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tellshannon815) wrote2022-05-03 01:09 am
tellshannon815) wrote2022-05-03 01:09 am
Everything Happens For A Reason
So, since the bethefirst reveals have now been made, I can now post this:
Title: Everything Happens For A Reason
Fandom: Flight 19, by Grant Finnegan
Characters: Tammy, Tony, Ross, Melanie, Emily, Todd, Michael, Tim.
Pairings: Tammy/Tony, Ross/Melanie, Emily/Todd
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for both Flight 19 books
Summary: When Flight 19 took off from Honolulu in 2019, it arrived in Los Angeles in 2024. In an attempt to recreate the flight and see if the passengers can return to their own timeline, they instead find themselves in 2021. One day at a Flight 19 get together months later, someone poses the question: What if none of that had ever happened and they landed on schedule from the start?
It was a simple conversation at one of their Flight 19 get togethers, and no one afterwards could remember who’d first brought it up: how would their lives have been different if Flight 19 had arrived on schedule instead of the time jump causing it to arrive five years late, or if Darcy’s suggestion had actually come off and, instead of finding themselves in 2021, they’d made it back to 2019 to land on their original schedule? It had given them all something to think about…
Tammy Hourigan wished the question had never been brought up; she knew that if Flight 19 had landed on schedule, she would have been safely delivered of her baby, and so for that reason, she cannot say, as she knows some of her fellow passengers are thinking, that she’s wholly glad that things happened as they did. If she’d landed in 2019 as planned, she would never have lost those five years of Beth’s and Noah’s lives, never have had to watch Noah back away from her, not knowing what to make of her. She’d have been their one and only mother, not having to watch her children being raised by her twin sister and husband, married to each other, with Annie now a legal parent to Tammy’s children.
And maybe if Tammy had never travelled forward through time, she would have had a better relationship with her parents now; they may not have been close, but at least her parents wouldn’t have kept looking at her as though she’d suddenly grown horns, kept talking about how her journey to 2024 must have been the work of the devil. No, Tammy had wanted to say, watching her husband now married to her twin, watching as “Teflon Fanny” took her place raising her children, knowing that the shock of that news on top of the shock of her time jump contributing to the stillbirth of her daughter, that was her hell right there.
If Tammy had never disappeared, she wondered whether Annie would have ever have forced the issue and told her about the affair in order to end Tammy and Brandon’s marriage – considering that according to her best friend Lee, Annie had only left it a week after the disappearance of Flight 19 before making her move on Brandon, and then Annie had later admitted it had been going on before that, she had to admit it was possible.
Tammy knew that if she’d disembarked in 2019, carried on to Missouri and to her marriage, even if she and Brandon had eventually separated anyway, and even if Tony had also separated from his wife, she and Tony would never have seen each other again, let alone ended up together, so for that reason, she couldn’t regret the time jump; yet a part of her continued to mourn Brandon, the man she had once loved. He’d proved Tammy and Lee wrong when they’d referred to him as having no balls in the early days when Tammy first returned, saving Tammy’s life when Annie fired the gun, and some part of him would always mourn his death, and regret that it was indirectly caused by her return.
Ross Moore looked at Tammy and thought he understood what she was thinking; he had to admit that while things had turned out okay for him now, in his new life with Melanie, having founded the flying school with Tony, he was painfully aware that had he not ended up jumping forward in time and being presumed dead, his mother would never have taken her own life. The fact that in landing in 2021, he’d been so close to landing in a time where he could have saved her, and yet still too late, would always cause him pain; he was never going to admit it to Todd, whose landing had been at just the right time to prevent his father’s death, but when he’d heard that story he’d struggled with the jealousy he’d initially felt towards this young man who hadn’t even wanted to rebuild his relationship with his father. And sure, in this timeline he’d managed to get his hands on some of his stuff before his asshole uncles got rid of the lot, but he’d have let Eddie take the record collection ten times over if it meant he could have time with his mother again.
He thought of the upcoming day when Melanie would walk down the aisle to meet him, Tony and Darcy at his side, Tammy at hers, and of how their flying school was helping people, Todd’s brother included, and knew he wouldn’t want it any other way. Although in one way, he had thought that maybe it would have been better if they’d stayed in 2024, where they could have avoided those few weeks where Ross had been held hostage before being rescued by Todd and Jason, spared Melanie and their friends those weeks of believing him dead. He and Tony could still have started the flying school then, they’d all still have each other. There was no easy answer to the question of whether it would have been better to have gone back to 2019, stayed in 2024, or gone to 2021 as they did, because as he looked round at all of his friends, Ross knew that every one of them would probably have given a different answer.
