Here, Now

A Mirror, Mirror & The Missing Fanfiction

Part Ⅴ

~2013~

Liston, Ohio

Whatever good New Zealand had done Gavin Danes, once he was home again, he seemed – so far as anyone could tell – to have gone entirely – and quite readily – back to his old ways.

Talking it over, his parents came to the joint conclusion either they were doing something amiss or else his external environment was simply a thing he couldn't overcome without extra help. Mrs. Danes made several pointed suggestions to her son about how he might like to change schools – how he might like to take up some weekend hobbies rather than loitering about with his friends.

Wouldn't it be fun to have hobbies?

"You want me to have hobbies?" Gavin had lifted his head from the game he was playing on his phone. "Okay, Mom, fine. Let me play basketball."

Mrs. Danes paled at that. "You know you can't."

"Why not?" he'd demanded.

Mr. Danes looked up from a crossword puzzle. "If you can't show enough responsibility to tell us when you're going out – if we can't even trust you not to skip injections because you just don't feel like it on the day – how can we trust you to play a dangerous sport without getting hurt?"

He wanted to snarl that basketball was hardly a 'dangerous sport' – he wasn't asking to be dropped from a plane with a faulty parachute – but Gavin was – by then – tired of the argument; he just blew out his cheeks. "Whatever, Dad."

"Maybe you could wear a different sweatshirt tomorrow," had been Mrs. Danes' next attempt. It would be nice, she thought, to see him in something not featuring a skull. "Aunt Stacy's sent you the cutest–"

"If you make me wear that," Gavin threatened, a sneer hardening on his face, "I'll run away and never come home again. I swear I will."

She didn't make him wear the shirt, and he didn't run away, but he was brought back to the house in a police cruiser one evening when he was supposed to be upstairs doing homework.

"Shoplifting?" Mrs. Danes wailed, once the officer had said goodnight and left. "Why, Gavey? Why would you do something like that?"

Gavin shrugged. He hadn't, actually – it'd been one his friends, but they'd split and left him holding their backpack crammed with unpaid-for Snickers bars and mini-Gatorade bottles. Only he didn't expect his parents to believe it, and even if they did, he didn't want to be labelled as a snitch. Besides, plenty of the other stuff he was in trouble for he had done – or at least actively participated in. Just not the actual stealing, though he'd played lookout for the kid who did it. He hadn't thought they would take off the minute they heard sirens. Then again, staying with Jo Tiegan had taught him even the best people let you down – left you disappointed – and he knew perfectly well his friends weren't the best people.

Later that night, however, Gavin's conscience pricked at him, and he thought he'd tell the truth after all. He went outside his parents' bedroom and was lifting his hand, was going to knock, when he heard Mr. Danes say, wearily, "You don't suppose he's just a bad kid?"

He let his hand drop. He'd known all along they hated him. It wasn't like it was with Jo and her parents. They regretted adopting him.

What his parents didn't know was Gavin wasn't just making trouble because he felt like it or out of boredom. He was in a private hell of which they saw no signs. A hell they unwittingly contributed to in small ways they never thought of.

They were surprised when they received a wedding invitation for a couple in Australia they'd never even met, but upon realizing the bride was the daughter of the Ms. Guthrie Gavin stayed with in New Zealand, they smiled and put the Save The Date magnet included in the envelope up on their fridge.

"I don't think we can go all the way to Australia for a wedding," Mrs. Danes mused practically, straightening the magnet. "It's not really in the budget this year. But we should send a gift."

"Mmm," said Mr. Danes noncommittally, humming through a mouthful of corn flakes.

Gavin walked in the kitchen, saw the magnet featuring a photograph of Michael with his arms around Jo, yanked it off the fridge and tossed it – with a throw that would have impressed a basketball coach if he'd been allowed to try out – right into the garbage.

"Gavin!" His father growled, while Mrs. Danes fished the magnet back out of the trash again. "What is the matter with you?"

