teaic | (no subject)

WHO: ~~Eleanor Hamilton~~ Nellie Dawson and Cash Whitaker
WHERE: The Titanic, some road in Lincolnshire Wolds, TEA Base
WHEN: 1912, 2018, 2020
WHAT: Cash and Nellie through the years, pt 1, featuring two near death experiences and the Oregon Trail
WARNINGS: A sinking ship, Rachael and Ari back at it

For a moment as Eleanor Hamilton stared through where a man had been but a moment before she thought she had lost her mind. It would not have been the first time her imagination had run away with her, dreams of what she would do once the voyage was completed and part of her family was reunited in New York had danced through her mind through the days staring out at the placid ocean waters of the Atlantic, had been shared with the mysterious man who had warned here mere hours before to go to the deck when you’re told, Eleanor, the trust she had felt in him implicit and yet now shattered with his disappearance.

And yet, she had no choice to believe what Samuel Warren had told her to be true.

The scrape of something large, something devastating meeting the great ship’s hull rang out suddenly, all anger fleeing as it gave way to fear.

It’ll hit an iceberg, and it will sink– get on the first lifeboat you see, or–

“H– how– what was that?”

“An ice cube just put a big fucking hole in the side of the boat,” a resigned voice said from behind the blonde woman, a rough hand wiping the sweat off his brow, “ice beats steel every time.”

Cash Whitaker detested large bodies of water on a good day. Cowboys were meant for wide, open spaces with firm, solid ground beneath their feet, not wide open spaces with the rocking surface of a boat that just got impaled by an ice sculpture beneath his boots.

On April 14, 1912, Cash Whitaker fucking loathed larger bodies of frigid, Atlantic water that would suck the ‘unsinkable’ ship to the bottom of the ocean. Even if he wasn’t a betting man (or from the future, but that was small peanuts), he would have bet that taunting Mother Nature with that superlative would unquestionably end in disaster.

One didn’t spit into the wind and not get wet after all.

So here he was. On a sinking ship. In the middle of the Atlantic. With a woman.

The ship has to sink, he had been told.

Well, he thought as he peered up at the stars to give the woman a moment to process, mission fucking accomplished.

“No.”

He could have given her years to process and she would have been just as hopelessly lost. The inky sky above provided no help in regard, nor did the phantom screech of metal against ice still ringing in her skull. Whatever spell had cast their section of the deck in silence gave way to a frenzy as crew members began to materialize from nowhere, their voices pitched low, assurances that everything is well, miss given before disappearing again.

“No, not the–” How disarming this whole situation was, she thought when she began to pace, waving a cautious hand through the space the man she’d been spending the voyage alongside had occupied. “What are you?” she clarified, hands curling around the railing and rising onto the balls of her feet to look into the depths below. She shivered at the icy wind that rose up to meet her, taking a large step back. “What was he?”

“I’m a cowboy.”

It wasn’t that far off from the truth, and the sooner they were gone the better. He wrangled time instead of cows these days, but there wasn’t enough of that left to explain right now.

Cash pulled at the collar of his shirt, uncomfortable in the starched uniform costuming had presented him with. He knew he should rely on his training and on what he had felt when this timeline shit had all been explained to him, but he had been too out of his mind with pain and whisky to even try to remember what the wrangler who had rescued him had said.

Honesty was the best policy when all else failed.

“Most of these people will be dead in a few hours,” he said quietly, bluntly, not trying too hard to hold onto the mid-Atlantic accent that he had adopted over the past few days, “so you can either trust me or meet the same fate as your beau there.”

Most of these people will be dead in a few hours.

It had to be shock that was keeping her irritation from flaring at the cavalier manner he’d delivered the options at her disposal, and while she cared about the man who had just disappeared, his life was no more important than anyone else’s on this ship, and if that was true and so many of them were going to die, then surely the right thing to do was warn others— to ensure they didn’t go down with it.

“They won't listen to you,” he said as he caught the way her gaze darted to the other people milling about the deck as they tried to get a view of what had interrupted their evening.

“I d— my brother is on the ship.” She had departed from him without a second glance as he dropped her at their cabin with a don't cause too much trouble, Nell before he went to play cards, hadn’t bothered to say anything at all as she waved him off with a roll of her eyes, but— “I cannot leave him here to d-” Her teeth were chattering, the frigid night air sinking down to her bones. “To die.”

“Do you want to die?” Cash asked as he glanced around for his partner, his finger hovering over his ear as if anticipating the communication he would undoubtedly get to hurry his ass up so he didn’t cause an anomaly in the timeline by going to find the man who was doomed to go down with the ship. It was a shit hand, but it wasn’t his job to try to change the timeline like her beau had.

“No, but—”

“Your partner ain’t coming back.”

“My god, I met him two days ago!” The man from— and this was truly a ridiculous thought— the alleged future’s wellbeing could not be her responsibility, and though she didn’t wish death on anyone, there was a simple truth she couldn’t deny.

