Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s plenty of time, at first, for Jonas to reflect on his failures.

More than thirty years with nothing but the work, with only Claudia’s infuriating optimism he knows she kept up only to keep him motivated, Noah’s ever-present scepticism over all they were doing until he vanished without a trace, and Elisabeth’s silent, growing madness.

All of it to return to the Winden of 2019 and fail to destroy the portal, and then bide his time until the apocalypse, only to fail there as well.

To be outmanoeuvred, to be left with nothing but a time machine to whisk away the friends he’d had before everything went wrong.

To leave her to die.

It’s easier to not think about it when he’s occupied.  Whether it’s working for Gustav Tannhaus – at least, up until his death, months after their arrival – or whether it’s experimenting on recreating the God Particle with the few resources the nineteenth century can afford him, he throws himself into it, everything he is.

But he can never forget.

You will carry this pain with you for the rest of your life.

She lives on in his dreams and nightmares alike, and he expects she always will.

He used to wonder.  Why 1888?

It doesn’t seem there’s a reason they would have been sent that far back.  He hadn’t even been aware that the apparatus could travel that far across time, but it shouldn’t have been able to in a single jump.  It moves only in increments of thirty-three years.  Everything he knew, everything he had learned with Claudia and discussed with the Tannhaus of the 1980s, made that about as clear as this could be made.

True, the pattern wasn’t exactly broken.  They had jumped back in time one hundred thirty-two years, or four intervals of thirty-three.  The God Particle he had found in 2053 had done likewise, sending him back to 1921, the same length of time.

It can only be the work of time itself, can’t it?

It makes a sick level of sense.  The same way he couldn’t fire a gun pointed at his head when time was aware that he lived at least into old age, the same way Ulrich couldn’t kill Helge as a child, the same way, he assumed, he had survived the apocalypse at all, when surely hiding in a basement couldn’t have been enough …

He doesn’t know what else to do.  He’s done his best for so long to fight against the future he himself first encountered when he was a teenager, done everything he could do to thwart Sic Mundus and Adam, and all of it for naught.

Here he is, in a time he knows damn well he won’t escape from until his transformation is so far underway that turning back isn’t an option, no matter how he fights the inevitability.

Time has won.

It only takes a year, maybe two, to finally accept that he will not, he cannot, change what is to come.  It isn’t exactly a surprise.  He suspects he’s known since he first received the scar over his neck, but all of his failures since returning to the Winden of 2019 have confirmed it for him.

From there, he knows what he must actually do with the portal once he has finally stabilised it.  It isn’t about anyone in Winden.  It isn’t even about the apocalypse.

Time has won the battle, but the war is far from over.

He remembers the conversation he had with Adam that day in 1921, the day he was so sure he was about to break the cycle and change everything.  He remembers the resentment and disgust with which Adam referred to time itself, likening it to God, and how it had become his war to battle it.

He didn’t understand where it came from when he was a teenager.  He understands now, and it didn’t take sixty-six years.

If he can’t change time, then there’s only one way to overcome it.

At first, Magnus and Franziska are – or at least, he thinks they are – afraid of him.  He isn’t so lost that he doesn’t understand why.  He has aged, and they have not, and they don’t know what he has become over the decades.  They are teenagers lost in time; he, an expert by necessity.

They know of Adam, but he is a name to them, a shadowy figure who does not yet exist.

But he is the natural choice of leader, to take over Sic Mundus and reformat it to the purpose they need, and so they either conquer the fear or move past it, either way willing to aid him.

Then there is Bartosz, who continues to hate everything he is, but calms after Silja’s arrival and follows his lead, if not quietly, or gracefully.  He has calmed, but any warmth he has left to feel exists only for her, with little even for those he still counts as friends.

He doesn’t think any of them like the fact that he is their leader, but they don’t have to.  It’s irrelevant.  Even if he didn’t already know that Adam is the leader of Sic Mundus at least by the early twentieth century, taking leadership of Sic Mundus in the wake of Tannhaus’s death was nothing but a foregone conclusion.

