Chapter Text
He was trying to be scientific about everything, but Brian May had been in the past, in his own past, for eight days so far and was struggling against Clarke’s law. Whatever had left him in 1978, as his younger self but with memories of more than forty years of future, well it might as well have been magic for all Brian could comprehend it.
That or insanity, or a dream so vivid he believed its prophecies. He was trying very hard to prove his own perceptions of reality either true or false, but he had no evidence of any kind, nothing to work with beyond “Well. It all FEELS real.” And that was about the limit of what science or philosophy could say about human perception anyway.
Mostly he was struggling not to let on that something very strange had happened to him, to stave off whatever adverse reactions his family might have to an incautious revelation.
Really, reeling from hearing his dad’s voice for the first time in decades, and actually seeing his mum looking young and strong in her fifties, he had had no time in all these mental gymnastics to spare for planning how to change his world, now he was so far back in it.
He had handled the first few days well enough. He had opened his eyes to discover himself at his old kitchen table, looking at a young Chrissie tired from late night feedings. Perhaps the instinctive caution she had come to inspire in their last years together helped him hold his tongue while he tried to get his bearings.
She was the worst of his dilemmas.
Freddie was no dilemma at all. He was here, and his hair was still a few inches long, which Brian had tried not to stare at yesterday when he’d first seen him again on their way to Switzerland. Over years of documentaries and interviews and the film, Brian had come to associate the longer hair with Fred being safe. He was still safe, that was the thing, and the only trick would be how to keep him that way. There was no choice involved, except in how to manage it.
Chrissie, however: recent mother and the mother of two more children not yet born.
And he was years and years before meeting Anita. Brian didn’t even know if the man he had been in 1978 would have paid proper attention to her - or rather improper attention - and the man who was in 1978 now certainly also wasn’t the man she had fallen for in 1985. And how did fidelity even work from this distance of years? In these circumstances? He found himself thankful that Chrissie was too tired to make that a challenge.
How did fidelity even work, maybe he should pay some attention to John, he’d gotten it right somehow.
In the studio, however, his eye was drawn to Roger. The Roger in Brian’s head had aged as nobody else in the group had, and this younger version of him was instead so very like every one of the younger Taylor clan. Laughing and joking around, then his face going serious and focused as he played, and so young, so young…
Brian almost called him Rufus right then. Hardly remembered what he was playing but his fingers knew and then Roger was yelling at him for getting it wrong during Mustapha (he had played the arrangement for stage, not the version they had recorded, as errors went it was minor) and in his effort to calm Roger down he had said, more gently than he would have to an older Roger, MUCH more gently than he would once have answered this version, “Look, Ru-“ and then he’d halted and Roger’s annoyance and Freddie’s amused peacemaking washed over him like a waterfall and he had had to put down the old lady and get a breath of air.
It was all of their kids. How could he change ANYTHING?
Then Fred came out to check that he was alright, and he really wanted to cry.