A/N: Kate and Jeffrey have fixed the red light they encountered on 16 August 1969 which took them to Miami. I've written a story about that, but that's just weird. This story picks up a few hours later, when they are relaxing after their success at giving history a push.
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Hawaii Beach, 8 June 1972.
Kate is playing in the floodline, running in and out of the water. Jeffrey sits on the beach, staring into the distance. Two minutes he had Bogg back in his life and he is off voyaging again. Okay, partly his own doing. And partly Kate's. She took him away from his folks. He shouldn't hold that against her though, not too much. It was an accident, and she did take him to them in the first place. Jeffrey pulls his legs up and rests his chin on his knees. Maybe when they get back to the Island someone there can take him back to his folks. So what if he is supposed to be the greatest Voyager ever. He wasn't supposed to be enslaved on a plantation for five years, was he? They can't make him become a voyager if he doesn't want to. And if they think they can, he will take his omni and try to find his folks, now that he knows they're out there somewhere. If they give him an omni with a time boundary set at 1982, he will ask Kate to rig it for him. Surely she will do that. He'll play on her guilt if he has to. Does she even feel guilt? She says she feels bad, but it would be a lot more convincing if she wasn't so damn cheerful.
Heay, you can't do that, he tells himself. It's not Kate's fault they're here now. He was the one that first triggered the omni. They should just make the most of the situation. He should do the mature thing. He's the experienced Voyager here. Kate has never voyaged before, save one illegitimate trip, and eventhough she knows about voyaging, actual voyaging has got the be pretty scary to her. He should take her under his wing, show her the ropes, take care of her the way Bogg took care of him.
Bogg. Bogg kept looking for him for twentyone years. He never gave up. Never forgot him. And how does he say thanks? He kidnaps his daughter. Bogg has got to be pretty devastated. Kate too. From what she's told him, he gathers that she and Bogg are close. Maybe it's like he said, they're even. He took her away from her dad, she took him away from his folks. And now they'll have to voyage until someone on the Island likes them back. He would have thought Bogg would have wanted them back immediately, but perhaps he doesn't have a big influence on the Island. Or he's paralized with devastation, or ...
There you go again with the horror scenarios, Jeffrey tells himself, stop that. He tries to think happy thoughts. At least he has got the color back in a lot of his childhood memories.
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"I thought I might find you here." Susan closes the door behind her and walks over to Bogg who sits in front of the Omnitron.
"You said a couple of hours. It's a couple of days now."
"I'm sorry. I thought ..."
"So did I. I don't blame you. It's just ..."
"I know." She puts a hand on his shoulder.
"If I knew how to work the Omnitron I would get them home myself."
"Is there anything I can get you? A more comfortable chair for instance?"
"I'm good. Your company would be nice."
"Your muscles are really tense." Susan starts to masage his neck and shoulders. "You know, your muscles are strong enough to break your own bones. We don't want you to break your shoulder on top of everything."
"What an odd thing to say."
"I think Kate told me once. You remember, she had found those medical books in the library. How old was she then, six or seven?"
"Six."
"Six. She'd tell everyone about the new things she learned. Did you know your own muscles are strong enough to break your own bones? Did you know there are 27 bones in the human hand?" Susan tries to imitate the six-year-old know-it-all.
"I was just glad the books were in alfabetical order, so I could put them on a higher shelf before she reached the R's and S's."
"I believe you also suggested we'd re-organize the library so that certain books would be out of reach for people of certain height."
"If you had re-organized the library, we would have found Jeffrey a lot sooner."
As if suddenly stung Susan pulls her hands away from Bogg. "Perhaps." It makes her sick to think that Voyagers had the information to Jeffrey's whereabouts all along in their library, but didn't know about it, because there was a backload of four decades worth of cataloging. Susan feels very responsible. So much so that a little part of her is almost glad Jeffrey isn't on the Island so she doesn't have to face him. She is head of Administration and Legal. The library is her responsibility. She feels she has utterly failed the young man. Susan changes the subject. "Where are they? I don't see Jeffrey."
"Hawaii Beach. Jeff is sitting overthere somewhere, staring into the distance. I can only imagine what he is thinking about. Kate's playing in the water. It's silly, isn't it?" He looks up at Susan.
"What is?"
"I used to be a pirate and my 18-year-old daughter has never seen the ocean."
"Yes, that is silly."
"Too bad there isn't any sound."
Susan walks over to the console. "There isn't anything on mute here. I guess the omni isn't transmitting sound." She turns back to Bogg. "Anything else I can do for you?"
"You could take over my class."
"I tried to, but your students refused to be thaught." She doesn't mention one of them suggested that Kate and Jeffrey hadn't returned yet because there is something wrong with the omni they took. She plans to look into that later.
