Try Again

“We’re running out of time.”

Sirens are blaring and red lights flash overhead. There’s a dead guard on the ground and blood on the walls. They’re nowhere close to the main room.

Casey laughs wetly, the sound coming out more like choking than anything else. “Isn’t everyone?”

The look Mel casts her is poisonous, deadly. Casey, fortunately or not, is plenty used to the look and just smiles at her. The intended charming effect is ruined a bit by the blood between her teeth.

“Can you take this seriously for 30 seconds, please?” Mel spits out, hands still working furiously at staunching the blood leaking out of Casey’s side. 

It is serious, all of it. Mom’s office, the research her and Mel spent years developing. The program is wrong and if it launches nobody can fix anything. There’s a bullet still in Casey’s left side, and she’s pretty sure it hit the liver.  

Casey bites her tongue to keep a scream in her throat and tastes blood, hot and metallic. “If I start taking this seriously, then you’ll really think I’m dying.”

Mel’s lip twitches up at that, just for a split second, and Casey takes it for the win it is. She lets her head fall back, skull thumping hard against the cinder block and brain sloshing a little too hard. She loses a few seconds. 

“Casey, I think… I think Mom is going to do something. Something bad.”

Casey hadn’t heard from Mel in years. She still sounds the same. Casey lights a cigarette and flips off the old man glaring at her from inside the shop. Fuck him, she’s on break. His car can wait.

“Fuck, Mel. Mom’s always doing something bad. Why are you still there?” 

Casey wasn’t. Left the day she turned eighteen. Told Mel to come with her. Mel stayed and stopped calling at all five years later. It’s been 10 years since they’ve spoken.

“I’m trying to stop her. I need help.”

Sirens filter in, then a voice. 

“--asey? Case!” 

“I’m awake, fuck,” Casey manages to slur out. 

“Fucking stay that way then.” Mel’s voice is practically a hiss as she ties the sleeves of her flannel over the wound in Casey’s side, fat knot pressing down on the soaked shreds of the rest of the shirt. 

“Better watch your mouth before Mom washes it out with soap,” Casey throws back, still half-smiling. 

The world is swimming around her, edges fuzzy. It expands and contracts with her breath. 

Maybe Mel was right, Casey thinks. How much time do I have?

“Mom can fuck right off,” Mel says. “We are out of time.”

Casey doesn’t even get to enjoy Mel – perfect, wonderful, golden Mel – telling their, admittedly awful, mother to fuck off because suddenly she’s being hauled to her feet and everything goes dark. 

“Are you dumb or something?” Mel asked around a mouthful of fries. “Mom says that’s why you have to go to school.”

Casey snorts and takes a swig of beer. She’s seventeen and friends with the bartender. “Maybe. But you’re smarter than smart, Mel.” She forces herself to smile when she flicks a french fry at her baby sister, red cheeked and bright-eyed. “Only twelve-year-old I know en route to a Nobel Prize.”

Mel smiles, sly and proud. “If Mom and I figure out this time thing, I might have them give it to me when I’m eleven instead.”

When she blinks awake this time she’s in a fireman’s carry over Mel’s shoulders, uninjured side pressed against the back of her head. She’s pretty sure she’s leaking blood down Mel’s back. 

“I c’n walk,” Casey heaves out between breaths. She maybe can’t, but even a few seconds of being conscious on Mel’s back is about to send her stomach contents onto the floor. And the front of Mel’s shirt.

Mel sets her down, not quite able to get words out between panting breaths. She keeps her hands on Casey until she finds her feet, then they both stumble apart and find a wall for support. The sirens are quiet now, but red lights are still flashing cyclically overhead. Casey tries not to think too hard about her mom becoming a consummate supervillain, lair and all. 

Looking at each other now, Casey can see the faint white gleam of a scar above Mel’s left brow and she knows Mel can see a gap in her teeth from where Mom had knocked out two molars.

Casey looks down at her watch. Two minutes. When she looks up, Mel’s actually trying to smile at her. They both know that it isn’t enough time.

Mel fishes around the pocket of her coat and produces the controller. It looks more like an old school Gameboy than anything else, but it’s the cleverest thing Casey’s ever seen. 

Their mother had been many things – cruel, demanding, wealthy – but she had also been a genius. Casey isn’t, didn’t even particularly enjoy reading when letters swam and changed shape in front of her eyes. But Mel – Mel is smarter than their mother ever was. 

Mel’s face falls and she turns the controller to face Casey. It’s cracked.

