A brief interlude from writing The French Kiss Job. The idea for this fic was spawned by Lyrical Dreamer (you ROCK!) in response to Hardison's comments at the end of Ch. 5 of TFKJ. This is also the AU/Crossover fic component of my Alec Hardison character manifesto for Heist 12 over at Leverageland on LiveJournal. Hope you enjoy the ridiculousness!
The explosion of sound blew Eliot Spencer off his feet, sending him careening backward into the couch and showering him with debris. He'd meant to crank up the Doc's crazy-huge amp to max power, but who knew it would pack that kind of punch?
He sat up, tipping his sunglasses forward on his nose, the hint of a smirk forming on his lips. "Damn," he murmured in appreciation. "Rock and roll."
The fire bell mounted on the wall suddenly burst to life, its shrill tone unforgiving even to Eliot's nearly blown-out eardrums. He scrambled to stand and shed his guitar - still plugged into the now-busted giant amp thing - before snatching up the phone and putting the receiver to his ear. "Hello?"
"Eliot? Hey, Eliot, that you?"
"Doc?" Eliot slogged through the piles of papers and random gadgets that now littered the floor. The Doc's place wasn't exactly a cleaning lady's dream on the best of days, but this might take some explaining. "Doc, where the hell are you?"
"Eliot, listen, no time to explain. I need you to meet me at Twin Pines Mall tonight. One-fifteen, 'kay? I made a ginormous breakthrough, and, while it pains me to say it, I could use your help."
"Excuse me? One-fifteen in the morning?"
"It's not like I'm messing with your sleep schedule, Eliot. Just get your ninety minutes before you come."
"Okay, what the hell's goin' on? You've been MIA all week."
"Do I give you the third degree when you go do your thing? I've been working."
Eliot rolled his eyes. "Well, where's Megabyte? He been 'working,' too?"
"For your information, yes, actually. He's right here."
"You know, Doc, you left all your electronic thingies on all week."
"Oh, hey, that reminds me. Don't. Touch. My. Amplifier."
"Yeah," drawled Eliot, clearing his throat a little. "Whatever."
"Good. So, don't forget. See you tonight. One-fifteen AM, Twin Pines Mall."
"Yeah - "
Of course, because the Doc's house was apparently full of every annoying sound-making device on the entire planet, at that moment over thirty clocks went off all at once. Electronic, analog, grandfather, cuckoo - the din they made together set Eliot's teeth on edge.
"Heh heh," cackled the Doc. "How do you like my clocks?"
"Dammit, Doc, when I see you, I swear I'm gonna - "
"My experiment worked," continued the Doc as if Eliot hadn't spoken. "Those clocks are all set exactly twenty-five minutes slow. "
"Wait. Are you sayin' it's eight twenty-five, not eight o' clock?"
"Yup."
"Dammit, Hardison! I'm late for frickin' school!" Eliot ripped the phone from his ear, jammed the receiver into the cradle, grabbed his skateboard from the floor, and sprinted out the door.
Exactly as the clock on the Twin Pines Mall's sign changed from 1:15 to 1:16 AM, Eliot kicked up his skateboard and headed for the only vehicle in the parking lot of the JC Penney: a white van with "Dr. A. Hardison Enterprises" painted on the side. Sitting behind the van as Eliot strolled up was Megabyte, the world's goofiest and least-threatening Rottweiler. The Doc claimed to keep him as a guard dog, but Eliot knew Doc Hardison was actually just a big pushover when it came to puppy eyes.
"Hey, Megabyte," said Eliot, scratching him behind the ears. "Where's the Doc, boy?"
While the Rottweiler offered no response, some strange whirling noises did begin coming from the van. As Eliot watched, the back door slowly lowered, smoke billowing from the opening, and then - holy crap - a DeLorean, of all things, backed down the ramp. After a second, the driver's side door popped open, lifting to reveal a white jumpsuit-clad Dr. Alec Hardison.
"Eliot!" he exclaimed with a broad smile as he climbed out of the vehicle. "Glad you could take time out of your oh-so-busy high school life to make it."
Eliot barely registered the jab. He was busy staring at the gorgeous sports car.
"Welcome to my latest and greatest experiment," said the Doc, his grin taking on a hint of satisfaction. He crossed his arms. "You're gonna pee yourself when I show you."
"Show me what?" Eliot laughed in slight disbelief. "It's… man, this is a DeLorean!"
"Yeah, it sure is." The Doc wiggled his eyebrows. "Here, I'll explain. Turn on that video camera and roll tape."
Eliot fiddled with the camera, which he'd swung by the Doc's house to grab on his way to the mall. "Where's the damn…"
Doc Hardison snatched the device out of Eliot's hands, pressed a few buttons, and shoved it back at him. "Seriously, Eliot, you need to learn a thing or two about electronics. We're moving into a technology-driven age, and you don't want to get left behind."
