Chapter Text
Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.
- Richard Siken.
It starts, as many of these stories do, with a young woman who leaves her home behind to do what is right. Her mother watches the scene from her throne, her muscles locked in anguish as her only daughter gathers up a golden lasso and a silver sword, and drops into a long, sweeping bow on the marble floors of the queen’s court.
***
It starts, as many of these stories do, with a child fast asleep in a ship from outer space, leaving his home behind in order to survive. His parents watch his chest rise and fall, and his mother reaches out to brush away the singular lock of hair that curls insistently on his tiny forehead and he smiles in his sleep, unaware of the world exploding around him.
***
It starts, as many of these stories do, with a little boy dressed in a suit and tie, who left his home behind with the blood of his mother on his crisp white shirt and the blood of his father soaking his knees. The boy never leaves the town he was born in or the house he grows up in, but in every way that matters, he never really returns.
The fabric of space-time.
It’s a funny phrase, isn’t it? You’ve heard it, over and over. Thrown around with little regard, like a toy shared between two particularly rough-and-tumble children. The fabric of space-time.
Much like other... fabrics you will have encountered over the course of your short life, the fabric of space-time is also woven of threads — finely spun, carefully crafted strands strung together tightly to make this so-called fabric. Much like your favourite t-shirt that you are wearing as you read this, or perhaps the blue denim jacket hung on your desk chair, the one you love pinning buttons onto. The weave that makes up your bedsheets and your towels, the kind you take for granted as you step on your carpets and close your curtains? Thousands and thousands of individual strands criss-crossing a million times over until you have something tangible that you can hold your hands.
Imagine that! Wispy wool and cloudy cotton fibers turned into something so solid, so unyielding. Have you ever tried to tear silk with your bare hands? Linen? Georgette?
Now take that image you have in your head, and expand it — multiply it — by infinity. Imagine an infinite amount of threads, starting from one point in space and extending outwards — imagine them falling over each other, looping over and under one another, sitting so close to each other they look to be one, pulling so tight that you can’t see the nothingness that stretches out forever on the other side.
That—
That is the fabric of space-time.
Each of those threads I just mentioned? Each one is a...version of events, let’s say. You and your kind would call them timelines. Each of them, these timelines, their beginnings rooted in one singular point in space-time — blinding and bright, as is the beginning of all things wonderful — is a hypothetical but perhaps not-so-hypothetical pattern that the events taking place in your universe could have followed. Each of these timelines is a series of events that didn’t happen — or at least, you in your reality did not experience them happening, and thus remain blissfully oblivious to.
In the millions and billions of timelines out there, there are many that are very similar to the one right next to them - like a gradient, little differences in one as compared to its’ neighbouring timeline on the left, and then the next one has a few changes as compared to the timeline on its’ left, and so on and so forth. These are little changes; small stones scattered too far and too wide in the path of a raging river to inflict any real changes. Things like variant spellings of country names and a milligram’s difference of sugar in the population’s favoured brand of orange soda.
Some universes are kinder than others — less wars, less death, less hunger and hatred and strife. It is not easily understood what sets these few apart from the others, but I feel it is a matter of both fate and fortune intertwined, rather one over the other.
But some universes are harsher than others — bodies piled high, destruction and disregard leaving behind empty wastelands barren of everything. Their worlds can’t even be called deserts, because deserts are teeming with life just under the surface. There is nothing left alive in these worlds, and if anything still is, it is lying down and playing dead with the rest of the carcasses in the hopes that they can escape whatever new suffering has yet to descend upon them.
Your timeline, I must inform you, is neither of the two. You are lucky, in that regard. Or perhaps unlucky? It is difficult to say.
...
...
Nonetheless, we must not ruminate too deeply on questions that cannot be answered. Let us move on. Now, where was I?
Ah, yes. Differences.
As you know, the one common denominator between all these timelines is that they have ...heroes.
Super -heroes.
No, your universe is not an outlier. Your universe has superheroes too. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there, you know. It’s simply a matter of time before they make themselves known, and the way your timeline is headed, well, I hope it’s soon.
Moving on. So, superheroes. Most timelines end up forming a few long-lasting hero teams - the Avengers, the Justice League, the X-Men, the Justice Society. Usually, these teams consist of a few meta-humans, some aliens and some average garden-variety humans, and usually , these teams cause as many problems as they solve.
Some teams don’t last very long. The one singular timeline with the hero team that names themselves the ‘Umbrella Academy’, for example, was doomed from start to finish. Their timeline — N/RL-UA-882 — imploded in the year they labelled two-thousand and nineteen, and now it is one of those dead-worlds I mentioned earlier. Most worlds that end up dead like theirs usually have a team like theirs, too — ]dysfunctional and disorderly, the...’heroes’ jaded and desperate. Even worlds with versions of the solid teams I listed above have often gone...off-the-rails — just look at timeline T/AN-JL-927. A bleak, colorless little world, bouncing from one disaster to the next — rather twisted judgement calls by their Justice League, several entanglements with timelines they weren’t supposed to cross, alongside the destruction of their Earth courtesy of a hostile breed of aliens, ending with a botched attempt at resetting the timeline before someone took action against them.
