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CHARACTERS: Marisol and Theo
WHAT: Theo seduces Marisol into a life of crime (or something)
WHEN: 2017~
WHERE: Their place in Cali
The bracelet in his hand held the weight of a loaded gun.
It was also the only hope he had of convincing Marisol he wasn’t fucking with her without a lengthy ‘conversation’. Not that he could blame her for not believing him on this; time travel was a hard sell without proof.
His footsteps echoed faintly against the linoleum of their kitchen floor, fading in with the hum of the AC and the sporadic clunk of the ever-struggling ice maker. The mundane sounds beat against the unsteady thrum of his racing pulse, prompting his eyes to fall to the bracelet and its twin on his wrist every few seconds, as if to confirm that they hadn’t vanished like the haze of lights in the desert as you approached them.
Every time he looked, they remained. They were real, and if they were real, so was the unbelievable truth that time wasn’t as linear as the general public assumed, and if that was true… maybe there was a chance that they could change things for Marisol.
“In here,” Marisol hollered from the couch at the sound of footsteps in the apartment. Exhausted and having only been home for twenty minutes from her last shift, she still summoned a smile easily when Theo walked into the room. It was gone just as quickly as it came, eyebrows knit together as she took him in. “All good?”
“Yeah,” he said quickly, a smile crossing his face, and his shoulders dropped slightly as the sight of her instinctively relaxed him. He crossed the small room in a few loping steps, sinking into the couch beside her.
“Yeah, just had an interesting chat with Sammy.” He draped his arm around her shoulder, pulling Marisol in closer and doing his best to ignore the way the bracelet he wore seemed to catch the light.
“An interesting chat,” Marisol repeated, prompting, as she relaxed into him. “Has he quit his job to be booed off stage at the comedy club on a more regular basis?”
“Something like that,” Theo said dryly, clearing his throat before continuing, “You're going to think I'm insane, but try to remember that you love me and I'm way better at bullshitting than this, okay?”
Marisol raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
Nothing for it but to rip off the band-aid. “Sammy doesn’t work in marketing for that museum. He-” Theo risked a glance out of the corner of his eye at his wife, grimacing apologetically at her preemptively. “He’s, well, he’s time traveling.” He lifted his left wrist to draw her attention to the bracelet he wore, then dropped the second, identical bracelet in her lap. “And I know you’re never going to believe me because it sounds like I went and hung out at Joshua Tree, so we’re going to go on a little trip together.”
After staring at him for a few moments, she shook her head. “A trip does sound exactly like what you’re on,” Marisol agreed, though her expression was equal parts concern and a clear expectation that this was some kind of odd gotcha prank moment. “But sure, I’ll humor you.”
The bracelet looked nice, but there was nothing that out of the ordinary about it. “Time travel requires matching jewelry?” She joked, thumb tracing the bracelet that hung on his own wrist. “You’ve either lost your mind, you’re high as fuck, or this is the weirdest fucking date night you’ve ever planned.” None of these options included time travel is real as a possibility.
“You can’t time travel without a date,” he said with a laugh that was more than half groan. He scrubbed his hand over his face, then slid his arm back out from behind her to take her wrist and put the bracelet on. “You trust me, right? Because this is about to get weird but I promise there’s a point to all of it.”
“Oh, it’s already weird." A beat. “I trust you.” Another beat. “Don’t know if I trust that you haven’t lost your mind, but I do trust you.”
“That’s good enough for me.” They’d both find out if he’d gone over the cuckoo’s nest in short order; he wasn’t willing to bet his life on the fact he hadn’t. With a grin that could have been more reassuring, he reached for his bracelet with his opposite hand, while touching hers with his bracleted one simultaneously.
The pull was instant. It bordered on the edge of uncomfortable, a sharp tug that centered at the navel. Theo had felt it earlier when Sammy’d done this to him, and he was mildly displeased to learn it wasn’t better a second time round.
