"I saw lights in one of the towers last night," Rust spoke, squinting up at the looming buildings. "We can probably find out what it was, if we look."

They had stopped outside the Store, but Shim was wary about actually going inside, lest he be trapped somehow, the world realising he was out of place. On the way over, Rust had told him of how he hadn't been there until she was leaving, and that hadn't helped his nerves.

"What if another me turns up, or it like, resets me, like a game character or somethin'?"

She nodded in understanding, and they carried on their walk, heading towards where she had seen the light, talking quietly between themselves.

As they got closer, Shim suddenly squinted, and then pointed up, "Ah, I see what you mean, there's curtains!"

She nodded, looking up herself. The window she had seen the night before was thrown open now, white curtains flapping in the breeze like a flag. It wouldn't have been much to look at in a normal city, but here, where all the buildings looked identical, it stood out.

As they entered, the inside of the building looked almost normal. Or it did if you changed your definition of normal, from 'giant cake tin' to 'building that might have existed in a regular city'.

Instead of a hollowed-out shell, there was an enclosed lobby area, with the ground floor doubling as a sort of shopping centre. They had a brief look around, but all the shops were shuttered and closed, awaiting future tenants who might never come.

The silence was eerie as they climbed the wide stairwell, counting floors, with Rust feeling every step in her knees. In a building like this, you expected the noise of people living their lives, but it was completely, utterly silent.

"It's weird," muttered Shim. The quiet and concrete stole his words away, and he didn't speak again.

A whole building which should have been full of life, instead desolate and empty. It was a strange feeling.

-

Even Shim was flagging a little by the time they made it to their destination, but they knew they'd come to the right place as the area opened up around them. Where the previous floors had contained corridors and lines of anonymous doors, identical down even to the nicks and scrapes, this floor was different. The corridor was wide, and the doors were all different colours. There was a big, bright window at the end of the hall, and halfway along one of the doors stood open. The smell of cooking and the sound of a radio drifted towards them as they approached.

Rust hesitated, and after sharing a look with Shim, she knocked on the open door, and they entered the apartment together.

-

The woman screamed at the sight of them and nearly managed to brain Shim with a thrown frying pan, spotting his uniform with grease and putting a large dent into the door behind him.

As he cowered with his hands over his head, Rust shouted at the woman, which in turn caused her to run, finally locking herself in the bathroom.

As they fought, the stove winked out and the sound of the radio cut off abruptly, casting the room into silence, the faint smell of gas in the air.

-

A few minutes later the pan was back on the stove, and the three of them were grouped up on the sofa tears running down their faces, pancakes stacked on the coffee table, forgotten.

"I thought I was alone," she sobbed, "I wake, I wake, I wake, I-"

She stopped as Rust placed a hand on her shoulder, instead letting out a strangled sob, "I remember it. I remember…"

Shim laid an awkward hand around her back, and she clung to his shirt, clutching at the fabric and turning the white cotton transparent with tears.

Rust kept her hand on the woman's shoulder, but also stared out of the window. She had never been so high up before, had barely ever been further afield than the local town. Even for her honeymoon, they hadn't gone further than...

She patted the shoulder again and stood to get a better view. From up here you could see the patchwork nature of the world, something she had only suspected before. The city ended as if cut, and a mountain in the distance was sliced cleanly in half.

When she peeked out of the left window, there was a strange void where there should have been land or sea, where there should have been-

She squeezed her eyes shut and pulled the curtain closed. Best not to look, she decided. She could already feel a headache coming on, a sharp pain spiking through her temple.

By the time she looked back, the woman on the sofa had eased off in her crying and was now eating the cooling pancakes, helped along by Shim and his endless teenage hunger.

"Do you want a name?" Shim asked when the pancakes were gone and even the crumbs mopped up. "We picked names, this mornin'."

He pointed over at her. "That's Rust, and I'm Shim."

The woman frowned in thought, wringing her hands through her skirt. Her face was still raw and puffy, but her eyes were bright. "I had one," she bit her lip, "a name I mean, I had one."

She stared down at the empty plate, and then up out of the window, her hands still forming knots in the abused cloth. "I like," a deep breath through her nose, "The first thing I remember is waking up, I wake…"

She took a moment to pull herself out of the loop again, and the other two let her. "I remember waking up with breakfast, the cooking. I would spend all day here, reading, always the same-"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Another pause, another moment to pull herself back together again, as she fractured over and over.

"Always the same book, I don't remember what it was about like, but I remember it. It was the happiest I'd ever been, pancakes in the morning, and a day spent reading in the sun."

Rust nodded in understanding, and Shim frowned to himself.

"I'm gonna be Quilt." She decided, "I had one once that I liked."

She swallowed loudly, "it was pink with patchwork flowers on it, I dunno where it went, but in the winter…"

Quilt trailed off, but more naturally now, scrubbing at her face and smoothing out her crumpled skirt. "I don't wanna be alone, I want to be Quilt. Can I stay with you?"

Rust nodded, "I have spare rooms, we can sort that."

-

Rust explored the surrounding flats, while Quilt and Shim sorted out what they wanted to take from the flat. Most of the doors were closed and locked, but she found several that weren't, the locks either missing or non-functional.

The first looked as if its occupant had stepped out only moments before. There was a still warm plate of food on the table, something with grains and a sauce she couldn't identify, and the bedroom door was half open, washing strewn over the floor. She tried shouting, and entering and leaving a few times, but when there was no response, she left, shutting the door behind her.

Shim did check in, as she was shouting, but shuddered when she explained what she was doing, and quickly went back to helping Quilt pack.

Another apartment looked normal at first glance, until she discovered the bedroom furniture all crammed into the tiny bathroom, and the bathroom fixtures were in the kitchen.

