Chapter Text
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The first thing 727 is aware of is her broken nose.
Secondly, her arms are bound behind her back. Foggy confusion has her blinking the sweat out of her eyelashes. She’s wearing- something, some kind of uniform, a vest that fits her tightly underneath three belts. An overwhelming amount of information. She’s wearing boots, and one of them is uncomfortably tighter around the ankle. More importantly- she’s bound. Not by something, someone.
“All cleared on this side.” Her captor is saying. An adult, towering over her, pushing her to the floor where her shaking legs collapse her down to her knees. They’re talking into a buzzing-static thing. Radio? “Serum was a success. All four are redacted.”
“Keep them separate.” A voice crackles. “2825 and 467 have come to and are becoming troublesome. Situation on number Three?”
“Ma’am.” Another voice, feathered under a large amount of static, almost uncertain. “I- I don’t know.”
“What?”
“She won’t stop screaming.”
“Sedate.” Authoritative, piercing. “727 is to be put on narcotics indefinitely, understood?”
The one behind her, “Understood.”
727 feels alarm punch past her haze. Narcotic? What-? She rears back, fighting one leg up to balance herself. Her captor startles, hand grabbing the back of her hair. 727 hisses, fear suddenly bright in her chest as she’s forced down again. Am I being kidnapped? What’s happening?!
She tries to yell, but her lips feel sluggish. There’s shuffling behind her. She can see who has her down in her peripheral vision. They’re dressed head to toe in black combat gear, a helmet over their head obscuring their appearance. They’re wriggling out a syringe from a pack at their hip. 727 panics, kicking her leg out backwards into their groin. There’s a startled oof and the hand against her loosens, just enough she scrambles over the ground and uses that momentum to summon an unbalanced sprint. She can barely understand what’s happening around her. She’s in some kind of facility, a warehouse, crates stacked high all around her and long hanging lightbulbs in quarters sectioned off by large wooden partitions. There’s sand underfoot.
“Mayday!” She hears behind her, “Strike, she’s running, get her!”
“What?!” She hears ahead. From around a corner, another combatant appears. This one has a rifle resting at their hip.
727 inhales sharply, pinwheeling herself around a corner. She doesn’t hear the gun go off, but she does hear rapid footfalls. She takes off again, bulling her way around each set of crates, listening to the crackle of their radios and desperately trying to find an escape. Where am I?! There’s gotta be an emergency exit!
Getting to the walls is the first step. There’s no immediate door she sees, but a bright red fire alarm catches her eye. She runs to it frantically, pushing her elbow up against it and yanking it down. The blaring scream of the fire alarm ignites with yellow lights- there! She can see it concentrated in a few areas, the brightness of it shadowing up to the ceiling. She can track it by looking up.
She turns a corner and almost goes face first into another masked kidnapper. She gasps hard enough she coughs, too surprised to stop herself from bulldozing into their legs. They yell, startled, as something they were holding- someone. It’s someone, who’s shaking and sobbing as they tumble to the ground. 727 can barely get a glimpse of her, but the fact they’re the same height strikes a chord with her. Another victim? She doesn’t think. She grabs their arm with both hands and hauls them to their feet. She’s a mess of dark hair and bloodshot red eyes, pale and crying.
And now, three assailants. 727 stumbles, her speed narrowed now that she has a partner, but the girl is at least stumbling after her, even if she’s heaving for air between sobs.
“It’s okay!” 727 tries to soothe, even if she doesn’t feel completely reassuring with sticky blood running over her lips. “It’s okay, these guys are really slow, c’mon!”
It doesn’t do much, but she feels less resistance in the way the girl runs beside her. She feels less like she’s dragging her along and more like she’s actually trying to match her speed. The emergency exit appears before her. She goes at it shoulder first, bursting it open and wincing as the force of it rattles every bone in her arm. Ow, that’s gonna bruise so bad. She doesn’t have time to kick the door closed. She can hear the radios encroaching fast. Outside is dark, only weak street lights assembled spottily around a parking lot and several shipping crates. The moon is a slim crescent overhead.
The girl beside her buckles, suddenly gasping as if she can’t breathe. 727 panics, casting the girl’s arm over her shoulder and dragging her at a near-limping pace. She’s not helping at all now.
