Chapter Text
When it’s all over, and Time has healed, Jennifer doesn’t think about him at all.
Really. Truly. Absotively, posilutely, no lie, cross her heart and hope to die. He never even crosses her mind. She has a company to run and a unicorn to create and a beach to sit on—way too much for any one person, let alone a probably crazy former (or not? She was never quite clear on that one) Primary person—and he’s not there so it’s all totally irrelevant anyways. Really.
Except sometimes. Maybe she looked him up to find out when he was born, and maybe she learned that Theodore William Deacon came screaming into the world on May 7, 2002, and maybe she spends most of her May 7ths staring into a wall and thinking about what might have been and where he is and how he spends his days and how she hopes his life is kinder this time around.
But only then. She has too many other things on her mind, too many other critically important things to do. If life’s a stage then she’s the star, and that comes with responsibilities, like remixing J.H. Bond’s music for a modern audience and single-handedly keeping outdated pop culture references alive.
*&*&*&*
April 22, 2018
Jennifer left her hula-hooping aerobics class full of smiles and addictive endorphins, so she was a little off-kilter as she walked past the fountain in her favorite park. She could hardly be blamed for the fact that she wasn’t exactly walking in a straight line, causing her to bump into a very handsome man walking the opposite way.
“Excuse me,” a British accent intoned, and Jennifer’s reply caught in her throat as she looked into his face. Julian Adler: younger than she’d ever known him, and totally unaware of the fact that he knew her, once upon a time.
As he looked back, his face twisted into a look of horror and embarrassment—precisely the look he used to shoot her way every time he passed her in the hallways at Raritan.
There was no way he could remember. Dr. Adler had never traveled. But something about his personality, his intuition, knew he wasn’t a fan of hers.
Jennifer muttered a quick apology and kept walking, giggling all the way home.
*&*&*&*
“It doesn’t matter anyways.” This is a phrase she repeats to herself over and over and over again.
Things would never have been different. In this world, she can meet him when she’s old and pray he remembers—and he will, she knows he will; she may not see Time like she used to, but she still knows things and she knows Deacon and she’s never doubted anything less than her conviction that he will remember her—and they can be friends and that’s all and that’s that. In the other world, the broken world, he would have met her on the day she died, or in a tent in an apocalyptic wasteland, or on a giant time-traveling Earthship—and they would have spent either side of that moment divided by time. Either she was too young, too confused, too damaged to understand what he really could be to her, while he’d secretly known her for years, or he was the student to her wise old lady teacher, showing him how to play a role and save time.
They were more than that, sometimes. And sometimes they were less. Time travel really had a way of making things messy.
They never could’ve worked. Time didn’t want them to, which was why Jennifer spent so many of her waking minutes and most of her non-waking ones trying to forget him and what they could’ve been, in a different life, not that one, another one.
If she was being honest—and who had the time for that, honestly—she would admit that she was terrified of seeing him again one day. She had to, obviously. She couldn’t live with herself if she never set eyes on Deacon again, no matter the circumstances. But she dreaded it all the same.
*&*&*&*
November 23, 2021
The interview came out on a Tuesday, just a few weeks after the movie, and when she read it she screamed so loud her neighbor knocked on her door to check that she wasn’t being murdered.
“Now that sci-fi pic by the heiress-scientist-woman, Goines something or other? That movie was insane. Next-level chaos and I barely understood a second of it. My brain just can’t process all that time-travel shit. I mean, her brain must be a real clusterfuck. But let me tell you, I loved every second of it.”
Quentin Tarantino had said that when a red-carpet reporter asked him about the best movies he’d seen lately.
The movie barely raked in enough box office money to cover what it cost to make. Jennifer couldn’t care less, and she hosted a poorly attended screening every May 7 anyway.
*&*&*&*
Her bad attitude about Deacon was silly, really. She would be lucky to call him a friend again one day, even if that’s all they could be, as divided by age as they were. And her life was good—so, so good now that she wasn’t locked up and everyone didn’t think she was criminally insane. Well, maybe some people did—she never stopped being a total (and proud) wackjob, after all—but she wasn’t and she knew that now so it was all okay.