Gavin shrugged and lifted a pair of headphones from his shoulders onto his ears.

A week afterwards, Jo left him a message to apologize. She hadn't sent his parents that invitation. Michael had thoughtlessly sent all of her personal contacts, including the Danes' home address, to his mother and brother – who were in charge of the invites and Save The Dates – and they'd figured the Danes were close friends of hers.

Knowing Jo hadn't deliberately rubbed her imminent marriage to Michael in his face made Gavin feel a little better, though not much.

Especially not when his phone rang at one in the morning and – seeing Jo's name flash on the screen – Gavin stuck his head underneath an impromptu pillow-fort to answer, "Hello?" (he didn't want his parents to hear him talking on the phone when he was supposed to be asleep) only to hear a testy male voice with a Sydney accent on the other end.

"Righto, let's have it out – who is this?"

"This is Gavin Danes," he snarled; "who the hell're you?" And why are you calling me from Jo's phone?

Michael – because it was Michael – burst out laughing. The testiness in his voice evaporated as soon as Gavin's gave the telltale squeak revealing it hadn't broken yet. "Oh, you are a kid! Jesus Christ, mate. She was telling the truth. I'm such an idiot. Sorry to bother you, little dude. No harm done. You have a good night, ay?"

Gavin heard another voice – this one sounded like Jo – going, "What are you doing on my phone?"

And then – right before the call cut off – Michael saying, "Relax, Josie, don't chuck mentals – I was just checking something."

Jo apologized for that, too, when it was a more reasonable hour in Liston, Ohio – apparently Michael hadn't considered the possibility, given the time difference, if his fiancée wasn't cheating on him, he might be calling a literal child in the dead-ass middle of the night – but Gavin didn't want to hear it.

What he wanted to hear was her saying she wasn't marrying some doofus who didn't even trust her.

"If I was marrying you," Gavin ventured, very quietly, after checking over his shoulder to make sure the nearest cafeteria lady couldn't see him talking on his phone and none of his friends were eavesdropping, "you could talk to anybody you wanted – I wouldn't mind. Let alone steal your phone. I wouldn't be mean to you like that."

"I know you wouldn't, Gavin." Then, in a lighter voice, "But, hey, you're a lot smarter than Michael. You know that."

Being told he was smarter than her fiancé didn't do much for him since she was still marrying the dumber guy.

Since he had Michael's last name from the stupid invitation his mom still kept in a drawer, Gavin looked him up on social media. He hadn't wanted to, but after apologizing for the one a.m. call, Jo wasn't in touch often. Probably, she was trying to skew their relationship back into more appropriate territory, embarrassed she – as a grown adult – had been reduced to mollifying a tired middle-schooler on his lunch break thanks to her soon-to-be husband's rampant stupidity, and of course she had her wedding to plan and life in general in Sydney to get on with, but regardless of the reason, the fact was, Gavin missed her. She might have thought it was better for him to just be around kids his own age in Ohio for a bit while she sorted things out, but he suffered – both morally and emotionally – when, to his young mind, she seemed to have all but ghosted him.

Stalking Michael on Facebook wasn't his ideal way of spending a Saturday, not by a long shot, only how else could he hope to hear anything of Jo?

He almost instantly regretted it. Michael's posts were few and far between, and he couldn't have cared less that his rival was 'eating meat pies and watching the sunset – hashtag sunset, hashtag meatpie'.

If anything, Gavin hoped Michael choked on those dang pies.

His friend's list was slightly more promising. A big-lipped woman accompanied by a dead-eyed Chihuahua in most of her shared pics was listed as one of Michael's friends. Going by her posts, she'd been dating Michael's brother Bill on and off again for several years.

A video she shared under the heading Wedding Dress Shopping with Future Sis (Fingers Crossed) caught Gavin's eye and he clicked on it.