He would never have trusted any of them to lead the way forward even if he was still their age, not quite as naïve but still so very innocent.

The other two know nothing, of course, having taken all of one trip through time and having returned soon thereafter.  Bartosz knows more – why, he has yet to know – and is the one who gave them any inkling at all, but even he has only dipped his toes into a pool that Jonas has long been submerged in: a pool that gave him his life, since it was through time travel that he was even born in the first place.  He and Bartosz will never be friends again, but it doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters anymore, except finding the origin.

So, he notes it all, but does his best not to acknowledge any of it.  Not even when they call him “Adam” for the first time.  Not even when the name “Jonas” is not spoken again, by any of them.

Even him.

He can’t help himself.  He tries to question Silja when she first arrives, two years after they do.

He remembers her, of course, can still feel the impact from the butt of her gun against his face from their first encounter, and he remembers how devoted she is to Sic Mundus in the distant future.

He didn’t know then, as a teenager, that she wasn’t always in the future, that she appeared there later.  He knows now, having grown up with Elisabeth for almost twenty years.

“You know I can’t tell you everything,” she says, seated across from him in the Sic Mundus study one evening.  Having known her primarily as a soldier, it is still bizarre to see her as a lady of the past.  “If I do, it might not all happen.”

“Did Adam send you, knowing you would not tell me?”

“Yes,” she replies, “you did.”

He does not flinch away from the implication as he had for several years.  They all call him Adam now.  He thinks they do it to separate him from their old friend, or maybe they believe it’s an expectation because they already know his future is Adam.  Either way, he’s tired of fighting it.  There is more than enough still to be done between now and 1921 without his wasting his energy fighting this.

Is he Adam?  Is he Jonas?

Does it even matter anymore?

“Does your role need to happen?” he asks instead, not even sure why, knowing he will find out only when it is finally revealed to them.  “Is it critical?”

She gives him a look he can’t decipher.  “I’d say so.”

What would transpire that would transform him into Adam?

For years after their arrival, that is the one thing he often ponders. Would it be a mere one thing that happens? Would it be gradual, or would it happen all in an instant?

Well, he supposes, he doesn’t have to wonder too much if it’s a gradual change.  Not as more and more of his flesh disappears under the scars and burns that bleed over him.

So, a different question: would he reject it, or accept it?

“Adam.”

There is no longer a pause before he turns when addressed as such.

“Yes?” he says with at least some politeness, because even if Magnus doesn’t particularly like or trust him, he doesn’t despise him as Bartosz does.

“What happened to Mikkel?  You know, don’t you?”

Though his gaze is steely, his hands give away his nervousness.  Magnus has grown, there was little choice but to do so when he lost his entire family in less than a year, but he is still so young.  They all are.  He’s old enough to be their father, and often feels as though he is, despite the fact he’s currently speaking to his biological uncle.

He takes a seat, and Magnus does likewise across from him.

“Did Katharina tell you anything before the apocalypse?” he asks.

Magnus shakes his head.  “She was spending a lot of time by herself.  She went into the cave a lot, but I don’t think she ever found anything there.”  For a moment, there is a faraway look in his eyes.  “She wanted to tell us something, a couple of days before … before it happened, but I never found out what.  I don’t suppose you know about that?”

He nods.  “It ties in with your previous question.  You are, of course, familiar with the time travel that is made possible by using the apparatus.”  At Magnus’s nod, he continues, “There is a passage deep within the cave that, for a time, had a stable portal that also enabled time travel.  One could travel between the years 1953, 1986, and 2019.”

“Is that what was causing all the flickering lights?”

“Yes,” he says simply.  “Mikkel was brought to 1986 using that portal, and your father, when he found the passage, ended up in 1953. Neither one of them ever managed to travel back to their present.”

Magnus goes quiet for a few minutes.  “Who was my brother in 2019?”

He tries not to sigh.  “Michael Kahnwald,” he says quietly.

