Chapter Text
FIXED POINT: MAY 2022. THE END OF THE CORNLEY DRAMA SOCIETY.
The day is one of the most beautiful they’ve had in months. Perfect temperature, broad sunlight, unobtrusive pigeons kindly not shitting all over their outdoor lunch. A languid sort of energy about them all, sprawled out on the grass in the community centre courtyard picking at containers of leftovers or McDonald’s bags or several slices of plain white bread.
Vanessa stares at the clouds. The sun in the corner of her vision is making her eyes water just a bit, but it’s not too bad, and besides, Dennis is pointing out something that–to him–looks like a unicorn wearing an inflatable pool tube and she wants to see it. There’s the horn, he shows her, that wisp off to the left. It’s got fangs but it’s still a good dude.
On one of the benches, Annie and Sandra and Jonathan are talking about one TV show or another, and off by the wall Chris and Trevor are going over production notes – a conversation that seems to be going downhill, if the tone of Chris’s voice is anything to go by. But that’s okay because Max approaches them, cajoles Trevor into a game of slaps that Trevor will inevitably win because he’s bloody good at slaps, and Robert slowly steals Chris away to take a breather and maybe make out or whatever they do when they’re alone.
“Ooh!” says Dennis. “A pumpkin!”
This one does look like a pumpkin. Sideways, Vanessa traces the ridges of cloud as the pumpkin’s veins, the little puff that makes its stem. They’ve been at this for long enough that she knows how this works: lunch breaks that last a little longer, the fluid back-and-forth of all the different combinations of cast members. How the way Max’s breath keeps hitching suggests that Trevor is kicking his arse, badly, at their slaps game. How without looking she knows that Annie has stolen half of Sandra’s food, because Annie shows love by stealing food, how Sandra shows love by letting her. Even Vanessa, in her knapsack, has a pocket dedicated to Other People’s Snacks – mostly the crackers Annie likes, one of Chris’s guilty-pleasure chocolate bars, a package of wine gums.
She points Dennis towards some cloud pillars that look like robots. Dennis laughs. She likes the sound of her friends’ joy.
Chris reappears a few minutes later, clapping like he’s trying to be heard from the back end of the theatre. “Alright, everyone,” he announces, “back to work, let’s go. We need to re-block half of the second act.”
Sandra lets out a hearty, dramatic groan. “I already wrote it all into my script.”
“I’ll give you a free white eraser,” Chris deadpans. “Get up.”
Vanessa rolls onto her belly and lays there for a few seconds, watching the grass move, then climbs to her feet, dusting off. “You’ve got grass on you,” she tells Dennis.
He shrugs, unbothered. “I get grass on me all the time.”
They file back into the rehearsal room, scattering about to drop finished lunches in bags or collect abandoned scripts from chairs. Trevor returns to his set-up in the corner, with his laptop and grid diagram and a small army of highlighters in various colours. Vanessa bounces on the balls of her feet to the music of Robert doing lip trills.
“Okay,” Chris says, back in full director-mode. “Let’s start with Annie and Max, page 52. Max, I know I said you’d come in from the back left, but apparently we’re storing the chest there, so we’ll need to redirect you through the right wing and have you do a little walk-around before actually landing on your mark. Same goes for anyone else who was supposed to enter through back left – Sandra, you have some entrances there in the next scene, so mark this down.”
All things considered, this is an easily workable setback, and they are in fact seasoned veterans at working with setbacks. Vanessa switches between mouthing her lines to herself–she’s so close to off-book she can taste it–and watching as Max and Annie and later Sandra weave around each other, trying out different walking paths as Chris nods or shakes his head.
Eventually he concedes on the scene and flips a few pages of his notebook. “Alright. Next on the list... I need Robert and Jonathan.”
Robert struts forward, eternally ready to both act and input his loud opinions whenever inconvenient. Jonathan does not.
“Jonathan,” Chris says again, impatient.
“He’s not here,” says Dennis.
Everyone stops what they’re doing to perform an ultimately unnecessary look around the room. Sure enough. No Jonathan.
