Welcome to the Bakery!

The prompt was “time machine.”

**WARNING – MENTIONS OF SUICIDE**

Looking mournfully over the swirling vapors of Divilian Mists, Maximus felt his Ghost buzzing alongside his head. He looked over it at its innocuous shell and marveled at how much and how little power it held. Its Light had brought him back from a death he’d suffered he didn’t know how many years prior to his resurrection. He knew nothing about himself from before. The Light had brought him back as a blank slate, a perfect soldier for this eternal war.

                  The Light could do so many things and had, but the one thing Maximus so desperately needed it to do, it could not. He shoved away the notion that the Light had tried to intervene and that Alistair had staunched that intervention. No, what Maximus longed for went beyond a simple resurrection. What he so desperately wanted was a time machine.

                  The idea felt childish, minuscule in the grand scheme of things. He could not recall his childhood but assumed he’d had one at some point in some moment of time. Yearning for a contraption to change the course of history felt like something he would’ve done as a child and not as a near immortal being. Maximus laughed out loud, a harsh barking sound, that echoed across the empty expanse around him.

                  Selfishly, he’d interject just before Alistair destroyed his Ghost. He wished wildly that his love would’ve been enough. Why wasn’t it enough? Why wasn’t he enough? Deep down he knew Alistair made the choice he’d made because the pain of what he’d endured was too much to wade through for the hundreds if not thousands of years he had spanning before him. But intermingled with that truth was Maximus’s broken heart and the pain he now had to carry. Why was he forced to shoulder this burden? Was this truly the price of love?

                  If this magical time machine was a reality he would go back to beyond his awakening as a Guardian. He would go back to the Red War and prevent all the brokenness that came as a result. He’d save Ruskol for Alistair. He’d protect Lex for Rhemy. The four would be alive and well and together. And Maximus would still exist, just on the periphery. Maybe he’d see the tall, dark, and handsome Titan in The Spire and develop a crush. Hopefully in this timeline he’d know Ariadne so they could chat about their untouchable unrequited loves – his being Alistair and hers being Rhemy. Not because Alistair was dead by his own hand and Rhemy was beyond the touch of anyone ever again since the loss of her beloved Lex. But because they would be happy and in love with their living partners. There would be no atrocities to take them from them. And maybe that would be the best way to stop Alistair from ending his life, breaking Maximus’s heart wide open but in new and different ways.