“It- I must have damaged it when they jumped us. It’s been leaking power since we got here and I don’t- I don’t know what to do. I don’t know. I can’t– I can’t fix it in time,” Mel rambles, not breathing. She jerks her head up.  “Case, there’s only one charge left.”

They make eye contact and Casey feels eighteen again, standing in front of a thirteen-year-old teary eyed Mel. 

Mel is shaking, bleeding sluggishly from a cut above her left brow and her hands won’t stop shaking even as she clutches Casey’s shirt.  

“Casey- don’t, don’t tell Mom, please,” she begs. “I need– can you fix it? She’s going to kill me – for real this time. What am I going to do?” 

Mel looks like their dad, mostly, except for the eyes. Those are all Mom. Now, though, filled with tears and fear in a way Mom’s never been – she just looks like Casey’s baby sister.

Their mom’s car, once a sleek black, brand new BMW, is a smoking wreck, upside down in a ditch twenty feet away and Mom really might kill Mel for it. 

Casey doesn’t even think before she presses the keys to her own piece of shit 1996 sedan in Mel’s hands. 

“Stay at Jackie’s, okay?” Casey says, prying Mel’s other hand from her shirt and steering her to Casey’s car. “I’ll come get you later. I’ll– I’m going to tell Mom it was me. Then we can leave, okay?”

Mom hadn’t ended up killing Casey, but they’d never spoken again. Mel had gone home instead of leaving with her.

Casey prods at the gap in her teeth with her bloody tongue. She doesn’t have any keys to give Mel this time, and she can’t leave her behind.

“You try again,” Casey says. She stumbles forward to catch Mel by the shoulders. “Hey, hey– you try again, okay? You’re not out of time.” She takes one hand away to press against her side, and her palm comes away dripping blood. 

“You’re not out of time,” she breathes out again as her legs give out. 

Her head bounces off the wall again, and the world goes dark again.

“Time travel? Really?” Casey stares over her beer at Mel. She tries not to feel anything when she realizes she doesn’t know when Mel cut her hair or got her ears pierced. It’s been 10 years, after all. “Guess you’ll be getting the Nobel Prize at 28 instead of 12. Little old, bud.”

Mel ignores the dig and leans forward, elbows creasing Casey’s shitty table cloth.

“I’m asking for your help, Case,” Mel says, voice steady. “Mom wants – she’s dying, and she’s trying to stop it and it’s not going to work.”

Casey slams down her beer and leans forward, face close to Mel’s so she can hiss out, “Good.” She leans back and takes a long pull from her beer. “The world is better off without her.”

Mel shakes her head. “You don’t get it – if Mom tries this…” She stops, looking away and exhaling hard. “If Mom tries this, there won’t be a world.”

She blinks the black edges away, and now it’s Mel with her hands on Casey’s shoulders, propping her up instead of letting her fold. The matching watch on Mel’s wrist reads 45 seconds. 

Casey swallows hard and manages to get a hand to Mel’s cheek. “You try again, okay? I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry. This shouldn’t be on you, none of it. Mom broke the world. But you can fix it because you’re so smart. You’re so smart and so good, and I’m sorry I can’t come back with you.” 

35 seconds. 

“No no no no,” Mel babbles, handing flying over Casey but not quite landing. She’s panicking. “I can fix this, I can- I just need– I want–”

Casey catches her wrist in one hand and hits the green button on the side of the watch. 

25 seconds. 

She fumbles for the controller, abandoned on the ground when Mel tried to catch Casey. Hits the switch. 

20 seconds.

“It’s okay, Mel. It’s- it’s okay. I’m not mad. Never mad. Not at you,” Casey smiles again, lips closed so the last thing Mel sees isn’t her bloody teeth. “Just wasn’t enough time. It never is.”

15 seconds. 

Mel goes quiet first, mouth still moving but voice at a different time. The pressure of her hands disappears. Her outline goes soft, and Casey can’t tell if it’s the blood loss or not but then she’s just gone. Casey is alone in the stone hall, red lights painting the ceiling. There’s no siren but her ears ring. 

She looks down at her watch. 10 seconds to spare. 

It’s cold and quiet and Casey finally lets herself close her eyes, time slipping away. 

And then there’s pressure on her side and a warm hand on her face. Casey snaps open her eyes to see Mel crouched in front of her – a little older, maybe Casey’s age now – and a stranger standing behind her. Her eyes flick down automatically. 

5 seconds. 

Mel’s hand is on her wrist. She hits the green button.

“We try again,” Mel says. 

This time Casey smiles with all the teeth she has left, bloody or not. Mel’s answering smile is the last thing she sees before it goes dark.