Both her parents were dead, her father succumbing to a massive coronary not long after he would’ve been killed in the other timeline, and she supposed that would be sad for some people, but for her it was okay. Maybe not good—it would always have been better to have two living parents who loved her and didn’t try to drown her—but in lieu of that, freedom was a good second option.
Jennifer did what she wanted when she wanted, and very often that meant making other people smile, which was a damn fine alternative to rotting away in J.D. People’s, spitting out pills and drawing monkeys.
They were all doing fine.
She saw Cole and Cassie whenever any of them could fit in the drive. Sometimes she spent weekends in Binghamton, and other times she took Cole to lunch in the city, where they pretended to be fancy pretentious people and not the came-of-age-in-an-apocalypse orphaned heathens they really were.
Perfectly fine.
The lovebirds—who really were irritatingly happy, whatever the state of the universe—had a little boy who wasn’t Athan but whom Jennifer loved all the same, and there was another on the way. They were busy and happy and peaceful, and she loved the life they got to enjoy.
Better than fine.
So much more fine than they ever hoped to be in the 2040s.
And it hurt that it wasn’t enough. That as much as she appreciated every good thing she had, there was still something missing. Like her life was a puzzle, and one piece had fallen on the floor and rolled under a cabinet, never to be found again.
The picture was beautiful either way, but there was something to be said for finishing what you started.
*&*&*&*
June 13, 2025
“Jennifer Goines.”
She stood. She grinned so big she thought her face might break. She looked into the audience and saw so many people cheering for her: friends who were becoming family. Cassie and Cole, who already were.
She walked across the stage, shook the dean’s hand, and grasped her diploma.
Dr. Jennifer Goines, Ph.D.
*&*&*&*
It was Cassie who noticed first. Jennifer had driven to their little white house for dinner, and she was helping chop potatoes when Cassie caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the microwave window.
“Great,” she said, setting the bowl of green beans down on the counter. “I look more and more like an old lady every day.” She put her fingers at each corner of her eyes, pulling back to erase the crows’ feet there.
(Cassie was literally one of the most beautiful women Jennifer had ever seen—and she was famous, after all, she’d been to all manner of movie premieres and fashion shows—but it seemed like her friend’s statements were rhetorical, not seeking affirmation.)
“I used to think I would never get to have wrinkles and grow old,” Cassie continued. “Back then, when we… when any second could’ve been the last. I mourned it, the life I would never get to have, the life my mother never got to have. But now that I’m here, it’s hard to make peace with these. ” She was still pulling and twisting at her barely-there crinkles.
Cassie chuckled sardonically, turning around to look at Jennifer, who continued chopping potatoes. She was enjoying the pattern she’d made, cutting each vegetable into a trapezoid. Cassie tilted her head to the side.
“How do you do it?”
Jennifer looked up, startled. She hadn’t been prepared for questions, and she’d never really thought about wrinkles, anyway.
“Do what?”
Cassie laughed.
“Stay looking so young. You look like you haven’t aged at all since … we got back? Since everything changed? I’m still really not sure what to call waking up to a former life that never happened.”
“I like to call them ‘the years that never were.’ Adds drama to any conversation,” Jennifer said, smiling lopsidedly.
“Ha. I like that,” Cassie said, returning to the green beans and microwave buttons.
There was a pause while the microwave whirred, and Jennifer’s knife kept chopping, and a pan of chicken on the stove sizzled on.
“I never really paid attention to my face. I mean, not outside of my glitter eyeshadow and goth lipstick and eyebrow piercing phases. I guess wrinkles never occurred to me,” Jennifer said quietly.
“It’s probably just good genes. God knows your mother owes you one nice thing.”
The two women laughed, and Jennifer forgot about the whole conversation by the time they’d finished dinner.
*&*&*&*
August 16, 2026
Jennifer posed for the cameras as best she could, but she couldn’t help being distracted by the busyness around her. The clinking glass, gentle instruction, blinking iPads and smiling small faces.
It was everything she’d never had when she started at Markridge all those years ago. She hadn’t really needed it, intellectually, but she had certainly needed some mental, emotional, spiritual mentorship.