There is nothing he can do to hide the many implications of this.  He watches silently as his old friend walks away, making an admirable attempt at keeping his composure, and returns to his research.

Magnus never brings up the subject again.

He does, however, along with Franziska, assist more often with the work.

Travelling doesn’t leave one unscathed, he will eventually tell himself.

It must be yet to come.  He has not been able to travel since their arrival in 1888.  The God Particle is not yet stabilised, the apparatus has no fuel with which to travel since there is no nuclear power until about half a century from now, and the false Martha took her device with her when she vanished.  There is no current escape from the past.

No, he corrects himself, when he thinks this one too many times.

There is no escape, current or ever.

And he knows, with a greater certainty every day, that he truly will become Adam, beyond simply the name his old friends have long since called him by.

Because of course the change isn’t all at once.

It’s gradual, so gradual he might not see it if he didn’t know the end result: a product of so many failures, so many setbacks, blasts to his body as he experiments over and over again, slowly warping himself into something else, as though the God Particle is fighting back against its own inevitable creation every step of the way.

Or, in turn, creating him.

The turn of the century swiftly approaches, and just as swiftly passes.

He takes no note of it, not even as the others use it, as with any excuse, to find something to celebrate in this era.  He knows that 1921 is the end of the current cycle, and there is still so much he must do.  He has made progress, but not enough, not yet.

There is time for drink, and he is certainly no stranger to it at this point, but he has no time or desire for other people.  Nothing matters, except the work.

He sometimes stares at his warped, wrinkled face, hair and beard both long since gone, and wonders just when he’d first stopped thinking of himself as Jonas.

It has never really been a question of why, or how, whatever he thought before he accepted it, or at least, no longer fought back against it.  His opinion of Adam hasn’t changed, not even as he becomes Adam, losing the face of Jonas Kahnwald to the visage of Adam more and more as the years go by.

No one could ever hate Adam more than he himself.

He remembers the lakeside in 2019, kissing her, seeing his father for the last time, believing he was about to change everything, and in more than half a century he has never changed a thing.  And with that lack of change, with everything he has come to hate, it’s easier every day to bury Jonas within that unstoppable monster, leaving his humanity – and Jonas himself – in what could laughingly be called the past.

It’s easy to ignore all he has done long before the first bolt strikes his arm, because Adam might be his transformation, but it’s far from simply physical.

Was there ever really a choice?  When he was a teenager, caught up in events he didn’t truly comprehend?  When he was an adult, having lived through almost all of those events and ready to maintain what was necessary so he could ultimately fix it all?  Now he is old, long since disillusioned and long since broken.  And prepared to see the end through, no matter what.

Then, and only then, will they finally find paradise.

He wonders if Claudia Tiedemann knew even half of what was to come, back when he was so certain of her intentions that he would defend her to his friend Noah, again and again.  Back when he thought he understood her.

And when he came to despise her almost as much as himself.

It takes twenty years for Silja’s true purpose in the past to become clear, beyond simply being a rock for Bartosz to lean on, because of course it was never that simple.

Time really is mocking them all.

Admittedly, Adam has not paid too much attention to the goings-on of his underlings in quite a while, focused as he has been on recreating the God Particle.  What they do on their own is simply not worth concerning himself with, as long as they are dedicated to aiding him when he has need of their assistances.

When he finally manages to recreate it, in far fewer years than he would have guessed when he first began this work, he doesn’t even recognise himself, let alone any of them.

They are grown now.  They have lives they’ve built in the here and now.  They are tempered, matured by circumstance and then by age.  Magnus and Franziska, now in their thirties, right on the cusp of their own middle age: long since married, long since set in their own routines, and yet all too ready to follow him to the end.  Bartosz and Silja, also married, reluctant but willing.

He really ought to have known after the birth of their first child.

He is Adam now, but he is not omniscient.  He has always thought of his friend of both past and future as Noah.  Noah, a teenager when they met in 1921, who grew up with him in the post-apocalyptic world, until he finally left to search for his daughter.  The name, he supposes, always seemed to suit him.

