A/N: Since Square thinks that completely ignoring a few important theories on time and quantum uncertainty, and then lampshading their plot holes by making an enemy called a Schrodinger, is an acceptable way to make a story about time-travel, I decided to give them a hand and fix their canon for them. I have indeed unlocked the cutscene where Caius claims that there's no way to bring the Goddess back, but considering how much worse that makes the plot holes, I decided to throw it out entirely and pretend like he was just outright wrong.
This is going to be a multichapter fic.
Main pairing is Hope/Noel, with some side pairings including but not limited to Snow/Serah and vague platonic!Caius/Yuel. That means this is primarily slash.
After spending three years in darkness punctuated only by the appearance of paradoxes and short, desperate kisses from his then-boyfriend, Noel found he didn't want to leave. They had finally, finally found a way to time the paradoxes such that they could know exactly when a paradox that lead to a specific time would appear, and where. There was one that would take him to the Bresha Ruins, some four hundred and ninety-eight years earlier, just hours after he and Serah had left it. They'd decided he needed to end up exactly where the new timeline was going to start, Hope worried that him even showing up in another time briefly enough to find the nearest gate could set off a series of events that would ruin everything, again. He waited at the edge of the chasm that would spawn the desired portal, knowing he just had minutes to make up his mind to jump, and that in doing so he would probably lose the Hope he knew and loved forever. They didn't even know if the stupid plan would work, if nineteen year-old Hope would be able to traverse the timeline with him if he gave him a shard of the Goddess's throne, but they had to do something.
Others had been able to go back in time through paradoxes and use the gates there, in a world where the Goddess still existed, to return so long as they had shards of the throne; he supposed it was Lightning's final gift to them, she still had faith in them, so he had to keep going and hope that it would work for someone from the past as well. Vanille, Fang and Sazh had already tumbled through time to find Snow, and they were all waiting for him in the ruins. Dadj had been left in a more peaceful time with another version of Sazh until he was old enough to handle the danger they'd be facing. Snow had gone around the timeline until he found a version of Serah he could steal, leaving that time's Noel and Hope to each other with fake knowledge of a threat on the Director's life. The hunter knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they would start dating within a few weeks, and took solace in the knowledge that at least in that timeline they would get to be together. Maybe in that past they found a way to prevent the Goddess from dying, and saved Serah and Lightning too.
This version of Hope, something like five-hundred and seventeen years old but still only thirty by virtue of a deep sleep started at thirteen AF, would be left completely alone again. As the only one who didn't time travel through the gates, he existed in all the possible times when Noel could change the future, and it would cause a massive, unfixable paradox if two Hopes from different timelines were in the same time. He was at his lover's back, waiting to see him go, and the brunet didn't need to turn back to know he was silently crying. It was hard enough to lose a few friends, but the green-eyed man was losing everyone he knew for the second time in his lifespan. He'd done everything he could to save everyone, and even if he succeeded now, he had lost them forever. They could never come back to this time because it would no longer exist to them, and hopefully, he would be erased with it if they could change it. Noel didn't want to see him suffer for much longer, he was always the one left behind at every turn in the timeline they'd lived, and he'd just accepted it and pushed on with his thankless research to help people.
"It's time, Noel. Remember, if the other me is reticent to go, I give you permission to knock me out and kidnap me," he said with half-hearted humor before continuing quietly, "And remember that I love you, even if that version of me doesn't yet. Carry it with you, it'll keep you going."
"Thank you, Hope. For everything. I'll make sure this time it really does all work out, and you and I will grow old together in the world you created, with everyone else safe and sound. I'll always love you, in any timeline, and I promise to fix every mistake I made in the past."
Closing his eyes and letting a few tears slip down his cheek, he took the single jump necessary to send him careening into the maw of Pulse, the paradox opening just in time for him to pass through it, and into another place and time entirely.
