Chapter 1: One Lucky Meg
After some consideration, I've decided to combine all of the Lucky Meg stories into one with some slight edits rather than have six of them scattered all over the place. One Lucky Meg was originally written as and intended to be a one-shot, but then I started writing more and more and it turned into a series. I hope that anyone who reads this enjoys it as much as I did writing it.
Meg Griffin celebrated her nineteenth birthday. Well, celebrate was probably not the right word to use, given the tension in the air.
Her parents tried to, in their own foolish ways, to make her happy but nothing would ever make up for what they did. They ruined her life, and she genuinely hated them after said incident. Their problem, Meg thought, was that neither of them thought things through and her dad especially had a habit of ruining things at the last possible moment.
It was he, she'd learned later, that came up with the idea for the doctored windsurfing photo. If it wasn't for that, then she would still be in college. She wouldn't be stuck.
Stuck still living with her parents, Brian, Chris and Stewie.
Stuck with no boyfriend in a gruelling dead-end job, mostly to pay back her hefty hospital bills from nearly dying in that accident.
Stuck unable to go to likely any college or university ever due to the admissions scandal and being expelled, with a stack of rejection letters as a constant reminder.
She tore into both Peter and Lois after they'd thought they could appease her with gifts, more than she'd ever received in her previous eighteen birthdays combined.
"You think you can just buy me off, make things better and gloss everything over? I hate you! Both of you! And remember what I said mom, that as soon as I turned eighteen I might never want to see you again? I should've gotten out! And dad, I should've just let Aunt Karen just break your neck, you fat piece of crap!"
Meg's chest heaved with her rapid breaths and tears streamed down her face.
"Again with the college..." muttered Stewie, while Brain nodded to him silently.
"Shut it, you little turd!" yelled Meg.
"Or what? What can you do, Meg? Huh Meg? What can you do? Just keep on whining about how horrible your life is, boo hoo. Life isn't fair, if you want something you need to reach out and take it!"
"The only thing Meg's good at taking is a beating," said Chris, "the paramedics pretty much had to scrape up what was left of her at the bottom of the falls."
Meanwhile Peter and Lois shook their heads and glared at Chris to keep quiet, but it was too late. Before he knew it, Meg had grabbed him and smashed his face through the cake and the table itself, breaking both it and a fair number of Chris's teeth, then she ran crying upstairs to her room and slammed the door shut.
"Don't mention the time she went to college." Peter said, while pointing to a giant mural on the wall that said DON'T MENTION THE TIME SHE WENT TO COLLEGE, with a crashed windsurfer and a nearly-drowning Meg underneath that was expertly painted.
"Oh Peter, what are we gonna do?" asked Lois. "If nothing changes then we'll be stuck taking care of her for the rest of our lives!"
"Uh mom, I think I might have swallowed a tooth and probably also a fork..." said Chris.
"One problem at a time..." muttered Brian, while Stewie nodded to him silently.
Predictably, Meg spent the rest of the night in her room in bed, very hungry but with no mood to eat or do much of anything. She felt like she wanted to die and spent several hours thinking of ways to off herself, but something that Stewie said kept repeating itself in her head:
If you want something you need to reach out and take it!
Meg was no fool. She'd known that Stewie was far more than he appeared and that he and Brian had gone on many adventures together, and everyone figured that she was too dim-witted to ever notice. If anyone could help, it was him, but he had no reason to do so and would probably just laugh in her face if she asked.
He had a freaking time machine in his closet.
From what she pieced together by eavesdropping on Stewie and Brian whenever they were talking about time-travel, there was no saving herself. Time-travel erased the old timeline if you succeeded in changing your personal timeline, which also meant you'd cease to exist. But she could save the other Meg, who still had her whole life ahead of her, and keep her from becoming the bitter wreck she'd become. She had no plan and no idea where to even start though, which frustrated her to no end.
She considered trying to stop Peter from suggesting the windsurfing idea, but knowing him he'd just come up with something else equally as bad anyway.
She considered stopping Peter and Lois from forging her resume in the first place, but the problem with that idea was that she had no idea where else she'd end up. Brown University was her way out, she knew that with all the fiber of her being.
Peter farted in his sleep at the too-easy fart joke setup.
If you want something you need to reach out and take it!
So Meg tiptoed into Stewie's room, her brother seemingly fast asleep, and headed towards the closet. The very moment she placed her hand on the door, the lights came on and Stewie was immediately standing beside her pointing some sort of gun in her face.
"Silent alarm and teleporter. Just in case someone ever tried sneaking in here in the middle of the night to use my time machine, steal Rupert or suggest to me in my sleep that we do another Simpsons crossover. I knew you'd come here, Meg. I can smell it on you..."