Eliot snorted. "Yeah, sure. An age of the geek. Whatever you say." He hoisted the camera to his shoulder and pointed it at the Doc, who tucked his clipboard under one arm and cleared his throat.
"Hello," he said. "I'm Doctor Alec Hardison and I am standing in the parking lot of Twin Pines Mall. It's Saturday morning, October twenty-sixth, nineteen eighty-five, one eighteen AM. And this…" He gestured to the DeLorean. "… is Temporal Experiment Number One."
The Doc moved toward Megabyte. "Come here, boy. Good boy. All right, up into the car. Right up here." Megabyte, leaving a trail of drool in his wake, jumped up into the driver's seat, and the Doc buckled the seatbelt.
Eliot shuffled to one side to get a better angle with the camera. "Doc. Hey, Doc, move your ass. Your viewers can't see anything except your backside."
The Doc shot Eliot a dark glare but crouched. Eliot adjusted to get both him and Megabyte in the frame.
"'Aight, so, note that my stopwatch and Megabyte's stopwatch are synchronized. For you slower types, like Mister Spencer here, that means they display exactly the same time."
Later, the tape would be underscored at that moment by noise like a motorcycle's engine - Eliot growling close to the microphone.
"Okay, Megabyte," said the Doc. "Have a good trip, buddy. Watch your head." He closed the door. Through the window, Megabyte could be seen happily panting and dribbling saliva all over the steering wheel.
As the Doc straightened, he pulled the antenna out of what looked like an enormous controller for an RC car and placed his thumbs on the joysticks.
"Is that thing hooked up to the - " Eliot cut off as the DeLorean roared to life.
"Prepare to be amazed," said the Doc ominously.
"Oh, I'm prepared," replied Eliot, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
As Doc Hardison adjusted the controller, the car, with Megabyte sitting unfazed in its front seat, reversed all the way down the parking lot. Then, after a pause, it shot forward, steadily gaining speed and heading right for them.
"If my calculations are correct," shouted the Doc over the sound of the DeLorean bearing down on them. "When this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you're going to see some serious shit!"
"If your calculations are wrong," Eliot yelled back. "I'm gonna break your face!"
Eliot steeled himself and trained the camera's lens right on the car as it traveled like a bullet from a gun. Bolts of what looked like lightning crackled over its hood and windows. It was only ten feet away when he flinched, considering diving out of the way, but then it disappeared with a bang. Literally. Into thin air. In its wake it left two parallel streaks of flame which licked at the space between Eliot's and Doc Hardison's feet.
The Doc's eyes, wide as dinner plates, took in the controller in his hands as if it were the Holy Grail itself, and he started laughing uncontrollably. It was the kind of laugh an evil scientist from a movie would have been proud of. Then he was jumping up and down and doing some kind of absurdly ridiculous dance, shaking his hips and pumping his arms as he turned in a circle.
"What'd I tell you?" he cried between bouts of laughter. "Eighty-eight miles per hour!"
Eliot blinked probably a million times, trying to take in what had just happened. The Doc kept jabbering on behind him.
"The temporal displacement happened at exactly one twenty AM… ha!"
"Son of a… son of a bitch, Doc, you disintegrated Megabyte!"
"Did not," said the Doc. He was beginning to calm down, but his face was still awash with glee. "Megabyte and the DeLorean are both molecularly intact. See… and I told you you're gonna pee yourself… Megabyte just became the world's first time traveler! I just sent that dog a minute into the future."
Eliot slowly turned around to fix the Doc with an incredulous stare. "Wait. You built a time machine? That's what you're saying?"
The Doc crossed his arms and beamed. "Out of a DeLorean, baby."
"You're crazy, man."
"Not in the slightest. Well, okay, in the slightest. But, just wait. In exactly five seconds, Megabyte's gonna appear again, and you're gonna need a new pair of boxers."
"Yeah, sure, and I'm the Queen of - "
"Look out!" Doc Hardison grabbed Eliot's arm and pulled him to one side. Not a moment later, a glowing, flashing DeLorean materialized right where they'd been standing. It finally skidded to a stop about a hundred feet away, steaming.
They approached it slowly. The car was now covered in a thin sheet of ice, but it was very much solid and real. The Doc used his foot to nudge the latch, and the driver's door lifted once again, revealing a still-drooling Megabyte.
"Haha! Look at that," crowed the Doc. He compared his stopwatch and the one around Megabyte's neck. "Megabyte's clock is exactly one minute behind mine. To him, the whole trip took under a second! He leapt forward into the future instantaneously!"
