Drew came to, staring into the void where the sky had been. It took him a minute to remember what had happened, and even now he wasn't really sure how he had gotten here. He set off in a random direction, hoping to find anyone or anything. "I guess it's too much to hope that the cult compound was left intact, right?" He said to nobody in particular.
He stopped short a few seconds later, coming into view of a throne, or rather, the throne. Azathoth's Throne. Fortunately an abandoned truck was nearby, so he got in and headed back in that opposite direction again.
As Drew walked, he started recording logs of the major moments of his life. He started with an explanation of who he was, then went on to explain how he destroyed his world. Next, he covered how he had almost given up, and why. Then, what had happened to cause him to become lost in this void. He also recorded two smaller uploads about major events with his friends that meant a lot to him. As he made these logs, he eventually got closer to his destination, which started out as a speck at first, then began to grow bigger.
Finally arriving at the doorway to the structure, Drew places his hand on the handle. Before he can open the door, he blacks out.
Drew comes aware of himself sitting at a desk, unable to remember how he got there. A man walks up to him and says "What's wrong, Drew? You look like you've seen a ghost!"
"I feel like I have," he said. He was back in his office, in 2012.
He ran out of his office, and drove home as fast as he could. Bursting through the front door, he swept his daughter and wife up in the biggest hug he could muster, and broke down crying.
"Dada, why cry?" His daughter asked him.
"I'd quite like to know that as well," his wife asked, confused.
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he said.
---
A few weeks later, Drew is busy working on the coding for what will become Mimir. He's almost forgotten what he assumed was just a nightmare. Suddenly, his phone rings, and he answers it. He listens for a minute, and let's the handset drop to the floor. He sits down hard in his chair, and just breaks down. A few minutes later, the man from before helps him up and leads him out to the car.
---
The beeping from a heart rate monitor can be heard. Drew is sitting head down on a bed, his wife in the first bed, and his daughter in the next. The doctor had just left, and the news wasn't good. They were both in critical condition and likely wouldn't make it.
---
Another week later, and Drew had been promoted. He and his wife had agreed that going back to work was the best thing he could do, since his project was vital to finding a cure. His phone rang again, it was the hospital. He answered, and collapsed into his chair for the second time.
---
Drew came to again, back with his hand on the door. He hadn't expected to relive that particular memory today, let alone ever again. He opened the door, and made his way inside. It appeared to be his old house. He moved forward, into the entryway, and seemed to black out again as he moved to the hallway.
---
Drew came to again in his office, staring at the mostly competed source code of Mimir. A black ops government project had co-opted their program and put him in charge a few weeks prior. To keep his mind off of what had happened with his wife and daughter, he threw himself back into his work. The government guy that was his boss had told him that he needed to take some time to himself, and that they didn't need him to be there all day every day, but Drew explained to him that the home he used to share with his family was the worst place for him now. They also tried to get him to meet with the company therapist but he just kept telling them there was no time. In fact, what he was doing was working on a different version of the project, that instead of accessing data from alternate timelines could move people from one timeline to another, and he was almost done.
---
Later that month, Drew snuck into the testing lab late at night. He plugged his external drive into the lab computer and began running the program. As it locked on to a potential target, the air in the middle of the lab began rippling. An alarm started blaring, and he could hear boots slamming the floor headed his way. A tear in the room opened, and he saw the form of his wife and daughter appearing. The door started shaking under the weight of the military guard at the facility trying to break in. Finally, they appeared fully and stumbled forward. Drew dropped to his knees and cried. The tear collapsed in on itself, just as the guards broke into the room. He was taken to the boss's room, while his wife and child were taken to the med wing. He had done it. He had them back.
---
Drew came to again in the hallway, looking at the family pictures up on the wall. He smiled at the memories of them, moving forward to the living room. He collapsed onto a couch and slept the dreamless sleep of the void.
Drew came to himself back in his house, having been relieved of his leadership duties on Project Mimir. He didn't begrudge them, he deserved it. The one thing he was happy about is that his family was being allowed to stay and wouldn't be sent back. He hadn't been allowed to see them yet, but he was hoping soon. He had arranged their home just the way it had been a few months prior, in anticipation of his wife and daughter coming home. As he sat down to relax, his phone rang. They wanted him to come back to work and give a few statements about what had happened.
---
As Drew made his way back to the directors office, he caught a glimpse of his wife and daughter ahead of him. He hurried his pace to catch up with them, but as he did, his daughter shrieked and one of the guards stopped him.
"What the fuck man, that's my family, why am I not being allowed to see them?"
"The director will explain everything to you. Please move along."
He finally made it to the directors office, and the first words out of his mouth were "Jim what the fucks going on-"
He stopped short as Jim held up a hand. Apparently, Jim explained, they came from a timeline where he had become extremely abusive, and they had just managed to permanently escape from him, only to be pulled into another world by someone with the same face as him.
