When Hiro takes a trip through time and accidentally ends up in 1976, he meets one Daniel Faraday, and unwittingly changes everything. Why Faraday changed his mind about whatever happened, happened. Takes place pre- "The Variable" and pre- "Tabula Rasa".
Disclaimer: I do not own Daniel Faraday, Hiro Nakamura, Heroes, or Lost... unfortunately.
A Chance Encounter
A street corner. A few cars driving past. Buildings that were neither very small nor very large. A number of pedestrians walking along the sidewalks and across the street.
This was definitely not Tokyo.
"Uh oh."
Hiro Nakamura turned in a slow circle, taking in his surroundings with worried eyes. He was in what could be classified as either a big town, or a small city, by the looks of things. But where – and when – he was not sure.
Easy enough fix. He closed his eyes again, concentrating with all his might on his intended destination. After a long, anticlimactic minute, he reopened them tentatively, fearing that it hadn't worked.
His fears were confirmed. The street corner had not changed.
"Oh no," he said again, voice small. Where am I?
He glanced around, and spotted a man walking down the sidewalk away from him. Hiro shrugged; there was one way to find out… He hurried after the man.
~o~o~
"Excuse me, sir." Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and Daniel Faraday stopped walking; he turned to see a short, Asian man with glasses looking curiously up at him.
"Yes?"
"Could you tell me what today is?" His accent was pronounced, but his English was good.
"Er, it's Tuesday," Daniel replied slowly. There was something strange about this man, something that Daniel couldn't quite put his finger on…
The man shook his head. "No, the date."
Oh. "September sixteenth." The man kept staring at him expectantly, waiting. For what? Daniel had no idea; he just stared back.
"What year?" the man asked after a long minute, his tone encouraging and yet conveying an unspoken duh, as if it should have been obvious.
Who doesn't know the year? "Nineteen seventy-six," he said anyway.
The man muttered something that sounded like "Great-o Scott-o," followed by a stream of some Asian language that Daniel had no chance of understanding.
He stared at the man awkwardly. "Er, are you alright?"
The man looked back up at him, eyes worried behind those rectangular lenses, and Daniel again got that nagging feeling that something about this man was strange, and yet familiar…
"Yes, I am fine. Thank you," he said, sounding anything but fine; he tried for a smile, and started to walk away.
Daniel scratched his head and stared after the man, confused and curious. He was about to shrug off the odd encounter and walk away himself when something gave him pause. The man had pulled an object out of his pocket which made Daniel's eyes widen in shock.
He blinked and did a double take, sure he must have been imagining things. But the object was still there, held absentmindedly in the man's left hand while he continued rooting through his various pockets with the right one.
It was a cell phone.
No way. It just wasn't possible. This was nineteen seventy-six. Cell phones – especially ones like that – didn't exist, and would not exist for some time yet. That phone… it was modern. Or, rather, futuristic, Daniel amended himself. The point was, though, it just couldn't exist.
And that was when he realized why the man had seemed so strange. He was dressed like someone out of the two-thousands, not like someone from the nineteen-seventies. The glasses in particular were to sleek, too modern. Not modern, futuristic.
Before he had stopped to think on what he was doing, Daniel found himself to be jogging up to the man. This time it was Daniel doing the shoulder-tapping.
"Excuse me," he said, and then paused, not really knowing how to continue. What do I say, 'hey, are you from the future?' I'll sound like a lunatic. And so he settled for, "I like your cell phone." Which, admittedly, sounded very lame.
The man looked around at him, brow crinkled. His gaze shot from Daniel to the phone and back again; he looked suddenly very guilty and hastened to pocket the device.
"No, wait," Daniel exclaimed, seized by a sudden desire. "Can I see it?"
The man hesitated, but then proffered the sleek little phone to Daniel. "You know what it is?" he queried, looking very surprised.
Daniel turned the phone over in his hand, flipped it open, watched the screen light up. He suddenly missed his own cell phone, and all of the other wonderful gadgets of his own time period. "Yeah," he murmured in response. "Yeah, I haven't seen one of these in a long time…"
"Are you from the future, too?"
Now it was Daniel's turn to look up in surprise. What on earth…? "Er, what?" he asked tentatively. I can't have heard him right.
The Asian man had a smile the size of Texas, and his tone conveyed pure and simplistic joy. "My name is Hiro Nakamura. I am from the future. And you are from the future too?"
Guess I did hear him right… But how is that even possible? He can't be serious… But he does have a cell phone, and those don't even exist yet… "Um, yeah, actually, I am," Daniel found himself confessing. "My name's Daniel Faraday. But how –"
He was cut off as the man – Hiro – rambled on excitedly. "You must have an ability, like me! I have never met another time traveler."
Daniel's brow furrowed in confusion. "Time traveler?"
But Hiro was undaunted by his bewilderment. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "I travel, through time and space. You must, too! Right?" He looked to Daniel expectantly.
"Um, no." The physicist shook his head. "I'm not a time traveler."
"But you said you were from the future." Hiro seemed bothered, and disappointed. "You recognize my cell phone!"
"It's… complicated," Daniel admitted.
"Complicated?"
"Yeah…"
"How? If you can't travel through time, how are you from the future?"
"Do you have a couple of years to listen?" Daniel asked doubtfully; it really was a long story. When Hiro looked as if he thought Daniel was serious, the physicist shook his head. "No, it's just a long story."
"I have time," Hiro insisted. He seemed so eager to hear Daniel's tale… "Is there a restaurant nearby? With waffles?"