Of course, there wasn’t much time to concentrate on the feeling as the world spun around them at a dizzying speed. They might have been sitting on the couch, but when everything finally stilled, they were launched forward onto their feet. Theo had just enough awareness to steady himself and keep his grip on Marisol to help her do the same.
They were outside. The cool bite of the air around them hinted that it wasn’t the same summer day they’d been living out only seconds earlier, and Theo quickly pulled them behind the cover of a tree.
“How you feeling?” His eyes scanned her to make sure he wasn’t in the direct path of her blowing chunks. “Alright?”
“No.” That was all Marisol could manage at that moment. Her brain scrambled to make sense of any of it. She’d been inside moments earlier. Talking to a crazy man, sure, but inside. Not outside. Not… whatever this was. Time travel, according to Theo. Teleportation, at a minimum, though that was an insane thought to even think.
“How?” Truthfully, it was convenient that Theo was supporting her, as her legs had perhaps turned to jelly. “How—this isn’t possible.” Even if she discredited the idea that they had time traveled, it didn’t make sense that they were now outside. Not even near their apartment.
While she certainly looked a little green around the gills, Marisol didn’t seem to be at immediate risk of throwing up, allowing Theo to pull her in closer and rub his hand in small circles on her back. “I didn’t get the technical stuff,” he said with a sheepish shrug of his shoulders. “Sam didn’t try all that hard to explain that– he probably doesn’t get it himself.” His best friend was a nerd, sure, but he was the sort of nerd who knew all the signers of the Magna Carta, not the type to explain interdimensional travel or whatever the fuck they’d just done.
“I just know it works.” Movement out of the corner of his eye prompted him to look away from his wife to look at… his wife again, but in the distance and standing beside himself as he set down a blanket on the ground. He gave a tilt of his head to get Marisol to follow his gaze. “See?”
“What the fuck. What the—what the fuck.” Pulling back from peering around the tree, Marisol leaned back against the tree trunk. “What the fuck, Theo.” Her thumb jerked back in the direction of them. “This isn’t possible.” After a moment, she resorted to taking a couple of deep breaths in an attempt to calm herself.
“In the movies, you’re never allowed to be in the same place as… yourself.” Did it make sense to rely on the logic of movies? Maybe not, but it was all Marisol had to pull from. “I can’t believe I just fucking said that. This can’t be real. I’m dreaming or I’ve lost my mind or I’ve accidentally dosed myself with hallucinogens.”
Her reaction was so similar to his own a few hours ago (or, maybe the reaction he’d have in the distant future, if they were going off their current physical location) that he had to bite back a smile. “We do keep all those shrooms in the house, so…” His teasing tone faded just as quickly as it came. He loved to fuck around as much as the next guy, but seeing his wife in genuine alarm that was damn near ready to bleed into panic wasn’t something he enjoyed.
Theo placed his hands on her shoulders, ducking his head slightly to catch her eyes. “Hey, I’m sorry I dumped this on you. I know it’s a lot. I almost shit myself when Sammy showed me, but if I was able to wrap my head around it, I know you can. This is real. We’re in the past, and yeah, we really shouldn’t let ourselves see us. I thought about taking us to like, old LA when it was being built, but figured we’d stick out too much.” He lifted his right hand to run through his hair, gesturing helplessly afterward. “This was the next best thing to make you realize I was telling the truth.”
“It’s fine.” A beat, as she considered whether that was true or not. “It’s fine. I just need a second.” The thought of herself — and him, but not him — in the distance flicked back into her mind and she shook her head. “Maybe that second shouldn’t be here. How—take us home, Theo.” Not easily thrown for a loop, Marisol felt deeply out of her element.
Not needing to be told twice, Theo moved to wrap his arm around her to hold her steady, then pressed both of their bracelets again. When the world stopped moving in a bright, vivid, chaotic symphony, they found themselves back inside their living room.
He cocked an eyebrow, looking over to Marisol. “Believe me now?”
“Until I wake up from this dream, yes.” A joke. Kind of. “I think it’s going to take me a minute to wrap my head around it, but… I believe you.” Studying the bracelet on her wrist, she tilted it from side to side as if that would unlock understanding. “How far back can you go? Or—wait. Forward?”
