Chapter Text
Basically every piece of serious time travel media of any kind has the same message: don’t fucking mess around with time.
Matt had never been much for following logically sound advice, though, and Jay had always ended up tangled up in his messes.
He's used to that, but this particular mess is definitely the worst one yet.
The ordeal should have been over, when he’d fixed the timeline and then took himself back to the day before Matt had come up with his stupid time travel plan. He’d poured out their last remaining bottle of Orbitz and had done the skydiving plan again with Matt, leaving early enough to make it before the stadium roof closed, unlike the previous attempt. It wasn’t much more successful: they couldn’t get to a mic so nobody could hear them, and they were chased out into the street by security within minutes. They hadn’t managed to communicate effectively with anyone at all about their planned show at the Rivoli.
It didn’t matter; Jay was just glad that everything was back to normal. Matt was there, alive and unscarred, smiling at him like he always had, not knowing what Jay had nearly given up for an empty life of fame, not knowing that he had fucking died.
It was already almost like the whole thing was a terrible dream, by the time they stumbled home late that evening in the pouring rain. Jay distracted Matt before he came up with that terrible time travel plan again – though it couldn’t have actually worked again, at least, not with the Orbitz good and gone – and went to bed confident that he’d be able to leave the whole thing behind him.
Except then Jay wakes up the next morning after a nightmare involving lightning and Matt and screaming and blood, and it’s still the same day.
He doesn’t immediately notice. He’s up before Matt, and he has breakfast and then sits down at the piano to play. Everything seems normal, until Matt flies down the stairs at leaps onto the couch, shouting “Jay! I figured it out!”
Jay jolts, pressing down hard on the keys in a way that sets off a discordant shriek of sound. He nearly groans out loud. He’d thought they’d take at least a couple of days to recover from jumping off the goddamned CN tower before Matt had some other ridiculous, convoluted idea that Jay would inevitably end up going along with eventually.
“This plan is called the seventh inning skydive,” Matt continues, writing it on the board as he speaks, and Jay’s blood runs cold.
This is bizarre, even for Matt. “What?” he asks weakly.
“Step one –”
“We already did that, Matt, come on.”
“I haven’t even – what are you talking about, how do you know if we’ve done it or not, I haven’t even, like, explained the plan yet, so –”
“Yes, yes,” Jay interjects. “We skydive into the SkyDome. We go up the CN tower, jump into the open dome, tell them we have a show at the Rivoli tonight, I know, we’ve already done this!”
Matt’s got that stupid adorable shocked look of his on his face, jaw slack and mouth dropped open, eyes wide under dramatically arched brows. “Bird. Did you steal that from my head or something? I just came up with this plan this morning. We definitely haven’t done it before. Ha! Imagine! I would think I’d remember, duh.”
He reaches forward and raps Jay’s forehead with two knuckles. “Thunk thunk. Anyone home up there –”
“Stop, Matt,” Jay says, jerking back out of reach. His voice comes out panicked and too high, embarrassing, nearly cracking through like he’s a teenager again. He fumbles around on the piano and in his pockets for his cell phone for a moment before eventually finding it discarded carelessly on the shelf to his left amongst the toy figurines there.
Sure enough: July 10, 2025. It should definitely be the 11th by now – should be well past it, even. It’s been nearly a week since he’d first lived through the 10th by this point.
Fucking hell. He had thought it was over. “Oh no,” he whispers.
“You good, bird? What’s all this right now, huh?”
He looks at Matt, then at the whiteboard, then down at his own hands. He feels like he’s floating a foot out of his body. The desire to stay floating there, out of it, and to let himself be swept along with whatever is incredibly strong. He doesn’t want to face this, not yet.
“I’m good,” he manages, quiet. “Just. Nervous about jumping. Could be dangerous.”
“Oh, we’ll be fine, just you wait!” Matt exclaims, the concern vanishing near-instantaneously from his face. “Just trust me. You trust me, don’t you? Bird?”
“Yeah, ‘course I trust you,” Jay mutters, but he’s a thousand light years away. It’s Matt’s fault that he’s somehow ended up stuck it what seems to be a fucking time loop. Matt did this. He does trust him and always has, which is his entire problem, really. He shouldn’t trust him with anything.
He doesn’t bother to suggest going to the tower early. They end up on the roof.
He has another terrible nightmare that night. The next morning, it’s still July 10th, and they do the same thing again. And then again. And again. After the fifth time – or sixth, really, if the pre-time travel original attempt is to be counted, which Jay supposes it should be – it finally gets through his head that this issue is clearly not going to fix itself, and he snaps out of the wavy nothingness that’s been swallowing him for the past couple of days.