Another was empty of everything except various stacks of mismatched chairs, like a church storage room.

The further she got from where they'd found Quilt, the more things seemed to break down. The rooms at the end of the corridor were empty of everything, even carpet, and floors. She didn't step into those, gazing instead down the well, towards the ground floor far, far below.

-

They didn't go into the Store on the way back, Shim pulling them past, his lips tight, but they had scraped together enough supplies that they wouldn't starve for a while.

Were they even capable of such a thing? The act of cooking and eating seemed to be more a breath of the familiar, a way to ground themselves, than a real need, but maybe that would change as time went on.

-

As they sat around the kitchen table that night, Jenny and Jeremy roosting on the windowsill, Gertrude snuggled into Quilt's lap and Sightmind and Samantha snuggled together in a box by the door, they discussed the future.

"You said you were happy," Shim hedged, the meal long over but nursing a cup of boiled water. "On that day, you remembered… Well, the thing what we remember, but you said you were happy?"

Quilt nodded, "I think that day was the happiest I ever was. I used to think about it sometimes, later, and I came close other times, but that one day in the sun..."

She smiled, her face shining in the evening light, and Rust nodded.

"I understand. Today-" she paused, "Not today, but what Today was for me, the… The day I awoke?"

She struggled to find the right words

"My day. I talked to my hens. My children were going to visit tomorrow, they were going to bring somebody new with them. Somebody young." Her heart lurched, but she carried on, "It was a calm day, a beautiful day before a storm. It was winter and my home was warm and safe, tomorrow was only anticipation, I wasn't in any pain, and I was happy."

Shim looked between them, unhappy with their responses. "You two can lose yourself in musings later," he grumbled, placing his cup down on the table a little bit too hard. "I don't want the day I was happiest to be the day I was working in some supermarket. I don't want that to be what the sum of my life was. If, if it happened on the days you were both happiest, what does that mean for me?"

He stood suddenly, startling the chickens off the window sill and causing the two in the box to look up, "I don't- what if…"

He stared out the door, a silhouette in the doorway. "What if I'm just made up somehow, what if I don't have a past, or a family. You said I wasn' even there until you left the shop, what if like, the shop just made me, because it knew, somehow, that you were meant to have a person there to ring up purchases."

He took a deep, shaky breath, holding back tears. "What if- what if you go back in, because you want some sweets or somethin', and I just stop existing. What if somebody else else goes in, somebody we don't even know, and that makes me stop existing."

Rust stood up and walked over to where he was standing, staring out into the darkness, one trembling hand clutching the doorframe. She started to speak, but he carried on before she had a chance to interject.

"You said it already happened once. You woke, I was gone. I didn't even, I don't even remember that, I don't remember that day."

His fingernails bent against the oak of the door-frame, and gently Rust reached up, pulling his hand down.

"We'll find what your day was." Her voice was quiet, "maybe it was a day you helped somebody, or you met a beloved, or you just had a really nice afternoon and evening in the park."

She pulled him back towards the table, and a minute later he was sitting again, a grumbling Sightmind on his lap.

"We're not gonna lose you. You're not gonna cease to exist."

Rust emptied out his mug, before refilling it from a pan on the stove.

"And if you are gone one morning, we know how to get you back. The chickens'll find you."

He flinched, and she wondered if she'd said the wrong thing, handing him the mug back, filled with freshly warmed water.

From next to him, Quilt stepped up, reaching over the nervously petting the chicken.

"I don't know if I'll be here when morning comes eithr. I don't really know what happened with you both, I'm new, I only just..." She took a deep breath. "I only just woke up, and I don't know if I'll be here tomorrow."

She let out a breath, "We can't know these things."

She licked her lips, hesitating, and both of them watched as she struggled.

Almost two minutes later, she scrunched her face up and spoke. "It ended. Everything ended. We remember it ending, or I do. We keep dancin' around the subject, but that's what happened.

"I don't know how we ended up here, beyond the End, or whatever here is. But I like it here, I didn't want to End, I didn' wanna die. None of us did."

The colours in the room were fading as the last of the sunset light ebbed away, leaving the three of them shrouded in darkness. Rust was leaning back against the counter, Shim at the table with his eyes on the floor, gently petting the chicken, and Quilt sitting straight and defiant, almost invisible in the deepening shadows.

"But I won't not talk about it, even if it makes me repeat the same day another hundred thousand times. The world ended, and we watched it happen, we were there, and now, I dunno. But I'm not gonna just give up and hide in fear of it happenin' again."

"It did end." Rust found the words hard, but she pushed through, "I remember it too, I remember reliving that day over and over. I was awake before either of you."

She pushed away from the counter, and a moment later was clearing the cups and plates off the table. They had taken a big lamp from Quilt's apartment, but none of them were quite sure how to get it going.

"I was awake before you two and I think, whatever happened, something, somebody, is putting it back together."

She huffed out a quiet laugh. Outside, the frantic evening birdsong had faded, and a chill breeze blew in through the open door.

"They're not very good at it though. The empty buildings, the strange labels."

She went to indicate some of the things she had taken from the store the previous day, but it was too dark now for them to be seen.

"Maybe it'll get better, though. Maybe one day we'll be sitting around this table and things'll be good. We'll know that it ended, but we'll be the only ones. Everyone else will just live their lives, and the world will be complete and whole around us."

She placed the last of the mugs on the draining board, and a moment later she had put the crocks of butter and bacon in the space outside under the step. A quick relocation of the chickens, and then a closing of the door, locking out the night air, locking in the darkness.

"I want to find my family." She said, "but first, I want to live."

There were nods and agreement from the two silhouettes, and as the three of them headed upstairs for bed, the air in the house was hopeful.