Hope was more than shocked to see everyone just fall out of paradoxes an hour or so after he as debriefed by Alyssa about Serah and her time-traveling partner. To add to his confusion, the pink-haired woman was younger than she should have been, Sazh a little older, Snow appeared to be roughly the correct age though he suddenly had a brand again, and Fang and Vanille were the exact age at which they had crystallized. The group had explained that they were still waiting for another person, and when he guessed Lightning, a somber expression had made its home on their faces. In the world they'd come from, another time, Lightning was dead, and the world had fallen apart. They didn't know if changing history would bring her back or not, because she had been fighting in Valhalla, a world without time. Frowning, he wondered what he could possibly do to help them, he was exceptionally high-ranking in the Academy for his age, but saving the entire timeline and the Goddess herself seemed far beyond his reach. Everyone disagreed, claiming he was exactly what they needed, if all of them worked together they could change the future into one where everyone could survive. Any further explanation was cut short when the sky flashed and they saw something falling from it.
In a flurry of activity, Snow summoned the Shiva sisters to grab the figure careening toward the ground and carry them safely to the group. They circled around the person before taking hold of their arms and lowering them to the ground. The falling star was male, with the body of a runner and strange clothes, brown hair pulled back into a ponytail with hair falling in his face. Serah ran up to him, embracing him like a long-lost friend, and the others followed. The moogle that had come with them circled him once as well. The smile on the brunet's face was hollow and brimming with a deep sorrow.
"Hope, this is Noel. In another timeline, you two knew each other," Serah explained, blue eyes shiny.
"It's nice to meet you, again I guess," the silver-haired man said, offering his hand to shake.
"Yeah, it's good to see you again," Noel replied, a tear trailing down his cheek as he said it, taking Hope's hand.
"Is something wrong, Noel?" He pressed, green eyes curious.
"I left behind a lot when I came back, that's all. It's nothing. Is Alyssa here, in this time?"
"Yeah, she is, did you want to meet her again? I could take you to her, she's my assistant."
There was something sinister in the smile the mysterious man gave him when he nodded, and the cadre headed toward the tent where he last saw the blonde girl. She was altogether too friendly toward him, he got the feeling she either wanted to endear herself to him because of his position, or she was attracted to him. Both options made him feel uncomfortable around her. She bounded up to meet them, a grin on her face as she greeted Noel, who she apparently had just watched leave a scant four hours ago. He smiled back at her and handed her an artifact of some sort, telling her he wanted her to try it out for them. The brunet claimed it would let her traverse time just as they had, and she was all too excited to try it.
She replied that she would be right back, then disappeared in a flash of light. Minutes dragged by and the blond woman didn't return, drawing an odd expression out of Noel. The others looked among themselves, confused, and Hope got the strong feeling that they weren't in on this part of the plan.
"Where did you send her, Noel?" Serah asked, blue eyes worried.
"The void. She won't be coming back. You don't know this, but she did the same thing to us, once."
"So you sent her to her death, essentially," the silver-haired man asked lowly, disturbed that he'd do something like that.
"To fix the timeline, yes. I couldn't kill her, so you and I came up with the next best thing."
"But if you got rid of her, then the timeline I took Serah from-" Snow started, confused.
"No longer exists, correct. However, there are so many versions of Serah throughout history that it doesn't matter if we destroy a few tangents, she'll still have a reason for being here."
"I sure hope you two knew what you were doing with this plan," Vanille said as they all absorbed his words.
"Uh, sure. Of course we did," he replied, laughing.
"Really inspiring a lot of confidence here kid," Sazh commented with a shake of his head.
"Hate to break it to all of you, but no one has a clear idea what they're doing with this sort of thing…Even Hope and his team of scientists could only theorize what was going to happen. There was a lot all of you were left out of, we were worried that even everyone knowing about it would change the outcome. Speaking of, we should move on to the next step of the plan."
"Lead on, oh fearless guide to the timeline," Snow replied with a snarky tone, most likely antagonistic because he wasn't used to being ordered around by anyone other than Lightning, and even then he barely obeyed.
