Donnie Darko x Final Destination crossover fic!!!
Hey sooo.. I finally watched DD and well. Confusing is an understatement.
Don't get me wrong, I still liked it, enough for me to want to still write the fic, but problems arose naturally when I realized that, if I wanted to make a story around the two movies, I'd have to actually make some sense as to how the rules of this universe worked together.
I want this fic to take place at the same time as the events from FD unravel, for Donnie to somehow be involved I this entire situation of Death hunting down the Flight 180 survivors, but I also want the events from DD to happend and have some form of impact on the story, which means that I, somehow, have to find a way to mix both lores into one, to explain time travel and how it relates to the deadly design, and I think I found a solution to it.
Ofc some elements of the story had to be re-written, the time periods for example, DD takes place in October 2nd, 1988, over the course of the whole month (28 days, 06 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 secs to be exact). Meanwhile the Flight 180 disaster takes place in in the spring, May 13th 2000 (or 1999 depending on who you ask apparently) which is not what I had planned ofc, I wanted to somehow make the connection that the jet engine that fell on Donnie's room had been originally from Flight 180.
But for me to be able to make that connection make sense I'd have to, not only change the dates from either movie, but also have to move the location from one of them as well. And honestly this was definitely one of the least of my worries when it came to the logistics, it's simple: just move Middlesex from Virginia 1988 closer to NY 2000, close enough for Flight 180 to have an presence on Donnie's life.
The next thing to worry about was... *sigh* the time travel.
It took me a while to think about how I was going to involve a time travel narrative into a context where the only thing close to it were psychic visions. I -think- I might have a reasonable explanation as to how these two systems could work together in a way that makes sense, it's not perfect, and o still have to somehow justify a few details (and I might have definitely given FD more priority than DD, bcs I am a FD fan first and a DD enjoyer second) but, here you go:
How would Time Travel and Death's design work in the same context??? Spoilers for both movies... duhh
In the FD universe it is never truly explained how or why exactly premonitions occur, so I used this as an excuse to sew them on with the time traveling aspects. To explain my idea better I feel the need to make a quick recap of DD's ending and how it will connect to Flight 180 (pls forgive the extra long paragraphs, I tend to forget when to cut them up).
After the deaths of Gretchen and Frank, Donnie's countdown nears it's end, so he realizes that in order to prevent the tangent universe from forming a black hole and beginning the end of the world he needs to take another jet engine from this universe and send it back to the primary universe.
The tangent universe cannot handle 2 copies of an artifact (the jet engine, the one that crashed in Donnie's room and the one in the commercial plane that Rose and Sam were on board) and if it collapsed with those two copies existing in it at the same time it could potentially trigger a "glitch" in the universe, forming a black hole that ends existence entirely. He takes the jet engine from that same plane and goes back in time with it, since the primary universe is not prone to collapsing, there is no danger in it having two copies of the same artifact co-existing. Donnie ends up dying crushed by the jet engine and then the movie ends with the characters (the manipulated ones) experiencing memories from the now gone tangent universe.
My idea goes like this: time travel does exist, but only as an accident, a natural but rare event outside of Death's design. So I propose that the reason why Donnie gains these supernatural abilities was because of Death needing him to fix this rupture in time. This idea is also not completely detached from FD lore (I hope), since in the fourth movie (The Final Destination), Nick was basically tricked by Death when he was given the false premonition in the mall, ensuring that Janet, Lori, and himself would all be at the exact place where Death needed them to be in order to end their nonsense. Meaning that Death's influence goes beyond just manipulating the realm of possibilities, more than using coincidences at it's favor, but can actually interact with people's minds as well, so why not make it able to also be able to gift certain people with special abilities in order to fulfill harder tasks than just setting the design back to the original track?
In this rewrite, the Frank we follow in the tangent universe is not a "manipulated dead" but instead the embodiment of Death, persuading Donnie into doing what it needs him to do. At the end of the film, Donnie and the stolen jet engine go back to the Primary universe, at this point is where the original ending of the movie happens, Donnie is about to get crushed by the jet engine, but Death (who I'd like to mention I might refer to as a she or an it sometimes) still needs him alive, so she lures him out of his room once more.
Why you may ask? Because of two simple reasons. One: he isn't meant to die, he was only chosen by Death as the Living Reciever because the jet engine that traveled in time by accident was going to kill him, and as we know, Death doesn't likes it when it's design is fucked with and sometimes that doesn't means surviving your death, it can be the opposite too, dying ahead of schedule. The second reason is tied to the first one, Death doesn't likes when it's design is cheated, so when it is, she tries to make sure that it stays as truthful to the original as possible. She needs Donnie to be present, or even be the catalyst of some of the events that lead to the deaths of Gretchen (who is originally run over by a car driven by Frank), Frank (dies shot from Donnie), and most importantly, Donnie's mother and sister, which both supposedly died in the plane from which Donnie stole the jet engine.
I'd like to think that this is where DD and FD finally converge into one, that same plane was Flight 180, in the tangent timeline Donnie stole its jet engine and caused the disaster. In the primary universe the "time vortex" was accidental caused by some form of "glitch" in reality.
After Donnie fixed the timeline, Death once more lured him out of his room, making sure he somehow got involved in all of the deaths that happened afterwards, etc. Basically after the movie everything happened once again just with slight differences, up until the the countdown is over, disaster finally strikes. The temporal vortex opens, causing fuel leaks and electrical malfunctions that led to Flight 180 exploding, this time, under Death's approval. What she wasn't expecting however, was Alex Browning's glimpse into the future, his premonition. Unlike Donnie, Alex isn't time traveling, just watching the events unfold, and given the opportunity to change them, which messes with the design, but Death isn't willing to use Donnie once more to fix this mistake via time traveling, so from this point on there are no other branching timelines or alternative universes, this is a job for Death herself.
As I said before, this re-written version of events is not quite perfect, some details like, the fact that Flight 180 was an international traveling plane going outside of the US, meanwhile the plane in DD was not only traveling within the country, but also was landing into the city not going away from it.
However I'd still love to heat out anyone's thoughts, opinions, feedback, anything.
Thank you for giving me a minute (prob more) of your day just to read my train of thought :p
