It had taken Sven a few days, he thought, to make it back here. Give or take an eternity.
It was difficult for him to chart a path cleanly from one point to the next, even at the best of times. Sven had a tendency to get sidetracked or turned around, to end up in spots other than where he intended while en route to any destination. It had been this way as long as he could remember being aware of his travel process, but that only began when said process became abruptly traumatic. There was, perhaps, another reason for his difficulties navigating time and space in that.
He had come back to the river because this was the spot where everything went wrong. He'd seen it as a blessing at the time. It was, in a certain manner of speaking, but it also left him confused, disoriented, purposeless. These were not bad traits per se, but they weren't what he needed right now.
He didn't need anything. What would happen would happen and his willing participation, or lack thereof, meant little. Still he searched.
He had started upstream, far upstream from where he had encountered the boys days or months or lifetimes ago. He had slipped through the bushes with surprising silence. It was easy to be quiet when you weren't in a hurry, and easier still when there was nobody around to hear.
Well, almost nobody.
There were animals everywhere, always, but they didn't count. Many scattered before Sven ever saw them as more than shadows, some silently and others crashing and whooping through the foliage, probably dependent on their particular evolutions and adaptations and defense mechanisms. Some went to ground, freezing or darting behind leaves and watching him furtively with slimy, beady eyes. Some showed neither interest nor concern at his passing, insects continuing their business and birds chattering away.
There was also, at one point, a person. A girl, totally naked, slipping into the water in a small alcove formed by large rocks. It was about as concealed as it came here, which was to say visible from a handful of directions, one of which was where Sven was. He immediately receded further into the underbrush, hoping he'd passed unnoticed, and slowly made his way further on. It wasn't that he was embarrassed precisely—he held no prurient interest in watching girls bathe—but he understood clearly that that would be an awkward and difficult conversation to have, one that might turn heated at the drop of a dime, and that his professing as much might not be taken as gospel.
He was on the same shore he had been before, and while it seemed improbable, before too long Sven began to recognize landmarks. An old scar in a tree trunk he could conjure a memory of running his fingers over. A scuffed area of dirt with no vegetation whatsoever that formed an oddly precise rectangle seemed just as unusual now as it had then. That meant that he was getting closer.
And then, sure enough, there it was: the wide, flat rocks that almost offered a crossing point. Sven stood on the bank and peered over to the other side, squinted his eye, tried to see what he knew should be there and equally knew was not.
The bush he'd aimed for was thick, and no evidence of its disruption remained. The boy who had rummaged around in it was, naturally, nowhere to be seen. Most likely he was still alive, Sven thought, despite not knowing his name. He was not the sort to get off easy, not after what he'd done. And if he had, well, Sven would've known somehow. He would've stumbled across him, or met someone else with the lightsaber clipped to their belt. It was so inevitable as to make the very idea of coincidence a farce.
None of this was real. It never had been and it never would be. So nothing mattered. It was just about doing the right thing at the right time, not because he wanted to but because he had to, and as long as he did that everything would turn out precisely as it was meant to. For the best? The worst? That didn't matter either. It was part of the plan, a piece of a grand design, and while Sven hated that design and was glad to have slipped its bonds, no freedom was eternal. Inexorably he had been dragged back, to set things right.
If he believed hard enough, he would go to that bush and reach inside and pull the lightsaber from within like King Arthur drawing his sword from the stone. And then he would do what needed to be done, despite the fact that he didn't want to.
Sven took his first step onto one of the stones. It was slick. His shoes were worn down. As he looked at them, he was surprised to find them nondescript. Ragged black shoes. What else was there to say? He probably had a fungal infection by now. He'd read the list of contents of daypacks assigned for Survival of the Fittest many, many times when he was back in the before part of his life, and one of the few things he had laughed about was the presence of anti-fungal cream in the first aid kits. Who needed that? What a clever joke. But oh, he wasn't laughing now. He couldn't remember anyone who lived through this having their feet amputated later, so maybe they'd all been religiously rubbing anti-fungal cream between their toes the whole time, or else their islands had been less humid, or else they'd taken their socks off once or twice to let things air out when it got itchy.
Wait, Garrett Hunter. Hadn't he...?
Sven hopped to the next rock.
How far was this crossing even? He wanted to go back to last time and check, or to look before or behind him, but his gaze was fixed ahead. One stone at a time. That's how the game was played. Black and white, alternating, until you were walled in and captured with no place to Go.
He hopped again and skidded a little. There was something he was forgetting. Last time, this trek had seemed treacherous and one-way. He had gotten back, but he couldn't remember how.
...maybe he hadn't. Maybe he'd never left at all.
One, two, three more quick steps and jumps and scrambles, and then Sven was there, at the terminus of his journey. The final rock, the one where he'd pulled up short last time.
It was in the middle of the river.
There was no crossing, no true path. Not here. The actual closest ford point was further back, up near where the naked girl had been. Sven was marooned once more, or still. He wasn't entirely certain.
As he looked back the way he'd come, the way he'd have to go again, he felt a heaviness settle over him. He reached into his pocket and found a plastic button there, shiny and black, with an image of an anchor on it. He remembered it. It came from a pea coat that had been his favorite, once upon a time. He couldn't recall why he'd stopped wearing it. Probably because it lost a button.
Sven clenched it in his hand.
He couldn't help but
what would happen if he 
into the water.((Sven Vee continued in Area Description: The Waterfall))