A / N: Uh . . . how to explain this?
Some time ago, I wrote a fic called World Enough and Time. In it, Fry died and Leela found herself trapped in a time loop, endlessly reliving that day. If you've read the fic, you know it mostly ended well for her, and for Fry.
But there is a Leela who wasn't so lucky. There is a Leela who had to live on in that post-Fry world, and as time passed, I found myself thinking about her more and more. I couldn't help wondering what her life might have looked like, in the aftermath of loss. And I started to feel bad, for leaving the reader with such a sad image, and never going back to her.
So . . . I went back to her.
You don't need to have read World Enough and Time to understand this one, but aspects of it (such as what actually happened to Fry) will make more sense if you have. We'll be picking up right from the jump at Fry's funeral, so if you're curious about how he died, just read chapter one of World Enough and Time.
This one also has an M-rating for sexual content, to be safe. Things I was euphemistic about there are slightly more explicit here, in a way that probably nudges us just over the teen rating. It'll also be a minimum of 30 chapters long, so if that sounds like your thing . . .
All aboard for a protracted exploration of Leela's grief! With some eventual amnesiac Lars, and some other twists and turns. Because life is funny like that.
Enjoy!
Panucci's Pizza
New York City
Universe G, 2012
It's a gray day in New York city, in the year 2012, and a man in his mid-forties is getting out of a cab. The man has thick red hair, and an even thicker beard, and his legs buckle uncertainly beneath him. He just got off a boat and is having trouble adjusting to being back on dry land.
The man's name is Philip J. Fry, but he hasn't used it in a while. Onboard ship, he was known as "the crazy American". Before that, he spent most of his time talking to a narwhal. He thinks she had a special set of clicks and whistles when she wanted to get his attention, the same way he thinks his dog has a special pitch of whine that means he's worried about his owner. But maybe that's just wishful thinking. Maybe he just wants to believe he has a special understanding with animals, because these days he finds it hard to reach any kind of understanding with people. These days, he feels like a visitor to an alien planet, everywhere he goes.
It doesn't help that the planet looks so much like home. If anything, that makes it worse.
He's starting to get the feeling his name doesn't fit him anymore. A feeling that there's another him, whose shoes it would be better if he stepped into. He doesn't know what that man will look like . . . but he thinks he knows what he has to do to find out.
The man has been on a long journey, and has made a hard decision. It's time to let go, he thinks. The women he loves doesn't love him back. He couldn't win her heart with an opera, or a message in the stars, or even a macaroni Valentine. Whatever future she wants to have in the year 3008, he can't share it with her. He knew that when he came back to live in his own time, but it seems part of him was still hanging on, all these years. Hoping that maybe he was wrong. That maybe she loved him after all. That maybe she'd follow him here one day with a time code of her own and tell him it was all a horrible mistake, and she can't live without him either.
But now, after releasing Leelu, he finally understands. Running away isn't the same as letting go. He let Leelu go so she could be happy. It's time he let Leela go too.
He shoulders open the door to his apartment, sighing to himself.
Across the street, a robot in sunglasses raises his weapon and trains its sights on the apartment window.
The man is the robot's best friend, and he doesn't want to kill him. If his operating system hadn't been hacked by nudist scam artists, he wouldn't be doing it at all. But it has been, and so, he does.
One metal finger pulls the trigger, and a jet of purple light springs from the barrel of the gun. It leaps through the window like a pulse of lightning, shattering the glass, and as it fills the room it flares out - blinding, unbearably bright - in a crackling corona of violet light.
This isn't what the weapon was designed to do, but when the storm dies down, the room is scorched and empty, and the robot considers his task complete.
There is, of course, an unseen but omniscient observer of events. As this observer watches the robot disappear, he concedes that the purple light may have been a little much. Too flashy. Too obvious, in other circumstances.
But he needed something to mask his sleight of hand, and anyway, it's not every day he pulls a man out of his rightful reality. It's a miracle. And not one of those bogus everyday miracles like a sunrise, either. This is the real deal.
What the hell. He can be a little flashy. Just this once.
