. But that was when he could leave whenever he wanted. Now the atmosphere and its utter lack of life felt maddeningly oppressive. It was a cold, empty, and uncaring world, and he was frantic to escape it. For hours he struggled, growing more terrified with every passing second, desperate to regain even a single spark of that power. It had to come back. It always saved him when he was in trouble. It was always there when he needed it.

But not this time. Hours turned to days, and all his effort yielded nothing. Weeks, nothing. Months, nothing. Years, nothing.

Jordan had been a statue for more than a decade before he finally accepted the truth: he’d burned himself out, pushed himself too hard and destroyed whatever it was in his head that had given him control over time. It wasn’t going to come back. Time was never going to resume. This was it. This was everything. The entire universe had been reduced to this single frozen moment that would never change. And no one would ever know it but him. No one existed anymore but him, and he would never get to join them in oblivion. He begged the truck he would stare at forever to move, to give him the death it had once promised and free him from this prison. Nothing happened.

Time passed. Centuries. Millennia. Quiet, dead epochs that only he was there to observe. Jordan spent the time the only way he knew how. He meticulously planned out, day by day, decades of torture for each and every single person who had ever wronged him. He composed and memorized year long prayers for salvation to every deity he could remember and some that he’d only imagined. He catalogued every last slight anyone had ever given him, and for each and every one concocted an elaborate revenge. He also catalogued every last slight he had ever given anyone else, and for each and every one spent months pleading for forgiveness.

And after he had done all of this a thousand, thousand times, he was reduced to incoherent screams of rage, and wordless sobs for mercy. Neither was answered. Neither could ever be answered.

Jordan Seeler, the immortal god, stood still and silent in his tomb, and eternity stretched out before him.

 

 

Epilogue

Christine sighed. This homework was going to be the death of her. She’d been at it for nearly two hours, and there was still a mountain of it to go. She rubbed her eyes and resisted the urge to pick up her phone and see what was going on in the rest of the world. Work first, play later.

Not that she was in any real mood to play, either. The truth was that she was exhausted and terrified. For a week now, there had been a sense that everything was about to go terribly wrong, and that there was only one way to escape it. She was doing her best to ignore it, but a voice in her head kept screaming that tonight was the night, and it was growing louder all the time. She didn’t know what was approaching, only that it was both horrible and inevitable.

Her problems had all begun the last month, ever since the day of Jordan’s accident. He’d been hit by a truck while walking home from school and gone into a coma. The doctors had been confident at first that he would recover, but it turned out the impact had damaged something in his brain. Physically he was fine, just a few broken bones, but mentally, he was… empty. His body still functioned, but it was as though there was no one inside. His parents had pulled the plug last week. Good fucking riddance.

She didn’t know why that sentiment had popped into her head.

Everyone had attributed her odd behavior lately as grief over what had happened to Jordan, and it was, to some extent. He’d been a good friend, even if they’d drifted apart after puberty, and his death had hit her hard. And yet…

Everything was wrong. Even her age. Christine knew for a fact that she was eighteen years and in high school.. Of course she was. But at the same time, being a teenager in high school felt like something that had happened decades ago, and when she saw herself in the mirror these days, she was always struck by how incredibly young she looked. Her skin felt like it should be bruised and callused, not smooth, and everything was supposed to hurt. Sometimes when she woke up, just that realization that she was lying alone in a bed brought twin surges of joy and guilt.

It wasn’t just the bed. So many little things that she’d always taken for granted, like eating dinner or having a wardrobe, suddenly seemed like incredible luxuries to her, and not in a good way. Part of her kept waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under her. Someone was going to be furious that she was wearing eating food and wearing clothes instead of… instead of…

Her entire life was like that now. It was like she’d become two people in the same body. One was Christine Summers, the normal if slightly overworked teenage girl. And the other… she was always the other when she dreamed. Someone older and wiser and stronger than she was, but but at the same time racked with pain and grief and self-loathing. Christine only remembered bits and pieces from her dreams, but they were always such horrible nightmares, filled with torture and abuse and degradation on levels she’d never imagined or wanted to imagine. And sex. So much sex, and never willing, always painful and humiliating. And the worst part of her dreams was how correct they felt. How much more real. When she woke up from one of them, for the first few minutes she would feel almost certain that they were her real life, and high school was just a silly dream that would vanish any moment now.

