Lucas wasn’t sure how he’d ended up in that chair, but he was surprised that his hand wasn’t handcuffed to the armrest. He was even more surprised to find out that he was uninjured; he didn’t even seem to be in a hospital. Instead, he was in a sort of waiting room surrounded by other people in chairs that he didn’t know.

He had no idea what it was he was waiting for exactly, though. As he looked around the room, he took in the drab gray paint and the dull taupe carpet in an instant. It was obvious that the arrangement had been designed by a committee to be as unremarkable and cost-conscious as possible. He could have been in any government office of any city he’d even lived in.

Processing the other people he saw, that took longer. There were other people like him wearing normal clothes. Well, clothes I would normally wear, Lucas thought as he saw that he was still in the hazmat suit he’d been wearing before his little lab had gone up in flames.

He shook his head, wondering why he was still wearing this shit. If he’d been arrested, then they should have stripped him, and if he’d escaped, then he should have ditched it.

Neither of those mattered, compared to the fact that some of the other people in the room were wearing everything from actual armor to silk dresses and rags. That, more than anything, made him think this was a dream because the only other options were comic con and central casting.

As he watched, workers in white came and got people at almost random intervals, and by the time Lucas watched them lead off the stranger, he turned back around to find that, invariably, their empty seat had been filled by a new face. None of it made much sense, but that worked for him because his brain was still feeling awfully fuzzy.

Even though he shouldn’t have been, Lucas was still surprised when one of those women in white approached him and said, “Mr. Sharpe, your caseworker will see you now.”

“My who?” he said, taking her offered hand. “Miss - I don’t know who you are or where I am exactly, so I don’t know if I should be talking to you or this caseworker without an attorney, you know what I’m saying?” He didn’t want to be rude to the woman because she seemed so pretty and nice, but at the same time, he was more than a little skeptical of following anyone with no idea where he was.

“I can understand your confusion,” she said, casually helping him to his feet with far more strength than he would have expected from her pale, slender limbs. “That’s very common in your situation.”

When she didn’t keep going, he sighed, “But my caseworker will tell me all about that, right?”

“Exactly,” she said with a smile before turning and walking out of the room, obviously exacting him to follow. “Right this way.”

Lucas did so grudgingly. At first, he dragged his feet, trying to see if he was about to make a mistake or not, but as soon as they’d left the room and gotten into the hallway, he stopped that. He had a bigger concern now, losing track of her.

The hallways they walked through were labyrinthine and crowded, and the further they went, the worse that got. It felt like everyone in the world had come down for a killer Black Friday sale, but it was already sold out. So, he struggled to keep up with the only person in this whole place who seemed to know his name and, sometimes, his language.

“What the heck is this,” he said mostly to himself. “Someone has to get this under control!”

“We cannot control the flow, sadly,” his guide said, just loud enough that he could make her out over the din. “All we can do is endure, I’m afraid. Endure and adjudicate you quickly and efficiently.”

“Adjudicate?” Lucas balked, pausing for a moment before she came back and tanked his hand to drag him on. “I told you, we aren’t doing any of that shit without a lawyer. I know my rights.”

“You do,” she agreed, “and your caseworker will go over those with you, but—”

“But nothing,” he answered. He could feel himself being railroaded here, and he wasn’t having it. Before he could lay out a blistering case and make a complete ass out of himself that would probably get a bailiff called on him, though, they were there.

Even as he was opening his mouth again, she was opening the door, and with a smile on her face, she waved him inside. “Good luck, Lucas. I pray it will be a long time before we see you again.”

Then, the door was closed, and like magic, it was gone. It literally vanished into the wall like a magic trick. “Are you seeing this?” he asked the pleasant-looking man behind the desk. “Where did the damn door go.”

“Please have a seat, Mr. Sharpe,” the bureaucrat said. “The door has just been put away to make room for other doors in the hallway. Some of these appointments can take quite a long time, and there are always more people to see. Rest assured, it will reappear when it is needed.”

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“When it's needed?” Lucas repeated, looking at the dude like he was crazy.

“Exactly,” the man said, gesturing to the seat opposite him at the desk. “I’m Darius, and I’ll be your—”

“Yeah, caseworker, I know,” Lucas said, choosing to remain standing. “Just what case are we working, anyway, because if this is about the bust, I want a lawyer, a coffee, and some privacy.”

“Why, Mr. Sharpe, we’re here to discuss your whole life, not just the circumstances with how it ended,” Darius told him.