The man rolled his violet eyes and nodded, handing Hope a whiteish-blue crystalline shard and pressing their hands together onto the gate. He noted that the once golden-colored metal was scorched, he surmised it had happened because of the burst of energy from Alyssa's trip, but he would have to ask later to confirm it. It lit from within and as he looked over at the brunet, he saw the other begin to dissipate, Hope's own arm doing the same.
"Just hold on to me, everything's going to be okay. I made a promise."
Not sure what he meant but willing to just go along with it as they were sucked into the gate, he marveled at the place they ended up. It seemed like it was full of an amber liquid he could breathe like air, giant gears and rings undulating around him. Noel laced their fingers together to prevent them from drifting apart, worry in his dark eyes. It was a little odd to be holding hands with a man who was basically a stranger, but he had no idea where he was or what was going on so he let it slide, more concerned that if they weren't attached somehow he'd float away into another time and be trapped.
"When did we meet, in your reality?" He asked, looking at the other intently.
"First when you were twenty-four, then several more times throughout the centuries. You were with me at the end, you helped all the others find their way here. I…I had to leave you behind there. My only hope is that you cease to exist in that reality soon, if we can change the future for the better."
Pursing his lips, he knew there was more to that story, but let it drop. There seemed to be tons of things more important than his future-self's relationship with a time-traveling man. The others began appearing behind him, catching up quickly. Hopefully he wouldn't be blamed for Alyssa's disappearance when he came back, it wasn't like he actually murdered anyone after all. Well, he assumed he was coming back to that time, if not he supposed the issue would be resolved by the time he returned.
"Where are we going? Or, when?" He asked the group, assuming someone knew their destination.
"Five years in the future, where with some luck, you won't be. If our theory about time is correct, you will have returned after our time trekking that's happening now and went back to work in the past, right up until a few hours before we're going to appear, where you will have sent yourself into another time period briefly. This is basically a test run to prove the theory, nothing like this has ever been tried before. If we're correct, the older version of you will have left a message with your subordinates to expect us," Snow explained carefully.
"And if you're not correct?"
"We'll have a whole mess 'a paradox to clean up when we get there."
"What if I'm there, or another version of me? Will I die or something?"
"Impossible. Only you that could exist in the future is the you now, and the you now would know not to be in that time. I think," Noel added uncertainly, brows furrowing.
"Do any of you really understand time travel and paradoxes at all?"
They all shook their heads, and he couldn't help but think that wasn't very reassuring. No one here even fully understood what they were messing with, and it could cause the collapse of all reality or the death of the Goddess that created and governed it.
"You understood it better than anyone really, or, the you I used to know," the brunet replied sadly, glancing away.
"Look, we're here!" Vanille interrupted brightly, shooting ahead of them and into the future.
"There you go, let the kid beat you to the punch," Sazh chided as the rest of them filtered back into reality.
They fell in a pile on top of one another, Hope himself ending up sprawled out on his newest companion, blushing and pulling his hand away from Noel before standing and brushing himself off. The others did the same, with a few groans and irritated huffs at the rough landing. Several soldiers and Academy members descending upon them, saluting rather than shooting as he expected them to do.
"Director! It's good to see you safely across time, your older self told us you would be coming through the gate shortly, so long as everything went as planned," one of the scientists explained as he walked up and shook the silver-haired man's hand vigorously.
"Uh, thank you. Have any paradoxes occurred suddenly, any radio chatter on your end?"
"Nothing yet sir, we'll keep an eye out for new time distortions, but in the meantime might I suggest we return to base? You left very detailed instructions for yourself there."
