Work Text:
After everything is all settled, Tulip can’t believe how boring it is.
There is before everything’s settled, when the police are called because she’s been missing for five months. When they ask her where she’s been, she shrugs, because how do you explain it? Oh yeah, there’s this train that takes people who have problems.
When her parents take her home, they go their separate ways to their cars. It’s a bit of a gut punch. Right, they’re divorced. She can’t believe that she forgot.
“I can’t believe you guys are talking now.”
Her mom looks back at her, and then understands. “We were always talking, camp was a scheduling problem.”
“I guess so. I’ll see you dad.” She hugs him.
“Don’t run away again.” He squeezes her tight.
“I won’t.”
It comes up in her life again and again, that her parents were divorced. She feels a little bit of resentment that the train didn’t fix all her problems, but she knows it wasn’t really ever the train, it was her.
It’s an adjustment period after everything’s settled. There’s no running for her life, no having to scavenge from the trains from food, no One-One to talk to. But there’s her friends, the months of school work to make up, the painful regularity of everything.
On the train, each car was different. Talking to corgis was normal, the temperature was different car to car, there were sentient crystals or plants or statues in this one, nothing was the same.
But now, there's such painful regularity. She walks the same path to school, she has to sit at the same desk at the same time each day, she sees the same people everyday.
Sometimes, when she doubts if the infinity train was ever real, she goes to the bathroom. Every time she looks in the mirror, her reflection is gone. The first time she looked into the mirror, she thought, oh, I’m like a vampire. But now it’s comforting, knowing that the train was real.
Before the train, she was a bit of a stickler for routine. School was school. But now, something about it rubs at her. The only place where she really gets to express herself is in her video games.
Years later, when she finally publishes her game, there's one simple line in the opening.
Dedicated to Atticus and One-One.