Re: #8: Aubrey and Jude
Even free from the confines of his jacket, Aubrey was flushed hot with adrenaline squirting through his veins and the racing scatter of thoughts flipped through like pages with the text blurred and illegible, what to do, what to do, how to get out of this mess. He wasn’t about to abandon Jude to the doldrums of alternate dimension or tear in the space-time continuum or whatever the fuck this shit was, because that wasn’t Aubrey, that wasn’t what he did. Even if it had occurred to him that starting over from the beginning might kick a reset into gear like a shaken Etch A Sketch wiped clean, he couldn’t have done it (because what if the wipe-clean didn’t distinguish between giant gaping whole in the world and living things trapped inside it, huh?).
“I’m not going anywhere, I’m not leaving you,” he called down in a promise that was muffled by his hands scrubbing furiously over his face, trying to clear his head out, think. Think and do it fast, before Jude was dead or worse. (Thoughts of perpetual limbo and eternal damnation were racing through Aubrey’s head, and maybe that was a little bit of the repressed Catholic superstition flourishing in the barren wake of frenzy and dread, but still.) “Okay. Okay, okay - Jude? I’m gonna try something.”
Flattening out on his stomach alongside the hole, Aubrey wrapped one sleeve of his coat around the wrist of his uninjured arm and gripped it tight in his hand as he dangled it into the darkness. His bad arm got hooked around the leg of the cabinet that they’d hauled over to block the doorway as an anchor before he started to inch his upper body out over the void, teeth gritted against the pain of holding his weight with his messed up elbow (and holding his breath, praying to all saints unseen that the heavy piece of furniture didn’t start to move behind him).
“Put your hands out, okay? Try to see if my coat can reach so you can grab on!”