Causality: Part Five
2027
Sprawled on the couch in front of the television, Alison Guthrie flipped idly through the channels and found herself growing increasingly frustrated with how many were still talking about Denver. It had been a month since the astral rift had opened over the city--hadn't anything newsworthy happened since?
Alison bit her lip, ashamed of how selfish the thought had been. Four million people had died, and she was worrying about there being nothing else to watch on TV? But it wasn't that, not really. She sighed and kept channel-surfing.
It wasn't just the news that was stuck on Denver, it was everything. Everyone. Even - maybe especially - her family. She knew how serious this was, how important it was to find the people who'd done this and make sure they never did it again, but all the people she cared about were so tense, so afraid. She might not have any empathic or telepathic abilities of her own, but she didn't need them to see it.
They were staying at the loft in New York for a few days, "to get away for a while", as Mom had put it. It meant Alison was missing school, but that didn't really bother her. A few days wouldn't hurt her grades any, and things were so crazy at the mansion and the Academy that it was a relief to get out of there for a while. Spending some time in New York had sounded like a good idea.
Except that New York wasn't the same as it had been, either. Alison knew that nothing like what had happened in Denver could happen here. There were XSE telepaths keeping watch on the astral plane all over the world, and the biggest group of them were right here in New York, at the Tower. Alison knew that, because Dad had taken the time to tell her when she and Mom had first arrived, but it seemed that most New Yorkers didn't. Or maybe they just didn't trust the XSE to keep them safe--she didn't know which it was. She didn't want to think about it.
All she knew was that the tension seemed just as bad here, and the streets were so empty it was creepy. Mom had wanted her to come along to the grocery store, but she'd begged off. Besides, Mom was going out to 'taste' the empathic atmosphere as much as she was to pick them up something for dinner. Alison had figured she'd just be a distraction if she came.
Sighing again, she muted the TV and got up to get a movie out of the cabinet. There was a sudden thump from behind her - the kitchen? - and Alison turned, expecting to see her father there. Dad sometimes had a teleporter send him back from the Tower to here or to home--
But there was no one there. The kitchen was open, only an island cutting it off from the main living room space of the loft, so she would have seen anyone standing in there. Weird-- Frowning, Alison stood up and crossed the room, wondering if something had fallen over in one of the cupboards.
There were feet sticking out from behind the island. Feet wearing boots. Someone was lying on the floor.
Alison froze, and then dashed forward--only to freeze again, a shriek escaping her, as she saw the black-clad man lying on the floor. Bleeding all over the floor. Hands over her mouth, she stood there for a shocked moment, staring wide-eyed, too stunned to react.
#Al--# The voice in her mind was so weak it was only a whisper. #Don't--be scared--#
It was Nate's voice. Her brother's voice. But this wasn't--
The man rolled over onto his back, something that sounded like a whimper of pain escaping him. "Al--help," he croaked aloud, a pleading look in the unfocused blue eyes blinking up at her.
Blue eyes. Nate's eyes. "Nate?" she said shakily. But he looked older--it couldn't be Nate. It just couldn't. But it was. Alison realized she was trembling, and tried to stop. "Nate," she almost whimpered. "Nate, you're--"
Bleeding all over the floor. Bleeding. Lots. Gulping back what she was pretty sure would have been a sob, Alison whirled, grabbing the cordless phone off the wall and dialing Mom's cell phone as fast as she could.
*
Sam opened his eyes again to find himself in the living room of the loft, and mentally blessed the young teleporter at the Montreal base who'd deposited him back here so precisely. "Dana?" he shouted, his head whipping from side to side as he took in the fact that there was no one out here. "Dana, where are you?"
"In the bedroom, Sam," he heard his wife's voice, and he was moving again, almost before she'd finished speaking. The bedroom door was open, thankfully, or he probably would have torn it off its hinges trying to get through.
Dana stood up from where she'd been perched on the edge of their bed and moved across the room to intercept him, hugging him tightly. He returned the hug instinctively, but had eyes only for his son, lying still and pale on the bed. There was an XSE medic there, setting up what looked like a transfusion kit, and the tightness in Sam's chest grew worse. If Dana hadn't been able to take care of Nate's injuries on her own--
"How is he?" he forced the words out.
"He'll be fine," Dana murmured, drawing back. Their link was still vibrating with tension, though, and she avoided his eyes as she turned away. "I'm glad Nate--our Nate--" She stopped, and sighed. "You know what I mean. I'm glad he's safely in Russia. One less set of explanations to make." Her eyes flickered sideways to Alison, who slipped out of the chair in the corner.
Sam opened his mouth to say something, but was cut off as Alison all but threw herself at him. "It's okay," he murmured, hugging his daughter tightly. "It's okay, Allie--" It didn't sound particularly convincing. Inwardly, he was shaking as hard as Alison was.
"I didn't know what was happening," she said tearfully, clinging to him. "He looks--I knew it was Nate, but he looks so much older!" She sniffled, burying her face against his chest. "So I just called Mom, as fast as I could--"
"You did the right thing, sweetheart," he reassured her. Alison drew back, wiping away tears and then recoiling as she looked down at her own bloodstained hands.
"I need to go wash up," she said shakily, and walked hastily into the bathroom before he could say another word. Sam sighed. He'd go after her in a minute to make sure she was okay, but he had to talk to Dana some more first.