He kept his arm around her; less now because he worried she might fall and more because it felt wrong to be disconnected from her as they shared this surreal moment together. “All the way back, I think. And forward yeah, but there’s something about that being more dangerous, somehow.” Sam had laid out a quickfire batch of rules, the majority of which had gone in one ear and out the other as his mind had been churning through the implications of time travel.
“You can even change things, in the past.” Theo’s eyes cut over to Marisol, watching for her reaction to this. “That happened, I mean. I don’t think it’s easy, but it can be done.”
“You can change things?” Her brows furrowed as she let that turn over in her head a few times. “As far back as you want?” It was chump change, really, to go back in time just a couple of decades from the sound of it. “So,” Marisol mulled it over, without actually broaching the actual subject head on. “We could buy a winning lotto ticket and hand it off to someone in the past and it’d change their lives?”
“Babe, if we’re giving anyone the winning lotto numbers, it better be us.” His hand rubbed against her back as he joked. He wasn’t about to press her into facing what they were both thinking. If there was anything they had, it was time. “Be realistic.”
Marisol cocked an eyebrow, pulling him down onto the couch with her. “What, you didn’t dream of being Robinhood as a kid?” A beat. “Although, I guess I’d have to check who I’d be stealing the money from first.”
He flopped down with her, leaning back to plop his head in her lap with a sigh. “I can’t believe you’d bring that up when you know my sexual awakening was Maid Marian in the Disney movie.” Catching her hand and bringing it to rest on his chest, he continued in a more serious tone, “Do you wanna talk about it? Or are we pretending it’s not there?”
“It feels too impossible to put into words,” Marisol settled on after a long moment, thumb rubbing over the fabric of his shirt. “Like — if I say it, I’ll realize how stupid it is to think it’s even possible.”
“Why would it be stupid?” Theo asked in a gentle voice. “We can right bigger wrongs than winning lotto tickets, babe.” He brought her hand up to his mouth to kiss, almost absent in the movement. “And I can’t think of a bigger wrong than the one that took your family away.”
“It’s just hard to believe that something like that is even possible. Even if we did just—“ Her free hand waved vaguely in an attempt to indicate traveled through time. “But I suppose if we can do that, there’s no reason that we couldn’t.”
“We’ve got all of time and… space?” His voice went up in pitch, his face screwing up in uncertainty as he tilted it back to look up at hers, capping the thought with a shrug before continuing, “to play around in. We can get a feel for how things work before we jump into anything too serious. Sam was saying there was good money in it, if you know where to look.”
“It’d be good to get a feel for time travel before it’s so… crucial.” A beat. “Good money, huh?”
“Good money,” Theo repeated. “I invited him over for dinner tomorrow. Figured we could pump him for deets before making any firm choices.”
“I would’ve just said yes,” Marisol admitted, running her fingers through his hair. “But asking questions first is better.”
“That’s what you’ve got me for. I’m the sensible one.”
“So sensible.” Teasingly, with a tug against his hair. “God. Today feels unreal.”
“No kidding,” his voice trails off, his eyes falling from her face to stare up at the ceiling. A part of him– a small part, but a part of him all the same– had thought that maybe he’d lost his shit, or that his buddy was playing some sort of fucked up trick on him. There had been something… almost comforting in that. In sticking with the laws of reality as he’d always believed them to be, rather than…. whatever they were now.
Theo’s eyes moved back to Marisol’s face, his mouth pulling up into a smirk as he raised his eyebrows expectantly. “I’ve always thought that making out a little helps ground me. Wanna try?” New laws of time or not, some things were exactly the same as they’d been yesterday.
“Mhm. I wouldn’t mind not thinking.” Her mind was a little too scrambled by time travel to actually be much use thinking. “And you always make it easy to forget everything else.”
“Thinking is vastly overrated,” he agreed, sitting up and pulling her back down with him in one motion. “I’ve always thought that.”
