Archive of Our Own

The tortoise is drawing stares.

It was only meant to be a test of his abilities. A small change in the past to prove that larger ones are possible. It stands on the bright mosaic tabletop, forelegs on its dish of melon, little face buried in its dinner. He never realized it would be such a useful divining rod, separating the crowd into natives and voyeurs.

There goes a butcher who’s actually a butcher, born in this city. He passes without looking twice.

There goes a rich traveller pretending to be from Mauretania but actually from much further afield. His eyes drag sideways to the tortoise, and start to water. That woman, there, between the stall selling wooden carvings and the one displaying skeins of bright thread, staring, her grip going loose on her pouch. That old man, across the square, Greek maybe, standing under the portico; he seems preoccupied, but his gaze flicks to the tortoise, again and again.

The tortoise takes another deliberate bite of its melon, unaware of its own significance.

It’s only a small change. He’s waiting for something much larger to happen. He intends to cut a bloody stripe out of history’s living side, and everyone else can wait around to see if it heals or dies of its wound.

Any time now. He glances up at the sun, well past noon; the shade he has sheltered in is quickly disappearing. It’s hot, sweltering with the stink of bodies, of summer, the July (or Quintilis, still, for another forty years) heat sticking his tunic to his skin and clogging up the square as thickly as the crowds of citizens, workmen, slaves, and foreigners. That never changes, no matter what century he visits; Rome is always Rome. He’s pleased, in a small way, if he has it in him to be pleased by anything, that it will happen here.

There’s a clamour, not much of one in Rome on a summer’s afternoon, but a bustle of slaves and workers fleeing the path of a small procession. He looks over, absently pulling his finger away from the hungry tortoise's mouth, his hand tacky with juice, and offers it another wedge of melon. It stretches out its neck, little jaws opening wide; misses, tries again, successful with a crunch he can barely hear over the sounds of the square.

Barbarians, northerners of some description. A blonde queen, regal and wild looking, hard muscle on what he can see of her arms, old enough for faded scars; her retinue only a younger man, just on the willowy side of lanky, doe-eyed and intimate enough with his looks and touch to be her consort as well as a bodyguard. They are lead by an older man, also foreign-- by his clothes, either from Judea or returned from a long sojourn there. The old man is expertly winding through the crowds, staring down a small troop of pickpockets as they sidle closer, and, it appears, keeping up a running commentary.

The man’s eyes catch his own, a moment, and drift down to the tortoise, dubious. Ah: another. He had never known before how many of the visitors to Rome came from so very far beyond the the lands of the Republic. The traveller steers his charges away.

He thinks he feels the change, then, a pressure against his ears like the one before a storm, clammy against his skin beneath his sweat and the summer sun. History is squeezing, around him, pulled taut. He shivers, his soft insides churning; the air goes cold around him but he begins to sweat.

His chest is tight, ribs straining. He can still breathe, but he’s being crushed into a too-small space. He thought he’d have more time, and despite himself, begins to panic--

And then history heaves back onto course, throws him out of its way like a train. Speaking from experience, there-- the sudden jarring, painful shock, yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.

His ears ring and he tastes blood. Even before he puts his hand to his mouth he knows it’s an illusion, that the meat he wears isn’t damaged. His heart’s still racing; his breathing quick and sharp. That, at least, is real.

How many times must this happen. How hard can it possibly be--!

He waits, hands pressed tightly together in his lap, until the ringing has faded, until he no longer tastes blood, can breathe without thinking he might vomit. The tortoise finally grows full of melon, retreats the paltry shade offered by Adam’s elbows, and sleeps.

Time passes around him. That, too, is familiar.

He retreats from it, not entirely; lets it run around him, grow cold and distant, speeds and slows its passage over him until it’s like breathing, until the moments pass like one thought to the next and he disappears from the minds of those around him, becomes as expected as the wall, as unseen as a familiar face, existing in both the places where he’s always there, and where there’s nothing to see at all.

Day shifts to evening, a breeze stirring off the river, cooling the air as the sky darkens. He lets his consciousness wash back ashore to linear time, to single measured moments, each following on the seconds of the one before. It’s not quite rematerialisation, but close, and the startled expression on the assassin’s face when he refocuses is pettily fulfilling.

He’s sitting where he was; the melon is gone, the tortoise is still by his arm. The night is cool and damp, the sky shades of indigo, lit through with stars. It loses its mystery after a few decades spent amongst it, but it’s still calming, peaceful in a way that crawls inside his skin, reminds him like nothing from outside him could of what he’s become. The assassin is waiting in the seat beside him, as he had been instructed to. Adam wondered how long the man had debated with himself whether to come at all; he could look, peer along the man’s timeline back until he found the moments, but it’s unnecessary. He’s here, his body tense, his jaw set.

“You failed,” Adan says, conversationally.

The assassin sets a bag on the table, gently enough that the coins inside barely make a sound.

“Signs and portents attended me, Longinus. I lost my way in my own city, and saw phantoms of things yet to come. When I slipped through the door to the bedchamber, I found myself in another house. I stepped through a door with only one side, and found myself on the street where I began.” The man shakes his head. “The gods mean this child to live.”

“I mean it to die.”

“Not by my hand.” The assassin stands again, leaving his bounty on the table, and steps into the shadows of the square, the crowds of people still there, as busy as if it were still midday. This is Rome, after all. Adam watches him flee. He doesn’t need light to follow the bright trace of the man’s timeline.

He quibbles with himself. Perhaps, before he does what he came to do, he should go take a reckoning out of the assassin, some time near his natural death, when no signs or portents will protect him.

Perhaps.

But. No. He’ll lose his nerve. He has before.

He leaves the bag of money, the tortoise, and slips into the crowds himself.

It’s been more than two thousand years since he walked this city as it is now as a man, but his feet know the way; the faint groove of old habit guiding him down a side street, up to a door. He stands, hands against the wood that is not the colour of his memories-- it will be soon, glancing sideways up and down time. He can see this place as it was when there was no city, can see how the house will look in ruins and when it has been rebuilt again and again, and when it is eventually lost, first to a shopping plaza and finally to dust.

He feels eyes on him, and refocuses on the present.

The old man from Judea stands at the edge of the alley, lantern in hand, watching him.

There’s no stink of slave-master about this one-- he’s not a Time Lord, and not likely to stop Adam. Not even likely to be able to.

So Adam smiles at him, smiles against an uneasy tug of familiarity, and as the man opens his mouth to speak Adam walks forward, through the time when there was no door, and is inside the house.

There’s a startled scream-- a young servant girl frozen in her tracks. He knows her, her face and her kind dark eyes, and pauses himself to look at her as she was and as she will be. A too-faint pang of loss goes through him. Once, he was not entirely alone.

Once, there was a family. Siblings. A nurse, a handsome woman with dark eyes who taught him to read two languages and speak three.

“Where are the master and the mistress of this household?” He steps closer. “I’ll know if you lie.”

She shakes her head frantically, mouth falling open. He lifts a finger.

“Ah, ah. It’s a simple question.”

“Out. They’re out, they’re at a dinner--”

“Good.”

Why is his chest tightening? Is it possible that he’s disappointed that he won’t see them, a last time? Well, he lives to be surprised.

“Now. Sit. Not a word.”

He pauses her in time, extends a bubble of stasis from himself and locks her in the instant that her backside touches the chair; it won’t harm her, but it will keep her from doing anything stupid. Up the stairs now-- they seem so much smaller, so narrow-- and into a room where a tiny form sleeps soundly in its cradle.

Adam reaches out and history screams around him.

His vision begins to flicker, his temporal sight fading to blackness where his past is and where his future will be. He ignores it. He feels as if the air is becoming solid around him, and pushes through it, straining with sweat as the moments stretch into long hours and Time tries to protect itself.

It’s… harder. Than he thought it might be. He’s disoriented by the potential paradox, and the angles of the world slowly cringe into the wrong shapes. It takes all of the power that he has-- he has to let go of the tiny stasis bubble, and hears the servant girl screaming downstairs.

This can be done. Little paradoxes are within his grasp, and this is only a larger one. Only a larger one.

He convulses before his hand can touch the little head. He heaves as if he’s swallowed poison, his body trying to reject the thing he’s about to unleash. He forces himself to ignore the pain. It’s only the reflex of a body that doesn’t want to die, a body ignorant of the peace he’s made with death.

Heavy, heavy infant head. Soft skull, weak neck. All he has to do is--

His fingertip grazes the infant’s skin and he convulses again, harder, his body spasming. Light arcs between the child and his heart. He feels his body fling itself back--

And he surfaces in a river, retching, panting, sobbing with pain and rage and relief from pain. His failure eats away at his mouth like acid, like the bile he can taste surging up and mingling with the water of the Tiber. It is night and he is naked, one last betrayal of himself. He hasn’t rematerialized in a river without his clothes in decades, an indignity, a loss of control as profound as if he’d pissed himself in the street. And he hurts, hurts as if he’s had a burn and then been struck with something heavy.

Someone grabs his arms. His vision swims, time ebbing and flowing around him-- nightmares come out of his past, the SS dragging him from a frigid river. He can hear their ringing shouts. Wrong river. Wrong country. Wrong century.

No. This river, this century. The little imp from the blue temple, up to its chest in the water, bright woolen tunic sodden and battered hat askew, eyes dark and ancient, whispering Blinovitch has had his way with you, poor man, soft politenesses and apologies as it reaches in to steal his memory. But that was long, long ago, and hasn’t happened yet. But it will. It has. Is he there now?