“Get on my back.” 727 whispers frantically. “Quick, please, c’mon!”
She doesn’t get a verbal response. She has to haphazardly claw the girl up onto her back, which doesn’t work very well when she’s trying to keep them walking forward at the same time. The girl keeps stumbling, threatening to fall to the ground and curl up there. 727 feels she has no choice.
“Sorry.” 727 whispers, fast, as she grabs the girl forcefully by her legs and hauls her up. She’s glad the girl at least manages to cling to her back. She would hate for her to fall backwards. It’s much easier to run now, even though the extra weight has her slowing a little- in the end, this girl doesn’t feel like much weight at all. It’s worrying her. Did they hurt her?
“Ma’am!” She hears a distant cry. “Ma’am, 727 and Three are out in the courtyard-”
She hears an angry crackle of static. Night is her cover, but sound is her weakness. The girl won’t stop crying. 727 winces as three flashlights pierce through the dark. Seeing them feels like ice in her stomach. She moves around shipping containers carefully, adjusting Three on her back.
“I know this is kinda out of the blue.” 727 says mutely. “But I think these guys want me because I’m a time traveller.”
Three sniffles against her back. 727 can feel every tremble that passes through her. Her whole body feels like it’s under pressure.
“Watch?” Three asks meekly. Her voice swims under tears.
“Watch?” 727 echoes. “You mean, the watch? How’d you know?”
“I have one.”
“No way.” 727 feels herself starting to smile, although it doesn’t linger long as she starts to connect more weird puzzle pieces. “Wait, that means they’re after all time travellers?”
Three makes a weak noise.
Weird, 727 acknowledges. Right now, her priority is shifting from escape to protecting Three. It doesn’t seem like her fellow time traveller is capable of doing anything aside from crumpling like a soda can. What’s up with that? Well, not all time travellers can be brave, I guess. She creeps along the crates, watchful of where the three combatants are jogging. The swaying flashlights are dangerous. Too easy to be caught.
On the other side of the warehouse, a commotion breaks out. All three turn and run for it. 727 pauses, hovering uncertainly. When gunfire starts popping, she bristles, afraid. Not worth it! She turns tail and runs. Along the parking lot is a wired fence. She knows she’s small enough to crawl under these. She’s done it a few times when going looking for her Myth. The only problem is how exposed it makes them. She lowers Three down to the ground hurriedly.
“We gotta crawl under.” 727 says, hushed, keeping her fingers loosely gripping Three’s sleeve. She feels that if she doesn’t have a grip on her at least a little bit, this girl will flicker and fade right in front of her. “Can you do that? You go first, I’ll be right behind you.”
Three is hunched low to the ground, sleeves pressed against her face, hiccuping sobs as she manages out, “Y-You will?”
“Right behind you.” 727 reassures, feeling pleased that she could follow through with that.
Three moves sluggishly, at times pausing, frantically afraid of something. 727 can’t see whatever is freaking her out so badly. It makes her nervous, trying to whisper just loud enough to be heard over her hyperventilating.
“Keep going, you’re almost through.”
Ultimately what gets Three through is the streetlight on the other side. A road crosses between the fence and a forested hillside. Three scrambles for the light as if everything else was on fire. 727 crawls after her, feeling spirited in the way grass tickles her chin. Army crawling! She can’t help but grin, even if she immediately winces at the feeling of blood in her teeth. Eugh.
“Hey.” Three says, her voice wobbling as she looks back at 727. Her eyes are wider than moons. “You’re wearing…the same…”
“Huh?” 727 asks. In the streetlight, she can see Three better. She’s wearing the same vest, the same belts, even the same boots. 727 blinks. Suddenly, her puzzle pieces felt like ancient hieroglyphs. “Why are we wearing the same thing?”
“I don’t know.” Three quails. The way she huddles up against the street pole makes her look like a hedgehog. 727 crawls over to her. “I don’t know anything.”
“Hey, neither do I,” 727 says. “We should get outta here though. I don’t wanna get caught by those guys.”
Three whines, “Don’t leave.”
727 frowns, “We gotta go.”
