Downton Abbey AU: Timecrossed Masterpost
Sep. 25th, 2012 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frea_oTitle: Timecrossed
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Matthew/Mary, Bates/Anna, Sybil/Branson, Robert/Cora, Violet/Awesome, Carson/Awesome, Thomas, O'Brien, Mrs. Hughes, Pamuk
Summary: When the ability to travel through time is perfected, a new type of criminal emerges. Master thief Mary Crawley is one of the many that use this new technology to her advantage. Detective Matthew Crawley of the Time Enforcement Commission has his mind set on capturing Mary and her crew.
Complete: Probably not.
They set up in 1912 because of course they did.
Inside the Abbey, Robert calls himself Crawley and pretends like he’d always been there, occupying that great monolith of a castle/mansion/whatever the hell these old buildings were. Mary smiles a little at the name, the first flick of emotion, the first hint behind the cool exterior that anything could possibly reach her after Patrick had been lost to the Rift.
The Rift, that Patrick jumped across daily, sometimes twice daily, to flit about in time.
The Crawleys, Robert says, and Mary smiles, just a mild tilt of the lips because isn't that their motto?
Time Crawls On.
The job in 2241 hadn’t gone well. They’d lost Patrick, and Thomas is still sulking and skulking and doing some vaguely Thomas-like thing. All because he couldn’t convince Patrick to give him a shag, Edith says around puffs from the 1912 cigarette that had been the first thing she’d picked up in the little village they are calling Downton Village.
Downton. Named because of the time Cora, Robert’s mate and ex-masterthief who’d gracefully stepped aside for young prodigy Mary, had misspelled the address of a heist on a paper. So Downton it is to remain instead of Downtown, instead of Cavendish or Poppycock or whatever silly name Robert chooses because he’s the architect and Mary likes to let him set the scene. It lets her focus on the stealing.
They’ve been together for years: Thomas the brilliant, sulky locksmith, Edith the snitch and the lookout, Anna the time engineer, Sybil who got so good at switching and baiting that Mary never knows whether she’ll bait or she’ll switch on any given day, dependable Bates, Cora the matriarch, Robert the architect. Mary the thief, Carson the thought-smith.
There are townspeople to fool at the newly named Downton Abbey, townspeople Carson has to carefully arrange to his way of thinking, of pretending that the “family” has been around for years. A prim, proper housekeeper that automatically hates Mary—she can probably tell Mary’s a thief, as thieving transcends time and so do schoolmarms—the people in the village, the new chauffeur that sniffs after Sybil almost right away. There are new costumes: restrictive corsets and servants’ uniforms, baggy underwear for the men. There is a new cover to maintain, and it’s difficult as hell, knowing what’s coming to this world, knowing the war is near and knowing that they’re only stuck in 1912 because Patrick accidentally left the Rift open and the Enforces got hold of Anna’s frequencies and Anna needs time to build more, to build better, more secure ones.
The first Enforcer to find them is a scout. Mary disables and kills him before he can log his frequency and location through a time beacon. It’s a pain because it’s 1912 and she’s a woman, and a Turk dying in her bed is not only illegal, it’s a scandal, no matter that there’s no way Pamuk was born in this century or even the five centuries surrounding it.
Cora, Mary, and Anna hide the body, but one of the servants spots them.
And then the news arrives, the news that makes them freeze because there’s no way that this can be a coincidence.
Robert Crawley has an heir. There’s no way Robert Crawley can have an heir.
It’s an Enforcer. It has to be. Mary and the others know it. He has no way of knowing if they’re truly Crawleys and Yorkshire folk, but there will be clues and they can’t kick him out, not with the customs of the time. We’ll have to pretend, Mary says in a late-night council where her team has gathered at the servants’ table, even those who should never set foot in this room if they were truly who they are currently pretending to be. Anna, how long until you’re ready?
Could be months, her engineer says with a frustrated look.
Then we pretend. This Matthew Crawley thinks he can trick us into thinking he’s not an Enforcer? He has no idea what he’s in for.
What about Pamuk? This comes from O’Brien, Cora’s oldest friend, who’s good in a pinch but not for much else.
Pamuk died of natural causes. He’s investigating us because of that and because of that only. He has no reason to suspect…
Yeah, right, snorts Thomas, and even though Mary can’t help but agree, a little bit, she wishes he’d just shut his mouth occasionally.
“This may not be our time,” Carson says, speaking aloud because he’s never liked thought-speak, an odd quality for a thought-smith, “but we’re English. If there’s one thing we know how to do, it’s buck up and deal with it. Matthew Crawley can come here and poke his nose in all he likes, but Downton is ours.”
And that becomes the consensus of the crew…until two weeks later, when Matthew Crawley shows up, dressed impeccably in the style of 1913. One look into his impossibly blue eyes and Mary begins to feel, for the first time in her life, that she is well and truly in trouble.
Their first social event—big event, that is, besides having the Duke of Crowborough come and be adjusted by Carson, cementing the so-called aristocratic Crawleys into the highest drawing rooms of society (Carson did a brilliant play there, convincing Crowborough that Thomas was an old beau and that Mary was unweddable due to money issues)—is a fox hunt. Mary’s not one for killing things, but she likes that there are still horses in the world, and she loves that she’s finally in a place where she has ample time to ride. Though she knows from her history lessons that great inventions and innovations are happening all over the place around her, this sprawling Yorkshire estate is peaceful and separate and perfect.
She knows the others feel the same. Anna’s working on the frequencies and they’re all tense around Matthew Crawley, but her team…they’re content.
Finding contentment, of course, is usually when all hell breaks loose and even though Mary knows that, she still lets her guard down and flirts with the cute Turk. After all, this is a foxhunt in rural England and no Enforcer is going to know the custom well enough to ride along with the lords and hounds. Matthew Crawley bows out. Doesn’t hunt, he tells the family at dinner. Though he’s quite insistent that he rides. All great families like their hunt, but he’s just a solicitor.
So Mary flirts with Mr. Pamuk of the dark eyes and smoldering countenance is safe. She lets herself be a young woman from 1912, headstrong and fettered by turns. Flirtation on horseback, borderline scandalous looks after dinner. And when those scandalous lead to a moment away from everybody else, a moment where Pamuk’s pressing her against the wall and his tongue is in her mouth, who is she not to enjoy it?
