The X's "Why" •••

I didn't know if I was going to wake up until I did. It could've been a moment, or a thousand, or several years worth of moments.

Either way, it didn't matter.

The moment my eyes shot open, I gasped. The room swam around me, unfamiliar, but the moment I looked down at my hands I knew I was somewhere. And somewhere felt much better than nowhere. I hoped soon I'd 'know where' I was.

"You're awake," a stoic voice stated from beside me.

"Minta?" I muttered, still swimming. Waking up from anesthesia had never been quite so blurry. This was something else.

"Who? No, it's Cecil," apparently Cecil stated from beside me. As I fought to regain full consciousness, the familiarity of his voice came to awareness.

Something familiar. Thank God.

"Cecil," I repeated dumbly.

"That hit shook you hard, huh?" Cecil asked dryly. I turned to face him, still slightly fuzzy, and I could almost swear he wore the glimpse of a knowing smile. Like we, together, shared a secret.

"Am I in the hospital?" I asked, still trying to shake myself awake. I squinted at Cecil, waiting for my double vision to become one. The more I focused, the closer I got.

Grounding myself in reality, right now, was my first order of business.

"You've been here long enough to miss quite a catastrophe," Cecil stated.

Before he could finish, I asked again, anxious, "How long?"

Cecil shrugged. Or maybe I just imagined that. But this time, only one Cecil shrugged. "About three days," he replied. Before I could even more, he added, "And you're not leaving any time soon. We need to watch your vitals."

"My vitals feel fine, thank you," I countered. Now that I could hear, and I could see, I was certain I could stand.

Unfortunately, that faith was misplaced. Too easily I pushed myself out of bed, and stumbled as my feet hit the floor. I found myself seated right back down again, apparently no longer dressed in my tarnished suit. A somewhat trendy (as far as hospital styles go) gown had replaced it, white with small red roses.

"And you need to watch your feet," Cecil commented. I might have laughed, had it been a joke.

"So I'm supposed to just stay here?"

"And rest," Cecil affirmed. "For once, leave it to the rest of us."

For the next seven days, that's what I did. I had minimal visitors. My father, and Cecil. No matter how much I begged to see anybody else, I wasn't allowed.

On day eight, I was free to go.

Throughout those seven days, memories danced in my head. Several pathways, or timelines as Minta would say, played with me.

They showed me all sorts of things. In the beginning, most of them were horrible. Homes, worlds, universes getting destroyed. People fighting, killing each other. My head spun when one of them showed me slaughtering my friends. Even worse, ones of my mother, as great of a weapon of destruction as I feared she'd be.

Slowly, though, at about the same pace I got my legs to walk correctly, the bad gave way to far better. People holding hands and singing, lovely green Earths, synergetic universes. At the middle of it all, was my mother. Creating a beautiful landscape, showing people what love is truly like. Me, glowing gold, her first perfect creation. Orbiting around her, her orbiting around me.

And in my favorite one, the one I clung to, was the best of all. And in the middle of it, most central to my eye, was Mark and I. I could see our past, and our future, and the greatest present is that the present would forever be more exciting than I knew and less terrible than I feared.

By the time I got out, that eighth day later, I knew this timeline, Mark's timeline, was the one I was walking into. I didn't want to walk into anyone else.

"Have you seen Minta?" I asked Cecil as he walked me to the door. Outside, a government vehicle was waiting, ready to pick me up.

"I don't know who you're talking about," he replied. Cecil was ever proper, and completely certain.

My brows furrowed, confused. "You know... about ye tall, scary, green skin?" I prodded. "Looks kind of like my mom?"

Cecil gave me a strange look. Even though I'd drawn her mugshot for him and described her that way about a thousand times. Even though she was once my number one bet for the Guardian's killer.

"I don't know her," Cecil replied. "I'm sure you do, though. You were repeating her name in your sleep."

"What did I say?" I exclaimed. I had hardly considered that, in this reality, for everyone else, I had merely been sleeping. Dreaming, although what happened to me felt far realer than a dream.

If I had talked in my sleep, I was dying to know what I said.

"You thought you were her," Cecil stated. "'I am Minta.' We noted it; I wasn't sure it would mean anything to you. You said a lot of nothing."

Nobody had ever loved me enough to tell me that before. I could've been talking in my sleep this whole time.

"I am Minta". I muttered the sentence under my breath, testing it out in my mouth. It tasted bittersweet, something uglier than a lie but far prettier than truth. Something in between, some secret third thing.

"I guess I... am Minta," I said again, shaking away the chill the words set down my spine.

Cecil harrumphed. But again, I could've sworn he ghosted a smile at me, like he knew something better than I.

Infinity 1/30/25 1:03am

~WWAP Epilogue featuring Mark coming soon