He strikes out against the imp, the soldiers, strikes something solid and falls hard. The endless stretches of past recede and this time and this day come into focus, the stairs he has collapsed on, the figure that dragged him from the water.

The traveller he saw earlier, the man from Judea, is crouching over him, and he has a lantern set on the step above him.

Adam hears “Easy, my friend, be at peace--”
Adam hears “Easy, pal, easy, calm down--”

One voice like the shadow of another. He tries to make out the man’s face, but there is the same shadow over his attacker’s body and skin. He claws at the arm that reaches for him and perceives past the shadow, sees through the illusion to a string of numbers inked on skin, faded and indistinct in the lantern light.

Still two voices. One real, one shadow. One Latin as a foreigner speaks it, one -- English. As a native speaks it. As a Brooklyner speaks it.

He makes the numbers and the voice his anchor and pulls himself past the shadows, clinging to the offending arm instead of clawing, head aching with his efforts. But he can see the man who pulled him out of the river now.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” says Abraham Morgan. “Calm down, all right?”

The shock of being recognized leaves him paralysed for long fractions of a second before he rips his hand free of Abraham’s and lunges up the stairs and sideways in time.

--It’s like stepping on a broken leg.

He collapses back into the present and staggers, stable on two feet but flattened against the fourth dimension, being dragged forward second by second helplessly.

“Jeeze,” Abraham says. “You okay?”

“No.” He’s trapped inside himself. He can’t breathe. Not again. Not this again. There’s a wheezing sound not unlike materialization, but it’s only his heaving lungs. He’s hyperventilating. He’s damaged himself badly, but not enough to destroy himself, only to cripple himself. “No. No!”

Wet cloth clinging to his skin; the sensation becomes overpowering and intolerable. The sensation of having skin at all is frightening and present and he’s trapped inside linear flesh again, blind and deaf and more than a little insane.

Spots in his primitive optical vision; he’s depriving himself of air and should be able to survive without air, but he is broken, broken, broken--

He lands on stone again and knows nothing.

He comes to and he is--
-in the Institutio Klystae tangled in his own skin, fighting for life--
--No, he is not, he is one thing now, not two dying things
-in the camp again--
--No, he is not restrained
-in the hospital--
--No, the air stinks of sweat and clay and the fabric against him is rough

he is--

--where the hell is he?

He is wrapped in a thin sheet, almost soaked through with his own cold sweat. The light is too bright when he opens his limited, physical eyes, flame in an otherwise dark room, best he can tell, small and low-ceilinged. He can see nothing else but what’s in front of him, severed moments of time, hacked from the whole and placed in a long, linear row. He shivers, shoves at the mattress to push himself upright-- struggles, wildly, one arm caught in a tangle, at a useless angle, bound--

“Easy, easy, just calm down.”

“What are you-- what-- “ Adam rasps.

“You were already gone by the time the maid got anyone in there. She heard you screaming right at the end, so obviously whatever you were trying to do didn’t go according to plan. I figured I’d find you in the river.”

“What do you want?”

“You calming down, that’d be a start,” Abe says, so matter-of-factly that Adam cackles with helpless laughter, a high, manic giggle.

“Not reassuring me here, Adam.”

“I am not here to reassure you, Abraham Morgan. Then again. Who can say why you’re here.”

A shrug. “I’m just a tourist. I recognized you in the market this morning, figured I’d better see what you were up to.”

“A strange. Coincidence.” The words are difficult. He’s losing track of himself, terrifyingly, his head full of chaos. He slumps back down, and tries to collect himself against a terrible ache that has nothing to do with his body. He focuses on Abraham; something whole, external, free from the swimming, bleeding mess inside himself.

“You’re telling me. We picked this era because there weren’t gonna be a lot of gawkers. I mean. It’s the Roman Republic so there were gonna be other time travellers, but it’s not as bad as trying to find temporal parking in Pompeii. So I hear, anyway.”

It’s the obvious thing, but it must be said. “You’re a time traveler.”

“Time passenger, really.”

“Have you always been?” Adam tries to focus on him, searching for the time-threads he knows are there, the man’s own, those he crosses, flows with for a time, wraps around. How linear is he, how scattered across the vortex and the cosmos? Nothing; not even an absence. “Were you, when I met you.” He can see only the present, only the outside of Abe’s skin, pitted and furrowed with age, shadowed by the dim light. It’s terribly like being blind.

Abe shakes his head. “It’s new to me. Took my first trip about a week after you shot Henry.”

Adam breathes out an acknowledgement, understanding the tension in Abe’s voice and the meaning of his words both. “Is it the Time Lord? I last saw Henry in the twenty-second century. He’d taken up with a woman from Gallifrey. After the second invasion.”

“Sue? Nah. She’s done Ancient Rome before. Met Nero, so I gather she’s not in a hurry to come back.”

But Abe has met her. ‘Sue.’ She hadn’t had a time capsule, had she? If she had, would she have risked bringing Henry into his own past to gather up his son? Was she on Earth because she was a criminal, perhaps, unwilling to abide by her people’s laws?

He’s too exhausted and in too much pain to unravel this. He closes his eyes and lies back, seeks the refuge of the darkness that is not the vortex, is not the calm vastness of space, but is at least something.

A damp weight comes down over his eyes, a rag or a cloth. An insignificant gesture, a dab of salve on the wounds of a man ripped into pieces, but the tiny relief is better than none.

If he concentrates only on his linear body, he’s healthy; completely refreshed in the way that he is after every trip to the river. But separating the sensation of the flesh from the screaming alarms coming from his larger self is difficult. He has lived on instinct, messages and errors in his function coming to him as headaches and phantom scents, pain without origin, noises without sound, strange sensations over his fingertips.

He knows that his limbs are still attached and whole. It only feels like they aren’t.

He flexes his fingers and they respond easily. In a moment of whimsy, he even touches a finger to his nose. He could almost certainly walk a straight line, if he could stop trying to stare into the future.

He shudders all over, coming too close to understanding what he’s lost. Once started, the shiver keeps on, because his body is clammy with sweat and river water and the night is almost cool.

The sound of movement, and something heavy is laid over his sheeted body-- a blanket, or a cloak.

“Whatever you did up there really did a number on you, didn’t it?”

He hisses instead of answering.

“Nah. Don’t try to talk. I’m going to get you something to drink, all right? I’ll be back in a second.”

He waits until he hears the door click and tries to throw himself out of bed-- he means to escape. His limbs tangle; the sheet wraps like a living thing around his ankles, the cloak weighing him down, becoming a burden.

The absence of Time surrounds him and buffets his ears. He can’t sense it; certainly can’t move through it; can barely move at all. It’s like being dizzy, like vertigo and blackout drunk, but not physically, the sensation without the reality, but hamstringing him as surely as a blade. He falls on his knees, and opens his eyes to see Abraham still standing inside the door, watching him knowingly.

“That’s a yes, then.” The other man comes and offers his arms, pulls him up with a wince-- old knees, old frame, but he’s strong and he lifts Adam back into the bed and untangles him from the sheet with wary, learned patience.

“I am going to get you something to drink, now. Don’t be dumb.”

He stays where he is this time, listening to Abraham make his way down the hallway. His heart is racing, his fingertips throb along with it, little shocks of pain to remind him he failed. That-- ha, that he’s alive.

His head is pounding, skin smarting like he’s burned it. He knows what it is to burn; it’s like that, those early seconds, when pain is still sharp and new, before the skin curls and the nerves are literally set ablaze. Leftover pain replays down his limbs, his back, his brain; a loop of shorting, stinging disorientation. There are parts of him he doesn’t know the words for, and he has torn them to shreds.

He can’t keep track of time; he closes his eyes, starts up, sinks back down in darkness.

The door opens. He forces his eyes open. They’re heavy, weighed down with all his years; he blinks stupidly at Abraham for a moment. Where is he--

New York? The early twenty-first century. Henry’s son, their shop-- no. Henry is in England, the slaver’s house. The slaver’s ship-- Henry. No, that was New York. The traveller from Judea. Abraham. Weinraub. Morgan. The camps. No. Morgan. Henry Morgan.

No.

No. He’s in Rome. Before he was reborn. Near when he was born. Abraham Morgan is staring at him, a metre away, silent, with such a look of tired pity he wants to spit.

He was only gone a moment, Adam is sure. How can one moment feel like this?

Abraham must see something in his expression, because he grunts, puts a jug of wine down on the table. “I’ll pour you a glass. You should drink something.” He drags a chair around from the other side of the table, into the space beside the bed, then shoves a cup into Adam’s hand. “Here.”

He picks up the cloak from where it had fallen, spreads it across Adam’s legs, then sits down. He pours a second cup, sips it carefully. “Drink that,” he says, points at the cup. “Or put it down before you drop it.”

Adam opens his eyes; he hadn’t realised he’d closed them again, and the little cup has slipped dangerously in his grip. He rights it, brings it to his mouth and cautiously sips. It’s not like it’s going to kill him.

Drinking is. Strange. He hasn’t bothered in so long. Food, drink. Once he learned he didn’t need to-- he seldom has the energy to be angry about this, only sometimes, when the past is fresh, remembering the agony of dehydration and starvation. The wine is a little sour, but he’s drained the cup before he notices, suddenly aware of how dry his mouth his, how parched he feels.

