Here, Now

A Mirror, Mirror & The Missing Fanfiction

Part

~1918~

Yekaterinburg, Russia

"You think she'll notice her brother's a year older than when she last saw him two minutes ago?" Hodge grunted as he hoisted a limp Alexei onto the empty wheelchair, its cushioned seat warmed by the afternoon sun – a task that really should have been Gary's, since he was quite literally the muscles of this operation – and placed him right into his glowing tracer-self.

Hodge said this because – strangely, impossibly – rather than the boy they'd taken from 1919 taking on the traits of the waiting, sickly and swollen tracer, the former tracer (now Alexei Romanov in 1918 for real) had largely taken on the look of the older boy – the one who had called himself Nicholas, for their father – from the now surely deleted timeline.

There was colour in his cheeks, and he was at least an inch taller.

"What's a year?" Gary sneered, ready to have done with it all. "There's hardly any difference. If anything, Anastasia will be glad to see him looking so strong and healthy. We can say whatever else we like about him, but Sir Ivor didn't have the kid miss out on any meals. Like us, he was a gentleman with an eye for a good investment. Besides, they'll both be babies soon enough."

"She's coming," Hodge told him.

Gary spoke into his Elucidator. "Make us invisible."

A moment later, Anastasia, lifting the skirt of her plain black dress, came scurrying over to her brother's side. "Did you fall asleep? I had better wheel you back inside and get you into your bed again. Before the guards–"

Alexei blinked blearily, groggy and heavy-headed. He was fairly certain Gary had drugged him. "Mr. Iredale?" His voice was hoarse. He could make out the shape of a girl looming over him, about to touch his shoulder. What was more, as his head cleared some, he registered how the voice he'd heard speaking just now was female. Therefore it could be neither Gary nor Joshua Iredale. "Louisa?"

"Who is Louisa?"

Suddenly Alexei was granted awareness of where he was, even with his head still partially muddled. It was Mama's wheelchair he was sitting in, and the air smelled like Russia, totally different from New Zealand.

He'd forgotten Russia had a smell, and maybe that would have sounded crazy to someone who'd never lived there, but it did. It was like snow and fur and sulphur and, also perhaps, whatever it was the colour blue smelled of.

Ironic, that the smell should make him think of blue, considering what Jo told him about the Soviet Union the night they'd spent at the ruined summer house hiding from Sir Ivor and his men after they'd broken her out of gaol.

But he couldn't make himself think of Russia as red.

He just couldn't.

At least, the way Jo'd told it, things didn't stay that way forever – even if they didn't get another tsar.

Then it really struck him: the girl who just said, who is Louisa? was...

She was...

His eyes opened all the way, his vision quite clear now. "Nastya!" He thought he might explode with joy. "Oh, Nastya, you're alive!" He lifted an arm and crossed himself in the orthodox fashion. "God and all the saints be praised!"

"What? I'm alive?" cried Anastasia, almost laughing as she pulled a teasing face at him and patted herself down comically. "I am, apparently! That's good to know. Thank you, Alexei."

"But you were dead," and though he rather garbled it, he recounted reading about her and the others all having been assassinated. "It was in an encyclopedia."

"What encyclopedia?" They had no encyclopedias here at the Ipatiev House.

"The... The one..." He coughed and straightened in the wheelchair. "Why, it was the one Jo's father gave her for Christmas, of course. The diagrams and photographs, they were all coloured."

"Oh, there's no such book!" she said. "You've dozed off in the sunshine during our stolen time in the garden and had a dream, that's all." A dream which seemed to have done him a world of good, somehow, for – although his increasing agitation was draining him of the added colour quickly now – she'd seen how his face had been pink, radiant with health, and his eyes bright.

"It wasn't a dream!" he insisted. "Last year one of our guards told me to dress – only he wasn't one of our guards, really, I know that now because, oh, but that would take too long to explain – so never mind it – and, anyway, I ran... And Sir Ivor came on his great horse... And, well, I've done so many things and been so many places since!"

