***ALEX***

"Dude. How many funerals have you been to in the last year?"

"One," I tell Gabe. "All the others were demonic cremations, remember?"

He picks up the fire tongs sitting between the two of us so he can stoke the fire for a minute. Then he puts the tongs down on his other side so he can scoot closer to me. I'm tempted to move a little closer to the fire myself, but it's roaring higher and hotter now, so it's reaching me better at this point on the cabin floor. Plus, I don't want to move away from Gabe. Not now that we're having this time to ourselves, probably the last for a while. Who knows how long it'll take until we see each other in our dreams again? It's not like it happens every night.

"I don't believe it," he says.

"What? That I went to a funeral?" I reach for my phone in my pocket, but with my fingers still cold - fingerless gloves, so impractical in weather like this - it's hard to stick them into said pockets. Even with my jeans, as always, being slim instead of skinny. "I should've come to this dream in my suit, then I could bloody prove it."

"You didn't really wear a suit, did you?"

"A suit by my standards. Luckily for me, everyone whose memorial I've been to, they wouldn't have minded if I'd shown up in a T-shirt and cargo shorts."

"For me and Fionna, for sure, but for...?" I sense he doesn't want to say it because if so, it would clash with so many years of irreligion on his part. Not that I was much better about that. I've only willingly been to church once or twice in the last five years, and even then because I was at such a low point - struggling to recover from another fresh tidal wave of grief - that I'd have taken any attempt at spiritual healing I could get. And it never worked. The magic of church left me years ago, and no wonder, now that I know the first face to whom I was supposed to always be praying. And the second, I'm still reeling from seeing him go. Will I meet the third one day too? Assuming the Holy Spirit even has a face to begin with.

"Josh wouldn't mind," I say. "You'd have fucking loved him, man."

"You're probably right," Gabe says. "You're also a breeder."

"And you're a cocksucker."

His arm snakes around my neck from behind. "Pussy eater."

I wriggle away from him, then drag him closer to me by his neck and kiss the shaggiest part of the top of his blond head. "Buttfucker."

"You should try that sometime, you cheeky bastard."

"Yeah, if I ever date someone who's into it."

Gabe relaxes, sinking into my grasp. "For an icy boy, you're hella warm."

"Really?" I look down at the long sleeves and pants still plastered to me. When did I get them so wet? Did I go swimming in a frozen lake?

"You don't remember?" Gabe asks. "Well, to be honest, we're always waking up in these dreams halfway through the narrative. And..." He takes my hand for a second. "Good, your extremities ain't so dead anymore."

"Why would I-?"

"Hell if I know. I came in to find you drowning." Now it's his turn to kiss the top of my head. "Dude. Why?"

"Why what?"

"Don't play dumb. Why do you dream about your own death?"

"You really want the answer?"

"No, but what I want is to be the one cuddling you, not the other way around. Tell me the truth or your ass gets spooned."

"Good luck."

Gabe fights to make good on his threat, but I'm just as strong as he is. I can resist his attempts to get away from me pretty well. "Fuck," he groans after about a full minute of fish-like thrashing in my arms. "This is what happens when I'm used to spending my time with a smol cinnamon roll of a boy."

"I'm used to the people I love being smaller than I am."

"Kelly's not that much smaller. She's a tall girl."

"True. True."

Gabe's lips tighten as a brief cloud of negative thoughts spits fire in his brain. "You're used to the people you love being smaller. You're not used to me being around anymore?"

"I wish I could say I was, but meeting you in the dreamscape...it's just not the same, brother."

He shakes his head. "I know. I feel the same. Honestly, if I could...I wouldn't have tried to jump on Leah's gun if I knew then-"

"I still would've. So in that alternate timeline, I'd be the one who's dead."

"Is there any alternate timeline where we're both alive and well and in love with people who aren't dead?" He scoffs at the thought. "Well, actually, there is, but it's not an alternative timeline. It's our humans."

"How do you know?"

He pulls out his phone and shows me some pictures. "Didn't realize I had these on my phone for real, but I guess maybe just for this dream."

"Records of our humans?" I remember a dream I had to share with Elijah, where he talked about how seeing records of his human drove him over the edge.