WHAT: Theo seduces Marisol into a life of crime (or something)
WHEN: 2017~
WHERE: Their place in Cali
The bracelet in his hand held the weight of a loaded gun.
It was also the only hope he had of convincing Marisol he wasn’t fucking with her without a lengthy ‘conversation’. Not that he could blame her for not believing him on this; time travel was a hard sell without proof.
His footsteps echoed faintly against the linoleum of their kitchen floor, fading in with the hum of the AC and the sporadic clunk of the ever-struggling ice maker. The mundane sounds beat against the unsteady thrum of his racing pulse, prompting his eyes to fall to the bracelet and its twin on his wrist every few seconds, as if to confirm that they hadn’t vanished like the haze of lights in the desert as you approached them.
Every time he looked, they remained. They were real, and if they were real, so was the unbelievable truth that time wasn’t as linear as the general public assumed, and if that was true… maybe there was a chance that they could change things for Marisol.
“In here,” Marisol hollered from the couch at the sound of footsteps in the apartment. Exhausted and having only been home for twenty minutes from her last shift, she still summoned a smile easily when Theo walked into the room. It was gone just as quickly as it came, eyebrows knit together as she took him in. “All good?”
“Yeah,” he said quickly, a smile crossing his face, and his shoulders dropped slightly as the sight of her instinctively relaxed him. He crossed the small room in a few loping steps, sinking into the couch beside her.
“Yeah, just had an interesting chat with Sammy.” He draped his arm around her shoulder, pulling Marisol in closer and doing his best to ignore the way the bracelet he wore seemed to catch the light.
“An interesting chat,” Marisol repeated, prompting, as she relaxed into him. “Has he quit his job to be booed off stage at the comedy club on a more regular basis?”
“Something like that,” Theo said dryly, clearing his throat before continuing, “You're going to think I'm insane, but try to remember that you love me and I'm way better at bullshitting than this, okay?”
Marisol raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
Nothing for it but to rip off the band-aid. “Sammy doesn’t work in marketing for that museum. He-” Theo risked a glance out of the corner of his eye at his wife, grimacing apologetically at her preemptively. “He’s, well, he’s time traveling.” He lifted his left wrist to draw her attention to the bracelet he wore, then dropped the second, identical bracelet in her lap. “And I know you’re never going to believe me because it sounds like I went and hung out at Joshua Tree, so we’re going to go on a little trip together.”
After staring at him for a few moments, she shook her head. “A trip does sound exactly like what you’re on,” Marisol agreed, though her expression was equal parts concern and a clear expectation that this was some kind of odd gotcha prank moment. “But sure, I’ll humor you.”
The bracelet looked nice, but there was nothing that out of the ordinary about it. “Time travel requires matching jewelry?” She joked, thumb tracing the bracelet that hung on his own wrist. “You’ve either lost your mind, you’re high as fuck, or this is the weirdest fucking date night you’ve ever planned.” None of these options included time travel is real as a possibility.
“You can’t time travel without a date,” he said with a laugh that was more than half groan. He scrubbed his hand over his face, then slid his arm back out from behind her to take her wrist and put the bracelet on. “You trust me, right? Because this is about to get weird but I promise there’s a point to all of it.”
“Oh, it’s already weird." A beat. “I trust you.” Another beat. “Don’t know if I trust that you haven’t lost your mind, but I do trust you.”
“That’s good enough for me.” They’d both find out if he’d gone over the cuckoo’s nest in short order; he wasn’t willing to bet his life on the fact he hadn’t. With a grin that could have been more reassuring, he reached for his bracelet with his opposite hand, while touching hers with his bracleted one simultaneously.
The pull was instant. It bordered on the edge of uncomfortable, a sharp tug that centered at the navel. Theo had felt it earlier when Sammy’d done this to him, and he was mildly displeased to learn it wasn’t better a second time round.
