A/N: I think this is the darkest chapter. Have fun.


July 8 (2050), 1:00 PM, Hiza Street

"We should not be doing this," Jana said, face pale, "we should not be interfering with the past. It is a mistake. It is not our place to do-"

"Shh," said the older Jana, her eyes not leaving the gray sedan with the 6YJL401 license plate.

"Alois will die in the future if this does not happen. Is this not what you came to past to prevent?"

Future Jana spared her a glance. "There are 25 people who will also die if we do not act."

"They survived in the delta timeline. Is that not enough?"

"The delta timeline is not the true timeline. This is."

"Alois will die," Jana repeated.

They were quiet enough for a moment that they could faintly hear Franziska's high, carrying voice: "There is a fast food restaurant on the other side of that building over there. You two go buy yourself some lunch, then come back here."

"It is either Alois or those 25 people," future Jana said, looking down at Jana. Her face was very serious, and her eyes inscrutable. "Make your choice."

"I…"

"Well?"

Jana glanced at the alleyway. She was running out of time. The gray sedan was starting to inch forward.

"What is it going to be?"

Jana put her foot down. "Alois," she said, "I cannot lose him."

Future Jana nodded, then put her arm in front of the younger Jana as the gray sedan rolled forward, blocking the exit to the alley. They could hear Alois on the other side of it - "Excuse me, what- ah-!" and despite Jana's declaration that the kidnapping and hostage massacre had to happen, it was still a good thing that her older self was holding her back, because everything in her was screaming at her to run at that car and break the window and stop this, here and now.

The car door slammed, the engine revved, and it sped down the street. Jana saw the license plate that had always, always been burned into her memory, and she realized that Detective Grantaire was right. There was an eleven-year-old girl, lying in the middle of the alley, who had never seen that plate.

Jana ducked out from under her future self's arm and ran into the alley, pulling her eleven-year-old self to her feet. The thought crossed her mind of how strange it was too see her like this, stranger even that meeting her delta timeline self - because this was her, four years ago, when she wore a long ruffled skirt and her hair in gigantic pigtails and she hadn't even had a riding crop yet.

"W-Who-?" the child Jana started.

"6YJL401," Jana said clearly and quickly, "remember that number: 6YJL401. It is the license plate on that car. Tell them you saw it. Do you remember it?"

"6YJL401," past Jana said faintly.

Jana nodded once, then, realizing that her young self was still in too much shock to do it herself, cupped her hands to her mouth and screamed, loudly. That, she remembered, summoned her mother in less than half a minute, and then she told her what she saw, and the plate number, and the police had found out where Alois may have been taken to, which really was where he had been taken to.

Jana bolted out of the alley, meeting future Jana just around a corner.

"Interesting," future Jana said, "I suppose I- we must have convinced ourselves that we had indeed seen the plate, since we forgot about our encounter with you once you returned to your own time."

Jana half-laughed, even though it wasn't really funny. "I cannot believe it… the one memory that haunted me for so long, and it was made up…" Inexplicably, she noticed the sunlight shining on the attorney's badge habitually pinned to her sleeveless jacket, and laughed again. "I remember now," she said, "after this incident, that was when I decided I wanted to become a defense attorney instead of a prosecutor."

"You made a very deep impression on yourself," future Jana chuckled, then checked her time device, her brow furrowing. "We are approaching a point of flux in time," she said, her voice hard once again, "timelines are about to split. Come, back to the hotel."

They both ran to the Hollywood corner where the former hotel stood, weaving in and out of foot traffic and getting plenty of odd looks. Police vehicles with their sirens on passed them as they were starting to get close, and they quickened their pace. Jana felt like her lungs were going to burst.

They drew near to the hotel, and already there was a barricade of cop cars and hostage negotiator vans blocking the the street. The front door was closed, and there was a dead man bleeding all over the sidewalk just in front of it.

Jana bent over, gasping for breath. Future Jana stretched her whip between her hands, grinding her teeth. "How am I supposed to get in now?"

"Why do you… why do you need to get in?" Jana panted.