She goes to bed still buzzing a little from that kiss. Is that how all gentlemen in the early 1900s kiss? If so, she’s really going to like it here. With a contented sigh, she leans back against her headboard with her holo open in her lap. There’s only a split-second for her to digest that the air tastes like electricity and pineapples, the sign that there’s a jumper about to arrive. In a panic, she aborts the track screen on her personal holo, deactivating it with a kill swipe.
The room plunges into darkness as she dives out of bed, tossing aside the bedclothes in her haste. Why oh why did she stop sleeping with her gun? It’s locked away where no servant but Anna can find it, and Mary knows she’ll never get to it in time, not if there’s a jumper. It can’t be her team. They won’t jump without the frequencies, not even hothead Thomas.
Blue light fills the room for an instant while she hurries to unlock the gun drawer.
It’s not anybody from her team. It’s not anybody from her team at all.
“What the hell?” Mary breathes, staring at the glaring, very much not-from-1912 face of Mr. Pamuk, who has just jumped into her bedroom. “W-what? How—how did y-you do that?” She forces a waver into her voice, playing the 1912 miss.
Pamuk gives her an unimpressed look. “Stop pretending, Falcon. I know it’s you.”
Mary is left with two options: continue to deny or play along and see what he knows. Enforcers are messy, after all. They like to pretend they believe in law and order, but they’re untidy and loud and boorish, and they keep terrible records, letting thieves like herself slip through the cracks of time. She should know. Her father was one. Is one. She can never tell in any given year which it is if he’s a past or a present tense. And it’s obvious she’s not panicking like somebody witnessing a jump for the first time would be. In fact, it’s even more obvious that she’s going for a weapon.
So she gives Pamuk the full Mary Crawley cold smile. Time to find out what he knows.
And she knows what she has to do after that, and she doesn’t like it, but it’s not just her, it’s her team, and they look out for her.
“How’d you find me, handsome?” she asks, rising to her full height. The long nightgown of the era is going to get in her way, she knows that, but there’s very little she can do about it. Just one more way, she thinks, for the patriarchy to keep a good woman down.
Pamuk rolls his eyes. “Your engineer’s sloppy. This place is practically Chernobyl, it’s radiating so much time energy.”
Rather callous of him to joke about a disaster that hasn’t even happened yet, Mary thinks. And Anna is not sloppy. Anna is the best in the business and got that way because she is meticulous and neat.
Pamuk’s got to be goading her. Which means, he’s fishing for information, Mary realizes. She’ll let him.
“I don’t know,” she says, slinking a step closer to him, making sure to keep her eyes on his. She catches it: just the tiniest flicker in his gaze, a glance down and up at her lips, and she knows she wasn’t the only one affected by that moment in the dining room. He must be a very young Enforcer. “I find it…quite pleasant, don’t you?”
She seems him visibly draw himself back. “So, the famous Lady Mary. Cross-century money laundering and arms trafficking, smuggling of cultural artifacts, and I’m sure there is more we don’t even know about,” he says, hiding behind bureaucracy in a way that tells Mary he’s exactly as young as she thinks.
“I think,” she says, still slinking toward him, “you believe I’m much more of a rebel than I am.”
“What—” is all Pamuk has time to say before Mary pounces.
In the end, she’s sorry for what happens, but her team is relying on her, and they come first. Once Pamuk is dead—more blood on her hands, more red in the ledger she started in 1978 and continued in 2357—she finds his holo and accesses his files with a swipe of her finger to see if he’s left the beacon for his superior officers yet.
He hasn’t, but Mary knows they won’t get lucky again. Guilt dogs her footsteps as she goes to find Anna. None of her team will judge her for what she’s done to poor Mr. Pamuk, but the fact of the matter is, it’s 1912, she’s still a woman, and Carson can’t fix everything.
Mary wanders through the Abbey late at night. They’ve got the frequencies—Anna figured those out years ago—but the 1900s are a place to settle, a place that nobody will suspect a group of technologically-advanced thieves and criminals will ever willingly choose over so many more innovative times. The industrial revolution at its height, perhaps, for the novelty, or the end of the twenty-third century, where Sybil is from and still adores. But it’s Downton that draws them back, and Downton that they continue to call home despite all of its oddities and foibles. Robert’s probably convinced he’s actually an earl, and Cora certainly doesn’t mind. Violet just loves having an excuse.
They’ve stopped jumping as much. Mary tells herself it’s smarter to stay in one place, it’s safer.
“What do you mean?” she’d asked Anna, a week ago now. The blonde was holed up in Mary’s room, where no civilians would dare to be at this hour, and she’d shed her black dress for the wifebeater and yoga pants that would become popular later in the century.
Anna had just looked at her. “You know what I mean. Or I should say whom.”
Mary knows who she means. She’s known all along. So she wanders at night, after a dinner party where they shouldn’t be here because here means the Spanish Flu and she knows from her history lessons how many lives that took. But if they jump en masse, they can’t jump back. Carson’s good, but he’s not that good.
Is he worth it?
Her training tells her to say no. If he’s genuinely who he says he is, he’s from the twentieth century and she’s from the twenty-fourth. That’s not even star-crossed, that’s time-crossed, too, and every jumper knows time-crossed never works. Some jumpers don’t care; Sybil certainly doesn’t, but then, she was looking for a way out. She’s got the frequencies, though, and Tom’s probably the one person at Downton that could handle the thought of skipping through time, removing artifacts from the timeline and selling them, setting up accounts to accrue interest and accessing them years later to become millionaires. It’s a way out for Sybil, if Sybil wants it.
Mary won’t have that way out. She’s not like Sybil. The ink on a marriage certificate won’t mean anything to her, and what happens when she gets restless? If he’s not lying, if he really is the noble, self-sacrificing prig Manc lawyer, then even he won’t be enough to keep her from getting that feeling in her bones, the one that itches and burns and makes her long for a different time, any other time than the one she is currently experiencing now.
And if he is lying, it’s the end for all of them.
She wanders on. Cora’s faking sick because they’re all inoculated against diseases like the Spanish Flu—you have to be, to jump—so the Abbey’s quiet. Her dinner dress is the only sound, rustling around her legs, whispering against her elbow-length gloves.
Why would he stay so long, if he’s lying? He nearly lost his life in the war. He came back to them broken. If he’s really Matthew, then Mary’s lucky he didn’t die. If he’s an Enforcer, then maybe it’s love. And that’s depressing to think about, Matthew Crawley loving another woman so much that he’s willing to be stuck in time for her—and for that woman not to be Mary, Mary Crawley as she calls herself.
