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jedibuttercup) wrote2009-08-21 01:03 am
jedibuttercup) wrote2009-08-21 01:03 am
Entry tags:
Fic: Oh, Boy (BtVS/Eureka; PG-13; 4/?)
PG-13, BtVS/Eureka; 2900 words. (For August 20; 4th of "No Place Like Eureka.")
There was no way Henry was going to drop this on them without laying a little groundwork first.
Title: Oh, Boy
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: There was no way Henry was going to drop this on them without laying a little groundwork first. 2900 words.
Spoilers: B:tVS 5.05 "No Place Like Home"; all Eureka, esp. 1.12 "Once in a Lifetime" and 3.14 "Ship Happens"
Challenge:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
twistedshorts - August, Day 20
Notes: So close, and yet so far. 4th in series.
Henry could hear Nathan approaching the lab before he saw him; a low-pitched, one-sided conversation carrying a familiar note of paternal reassurance. It made Henry smile, still feeling the joy of having his former student and friend returned against all expectation; and worry, just a little, about the teenaged girl probably on the other end of the line.
By all rights, they should all still be celebrating Nathan's return, or dealing with the fallout from the landing of the Columbus and its organic, human-cloned computer, not questioning the existence of Nathan's daughter. Henry, Jack and Allison had all decided, however, that if it would help put Nathan's mind at rest, a simple DNA test would be easy enough to run; and so Henry had run down to the labs to take care of the matter himself.
Simple. Hah. They should have known; nothing was ever simple in Eureka.
"Nathan," he said, greeting the younger scientist as the man came through the door. He was dressed casually, in jeans and a white tee shirt; not quite the sharp suit he'd habitually worn to G.D., but better than the scrubs Henry had last seen him in. "I see Allison agreed to spring you from the infirmary?"
"You said it was urgent," Nathan shrugged casually, putting his phone away. "And truthfully, there's nothing wrong with me that a little rest won't cure. As long as I stay under observation tonight, I'll be cleared to go home. Whatever the problem is with my memories, it doesn't seem to be physical."
"Then why didn't it affect any of the rest of us?" Jack asked from the far corner of the room, the voice of pragmatism as always. He was still in uniform, arms crossed in front of him as he studied Nathan; and Henry didn't think he was imagining the warmth underlying the sharp calculation in Jack's gaze.
"And-- why's he here again?" Nathan asked, glancing briefly at Jack before raising his eyebrows at Henry. "I thought you wanted to talk to me about Dawn?"
It boggled the mind. God knew they'd faced down any number of crises together over the last few years, enough to promote a real foundation of respect, and Henry trusted his own science; but he still had trouble imagining how the two men in front of him could possibly have gone from constant bickering and competing for Allison's attention to-- to-- well. He shook his head. He was getting ahead of himself; and there could still be another explanation, after all.
"I do," he replied. "But I think Jack should be a part of this conversation, too."
Jack and Nathan shared a glance, again; this one palpably apprehensive. No doubt they were wondering just what crime Henry might have uncovered that would require the town sheriff's presence. He was fairly certain they'd both be shocked by the answer.
"If you think it's best," Nathan said, "who am I to argue with you?" Then he stepped further into the lab, resting his hand on the edge of the table where Henry had spread out the paperwork from the tests he'd done. "So-- you have the results?"
"Yes, I do," Henry nodded, lifting a specific set of sheets from the pile and handing two over. "The good news is, she's definitely your daughter. Better than a 99% probability."
Nathan took the pages, but didn't so much as glance at them; he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them again, locking gazes with Henry. "Then why don't I remember her childhood? Who's her mother? Allison says there's a whole photographic record back at the house, but the woman she says I was married to before-- I barely knew her. We had one class together in college, and shared a lab for a while; but I certainly don’t remember any kind of a relationship that might have led to this." He waved the pages through the air. "I'm not my cousin, Henry; I don't do casual. And even if I had slept with her and left her pregnant, why would she have kept Dawn from me for eight years, only to dump her at my house after I married Allison and make us all believe I'd been raising her all along? How could she have done it? Frankly, she didn't have the access, or the inventive capacity, to have come up with a device that could reweave memory that thoroughly. Even G.D. doesn't have equipment that could do that."