Vanessa shoves her script off her lap. “Did we lock him outside again?” She strides toward the window, preparing to see Jonathan peering in mournfully as he so often does, but near the door there’s nothing but pavement. Further down the path, however, she does spot him – not alone. “He’s getting propositioned by either an improv group or some people with bibles.”
“He’s what?” says Chris.
“I don’t know,” Vanessa says. “Some gentlemen in purple suits. Looks very official. A little campy.”
“What kind of purple?” asks Sandra. Vanessa must have missed something, because her voice is tight, and when Vanessa turns around half the room looks immeasurably tense.
“Uh,” she says. “Dark purple. I don’t know colours. Eggplant?”
Trevor makes an aborted grunt. “Do they all have, fucking, I don’t know how to ask this without sounding like an idiot. Watches. Do they have the same watches.”
Vanessa frowns out the window. They’re approaching slowly, in a casual, wandering sort of way. “I think so? I can’t tell. What’s going on? Who are they?”
“We need to go,” Sandra says quietly. “Back door.” She slips off the stage area to collect her things, and everyone else moves in tandem – even Chris, who Vanessa was praying would be the one making a modicum of sense here.
The gentlemen in purple are getting closer. “Someone please tell me who these people are,” Vanessa begs, because if she needs to be getting her stuff lest she be arrested or something it would be great to know, and she has no idea who they are and what they do and why literally everybody is so insistent that they do not interact.
Annie appears at her side, squeezing her hand as she peers out the window. “It’s them for sure,” she announces to the rest of the cast. Lowering her voice, she adds, “Time police. Trev and I used to work for them.”
“Still do, technically,” Trevor says, throwing his bag over one shoulder and tugging at Annie. “We never sent in our resignations.”
“Time police?” says Vanessa. “Here? Does Jonathan know?” As far as she knows, she and Jonathan are the only two cast members who are in the time they’re actually meant to be in.
“Probably not,” Trevor says. Urgency colours his tone. “C’mon, Anne, we gotta go.”
Vanessa swirls back to the room. Robert is yelling at Chris, something about leaving his watch at home, and Sandra has latched onto Max like a barnacle, and with panic seizing in her chest all she can think to say is, “All of you are fugitives?”
Hand on the back door handle, Robert says succinctly, “Yes.”
And then the front door opens, and the Eggplant Men are in the room, and everything sort of happens in one big jumble after that.
AUGUST 2019. 2.6 YEARS BEFORE THE END OF THE CORNLEY DRAMA SOCIETY.
Vanessa learns the truth about her coworkers halfway through 2019, and it’s mostly an accident. The story begins when she leaves her cardigan at Robert and Dennis’ place and ends when she watches them disappear into oblivion for five minutes, then reappear in their own living room, staring at her guiltily like they’ve been caught with their hands in the biscuit tin.
She doesn’t even really know what to say, other than, “Do I want to know?”
“Dennis, call Chris,” says Robert, and Dennis scuttles away. Half an hour later the entire cast minus Jonathan are in a circle in the living room and this looks a lot like an intervention. Vanessa isn’t entirely sure who the intervention is for.
Chris releases the details slowly, less like he’s willing to talk about it and more like he’s being tortured for information, even though all they’re doing is sitting and looking at him. Not that that isn’t torture – but not all people have Vanessa’s fear of being put on the spot, and Chris should be used to this by now, being not only a director but their director for the better part of a decade. It takes another hour to explain something that reasonably could have taken fifteen minutes. Or, really, two sentences. “None of us were born prior to the twenty-one hundreds” would have been a good place to start.
Vanessa doesn’t ask them to prove it. There really is no other explanation for the spontaneous disappearance and reappearance of her friends, and besides, if they were pulling a prank or trying for an alternate explanation she’s sure they’d come up with something far worse. Like trying to convince her that Dennis has an affliction that makes him occasionally invisible. Sort of plausible, but nonetheless not the truth. She takes her cardigan and goes home and sleeps on it and wakes up the next morning half convinced it was all an elaborate dream.
It is not an elaborate dream. It is, in fact, reality.