Of course, there wasn’t much time to concentrate on the feeling as the world spun around them at a dizzying speed. They might have been sitting on the couch, but when everything finally stilled, they were launched forward onto their feet. Theo had just enough awareness to steady himself and keep his grip on Marisol to help her do the same.
They were outside. The cool bite of the air around them hinted that it wasn’t the same summer day they’d been living out only seconds earlier, and Theo quickly pulled them behind the cover of a tree.
“How you feeling?” His eyes scanned her to make sure he wasn’t in the direct path of her blowing chunks. “Alright?”
“No.” That was all Marisol could manage at that moment. Her brain scrambled to make sense of any of it. She’d been inside moments earlier. Talking to a crazy man, sure, but inside. Not outside. Not… whatever this was. Time travel, according to Theo. Teleportation, at a minimum, though that was an insane thought to even think.
“How?” Truthfully, it was convenient that Theo was supporting her, as her legs had perhaps turned to jelly. “How—this isn’t possible.” Even if she discredited the idea that they had time traveled, it didn’t make sense that they were now outside. Not even near their apartment.
While she certainly looked a little green around the gills, Marisol didn’t seem to be at immediate risk of throwing up, allowing Theo to pull her in closer and rub his hand in small circles on her back. “I didn’t get the technical stuff,” he said with a sheepish shrug of his shoulders. “Sam didn’t try all that hard to explain that– he probably doesn’t get it himself.” His best friend was a nerd, sure, but he was the sort of nerd who knew all the signers of the Magna Carta, not the type to explain interdimensional travel or whatever the fuck they’d just done.
“I just know it works.” Movement out of the corner of his eye prompted him to look away from his wife to look at… his wife again, but in the distance and standing beside himself as he set down a blanket on the ground. He gave a tilt of his head to get Marisol to follow his gaze. “See?”
“What the fuck. What the—what the fuck.” Pulling back from peering around the tree, Marisol leaned back against the tree trunk. “What the fuck, Theo.” Her thumb jerked back in the direction of them. “This isn’t possible.” After a moment, she resorted to taking a couple of deep breaths in an attempt to calm herself.
“In the movies, you’re never allowed to be in the same place as… yourself.” Did it make sense to rely on the logic of movies? Maybe not, but it was all Marisol had to pull from. “I can’t believe I just fucking said that. This can’t be real. I’m dreaming or I’ve lost my mind or I’ve accidentally dosed myself with hallucinogens.”
Her reaction was so similar to his own a few hours ago (or, maybe the reaction he’d have in the distant future, if they were going off their current physical location) that he had to bite back a smile. “We do keep all those shrooms in the house, so…” His teasing tone faded just as quickly as it came. He loved to fuck around as much as the next guy, but seeing his wife in genuine alarm that was damn near ready to bleed into panic wasn’t something he enjoyed.
Theo placed his hands on her shoulders, ducking his head slightly to catch her eyes. “Hey, I’m sorry I dumped this on you. I know it’s a lot. I almost shit myself when Sammy showed me, but if I was able to wrap my head around it, I know you can. This is real. We’re in the past, and yeah, we really shouldn’t let ourselves see us. I thought about taking us to like, old LA when it was being built, but figured we’d stick out too much.” He lifted his right hand to run through his hair, gesturing helplessly afterward. “This was the next best thing to make you realize I was telling the truth.”
“It’s fine.” A beat, as she considered whether that was true or not. “It’s fine. I just need a second.” The thought of herself — and him, but not him — in the distance flicked back into her mind and she shook her head. “Maybe that second shouldn’t be here. How—take us home, Theo.” Not easily thrown for a loop, Marisol felt deeply out of her element.
Not needing to be told twice, Theo moved to wrap his arm around her to hold her steady, then pressed both of their bracelets again. When the world stopped moving in a bright, vivid, chaotic symphony, they found themselves back inside their living room.
He cocked an eyebrow, looking over to Marisol. “Believe me now?”
“Until I wake up from this dream, yes.” A joke. Kind of. “I think it’s going to take me a minute to wrap my head around it, but… I believe you.” Studying the bracelet on her wrist, she tilted it from side to side as if that would unlock understanding. “How far back can you go? Or—wait. Forward?”