He just sat there, head in his hands. "I'm guessing that means they aren't coming home with me then.". He stated.
"Probably not, old friend."
---
Drew wakes up on the couch in the living room, feeling refreshed. He moves from there to the dining room, where he spent a lot of happy meals with his family.
As he enters the room, his mind drifts off again.
---
The control room was in crisis mode. Apparently Drew's bringing people over from another universe had the unintended consequence of bringing viruses through to their world. So far, nothing he or any of the rest of the team could do could fix it. He tried to get the alternate version of his wife to talk to him and tell him what to do to stop it, but shortly after entering this world, she and his alternate daughter had contracted the same variant of H1N1 that had killed their counterparts and passed quickly. He had pleaded with Jim to allow him to use Mimir to send him to their world to find a cure, but the code was being kept under lock and key, with the excuse "it was too dangerous."
Bullshit.
So he found himself accessing various systems from that world, but couldn't find anything to stop this mutated strain. Eventually half of the world had died. Then half of the survivors. Eventually there was only small pockets of survivors left, with Drew leading the remenants of his organization.
They changed their name to Path of Black Leaves and spent a good four years together just surviving.
Drew moved from the dining room into the kitchen, checking to see if there was any food. There wasn't, but he wasn't hungry anyway. He moved on from the kitchen to his office. As he looked out the window, he saw what looked like a wad of magnetic tape like from a casette float past in the void, as well as a spider-person thing. He shrugged at that, eldritch deities come in stranger forms, he guessed. He sat down at the desk and drifted off into a memory again.
---
Drew spent the last four years trying to keep his band of survivors together, occasionally having to make tough decisions, but generally doing his best to keep the group together.
One day, while out on a supply run, Drew encountered a tall faceless man, surrounded by an aura that caused sickness. The man started appearing more and more often, and Drew's decisions became more and more erratic. Finally, seven years after the end of the world, the group kicked Drew out, because they no longer trusted him. He didn't take it very well, and took up residence in the basement of a destroyed house for a few months.
---
Drew moved from his office to the basement, looking for something he had placed in a box many many years before. He let his thoughts wander again as he browsed the boxes.
---
A few months later, Drew broke into the Path of Black Leaves camp, followed by a rival group. He needed something out of their safe, and needed the rivals to get in. Once there was a decent distraction going on, he broke into his old office and opened the safe. Fortunately, he found the orange silicon covered hard drive and dropped it in his backpack. He looked back under the hard drive, and found a picture of his family. He picked it up, and realized with a fair amount of surprise that he hadn't thought of his family in years. He heard a commotion outside of his old house, and rushed to the basement still holding his picture. Once he got down there, he hid the photo in a box, and stayed crouched down as low as he could manage. Once they had moved on, he left the house and made his way to the place they snuck in. He stopped in his tracks, his former group and the rivals he had snuck in with had killed each other. He shed a tear for his fallen comrades, it wasn't supposed to end this way. When he got back to his hideout, he poured out several shots for his fallen friends, and moved on to a new area, on his own.
Drew tossed the last box to the side, not finding what he was looking for. He made his way back upstairs, and headed up the stairs in the entryway to the second floor. As he did so, he let his mind wander again.
---
Drew, having found a new place to settle down, in what he thought was near New Jersey, near a beach. He'd always wanted to live on the ocean, but was wary of the dangers of rising tides. Now it didn't really matter to him. He spent most of his days modifying Mimir, trying to find any survivors near him, fearing that he was truly alone. One day, out of the blue, Discord on his phone pinged out of nowhere. It was a group of people in situations similar to his, just doing their best to survive. Talking to them became a normal part of his day, but he kept many of his details to himself, not wanting them to think any less of him. He made friends with lots of them, there was Locke, the alternate version of some asshole named Kingsley's daughter, Hayden, who had been captured by a group called Amalgus, Poet who worked with a group called the Legion, Colette and Gustav, and the alternate universe version of their son, so many people he had thought of as friends. And then Locke was killed. She came back, but different. And Hayden left the group because of something they were going to do in the future. And not only that, everyone's worlds began to be erased. And The Photographer showed up for them and brought them to his world. And he wasn't alone anymore.
---
Drew made his way into his old bedroom, the first time he's seen it in years. It looked just like he remembered it. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and remembered the last thing his family had done together before they got sick. He stood up and made his way back into the hallway, mind drifting yet again.
---
Bang.