Stewie sniffed, gagged and pinched his nose in disgust. "Or maybe you just need a shower, ew."
Meg took a few steps back. "If you're so smart then you know why I'm here, Stewie. I need to make things right!"
Stewie, however, was not convinced and seemed to care very little. "Time travel is dangerous, Meg. Like you can end up with two heads or another older sister named Julie who was a way better sister than you Meg, or everyone dies horribly. Crashing a windsurfer isn't a world-ending event! Get over it!"
Similar to what happened with Chris earlier, Meg's rage took hold and with one quick motion she grabbed the gun out of his hand, broke it into pieces and then lifted Stewie up by his neck with the other.
"You... you little bastard! How can you say that?"
"About time travel being dangerous?"
"No."
"Two heads?"
"No."
"Julie? Because I can tell you a lot about Julie! She's like if Lois had a clone and the exact opposite of you!"
"No!"
"Everyone dying horribly?"
"No!"
"Oh, the windsurfer not being a world-ending event?"
"That's the one." Meg said, and lowered the frightened Stewie to the floor. She was no longer angry, and though she thought she'd cried her eyes out hours before her eyes filled with fresh tears. She sat down next to him and looked directly into his eyes.
"It was for me."
Meg stayed silent for a moment before continuing.
"For once in my life I had everything going for me, Stewie. And it was all taken away like that, in a second. And there's no going back, I'm blacklisted everywhere for something I didn't even do myself! I think... I think everyone has some horrible moment in their lives that they wish they could change, and I know you've done it at least once! Well, some version of you anyway... so don't give me crap about world-ending events! Was Brian's death a world-ending event, Stewie?"
Stewie perked up at that last comment. "How do you know that?"
"Room close to mine, loud whatever machine you use to look at other universes, hearing you and Brian talk all the time. I'm not stupid."
"Well yes, Brian is my best friend and means more to me than anything and oh you've got me there. Clever girl."
"So... does this mean you'll let me use your time machine?"
"No."
"Pretty please, my favorite little brother?"
"No."
"Do you want me to still be here until you're eighteen and have to awkwardly explain to your friends about me and the mural every time they show up at the house?"
"I'll show you how to work the time machine."
It took Meg close to a week to understand it enough to get her where and when she wanted to go, and Stewie gave her a small list of things not to do in the past:
"Don't meet or talk to yourself, don't accidentally start Skynet and don't warn people about Covid."
"Why not warn people about Covid?"
"Because it'll evolve into Mega-Covid and kill all the whales, Brian and I already tried that. Oh and it also turns people into whales. And then kills them."
Meg picked up Stewie and kissed his forehead. "Thank you, you don't know how much this means to me. Well, another version of me because I'll fade into oblivion if I succeed, but that's good enough."
Stewie wiped off his forehead. "You know, next to Brian you're really not that bad. Maybe, just maybe in another life we could have been friends."
"Maybe. Also, I don't know whether I should be offended or pleased that I rank above the rest of my family but below a dog."
"Everyone ranks below Brian, it's nothing personal. But Meg, I think you're a very distant #2."
Again, Peter farted at the too-easy fart joke setup.
"Well, time to go. I really hope I know what the hell I'm doing. Bye, Stewie. Well, bye everything really since I'm not coming back." said Meg, who stepped into the time machine. With a roar that shook the house (but somehow nobody noticed) and a bright flash, she was gone.
Not being used to time travel (and because Stewie forgot to warn her), Meg immediately threw up as soon as she'd arrived in the past. It was a week before the ill-fated windsurfing event at Providence Falls, the last hurdle she needed to clear to stay in college. Against all odds, she had done everything that was thrown at her, stuff that she supposedly was good at... and she found that she actually was good. Meg had surprised herself, her family and everyone else who for so long had looked down on her.
Until the windsurfer broke apart, and her hopes and dreams with it.
For weeks and months after that Meg pondered in her mind over and over the events of that day. Even she, unlucky personified that she was, wasn't that unlucky. Something was wrong, and she knew it.
So Meg, avoiding one inept guard at the entrance, snuck into the marina. After searching for what seemed like hours she finally found the one boat she was looking for, the windsurfer that she used (or more accurately, tried to use) at the falls. During the event, she had been so pumped with adrenaline and excitement that she hardly thought about the boat, only the end result of proving herself worthy... proving to everyone that she was not a loser.
But with a clear head, Meg got into and examined the boat and her suspicions were cruelly confirmed. There were bolts and whole pieces missing, and it would likely collapse under her own weight if she lingered too long. There was no way it could sail down a creek, let alone over the falls.
It was sabotage.
"Those bastards!" Meg yelled. "It... it was them all along! Brown University didn't want me to succeed! Oh my god..."
