Viennese Waltz: A Tuck in Time
Rose pushed her face and torso up off the dirt floor and groaned – landing on a gunshot wound isn't a good way to make it feel better. She managed to twist around and sit, then looked over at her two unwilling "guests", just struggling to the same position themselves. The looks on their faces would have been comical if they had been in a movie: utterly flabbergasted, and not a little fearful, their huge eyes darting around the little hut – for that's where she'd brought them, using the "escape hatch" she'd programmed into the jumper two days before.
The Archduke's mouth worked, but no sound came out. Duchess Sophie merely gaped.
"Your Majesty," Rose began using her best German, holding up one hand. Both their eyes snapped to hers. "Please be calm. I brought you here – "
"You brought?" Finding his voice at last, he managed to imbue it with a truly impressive amount of imperiousness in just a few words. "How? Where are we?" he demanded.
"We're still in Sarajevo, on the hill outside of town." Rose picked herself up off the floor at last, coming to slightly unsteady feet. She thought of offering a hand to the couple, then thought better of the impulse, and merely motioned towards the hut's door. "Please, have a look."
Franz Ferdinand lumbered to his feet, stopped to pull his wife to hers, as well, then stomped past Rose to fling open the indicated portal. And stopped dead, jaw hanging, at the sight of the town he'd just been riding through the middle of spread out below his feet.
"Notice anything different, Your Majesty?" Rose asked innocently.
"Highness!" he snapped without turning.
"Excuse me?" Rose turned to look at Sophie, confused.
"Highness, not Majesty," the Duchess informed her, and then Rose caught on: she had the wrong form of address for the stuffy, hidebound noble.
Rose swallowed a grin, sliding what she hoped was an appropriate note of contrition into her voice. "Forgive me. Your Highness."
Sophie was still staring at her. "Fraulein...?"
"Tyler, Your Highness. Rose Tyler."
The Duchess shook herself, then motioned towards Rose's shoulder. "You're wounded. Please, sit, and let me take a look." Telling her husband to face away, she sat Rose down on the bed, then gently folded back the shoulder of her peasant blouse to find that the bullet had only grazed the top of it – impressively bloody, but not life-threatening.
"Just a scratch," Rose commented, peering at it out of the corner of her eye. Then she grinned. "I've always wanted to say that."
"Fraulein?" Sophie was mystified, and a bit apprehensive.
Rose shook her head. "Nothing, Your Highness. Forgive me." She carefully pulled the blouse the rest of the way off with Sophie's help, then her torn and bloody Tshirt, and handed the latter to the Duchess. "Use this."
A short time later her shoulder was bandaged as well as it could be under the circumstances, and her blouse was once more in place over it. Sophie stepped back, and Rose tried the previous line again, directing her words towards the Archduke's back as she stood. "Notice anything different, Your Highness?"
He finally turned, giving her a confused stare. She opened her mouth to explain – and at that moment, thunder pealed almost directly above the hut. Rose shut her mouth with a pop, and merely pointed a finger upward as the rain rebounded on the roof, pouring even harder than it had been the minute before.
"It wasn't raining a minute ago in the town," Sophie put in, wonder tinging her voice.
"That's because it isn't a minute ago," Rose told her. "It's two days ago."
"I beg your pardon?" Franz interrupted stiffly, not at all amused.
"I didn't just bring you to another place, Your Highness. I brought you to another time. It's now Friday, the twenty-sixth of June. We've come back in time two days." She waved her hand out the door again. "If you knew exactly where you were at this time, you could go take a look at yourself. But that's really not recommended..."
Disbelief warred on his face with the evidence of his senses, then he put it aside. "What do you want?" he asked her straight, his brusque manner making his opinion plain: if she'd kidnapped them, she must be dangerous.
"Only to talk for an hour, uninterrupted. I give you my most solemn promise, Your Highness, that when we're finished talking, I will return both of you not only to your car, but to the precise moment we left it, safe and sound."
"The moment...?" Sophie repeated. She turned to her husband, shaking. "Well, I suppose we'd better listen," she told him, her voice quavering with the effort of grasping a straw of common sense in the situation.
"Please sit down," Rose said as graciously as she could. "I'm sorry the accommodations are so rough." The two royals looked around, taking in the furnishings for the first time, then moved together to sit gingerly on the two rickety chairs. Rose waited till they were settled, as she thought good manners indicated (never having dealt with royalty before), and then sat herself again on the edge of the bed.
And then suddenly found herself at a loss for words. How do you begin this kind of conversation? Her visitors gave her no help, merely staring at her warily.
"I'm sorry, Your Highnesses. I don't exactly have anything prepared to say. I brought you here to... to convince you of the grave danger that you're in – that the world is in. Your deaths here today would have kicked off a war, one that would sweep across the world and involve everyone, at the cost of millions of lives..." She trailed off, knowing she was making a fool of herself. This really isn't going well.