Tony Papas couldn’t help feeling guilty as he looked around at everyone, knowing that a lot of his friends had mixed emotions around that question and that some people would have benefited from landing in 2019 as planned. He wondered if he was the only person there who could honestly say that there would have been nothing for him in 2019.
If Tony had returned as planned, would Tina ever have ended their marriage to be with her sister in law, Suzanna? He would never know; possibly Ricky’s death, which had set Suzanna free, may have precipitated that. Or would he ever have ended the marriage himself? He thought of the second time he returned home, in 2021, when Tony had admitted he knew of the affair and Tina had said that maybe she was making a mistake. Tina hadn’t said that when he first returned in 2024, although if she had, at that point Tony would have reconciled with her. When he returned to 2021, he’d mentally moved on from the end of his marriage to Tina, knew he wanted his future to be with Tammy, and so he could honestly tell himself that reconciliation with Tina wasn’t an option for him.
He was happy with the way things had turned out; but knowing that Tammy would have her own reasons for wishing she’d landed in 2019 after all, he wasn’t going to make a big thing of it in front of everyone.
Melanie Lewinson wondered how much longer her marriage to Charles would have lasted had they landed in 2019 as planned. It’s possible, she thought, that maybe he would never have found out about her liaison with “Kevin. Fucking. Brewster”; the mutual acquaintance who had filled Charles in had done so when she was long since presumed dead, and may not have done so had she returned on schedule. If Charles had never found out, would Melanie ever have made the choice to leave her marriage? She’d known, of course, of Charles’s affairs, although she still wondered if she’d ever known the full extent, and yet she’d still stayed with him; she wondered now what it would have taken for her to have walked away from her marriage.
In the end, it had taken a combination of Charles’s attempt to kill her in 2024 (Melanie still wondered what had happened to the limo driver who had saved her at the time, and whose mortgage she had paid off from Charles’s estate; she liked to think that things would go well for him in this timeline too) and her relationship with Ross Moore, finally understanding more of what a happy and healthy relationship could be, that had given her the impetus to leave. Sometimes she still wondered what would have happened, whether she would still have been able to safely escape, had that confrontation with Kevin Brewster at the Irish bar, where Charles had ended up falling over the railings, never happened – it would have been difficult to lose herself in the crowds in another city; Flight 19 had received enough publicity that Melanie would have been recognised wherever she moved to, and all too easy to track down. But she wasn’t going to think about that now; Charles was gone, and thanks to Jason, Ross had come home to her. They all had second chances now; it was time for them to look to the future.
Emily Collins had to admit, she was probably one of the people who had things the easiest. She was expecting only her father to turn up and meet her, and Dave Collins had been the one to turn up; none of these nasty shocks that so many of her fellow passengers had experienced. For her, the major impact on her life had Flight 19 arrived in 2019 as planned would have been that she would never have bonded with Todd during their days being held at Vandenberg, never formed the relationship with him, in all likelihood never seen him again once they left the airport. If she’d never formed the relationship with Todd, she wouldn’t have been able to be there for him when the Andrew scandal came out. And as she thought of her father, happy again with Kylie so many years after the deaths of her mother and brother, she thought of how he may never have met her had they not been introduced by Emily and Todd.
In some ways, it was a harder question for Emily to answer than it would have been for some of the others, because a lot of what had happened since her return had been more about Todd’s family situation, with her in a supporting role, than her own, but she wouldn’t change the fact that she’d been there to help him through it all to the best of her ability.
If Todd Roberts had landed on time in 2019, he imagined he’d have had another couple of good years with his father, being unaware of the whole history of his father’s affair which had resulted in his half brother. But that wouldn’t have changed anything for Jason; Jason would still have ended up in that final confrontation with Andrew, would still have pulled the gun on the father who had turned his back on him all those years ago. Todd would have found out the truth along with his mother, although it would still be more of a shock to him than to Kylie, considering she’d been aware of his infidelity for years at that point while Todd still maintained his illusions, placing his father on a pedestal he didn’t deserve. What Todd was grieving now was his old image of his father, the man he used to look up to, but now knew that he wasn’t the man Todd had thought he was.