"L-last year? You had an adventure last year?" Anastasia frowned, wondering if he was simply making up a story for fun. "I don't understand what you're saying, Alyosha. Do you mean when we were in Tobolsk? Or before that, at the palace, before they made us leave and go into exile?"

"Nooooooooo," moaned Alexei, realising the horrid truth. It wasn't a dream – it couldn't have been – Jo couldn't have been – but if he was here, in Russia, talking with his sister he knew for a fact had been murdered a year ago, who seemed to think of things which occurred two years ago as only last year... Who had no idea he'd even been gone... Time travel was the only logical conclusion.

And why not?

He'd travelled through time before – he'd been to 1995, even if he hadn't left Jo's bedroom.

Only...

Why had Gary brought him here?

The last thing Gary said to him – the last thing he remembered – was, don't worry you won't remember a thing. Time to set it right and get rich.

But he remembered everything, each and every boring day with Sir Ivor and then that heart-pounding week of ceaseless excitement, horror, and even romance that began when he saw Jo and Louisa poking around the well, and his being back at the Ipatiev House – he recognised the garden now, of course – wouldn't make Gary rich, would it?

As if in obtuse answer to his unspoken question, the hateful, familiar voice called out, seemingly from thin air, "Make us visible!"

"What?" Anastasia's grey-blue eyes widened and she gasped, sliding an arm protectively around her little brother's shoulders. "Who said that?"

A second later, they could both see perfectly well who said it.

Gary and Hodge were standing right in front of them. They'd been listening invisibly to their entire conversation – clearly not with much genuine interest beyond waiting for the right moment to pounce.

"Hey, kids – good news, I think we finally fixed it."


~1918~

Yekaterinburg, Russia

(Again)

Catching sight of Gary and Hodge in the basement where his whole family was about to be slaughtered by murderous Bolsheviks, Gavin sprung up and ran at them, roaring, "You lied to me!"

Chip – a little less emotional in his response – tried to threaten them with a gun. In retrospect, this might have been a lot smarter than Gavin's fly right off the handle and run in kicking and screaming method. At best, he probably would have succeeded in little beyond giving himself a concussion (if not a fatal internal bleed) trying to head-butt Gary in the abdomen.

Not that either of them were successful.

A gun from 1918 was useless against a fully functioning Elucidator, and as for Gavin, they just froze him in place as calmly as pushing the mute button on a TV remote.

Then, if you went with the TV comparison, it was more like a pause than a mute, really – like when you were watching a movie with a group and someone suddenly announced they had to go to the bathroom but didn't want to miss what was happening next, so you paused it wherever it happened to be and caught the onscreen character mid-sneeze or something, always in a position that made even the hottest actor look about as attractive as Quasimodo.

Gavin was midair, mid-run, one knee bent, elbows jutted outwards like he wasn't sure if he was running in an unflattering imitation of an early-CGI villain going down a poorly rendered corridor or simply about to break out into the chicken dance.

Strange, he thought later, when he was less angry, how all the little movements people make when they run don't look particularly stupid when they're doing them at regular speed, only as soon as you freeze or slow them down, they look like total morons.

Which was exactly how Gavin felt right then for ever having trusted Gary.

Discovering he was frozen only from the neck down and could still talk, he bellowed, "What did you do to me?"

"Relax, all of you," Gary told them. "Well" – a sickening smirk – "I guess Gavin can't relax, really, suspended in midair like that. But be at peace, anyway. We're not going to hurt you. We're saving your lives, remember?"

Katherine Skidmore looked up from the floor and demanded to know why they should trust them.

Gary and Hodge – lazily and patronizingly – explained they'd kept time from starting up again at any truly fatal moment, even for Katherine herself, who at one point had been unwittingly in danger of taking a stray bullet her brother thought he was moving out of harm's way during stopped time.

"Anybody else," Hodge practically simpered, "feel inclined to rush towards us and be frozen like Gavin?"