Most of the video was big-lipped woman's giant blonde bobble head taking up the screen while she droned on and on to her alleged followers for almost four straight minutes, but towards the end a curtain behind her twitched open and a blurred but familiar figure Gavin recognized as Jo in a puffy white dress with what the video's tags indicated was a 'flounce skirt' emerged, muttering to herself.

"Okay, I look like a marshmallow," she deadpanned.

"Ah! Shut up! No, you don't, you look like a princess!" squealed Big-lips.

"Hang on... Tell me you aren't filming this right now," Jo groaned.

"Of course I am! Give us a twirl!"

"Listen, this is a lot of chiffon..."

"Or..." Big-lips looked more sly than Gavin would have thought her capable of looking judging solely by her profile picture. "...I mean... You could just go home and try on your future Gran-in-law's dress again."

Jo blew an exasperated raspberry, lifted her puffy skirts revealing – and Gavin couldn't help smiling at this, in spite of everything – a pair of paint-splattered sneakers underneath, and spun round a few times while Big-lips finally took the camera off herself to properly film the twirl.

Off-camera, Big-lips' voice cooed, "Aw, Michael's gonna love you in this!"

Gavin closed the laptop he'd been using and shoved it off his lap. He wished he hadn't seen that.

The Time Cave, via The Clarksville Valley Cave Entrance

"We're going to take each of you to a different corner of the room and talk to you individually," that bossy kid, Jonah, announced, regarding the adults they appeared to be trapped with.

"What good will that do?" Gavin called out, cupping his hands over his mouth.

Antonio clapped him supportively on the shoulder. Well, at least he appreciates me, Gavin thought. That was more than could be said for the snobby boy who'd taken charge just because he overpowered that woman, Angela. Which any of them could have done, if they'd known it was what they were supposed to be doing; he'd just gotten a lucky shot in first.

When his searching eyes landed on him, Gavin knew Jonah saw right through him as if he wasn't even there. That was, he didn't see him – not Gavin Danes. He just saw his sweatshirt. Most of the kids he'd been with at the conference weren't even adopted – and of the few that were, apart from Antonio, who Gavin was standing right next to, hardly any of them had been put into Gary and Hodge's group. But Jonah still saw him as just an ensemble cast member – one of the troublemaking skull-shirt kids. As replaceable – as interchangeable – as a faceless member of a Greek chorus.

Jonah Skidmore couldn't have picked him out of a crowd without the sweatshirt to clue him in, yet he thought he had the right to tell him what to do?

This day just kept getting better, didn't it?

He hadn't wanted to go to the stupid adoption conference at Clarksville Valley High in the first place. Of course, his mom pushed him into it. She had tried everything to make him want to go – bribes, promises it would be fun, a suggestion he might like to see his future high school (to which he'd retorted, "Why would I want to do that?") – and none of it would have worked... Except... She'd been more fragile than usual, lately, maybe because – in a moment of frustration a couple weeks ago – Gavin had snapped, "You're not even my real mom!" at her.

He'd said it deliberately to hurt her, but he still felt kind of bad when it did.

Even so, despite the guilt, it had taken her giving him permission to go alone with his friends, without her or Dad, to get him here.

And now look what happened!

He should have known today was going to suck. Mom'd gone and stuck that stupid Save The Date magnet back on the fridge – she always seemed to fish it out of the trash no matter how deep he buried it – and he'd had to eat his morning cereal looking at Michael and Jo in a couple-y pose. Not to mention, he noticed the date, which had seemed mercifully far off when the magnet first arrived, was looming closer. Soon Jo would be Michael's wife. She'd sort of belong to him. Gavin hated thinking about that.

Funny to remember Jo marrying a jerk had been his biggest problem before getting trapped in the time cave with this load of weirdos.

Now he might never get back home.

Well, if he didn't go home again, at least he wouldn't have to hear another word about Jo's wedding, or the stupid fish forks his parents were sending her and Michael as a gift.

That was something, at least.