"Not yet anyway," Henry agreed with him. Which was, of course, the whole crux of the problem. "And you're right; I ran a full comparison with the DNA profiles obtained-- voluntarily-- for Dr. Stefano's abandoned DNA monitoring system, and was able to identify the second parent as someone already in our records."
"He got far enough along for samples to be taken?" Nathan asked, eyes brightening with interest; then he shook himself, tracking back to the question at hand. "Nevermind; I'll catch up on what I've missed from the files later. You're saying-- it couldn't have been her, because she never came to work at Global Dynamics, and thus wouldn't have had a sample taken."
"Exactly," Henry agreed, nodding.
"So-- who is it, then?" Jack asked, curious and a little wary. "Who's her mother? And-- am I going to have to arrest her?"
He'd just have to restrain that curiosity a little longer; there was no way Henry was going to drop this on them without laying a little groundwork first. "Before I answer that question," he said, "I have a story to tell you both. And yes-- it's relevant. It's something I'd hoped I'd never have to explain; but needs must. And I suppose it's time."
"That doesn't sound ominous at all," Nathan observed, dryly. "Could you be a little more vague, perhaps?"
A smile tugged briefly at the corner of Henry's mouth; yes, he had missed his friend's sharp tongue. The usual brainstorming sessions with Jack just weren't the same without Nathan's added insight and wit. "Let me summarize, first: I think I know how she may have got here."
Nathan perked up at that; Jack straightened out of his slouch, frowning intently at Henry. "So you agree with Nathan, then. She definitely wasn't with him until she was a grade-schooler; and everyone that remembers otherwise was brainwashed somehow into believing another version of events."
"Close enough," Henry agreed. Then he took a deep breath. "To give you some perspective and background on how I think it happened, I need to tell you about the alternate future I created over a year ago, when-- Kim died." He swallowed, then described briefly the incident with the Artifact, and the four years he'd spent fighting to get into a position where he could access Walter Perkins' tachyon accelerator and send his own consciousness back to prevent the accident from ever happening. "The two parallel realities eventually began collapsing into one another, and in order to stop the chaos from growing worse-- another traveler's consciousness was sent back to stop me from ever making the change to start with. Because he stopped me after my initial jaunt back through time, though, I retained all the memories of my version of those four years-- the ones I'd spent fighting to get Kim back, not the four in which I had apparently succeeded. And for all four of those years-- I had no memory of Dawn."
Both men had thankfully listened patiently to the story, asking minimal questions-- though Henry could see each of them silently tallying things up to ask him about later. The salient part, the part that applied at that moment, was the last piece; and if he could have simply mentioned it without explaining the rest, he would have.
"None whatsoever?" Nathan asked. "Not just a missing childhood?"
"None whatsoever," Henry confirmed. "And what's more, I had no idea anything was missing during that time; you left for San Francisco alone, and I never thought anything of it until I came back in time and saw Dawn sitting with you in the infirmary after your little flirtation with spontaneous combustion. I remembered everything about her, remembered knowing her since she was an infant-- but I also remembered her not being there, and that seeming perfectly normal, too. That bothered me, since anyone present in the past should also have been carried into the future I constructed, but I dismissed it as a strange anomaly possibly caused by exposure to an upgraded version of the memory erasure device I was testing."
"That's weird," Jack commented. "The whole thing with Nathan and Allison having two different sets of memories regarding the same events is strange enough, but this alternate reality thing?" He wrinkled his brow, putting more pieces together. "Hey, you said someone else came back from the future, too-- can that person corroborate? Did they experience the same thing?"
Henry winced at the irony of Jack asking that; he'd known the question would come up eventually, but had still been hoping to be able to avoid it. He wasn't proud of the way he'd buried hatred under a brittle shell of friendship and lied to Jack's face for so much of the prior year, and had hoped Jack would never have to know the full extent of it. "Unfortunately-- he can't," he admitted, quietly.
"He who, Henry? And what happened?" Nathan asked, gently.
He sighed, wringing his hands slightly around the curled sheet of paper he still held. "You see, after our respective returns, the other time traveler and I both had trouble adjusting to this Eureka, which was already evolving differently than either of us remembered. It was-- painful, for both of us, and as I mentioned, I had a prototype memory erasure device on hand. I reprogrammed it to take out the entire four years' worth of experiences in the alternate reality, and asked his permission to use it, promising to flash myself with it, too."