Drew appeared to be in a vast white expanse, all by himself. He called out, but nobody was there. He wandered around for a bit, then just sat down. He'd been feeling more and more isolated from everyone lately, and unsure how to shake the rut. He didn't have a home to go back to, and he was having trouble settling into a life with everyone else. It didn't help that Photo had, unintentionally, opened a portal to a world that was a carbon copy of his own, down to the house he had explored just before he ended up here. It was his house. As soon as he realized, he just lost it and went into a spiral. Nobody really paid him any attention, nobody cared what he was up to, and nobody would miss him. He had his sidearm, and before he knew what he was doing, he held it up to his head and felt a pound of pressure on the two pound trigger but before he could pull it something hit his hand, redirecting the barrel and burning out his eye as the gun discharged. He held his head in his hands and screamed, but he was the only one there to hear it. He blacked out from the pain, and that's how he had gotten here, in this void. He guessed he was going to be stuck here until he figured out why he wanted to live. He had no reason to live. That was the long and short of it.
But still, there was a not small part of him in the back of his head that wanted to live. To get his friends back. To keep them all safe.
There, that was his lesson. He needed to live to keep all of his friends safe. He blinked, several times, before he realized he just couldn't see out of his left eye. He hastily made up a story as he headed back to Photo's place.
In the following months, New Drew City as it came to be called became the base of Operation Wildcard, Drew's Geist detachment. They would go on to do great things, even after Drew moved on.
---
Drew moved along the hallway, poking his head into the bathroom, and, sure enough, it looked like a bathroom. He continued down the hall to the guest bedroom. Nothing there looked out of the ordinary, but he did notice the books on one of the shelves. He smiled with fondness remembering the children's book he and his wife had written, thinking they'd become millionaires. How foolish they both were then. He drifted off again.....
---
He found himself thinking of Zahk, and how he'd done him more harm than good. He'd never liked amnestics, and he maintained that was the wrong decision, but that didn't absolve his wrongdoing. Sure he gained the ability to come and go as he pleased, but almost at the cost of someone who had once been his friend. Just another failure in a long line of failings. He has always considered himself an agent of good, but despite his intentions, he always seemed to hurt the people around him. The only exceptions had been his wife and daughter the first time, and Hayden and Locke. He had hurt Hayden at least, but he felt like his actions before the end had made up for it. But the more and more he thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense that the harder he tried, the more people got hurt.
---
Moving across the hall, Drew entered his daughter's room. This was the hardest place for him to go, because he still had trouble accepting she was gone, even ten years later. It looked just the way they'd left it, pink on pink on pink. He quickly moved across the room, to the attic hatch in the ceiling. He pulled it down, and made his way up the ladder, thinking of the last time he'd seen his wife and daughter...
---
He had been running Mimir nonstop for months at this point, looking for anything, any possible world where he hadn't been a fuckup and ruined everything. It turns out there were plenty of worlds where his wife was happy, most of them were worlds where she had never met him. He found worlds where they met and got divorced, worlds where neither of them existed, and worlds where he was happy but not with her. It was good to see versions of himself that were happy, but they weren't what he was looking for.
Eventually he found one.
One world where he hadn't fucked shit up.
He made sure to isolate that world, to keep it separate from the greater multiverse as a whole, safe from everyone. Especially himself. They deserved that much at least. He also fudged some documents and left them pretty well off, a rich uncle they'd never met, blah blah blah, and they'd never have to work again. He smiled. At least he'd been able to do one good thing with his life.
---
He stepped up into the attic, looking at the dusty boxes. It had clearly been years since anyone has been up here. He turned to leave, until he noticed something slightly out of place. It was an orange rubberized hard drive case, with a laptop sitting right next to it, and a crow feather sitting on it. He dropped to his knees, tears of relief flooding his face. He had been afraid that in the world ceasing to exist, his totem and computer would have been gone too.
---
The memories of his time watching over Jai came back to him too, both the good and the bad. He'd almost been able to make him forget about the stupid plan to destroy the world. It always came back to that, no matter what he did, everything always went forward the way they were meant to. He stood back up and grabbed his things.
"Some Wildcard I turned out to be," he spoke into the void.
"You did the best you could." A voice spoke out to him.
He whipped around in shock at the voice he heard.
"Marie?"
Drew sat down on the edge of an old trunk, hardly believing what he was seeing.
"I thought I'd never see you again." He said to whatever had taken his wife's form.
"We both know that I'm not her, Drew. She's just the form your mind is giving me based on your biggest regrets and desires."
"And why am I being confronted by my greatest regret? It's not like I'm dying, am I?"
"Well....."
"Ok I mean yeah being a nihilist of course I know I'm dying every second I live but I mean it's not like I'm in a hospital bed in the real world and this is all in my head right?"
"Oh no you're definitely not in a hospital somewhere. Actually, I'm not even sure that we exist right now."
"Well that's good to know. So what, I'm supposed to accept that there's nothing I could have done to save you? Or how do we do this?"
