Author: cardinalgirl
Rating: TEEN
Disclaimer: Not mine, never have been.
Summary: Alex Whitman is dead, and Tess Harding will do anything to set right what she's done.
Author's Note: Written for the Support Stacie Fanfic on Demand Author Auction, for drogyn. <3 This was supposed to be 500 words, but... well it's taking a teensy bit longer than that. Will be three or four [short] parts long.
Part One
What have I done? My God, what have I done?The thoughts were flying through her mind too fast even for herself to follow them. Tears blurred her vision as she raced down the road, but it didn’t matter much. She wasn’t seeing where she was driving, anyhow.
What she kept seeing, over and over again, was Alex Whitman falling. Feeling the connection—not break, but flicker out and die.
Alex Whitman was dead.
Oh please, God, no.
She kept hearing Kyle asking what had happened, hearing his voice get louder and more accusing as she’d stared helplessly at the figure he was leaning over.
And then she’d turn and run. She’d had the advantage, he was still distracted. She’d run hard and fast, and started the car before she knew precisely where she was going.
Please, please, let this work.
If she succeeded, this will have never happened. Kyle Valenti would never have looked at her like she was something terrible - a monster.
Please, God, please.
She was scrambling up the sandy path to the pod chamber. It was the only place she could run to. They’d be after her, looking for her, and she only prayed she could get this to work before they caught up to her.
How did it come to this?
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know, please believe me.” She was mumbling the words incoherently. She didn’t know who she was talking to—Alex, or Kyle, or even God, maybe, if there was one. Was there one?
She found the box Nasedo had told her about, the one hidden inside the wall of the chamber, and the long crystal that rested securely inside it. If there was a God, she didn’t know how he looked at time travel. She didn’t know if this would be enough to wipe away what she’d just done—even though changing that world would wipe this one off the face of existence. One whole world, to save a life.
Please, please let this work.
There were instructions, but they were written in the Antarian language—of course. Thankfully the flashes that accompanied her picking them up gave her a fairly clear idea of what she had to do.
Her tears were over now. She was too terrified to cry, too uncertain of what this next decision would bring.
As she placed the crystal into the granolith and was swallowed up by it, she concentrated on the moment she wanted to go back to. The moment she’d been lying to herself about for too long now.
For a moment, she was suspended inside the granolith, just long enough to see Kyle, Max and Michael bursting into the chamber, shouting and gesturing angrily—she couldn’t hear them, but they seethed.
She didn’t turn away from them. Let them think she was a murderer, a traitor. She was. She knew it.
And then their faces were gone, and there was only energy and light. It seemed to last forever, and she was starting to forget what was so urgent in the first place. She was starting to lose everything.
And then she hit the ground. Hard.