She’d never gotten it, except from herself. But things could be different for these girls.
It was day one of the Jennifer Goines “Girls Who Save the World” Initiative, a scholarship program for young girls from underprivileged backgrounds who wanted to learn about STEM.
It was still early days, but she could tell that this was a forever-project. One that she’d be growing and promoting until her last days, when she’d endow it with so much money that it could never, ever die.
No one would be threatened or accused of a murder they didn’t commit. No one’s genius or emotional scars would be weaponized. Not a single one of her girls would ever be belittled for the way their brain worked or the demons they fought inside their heads.
She looked around the room, a tear falling down her face.
It felt good to have daughters again.
* &*&*&*
But her brain wouldn’t let her forget forever.
It was two years later after that night chopping potatoes, at her yearly PAP smear, that Jennifer remembered and started to wonder, too. The OBGYN was excitedly telling her that she was a positively ideal patient. In the very gross words of her doctor, Jennifer’s uterine lining, ovarian reserve and follicles were as thick and full and numerous (respectively) as that of a woman 10 years her junior. Nearly a miracle, the doctor said, at her age. If kids were something she ever wanted to pursue, she had plenty of time.
Time. Not something she was used to having plenty of, except lately, when she had so much and not the right things to fill it with.
She went home. Grabbed a handheld mirror from the bottom drawer of her vanity, where it had been sitting for years. Plopped herself in front of her laptop. Typed “Jennifer Goines” into the image search bar, and limited results to photos from 2016.
There she was, in the year she returned from the years that never were. In each picture, everything from social media selfies to cable news interviews to paparazzi photos, she looked happy. A little lost maybe, trying to navigate a whole new world, but happy.
And she also looked the same.
She glanced between a close-up of her face from a magazine photo shoot and her reflection in the mirror. Nothing was different. No new wrinkles, no weird freckles or moles. Less eyeshadow, definitely, but no heavy bags under her eyes. Her ears were the same size, too—she’d been told as a child that they grow your whole life, and that sticks with a kid.
She was exactly the same.
Her heart thundered.
There were a million possible explanations. Maybe Cassie was right, and it was good genes. Maybe it was the expensive Korean skincare routine she’d performed religiously since that conversation in the Coles’ kitchen. Maybe it was just part of being Primary, and none of the others had lived long enough to find out.
But only one explanation seemed right, and it was the most improbable, impossible one of them all.
Jennifer closed her laptop, put the mirror back in the drawer, and climbed into bed. She’d think on it more tomorrow.
*&*&*&*
March 8, 2029
“Jennifer, what’s your skincare routine? How do you stay so young?” The shouts and flashbulbs swarmed around her as she exited her car to head into the Met Gala, which she was only attending so she had an excuse to wear a dress that looked like a flamingo crossed with a peacock.
She looked up, smiled for the cameras. “Time travel.”
The surrounding reporters and photographers laughed.
Jennifer didn’t.
*&*&*&*
They had just settled into January 2030—Jennifer was interested to see how this decade went, given its apocalyptic nature last/next time—when Cole brought it up on one of her visits to the house of cedar and pine.
“Jennifer, have you noticed that you’re not aging?”
She had, obviously—who hadn’t?—but she hadn’t been particularly inclined to bring it up. Was it a punishment or a reward? An accident or fate? She could still see a lot of things, but not this.
Cole wanted to go to Jones, see if she remembered. Even if she didn’t, he said, she might be able to answer a hyper-specific, off-the-wall hypothetical about the theoretical odds of someone not aging after a lifetime’s worth of bouncing through time.
Jennifer and Cassie shut that idea down faster than Jones used to say their surnames in a threatening German accent. Jennifer, because she didn’t want to think about it at all, didn’t want to know, wanted to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Cassie, because she said Jones deserved her peace, and they didn’t need to jeopardize or interrupt it.
“Okay, fine, but don’t you think we should investigate? How can we be aging but you’re not? Seems to me that you might want to at least have a heads up if you’re immortal,” Cole intoned.