Now that Todd had gone back to 2021, he and Jason had their relationship as brothers. He even decided to ask Jason to be one of his best men when he was planning to propose to Emily. By boarding the plane, he’d managed to prevent Andrew’s murder at Jason’s hands, and his own murder of Jason in order to avenge Andrew. Yet in Todd’s own timeline, everything had still happened; the obsession with tracking down this man, eventually pulling the trigger only to find that the man he’d shot was his half brother, and that his mother had known for some time. Todd had thought that killing the man right before boarding Flight 19, and possibly travelling through time again, would allow him to escape any consequences of his actions; yet even though landing in 2021 meant that he hadn’t killed Jason after all, and had been able to build a relationship with him, he hadn’t escaped anything. He couldn’t talk to anyone about the fact that he still remembered pulling the trigger, that he still had to live with the memories of Jason falling down dead in front of him, that he still sometimes felt he had to scrub the blood from his hands. As he grieved the man he’d believed his father was, he also grieved the man he had himself been before he pulled the trigger.
But although he was still haunted by his own memories, he’d saved Jason from a similar fate; Todd could take comfort in that. And while his illusions had been shattered and he no longer had a relationship with his father, Todd had never wanted him dead; by boarding the plane, he’d had a part in preventing that. And the fact that Andrew was alive, and had sent Mac to follow him and Jason that day, had meant Todd had backup on the spot when it came to rescuing Ross, so in a way, by inadvertently saving Andrew, he’d managed to help save one of his friends. Maybe everything really did happen for a reason. Now it was time to close the door on his father, to look to his future, with Emily, with Jason, with Emily’s father already making Kylie happier than Andrew had in years.
Even as Michael E. Darcy had brought up the possibility of getting back to 2019 once he’d bought the A380, during that long ago dinner and drinks where he and Captain Ross Moore had first started to become friends, a part of him had never entirely believed that was actually going to happen. And ending up splitting the difference, jumping back another two and a half years and finally ending up in 2021, sure as hell never occurred to him.
When Tim Erwin first explained to him about the disks that had caused their plane to travel through time, and that his son had been working with controlled time travel, his initial reaction was to think of the possibility of using it for them all to return to their old lives. Now that he had had time to think, he understood that actually, it was better for him that it hadn’t happened, and he wondered why he’d even wanted to. Sure, if he’d managed to step back straight into his old life, he’d have been able to hold on to his billions, but he’d come to understand that they weren’t worth as much as he’d thought they were, and even after the 2021 version of Joanne had requested that their son make the arrangements to give him one company back, Darcy realised it no longer mattered. Would he really want to go back to a life where the world knew him as an asshole, based on rumours in the media, a lot of which were complete bull, others having some grain of truth but having been twisted, misquoted, making him out to be a totally different person?
And would he want to go back to the marriage that he had to admit hadn’t been happy for a long time before he boarded the flight, to the family who hadn’t even made the effort to come and see him when he first returned to 2024? At that point, he would have had to say that his friends had started to feel more like family to him than his actual family. Maybe even now, that was true to some extent; while his oldest son Andrew had always been a part of his life, and he felt like he was starting to bond with his daughter Samantha again following his wife’s stroke, he wasn’t sure that relations with his two younger sons were ever going to improve.
His first thought when he’d first proposed to Ross Moore that they fly the A380 again had been of redemption, yet he had come to understand that this was never likely to happen in the way he had hoped; even as he wondered if the plane would take them back in time, what were the odds of him being taken back to that moment in his past in Missouri to the guy who’d taken his own life and those of his family after being laid off by Darcy? Slimmer than none; there was nothing that Darcy could do for them now, nothing but try to come to terms with what had happened, once he’d gone out to Missouri to pay his respects. And as he’d now found out from the guy’s sister, he may not have made a difference to the outcome anyway even if he had gone back and never taken over that company, laying off its employees; since it had now come to light that it was the guy’s wife’s involvement with drug dealers that had led to the house fire and Darcy bore no responsibility, there was nothing he could have done to change the outcome.
But he understood now that cultivating the don’t-care personality, becoming the asshole the media had made him out to be in the days following those events and right through the rest of his life until the day he boarded the A380, closing his heart and his mind to what happened, wasn’t the way to go. And he knew he could never go down that road again; the same feelings of guilt washed over him as he learned of Joanne’s stroke in 2021, minutes after her learning of his return, while the Joanne of 2024 had moved on and been in a better position to handle his return. If he’d stayed in 2024 and made no attempt to fly the plane again, Joanne would still be here.