“I can’t go.” The tears are mounting again, her voice breaking. “I don’t have a timeline. I can’t go anywhere.”
727 feels cold. She wasn’t expecting that. It explains a little bit why Three shakes as she does. It staggers her plan of just grabbing her watch out of- wait, where’s her watch? She pats her pockets, alarmed, until she feels her wristguard rattle weirdly. She finds it clasped inside of it like a really big wristwatch. She can’t figure out the mechanism to unlatch it, but more importantly, she doesn’t know how to time travel with someone. She’s seen other time travellers do it! She just… can’t recall off the top of her head how.
Three is touching her wristguard too. The watch inside confirms it for 727- Three is a time traveller. They have some kind of connection beyond that.
“Do you know how we got here?” 727 asks slowly.
“No.” Three murmurs. “I don’t know. I just woke up.”
“Same.” She can’t even recall what she was doing beforehand. It feels like a blur. She knows where her timeline is, and she knows her goal, but she can’t really identify what she was doing earlier today, this week, or even this month. It felt foggy. She wipes at her face with the back of her hand, wincing when her nose tinges in a bad way. It makes uncomfortable tears prick her eyes. “This really sucks.”
“Mhm.” Three sniffles.
A light shines across the parking lot. It flashes along the fence. 727 jolts, lurching forward to grab Three and ending up in a tackle that sends them both to the ground. Three yelps.
“There!” She hears someone yell. “Over there, I see them!”
“Shit!” 727 grabs Three by her arms and physically draws her up to her feet. Three resists, rearing her head back like straying from the light would actually kill her. 727 meshes her lips together and pushes her, forcing her across the road until they’re both sprinting into the woods.
Without any light to guide them, 727 ends up stumbling a lot more than she’d like. There’s a scary shine of lights through the trees that she veers away from. She has her arm hooked underneath Three’s to drag her along, trying to shush Three’s panic. She doesn’t think they get far when she feels something ram hard into her side. She stumbles, leaves and dirt meeting her vision. Her nose explodes with pain. She yelps. Three is mid-wail when she cuts off abruptly as well. It has 727 scrambling, shaking off the grass from her eyes to peer around.
There’s a girl with her face lying on top of her.
She looks dazed and just as confused as her. A shorter time traveller had Three down, hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. They both look wide-eyed and afraid.
“Oh.” The girl on top of her says breathlessly, “You’re not one of them.”
“We have to hide!” The smaller one whispers frantically. “They’re coming!”
727 blinks rapidly, “H-How many of us are there?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was just us two.” Her assailant rolls off her to help her up. “I’m 467. That’s 2825. You guys are-?”
“727. That’s Three over there, she’s not doing so hot.”
467 frowns, “Is she hurt?”
“Guys!” 2825 begs. She’s herding Three towards tree roots in a desperate bid for cover. “Hide!”
467 grabs her shoulder, but she hardly has to help as 727 all but dives for their hiding spot. It’s incredibly cramped in the spot below the tree. Three is huddled to the far back, nearly pressed into 727’s chest from where she meekly curls. 2825 is almost small enough to be able to crouch. She’s perched towards the opening, right beside 467, whose legs are hopelessly tangled with 727’s and Three’s.
“What were they doing to you guys?” 727 whispers.
“I don’t know.” 467 replies, equally as quiet. She keeps shifting and tugging at her vest, uncomfortable with what she’s wearing. She’s eyeing 727 and Three. “I guess we all just have these weird uniforms, huh? I was telling Five that I think they kidnapped us and were totally planning to make us child soldiers.”
Five looks exasperated. “I-I don’t know if that’s what’s happening. We really don’t know.”
“Neither do we.” 727 says. “Were you the ones they were firing at?”
“No way.” 467 says. “That’s way too scary. It’s some other people that dropped in. I think they were time travellers too. Do you think we got caught up in some kind of time traveller mafia war?”
“You’re crazy.”
“It could be so real.”
Five looks like she’d endured many of these types of these conversations already, “What do we do now?”
No one answers. Three is receding meekly in her spot, face pressed against 727’s shoulder and drawing her sleeve over her head as best as she can. 727 worries. She throws her arm around her and tugs her close, watching the outside as distant flashlights pass through the trees.
