Tuesday: Time Travel
Hello, everyone. I’m argentum-ls, pinch-hitting for the week, and today's theme is time travel. Prompts can be characters going back or forward in time, time itself changing directions, metaphors about time or traveling through it, or any other way you way to interpret the theme
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He makes himself a sandwich to die for and cracks open a beer, silent as he always is so as to not wake the others, but can’t bring himself to eat it. The kitchen, Nate’s kitchen, seems so empty, despite the knowledge that Nate and Sophie are upstairs, and Hardison’s splayed on the couch with Parker nestled at his feet.
Out of reflex, he’d gone to all the wrong cabinets and all the wrong drawers, searching for plates where there were glasses, searching for knives where there were dish towels. He keeps expecting her to sit down next to him like she had so many other times when he couldn’t sleep, dead on her feet but determined to stay up as long as he did. She’d say nothing, just sit, and wait for the sunrise to wash away his unease for one more day.
But she doesn’t, and he’s one step away from punching himself in the face. Spending seven years in the past has made him unacceptably weak.
Apparently he thinks too loud, however, for a moment later Sophie comes padding into the kitchen, clad in one of Nate’s shirts and doing her best not to yawn. “How’d I know I’d find you down here?”
He starts to give her a smile, but decides against it-she’d see through it in a second, anyhow. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
Sophie waves his apology away. “Nate snores when he’s coming down with a cold,” she explains. “It’d take a miracle for me to sleep through it.”
Eliot can empathize: his buddy Kenny snored like a freight train, only his wasn’t only limited to being sick. He holds out the plate to Sophie and says, “Here. I don’t think time travel agrees with me.”
Sophie accepts the sandwich readily-Eliot’s never met someone to turn down his food-but only manages a bite before growing melancholy. “Yes, must be.”
“What else would it be?” Eliot asks, daring her to push him further.
She does, because that’s her job. “I think that you need to be honest with yourself,” she says. She pauses, and then asks what Eliot wished she wouldn’t. “Did you want to come back?”
The ticking clock on the wall provides a quiet metronome as he studies Sophie, the woman who’d constantly bounced between mother, sister, and friend, who’d occasionally done the wrong thing but always cared. Whatever she may be, he sits down on a barstool and laughs a laugh so caustic it sets Sophie’s nerves on edge.
“No. And if Hardison hadn’t found me, I never would have.”
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