Seeing how his friends had coped with everything that had happened to them after both flights had given Darcy a new perspective on life, a perspective he couldn’t say he’d ever have had if he’d returned to 2019 as planned, and if the disks were available to him now, he wouldn’t use them to go back.
Tim Erwin knew that he could never say half the things he wanted to stay, couldn’t admit that if the plane had landed on schedule, he would never have had to go through those weeks in 2024 where Sandra was dead. She still didn’t know that that had been the case, that knowing this, Ben had travelled back to the morning of the flight, had faked his illness delaying her departure and ensuring she never boarded Flight 19, and Tim was determined she never would. It had been the stress of her time jump in the original timeline, combined with the news of Ben’s presumed death, that had led to her death in the first place, and Tim wasn’t going to tell her anything that happened. With Sandra’s history of heart problems, he couldn’t take that risk.
He also knew he could never tell her the whole truth (much as he knew there could be one day that she would question him further; his explanations about his time with Ben had left out as much as they filled in, and she was bound to pick this up) about Ben’s presumed death in 2020, or the time he’d spent with Ben at the base, culminating in helping Vernon go home to his own planet, or Ben’s work on controlled time travel. If Tim had told anyone present of any of the things he had learned, that for those who did want to go back to 2019, he knew of a way that it had actually been possible, he knew there would be consequences, both for him and for Ben. He’d almost slipped up and said something to Darcy at that memorial service for the criminal wrongly identified as Ross Moore in the car accident, his desire to give hope to one friend, to save another, almost trumping his promise to his son before he came to his senses at the last.
But even taking the need to protect his family out of the equation, he also knew that to explain the controlled time travel, or as well as he could considering he still wasn’t sure he knew everything himself, was also going to expose to the passengers that he, or specifically the device he had taken on the plane with him, had been the reason that they had travelled through time at all. The devices were all gone now, back with Vernon, leaving no immediate way for anyone to travel right now; he didn’t want to have to explain to any of those who would have chosen to return to 2019 that while it could have been an option at one stage, it no longer was. And while things had worked out for a lot of the people sat there, Tim knew that not everyone on that flight had been so lucky, and he didn’t want to have to explain his role to any of them. So he said nothing as the conversation continued around him, knowing that there was nothing he could say to anyone.
Title: Everything Happens For A Reason
Fandom: Flight 19, by Grant Finnegan
Characters: Tammy, Tony, Ross, Melanie, Emily, Todd, Michael, Tim.
Pairings: Tammy/Tony, Ross/Melanie, Emily/Todd
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for both Flight 19 books
Summary: When Flight 19 took off from Honolulu in 2019, it arrived in Los Angeles in 2024. In an attempt to recreate the flight and see if the passengers can return to their own timeline, they instead find themselves in 2021. One day at a Flight 19 get together months later, someone poses the question: What if none of that had ever happened and they landed on schedule from the start?
It was a simple conversation at one of their Flight 19 get togethers, and no one afterwards could remember who’d first brought it up: how would their lives have been different if Flight 19 had arrived on schedule instead of the time jump causing it to arrive five years late, or if Darcy’s suggestion had actually come off and, instead of finding themselves in 2021, they’d made it back to 2019 to land on their original schedule? It had given them all something to think about…
Tammy Hourigan wished the question had never been brought up; she knew that if Flight 19 had landed on schedule, she would have been safely delivered of her baby, and so for that reason, she cannot say, as she knows some of her fellow passengers are thinking, that she’s wholly glad that things happened as they did. If she’d landed in 2019 as planned, she would never have lost those five years of Beth’s and Noah’s lives, never have had to watch Noah back away from her, not knowing what to make of her. She’d have been their one and only mother, not having to watch her children being raised by her twin sister and husband, married to each other, with Annie now a legal parent to Tammy’s children.
And maybe if Tammy had never travelled forward through time, she would have had a better relationship with her parents now; they may not have been close, but at least her parents wouldn’t have kept looking at her as though she’d suddenly grown horns, kept talking about how her journey to 2024 must have been the work of the devil. No, Tammy had wanted to say, watching her husband now married to her twin, watching as “Teflon Fanny” took her place raising her children, knowing that the shock of that news on top of the shock of her time jump contributing to the stillbirth of her daughter, that was her hell right there.
