DISCLAIMER: I don't own Legends of Tomorrow.

WORD COUNT: 1968

"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." – Jean de La Fontaine

Tuesday, September 26th, 1995

The Humvee swerves violently, jarring the soldiers inside. The driver ignores their swearing, his eyes scanning every inch of the road in front of him with a nervousness bordering on paranoia. The voice of the young man he met two weeks ago echoes in his head, near tears as he begged him to keep his head on a swivel for an IED.

He still can't believe that time-travel is real, that he saw his newborn son in the hospital while having a conversation with the same son as a young adult. His Jefferson, telling him that he's going to grow up without a father, because he won't make it out of Mogadishu alive, that he won't get to raise his son or see his Stacie ever again.

So as he drives, he's avoiding everything he sees on the road, from litter to what might just be rocks. He wants to hold his boy, wants to watch him grow up to become the hero he saw two weeks ago. He always knew his boy would be meant for great things, but he wants to see it happen. But he has to get out of Somalia alive to do that.

They reach their destination soon enough, and begin to pile out. They're in the middle of enemy territory, so they have to stay vigilant. But he can't help feel slight relief. He's gotten through the only slightly hypothetical minefield unscathed. It's only one step; he still has the rest of his deployment to survive, but it's further than he originally got, according to his son. He just has to take it step by step, surviving one new danger at a time, and he'll be able to hold his wife and son once more.

Then an enemy sniper's bullet slams through his skull, splattering blood and brains all over his fellow soldiers.

The Refuge, 8:50am

NIGHT TWENTY-FIVE ON THE WAVERIDER

"DAD!" The scream echoed through the room as the young man bolted up into a sitting position. It took him a while to calm down, to breathe normally again. He was so sure, for a second, that he'd been there, even though he knew all his knowledge of the Somali Civil War came from the books he'd read about the battles, that he only knew what a man getting shot in the head looked like because of movies and TV. But Rip had never said anything about time-travellers getting prophetic dreams, or anything (not that their captain was always open with important information), so there was no way Jax could actually be seeing the results of his efforts to save his father.

The failed results.

Sure, maybe his dad could avoid the IED. But he had been in the middle of a warzone. There were so many ways he could die. What seemed like one of Rip's favourite sayings played in his head: "Time wants to happen."

Kendra and Carter had tried to save their son from a past life, but he'd died even sooner and far more violently than he'd originally been meant to.

Snart had tried to save himself and his sister from a childhood of hell, but his old man had just screwed up in a different way and had still gotten himself arrested.

So how could his dad avoiding death by IED ensure that he'd live through the rest of his deployment? That he'd still be alive twenty years later?

Although he was more than a little afraid of what the answer might be, Jax got up out of bed and went to the bridge, meeting no one on the way as his room was the closest. Thankfully Rip wasn't pulling one of his all-nighters and doing research in his office – it seemed that even the experienced time-traveller was a bit wiped out by the thirteen time-jumps they'd performed in the space of less than 24 hours trying to outmanoeuvre the Pilgrim. Of course, as Jax glanced at his dad's watch, it was nearly nine in the morning. According to Mick and Sara, who were up late almost as often as Rip, even the Time Captain got some sleep in the earliest hours of the morning, and combined with all those time jumps, he would likely still be out like a light.

Jax made his way to the console in the centre of the room. "Gideon, I need you to show me the timeline of my father, Sgt. James Jackson."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Jackson," the AI replied, "but Captain Hunter has asked me to not share that information with you."

"Oh, come on! It's not like it's showing me the future! You let Snart look at his dad's timeline when he tried to change it!"

Then his mind wander to his conversation with Rip after he gave his dad the warning, to how the Time Captain had suggested that maybe time would possibly allow him to grow up with his father. Could Rip have checked for himself and decided that, whatever the results were, he didn't want Jax to see them? Not because of issues with the timeline, but because they were so bad that Rip didn't want Jax to have to see them? "Well, why not?"

"Captain Hunter did not disclose his reasons."

"Well, ain't that a surprise?" Swearing under his breath, he paced up and down the bridge, not wanting to go back to bed without his information just yet.

"You lookin' for something?"

Jax whipped around when Mick's voice came from Rip's office. He didn't see the arsonist at first, until the man in question emerged with a grunt from behind Rip's desk with a bottle of liquor in hand. Of course. Rip's 'secret' liquor stash that pretty much everyone knew about by now. Mick must have already been going through it when Jax entered. "Ah, nothing," Jax lied.

"You do realize I heard everything you were just telling Gideon, right?" Mick opened the bottle and took a drink. "Why're you looking up your old man?"

