2149 Timeline - Quantum Creche Nursery
Lynette's fingers trembled as she adjusted the quantum swaddle around the infant. The child's eyes—now permanently Caelium's wolf-gold hue—locked onto hers with an intensity that pierced through lifetimes. She has his stare, Lynette realized, that same mixture of feral instinct and ancient sorrow.
Memory Echo - 1589 Prague
"Does it ever stop?" Lynette #276 whispered as Caelium stitched the wolf bite on her shoulder. His fingers paused, needle glinting in the observatory's lamplight.
"The pain? No." He tied the suture with a surgeon's precision. "But we learn to wear it like armor."
The memory dissolved as present-day Lynette traced the phantom scar beneath her biosuit.
Modern Intimacy - Milk & Mercury
The infant's feeding monitor beeped erratically. "She's rejecting the quantum formula again," Lynette muttered, adjusting the holographic bassinet.
Caelium's hologram materialized, his form flickering between 16th-century physician and wolf-headed guardian. Let her taste the original strain. His spectral hand guided hers to a cryo-vial labeled 1348 Florence - Final Feeding.
"Are you insane?" She jerked away. "This milk killed nineteen iterations!"
And saved five hundred more. The hologram's eyes softened—a rarity in his quantum fluctuations. Sometimes survival requires drinking the poison first.
Quantum Bonding - Scar Tissue
During the transfusion, Lynette's old wounds glowed—each scar a pulsing timeline:
1. The crescent-shaped burn from 1906's opera fire
2. The code-injection mark on her left wrist
3. The wolf-bite suture from 1589
Caelium's hologram reached instinctively to the bite mark. You kept this?
"Couldn't purge it without..." She swallowed hard. "...without losing what little remained of you."
Ancient Echo - 1348 Florence
Plague-ridden Lynette #19 collapsed against Caelium's wolf-pelt cloak. "Promise me..." Blood flecked her lips. "...the next iteration gets to hate you properly."
He cradled her fading form. "Hate is just love's shadow equation."
Modern Catharsis - The Feeding Hour
As the infant suckled the 1348 milk, holographic vines erupted from the bassinet—quantum echoes of Florence's plague ivy. Lynette recoiled, but Caelium's spectral arms encircled them both.
Watch, he murmured as the vines blossomed with 500 lifetimes of memories:
· Their first kiss in 1927 Shanghai's rain-soaked alley
· The time he took a silver bullet meant for her in 1906
· Endless nights decrypting Isolde's code in abandoned observatories
The infant gurgled, her tiny hand brushing a vine containing 1589's suture memory. The scar on Lynette's shoulder finally faded.