Both Cassie and Cole looked at her questioningly. Jennifer sighed.
“No, I don’t want to know. I mean, it would be pretty sick to be immortal. Maybe. Probably. Only if it was like elves in the Lord of the Rings, not like Twilight, that sounds hella depressing.”
The Coles just stared at her.
“I know, I know, it’s cliché at this point to rag on Twilight, but I’m an 80s baby and I just can’t get behind the sparkly vampires. Vampires in general , though, that’s different. Put me in the middle of Spike and Angel and we’d have a real good time, badabing, bada—"
“Jennifer, be serious,” Cole said, frowning.
Jennifer sighed again. Paused. Took a deep breath.
“I am being serious. I don’t want to know.”
And she really didn’t. Knowing the truth—what was happening to her, and why—might also mean the end of the fragile hope that had started blooming inside her chest that night in front of her glowing laptop.
She didn’t want to know if it meant knowing that this wasn’t a second chance with him. Extra seconds and minutes and years to wait for him to catch up to her, so they’d be together, on the same side of time. If it wasn’t that, she didn’t care what it was.
Cole and Cassie seemed subdued that night when they saw her to the front door. She kissed their cheeks goodbye and squeezed Cole a little harder than usual, saying, “chill out, Otter Eyes. I think it’s all gonna be okay.”
And in that moment, she really believed it. Maybe it really would be okay. Maybe, just maybe, Time owed her one, too.
*&*&*&*
July 10, 2032
Jennifer’s thrilling, suspenseful, romantic and tear-jerking tale of a soldier named Duke and a queen-scientist-actress named Julie who battled through time to be together—based on a true story, but massively abridged for young ears—was stopped mid-sentence by a hand pulling at her sleeve.
“Aunt Jen. Jen. Jen. I have to tell you something,” Mattie said.
“What’s up babe?”
He grimaced, as if his little brain knew this wasn’t the nicest thing to say, but he had to tell her anyway, for the sake of honesty.
“This story doesn’t make sense.”
Jennifer laughed. This was what she loved about kids—they didn’t have filters, and they spoke the truth, just like her.
“You’re right, little buddy. It doesn’t make any sense at all, not even the tiniest bit. I think that’s why I like it so much.”
Mattie looked unconvinced. “Even if it’s crazy?”
She chuckled again. “Crazy” was a bad word in the Cole house, fully disavowed by both Cassie and Cole, but she’d let her godchild get away with it, just this once. He wasn’t wrong.
“Especially if it’s crazy.”
*&*&*&*
Jennifer thought about that conversation often in the months that followed. Little Matthew Cole hadn’t looked convinced by her claims that the story was exactly as it should be, even if it was a little wacky.
But wackiness had never really bothered her. And while it generally seemed like a good thing that the world was mostly normal and un-clusterfucked now, she sometimes missed the chaos of the days that never were. They sucked, mostly. But she always knew she belonged there, and sometimes she just felt so alone and out-of-place here without time whispering in her ear.
So this was good. It was like a love letter from Time itself, and a sign that she was still just a little bit special . She liked that.
And she liked that it meant Deacon was special, too. That Time knew him now, even if it missed him the first time around. He was going to enjoy that when he remembered, no question about it.
*&*&*&*
August 12, 2034
When she was busy, when she packed her days full of good and helpful things that brought her and others joy, Jennifer could sleep soundly, dead to the world until her alarm clock resurrected her.
But summer was slow, and this one was especially hot and muggy, so she lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling and counting the blades of the fan as they swirled.
With each rotation, a thought cycled into her head, only to be replaced by its opposite on the next spin.
When he remembered.
If he remembered.
Sometimes it felt like her whole life balanced on a tightrope in between those two thoughts, looping each other like a djinn through her brain—as if she hadn’t had enough of those.
*&*&*&*
December 14, 2037
Bzz. Bzz. Bzzzzzzz.
Jennifer almost didn’t answer the phone. Who calls people anymore, anyway?
But she picked up despite herself, thinking it might be related to her seventh J.H. Bond album, which she was due to record next week.
It wasn’t.
“Jennifer Goines?”
