Disclaimer: I am not an expert on physics and some information is very generalized to fit the story more. Most of it is still fiction.

Also, this chapter is really dialogue-heavy. I'm really sorry.

o-o-o

Johnny didn't wait long to schedule a meet-up with the researcher he was talking about. In fact, Ponyboy was fairly certain that he called them right after he left his house. He thought that it was going to take a bit less than a week to do, but he was wrong. They set the meet-up for Friday so that they could visit right after school finished for the week.

The researcher was also a professor at Oklahoma State University, so they drove over and spent half an hour trying to find a parking spot. There weren't any open at the college itself, so they had to park a bit away and walk to the campus.

College was strange, to say the least. He had never been to one before, making him feel out of place there. Nobody paid him any mind as they went about their day. So, his nervousness was unnecessary. There were people everywhere doing various things—taking surveys, walking their pets, cramming, or even sleeping on surfaces that weren't meant to be slept on. They navigated through the campus, which felt like a maze with how many pathways there were. They finally found the building that they were looking for and slipped into the classroom that the professor was supposed to be teaching in. The class was basically finished so they didn't think that it would be a problem to listen in for a bit.

"Remember, your papers are due before midnight today," the professor reminded the students. The students filed out of the room and Samuel and Ponyboy stood up to approach the pedestal. There were a few students asking questions about their assignments, but they filtered out quickly enough.

"How can I help you? I've never seen you two in my class before," the professor said, sliding his laptop into his bag.

"Oh, um, Johnny Cade said you would be able to help us?" Ponyboy started.

"That's right!" The professor gasped out in recognition. "It was about a science fair project, correct? I didn't know they still did those in high school."

"A science fair… right," Samuel awkwardly chuckled. So that was how Johnny explained it to him. "Yeah, it's just a project we're working on for the fair."

"What made you choose time travel for your project? Just curious. Most people would have chosen something simpler and easier to do."

"It started out as jokes and giggles but then we decided to actually try," Ponyboy lied, shrugging. "We tried to change our topic, but we weren't allowed to."

The professor nodded, sitting himself down on one of the cushioned seats in the lecture hall. He rotated one of the miniature desks (which weren't even big enough to support a notebook fully) to be able to have a place to rest his arm. "I see. Well, whatever you need, I'll try my best to help."

Both of them sat down, keeping a bit of a distance from the professor to not make it weird. What should they ask first?

"Uh…" Samuel started, forming a question in his head. "So, tell us about time travel. Is it even possible to do it?"

"Yes, it's possible to time travel. It seems like it's fiction, but it's real," the professor explained excitedly. He acted like a kid, talking about time travel. He bounced in his seat, eyes sparkling. Maybe he never got to talk about time travel that often and was finally letting out everything he was holding back. "You see, Albert Einstein discovered the theory of general relativity. In this… space, time, and speed are taken into account. Basically, the faster you are, the slower time is for you individually. There had been many… Aren't you going to take notes?"

Ponyboy blinked in surprise, pulling out his phone. He briefly remembered the recording capabilities of it.

"I'm recording our conversation if that's alright," he said. Samuel beamed at him, probably proud of him for remembering that phones could do that. It wasn't really hard to remember. Ponyboy just knew that mobile phones could do basically everything.

"Yeah, that's fine," the professor agreed, continuing with his explanation. "So, there had been experiments performed to test if time travel could be an actual theory. To sum up one of them, there was a test with two clocks that were set at the same time. One stayed on the earth while the other was put on a plane that flew in the direction of Earth's rotation. After the experiment, they found that the clock on the plane was behind the one near the ground, meaning that time moved slower on the plane than the average one second per second that we usually abide by. Even astronauts experience time differently. They experience time much slower than people on Earth."

That was interesting and all, but it wasn't what they wanted to know about. "What about going back in time a few decades. Is that possible?"

As soon as he asked the question, the professor shook his head, and Ponyboy felt his heart sink. "It's not possible. That's fiction. I really wish we were able to do that. It's what inspired me to go into this field."

"But can you tell us hypothetical-wise? If it were possible, how would we be able to do it?" Samuel asked, putting the conversation back on track before the professor could talk about his inspirations.

"Well, hypothetical-wise…" the professor hummed in thought, scratching at his chin. "Maybe if you traveled at the speed of light, but that would still move you forward in time and you would also have to go to space."

But Ponyboy didn't have to go to space or travel at the speed of light to get to the future. There had to be something missing, something that wasn't discovered yet that would explain his phenomena.

"You see," the professor continued, "if you traveled the speed of light in space for a year, for example… this would include the return… then around eighty-two years would have passed on Earth while it would be only one year for you. However, I will say that we do not have the resources for this to become a theory."