Noah, as he is Adam.

“What is paradise?” asks a five-year-old Hanno Tiedemann.

He blinks and stares down at the boy, who looks up at him, unafraid of the frightening visage he now has.  He supposes it’s not that surprising the boy has taken to him: his father, with the knowledge of what Hanno will become, is ever nervous around him.

He looks up at Silja, who maintains her complete devotion to whatever his plan for her is in the future, unwavering even after a couple of decades.

“I thought you were better able to answer him, Adam,” she says simply.

Perhaps he is, he thinks.  Still, he doesn’t need to terrify a young boy.  Not yet.  He knows what paradise is – at least, what he believes it to be – but it can be something more.  It can be a comfort, whether truth or lie.

“Paradise, my dear boy, is freedom from pain and suffering.”

He sees her, in his mind’s eye.  He sees the night they shared together, and the last moment he had her in his arms before a bullet tore her life away, and the last moment, chronologically, he would ever see her, as he tried in vain to prevent her death.

"Any pain we've ever felt," he continues, seeing Hanno's rapt attention at his words, "is erased..."

It is still painful, as he once assured himself it would be for the rest of his life, but he has, he believes, reconciled himself with Martha’s death.

"...and all the dead live.”

Then their second child is born, and all becomes clear.

Agnes.

It’s all he can do not to lose himself to laughter when he finds out.  Noah never spoke of his sister, or anyone other than the prophet he knew as Adam.  Perhaps this is why?  The entire Nielsen family – including him, Mikkel’s son – descended from Bartosz.  No wonder he sends Silja to 1890 at some point in the distant future.

If this isn’t outright mockery by time, he doesn’t know what is.

He has long since buried himself within what he once considered little more than a monster, unable to see its perspective until he himself became the monster.

“Jonas?”

But he is still human, he supposes, whatever else he has transformed himself into over nearly a quarter of a century, and it can only be human emotions he feels as he turns and stares at the one person whom he truly thought he would never see again.

Stares at her, for the first time, through Adam’s visage.

Sees the silent horror in Hannah Kahnwald’s eyes as she stares back.

For a moment, he’s taken aback.  Hannah disappeared just before the apocalypse, which is now more than twenty years ago, in a manner of speaking, and yet she appears as though she had only aged a couple of years since then.  He remembers her age, and he knows she was forty-eight when he last saw her; she must surely be seventy by now, if not older.

How has she broken the thirty-three-year cycle, when it persists in all times but the one that they’re in now?

He shelves the question for the moment, taking in her wide-eyed reaction to seeing his face, and feels a momentary disgust.  Had she expected that she would find him unscathed?  She has, he notes, and it’s all well and good when she has clearly started over in a different era, if the style of clothing and the little girl clutching her hand is anything to go by.

Did she believe that the same amount of time had passed for both of them?  If so, this must be her first instance in breaking the thirty-three-year limit.  Even if it hadn’t been a couple of decades longer for him, though, little would remain of even the adult Jonas.

The stranger in Winden.  He who’d thought he could manipulate from the shadows.  Plot with Claudia.  Work to an answer with Tannhaus.  All the while, still clinging to a ridiculous hope that he had the power to change things, could destroy the knot … could save her.

Not naïve, not after all those years in the future, but still so very innocent.

An innocence that has since rotted away.

He then lets his eyes fall to the little girl, takes in the familiar scarred face, and almost reveals his surprise.  It’d be impossible for him to not recognise her at once.  The teenager from the future Winden, Elisabeth Doppler’s hand and translator, and, more to the point, the woman who just died giving birth to Bartosz’s second child barely a year ago.

“This is my daughter, Silja.”

He can feel time itself laughing at him again.

It wasn’t enough that Bartosz, who even now stands behind them with wary eyes, is his own ancestor.  He remembers the last conversation he ever had with his grandmother, before he left his present behind for good, remembers telling her that the Nielsens were all fine, that he was what was wrong.

