A/N: This is my antidote to the oft-inexorable sadness that comes with reading The Time Traveler's Wife, even after I have read it before. To those who have insulted my fanfictions in other fandoms for being "unrealistic"- it's fanfiction. Live with it.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
December 31, 2006 (Henry is 43, Clare is 35)
HENRY: I am going. I am going and Clare is crying out, lips parted, red hair wild. The imprints of her fading hands cling to my wrists.
No, she says, Change it. Don't let it happen.
If only, if only. In this moment, there is everything I could have done, but didn't. There is everything I could have changed, if I knew, but like everyone else I am trapped in the constraints of what I have done, like everyone else I must live with my regret, but unlike them I am forced to live in it, over and over again. In this moment there is all of this, there is the little girl at the ice rink, there is the date Clare wrote on her drawing, there are the five nascent children in our backyard beneath snow and dirt and all the pain that could have been spared. There are my feet. There are all the stupid, wasted, minutes and hours of my depression, the hurt I gave Alba and Clare.
There is the stupidity of believing that this, this instant of fading into impending death, was inevitable. No! I could have been anchored, but instead I have allowed it to build, believing it foreordained. The anxiety, the tension, that preceded every slip into the capricious river of time is filling me now, pulling me down to drown me. I could have changed it, Clare's dissipating face is telling me, I could have, but-
Something is wrong. Henry, you great biologically inhibited fool. Why time travel to the moment of your death and not the moment before, to stop it? If, in the great circular catch-22 of sorts that is my life, all the dates that I time travel have somehow, somewhen, been decided before, why not prevent my death?
It is, after all, the Darwinian thing to do, and according to Alba's ten year old incarnation, I am destined to herald in some great evolutionary shift or something. So, why-
Saturday, October 27, 1984 (Clare is 13, Henry is 43)
CLARE: I wake up early with my bad dream still hanging over me. It was the worst kind of bad dream, where you remember it kind of, but not the specifics, so for the whole day you're jumpy and paranoid.
I hear Daddy and Mark moving around downstairs, getting ready to go hunting. Stupid idiots. I suddenly have the weird urge to go argue with someone over something, and the pair of them and their stupid hobby are the only ones awake. Besides, I am randomly remembering a conversation I had with Henry once, God, what was I, six? Something about animals having souls, and nicer ones than people. I don't know what exactly I'm doing, but I leap out of bed, the dread of the dream trailing after me, and run downstairs. The stupid dream just won't go away. Maybe if Mark and I have a friendly cursing battle, it'll help. Maybe not.
"Clare? What are you doing up?" asks my father.
"Why do you have to go hunting?" I whine.
Asshole, Mark mouths at me from behind Daddy's back. Daddy bends to fix his shoe, and I glare at him and mouth Asshole back.
"Jesus, Clare," says Daddy, straightening. "Not you, too."
Mama hates it when they go hunting and the comparison bugs the crap out of me.
"Fine. God. Go then," I snap.
They do. I kick Mark as he passes me, and whisper Asshole again as he turns to look. When they are gone, I start to make myself tea, enjoying the illicit feel of violating the sanctity of Nell's kitchen (and of using, even mentally, my new vocabulary words).
There is a shot, I hear my name.
Dread shoots through me, the dream returns with a vengeance: Alone, dead gone, alone, all alone-
I run outside.
Henry stands with Mark and my father, looking at someone- at another Henry- laying on the ground.
OhmyGod.
Blood seeps from somewhere- his arm- he disappears.
December 31, 2006 (Clare is 35, Henry is 43)
CLARE: Henry reappears suddenly, and blood is streaming from his arm- his arm? You don't die from that, not right away-
"Gomez, you fucking idiot, call 911, now!" I scream when I glimpse him standing and gaping. Alba is crying, Colin looks shell-shocked, Dr. Kendrick is examining Henry's arm, recalling gunshot wound facts from his internship, I am at Henry's side, praying to my old god in one long violent continuous river, like time, time, time, damn time, goddamn it to hell.
Death be not proud, you stupid motherfucker, Ben said, imitating Henry. Time, be not proud, go fuck with someone else's life!
Henry is grasping my hand with the hand of his good arm, both of us white-knuckled. Charisse yells that she will bring Alba to the ER as Henry is loaded onto a stretcher and I follow, ignoring the protestations of the paramedics. Henry goes where I cannot follow, but here I can follow, damn it, so I will.
January 1, 2007, just after midnight (Henry is 43, Clare is 35)
HENRY: Something is wrong. Something, something.
Oh, yes. I'm not dead.
Clare changed something in 1984. Clare did something she did not do. She delayed Philip and Mark- I, the other I, was already there, that didn't happen before. The shot caught me somewhere nonlethal.
But how…
Then, I wonder: Dead, would my soul time travel? Into the realm of Clare's dreams?
Dead, do I get to fuck with causation?
Or, somehow, were we deluded? Is this what happened all along?
CLARE: Oh thank God oh thank God oh thank God oh thank God.
Every moment for the rest of my Henry, I will know: this was not supposed to happen.
Every moment is a miracle.
April 23, 2007 (Henry is 43, Clare is 35)
The river of time flows straight for me now.
Sometimes, I get visitors from my past, and rarely, the future: Younger and older Alba's, younger versions of me.
But everything is different, yet somehow the same.
Clare is thankful.
I am, usually.
But every so often, when Alba has flown off, briefly, to elsewhen, I miss it.
And then I realize: Here I am, with my tea and my book, my red cotton shirt, my black jeans, and so much better, my wife, no longer waiting, and approximately 91 of the time my daughter.
And nothing, nothing at all, can pull me arbitrarily away.
I am content, at last, to just let the river of time carry me, slow and steady and straight, beside Clare, toward the horizon of our forever.