Just like that, the subject of her thoughts appears on the floor below. He hasn’t seen her, Mary realizes immediately, as Matthew is standing in the middle of the great hall, facing away from her. He’s leaning on his cane—which may be another lie—looking down at a table, and Mary immediately quiets herself, moving as silently as she thief she’s been for longer than her physical age will tell you. Jumping keeps you young, everybody knows that. At fifty, she’s barely starting to get crow’s feet.
What is he doing?
It’s such an interesting opportunity to get to watch Matthew while he’s unaware of her, like those moments when he came back from the war, ragged and pale and a mere sliver of himself. Perhaps he’s thinking and—
The holo screen makes her gasp, as it’s centuries too soon for that kind of tech. Which must mean...
Before she knows it, before she can process it, she’s practically flying down the stairs. Years of making Downton her home between jobs whenever it’s safe to sneak out make her familiar with the steps. Years of thieving make her as silent as an assassin. Years of unresolved feelings make her a stone cold bitch.
She’s halfway across the room before Matthew even realizes she’s there. He opens his mouth, to demand what she’s doing there or offer an explanation or something, but he catches the look on her face. Instinct, it appears, has him going for his cane.
Mary’s faster. She knocks it away, and in the next blink, she’s got her gun in her hand, though she doesn’t recall drawing it.
“Hello, Detective,” she says. “Can you manage without your stick?”
“Hello, Detective,” Mary Crawley—which he knows is not her real name—says, and the coldness in her voice is only surpassed that by the frigid cast behind her eyes. “Can you manage without your stick?”
The truth is, he can’t. Matthew stares at the gun in her hand—a Powell 924d, nice model, banned after 2124, death penalty to own but he’s not going to bring that up at the moment—and nearly cringes. He thought he was being careful, but that is clearly not the case. “Going to shoot me?” he asks, and a chuckle, of all things, rises to the surface. Years of dancing, of will-they-won’t-they, and it’s come to this.
“If need be.” Mary Crawley’s eyes grow colder. Sometimes when she looks at him, Matthew likes to pretend that there’s a warmth behind that gaze that is only for him, but that warmth is gone, and probably never existed in the first place. Just as well. He’s an Enforcer; it was always going to be a bachelor’s calling. “Who are you, really?”
“Matthew Crawley,” Matthew says, and her eyes narrow. This time he does chuckle, which doesn’t help his case: Mary’s fingers tighten fractionally around the gun hilt.
“Don’t lie to me,” Mary says. “What’s your real name?”
“I swear to God, I’m actually Matthew Crawley.” Matthew wants to go for his cane so that he can rise to his feet, as that feels like more of a fair fight, but he knows better. He knows exactly how proficient Mary is with that gun. If the Historic Preservation Division is right, there are at least three unsolved murders to her name. The Falcon has struck all over time, after all, though God knows, the HPD’s been wrong time and again. “But perhaps not, as you can see, Matthew Crawley, heir to Downton Abbey.”
“He doesn’t exist.”
“No, but I do.”
Mary frowns. “Get up.”
Slowly, Matthew complies, keeping his hands in her sight. If even half of what he knows of the Falcon is true about Mary Crawley, as she calls herself now, he’s in for a world of trouble unless he thinks quickly.
But something’s not right. From what he knows of her file, the Falcon would have already killed him by now. And certainly, Mary Crawley’s hand isn’t shaking, though holding the gun up like that has to be weighing on her, but Matthew is also not dead. He finally manages to climb to his feet, which hurts because of the damned severed spine that he’d barely managed to get to the twenty-second century to fix—good thing the country doctor in Downton Village is a bit of an idiot and can provide medical blustering to cover for Matthew’s “miraculous” recovery—and it’s late and he’s so tired. As he rises to his full height, he sees something flicker across Mary’s face, which has always been so remarkably cool and composed.
“Matthew Crawley,” he says, holding out his hand in introduction. Mary gives it an incredulous look. “Born 2013, recruited by my great-great-great-grand-nephew. When do you hail from?”
“What do you know?” Mary asks instead of giving him the handshake he desires.
“I know your head housemaid’s wanted in four countries and six decades,” Matthew says.
It’s precisely the wrong thing to say, he realizes just a second too late. “Son of a bitch,” Mary says, and he realizes later that he’s lucky she doesn’t shoot him point blank in the chest. Instead, she does something worse: she lashes out, so fast and so furious that he doesn’t even think to block, and she clamps four fingers onto his wrist. And just like that, they’re jumping; Matthew’s clothes buzz with electricity for a split second and then they land. His legs immediately give out on him; he falls to the pavement, startled and shouting.
It’s the twenty-first century. He can tell that at a glance as it’s home to him, but he doesn’t get much more than a glimpse as he’s suddenly too busy fighting Mary Crawley off. She scratches long gouges in his wrist as she scrambles for his time-unit. She means to strand him, Matthew realizes immediately, and he can’t let her do that. He can’t be the Enforcer that got shot in the trenches of the Great War and let the Falcon get away. He’s enough of a joke at the water cooler as it is—
But Mary Crawley is stronger than she looks. She wrenches the unit away from Matthew and all but leaps backward, jumping as she does so. Matthew’s left with the taste of ozone and the knowledge that he’s definitely, profoundly screwed the pooch. There are failsafes for this sort of thing. He just has to get to a check-in station and leave a message for Requisitions, but the Retrieval Team always takes a couple of days out of sheer spite, and Matthew is coming to realize he’s standing in the middle of Tottenham Court Road dressed like a dandy from 1919.
Oh, hell.
He climbs gingerly and painfully to his feet and sighs. There’s no way Mary Crawley is going back to Downton Abbey now. He could jump back in her timeline, but he’s pretty sure the Crawleys and Crew deliberately stayed for long stretches of time to prevent him from creating a paradox. Which means he’s going to have to nab her going forward.
First, though, he needs a bloody cane and some bandages for his wrist. Mary Crawley has nails like the bird of prey whose name she uses.
“Excuse me?” a voice behind him asks, and Matthew turns, surprised. There’s a young woman, no more than seventeen or eighteen, standing there. Her clothing is typical for the time and she’s not wearing a wrist-unit, so probably not a jumper. She’s holding a cane—one he recognizes because even though it’s aged quite a bit, it’s the same one he had in 1919—and a small box. “Are you Matthew Crawley?”
“Who’s asking?” Matthew asks.
The girl squints at him, and she seemed somewhat familiar, though Matthew had no idea why. She is petite, blonde and blue-eyed, but nobody he knows. “Are you or aren’t you?” she asks, her chin rising slightly.
