#psywb

Well.

This gargantua of a fic — Pretty Soon You Will Be — is finally finished.

I really don’t fucking know where to start 😭 There’s just so much to say. But I’ve said quite a lot in the chapter notes… the one thing that I will repeat here is: thank you, thank you, and thank you, and I love you.

Whoever finds it shit, will see it shit. Whoever finds it good, will see it good. And by that I say LONG LIVE FANFICTION! LONG LIVE CREATIVE WRITING! LONG LIVE HORROR! LONG LIVE AU’S! LONG LIVE GCEST! LONG LIVE OASIS!

Before we start, we need two labels:

LT = Living Twin (The twin who continued living until 2005)

DT = Dead Twin (The twin who died in 1991 and has existed inside the Limbo ever since).

For now I am intentionally not telling you which one is Noel and which one is Noelín. It will make more sense once we establish how the Limbo itself works.

PART 1: THE RULES OF THE LIMBO

The Limbo is a cosmic waiting room for souls who haven’t moved on to heaven or hell. 

It looks exactly like earth. It mirrors the familiar places the souls knew in life, making it feel normal.

Limbo is timeless. Time is not a straight line here. Souls can walk across it, relive memories, alter what they can, and occasionally bleed into the world of the living.

Because Limbo exists outside of time, the moment a person dies, they have technically ALWAYS been there.

Category 1: The Liminal Souls (The Dead)

When a soul dies and enters the Limbo, they gain the ability to morphologically adapt to whatever timeline they are currently walking through.

If they visit 1996, they look like their 1996 self.

If they visit 2005, they look like their 2005 self.

Category 2: The Unconscious Souls (The Comatose)

This is the loophole. If a soul is in the Limbo because they are unconscious/comatose but not officially dead on earth, the rules change completely. They do not adapt to the timelines. They are stuck exactly as they were at the moment of trauma.

PART 2: THE FOURTH-DIMENSIONAL PROBLEM

You might be asking:

“Okay… but why are there multiple Noels?”

“Why can Liam see himself?”

“Why can DT die in 1991 but still appear in later scenes?”

Here is the missing piece: The Limbo doesn’t experience time the way humans do.

To a living person, time is a strict line: 1967 → 1996 → 2005 → Death.

To a soul in the Limbo, all of those points exist simultaneously. Imagine standing high above a road and seeing the entire highway at once instead of walking along it step by step.

Because of this, DT who died in 1991 can still walk through 1996 and 2005. Likewise, LT who died later in 2005 can walk backward through 1991 and 1996.

Neither of them are traveling to the future or the past. They are simply moving around inside a place where all moments already exist.

PART 3: THE DOUBLES & PARADOXES

This exact fourth-dimensional layout is why "doubles" can exist.

If a Limbo soul walks into a memory that already contains a past version of themselves, both versions can occupy the same scene.

The living version is simply experiencing the moment normally in real-time. The Limbo version is visiting it from outside time.

This is why Liam can briefly coexist with younger versions of himself, and why multiple versions of Noel/Noelín can theoretically occupy the same space. No fate is being changed; the memory is simply being revisited by a ghost.

PART 4: THE RAGDOLL, THE TRAP, AND THE CRICKET BAT

(Or: How DT’s masterplan got hijacked by LT)

When Liam went back to the Burnage house, he found a hidden hole. Inside was an envelope of newspaper clippings and a ragdoll. This single discovery exposes the most predatory fact of the twins: BOTH of them are dangerous. Both are FIGHTING over Liam.

1. The Ragdoll as a "Bridge" Object

A soul in Limbo cannot normally pull a living person into their timeless world. To breach the gap between the living and the dead, they need an anchor.

The ragdoll is 100% real. It came from Liam’s original universe.

At the exact same hour LT got into his fatal car accident in 2005, 'Daddy' (DT) visited a young Anaïs (now we know Anaïs is special!). He talked to her, and was later referenced that he’d also taken her ragdoll.

By taking a physical object from the living world and placing it in the Burnage house, DT initiated a reverse-Ouija board. Instead of the living reaching out to the dead, the dead placed a physical trap for the living to find.

DT used little Anaïs to influence Liam, tasking her to tell Liam to go back to Burnage.

2. The Trap

His goal was simple: Force Liam to find the truth, touch the ragdoll, and trap him. ALTHOUGH THIS WAS NOT MENTIONED IN THE FIC/SUBTLY IMPLIED!

Liam cannot enter Limbo without being dead or comatose.

DT had a malicious plan in motion to force Liam into that state. By having Liam touch the ragdoll, DT was preparing to either possess him or manipulate the physical environment (locking him in, burning the house down) to force Liam into death.

The motive? Well... you can guess. :)

3. The Cricket Bat

Before DT could execute his trap, LT beat him to it.

LT caught Liam at the Burnage house. He realised Liam had found the hole, the clippings, and the ragdoll. He knew Liam knew about the secret twin.

In a fit of anger, LT swung the cricket bat.

LT hit Liam so hard he put him straight into a comatose state.

By doing this, LT accidentally did exactly what DT wanted to do himself: he severed Liam's consciousness from his body and officially cast Liam's soul into the Limbo. Every single timeloop, overlap, and reality fracture in Chapters 25–29 exists because DT set the trap, but LT swung the cricket bat. All with their own same, yet different motives, which is to have Liam all for themselves.

If we go with the 1980 universe (which is ours!) I’m sure Liam doesn’t really remember everything that happened. The memories are gone but the feelings are still there.

but of course… there’s Noel! And he’s just this walking paradox of one body carrying two people Liam once loved so intensely while also carrying two people’s feelings for Liam. Noel and Noelín spent their entire lives trying to destroy each other over Liam and now they’re forced to coexist as one person can you just imagine how much of a TRAINWRECK that is!

Which is why I wanted the ending to return to the Noel and Liam we know. I just think it’s a really fun (and tragic 😭) way to look at their relationship.. that maybe it was always beyond fucking tangled. This fic sort of externalised it. The twins’ duality became literal but perhaps that contradiction was always what drew Liam in!

Even now he’s loving “Noel” except Noel has never really been just one person anymore. HE’S A LITERAL GEMINI!