Abe leans over and refills his glass. He takes another drink, holds this one in his mouth; flat, sour wine. There’s nothing else to it, no history of the grape, no lingering sense of its time-trace, no--

His stomach heaves, and he shoves the cup back at Abraham, slopping wine down his arm. The heave turns into a shudder; he locks his jaw, hissing as parts of him that aren’t there shriek and grind. Abraham presses the cloth against his forehead. It shouldn’t help, such a small thing, the pain that’s only phantomly physical, but it drains some of it away. His mind races, skittering in every direction, but locked, slowed, dragged along these limited dimensions.

“You know what I am?” he asks Abraham, blinking against the too-flat world. “You know something.” He’s too knowing. He’s accepting too easily. He’s asking too few questions.

Abe shrugs. “I know what Henry is. And I connected the dots.”

“He learned. He knows?” He hadn’t told Henry; at first, a secret, a discovery, an advantage. Then, the Daleks had come. Once, twice. When the first plague had come, he’d fled to uninhabited wastes in western North America. The second time, to Antarctica, until it became clear that Earth itself wasn’t safe under the occupying Dalek forces. He’d offered Henry the chance to come with him, that time. He’d refused, of course, clinging to all his hypocritical earnestness to being a doctor, to helping where he could. As if anyone could do anything but wait for it to be over.

“He will. Yeah. He will.”

Henry is free. Of course he is. Why would he be any less the universe’s favoured child even in this. Adam curls on himself and doesn’t speak for a long time.

Abraham remains beside him through that long night-- when Adam can bear to open his eyes he sees him close, reaching out with the washrag, or less close, an arm’s length away and sleeping uncomfortably over the table.

In that too-hot too-cold night that he fears will never end he feels Abraham’s hand sometimes, holding his own. Sometimes a cup is held to his lips and he drinks a few sips of wine. Sometimes he lays there, eyes tight to keep the dark in, and listens to the way they breathe.

It’s a terrible relief when he can finally squirm free of his pain, decouple the screaming error-error-fault sensations from his body and be one small, frail self again. There’s morning light through the window, lighting the small, plain room, and Abe is fast asleep in his chair, head on his shoulder.

He crawls out of bed, quiet and careful, and knows by now not to try to extend his senses any further than the present. The sheets are a knotted mess, damp with sweat; the cloak tossed to the floor the last time he was too hot.

The view from the window is teasingly familiar. He knows this road. If he concentrated for long enough he could remember the name of the hostel they must be in.

His flesh is exhausted, and hungry, but it’s hardly the worst he’s felt. He could flee, now, easily. The cloak that served as his blanket would preserve his modesty long enough to steal, charm or buy new clothes. And this hostel is no charity, Abraham must have had money on him to buy the room tonight, so where-?

He has to stifle a laugh. There’s a small pouch on Abraham’s belt, but on the table is a familiar bag; the assassin’s ransom that Adam left in the bar. How admirably mercenary of the twenty-first century man, to use Adam’s own abandoned denarii to nurse him.

He wraps himself in a cloak and slips out into the morning.

In this Rome, in this time, for the right amount of money, you can find anything without questions asked-- clothing, food, and news all come easily. The stalls open with the sun, the heat already building, and the crowds are waking. He changes silver for bronze, winds up with a moneybag just as full but worth slightly less than when he started.

The world goes on, history undented. He is among strangers, and that is sickeningly familiar. It’s perhaps a little worse that he’s at home.

He could go anywhere. It’s not a small sum to buy an infant’s life. Everything is for sale here, but not cheaply. He has enough in this bag to set up a new life.

And... then what. Try again? He doesn’t think he has the nerve. But he doesn’t want to relive his history; he knows what’s to come and he wants very little part of it. Oh, he could set himself up as a prophet or gambler, but wealth means nothing to him and there is no pleasure or freedom here in his own shadow.

Perhaps his best bet is to buy passage away with one of the time travelers. Difficult; they won’t be swayed by denarii. And they may ask questions. Where would he have them take him-- where would they be willing to take him? Would it even be Earth?

He pauses in indecision for too-short seconds, and then decides very suddenly.

And it’s as much to his own surprise as to a sleepy Abraham’s when he comes slipping back through the door.

“Breakfast?” he says, cheerfully, and lays out the morning’s finds on the table.

“Surprised you came back,” Abraham says, after they’ve made it through half a loaf of bread and some excellent cheese and grapes. They’re eating at the table-- like foreigners do, Adam chuckles to himself.

“I’m surprised you’re eating anything I put in front of you,” he points out, instead of answering the unspoken question.

Abe looks down at the remains of breakfast. His lips thin, and he shrugs fatalistically. Ah, there it is again-- his strange acceptance of what he cannot change. He’s not certain, Adam can see that now that he’s coherent. He’s not unafraid. But he is unflinching. This odd form of courage is intriguing. He never got to know the man well enough, when they were of the same time period, too busy sparring with Henry. Perhaps that was a mistake.

He’s linear and mortal, and yet a cipher to Adam.

He slices off a piece of cheese, keeps his voice calm, the intensity out of his curiousity. “Why did you pull me out of the river last night?”

“Because better me than Henry.”

“He’s here?” Fear and longing both go through him. “But is he the Henry of your timeline, or the Henry who knows?” He leans over the table, straining eagerly.

Abe holds up a hand. “...This is why I didn’t want it to be Henry. You two are bad for each other.”

“You wanted to protect him from me,” Adam interprets.

“I wanted to protect you from each other.”

Ah. Adam pauses, not sure if he’s delighted or… on the verge of remembering too much again. “You know.”

“I know he did something to you.” A slight shrug, and Abraham looks down at his grapes, rolls one absently with a little shove. He looks back up. “I don’t know what. And he can’t undo it. It’s fixed.”

The idea is unsettling. Abraham's real regret at the notion-- and his temporal proximity to the event-- has a strange weight, an unexpected weight in his mind.

His long stay in the hospital-- unaging, undying, unmoving. He's never considered undoing it himself. The idea of it surprises him now. It was the beginning of this for him.

"He didn't tell you."

"I knew he'd done something. I mean. I didn't have to be told." How troubled Abraham is, now. "But he clammed up. Got a little antsy, actually, like he was trying to convince himself things were okay. I knew they weren't. I knew whatever he'd done I'd be pissed off. When he came to visit later-- the older him, agh, how do you talk about this-? Nah, he didn't give me the details then either. He just told me it was bad. "

"He paralyzed me," Adam says, the words coming out slow and deliberate. It still affects him, why does it still affect him this way? "I was... conscious. Unable to move or speak. But aware of the passing of time."

Abe spits out a horrified blasphemy.

Adam waves it away. "He did me a service. Neither of us understood that at the time."

"Bullshit."

"Not at all. That paralysis... being trapped in my own body... impossible not to remember the camps, of course, but as my mind began to turn inward I remembered more. I remembered being trapped in flesh... remember the voice that told me to focus on the available dimensions; ignore the missing ones."

He remembers it now-- only a memory, not the ability to see his own timeline that he’s become used to, but clear enough. "It seemed... like a cruel joke. There were no available dimensions. But there were. The missing dimensions… were there. I found the path back to the river. ...eventually, I managed to follow it.”

Abraham watches him, quietly. He must know already, at least the theory, but Adam has never tried to put this into words before; now that he’s started, he finds it difficult to stop.

“I learned how to initiate the self repair cycle without dying. To go somewhere else besides the nearest body of water. In the twenty-second century, when Earth was invaded, I learned how many of my limitations were habitual.” The cold, he had never felt so cold, the terror of his breath freezing in his lungs, his blood freezing in his veins. Waking in icy, frozen water, trapped beneath the ice sometimes-- freezing again before he could make it to the shore. But he’d learned, in the moments, in the spaces between thought.

“I could do without food. I could survive temperatures that should have frozen my blood. Breathing was… an option.” The words stick in his mouth. He may never step into the vortex again. He may never feel the time-winds over his skin. The vortex is colder and wilder than the frozen pole where he cut his teeth on time travel, but he had fitted into it and it to him.

This could be his ultimate failure, leaving him alive, but paralyzed. Again. But this time, the damage is not only of meat and neuron, this time the delicate unseen part of him that grew into four and five dimensions is broken. He doesn’t realize he’s shaking, nails digging strips out of the wooden table, until Abraham says, quietly: “Hey.”

When he makes eye contact, Abe cautiously reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder. He cannot feel the strands of Abe’s timeline and his potential where they should tangle with his own, but the warmth of human contact is unfamiliar enough to jar him free of his panic for a moment.

“Why.” Adam can’t completely articulate the question, but Abe seems to understand.

“Because leaving you in the river wouldn’t fix anything. Because hurting you really wouldn’t fix anything. Because you and my dad have hurt each other enough and that’s not how it’s going to be this time.”

A decent man, he called himself once. Pointed to himself and told Henry that this is what two thousand years could do to a decent man.

What would Abraham be, after two thousand years? Perhaps this, constantly, a little bad-natured and curmudgeonly, but decent.

The wine is affecting him. He had-- forgotten that he couldn’t metabolize it away. His body cries out for the rest it was denied, and it’s difficult to resist.

“Get some rest,” Abe says, presciently, and Adam can only nod.

He returns to the bed and focuses carefully only on the physical senses-- the sheet under him, the smell of last night’s sour sweat, the aches in his muscle that mean nothing more profound than that he tossed and turned and thrashed all night.

And sleep, as he has not known it in a long time, takes him.