He kept his arm around her; less now because he worried she might fall and more because it felt wrong to be disconnected from her as they shared this surreal moment together. “All the way back, I think. And forward yeah, but there’s something about that being more dangerous, somehow.” Sam had laid out a quickfire batch of rules, the majority of which had gone in one ear and out the other as his mind had been churning through the implications of time travel.
“You can even change things, in the past.” Theo’s eyes cut over to Marisol, watching for her reaction to this. “That happened, I mean. I don’t think it’s easy, but it can be done.”
“You can change things?” Her brows furrowed as she let that turn over in her head a few times. “As far back as you want?” It was chump change, really, to go back in time just a couple of decades from the sound of it. “So,” Marisol mulled it over, without actually broaching the actual subject head on. “We could buy a winning lotto ticket and hand it off to someone in the past and it’d change their lives?”
“Babe, if we’re giving anyone the winning lotto numbers, it better be us.” His hand rubbed against her back as he joked. He wasn’t about to press her into facing what they were both thinking. If there was anything they had, it was time. “Be realistic.”
Marisol cocked an eyebrow, pulling him down onto the couch with her. “What, you didn’t dream of being Robinhood as a kid?” A beat. “Although, I guess I’d have to check who I’d be stealing the money from first.”
He flopped down with her, leaning back to plop his head in her lap with a sigh. “I can’t believe you’d bring that up when you know my sexual awakening was Maid Marian in the Disney movie.” Catching her hand and bringing it to rest on his chest, he continued in a more serious tone, “Do you wanna talk about it? Or are we pretending it’s not there?”
“It feels too impossible to put into words,” Marisol settled on after a long moment, thumb rubbing over the fabric of his shirt. “Like — if I say it, I’ll realize how stupid it is to think it’s even possible.”
“Why would it be stupid?” Theo asked in a gentle voice. “We can right bigger wrongs than winning lotto tickets, babe.” He brought her hand up to his mouth to kiss, almost absent in the movement. “And I can’t think of a bigger wrong than the one that took your family away.”
“It’s just hard to believe that something like that is even possible. Even if we did just—“ Her free hand waved vaguely in an attempt to indicate traveled through time. “But I suppose if we can do that, there’s no reason that we couldn’t.”
“We’ve got all of time and… space?” His voice went up in pitch, his face screwing up in uncertainty as he tilted it back to look up at hers, capping the thought with a shrug before continuing, “to play around in. We can get a feel for how things work before we jump into anything too serious. Sam was saying there was good money in it, if you know where to look.”
“It’d be good to get a feel for time travel before it’s so… crucial.” A beat. “Good money, huh?”
“Good money,” Theo repeated. “I invited him over for dinner tomorrow. Figured we could pump him for deets before making any firm choices.”
“I would’ve just said yes,” Marisol admitted, running her fingers through his hair. “But asking questions first is better.”
“That’s what you’ve got me for. I’m the sensible one.”
“So sensible.” Teasingly, with a tug against his hair. “God. Today feels unreal.”
“No kidding,” his voice trails off, his eyes falling from her face to stare up at the ceiling. A part of him– a small part, but a part of him all the same– had thought that maybe he’d lost his shit, or that his buddy was playing some sort of fucked up trick on him. There had been something… almost comforting in that. In sticking with the laws of reality as he’d always believed them to be, rather than…. whatever they were now.
Theo’s eyes moved back to Marisol’s face, his mouth pulling up into a smirk as he raised his eyebrows expectantly. “I’ve always thought that making out a little helps ground me. Wanna try?” New laws of time or not, some things were exactly the same as they’d been yesterday.
“Mhm. I wouldn’t mind not thinking.” Her mind was a little too scrambled by time travel to actually be much use thinking. “And you always make it easy to forget everything else.”
“Thinking is vastly overrated,” he agreed, sitting up and pulling her back down with him in one motion. “I’ve always thought that.”