"Are you all right?" he murmured, coming up behind his wife and laying his hands on her shoulders, squeezing gently. Some of his worry was redirecting itself in her direction. He'd rarely felt so much turmoil on their empathic link.
Dana shrugged, almost irritably. "I'm not the one that was shot in the chest, was I?"
He let that pass, and waited. A moment later, he was rewarded. "Sulven was right, you know," Dana went on, her voice low but edged with something almost dangerous. "He reappeared at just the right time to get help. I suppose I should be happy to know that she was honest with us."
Sam bit his lip. They'd gone to Sulven for advice after the attack on the hive, only to have her tell them to do nothing. Nothing. After what had happened--
But the way she'd put it--they hadn't had much of a choice. You can't tell them, Sulven had said, forcefully. It would disrupt the timeline even further. I know this is a future you want to stop, but if you try too hard, you'll throw this Nate off his temporal course. He'll never get back to his own time, and if he gets lost, he'll die.
Faced with that, they'd done as she'd told them, limited their reactions to what she'd said would keep the change to the timeline within an acceptable variance. They'd done all they could to stay close to Roberto and his family, Stef in particular. And Sam hadn't told Nate any of it. He had, however, made him promise, on the day he'd graduated the Academy, to never let his TK shield down if he found himself in a Sentinel hive.
Apparently he'd forgotten. Ah should tan that boy's hide, ah swear--
Dana continued in that same quiet, too-controlled voice. "I was just parking the car when Alison called me, you know. Two minutes from the parking garage to the door. If I'd been five minutes later, he would have bled to death before I got here." Sam shuddered at the mental image.
If you do as I tell you, Sulven had said, I swear to you that he'll wind up where he can get the medical help he needs. Things are just barely stable enough to ensure that now. We have to be very careful.
It had taken almost a year before he could look at his son without remembering that day, before he could shake the terror that had lingered so stubbornly at the back of his mind. But Sulven had been so sure--and when Nate hadn't reappeared, he'd eventually let himself believe that things were okay.
He hadn't expected this.
"We should have told Nate about this the day it happened," Dana murmured, almost savagely. "And I swear to God, Samuel Guthrie, if you quote any of that tripe about acceptable variance and crosstime disruption back at me, I'm going to--"
"He's coming to," the XSE medic said, straightening and moving adroitly out of the way as a stampede ensued.
Dana got there first. "Nate?" she asked in a gentle voice, sitting down on the edge of the bed again. "Honey, can you hear me? Come on, Nate, open your eyes."
Nate did, but didn't look at Dana, or anyone else. He was staring off into the distance, Sam thought as he hovered watchfully. *As if he's looking for something--*
"Not right," Nate finally murmured, his voice appallingly weak. "He's--not here--"
He? *Stef,* Sam realized instantly, something twisting in his chest. "Don't you worry about that," he said almost fiercely. At the moment, he didn't give a damn about Nate's mission, the safety of the timeline, or the fate of the universe as a whole. "You just rest."
"Can't--" Nate muttered, and tried to push himself up to a sitting position. He managed to raise his head a little, maybe an inch, before he sagged back against the bed with a soft moan.
Dana made an aggravated sound and laid a hand flat against his chest. "Would you stay still?" she demanded, her voice shaky. "You nearly died, Nate. You have to rest!"
"Dad," Nate muttered restlessly, bleary eyes focusing, just barely, on Sam. "Dad--someone has to find out what he's doing--"
"Nate--" Sam started hoarsely.
"P-Please--" Nate pleaded, clearly struggling to stay away for long enough to get the message across. "Get--Uncle Nathan--or Aunt Sulven--tell them I can't--"
"I need to give him the transfusion now," the medic said crisply.
Dana nodded and stood, backing away from the bed to give the medic room. She reached out and grabbed Sam's hand. "Can you call for a teleporter?" she murmured, her eyes fixed on Nate.
"Yeah," he said. "To Jonestown to see Sulven?"
"No," Dana said, almost harshly. "To Eastport, to see Nathan." Sam opened his mouth to protest, but Dana shook her head almost violently. "I want answers, Sam," she almost hissed. "Nathan, I can MAKE give them to me."
*
"I told you he'd be all right," Sulven said.
Dana seriously considered smacking the older woman. Only the realization that Sulven would probably knock her on her rear for trying stopped her, but she was angry enough that she came very close to doing it anyway. "I don't think I want to hear any more 'I told you so's'," she said as clearly and levelly as she could. "Not when I'm going to have to go home and mop my son's blood up off our kitchen floor."
Logan reached out and laid a hand on Sulven's shoulder, and Sulven's mouth twisted a little. But she said nothing else, and Dana turned to Nathan, who'd insisted that she hold off on her questions until Sulven teleported herself and Logan here to the house in Eastport. Which had taken only a few minutes, admittedly, but Dana was not possessed of a great deal of patience at the moment.
"I want some answers," she said tightly, glaring at Nathan, who shifted a little in his chair, his hand clenching and unclenching on the handle of his cane. He really shouldn't have even been out of bed. At any other time, Dana would have fretted about how exhausted he looked, how little he seemed to have recovered from the drain on his energies he'd suffered repairing the astral rift over Denver.
But her compassion seemed to be somewhat in abeyance at the moment, too.
"We don't have a lot of time," Nathan said, that mismatched gray and gold gaze meeting hers steadily. "So why don't I save precious seconds and answer your questions before you ask?"
"Fair enough," Dana said through gritted teeth.
