Page 68 of Evermore

River knelt there in the silence, surrounded by the wreckage of good intentions and the unbearable weight of absolute loss, and learned what it meant to have your heart stop beating while your body continued the pointless work of staying alive.

The silence stretched on, broken only by the sound of his own ragged breathing and the terrible knowledge that love, despite everything he'd believed, hadn't been enough to save them after all.

Chapter 22

Letting Go

River

The silence wasn't peaceful—it was predatory, stalking through the cottage like something that fed on absence. River stood frozen in the main room, his body refusing to move as if motion might make Finn's disappearance more real. The emptiness pressed against his chest until breathing became conscious work.

No soft humming from the workshop where Finn lost himself in restoration projects. No pages rustling as he read by the fireplace, unconsciously tucking one leg beneath him. No gentle scratch of his fountain pen recording thoughts that would make River smile when he found them later.

The lighthouse beam swept through the windows like always, but it felt dimmed, muted, as if even the light was mourning. Where it used to catch fire in Finn's copper hair, now it illuminated only dust motes dancing in empty air—thousands of tiny particles where a whole person used to be.

River's hands trembled as he stared at the exact spot where Finn had vanished, his eyes burning from refusing to blink. As ifhis desperate gaze could somehow tear a hole back through time and drag his partner home from whatever impossible place he'd been scattered to.

The cottage door exploded inward hard enough to rattle windows in their frames. Maya burst through first, her dark eyes wild with the particular panic that came from sensing supernatural disaster. Jake and Dr. Voss followed close behind, their faces carrying the pale terror of people who knew something unthinkable had happened.

“Where is he?” Maya demanded, her voice splintering on the words. “Where's my brother?”

Jake surveyed the scene with military precision. His expression hardened with grim understanding of what they'd walked into.

Dr. Voss immediately started yanking equipment from her bag, her scientific mind defaulting to data collection even in crisis. “We need to track his temporal signature while the trail's still fresh,” she said, her voice maintaining clinical detachment despite the chaos. “If we move quickly, we might be able to follow his displacement pattern and?—”

“No.”

The word came out of River's mouth with such quiet finality that all three of them stopped and stared. River looked between their frantic preparations and felt something crystallize in his chest—a choice he'd been avoiding for months finally presenting itself with startling clarity.

He could join their rescue mission. Could throw himself into the desperate pursuit that felt like love but was actually control wearing love's clothes. Could spend the next fourteen years becoming the broken thing that Future River had shown him was possible.

Or he could break the cycle.

River's mind immediately started racing, that familiar panic rising like floodwater in his chest. He needed to do something. Create something, fix something, control something, anything to avoid the terrible powerlessness of just?—

But as he looked at Dr. Voss's equipment scattered across his floor, understanding hit River with the force of a lightning strike.

This desperate need to fix everything, to control every outcome, to turn love into a research project—this was exactly what had destroyed them in Future River's timeline. The irony would have been hilarious if it wasn't so fucking devastating. Every attempt to save Finn had only pushed him further away.

Christ, it was harder than he'd expected. Every instinct screamed at him to move, to act, to do something instead of just standing here accepting that Finn was gone. River's hands clenched into fists as he fought the overwhelming urge to grab Dr. Voss's equipment and start scanning for temporal signatures himself.

“I have to stop trying to save him,” River said, his voice barely steady as he wrestled with years of scientific training that demanded he find solutions. “I have to start trusting him.”

The words felt like stepping off a cliff, but for the first time in months, River sensed something solid beneath his feet. Not the ground of certainty, but the bedrock of truth.

Maya stared at him like he'd started speaking in tongues. “River, that's my brother?—”

“I know whose brother he is,” River interrupted, his voice gaining strength even as his hands shook with the effort of not reaching for Dr. Voss's monitoring equipment. “And I know that every time we've tried to manage his condition, every time we've treated his TPD like a problem requiring solution, we've made everything worse.”

Dr. Voss's equipment clattered to the floor as she rounded on him, her scientific mind reeling at what he was suggesting.“You can't just give up on him!” she argued, desperation making her voice sharp. “We have technology, monitoring systems that could track his displacement. We could follow him into the temporal stream, anchor his consciousness, bring him back to linear time!”

Her eyes held the same obsessive gleam that had once driven River's research, the same look he'd seen in his own mirror for months. The same desperate certainty that love meant never accepting what you couldn't control.

River felt the pull of her argument like gravity. Part of him—the scientist, the problem-solver, the man who'd spent months documenting every aspect of Finn's condition—wanted to grab those instruments and start searching. But a larger part recognized the trap.

“We're on the verge of breakthrough treatments,” Dr. Voss continued, her words tumbling over each other in their urgency. “Electromagnetic anchoring, consciousness stabilization protocols. You can't abandon him to this condition when we're so close to a cure.”

“There's nothing to cure,” River said, and the words felt like swallowing broken glass. Not because they were untrue, but because accepting them meant accepting uncertainty on a scale that terrified him. “Finn isn't broken. He's different. And I've spent so long trying to fix what didn't need fixing that I nearly lost him to my own fear.”

---