The Rottweiler gave his master an enormous and slobbery lick on the cheek before hopping down from the DeLorean, and he trotted over to the van.
"Holy…" began Eliot. "He's okay."
"You bet yo' ass he's okay," the Doc said. "He just made history. C'mere. I'll show you how it works."
Dazed and wondering if he'd eaten some bad meat the night before, Eliot shuffled over to the DeLorean. He pointed the camera at the Doc as he slid onto the seat Megabyte had just vacated, smearing a puddle of drool all over his jumpsuit.
The Doc pointed at a liquid crystal display on the dashboard which displayed three different date/time combinations. "This is where you input the time where you're going, this one tells you where you are, and this one tells you where you just came from. Heh, check it, say we wanted to go back and see me sitting on the john, coming up with the idea for the flux capacitor… we'd input November fifth, nineteen fifty-five."
"The fluxa-what?"
"The flux capacitor. It's what makes time travel possible. Expensive as hell, took me freakin' forever. But now… now I've finally done it!" Grinning ear-to-ear, the Doc clambered out of the car once again and started heading for the van. "Come on. Help me refuel this sucker."
"We going to a gas station?"
"What? Honestly, Eliot, it's like you've never taken a science class in your life. No. My baby runs on plutonium. I need a nuclear reaction to generate the one point twenty-one gigawatts of electricity needed to power her."
Eliot blanched. "Plutonium? You don't just walk into a grocery store and pick that off the shelf, Doc!"
"No, of course not." The Doc's lips pressed together and he looked to one side guiltily. "I maaaaaay have ripped off some Libyan nationalists, told them I would build them a bomb."
"WHAT?!"
"No, no, nothing to worry about," insisted the Doc. "I gave them something. It's just made out of pinball parts. Now, c'mon. Let's get you a radiation suit and rev this baby up again!"
Eliot rolled the camera again after he'd been fitted into a canary-yellow radiation suit that made him look like a Martian. He filmed the Doc putting a canister of plutonium into the DeLorean's reactor and hit pause when the chamber clicked shut.
"You can take off your helmet," said the Doc. "Everything's lead lined in there."
They were putting away their equipment, arguing over who Eliot should send the recording of the world's first successful time travel experiment to, when the sound of another car's engine rumbled through the night air.
The Doc's head jerked up, and his face went slack with sudden fear. "Oh no," he murmured. "They found me. I don't know how, but they found me."
"What? Who?"
"The Libyans!" The Doc pointed, and Eliot followed the trajectory of his index finger to take in another van coming around the perimeter of the parking lot. A man's torso was halfway out of the sunroof, the automatic weapon in his arms glinting in the moonlight. The van got closer, and the man with the gun opened fire.
"Holy shit!" yelled Eliot, diving behind the DeLorean.
He saw the Doc fumbling around for something that turned out to be a revolver, which he cocked and extended in front of him. But, when he tried to fire it, nothing happened. No wonder; Eliot hadn't seen him load the chambers. Seriously, the guy needed to stick to science.
"Doc, stop! I'll deal with this!"
"Get out of here, Eliot!"
The van was practically on top of them now, and its brakes squealed as it came to a halt, its hood not five feet from the Doc, who tossed his gun aside and put up his hands. Then, as Eliot looked on in horror, the man with the automatic rifle unloaded multiple rounds into the Doc's chest.
"NOOOO!" Eliot heard his own voice like it was coming from far away. "Bastards!"
He emerged from behind the DeLorean and rushed the van, zig-zagging to avoid the Libyan's fire. A barrel roll in front of the van's hood kept him sheltered from bullets for another second, and he popped to his feet next to the front door, yanking it open and smashing the head of the driver into the steering column. The man with the gun looked momentarily confused, and Eliot took the split second to reach in and grab his ankles, pulling him down into the van's interior.
The guy cried out as his head hit the side of the sun roof when he collapsed, and he struggled to escape Eliot's hold, kicking out with both feet. But Eliot was already crawling all the way into the van, and he pinned the shooter's legs with his right arm while dealing a crushing blow to the head with his left elbow. The man went still.
Eliot caught his breath, feeling his pulse thumping in his ears, and scrambled out of the vehicle, hurrying to the side of Doc Hardison, who was sprawled on the pavement. Blood oozed from the bullet wounds in his torso.
"Doc?" Eliot cradled the other man's head gently in his lap. "Doc? Come on… stay with me…" But when felt for a heartbeat, there was no response against his fingertips. "Oh, Doc…"
He almost slipped into despair. The Doc had become like an uncle to him… a crazy, harebrained uncle, sure, but basically family nonetheless.
Then it hit him.
He glanced at the DeLorean, still sitting there with its flux capacitor and its date input interface.
A time machine.
And he knew how he was going to save the Doc.