“Yes, I’m Matthew Crawley,” he says at long length.
“Good. I’m supposed to give you these.” The girl holds out the box and the cane.
“How did you—”
“Family secret, Mr. Crawley,” the girl tells him, and once he’s reluctantly accepted both cane and box, turns on her heels.
“Wait!” Matthew calls after her. “Who do you work for?”
“No one.”
“Who are you?”
“Bates,” the girl says. “Suri Bates. Toodles.”
Matthew blinks at that, but shrugs. He’s had weirder things happen, which is practically the motto of the everyday Enforcer. He hobbles into an alley to open the box just in case it’s something that doesn’t belong in 2015 or whatever year it is.
The note could come from any time, but the other object definitely doesn’t belong in this year. It’s his time-unit. He knows it’s his because he put that scratch on it in 2345 during the Second Crimean War, and his boss looked askance at him when he said he was rather fond of the piece despite it.
The note simply says, “Doing you a favor. – AB” Whatever the hell that means, though Matthew is grateful beyond words to get his unit back.
It’s pre-programmed for him and everything. Matthew is starting to feel like he’s walked into something vaguely Twilight Zone-ish, but no Enforcer survives without a little curiosity. Tracing Mary through her frequency will be impossible with Anna as her engineer—there’s a reason the woman is wanted in so many places—so why the hell not? He hits the activate button, and jumps through time.
He lands in Downton Abbey, in a room he doesn’t recognize.
“What the hell?” he asks himself as he looks around. It’s a bedroom. He’s stayed over at the Abbey enough to know that, at least. His time unit tells him it’s 1919, but months after his encounter with Mary a few moments ago.
Before he can process that, the door opens and Mary Crawley enters, wearing a red dress he’s also never seen before. “Oh, there you are,” she says before he can even go for his gun, and he’s absolutely floored when she crosses the room in hurried strides, wraps her arms around his neck, and kisses him soundly.
Matthew’s dreamed things like this before, but this is reality and he knows it’s reality because his wrist is still hurting like nothing else and possibly still bleeding, but no, that’s definitely Mary kissing him, and her tongue teasing at the corner of his lips. He doesn’t understand a single bloody thing that’s going on, but Mary Crawley is apparently a better kisser than he even dreamed, and he kisses her back.
She’s the first one to draw back, her eyebrows furrowed. “Matthew,” she says slowly, looking at his face warily. “Matthew, why do you have your cane? You haven’t needed that for—oh, my God. When are you right now?”
Matthew comes back to himself enough to stumble backwards and grab clumsily for his gun. He’s still light-headed from that kiss.
“Oh, for crying out loud.” Instead of quaking in fear in front of the gun, Mary rolls her eyes. “I’m going to kill you.”
“I give you leave to try.”
“Not you-you,” Mary says, exasperated. “Future-you. You never told me about this!”
“I—what?”
“You’d think that this would be an important thing to mention,” Mary says, peevish now. She crosses her arms over her chest. “When are you, Matthew?”
“I—we just—the parlor. You caught me—and we went to the twenty-first century—”
Mary’s scowl deepens. “Oh, that’s just bloody fantastic. You need to go.”
“No. You’re under arrest and—”
“Hear that?” Mary asks, cocking her head toward the door. “Those are definitely your footsteps coming down the hall. Are you trying to cause a time-hole?”
Every Enforcer knows the first rule of jumping: you can never, ever meet yourself. HPD warns against it. He knows if the future version of himself opens the door—oh, mother of God, they’re in Mary Crawley’s bedroom—Containment is going to show up and there will be a hole in time and possibly a crater, taking all three of them with it.
He gives Mary one last desperately confused look and grabs his time unit, hitting the first preset. The last thing he sees before he jumps is the door swinging open and Mary turning that annoyed look on whoever’s coming inside, and his brain finally, finally puts it together:
He’s about to have an affair with the woman he was assigned to track.
Oh, God. Headquarters is going to have his head on a pike, and he is never, ever going to live this down.
She should not be doing this. She should absolutely, absolutely not be doing this.
She says as much, aloud. Or she is sure she does. At any rate, Matthew chuckles, and she feels more than hears the way it reverberates through his chest and into her, probably because he has her pressed back against the wall, his body against hers from ankle to chest, and they’ve been doing their level best to forget that it is 1918 and they are supposed to be enemies for the past eight minutes.
Mary wishes they’d be able to forget it for forever, but sometimes, that look comes into Matthew’s eyes, and sometimes she flinches when he comes into a room, and they’ll never truly forget that there’s a line between them and they stand on opposite sides of it, even when they are pressed together as they are now.
“C’mon, Lady Mary,” he says, as nothing amuses him more than the fact that she has a title now, and she’s been living this identity for years longer than she ever lived her own life. “Live a little.”
“If Carson—finds out—or worse, Anna—”
“Hush.” Matthew’s lips work down her collar and she’s distracted by just how good it feels that she almost doesn’t hear the footsteps approaching. Matthew does, however, as the assault on her collarbone stops abruptly. He lifts his head, his eyes staring into hers in panic.
“Jump, dammit!” Mary hisses, scrambling for Matthew’s wrist-unit herself when he doesn’t move fast enough.
His fingers are shaking a little as he plugs in the coordinates, but he hasn’t risen in the ranks based on his looks. There’s a split-second crackle of electricity in the air, Mary’s stomach falls out like it always does when she jumps, and suddenly they’re no longer in a secluded alcove of Downton Abbey. Mary swallows hard to rid her mouth of the taste of ozone as she realizes she’s standing in…a forest?
“Oh, bugger,” Matthew says, and Mary realizes it’s not just any forest. The leaves are too thick, it’s distinctly tropical in a way that England will never, ever be, not even in the twenty-ninth century, and…
A hundred meters away , there’s a stegosaurus contentedly munching on what looks like something that might have once been an ancestor of a cow. Mary and Matthew gape at it in shock. It’s not the first dinosaur Mary’s seen—like any jumper is able to resist the lure of giant lizards at least once in his or her career—but it’s the first time she’s been this close to one. She watches its club tail twitch in the tall grass fields.
“Um,” Matthew says.
Just like that, the spell is broken. “Dammit, Matthew,” she says. “I think you typed a few too many zeroes.”
“I still prefer this to Carson finding out,” Matthew says, cracking a wry grin.
Mary gives him a stink-eye. “Say that again after you’ve been dinosaur kibble.”
“Even then. Grab my arm, I’ll try to get us back.”