Gavin felt sick remembering that he'd hoped – if not Gary, his first choice, since they were the ones conspiring together – Mr. Hodge would be the one to adopt him in the future! How could he have ever thought Hodge, so plainly horrible, was better than his parents? Better than either set. Both the Danes and the Romanovs – for all their individual flaws – were vastly, vastly superior to the likes of him!

"I hate you!" he screamed.

Those same words would have wounded Mr. Danes, but Hodge shrugged.

Gary had lied about everything – everything – neither he nor Hodge cared about him. All that rubbish about how they thought he was possibly the smartest kid in the cave and they wanted to give him the life of a prince he deserved... It meant nothing. Yet Gavin had lapped it all up as if it were strawberry ice cream and they'd handed him a spoon and told him to go hog-wild. His own inflated ego had let him believe, so easily, too easily, of course two total strangers from the future would love him at first glance and see him as special, as more valuable than the other stolen kids.

He'd just screamed he hated Hodge. And he did. Gary, too. But the person he really hated right now, more than either of them, was himself for believing such obvious lies.

Anybody else would have seen right through it. Daniella, if she'd been at the conference and the time cave that day, or Chip Winston.

Gary couldn't have fooled either of them.

An image of young teenage Jo, from a picture he'd seen in that yellow house in New Zealand, came into his mind, then, and he thought she would never have untied Gary, not for anything he might have promised, much less stolen an Elucidator and used that stupid code. He didn't let himself think of adult Jo, who – depending on exactly how time travel worked – probably was already married to Michael somewhere in the year 2013 by now. He couldn't bear to imagine what she'd think of his being here, and he was too bitterly ashamed that part of him still – selfishly, irrationally – wanted to blame her because she'd been at her rehearsal dinner and hadn't picked up the phone to talk him out of this.

Meanwhile, the others had continued talking to Gary and Hodge, and Gavin made himself tune back into the ongoing conversation.

"I think," Chip Winston was saying, "if your main goal was saving people's lives, you would have done all this very differently. Why did you even want us in 1918?"

Hodge's reply was mocking. "You think we sent you to 1918? Wasn't it Gavin's fault? Sometimes it's so hard to pick out cause and effect, event and consequence."

Gavin could blame himself – he could even blame Jo, and then hate himself all the more for doing so, making it a truly vicious cycle – but he couldn't stand hearing Hodge blame him. "I didn't want to come here!" he yelled. "You promised me I could go to the future! You told me that's what would happen if I typed that code you gave me into an Elucidator!" Gary told me I could grow up and marry Jo.

"Yes, yes, that's still where you're headed." Hodge waved his arm dismissively. "We just didn't tell you there'd be one little detour along the way."

Gavin tried to swallow but the saliva kept getting stuck midway in his throat, stopping where the rest of him was frozen. You call making me come back and relive the day my family died a detour? The fuck's wrong with you?

It was Jonah Skidmore who put it all together, figured it out. "You had to do something to fix 1918, didn't you? When you kidnapped Alexei and Anastasia the first time around, you were lazy and did it in the afternoon. You grabbed them from the garden – when they were supposed to be up in Alexei's bedroom – and time travelled from there, hours before it was safe to take them away. That's why we all landed in the wrong place – the garden – coming back here."

"Maybe," admitted Gary. He cast a look over Gavin's family and their servants, all frozen in various expressions of despair. "Who in their right mind wouldn't try to avoid coming here tonight?"

"But your laziness must have created too many problems with time, and so to get away with the kidnapping, you had to send Gavin and Daniella back to finish living out the day," Chip Winston put in.

Katherine wanted to know why they'd gotten her and Jonah and Chip involved at all. None of them belonged in this time. She was still on the floor, right beside a gawking Daniella.

"You think Daniella and Gavin could have handled this day all by themselves?" Hodge asked. "You know Daniella's coming into all this cold, without the slightest bit of background in time travel. And Gavin... Well, Gavin's got that little anger-management problem."