"Yeah, but what about going back in time?" Ponyboy pushed.

"If a wormhole was created, going back in time could be done. It would be almost impossible for us to create a wormhole here in this time period and go back in time. But, if one were created in the past and the other end of it opened up in this time period, it would work. Hypothetically speaking, of course."

Going to the future was definitely easier than going to the past, but as of what the researcher had just said, Ponyboy had one question.

"What are wormholes?" he asked. It was a legitimate question for him. Sure, he heard of the word before, but that didn't mean he knew what it meant. His school never covered it and he didn't think that it was in the future as well.

"Wormholes are bends in space and time that are so concentrated that they create a tunnel," the professor explained. "They're really unstable and dangerous, and if a person goes through one, they may die instantly as the wormhole collapses."

Ponyboy gulped. Die instantly? This was a lot scarier than he thought. Going back in time could possibly kill him and then he would never see the gang. His memorial picture in the yearbook flashed in his head, causing him to shiver. That page would become true in two yearbooks instead of one.

"Is there a way, to, you know, not die?" Ponyboy asked nervously, biting the insides of his cheeks.

"Yeah…" the professor trailed off. "Last year, I believe, other physicists were able to find a way to create a wormhole that would be stable, but only for a short amount of time. It would only be open long enough for someone to put a letter inside. So, someone might have seconds or a minute worth of time to get through the wormhole before it collapses."

Seconds may be enough time. It was risky. Ponyboy didn't know what wormholes were like—how long they were or if he would be able to move around in them—but it was a small chance. "How about creating one? Can we create one?"

The professor snorted, shaking his head. "Maybe if you had some black holes and long cosmic strings."

"We don't have those…" Samuel mumbled. "Is there anything else we can use that are more reasonable?"

"What are you two going to do? Try to build your own wormhole that may swallow up Earth with it?" The professor meant that as a joke, which the two teens chuckled to, but they weren't taking it as one. They were quite serious.

"Just… science…" Ponyboy answered, not able to come up with a better explanation. "It's really interesting."

"Yeah, it really is," the professor laughed, lazily nodding. "Well, I guess, to answer your question, you would need matter and energy. But those would still be too unstable. So, to remedy this, you would need negative mass as well. It should be able to stabilize a wormhole, but that's where you reach a problem. Negative mass is so hard to get that it's safer to say that it doesn't exist."

"There has to be something else that we could do…"

The professor checked his watch to see how much time he had left before he had to leave to get to his next class on the other side of the campus. He ticked his tongue, jerking his head to the side as if trying to get hair out of his eyes. "Maybe if you create one using electromagnetic energy, but that would still need a lot of gravitational energy."

Now, that was getting somewhere.

Ponyboy and Samuel exchanged glances, knowing that what they had hypothesized before was connected to what the professor was about to talk about.

"So, hypothetically, would lightning and a strong tornado be able to create one?" Samuel asked.

"At the right place, maybe. But that would be extremely rare and unstable," the professor confirmed.

"And a tornado's basically a black hole isn't it?"

The professor shook his head, standing up. It seemed like they were about finished on his available time. "If you mean if they are similar in them having an eye, then yes. Black holes do not necessarily rotate like tornadoes do. The pressure of gravity is much higher as well. The eye of a tornado has a low pressure of gravity but it's much higher at the side. But that's as much as I'm able to tell you right now. I have another class to go to."

Samuel and Ponyboy both stood up, shaking his hand.

"Thank you so much for taking time out of your day for this," Samuel thanked.

"Of course. Good luck on your project," the professor said before leaving the lecture hall. The duo started to walk back to the car. Only when they were situated inside did they start to talk about their plan.

"I think we had the right idea about how the time travel happened," Samuel started, starting up the vehicle. "So, we're going to have to go to the power plant because of how much electromagnetic energy there is there. We'll have to figure out what to do for when it's time to send you back."

"Do you really think we can pull this off?" Ponyboy asked, nervously licking his chapped lips. He used to be confident about heading home, but hearing the professor talk about how unstable and unlikely wormholes were, he was starting to fear for his safety. If he walked in a wormhole, there was a high chance of it collapsing while he was in there, meaning there would be no more Ponyboy. Who wouldn't be at least a little bit scared about that? But there was a small chance of him making it. Emphasis on 'small'.

Samuel hesitated, deciding on if he should speak his mind or not. "No, I think that you'll die if you try. We don't have one chance to test the wormhole out and we can only try one time. The odds aren't in our favor on this."

"But still, we have to try. We'll never know until then."

o-o-o

It was a week later when they had the opportunity to enact their plan.

The two boys were in Samuel's room, finishing up their homework when both of their phones blared the awful siren for a storm warning. They nearly jumped out of their skin as the noise shrieked, making their ears ring.