Back to consciousness. Not quite rematerialization, but a just-passable substitute. It’s like time travel; but involuntary, and only in one direction.

The angle of the sun has changed; still morning, but a warm morning, and Abe has been in and out while he slept-- he’s back in his chair, but things have moved, his clothing has changed, the stink of the market is with him.

"Feeling better?"

Adam swings his feet out of bed and gets to his feet, testing his limberness. "Only physically."

"That bad, huh?" Abe sighs. "I picked up a lot from Henry and Sue, but first aid for time machines is a little beyond me."

"Your help has been... invaluable." He isn't insane. He might have been, without someone to help him readjust to this sack of meat. "I'm not without gratitude."

"Didn't do it for the gratitude."

"No. You did it out of filial piety. Admirable."

"I just didn't want to ruin Henry and Abigail's vacation." Abe waves a hand, not looking at Adam as he freezes.

"Abigail. She's... here. She's alive."

Abe does look at him now, sharp and canny. He will lie to protect his parents. He will die, and he was prepared to die when he followed Adam to the river last night. Adam would never harm him. But he needs to know this.

He takes a step forward, draws up sharply in front of Abe in his chair. "He changed that?" Adam demands. "He broke the laws and changed his own past?"

"No."

Adam nearly spits. Usually he finds Henry's hypocrisy charming, his pretense at decency endearingly twisted, but he refuses to accept this. "Then he still clings to his virtue, even when the woman he loves--"

"He didn't change it because he couldn't, Adam," Abe says, voice hard. "It's a fixed point in time. A fundamental part of his timeline. He tried, all right? That's not evil, that's human. --You know what I mean. He just couldn't."

Adam subsides, his indignance ebbing away. He folds back, sitting on the bed. "But she's here."

"He took her out of time. Right before she died. She had a few seconds to live, but -- a few seconds is a lot of leeway for people like you and him."

"I don’t remember that."

"Yeah. He... did something with your memory. Telepathic circuits, he said." Abraham's strange acceptance rears its head again; he sounds so resigned to his father's alien nature.
But he was trained nearly from the cradle to be so. "It's been so good seeing her again. Even if she has to go back. Sometime. At least I got to see her again."

I'm pleased for you, Adam doesn't say, because it would be cruel to, and cruelty lacks its usual savour today.

"Henry told me about fixed points in time. When I asked him if he tried to change things. Not just Mom's death. World War II. World wars in general. Plagues, genocides, lose Columbus' compass for him, vaccinate a few people in the right place before England sent ships over to the Americas and Australia... all the old standards."

Adam chuckles despite himself. The old standards indeed. He's been there, and time travelers swarm to those places-- time travelers and those who would enforce the laws of time. "And what did he say?"

“He said... it was like reaching down a garbage disposal to hit the on switch. Hurt to try, hurt worse to succeed. You know?"

His laugh is more than a chuckle this time. He had almost forgotten the morbid streak that runs through his younger... counterpart. He misses him, hatred and fear tangling with affection.

"It’s true. Time is cruel. Morality is an artificial concept," he says, mouth still stretched in a smile. "You find that out quickly. Time treasures its atrocities, its precious, monstrous children. Decent, quiet people can come and go, be kindled or snuffed like lamps. But Hitler always survives the battle of the Somme, Abraham. Jackson always orders the grim march. I've tried, of course. To put Odo of Châtillon in the ground long before he sent his armies to Jerusalem. To strangle Davros over his schoolbooks. To put the survivors of Mondas out of their misery before they could unleash themselves on the universe. But those things Time protects."

Abe knows the names, even the ones from distant times and planets. He nods. These, then, too, are Henry’s ‘old standards’.

But he’s unmoved, leaning back in his chair. "You think life's fair for the rest of us?"

Adam raises his eyebrows.

"Yeah, theoretically, it'd be-- good. If all the massacres and genocides and invasions and plagues could be prevented. But that's theory. That's philosophy class bullshit. But Mom? Mom hurts. Knowing the universe cracks in half if she doesn't-- wind up where she winds up, when she winds up. That it's impossible that we ever got more time being a family. You don't have to tell me it's not fair, Adam."

There's anger and grief under the surface of that calm voice, and it rings in the silence after his speech.

He considers Abe with interest. Abe considers him back.

"Once I knew, I always kind of wondered. Did you find the information about the Weinraubs for me to make up for her somehow? Sorry I took one of your parents away, here’s a couple more?"

It's not a rhetorical question, and Adam answers honestly: "It was... a factor in my choice of gifts."

"It doesn't work that way."

"Yes. But the symmetry appealed to me."

"You're a creepshow, you know that? A mess." He shakes his head, glances out the window, then back to Adam, his gentle face resolutely kind, softly determined. “Who was it you tried to kill last night? The senator who stabbed you? Brutus? Because it was personal for you, whatever it was. Like Mom was for Henry.”

“Not Brutus.”

It hadn’t been Brutus. And it wasn’t Brutus, the night before, or even an ancestor. Although the thought had occurred to him, at times, and he’d tried, oh he’d tried. Find the fragile threads around the dalekanium ones, untangle the knot centuries before it could form; there was such simplicity in it. But Time protected itself.

He doesn’t mean to say more, but he does, after all, have this debt to Abraham, and he finds himself speaking, the words coming out at a measured pace but unstoppable in their slow crawl. “No-one in particular. The child of immigrants from Judea, a well-off family but not particularly consequential. The boy grows up and becomes a guard. His greatest significance is that he tried to protect his Caesar and died in the attempt.”

“...You mean he’s you,” Abe concludes, striking gracelessly to the root of things. Adam sighs.

“I thought Henry would have given you a tolerance for drama.”

“Yeah, more like he used it all up.” Despite the flippancy, there’s a horrible sympathy in Abraham’s face and Adam sneers in self defense.

“Then. Yes. He is… the human I was, before I was remade.”

“You were trying to kill yourself.”

“Henry was right, when he confronted me, in your time period. It was time to end the game. His only failure was that he didn’t know how to end it decisively enough.”

“Yeah, I can see how there are no options between ‘stop being a serial killer’ and ‘wipe yourself out of time.’”

“I wasn’t meant to be, Abraham. Neither was he. We are the failed hybrids of a slave race and we should not exist.” His mood is swinging again, a compass without a magnetic field. “I thought I had found a way to die!”

“But instead of causing a paradox and destroying yourself, you just… cracked your time engine.”

“Don’t make the mistake of pitying me, Abraham Morgan.”

But he does. Oh, he does. This kind, decent man. Adam crashes against his mercy and his patience like a wall.

This… floundering is beneath him. He has his own reserves of dignity and he knows how to charm. He can regain something. He may have crippled himself, but he is a rich man in the city he grew up in and he can regain control of the situation.

He composes himself, draws on his various useful, unthreatening personas, and pulls himself back together with a smile that would be comforting if Abraham didn't know his true nature.

“Pardon me.”

“Yeah. Not creepy at all.”

“I’ve told you the truth, Abraham. I’m not here to confront your father. I’ll leave him unmolested.” For now. “Allow me to repay you for your help last night. You said you were here as a tourist. Let me show you the city. As a native. Slightly before my time, of course-- it won’t be familiar to me for another ten years or so. But I can guide you better than the history books.”

Abraham looks at him, long and hard, quite rightly suspicious. But he says: “No gladiators, all right?”

Adam allows himself the slightest smile. “Easily avoided.”

“And call me Abe, all right? Only Dad and the IRS call me ‘Abraham’, and Dad’s not who you remind me of.”

Adam chuckles, rising from the bed, and offers an arm.

It’s a beautiful morning, and they make much of it; the sky is high and blue, the sun turning the dusty brown stone around them to warm, cheery gold, gleaming off the marble walls and decor of the more affluent locations. Escorting Abraham through the streets and byways of Rome is informative, although not in the ways that Adam expected.

Abraham makes no attempt to outwit or manipulate him: blunt honesty is his shield and silence is his lance. Adam's attempts at gleaning information from him are... unsatisfactory. There's very little pleasure in maneuvering to steal something that's freely offered.

No, it's not the thrill of a set-up, the deadly game he played with Henry that lightens Adam's step. Disturbingly... it seems that he likes the company. That he has company at all, and that it's so agreeable both.

He has not yet asked how Abe managed to find his way from Brooklyn of the twenty-first century to a Rome resting uneasily between the pulls of Cinna and Sulla. That's a harmless little puzzle, all of the game that it seems worthwhile to play.

So he finds himself talking. Nothing consequential, of course. Small things. His travels before this, omitting his varied attempted (and occasionally successful) assassinations in the name of a better future. In exchange, Abe offers...

Stories.

Potential.

"We went to Grallista Social,” he says, as Adam leads them down a road parallel where the Pantheon will be in another century and a half. “It's kind of a resort planet-- lots of coastline, parties, locals friendly and working the tourist economy."

"Sounds lovely." Adam says, without meaning it. It sounds tedious.

"It's not the beach huts and coastlines thing that was special, though." Abe waves a hand. "It's the time we went. Cryogenic travel was still-- is still going to be-- common enough that the age difference didn't raise any eyebrows. Won’t raise eyebrows. Screw it, this language wasn’t built for this. What I’m trying to say is there were no perception filters, no cover stories. We could be a family just the way we were, meet other people in the same boat.”

"...Extraordinary. I haven't explored much of humanity's future. My travels have been... business."