“I do not care about anyone on this ship but William,” she managed, damp eyes shining with unshed tears as she flattened the locket around her neck against her collarbone. She could only pray that he was not deep in the bowels of the ship, that the warning she had received to get on a lifeboat would now be a wish she sent in her brother’s direction to come true as she put her life in this strangely accented man’s hands. “Will he—?” No, she could not make herself ask, nor could this man know.

William would forgive her. She would make herself believe it someday if she could not today.

“I’ll go.”

“Easy,” Cash exhaled under his breath as the car lurched to the right, teetering dangerously close to the row of hedges that hid the base from prying eyes. His fingers curled as if he was tightening his grip on the reins to gain control of an unbroken horse as he snuck a glance at the woman behind the wheel.

In hindsight, perhaps teaching Nellie how to drive wasn’t his brightest idea. It had seemed like a good idea at the time — he had found some comfort in things that weren’t too different from things he had in his own time when he had gone through his assimilation course — but he was beginning to think they were on the back of a bronco than in a Peugeot.

“Didn’t y’all have cars?” he asked, an easy smile curling his lips as the car shuddered to a stop.

“I did not drive them,” she said testily, her foot pressing on the brake as though it was possible to stop more despite the fact that they had come to a complete halt on the gravel, “and I had only been a passenger a handful of times.”

Carefully, she eased off the pedal, brows knitting together worriedly as she tilted the wheel to the left to get them back on course. “I don’t recall them moving this easily, either. It seems to me that something so large and dangerous should be a bit more work to ste— oh, damn it all—” There her foot went again, hard against the brake to keep from drifting into the opposite lane. “It’s dreadful.”

“You have to sweet talk it, duchess,” Cash wheezed as the seat belt snapped against his sternum as the car fishtailed back into the left lane, “no different than handling a skittish colt.”

“It doesn’t have ears.” She glared, first at the wheel, then him.

“I know I’m pretty, sunshine, but eyes on the road,” he directed with a shit eating grin.

The gravel in front of her received her next glare, face flushing. “Maybe it’s that you aren’t a good teacher. Have you ever taught anyone to do this before?”

“I’m a perfectly fine teacher,” he said with a shrug, glancing back down at where her hands were white knuckling the steering wheel as they puttered down the road.

“So that is a ‘no,’” she huffed, squeezing the wheel as though she was apologizing to it for her ineptitude.

“You just gotta trust you can do what I’m sayin’.”

“The last time I trusted you, I ended up in an entirely new century.”

Her comment pulled a laugh from the cowboy as he ran a hand through his shaggy hair, keeping his commentary that he just saw a snail pass them to himself as Nellie kept the car on a more or less straight path.

“I didn’t let you die then,” he pointed out, pointing at the stop sign ahead so they didn’t inevitably get flattened by a lorry (unnecessary, as her foot had already found the brake again and they jolted to a stop), “and I sure as hell ain’t gonna let you die now.”

“Yes, well, if we make it back to the garage in one piece, I might die of shock regardless,” Nellie grumbled, checking her mirrors to ensure no one was being held up by her, “and then you’ll truly rue the day you met me.”

Cash slid his sunglasses over his eyes as the clouds parted, carefully easily himself back into his seat as his large hand hovered over the emergency parking brake. He trusted her, but no sense in wasting a good contingency plan.

“Nah, sunshine,” he said, “I’m as stubborn as the day is long, so it’ll take more than this joyride to make me rue that.”

The door to the crying cupboard clicked shut behind Cash, the heel of his hand pressed into his eye socket to rid the sleep from his gaze. The twenty-first century was still overwhelming all these years later for the cowboy — too loud, too fast, too crowded — and the cupboards were the perfect place for a soft reset instead of going into the temporal decompression room. Plus, the acclimation aromatherapy lately had been making him sneeze.

Perhaps it was time for a vacation, he thought as he ambled into the game room, but that was quickly pushed aside. A smile hitched up the corner of his lips as he spotted a familiar head of blonde hair, and he sprawled in the chair next to her before she could shoo him away.

“Hey, duchess,” he drawled, “fancy seeing you up here.”

Nellie Dawson, newly 26, didn’t bother disguising her groan as she straightened in her seat, all attempts at relaxing dissipating with the low sound of his greeting. While she wasn’t one to constantly mope about her circumstances, there was something about mid-April (truly, it was a mystery) that grated on the thin layer of her patience that shielded others from the worst of herself.

“The crying cupboard was occupied,” she said dryly, briefly touching her knuckle to the corner of her eye. “This was a last resort.”

“’s free now,” he offered, the chair groaning as he shifted to pull a clean bandana from his back pocket. He offered it to her without a comment about the glassy sheen to her eyes, keeping his gaze forward and his tone light as he prompted, “softer than one of those wads of cheap cotton.”

“I don’t need it now.” She did, however, accept brightly colored fabric regardless of her claim, weaving it between her fingers briefly before she gave it a tug and let it go, letting it flutter to her lap.

“Course not,” he chuckled, head dropping back as he felt a yawn coming on.

“There’s…..whatever this is on.” With that, she leaned forward, squinting at the computer game hooked up to the projector. It was easy to recognize a wagon and axles, less obvious to distinguish a group in pixelated gear, but it was the bad news of dysentery infecting the travelers that made her stand, crossing to the abandoned laptop that proudly proclaimed—

The Oregon Trail.