We did, by the way. We took action. T/AN-JL-927 was terminated before their Speed-Force avatar could complete its reset, and now the fibers that make up the thread of their timeline slowly unravel until it is as if it never existed in the first place.
A number of other universes have been cut out like this. It is necessary, you know, to maintain the stability of the fabric of space-time. Nothing personal, just a job that needs doing. But the thing all these cut-short timelines have in common is the lack of interpersonal...[???].
Did that translate right? I said [???].
[???]. You can’t understand me? Well. The closest translation I have available is ‘love’. A lack of interpersonal love between friends, between family — that is what drives a timeline to destruction. We’ve seen it before — S/RL-TA-628 almost self-destructed when the entire universe’s population was cut in half, followed by a 34% loss of the remaining sentient organisms. Against all odds, however, that timeline repaired itself, thanks to the love that somehow persisted beyond the everlasting grief of such a tragedy.
Similarly, every so often we hold council to decide whether or not to destroy D/CM-JL-328. This particular timeline is riddled with Speed-Force avatars, each more meddlesome than the next. Their resets cause problems — knots, if you will, in the thread of the timeline — and they alter the direction of the fate of their universe without a second thought. We almost terminated them a few years ago, when it seemed that everyone human had lost their humanity. But in the time it took to reach the decision of termination, their timeline had been re-knotted in a different, more suitable, direction. Thanks to the inefficiency of bureaucracy, D/CM-JL-328 was saved.
Well — inefficiency, and the power of love, of course.
As ridiculous and sentimental as it sounds, love is perhaps the only unquantifiable variable in the experiment of life. It is not measurable, definable or even understandable in any way, shape, or form — the closest anyone has ever come to demystify it is managing to list the chemical compounds in a human brain when a person experiences affection or attachment of some kind, yet it is unknown as to what factors cause those chemical compounds to be produced.
Loveless universes, like T/AN-JL-927, will never survive. We’ve seen it too many times, and we know this to be true. In the end, a loveless timeline - no matter how technologically advanced, or militarily capable — a loveless timeline never makes it out alive.
(Let us hope your timeline has enough love to save itself from the onslaught of horror headed its way.)
Nevertheless. Let us not speak of the worst of these universes — these empty mockeries of what a real world should look like. Let us sever these threads and watch them unravel out of existence, and instead —
Let us look at the best of these timelines. A hypothetical reality where it is not seen as weak or damning to care for a person other than yourself, where kindness is more important than power, where humans try harder to keep the flames of hope and truth and justice alive. It was difficult to find this one, you know. A diamond in the rough, an oasis in the desert, a [???] on the [???].
The point is, this particular timeline is a rarity.
At first glance, it appears familiar to other universes. In fact, timeline I/MU-JL-328 bears a striking resemblance to D/CM-JL-328. Their history covers similar events, tells stories of similar wars, more often than not played out by a similar cast of characters. However, because of the average fractional increase in compassion per human, an interesting phenomenon occurs.
I/MU-JL-328’s wars are shorter every time, sometimes by a day, but sometimes by a year, relative to the length of their co-incident conflicts in other timelines. In the same vein, their outbreaks of disease are shorter too, their people more caring about their impact on others. While their Earth still runs on coal-power and petrol, their shift to green technology to protect their planet has been noticeably faster than any other Earth in any other timeline. Their drive to build equality between all people is also more...persistent than any other timeline under our purview.
Horrible things still happen. Violence, injustice, destruction. People still steal, people still kill, people still suffer. But these are, unfortunately, a given. Just like it is a given that the young woman, the child, and the little boy must bear the brunt of the weight of the world on their shoulders every time they exist— them and so many other heroes alongside them who will rise and fall and rise again. And somehow, they turn this world — their timeline — into the only exception. The kindest timeline.
The young woman’s story does not change much between universes. She leaves her home — sometimes to help a handsome soldier stop a war her people had no stake in, and other times, to help save a young girl from the world and the world from the young girl. And every time, her mother watches her go, knowing that she will never see her daughter again.
The infant’s parents almost always manage to send him off in time, his cousin right behind him. Most of the time, he is accepted into a loving home and raised with the compassion that will shape him into the savior of humanity time and again; sometimes he loses that compassion and becomes something darker.
But the real point of inflection in starting every timeline’s Age Of Heroes is the little boy who loses his parents in the alley. Out of all of these bright and beautiful, terrible and tragic beginnings, it is what happens to those humans in that alley that changes the course of history forevermore. [The reason is yet to be determined; a popular theory is that because the boy and his parents are humans and not Amazons or Kryptonians — it is thought that humans, as the most base creatures in any universe, are both capable of and susceptible to the greatest changes.]
Perhaps there really is no other way to spin this yarn, no other version of this story. But what do people do except sing the same songs again and again, just missing each other by milliseconds? Perhaps this time, the story will turn out differently. The fabric of space-time continues to knit itself in the same pattern it always has — and we will follow this singular thread until it is spun into gold or left untethered and broken.
The choice is not ours. We may only watch. And so without further ado, I present to you: the story of the Kindest Timeline.
