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“Where is he, Sara?”
“He--no, Ryan, come back to the TARDIS, we can fix this later!”
Ryan’s gaze can’t be broken from the tombstone in front of him, the sunlight glinting off of the fresh marble. He holds his hand up, helping him read the black letters carved into the stone, and his heart drops with every letter he reads.
“Shane Alexander Madej. Born May sixteenth, nineteen eighty-six. Died--wait.”
Ryan slowly turns around, staring Sara directly in the eyes, going from Sara to Helen, who is now standing in the doorway of the blue TARDIS, tears beginning to blur his vision as it all falls into place in his brain.
“Where’s Shane?”
Sara visibly gulps, her hands twisting in front of her and tugging at the bowtie around her neck, as if she’s getting too hot and nervous in answering the question. Ryan already knows the answer, and his first tear drips down his cheek as Sara speaks.
“I’m sorry, Ryan. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Well--we can just save him! We can get into the TARDIS and save him!”
“
No
, Ryan. That would rip New York apart.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re lying to me.”
With that, Ryan turns around and stares at the stone angel in front of him, its outstretched finger only a foot from his chest as he stares at the gravestone, feeling tears course down his cheeks and fall onto the tops of his shoes. He hears Helen faintly say “it’s true, Ryan,” but he can’t process it. He can’t process anything right now, not when Shane was just there a second ago and then he’s disappeared into thin air, placed in a coffin six feet under the soles of his shoes without him. They’d joked that Ryan would be the first to go, killed by a ghost or an alien, but Ryan didn’t expect any of this to actually happen, and not so soon. They had a whole life to go, a whole life ahead of them, and if only Ryan had just died with him, then he wouldn’t feel like this--
Wait.
“That gravestone,” Ryan says slowly, pointing at it as he turns around, staring Sara right in the face, “there’s room for one more name, isn’t there?”
The panic on Sara’s face confirms his suspicion, and he smiles almost sadly to himself. Helen looks like she’s frozen to the side of the TARDIS, fingers white against the dark blue paint. She doesn’t know what to do, but deep down, she knows exactly what Ryan is about to do; he sees it in her eyes, and she looks like she’s about to cry.
He can hear Sara faintly in the background as he looks at Helen, pleading with him to come back to the TARDIS and that they’ll figure something out, but they won’t. This is a fixed point, it would create a paradox if he went back with them. This has to happen, and hopefully it won’t hurt. Dying doesn’t hurt, at least dying like this, because he’ll be with Shane at the end of all of it.
“Will it send me back in time? Back to him?”
Ryan finally looks over at Sara as he asks, and her face falls.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“But it’s worth a shot, right?”
Sara covers the ground between them in lightning speed, repeatedly saying “no!” underneath her breath, holding Ryan’s face in her hands, shaking her head. She’s trying to blink away the tears forming in her eyes, and Helen’s voice silences Sara almost immediately, freezing her to the spot.
“Sara, shut up! It is your best shot!”
“No, Ryan, don’t you dare, I can’t lose you too,” Sara babbles, still holding Ryan’s face in her hands, and his own hands come up to his face and pulls her hands away, holding them in front of him. He smiles sadly at her, and the shock on Sara’s face translates immediately into rage.
“Don’t you
dare
, Ryan Bergara!”
“I’ll be fine, I’ll be with him. I’ll be with Shane. Ryan and Shane, just like how it’s supposed to be,” he says, sounding almost otherworldly as Sara repeatedly says
no
like a religious mantra. Ignoring her pleas, Ryan looks over at Helen, who is silently crying but smiling at the same time? She had a habit of looking beautiful even when she was sad.
“Look after her, alright? You’ll be okay.”
Helen nods, and disappears into the TARDIS, presumably to miss what was about to happen.
Sara is holding onto the front of Ryan’s shirt now, fat tears rolling down her cheeks and smearing her mascara so badly that she looks like an actress from an angsty teen film. “Please, I’ll never be able to see you again, this is going to be a fixed point in time!” she says, hoping that that’s what changes his mind, but Ryan’s mind has already been made up ever since he saw the extra space on Shane’s headstone.
“I’ll be fine, Sara. I promise.”
“Please,
please
, just come back into the TARDIS, come on--”
“Goodbye, Sara.”
The last thing Ryan sees before he’s catapulted back in time is Sara’s face, awestruck, and her mouth tearing open as she screams, arms outstretched for him.
---
The old book that Ryan had brought with him was sitting in the same place in Central Park that he’d left it, his black reading glasses sitting neatly on top of it, the smudges on the lenses still fresh from the oil of his fingers.
Sara all but tramples across the red patchwork blanket, swiping up the book and cracking it open to the last page; Ryan had a habit of leaving notes behind when they were separated, so she’d know he and Shane were safe and sound.
Sure enough, in the afterword, there’s the message.
Hey, Sara. By the time you read this, Shane and I will definitely be long gone. Just know that we lived a really happy life together, and know that we’ll always love you. Sometimes I worry about you, though, and I think that once we're gone, you won't be coming back here for a long time; you might be alone for even longer. Don't be alone, Sara, and do one more thing for me. There's a little boy waiting in a garden, and he’s going to wait a really long time, so he’s going to need a lot of hope. Go to him, tell him a story, tell him that if he’s patient, he’s gonna go on adventures that he’ll never forget. Tell him that he’ll go to sea and fight pirates. He’ll fall in love with a man who will wait two thousand years to keep him safe. Tell him he’ll give hope to the greatest painter who ever lived and save a whale in outer space. Tell him this is the story of Ryan Bergara, and this how it ends.