“Did you travel this?”

“Travel what?” he managed through his yawn. He scrubbed at his cheeks before pulling his head forward, scanning the screen to try and make sense of the images swimming in front of him.

“Huh.”

He could make out the familiar shape of a wagon, and it was almost as if he could hear the way the wind snapped the canvas or smell the dust churned by countless wheels hanging in the air. It still felt like yesterday even though it was over a century in the past, and he felt a pang of homesickness at the cartoon version of his life.

“Damn near killed me,” he shared after a moment, heaving himself out of his chair to get a better look.

She had known, in the absent sort of way, that she was not the only person to be pulled from their time. There weren’t many of them, the circumstances of pulling a person from their timeline reiterated as something unusual, a last resort. Most often she avoided all thought of her own displacement— wondering about another’s seemed uncouth at the very least.

Now, however, she was studying what she knew to be a truly ancient piece of technology by 2021 with a person who had lived during the time period portrayed on the screen, and she did feel a bit curious.

Likely because he had offered her a lifeline rather than having her meet her death, but curiosity was curiosity.

“Surely not dysentery?” she asked, idly winding the borrowed bandana around her fingers.

Cash scoffed, leaning his weight into his palms as he braced himself against the table. He didn’t talk much these days about his past, knowing his slow drawl and impatience with technology made it pretty damn evident that he wasn’t from around these parts. Assimilation had been an unsettling pain in the ass, but at least he wasn’t dust on the wind.

“No shit,” he confirmed, gesturing for her to start the game, “takes more than a few of those germs to kill me.”

“A rattlesnake bite would be much more of a story.” She shifted her weight between her feet as he snorted, unsure whether to do as he bade or not. There was plenty of reason not to— however outdated this technology was, it could bring up things that were better left behind— but she slid onto the stool and tapped at the keys to bring the screen back to life. “What were you hoping to find?”

He was uncharacteristically pensive as he half watched her navigate the prompts on the screen, half reflected inward to a time where things were both simpler and infinitely more complicated. Where a rattlesnake bite could have been an immediate death sentence but one got to watch the sun crest the mountains every morning, where you typically worked the land until you died unless you risked it all to travel west.

“I don’t know,” he vaguely dismissed, pulling up a stool to perch on so he wasn’t looming over her, “what everyone else was, I suppose. Freedom, riches, air clear of five hundred Whitakers’ or politician’s bullshittin’.”

“Yes, I can imagine countless numbers fled from the cacophony of the Whitaker homestead and their ridiculousness,” she mused, the dry tone of her words betrayed slightly by the corner of her mouth lifting.

“Imagine, you’re stuck with the quiet one,” he teased, shoulder pressing into hers as he watched.

“A truly daunting thought.” She made her selections in the shop quickly, not thinking too much about how logical her wagon’s load was before it departed from Independence. “Instead you’ve been inundated with more noise and ceaseless advertisements to subscribe to satellite radio.”

“Still don’t understand how that shit works,” he confessed, crossing his arms over his chest as the wagon took off towards the west. He was a tactile man, so if he couldn’t see or feel the ‘waves’ or ‘frequencies’ Innovators had droned on about then it was nothing short of magic to him to make it work.

“Independence was a big city to me,” he shared, trying to figure out how much of his past he had shared with her and realizing it wasn’t much

“In possibility or size?” There was a difference, Nell had found over time, between feeling as though the world was at one’s feet and there actually being a possibility to change one’s life. In London, it had been both: a hub for education and both arrivals and departures in her own day; a tradition that seemed to have stood the test of time over a century later.

“Both, and they gouged the fire out of everythin’ just like they did in this game.”

“I’m sure that’s just good business acumen. It’s not as though anyone departing would have had much to counter with.”

“Nah, just dreams and a horse,” he said, raking his hand through his sandy hair. It has been hard to leave Whitaker Ranch and his family behind, but he knew there was a difference between living and having a life. He could have settled and had a life working the land he knew better than the back of his hand alongside his brothers and sisters and maybe having a family of his own, but as wide open as the plains had been, they had been limiting as well. There wasn’t a chance to live there. Not with all the turmoil brewing on the horizon.

“What’s goin’ on here?” he asked as the screen flashed, a notification popping up.

“I’m not sure.” Nellie leaned in, squinting down at the screen as she mouthed the message that had appeared whilst reading it. “How does the party have dysentery already— we’ve only just left?!”

“Did you forget a doc, duchess?” He asked, laughter ringing in the space between them.

Any protest that she had taken what was assigned to her was ignored, her own laugh hidden behind her palm as she dutifully continued on until each member of her party sadly succumbed. “This was not built to test me to begin with,” she huffed as the final tombstone appeared miles and miles off from her intended destination. “I already appreciate history.”

He hummed his approval with a sly smile, arms crossing over his chest as he assured her, “The world won’t end if I’m better than you at somethin’, sunshine.”

“We should not test it,” she scoffed, stubbornly starting the game over. “Heaven forbid.”