Robot Arms Apartments
New New York
Universe G, December 3008
"I can't believe you killed me," the young man says, running a distracted hand through his red hair.
The robot huffs at his wounded expression.
"It wasn't you! It was a lame knock-off version of you. And he was doomed anyway! I did him a favor. Being killed by me was the coolest death he could ask for. It was probably the high point of his whole sad, beardy existence."
"Yeah, but he was still me. You walked right up to another me and shot him in the face!"
"It wasn't in the face! It was from a distance! And I told you, I was being mind controlled by the scammers -"
"I know. And if anyone had to brutally murder me, Bender, you know I'd want it to be you. You'd make an awesome Terminator, I've always said that. But it's still weird to think about."
"I told you -"
"No, no, I get it. You didn't want to murder me. And I bet you made it quick. And memorable. I bet time duplicate me got a really cool obituary, with a headline like PIZZA DELIVERY BOY GROWS BEARD AND DIES IN BADASS EXPLOSION, and a catered wake and everything. I'm good with that."
"Then what's your problem?"
"I don't know. I guess . . . I guess I just never really thought about my own death, until I walked in on you guys holding my memorial. And until you crashed that memorial and told me how you violently murdered my doppelganger. I mean, stuff like that, it makes you think, you know?"
"No."
"Hey, Bender?"
"Yeah?"
"Leela gave a really nice speech about me. Um. Even with all the crying and stuff. You think she really meant all that?"
"I didn't hear it, dum-dum."
"Oh. Yeah. You showed up in the middle of it. She said some really nice stuff about me."
"I know. You just said."
"Oh. Yeah. You think that's really how she feels about me?"
"How would I know? I'm not her diary."
"I guess not." Fry fidgets a little. "Bender?"
"Yeah?"
"Before you got there, it seemed like she was gonna say something. Something important."
"Like what? Like, I wish Bender was here, this party is a drag?"
"Oh. Sure. You're right, that was probably it." Fry fidgets some more. "Bender?"
"Ye-es?"
The robot is getting testy.
"She just seemed so relieved when she saw me again. She thought I was gone forever. And she just seemed so sad and . . . and alone. I never thought me going back to my time and dying there would upset her so much."
"Gee. Who'd a thunk it."
There is a long silence, while Fry stares blankly at the floral arrangement from his own funeral. It's blocking the TV. It seems wrong to keep the giant picture of himself and all the flowers in the apartment, but no-one really knew what else to do with them.
Bender is scrutinizing the canapés he stole from the wake. They smell like week-old prawn to Fry. He can almost see the odor - murky green, deepening to red. He snaps off a daffodil and breathes that in instead. It's a sunny yellow that makes him think stupidly of Leela.
He can't shake the image of Leela at his funeral. Memorial. Whatever. Is it a funeral if you don't have a body? If you're a thousand years too late? Fry isn't sure. What he is sure of is that watching Leela give his eulogy might have been the worst experience of his life. Standing there unseen, watching her stumble like a sleepwalker through a speech about how he was her best friend, how she wished she could live life the way he did, see the world the way he did . . . She'd started to cry at that point, and stopped making any sense - not just to Fry, he thinks, but to everyone.
Leela isn't supposed to be like that. She's not supposed to look so hopeless. Leela always has hope - more than hope, she has certainty, and when Fry is with her he feels certain too. No matter how bad the situation - even when his brain is running on blind panic - he's never hopeless, because he knows Leela is there, with a plan, with determination and fearlessness and stubbornness and . . . Leela-ness, to see them through.
She'd looked all wrong, standing there in front of their friends, crying.
Alone.
That's the image Fry keeps coming back to, the one worse than all the crying. It's how alone Leela looked, with that big empty space beside her. It's bad enough that she had to cry over him. Someone should have been there to stand next to her, and . . . and hold her hand, or be a shoulder to cry on, or . . .
Hold her, he thinks.
He sits up suddenly.
"I have to go."
Apartment 1I
Commuter Sleeper Quarter
New New York
Universe G, 3008
The kettle on her stove is whistling. Leela stares at it, unable to bring herself to lift her arm and take it off the heat.
