(everything that was will be again)
—
“Are you scared?”
Alcor looked up as Lolojna trotted up to him. All around them, the Flock, so large in number now, played for one final time before the end.
The time for bravado, for comforting lies, for lying in general, had passed eons ago, leaving Alcor with only a blunt empty honesty.
“A tiny bit.” There was still, at the end of all things, a spark of humor, so he added, “Like, five percent scared.”
Lolojna snorted. “You’re just upset that we’ll remember this and you won’t.”
He smiled. She knew him well (as she well should.)
“It’s that too,” he admitted.
She rolled on her back to look at the dead sky above her.
“Well look at it this way, another time another place and we’re going to be in the same position as you.”
He smiled. “From one person at the end to over 50,000…” He thought about it. “That’s going to get kind of cramped.”
—-
everything that was will be again.
He had sent the sheep to sleep when that phrase filtered through his head, uttered by a soul now long dead and asleep as well.
They had gotten it, Alcor thought as he readied himself for his final and most greatest trick, about half right.
It wasn’t that everything repeated itself over and over again. How boring, how terrible that thought was, that nothing ever changed. That no one had a choice.
No. That was a very limited and biased reading of the word ‘be’.
What was to be after all, than life? To live.
Everything that had been would be again, everything that lived would live again, an endless cycle of darkness and pain, yes, but also of life and joy and light. A great cacophony of souls and stars constantly reinventing themselves, creating and destroying and creating and destroying all over again.
And in this iteration, he would have the honor of closing the door on this universe, and beginning another one.
Dipper smiled as he placed his hands on his chest, readied the swirling nebula inside of him for explosion.
He couldn’t wait to see Mabel again.