Wanda called Todd to her office.
She did that sometimes. He’d realized quickly that he was one of the few people that she was interested in talking to in person on a regular basis, that for almost everyone else she was content with online communication, now that the internet was emphatically real again and she didn’t have to depend phone calls.
It was the opposite of when she was Wodin. They’d mostly hung out online, before his disappearance into the widening gyre of the Eye Killer’s path, an escape from the forced proximity of school.
Todd knew, however, that this meeting was different. Tomorrow was the end of the world, and while Wanda was scattered and kind of insane she would have told him up front if she wanted to greet the end with a party. Instead, she’d sent him an unusually terse message.
CEBro: Meeting in office at 4pm. Something 2 discuss.
Utterly correct punctuation was unsettling, though not quite as unsettling as a hypothetical text where she used “to” instead of “2.” Old habits of hyper-analyzing messages died hard, apparently. At this point Todd was almost sure that Wanda knew that, too.
Her office door was open when he reached it, revealing her sitting at her desk on her phone, frowning at something she was reading there.
“Hey Boss,” Todd said, stepping through the open doorway. He shut the door. Anyone who had the authority to interrupt these meetings wouldn’t be stopped by doors anyway. “It’s 4pm.”
Wanda put her phone down, her face lighting up immediately upon seeing Todd. “Hi!” she said. Her expression changed to something more uncharacteristically serious. “I need to ask you a question.”
“Shoot.”
He slid into the only other good chair in the office other than the one Wanda used. The chairs were identical, but as the CEBro’s best friend, he had special chair knowledge privileges. “Do you want to be in the Loop?”
He couldn’t read her expression. She was waiting for his answer, and based on what she’d said before, might already know it, but crucially, she was waiting to hear it before she acted. It had taken adjusting, realizing that he was one of the exceptions in Wanda’s willingness to act unilaterally and without asking for other people’s input. It was touching. It was also sometimes a little unsettling, like now.
“No,” he said. He’d thought about this. He’d expected her to ask earlier, but she’d never quite gotten around to it, the pressure of the literal actual apocalypse finally forcing her to schedule the meeting. “You already know that, I think.”
She nodded. “You say that every time,” she said, voice full of affection. “It’s not fair, though, leaving me alone in Italy in the ‘70s. No internet. Nothing to do but create a video game company and steal all of my favorite IPs before they can be made. Did you know that Yu-Gi-Oh is the hardest one? Making a game based on Magic: the Gathering before Magic: the Gathering was invented and before Pokemon really kickstarted the anime-as-TCG-advertisement is really difficult, actually, I’m kind of impressed that it’s still so popular—”
“I’d be with you, but he wouldn’t,” Todd interrupted. This was one of those things that had confirmed to him that Wodin and Wanda were the same person with different genders and ages; the tangents, the infodumping, the hyperfixating. It was no wonder that Wanda liked having the Quotidians work for her, their social structure was clearly more intuitive for her than it was for most humans. “If we’ve had this conversation every loop than you know who I’m talking about.”
“I’d reach out to him,” Wanda said. “Do the same weird esoteric meme bullshit I always do. Probably.”
“Would you?” Todd knew that part of what drew Wanda to him was the fact that he was her old best friend, who could be surprised. Who was normal, mostly. If a version of him was already there, would she actually bother?
“I—”
“It’s not fair to him—to me,” Todd said. He’d been rotating these words in his mind for ages, trying to figure out what to say. The knowledge that other versions of him had already said them did not actually help matters, because those other versions were not there to plan for him.
Part of him wanted to be in the Loop. It was a kind of certainty he could appreciate, after everything. Fifty years, very few deviations, over and over, no need to worry about death.
No need to worry about anything at all except for his other self, some kid from Ohio who would never see his best friend again.
Because Wanda wouldn’t. She’d get distracted, if Todd was already there.
“It’s also not fair to you,” Wanda said. Todd didn’t understand why she was still arguing with him, if she always lost, every loop. It couldn’t be that she wanted him to come with her. Not if she actually agreed with him.
“I’ll be fine,” Todd said. “A little Apocalypse isn’t going to stop me, it’s not like I’m going to die. The world’s just going to end.”
Wanda picked her phone up, tapping at something on it as a fidget. They’d discovered that you couldn’t speed up the invention of smartphones by that much, but you could speedrun the creation of your favorite apps after you passed that tipping point. This phone had ZampyBird and always would, as quickly as possible.
“You’ll be alone,” Wanda said. “Everyone in the Loop will be gone, and you’ll just be left with whatever remains.”
“I’ll be fine,” Todd said, not quite lying. It was still a harrowing thought, waking up to an empty office in a destroyed world. But the other Todds were just as real as he was, and they deserved to find their friend again as much as he did.
It had made him so happy, and confused, and a little terrified, to discover that his best friend was alive. Wodin had always been weird, and Wanda was only a little weirder, and it explained why the world was so full of her favorite creepypasta.
“Promise?” she asked. She was both about seventy years old and unfathomably older than that, Todd knew, but in that moment she was seventeen again, making Todd swear that he wouldn’t rat Wodin out to his parents for ditching class.
“Promise,” Todd answered.