The Required: BTTF is the Bobs'. Lisa is mine. I borrowed a song from The Calling. I'll return it. Honest. In-joke alert! The present-day date I gave, August 22, was the time I wrote the line: 8:22PM. Extra special hugs to John and Ben.
Lisa woke abruptly. Somehow, the sound of the clocks had been so loud, they jarred her into wakefulness. Groaning, she rolled over, but stopped when she realized something.
Her photograph was gone.
She turned on the light and searched her room, around the bed and under it, underneath her covers and between the mattress and headboard and pillow.
The photograph had disappeared.
Lisa remembered having it in her hands in her dream, dropping it, and Doc picking it up. He was holding it before she woke up.
Could he have it, now? It…wasn't impossible. Improbable, unlikely, yes. But not impossible. Nothing was impossible, unless you stopped believing in it.
She stood and went to her open window. Her room's side of the house faced toward the forest. Briefly, she thought she saw a glimmer of blue, but it could have been anything. Blue animals were far more common on Alnilam than they were on Earth.
Leaning against the frame, she closed her eyes. She could hear rustling coming from the forest. A cool breeze caressed her bare arms and tugged at her nightgown.
She opened her eyes and gazed upward at the sky. There was little to no air pollution here, so the stars were easily visible. She didn't quite know if Earth's sun was visible (or, even, if it was the right time of year, as Orion was a constellation seen from Earth only in the winter), but looking up and knowing it was out there, somewhere, was mildly comforting.
Again, she considered returning to Earth; again, something told her no. A part of her was so firmly convinced nothing would come of it, it always kept her from doing what she knew deep inside her was right.
Sniffling, she felt a familiar pang in her hearts. The same one that occurred when she was thinking about a painful memory. That could be one of the factors keeping her from returning to Earth.
Lisa turned away from the window and looked at her wall calendar. It was specially made and enchanted to follow not only Alnilam's time, but Earth's as well. It made it easier that both planets were in time-sync, but only Lisa thought of the passage of the days as Sunday through Saturday, 24 hours in a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, leap year every 4 years (it came from too much time spent on Earth).
According to the calendar, it was August 22, 1993 on Earth. Would Doc even be there? That was another factor: The scientist had gone to live in the past with his family. He could still be there. He could even be…
Stop that! Lisa mentally berated herself. She would have felt it, even though the vastness of time and space itself, if Doc had died. No, he was still living…somewhere…in time.
End part eight.