'What are you doing here?' Emily retorted, because she was sure that this was a Rachel of her own time.
'I asked first.'
'I'm here to fix things up.'
'What! Emily, it's over. It wasn't meant to be.' Even though Ross was so wonderful, and Rachel could understand her attitude, Rachel wasn't going to let her manipulate events to stay with Ross. Ross was Rachel's!
'Of course not,' Emily said incredulously, 'What do you think I'm here for?'
'To get Ross back of course, that's obvious.' Emily made rude noise.
'You are obviously deluded. I'm trying to stop anything happening.'
'You are?'
'Why would I be here, at this moment in time. If I wanted to save things I'd at my own wedding, ready to garotte you the moment you stepped near the place,' Emily said contemptuously.
'Oh,' Rachel said. Both women looked each other up and down. 'So what do you plan to do?'
'Tell Emily - Emily 1998 - in her sleep that she can't wait to get home and stay home, and remind her of all the other boyfriends who kiss better than Ross, not to mention a few other things.'
'Hey!' Rachel said sharply.
'It's the truth. I can't help it if you've got low standards.'
'How dare you?'
'Oh you want me to tell her how wonderful he is? Then she might not even get on the plane. What were you going to do?'
'Tell Ross similar things. Holiday romances aren't meant to last. You can't possibly be as nice as you seem, that sort of thing.' Emily glared at her and then said,
'Well it's a means to an end. I was going to wait until they got home, got finished - that Rachel took some time - and then fell asleep.'
'Hmm,' Rachel said. 'Well all right. So all we have to do it wait.'
'There's a few more hours yet,' Emily said.
Suddenly there was a knocking on the door and both of them jumped.
'It's nothing,' Rachel said. No-one was supposed to be there at this time in 1998...
'I know you're in there,' said a loud English accented male voice of the Stately homes variety, 'It's no use pretending you know.' Emily and Rachel looked at each other.
There was a fiddling with the lock and a middle aged man dressed in a suit and wearing a monocle came in.
'I really prefer it when people open up but no matter, no-one will notice the lock's been popped. I can do it without very many scratches.' The man put what looked like a small set of tools back in his pocket.
'Who are you and what do you think you're doing here?' Rachel demanded.
'I could ask the same of you,' said the man, fixing his monocle on her. 'Six years or thereabouts out of time, the pair of you. It won't do you know.'
'What?' Emily exclaimed, 'You know about us?'
'Neither of you have covered your tracks very well. You've stirred up all kinds of ripples in the space time continuum. And there's a pretty muddy patch even further back in time.' He looked at Rachel who was blushing, 'I suppose that was you. All that will require cleaning up you know. We just can't have all this mess.' He looked them both. They looked at his monocle. It did funny things to his eye. 'Oh all right,' he said, putting it away. 'I can see quite well without it. It's just that I'm rather fond of the Edmund Campion look - or do I mean Lord Peter Wimsey? Yes I do mean Peter Wimsey. I always fancied being a time lord, although actually a time policeman would be more accurate - but I can see you're both struck dumb which must be rather unusual. My name is really Charles Alendar but you may call me Alendar. What do you think you're doing here? I could feel you blundering around from way back in seventeenth century.'
'Just trying to fix things up,' Rachel said sullenly.
'In what way?'
'Well she,' Rachel said, pointing at Emily, 'came in to Ross's life. He married her, then they broke up and then he took ages to get over it - '
'Did he?' Emily asked, interested. 'I thought he didn't care.'
'Yes he did care, don't interrupt. Then we had this stupid wedding in Vegas where we were both drunk and then we got divorced.'
'How very interesting,' Emily said, this time satirically.
'Will you just shut up a minute,' Rachel turned on her briefly. 'And it took forever - or years to get things where they should have been. We were destined to be together,' Rachel summed up, 'And if it wasn't for the fact that she got in the way we would have been together sooner, so I don't see why we couldn't have gotten back together sooner.'
'And you?' asked Alendar.
'My life would have been so much better if I'd left here for good at this time. Then I'd just have a memory of a holiday romance and none of the awful things that happened to me because of him, and because of her, would have happened,' Emily said.
'So you thought you'd whisper into their dreams?' Alendar asked, with a knowing look.
'Well, yes,' Rachel said, disconcerted at having the plan seen through so easily.
'It doesn't work like that,' said Alendar, shaking his head. 'You change something now, you change it into the future forever.'
'But we could just go forward in time and fix it up,' Emily said.
'No you couldn't because you wouldn't be able to remember what you needed to fix up. You would change, then and now. And things might not turn out how you planned.' Alendar opened a piece of paper on the table and said, 'Look.' He spread it out and the paper not only flattened, it became larger, and more and more like a blank TV screen which shimmered into an image of the airport. 'Rachel, this is what would happen if Ross went to the airport with Emily after you two had been at work.'
They watched. Ross and Emily 1998 were chatting as they waited for her boarding call. Ross was being more diffident than Emily remembered and Emily 1998 had looked, well, impatient to board. She hadn't quite felt like that at the time, Emily was sure. There was a goodbye, a kiss, and Emily walked through the departure gate with her Toblerone and without a backward glance.
Ross stood there for a moment and walked out.
'So?' Rachel demanded. Emily looked at Alendar inquiringly. Both of them were quite satisfied with the outcome.