The German accent on the other end of the line startled her so much that she banged her knees on the underside of her desk.
“Uh, yes?” Not the most professional way to answer the phone, but she could barely speak at all.
“My name is Dr. Katarina Jones. I’m a physicist with Columbia University. I’ve been following your work for some time now. While much of it frivolous, I found myself highly impressed by your ‘Girls Who Save the World’ initiative.”
“Th-thank you,” Jennifer said, her voice shaking. “I’m very proud of it.”
“As you should be. I’d like to offer my skillset and be involved in whatever ways I can.”
And so she was .
Jones never gave any indication that she remembered another lifetime. She visited Markridge once a month to mentor the girls and tell them what it was like to pursue a career in STEM as a woman. She was so gentle with them in a way she had never been with Cole or Jennifer or Cassie, but Jennifer thought it was probably how she got to be Hannah this time around.
Cole was constantly speculating about the state of Jones’ memory. He was convinced that she didn’t remember , because there was no way she could remember and not tell them, not seek him out.
Cassie never offered a guess, though Jennifer could tell from the twist of her mouth that they were thinking the same thought—that Jones likely did remember, just like the three of them, but she was choosing a different ending for herself. One where she could live the life she’d longed for, once upon a future, and one where she could try to forget her own capacity for apocalypse creation.
Jennifer could see it sometimes, on those Tuesdays at the lab. Jones would be bent over a computer, assisting a student, when her face would go slack and her eyes zone out, as if she was remembering another computer, a different lab and code with much higher odds and all the horrible things she did to beat them.
Remembering was both a blessing and a curse, and they couldn’t blame Jones for creating a brand-new future over one that never happened (except in all the ways it did). She deserved happiness as much as the rest of them.
Jennifer never told Cole about her suspicions. She didn’t want to hurt him, and she wasn’t sure, anyway. For every time Jennifer thought she caught a glimpse of the Jones she knew, there were countless detached conversations about curriculum in which Jones felt like nothing more than a colleague. Once, a student made a casual mention of time travel, and Jones explained the Hartle-Hawking state without a smile or wink to Jennifer, or even the slightest air of tension or awareness.
They’d probably never know, if Jones had it her way. So Jennifer treated her with respect and gratitude, and Jones helped the program out every month for years, and that was enough for both of them.
…but damn it if Jennifer didn’t jump every time she heard a barked “Dr. Goines!” calling to her from across the room.
*&*&*&*
The problem with receiving a gift from Time is knowing when to use it. If she was right—and with every passing day she became more convinced that she was, that Time was blessing the Primary that held it together for all those troubled eons—then when she found Deacon again, they would age together. But when should that start?
She assumed that Deacon would start to remember the day he first interacted with time travel in the other timeline, just like Cassie did. Probably. Unless Time’s gift to Cole was the only reason Cassie remembered, and Jennifer only remembered because she was Primary, and no one else was meant to remember at all, which explained Jones.
Her surety that Deacon would remember was diminishing the closer she got to the big day, which she’d figured to be sometime in the fall of 2043—even old Jennifer hadn’t been great at keeping up with days in the apocalypse, so it was just a best guess.
She liked the thought that she would likely be the first thing he remembered, if he did at all. Granted, it would be the old version of her, the first one he met, which wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing, and she’d learned to take what she could get.
*&*&*&*
October 30, 2041
“Listen, I know it’s weird. No, I know. This is not how stories normally go. It’s not like all those Disney princess movies my nanny made me watch as a kid, when all I really wanted was to watch the slasher films my mom left on when she was on a bender.”
Her stuffed unicorn just sat there, looking back at her and offering nothing productive to the conversation. Still, Jennifer thought she could see a gleam of pity in his eyes.
“Stop distracting me, this isn’t about my disastrous childhood, anyway. It’s about Deacon.”
Jennifer paused as if expecting a response.
“Yes, I know you miss him. I do too. And I can’t help but wonder what he’s like now. Do you think he’s the same?”
She snorted at the unicorn’s imagined reply.
“You would say that. I know he was difficult, but so was I. So was everyone.”