Cool and fine. Vanessa is not freaking out.
“Do you still believe us?” Max says–it’s the first thing he says–when they see each other next.
“Unfortunately,” says Vanessa.
“You’ll come around. Hey, then we can take you places.”
The prospect of actually travelling in time, rather than just hearing about it, simultaneously excites Vanessa and makes her want to pack her things and run away. She lets Max sling an arm around her shoulder and follow her around because Max likes that sort of thing and she wants him to be happy. It helps with the static in her brain.
Several months later, they introduce Jonathan to the secret after discovering his not-quite-conspiracy board, on which he’d written down every untraceable film and media reference and surrounded them with question marks. He takes it on agreeably enough. Far better than Vanessa, who is very close to being comfortable with the whole thing until Chris and Robert say exactly what time they’re from and Vanessa has a small crisis over (technically) being about twenty to thirty generations older than them. Technically.
It all comes to a head a year later in July, when Annie slams her Festival proposal down onto the table before Chris and says, “We need to take a trip.”
Chris picks up the proposal between two fingers like it’s going to hurt him. “A trip.”
“To the nineteen seventies,” Annie says. “For research. Also maybe to change the timeline?”
“You can’t make unsanctioned timeline changes,” says Chris, in a sort of way that suggests he’s no stranger to this conversation. “We don’t know what the fixed points are.”
Vanessa watches with foreboding interest. Mostly so if they get into another load of trouble, she at least knows what started it.
“Loophole,” says Annie. “I haven’t done any research yet. So what happens could be what happened. I don’t know.” She gives Chris a dramatic pleading look. “As above, so below?”
“That’s not the phrase,” Chris says flatly.
From what Vanessa has gathered, time travel has one singular tenet, and it’s usually quoted as this: anything that will happen has happened, and anything that has happened will happen. Time is a circle, or something. If nothing else, it seems to quell most of the confusing time-travel paradoxes; if she went back in time and killed her grandfather, she would not cease to exist because her grandfather wasn’t actually her grandfather, and this was always how time was and he would always die like that. Or something. She doesn’t quite understand it. The others have elevated it to top ten in the lunch debates, behind modern vs period Shakespeare adaptations and also which fruit gummy is the best flavour – does time change because we make it so? Or are we just along for the ride, with predestined choices and no escape?
This usually gets existential very quickly. That, or someone has to break up a fistfight. Sometimes both.
“C’moooooon,” Annie says, dragging out the O. “Don’t you want to go have some fun in the seventies?”
“Not particularly,” says Chris.
Annie turns in a circle, immediately zeroing in on Vanessa. “Ness! Don’t you want to come with us?”
Vanessa freezes in her seat. “There is no us in this situation,” Chris says in the background, but she’s more focused on the full blast of Annie’s excited attention. More than usual it catches her off-guard; there’s something almost blinding about it, and her heart trips over itself.
“I,” she says, and as Annie’s hopeful look doubles down she can already feel her resolve crumbling. “Could be fun?”
“Yes!” Annie shouts. “Trev, we’re going to the seventies!”
“I didn’t get consulted for this!” Trevor shouts back from the other side of the room, but everyone knows he will in fact follow Annie anywhere in time, so he’s not fooling anyone.
Somehow Annie manages to get Chris on board (Vanessa suspects there was bribery involved, or maybe just bullying) and they take the trip two weeks later. They use Chris’s watch, one Vanessa has seen around a lot but never in action – the clock face flips to reveal a digital input where he then uses the dial to set the date and time. “It’s never exact,” he explains, “but the more precise you are with your programming, the more likely you’ll be to end up in the same, oh, month or so. Everyone hold on tight.” And then they all crowd around him, connected at various points – Max holds onto Dennis who holds onto Chris’s arm, Robert’s hand gripping his shoulder, Jonathan and Sandra each wrapping a hand around Chris’s other bicep, Trevor holding Annie holding Vanessa. Chris, wholly uncomfortable, hits something on his watch.