"Fuck, I hate when it does that," Samuel cursed, calming down. He grabbed his phone to read the notification.

ALERT: TORNADO WARNING FOR TULSA COUNTY, OK.

"Tornado?" Ponyboy read on his device. He picked up his phone as well to read the message there. He looked up, eyes filling up with determination. This was it. "Is it go time?"

Samuel sighed, "Yeah, it is. Let's go before it's too late."

They drove to the powerplant like the devil was on their tails. It was more like the tornado was on their tails though. Tornadoes don't last for a long time, despite the amount of damage they do, so they had to rush. Most people were off the roads already, taking shelter somewhere and making it easy for them to get to their location quickly. Once there, Samuel parked down the road a bit to hopefully prevent it from damage and/or assure that it wouldn't be seen by cops if they were to arrive. They hoped that the tornado would head in their direction so they would be able to do what they need to do.

They slipped inside the fencing (which was terrible protection for something so important) and they instantly felt the change of energy around them. Their hairs stood up on their ends, tingling their skin. It was windy due to the storm, but despite that, they could smell that distinct metallic scent that electricity gave off.

Both of them looked around at the machines. Would it be enough? It sure felt like there was enough magnetic energy, but it was hard to judge.

"So," Ponyboy started, examining some of the magnets there, "how are we going to do this?"

"Uh… good question…" Samuel stammered, pulling out his phone to see where the tornado was at. He scrolled through a few posts and skimmed through some live updates. "It looks like it's heading closer to us, but it would be passing by. We're going to need to bring the electricity over. I just don't know how…"

Ponyboy looked around again, following the power lines above his head. He tentatively wetted his own lips with his tongue. He wished that he brought rubber gloves or something that would protect him from what he was about to do. It was stupid and he didn't think about how dumb it was until he started doing it. Darry always said that he had a problem with not using his head, but, sometimes, it was an asset to him. He just hoped that it was an asset this time around.

He sprinted over to one of the utility poles, using his momentum to easily start climbing it. He didn't look down, training his eyes to the cloudy, green sky above him.

"Holy shit, what are you doing?" Samuel asked, rushing over to the pole he was on.

"We need electricity," Ponyboy answered, reaching for the next handle.

"That's a lot of volts you'll be close to. Are you trying to kill yourself?"

Ponyboy finally looked down, smiling sheepishly. He decided to take a page from Samuel's book. "If there was one person who I was going to kill, it's going to be me."

It took a second to process what he said. When it did, Samuel choked on laughter. He didn't expect him to make such a comment since he always became concerned whenever he made them himself. He looked over to another utility pole, smiling and disregarding his safety. "Well, let me help at least."

"Aren't you worried that you'll die?" Ponyboy relayed back.

"I have a presentation next week anyway."

Samuel started to climb a utility pole. They quickly reached the top. The vibration of the powerlines as electricity ran through them was loud and almost as eerie as the howling wind. Together, both of them attempted to remove the powerlines, but they were stuck no matter how hard they tugged. They were chilled to the bone, the wind going through their jackets like it wasn't even there, but they continued to pull.

As time went on, the wind got harsher. It got to the point where the utility poles they were on swayed. Debris was flying around, slapping and scratching their skin. From the distance, they could see the cyclone move closer to them. It was large, but not nearly as large as the one that Ponyboy saw that day he was transported to the future. With the speed it was approaching, they probably only had seconds to dislodge the powerlines and get to somewhere safe. Unfortunately, the only way that Ponyboy saw that happening was if they jumped on the powerlines and used their weight to free them from the utility poles. But, since none of them wanted to be electrocuted to death, they weren't going to do that.

"We need to get shelter!" Samuel screamed, barely audible through the howling wind.

"No, I'm staying! I have to do this!" Ponyboy screamed back. "Find shelter for yourself!"

"I'm not leaving you! If you're staying, then I'm staying too!" If they were in another situation that wasn't life-threatening, Ponyboy would have marveled at how sweet that was. But, since it was, he continued to pull at the powerlines like their short exchange never happened. But it seemed like he didn't need to do it anymore because, all of a sudden, a rusty, abandoned car bumper came flying towards the powerline that Ponyboy was working on. It tangled itself in it like a yoyo. Its weight dragged the line down before it crashed to the ground along with the newly dislodged powerline. Like a wave, Tulsa went dark.

Well, that worked.

The storm was getting too intense, threatening to fling them off their utility poles. The two boys held onto them like their life depended on it. There was no way they were going to get to the ground in these conditions, especially with the powerline that was whipping wildly on the ground with sparks that were flying everywhere. If it were to hit any of them, they would most likely die within seconds. Of course, that was if they survived the tornado. The tornado wasn't going to hit them, but, man, it was going to get close. Ponyboy didn't want to find out how close a human could get to one before they were sucked in the vortex and thrown about.

