Actually I wrote this story in Russian as a New Year present for a friend of mine, but after that I decided to translate it into English (thanks to Lolita Tides's encouragement!:)).
Special thanks to theviewfromhere for beta-reading and her warmest supporting words.
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The Guardian.
The only right he had was to watch.
Observers have watched human history for thousands years. They collected statistics, fixed data and abnormalities, exchanged their information in rare meetings, but they never, not for any reason, interrupted the slow flow of the common humans' life.
Fortunately, humans rarely noticed their presence. The Observers are very similar to people, and the best disguise is mimesis, or assimilation. That's why an Observer can easily vanish in a crowd just as easily as a single pebble on the sea-shore.
For a human being time is a line, a one-way road: no matter how hard or fast you dodge, how many times you take turns – there's no way back. An Observer can easily travel through time if it's necessary, and though his own life is only twice as long as a regular human's, time holds no particular power over him. In fact, an Observer almost escapes the aspects of the aging process.
Non-intervention is a law for Observers. They are candid, unbiased and it's this that makes them so different from humans. Feelings – these rudimentary, worthless ghosts, which live in every man's soul – are alien to Observers and that's one of the reasons why they die – unlike humans – strictly of natural causes.
August saw the bridge collapse. The mass of cars was slowly moving down into the water, big tracks were crashing little vehicles with their enormous mass. August was standing on the bank and watching the disaster through his binocular.
He'd already knew what would happen: lots of victims – most of them returning home after spending weekend in the country - millions of dollars in damage, the next several years devoted to building a new bridge.
The Hollises would die too. It was inevitable. August returned many times to this moment, because sometimes events may change a little (the space-time continuum does, in fact, exist!), but here everything had always been the same: a disaster, deaths and grief…
Christine Hollis was saved. Her parents were not.
August knew every minute of her life as if it were his own. Having seen her once on this gruesome day – Christine was seven years old – he traveled through her life, when he had some free time.
She is four and it's her first visit to the zoo. Some years later her skin will gain the perfect hue of apple-tree blossoms, but now her cheeks are bright red, velvety and smeared with cotton candy…
She's thirty six, she's carrying a basket with fresh washed clothes into the back-yard of her country-house to put them on the dryer strings. The evening's coming and the verging sun is shining straight into her face. Once upon a time August was watching flocks of pigeons flying up from the Piazza San-Marco. When the pigeons were caught into the light, their wings seemed to be shining from within – like a pearl. Christine's hands, now putting the table cloth on the dryer string, are faintly gleaming and August is reminded vividly of the pigeon's wings...
She's fifty eight and hasn't got a single grey hair. Her locks are still dark-brown, just as they were forty years ago. And she still loves reading while sitting in the café.
When she was in her early thirties, she used to go to the park with her daughter. They would read children's books, looking through colorful pictures of fairies and knights, and August discreetly watched as her fingers would absent-mindedly toy with her daughter's fair curly hair.
When she was twenty seven, she bought a ticket to Rome. August knew that her airplane was fated to fall into the ocean and there would be more than two hundred victims.
It might be fixed. He saw all her life – till the very end, and this flight was never meant to be.
The Observers don't break laws. Breaking the Observers' rules is grounds for very serious punishment. Breaking the laws can bring disaster in the human world.
August preferred the first one. Christine almost didn't struggle – the Observers are much stronger than common humans, so August quickly managed to inject a sedative solution while she was fighting in his arms. He kidnapped her in the heat of midday, as soon as she left the university.
On the way to a motel, August was considering the fury and despair in her eyes and frequently looked at his hands: his palms seemed to keep the tingling sensation of the female body, hair, clothes and her living warmth.
… he had to leave her. Just for a little while. The other Observers already knew about his actions and waited for his explanations. Besides, he should meet that scientist, Walter Bishop. He knew, he had to know what to do.
August tied Christine's hands to the footboard of a bed and left.
… everything happened as he had meant it to happen. He ruined the natural course of history. It was illegal. He tried to persuade the others that Christine was important, necessary, but all his words were ineffective. The Head of Observers told him that his mistake would be fixed. August knew what he meant: the man with a gun had already started hunting for the girl.
… he came back in time. She tried to escape, having managed to break the footboard, but fell on the floor and didn't have enough time to get released from ropes.
"Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?" Yet again he heard those emotions in her voice – fear, rage, despair.
He noticed big bruises on her wrists next. "You've hurt yourself," he murmured and looked into her eyes.
Despite her state Christine was amused: pale eyes of her abductor – lucid blue ice – were clouded with confused, shameful sadness.
She repeated her question.
The faintest shade of inexplicable emotion softened his dispassionate features. "It would be easier to show you."
He switched on the TV and she saw everything: her plane, sinking in the dark waters of the midnight ocean, useless helicopters of rescue squads, searchlights and endless death.
August had to leave her again. He needed to get advice from Walter Bishop.
When they met, the old scientist start telling something to him, something about his son, Peter. He even begged him… but all August needed was a piece of advice. Walter Bishop's mutterings were irrelevant.
"I need your help." His voice was like a sound of a mechanical toy. Walter Bishop asked him the same question as he had been asked before, what was so important about Christine, why it was so important to save her life. The pale face of August revealed his inner turmoil, but he could not explain his certainty, could not find an answer to satisfy.
But he's got advice. A priceless bit of advice – that's the human term for such sorts of things.
"If you cannot persuade the others in your conviction, than you must do something to prove it. You must make her important. And of course, whatever you do, you must be prepared to face the consequences."
August came back to the motel and briefly told Christine what to do. They had no time left, perhaps not more than five or ten minutes. While he was speaking she watched him.
August moved the mattress aside from the bed. A lean person could easily hide in the gap between the wall and the bed. He took the girl's hand to help her to hide in the gap, and Christine suddenly felt that there was something supernatural, seraphic in the sensation of his large palm spreading discreet warmth on her skin.
For several seconds they were looking at each other: a bald man in a black suit – the moonlight turned the natural paleness of his face into marble whiteness and his thin features seemed to be carved by a skillful sculptor – and a relatively plain girl with a mop of tousled brown hair. August noticed the moonlight splashing in the depths of her dark eyes and thought absent-mindedly that he would like to come back to this moment one more time – to see it again, but stopped himself at once: none of this would ever happen again.
After the moment was broken, he helped her hide and prepared himself for the assassin coming. August already knew that he was contaminated, poisoned with feelings. Living among human beings didn't come without side effects for some, this he knew. Everything was not just against the rules, it had never happened before. However, it didn't really matter by this time.
He managed to out-wit the system. He broke the rules and at the same time, he didn't do it. It never happened, yet it had.
The assassin was neutralized by FBI agent Olivia Dunham and Peter Bishop. August didn't see their actions, laying on the motel parking spot and feeling the life draining from his body from the dark blood trickling out of three bullet-holes in his chest: the killer used bullets on him, not on Christine.
September, the other Observer, who once had saved the Bishops, arrived and took August. "Who is she? Why did you save her?" September blinked against the blinding lights of oncoming traffic while driving away from the motel.
"I saw her many years ago." August's speech was slow and laborious. "She was a child… her parents had just been killed…"
August felt his vision blur and he had to close his eyes, to give them some rest, but he knew that he could not open them again once he had.
"She was crying. But she… she was brave."
His breath became shallow and uneven. September looked at him at the rear mirror. "She crossed my mind and somehow… she never left it."
Then, a long spasmodic sigh. "I think it's what they call 'feelings'…" He was hesitating, but there was almost no time left for him.
"I think I love her."
His last words sounded like gasps. He looked in the rear mirror; his eyes met September's. "Will she be safe now?"
September averted his gaze, watching the road. "Yes. You made her important."
There was silence.
"She is responsible for the death of one of us." He saw a tear roll down from August's dead eyes and felt foreign dampness on his own cheeks.
///
The following day the Bishops came to see Christine Hollis. Walter Bishop was both confused and determined.
"He, he asked me to give you something…" Christine looked at him with mild, sad surprise. "The bald man… in the event that he couldn't…"
The senior Bishop took out the shabby teddy bear he was holding under his sweater and gave it to Christine.
"My Dad won this for me playing ski-ball. I was holding it in the back seat when the bridge collapsed." She kissed the bear's nose and felt an overwhelming sense of loss and loneliness... as if her guardian angel had left her.
The End.
AN: Peter Woodward (August) is brilliant, isn't he?;)