Gavin repressed the urge to scream I'll 'anger-management' you! Antonio and his other skull-shirt friends had taught him – what felt like forever ago now – the often-untapped value of turning every insult into a transitive verb – it drove his poor parents (and certain teachers at his school) absolutely crazy. Not to mention made him look tough and cool in front of other kids. But he didn't think it would help in this case.

Instead, he made himself say, in protest, "Not since I became Alexei. Not once I saw how he coped–"

"And that's why you were trying to attack Hodge and me?" Gary asked pointedly.

Gavin glowered. Maybe he should have just gone with the transitive verb idea after all.

"So what's going to happen now?" Daniella asked.


A Time Hollow

Gavin's hand clamped down hard on Jonah's arm. "I'm going to die, and there's nothing anybody can do to save me. So you have to listen to my last words and tell my family. My other family, I mean, my parents who raised me. I'm squared away with the Romanovs. But tell Mom and Dad I'm sorry. I'm not mad at Mom anymore for trying to protect me all the time." He wondered, briefly, if he should add he was sorry for having once unfavorably – and rather loudly – compared his dad, poor long-suffering Mr. Danes, to the reverend from Footloose, but ultimately decided against it. Jonah might laugh at that, and he wanted his last words, his goodbye, to be solemn and proper. "I love them and–"

"Young man," said JB, behind Jonah, "you are in no danger whatsoever of bleeding to death."

"Yes I am!" Gavin hissed, gritting his teeth. "Don't you know I have hemophilia? Quit making me spend my last moments fighting with you! I have important things to say!"

"Yes, you do. And we're going to make sure you have time to say them all."


~The Distant, Distant Future~

Exact location unknown, but possibly near Ohio

In a room made to look identical to a twenty-first century hospital room, Gavin sat – fully dressed in his old clothes, sweatshirt and all, from the day he'd kidnapped Daniella, Chip, Jonah, and Katherine using Gary's code and Angela's Elucidator – on the bed, waiting – somewhat impatiently, legs swigging over the side – to go home.

There was just so much he wanted to start setting right and he was beyond tired of thinking about it instead of being able to do it. Who knew it took so long for four bullet wounds and a hip-bleed that had been temporarily suspended in a time hollow to heal?

Over 'Skype' he'd told Leonid he was going to start living in a way that made him worthy of how – in the end – Katherine Skidmore had risked her life to save him.

Part of that was making it up with his parents.

Initially, he'd been happy – as anyone would be – when JB's assurance he was going to live to mend fences with his adoptive folks really sunk in, but then he'd realized – damn – it was going to be a lot more difficult than dying and having someone relay an 'I'm sorry' message to them.

You kind of have to forgive the dead.

He remembered now, as Alexei, he'd quarreled with Tatiana once and – having been going through a weird phase that drove Anastasia nuts where he just wanted to be in Olga's shadow and ignore the others as much as possible – fled to their oldest sister's side, declaring himself 'Olga's boy' and vowing he'd never forgive the other half of the 'big pair'. Never, not ever. Having seen Tatiana die on screen in a time hollow, he couldn't even remember what it was his little self had been so mad about. Tatiana probably could have told him – like their mama, her mind had been orderly and her memory practically photographic. If it was a material possession they'd fought over, he'd gladly give it to her and make it up, if only she were alive and he could. If it were a mere argument, he'd have said she was right even if he didn't actually think so, if only it could bring her back to life again.

But if she was truly alive – if when Katherine said, "If you want to live, grab on to me," Tatiana had grabbed on, too – and their stupid old argument came up again, even playfully, in 'modern day' Liston, would he have so willingly conceded the point?

It took work to mend strained relationships.

And with his parents...

Well...