And he was wrong.  Silja, his former friend’s wife, his sister, is their progenitor.

His focus returns to Hannah again, and he is taken once more by the blissful nothingness he has come to know.  How can he feel anything here?  How can he truly care, if everything is predestined and he is to know the fates of those he must interact with and send off to their destinies?  He knows better than anyone the parts they all play, the delicate roles they all must sustain to maintain all of their existences until …

… until it’s time.

“How did you find us?” is his only question.

He listens as Hannah describes the woman, Eva, who sent them to him.  It explains how she broke the limit of the cycle, which their own God Particle is also quite capable of, as it has the same components; it must have been whatever the other Martha had used.

And Adam knows what he must do next.  There will be no happy Kahnwald family reunion for them.  Not this time.

Neither of them should be here.

He knows when Silja must be, what she must become.  He knows, having spent his adulthood in that time, that if Silja was about his age when they met in 2052, and she’s perhaps five or six years old here, then there can only be one way she’s come to exist there.  A replacement for what Elisabeth lost, and yet unable to prevent that transformation she underwent when she lost everything.

And if there was no trace of Silja’s actual mother alongside her in the post-apocalyptic world, there can only be one reason why.  His mother is many things, and she abandoned him and everyone else, but she has always loved her son.  Now, son and daughter.

But he remains committed to keeping the knot in balance until the end, no matter what.

A fact he tries his damnedest to hold onto, later, when he allows that lingering part of him that is still Jonas Kahnwald to grieve over the act he has carried out, all for the end.

The final cycle.

He knows now why he renames Hanno.  His half-nephew, among the many other ways that they are connected: friends and family, both direct and distant.  He knows now why he does what he does to the boy before he returns as the man.

Biblical allegory aside, even if he’d never known Noah, he would never want the reminder of his mother.

In truth, leading his old friends is simple.

He has long since lost himself to the role of Adam, and the more he sacrifices, the more he forgets just what Bartosz once meant to him, and the easier he can ignore the love that has come to tie Magnus and Franziska.  They all serve him, just as the rest of Sic Mundus does, and will continue to serve him until the final cycle.

The preparations are made by Magnus and Franziska, the passage is tunnelled out by Noah and Bartosz, and the end of the cycle quickly approaches them.

And one day, a year before the end, his old friend Noah at long last appears before him again.

Like Hannah before him, he looks almost identical to how he did the last time Adam saw him, before he left to find Charlotte.  Perhaps he has aged well over the last ten years, or perhaps no amount of time has passed for him at all.

For Adam, it has been over forty years, without counting his meeting with the teenaged Noah on the day of the apocalypse.  He can still remember their close friendship as they grew up, until Noah’s disappearance in 2041, but he is far too old and far too committed to what must be done to allow it to hamper him now.

It is not difficult to redirect Noah’s focus, either.  In his own way, Noah knows almost better than he himself what is to come.

So, he spins his lies, and ignores the fear in his old friend’s eyes as he sends him to go work alongside Helge Doppler, warping him into a henchman for the creation of the basis of time travel, not even sparing a thought to the hardships he will face.

Or the children they will sacrifice for the cause.

The adult Agnes Nielsen appears not long thereafter.

He finds her proclamation of dedication to him suspect at best.  Still, at this point in the cycle, it matters little to him.  It doesn’t exactly surprise him when it turns out she is working with the old Claudia, and very little when she then betrays Claudia and returns to him.

He hears his underlings note her betrayal, with an undertone of expectation that he will not allow her to return to Sic Mundus.

It amuses him more than anything.

He doesn’t acknowledge it to any of them.  Privately, he wonders if he has so thoroughly been able to separate himself from what was once Jonas Kahnwald that even his underlings might sometimes forget that he is Jonas, and that he has spent decades with Claudia Tiedemann, longer than almost anyone else.

Including, right now in a different year, with the old Claudia.

He scoffs, once, and puts the matter aside to refocus on his preparations.

Despite his reluctance to open up to anyone, including members of Sic Mundus, Adam is not blind to the emotions of those around him.