"It's been a while since I was a Guardian," Gabe says. "Didn't think I still had these, but Russell's influence never dies, I guess." He swipes the screen a couple of times and says, "Look, see, our humans' records are pretty thorough. They even have their significant others listed. Who's Armando diFranco? Sounds handsome."

Of course that's the name of Gabe's human's boyfriend. As for my human, it makes me cry tears of joy - and grief for my own screwed-up life of love - to see that he's dating Fionna's human. She's still alive and well after all that time-travel shit with the Black Mirror? Thank Jesus for that too.

"See?" Gabe puts his phone away. "There's some universe where you and Fionna are together like nature intended."

"Yeah, but..." Shit, don't say it.

"What?"

"I still..." Alex. Stop.

"You still love her." Gabe cranes his neck as much as he can to look up at me. "Don't you?"

"I..."

"I mean, it's not like it's usual to fall in love only once, and forever, but..." He keeps on looking up, his eyes boring into my soul. "I dunno, man. As much as you've gone out with other girls-"

"You say that like I've dated another girl every week. I've only been with two."

"Maybe you're just not gonna see it for yourself without help, but..." Please, Gabe, look away. "I can tell, man. You and Fionna, you're both dating other people, but you're both still-"

"Don't say we're in love. Don't-"

"I'll compromise and say you two are super attached."

"Can we just...?" I let go of Gabe, and he gets up and goes to the kitchen behind us so he can fetch some food. Damn, my sniffer must really be failing me if I can't even tell there's Joey's Pizza within smelling distance. "Did you forget we were talking about Josh?"

"No, but we were gonna circle back to him at some point, am I right?" He slides a plate of pesto, sausage, salmon, and melted mozzarella into my hands. Holy shit, yes, I need to try this for real the first chance I get. Of course, it won't be at Joey's for a while. As I understand it, Joey's staying closed at least through New Year's, if not longer, in the wake of Dio's murder. So I've heard from both Gideon and AK.

Shit, there's another thing I've got to talk about.

"What about TJ?" I ask.

Gabe pauses, and I'm tempted to laugh at how ridiculous he looks with a piece of pizza hovering in his hand, halfway to his mouth. "Someone you didn't get to meet, but should have?"

"Our stories in parallel," I say. "Except I did get to meet him. For a second. Something about when Elliot took over both their bodies, he switched 'em around for a second." I shudder at the thought, hard enough to knock a piece of salmon off the end of my slice. "I still can't wrap my head around either of them being that desperate to put a stop to Scoville that they agreed to it."

"Not everyone's us."

"But the worst part was, AK felt it when his brother died." I feel a tear drip from my eye, but I don't clean it just yet. Not when I've touched my pizza just long enough that I'd grease my eye from touching it, and even in a dream, that'd hurt like hell, I'm sure. Even worse because of how dreams dilate time, according to Inception rules. "I mean, I felt something leave my soul too when you got shot, but this was...it wasn't like that for him. I think he was closer to his brother's soul than he'd ever been, even when they were both still alive, and..."

"Is AK doing okay?" Gabe asks.

"I dunno. I was supposed to see him at Christmas, but I'm not even sure he'll show up at this point." I keep on staring at my pizza, fighting the war between my watering mouth and my self-tying stomach. "I'll check in with him when I wake up, but I'm still bloody worried."

"You're not wrong to be. But don't just wake yourself up on his account. You should let him reach out to you if he needs help."

"And what if he doesn't?"

"From what I gather, he's like me more than you. No wonder you bonded pretty well with him," Gabe adds with a fake embarrassed chuckle. "I'd appreciate any help you offered me unasked, but I'd reach out if I really needed it. You, though? You're already an overprotective daddy."

"Aren't you the one who thinks you're the Dean to my Sam? Which, yeah, you are, but only in terms of personality-"

"Sam would daddy as well as Dean could if the writers gave him half a chance. You're the proof they need to give him that chance, 'cause it works."

"I'd like to think I'm a loving daddy."

"What do we know about loving daddies? We never had one."

"We gotta be our own, son!"

Gabe ruffles my hair with slick, pizza-greased fingers. "That's it, dude. Don't let the daddy syndrome get to your head."

I slap his hand away. "Stop dirtying me up, you dirty fucker!"

"Stop waving your plate around if you don't want your pizza to be dirty too!"

I steady my plate so I can keep the pizza from falling off, then finally take a bite. Or, at least, I pick up that one piece of fallen salmon and eat it. "The point I'm trying to make all this time..."