“You’d better,” Mary sniffs, but she breaks character by smiling at him before she links her fingers through his.
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Matthew/Mary, Bates/Anna, Sybil/Branson, Robert/Cora, Violet/Awesome, Carson/Awesome, Thomas, O'Brien, Mrs. Hughes, Pamuk
Summary: When the ability to travel through time is perfected, a new type of criminal emerges. Master thief Mary Crawley is one of the many that use this new technology to her advantage. Detective Matthew Crawley of the Time Enforcement Commission has his mind set on capturing Mary and her crew.
Complete: Probably not.
They set up in 1912 because of course they did.
Inside the Abbey, Robert calls himself Crawley and pretends like he’d always been there, occupying that great monolith of a castle/mansion/whatever the hell these old buildings were. Mary smiles a little at the name, the first flick of emotion, the first hint behind the cool exterior that anything could possibly reach her after Patrick had been lost to the Rift.
The Rift, that Patrick jumped across daily, sometimes twice daily, to flit about in time.
The Crawleys, Robert says, and Mary smiles, just a mild tilt of the lips because isn't that their motto?
Time Crawls On.
The job in 2241 hadn’t gone well. They’d lost Patrick, and Thomas is still sulking and skulking and doing some vaguely Thomas-like thing. All because he couldn’t convince Patrick to give him a shag, Edith says around puffs from the 1912 cigarette that had been the first thing she’d picked up in the little village they are calling Downton Village.
Downton. Named because of the time Cora, Robert’s mate and ex-masterthief who’d gracefully stepped aside for young prodigy Mary, had misspelled the address of a heist on a paper. So Downton it is to remain instead of Downtown, instead of Cavendish or Poppycock or whatever silly name Robert chooses because he’s the architect and Mary likes to let him set the scene. It lets her focus on the stealing.
They’ve been together for years: Thomas the brilliant, sulky locksmith, Edith the snitch and the lookout, Anna the time engineer, Sybil who got so good at switching and baiting that Mary never knows whether she’ll bait or she’ll switch on any given day, dependable Bates, Cora the matriarch, Robert the architect. Mary the thief, Carson the thought-smith.
There are townspeople to fool at the newly named Downton Abbey, townspeople Carson has to carefully arrange to his way of thinking, of pretending that the “family” has been around for years. A prim, proper housekeeper that automatically hates Mary—she can probably tell Mary’s a thief, as thieving transcends time and so do schoolmarms—the people in the village, the new chauffeur that sniffs after Sybil almost right away. There are new costumes: restrictive corsets and servants’ uniforms, baggy underwear for the men. There is a new cover to maintain, and it’s difficult as hell, knowing what’s coming to this world, knowing the war is near and knowing that they’re only stuck in 1912 because Patrick accidentally left the Rift open and the Enforces got hold of Anna’s frequencies and Anna needs time to build more, to build better, more secure ones.
The first Enforcer to find them is a scout. Mary disables and kills him before he can log his frequency and location through a time beacon. It’s a pain because it’s 1912 and she’s a woman, and a Turk dying in her bed is not only illegal, it’s a scandal, no matter that there’s no way Pamuk was born in this century or even the five centuries surrounding it.
Cora, Mary, and Anna hide the body, but one of the servants spots them.
And then the news arrives, the news that makes them freeze because there’s no way that this can be a coincidence.
Robert Crawley has an heir. There’s no way Robert Crawley can have an heir.
It’s an Enforcer. It has to be. Mary and the others know it. He has no way of knowing if they’re truly Crawleys and Yorkshire folk, but there will be clues and they can’t kick him out, not with the customs of the time. We’ll have to pretend, Mary says in a late-night council where her team has gathered at the servants’ table, even those who should never set foot in this room if they were truly who they are currently pretending to be. Anna, how long until you’re ready?
Could be months, her engineer says with a frustrated look.
Then we pretend. This Matthew Crawley thinks he can trick us into thinking he’s not an Enforcer? He has no idea what he’s in for.
What about Pamuk? This comes from O’Brien, Cora’s oldest friend, who’s good in a pinch but not for much else.
Pamuk died of natural causes. He’s investigating us because of that and because of that only. He has no reason to suspect…
Yeah, right, snorts Thomas, and even though Mary can’t help but agree, a little bit, she wishes he’d just shut his mouth occasionally.
“This may not be our time,” Carson says, speaking aloud because he’s never liked thought-speak, an odd quality for a thought-smith, “but we’re English. If there’s one thing we know how to do, it’s buck up and deal with it. Matthew Crawley can come here and poke his nose in all he likes, but Downton is ours.”
And that becomes the consensus of the crew…until two weeks later, when Matthew Crawley shows up, dressed impeccably in the style of 1913. One look into his impossibly blue eyes and Mary begins to feel, for the first time in her life, that she is well and truly in trouble.
Their first social event—big event, that is, besides having the Duke of Crowborough come and be adjusted by Carson, cementing the so-called aristocratic Crawleys into the highest drawing rooms of society (Carson did a brilliant play there, convincing Crowborough that Thomas was an old beau and that Mary was unweddable due to money issues)—is a fox hunt. Mary’s not one for killing things, but she likes that there are still horses in the world, and she loves that she’s finally in a place where she has ample time to ride. Though she knows from her history lessons that great inventions and innovations are happening all over the place around her, this sprawling Yorkshire estate is peaceful and separate and perfect.
She knows the others feel the same. Anna’s working on the frequencies and they’re all tense around Matthew Crawley, but her team…they’re content.
Finding contentment, of course, is usually when all hell breaks loose and even though Mary knows that, she still lets her guard down and flirts with the cute Turk. After all, this is a foxhunt in rural England and no Enforcer is going to know the custom well enough to ride along with the lords and hounds. Matthew Crawley bows out. Doesn’t hunt, he tells the family at dinner. Though he’s quite insistent that he rides. All great families like their hunt, but he’s just a solicitor.
So Mary flirts with Mr. Pamuk of the dark eyes and smoldering countenance is safe. She lets herself be a young woman from 1912, headstrong and fettered by turns. Flirtation on horseback, borderline scandalous looks after dinner. And when those scandalous lead to a moment away from everybody else, a moment where Pamuk’s pressing her against the wall and his tongue is in her mouth, who is she not to enjoy it?
She goes to bed still buzzing a little from that kiss. Is that how all gentlemen in the early 1900s kiss? If so, she’s really going to like it here. With a contented sigh, she leans back against her headboard with her holo open in her lap. There’s only a split-second for her to digest that the air tastes like electricity and pineapples, the sign that there’s a jumper about to arrive. In a panic, she aborts the track screen on her personal holo, deactivating it with a kill swipe.