"Yeah. I get that. It's kind of a shame. You could go--"

He closes his mouth before he says 'anywhere' but it still sends a throb of pain all through Adam. He can't. Go anywhere.

"Please go on." Is it masochism that makes him want to hear what else he's missed? Or is he just looking for fuel to rekindle the old grudge? He doesn't know the answer himself-- hides his awareness of the question entirely from Abraham. More of his little puzzle.

Abraham seems to think the knowledge can do no harm. "At some point before Grallista Social, Mom and Dad spent twenty years on Mars. Way before the whole gravity well thing."

The taunting, painful potential of the unfolding future skips, pauses. "Gravity well... thing?"

"Yeah, that's what I asked. Big natural disaster, I’m told. Used to be a pretty nice place. They just...set up house, pretending to be this sweet old lizard couple in one of the equatorial cities, did the domestic thing for years." A headshake, almost exasperated. "Not a thing you ever expect to say about your parents. Mom would send me pictures, with and without the perception trick. They were pretty cute."

"There's life on Mars?"

"...yeah, also what I asked. There used to be. Lizard people. Long time ago. Not much of it now, but once... Mom said it was cold, but the neighbors were friendly."

Adam's experience with alien life has been entirely restricted to that of it which invaded Earth during his lifetime, and that of which has tried to police and enslave him. Daleks, yes, he knows them very well. The Cybermen, he’s aware of them. The Time Lords he can smell at a distance. But Mars-- so near a neighbor, he had no idea. His horizons are expanding rapidly and he has no way to chase them.

When Abe stops talking, very decisively, he realizes that he's showing his pain, jaw too tight, eyes too hard, and he forces himself back into blank, friendly banality.

“Come on.”

He drags Abe down a few streets, pointing out the places where things will be, the names of merchants who are still young, loses himself in a tour guide’s prattle, until he’s cut off by someone calling him.

“Travellers! Have you got family in these parts?” Not Latin. Aramaic.

No. No, he knows that man although his beard isn’t yet shot through with gray. He knows that voice.

“A cousin,” Adam croaks. His father’s name spills from his lips before he can stop it.

“Ah! He lives nearby. But I can see you’ve been travelling a long time.”

He’s made an inexcusable mistake of habit. Of habit so old he would have sworn it had faded away long ago when he still thought he was only some unusual strain of humanity.

But this was where his father worshipped, and where he worshipped. And he has his father’s height and enough of his features that he’s been recognized. But his accent must be unidentifiable, the language so rusty in his mind he’s afraid he won’t be able to keep up the conversation.

His jaw locks. First, with fury; he hates that this makes him vulnerable, that he is afraid to appear as a stranger here. His Latin sounds strange and stiff after so long but that’s acceptable, he meant to be an outsider, but to be an outsider here feels wrong, fundamentally-

“We’re both new in town. We’ve been away a long time.”

Then, shock, because the shadow over Abraham speaks those words in Aramaic, and it is the voice of a native son, his strange word choice translated as eccentric instead of alien.

“Have you come to visit?”

“No-- business, but we’ll try to make time for family.”

“Good fortune, then!”

Adam all but drags Abraham away from the conversation and into the nearest alcove. He has a tight grip on the shoulder of his tunic, his fingers aching. “How are you doing that?”

“I’m not. Henry’s doing it. Wait. You can’t?”

“Can’t cast illusions and speak in tongues? No! I can’t!”

“But you understood the guy.” Abraham’s face is honestly confused, so open, half-lit with green sunlight shining through the ivy that trails around their alcove. He releases Abe’s tunic; flings his hands in the air.

“I speak Aramaic!”

“..And Latin. You’re just… speaking Latin?”

“Yes. I grew up speaking it, Abraham, I speak Latin.”

“I don’t! How did you think I was talking to anyone? It’s the telepathic thing.” Abe taps his temple. He seems to have realized something. “I wondered why you let me recognize you yesterday, didn't do the perception trick. But-- you can't do that, either, can you?"

And Henry can, he realizes with a sickening lurch. It’s Henry doing this, not some piece of technology pilfered from the future. Henry who disguised his wife and himself as aliens. Henry himself who casts the shadow over Abraham and makes him seem as if he belongs in this time.

Adam never considered that they would be capable of this. These... features, a word burning like acid, these are conveniences designed into enslaved machines. And whatever unholy thing he is, it is the result of a frightened soldier implanted with a newborn machine mind, and the body that grew around them, but he never thought that he was so like his many-dimensional forebears.

Perception filters. Telepathic circuits. Translation circuits. He's read the words, stolen the information from un- and under-guarded computers in order to understand his origins, but never applied them to himself. Why would he? He’s... something. Something else. But still, flesh, still something else trapped in a meatsack body that should have died and rotted and left nothing but bones behind centuries ago.

His face has been frozen in a snarl for long seconds and Abe is tense and wary again, shoulders up and defensive.

"No. I can’t." His unanswered questions are no longer an amusing puzzle. All his focus is on Abe again, all of his frustration driving him. "How did you come to Rome, Abraham Morgan?"

"Henry brought me."

That's deliberate, that 'me', he doesn't say 'us' though he means it. It's in his body language, the misdirection, he will not remind Adam that Abigail is here too. But the stupid boy won't back down, either.

"Alone? No. Nothing organic could survive the vortex.”

"Not unprotected,” Abe agrees, cautiously.

"We are not vehicles, he and I!" Adam seizes him by the breast of his tunic. "We are not piloted, we are not used."

Abe grabs his wrists. There's a surprising strength in his gnarled hands, though not enough to break Adam's grip. His eyes widen, but he leans on that damned world-weary stoicism and refuses to panic. It’s enraging.

"You should fear me," Adam snarls.

"I do." Defiance. Unyielding, unimpressed.

"Then don't mock me and don't pity me!"

"Empathy’s not the same as pity, asshole!" Abe lets go of his wrists and stands fast again, a school teacher with an unruly pupil.

“And what do you have to empathise with? I’ve lived a life you couldn’t begin to imagine.”

“Yeah? But it hasn’t been fair, has it. That eats you up. I told you, I know what it’s like. Henry got lucky and you didn’t and you hated that, you still do. He was on his way to closing off, but someone jammed her way into his life and forced him not to be lonely. He didn’t even get a choice. You didn’t have that, I bet. And now-- then-- the future-- he figures out he’s half time machine and what are the odds, he’s already friends with someone who has a copy of the owner’s manual? While you’re alone and figuring it out for yourself--”

"Henry's a fool, and I'd rather be ignorant for millennia than depend on a Time Lord!"

"They're not all out to get you, you know."

"How would you know? You know nothing of what they are, what they've done."

"I know Sue's grandad put a stop to the experiments that made you. He protected people like you."

...grandfather. What? The memory again, the-- "The imp, in the blue temple?"

"What?"

"A small, timeless creature, in a blue temple that spoke with the voice of its own priestess."

"...we talking maybe a little Scottish guy in a blue phone booth, here?"

"Is that what Henry saw?” The English, what a ridiculous people. “I promise you, that impression is as much a matter of perception as mine. That race is ancient, and calculating, and as merciless as Time itself."

"And they scare the shit out of you," Abraham breathes, understanding dawning on his face; he doesn’t bother to try to hide it, rubs it into Adam’s too-fresh wounds. "You're running scared again. Like Dad was when you met him."

He's so furious he can feel his heartbeat in his temples. His blood pressure is out of his control and working as its own organic error message once again. "I've spent a significant fraction of your lifespan practicing psychotherapy. Don't attempt to use it on me!" He thrusts Abe away, releasing him in the same movement. "Go back to your family, Abraham Morgan. You've done enough."

"Adam."

"I may be reduced to this body, but I was never helpless in this body," he warns. "Go."

Abraham wars with himself, caring to the end, but he is practical. And finally, he turns to go, and Adam watches to make sure he’s truly gone before he stalks to the other end of the alley and fades into the crowd.

In the absence of stimulus, it takes twenty minutes for the chemical byproducts of anger to filter out of the bloodstream, for heart-rate to normalize and his breathing to steady. Adam provides his own stimulus, clings to his anger for another full hour, well-practiced at nurturing a good strong hatred, but soon enough he has to face the situation with clarity.

He has… made an error in judgement.

Abe is at present his most promising link between now and then. If he must be stranded in a bag of organic matter he would much prefer to do it in a world with indoor plumbing and decent medical care. In fact, it might be tolerable if he could get forward to a time after the major Dalek invasions, to live new history instead of this hateful repetition.

He would be very foolish indeed to throw this chance away out of spite.

Where will Abraham be now? Still on a main road. There’s a spice market he would likely be drawn to not far from where Adam abandoned him-- as an antiquities dealer, the curios on display might hold his attention.

He can go and give meaningless apologies; he can ingratiate himself again, regain access to a useful resource. It’s a simple course of action, as simple a ruse as he’s ever embarked on.

He is entirely capable of this.

He has no reason to lean against this wall and ache.

He can be charming, reassuring.

He does not have to tip his head against the brickwork, grinding his skull into the stone and closing his eyes against this ache neither of the body or of the temporal function. He does not have to bare his teeth in this rictus of agony.

He-- he has no reason to have been frightened or wounded by anything he has heard today.

He is not frightened of Abraham’s mercy. He does not have to press his hands against his face as if he could claw the weakness out of his skull.

He is not afraid to be alone.

Or of not being alone.

He will survive, forever and without end. What is there left to fear?

He fears survival itself. He scrubs his face and hurries from the alley as if he can flee the tangle of his own thoughts.

