“…What did you do?” Mr. Jack asked me in the aftermath.

We sat by the pale ocean in some newborn place. I thought about a breeze, and one came along, rippling over the grass, ruffling his scarf and my hair.

“…Don’t you know?” I asked back.

“The last thing I remember was seeing you drowning,” he said. “And after that…I just figured my powers were eroding along with everything else.”

I folded my hands. “…I didn’t drown,” I said. “Because I didn’t breathe…I was just…there, and I wrote this.” I picked up my golden scissors, and the sun appeared in the sky to bathe them in sparkling light.

“I went back to the Deathbed…I made myself appear there,” I continued. “Mère L’Oye was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her. So I just did what you said to do…I went up to your Odsplut, and I cut the chains, and I set it free.”

I looked at him: the look on his face was as grim and gloomy as it usually was, but with little hints of pain around the eyes.

“…So what did you do?” I asked.

“I wrote the story,” he said. “But it didn’t actually work. Like I feared…it was just too far away from her character, to suddenly accept death…”

“So I had to try…something else,” he continued. “I realized that Mother and I are a lot alike…when things seem hopeless we get depressed, despondent; engulfed in self-pity. I got to the point where I thought there was nothing left to do but wait for destruction…but she wasn’t there yet. She still had motivations…until…”

I closed my eyes. “…Until you took them away from her,” I finished, almost in a whisper.

Jack fell silent then. For a while, we both sat very still and listened to the wind.

“…You know,” I said, “You only did what you—”

“Don’t…say that,” he interrupted. “Whether or not I ‘had’ to do it, or whether or not it was right…it’s done. And I’m just going to live with it.”

~~

We stopped talking for a long while after that.

Instead, we took turns writing; playing a sort of game of catch with our imaginations. I pulled the tide in, he pushed it out again. He made the sun rise, I made it set. I filled the meadow with wildflowers, and he planted long grasses on the dunes.

As we were rotating the clouds overhead, I thought of something that I wanted to ask, ever since that last day in the old world.

“…Mr. Jack,” I said. “About the gun—”

“What about it?”

“…So you did know about it.”

“You’re my character; of course I knew you had it.”

“I don’t mean just that I had it; I mean…was Mère L’Oye telling the truth when she said that it could kill her? Is it really the most powerful weapon in the world…?”

“I don’t know. Mother never even told me that much.”

“But, why did my mother bring it here??”

“To protect herself, I guess.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all I know.”

I picked up my scissors again. “…I wonder if it still has all that power, now that it’s in this form,” I said. “I wonder what I did to it…I wonder if this is what she would have wanted me to do…”

“I think she would have wanted you to do whatever you wanted to do with it,” he said. “That’s the kind of person she was.”

“…Did you know her?” I asked timidly.

Mr. Jack made a motion with his hand that meant ‘a bit’, although I had a feeling it was more than that.

At the time, I wasn’t ready to ask, however. I was already overwhelmed with facing my new existence as an author; my origins, and my birth mother’s origins, were topics that I decided to broach another day.

“…Mr. Jack,” I said, one last time. “I want to ask you for a favor.”

He shrugged. “…I guess you’re entitled to that at this point,” he replied. “What do you want?”

“I want…I don’t want to be an author just yet,” I began. “I mean, not a ‘real’ one; living on the moon and away from everyone…I just want to go home.

“And I know it’s not fair to leave you in charge all by yourself…you had a hard time, too; you probably had it worse than me. And now you don’t even have Gin anymore…but I…I don’t know how to live like this yet. And I really don’t feel ready…

“Besides, I want to see my friends again; I feel like they deserve to know what happened. So if you could just…” I clasped my hands. “Please take care of me, for a little while longer…”

“…Hey, it’s not as big a deal as all that,” he said. “I don’t mind. You have a life; you deserve to finish living it…besides, it’ll only be, what, 60 years, tops? And then you’ll be back…hopefully, with a little more maturity…”

I brushed away a tear. “I promise I’ll be responsible with my powers this time,” I said. “In fact, I won’t even write anything until I come back to the moon; I’ll live just like a normal person until the end!”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” he replied. “You’re not a normal person anymore…and you’ll probably be better off remembering that.”

~~

The rest of that day, if you could call it a ‘day’, was a bit of a blur…I remember giving Mr. Jack a hug, or at least wanting to. And I remember settling down to sleep in the soft grass…

Nothing was quite clear again until I woke up in the rowboat.