"You didn't follow through on that, though, did you?" Jack asked, sudden worry-- and suspicion-- bracketing his mouth and brow with faint lines.
"No," Herny admitted. "I didn't want-- I thought there might still be a way to save her, even given the consequences I'd encountered before. I was furious, and grieving; I didn't want to forgive and forget. I thought she deserved better from me."
"That-- explains so much about what happened last year," Jack added, looking stricken.
"Yes. It took almost losing my place here for me to finally come to grips with her loss, and to regain my perspective," Henry said, meeting gazes with them both. For all he'd more or less betrayed Jack, he'd never told Nathan and Allison the full truth, either, and he wasn't sure how his friends would react to the spin that knowledge would put on the events with Kevin and the Artifact.
"And now she's back again-- or something that looks, and acts, very like her," Nathan murmured, eyeing him speculatively. "Did you know that would happen?"
Henry shook his head. That had baffled him as well. "The ship never returned in the other timeline; I wouldn't have been so surprised, otherwise. Perhaps it was the fact that Zane was never in Eureka to build the automated road network in the first place, so the signal had nothing to connect to and thus doomed the ship to take a slower approach? There's no way to tell."
Jack had been eyeing Henry the entire time he was talking to Nathan about the Columbus; now he took a few steps forward, an echo of old pain in his eyes. Henry had never been sure whether Jack had retained anything of those four years; plainly, he'd kept enough to put it together now. "Henry--" he said, unhappily. "It was me, wasn't it? The other traveler?"
He swallowed. "Yes. I'm sorry, Jack." Part of him still blamed Jack for what had happened; but that small part had long since been buried under his own guilt, and the weight of what their friendship meant to him.
Jack smiled sadly at him. "Don't be. I understand, I think. I'm just-- glad we're still friends, now."
"Me too, Jack," Henry agreed. What else was there to be said?
"So-- how does this explain what happened with Dawn?" Nathan asked lowly, steering the conversation back into safer waters. "What does her absence from the alternate reality mean?"
Henry cleared his throat and allowed the shift in gears. He'd already dealt with more than enough emotion for one day. "I'm pretty sure it means that she's traveled back in time," he replied. "If she were from the future of this timeline, somehow-- physically sent back at a future point from a reality that could evolve only from this specific chain of events, in which Nathan did not leave Eureka for San Francisco as he did in both the other outcomes I'm aware of-- then that could explain why she wasn’t in the other futures; the circumstances that would result in her having been sent back could not have happened then, ergo, she wasn't there at all. But once I returned and everything was more-or-less reset-- the circumstances lined up properly, and she was."
Jack blinked owlishly at him. "I'm not sure I followed all that," he said. "But-- I think I got enough. Time travel? Seriously? I thought that wasn't possible; which was why we almost lost Stark in the first place." He gestured toward the equally surprised scientist.
"It is a rather-- daring-- suggestion," Nathan said, frowning. "I assume you have proof? Or at least a logical reason why I might have sent my own daughter back in time?"
"Something like that," Henry agreed with a bare smile, then uncurled the paper still in his hand and held it out toward Jack. "Congratulations," he said, dryly. "You're a father. Again."
"I'm what?" Jack sputtered in shock, staring down at the test results.
Nathan shook his head in disbelief. "Tell me you're not implying..." he said, slowly.
"I'm not implying anything," Henry said, bemused by their reactions. "I'm stating it. You're both her fathers; the DNA tests proved that fairly conclusively. And as we didn't have that kind of technology eighteen years ago, not to mention neither of you were in important enough positions then for someone to take that kind of liberty without your knowledge..." He trailed off suggestively.
Jack looked up from the test results, to glance at Nathan; Nathan stared back for a long moment, then they both turned back to Henry, intent and inquiring.
"You're saying Dawn's my daughter as much as Zoe is," Jack summed up, "except that since she obviously can't have been born the normal way, she must have been sent here, probably by us, when she was a kid. From the future. Which means it was probably Stark who rewrote everyone's memories with some other kind of technology we don't have yet either, so it's his own fault it's falling apart on him now."