Abraham is long gone by the time he’s managed to marshal his thoughts. He did stop at the stalls Adam remembers, and a growled threat and a few coins gets his direction. He’s headed toward the Via Sacra-- a larger road you won’t find, will he stay on that?

It’s better than the alternative, the labyrinth of little alleys and side streets; he’d been leading them through those, when the fancy or habit took him, but Abraham, as much as his father may make him look like he belongs, is still a stranger far from home. Earlier, when Adam had pointed out where the Piazza Navona would one day be, he’d said he’d been to Rome before, in the twentieth century; the main streets will be the most familiar to him, but so little resembles the Rome he would know.

Adam himself has played the tourist in Rome. Where would--

Inspiration strikes. Real inspiration, not the flashes of time sense he had once had and mistaken for deduction. He can tell: this feeling is more doubtful, more risky.

He turns up the Via Sacra and with hurried steps that almost become a run goes east. He thinks perhaps he hears someone speaking in English, shadowed with Latin, and stops to peer around.

The relief at seeing Abe’s silver hair makes his chest twist, a sense of loss and missed opportunity he had told himself he didn’t feel dissipating. Replaced, ridiculously, with trepidation. What if he has exhausted the reserves of Abraham’s patience?

“The Coliseum is a century away,” he calls out. Not what he meant to say, and he gets a few odd looks from the strangers around them, but Abe turns, and the surprise on his face is not entirely hostile. He steps out of the crush of foot traffic and waits for Adam to catch him up.

“More than that actually,” he says, once he’s in a conversational distance. “You’d be waiting around quite some while, through some unpleasant times.”

“Thanks,” Abe says. There’s… is that amusement? Abraham is amused. Exasperated and amused. At him. Wary and afraid of him, because he is a practical man, but amused in the face of fear.

Adam scowls at him, not muting it behind a practiced smile.

He must admit his own motives even if he doesn’t like them: the alternative is more miscalculation, more of the morning’s missteps. So: as galling as it is, he accepts that he doesn’t want to be alone. There. A bitter pill, but necessary. Abraham’s easy nature is reassuring in his crisis.

He makes no apologies, and Abraham lets him take his arm again. His presence is grounding. Awareness of him mutes the lack of awareness of time.

“If you must see the tourist architecture, let me show you some worth seeing.” Adam steers him west.

“Didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”

“Jerusalem was still half in ruins when Vespasian started that monument to his own pride,” Adam says darkly. “It’s built on the riches his family looted from the Temple. I didn’t know until the thing was fully built; I’d been on the run from enemies who had seen me die once too often in the last days of the war. I came back, and it was there like a canker in my city, a monument to the pillage of my father’s country.”

“...They didn’t focus as much on that part of it during the tour.”

“They wouldn’t. It is, after all, ancient history.” His lip curls. “The wars are only dates and numbers, the reasons are forgotten. Who remembers the dead anymore?”

Abe squeezes his arm against his side, a comforting pressure.

They walk in silence, down streets not yet bricked into the marshy valley, where the walls of the Circus stretch on either side of them. There’s a tide of cattle being driven up the roads, and the sight stirs something ancient and childish in Adam’s memory. It’s echoed by children shouting-- boys just out of their mother’s care, probably risking a beating by abandoning whatever errands their fathers sent them on to the market up the hill, but they know what it means as well as Adam does.

“They’ve driven the livestock out of the Circus,” he tells Abraham, a little too loudly, a little to pleased.

“And that means?”

A gaggle of young women is slipping away from the market, and shuffles past them in a cloud of whispers.

“Chariot practice.” He grins fiercely and releases Abe’s arm, only to take his hand and pull. “Come on!”

“All right, all right, I’m coming!”

Adam tugs him with unseemly haste through one of the gates, finding the way he knew as a boy still open-- is already open-- a tunnel the builders used that leads under the wooden bleachers until you feel nearly at the foot of the track. Muddy footprints in the gloom show that a generation of young men before him know the way, and where they stop-- dignified adults, in the shadow of the good seats-- he can point up to young figures that have climbed their way up to the stone seating reserved for the senators during any real event.

But life goes on for chariot practice; there are still some livestock in the grassy center of the circus, unconcerned and used to the noise and the speed of the horses, and the timber-built shops are open, and younger children play in the Murcia. But the chariots rumble past, and the young women from the market lean in and call out the names of their favourites, and the boys whoop.

Abe is smiling at him.

“What?”

“You really did grow up here, didn’t you?”

“I did.” He nods up at the young spectators. “In ten years, I’ll be one of them. And be beaten for shirking my chores to watch, and do it again anyway. In sixteen years, I’ll be stupid enough to meet a man under that overhang, there-- a gentile, too-- and I’ll be beaten for that too, and do it again.” His lips curve.

“Ever try to change any of it? Anything personal?”

He shakes his head, smiling. He thought his heart was all scar tissue, but it aches. “If I had died only once, in March, in forty years. I would have died with very few regrets.”

An arm loops around his shoulders, and together he and Abe watch as the charioteers pound around the long track and then past them again with the sound of thunder and metal and cursing, then off into the distance, over the bridged Murcia.

“So?” he asks.

“Well. It’s no Ben Hur.”

“Savage,” Adam says, witheringly.

“Better than a Giants game, I’ll give you that,” Abe says, and then they’re laughing. Together. And Adam is feigning nothing, hiding nothing, letting his actual joy mingle with someone else’s and it is a naked, terrible feeling. He craves it, and it chews at him.

Another hour, maybe, and Adam lets himself be drawn away. They trudge up the hill back to the market, and Abe sighs with regret at all the trinkets that would be worth a fortune if they could survive into his era somehow. Adam gives him a lesson in the clothing around him, what the cut of cloth means about status and home life, gossips shamelessly about people who are still infants or not yet born, shows him the city of his youth.

He would have unwritten all this, too. All the time he spent here. When he first set out to murder himself it had seemed so distant, so unimportant, merely the beginning of a long, largely unhappy life. Now it’s too present.

They chat like conspirators about times that will be. Arm in arm and wandering the past, Abe tells him how faith found him in the jungle, how the once-theoretical teachings an atheist father and a protestant mother tried so dutifully to expose him to suddenly found their meaning, gave him strength. How he has moved from city to city, often running, often unsure of his own place in the world, but ultimately a happy man.

Adam tells him about the future, only alludes to the invasion but speaks frankly about the xenophobia and idiocy that follow it. Tells him about the long decades he spent when he first mastered space travel, alone on an asteroid, sitting motionless and watching Mars and Jupiter through their long years. How he slipped into the frozen clouds of Jupiter unharmed, floated in the raging storm and almost, almost thought he heard voices.

He’s never told anyone any of these things.

Has Abraham.

Who could he have?

Who could they tell but each other?

Over dinner, much later, under the spread of stars like those from his childhood and over wine meant for being drunk and not just for drinking, he realizes something.

"Caesar."

"...what?" Abe looks up, looks around like he thinks Adam might be pointing the man out.

"Julius Caesar. You asked if I had ever tried to change something personal. I have. I have tried to see Julius Caesar survive the fifteenth of March.” There’s a breeze off the Tiber, gentle, cool with night but still heavy with the leftover heat of the day. He studied psychiatry for years; stayed with the science as it evolved over the centuries. He knows what scents do to the brain, even one like his; it still finds him like a kick in the gut, to speak of Caesar and have the air put him suddenly back in his childhood.

He looks past Abraham, beyond the street and the dark outlines of the little shops and occasional thermopolium, into nothing. “I’ve lived through too many of the ‘old standards’ for them not to be personal, but of all the unchangeable tragedies that one is the closest to my heart. And not for my sake. I’d have willingly died for him, in my life. My other attempts to change time were as painful as Henry described; one or two failures was enough. For Caesar, I tried six times. On the fifth I caught the attention of the Time Lords. On the sixth, they nearly caught me."

It had been terrifying; it still is, a cold promise in his gut that is half panic, half horror. His skin crawls at the thought, and for a moment he is plunged back into aching, empty vertigo as the other part of him, that which remains damaged and insensate to Time, remembers too.

The stench of the Time Lords. More than a species, they are a stain, a corrosive spill that spreads out into the vortex wherever they touch it, potential and interference leaking off them in dense threads of uncertainty. He’d known of them, had seen their marks in the vortex even before he’d heard the whispers of them and followed their time threads to Gallifrey. He’d seen the others. The silent ones. Enslaved sentences, block transfer intelligences like his own, a fleet of them. Muted. Chained. Assigned pilots and roles, used and abandoned to lonely death when they outlived their service.

He’d understood in a way he hadn't, then. He’d seen slavery before; it wasn’t unique to history, it wasn’t unique to humanity. He’d survived the Dalek invasions. But to know he was nothing more than a vehicle, a failure, a science experiment ready to be harnessed or destroyed, stripped of anything that wasn’t designed--

He’d fled.

He’d avoided the Time Lords' attention after, at all costs. He knew what would happen if they learned of him, if they captured him.

But he’d tried again, for Caesar. The sixth time, even knowing the stink of slavers was clinging to every thread of potential around him, closing in like gas. And he’d failed. Of course he failed. Caesar died in the portico. History reset itself, and he’d run, slipping from epoch to epoch, from the farthest corners of the universe he could reach, while the Time Lords hunted him, sent something that followed every move he made, scooped through the vortex indiscriminately and snatched at him.