The room plunges into darkness as she dives out of bed, tossing aside the bedclothes in her haste. Why oh why did she stop sleeping with her gun? It’s locked away where no servant but Anna can find it, and Mary knows she’ll never get to it in time, not if there’s a jumper. It can’t be her team. They won’t jump without the frequencies, not even hothead Thomas.
Blue light fills the room for an instant while she hurries to unlock the gun drawer.
It’s not anybody from her team. It’s not anybody from her team at all.
“What the hell?” Mary breathes, staring at the glaring, very much not-from-1912 face of Mr. Pamuk, who has just jumped into her bedroom. “W-what? How—how did y-you do that?” She forces a waver into her voice, playing the 1912 miss.
Pamuk gives her an unimpressed look. “Stop pretending, Falcon. I know it’s you.”
Mary is left with two options: continue to deny or play along and see what he knows. Enforcers are messy, after all. They like to pretend they believe in law and order, but they’re untidy and loud and boorish, and they keep terrible records, letting thieves like herself slip through the cracks of time. She should know. Her father was one. Is one. She can never tell in any given year which it is if he’s a past or a present tense. And it’s obvious she’s not panicking like somebody witnessing a jump for the first time would be. In fact, it’s even more obvious that she’s going for a weapon.
So she gives Pamuk the full Mary Crawley cold smile. Time to find out what he knows.
And she knows what she has to do after that, and she doesn’t like it, but it’s not just her, it’s her team, and they look out for her.
“How’d you find me, handsome?” she asks, rising to her full height. The long nightgown of the era is going to get in her way, she knows that, but there’s very little she can do about it. Just one more way, she thinks, for the patriarchy to keep a good woman down.
Pamuk rolls his eyes. “Your engineer’s sloppy. This place is practically Chernobyl, it’s radiating so much time energy.”
Rather callous of him to joke about a disaster that hasn’t even happened yet, Mary thinks. And Anna is not sloppy. Anna is the best in the business and got that way because she is meticulous and neat.
Pamuk’s got to be goading her. Which means, he’s fishing for information, Mary realizes. She’ll let him.
“I don’t know,” she says, slinking a step closer to him, making sure to keep her eyes on his. She catches it: just the tiniest flicker in his gaze, a glance down and up at her lips, and she knows she wasn’t the only one affected by that moment in the dining room. He must be a very young Enforcer. “I find it…quite pleasant, don’t you?”
She seems him visibly draw himself back. “So, the famous Lady Mary. Cross-century money laundering and arms trafficking, smuggling of cultural artifacts, and I’m sure there is more we don’t even know about,” he says, hiding behind bureaucracy in a way that tells Mary he’s exactly as young as she thinks.
“I think,” she says, still slinking toward him, “you believe I’m much more of a rebel than I am.”
“What—” is all Pamuk has time to say before Mary pounces.
In the end, she’s sorry for what happens, but her team is relying on her, and they come first. Once Pamuk is dead—more blood on her hands, more red in the ledger she started in 1978 and continued in 2357—she finds his holo and accesses his files with a swipe of her finger to see if he’s left the beacon for his superior officers yet.
He hasn’t, but Mary knows they won’t get lucky again. Guilt dogs her footsteps as she goes to find Anna. None of her team will judge her for what she’s done to poor Mr. Pamuk, but the fact of the matter is, it’s 1912, she’s still a woman, and Carson can’t fix everything.
Mary wanders through the Abbey late at night. They’ve got the frequencies—Anna figured those out years ago—but the 1900s are a place to settle, a place that nobody will suspect a group of technologically-advanced thieves and criminals will ever willingly choose over so many more innovative times. The industrial revolution at its height, perhaps, for the novelty, or the end of the twenty-third century, where Sybil is from and still adores. But it’s Downton that draws them back, and Downton that they continue to call home despite all of its oddities and foibles. Robert’s probably convinced he’s actually an earl, and Cora certainly doesn’t mind. Violet just loves having an excuse.
They’ve stopped jumping as much. Mary tells herself it’s smarter to stay in one place, it’s safer.
“What do you mean?” she’d asked Anna, a week ago now. The blonde was holed up in Mary’s room, where no civilians would dare to be at this hour, and she’d shed her black dress for the wifebeater and yoga pants that would become popular later in the century.
Anna had just looked at her. “You know what I mean. Or I should say whom.”
Mary knows who she means. She’s known all along. So she wanders at night, after a dinner party where they shouldn’t be here because here means the Spanish Flu and she knows from her history lessons how many lives that took. But if they jump en masse, they can’t jump back. Carson’s good, but he’s not that good.
Is he worth it?
Her training tells her to say no. If he’s genuinely who he says he is, he’s from the twentieth century and she’s from the twenty-fourth. That’s not even star-crossed, that’s time-crossed, too, and every jumper knows time-crossed never works. Some jumpers don’t care; Sybil certainly doesn’t, but then, she was looking for a way out. She’s got the frequencies, though, and Tom’s probably the one person at Downton that could handle the thought of skipping through time, removing artifacts from the timeline and selling them, setting up accounts to accrue interest and accessing them years later to become millionaires. It’s a way out for Sybil, if Sybil wants it.
Mary won’t have that way out. She’s not like Sybil. The ink on a marriage certificate won’t mean anything to her, and what happens when she gets restless? If he’s not lying, if he really is the noble, self-sacrificing prig Manc lawyer, then even he won’t be enough to keep her from getting that feeling in her bones, the one that itches and burns and makes her long for a different time, any other time than the one she is currently experiencing now.
And if he is lying, it’s the end for all of them.
She wanders on. Cora’s faking sick because they’re all inoculated against diseases like the Spanish Flu—you have to be, to jump—so the Abbey’s quiet. Her dinner dress is the only sound, rustling around her legs, whispering against her elbow-length gloves.
Why would he stay so long, if he’s lying? He nearly lost his life in the war. He came back to them broken. If he’s really Matthew, then Mary’s lucky he didn’t die. If he’s an Enforcer, then maybe it’s love. And that’s depressing to think about, Matthew Crawley loving another woman so much that he’s willing to be stuck in time for her—and for that woman not to be Mary, Mary Crawley as she calls herself.
