Two Roads Diverged
By: Karone

Chapter One

A hundred years.

It was strange to think that a tree could live several centuries.

That it could stand through so many generations and so many lifetimes, strong and vibrant.

While the world around it changed, the tree remained as it always was, growing a little taller, a little older, with each passing season and each year that fell away.

It was hard to believe that he'd once stood at this very tree, a hundred years ago.

But the memory of many a warm summer afternoon spent stretched out in the shade beneath its lush green canopy was as vivid as if it had been just yesterday, and he could almost smell the popcorn from the park vendor stands in the air, could almost hear the sounds of familiar laughter as a frisbee whizzed by overhead.

Sighing, Phil Diffy let his fingers drop from the bark of the tree, looking away from the initials carved there.

If he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough, he could picture her standing there in front of him, smiling that warm, tender little smile that was reserved solely for him, her eyes twinkling brightly.

He didn't do it, though, and resisted the temptation to try.

Imagining she was there was the road to madness, as he'd learned all too well as of late, and he refused to take that road today.

Not when he'd already taken it so many times before.

It had been a month since his family had returned to the future, since he'd had to say goodbye.

Four weeks. Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours. Forty-three thousand and two hundred minutes. Two million, five hundred ninety-nine thousand seconds.

And counting.

His family had already resettled into their old lives, picking up where they left off, minus the six years they lost while they were stuck in the past, but Phil couldn't seem to do the same. Old friends felt like strangers now, and he wasn't sure whether he hardly knew them or they hardly knew him.

Even hobbies that had once been thrilling, like hoverboarding, didn't interest him anymore.

He would have given anything for a regular old skateboard and a set of knee pads.

Most of all, though, he would have given anything for her.

When his family had first gotten stuck in the twenty-first century, Phil had been miserable. All of his friends, his hologames, his whole life and everything he'd ever known had been a hundred years in the future, out of touch and out of reach.

Then he'd met Keely Teslow.

Blond, beautiful, popular and dizzy, she had been so far out of his class it wasn't even funny.

But she'd turned to him for help with algebra, albeit secretly, meeting out of sight from the rest of the popular kids and ducking under the table when her friends happened by so that they wouldn't see her with a 'math geek'. Still, she'd come around and after getting a B on her math test, she'd surprised both him and her friends by sitting with him at lunch.

It had been the start of a beautiful friendship.

And, eventually, that friendship had begun to turn into something more.

He hadn't realized it at first, and he suspected that Keely hadn't either. The two of them had been oblivious to the true nature of their own relationship, even while those closest to them had suspected more.

They'd gone to prom together, both junior and senior, as best friends.

Junior year Phil had come through for her at the last minute, after Keely's original date failed to show, and he'd spent the whole night making her laugh so she would forget about the fact that she'd been stood up by a jerk who hadn't deserved her in the first place.

That had been the first night that he realized how deeply attracted he was to her.

But it hadn't been until senior prom, a year later, that he'd actually done something about it and kissed her.

To his surprise, and maybe to her own, Keely had kissed him back, without hesitation, and the two of them had, from that moment on, been a couple in one form or another.

Graduation night, she'd told him that she loved him.

They'd gone to college together, enrolling at the local university and living in the same dorm building, on the same floor. Keely had roomed with Tia, of course, and Phil had shared a dorm room with Seth, so the four of them had been able to hang out on a daily basis, although Fridays had been exclusively reserved for just him and Keely.

Keely had been majoring in fashion design, and he'd gone into physics, breezing through his classes and earning an internship at a blossoming computer tech company.

With their third year of college coming to a close, they'd been talking about getting an apartment together.

They'd been talking about a lot of things, actually, like what they were going to do once they got out of college... about marriage and, someday, children.

For the first time since getting stuck in the past, the future hadn't meant the twenty-second century.

It had meant a life with Keely, a family of his own, all the things that he'd never really given much thought to at the age of fifteen, or at the age of eighteen to be truthful.

And then his father had said the words that ruined it all.

After six long years of living a hundred years in the past, the time machine was fixed and they were going home.

And just like that, Phil's world had come crashing down.

It had been the hardest thing he'd ever done to leave, and he suspected it had been the hardest thing Keely had ever done to let him.

She hadn't come to see him off, they'd said their goodbyes the night before.

In the hours after she fell asleep in his arms, Phil had lain awake in the dark of her room, watching her sleep. His father had informed him that they were leaving at sunrise, and so he had waited until the very last possible moment to slip out of her bed and get dressed.

He'd stood over her for a long moment, just staring down at her, heart ready to burst it hurt so bad.

The watch on his wrist had blinked twice, alerting him that his family was waiting on him, and he'd bent over to kiss her forehead, whispered with tears in his eyes that he would always love her, no matter how much time passed, matter how many centuries kept them apart.

Then he'd turned and hurried from the apartment she shared with Tia, without looking back.

Because he'd known then what he knew now, that if he'd hesitated just a moment, if he'd so much as glanced over his shoulder for one last glimpse of her, he would never have had the strength to leave.

Now, though, a month later and a hundred years away from the girl he loved, Phil Diffy decided it hadn't been strength, at all, that let him walk away that day.

It had been sheer and utter stupidity.

Turning away from the tree, their tree as marked by the initials encased in a heart that Keely had carved into the trunk one blissful summer day during a picnic for two in their freshmen year of college, Phil shook his head sharply and made himself start walking.

What was done, was done.

He'd made the decision to return to the twenty-second century with his family, and he would have to live with it.

But as he left the park, so different from the park of a hundred years ago and yet strikingly similar just the same, he couldn't help recalling the words his beaming father had spoken upon arriving back in their own time.

We're home.

Maybe that was true for the rest of the Diffys, but not him.

Keely was home for him.

And home was out of reach now, lost to the sands of time.