“We have to go.” Five eventually says.
“But where?”
“Does it matter where? I mean,” Five stutters, “can’t we just go back home? We all have our watch, right?” She’s raising her wristguard pointedly. 467 does the same. 727 glances around, finding every one of them has a golden watch fitted into it.
“I can’t.” 727 utters. “Three doesn’t have a timeline. I can’t leave her.”
467 looks aghast, “What?”
“You guys can go.”
“She can come with us.” Five insists.
“Where? Is it a good idea to stick together?”
467 pipes up, “I think so! What if we just end up getting kidnapped again? Four heads are better than one!”
Three speaks for the first time, her voice swimming with tears, “I don’t want to be here.”
Five wilts, “My timeline. There’s… there’s some creatures I’m taking care of that I'm really worried about. Can we go there?”
“Of course.” 467 says empathetically. “Timeline 2825. Are we set to go?”
There’s a round of murmured agreement. 727 coils her arm tighter around Three. She gets a nod into her shoulder. She knows how to time travel to another timeline, but the wristguard is weird to touch and try to figure out. She has to have 467 lean over to correct where she rests her hand as they both try to figure it out. The minutes are spent in tense silence as they listen to bootfalls outside.
They manage it. Together, in the golden snap of time, they land in a different forest. This one is brighter, the inches of dawn yawning its way through the trees in pinks and golds. 727 feels a sigh escape her, shoulders sagging with relief. She keeps a hand on Three’s shoulder from where the girl clings to her- she can feel Three relaxing as well, for the first time. She was sagging exhaustively against 727’s arm.
“Where are-?” 727 starts to say, but she’s cut off abruptly by 467 suddenly upon her. The girl’s eyes are blown wide with fright as she grabs 727’s shoulders.
“Your face!” 467 cries. “What happened?! Did they hurt you?!”
“What?” 727 worriedly reaches to touch her face, expecting something horrific, but all she feels is her broken nose. She winces, wiping at the dried blood over her lips, “I dunno, I kind of just…woke up? When I was coming to, it was already broken.”
Five is worming her way under 467’s arms, “Can I see it?”
“I’ve never seen a broken nose before.” 467 says.
“Me neither.” 727 says. “What does it look like?”
“Bad.” They both say. Five seemed more stressed about it than 467. With all four of them nearly huddled shoulder to shoulder, 727 felt their concern translate over all of them. Everyone’s gaze kept switching between each other, shaken by their kidnapping.
467 eventually says softly, “We’re okay, right?”
“Mm.” Three makes a weak noise, but it’s an acknowledgement. 727 feels better hearing it.
“But-” Five turns to the woods around them. “I just don’t get it. We should have been at my house, but there’s nothing here.”
“Where do you live?”
“Not in the woods!”
467 stands on her tiptoes, hands over her eyes as she surveys around them, “I mean, there’s a log cabin up ahead.”
“That’s not mine.” Five says.
“This is your timeline, right?”
“It is!” The insinuation that she might have messed up the jump has her trudging ahead towards the cabin, “I-I hope it’s empty. Seven could use something for her nose.”
“I’m fine.” 727 says. When 467 looks back at her with dry amusement, she can’t help but laugh, “Seriously! I’m trying to be heroic here, you know.”
“Three seems to think you’re cool.” 467 teases.
Three, who’d been finding great comfort in treating 727 like a pillow, suddenly ducked her head, an embarrassed hunch to her shoulders. 727 lets her stay there anyway as she moves them forward at a much slower pace, mindful of Three tripping over any exposed tree roots.
The cabin door is locked. Five tries it a few times before giving up, frowning back at them. After a second of deliberation, 467 steps down from the porch to grab a rock.
“What are you doing?” Five asks with alarm.
“We gotta get some help,” 467 implores, “Besides, look at Seven’s face.”
“You guys are being mean,” 727 complains, self-consciously raising her sleeve over her nose.
467 shoots her a winning smile, rears her arm back, then throws the rock directly through the cabin window. Three startles violently at the noise, her face buried against Seven’s side.