That earned a glare from Nathan; but it was pretty close to what Henry had worked out, for a layman's explanation. "Pretty much," he said. "I don't know why her arrival didn't threaten the stability of this reality like every other example of time travel we've seen. Perhaps it's that it wasn't simply a change of event, or a repetitive loop; she literally didn't exist before she arrived, so this parallel reality, if you will, isn't close enough to its neighbors to risk overlapping their time-space continua. Regardless, the fact that she's apparently been here for years without ill effect suggests that whomever sent her back knew exactly what they were doing."
"And whatever their reason for doing so-- they wouldn't have done it lightly," Nathan mused.
"Forget why," Jack snorted, shooting another look at Nathan. "What about who? Seriously, a daughter of ours?"
"I don't know, Carter; maybe we were accidental test subjects for the technology?" Nathan rolled his eyes. "This is Eureka, after all; your guess is as good as mine."
Henry shook his head, keeping his own ridiculous speculation quiet. The less said the better on that subject.
Jack apparently thought so, too. "So," he said, turning back to Henry and abruptly shifting the line of conversation. "Two daughters, then."
"Two daughters," Stark agreed, thoughtfully, undoubtedly thinking of his and Allison's yet-to-be born child; she'd just found out it would be a girl, from what Henry knew.
"Good thing she and Zoe are already friends," Jack mused aloud. "Can you imagine them being so close in age, and not?" He shook his head. "That would be a nightmare."
'"Given how similar they are in temperament, and how much trouble they tend to get into together..." Nathan murmured, smirking in agreement.
"In retrospect, we really should have known, shouldn't we?" Jack chuckled. "Not to say I don't still find this pretty bizarre, but..."
"Agreed," Nathan said, then sighed. "So the next question is, I suppose-- how do we tell her? And do we tell anyone else?"
Henry shrugged as Jack turned an advice-seeking, deer in the headlights expression toward him. "It's up to you two, though if you do tell anyone other than the girls and Allison, it's going to attract a lot of outside attention."
Jack looked down at the test results again, and sighed. "Oh, boy."
-~-
(x-posted totwistedshorts)
There was no way Henry was going to drop this on them without laying a little groundwork first.
Title: Oh, Boy
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: There was no way Henry was going to drop this on them without laying a little groundwork first. 2900 words.
Spoilers: B:tVS 5.05 "No Place Like Home"; all Eureka, esp. 1.12 "Once in a Lifetime" and 3.14 "Ship Happens"
Challenge:
twistedshorts - August, Day 20Notes: So close, and yet so far. 4th in series.
Henry could hear Nathan approaching the lab before he saw him; a low-pitched, one-sided conversation carrying a familiar note of paternal reassurance. It made Henry smile, still feeling the joy of having his former student and friend returned against all expectation; and worry, just a little, about the teenaged girl probably on the other end of the line.
By all rights, they should all still be celebrating Nathan's return, or dealing with the fallout from the landing of the Columbus and its organic, human-cloned computer, not questioning the existence of Nathan's daughter. Henry, Jack and Allison had all decided, however, that if it would help put Nathan's mind at rest, a simple DNA test would be easy enough to run; and so Henry had run down to the labs to take care of the matter himself.
Simple. Hah. They should have known; nothing was ever simple in Eureka.
"Nathan," he said, greeting the younger scientist as the man came through the door. He was dressed casually, in jeans and a white tee shirt; not quite the sharp suit he'd habitually worn to G.D., but better than the scrubs Henry had last seen him in. "I see Allison agreed to spring you from the infirmary?"
"You said it was urgent," Nathan shrugged casually, putting his phone away. "And truthfully, there's nothing wrong with me that a little rest won't cure. As long as I stay under observation tonight, I'll be cleared to go home. Whatever the problem is with my memories, it doesn't seem to be physical."
"Then why didn't it affect any of the rest of us?" Jack asked from the far corner of the room, the voice of pragmatism as always. He was still in uniform, arms crossed in front of him as he studied Nathan; and Henry didn't think he was imagining the warmth underlying the sharp calculation in Jack's gaze.
"And-- why's he here again?" Nathan asked, glancing briefly at Jack before raising his eyebrows at Henry. "I thought you wanted to talk to me about Dawn?"
It boggled the mind. God knew they'd faced down any number of crises together over the last few years, enough to promote a real foundation of respect, and Henry trusted his own science; but he still had trouble imagining how the two men in front of him could possibly have gone from constant bickering and competing for Allison's attention to-- to-- well. He shook his head. He was getting ahead of himself; and there could still be another explanation, after all.