The dreams had been terrible enough on their own, but they were beginning to seep into her real life. She’d have these disgusting flashes that felt like nothing she’d ever experienced before, like a cross between a waking dream and a memory. She’d pass a student in the hall, someone she didn’t even know, and imagine having her legs wrapped around him while he raped her. She’d say hello to one of her teachers when she entered a classroom, and feel like she knew exactly what it would be like to kneel in front of him and suck his cock. How was she supposed to focus on her classwork when she knew, as well as she knew her own name, that her Calculus teacher would love having her eat his ass out? Or that the boy in the adjacent locker would happily fuck her tits for hours if she let him? Two weeks ago her father had passed her a bowl of mashed potatoes and she’d suddenly known with perfect clarity what his piss would taste like, and that he would cradle her head lovingly while he fed it to her, as though sharing something intimate. Dad had cleaned up the spilled mashed potatoes for her while she was being sick in the bathroom.

There was a knock on her bedroom door, and Christine flinched. “Everything alright?” her mother asked.

“Yes, Mom,” Christine replied “Everything is going fine.”

There was silence for a few seconds. “You’re working on your homework, right?” Mom asked cautiously.

“Yes, Mom.”

“…It’s just, I know things have been hectic at school lately, and it’s important that you do well this year. Colleges are going to be paying very close attention to your GPA…”

Christine suppressed a sigh. “Yes, Mom. I’m working on my homework, I promise.” One of her few non-sexual epiphanies in the last month had been that what her mother loved most about her was having a model student to brag about. Maybe that was harsh, but it was also true. Her mother did love her, and Christine loved her back, but it was a more realistic kind of love these days. She’d accepted that her mother had her faults, and that she wasn’t a person that Christine could trust, but she was still her mother, and Christine would always care about her, even knowing what it would be like to sit on her face and… ugh.

Dad, on the other hand, she’d found herself feeling closer to lately. Even when her weird flashes told her all kinds of gross things about him that she’d rather not have known, they always came with the sense that he loved her and cared about her. She felt safe with him in a way that she felt around very few people in her life these days, and she knew that the other person inside her felt the same way.

That other self would come out randomly all the time, bringing with her a mess of confused and contradictory feelings. Someone would ask her a question, for example, and she’d find herself certain that the proper etiquette was to kneel in front of them and fix her eyes on the floor before giving a meek answer. She’d embarrassed herself doing just that without thinking in the classroom once. But it wasn’t that her other self wanted to do that. Rather, it just felt like the thing to do, like saying something when someone sneezed. What her other self actually wanted was the exact opposite, to stand tall and give a clear answer and maybe tell the other party to go fuck themselves if they were being hostile.

That other person was kind of awesome when she wasn’t struggling with perverted instincts. She’d come out while Christine was giving a public presentation in AP History last week, and despite feeling certain that she was supposed to be naked while in front of so many people, she had felt calm and confident in what she said. And she made all the things that had once inspired so much anxiety, like getting into the best college or maintaining her social status in school, seem like trivial issues that were no match for her. Christine felt accomplished and powerful when she was that person, even if she felt like she was also supposed to be pathetic and weak.

Christine was pretty sure it was her other self that had punched Danny. The creep had been hitting on her like he always did, and instead of just being polite and secretly wishing he’d go away, she’d broken his jaw with her fist. And it had felt wonderful. The only thing better than that feeling of impact had been the terror in his eyes, and the way he’d fled from her. Even knowing how much he’d enjoy making her puke on his cock hadn’t diminished her sense of satisfaction. When Mom had found out about it, she’d spent an hour lecturing Christine about how much she’d put herself at risk, in terms of both her academic career and reputation. Dad had just asked her if he deserved the punch, and when she said yes, he’d told her he was proud of her.

The incident had quickly spiraled into something much larger. Danny’s parents had complained to the school, demanding that Christine be expelled, but the principal defended her character and gave her merely a week of detention. That hadn’t gone over well with them at all, and they’d escalated the complaint to the school board. They were rich and had a great deal of influence in the community, but to her surprise Hailey Jeffords, one of the most popular girls in school, had used her social clout to organize a student protest against her expulsion. She’d never been sexually harassed by Danny herself, but many of her friends had, so she’d persuaded them and several other students to step forward and recount what had happened to them. In the end, Christine’s only punishment was the week of detention, and Danny had been the one to get expelled.

Nadine was still pissed at her about that, and Christine was starting to think that their friendship wasn’t going to be salvageable, but she felt oddly okay about losing her best friend. She was as certain as anything else that the girl couldn’t really be relied upon. And her social circle had unexpectedly grown thanks to the event. Sandy had been one of the students to speak up in Christine’s defense and share a story of harassment, and Christine had discovered that her seemingly cold attitude was thanks to social anxiety more than anything else. She was actually a very sweet, if rather sheltered girl, once Christine had gotten to know her. And Millie, an old friend that she hadn’t seen much of in the last few years, had been super impressed by what Christine had done, and it had led to them reconnecting. Between the two of them, Christine had soon realized she wasn’t missing Nadine at all.