It's screaming now, super-charged steam stripping the paintwork from the patch of ceiling above. Her neighbors are pounding on the other side of the wall.
Her mind has gone blank again. It's been like this all day.
Get it together, she tells herself sternly, as she finally pulls the hot water off the heat.
Hot lemon. That's it. She was making hot lemon.
Hot lemon is soothing. Her throat is raw, and her nose is bunged up, for reasons she would prefer not to think about but is hoping she can pass off as a cold tomorrow.
She slices a lemon in half and examines her reflection in the blade of the knife, wincing. This close, her face is blotchy and her huge, bloodshot eye looks monstrous. The odds of her not terrifying people tomorrow are slim to none.
Maybe Bender will lend her his sunglasses. Maybe she can do something with her bangs.
Don't kid yourself, she tells herself wearily. Don't you do enough of that?
She groans.
Someone is pressing the buzzer. It's probably the apartment super, come to complain. Leela is tempted not to answer. All she really wants is to drink her hot lemon and crawl into bed. She can set her alarm early for tomorrow, pour her feelings into a super intense workout - something involved, something high-cardio that doesn't give her a chance to think - and then -
And then go back to pretending she's not in love with a shiftless Stupid Ages delivery boy, who has the emotional maturity of a hyperactive puppy.
It's easier to think of Fry in these terms. It's easier to be stern with herself, and ruthlessly shoot down any inclination to view him in a romantic light. To give those feelings free rein is to open up a can of worms that leaves her . . .
Sobbing through Fry's eulogy, actually. And then sobbing even harder when he showed up alive.
She can't decide which was worse: the wrenching emptiness of thinking he'd left her, of thinking he'd died alone a thousand years ago . . . or the sick relief of seeing his face again; a second chance she knew she would always be too much of a coward to take.
Leela thinks she might have spent the last four hours crying out her frustration at herself, more than anything.
She splashes cold water on her face and makes an effort to pull herself together. So Fry died and resurrected himself, like some sort of lazy, agnostic Jesus. So what? That's no excuse to wallow in her feelings.
She chops another lemon in half, with slightly more aggression than intended.
The buzzer sounds again. Whoever it is is too stupid, or too stubborn, to realize she's ignoring them.
"Alright!" Leela snaps. "Knock it off! I'm coming."
She wrenches open the door, prepared to lay into whoever is on the other side.
"Uh. Hey."
It's Fry.
Leela stops. The lemon knife is still hanging uselessly from her hand.
She stares at him.
"Fry? What are you doing here?"
"I don't know."
There's this to be said for Fry: he doesn't lie. He's confused, often, but when it really matters, he's not dishonest. It gives him the upper hand over every other man she's ever known. It gives him the upper hand over her, sometimes.
Which is why, when he blurts out "Were you crying?", Leela doesn't tell him it's a cold.
"It's been a . . . day," she tells him instead.
What kind of day, she can't say. But Fry seems to think the hopeless pause is description enough.
"Yeah," he says.
He digs his hands into his pockets, looking strangely lost on her doorstep. Any minute now he'll take a step.
Forward? Back?
Leela lets her arm fall and steps back, opening up the space beside her. An invitation for him to step into it.
Fry blinks, the surprise obvious on his face.
He follows her over the threshold before either of them can overthink it, and the door slides shut behind them.
And Fry is standing in her apartment. Just like that.
Once there, he doesn't seem to know what to do any more than she does. His gaze lands on the lemon lying half-chopped on the countertop.
"I didn't know you ate lemons," he says inanely. "I told Bender humans don't do that. I bit into a lemon once. It was bitter."
"I was making a drink."
"Oh. That makes sense. But what about the bitter?"
"It's not bitter. The honey -"
Leela stops suddenly.
She doesn't have honey. She doesn't keep any in the apartment. Even now, almost four years after her coma, she can't stand the sight of it.
"You hate honey," Fry reminds her.
"Yes."
She does.
"You never eat honey."
"No."
But it had seemed like a soothing thing to do today, to dose herself with honey.
Fry is frowning.
"Maybe you should drink something else."
"You're right."