Bogg takes her hand and presses a kiss on it. "Thank you for being here for me."
"I'm always here for you, Phineas."
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Kate stops playing and looks at Jeffrey staring into the distance. Her heart aches seeing him like that. Why doesn't the omni want to take them back to 1989 anymore? Did it reset its time boundary? Can't be. They're in 1972 right now. And why isn't the Council getting them back? They must have been gone for at least 50 hours now. How long does it take to press the right button on the Omnitron? The Council should know the home button on their omni doesn't work, so what's taking them? No need to tell Jeffrey about this. It would only add to his agony. Time for a cheerful face and sunny attitude, even if the natural state of the situation sets for a bad mood.
Kate flops down beside Jeffrey and stretches out on the beach.
"You really like the ocean," Jeffrey tells her.
"It's marvelous. Voyager Island is great, don't get me wrong. Always excellent weather. I am told I don't really know what bad weather is like. But whoever designed it forgot to put in an ocean."
"Is that why we haven't voyaged yet, although it's a green light here, and earlier you said we should voyage as much as possible so they could get us home." Jeffrey lies down on his side.
"I think it is part of it. The other part is I'm still on this thrill from my first green light."
"I would think that would encourage you to go to another red light time, fix things there."
"No, I want to wait doing that, until this thrill wears off. I was mistaken though, this was not my first green light."
"You're not counting stopping me trying to stop Oswald, are you?"
"I hadn't thought about that one, so, no. No, this was when I was sixteen. Dad took me to see the opera The Pirate."
"He inspired Bellini and Romani to make one of the characters a pirate." His memories take him back to 1827 where he and Bogg had to get Romani and Bellini to work together.
"Yeah, I know. That's why I wanted to see it. So, for my sixteenth birthday, dad took me there. A very special performance he said. Actually, the first time it was going to be performed. When we got there, there was a red light. The opera wasn't programmed with the lead that was supposed to, Rubini. So we went back in time to find him and get him out of the predicament he was in. Something about romancing someone else's wife, which badly influenced his singing career." Jeffrey chuckles. "That kind of was my first green light. But this one in Miami felt more like it was mine. There it was dad who took the lead, and did everything. I just looked at him admiringly."
"And here you just followed my lead." Jeffrey rolls on his back.
"Yeah, right."
"I was the one who told the man from Train that Lang was a manager."
"And I was the one who asked him to take us to Michael Lang's shop."
"So, it was a joint effort then."
"Yeah, a joint effort. We make a good team."
"How about we try to be a good team somewhere else?"
"Are you bored?"
"Well, kind of."
"I thought after all those years of working hard on the plantation, you could use a short vacation, not do anything."
"I would have thought so too. I guess I'm just one of those people that always needs to be busy."
"Lying in the sand is an activity."
"Too passive."
Kate rolls over and leans on her elbows. "Where would you take your active holiday?"
"I'd like to go to the Wild West."
"The Wild West? Oh yeah, when men were real men and women were real women, and getting shot was just one smart ass remark away."
"I see why you would have a problem there. That's where the real America was made."
"Sure. So that's what some French writers mean by America's cowboy mentality. It is really appreciated by the rest of the world."
"What are you talking about?" Jeffrey gets up on one elbow to look at her straight.
"A lot of things that happened after 1982. You're excused for not knowing."
"What kind of things happened after 1982?"
"Er, the Berlin wall fell in '89. War on the Balkan, again. The whole 21st century, but I'm not really familiar with that. I specialized in the period from 1750 to 1950."
"I didn't know Voyagers specialized in times."
"Hmm. We're under new management. Things change. It's a choice you can make: know a little about a lot, or know a lot about a little. I did a bit of both, I know a lot about the period between 1750 and 1950, and a little about all the rest."
"Why did you choose those times?"
"They're very interesting times; the world changes a lot there. Well, it does in all centuries after the Industrial Revolution. I had to draw a line somewhere, and I kinda lost interest at the end of the 20th century, so I drew my line there. It's a great time period. I'll show you." Kate sits up. She rubs the sand from her feet and puts on her sneakers. "Best if we stand up for voyaging. We never quite know where we end up. We might have to jump out of the way of something." They get up. Kate opens the omni and sets the dials. Jeffrey puts a hand on her arm.
"The period of 1750 to 1950 is great because of the advancements in technology and ... "
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" ... and engineering. Such as the Eiffeltower." Kate spreads her arms. "Isn't Paris great from up here?" Kate and Jeffrey are standing on a half finished Eiffeltower. "Or how about the social advancements?" Kate resets the dials.
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"Such as women's suggrage?" They appear at a demonstration for women's suffrage. "Or how both brought about a new kind of entertainment." They voyage again.