"…because I understand now," future Jana said, still pulling on her whip, "that blood, and why Alois was unharmed. I know now. I know what I need to do. And I think… I always did."

"What…?" Jana didn't quite get it.

"But how do I get in…?"

Jana swallowed hard. "I remember hearing my parents mentioning an underground tunnel used for drugrunning that connected to the hotel. There must be an entrance to it nearby," she said, then pointed at alleyway two buildings down from the hotel. "Try over there."

Future Jana's hands relaxed, and after a second of standing perfectly still, staring at Proserpine's house - for some reason, Jana thought I really do grow up to look just like Mama - she turned to Jana. "Thank you," she said.

"What?"

She handed her the time travel device. "I will not need this anymore," she said, "the timeline only corrects itself when and if the time-travelers leave."

"You- you are staying in the past?"

"You will not see me again. Take care of Alois," she added in a softer voice, then she turned and jogged away towards the alley Jana had pointed out, leaving Jana standing there with the time travel device in both hands. She looked down at it.

HEAD HOME?, it said.


July 8, 1:20 PM, The murder house

Alois was locked in room with a gray-haired boy a little shorter than him. The boy had been staring at him, just staring, for as long as he'd been here. Probably only about fifteen minutes, but it felt like an eternity.

He glanced at the door before whispering, "How do we get out of here?"

"We don't," said the boy.

Alois stared back at him. "Was?"

The boy didn't say anything. Alois turned away, and listened carefully, straining his ears for anything outside the blacked-out windows. He'd heard sirens about five minutes ago, but they'd stopped. There was some sort of commotion outside, he thought, but he couldn't tell what it was.

"Do you think someone will come rescue us?" he asked the boy.

The boy shook his head. "We're stuck here forever," he said.

Alois blanched, and hugged his knees a little tighter to his chest. "But I want to go home," he said plaintively, and he knew it was a childish statement, unfitting in the mouth of a thirteen-year-old. But this wasn't really the situation to care about that…

The boy cocked his head at him, still staring unblinkingly. "It isn't so bad here," he said, "she takes care of us. She feeds us and everyday she lets us play in the gym, and sometimes lets us talk to the others." He paused. "Sometimes we hear her yelling downstairs, but then she comes and sees any of her children and she calms down. She likes us. We're hers."

"We are not," Alois snapped, "we're free people, just like anyone else. Und she's not our Mutter. She's a kidnapper!"

The boy finally looked away from him, staring at the blacked-out window. "My Ma let me wander around the streets downtown, and wasn't paying enough attention to me. Someone really bad could have gotten to me-"

"Someone really bad did get to you," Alois said, "you're locked up here, aren't you!"

The boy just kept staring at the window. Alois had almost given up on a reply when he murmured, "I want to see my Ma again. I want to take a road trip with her and see my babci and dziadek again…"

"You can do that," Alois said, seizing him by the shoulders, which startled him out of his reverie, "und I want to see my Mama and Papa and kleine Schwester again. We just have to figure out how to get out of here!"

Just then, the door opened. It was the same woman who had dragged Alois into her car, only now there was blood splashed down her front and a panicked rage smoldering in her eyes. She was carrying a large butcher knife that had clearly just been wiped of blood, which she was methodically sharpening with her other hand.

"Miss," said the gray-haired boy in a faint voice, "is that your blood? Are you hurt?" Meanwhile, Alois had jumped up and had bolted for the window, pounding on it with his fists.

"Hilfe!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, and in the blurry reflection of the window he saw the woman pick up the boy by the collar of his shirt and plunge the knife deep into this stomach. He screamed, and Alois had never heard such a terrible sound in his life, and he was screaming too.

He turned around, back pressed against the window, and watched in horror as the woman dropped the boy to his feet, where he stood erect if only by inertia, and drew her knife across his throat in one quick gesture that sprayed the room in blood - the boy twisted as he fell, and that foul, hot, copper-smelling wetness got on Alois as well.