Mom and Dad would probably be glad to be rid of him. He'd be gone properly this time, not just away in New Zealand for six months. Maybe they'd go ahead and adopt another kid – a good one whose blood actually clotted on its own.

Gavin was so wrapped up in his thoughts about Jo and his parents and everything else, he didn't realize at first he'd been voted by his immediate group to privately interview Gary – the beefy, kind of jacked-up one with the extra-tight knots on his bonds – while another kid to his right got to interview Hodge, until Antonio nudged him forward and said, "Go on, man."

Might as well, he thought, and went over to him.

Gary grinned wide. "Heeeyyy. Long time no see, kid." He held up his bound hands. "How about loosening these for an old friend?"

Gavin snorted. "How stupid do you think I am?"

"I don't think you're stupid at all – I think you're one of the smart ones. Maybe even the smartest. You were set to rule over one-sixth of the world at one point – real tragic how that didn't work out for you. Bet you would have done great."

"You want to take me to the future," Gavin said flatly. "Why would I want to help you?"

"Don't you know how great the future is? You'd love being there!"

How could he know that? Gavin scowled disbelievingly at him.

"Come on, Alexei..."

"Don't call me that, I'm Gavin – Gavin Danes!"

A muscle in Gary's face twitched. "Fine, Fine – Gavin. Gavin it is. So, Gavin, tell me something – do you enjoy being a hemophiliac?"

He clenched jaw. "You know about that?"

"Sure do." He shrugged his shoulders stiffly upwards. "Too bad de-aging alone couldn't fix it, huh? Darn genetics diseases. Real stinkers, aren't they? Of course, if we'd got you to the future we'd have cured it right up no problem..."

"There's a cure in the future?"

"Sure is."

"You mean..." Gavin tested. "You mean they've got better injections. More treatments. Maybe I'd only have to get a shot once a year or something, instead of every three days, right?"

"No, kid, I mean they've – we've – straight-up cured it – one hundred percent."

"They never get bleeds?"

"Never."

"They can play basketball or football?"

Gary beamed. "Of course they can! They're just like everybody else! Sounds good, doesn't it?" He inched closer and held up his hands again. "I can get you there – to the future. That's all I wanted from the start. All you have to do is untie me."

As tempting as a life without hemophilia was... "I don't want to be a baby again." The thought of some future adoptive mommy – a strange woman he didn't even know – changing his diapers was mortifying. And, anyway, what sort of nut would want to go through puberty...what...three times and counting? Worst of all, he'd lose all his memories of New Zealand and the Tiegans – of Jo! "Thanks, but no thanks."

Gary swung his bound hands and Gavin ducked away, thinking – for a second – he'd been about to strike him across the face. It turned out Gary was just making a waving motion for emphasis.

"Pshaw," he laughed. "That's just for the other kids – we know you're special. Yeah, originally, you were gonna be a baby again, but you don't have to be – you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. You can stay Gavin Danes. Just Gavin Danes in the future."

Gavin bit his lip, considering.

"Isn't it better than dying in a cellar in 1918?"

He couldn't argue with him there.

"This guy you kids are calling JB wants you all dead in your original times."

Okay, yeah...

"Right, okay, so what if I don't like the future – what if it's not as fun as you say it is?"

"Awesome little thing called Time Travel – works both ways. Back and forward. Ooh, remember that?"

"I–" Gavin squeaked, hated himself for squeaking, then pitched his voice as deep as it would go to try and sound tougher. "I guess I–"

"Oh, and of course, there's Jo Tiegan..."

Gavin's face darkened. "What about her?" How did Gary know about her?

"You like her, don't you?"

His cheeks were hot and he dropped Gary's gaze for the briefest second, giving himself away.

"I don't blame you." Gary grinned. "She's pretty, isn't she? Too bad about the major age-gap. And the lousy, dim-wit fiancé, too, of course. That's a bummer. What does she see in him? You'd think she'd have her head on straight by her age."