Anyway, when JB turned up, pronounced them healed, and said they were going home today, he and Jonah – his hospital roommate recovering from two bullet wounds of his own – had high fived their relief. It felt natural, which made it okay. He and Jonah weren't exactly friends. Gavin had the idea Jonah didn't want to be his friend. He'd almost asked him, point-blank, and he thought Jonah picked up on that and got almost viscerally uncomfortable. But when Gavin explained he and Daniella had this idea Gavin could go to Harris Middle, where Jonah and Katherine went and Daniella herself was starting new since she'd just moved, Jonah had agreed to hang out with him. He'd sort of tried to weasel out of it by saying he – and Chip, who also went to Harris – weren't popular, but he seemed glad when Gavin didn't mind and wanted to try out for the basketball team with them. It was a start. And, either way, even if they didn't ever become best friends, Gavin really had enjoyed bouncing a basketball back and forth between their beds here in the futuristic hospital, and he had a guaranteed table to sit at at Harris. You couldn't go back to 1918 with someone and get yourself shot and not let them sit with you at lunch at least.

While Gavin had been changing from his hospital gown into the clothes he was currently wearing, Jonah noticed the other boy still had raised pinkish-white marks on and around his general stomach area.

"JB, look, his scars aren't–" he'd begun, confused, lifting up his own shirt to look at his seemingly unblemished belly.

"Relax. It's all right, Jonah," Gavin answered for JB. "I asked him to let me keep them as a reminder." A reminder never to be that stupid or selfish again.

Jonah didn't seem to understand this. "But won't your parents wonder why you have four little scars you didn't have before?"

Gavin had shrugged. "Yeah, but they won't see them – not for a while, anyway. I'm gonna make that deal I told you about with my mom to try out for basketball and not have to do swimming. So I'll have loads of time before the summer to think of a good excuse." He was hardly going to strut around the house shirtless during winter...

"Okay, then." Jonah turned his attention from Gavin back to JB. "I guess we're ready to go home."

JB opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, the time traveler Gavin had seen giving Angela the Elucidator he'd stolen appeared in the room.

Jonah had been shocked, almost angry. "Hey, JB! You said no one could just zap in here." JB had used the door. "We're supposed to be in a dead zone so that Gary and Hodge can't find us!" And there was Hadley Correo just appearing like–

JB looked – if only for a moment – like he wanted to roll his eyes, but his response was tempered, patient. "You're going home – we turned off the security measures. How else could we take you back in time to your parents?"

"Oh." Jonah's cheeks had gone a bit red. "Oh... Okay. Right. Sorry."

Then, to Gavin's great surprise, it was Hadley alone who gently gripped Jonah by the arm and began typing a code into his Elucidator. JB said there was something more he and Gavin needed to discuss before he could bring him back.

"Is it about me?" Jonah's last glance around the room was paranoid. It was as if he'd thought JB was going to confide his real identity or something equally important to Gavin for some reason and not to him.

Gavin had stuck out his tongue at him then made himself look completely innocent – tongue back in his mouth and hands folded in his lap, smiling as sweetly as a purple-haired saint – when Hadley and JB looked at him again.

"Jonah, not everything is about you," JB'd told him, not unkindly. "It's about Gavin. And I think he'd appreciate a little privacy while discussing it."

Then it had been Gavin's turn to worry. Feebly, he'd blurted, "You know what, maybe we could talk some other time – because didn't you say we all had to be dropped off carefully at the same time, so my sister and Leonid could roll into the bushes and Chip could go home, so – uh – you know – Jonah's neighbor Mrs. Beer doesn't think we're a gang?"

"It's Mrs. Greer. And it's time travel. Leaving later, after we talk, you'll still arrive at Jonah's house at the same time he and the others do."

After that, Hadley and Jonah vanished and JB excused himself, walking – poker-faced – out the door, saying he'd be right back.

This was why Gavin was sitting up waiting for him.

Nervously, he twisted the signet ring on his finger. This ring bore the imperial insignia of the house of Romanov, the double-headed eagle. He'd been a little afraid one of the doctors – or JB himself – would take it from him and – at first – made a rather foolish practice of hiding his hand under the sheets whenever JB visited, as if a thin polyester and cotton blend could magically shield its existence. But nobody had suggested it would be a problem yet. Gavin wasn't sure what became of this ring the first time around – when Gary and Hodge took him and Anastasia from 1918 in the afternoon and made them babies again. He only knew, now he'd been back and gotten his old memories again via tracer-joining, his father had given it to him and told him never to take it off. And he hadn't – not even in the bath.