There had been good days like that in the last month, days where she felt like a better, more confident version of herself. When she was like that, her life seemed fantastic, and she couldn’t wait to experience more of it. But then there were the bad days. During those times, she felt ashamed and small and worthless. It didn’t feel right for her to have friends. It didn’t feel right for her to have a family. She was supposed to be alone and miserable. Whenever she was in that state, she found herself fighting the urge to go slip away somewhere and kill herself before anyone could stop her.

It was getting harder and harder to resist.

Christine realized she’d been staring at the same page in her textbook for the last ten minutes without reading a single word on it. She put it down and rested her head in her hands. She was so tired. At first, there had been more good days than bad, but the balance had changed over time. Almost every day was bad now, and worse than the last. The dream memories came more frequently, and it was getting difficult to remember that they weren’t really hers.

And now there was this feeling too, the one telling her that her entire life was about to collapse around her. It was getting exponentially stronger with each passing minute. It almost felt like she was choking, and part of her wanted to scream. The moment was coming soon. It would be here any second. It was…

It was here.

Right now.

Christine didn’t know why, but she was absolutely certain. This was it, the the moment things would change. Her fingers touched the desk. He would tie her down here, she thought absently, with her own clothes. Blind her and gag her. Once she was helpless, he’d have his way with her, while her family remained oblivious downstairs. He would rape her, and then he’d do it again, and again, and again. For the rest of her life, her insides would never feel clean again. And everything would only get worse from there…

It was the most vivid dream memory Christine had felt by far. She could almost taste the shirt in her mouth, and feel her rapist’s fingers as they crawled over her skin. She shook her head, trying to dismiss the memory, but it refused to go away. If anything, it grew stronger, until she could barely tell what was real and what was the memory. She was supposed to be getting raped right now. She had been raped right now. She was being raped right now. And in a few day she would be raped in the bathroom, blindfolded again and cuffed to the toilet. His cum would taste bitter and he wouldn’t let her breathe until she’d swallowed it all. And then he’d start visiting her very night… she trembled. It was just more than just one memory coming back to her, it was a flood. Years worth of them pressed on her mind insistently, demanding to be let in.

If she let them, they would consume her. She knew that as an absolute truth. There would be no Christine Summers left, only her other self, and neither of them wanted that. She could feel them both straining against the surge, but it was stronger than either of them, and stronger still every second. Danny, her sister, her mother, her father, him… the memories swirled in her head as shadows, holding the shape of the thing without the substance. She could see them, but not truly feel them. They still belonged to someone else. For now. They were becoming sharper and more defined, a lifetime of horrors creeping into her head to transform her into a broken thing.

She would be his again. She’d known that she could never change that. Even when she’d shot him, she’d known it, that she could kill him, but he would remain inside her. He’d made her into something less than human, and no amount of time could ever undo that. That was why she’d saved the last bullet. She’d lied when she said the gun was never meant for herself. It was always meant for both of them.

Christine moaned. These weren’t her thoughts, but they were in her head, drowning out her own. The memories were becoming clearer, and far more powerful than the flimsy ones of the last eighteen years. What day was today? How old was she? Had he already raped her? Was her father still alive? Had she gotten married yet? She fell to the floor clutching her head and gasping, choking on a neverending stream of pain and degradation. There was nothing they could do to stop this. No way to prevent herself from coming back.

No. No, there was. The bathroom. There would be a razor in the bathroom. A few quick cuts would do it. It would barely hurt. She scrambled to her feet and staggered to the door, throwing it open and-

“Heya splort,” Rebecca said cheerfully, standing in the doorway. “Guess who came by for a surprise visit?” Her smile faded as she took in her sister’s expression. “…What’s wrong?”

Christine flinched, staring at her sister. The memories in her head were screaming a thousand different warnings. Rebecca hated her, despised her, wanted her dead. But behind the terror and the panic was another feeling, buried deep but even stronger, and it rushed in to sweep away everything else. Christine trembled, and then her feelings overwhelmed her and stumbled forward to embrace her sister.

“I missed you!” she cried, squeezing as tightly as she could, tears running down her face. “Oh God, I missed you! I’m so sorry! It was all my fault! It’s okay if you hate me! It’s okay if you kill me!”

Rebecca’s arms wrapped around her, drawing her into the warm hug. “It’s okay, Chrissy,” her sister said. “It’s okay, I promise.”