"Our deaths?" the Archduke said icily.
"Yes," she replied. "You would have died down there today, both of you, if I hadn't gotten in the way."
"And how do you know this?"
She stared at him a moment. "Because you did. It happened, in history. In one history." She was babbling and she knew it. She took a deep breath, let it out, and simply told the truth. "I'm from the future. A hundred years into the future, in fact. And I've come back to correct history, to change history, to split the timeline in two, so that what was supposed to happen, what did happen in one stream, doesn't happen in another – in mine. So that I can get back home to my timeline, in the future – a future where you didn't die today, where you went on to do all the things you are supposed to do. The things the world so desperately needs you to do."
His eyes were bulging. "You're speaking utter nonsense, Fraulein!"
And that's when it hit her. She held up a finger, "Please wait one moment, Your Highness." Kneeling down by the bed, she reached under it for the loose stone, and pulled out the paperback, then sitting down again, she held it out to him. As he took it, cautiously, she explained, "This book is all about the war that's going to start, how it came about, how everything that's happened over the past few decades has been leading up to it, how you died on Sunday, and how that kicked everything off." As he studied the cover, she suddenly remembered. "Oh! I'm sorry, Your Highness. It's in English."
"I can read English," he informed her stiffly, then proved it by providing the German translation of the book's title.
"Forgive me," she murmured. "Then, Your Highness... start on page five. Just a few pages." The book jumped right into the assassination, before backing up to give the background.
He shot her a fierce glare under his eyebrows, his waxed mustache twitching. Then he opened the book, flipped the first few pages, and began to read, silently. Sophie and Rose merely sat and watched him for several minutes as he turned the pages. His eyes gradually became wider and wider, his breath coming in occasional gasps as he remembered to breathe, and finally all color drained out of his face.
Reaching the end of the intro, he slowly raised his eyes to Rose's again, staring.
"Franzl?" Sophie whispered fearfully. "What is it? What does it say?"
"That young man," he started, his voice shaking, "... Princip? … was going to shoot both of us. And we both would have died. Sopherl... you would have died." He tore his gaze from Rose to look at his wife's dear face instead. Rose could tell fro his anguished voice how deeply the thought of her death had cut him – much more deeply than his own.
Sophie shook her head, denying it all. "But it's just a story, isn't it? How could it tell what didn't happen?"
Rose caught his attention again. "But the first part of what it said, right up till he fired those shots, told what you'd already been through, didn't it? Word for word?"
He nodded, silently, unwillingly.
"How could anyone possibly have written that down already, let alone printed it and bound it in a book?" She let him consider that for a moment, then added, "Take a look at the copyright, Your Highness."
He flipped back to the first page. "Nineteen sixty-two..." he whispered hoarsely, staring at it.
She nodded. "That book is from the future. From one possible future, I should say. I'm trying to get it back on track to what it's supposed to be. I'm trying to correct history." She'd decided on impulse that putting it that way probably sounded better to two people who were "supposed" to die in the other, Alpha timeline.
Finally, finally, the Archduke nodded. He turned back to Sophie. "I believe her," he said simply. "There's even a picture of us walking down the steps of the city hall ten minutes ago – or, ten minutes before..." he added, flipping back to that page and showing it to her. "How could anyone have processed that picture and printed this book so quickly?" Sophie took the book from him and stared at the picture, proof of everything, her face ghostly.
He turned back to Rose at last, capitulating. "All right," he said quietly. "We... are in your debt, Fraulein. But I still do not understand... I still do not see how our deaths could precipitate a 'world war'," he quoted the book's title, obviously not believing the implied magnitude.
"Do you know what dominoes are, Your Highness?" she asked on impulse. He nodded stiffly, surprised at the non sequitor. "You've seen them set up in rows, standing up? And then when you knock one over, the next falls, and the next, until they're all down?"
He nodded again, now seeing where she was going with it. "Yes."
"You know that all of Europe, every country, is connected to others with treaties, and agreements, and fears. Here's what would have happened. The Austrian government would have blamed the Serbians for your deaths – and they wouldn't have been completely wrong – and sent them a list of almost impossible demands. When the Serbians couldn't meet them all, they would declare war. Then Russia comes in to back the Serbians, and France with Russia, then Germany comes in on Austria's side, attacking France first, then England, and Italy, and Turkey, and on and on, until even the Americans are involved. Dominoes. And then we've got a war on our hands, raging across Europe, that will cost tens of millions of lives. But that's just the beginning... this war will open up the bloodiest century in all of human history, Your Highness." She paused, licking her lips, then leaned forward for emphasis. "If it happens. If it isn't stopped. If you don't stop it."
"And what am I supposed to do?" he hurled back at her, the product of a thousand official slights embittering his voice beyond recognition from the haughty man who'd entered the room. "How am I supposed to stop an entire continent from tearing itself apart? I am nobody! Less than nothing! A laughingstock!"