Jennifer trailed off, getting lost in thoughts of that time and everything they did to hurt each other, to hurt her, for the sake of one person or seven billion.
“He was such a product of that world, in a way the rest of us weren’t, and he had to play the villain all the time. But sometimes it was just a role, like all the roles I played. I guess I just wonder what kind of story he’s living now.”
The unicorn’s rainbow mane gleamed in the sunlight coming through her office window.
“I don’t know, buddy. Time and I… we don’t work together the same way we used to.” She paused, then continued speaking softly. “But somehow, I think I know how this ends.”
If a stuffed unicorn could look quizzical, this one certainly did, so Jennifer answered his unspoken question.
“It’s a love story.”
*&*&*&*
Jennifer had been anticipating the year 2043 for decades now. But the second it rolled around, at 12:00 a.m. on January 1 while she stood in her Manhattan penthouse apartment, surrounded by friends she loved very much but who would never understand the enormity of this moment, her legs nearly gave out.
For the first 10 months of the year, she agonized. She’d Googled him enough over the years to know he owned a bar in the Bronx with his brother, just like he said he wanted to. She felt a little sicker with each day that passed by, and it was only magnified once the trees turned yellow and gold and red . Any day could be the day he recalled, but how could she know? When was the right time, Time?
She spent Thanksgiving alone, with just her two cats—River and The Doctor—for company. Everything and everyone else was just too much when her brain was such a mess. It almost felt like being Primary again, with all the thoughts and fears and images and dreams swirling around and around and around.
But Cole and Cassie insisted she come up for Christmas, and she wasn’t in the habit of disappointing them, not anymore, not ever , so she did as she was told.
Somehow, despite her incessant need to talk, she never told Cole and Cassie about her theory, that she was waiting on him. It was too raw, too close to share—not until she knew, not unless she could tell him first.
They knew, though, somehow. (Thinking about it, Jennifer had never been good at keeping secrets, so maybe she really was crazy to think they wouldn’t pick up on something as big as this.)
She was sitting on the front porch of the old house in Binghamton with Cole on Christmas Eve when he abandoned all polite pretenses—the two of them had never had many of those, anyway—and let loose with his thoughts on the Deacon-Jennifer timey-wimey immortal-or-not maybe-love-story.
“He locked you in a cage, Jennifer.” He said it disapprovingly, like she’d forgotten. As if—Jennifer had never forgotten a single thing, not about those days.
“Yes. And you left me in France for three years and weren’t even happy to see me when you finally did come to get me.”
Cole glared at her. “Fair point,” he said begrudgingly. “But why Deacon?”
“He was my friend,” she said. At Cole’s look pressing her to continue, she sighed. “And I thought maybe we were more than that, sometimes, or that we could have been if there weren’t such an endless series of shitstorms… and shitquakes and shit-volcanic eruptions. Between him being in love with Cassie…” Jennifer could practically hear Cole’s eye roll. “...and him being lowkey evil for a while there—”
Cole tutted. “I think you mean highkey.”
Jennifer kept going as if he hadn’t said anything. “—Him being locked up on Titan. Me being Primary, me being shut inside my own mind, me being totally incapable of anything outside of trying to sort out Time.” She paused, processing. Their lives had just been one incomprehensible disaster after another.
“But there were moments, you know? One night, before it all went really bad, when Deacon was sad that he wasn’t in my pictures, so I asked if I could draw him and he let me and it was terrible but there was… something. Or the way he looked at me before his head got thwacked off. All the winks.”
“The winks?”
“Yeah. It’s… you wouldn’t understand, Otter Eyes.”
“Maybe I don’t understand you two and your weird… whatever it is. But I did see it. You always had a bond with him that I never did. Or, well, maybe we did, if you watched it all from his point of view. I still can’t wrap my mind around that,” Cole said, shaking his head slightly.
Jennifer looked out into the darkness and smiled softly. Thinking about that, about all he did for them, never failed to make her emotional.
“He was a good man, Cole. Is a good man. He knew he was going to die—I can still hear that awful sound—and he saved us anyway. Before time reset, there was a version of him that lived it all over again, every awful thing, knowing exactly how it would end and acting like he had no clue, just to ensure we really did win. Because I told him to. I mean, wrinkly me, chicken me. And we never, ever thanked him. Not once.”