Magnus and especially Franziska have long since been devoted to him, but Bartosz has been reluctantly willing at best, and he has always understood that.  He knows why Bartosz hates him, even when the man continues to follow him, to work along with Sic Mundus, to dig out the passage in the caves with his corrupted son.

He has taken everything from Bartosz, and he feels nothing when he instructs Noah to take the final thing Bartosz has left, after sharing some concern of the boy’s father “having lost his faith” as if Bartosz has ever had faith to begin with.

Noah believes it was necessary for paradise.  Perhaps it’s a comfort.

Then his own teenaged self finally appears, mere days before the end.

For young Jonas, not even a full year has passed since he was abandoned to the bunker by his adult self.  For Adam, though, it’s been practically a lifetime.  It’s odd, how fascinated he finds himself to be by the boy when the boy is him; he’d even forgotten how shattering it was to see the collar pull back, revealing the matching scar.

“Travelling doesn’t leave one unscathed,” he tells the boy, not because the words were once spoken to him but because it’s the raw truth.  It’s far from simply physical and always has been.  His life surrounded by the enemy of time has taken almost everything from him.

He remembers the moments that he spends with young Jonas, both now and from when he was young Jonas.  Perhaps that’s why he tells the boy so much.

But they are the catalyst – the trigger, as young Jonas put it – in the end, and it’s a simple matter to guide the boy’s thoughts to what he believes to be the defining moment of the cycle, sending him there to ensure that it happens as it always has, torn between disgust and sorrow at the boy’s naivety.

If he is even still capable of regret, it’s at sending his once-beloved father to death.

He saved my life once.  But I only understood that much later.

But he must live, so that he can finally end existence.  No one, not even Michael Kahnwald, can be allowed to change that.  Besides, he’s already killed one of his parents through this mission, hasn’t he?

Death is incomprehensible, but you can make peace with it.

The day of the apocalypse finally arrives.

He is confronted by Noah and watches dispassionately as he is killed by his own sister, then collects both the triquetra notebook and its missing pages.

Everything is in place for the apocalypse to occur as it always has.

The young Noah is sent to the future so he can grow up in the ruins of Winden, friends with Jonas and eventually something more with Elisabeth, but not before he prevents adult Jonas from interfering with the most necessary act Adam will undertake that day.

What will, beyond almost anything else, ensure he becomes what he has and must.

You will carry this pain with you for the rest of your life.

He’s managed to not give Martha too much thought over the years.  She lingers in his dreams and nightmares alike, but he has learned not to dwell on them.  He has watched her die, and he has failed to save her, and now he will finally kill her.

She is, like everyone else, a cog in this machine.  Even now, her adult brother and his wife aid him in preparing to travel to the future.

Until you’re finally ready to let go.

He barely notes the young Jonas as he marks the calendar, and stares dispassionately as the boy tries to keep Martha from bleeding to death from the bullet hole in her stomach, knowing it is futile.  He has seen this scene thousands of times in his nightmares; it is, to his surprise, more bearable than he expected to watch the reality a second time.

And as he watches, he delivers the message for the adult Jonas to the young one:

“You can stop me.  Or try to save her.  You’ll know what to do.”

Of her, too.

In 2053, as the Sic Mundus of the past absorbs the devotees of the future, Adam finally reads the triquetra to completion, and studies it for weeks until he knows all he needs.  And knows, at long last, where the origin lies.

All that’s left is to fill in the gaps.

He sends the other Martha and then Silja to the past to play their roles, as he’s long suspected he would, and Magnus and Franziska to retrieve the other Martha in the first place.  Agnes, having already played a critical role in the knot as he’s learned, is sent off with a newspaper article detailing Claudia’s death, to eventually give to her.

Charlotte and Elisabeth are dispatched to kidnap baby Charlotte and bring her to Tannhaus so their impossible line can continue, and he notes somewhere in the back of his mind that he really did betray Noah and simply didn’t realise it yet.