He fell to his knees, spitting out blood that had splashed in his mouth, and looked up again to see the woman approach, polishing her blade on the hem of her skirt. "Ach Gotter," Alois wheezed, then he slumped over, having fainted from the sheer terror of it.

Proserpine wasn't about to be stopped by that. She gripped his hair with one hand, pulled him up to expose his neck, and-

Something hit her hard from behind. She jerked forward to the ground, and whoever had tackled her was now sitting on top of her, pinning her down, and with one fist in her hair smashing her face against the floor again and again, over and over and over. Proserpine felt her nose break, and the carpet beneath her was now spotted red from something other than the dead boy with the gray hair.

Jana could hear Proserpine struggling to breathe.

I could do it, she thought, I could just kill her.

She either hesitated or savored the moment - even she didn't know which - with Proserpine's head pulled roughly back in preparation for what might be the killing blow.

Proserpine twisted and stared sideways at her assailant through eyes already starting to swell shut. Blood ran down her face, and she spoke with difficulty.

"I see you feel the same anger I do."

Jana clenched her jaw, her hand tightening in Proserpine's hair.

"Who are you?" Proserpine mumbled.

"I-" Jana said, "I am Ja- Jantje," she said, all at once throwing her past away, "and I will not let you hurt anyone else."

Proserpine smiled at her, and it looked like Jana - Jantje - had knocked a few teeth loose. "It was just the new boy and Ked who were left," she said, and started laughing, coughing up blood, then her eyes rolled up.

Jantje thought for a second she had died, then realized she was still breathing and had merely passed out. She dropped her, stood up, and stared at Alois.

She knew if she didn't do something about it Proserpine would wake up again and escape before the police finally kicked down the door, and she knew if she suffered her to live it'd only bring pain and grief down the road, just as it had done to her seven years in the future - a future that even now still existed, and she just had to trust the fifteen-year-old Jana to prevent somehow, if only she could get ahold of her message to her.

But she couldn't bring herself to kill an incapacitated woman. That would be murder.

That would make her no better than her.

She gathered the unconscious Alois in her arms - although tall, he was rather thin, and even when their age gap wasn't reversed and more than doubled she could always pick him up - and realized that she couldn't take him with her. She was just acting out a time loop, one that she already knew the events of… any deviation would send this whole timeline spinning into an alternate, and although she came here with the goal of turning her present into nothing more than a false copy, she had to make sure that this - with Alois surviving, if no one else but Jackie Proserpine and a man who would languish in a psych ward for the rest of his life - stayed the alpha timeline, even if it meant sacrificing her future and surrendering to 'fate'.

She carried him out the room and placed him in a hall closet. She closed the door. This had already happened, after all.

In that moment, Jantje felt the crushing, helpless, fatalistic despair of knowing you had no free will, and she thought about Watson Justice.


May 1 (2054), 12:35 AM, Kaminogi Housing Complex, Apartment no. 8

Miguel had already been asleep and was pretty much still asleep when he answered the door. As a result he didn't notice that he was still shirtless until he saw Jana standing on his doorstep.

Neither of them said anything for a moment, then Miguel stepped back, gesturing for her to come in.

"What happened?" he said flatly, shrugging on a shirt but not bothering to button it up.

"I…" Jana mumbled, looking at the floor.

She didn't continue on her own, so Miguel sat her down at his kitchen table and got both of them a cup of coffee. The ghost of a smile touched his face as he realized this was almost the same thing as had happened on Valentine's Day, when he'd gotten dragged into all this, too. No, that wasn't true… he'd been involved ever since he discovered them missing that evening in January. Maybe even before that, and he just hadn't known yet. Maybe this was inevitable, inexorable.

"How did you get here?" Miguel said, attempting to ease into the conversation.

"I walked," Jana said.

Miguel raised his eyebrows. "Filly, my apartment is six minutes away from your house by car. That's, what, three miles? At midnight, by yourself?" He put down his coffee cup. "Are you insane?"

Jana just stared at her coffee.

"Alright," Miguel said, leaning back in his chair and putting one hand to the side of his face, "alright. Tell me what happened with you and Jantje."

