Danny: Agh! Who are you?!
Tim: Don't panic
Danny: How did you get in my Haunt!? How did you get past my wards!?
Tim: You're panicking. Please stop. I've come in peace.
Danny: Why do you look like me!?
Tim: My name is Timothy Drake. I'm a failed clone that Vlad Masters made of you in the future, but when he realized that I wouldn't have any of your ghost powers, he sold me to a couple that wanted a genius as an heir. They marketed the sale as an adoption from a surrogate mother, and only recently did I find out the truth.
Danny dumbfounded: What?
Tim: I had the same reaction. Listen, in the future, I will become a vigilante known as Red Robin, and I was in the middle of fighting a wizard when he threw a time-altering spell at me. I have only a month to find a rare crystal hidden somewhere in Casper High to break the spell and make it back to the future. If I don't, I'll be trapped here forever. However, since the spell anchored me to the Ghost Zone, I couldn't enter the living world of this time to search without an anchor of my own. I need your help.
Danny: Why would I believe the frankly insane story you just said? How do I know it's not just a powerful ghost trying to trick me into letting it lose in my city?
Tim: Please, I don't have anyone else to turn to.
Danny: Boo-hoo.
Tim: Please....Dad.
Danny:.....shit, you pulled the son card. Alright fine! I'll help, but the second you try to rampage in Amity Park, I'll beat you back into the Zone. Also, never call me 'dad' again... just say you're my long-lost twin or something.
so! i woke up with the line "billy pilgrim has come unstuck in time" going round and round in my head and promptly chucked tommy in the meat grinder. i SWEAR i'm getting on the fluffebruary train tomorrow but for now, here's...not a fic exactly, let's call it 950 stream of consciousness words
Tommy Kinard has come unstuck in time.
It happens so suddenly that he doesn't even have time to realize. He's driving home from Evan's loft for the last time, feeling cold and strange. There's a buzzing of confusion in his ears because he knew it would end, but he didn't think it would end tonight. He thought tonight would be good.
He lifts a hand from the wheel to wipe a couple of tears from his face. He blinks.
He's on one knee in a dimly familiar room lit by LED candles, and Abby is looking down at him with huge eyes.
"Oh my god. Tommy. Yes!"
He felt like this before. The first time. Like he didn't know how the hell he got here.
He lets her pull him to his feet and hugs her, feeling more like a robot than a person. He puts the ring on her finger and wonders if he's losing his mind. If he wrecked his truck and he's experiencing some kind of hallucination. If the head trauma is bad enough that random synapses are firing, triggering memories.
Later that night, with Abby sleeping by his side, her hand on his chest, Tommy stares at the ceiling and tells himself he's dreaming. He must be dreaming.
Never mind that he doesn't remember getting home, he's dreaming. He's going to wake up in his own bed and he's going to have broken his own heart, but he's going to be where he should be.
He closes his eyes.
He opens them, and he's walking into Harbor station and there are still moments missing from his memory, but he's where he's supposed to be.
Except then he catches sight of Alvarez, who moved to San Francisco five years ago. Panic squeezes at his throat, but the alarms sound before it has chance to take over, and the world moves around him.
Sometimes it happens so quickly that he only gets moments: Evan kisses him in a hospital waiting room, heedless of the soot getting everywhere; his dad screams that he's a fucking disgrace as Tommy steps out of his childhood home for the last time; Sal tells him that Gina's pregnant and they're moving back east; he makes out with a stranger in a club.
And then sometimes, it lasts long enough to feel like everything that came before was the dream. He watches his mom fade all over again, tells her he loves her, asks her not to go, holds her hand and listens to the machines. He spends a week in the desert flying extractions and realizes he somehow managed to forget how it felt to be so afraid, all the time. He spends six weeks — six miserable fucking weeks — at the 118, trapped in the worst version of himself, and he's just lost his increasingly tenuous grip on himself, bolted upright with every intention of laying Gerrard out with an uppercut to the jaw when he's suddenly somewhere else.
It's a house. There's his coffee maker. There's an unfamiliar blender. Pairs of shoes neatly lined up on a rack by the door. There's — he hears a weak noise come out of his throat — there's a photo above the mantle. It's black and white. It's unmistakably a wedding photograph.
It's him and Evan.
Outside, he hears a car pull up, a door slam closed. Footsteps approach the house. There's a key in the lock.
Tommy closes his eyes.
He opens them, and he's waking up on a bare mattress with Evan snoring next to him, looking unspeakably beautiful in the early morning half-light.
He tries. He tries so hard. But just like every other time, knowing what's going to happen seems to make it inevitable. He doesn't step into the inviting space between Evan's thighs when he hops up into the counter. He doesn't kiss him to keep the stupid, stupid words inside his own stupid, stupid mouth. He doesn't make anything better.
Outside, blinking in the light, he squeezes his eyes shut and thinks I want to go home.
Instead, he opens his eyes and he's watching his first boyfriend walk away.
Closes them.
Opens them, and Abby's crying and saying she doesn't understand.
Closes them.
Opens them, and he's at his old muay thai gym, the first one he ever went to, feeling a surge of something familiar and naming it as attraction for the very first time.
Opens them, and he's watching on a grainy screen as Evan screams and sobs and collapses to the ground.
Closes them.
Opens them, and Evan's smiling at him, grey-haired, his face lined, pressing a kiss to Tommy's knuckles.
Closes them.
Opens them, and he's in his truck, driving away from Evan's loft and wiping tears from his face. He jerks the wheel and slams on the brakes, his heart thudding wildly as he ignores the sounds of car horns.