"I'm the manifestation of your greatest regrets, I'm literally in your head right now. "
"Right. Well I know now that I couldn't save you, that's why I tried to bring a different you that needed saving."
"But did you really save them? Can you say they're better off because of you?"
"You mean so you think they're better off dying from the plague than being killed by an abusive me from another universe? Personally if I had to pick I'd rather be killed by a plague than an abuser."
The face of his wife looked back at him.
"I mean personally I'd rather not die. Oh I see what you're saying. I should have left them to their fates?"
"What did you do after bringing them over?"
"They said they did t want anything to do with me."
"At first, you could have been the you they needed!"
"NO I COULDN'T!" He shouted at her. "I WAS STILL RECOVERING FROM LOSING THEM THE FIRST TIME." He took several deep breaths. "I get it. I accept that in y grief I ruined their lives worse than staying where they were ever could. And what it did to that other me."
The face of his wife smiled as she faded away.
Reality seemed to shift around Drew, and next he knew he was in the headquarters of his survivor group.
---
"Well that was odd," Drew said, looking around. He appeared to be in the same house, just a few years later. He looked left, and saw Jim, his former second in command. "So you're my guide through this part of my hell?"
Jim smiled, and said "Bold of you to assume Hell would have you."
"So what's the lesson I'm supposed to have learned here?"
"The fact that you even have to ask should answer that question for you."
"It wasn't my fault what happened to you, and I didn't hold your deaths against myself, so clearly that didn't answer the question, now did it?"
Jim gave him a look.
"It was my fault. I let them in and didn't care what they did. I cared more about my drive than I did your lives. Is that what you want to hear?"
"Is that what you need to hear?"
"Honestly I don't know what I'm supposed to have learned from my time with you all. I lost myself for a good long while after I lost my wife and daughter twice, and you all paid that price for me. I guess what I need to hear most from you is that you all never held my mistakes against me. I really did try my best to be a good leader."
"What was that?"
"I said I tried my best despite everything that happened, and regret the bad things I did every day."
At that, reality shifted again, and he was in his house on the beach.
---
Drew made his way out to the deck of the beach house. Though this was the place in his life he spent the least amount of time, it was the most precious to him. He supposed it too was lost in the void now, in Apollyon's rewrite. He kicked back and relaxed in a deck chair, waiting for the manifestation of his guilt to show back up.
"Figures you'd be relaxing when there was work to be done."
He leaned forwards the voice, not believing his eyes. "H... Hayden?"
"Yeah, supposedly you have a lesson to learn and I'm here to help you through it."
"What lesson is that, that I failed?"
"Failed? Man you guys almost had me convinced to leave Apollyon, if he hadn't intervened you'd have saved me."
"Actually I've thought about this a lot since that day. My regret with you isn't not saving you. It's not saying I'm sorry, or invoking the deal with Apollyon sooner."
"Don't you remember those last moments? I knew. And I forgave you all."
"If I accept that it still means ultimately accepting I failed you."
"This coming from the guy who took that and used it to beat Apollyon at his own game. The only person ever to do that."
"I suppose so. You're right. What happened to you didn't happen because of us. It happened in spite of us. And it let me help Munnin in a small way later."
Reality warped around him again, until he was in what became the head office of Operation Wildcard, day 1 of boots on the ground in Drutopia.
---
Drew groaned, knowing who he was going to see here.
"I already know it's you, no need for the theatrics," he said as he walked from around the other corner. "Yup, you're here to convince me that life is still worth living, right? And that I need to stop looking for a way to die saving my friends?"
The other him smiled. "What do you think?"
"That objectively I know you're right. What I did that day was selfish. It was even more selfish to not talk about it afterwards. I know I have people I can talk to, but then I'd have to actually open up."
"Would that really be so bad?"
"Objectively no, but the last people I really opened up to are all gone or beyond my reach."
"Well, what do you think the lesson here is?"
"That if I don't accept myself I can't expect others to, but if I never give them a chance to accept me then they can't reject me either."
"Come on dude that's bullshit and you know it."
"I guess if I make it back I have an awful lot of explaining to do."
"So what's the lesson here?"
"Everyone deserves the right to know the real me, and the real me isn't as bad as I may think."
Reality shifted again again, and he was back in the attic of his old house.
---
"So that's it? I go on an inward journey of self acceptance only to end up where I started?"
"Sometimes it's not the destination, it's the journey." His wife answered.
"Besides, do you really think we'd let you go without the real closure you wanted?" Jim asked, grinning.
"Never forget what happened here today." Hayden told him.
The other Drew just smiled at him.
He hugged all of them in turn, a shining door opening in front of the window. Shouldering his bag once more, he stepped forward into his next great adventure, no longer burdened by the ghosts of his past.