His voice turned sullen. "I don't wanna talk about her with you."

"Wow... You really haven't worked it out yet, have you, Gavin?"

"Worked what out?"

"You could marry her yourself." Gary's eyebrows wiggled at him suggestively. "She doesn't have to marry that guy she's with right now."

"What?" Gavin's brow sank with deep confusion. "What are you talking about?"

"If you go to the future, spend a few years having the time of your life until you're all grown up, you could travel back in time – as a grown man in your thirties – and find her again." His grin broadened. "Heck, think about it – you could even be the one she meets outside of Pizza Hut the day she was going to meet..."

The day she was going to meet Michael.

"Wouldn't she be happier with you than him?" pressed Gary, lips pursed now. "You'd be strong, handsome, perfectly healthy, about the same age... You're already smart. Like I said, probably the smartest kid in this cave. She'd like you much better than him, wouldn't she? She'd probably fall in love with you right off the bat. Then you'd have everything you ever wanted, after a lifetime of ease and fun, the kind of childhood you couldn't dream of in this backwards century...

"Of course, if JB has his way, you die in 1918 and she marries..."

Gavin swallowed hard. His chest hurt and his throat felt like it was closing on him. "But–"

Gary's eyes widened and he tsked softly. "I mean, if you want the woman of your dreams to cry herself to sleep every night because she's married to someone who'll never appreciate her, that's on you. But, you know, JB wouldn't care one way or the other. He's all hung up about Angela not marrying her plumber and popping out five little brats in succession. Doesn't care whether or not original time made her happy, does he? What if she hates her plumber husband? JB wants Jo to marry someone who treats her bad if it's what originally happened. Continuity matters more than happiness to him. How many kids do you think Jo'll have, Gavin?"

"Shut up!" Gavin burst out, bringing a hand to his forehead. "I don't want anything bad to happen to Jo. I don't want her to cry and be sad all the time and for Michael to treat her mean. But–" He might not have cared what most of the other kids thought – it would only serve that Jonah Skidmore right to have to be a baby all over again – but Antonio was his friend... And if he really had been Alexei Romanov in the past, it meant he probably had a sister he didn't know somewhere in this cave, too... Should he ask Gary to not make her a baby, too? That was, if he agreed to set him free... He decided against saying anything about it and – a little lamely – invented another objection. "But I don't know anybody in the future."

Gary's doting expression was nearly sycophantic. "Aw, sure you do, kid! You know me – and Mr. Hodge. Maybe one of us will adopt you in the future. Of course we're real busy, but you're clever enough to look after yourself. We'd trust you to do whatever you feel like doing."

No more listening to his parents scold him for skipping classes or hanging out with juvenile delinquents. He'd have guardians who trusted him.

"We'd treat you like a prince!"

A pampered childhood, followed by marriage to Jo. Getting to break up Jo and Michael for good. Better yet, getting to make it so they were never together. It did sound better than anything Gavin had had to look forward to in the life he'd left behind when he unwittingly entered the time cave...

Gary twisted the temptation in just a little further with, "Say, I get it's a painful subject, but that wedding of Jo Tiegan's – back in 2013, day of the conference – it was getting pretty close, wasn't it? How were you coping with it?" His muscular face softened with concern.

"Fine," he muttered. "I was coping just fine." No, he hadn't been.

"Well, yeah, I guess – even being such a smart kid – you wouldn't know, not at your age, what happens the night after a wedding, huh? Lucky you're too young to understand that. It'd only have made you feel worse. I'm glad you were spared – what with everything else you went through, in both your lives, that would have been too cruel."

Gavin grimaced. How could Gary say he'd been 'spared'? He was thirteen, not three. He had some idea about the birds and the bees – he and his dad had had a really uncomfortable talk, most of which admittedly did go over his head, and there'd been the time he walked into that sex ed class by mistake in Wellington... Not that he'd heard or seen much of it.