Possibly, when his hand became that of a baby again, the ring simply fell off. Maybe Hodge then pocketed it to sell later. Or else he and Gary kept it as proof of Baby Alexei's identity to his would-have-been future buyer.

Whatever happened the first time around, during the second one, Gavin got it back on his hand after joining his tracer and he'd still been wearing it in the basement – despite having separated from his tracer multiple times by then – when Katherine appeared to rescue them at the last minute.

He had no intention of ever giving it up again.

Just because he had to be Gavin Danes – a better Gavin Danes – from now on, didn't mean he couldn't keep this – along with his bullet scars – so he didn't lose every last part of who he'd been and what seemed to matter so much in that other life.

The door opened and for a terrible second Gavin remembered the security was down, so Jonah could go home, and had a rush of fear that Gary – or Hodge – had overpowered JB outside that door and was about to barge in and take him by force.

He put his hand over the flat surface of his ring on his other hand. He did this for strength, hoping to feel a rush of courage to outweigh the fear, but JB – because it was JB, not Gary or Hodge – entering, gave him kind of a funny look, clearly thinking he was still trying – unnecessarily, and rather pathetically – to hide it from him.

JB held up his Elucidator, pointing at the wall opposite them. "There's something I have to show you, Gavin. A part of damaged time you don't know about because you don't remember it. Try not to be too alarmed."


~2013~

A Beach, Somewhere Down Under

"Thank heavens that's over with," Jo groaned, rolling over in the clingy sand and flopping flat onto her back to look up at the cloudless blue sky overhead. "And I never want to hear another word about weddings or dresses or cakes or bloody guest lists as long as I live!"

She turned her head to look at the man sitting next to her. He tried to keep a straight face for her sake, but after about half a minute, they both burst out laughing.

Once Jo started, she couldn't stop. She laughed until she was hysterical; she laughed until she was crying and hiccuping.


~The Distant, Distant Future~

Exact location unknown, but possibly near Ohio

JB's pointed Elucidator projected the image of an old man in some kind of dim, indoor setting, methodically polishing a mirror to a perfect shine.

Gavin frowned, confused, wondering what this had to do with him, and then the old man finished his task and turned around. Apparently inside of an antique shop – the painted letters on the window-front backwards from inside, so Gavin couldn't read them – he flipped the sign on the door from closed to open before reaching to comfort a mewing tabby cat.

Gavin started, mouth parting in shock. Mr. and Mrs. Danes had never let him have a pet, saying he wasn't responsible enough, but in Russia, he'd held his cat Zubrovka just the same way as the old man held the tabby. The old man had blue eyes – slightly watery and sunken but otherwise exactly the same as his own. The truth was obvious and undeniable.

"Hey! That's me," Gavin marveled.

"That was you," corrected JB.

Was? Gavin's brow furrowed. How could that be? The old man was at least in his early nineties. JB must be showing him his future, not his past.

"W-what," he stammered out, a bit shakily, "what year is that?"

"1995."

Alexei Romanov would have been ninety-one in 1995, but it still didn't make sense. Because even if JB was showing him the future he would have had if Gary and Hodge hadn't kidnapped him and his sister, wouldn't his future end in 1918, a month before his fourteenth birthday, when he was in the basement and gunned down with his entire family?

Gavin couldn't see any tracer lights in the projected image, either.

"Gary and Hodge messed up 1918 even more than you and Jonah and the others eventually realized when you discovered why they'd wanted you back in that year," JB told him. "Taking you from the garden at the Ipatiev House was not their first attempt to avoid needing to snatch you from that basement."

"It wasn't?"

JB clenched his jaw and shook his head. "No, first Gary tried to take you the night before, while everyone was asleep."