"I…" Jax sighed, figuring he might as well tell the bigger man, especially since he was the least likely to give him a lecture, anyway, "When we had my dad on board, I tried to warn him about what was going to happen when we put him back in 1995. See, I never knew my father, 'cause he got shipped off to Somalia the day I was born, then got killed by an IED two weeks later. So I told him about it, told him to be careful. I was just trying to see if it worked, but Gideon won't let me."

Mick frowned. "She let Snart check after he gave the emerald to Lewis in '75."

"That's what I said, but apparently Rip's told her not to, this time. I don't know why he's trying to hide it from me."

"Have you met him?" Grumbling, Mick dug through something else in Rip's desk and pulled out two glasses. "Gideon, don't tell Hunter about this. Or Stein." He poured the liquor into the glasses and held one out to Jax.

Deciding that he was more than a bit pissed about Rip's rules and restrictions right now, Jax had no qualms about walking up and accepting it. God knew he could use a drink right now, and he was feeling the urge to commit a little rebellion. He threw it back like he'd seen Mick do all the time, but coughed and sputtered when the alcohol burned his throat.

"Easy, easy," Mick warned him, "First off: you're too new at this to just knock it back. Second: this isn't the kind of booze you chug. If I was in the mood to just get drunk, I'd just grab some beers from the galley. You need to take your time and appreciate stuff of this quality."

Jax nodded, his eyes watering, but set the glass down for now. His throat was burning too much to handle any 'appreciating' at the moment. "Do you steal from Rip's stash every night?"

"Not every night, but more often than not. This stuff was made to be drunk, not sit and collect dust in a hidden cache." He took a deep sip from his own glass and sighed. "Mmm… Now, why in the hell would Rip ban you from knowing what happens to your old man?"

Jax shrugged. "I don't know. I mean, if I have changed my own personal history, shouldn't I be warned about that before I go home? Or maybe…" He trailed off, really not wanting to voice it out loud, because that would mean admitting that it was a real possibility.

"Or maybe what?"

"…Or maybe I made things worse. What if… what if I screwed something up, and Rip just doesn't want me to find out like that?"

"Nah," Mick dismissed that, "Rip loves telling us when we screw up, remember?"

"Then why else would he keep it a secret from me?! I knew, when I told my dad how he would die, that he could still die. He was in a warzone, for God's sake! People die in warzones! I already know that, and I can handle finding out that he survived the IED only to be killed by something else!"

"Can you? Can you handle it?" Mick took another drink. "This is your dad we're talkin' about. I figure those of you with decent dads – or ones that could've been decent if they'd had the chance – would be a lot more invested in their survival."

"I know, I just… I've lived my whole life without him. I'm already used to it. I think I can handle knowing that my life is gonna be the same when I get back."

"But you've let yourself hope that it'll be better. Losing that could be like him dying all over again, which'd be worse now that you've actually met you him; you've got more to lose than just a name and a face and whatever stories you've been told."

Jax blinked at Mick, wondering when the hell the pyromaniac had actually gotten so… wise. Or maybe it was just a one-off thing. But either way, Mick was right. He'd been held in his father's arms for the first time in his life today. He'd gotten to talk with him and hear him say he was proud of him, but it wasn't enough. He wanted more of that. And he might not get it. He'd given himself a chance to have more time with his father, but that chance was something to lose, something that could be ripped away from him.

Mick clapped him on the shoulder, startling him out of his thoughts, and began to walk back towards the barracks, his nearly-empty glass in one hand and the bottle in the other. "Well, whatever Rip's reasons are, you can ask him when he drags his ass out of bed. But you might wanna think about if you're ready for the answer or not."

Jax picked up his own glass and stared into it, picturing his father's face in his mind's eye. "Here's to you Dad," he whispered, "Whatever happens." And he took a slow drink.

I'm tweaking things with history a bit; in 'Last Refuge', Jax says his father was killed in Mogadishu, most likely meaning the Battle of Mogadishu on October 3-4, 1993, according to Wikipedia. However, Jax having been born in 1993 had to have been a mistake by the writers, since there's no way he could be born then and still be under 21 when Rip recruits them (or still be in high school when the Particle Accelerator blew in 2013), and Wikipedia also says that the UN pulled the foreign soldiers out of Somalia in March 1995, before Jax would have actually been born. So I'm just pretending – in this universe only – that they were still in Somalia. I also really don't know much about the Battle, so please forgive me if I get things wrong.

The quote at the top was chosen because it's basically 'Time Wants to Happen' reworded. All quotes in this fic came from 'Criminal Minds'.

I'm leaving James's fate unspecified because I don't know if it'll be revealed in a later episode or not.