"I do," he replied. "But I think Jack should be a part of this conversation, too."
Jack and Nathan shared a glance, again; this one palpably apprehensive. No doubt they were wondering just what crime Henry might have uncovered that would require the town sheriff's presence. He was fairly certain they'd both be shocked by the answer.
"If you think it's best," Nathan said, "who am I to argue with you?" Then he stepped further into the lab, resting his hand on the edge of the table where Henry had spread out the paperwork from the tests he'd done. "So-- you have the results?"
"Yes, I do," Henry nodded, lifting a specific set of sheets from the pile and handing two over. "The good news is, she's definitely your daughter. Better than a 99% probability."
Nathan took the pages, but didn't so much as glance at them; he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them again, locking gazes with Henry. "Then why don't I remember her childhood? Who's her mother? Allison says there's a whole photographic record back at the house, but the woman she says I was married to before-- I barely knew her. We had one class together in college, and shared a lab for a while; but I certainly don’t remember any kind of a relationship that might have led to this." He waved the pages through the air. "I'm not my cousin, Henry; I don't do casual. And even if I had slept with her and left her pregnant, why would she have kept Dawn from me for eight years, only to dump her at my house after I married Allison and make us all believe I'd been raising her all along? How could she have done it? Frankly, she didn't have the access, or the inventive capacity, to have come up with a device that could reweave memory that thoroughly. Even G.D. doesn't have equipment that could do that."
"Not yet anyway," Henry agreed with him. Which was, of course, the whole crux of the problem. "And you're right; I ran a full comparison with the DNA profiles obtained-- voluntarily-- for Dr. Stefano's abandoned DNA monitoring system, and was able to identify the second parent as someone already in our records."
"He got far enough along for samples to be taken?" Nathan asked, eyes brightening with interest; then he shook himself, tracking back to the question at hand. "Nevermind; I'll catch up on what I've missed from the files later. You're saying-- it couldn't have been her, because she never came to work at Global Dynamics, and thus wouldn't have had a sample taken."
"Exactly," Henry agreed, nodding.
"So-- who is it, then?" Jack asked, curious and a little wary. "Who's her mother? And-- am I going to have to arrest her?"
He'd just have to restrain that curiosity a little longer; there was no way Henry was going to drop this on them without laying a little groundwork first. "Before I answer that question," he said, "I have a story to tell you both. And yes-- it's relevant. It's something I'd hoped I'd never have to explain; but needs must. And I suppose it's time."
"That doesn't sound ominous at all," Nathan observed, dryly. "Could you be a little more vague, perhaps?"
A smile tugged briefly at the corner of Henry's mouth; yes, he had missed his friend's sharp tongue. The usual brainstorming sessions with Jack just weren't the same without Nathan's added insight and wit. "Let me summarize, first: I think I know how she may have got here."
Nathan perked up at that; Jack straightened out of his slouch, frowning intently at Henry. "So you agree with Nathan, then. She definitely wasn't with him until she was a grade-schooler; and everyone that remembers otherwise was brainwashed somehow into believing another version of events."
"Close enough," Henry agreed. Then he took a deep breath. "To give you some perspective and background on how I think it happened, I need to tell you about the alternate future I created over a year ago, when-- Kim died." He swallowed, then described briefly the incident with the Artifact, and the four years he'd spent fighting to get into a position where he could access Walter Perkins' tachyon accelerator and send his own consciousness back to prevent the accident from ever happening. "The two parallel realities eventually began collapsing into one another, and in order to stop the chaos from growing worse-- another traveler's consciousness was sent back to stop me from ever making the change to start with. Because he stopped me after my initial jaunt back through time, though, I retained all the memories of my version of those four years-- the ones I'd spent fighting to get Kim back, not the four in which I had apparently succeeded. And for all four of those years-- I had no memory of Dawn."
Both men had thankfully listened patiently to the story, asking minimal questions-- though Henry could see each of them silently tallying things up to ask him about later. The salient part, the part that applied at that moment, was the last piece; and if he could have simply mentioned it without explaining the rest, he would have.
"None whatsoever?" Nathan asked. "Not just a missing childhood?"
