Chapter Text
Yasmin Khan is often frustrated with her job, her family, and her life in general. When she was a child, everyone around her seemed to hype up adulthood with a single-minded intensity — planting dreams of perfect futures with perfect partners and perfect houses and perfect jobs — but reality has been nothing sort of disappointing. She may be nineteen, but she still feels like a child. She’s barely got a friend to her name, nonetheless a dating life, she still lives with her parents and her often-infuriating younger sister, and worst of all, she’s stuck writing tickets at work. She wanted to become a police officer in order to make a difference, but most days, she doesn’t feel like she’s doing anything at all. Her supervisor keeps telling her that things will improve once she’s off of probation, but probation feels utterly endless.
On this particular day, she’s the entire day mitigating pointless disputes, including a neighborly tiff over a parking spot that hardly merited a call to law enforcement. She feels the last of her resolve dripping away with every wasted second, and by the time she declares the fight over and returned to the relatively sanctity of her own car, she is exhausted. It sinks into her bones and tightens its grip around her heart, and she tosses her hat aside and places a call to her supervisor.
“Everything good?” he asks, in the way of someone who expects the best but is still braced for the worse.
“Yeah, I just —“ she props her elbow on the car door and her head on her hand as she tries to find the most professional way to voice her complaint — “I feel like I can do more than this.”
His sigh is barely audible over the phone, a whisper of static against her ear. “I keep telling you, you have to master the basics.”
“Can we cover a different set of basics, then? Something that’ll test me? Mix things up a bit? I know there’s more to this job then old ladies and parking meters, and there’s no point pretending that there’s not.” Other probationary officers are taking more interesting calls, and yet, despite testing higher than most of them, she’s still stuck scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Sometimes she can’t help but think that someone in the department’s got a grudge against her. It wouldn’t be the first time. In school, Izzy Flint made it her life’s work to dismantle Yasmin’s confidence, kicking her out of social groups and ostracizing her in the classroom. Izzy Flint was more direct than whatever nonsense is blocking her from progressing and taking on more meaningful work, but when her mood gets grim, it’s hard not to compare the two.
“Mix things up a bit,” her supervisor echoes, clicking his tongue against the back of his teeth as he considers the request. She can practically see him pulling his chair up to a monitor and scrolling down a list of reports, looking for something that serves both her agenda and his.
“There’s a call down south that just came in,” he reports after a momentary pause.
For a moment, Yasmin’s hope rises. She straightens, ready to hear the details, excited at the possibilities. “Hit me.”
“Fellow called in a portal in the park. Something about a rip in space and time and somebody disappearing.”
Her heart sinks. Of course they’d give her a prank call.
“You sure it isn’t a joke? Some kids having a laugh at a sleepover? Next thing you know they’re going to ask if you’re refrigerator’s running.” It’s a rather poor attempt at levity, and the words ring hollow in the suffocating air of the car.
“Someone’s got to check it out and you’re next on the list.” Yasmin swears she can hear the rush of air as his chair spins. “Just think of how much fun the report will be to write up. Not everyday you get a sci-fi novel thrown in your lap, is it?”
She barely hears the rest of the call, and hangs up at the first available opportunity, dismissively tossing the phone onto the passenger seat. She leans against the steering wheel for a good long moment, bracing her head in her hands and repeating reminders under her breath. “You’re just on probation. This happens to everybody. It’ll get better. I promise.”
Some days she wholeheartedly believes in these words and the sentiment behind them. Other days, they feel like nothing at all.
Today is a nothing-at-all kind of day.
But she takes a deep breath, checks her mirrors, and puts the car in gear. There may not be a way to take this call impressively, but there’s a hell of a lot of ways to mess it up, and she can’t afford to take any steps backward, no matter how brain-numbingly stupid she thinks this entire exercise is.
She finds the caller standing the park, right where he said he would be. What she doesn’t see, however, is a rip in space and time. Everything seems totally normal — normal trees, normal rocks, normal dirt. There’s nothing out of place in the slightest, aside from the man himself.
“You call about a portal?” she asks, doing her best to power through the absurdity of the question and maintain a certain semblance of professionalism. A shuffle of hands pulls a notebook out of her pocket, ready to take down the necessary notes — name, location, possible crimes committed.
“Yeah,” the man says, raising a hand to scratch the back of his head. Something about him seems familiar to her, like she’s seen him somewhere before, but she can’t seem to place the face. She definitely can’t place the height — she feels like she takes notice of people that tall. “It’s just kind of buzzing in the air right about here. You can’t see it unless you squint, but I watched my granddad walk through it and disappear, right? And he hasn’t come back since.”
Yasmin huffs through her nose, flipping to a blank page. Missing grandads, she’d buy, but not in midair, and she definitely doesn’t hear any sort of buzz, unless you count the gnats. “Name?” she asks.
“My granddad’s or mine?”
“Let’s start with yours and then work our way to your granddad’s, yeah?” She can feel her control slipping, feel the anger and the tiredness snapping around the edges of her words. She bites the inside of her cheek to remind herself to follow the rules and do this according to procedures. Should be easy enough. Ten minutes and a few notes and it’ll be done.
The man shifts slightly, shoving his hands in the pocket of his jacket and rocking back on his heels nervously. “My name is Ryan Sinclair, and my granddad’s name is Graham O’Brien. Well, I say he’s my granddad, but he’s not really. My gran remarried about a year ago.”
Her head snaps up, confusion digging deep furrows into her brow. Not only does he look vaguely familiar, but the name’s familiar, too. It takes her a moment to place it. “Redland’s primary?” she asks hesitantly, dropping the practiced professional façade altogether.