Another little curveball from time.

But he can ignore its laughter this time.  The end of the war is nigh.

The pieces are finally in place, across all of time.  Everything he has done for more than thirty years has been for this exact moment.

Decades of research, of endless work and study, maintaining the knot despite his wish to see it destroyed, all of it to reach the end of existence at last.  The abomination to be born from the other Martha will be obliterated, and everyone and everything with it.

He stares through the window at the other Martha and allows himself, just for a moment, to remember his own.  And then he starts the machine.

As the storm tears her apart, as her tortured shrieks reach his ears, he closes his eyes.

He takes a deep breath, and then another, and opens his eyes to find a world intact.

The God Particle is gone, as is any trace of the other Martha.  The combined raw power of the two apocalypses, one from each world, ripping her apart with a thousand times more force than even any blast of lightning his own flesh had ever borne.

Yet the world still exists.

He walks out of the room and then the plant, looking around with growing confusion and more rapidly growing fury.  The land remains barren, the sky, grey.  There is no sign of change.

The world is exactly as it was before he destroyed the other Martha and her spawn.

How can this be, when the origin is destroyed?

He is certain he has studied everything.  The nameless abomination they created would go on to become the knot binding everyone who is born of time travel.  The Nielsens are directly born from him through Agnes, in both his world and Eva’s.  And through them, through he, Mikkel’s son, and through the other Martha, the worlds continue to exist intertwined.

What else could sustain them?

He knows of one sure possibility, and it’s now within his power to put an end to her, too.

“I was expecting you.  I know why you’re here.”

He slowly walks toward her, taking her in as she turns to face him.  What his Martha might have been, had she lived to old age in his world.  Dressed in black as he is, with greying hair framing a face lined with old scars.  He recognises the smaller scar, dotting her cheek.  The other, a jagged line across the other side of her face, he has no knowledge of.  Presumably a scar she was inflicted with after killing his alternate self.

Eva, as he is Adam.

She stares at him as he moves to stand before her.  Her eyes drop to the gun in his hand, and she looks as though she might smile.

“But in the end,” she says softly, “every death is just a new beginning.”

He doesn’t bother to reply.  Without taking his eyes off hers, he lifts the gun and presses it against her chest.

Eva actually does smile at this.  The scars are more noticeable with her lined face stretched by the expression.  “You can’t win,” she says.  “My dying is only another step in the cycle.”

“That can’t be,” he whispers.

She hears him.  “It can,” she says.  “He will continue to live on.  What you want is impossible –”

He pulls the trigger, and watches without satisfaction as the light leaves her eyes.

There is nothing else he can do.

He has lived with the knowledge of time travel for the majority of his life.  He knows what he has power over, and what limits him.  He is too old to wait another thirty-three years, and he knows that it wouldn’t matter if he could: he has never met another older version of himself or otherwise received information from one.

The orb device is the greatest of the line of time machines, surpassing even the God Particles, but even it cannot break the rules of cause and effect.

Everything he has done, for naught.  All, ultimately, part of the knot.

My dying is only another step in the cycle.

He clenches the hand still gripping the gun.  In his mind’s eye, he is back in his father’s ruined attic studio, holding a gun to his own head and pulling the trigger to no avail as Noah watches him, explaining that as long as he has a known older counterpart, he cannot be killed.  He is effectively immortal, as time needs him to complete his role.

There is no older counterpart now.  He has reached the end of his cemented role in time, and all he feels is bitterness at accomplishing nothing.

Time has won.

He closes his eyes and, as he had decades and decades earlier, puts the gun to his head.

He will carry this bitterness and regret with him to the grave, assuming he is ever found and buried.  With no love lost between him and any of his surviving underlings, he can safely assume he won’t be.  They will live out the remainders of their lives in some era or another, and he will, at best, be forgotten.

All he has left to him is to reconcile himself with death.  To finally reach the end of the vast labyrinth he has long called life and know that his paradise won’t be found there.

He pulls the trigger and vanishes into the eternal dark.