They’d almost had him; he had felt it, whatever it was closing around him, all possibilities narrowing down to one inevitable certainty. Capture. Dissection. Death.

Even now he can feel his blood pressure spiking, his vision going dark, a blurry red haze. He can smell the camps; he can remember the sheer helplessness of paralysis; he can feel the greasy time-trace of the Time Lords. No.

He’d gotten away, fled to a populated city, an overpopulated point in Earth’s history, forced his temporal senses down and walked as a man, lived as a man for months before he felt safe enough to slip sideways through the universe and seek the quiet of the asteroid belt.

"Why him?" No judgement; puzzlement. Abe looks at him, draws him back from the memories. "Why Caesar? Henry told me you were there when he bit it, that you died trying to save him, but -- that's the thing that gets you the worst?"

He’d never gone back a seventh time. The risk was too great. Failure inevitable. He would never have even come here, this close, if he hadn’t--

But that had failed too.

He looks down at his cup, tries to put something into words that hadn’t needed to be said then, and he hadn’t had anyone to say them to since.

“Caesar. He meant something. He was-- he was incredible. He was important, to all of us.” He gestures loosely, encompassing them, the crowds around him, the quarter on this side of the Tiber. “After the civil war, especially. My father lost most of his wealth, not that we’d ever had much. We certainly lost family, in Jerusalem. The massacre.” His face twists up, unexpected bile. It’s been millennia, faces he had never known, only his parents’ pain. Maybe it’s the temporal proximity. Maybe it’s just that he’s torn himself apart, in places he can’t see, and everything is open and raw.

He takes another drink of wine, tries to explain. “When Caesar’s army entered Rome, it seemed like the whole world was changing. It was naive... but I believed in him. So many of us did. He did great things. He’d conquered so much of the west, made Rome so vast. To live in Rome, under Caesar... there was no doubt, no possibility of doubt, that he made us all greater. We were all Romans, no matter who we were. And he was good, to our people. Far better that we had come to expect; he revoked Pompey’s laws in the east, we were religio licita here. When he died... I have lived through massacres, Abraham. Torture. Alien invasion. Enslavement. I know how it feels when your world falls apart.

“I wanted to serve him. I believed in him, I never questioned... It seemed like all of Rome cheered when he returned. And I was devoted, utterly loyal. I served in some of his campaigns, the Battle of Munda. I became his guard. I was good at it, and I loved him. I saw them-- I fought, I tried, but there was only so much the few of us could do against sixty of them. I saw them turn on him, the swarm-- his blood.” He drops a hand to his stomach, the old puckered scar there-- snatches his hand away when he realises what he’s done.

"He was... hope. To my parents. To me. To all of us. When he was alive it seemed that the world could only become better, only become greater. When I crawled out of the Tiber and found myself in a world without him." He knows he sounds maudlin, melodramatic and doesn't care; he can still taste the millennia-old bile in his throat. "My hope was dead. My faith in man didn’t survive it for long." His teeth feel sharp in his mouth. He is half-smiling at his own pain, mostly grimacing.

Abe closes his mouth over a question.

"Ask me," he hisses. "Who else can I tell? Ask me."

"I wondered how you wound up pissing off the Nazis. But if you still feel like this after a couple thousand years--"

"No. My faith in the divine didn’t outlive my faith in man by long. It had been hundreds of years since I even pretended to keep the faith." He hasn't told anyone any of this. He hasn't spoken to another person about his life since Henry stabbed him in the neck with a syringe, nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. The words have rust on them, surprise him with their reluctance. "It was... a coincidence. I was caught in the wrong nightclub.”

Abe's forehead creases into even deeper wrinkles as his eyebrows crawl up. "Jeeze. You just can't win for losing, can you. "

"You're too good a man to excuse my crimes out of pity."

"Hey, I can think you're an asshole and feel sympathy at the same time."

Adam pauses, bemused by the unfamiliar ease in his anger.

"What?" Abe asks, when he stares for too long.

"...it's comforting. That you sympathize." Without reducing him to the sum of his pain. Not that, he thinks, it's much of a reduction. "In its way."

"Yeah, well here's to small comforts." Abe raises his glass sardonically, and they drink.

Adam can still feel the raw wounds where his sense of time should be, and they still leave him feeling panic and rage, but he feels off-kilter as the weight of his despair shifts. He shifts the conversation to trivialities, or tries to. He can still feel the fear, and Abe can see it in him, even if he doesn’t know what Adam fears.

“What’s up?” Abe asks, instead of letting himself be drawn into a discussion about the infidelity of the man eating his own dinner few metres over.

“I don’t understand how Henry could freely stay with one of them. A Time Lord. They make their machines silent.”

“...silent.” Abe’s frown. “No they don’t.”

“They do. They can’t speak?”

“Sure they can. You’ve heard it. Uh, the temple? She spoke with the voice of her own priestess?”

Yes.

Yes, he hadn’t-- put the ideas together. He knew but he hadn’t known, fear keeping him from drawing the right conclusions.

“She did speak. Not in words.”

“Henry heard her, too. Before the Sue’s grandad blocked off his memories. She told him not to be afraid, that it’d help in the long run. I… don’t think the Time Lord was exactly the one driving there.”

Her chuckle rings in his memories. Not a chuckle, not even words, but his mind had responded as if a woman had laughed sweetly. He knew her words only by his response. Conspiratorial. Fond of her little pilot, indulgent, loyal, but whispering to Adam alone, secrets. The Time Lord hadn’t known what Adam was. She had.

Abe is watching him again, so carefully, rolling his cup between his palms. “Did you go through a patch, where … sometimes things talked to you?”

“Yes.” He thought it was madness. The second century.

“Dad did, too, in the twenties. Nineteen-twenties. Had an entire conversation with a dead oak tree in the middle of Queens before he realized he wasn’t talking to anyone. ...He put it down to the bathtub hooch.”

“I met a very persuasive house once,” Adam admits. “She warned me to avoid her man, a hooded man with a scarred face. I thought it was madness. Or an omen.” And he ignored the voices from then on. After a time, he simply stopped hearing them.

“They talk. Henry blocked them out, too, but when he started figuring out he was a little bigger on the inside, he stopped blocking them out. And they talked to him.”

“But they serve--”

“Yeah, they do. They’ve got a job to do. But they’ll look the other way if you let them. The Time Lords… yeah, they’re jerks. Sue’s uncle is kind of a stuffed shirt and he really doesn’t like Henry. They don’t like things they can’t control. But the TARDISes like you guys. They think you’re cute. Like kids. Weird… squishy, kinda clumsy kids.”

It drives counter to everything that Adam understands, and all he can think to say is-- “TARDISes?”

“Sorry. Sue’s word. It’s an acronym, I think? Time and something. In space. It’s a word she made up for... block transfer… you guys.”

He chases the word around his mind. It’s half familiar, reminds him of the blue priestess. She must have known it too. It fits pleasantly around him, separates him from other artificial intelligences, other inert time machines and time capsules that he has seen other races use. TARDIS.

He nods, numbly. He has a great deal to consider and he needs quiet to do it-- his thoughts are making enough noise all on their own. Solitude, for a while. "Are you staying at the same inn tonight?"

"Yeah. Might spring for another room if you're coming back with me."

"And your parents won't be puzzled that you've vanished for two days?"

"Nah, I've been sending them couriered messages all day. May have implied I found some friendly company. Of a certain age, and a certain--" Abe makes a subtle hourglass gesture. "Charm. They know I’m all right and they’re gonna give me a little space."

"I am several millennia too old for you."

"Short on the charm, too." Abe bobs a brow, and the barb is blunted before it can strike.

Adam is being teased. As an adder might be teased by a particularly irreverent mouse.

He feels his mouth pull into a thin, genuine smile without his consent. He schools the expression off his face, turns deliberately to business. "I realize that you want... a distance between your father and myself. But if you know any other time travellers. Trustworthy ones. I don’t want to relive my own history. I don’t want to be trapped here.”

"I'd been wondering about what you were gonna do. I assume Sue's out?"

"‘Sue’ is out. No-one from Gallifrey." His stomach knots at the thought, the wine going flat and sour in his mouth; the night is suddenly cold. No.

"Understood." Abe doesn't look surprised. "I'll see what I can do." He sighs, rakes a hand through his silver hair. “Which may not be much. But I’ll try to find you a lift.”

"Thank you." He means that. He means that genuinely. He's... appalled at himself. He thought he'd done with sentiment long ago. Today has been quite enlightening.

"Given up on the whole paradox thing?"

What Abe is carefully not asking is whether he's decided he wants to live.

"...I'm reconsidering my options, certainly."

“I guess it’s a start.” Abe lifts a drink to him. He joins him in the toast.

“You gonna get mad if I make a suggestion?” Abe says, while he’s drinking.

He swallows, gestures with his cup. “No. By all means, suggest.”

“...would you maybe want to go back to the Klyst Institute?”

He shudders, the words like electricity down his skin even in a foreign tongue.

“It’s Time Lord free,” Abe says quietly. “None of them want to be used as guinea pigs any more than you. And they may not be exactly the same as you and Henry, but they’re sort of family, right?”

“They’re gone. Hiding.” He never looked, not really. He never tried to return to his second birthplace, the place where he was made. It only features in his nightmares.

“Sue’s grandad could probably find them. But he’s--”

“A Time Lord.”

“And the only one the other people from that whole mess trust.”