Ponyboy held the pole tighter, shutting his eyes to protect them from the debris and from viewing his inevitable doom. But moments after he did that, a sonic boom caused his ears to ring. Instantly, everything went silent and the wind became still. Ponyboy reopened his eyes only to find the tornado gone and the sky blue as if a storm had never occurred in the first place. The only sign that there was one at all was the debris that had been blown everywhere and the wires that were now lying still on the ground. But, where the tornado once was, there was something else. From where Ponyboy was, he could see a thin line of light that floated in the air.

Descending the utility pole, Ponyboy's arms felt like jelly. Samuel hopped down as well and both of them warily walked over to the free-floating line.

"Is that what I think it is?" Samuel asked.

"A wormhole," Ponyboy breathed out. He honestly was expecting something more grandiose like an actual black hole; not a thin line in the air. He smiled excitedly nevertheless. This was it! He was finally going home!

"That means… this is it, right?" Samuel took a shaky breath, massaging the back of his neck. He stared intensely at Ponyboy as if taking in every detail of him so he wouldn't forget him. "I won't see you again after this?"

The smile dropped. Oh, right. It started to hit Ponyboy. After he steps into the wormhole, he would never be able to see Samuel again. His heart dropped to his stomach. This was it. He will never be able to breathe in Samuel's eucalyptus scent again, hold him, or even learn more about him. Ponyboy was excited to leave, but not if that meant leaving Samuel. The other male made his heart flutter whenever he was around him. He always felt different when he was with him—not in a bad way but more in a way that made him feel like himself. Ponyboy couldn't imagine living without Samuel by his side despite only knowing him for a short amount of time. "I don't know what to say."

"Don't say anything," Samuel said, shaking his head. "There's no time anyway."

"Thank you for everything, Samuel… really. You were the best part in coming to the future," Ponyboy said, stepping forward to hug him tightly. Samuel squeezed him back, holding him a second longer than him. When they pulled apart, Ponyboy turned to the wormhole, breath shuttering. It was time. There wasn't anything left to do. He already said goodbye to Johnny on the way over to the power plant. All that was left was to step in the rift.

As Samuel watched Ponyboy step closer to the rift, he couldn't help but get a sick feeling in his stomach. It didn't feel right and there were multiple reasons that could be plausible for that. First, he didn't want Ponyboy to go. He wanted him to stay with him. He should just pull him away from the rift. That would be all it would take for him to stay. Second, his sick stomach was telling him that something was wrong. They didn't know where the wormhole would take Ponyboy, if there was another side to it at all. They didn't know how stable it was or how much longer it would stay open. Besides that, there were too many coincidences that day for everything to go as planned. Third, he ate something bad that morning and it was finally upsetting his stomach. It was most likely the first two possibilities though.

Ponyboy stepped forward and Samuel couldn't take it anymore. Something bad was going to happen, he was sure of it. Before he knew what he was doing, he grabbed Ponyboy before any body part could touch the rift. He tugged him back with all his might.

"Hold on!" he hollered as he did that, collapsing in a tumbled mess on the ground.

"What?" Ponyboy stammered, lifting his upper half up. "What's wrong? Why'd you stop me?"

"I—" But Samuel couldn't speak. He just stared at the rift with wide eyes. What did he just do? This was Ponyboy's only chance and he probably prevented him from going into the rift.

As Ponyboy was waiting for an answer, they both saw a bird fly in the direction of the rift. It must have not seen it because it flew right at it, entering it… or, at least, it tried to. It was only able to get its head in before the rift completely collapsed. It worked like a guillotine, cleanly cutting the head off the bird in less than a millisecond. The body fell to the ground in a bleeding heap, the slap reverberating in their souls. The head was nowhere in sight.

And, just like that, the wormhole was gone.

"It failed…" Ponyboy muttered, rolling off of Samuel. Cold sweat ran down his spine as he dug the heels of his palms into his eyes. That was it. That was his only chance of returning to his time period and it was gone. He was never going to get back home now. Maybe if he would have hurried, he would have made it back. But maybe the bird was a sign that it would have cut him in two if he stepped in. He would never know now. Tears threatened to spill out from his eyes as hopelessness completely washed over his once hopefully heart. "What am I going to do? I don't know what to do now. Samuel, what am I supposed to do now?"

Samuel didn't know how to answer that. He didn't know what to do himself. He wished that he could be of more help to him. He took a deep breath. "I guess… you're stuck here until we find another way to get you back."

None of them believed that they would be able to do that though.