Just like that, the subject of her thoughts appears on the floor below. He hasn’t seen her, Mary realizes immediately, as Matthew is standing in the middle of the great hall, facing away from her. He’s leaning on his cane—which may be another lie—looking down at a table, and Mary immediately quiets herself, moving as silently as she thief she’s been for longer than her physical age will tell you. Jumping keeps you young, everybody knows that. At fifty, she’s barely starting to get crow’s feet.
What is he doing?
It’s such an interesting opportunity to get to watch Matthew while he’s unaware of her, like those moments when he came back from the war, ragged and pale and a mere sliver of himself. Perhaps he’s thinking and—
The holo screen makes her gasp, as it’s centuries too soon for that kind of tech. Which must mean...
Before she knows it, before she can process it, she’s practically flying down the stairs. Years of making Downton her home between jobs whenever it’s safe to sneak out make her familiar with the steps. Years of thieving make her as silent as an assassin. Years of unresolved feelings make her a stone cold bitch.
She’s halfway across the room before Matthew even realizes she’s there. He opens his mouth, to demand what she’s doing there or offer an explanation or something, but he catches the look on her face. Instinct, it appears, has him going for his cane.
Mary’s faster. She knocks it away, and in the next blink, she’s got her gun in her hand, though she doesn’t recall drawing it.
“Hello, Detective,” she says. “Can you manage without your stick?”
*
“Hello, Detective,” Mary Crawley—which he knows is not her real name—says, and the coldness in her voice is only surpassed that by the frigid cast behind her eyes. “Can you manage without your stick?”
The truth is, he can’t. Matthew stares at the gun in her hand—a Powell 924d, nice model, banned after 2124, death penalty to own but he’s not going to bring that up at the moment—and nearly cringes. He thought he was being careful, but that is clearly not the case. “Going to shoot me?” he asks, and a chuckle, of all things, rises to the surface. Years of dancing, of will-they-won’t-they, and it’s come to this.
“If need be.” Mary Crawley’s eyes grow colder. Sometimes when she looks at him, Matthew likes to pretend that there’s a warmth behind that gaze that is only for him, but that warmth is gone, and probably never existed in the first place. Just as well. He’s an Enforcer; it was always going to be a bachelor’s calling. “Who are you, really?”
“Matthew Crawley,” Matthew says, and her eyes narrow. This time he does chuckle, which doesn’t help his case: Mary’s fingers tighten fractionally around the gun hilt.
“Don’t lie to me,” Mary says. “What’s your real name?”
“I swear to God, I’m actually Matthew Crawley.” Matthew wants to go for his cane so that he can rise to his feet, as that feels like more of a fair fight, but he knows better. He knows exactly how proficient Mary is with that gun. If the Historic Preservation Division is right, there are at least three unsolved murders to her name. The Falcon has struck all over time, after all, though God knows, the HPD’s been wrong time and again. “But perhaps not, as you can see, Matthew Crawley, heir to Downton Abbey.”
“He doesn’t exist.”
“No, but I do.”
Mary frowns. “Get up.”
Slowly, Matthew complies, keeping his hands in her sight. If even half of what he knows of the Falcon is true about Mary Crawley, as she calls herself now, he’s in for a world of trouble unless he thinks quickly.
But something’s not right. From what he knows of her file, the Falcon would have already killed him by now. And certainly, Mary Crawley’s hand isn’t shaking, though holding the gun up like that has to be weighing on her, but Matthew is also not dead. He finally manages to climb to his feet, which hurts because of the damned severed spine that he’d barely managed to get to the twenty-second century to fix—good thing the country doctor in Downton Village is a bit of an idiot and can provide medical blustering to cover for Matthew’s “miraculous” recovery—and it’s late and he’s so tired. As he rises to his full height, he sees something flicker across Mary’s face, which has always been so remarkably cool and composed.
“Matthew Crawley,” he says, holding out his hand in introduction. Mary gives it an incredulous look. “Born 2013, recruited by my great-great-great-grand-nephew. When do you hail from?”
“What do you know?” Mary asks instead of giving him the handshake he desires.
“I know your head housemaid’s wanted in four countries and six decades,” Matthew says.
It’s precisely the wrong thing to say, he realizes just a second too late. “Son of a bitch,” Mary says, and he realizes later that he’s lucky she doesn’t shoot him point blank in the chest. Instead, she does something worse: she lashes out, so fast and so furious that he doesn’t even think to block, and she clamps four fingers onto his wrist. And just like that, they’re jumping; Matthew’s clothes buzz with electricity for a split second and then they land. His legs immediately give out on him; he falls to the pavement, startled and shouting.
It’s the twenty-first century. He can tell that at a glance as it’s home to him, but he doesn’t get much more than a glimpse as he’s suddenly too busy fighting Mary Crawley off. She scratches long gouges in his wrist as she scrambles for his time-unit. She means to strand him, Matthew realizes immediately, and he can’t let her do that. He can’t be the Enforcer that got shot in the trenches of the Great War and let the Falcon get away. He’s enough of a joke at the water cooler as it is—
But Mary Crawley is stronger than she looks. She wrenches the unit away from Matthew and all but leaps backward, jumping as she does so. Matthew’s left with the taste of ozone and the knowledge that he’s definitely, profoundly screwed the pooch. There are failsafes for this sort of thing. He just has to get to a check-in station and leave a message for Requisitions, but the Retrieval Team always takes a couple of days out of sheer spite, and Matthew is coming to realize he’s standing in the middle of Tottenham Court Road dressed like a dandy from 1919.
Oh, hell.
He climbs gingerly and painfully to his feet and sighs. There’s no way Mary Crawley is going back to Downton Abbey now. He could jump back in her timeline, but he’s pretty sure the Crawleys and Crew deliberately stayed for long stretches of time to prevent him from creating a paradox. Which means he’s going to have to nab her going forward.
First, though, he needs a bloody cane and some bandages for his wrist. Mary Crawley has nails like the bird of prey whose name she uses.
“Excuse me?” a voice behind him asks, and Matthew turns, surprised. There’s a young woman, no more than seventeen or eighteen, standing there. Her clothing is typical for the time and she’s not wearing a wrist-unit, so probably not a jumper. She’s holding a cane—one he recognizes because even though it’s aged quite a bit, it’s the same one he had in 1919—and a small box. “Are you Matthew Crawley?”
“Who’s asking?” Matthew asks.
The girl squints at him, and she seemed somewhat familiar, though Matthew had no idea why. She is petite, blonde and blue-eyed, but nobody he knows. “Are you or aren’t you?” she asks, her chin rising slightly.
“Yes, I’m Matthew Crawley,” he says at long length.