The words rang in the silence for a moment, while both women stared at him. Then Sophia laid a gentle hand on his arm, dragging his anguished gaze around to her again. She spoke quietly, with such intensity and sincerity that no one hearing it could fail to be moved.
"You are not nobody, Franzl. You are my husband. And I believe in you."
His mustache twitched, his fierce dark eyes filling with unshed tears. Covering her hand with his, his gaze then dropped to the floor, abashed at her devotion.
Sophie glanced back at Rose, almost as if only then remembering their audience, but Rose merely nodded silently, giving her the tiniest supportive smile.
Eventually, he looked back at his hostess again. "And what am I to do?" he repeated quietly, all wounded defiance gone.
"Take the book," she said. "It will tell you everything – all the names, of all the people who are really in charge in each country, and what they're doing. Use it, and work to dismantle the machines that are driving each government to war."
His head was shaking. "I have no power. I can do nothing."
"Officially, no. Not right now. But..." She bit her lip, unsure how far she could push him. "How old is your uncle, the Emperor?"
He jerked slightly, shocked, but then answered levelly. "Eighty-four."
"If you read far enough in that book, you'll see he's going to die in two years – from natural causes," she hastened to reassure him, but then plowed on to state the obvious. "And then you'll be the emperor. And you'll have the power to put your own men in place, instead of men like General Conrad and Count Berchtold," she named off from memory the two men who – in Alpha – would have been the primary drivers of the war with Serbia, and had the satisfaction of seeing his eyes widen again in shock at her inside knowledge of his own government's workings.
"But then... you need to go even further, Your Highness. You need to not only dismantle war machines, but you need to – you must – work to create a framework for peace, instead."
He wasn't following her. "You mean the Hague Tribunal? It's already there..."
But she shook her head. "It's not enough. There must be something stronger. Something that will let – that will demand – that individual nations come together to discuss their conflicts with each other, and resolve them peacefully." She stared at him intensely, somehow knowing that he needed to come up with the idea himself, or he would never get behind it.
And at last he did. "A league of nations..." His eyes were wide with wonder, as he whispered the answer. She nodded conspiratorially, and he went on, admitting, "I have been dreaming of such a thing."
And Rose let loose her supernova smile then at the man who, in her history, had been the founder of precisely that – one of the few things she remembered from her high school history classes.
"Yes. I know. That's my history you're talking about." She sighed then. "It doesn't last forever, not more than a few decades. But while it does, it – they – prevent dozens of wars, and send aid after countless disasters, and save the lives of a hundred million people." It had been nice of Jared to give her the figures, something her own timeline's historians had of course never been able to do definitively.
Then she sighed. Their hour was almost up; she didn't want to run the risk of staying too long. So she stood up, saying, "It's time to go, Your Highnesses." She nodded at the book still in Sophie's hands. "Keep the book – but put it away for now." Franz Ferdinand took it and slipped it into a large pocket in his uniform coat.
"How do we get back?" Sophie asked.
"The same way we came," Rose told her, not elaborating, but she began to reach for their hands. "And back to the precise same moment in the car, as I promised."
"Wait!" the Archduke broke in, holding up his hand. He looked straight at Rose. "Thank you, Fraulein Tyler," he said simply. "For saving my life, and for telling me all of this – for giving me the direction to go in. But most especially.." He paused, a tear lurking in his eye. "Thank you for saving my Sopherl's life. I am in your debt."
"Franzl," his wife demurred, blushing. But she looked at him adoringly.
Rose grinned at both of them, then reached for their hands again, and they both reached out willingly, grasping her forearm as they had before. Then she flipped open the time jumper, recalled the last jump and reversed it, and punched them back to the car.
They came out of the transport flash, ears ringing from the explosion of air that always accompanied it, and found themselves back in the touring car, surrounded by chaos. Rose somehow landed inside the car this time, and blown apart from the royal couple by the blast, bouncing hard on her rump on the little rear-facing jump seat behind the driver. The General and said driver were yelling, ducking away from what they thought had been another bomb exploding just behind their heads. The driver had just finished backing the car frantically away from the gun-toting madman and back around the corner, and threw it into forward gear, jamming his foot on the accelerator to zoom off.
Count Harrach, still on the car's left running board, and holding on for dear life, also yelled in shock and fury, and reacted instantly to the perceived threat from this strange woman, leaning over to grab Rose's arm in a tight grip.
"STOP!" roared the Archduke. "STOP THE CAR!" The driver jammed on the brakes again, bringing them to a screeching halt. "HARRACH! Let her go!" He glared at the Count with a steely gaze, not repeating his command.
Harrach took a breath to argue, then thought better of it, and released her.
"Rose! Go!" Sophie cried urgently, reaching to swing open the car door. Rose didn't wait for it, though, and simply vaulted over the car's side, skirt and all, darted into the gaping, shouting crowd, and was lost to sight in an instant.