He breathes out. Remembers that black and white photograph on that unfamiliar wall.
He pulls a distinctly illegal u-turn, and makes it back to Evan's building just in time to see him open the door to his Jeep.
"Evan!"
Tommy gets tangled in his seat belt in his rush to get out of the truck. Evan turns to look at him and it's like slow motion. Slow enough that Tommy can see the puffiness of Evan's face, the redness in his eyes. He's been crying. It hurts. It hurts to look at.
"Tommy?"
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"You came back," Evan says, hesitant.
"I never should have left. Can we talk? Please?"
Evan hesitates.
The future hangs in the balance.
"Okay," Evan says.
Tommy closes his eyes.
Opens them, and Evan's looking at him, tear-stained and expectant.
I don’t think we, as a fandom, acknowledge just how painful and how much of a toil Lu Guang’s self imposed burden to save CXS is.
Yes, we’ve all cried over how LG/The Concept of Moving On is just a hard hitting subject when it comes to Cheng Xiaoshi. Having to continually relive and redo every action, knowing that there’s an almost 100% chance he’ll have to keep this up for the foreseeable future because the moment he pauses and stops and grieves means that the weight of his anguish will force him to collapse in his wake has me staying up and writing a 20k character study in my head some nights.
But also, every single timeline, with close to no doubt about it, he loses other cherished people in his life. Friends, close acquaintances, family (Qiao Ling is kind of the only one we’re all that aware about considering the lack of backstory reveal but i have zero doubts she must’ve died in at least one of the other timelines considering it all) all gone, those precious memories that only he remembers. QL won’t remember the night of CXS’s death and them clutching onto each other like a lifeline. QL won’t remember that one time they sporadically got boba that hasn’t occurred in other timelines because something changed in that one. Captain Xiao won’t have any recollections of that one inside joke made when times were happier.
LG is the sole carrier of those past times and when he does die, it’ll all go with him. Those overwritten timelines, countless other deaths he’s had to push through because yes, saving CXS is the priority and yes CXS’s death breaks him each time it happens but he’s not apathetic to others’ deaths and in the end, LG is forced to live in isolation, even with CXS, the one he holds the most genuine care for. Because CXS doesn’t remember 3 timelines ago when he comforted LG after a nightmare and CXS doesn’t remember when LG was so close to the edge and losing the tether to reality that QL noticed and they got hotpot together at Haidilao. LG is the sole person to even know about those timelines, the important parts that keep him going and diving through time at least.
The sheer torment LG undergoes because it is so much more than just ‘he will never be able to save CXS, not in a way that matters’ but also that with every different timeline, he loses people. With each loss, the further he gets from them.
During a time travel misadventure, Clockwork stores Danny (controlling skeletons) and Dani (who fights using liquid ectoplasm) inside his chest compartment before Dan (firing lightning bolts) frees them
This is literally the myth of Zeus taking his siblings out of Kronos
Why is this happening? Danny and Dani were just aware they were given free reign because they couldn't make the current disaster any worse. Except they did because Fentons are like that so Clockwork stepped in to rein them in
they couldn't make the current disaster any worse is so funny. especially coupled with the fact that they did, in fact, make it worse. i love that this is either a) literally the reason that Zeus myth exists in this world or b) is a parallel to that myth. i heckin' love greek mythology so i love this myth so much
kinda need jack to time-jump to s6 and get stuck there for a while while his grace is recharging. he shows up at lisa's couch and refuses to elaborate while he takes a thirty-hour power nap. he's basically human for a while again but it's not his first rodeo so mostly he's just sulking around refusing to leave. most importantly since no one tells him shit in this family he is fully oblivious to s6 dynamics
what if whenever Phantom time-travels his clothes change to resemble the general time period and cultural area of where he ended up, but it's always something they would wear in a laboratory, something their practical scientists would be wearing while working.
so he is always described as a boy with white hair, green eyes and wearing black with white accents protective gear of a scientist
yall ever think bout how in zelda there's the timeline split into the three timelines & the never ending cycle and how much negative space that leaves behind. yall ever think bout the legend that grows up to be a knight. bout the warriors who grows up to be a farmer. bout the twilight that still lives in the desert with a cursed sword or the sky that stays stuck in his cycle of hatred or the hyrule who has a home. where did all those versions go? funneled into one irreversible path always? if time itself can be split into three what about the other possibilities it left behind? the mirrors and stained glasses and cracked windows and shadows of the links?
Stanley Pines has changed the timeljne a bit too much, the realisation comes when things that shouldnt have been happening keep...happening. Natural disasters around Gravity Falls, the weirdness being dragged closer to Ford's lab- and so on.
He brings Stanford Pines back and before anyone can really realise he was ever there, he fakes his death.
Stanford Pines isn't an idiot though, the cops may have had their own evidence of Stanley's death but they didn't see his home... They didnt see the toast half eaten and made just the way his brother and still warm, they didn't see the one sock his brother forgot or the hairs that fell leaving the perfect DNA sample for Stanford...
But its been years and Stanford, with all his anger (hurt) and stubbornness to find his twin...hes starting to think Stanley really is dead and if he isn't...well, he certainly doesnt want anything to do with Stanford, why would he?
Shermie grandkids visit and suddenly everything changes. They find clues Stanford was too blind to see, clues clearly meant for them...
"What if grunkle Stan isn't dead? What if he just had to disappear for however long to balance out the timeline?"
"But where could he be hiding?"
As Stanford feels inside his breast pocket, he thinks he has an idea.