Vanessa’s ears pop. All the air is sucked out of the space they occupy, and something peculiar happens in the realm of her stomach, like she’s being flipped inside out like a tube sock.
And then they’re back on solid ground again, except they’re somewhere else–somewhen else–and even as everyone else releases, Vanessa keeps her grip on Annie’s hand.
“Hey,” Annie says, carefully extricating her hand, clapping it instead on Vanessa’s shoulder. “It gets easier, promise. A few more trips and you’ll be a pro at this.”
“Yeah,” says Vanessa. She tries a smile and finds that it’s genuine. “Okay.”
They go shopping, Sandra and Annie doing most of the actual interacting-with-people-from-the-past work, and once they’re kitted out and have done their crash course of seventies slang, they’re free.
Despite everything, Vanessa has fun.
Watching some shows, Annie scratches away in a notebook from the back of the audience. Vanessa joins her for most of them. Sandra and Max go off to party, and Chris presumably squirrels away in a diner for half the week they spend there. On their last day, they take two pictures: one gets tucked into Annie’s pocket the moment it prints from the disposable; the other gets left behind.
Vanessa finds the second picture after they film their Shakespearean play of the week. Going through old Cornley Community Centre boxes as an apology chore for Malcolm, and there it is, tucked between a framed photo of a horse and a stack of business cards for a gentleman who calls himself the Mind Mangler.
“Huh,” she says, running a thumb over their aged faces. The fact that it’s still whole, still in Cornley limits, is an honest surprise.
She gets it framed.
Half a year later, the Eggplant Men come a-knocking. Vanessa has been on exactly one time travel escapade. By the looks of it, it’s the only one she’ll ever get to have.
MAY 2022. 15 MINUTES AFTER THE END OF THE CORNLEY DRAMA SOCIETY.
Feverishly, this reminds her of Scooby-Doo, and she doesn’t even know why. Maybe it’s the line of hands, all of them clamped together like this is a horrible, mobile game of Red Rover, Trevor to Annie to her to Dennis, sprinting down the street like they can outrun whoever is chasing them. Half of Vanessa’s panic has been bleeding into her from the way Annie is holding onto her, desperate, and from the way she’s holding onto Dennis because if they lose him that’s pretty much unthinkable.
Mind swirling, she tries to decipher all the secrets still being kept from her. What did they all do to warrant such panic in the face of the time police? How has she been existing alongside, working with, loving a group of wanted persons? But then again: how else would they be here, if not through some illegal means?
It’s all too much. All Vanessa knows is that she doesn’t want to let go of this, even though the pieces of the drama society are crumbling beneath her fingertips.
“Do you think,” Trevor says, on one of their breathing breaks, hidden inside a copse of trees in a park, “do you think we can get back to my apartment?”
“Are they going to follow us?” Annie says. “Do they know where we live?”
“How did they know where we rehearse?” Trevor shoots back.
“Good point.”
“I mean, if Jonathan didn’t know,” Vanessa says.
“But they needed to find him first. We don’t go far from each other.”
Trevor thunks his forehead into the nearest tree. “Fuck. Bloody fucking shit arse cunt!”
“Alright, look,” says Annie. “Let’s go back to your place. If nothing else, we can pick up your watch and get the hell out of here for a bit, lie low in the nineties or something until we figure out a better plan.”
Dennis has been markedly smaller than usual while they’ve been running, but he perks up at mention of the nineties. “I haven’t been there yet.”
“It’s pretty cool,” Trevor says. “You’ll like it.”
Years of knowing about time travel and Vanessa still hasn’t wrapped her head around the way they can talk so easily about traveling to different time periods like they’re holiday destinations. “Come to mine,” she says. “They can’t do anything about me, right? I’m from here and I have plausible deniability.”
They contemplate. Finally, Trevor says, “I’ll feel safer after I pick up our watch, but after that, we can try V’s place. For a bit.”
“Maybe the others will show up too,” Vanessa suggests halfheartedly. It probably won’t happen; she’d both seen and felt it when Sandra grabbed Max and they vanished, when Robert did the same with a much less willing Chris. They’re off in the timestream together, somewhere. Vanessa pretends to hold out hope that they’ll be back when everything clears up. It’s easier than accepting the alternative.
