Hold Me Now
Posted on 11 Jun 2026 @ 2:12am by Captain Sabrina Corbin
946 words; about a 5 minute read
Mission: Time After Time
The neighborhood had changed after the lights went out.
Not dramatically.
No screaming. No running. No emergency vehicles.
Just the subtle rearrangement that happened when people expected normal to return soon.
Garage doors had opened. Lawn chairs appeared. Coolers emerged from kitchens. People drifted outside because houses without lights became warm and strangely quiet, and because sitting alone inside felt wrong when everyone else was visible.
The cul-de-sac still belonged to the children.
That part had not changed.
Bikes remained scattered where they had been abandoned. Somebody had dragged a portable cassette player back outside and fed it fresh batteries. A basketball bounced intermittently somewhere farther down the curve of the street. Sprinklers continued their slow mechanical sweep over darkening lawns, catching the last orange light in tiny arcs that turned gold for a moment before disappearing.
Aster sat on top of one of the neighborhood mailboxes at the edge of a driveway, balanced easily on the faded metal box as though people did this all the time. It was painted a beige that had long ago given up trying to stay clean, mounted to a rough wooden post that leaned a few degrees toward the street. Black house numbers had been fixed to the side years earlier and one corner had started peeling away. The small red mail flag was raised.
It gave him a place to observe.
He sat comfortably on top of it despite there not really being enough room to sit comfortably.
One foot rested against the post. One swung gently over the side.
No one questioned it.
That had surprised him.
He appeared approximately fourteen by local standards.
He wore white canvas sneakers with greyed rubber edges, straight blue jeans, and a lightweight windbreaker in faded blue with pale cream panels across the shoulders. The style matched the neighborhood well enough to disappear into it. Nothing expensive. Nothing memorable.
His hair was dark blond and slightly too neat.
People looked at him.
Then stopped looking.
Not because they forgot him.
Just because their attention seemed to slide past him naturally.
Adults assumed he belonged somewhere.
Children accepted him immediately.
That appeared to be how groups worked.
Earlier, a woman had stepped out carrying a tray of paper plates and asked if he wanted a hotdog.
He had looked at the food.
Looked at her.
“No thank you.”
She smiled.
“Suit yourself, sweetheart.”
Then she left.
No follow-up questions.
He had recorded that interaction.
The people here seemed unusually willing to leave things unexplained.
That had not matched his briefing materials.
He watched.
Across the street a man stood beside a green station wagon with wood panel siding, leaning against the front fender with a beer while discussing transformers with another man in tube socks and shorts. Neither appeared distressed.
Two houses over a woman lit citronella candles and arranged them around folding chairs as though a blackout was merely another variation of summer.
Children adapted faster.
Children always adapted faster.
Aster had observed that repeatedly.
One little girl had spent fifteen minutes trying to catch sprinkler water in a plastic cup and appeared completely unconcerned that the sky had become darker without any streetlights turning on.
The adults watched clocks.
That was different.
People looked at watches.
Looked west.
Listened for sounds.
Several times someone commented on traffic.
There should have been freeway noise.
There wasn’t.
One man eventually said:
“Whole Valley sounds weird tonight.”
Another shrugged.
“Power outage.”
The explanation appeared satisfactory.
For now.
Aster looked upward.
The sun had reached an angle his people would classify as stable.
Warm.
Diffuse.
Low stress.
People seemed calmer.
Someone laughed nearby.
“Well if they don’t get this fixed by tomorrow maybe school gets cancelled.”
Children cheered immediately.
Another voice answered from farther back:
“Honestly?”
A pause.
“I wouldn’t mind if the sun stayed like this.”
Agreement followed.
Aster considered.
His people learned through intervention.
Not large interventions.
Small ones.
You observed.
You adjusted.
You measured outcomes.
The neighborhood had become quieter.
People seemed happier.
The environmental conditions were favorable.
The request was simple.
He reached upward.
Not physically.
No gesture.
No movement.
The way his people interacted with reality was closer to changing tension than moving objects.
Like smoothing wrinkles from cloth.
The sky resisted.
Time resisted.
He adjusted carefully.
Very carefully.
The sun stopped.
Nothing else changed.
Children continued riding bicycles.
Someone laughed.
A radio clicked on.
A man opened another drink.
One woman remarked that the temperature was perfect.
Aster watched.
This appeared successful.
Several minutes passed.
Then more.
Then more.
The first person to notice was not an adult.
A little girl stopped her bicycle in the middle of the street.
She looked west.
Looked at her shadow.
Looked west again.
Then she rode over to her father.
“Dad?”
He looked up.
“What?”
She pointed.
“…wasn’t the sun over there before?”
The man looked.
Then checked his watch.
His expression changed slightly.
Someone turned up the radio.
Static.
Then—
the announcer.
Again.
Exactly.
“…Tuesday, May fifteenth, nineteen eighty-four…”
Same weather.
Same joke.
Same song.
People stopped speaking.
Nobody understood immediately.
But they all felt it.
Aster watched carefully.
Observation phase.
The distress indicators should have reduced.
Instead—
more people began looking at the sky.
A woman carrying lemonade looked directly at him.
She smiled uncertainly.
“You waiting for somebody, honey?”
Aster considered the question.
Then answered truthfully.
“No.”
The woman nodded.
Like that answer was acceptable.
She looked away.
Aster looked back up at the frozen sunset.
People had requested more time.
He had given them more time.
He waited for the distress to reduce.
Instead—
it increased.
Aster, Juvenile Stage Four of the Meridian
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