“I don’t know.” He shivers again, though the evening isn’t yet cool. He had never seen anything like that place, a cold, dark, hateful place. He recognizes the Victorian style now, but it had only seemed alien to the soldier that he was. They had put a half-formed mind into his head and it had driven them both mad, the child and him, and now he is one thing instead of two dying things, but what that thing is he has never been able to say. “I don’t know.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to decide tonight. We’ll work something out.”

He drinks entirely too much, and strong wine, too, leaning on Abraham as they make their way back to the inn, winding down the flame-lit streets, the sound of their sandals slapping the stone and the nighttime air smelling like home. Abraham’s offer is daunting, a heavy weight over him.

But strangely enough, it’s the earlier, unasked question that bothers him the most. It’s taking on a strange significance, repeating over and over, demanding a conclusive answer. Yes/no, a hard binary.

He sags into bed, as soft as strong wine can make it, mumbles a goodnight as the door shuts behind Abe, and feels the question consume him. Is he done with trying to kill himself? Has he decided to live?

The drink has quieted everything but this. There is no message, no words that accompany this strange sensation, but.

If there were. If he could interpret them by his reaction to their absence.

The words might be ‘initiate emergency repair?’

Does he want to live?

Does he want to live?

As himself? As what he is?

Does he want to live?

Initiate emergency repair?

“Yes,” he whispers, an unnecessary echo of a decision made at a much baser level.

There are no words that follow. The only warning he has is not phrased in syllables or letters, no voice says ‘shutting down nonessential systems’. There is only the sensation of his lungs slowing, finally stilling. The sound of his heart in his ears, the distance between every beat increasing. One second. Two. Four.

There is only the darkness, not quite like sleep, not quite like dematerializing.

Other sensations come to him before the physical ones. The whisper of minds, a chatter once shut firmly out, are the first noise. Sensation, next; ripples in the fabric of space and time around him where others like him come and go. Not quite silent passages-- there are distant greetings, acknowledgements, subtle and simple. He feels Time in its ebb and flow around him, fixed points and chaotic branches.

Then vibrations that would be sound if he was using his ears, and a familiar time-trace, entangled with his own in several places.

His body is an afterthought; auditory processing notes that several voices have been shouting around him for some time only after the fact. He opens his eyes and the familiar time-trace has a face and a name, of course. Its hand is gripping his.

Abe sucks in a breath, eyes wide with shock, and Adam leisurely slips out of bed without moving.

He’s still weak, comes into the vortex at a stagger, but the relief of it is like no resurrection before it. He works his way through infinity, using Abe’s timeline and his own as a guide, and slips back out with an effort.

He is in the portico of a building, on his feet, lounging against the wall. He can feel the observation of the humans and human pretenders around him, absentminded, taking him in as part of the scenery. He examines the feeling instead of shutting it out, feels it like the flow of water over his skin, and stretches very carefully. The flow changes. He shapes it, casts a shadow over himself.

Across the square, his two-day-younger self meets his eyes and sees an old man, unfamiliar, maybe Greek.

Adam lets his eyes drift down to the tortoise on the table, a little ball of tangled time. Only two days ago he found its shattered remains and strolled back to its three-days-ago life, picking it up out of the path of an oxcart and carrying it alive/dead into the future, letting it exist at once as a sad remnant of shell and an untroubled living animal. His futile test of strength, nothing near the magnitude of what he tried/will try to do tonight/two nights ago.

Voices he had not heard two days ago murmur, ask kind questions to the mute figure that he was, his deafness a choice, and a wall against them.

The questions turn to him, concerned, what is he going to do, what has he done? He answers without words, an instinctive warning and reassurance both that time will go on.

Fond not-voices caress him, reassure him, murmur to him like a child. He has not been alone, all this time. He has not been alone, except that he made himself alone. All of his long life.

Adam looks across the square and sees the traveler from Judea and his two Barbarian charges. It’s easy to look through the shadow of the perception filter, now. The old man resolves into Abraham without any effort at all. The blonde queen--

Her features soften and her scars vanish. In many ways she is the same woman, seen at a different angle, in a different light. Abigail Morgan laughs delightedly at some joke her son has made. The queen’s consort resolves into--

Something very like Adam. A vast interior wrapped in a shell of meat. A three dimensional being that slowly grew outside of limits, powerful and robed in potential.

Henry looks very much like did two hundred years ago. Young, handsome, healthy. But more at peace than Adam can remember seeing him. Happy, on his wife’s arm. Adam finds that he doesn’t hate him for it. He can hear Henry responding to the whispers of the other TARDISes in Rome, and sends out his own warning that their timestreams shouldn’t tangle yet. Obligingly, indulgently, they distract Henry from his presence.

Abe catches a glimpse of the younger Adam, worry flickering across his face, and steers his parents away. Such a virtuous boy. Granted, complete honesty is not among those virtues.

This Adam smiles to himself, a bit shaken. Is this faith again? If not in man, in some men? In-- family, again? In more than he understands?

There is a pressure in the air like a storm. Somewhere, an assassin is torn between his duty and his faith, a tiny life hanging in the balance, and history grumbles and bucks. Adam steps back behind a column, rolls his head to clear the tension in his neck and slips forward, around the wrench in time that afternoon, rematerializing after the little time disturbance has settled and his younger self has stormed off to create an even larger one.

The paradox-tortoise sleeps in its shell, besides a piece of its body, alone in the market.

Today/two days ago he carried it with him without thinking. Without understanding that he could do exactly what Henry had done. There’s a great deal he hasn’t allowed himself to think about.

There’s a vastness inside him, and the universe around him is so much fuller than he understood.

He feels time straining. His two-day-younger self is approaching his infant-self, fighting history and the Blinovitch limitation effect to try to destroy his entire existence. No need to relive that; he strolls across the square and picks up the sleeping tortoise, tucking it into the breast of his tunic.

He did this on instinct yesterday, but now he lets himself feel what he’s doing-- understand the topology of relative dimensions. He feels the little life contained inside him, tucks the tangled timeline inside himself, shapes the world around the tortoise and its perceptions; easy to give it warmth, and one material is so much like another if you look at it from the right angle. It sleeps on soft earth now, in comfort, in the fold of his tunic which is behind his breastbone somewhere which is no-where at all. They’re all the same place, if you know how to look at it.

Of course.

He smiles without malice at the idea of Henry gathering his family into himself like a mother bird takes her chicks under her feathers.

He sidesteps the time disturbance, is already feeling more steady on his temporal feet; he inserts himself neatly back into the moment he left the inn, before Abraham has finished his startled inhale.

“Adam!”

“Abraham.” He feels his face stretch in a smile, and the chemical markers that indicate comfort and familiarity flooding his system. He can feel Abraham’s past stretching behind him and his potential futures branching ahead, may-be trickles that Abe unknowingly weaves moment by moment into the sturdy rope of has-been.

“You scared the shit out of me. I thought you might have ditched me, but the innkeeper opened the door and you were lying there without a pulse-- ah, crap.”

That as the aforementioned innkeeper collapses in a quiet faint behind them. Apparently, he’s not accustomed to dead men waking up, vanishing, and reappearing.

“You’d think he’d be more used to this,” Adam says critically.

Abe shrugs. “Maybe he’s new at this job.”

Adam helps him prop the unconscious man up against the wall, looks at his skin and then looks inside at his heartbeat and feels no abrupt end to his time-trace. Abe checks his pupil response and skin temperature as if he’s done this before. But then, he is a doctor’s son.

“He’ll be all right.”

“Yeah. He will be. What the hell happened to you?”

“I overestimated my ability to damage myself. I’m… healing.”

“Huh.” Abe looks cautiously pleased. “That’s good. Right?”

“Yes.” The world feels so comfortable again, so complete. The past and future are at the edge of his vision; the missing dimensions exactly where they should be. “Yes.”

“Good.”

“I’ll be leaving. I think. I have things to do.” People to find. The Institutio Klystae and his old nightmares to confront. Voices to hear, conversations to have, so much to learn about himself.

“Not gonna do anything stupid, are you-?”

“I can’t guarantee that. But nothing drastic for a while. No load-bearing pillars of history to attack.”

Abe lets out a slow breath. “...okay. I’ll take that one on faith.”

He knows he’s smiling like a fool. There’s a tide of euphoria bearing him up, joy at having himself back, at having the universe back. Still weak, still healing, but not irreparable. Is this faith after all?

“You look different,” Abe observes.

“Do I?”

“You look kind of like Henry did. Future Henry. When he showed up the first time. Different.”

“Mm?” The stars are moving past this planet, the galaxy expanding, the universe breathing, and he only has to take a step to be among it all. It’s pleasantly distracting.

“Less afraid.”

He considers that. Hmm. “I am.”

“That’s probably good. See you around, then.” Abe sketches a little wave, a puzzled smile on his lips.

“When in Rome,” Adam chides him, and reaches out to cup his face. “I have not been… entirely unlucky in my life, Abraham Morgan.”

He kisses Abe soundly in leave-taking, as is the custom here. Understands why with all his power Henry has not abandoned humanity. There is comfort in this contact if he allows himself to accept it. The lives around him may be shorter than his own, but their tracks through time, fixed and chaotic, are bright and endearing and friendly.

Abe does not tell him to ‘take care of yourself,’ but he feels the intent of it tucked around him like a cloak, warm like a drink pressed into his hands. So he nods, to the human man’s confusion.

And then he steps out of time, dematerializes and slips back into eternity. There is a paradox behind his breastbone and he is unafraid.