Still, he had a general notion of...

Of...

Of what grownups did on their wedding night.

And he didn't want to think about Jo and Michael doing that.

Sure, Gavin knew some people – probably most people – didn't wait for marriage to do...stuff... Not these days. (If you could even say 'these days' when you were in a cave outside of time.) But figuring they'd probably already done it anyway didn't make him feel any better. It was tough enough seeing the Save The Date magnet without imagining such a sickening scenario.

What was Gary trying to do, make him barf right into his corn flakes if he ever did get home again?

Except Gary wasn't offering to take him back to the Danes household. That wasn't even an option.

He was, however, offering him a way out.

A way out for Jo, too.

Because she couldn't really want to be with Michael, could she? She must be making a mistake or else just not know how bad she was going to mess up her life. Adults could be dumb sometimes.

"All you gotta do, to get everything you ever wanted" – Gary's voice lowered to a whisper – "is untie me."

Gavin glanced over his shoulder, then nodded back at him. "Okay."

Less than a minute later, Gary was hunched forward rubbing his newly freed wrist. "You won't regret it." Then, drawing something from his pocket, "There are just one or two more things..."

His face heated all over again. He should have known it couldn't be so easy! "Can't you take me to the future now? I'm ready to go." Ready to have years and years and years of fun without worrying about Jo and Michael.

"There's a chance JB might win this round," he warned, passing him a folded slip of paper. "But you can still have everything I promised. This is a very special code. All you've got to do, should things not work out the way we want, is get your hands on an Elucidator – you do that, by hook or by crook – type the code in and voila! Future ahoy, kid!"

Because, sure, Elucidators were just everywhere in the twenty-first century – you practically couldn't go into a Goodwill without seeing a shelf full of 'em! Gavin arched an eyebrow skeptically.

"Trust me, you'll get one – smart kid like you knows who to watch and when to strike – and when you do... Well, I hope you'll be willing to do me a favour. Given all I'll offer you, it's–"

"You said all I had to do was untie you," Gavin whined. "I just did that."

"Nah, trust me, you'll like this – it'll be real easy, too." And he explained how – once he had the code and Elucidator – he was supposed to ambush that Jonah Skidmore kid, Chip Winston, and his own sister. "You'll think of some way to corral them together. That'll be a snap. Say you want to be friends, or you've got new information on their pasts that could be useful." Gavin winced – making new friends, even under false pretences, wasn't something he excelled in. "Then grab them. The code also will release me and Hodge if we're trapped in Time Prison. So we can meet you and the others in the future."

"Couldn't I get the others another time? Since I'll have an Elucidator?" Gavin asked, looking almost jealous. "What do you want with them? There's nothing special about them. You're not gonna make them a deal like mine, too, right? It's just for me, isn't it?"

"Of course, of course it is," Gary assured him. "But if you're gonna be living like a prince, don't you want servants?"

"Can't I pick out my own attendants in the future?" And he sounded very grand and uppity, very like a boy who could have been a tsarevich once upon a time. "I don't like Jonah Skidmore."

"Trust me, kid – and, hey, even if you don't like him, you'll like having your own sister to play with, won't you?"

Gavin didn't know – in this lifetime, he'd never experienced having a sister. Sisters were supposed to be annoying, but maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Maybe she would be fun. She could be somebody to play futuristic video games against, anyway. Even the best game in all of history wouldn't be fun on his own.

"Don't worry – you just type in the code, like I've told you how," were Gary's last words to him in that cave; "this" – he pointed to the paper emphatically – "will get me out of prison and set you up fine!"

And Gavin tucked the code away, watching from the corner of his eye with satisfaction as Gary got up, the remains of the ropes made useless without their boy-scout double knots dragging behind him, and charged forward to take on JB and the kids he'd won over to his side.

Jonah's voice screamed, "Hey! Who untied Gary?"