Leela drops the lemon in the sink and pulls a bottle off the top shelf instead. Angus McGargle's Mid-Pure Whiskey. She puts it on the table and pours each of them a glass.
"It was for your wake," she explains. "I took it home. I didn't know what else to do with it."
"I took the big picture," Fry confides. "And the flowers."
He pulls out a crumped daffodil and sets it on the table between them.
He doesn't mean anything by it. But Leela stares at the flower all the same, unable to tear her eye away from this sad little splash of yellow and sweet scent. Her apartment has never seemed grayer.
She swallows another finger of whiskey, feeling her eye swim as the burn hits the back of her throat.
"It's funny," she muses.
"What is?"
"How an aromatic chain of hydrocarbons can evoke our deepest emotions."
She laughs. Fry frowns.
"I don't get it."
Of course he doesn't.
"It's not important," she assures him. "I was just thinking about flowers."
"They were good flowers," Fry offers. "For my funeral. I liked them."
Leela nods. She doesn't trust herself to do anything else.
"I considered lilies," she says at last. "Lilies are more traditional."
She'd argued with the florist over that, and she feels gratified, now, to watch Fry's nose wrinkle in disgust.
"Yeuch," he says. "Lilies smell like dead people."
He traces the edge of one yellow petal, following it with his fingertip. Lost in thought.
"I like daffodils," he says softly. "They used to grow outside my house. My mom buried these onion thingies -"
"Bulbs."
Leela corrects him automatically.
"Yeah, those. She buried them under my window and they'd grow up every spring. They died in the winter but when the sun came out they'd always come back. I liked that." He smiles. "They were like a friend, waiting for me even when it looked like they weren't."
Leela's mouth has gone dry. Her vision is starting to blur, but Fry seems to have suddenly shifted into sharp focus.
They died in the winter but they'd always come back.
She swallows.
"You used to give them to me," she says carefully. "Daffodils."
It takes an effort to keep her voice light.
"Why?"
"Huh?"
"Why always daffodils?"
Fry blinks. As if he thought it was obvious.
"Because," he tells her. "That's how you make me feel. Like the sun came out."
He picks up the daffodil, smiling shyly, and offers it to her across the table.
Time seems to stop. Suddenly, Leela has the feeling that how she responds to this - what she chooses to do next - will impact the entire future course of her life.
She takes the flower.
Then, while Fry is still smiling, she pushes through her hesitation and takes his hand too.
The moment shifts between them.
"Fry?"
"Yeah?"
Just tell the truth. Stop kidding yourself.
"That's why I chose them too."
There is a universe. For the sake of differentiating it from others, let's call it . . . oh, I don't know. Universe G. In this universe - as in many others - in the year 3008, Philip J Fry traveled back in time to New Year's Eve, 1999, and in a petty argument over cold pizza, created a time travel duplicate of himself.
The original Philip J Fry returned to his own time, and walked in on a devastated Turanga Leela delivering the eulogy at his memorial. Eventually, in the fullness of time, they worked it all out and were very happy together.
His duplicate chose never to return to the 31st Century and lived twelve unhappy years in the past, before being blown up by a mind-controlled Bender Rodriguez. Or, so it appeared.
In Universe G, Philip J Fry never went on to become Lars Filmore. But the multiverse is like a game of poker, and the cards are dealt by a dealer accomplished in sleight of hand. A dealer who plays the long game, and always sees ten moves ahead.
Sometimes he shuffles the pack.
And sometimes a card gets lost in the shuffle, and winds up somewhere no-one expected.
There is a universe. For the sake of differentiating it from others, let's call it Universe D. In this universe, Philip J Fry never played a holophonor concert for Turanga Leela at Carnegie Hall. In this universe, Lars Filmore never proposed to her. Lars Filmore never existed, in fact. In this universe there was no argument about pizza, and no time travel duplicate.
Because in Universe D, Philip J Fry died on an unremarkable day in November, in the year 3004. It was a small thing, and the impact it had was small. The world didn't stop spinning.
(There is a world in which it did, but that's another universe, and another story, soundtracked by Sonny and Cher.)
This story follows the people left behind in Universe D.