“No, it’s not!” Christine protested, sobbing. In the back of her head, she knew that she sounded ridiculous, that Rebecca didn’t know about any of this, but she couldn’t stop the words from pouring out. “You were hurt because of me! He did so many awful things to you, and it was all because of me! And I killed him, Becky, but he’s still winning! He’s still in my head and I can’t get him out! I’ll never be anything more than what he turned me into!”

“You mean Jordan?” Rebecca asked softly.

Christine froze. “You… you’re not… you’re not supposed to…”

“Not supposed to remember? I don’t, not really,” Rebecca said. “Not any specifics. But I think the bastard rewound me so many times that I ended up with a head like an old videotape. What’s there is all garbage and faded imprints, and I spent most of last month thinking I was just going crazy, but there was enough to connect the dots eventually. Then Dad called today to tell me he was worried about you. You didn’t get away so easily, huh?”

“I don’t want to remember,” Christine whined. “But I can’t stop it! It’s all coming back and I’ll just be his worthless fucktoy slave again, even if he’s dead and gone! I can’t-” Rebecca laughed.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said. “But that’s maybe the silliest thing you’ve ever told me, Chrissy. You were never that.”

“I was!” Christine insisted. “I am! He used me and he hurt me and I let him do it! Because I was stupid and pathetic and I deserved everything I got!”

“Oh yeah?” Rebecca said dryly. “Then why are you here and he’s not?”

“Because… because…”

Rebecca sighed, but there was love in it, and she drew her sister in closer to her, stroking her hair with one hand. “Listen to me, Chrissy, okay? You are stronger than him. You always have been.”

“No, I’m not!” Christine said, trying to squirm away. “I couldn’t, I couldn’t protect you from him! I couldn’t stop him from doing what he did to you!”

“That wasn’t your fault,” said Rebecca. “ I’m the one who was too weak to resist. And I remember enough to know that I hurt you terribly. You don’t need to apologize to me, Christine. I need to apologize to you.”

“No! It was all my fault that-”

“No,” Rebecca said firmly. “It was not your fault. None of it was your fault, Christine. You didn’t make him rape you, or make him hurt me, or any of the other million shitty things he did over the years. That was all on him, do you understand? He doesn’t get to put one fucking iota of the blame on anyone else. And these memories of him, they don’t define you. No matter what else you remember, remember this: you are Christine Summers. You are smart, and you are courageous, and you beat that sadistic son of a bitch and his bullshit powers.”

Christine couldn’t tell which version of her she was right now. She wasn’t certain that they were even separate anymore. “You… you mean you don’t hate me?” she asked in a small voice. “For what happened?”

She felt Rebecca’s tears drip onto her head. “No,” her sister said hoarsely. “I love you, Christine. Do you hate me?”

“No,” Christine whispered, feeling like a weight that she’d been holding for years had finally vanished. “I love you too, Rebecca.”

For a long minute the two sisters embraced, neither saying anything. Christine surrendered herself to the memories, letting them fill her head. No matter what happened, no matter what lay in her past, she was here, and she was loved, and that was all she needed. She could feel that her other self was gone. No, not gone, part of her. They were simply Christine now, and Christine remembered everything.

And then the memories began to fade. Not just the new ones, but the old memories too, the ones about her father and her teachers and everyone else. Deep down, she realized, she’d been the one calling them all this time, holding onto them. She’d thought that she needed all her old memories as penance, as a reminder of all the horrible things she’d let happen. But she didn’t need to punish herself, or agonize over what she should have done. She was here, and she was loved. She was here, and she was loved.

Christine let the memories go, and they drifted away like any other dream.

“I think… I think I’m going to be okay,” she told Rebecca.

“Of course you’re going to be okay,” Rebecca replied. “Didn’t you hear me? You’re Christine Summers.” She giggled. “Come on, why don’t we go downstairs? I’ll make you some of my special popcorn.”

“I’m not old enough to drink alcohol yet,” Christine reminded her. She was only eighteen again, and she was going to enjoy it.

Rebecca rolled her eyes. “Fine, I’ll make you the regular, boring kind of popcorn then,” she amended. “Come on, splort.”

“Can, can we stay like this for just one more minute, Becky?” Christine asked.

“Of course,”said Rebecca gently. “As long as you need, Chrissy.”

Her sister was warm and soft, and Christine felt safe and secure and loved in her arms. She knew she couldn’t keep hugging her sister forever. Soon they would separate and go downstairs, and time would march on. And that was a good thing. Christine had her whole life ahead of her, a life that promised happiness and joy and everything else that Jordan had tried to steal from her. But for now, she basked in their embrace, and for just a moment, time stood still for them.