"I did know. I've known for twenty-two years, since the first jump Stefano made." Nathan didn't break eye contact, not even for a moment. "I know precisely where the two of them have been, and exactly what Stef is trying to do."
"Then why didn't you do anything?" Dana nearly shrieked at him, all of her self-control deserting her in an instant. Nathan had known all along that her son was in this much danger and he hadn't done anything to stop Stefano? "Nate almost DIED!"
"But he didn't," Nathan growled, his eye flashing. "In every other nexus window the two of them have visited, Nate's emerged in close vicinity to Stef. It took a great deal of effort for me to make sure he wound up in your loft today, instead of somewhere else entirely."
Dana felt Sam's surprise blossom along the link. "You--put him in the loft?" Sam asked, sounding bewildered. "But--" The surprise altered rapidly, into suspicion. "Are you doing this?" Sam continued, more sharply. "Moving him around, after Stef?"
"No," Nathan said, something almost pensive in his expression for a moment. "I'm not. But I can intervene, a little--and I have been. I've been trying to minimize the damage from all of this and keep Nate safe at the same time." He took a deep breath, as if to calm himself, before he went on. "I can't explain all of it to you--"
"I'm getting so sick of hearing that!" Dana cried, and then took an involuntary step backwards as Nathan's eye blazed and the air around him seemed to shiver. For a moment, she was almost afraid of him, for the first time in nearly thirty years.
"Listen to me," Nathan said, his voice ominously soft, "because I'm only going to say this once." He didn't look nearly as old and tired as he had a moment ago, Dana thought absurdly. "I swear to you that I am doing everything I can to protect Nate. But if we make any drastic moves to stop Stefano, we risk doing his work for him. The timeline has to be kept on course, or everything goes to hell faster than you can imagine."
His expression softened, and he reached out a hand to Dana. There was something so imploring in the gesture that she found herself responding to it automatically, reaching out and taking his hand. "Please trust me," Nathan said, all of the exhaustion back in his voice. "Just because I can't tell you exactly what's going on doesn't mean--" He hesitated, then shook his head slowly. "I'm doing the best I can, Dana. Some of this is beyond my control, but I swear that I'll do everything in my power to make sure Nate comes out of this all right."
There was sincerity there. Sincerity, and sadness, and a fierce, somehow protective determination. Dana swallowed, torn. She trusted Nathan, but this was her son's life they were dealing with, here.
Then again, her son would be the first to take the risk, if there really was so much at stake. She knew that, knew all too well that Nate had inherited more than a name from Nathan. The tendency towards self-sacrifice was there, too. "Your best is pretty damned good, I know that," she said shakily, her eyes blurring with tears, "but what if this happens again?"
"It's almost over for him and Stefano both, little sister," Sulven put in softly. "All circles end."
Logan cleared his throat. "I'm not getting a lot of this," he said bluntly. "I'm not going to ask, either. But I'm guessing that we have to do something to stop whatever's happening here and now, if Nate can't."
Nathan made an impatient noise. "I know exactly what Stef's doing here," he said. "And 'we' aren't going to do anything about it, Logan. I am."
Logan's eyes widened, just a little. "You are," he said flatly.
Nathan's mouth twisted in a bitter little smile. "I'm not doing anything critical to the timestream today," he said, and didn't elaborate further. But Dana knew that there was something else passing between them, something hard and bleak and somehow ruthless, that felt like a cold wind to her empathy.
She didn't ask. Her principled self cried out in protest, demanding that she speak up and drag whatever this was out into the open. There were too many secrets today, too many things being left unsaid.
But she didn't ask. Part of her was afraid to know what they were planning, and part of her didn't care, so long as it ended this here. She wasn't used to turning a blind eye to things like this. Then again, she'd never run into a situation where she felt the need to make an exception--
Dana nearly jumped out of her skin as every beeper in the room went off at once. Sam pulled his out of his pocket, blinking at it worriedly, as Sulven and Logan checked theirs as well.
"Damn," Sam muttered. "Red code." He looked sharply at Nathan, dread blazing in his eyes. "Stef's done something already?"
Nathan's jaw clenched, and he reached for the television remote, switching it on "--breaking news from UN headquarters in New York," a commentator was saying. "There's been an explosion here in the parking garage. No word yet on any injuries, but security forces are--"
Dana jumped as Nathan switched the television back off and threw the remote at the wall. "I didn't feel it," he growled, his eyes blazing again and the air beginning to shiver around him once more. "Oath! I was scanning for hot spots--I didn't even see a nexus window this close to us!"
"It's--he did it, then?" Dana asked helplessly, struggling for some semblance of calm as the tension level in the room increased exponentially. "He's changed history?"
Nathan was breathing heavily, as if he'd just run a marathon. The look in his eyes was well and truly frightening. "I can feel the branch point starting already," he almost hissed. "Stab his eyes!"
"Time for us to do a little timeripping of our own?" Sulven asked with a humorless smile. Outwardly, she was calm, but Dana could sense the emotions raging beneath the mask, and knew better.
Nathan glared at her. "Not 'us'," he growled, looking very much like he had twenty-two years ago, in Akkaba. "Me."
*
Stef wondered why he was still looking over his shoulder for Nate. Habit, probably. It was stupid. Paranoid. He hardly had to worry about Nate anymore.
His hands shook so hard for a moment that he stopped working and set the explosive charge carefully on the ground beside him. If he wasn't careful, he'd blow himself to kingdom come, long before his target arrived.