No longer running but still holding hands, they plot out a path to Trevor’s flat and start walking. Vanessa grounds herself in the warmth of Annie’s hand. She’s always been a little bit of a space heater. “What about Jonathan?” she asks finally. “Would they arrest him?”
“Nah,” says Trevor. “They might try to explain away whatever sudden disappearances he saw, though, because as far as anyone knows you lot don’t have a clue about the time travel thing. But most likely they’ll try to get information on us and then let him go.”
“So, theoretically, they know where I live, too, and you’re not actually safe there.”
“It’s Jonathan,” Annie says. “He can be a dick, but he’s our dick. I doubt he’d sell us out like that.”
She grips Vanessa’s hand with just a little more strength than normal. “Yeah,” says Vanessa. “Okay.”
The walk back is quiet.
Trevor’s flat is cluttered in a way that still makes a kind of logical sense. Papers scattered about, but they each seem to have a purpose or at least a pile of similar papers, a collection of small portable speakers in the corner of the seating area, perfect cable coils scattered throughout the space. “Trev,” she says, irrationally afraid to speak too loudly, “it’s like you’re your own production company.”
“Well, yeah, kinda,” Trevor says, and Annie barks out a laugh as she heads further into the flat with no reservation. “Do you guys need to pick up anything? Or, I guess, Dennis, do you need anything before we hit V’s?”
Dennis lingers in the entryway, looking lost and sort of miserable. “A hoodie?”
“One of yours or one of mine? Actually, I think I have a Max hoodie around here somewhere, too.”
“Max,” Dennis says. “Please.”
“You got it,” says Trevor, bumping Dennis lightly with his elbow before also disappearing into his bedroom.
Vanessa takes a breath, looks in each corner and counts the cable coils–three in one, two in another, one in a snakelike pile on the couch–and sighs.
“Do you want to stay with us?” she asks Dennis. “I mean, apparently Annie and Trev are on the run from their own bosses, or something like that, but I can’t see that you have any reason to be nervous about the time police.”
Dennis is quiet for a moment. “They’re called Timekeepers,” he says. “If they find me and Max they’ll take us back to our own time for good and we don’t want that. Besides, we’ve been in proven contact with other travelers with personal devices. Since we’re still living here even though we’ve had the chance to go back that’s grounds for some sort of illegal thing.” His brow furrows. “I think. Max tried to explain this to me once. That’s all I remember.”
“Timekeepers.” Vanessa rolls the word around in her mouth for a little bit, pasting it to the mental image of the Eggplant Men. “Sounds kinda shitty.”
“Yeah,” Dennis says, this small, sad word, and Vanessa wraps him gently in a hug.
Trevor appears a few minutes later with a packed-full duffel in addition to his work bag, an I <3 NY hoodie slung over one arm that he hands to Dennis. Then he turns, regards his apartment with an almost wistful expression. “It’ll be fine,” he says, and it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as well as everyone else. “Be back in a jiff.”
“Hey, guys?” Annie shouts from the other room. “The, uh, the Keepers are here.”
Trevor swears so heartily he may as well be dead already. “Did you find it yet?”
“No! You said it was in your lockbox!”
“It is!” Trevor scowls at Vanessa and Dennis–though maybe not at them, just in their general direction, from all this perpetual inconvenience–and drops his bags and goes after Annie. Vanessa can hear them bickering, a low litany of sharp words as they struggle over where exactly Trevor had left their timepiece. Trevor pokes his head back out of the room. “You two go. If we find the watch we’ll find you.”
“Are you sure?” Vanessa says.
“They’re getting fucking closer yes we’re sure,” yells Annie.
Vanessa grabs Dennis, and Dennis grabs her, and she yanks on the doorknob and comes face-to-face with Jonathan.
“Okay,” she says, recalculating. And recalculating again. God, she hates being out of control like this. “I know this looks bad, but we really need to go. The people asking about them–us–are not good people, apparently.”