'Well he had been waiting by the window, to watch Emily's plane leave,' Alendar said, 'Except he isn't. Look at him now.'
They continued to watch. Ross bumped into a woman knocking over all her things. He was aghast.
'Oh I'm terribly sorry, here, please let me help.' He helped her pick them up. They watched as they got chatting. She was just seeing someone off at the airport. She had an interest in dinosaurs. She lived near Central Perk but had never been there before. She was really quite cute. Rachel was appalled, while Emily stood by, examining her fingernails.
'They hit it off straight away,' Alendar said conversationally. 'Of course your relationship with Joshua progresses for a while, because you don't blurt out anything about marrying him.' Emily shot Rachel a look of inquiry, which Rachel ignored. 'But then you find out why his wife divorced him. It wasn't for the reasons he told you so you get out of that relationship fast. You end up marrying someone from Boston, an orthodontist.'
'What?!'
'Called Gary Marber. And there's no Emma in your life. You have another child but she's a different one.'
'No,' Rachel breathed in horror. Emily had stopped looking at her fingernails and was staring at Alendar in trepidation.
'Just as sweet,' Alendar said.
'Not possible,' Rachel said.
'She's a great comfort to you when Gary Marber is convicted of murdering six of his patients forcing you to leave town under an assumed name,' Alendar said. 'Unfortunately people believe that you are involved in covering up the deaths so you are unpopular.'
'Emily, your turn,' Alendar said. Emily, having seen how it would turn out for Rachel, was prepared for the worst and held her breath but then she saw herself, dressed up, having returned from dinner with her parents. It was the night she had rung Ross to find that he was, contrary to his promise, having dinner with Rachel.
'Oh well then, nothing's changed,' she said with evident relief.
'Nothing? You went to bed that night - it was a late one, and you slept soundly. I don't think you did sleep in the original version at all.'
'No I didn't. It was one of the worst nights of my life,' Emily said. 'That was one of the things I was trying to avoid this time around.'
'Yes, and you do. In the original version you gave up sleeping and you went out to catch the early bus, in plenty of time.' He emphasised the words 'plenty of time,' and Emily stared at him in horror. 'You intended to catch that bus in this version too, but after your meddling here, you will have nothing to keep you awake at night so you will sleep in. You raced...'
Emily watched herself run for the bus - and miss it.
She screamed. She'd met Jasper on that trip. He'd been thinking over whether or not to give his relationship with his ex another try and he had always told her that meeting her on the bus, sad as she was, made him realise that he'd rather stay on the bus and make her smile, than get off at the right stop and see Jennifer.
'Yes,' said Alendar. 'He gets off the bus at the right stop. He sees Jennifer and they make it up. It only lasts for seven months, after all, they are totally incompatible, but you miss your time. You see him on the bus every day for the next few months but he's not looking at you at all and you don't notice him either.'
'Don't,' Emily said in horror.
'Jasper doesn't talk you out of getting married again because he doesn't even know who you are.'
'No,' she said with a shudder.
'So you do. It works in a mediocre kind of way.' Mediocre - when she could have had fantastic. 'You don't have any children because your second husband is infertile. So no Alun, and no little one to follow.' She stared at him in shock. 'You didn't know you were pregnant again but you are. Conception was seven days ago. Of course that only works if nothing changes.'
'No,' Emily said again, putting protective hands on her belly.
'But you do take up Dodo farming and become one of the leading authorities on the subject,' Alendar said. Emily shuddered. She refused to look at the image, which was showing scores of the little perishers...
'Okay, we can't do this,' Rachel said. 'I give up.'
'Me too,' Emily said.
'Best leave things as they are,' Alendar said. 'Leave it to me and I'll have you back to the exact time and place you left. Time pieces please.' Each woman handed over a watch. Alendar shook his head. 'That bloody Jonathan. I suppose this is the one he broke and then lost in New York and this is the one he lost in London. The clot.'
'Jonathan?' Rachel asked, curiously, 'He's got an English accent only different from yours?'
'I should think it was different to mine,' Alendar said, loftily, 'I'm surprised you even understood that he was speaking English at all, if we're talking about the same person. Thin, weedy fellow, needs a haircut, and a bath.'
'Could be him. I was walking behind him in the street when he dropped the watch on the sidewalk. I did try to get it back to him. Did he get into trouble?'
'Lots,' said Alendar in a forbidding voice. 'Technically you both are in trouble for time crimes, but all in all, it's best if we get you both back where you belong and paper over the cracks.'
And Rachel found herself back in her own kitchen, just one minute after she'd wandered out it. She felt so tired, even though it was only three in the afternoon, but of course she'd just lived a few hours of extra life, tucked away in 1998. She hurried to pick up Emma and found her just the same. Rachel breathed a sigh of relief.
Emily had travelled to the US in her own time in the belief that she could cover her tracks later. Without the Device, she couldn't. The man debated this for a while and then said,
'Hang it all, I'll get you back then and there.' He didn't want her husband asking questions - time travel had to stay secret. So Emily found herself back in her own home, in her own time, with her passport was unstamped.
However, in accordance with the universal laws of travel, her luggage didn't arrive back until two months later.
Well? At least it arrived.
AN: Really the end. I have three more ideas which may or may not make good stories, I don't know. There may be some delay on those. Living Doll is nearly finished too. I make no apology for the really bad pun in this piece.