Sliding out from under the car, Stef cursed softly, clenching his hands into fists to still their trembling. The sick feeling in his gut remained, pulsing in time with the agonizing headache that, impossibly, was still building in strength. He swallowed, staring blindly straight ahead, his own harsh breathing the only sound in the quiet parking garage.
No time for a conscience attack. He had an ambassador to blow up. Timmins, the American representative at the UN, had launched his own widely-publicized investigation into the Denver incident, and the XSE's 'inability' to prevent it. His campaign had attracted a lot of attention--a lot of support, especially from the people who'd believed that the XSE had to be at fault somehow.
So if Timmins had died under suspicious circumstances, the victim of an attack that would seem as if it had been meant to silence him, the nascent anti-XSE movement would have had a martyr. And all great movements needed their martyrs, didn't they?
Is that how you class Nate? As a martyr? his conscience, unwilling to shut up, asked him acidly.
Stef closed his eyes, a groan wrenching itself out from behind his teeth. He'd had to do it, hadn't he? He'd been prepared to do it back in 2012, back on the command ship. There hadn't been a choice then, and there hadn't been a choice in the hive in 2022 either. Stef had known that, as soon as he'd spotted Nate running back towards the hive. Nate had to have been coming for him--to kill him, or bring him back to 2041, which amounted to the same thing.
No choice, he told himself feverishly. I did the right thing. I did--what I had to do.
Only he could still see the look on Nate's face. The shock as he fell, as if he hadn't known what had happened to him--
"He didn't," a deep, gravelly voice said tightly, from somewhere behind him.
Stef froze. No. No, he wasn't--no. It was just his imagination running away with him or something. The headache. That was it. He was hallucinating because Nate had ripped through his shields--
Anger flared into incandescence inside him, driving the pain back just a little. Nate hadn't held back, so why should he have done anything differently? At least he'd just shot Nate. He hadn't torn into his mind. Hadn't--VIOLATED him--
The explosive charge floated up from the ground, and Stefano cursed and grasped desperately at it. Too late. It was whisked away, through the air - just like the disk, back in the hive, he thought almost distantly - and thought Stef grabbed at it again, he managed only to wind up sprawled on his stomach on the cold concrete.
Foiled again, he thought, giving a cracked, shuddering laugh. "Are you going to kill me now?" he said raggedly, pushing himself up to his hands and knees.
"Don't be ridiculous," Nathan Summers said quietly. Stef looked up at him, seeing the explosive pack hovering in the air for a moment before it--folded in on itself, glowing fiercely as some unimaginable force compacting it more and more until it was nothing but a pinpoint of light that winked out as he watched. "But I can't let you do this."
Stef laughed hoarsely. His hands weren't the only things trembling, now, but he couldn't make himself stop. "Why?" he asked. Nathan started to say something, but Stef cut him off. "Why me? Why does the world have to stay the way it is? Why don't I matter?"
Nathan actually flinched. His expression hardened again almost immediately, but something weary and sad lurked in his eyes. No real sympathy, though. "You made your choices, Stef," he said.
"I did what I had to do!" Stef snarled up at him, tears trickling down his cheeks despite his best efforts to hold them back, to stay in control. Control. He'd always wanted to be in control, like his father, and yet things kept spinning out of his grasp, no matter how hard he tried to hold on. "You all--you DROVE me to this, don't you understand?"
"I know you've got yourself convincing that's true, but we didn't turn away from you, Stef," Nathan said somberly. Pitilessly. "You made that decision on your own."
Something brushed against his mind, gently enough that the headache actually faded a little, and Stef jerked as a series of memories, mostly from his childhood and teenaged years, flowed through his mind in a gentle river. Warm memories, most of them, but the later ones were fewer and farther between. Tainted with all the coldness and sense of isolation that had just grown and grown as he'd turned away from their condescending attempts to make amends. As if he were some kind of damned reclamation project--
It only hardened his resolve, reminded him why he was here. "Fuck you. I wasn't going to be the token human tagalong," Stef rasped, rubbing at his eyes angrily. "That's the only place I had in your 'family', Uncle Nathan." He drew the gun and leveled it at Nathan. Maybe it was an empty gesture, but how he wished he could pull the trigger and have it mean something--
"Put the gun down, Stef," Nathan murmured, and the pity in his eyes made Stef want to scream. "You know you can't hurt me."
"I almost did, back at the embassy."
"I wasn't sure how far you were ready to go. I know now. Put it down."
Stef's vision blurred with tears again. "All I wanted--was to be good, you know," he said haltingly. "I wanted people to look at me and see me as ME--not my father's son."
Something flashed across Nathan's features, a tremor of something that was gone again before Stef could identify it. "You could have been that, Stef. No one was stopping you from making your own life."
"You fucking hypocrite! I couldn't be anything in your world!" Nathan opened his mouth and Stef laughed loud and bitterly. "Your world. That's the problem. It all comes back to you, doesn't it? You're at the centre of everything--you're like a spider--"
"I held you in my arms the day you were born," Nathan said in a low voice. "I never wanted anything but the best for you."
"SHUT UP!"
In the silence, the soft chime of the elevator was all too audible, and Stef, still on his knees, half-turned, firing wildly in that direction as the elevator door slid open. Willing one of the shots to hit Timmins. Dead was dead was dead--
#NO!# His shots bounced off a TK shield, and something smashed him to the ground., knocking the breath out of him.