"Jantje?"

"Your older self."

Jana gave him an odd look - probably because, he realized, he'd slipped up and used the name Jantje when Jana wouldn't know it, but said, "We stopped the hostage massacre, but it only lead to an alternate timeline where Alois and Maria were murdered by Ares last December."

Miguel's jaw worked. "Ah," he said.

"So… we went back and…" she looked at her coffee again, frenetically running her finger in circles around its rim, "…realized that the hostage massacre had to happen if we wanted Alois to survive that. He would have died if he did not have a phobia of blood."

"So," Miguel said, a sour taste in his mouth, "you chose not to act."

"Y… Yes. I chose not to act."

Miguel shrugged, knowing full well Jana could probably see right through his forced nonchalance. "Well, filly, even if you had acted, it would have just created another alternate timeline, right? It wouldn't have affected us here. Don't feel guilty about-"

"We did affect the timeline," Jana said, "do you remember how Alois was found in the closet, unharmed? And you could never figure out why that had happened?"

"…" Miguel took a sip of his coffee. "It was strange," he said at length, "because he had blood on him. It wasn't just a case of him hiding in the closet before anything happened, and managing to stay hidden. It was almost as if he had been… intentionally spared… or saved."

"I think the one who saved him was my future self," Jana said.

"So you did interfere."

"Yes."

"And it affected our present."

"Yes. Rather like your father's death penalty."

"…"

"…"

Miguel slammed the bottom of his coffee cup on the table, standing up abruptly. "You changed the course of history," he said sharply, "and you chose to let those 25 kids die?!"

Jana stood up too, bending her riding crop almost in half. "It was either them or Alois and Maria!"

"You sacrificed twenty-five children for just two people?!"

"It was my brother, and your sister!" Jana said, her voice hot but her eyes swimming with tears. "I am not proud of what I did, but I do not regret it. I know it was not the right thing to do, but I would not - I could not do otherwise!"

Miguel took a deep breath, almost shaking in appalled fury, then… deflated, sitting down in his chair once more. He half-raised his coffee mug to his lips then put it down, and let out a dry laugh. Jana stared at him in confusion.

"You're right," he said, "it sure as hell wasn't the right thing to do. But…" and he laughed again, "I would have done the exact same thing, if I were in your shoes."

"You…?" Jana said, her shoulders un-tensing.

"Yeah," Miguel said, "yeah, I would, filly." He took a deep drink out of his coffee cup. "…may God have mercy on our souls."


May 1, 9:55 AM, District Court, Defendant's Lobby no. 9

That morning at WAA had been a rather interesting one. Mainly because Kristoph and Jana had showed up for work as usual, despite Wright's insistence that Jana, at least, really didn't have to be there since her brother was still in the hospital. (Something about a psychotic break.) Then Jana and Kristoph had gotten into an argument about how the previous night, Jana had apparently snuck out of the house, and had returned home riding on the back of Miguel Fey-Armando's motorcycle at around one in the morning.

Apollo hadn't even known that Armando's son owned a motorcycle.

Anyway, as far as Apollo was concerned, that little piece of family drama was the entire reason why he was almost late to court. Technically, as long as he got here before ten, he was good.

It wasn't like Ennie had much to say to him before the trial, anyway.

"I really didn't kill her," Ennie said again, "I really didn't. I didn't even know her. I don't know how she got into my apartment."

"I know," Apollo said, then added, "I investigated a bit more myself yesterday, Mr. Ennie. I think I'm starting to get an idea of what happened."

"Really?" said Ennie.

"Don't worry, you'll be fine," Apollo said, crossing his arms confidently. "I'm not about to let an innocent man go to jail. Now… whoever the new prosecutor is had better prepare themselves, because here comes Justice!"


Translations:
Was? (DE) What?
Mutter. (DE) mother.
babci (PL) grandmother note: this is specifically used by Polish-Americans, not so much actual Polacks in Poland
dziadek (PL) grandfather
Hilfe! (DE) Help!
Ach Gotter (DE) Oh gods