If Tammy had never disappeared, she wondered whether Annie would have ever have forced the issue and told her about the affair in order to end Tammy and Brandon’s marriage – considering that according to her best friend Lee, Annie had only left it a week after the disappearance of Flight 19 before making her move on Brandon, and then Annie had later admitted it had been going on before that, she had to admit it was possible.
Tammy knew that if she’d disembarked in 2019, carried on to Missouri and to her marriage, even if she and Brandon had eventually separated anyway, and even if Tony had also separated from his wife, she and Tony would never have seen each other again, let alone ended up together, so for that reason, she couldn’t regret the time jump; yet a part of her continued to mourn Brandon, the man she had once loved. He’d proved Tammy and Lee wrong when they’d referred to him as having no balls in the early days when Tammy first returned, saving Tammy’s life when Annie fired the gun, and some part of him would always mourn his death, and regret that it was indirectly caused by her return.
Ross Moore looked at Tammy and thought he understood what she was thinking; he had to admit that while things had turned out okay for him now, in his new life with Melanie, having founded the flying school with Tony, he was painfully aware that had he not ended up jumping forward in time and being presumed dead, his mother would never have taken her own life. The fact that in landing in 2021, he’d been so close to landing in a time where he could have saved her, and yet still too late, would always cause him pain; he was never going to admit it to Todd, whose landing had been at just the right time to prevent his father’s death, but when he’d heard that story he’d struggled with the jealousy he’d initially felt towards this young man who hadn’t even wanted to rebuild his relationship with his father. And sure, in this timeline he’d managed to get his hands on some of his stuff before his asshole uncles got rid of the lot, but he’d have let Eddie take the record collection ten times over if it meant he could have time with his mother again.
He thought of the upcoming day when Melanie would walk down the aisle to meet him, Tony and Darcy at his side, Tammy at hers, and of how their flying school was helping people, Todd’s brother included, and knew he wouldn’t want it any other way. Although in one way, he had thought that maybe it would have been better if they’d stayed in 2024, where they could have avoided those few weeks where Ross had been held hostage before being rescued by Todd and Jason, spared Melanie and their friends those weeks of believing him dead. He and Tony could still have started the flying school then, they’d all still have each other. There was no easy answer to the question of whether it would have been better to have gone back to 2019, stayed in 2024, or gone to 2021 as they did, because as he looked round at all of his friends, Ross knew that every one of them would probably have given a different answer.
Tony Papas couldn’t help feeling guilty as he looked around at everyone, knowing that a lot of his friends had mixed emotions around that question and that some people would have benefited from landing in 2019 as planned. He wondered if he was the only person there who could honestly say that there would have been nothing for him in 2019.
If Tony had returned as planned, would Tina ever have ended their marriage to be with her sister in law, Suzanna? He would never know; possibly Ricky’s death, which had set Suzanna free, may have precipitated that. Or would he ever have ended the marriage himself? He thought of the second time he returned home, in 2021, when Tony had admitted he knew of the affair and Tina had said that maybe she was making a mistake. Tina hadn’t said that when he first returned in 2024, although if she had, at that point Tony would have reconciled with her. When he returned to 2021, he’d mentally moved on from the end of his marriage to Tina, knew he wanted his future to be with Tammy, and so he could honestly tell himself that reconciliation with Tina wasn’t an option for him.
He was happy with the way things had turned out; but knowing that Tammy would have her own reasons for wishing she’d landed in 2019 after all, he wasn’t going to make a big thing of it in front of everyone.
Melanie Lewinson wondered how much longer her marriage to Charles would have lasted had they landed in 2019 as planned. It’s possible, she thought, that maybe he would never have found out about her liaison with “Kevin. Fucking. Brewster”; the mutual acquaintance who had filled Charles in had done so when she was long since presumed dead, and may not have done so had she returned on schedule. If Charles had never found out, would Melanie ever have made the choice to leave her marriage? She’d known, of course, of Charles’s affairs, although she still wondered if she’d ever known the full extent, and yet she’d still stayed with him; she wondered now what it would have taken for her to have walked away from her marriage.