“I know,” Jonathan says.
“So you can come with us if you want but they’re on the way up and we can’t stay.”
“I know,” Jonathan says again. He takes a small step forward, filling the doorway with broad shoulders and a purposefully blank face. “I can’t let you leave.”
Vanessa’s brain stutters to a stop. “What?”
“I appreciate the lengths you’re going to to protect them. In any other circumstance I’d probably do the same. But you’re dealing with wanted men, Vanessa, I cannot let you leave.”
The toneless way he says it catches Vanessa even more off-guard, plus the use of her full name – she’s so used to the others calling her some form of nickname, Ness or Van or V or on certain occasions, Nessarose, mostly when someone’s feeling theatrical. Chris and Robert use her full name in professional settings and it’s normal from them, but with Jonathan it feels sour. He’s supposed to be easygoing, willing to play along, not – not whatever this is.
Footsteps clump up the stairs, echoing through the stairwell in sets of twos or threes. Sounds like a lot of people. “Jonathan,” she says. “Please.”
Pain flashes across his face, replaced almost instantly with the same poker-face as before. “I’m sorry. I have to do my job.”
There’s a triumphant “Aha!” from the other room, then some kind of go go go go and Annie and Trevor appear back in the main area, almost colliding with Dennis and Vanessa in their haste to get out. “I thought we told you to – Jonathan?”
“Annie,” Jonathan says. “Trevor.”
“What the fuck are you doing – no, no time, everyone go.” Trevor starts shooing with his hands. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”
Instead of moving, Jonathan looks over his shoulder and says, “They’re all here.”
The Eggplant Men fill the doorway. Spilling out into the hallway, them and Jonathan, at least six maybe seven – facing down the four of them in Trevor’s apartment. An unmatched front, one that looks like it could be further unbalanced by the outlines of weapons in the Eggplant Men’s pockets. Vanessa swallows down a dry throat. “Jonathan,” she says again.
Jonathan doesn’t look at her. Doesn’t say a thing.
“Ma’am,” one of the Eggplant Men says to her. “Step aside, please.”
“Uh, no?” The words fall out of her before she can even really think about it. Half her focus is stolen by the veritable wall of people in front of her, the other half by Dennis’s death grip on her hand. Behind her, Trevor’s swearing up a storm, and it would be ambient noise as it so often is except all of this is wrong.
Dennis’s hand is ripped away from hers, and Vanessa is so preoccupied with the loss and ensuing panic that she barely notices the Eggplant Man pick her up and haul her halfway down the stairs. She starts clawing at him one she snaps back to herself, catching her hangnails on the linen of his jacket as an animal noise tears free from her throat, and belatedly she thinks maybe this is an overreaction but just as quickly she thinks no, fuck that, and scratches some more. But the Eggplant Man is trained for this, apparently, because with each direction she kicks and slips he re-adjusts, never once breaking his hold on her until they’re at the bottom of the stairs and outside.
“Christ,” she spits at the man, and she wriggles a little more until he deposits her on the road. There are two more Eggplant Men hovering nearby. One of them stares at her like she’s a flight risk, which, rude. But probably a little accurate. Her brain is still running at two hundred percent, like an overloaded computer, all high definition details through a horribly lagging framerate. Flashes of anxiety and the growing sound of Trevor shouting obscenities at anyone he can reach.
“–ballsless fucking coward!” The front door to her apartment building opens and Trevor is spilled out onto the walk, stumbling over his boots, arms pulled taut behind him. “Not even gonna look me in the fucking eye, huh? Sorry, my monitors don’t pick up the voices of wankhead fucking traitors!” He’s screaming back at the open door. One of the Eggplant Men has an iron grip on his shoulder; he tries to buck them off, but just like the one who carried her, this man is unshakeable. Next comes Annie, raging silently–Vanessa can read it in the pinch of her mouth, the level of genuine anger that she’s only barely keeping a lid on–and then Dennis behind her, all drawn shoulders and blank eyes.