“Oh, so you’re a social worker you want to… Wait, my, what? Ended?” For a moment, Lucas felt a wave of anxiety go through him, and he tried to wave it off. “I’m not—”

Even as he started to speak, fragments of memory went through his mind. The door being knocked down, the explosion, and the burning all assaulted him for an instant, and under that barrage of pain, he endured. For a moment, he felt faint, but then suddenly, as quickly as the barrage started, it stopped, and he felt whole once more.

It was only after he saw the way his supposed caseworker was looking at him that Lucas suspected that he’d in some way inflicted those memories on him. That’s crazy, though, he told himself, before momentarily adding, but not as crazy as a fucking door disappearing.

“Yes, the way that your life ended was unfortunate,” the caseworker agreed, flipping the pages of the file that had appeared in front of him. “but what we need to talk about today isn’t so much how your life ended as the choices you made. While you were in the waiting room, I had the chance to look at your life, and honestly, it was right on track through your early twenties, but when you developed your addiction, it—”

“Don’t talk like you know anything about me,” Lucas said, suddenly defensive. “Because you don’t know shit about what happened.” At that moment, he felt the need to stand again and try to find some way out of this insane office, but before he could, he was suddenly battered with memories.

They were old ones. Things he hadn’t thought about in a long time. His mom’s OD, his time living with his grandmother when he started filching her pain meds, his first girlfriend and her crazy mood swings, the first time he stole a car, and his first night in Juvvie, along with his first real beat down all hit him one after another like a rising tide.

Individually, each one of those was an awful memory, but together, they were like the road to hell. His wasn’t paved with good intentions, though. Instead, his life was paved with individual moments of human weakness and the need to escape a bad situation that inevitably lead to a worse one. It was horrifying, and by the time he came up for air, there were tears in his eyes.

Lucas blinked them away and then fixed a gaze of pure anger at the man across the table. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing poking around in my head, man!” he growled.

“I’m just trying to remind you how you ended up where you are now so we can properly discuss what you were supposed to do with your last life and figure out what you need to do with the next one,” Darius said with an apologetic smile.

“Man, the shit that comes out of your mouth… Do you even hear yourself? Do you hear how crazy you sound?” Lucas asked as he pointed at his own head in a mocking gesture. “I lived my life on my terms. I made my choices, and that’s fucking that, okay?”

“Indeed,” the caseworker nodded. “But did you know you were supposed to become a chemist? You weren’t even supposed to die until congestive heart failure in your seventies. You were going to have three kids and—”

“Enough, alright!” Lucas raged, standing as his caseworker tilted the folder forward so that Lucas could see the pictures of three hypothetical children he was apparently supposed to have. “You say one more screwed up thing like that, and I’ll—” He lifted the chair to smash it on the desk, but with a gesture, Darius made it stick back to the ground again, stopping him.

“I think you’ll find that you have no power here, Mr. Sharpe,” Darius said with a shake of his head. “The odds of you overpowering an angel in purgatory are quite slim. We need to focus on the positive here and find a solution that will get you back where you’re supposed to be.”

“Supposed to be, huh? Where’s that?” Lucas demanded, not bothering to hide his anger. “Where does a fuck-up like me fit in your supposed plan?”

He didn’t know who this dude was supposed to be and if he was really a divine servant or just some nutter, but he went a long way toward believing when the mine dimmed the lights and turned on some kind of holographic display with a wave of his hand.

A semi-transparent wall of light arose on the desk between the two of them. At first, it just seemed to be a sheet of pure white, but as it started to zoom in and his eyes adjusted, Lucas could see that it was actually a very complicated pattern with tiny multicolored threads weaving in and out.

“This is the skein of fate,” Darius announced, “For your world at least. Everyone has a place in it, and it’s important that all of you do your part for the warp and weft so that things align just so. It’s for the good of everyone, don’t you see?”

“Like I have any idea what the hell it is I’m looking at,” Lucas scoffed while his mind spun, and he tried to get a handle on all of this.

“Do you see this here? This snarl?” his caseworker asked.

Lucas didn’t, but as the angel spoke, he made a gesture, and the entire image changed. Almost all the threads faded out, leaving them with a slender blue thread that presumably belonged to Lucas and a couple of hundred threads he interacted with. Now, he could definitely see the knot that Darius was talking about.

It was an ugly thing, and it pulled a number of other surrounding threads out of their course and even seemed to end a few of them that went into the knot but never came out again.

“What’s this one,” Lucas asked, reaching out to touch the red one that vanished into the snarl. He regretted it instantly.