Waffles, huh?"Er, yeah, there's a café a few blocks over that serves breakfast all day, but –" Anything else he planned on saying was lost as Hiro shouted something else in his Asian language and rushed off as if he was on a mission – in completely the wrong direction. Daniel hurried after him.
"Hiro, wait!" The Asian man stopped short. "This way," he instructed, pointing back the way they'd come.
"Oh. Lead on, Future Man."
What an odd man this guy is, Daniel mused as they walked. "What language is that, anyway, that you keep speaking?"
"Japanese," Hiro replied.
"And what year in the future do you come from?" His curiosity was beginning to get the best of him…
"I am from two-thousand and nine. And you?"
"Last time I was in the future, it was two-thousand and… four, maybe? Or seven? I don't even remember."
"You are stuck in the past?" The way this Hiro was looking at him, it was like Daniel was something highly fascinating to be marveled at.
"Yeah. Have been since nineteen seventy-four." It's really already two-thousand nine somewhere?
"How did you get here?"
Daniel sighed. He'd give the endnotes version and see where that got him. "I was on an island. And the island moved through time… Or, well, the island didn't really move, I guess. Just the people on the island."
"You were on an island?" He sounded skeptical. "That moves… through time?"
"Crazy, right?"
Hiro shrugged and then dismissed it. "I can move through time, so why couldn't an island?"
Well he accepted that a lot easier than I did… "How do you do it, though? I'm a physicist; I study time travel, but I've never met someone that can physically move through time and space…"
"I have an ability," Hiro said again. "It is a great responsibility. If I am not careful, I can change the future."
Daniel stopped short. "No, you can't," he said at once. "You can't change the future. Whatever happened in the past, happened."
The Japanese man shook his head avidly. "No. You can change the future. I have done it. I have changed the course of time."
"But that's… impossible!" All of my research has been centered on that hypothesis!
"You are wrong, Future Man. If you step on a butterfly, even a small one, you can change everything." He was downright adamant on the point. "I have stopped terrible things from happening by changing the past."
Daniel felt suddenly weak. "But… how?" he asked, voice small. I can't be wrong about my theory… But what if I am? What if there's a way to change what happened on that island, to save Charlotte? He didn't dare hope.
"You fix the past. Stop things from happening so that the bad future cannot occur. It is difficult, and it can be dangerous. But it is a hero's duty."
Well, Daniel wasn't too concerned with being a hero. All he wanted to do was go back to the future, and save Charlotte's life. Guess that's a little heroic in its own right… "But I always thought… that the future was fixed. That whatever happened, happened."
Hiro shook his head. "No, Future Man. We can make choices. We can change the future."
Choices. The word stuck in Daniel's mind. People. Choices. The choices we make… It was a new variable he had never considered. Hirowas still talking, but Daniel was no longer paying attention. His extraordinary brain was on overdrive, reworking his hypotheses with this new variable in mind. What is the future but the result of past choices? One can't change an event once it's already occurred… unless, of course, one could. Any choice made in the present would influence the future and become an unchangeable part of the past. This was solid fact.
But what if he were to consider himself in the equation, and his unique place in time? This, nineteen seventy-six, was his present. And so couldn't he, Daniel Faraday, theoretically do something that would impact the future? And since he was stuck in what was to him the past, wouldn't it be possible for his actions now to affect the life of his younger self, living in the future? Couldn't he, in theory, make a choice with such profound ramifications as to stop himself from ever going to the island?
There was a world of possibilities; he really needed to get back to his lab, to write this down and mull over the logistics. It was mindboggling. He had left out a key variable; it would change everything.
"Er, Mister Future Man?"
Daniel was abruptly jerked back to reality; he reluctantly pushed the variables to the back of his mind and refocused on the Japanese man that had inspired this breakthrough. "Huh?"
"Are you alright, Future Man?"
"Er, yeah, I'm fine. No, better than fine. Hiro, I think you may have just given me the answer I've been searching for. My ticket back to the future. Thank you."
~o~o~
Hiro beamed happily at the strange man he'd just met. "You are welcome. I am glad that I could help," he said in response to Daniel's excited declaration. This must be why I ended up in nineteen seventy-six, he realized. To help this man. "I think… my work here is done."
Daniel cocked his head to the side in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"Destiny brought me here for a reason," he explained patiently. "I think that meeting you was that reason. I have given you the answer that you needed. My work here is complete."
"Er, alright…"
"I must go now. A hero's work is never done. Good luck, Future Man." Hiro bowed his head to the physicist.
"Um, good luck to you, too?" Daniel's words were spoken with such uncertainty; Hiro smiled.
"Thank you," he replied, and then squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated on traveling back to his own time.
~o~o~
Daniel Faraday blinked in shock at the empty sidewalk in front of him where, just a moment ago, a Japanese man with glasses had stood.
Did I really just witness a man physically travel through time?
All those years of research and experimentation in sending consciousness through time, and now I meet someone that can move through time and space as easily as I can walk down the street.
It was astounding. And it was wonderful for Daniel to have witnessed the epitome of his research. And now I have another variable to work with…
He continued to mull over this strangest of encounters as his feet carried him absentmindedly towards the café he'd been taking Hiro to. He stopped outside the door, thinking, So much for waffles… before deciding that waffles did indeed sound good at the moment.
He smiled. Thank you, Hiro Nakamura…
His future – and his past – was going to change forever. He just needed to find a way to make it happen.