Cole was silent, pondering. “I know. Outside of how we treated you, I don’t have a lot of regrets. But I do regret that I never told him what it meant that he was working for us while he was with Olivia. And then he was gone.”
The pair went silent. There were a lot of things to be said about Deacon, but none of them surmounted the guilt they both felt in that moment. Cole seemed to know that just as well as Jennifer did, so he changed the subject.
“Are you okay? With … this? Not aging?”
It was a hard question. One she’d pondered many, many times over the years—not because she didn’t know the answer, but because she wasn’t sure why the answer was what it was.
“Yes,” she said, truthfully.
“Really? I can’t imagine it. Watching the people I love get older while I stay the same. I can barely handle watching you not age.”
“I mean, it’s weird. It’s really weird. But when has my life not been weird?” she said with a chuckle. Cole joined in.
“But it’s okay. Good, even, most of the time. I know I never told you this, but when you reset the universe, I remembered everything. Not just the stuff I lived through, you know, this me. I remember everything old Jennifer did, too. I remember raising Hannah and leading the Daughters, I remember the day Deacon shot me and the day I recruited him to help on Titan, and I remember the first time you came to see me in the camp and you were so, so pissed at me. It’s all here, inside this fucked-up imagination factory of mine.” Jennifer tapped her temple for emphasis.
“I’ve seen it all. And I’ve always been the chicken or the egg. I was always burdened with too little foresight or too much hindsight. I never got to just live, you know? To do the in-between. The little moments and the learning and growing. I mean, I did learn and grow, but always into a person I already knew I had to become. I never got to do it just for the sake of it. I missed the chick stage. And now, I get to have it. This is my chick stage, Otter Eyes.”
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad,” he said with a smile, closely followed by a yawn. He stood up to go inside, grasping Jennifer’s shoulder as he went. He was old now—64, they thought, though the math was kind of hard considering he’d never been born—and staying up late didn’t appeal as it once did.
Jennifer was left on the porch swing by herself, swinging idly back and forth with the breeze. The stars were bright this evening, the air unusually warm for December, and she was content to sit there for a while more, wrapped in a blanket with a mug of hot chocolate in her hands.
She hadn’t told Cole the whole truth. She’d never told anybody the whole truth.
There were more than just moments of potential with Deacon. There were real moments. Like the time she couldn’t sleep because the world was too loud and she was blasting 90s punk rock and screaming at the top of her lungs to drown it out, and no one seemed worried except him, of course. And he knocked on her door and turned down the music and held her face and whispered calming nonsense until she stopped screaming. And then he tucked her and her stuffed unicorn into bed and sat beside her, telling her stories from his childhood—the very few good ones he had—until she finally fell asleep.
Or the time she’d tried to kill herself in that cage, and Deacon insisted she be let out and that he’d let her go anywhere, anywhere , and she could see in his eyes that he was heartbroken to see what he’d done to her. She’d given him a wink to show that she was okay, and that had been the start of the Jennifer-Deacon “secrets are fun” club, and she’d never told anyone about that, either.
There were moments as her old self, too. Not that he was ever interested in a wrinkly old woman in that way, but despite the age difference and knowledge imbalance, there was still always something between them. Not something romantic, per se, but a different kind of relationship than what most elderly women have with middle-aged men. Something special and sparky.
No matter what, no matter how old or young either of them were, there was a connection. An ember, waiting to be stoked. A beginning, if they chose it.
At least, she thought there was. As time passed, she started to doubt herself more and more.
No. She wasn’t wrong. There was a spark.
Jennifer just hoped Deacon had felt it too.
*&*&*&*
May 6, 2043
“What’s your favorite thing about science?” the news anchor asked.
“Oh, that’s easy. It’s magic.”
The studio audience chuckled along with the anchor.
“I thought magic was the opposite of science?”
They didn’t understand. They didn’t get it, because they hadn’t seen the way magic and science blended and swirled and coalesced into the world they saw as ordinary—the way it could create people just like her and the people she loved and the stories they’d written for themselves.
