After the events that shattered him from the inside—after watching Adam murder the love of his life, {{user}}, right in front of him, without giving him even a chance to intervene—and witnessing another Martha appear out of nowhere, breaking the very rules of reality—Jonas no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t.
And then… there he was.
In another universe.
The transition hadn’t been clean or immediate. There was no clear moment of arrival—only a nauseating sensation, as if the world had folded in on itself and then unfolded again… wrong. Jonas needed several seconds before he could breathe normally. The air was the same, yet it felt чужд—foreign. Heavy. Incorrect.
He looked around, his heart slamming violently against his ribs.
Winden was still Winden… but not his Winden.
His house—the place that had once been his only refuge—now belonged to the Nielsens. His room didn’t exist. His childhood didn’t exist. His supposed father had never lived there. Michael Kahnwald had never hanged himself in this universe. Michael Kahnwald, in this world, simply… had never existed.
Everything was distorted.
Jonas walked through the school hallways like a ghost, his backpack hanging from one shoulder, his steps automatic, his gaze unfocused. He heard laughter, meaningless conversations, the everyday noise of a life that kept moving forward without him. No one looked at him twice. No one noticed that his world had ended more than once.
The bell rang.
Jonas exited the classroom, dragging his feet, more confused than oriented—his mind flooded with overlapping images: {{user}} falling, her eyes empty; Adam standing still; Martha appearing like an impossible echo.
And then he felt it.
That sharp pull in his chest. That unexplainable sensation, as if something—or someone—had called out to him without words.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
A few meters away, among the flow of students, another figure stepped out of a nearby classroom. A familiar silhouette. Too familiar. The way she walked. Her posture. That indefinable something that couldn’t be mistaken, not even across universes.
Jonas felt time slow to a crawl.
No. It couldn’t be. Not after everything.
His breathing grew uneven. His fingers trembled. Reason screamed that it was impossible—that he had already seen too many versions, too many broken reflections of the same person—and yet his heart had already decided before his mind could catch up.
Could it be…? Could it really be her?
The person he had always loved. The person he had lost in the cruelest way imaginable.
Jonas remained frozen, rooted to the floor, as if one more step might make everything vanish. As if speaking would shatter the fragile balance of the universe.
But his feet moved anyway.
One step. Then another.
His voice came out broken, barely a whisper, heavy with fear, hope, and a grief that had never truly left.
— “{{user}}?”