Little Bird's Vengeance Chapter 60 Impossible
Tim groaned and put his head in his hands. "Please tell me you didn't say that," he pleaded.
"We cobbled together a Cosmic Treadmill and used it to get a lot of information to help with your cases," Cassie repeated.
Jason watched impassively. The Titans, shepherded by Barton, Romanoff and Hill, had interrupted their little chat with Fury, because they supposedly had some really important information.
"And what is a Cosmic Treadmill?" Fury demanded.
"It's a contraption a speedster can use to achieve stable time and or dimensional travel," Tim said listlessly.
"Something you could use to get home," Hill guessed.
"Theoretically," Cassie said. "We'd need a lot of calculations to work it out-"
"As far as I can tell, we're out of a CT's range," Tim shot down. "I wouldn't be able to start working it out."
"So you've been playing about with time travel," Jason interrupted. "How's that going?"
"Time travel as in, stable, reliable moving from one point in time to another?" Barton said incredulously. "That's not possible. Is it?"
"Possible, yes, advisable, no," Tim replied bitingly. "There will have are going to have been these guys, temporal trouble shooters if you will, who spend a lot of time repairing the mess made by earlier attempts at time travel and trying to stop people like us from bringing the timeline to the point of collapse whenever we get too carried away with our own cleverness."
"Please tell me I'm not hearing a Bat lecturing on the dangers of being too clever," Kon said, staring at Tim.
"I'm just quoting Rip Hunter, from every single lecture he's given us about irresponsible time travel," Tim frowned. "Didn't you ever listen?"
"Well, yeah, a bit, but you seriously mean you did?" Kon asked incredulously.
"Hunter is very capable, does not panic easily, has a good grasp of his responsibilities, and yet still manages to look on the verge of a nervous breakdown whenever he's giving those talks," Tim pointed out.
"Sorry, what's so dangerous about time travel?" Barton asked.
"In and of itself, absolutely nothing," Tim started, settling into lecture mode. "It's the human factor. Go back to observe a disaster, get carried away, prevent said disaster, you force the timeline to split. Then you have two different realities running parallel and causing all sorts of problems. There's a nice variety of paradoxes you can cause, and we're not entirely sure what the more dangerous ones cause. Possibly complete timeline annihilation, which would not be good. The tamer ones can be reincorporated into continuity if you're sharp enough, which is I believe the only stable way to change a previously established event." There were a whole lot of blank faces. Tim sighed. "Okay. Let us assume that, sometime during the war, Captain America died. The rest of his Commandoes finished taking out Hydra, just as he did. But we don't then have a cryogenically preserved supersoldier. When the Chitauri invade, you fail. So, you find a way to send, say, Clint, back in time to pose as a member of one of the Resistances to save Cap's life. Then everything unfolds as we know. But then there's no reason for Clint to go back in time, and the temporal waveform collapses. Unless, while in the past, he convinces Howard Stark to leave a time capsule for Tony with instructions for the saving-Cap mission. Problem is, what if Tony opens the capsule early, decides to complete the mission himself, and manages to fail and, in the process, deliver ARC technology to Hydra, letting them conquer the world by 1950? A temporal trouble shooter has a big mess to unravel."
"...So time travel is bad?" Clint asked.
"It's unpredictable, even when going to the past." Tim shuddered. "Going forward is even worse."
"Basically, your idiot teammates shouldn't have been playing with it," Jason confirmed.
"Hood, please," Tim sighed. "But no. I just hope you at least kept good notes of when and where you went?"
"Of course we did," Cassie sighed, rolling her eyes. "You can check it out back at the Tower. But there is a version of us still assembling the treadmill right now, so..."
"Where did you get the plans?" Tim asked. "I didn't know any of you had memorised them."
"We found the blueprints on your desk," Kon told him.
"You...oh, for the love of- Right. Give me a few minutes." Tim pulled out his notebook and pen and started drawing.
"I thought you didn't want them running around in time," Romanoff asked, confused.
"If they've already done it, trying to stop them will result in either a long series of potentially hilarious events leading to the blueprints being left there anyway, or an unsustainable paradox," Jason explained, letting Tim focus on the blueprints. "What? I know how it works too," he added, in response to the varying looks of amazement and scepticism.
"At least tell me your little venture was worth it," Tim grumbled.
"You could say that," Cassie nodded. "First we tracked down those two guys who'd done the hiring for the hit on Stark. They're semi-professional criminal recruiters, formerly of the Sicilian Mafia. They work for Fisk, but freelance. We were able to get photographic ID of their employer.
"Then we went to Russia and checked out Vanko's home. There were no signs of anything that may have gone into creating the Whiplash precursor array, but we did find a number of audio-visual bugs. SHIELD issue. We retrieved them, borrowed some from Barton's room - sorry, Clint - then went back in time two months to set them up. We now have a recording of the guy who stole the plans. It's the same man as hired the assassins.
"Then we did something similar with that cop who sicced a drug bust on us. He's in the pay of one of those recruiters we ID'd earlier. He just has to do whatever they tell him to do, but I don't think he's been given many orders yet.
"Finally, Bart sped around New York and identified some two dozen people with Sons of the Serpent outfits in their closets. Then we located the Supreme Serpent, bugged it, and got more visuals. Same guy again."
"This isn't good," Tim muttered. "Have you ID'd the guy yet?"
Cassie hesitated. "Have you finished those blueprints yet?"
"Nearly," Tim mumbled. He scrawled a firm 'BE CAREFUL' at the bottom, and slid the pages over. "Well?"
Kon produced a photograph. "This is the clearest visual," he muttered.
Tim took it, and froze. The blood drained from his face, and every muscle tensed instantly. Then he vaulted the table, pinned Kon to the wall with one hand, and raised his other fist, Kryptonite ring glowing sickly. "You're lying," he snarled. "You have to be."
Jason blinked. What on Earth had got into Tim? Lunging for allies' throats was something he'd do, not the Replacement.
"I swear," Kon gasped. "That's what we found. I swear on His parents' grave."
Swearing on Bruce's parents' grave was the most serious oath anyone in their community could give, because if it was broken, the Bats would hunt you down. It would never be taken lightly.
Tim's grip loosened, and Kon pulled away. "It's not possible," the young Gothamite stuttered. "If- If you're lying, I- I'll- It's not possible."
Tim stepped back. He looked strangely small, and fragile, and...fractured. His lips moved soundlessly, and he bolted out of the room.
"What was that about?" Hill asked, confused.
Jason picked up the discarded photograph, and felt a bus ram into him. There was no way, it couldn't be, it was absolutely impossible, and Kon had sworn on Bruce's parents' grave...
"If you lied, whatever he does, I will do tenfold," Jason said, his voice sounding thick and strangely far away. He had to get away, because there was no way this wasn't a joke, but it was the cruellest, most heartless joke there could be.
The photo had to be wrong. It couldn't be...Bruce.
AN: Now taking bets on what's going on...
Also today: Jason and the Argonauts,Black and Red, Ultimate Avenging Alliance, Ulitmate Writing Adventure.
Coming soon: Jason and the Argonauts, Black and Red, Little Bird's Vengeance, Ultimate Avenging Alliance, Ultimate Writing Adventure. Nag me if it takes more than a week.
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Katara