There'd been no time to repair his body-shield. No body-shield, no shields in his mind. Nothing. He had nothing left except his wits, and that had never been enough, had it? Not enough to get him what he wanted, not enough to BE what he wanted--
Someone else - Timmins' bodyguards? - opened fire. A shot ricocheted off the car door, just above his head, but none of the others came anywhere close to hitting him. He was on the ground, less of a target.
Less of a target than others, at least. Stef heard Nathan curse and looked up to see him stumble and fall, clutching at his arm.
Opportunity. Stef crawled forward rapidly, his hand closing around the gun he'd dropped when Nathan had knocked him down. He started to roll, bringing the gun to bear on Nathan again. Not the plan, not anywhere near the plan for this nexus, but having a plan hadn't worked for him yet--
He started to squeeze the trigger, and was pulled back into the timestream.
*
"Cease fire, damn it!" Nathan roared, reinforcing the order telepathically. Overzealous bodyguards, he thought, staring bleakly at the spot where Stef had been a moment ago. The world was full of them.
All around him, the timestream was shuddering from the impact of being wrenched back onto its original course. The branch point had died stillborn, but Nathan couldn't erase the fact that it had been here--or the damage that had been done to the cross-time barriers. He could sense the holes, like leaks in a dam.
This was going to take a great deal of time to fix. All the little tears that he'd have to seal--Nathan grimaced and closed his eyes, trying to summon up whatever reserves of strength he had left. The branch point had been averted, but that didn't mean his work here was done.
"Summers?" Timmins sounded appalled. "Is that you?"
Nathan tried not to grind his teeth. Stef might not have achieved his goal, but the near miss was only going to make Timmins more suspicious about the XSE--amazing to think that's possible. The end result could wind up being very close to what Stef had wanted, unless he took a little preventative action of his own.
"No," Nathan muttered, wincing as he took his hand away from his arm, putting pressure on it telekinetically instead. It wasn't that bad. Not much more than a flesh wound. "It's the Tooth Fairy."
Footsteps across the concrete floor, and Timmins came around from the other side of the car, staring at him with shock and suspicion written all over his face. "What the hell's going on?" the American ambassador demanded. "What did you do to my bodyguards?"
Nathan looked up at him a little balefully. "I don't like being shot at," he growled, and then forced himself to push the irritation away. This wasn't the time to be indulging in a fit of pique over what was basically an accident. "Nothing's going on," he said, catching Timmins' eyes with his own and easily bypassing the other man's rudimentary defenses. For someone who was such a thorn in his side, Timmins really didn't have a particularly strong mind. "Everything's all right," he went on, extending the suggestion to the bodyguards. "I'm not here. You can get in the car and go--wherever the hell you were going. Nothing happened."
It really was all too simple to be completely unethical, Nathan reflected, not for the first time, as he watched Timmins and his bodyguards get into the car and drive out of the parking lot. Charles would probably be spinning in his grave if he had any idea of half the things I'd done since he's been gone.
But Charles had never been in his position, either. Nathan closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillar behind him, trying to forget everything that he'd seen in Stef's mind. Nothing I did worked, he thought bleakly. Nothing any of us did worked. Trying to make sure that Stef knew he was loved, that he was family, had been the only option available within the timeline as it stood. Any of the more drastic courses of action would only have alienated him further.
Naive, to think that love could have been enough. Nathan's jaw clenched as he remembered a pair of little boys horsing around out by the lake, racing each other to see who could get to the end of the dock first. Sorting through Stef's memories like that hadn't been a good choice of tactics. It had only made Stef angrier, and it had--hurt, to remember.
Maybe he should have sent Sulven. She would have acted far more decisively, he was sure--but that was why he'd come himself. Sulven would have made the decision that Stef had to be stopped - which he did, he wasn't denying that - and used whatever means necessary. He didn't like to think that would have included lethal force, but he knew Sulven too well.
No, he'd been right to come. Wrong to be so slow, to let Stef slip away like that, but right to come. He couldn't let Stef succeed OR die. The timeline had to be protected, and Stef himself still had a life to live, a role to play. Even knowing what he'd done--would do to Clare in the future, Nathan couldn't ignore that.
Stef. Nate. What had happened, had happened. Nathan sifted desperately through the timestream, examining the permutations of events, trying to find a way out of this. What would happen was still going to happen, no matter what he did, but there was still a chance to save them both. There had to be.
*
"Nate! What are you doing!" Alison blurted out as her brother sat up and swung his legs down to the floor. "Mom said you had to stay in bed!"
"Don't shout, Al, please--my head hurts," he muttered, and stood, swaying on his feet for a moment before he made his unsteady way over to the dresser and opened one of the drawers. "I need a shirt. Can you check the closet and see if Dad's got a spare suit of body armor in there? I need to borrow the vest, if he does--"
Alison choked on her first response, then narrowed her eyes and tried her very best to sound like her mother. "Nathan Thomas Guthrie! Mom said--"
Nate stopped, and then actually smiled at her. It was a tired smile, but it reached all the way to his eyes. It made him look a little younger, more like the Nate she knew. "Don't do that, sis. It's frightening."
Alison set her jaw mutinously. "You're not supposed to go anywhere," she protested. "Mom called and said that Uncle Nathan was taking care of things--" She trailed off, her eyes widening involuntarily at how much paler Nate went all of a sudden. "I--Nate? That's not a bad thing, is it?"