"None whatsoever," Henry confirmed. "And what's more, I had no idea anything was missing during that time; you left for San Francisco alone, and I never thought anything of it until I came back in time and saw Dawn sitting with you in the infirmary after your little flirtation with spontaneous combustion. I remembered everything about her, remembered knowing her since she was an infant-- but I also remembered her not being there, and that seeming perfectly normal, too. That bothered me, since anyone present in the past should also have been carried into the future I constructed, but I dismissed it as a strange anomaly possibly caused by exposure to an upgraded version of the memory erasure device I was testing."
"That's weird," Jack commented. "The whole thing with Nathan and Allison having two different sets of memories regarding the same events is strange enough, but this alternate reality thing?" He wrinkled his brow, putting more pieces together. "Hey, you said someone else came back from the future, too-- can that person corroborate? Did they experience the same thing?"
Henry winced at the irony of Jack asking that; he'd known the question would come up eventually, but had still been hoping to be able to avoid it. He wasn't proud of the way he'd buried hatred under a brittle shell of friendship and lied to Jack's face for so much of the prior year, and had hoped Jack would never have to know the full extent of it. "Unfortunately-- he can't," he admitted, quietly.
"He who, Henry? And what happened?" Nathan asked, gently.
He sighed, wringing his hands slightly around the curled sheet of paper he still held. "You see, after our respective returns, the other time traveler and I both had trouble adjusting to this Eureka, which was already evolving differently than either of us remembered. It was-- painful, for both of us, and as I mentioned, I had a prototype memory erasure device on hand. I reprogrammed it to take out the entire four years' worth of experiences in the alternate reality, and asked his permission to use it, promising to flash myself with it, too."
"You didn't follow through on that, though, did you?" Jack asked, sudden worry-- and suspicion-- bracketing his mouth and brow with faint lines.
"No," Herny admitted. "I didn't want-- I thought there might still be a way to save her, even given the consequences I'd encountered before. I was furious, and grieving; I didn't want to forgive and forget. I thought she deserved better from me."
"That-- explains so much about what happened last year," Jack added, looking stricken.
"Yes. It took almost losing my place here for me to finally come to grips with her loss, and to regain my perspective," Henry said, meeting gazes with them both. For all he'd more or less betrayed Jack, he'd never told Nathan and Allison the full truth, either, and he wasn't sure how his friends would react to the spin that knowledge would put on the events with Kevin and the Artifact.
"And now she's back again-- or something that looks, and acts, very like her," Nathan murmured, eyeing him speculatively. "Did you know that would happen?"
Henry shook his head. That had baffled him as well. "The ship never returned in the other timeline; I wouldn't have been so surprised, otherwise. Perhaps it was the fact that Zane was never in Eureka to build the automated road network in the first place, so the signal had nothing to connect to and thus doomed the ship to take a slower approach? There's no way to tell."
Jack had been eyeing Henry the entire time he was talking to Nathan about the Columbus; now he took a few steps forward, an echo of old pain in his eyes. Henry had never been sure whether Jack had retained anything of those four years; plainly, he'd kept enough to put it together now. "Henry--" he said, unhappily. "It was me, wasn't it? The other traveler?"
He swallowed. "Yes. I'm sorry, Jack." Part of him still blamed Jack for what had happened; but that small part had long since been buried under his own guilt, and the weight of what their friendship meant to him.
Jack smiled sadly at him. "Don't be. I understand, I think. I'm just-- glad we're still friends, now."
"Me too, Jack," Henry agreed. What else was there to be said?
"So-- how does this explain what happened with Dawn?" Nathan asked lowly, steering the conversation back into safer waters. "What does her absence from the alternate reality mean?"
Henry cleared his throat and allowed the shift in gears. He'd already dealt with more than enough emotion for one day. "I'm pretty sure it means that she's traveled back in time," he replied. "If she were from the future of this timeline, somehow-- physically sent back at a future point from a reality that could evolve only from this specific chain of events, in which Nathan did not leave Eureka for San Francisco as he did in both the other outcomes I'm aware of-- then that could explain why she wasn’t in the other futures; the circumstances that would result in her having been sent back could not have happened then, ergo, she wasn't there at all. But once I returned and everything was more-or-less reset-- the circumstances lined up properly, and she was."
Jack blinked owlishly at him. "I'm not sure I followed all that," he said. "But-- I think I got enough. Time travel? Seriously? I thought that wasn't possible; which was why we almost lost Stark in the first place." He gestured toward the equally surprised scientist.