Annie’s rage surges in Vanessa, too–these are her friends, these are the people she’s chosen to love, her goddamn family. The bulk of the Eggplant Men come streaming out the door, keeping her friends in check, and after that it’s the one point of confusion. Or maybe she’s just refusing to see the truth here. Jonathan.
He leans off to the side to chat with one of the men. Vanessa catches something about clean-up and also mess in the apartment and then instrument and something else about the other one. Jonathan looks back at her. She squares her shoulders, lifts her chin.
Jonathan sighs, this performative, put-upon breath of a thing. “Get going.”
The Eggplant Men spark into motion, two each heading for Vanessa’s fellow fugitives as Jonathan picks through the grass towards her. The man’s hand disappears from her shoulder. She can’t quite move. “Jonathan, what on earth is going on?”
“I’m sorry,” Jonathan says, for the third or fourth time, like it’s supposed to solve anything. He rubs at the creases in his forehead. “It’s not personal. It’s my job.”
“Your job is to do what, exactly? You know these people?”
Jonathan bites out the words. “They’re agents. Someone must have filled you in. Was it Trevor?”
“All of them, actually.” Vanessa scowls. “How do you know?”
He looks her right in the eye this time, and there’s something cold and solid there that sends a wave of alarm up her spine. “I work with them.”
“No you don’t,” says Vanessa. Her head shakes of its own accord, the feeling of wrongness so vehement. “No, you work with us. You’re- you’re a mediocre actor just like the rest of us.”
“Better than you give me credit for, I think,” he says. “I need you to go home, now.”
“Bull shit. I need to know what’s happening.”
“You want to know what’s happening?” He straightens, stepping away a little bit, distancing them to an impersonal couple feet. “You’ve spent the last chunk of your life in the company of seven people who have been abusing unauthorised time travel technology, and they are finally facing the consequences of their actions. I don’t want to have to arrest you too. Go home.”
Vanessa has been truly angry very few times in her life – it feels so new, so visceral, like she’s lighting up from the inside and burning all the way through. She wants to press her hands against Jonathan’s shoulders or cheeks and hold on until it burns them both. “So it’s all been a lie, then?”
“If I say yes, will you step away from this?” Jonathan rubs again at his new friend, the forehead crease. “Listen, Vanessa. I have tried my best to get this done with minimal damage. Believe it or not, you all do mean something to me. But my loyalty is first and foremost to the Bureau.”
“Ten years. Ten. Years.”
Jonathan shrugs. “They call it a long con.”
Stuffing her hands into her pockets so she doesn’t punch him in the nose, Vanessa says, “So what now?”
“Now,” says Jonathan, “We go our separate ways.”
Annie and Trevor have switched ideas off to the side; Annie is now the one spitting at everyone near her while Trevor stews in silence, hunched and as close to Dennis as he can get. Dennis’s borrowed I <3 NY hoodie is a paradoxically happy symbol amongst the mess. Vanessa wonders how her neighbours haven’t been summoned by this mass of commotion, if the odd silence on the street is the agents’ fault as well.
“But,” Vanessa says.
Jonathan meets her eye. It seems like he’s trying for warmth but it ends up in the realm of cool impassivity. Firmly, he says again, “Go home.”
Inexplicably, Vanessa thinks, I used to be comfortable in your presence. I kissed your tongue on live television.
And then she just feels sick.
Without looking, Jonathan waves a get going hand behind him. Annie’s argument with the agents cuts off abruptly; the air changes and with a vacuum pop they’re gone. The last of Vanessa’s friends, off into an indeterminate, unknown future that she’ll never see.
“I’m sorry,” Jonathan repeats. It’s empty words at this point. Vanessa glares at him. With another breath, Jonathan fiddles with something beneath his jacket sleeve and then disappears as well.
So this is it. The end of what Vanessa thought would last her a few more years at least, a decade if she was equal parts lucky and insane – scattered off across the universe.
The sun is suffocating. She waits for a long time, tapping her toe against the pavement like if she waits for long enough everything will magically return to normal. Eventually she sweats through her shirt, and the resulting stickiness is enough to drive in the point: they’re not coming back.
Vanessa goes home.