Nodding, hoping he could actually keep which him they were talking about straight, he followed them through the area. A few monsters attempted to attack them, but Noel and Fang destroyed them before he could even get his weapon out. They moved in a similar way, fast and brutally efficient, and he decided it must be a Pulse thing, some sort of cultural muscle memory. Climbing the steel walkway up to the main tent, he noticed the way Noel walked closer to him than the others, like it was natural for him to be in friendly distance from the other man. He thought it odd, from his perspective the other should be the most friendly with Serah, if anyone, since they had spent the most time together. But there was something different about this Noel, he seemed older than Alyssa originally described him, which shouldn't have happened unless he remained in the same time period for an extended time.
"Noel, how old are you now?"
"I'm twenty-one, I existed in the distant future for three years consecutively trying to work out how to get everyone back safely. The others were able to travel the paradoxes a lot sooner than I was, since we didn't have to get a specific one. I waited for a year before the right one opened up after everyone else had gone. Just you and me."
"Sounds like it was lonely."
"No, not really. You were good company, and we were all too busy to think about things most of the time. But then, I lived in a world where I was the very last human alive, so I'm pretty immune to loneliness so long as there's even one person with me."
"That reminds me Noel, whatever happened to Yuel?" Serah asked, turning towards him suddenly, as if she had completely forgotten up to this point.
"Still in every time, as far as I know, though I haven't seen her since Caius died. I'm sure we'll see her and him a lot more as we're going back through the timeline to try and get it right this time. He'll definitely have something to say about that."
"I hope we can create a world in which she and Caius can be happy together, where she doesn't have to die any more than she normally would."
"And all of us can be together, in the new world," Noel added meaningfully.
"All one big happy family, right Noel?" Snow teased him, and the glare the brunet sent him seemed unwarranted, but he got the sense that the friendship between the two was strained at best.
"Yeah, just missing Lightning now. I'm sure she'll be thrilled to see everyone together again, finally get to attend that wedding you two lovebirds have put off for so long on her account," Fang agreed, smirking.
One of the researchers lifted a glowing crystal out of a box that had been placed on the conference table and handed it to Hope. For a moment he had no idea what he was supposed to do with it, but then it flashed and he could hear a voice, his voice, in his head.
"Hey Hope, it's you. I left this crystal to tell you that you don't have to go all the way back to 5AF and continue your work, just keep on the mission you're currently on and hopefully things will fall into place. By the time you read this, this version of me will be in the Void, I'd disappear once my tangent changes anyway, but I've set in motion the events that will need to happen before you reappear again in the distant future. Sometimes the intentional creation of paradoxes can be helpful, though Noel could tell you that. One more thing, and this is important; I can't tell you what's going to happen or how to prevent it because it'd mess with the timeline, but just…don't ever give up hope, even in your darkest moments. Good luck, Hope."
"So, what did you say to yourself?" Vanille asked, extending the vowel in the first word.
"Something that doesn't even seem possible, how can a future me do something that changes how he got here in the first place? For one, wouldn't I have to do the exact same thing he does? And for another, how can we stop something that's necessary for us to get to that point in the first place? Wait," and he turned to one of the scientists, "How long was my counterpart working for the Academy? I left in 5AF, do you know what time I returned to work?"
"Just a few hours after you originally left according to our records, sir. Why?"
"The other me said to not to return to my work with the Academy at all, maybe that's how he planned to stop his own timeline. He mentioned creating a paradox to hold the events that he created to reach whatever end goal we're aiming for steady in the face of changing timelines."
"Changing anything can create a huge disturbance in the timeline, we learned that from Yuel. The slightest thing caused her to see a new timeline and die. If you changed anything now, it's possible everything after could change too," the pink-haired girl explained, pressing a finger to her chin thoughtfully.
"I just hope I was right. I guess the other me is never coming back, he went into the Void to remove himself from the equation. I hope one day I'm strong enough to do that, end my life for the good of the world."
"You are, in every time I've met you, you were the strongest person I knew. But hopefully, this time around you won't have to be left behind or kill yourself," the handsome brunet man returned, voice heavy with conviction.
"So, you said this was just a way to test a theory, where are we going next?"