In the end, it had taken a combination of Charles’s attempt to kill her in 2024 (Melanie still wondered what had happened to the limo driver who had saved her at the time, and whose mortgage she had paid off from Charles’s estate; she liked to think that things would go well for him in this timeline too) and her relationship with Ross Moore, finally understanding more of what a happy and healthy relationship could be, that had given her the impetus to leave. Sometimes she still wondered what would have happened, whether she would still have been able to safely escape, had that confrontation with Kevin Brewster at the Irish bar, where Charles had ended up falling over the railings, never happened – it would have been difficult to lose herself in the crowds in another city; Flight 19 had received enough publicity that Melanie would have been recognised wherever she moved to, and all too easy to track down. But she wasn’t going to think about that now; Charles was gone, and thanks to Jason, Ross had come home to her. They all had second chances now; it was time for them to look to the future.
Emily Collins had to admit, she was probably one of the people who had things the easiest. She was expecting only her father to turn up and meet her, and Dave Collins had been the one to turn up; none of these nasty shocks that so many of her fellow passengers had experienced. For her, the major impact on her life had Flight 19 arrived in 2019 as planned would have been that she would never have bonded with Todd during their days being held at Vandenberg, never formed the relationship with him, in all likelihood never seen him again once they left the airport. If she’d never formed the relationship with Todd, she wouldn’t have been able to be there for him when the Andrew scandal came out. And as she thought of her father, happy again with Kylie so many years after the deaths of her mother and brother, she thought of how he may never have met her had they not been introduced by Emily and Todd.
In some ways, it was a harder question for Emily to answer than it would have been for some of the others, because a lot of what had happened since her return had been more about Todd’s family situation, with her in a supporting role, than her own, but she wouldn’t change the fact that she’d been there to help him through it all to the best of her ability.
If Todd Roberts had landed on time in 2019, he imagined he’d have had another couple of good years with his father, being unaware of the whole history of his father’s affair which had resulted in his half brother. But that wouldn’t have changed anything for Jason; Jason would still have ended up in that final confrontation with Andrew, would still have pulled the gun on the father who had turned his back on him all those years ago. Todd would have found out the truth along with his mother, although it would still be more of a shock to him than to Kylie, considering she’d been aware of his infidelity for years at that point while Todd still maintained his illusions, placing his father on a pedestal he didn’t deserve. What Todd was grieving now was his old image of his father, the man he used to look up to, but now knew that he wasn’t the man Todd had thought he was.
Now that Todd had gone back to 2021, he and Jason had their relationship as brothers. He even decided to ask Jason to be one of his best men when he was planning to propose to Emily. By boarding the plane, he’d managed to prevent Andrew’s murder at Jason’s hands, and his own murder of Jason in order to avenge Andrew. Yet in Todd’s own timeline, everything had still happened; the obsession with tracking down this man, eventually pulling the trigger only to find that the man he’d shot was his half brother, and that his mother had known for some time. Todd had thought that killing the man right before boarding Flight 19, and possibly travelling through time again, would allow him to escape any consequences of his actions; yet even though landing in 2021 meant that he hadn’t killed Jason after all, and had been able to build a relationship with him, he hadn’t escaped anything. He couldn’t talk to anyone about the fact that he still remembered pulling the trigger, that he still had to live with the memories of Jason falling down dead in front of him, that he still sometimes felt he had to scrub the blood from his hands. As he grieved the man he’d believed his father was, he also grieved the man he had himself been before he pulled the trigger.
But although he was still haunted by his own memories, he’d saved Jason from a similar fate; Todd could take comfort in that. And while his illusions had been shattered and he no longer had a relationship with his father, Todd had never wanted him dead; by boarding the plane, he’d had a part in preventing that. And the fact that Andrew was alive, and had sent Mac to follow him and Jason that day, had meant Todd had backup on the spot when it came to rescuing Ross, so in a way, by inadvertently saving Andrew, he’d managed to help save one of his friends. Maybe everything really did happen for a reason. Now it was time to close the door on his father, to look to his future, with Emily, with Jason, with Emily’s father already making Kylie happier than Andrew had in years.
Even as Michael E. Darcy had brought up the possibility of getting back to 2019 once he’d bought the A380, during that long ago dinner and drinks where he and Captain Ross Moore had first started to become friends, a part of him had never entirely believed that was actually going to happen. And ending up splitting the difference, jumping back another two and a half years and finally ending up in 2021, sure as hell never occurred to him.
