Out amidst a void of beige cosmic nothingness and bright twinkling stars there was a plain gray asteroid that had once been a planet. On this asteroid was an old man and a younger, middle-aged man, both with pink hair and red eyes.

They glared at each other, arguing their words lost in the rumble that still echoed onwards after the death of a nearby star.

The old man flicked the middle-aged man on the nose, the cartilage crumpling under force of the old man’s finger.

Holding his bleeding nose, the young man swore tried to take a swing at the old man and nearly got himself thrown off the asteroid.

“Asshole…” grunted the middle-aged man. Barely anchoring himself in place before he slipped off of the edge of the asteroid. Using great chains of glowing silver light to do so.

“Idiot…”said snorted the old man. Not deigning to look in the young man’s direction.

“So...this is when it happens, yeah? I can feel it...I can feel the paths crumbling. The old roads, I...we...have spent our lives walking are disappearing, taking our footsteps with them...So many fuckups and regrets disappearing like they’re all a bad dream.”

The younger man shifted his position with a short teleport. Disappearing from the far end of the asteroid and appearing next to the old man.

“Yeah, but knowing us we’re...he’s short to make new fuckups.” said the middle-aged man.

The old man frowned and then he smiled, the curving of his lips making his ancient face look like it was made of carved stone. Sinister and dark and somehow enchanting to behold.

“Tch...so? That’s his problem “we” no longer exist.”

The middle-aged man smiled as well, the expression coming off more as a sneer. A wicked thing straight out of a nightmare. Too wide, too bright, too full of teeth.

“How irresponsible of you...”

The old man looked down at himself as he saw that his body was fading away his existence being reabsorbed into the cosmic flow and the quantum tides.

“Hehehehe….Youngster you sound like my wife used to.”

The middle-aged man frowned, his head cocking to the right of him, to look at the spot where old man once stood.

“What wife? I got married? Why don’t I remember tha-? Oh right, altered-timeline...”

The man looked down at himself and then he shook his head. He too was fading away. His “present” was becoming irrelevant, same for the future that old man had represented. All that remained was the past. The living past. The one he’d stuffed full with as much potential as he could manage. The one that had even superseded Desmond Redmoon’s expectations by rendering his existence, his timeline null and void.

Even knowing that he was dying the young immortal couldn’t help feeling excited at the implications of what was happening.

Thousands of years of regrets and sadness were going away. Being erased from the eternal scoreboard.

There was no guarantee that, that which would come to replace them would necessarily be happy, but somehow, he found that he had some faith in his younger. He’d hopefully beaten enough skill, knowledge and sense into the boy to assure that at least the key things would change….Hopefully.

If after all that, things still ended in failure, then there really was “nothing” that could be done. Then...that’d just be the damndest shame. At the very least if things still ended in failure they end in spectacular. They’d end as a glorious and mutually destructive failure.

He could trust that the parties that robbed him last time, wouldn’t get off so easily this time and if that was the only thing he gained from all this, even that was enough.

Worst case scenario, another set of future-hims and future-future hims would try again. Continuing with the cycle till the wrongs were set to right.