The corners of Gavin's mouth curled upward as he played the absolute innocent even to Antonio's questioning looks in the melee which followed.

He was going to get everything he ever wanted.

Everything.

~2013~

Liston, Ohio

Everything was a long time in coming.

Gavin was on the verge of giving up hope – he'd decided, as the next best thing, he'd just go ahead and run away from home. After all, he'd thought about it plenty of times before. Before Gary and the time cave. He packed and unpacked an unimpressive backpack that – aside from a flashlight, some granola bars, and his waded-up skull sweatshirt – mostly contained random things from his shoebox, the one he'd brought back home from New Zealand with him after all, minus only the broken Swiss Army knife the Tiegans had made him relinquish before he went through Security. He also had a brown leatherette book Ms. Guthrie had given him as a goodbye present – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ms. Guthrie told him the name Gavin came from Gawain – she was the sort who knew stuff like that – and although he'd never have admitted it in front of his friends, he thought knights were kind of cool. He wouldn't like to leave it behind, not if he was going away forever.

The future would be different – who needed books in the future? But, for now, he wanted Sir Gawain with him.

Trouble was, he always ended up just over-turning the backpack and shaking everything out onto his bed after a while.

Gary had sounded so sure he was clever enough to get his hands on an Elucidator. Apart from Jo, Gary was the only person who thought Gavin was smart. His teachers at school sure didn't. He didn't want to let Gary down – not if he believed in him that much.

And, anyway, Gary had – or had had – time travel. What if he'd already been back to the future and met Gavin there, so he knew for a fact Gavin found an Elucidator and typed in the code?

So he did the only thing he thought he could – he kept spying on Angela, the only grownup from the time cave who was still hanging around this time and lived locally.

Nobody would tell him what was going on, but surely somebody would come and tell her – it was only a matter of skulking around and being patient.

Gavin didn't exactly enjoy spying on her, but he liked how it gave him something to do, a reason to keep busy and never look at a calendar if he could help it, so he didn't have to remember how close Jo's wedding was.

One day, kicking a pebble with the side of his sneaker, Gavin muttered to himself, "If nothing happens by then – if Jo marries Michael before I find an Elucidator, before anyone interesting comes looking for Angela – I'll run away. No more changing my mind. I'll just do it." He kicked the pebble right into a gutter with a plonk! "It'll be like a sign."

But a time traveler – not JB, who Gary claimed wanted him dead and Jo married to a jackass, some other guy called Hadley Correo – did finally turn up with an Elucidator, and Gavin seized the perfect moment, a split-second Angela wasn't directly looking at the valuable gift she'd been trusted with and snatched it away for himself.

He thought that would be the end of it, but there was another catch.

The sister he was supposed to bring along to the future to meet Gary and Hodge wasn't in Ohio yet! It turned out she hadn't been in the time cave with the rest of them – Jonah's sister Katherine had claimed to be her that day.

Anastasia Romanov couldn't avoid impostors even in a whole other century.

The real Anastasia, Daniella McCarthy, was all the way in Ann Arbor. She was moving to Liston – Gavin even saw the house her family were buying, if they ever resolved some problem over the title, having walked by it plenty of times while spying on Angela – but if he was going to snag her, the Skidmore kid, and Chip Winston, he had to convince her to trust him, to be with the others at the right time.

Unexpectedly, the voice of this lost sister, once he got her on the phone, did the worst thing to him it could possibly have done – it sought out the last remaining drop of conscience in him, the last soft spot, and pressed upon it.

He didn't care what he did to Jonah or to other kids he didn't really know, but Daniella was his sister by blood, and in a weird way, despite everything, he wanted her to actually like him.

When she accused him of trying to get her to do his dirty work for him, getting in touch with Chip and Jonah, and was so near the truth, Gavin's tough-guy act slipped and he blurted, miserably, "Are you mad at me now too?"

He should have known he'd mess up trying to reach out to Daniella – everything he touched got messed up.