When Tim Erwin first explained to him about the disks that had caused their plane to travel through time, and that his son had been working with controlled time travel, his initial reaction was to think of the possibility of using it for them all to return to their old lives. Now that he had had time to think, he understood that actually, it was better for him that it hadn’t happened, and he wondered why he’d even wanted to. Sure, if he’d managed to step back straight into his old life, he’d have been able to hold on to his billions, but he’d come to understand that they weren’t worth as much as he’d thought they were, and even after the 2021 version of Joanne had requested that their son make the arrangements to give him one company back, Darcy realised it no longer mattered. Would he really want to go back to a life where the world knew him as an asshole, based on rumours in the media, a lot of which were complete bull, others having some grain of truth but having been twisted, misquoted, making him out to be a totally different person?
And would he want to go back to the marriage that he had to admit hadn’t been happy for a long time before he boarded the flight, to the family who hadn’t even made the effort to come and see him when he first returned to 2024? At that point, he would have had to say that his friends had started to feel more like family to him than his actual family. Maybe even now, that was true to some extent; while his oldest son Andrew had always been a part of his life, and he felt like he was starting to bond with his daughter Samantha again following his wife’s stroke, he wasn’t sure that relations with his two younger sons were ever going to improve.
His first thought when he’d first proposed to Ross Moore that they fly the A380 again had been of redemption, yet he had come to understand that this was never likely to happen in the way he had hoped; even as he wondered if the plane would take them back in time, what were the odds of him being taken back to that moment in his past in Missouri to the guy who’d taken his own life and those of his family after being laid off by Darcy? Slimmer than none; there was nothing that Darcy could do for them now, nothing but try to come to terms with what had happened, once he’d gone out to Missouri to pay his respects. And as he’d now found out from the guy’s sister, he may not have made a difference to the outcome anyway even if he had gone back and never taken over that company, laying off its employees; since it had now come to light that it was the guy’s wife’s involvement with drug dealers that had led to the house fire and Darcy bore no responsibility, there was nothing he could have done to change the outcome.
But he understood now that cultivating the don’t-care personality, becoming the asshole the media had made him out to be in the days following those events and right through the rest of his life until the day he boarded the A380, closing his heart and his mind to what happened, wasn’t the way to go. And he knew he could never go down that road again; the same feelings of guilt washed over him as he learned of Joanne’s stroke in 2021, minutes after her learning of his return, while the Joanne of 2024 had moved on and been in a better position to handle his return. If he’d stayed in 2024 and made no attempt to fly the plane again, Joanne would still be here.
Seeing how his friends had coped with everything that had happened to them after both flights had given Darcy a new perspective on life, a perspective he couldn’t say he’d ever have had if he’d returned to 2019 as planned, and if the disks were available to him now, he wouldn’t use them to go back.
Tim Erwin knew that he could never say half the things he wanted to stay, couldn’t admit that if the plane had landed on schedule, he would never have had to go through those weeks in 2024 where Sandra was dead. She still didn’t know that that had been the case, that knowing this, Ben had travelled back to the morning of the flight, had faked his illness delaying her departure and ensuring she never boarded Flight 19, and Tim was determined she never would. It had been the stress of her time jump in the original timeline, combined with the news of Ben’s presumed death, that had led to her death in the first place, and Tim wasn’t going to tell her anything that happened. With Sandra’s history of heart problems, he couldn’t take that risk.
He also knew he could never tell her the whole truth (much as he knew there could be one day that she would question him further; his explanations about his time with Ben had left out as much as they filled in, and she was bound to pick this up) about Ben’s presumed death in 2020, or the time he’d spent with Ben at the base, culminating in helping Vernon go home to his own planet, or Ben’s work on controlled time travel. If Tim had told anyone present of any of the things he had learned, that for those who did want to go back to 2019, he knew of a way that it had actually been possible, he knew there would be consequences, both for him and for Ben. He’d almost slipped up and said something to Darcy at that memorial service for the criminal wrongly identified as Ross Moore in the car accident, his desire to give hope to one friend, to save another, almost trumping his promise to his son before he came to his senses at the last.
But even taking the need to protect his family out of the equation, he also knew that to explain the controlled time travel, or as well as he could considering he still wasn’t sure he knew everything himself, was also going to expose to the passengers that he, or specifically the device he had taken on the plane with him, had been the reason that they had travelled through time at all. The devices were all gone now, back with Vernon, leaving no immediate way for anyone to travel right now; he didn’t want to have to explain to any of those who would have chosen to return to 2019 that while it could have been an option at one stage, it no longer was. And while things had worked out for a lot of the people sat there, Tim knew that not everyone on that flight had been so lucky, and he didn’t want to have to explain his role to any of them. So he said nothing as the conversation continued around him, knowing that there was nothing he could say to anyone.