"We're hoping to go pretty far in the future, see what happened as a result of our meddling up to this point. If something else went wrong, which it probably did, we'll have to solve the paradox that caused the problem. After that, we should be set to go," Snow said with a broad gesture.
"That is if Caius doesn't create more paradoxes for us to fix. I'm sure he'll do his best to stop us, just like he did the first time."
"I know he's a human and all life is valuable and all, but can't we just kill him if-"
"No!" Came a collective shout from all of the other time travelers that cut off the rest of his sentence, momentarily shocking him into silence.
"That's the reason why the world ended last time, we can't let that happen again. If we do then everything we've done up to this point, everything everyone sacrificed, will be meaningless. I can't be the cause of the end of days again, once is enough."
"How did killing this Caius cause the death of the Goddess?" Hope pressed, knowing from the others what he meant by that.
"Within his chest beats the heart of Etro, and he ran himself through on my sword, killing her. I tried to stop him, but he was too strong. I'm sure if given the opportunity, he would do the same again, which is why I don't want to fight him."
Hope nodded, internally wondering why the Goddess would give an apparently evil man her heart, logically making him invulnerable and timeless. He was missing most of the story, he could tell that much, but now didn't seem like the time for asking. They were setting up an impromptu camp in the ruins near the operations tent, mostly just a bunch of sleeping bags set out with a fire between them. They'd all been in the wild long enough at one point or another to handle sleeping under the stars without a tent above their heads. For the first time things felt like they did five years ago, when it was just them against the world, the bonds of their friendship apparently strong enough to last centuries. The absence of Lightning sat like a knife in his stomach, their family didn't feel complete without the woman who was like an older sister to him, and an actual older sister to one of their members. As they curled up to go to sleep, he thought of something.
"You guys said that in the future, Lightning dies in Valhalla, right?"
"Sort of, she crystalized and became one with the throne of the Goddess…For all intents and purposes she's dead," Noel explained, purplish eyes curious.
"But Valhalla is a land without time right? So if she was ever alive in Valhalla, and ever dead as well, she must at all times be both dead and alive. So if we can change the timeline, maybe when we get to Valhalla and see her, she'll be alive. Technically, until someone consciously knows whether she's alive or dead, she has to be both."
"Well I hope that made sense to you, because the rest of us are lost," Sazh answered, echoing the expressions on the others' faces.
"Before getting promoted and transferred to Bresha, I majored in theoretical physics. The leading theory at the moment is that until something is observed, it is in a state of endless possibilities. This is especially applicable in time and paradox research. By the same extent, this is how the Goddess is still alive in this time even though she's timeless, and like Lightning, would have to be dead at all times if she died ever. That's why you can change history back to the way it should be according to you, and still end up with completely different timelines, outcomes, from one moment to the other. Nothing was technically wrong in the first place, the paradoxes you fixed were just unusual possibilities you made the assumption were erroneous. So long as time travel was possible, anything that happened was well within the bounds of reason, otherwise you'd have to admit you caused an irreversible paradox every time you entered a different time."
"He might be right, kupo. Otherwise every time we changed the timeline we would have disappeared like Snow. But we never went poof, kupo," Mog piped up finally.
"The little fella's got a point, every time you guys finished off a timeline's paradoxes, you should have went back to point A like I did and that gate should have been eliminated completely. Keeping them open would just leave them vulnerable to someone going back and altering things again, doesn't make sense," the large blond man mused out loud.
"I never thought of it like that," Noel replied, thoughtful.
He fell silent, guessing they all had enough to think about for the night. As it was he doubted he would be able to sleep. There were too many theories to consider, possible outcomes of their actions. The time traveling duo had provided a lot of support for some of the leading ideas in his time, but that didn't mean they were absolutely correct. He'd just have to hope for the best and wait until they reached the end of their path. Surrounded by friends that had become a family to him, albeit with two members he was less familiar with, he memorized the constellations while the dominos of probability toppled in patterns in his mind.