“The glass shards are gonna be a problem.” 467 huffs, approaching the window with a wry frown, “I could use the rock, I guess, to try and-”
Unceremoniously, Five grips the bottom of the window and lifts it up. She looks back at them hysterically as shards fall from the open window. 467’s silence is loud. 727 can’t help but laugh.
“We’re so dumb,” she says.
“Hey!” 467 protests. “Anyway, help me boost Three up.”
“You just wanted to break a window,” Five accuses, already hefting herself up and into the cabin. There’s a crunch of glass inside as she lands. “Be careful coming in!”
One by one they crawl in. It’s too dark to see, the rays of dawn only casting a few shreds of light. 467 finds a light switch. They’d ruffled themselves into a living room. There was a large quilt draped over the back of a small couch. A flat round sofa rest. A TV. Further inside, a makeshift kitchenette smelling of wood-smoke and dry leaves. There are two adjoining rooms and a single bathroom. Their exploring ends up with a lot of open cabinets and upturned bedding.
Three spends most of the exploring in a room with all the lights on, nearly crawling her way past the wood sliding door of the closet to hide under a laundry basket. 727 lets her, worried over how secluded she looks on her own. She’s dragged away by 467, who had found a first aid kit under the bathroom sink.
It leaves them in the same bedroom, huddled on the floor as her nose gets tended to. It makes her sniffle loudly, embarrassed and trying to cover up her snot-nosed blood. Her sleeves were starting to look like a massacre.
Five was staring at the wall. Specifically, the picture frames on the walls.
“This is my timeline,” Five says distantly, afraid, “so who is that?”
727 looks. She has to peer around 467, who was also leaning forward. The pictures on the wall depict five women, all of them enjoying the shade near a river. The make of the trees looked similar to the ones outside. 727 recognises them easily. It’s hard not to recognise the features of Myth, of the girls she’s been patiently looking for. They’re just older.
It’s the girl to the side, near the river, shyly trying to hide from the camera. Amelia Watson. An older one, but that’s her.
“What do you mean?” 467 asks. “Wait, if this is here, this can’t be your timeline.”
“It is!” Five insists desperately. “It absolutely is! It just hiccuped, I think, there’s no way it’s wrong.”
“Okay.” 467 says doubtfully. “But how do we explain the picture?”
“I don’t know!”
“You don’t have to yell!”
727 grimaces, “I don’t really get it either. Maybe you can try again? Just to see where it sends us. Maybe you weren’t looking.” It sounded ludicrous. Not looking. Five looked deeply offended by it. She was straightening up, her annoyance turning into determination. She pressed her hand to the watch on her gauntlet and disappeared.
467 looks back at her helplessly. A second passes before Five reappears, wild-eyed, her legs buckling to the carpet.
“The same spot,” 467 rasps, “There’s no doubt, okay?! This is it! I went back to the same spot! This is absolutely supposed to be my house! What happened?!”
“Calm down!” 467 twists her body to face Five, her hands raised in surrender, “Something weird happened to us back there, I think. Remember, they were talking about injections, right? Maybe it messed with our time travel.”
727 startles at that, her heart suddenly in her ears. My watch…? She holds her gauntlet closer to her stomach, a little nervous.
467 continues patiently, “Let's rest here for a bit, but then I’ll take a swing at it, okay? If no one's here, we should really keep moving until we can find protection.”
“Who will that be?” Five asks warily.
“Hopefully someone from Wattropolis.” 467 says, “We’ll try my timeline next.”
“Okay…” Five didn’t look happy at that. She was staring hard at the picture frames on the wall, an agitation that wouldn’t calm even once 467 was finished tending to 727 and had moved over to occupy her with cards she’d found in one of the cabinets.
727 crawled back on the floor to the closet. She opened it a crack. Even under a laundry basket, Three was easy to spot, a dark shadow meeting her gaze tiredly.
“You should take a nap for a bit,” 727 supplies quietly, “we gotta go soon, but you look really tired.”
"I can’t,” Three croaks.
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
727 sits helplessly. Three had turned away, face buried into her sleeves. With nothing to say to help, 727 stayed vigilant by the closet, unable to help herself from glancing back inside whenever she could.
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