After a few hours stewing in his misery, pitying himself, he realized there was one person who definitely wasn't mad at him, even if she wasn't currently talking to him much, and he suddenly needed desperately to hear her voice.

He would tell her everything – confess about Gary and the time cave and being some sickly Russian prince or whatever from the past and what he was going to do to those kids and why and all about Daniella McCarthy being his real actual sister – even if when he'd got it all out, she told him, as he imagined she likely would, not to go through with it.

While he waited with bated breath for her to pick up the phone, he inwardly debated whether everything included what else Gary promised him – that he could go back in time as a grownup and stop Jo from meeting Michael.

Maybe it did.

Maybe, if he told her, she'd realize he cared about her more than her stupid fiancé ever would.

Maybe she'd break up with him anyway.

Maybe he didn't need them to never have met.

Maybe he just needed them not to stay together now.

He wouldn't get to do all that awesome stuff in the future he was looking forward to, or live like a prince with Gary letting him do whatever he wanted, but still...

Straight to voicemail.

Beeeeeeep.

"Jo?" he rasped out, cradling his cell phone between his cheek and shoulder and looking out his bedroom window so hard the tree outside blurred. "It's Gavin – uh, Gavin Danes, you know – I need to, um, talk to you. It's really, really important, okay? So call me when you get this. Bye."

He waited what felt like twenty minutes but was actually just five. Then he tried again.

"I dunno if I'm bothering you, but I really need to talk to somebody. Bad. Please?"

Two minutes. No response. Not even a text.

Jabbing at the phone screen, he opened and closed, then reopened, an app to refresh his email, just in case.

Nothing there, either.

"Jo... I... I'm scared I'm going to do something... Not a bad thing, you know, not exactly bad... Just something I can't..." It wasn't like he couldn't take it back, since he had literal time travel, but it... Well, he couldn't explain it to a machine. He needed her. "Please just talk to me, okay?"

The next call, someone answered, and he almost cried with relief when he heard a female voice go, "'ello!" on the other end, but after about three seconds, he knew it wasn't Jo.

"Where's Jo?" he asked. "Isn't this her phone?"

The woman, whoever she was, seemed to pick up on the fact it was a kid calling. "She's having her rehearsal dinner right now, honey." Gavin suddenly recognized the voice as belonging to the woman he thought of as Big-lips. The one from Michael's social media. "I was just passing the room we all left our coats in on my way to the toilet, and I – ya know – heard this phone go off about a hundred, trillion times. Thought there might be an emergency. You okay, love? D'you need me to go get her for you?"

Even though Gavin had worked out if it was five his time it was only about seven Jo's, he'd forgotten it was seven o'clock tomorrow over there. Having not looked at the calendar deliberately for several days now, he hadn't realised what she'd be doing.

His parents weren't invited to the rehearsal, just the actual wedding, but the rehearsal dinner date had been on the magnet, too, in smaller letters.

She was already having her rehearsal dinner for the reception. She was going to go through with it.

Gavin felt the lump already in his throat harden. It was like he'd swallowed a golf ball. Swallowed a golf ball and then been sucker-punched in the stomach right after. Somehow, he managed to gasp out, "No, thanks – I'm fine," before ending the call.

Thinking of all the desperate, pathetic messages he'd left, imagining her listening to them right after the rehearsal, maybe even still in her wedding dress...

Did women wear their wedding dress to the rehearsal dinner? He wasn't sure.

Either way, Gavin's face felt like fire.

God, he'd screwed up again. There wasn't any coming back from this. He wished he could throw himself into his pillow face-down, suffocate, and then just die of humiliation! He hated Jo for getting married, and he hated himself for being thirteen and such a loser.

His swimming eyes drifted to the backpack on his bed, with a flashlight and the shimmery corner of Sir Gawain sticking out under the unbuckled flap. He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his wrist.

Beside the backpack was Angela's Elucidator.