"Is what?"

"Shit, I can't remember now." I spend a while eating silently. "Something about Josh?"

"And how much I would've loved him?" Gabe looks like he wants to dismiss the very thought, but can he? I don't think he can, not without being struck down with spontaneous combustion. "Probably 'cause he was nothing like the Jesus we were all taught about, huh?"

"Well, if by that you mean he wasn't a holy roller like his daddy..."

"So you met God too?" Gabe visibly rolls his eyes at this thought.

"Still won't believe in him?"

"Should I?"

I shake my head. "Don't meet him. Ever. I bet that'll make it easier for you to not believe. Hell, I'm finding myself becoming dangerously close to atheist just from having met him."

"How bad?"

I look up at the mantelpiece, where a newly formed set of speakers starts playing a chaotic old song that we both love: Don Henley's "How Bad Do You Want It?" A song just obscure enough that it's virtually unfindable on YouTube, but that's okay. Mom always had the album on both cassette and CD.

"That's how you plan to answer my question? With another question?"

"Par for the course for you, me, and anyone else who tries to engage us in a battle of wits for the fate of all civilization."

Gabe snaps his fingers, and the volume lowers - a shame, because Don's just started singing. Though the lyrics to that song do leave a lot to be desired - "You're leaving tongue marks on the carpet / And I know what you're looking at / You could walk on your lips through busted glass / If you could get next to that" - laughs aren't one of them; this song serves them aplenty, and is just goofy and Weird Al-like enough that it may have been intentional. Which may explain why I remember those words so well.

But then Gabe, with another fingersnap, puts on a song whose lyrics I can never remember: "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Actually, no, it's not the original. It's Weird Al's "Smells Like Nirvana." Now that, we can both sing along to on one lyric in particular: "It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss??? / With all these marbles in my mouth!"

Okay, so I think I know what I'm gonna spend another minute of real time, and ten minutes or so of dream time, doing. I'm going to challenge Gabe to a dance-off sing-off, repping the 80s while he gets the 90s. He's good enough to know that if he were to slay the 80s classics with his notorious voice, I would never forgive him, no matter how much I love him. But oh, how he tries my patience, going for my personal favorite 90s songs too. Green Day, Radiohead, and The Offspring, while I challenge him with Depeche Mode, New Order, and Roxette. On the last of these, because it's a dream, I'm still able to pull off the falsetto I haven't been able to do right since my voice first lowered at thirteen. Though I think my balls still disappear into my chest cavity to make it happen, even for a minute.

In the end, we compromise by singing together on my absolute favorite 90s song of all: "Even Flow," that Pearl Jam song I kept thinking was by the Chili Peppers for the longest time. Which is funny 'cause I'm not a Chili Peppers fan at all, and I thought it was weird that there was one song of theirs that I actually liked. Besides "Californication," that is.

Finally, though, I get back to the point I was hoping to make earlier. "Josh would've totally vibed to all this shit too."

"Is that so?"

"Let's just say that his daddy makes me want to all faith abandon." I lean back against the foot of the chair, reaching for my pizza plate, only to find that it's empty. I could get up and refill, but I need to take a moment to rest after dancing and singing around the room like complete shit. "But Josh is my reason for not abandoning. I don't just want to believe in him. I have to."

"Hmm." Gabe reaches awkwardly around me, pulling me closer to him by the shoulders. How he can wedge his arm between me and the chair, I'm not sure. "Well, since we're always on some kind of world-saving mission or other...what if our next one's a Jesus-saving mission?"

"He's not the kind of guy to want to be paid back for his services," I say. "But after two thousand years of him saving us, it's about time someone finally saved him." I drop my head onto Gabe's shoulder, unable to stop a tear from dripping onto his hoodie. "But I wish I knew how."

"Hey..." He pulls my chin up and gives me a tearful smile himself. "The day will come. And when it does, I'll be there."

I slide up so I'm not so slumped against the bottom of the chair, then reach behind Gabe's head and bring his forehead to mine. Mom says there's ultrasound proof of the two of us doing this in the womb, but me, I think we were inspired by our first time watching Vikings.

Whatever the case may be, Gabe puts his hand on the back of my head too, completing the bond. "I love you, fish breath."

"Love you too, you damned dirty white ape."