Nate bit his lip, his eyes going distant for a moment, as if he was thinking really hard. "I--don't know, Al," he finally said, his voice very low. "I hope not." He took a black t-shirt out of the drawer and pulled it on. "I don't think Dad'll mind," he said, turning towards her. "Me swiping a shirt, I mean." He hesitated, and then sighed. "Alison, it's okay."
Alison squirmed, sticking her hands in her pockets and staring at her shoes. "Whatever," she muttered. "Just don't get shot again, okay? You scared Mom."
"And you," Nate said, coming over and hugging her tightly. Alison stiffened, but then hugged him back. "Don't think I don't know that, Al. And I'm sorry I did."
"Sorry has no meaning," she grumbled rebelliously, and then drew back. "I'll go get Dad's vest. It's in the closet out in the hall."
"Thanks, sis," Nate said softly. "Don't worry, so much, okay?" he called out after her as she headed out of the bedroom. "I'll be fine."
"You'd better," she tossed back over her shoulder, "or I'll kick your ass, big brother."
The vest was right where she'd thought it would be, but when she came back into the bedroom with it, Nate was gone.
2041
Clare shook her head, trying to banish the strange double-image of the timestream she'd gotten for an instant. "Weird," she muttered.
"What?" Harry murmured.
"I thought I saw a branch point--but there's nothing there," she told him, returning her attention back to Stefano's temporal path. Really weird, she thought, uneasy. It seemed unlikely that she'd imagined it - the feedback earlier hadn't thrown her for THAT much of a loop - but it definitely wasn't there now. There was some minor disruption, the worst of it already unraveling as she watched, but nothing to suggest that whatever Stef had done had suceeded in forcing a new timeline to emerge.
She noted the spot where Stef reentered the timestream, and started to move Nate there, trying to make sure the transition was as smooth as possible, fighting her own increasing exhaustion. It's nothing compared to what Nate's probably going through, she told herself wearily. I wonder if he'll hate me, after all of this is done--
She wouldn't blame him if he did. She'd done the right thing, sending him, but that didn't mean that it was a good thing. And she was getting so sick of manipulating people just because it was necessary--
Something reached up out of the timestream and made contact, before she could even begin to shield, or even simply pull away. #Rest, mi'caehla,# her father's voice whispered softly in her mind, the Askani endearment tender.
Clare could no sooner have resisted it, and the powerful telepathic suggestion behind it - telepathy, when it wasn't supposed to work across time - then she could have stopped the sun from rising in the east.
She slumped sideways, crumpling into Harry's lap. The last thing she felt was her tether to Nate being gently severed.
Then, nothing.
2029
Something was different. There were no images this time, no discomfort--barely even a sense of dislocation. The timestream flashed by him in an instant, and he was somewhere else.
He was in a car. He'd emerged out of the timestream into a damned CAR. At least it wasn't moving. Precision like that would be a little frightening, Nate thought, rattled, and nearly jumped out of his skin as he saw Genevieve Bridge sitting in the driver's seat and grinning at him in the mirror.
"Hey, Guthrie," she said, almost cheerfully. "You grew up cute."
"Uh--hey," he said weakly. Damn, his head hurt. He stared blankly out the window, noting that they seemed to be parked beside a playground. That was interesting. All of this was very interesting. He was going to focus on how interesting it was, so that he didn't have to deal with who was sitting beside him. I am the man with the plan, all right--
"Nate, try not to start hyperventilating," Uncle Nathan said dryly. "You already know I'm involved in this."
Nate rubbed at the tense muscles at the base of his neck for a moment. "Yes, I do," he finally said, as calmly as he could manage. Clare couldn't possibly have intended for him to appear here; it made no sense. This had to be Uncle Nathan's doing. "Should you be? Taking an interest, I mean?"
"The answer to that question would depend on who you ask," Nathan said.
Typically obscure answer. Nate took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and finally looked at Uncle Nathan. His godfather looked considerably older than he had back at the embassy - we're still moving forward, then, - but that edge of fatigue Nate had almost always sensed in him wasn't there. He looks--I've seen him like this before, Nate thought suddenly. There was an aura of barely-contained power about him, filling the whole car--
"Personally," Uncle Nathan continued, more matter-of-factedly, "I think the price is worth paying."
From the front seat, Genevieve gave a long-suffering sigh. "I smell temporal physics in the air," she said drolly. "This is going to be one of those conversations I'm not going to remember I was privy to, isn't it?" She didn't sound particularly upset about it. Then again, with how much time she'd spent around Uncle Nathan, she must have been used to these little--compromises. Uncle Nathan raised an eyebrow, and Genevieve's reflected grin was almost wicked.
"Read your paper, Gen," Uncle Nathan murmured dryly, but any humor in his eyes fled rapidly as he turned back to Nate. "I owe you an apology," he said somberly. "Or I would, if I thought there was any point in one." Nate shook his head, not understanding, and a mirthless smile flickered across Uncle Nathan's features. "I had two chances to stop Stef, and I didn't."
Two chances? The embassy, and whatever had happened in the last nexus window. Nate shrugged uncomfortably. He still didn't know what Stef had been planning there. It bothered him--the not knowing.
"After a while," Uncle Nathan went on, sounding troubled, "you focus so much on the forest that you lose sight of the trees." He shook his head almost irritably. "Do you know what it's like to feel a branch point forming where it shouldn't?"