"It is a rather-- daring-- suggestion," Nathan said, frowning. "I assume you have proof? Or at least a logical reason why I might have sent my own daughter back in time?"
"Something like that," Henry agreed with a bare smile, then uncurled the paper still in his hand and held it out toward Jack. "Congratulations," he said, dryly. "You're a father. Again."
"I'm what?" Jack sputtered in shock, staring down at the test results.
Nathan shook his head in disbelief. "Tell me you're not implying..." he said, slowly.
"I'm not implying anything," Henry said, bemused by their reactions. "I'm stating it. You're both her fathers; the DNA tests proved that fairly conclusively. And as we didn't have that kind of technology eighteen years ago, not to mention neither of you were in important enough positions then for someone to take that kind of liberty without your knowledge..." He trailed off suggestively.
Jack looked up from the test results, to glance at Nathan; Nathan stared back for a long moment, then they both turned back to Henry, intent and inquiring.
"You're saying Dawn's my daughter as much as Zoe is," Jack summed up, "except that since she obviously can't have been born the normal way, she must have been sent here, probably by us, when she was a kid. From the future. Which means it was probably Stark who rewrote everyone's memories with some other kind of technology we don't have yet either, so it's his own fault it's falling apart on him now."
That earned a glare from Nathan; but it was pretty close to what Henry had worked out, for a layman's explanation. "Pretty much," he said. "I don't know why her arrival didn't threaten the stability of this reality like every other example of time travel we've seen. Perhaps it's that it wasn't simply a change of event, or a repetitive loop; she literally didn't exist before she arrived, so this parallel reality, if you will, isn't close enough to its neighbors to risk overlapping their time-space continua. Regardless, the fact that she's apparently been here for years without ill effect suggests that whomever sent her back knew exactly what they were doing."
"And whatever their reason for doing so-- they wouldn't have done it lightly," Nathan mused.
"Forget why," Jack snorted, shooting another look at Nathan. "What about who? Seriously, a daughter of ours?"
"I don't know, Carter; maybe we were accidental test subjects for the technology?" Nathan rolled his eyes. "This is Eureka, after all; your guess is as good as mine."
Henry shook his head, keeping his own ridiculous speculation quiet. The less said the better on that subject.
Jack apparently thought so, too. "So," he said, turning back to Henry and abruptly shifting the line of conversation. "Two daughters, then."
"Two daughters," Stark agreed, thoughtfully, undoubtedly thinking of his and Allison's yet-to-be born child; she'd just found out it would be a girl, from what Henry knew.
"Good thing she and Zoe are already friends," Jack mused aloud. "Can you imagine them being so close in age, and not?" He shook his head. "That would be a nightmare."
'"Given how similar they are in temperament, and how much trouble they tend to get into together..." Nathan murmured, smirking in agreement.
"In retrospect, we really should have known, shouldn't we?" Jack chuckled. "Not to say I don't still find this pretty bizarre, but..."
"Agreed," Nathan said, then sighed. "So the next question is, I suppose-- how do we tell her? And do we tell anyone else?"
Henry shrugged as Jack turned an advice-seeking, deer in the headlights expression toward him. "It's up to you two, though if you do tell anyone other than the girls and Allison, it's going to attract a lot of outside attention."
Jack looked down at the test results again, and sighed. "Oh, boy."
-~-
(x-posted to
twistedshorts)
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No matter what else happens, the idea of Stark and Carter having a kid together is hysterical.
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Having the 'green energy' get discovered is beyond the scope of this particular fic, which is all about her being sent there; but after the season ends and I know where all the characters end up I probably will go back and add a story where her other nature plays a part.
Dawn got sent there in the first place due to events I explained in the first bit; (1) the monk was using the interdimensional energy of the Hellmouth as a beacon to send the spell long-distance; (2) the universe-tearing going on during "I Do Over" bled over a bit and inadvertently provided a bigger beacon at just that moment; and (3) I postulate it was simply sent to whatever mystically qualified as the best person to protect the key in the area. Because by general 'magic rules' to target Buffy more specifically they'd have needed hair or something else of hers, and where'd they have gotten that? So, OOPS. =)
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Please update soon.
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Obi
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Thank you for reading; next chapter soon!
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Glad you're enjoying the story!