The image changed. Now he could see Gary – in full Bolshevik guard uniform – waking him and telling him to get dressed. A sleepy Alexei tried to ask about his sisters and his spaniel Joy, hesitant to go anywhere without them, but Gary seemed to reassure him it was all right, he could trust him.

Even then, Gavin thought miserably, Gary had had a knack for persuading him to do the wrong thing.

Alexei tried to get out of bed to change into the peasant clothes Gary was holding out, but he couldn't stand for long – he hadn't walked properly since Tobolsk. He swayed and nearly fell. Gary caught him and Gavin watched as he stuck something – a needle, maybe – into his arm.

"Whoa, hang on! What did he give me?"

JB's chin shook with repressed anger. "Medicine that hasn't been invented yet in either of the times you've lived in – to help you walk."

"Gary could have just carried me – he's more than strong enough."

"Yes," grunted JB curtly. "He could have."

Apparently, though, Gary's laziness paid off in an unexpected way. When the cart he put the disguised Alexei on was ambushed, Alexei was able to leap off the back and run for his life. Behind him was an angry mob, with dogs and guns, ahead a man on a big horse.

The man held out his hand, cried, "Boy!" and Alexei – winded and seeing no other option – took it and was immediately hauled up behind him.

"Who's that?" Gavin asked. "Does he work for Gary and Hodge?"

JB actually smiled. It was a tight, ironic smile, but a smile, nonetheless. "That is Sir Ivor Creevey-Thorne. And no, he doesn't work for Gary or Hodge. He wasn't part of their plan for you. He did, however, have a lot in common with them, as far as motivation went. Sir Ivor saw you as a monetary investment as well."

"Where did he take me?"

"It might be easier to say where he didn't take you – for almost a whole year, you travelled the world with him, changing names, being secluded in hotel rooms and ship cabins. Your health actually improved with him, but he convinced everyone you came into contact with you were extremely delicate, made certain they would never risk trying to remove you from his presence. He was very sly about it. He kept you in line by exaggerating the presence of your enemies. Once you were out of Russia and nobody suspected you of being a Romanov, you – in reality – had very few. Most of the close calls he used to make you think he was your sole protector were simply Gary and Hodge using their advanced technology to catch up, to find you again and take you from him."

"But... Didn't I ever ask about my family?"

"I'm sure you did," JB said. "Sir Ivor would have told you they were fine, that you'd reunite with them in England soon enough. It would have been believable, given he told you he was working for the British government, rescuing you because you were Queen Victoria's great grandson. If your questions got to be too much for him, he'd no doubt have played upon your health, saying it wasn't good for you to be so agitated and that you needed to rest."

Gavin nodded. That made sense.

"Another scheme Sir Ivor was mixed up in involved dumping toxic chemicals in New Zealand – so, a year later, in 1919, he took you there. That's where you grew up."

"To be an antique dealer?" Gavin couldn't help wrinkling his nose.

"It's fortunate you did. If you hadn't kept such a low, humble profile, if you'd tried to put yourself forward as the uncrowned tsar of Russia..." JB shuddered. "All of time might have been destroyed from the damage that would have caused."

The image was briefly back to the old man again. He was looking at his pocket watch. A pocket watch Gavin recognized as having belonged to him as Alexei.

"But... Gary and Hodge found me? And changed time again?"

"Yes." JB typed in something on the Elucidator, changing the projected image to one of Gary and Hodge returning Alexei to his 1918 tracer in the garden. "The mess they made was..." He gave another full-body shudder. "The ramifications of your ring alone..."

"My ring?" Gavin looked down at his hand.

"Because they were sloppy and lazy, that ring ended up in so many places at once the time agency nearly lost our minds keeping track."

"I don't understand."

"It was on your hand the night you and your family were murdered. Taken by a drunken Bolshevik afterwards. Passed around on the Russian black market for years."

Gavin winced.

"But when Gary lost you to Sir Ivor, the ring made its way into a drum of toxic waste, which at one point was so poisonous it could never be safely retrieved, but altered time brought about another reality in which the poison was completely neutralized by 1995.