She thought to her parents, about how horribly she'd treated them even though they tried their best to help her. It was wrong, but for the right reason... and she felt awful for what she'd said and did at her birthday party. While they weren't entirely without fault, she couldn't hate them. Not anymore.
Nobody thought that Meg would succeed in all the tasks given to her, not even herself at the time. But the staff must have been worried that she would, and would be forced to keep her there, so they made sure she wouldn't.
"I'll show them, I'll show them all!"
Meg worked into the night, piecing together the windsurfer with whatever she could get her hands on: duct tape, pieces of other boats and spent a good hour making it look as close to the original boat as she could. Otherwise, she'd be disqualified for not using what they'd provided and it would've all been for nothing.
Plus they couldn't admit to sabotaging it or else they'd lose their jobs at best or be tried for attempted murder at worst. She just hoped that the other Meg would succeed where she had failed.
So the day came and Meg stood off at a distance disguised as a clown, because that's all that was in stock in the marina for some reason. She heard her past self tell her parents that she loved them, moments before she'd set off.
That was the last time Meg told them she'd loved them, and she blew her nose. Unfortunately, being a clown's nose it honked and scared some nearby ducks away.
She was close to the edge.
Closer.
Closer.
She'd went over!
Meg heard her past self yell out "Woooooooooooooo!" as she sailed through the air. That hadn't happened last time, she was doing it!
Suddenly, Meg felt what was like all her weight going away all at once. She looked down, and noticed that she couldn't see her feet. They weren't there anymore. She was slowly dissolving, kind of like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Realizing that she had very little time left, she yanked off her clown wig and nose and waved to her past self... no, Meg is who she would be now.
The last thing she saw before fading away was said wave being returned, shortly before the windsurfer landed safely at the bottom.
"Oh my god, that was the most exciting thing I've ever done in my life!" said Meg, later when her parents had met her at the bottom.
"And it'll probably be the most exciting thing you'll ever do."
"Peter!" yelled Lois.
"No seriously, we're proud of you Meg. But something feels off, like the timeline's been changed or something. I can usually sense that with my Peter-sense."
"You didn't think I could do it, did you?" asked Meg.
"No. And I even had a 911 cutaway gag just in case!" he said, and then threw his phone into the water.
"Look, I... I didn't think I could do it either. Or any of this. But you both showed me that I can, even though you did it in the dumbest way imaginable."
Meg, still drenched with water from going over the falls, reached out and hugged them.
"I love you guys."
Dean Nearby and several of her staff approached the trio. "Meg Griffin, you have... er, shown that you be... be... be.."
"Bee!" yelled Peter, who swatted it off the Dean's arm.
"Thank you. As I was saying, you have shown that you be... beLONG here at Brown University. Therefore, all charges, investigations and anal swabs have been dropped. Show up for your classes tomorrow."
As the Dean walked off, Meg thought she heard her mutter "But how, but how..." but she quickly dismissed it. It was the best day of her life.
So far.
"And that was another one of those good things happen to Meg universes," Stewie said, having watched the Multiverse Viewscreen. "There was this one, the Meg Murdock one, the Meg Kennedy one, a bunch of others that aren't as notable..."
"But what happens next? For some reason I'm oddly intrigued," said Brian. "I mean, the same thing happened with the windsurfer here and our Meg doesn't seem that freaked out about it."
"That's as far as it goes. It hasn't been written yet."
"And will it be written?"
"Maybe. Probably not."
"Written by who, god?"
"Sure whatever." replied Stewie. "But if it's anything like the other ones she'll get married and have some kid that another version of me gets attached to. Hopefully that Meg is smarter than that."
"It just... it just makes me think how small we all really are. There's an infinite number of universes, no less valid than any other, with an equally infinite number of versions of us. And no two are really the same! It's like... it's like I'm high from just trying to comprehend it."
"That and the MV causes euphoria in dogs. That and diarrhea."
"What?"
"Never mind."
Meg, no longer a Griffin but not a Murdock or Kennedy either, was in bed with her sleeping husband with a mini-MV shaped like an iPad in her hands, having watched Stewie and Brian watching herself.
"Ain't I a stinker?" she said, and smiled at first but then dropped it as she rewound the video, and paused it on seeing herself in a clown suit waving at her. At first she'd thought it was because of the heat or otherwise a hallucination until Stewie, for some inexplicable reason, gave her the device she held earlier that day and told her to watch it.
"Thank you." she whispered, and turned the screen off. On the walls of her bedroom was her degree, various pictures of her family and children, but of all those one stood out the most: the photo of Meg and her parents celebrating that fateful day, the day that she truly gained confidence in herself. She then cuddled with her husband and then dozed off into a peaceful sleep.
She was one lucky Meg. One of the luckiest.