“What. The. Fuck. Have. You. Done?” he demands the moment that Matt tears down the stairs in the morning, shoving roughly at his arm with each word.
Matt tilts his head slightly to the right, lower lip sliding out in a perturbed sort of half-pout. “Is this about your sweater? Because I swear it was an accident –”
“What? No. It’s – wait, what did you do to my sweater? You’d better not be talking about the stripy blue one, you know that one’s my favourite.”
“Well, uh.” Matt scratches at the back of his neck, ruffling some of his hair up in a way that makes him look irritatingly endearing. “I’m not exactly… not talking about that one. Um. Look, I can get you a new one, okay? Like, an even better sweater.” His cheeks are going red, which makes Jay really want to know what exactly it was that he had done with his sweater. There are concerns that are presently more urgent, though, so he puts it aside for now.
“Not about the sweater,” he redirects. “Though we will be coming back to that.” He shakes his head, scrambles around for the anger that he’d been bursting with only a moment before. He can’t quite find it again; Matt often has that effect on him. The fact that he’d gone and died for him so recently doesn’t help, either.
“You made a time machine,” he says finally.
“Huh? Is that a joke?” Matt erupts immediately, before Jay can finish. “A time machine! Ha! Although, actually, hmm. Listen to this: time machine plan. We pretend to be from the future, we build a – oh my God, Bird. We take the RV from the backyard and we deck it out like the DeLorean in Back to the Future –”
“No, no, stop!” Jay has to yell a bit to get Matt to shut his mouth. “You already did that, okay? I know you don’t remember, but you did. You built a time machine that actually worked, somehow, Jesus, and we screwed up the whole timeline.”
Matt waves Jared away, and waits for the door to click shut behind him before responding. “Okay. Jaybird. Maybe you should sit down. I can make you some soup, yeah?”
Jay closes his eyes for a moment. His heart is starting to beat way too fast, making him feel kind of dizzy. “Matt, please, I know it sounds crazy, but I need you to believe me right now, okay? I don’t know what’s happening, but time’s all messed up and I’m stuck in a – like a time loop or something. I need – you need to fix it. You made the machine, you have to be able to fix this.”
“Shh, alright. Just. Bird, sit, seriously.” Jay lets Matt guide him to the sofa and press him down into it.
Matt sits next to him and sets a steadying hand on his knee. “Everything going to be okay. I’ll fix it.”
He sounds so certain. Matt always sounds certain when he’s talking about his Rivoli plans and they never work out, but it doesn’t even matter. Jay believes him anyway. Jay trusts him anyway. The panic recedes.
Jay draws in a deep breath, feeling his heart slowing and the dizziness ebb. “Okay. What do we do?”
“How long is the loop? And how many times have you been through it?”
Matt’s transitioned very suddenly and he’s all business, completely focused. Jay is so grateful for him that it almost makes him feel ill. He sounds insane, probably, insisting that they’d magically invented time travel, but Matt is taking him seriously, is genuinely trying to help.
Matt is always there for him when he needs him, and he always has been. The thought occurs to him suddenly with an overwhelming intensity, and he has to close his eyes again to ground himself.
Matt had gone and sacrificed his life for him, even. He had thought that Jay hadn’t remembered the proper timeline and maybe even realized that he'd just been planning to go back two days to save his own ass and he’d still been willing to die for him.
And now he believed him when anyone else in the whole world would just think he’d gone mad.
Jay can’t believe that he ever tried to leave, that he ever thought even for a second that he could live any kind of life that wasn’t with Matt by his side.
He drops his left hand down to rest on top of Matt’s right hand on his knee, fingers sliding into the gaps between Matt’s.
“Um,” says Matt.
“It’s just today repeating. Resets when I sleep. It’s been, uh, like six loops now.”
“And you’re only telling me for the first time now?” Matt demands, gaze snapping back up from their hands. “Come on, man. I’m the plans guy. I make the plans. You thought you could do this on your own?”
“No,” Jay tells him without hesitation. “I didn’t think that. I’d never think that. Honestly, I just wasn’t thinking much at all, that’s all.”
Matt frowns. His fingers wiggle under Jay’s. “Well. Good thing I’m here. You said we used the RV, yeah? You’ve checked that?”
“No. Didn’t think of that.”
Matt huffs out a heavy sigh. “Thank God you’ve got me in on this now, Bird. Come on, let’s figure this out.”
He pulls Jay up and their fingers interlock properly for a moment so that they’re fully holding hands. Still clinging on, Matt pulls Jay through the living room and out the door. When he eventually lets go, far later than he reasonably should have, Jay tells himself that he isn’t disappointed. But his palm is prickling in an odd, itchy sort of way, and his fingertips tingle.