“Good. I’m supposed to give you these.” The girl holds out the box and the cane.
“How did you—”
“Family secret, Mr. Crawley,” the girl tells him, and once he’s reluctantly accepted both cane and box, turns on her heels.
“Wait!” Matthew calls after her. “Who do you work for?”
“No one.”
“Who are you?”
“Bates,” the girl says. “Suri Bates. Toodles.”
Matthew blinks at that, but shrugs. He’s had weirder things happen, which is practically the motto of the everyday Enforcer. He hobbles into an alley to open the box just in case it’s something that doesn’t belong in 2015 or whatever year it is.
The note could come from any time, but the other object definitely doesn’t belong in this year. It’s his time-unit. He knows it’s his because he put that scratch on it in 2345 during the Second Crimean War, and his boss looked askance at him when he said he was rather fond of the piece despite it.
The note simply says, “Doing you a favor. – AB” Whatever the hell that means, though Matthew is grateful beyond words to get his unit back.
It’s pre-programmed for him and everything. Matthew is starting to feel like he’s walked into something vaguely Twilight Zone-ish, but no Enforcer survives without a little curiosity. Tracing Mary through her frequency will be impossible with Anna as her engineer—there’s a reason the woman is wanted in so many places—so why the hell not? He hits the activate button, and jumps through time.
He lands in Downton Abbey, in a room he doesn’t recognize.
“What the hell?” he asks himself as he looks around. It’s a bedroom. He’s stayed over at the Abbey enough to know that, at least. His time unit tells him it’s 1919, but months after his encounter with Mary a few moments ago.
Before he can process that, the door opens and Mary Crawley enters, wearing a red dress he’s also never seen before. “Oh, there you are,” she says before he can even go for his gun, and he’s absolutely floored when she crosses the room in hurried strides, wraps her arms around his neck, and kisses him soundly.
Matthew’s dreamed things like this before, but this is reality and he knows it’s reality because his wrist is still hurting like nothing else and possibly still bleeding, but no, that’s definitely Mary kissing him, and her tongue teasing at the corner of his lips. He doesn’t understand a single bloody thing that’s going on, but Mary Crawley is apparently a better kisser than he even dreamed, and he kisses her back.
She’s the first one to draw back, her eyebrows furrowed. “Matthew,” she says slowly, looking at his face warily. “Matthew, why do you have your cane? You haven’t needed that for—oh, my God. When are you right now?”
Matthew comes back to himself enough to stumble backwards and grab clumsily for his gun. He’s still light-headed from that kiss.
“Oh, for crying out loud.” Instead of quaking in fear in front of the gun, Mary rolls her eyes. “I’m going to kill you.”
“I give you leave to try.”
“Not you-you,” Mary says, exasperated. “Future-you. You never told me about this!”
“I—what?”
“You’d think that this would be an important thing to mention,” Mary says, peevish now. She crosses her arms over her chest. “When are you, Matthew?”
“I—we just—the parlor. You caught me—and we went to the twenty-first century—”
Mary’s scowl deepens. “Oh, that’s just bloody fantastic. You need to go.”
“No. You’re under arrest and—”
“Hear that?” Mary asks, cocking her head toward the door. “Those are definitely your footsteps coming down the hall. Are you trying to cause a time-hole?”
Every Enforcer knows the first rule of jumping: you can never, ever meet yourself. HPD warns against it. He knows if the future version of himself opens the door—oh, mother of God, they’re in Mary Crawley’s bedroom—Containment is going to show up and there will be a hole in time and possibly a crater, taking all three of them with it.
He gives Mary one last desperately confused look and grabs his time unit, hitting the first preset. The last thing he sees before he jumps is the door swinging open and Mary turning that annoyed look on whoever’s coming inside, and his brain finally, finally puts it together:
He’s about to have an affair with the woman he was assigned to track.
Oh, God. Headquarters is going to have his head on a pike, and he is never, ever going to live this down.
She should not be doing this. She should absolutely, absolutely not be doing this.
She says as much, aloud. Or she is sure she does. At any rate, Matthew chuckles, and she feels more than hears the way it reverberates through his chest and into her, probably because he has her pressed back against the wall, his body against hers from ankle to chest, and they’ve been doing their level best to forget that it is 1918 and they are supposed to be enemies for the past eight minutes.
Mary wishes they’d be able to forget it for forever, but sometimes, that look comes into Matthew’s eyes, and sometimes she flinches when he comes into a room, and they’ll never truly forget that there’s a line between them and they stand on opposite sides of it, even when they are pressed together as they are now.
“C’mon, Lady Mary,” he says, as nothing amuses him more than the fact that she has a title now, and she’s been living this identity for years longer than she ever lived her own life. “Live a little.”
“If Carson—finds out—or worse, Anna—”
“Hush.” Matthew’s lips work down her collar and she’s distracted by just how good it feels that she almost doesn’t hear the footsteps approaching. Matthew does, however, as the assault on her collarbone stops abruptly. He lifts his head, his eyes staring into hers in panic.
“Jump, dammit!” Mary hisses, scrambling for Matthew’s wrist-unit herself when he doesn’t move fast enough.
His fingers are shaking a little as he plugs in the coordinates, but he hasn’t risen in the ranks based on his looks. There’s a split-second crackle of electricity in the air, Mary’s stomach falls out like it always does when she jumps, and suddenly they’re no longer in a secluded alcove of Downton Abbey. Mary swallows hard to rid her mouth of the taste of ozone as she realizes she’s standing in…a forest?
“Oh, bugger,” Matthew says, and Mary realizes it’s not just any forest. The leaves are too thick, it’s distinctly tropical in a way that England will never, ever be, not even in the twenty-ninth century, and…
A hundred meters away , there’s a stegosaurus contentedly munching on what looks like something that might have once been an ancestor of a cow. Mary and Matthew gape at it in shock. It’s not the first dinosaur Mary’s seen—like any jumper is able to resist the lure of giant lizards at least once in his or her career—but it’s the first time she’s been this close to one. She watches its club tail twitch in the tall grass fields.
“Um,” Matthew says.
Just like that, the spell is broken. “Dammit, Matthew,” she says. “I think you typed a few too many zeroes.”
“I still prefer this to Carson finding out,” Matthew says, cracking a wry grin.
Mary gives him a stink-eye. “Say that again after you’ve been dinosaur kibble.”
“Even then. Grab my arm, I’ll try to get us back.”
“You’d better,” Mary sniffs, but she breaks character by smiling at him before she links her fingers through his.