The breath caught in Nate's throat. "Branch points?" he asked weakly. "He--there were branch points? I thought--" He stopped, fighting back the surge of panic at the thought. Branch points. Stef had succeeded? He thought of Clare in 2041, trying to deal with the distortion. She said she couldn't fix branch points--damn it, this is my fault! I was supposed to stop him from creating them in the first place--
"Nate!" Uncle Nathan said sharply. Nate wrenched his thoughts out of their despairing loop and stared at him, almost fearfully. "There was almost a branch point at the embassy in 2016," he said crisply. "The changes weren't significant enough, and events stayed pretty much on track." His smile was wintry. "There WAS a branch point two years ago at the UN, though. I had to jump back half an hour to stop it. Stef was trying to kill Timmins--not that I have any real problem with the concept in general, but it was inconvenient at that particular moment." Nate looked away, and his godfather sighed. "Stop kicking yourself in the ass. You did everything you could. Accidents happen, that's all."
Nate choked on a semi-hysterical laugh. "Accidents," he said shakily. "Oh, that's one way to put it--"
"I think your mother cursed you when she named you," Uncle Nathan muttered, and then shook his head again when Nate looked back at him. "Bad joke, never mind. I want you to settle down," he said, calmly but forcefully. "We have to talk, Nate. I can't keep you here for long."
Nate swallowed, nodding jerkily. "Okay," he said hoarsely. Uncle Nathan was right. They had to focus on what was happening now. The present, not the past.
"Present, past, future," Uncle Nathan said, and leaned back against the seat, giving an irritable shrug. "I'm not sure there's any difference, sometimes." He tilted his head slightly, studying Nate. "Sacrificing the future for the present isn't any way to get what you want. You always wind up giving away what you don't know you'll eventually need. I wish Stef had realized that."
"I'm--not following," Nate said, lost. Maybe it was the headache. "Stef sacrificed the future for the present?"
"His future," Uncle Nathan said and leaned back against the seat with a sigh. "He's trying very hard to sacrifice his own future. 'I want the world and I want it now'. It all comes down to a lack of imagination, you know. He's looking for the easy way," he said, an almost bitter note in his voice. "The magic wand. So he never bothered to explore other options."
It made a bizarre, marginal sort of sense. Nate didn't bother asking for more details. This was definitely straying into one of those areas that he knew Uncle Nathan wasn't going to give him any details about. "Is this a nexus window?" he asked, for lack of anything else to say.
"Two days prior to one, actually." Uncle Nathan gave him a strange look, half-thoughtful, half-resigned. "Do you trust me?"
The non sequitur caught Nate off-guard. "Of course I do," he said instinctively. "You know that."
Uncle Nathan's smile was smaller this time, but much more sincere. It was a sad smile, though, and seeing it set off little alarm bells for Nate. There was regret there--but for what?
"This next nexus window isn't the last one on Stef's list, but it's going to be the last he visits," Uncle Nathan said, in what Nate recognized instantly as his lecturer's voice. He'd heard it at the Academy countless times. "He doesn't realize that, because he doesn't understand exactly what he's getting himself into this time."
The alarm bells started to ring a little more loudly. "What's the date?" Nate asked sharply.
"2029. The eighth of September."
"Oh."
There wasn't much chance that he'd ever forget that date. Not when he'd been there, in a New York gone mad. Not when he'd been a witness to a battle--a duel very nearly as critical as the one between Nathan and Apocalypse in Akkaba.
On the tenth of September, 2029, Amahl Farouk had come back out into the open.
And all hell had broken loose. Literally.
"You--know what's going to happen?" Nate asked hesitantly. Uncle Nathan raised an eyebrow at him, and Nate sighed. "All right. Stupid question." That raised another, though--
"Why didn't I stop it?" Nate nodded, and Uncle Nathan shook his head. "Contrary to the belief you all seem to have, I am not temporally omniscient. I may be able to perceive something, but that doesn't mean that my all-too-human brain is going to process it in time to let me do anything constructive about it." His gaze turned distant and contemplative. "Some things are too big for me to see in their entirety. I've been chasing--hints and whispers for years, now, trying to find Farouk." He seemed to refocus on Nate all of a sudden, and his voice went cold as he continued. "Part of the price I paid for the Merge was my ability to live in the shadows. I'm a linchpin now, whether I like it or not, and that limits me. Farouk, for all of his flaws, hides very well. But I can feel him coming. I know he'll be waiting for me."
"And you won't have time to be worrying about Stef," Nate said slowly. It all made sense, after all. The pieces came together--not into a particularly palatable picture, but it was a coherent one. And here I thought Stef was playing with the fate of the world when he was trying to sabotage the Cairo conference and talking to Sentinels. The implications of this, of interference on that particular day, were terrifying.
"To put it mildly," Uncle Nathan nodded. "This time, if I try to worry about the trees, the forest's going to swallow the world whole." He hesitated for a moment. "Stef's shields are gone," he said, almost awkwardly. "You finished them off back in 2022. He'll have no protection." Numbly, Nate nodded. "That will only make him more dangerous," Uncle Nathan warned.
"I know that," Nate murmured, and steeled himself to ask the necessary question. "Are you telling me to kill him?"
"No," Uncle Nathan said, so definitively that Nate sagged in relief. "I'm telling you that you have to stop him."