"In that reality it was retrieved by somebody who – if I'm not mistaken – may very well still possess a version of its tracer in 2013!

"However, Gary put you back in your tracer in 1919, where you were wearing the ring in the garden. Because neither the guards nor Sir Ivor had taken it from you yet. No one in the time agency is even remotely certain where that version of your ring is now. If Hodge kept it and took it through time with him – and that's only a guess – well, it could be almost anywhere in history.

"And, of course, the ring is also on your hand now. Because you had it when Katherine rescued you the last time."

"Ouch, that's too much – it makes my head hurt," Gavin admitted, trying to keep it straight in his rapidly scrambling mind.

JB sighed. "And that's only one paradox. A relatively small paradox, all things considered."

"There's more?"

"A lot more." He paused a moment, then he added, "Gavin, when you told the others what Gary promised you if you untied him, stole an Elucidator, and used the code he gave you, you didn't tell them everything he promised." JB's gaze seemed to intensify. "Did you?"

Gavin tried to be indifferent but didn't manage it. His cheeks were hotter than the surface of the sun and he knew he must have turned bright scarlet. "No." How could JB have known about Jo?

"He promised you could go back in time for her, didn't he?"

Gavin's whole body tensed. JB didn't even have to say her name – they both knew who he was talking about. "Yeah. But he didn't say I'd go to 1918 first." Or that he'd betray me and try to turn me into a baby, rob me of my memories of Jo, anyway. "If..." Clearing his throat, he raised his blue eyes to meet JB's; he stared harder than he dared. "If Gary kept his word, if I grew up in the future... Would time agents have stopped my going back for Jo?" There, her name had been spoken, the taboo over and done with, like the breaking of a magic spell; it was both satisfying and devastating for him at the same time.

"No," said JB softly. "No, we wouldn't have stopped you."

"Oh." So he could have been with her. Maybe.

"We wouldn't have needed to."

"What? Why not?"

His expression was sympathetic. "Because the year Gary promised you could return to, the year Jo met Michael, was in damaged time. It happened during the years you were growing up in Ohio unaware of who you really were. There's no safe opening to get into those years because of what Gary and Hodge have done. Otherwise, they would have come back for their investments long before you had time to become a teenager again. Besides, even in undamaged time, there's the paradox of doubles. To meet Jo in Australia you'd have had to be alive twice over, as yourself grown up in Sydney, and as a child in Liston. That simply wouldn't have been possible. Gary knew that. He was just lying because he knew how you felt about her."

Gavin swallowed hard. "How do you know how I feel about her? Why's it matter to you that Gary promised I could marry her when I grew up?"

"Because this isn't the first time you've tried to readjust history to get everything you wanted – including Josephine Tiegan – without understanding the consequences."

Uncomprehending, Gavin blinked rapidly.

JB motioned with his chin at the new image being projected. "Look."

He was an old man in his antique shop in New Zealand. He was just pulling back the curtain between the staff section and the jumbled, dusty sales floor, to look at a customer who'd come in. He only stopped staring at this customer for a split second to look back at the mirror he'd been polishing earlier and pull the curtain even further aside as if to make sure it couldn't be missed.

This valued customer, a young figure with short hair wearing a red sweater had their back to him. Something about the way their hands fiddled constantly, always moving about whatever objects were within reach, was oddly familiar though Gavin couldn't immediately place where he'd last seen this habit.

The old man – me, Gavin still struggled to believe, he really is me – was gazing at the customer as if at the most beautiful sight he'd seen in decades. He slowly approached, a hand outstretched, but before he could make contact with the back of the red sweater – before he could gently introduce himself to whoever this extremely special person was – the bell above the door jingled and he drew back his wrinkled, liver-spotted hand.

"Good afternoon," the old man said – not to the person he'd been about to touch, but to whoever had entered and made the bell jingle – just as she – it was a she – turned around, aware now of his presence.

Gavin struggled to catch his breath.

She was Jo.