Chapter 38:
Mr. Atlas
Mary slowly opened the door to Julian’s room. Julian lay in the bed face flat, perhaps instinctively hiding his eyes from the gentle light that was seeping through the window. She had never understood his random sleeping positions and she never would.
She sighed, sitting on the bed. Across the bed was his table which he rarely used for studying. On it was a MacBook that their parents had bought him, which he ended up using mostly for watching movies or somehow playing games that ran on the macOS. Above the table was a small shelf full of scattered comic books, figures, and trading cards.
But what stood out to her was the wall of photos he had created on the corkboard. All of the photos were recent, as if he had just started to live. There was a picture of the original trio of when they had grilled for the first time; a picture of the four of them on the night they had gone rooftop camping; a picture of her family when they recently visited their parents back home. And while looking through the other photographs, she allowed herself to recall each peaceful memory as she sat quietly next to her naive brother. Some of these photos surprised her, since Julian seemed to have taken some of these without permission.
Her younger brother had finally crawled out of his shell at the cusp of the apocalypse. Now it was all coming to an end. He and the rest of the world would die prematurely.
She wasn’t sure about this “immortality” talk. She didn’t want to stop being herself. Yet death now scared her. Atlas had convinced her of the value of continuing to live. He taught her that she had never wanted to die–she had just wanted things to be better.
But she didn’t want to become a “god”. She just wanted to live a bit longer with everyone else.
In the end, the only thing she could do was wake her brother up and hear what he wanted to do. If he told her that he wanted to live on, she wouldn’t even have to have this dilemma.
She leaned into his ear and whispered gently, despite knowing it would take more to wake him.
“Julian… wake up.”
He didn’t wake, as expected, and she had to shake him a bit to get him to react.
“Hngh... Just a few more minutes,” he grumbled, pulling the blankets over his head.
She tried pulling the blanket off him. “Julian… this is important. Wake up.”
“Euuh…what could be so important…?” he groaned, fighting back for the blanket.
“Please. I need to ask you something.”
Julian sighed, letting her pull the blanket completely off him. Eventually, he pushed himself up on the bed and sat with his legs folded, yawning.
“It better be a really important question.”
Mary got off his bed, then rotated the chair by his desk and sat down, facing him directly. She clasped her hands, asking her question slowly.
“Listen. Hypothetically–just hypothetically–if you had the power to escape from our dying universe, would you?”
Julian blinked, clearly not expecting such a strange question first thing in the morning. “This is a really specific question...”
“Just answer the question.”
He sighed, then lay back down on the bed, resting his hands on his stomach and staring up to the ceiling. Long seconds passed, making her wonder if he was actually thinking about it.
Eventually, he responded with another question.
“Do I get to take anyone?”
Mary shook her head. “No. Just you. You’ll be like Superman, I guess. You’ll be the sole survivor of our dying universe. You know. In this… hypothetical scenario.”
“I guess that sounds interesting. It’d make a nice story.”
“Yeah.”
Julian closed his eyes. “But, no. I wouldn’t.”
“And your reason?”
He turned his head towards her, wearing his usual naive smile. “Because I’m not going to leave you here.”
Mary sighed, leaning back on her chair. She was expecting such a standard answer from him. But she felt that he wasn’t really thinking this through.
“Let me rephrase the question: do you want to die?”
“Huh?”
“Do you want to die? You’re saying you would rather die with me here instead of saving yourself?”
“I guess.”
Mary clenched the sides of the chair. “You’ll die. It means the end of your entire existence. Julian Everhart. Dead. Gone. And yet you would stay? Just because of what, loyalty? Devotion?”
She threw her arms up, slightly frustrated. “If you can escape, it means you can do much more with your life. Didn’t you tell us before that you wanted more time?”
Julian pouted. “You’re making it sound like you want me to leave you behind. It’s suspicious.”
Then, he stood up and stepped closer, bending his back forward and staring into the soul hidden behind her brown eyes.
Mary tried to turn away, but couldn’t. “W-what is it?”
He spoke softly, as if he was talking to a child. “Mary, if you had the power to escape from our dying universe, would you?”
“W-what?”
Julian closed his eyes with a soft grin. “Look. I’m not sure where your question is coming from. Perhaps you’re just using this hypothetical to ask if I would kill myself. Or perhaps you secretly meant it literally.”
He looked at her with soft eyes. “Listen, Mary. I’m not stupid. It’s been fun, yes. But I’m aware that there’s something bigger going on in the background. I’ve noticed your strange behavior. I’ve noticed the unexplainable events. There’s something that no one is telling me.”
“I, well…”
He shook his head. “It’s alright. You don’t need to tell me. Really,” he said, lightening his tone. “It won’t affect the time we had together with Atlas and Ms. Kovacs. And it’s fun, guessing the real reason why they both ended up staying with us for so long...”
“... But Mary, my own answer won’t change. I want to stay with you. So I think the real question you’re trying to answer is whether or not you want to leave everything behind.”
Julian gently held her face, lifting her head to look at him. Mary weakly tried to avoid his eyes, yet could not. And for a moment, the gray sunlight from the windows seemed to strengthen as it fell on them.
“What would you do, Mary? Would you run away? Or would you face the end together with the rest of the world? Maybe you will have to make a choice, if you want to settle the doubt in your heart before the end of everything.”
He gently let her face go, then fell back into bed, throwing the blankets back around himself. It seemed that his body still required more sleep.
Mary stared at her hands for a long time. Eventually, she could hear her brother’s breathing slow, indicating that he had fallen asleep. She slowly got up from the chair and quietly sat on his bed. She gently stroked his hair, the way their mother would do for them.
… There’s no way any one of us is making it out of here, is there…?
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