The man, Ryan, leans forward excitedly, as if he, too, had been trying to pair a face with a memory. “Yeah.”
“Yasmin Khan,” she provides, filling the gap with a smile that feels out of place, given the circumstances. It’s a good thing she’s not under observation right now. She’d definitely be marked down for this.
“Oh my god. Haven’t seen you in ages. Didn’t know you still existed.”
“I thought you moved or something. I mean, not that we were ever close, but you’d expect to run into a person if they’re still around.” Without thinking, she closes the notebook. This has to be a joke. Ryan wasn’t exactly a class clown in primary school, but he also doesn’t strike her as the sort of person to be seeing things that aren’t there. More the quiet type — concerned with himself and his work and making as few waves as possible.
“Nah, just changed schools, is all.” The thought trails off into a quiet pause, as though there’s something that Ryan isn’t quite ready to share, but he covers it with a quick question of his own. “So you’re a fed now?”
“We don’t call it that,” Yasmin corrects, ever conscious of the rules and guidelines that rule her vocation.
“Course you don’t.”
Awkwardness falls between them, and Yasmin hurries to fill it. “What about you? What are you doing?”
“Warehouse work, mostly.”
“Oh.” She can’t say that she’s not a bit disappointed. Doesn’t sound like the sort of job anyone wants. She’s read statistics in the news about how difficult warehouse work can be, and how it’s not a decent substitute for the jobs that it’s facing out of the sector. However, it feels a bit rude to bring up something that grim in a conversation like this one. “You like it?”
“Hate it,” Ryan says, eyes flitting ever so slightly skyward. “Saving up money. Want to be a mechanic.”
“That’s good, I guess.”
Her fingers tighten on the notebook in her hands as she reminds herself that the sun’s going down and her supervisor’s expecting an update on this call. “What are you doing making joke calls, then?”
“It’s not a joke,” Ryan pulls his hands out of his pocket and takes a step forward, reaching a single hand into the empty air of the clearing as if he’s searching for something.
Yaz sits back on her heel, raising an eyebrow. “C’mon, it’s me. It’s not like I’m a stranger, yeah? You can tell me if you’re just making stuff up.”
“I’m not, though,” Ryan insists. He takes a couple more cautious steps forward, and in an instant, his hand seems to disappear.
Yasmin blinks and shakes her head. It has to be a trick of the light. The sun’s going down, she’s getting tired, of course her eyes are susceptible to being a bit blurry.
“Ryan, you can’t do things like this,” she says. With a huff, she tucks her notebook back into her pocket and sets across the clearing with confident strides.
Alarm enters Ryan’s face as he looks over his shoulder at her. “I’d be careful if I were you. Like I said, my granddad disappeared. Haven’t seen him, haven’t heard him, dunno what’s on the other side of this thing.”
“There’s no thing, Ryan.”
She steps past him, and in an instance, the world seems to change.
It feels like she’s falling, but the ground beneath her feet is firm. A gas leak, maybe, something that messes with the head. She’s felt like this before, coming off of anesthesia.
She turns, about to yell at Ryan for whatever mess he dragged her into, but her feet don’t move as well as they did a moment ago. Her toe drags, and she begins to tip forward. The air around her is thick as water, and a buzzing begins to fill her ears.
Power of suggestion, she reminds herself. He told you that there was buzzing, so your brain’s decided to hear it. It’s not real.
She barely gets her arms out in time to cushion the fall and keep from smashing her face in on the grass, but she feels something in her wrist pop. Just her luck, an injured wrist in the middle of a park with a gas leak.
She closes her eyes, waiting for the pain to hit her and for Ryan to come running over. The pain smashes through her, drawing tears to her eyes, but no one runs to help. No one asks if she’s okay. There’s just silence, and the faint rush of her pulse in her ears.
“Ryan?” she ventures after a moment’s pause.
There’s no answer. She rolls onto her back, wrapping the fingers of her opposite hand tightly around her damaged wrist in order to protect it from the movement.
Her eyes crack open and gaze up at an orange sky with twin suns.
For a moment, her pain is forgotten.
“Ryan?” she repeats, more frantically this time.
Again, there is no answer.
Still holding her newly injured wrist tight, she scrambles to her feet. She’s covered in grass and dust — red grass and orange dust — and for a moment, she tries to explain it away with logic — It’s sunset. You’ve hit your head. You’re seeing things — but logic isn’t strong enough to keep her rising fear at bay.
She whirls around, desperately searching for the place from which she’d come, but there’s nothing, just a distant city edging up towards the horizon, comprised entirely of spires and towers and housed beneath a glass dome that seems straight out of a Stephen King book.
“Ryan!” she cries for the last time, voice edging up towards a yell, and she takes a few steps forward, hoping against hope that she’ll step back into Sheffield and the world will right itself.
Nothing changes.
The sky is still orange, the grass is still red, and twin suns still hang in the sky.
At a complete and utter loss of what to do, she plops down into the grass and waits. She’s not sure what she’s waiting for, exactly — drugs to wear off, Ryan to appear, someone to tell her than this is all a joke, all are very real possibilities — but the suns trace a strange path across the sky and a chill begins to set into the air and desperation rises.
“Okay, say this is real, then,” she proposes aloud, desperate to latch onto anything familiar, even if it’s just the sound of her own voice. “What do you do when you end up in an unfamiliar place?”
She doesn’t expect an answer, but she gets one anyway, from an unfamiliar voice somewhere behind her, dripping with untempered amusement.
“I’d say you’d start by asking a local for help, wouldn’t you?”