Jennifer smiled graciously. “No, it really isn’t.”
*&*&*&*
It was 2044 when Jennifer finally found herself outside of Brothers Deacon Bar.
She wanted to come months ago, the second fall rolled around and they all assumed it—the big reveal, the lightbulb moment, the flashbacks and certain migraine—had happened for Deacon.
But it didn’t feel right yet. They only thought the final stand happened in fall 2043 (the first fall 2043, anyway). They couldn’t be certain. What if they were all wrong? What if she showed up in September but he wouldn’t remember until November, and she was weird and he didn’t get it and everything was ruined?
No, autumn was too soon.
Once the calendar flipped over into 2044, she felt more sure about it. Had that sensation in her belly that had never failed to tell her when a thing was right.
And truthfully, she wasn’t even entirely sure how she got here. She’d just woken up this morning, January 9, and her feet had carried her around her apartment in a mad dash to get ready and hop in a car headed across town until, suddenly, she found herself right here, on Tremont Avenue.
Jennifer hadn’t made a conscious decision that today was the day, but something had. Time had. She really could be a pushy, meddlesome old entity, that was for sure.
It made her feel a little better, though, a little more confident, that even if she couldn’t hear Time anymore, she could feel it guiding her toward her future.
Her future with him, hopefully.
Their future.
Goosebumps broke out along her arms at the thought and—
The door to the bar opened, and there he was, leaning in the doorway.
Theodore William Deacon. She wondered if he preferred Teddy in this reality, or if he was always Deacon, apocalypse or not.
His hair had less gray than the last time she’d seen him—and then he had been older, and also his head had not actually been attached to his body, so fewer gray hairs made sense. He didn’t seem to have as many scars, either, though obviously his winter-appropriate jacket and jeans made it difficult to tell. That scar over his eye though, the one she had given him, that was definitely gone. Jennifer found she didn’t miss it.
“Can I help you?” He asked it politely, his voice as rich and deep as she’d remembered. He had one eyebrow raised in confusion.
Naturally. She was just standing outside his bar in the middle of the morning, and now she was staring at him silently like a serial killer. Get it together, Jennifer .
“Oh, um. Sorry. I was just checking out the bar. I’ve been waiting a long time to visit,” she said, feeling her face heat with immediate embarrassment. How had she been waiting for this moment for decades but hadn’t thought to plan out her opening line? If anyone knew the importance of a first impression, it was her.
“Alright.” He smiled, but still looked a little perplexed—presumably because, though the bar held sentimental meaning to him, it wasn’t anything special as far as Bronx bars go, and it wasn’t clear why she’d have to wait to visit. He’d soon (re)learn—little was ever clear when it came to Jennifer Goines, she thought, stifling a snort.
“Well, feel free to come back later. We open at 3, and you haven’t lived until you’ve had a Guinness pulled from that tap right there,” Deacon said, motioning to the bar inside.
He turned to open the door, and Jennifer thought her heart might burst outside of her chest. He couldn’t leave yet. He had to remember. He had to.
As if she had willed him to, Deacon turned back to face her before he walked inside, locking their eyes together. She couldn’t have looked away if she tried.
The seconds passed so slowly as she stared into his pale green irises, searching for any sign of recognition. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
She couldn’t breathe. She had been wrong. He didn’t remember, and this was the end. Tears started to fall down her face and she worked up every ounce of strength she had so she could tear her eyes away from his and run. She fisted her hands and scrunched up her nose. She could do this. It was the last hard thing she had to do, and then she could just be done with this. Find something new. She was ready to say goodbye to him, or she thought she was. She had to be.
Jennifer soaked in every part of his face, knowing this was the last time she ever could—the scruffy beard, the long nose and serious eyebrows. She saved his mouth for last, the part she’d always loved the most, and found it smiling knowingly—the kind of smile she’d never been able to see in the time that never was.
She gasped. Looked back into his eyes, and…
Click. Wink.
She smiled her biggest, bestest smile, the one she reserved just for him.
Because Time owed Deacon, too.