"Then tell me how I'm supposed to get us both out of this," Nate said almost desperately. "Please, Uncle Nathan." He gave an uneven laugh. "I'm having a hard time seeing anything clearly, anymore."
"You're looking at me as if you expect me to come up with a miracle," Uncle Nathan said, after a long pause. His gaze was uncomfortably direct again. "What's the first thing I taught you about time-travel?"
"What is, is," Nate said instantly. Uncle Nathan said nothing, clearly expecting more, so Nate elaborated. "What happened, happened. You can change things, but you can't erase them." An event could be--marginalized, pushed farther and farther out of sync with a timeline until it was nothing but a shadow, but it didn't negate that event's existence. Uncle Nathan himself was the best example of that, Nate thought suddenly, meeting his godfather's gaze steadily. Just because there was a new future forming for this timeline didn't mean that the fall of the Clan Chosen and everything else hadn't happened. "What are you trying to tell me?" he asked, as calmly as he could.
Not unsurprisingly, Uncle Nathan evaded a direct answer. "Make me a promise," he said firmly, and then actually smiled. "Remember it, this time. Not like the one about the TK shield and the Sentinel hive."
Nate coughed, imagining that he was probably going to hear about that from his father, once he was back in 2041 and could be safely yelled at without jeopardizing the timeline. "All right."
"Stef is carrying a stabilizer unit, on his belt. A little square metal box." The image of it flashed into Nate's mind. "Stop him, Nate. But no matter what happens then, grab him, smash the stabilizer unit, and hold on. Don't let go." Uncle Nathan leaned towards him, intensity in his eyes like Nate had never seen there before. This was the Nathan Summers that few of them had ever seen, he realized; the one who'd faced Apocalypse across the sand that night in Akkaba. "Promise me. I scanned the timestream, examined every possibility, and that's the only way out of this."
"All right," Nate said softly. One chance, with death or disaster - or both - lurking on either side. Not great odds, but he could deal with that.
Uncle Nathan seemed to relax a little. "Stef still has a role to play. What the rest of us did, how we reacted to having all of this happen, could still make enough of a difference." His smile, this time, was strained. "Change a heart, change the world."
"Optimistic," Nate muttered, his throat tight suddenly. "I've--made a mess of this, haven't I?"
Uncle Nathan shook his head, almost vehemently. "No. It had to be you. Clare's instincts were solid, even if she didn't understand why."
The why of any situation-- "You said you managed to avoid the one branch point, and circumvent the other," Nate said abruptly, trying to distract himself. Reaching out for more information, not knowing whether or not Uncle Nathan would give it to him. It was worth a try, at least. "Could you have fixed--others?"
"You mean, was it necessary for you to come back after him in the first place?" Uncle Nathan said. "I may have managed to fix the one actual branch point he caused, but I've been repairing the holes in the cross-time fabric ever since. I still am." He smiled thinly. "The more branch points, the more holes. Eventually, I would have missed one."
"And then?"
"You're sure you want to know?"
Nate nodded, and then closed his eyes as he was sucked into a thundering river of images. Their world, but different, and he saw through Nathan's eyes that these were real, 'natural' cross-time possibilities, alternate timelines that existed independent of any cross-temporal meddling.
He saw Shi'ar starships, a battle fleet, coming to Earth, and knew, with the sort of certainty he realized had to come from Nathan, not him, that this was all but inevitable. The war lurked along the timestream, present in countless alternate worlds as well as their own--
And everywhere he looked, he saw Clare, laying her hands on the M'Kraan crystal. The light, Nate thought faintly. That was the light he'd seen washing over her in the image that had come to him in the timestream.
There were only two endings he saw for that moment. Success or failure. Transcendence or defeat. He thought, distantly, that he recognized his Clare, and saw her soar above the dust of an alien world, transfigured.
But there were worlds where she failed, where the M'Kraan crystal raged unchecked across the universe, destroying everything that it touched in a crystal wave that reminded him of something his father had told him about, a near-catastrophe that had been inexplicably averted, years before the Merge.
Those timelines died. And the crystal wave bled through the tiny holes Stef's manipulation could have--would have--torn in the fabric of reality. The disaster spread like a shimmering plague, racing across other words, destroying everything--
The images stopped, and Nate reeled back against the seat, staring in shock at Uncle Nathan, who gazed back at him calmly, the corner of his mouth quirking upwards in what really wasn't a smile. "You see now?" he asked.
"Yes," Nate breathed, shaken badly by what he'd seen. The Shi'ar, coming to Earth in force--the M'Kraan crystal and Clare? It was all fading now, dissolving back into scattered images that refused to be assembled into a coherent whole, and Nate grasped at them frantically, willing himself to remember.
"It's down the road a little," Uncle Nathan said quietly. "Focus on today, Nate." He leaned forward again, that strange smile still lingering on his lips. "There's an exception to every rule. The branch points that Stef created weren't meant to be. They're artificial, and the timestream WANTS to reject them."
"I don't--understand," Nate said a little hazily, swallowing as a wave of dizziness hit him. Was the car starting to go transparent around him, or was he just seeing things?
#I try not to personify the timestream too much,# Uncle Nathan's voice said in his mind as everything started to shimmer, dissolving into color. #It's a bad habit of mine. But let's just say that it's looking for someone to do it a favor, and it doesn't necessarily insist that you be chrono-variant. The loophole's there, Nate. Use it.#
He fell back into the timestream.
to be continued...
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