Participants:
Scene Title | Iterations of History |
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Synopsis | Way, way too much infodump but possibly useful sometime, somewhere. |
Date | July 14, 2021 |
Department of the Exterior Headquarters
She’s not allowed to wander freely in the complex, but Elisabeth is not really looking to wander too freely either. She has already probably caused a little stir this morning by muffling a meeting with Michelle so the listeners can’t eavesdrop on it. She doesn’t even plan on doing that with Wright.
Smoothing her hand lightly down her gray slacks, Elisabeth doesn’t look as much like the peacekeeper Wright knows her to be as she does Richard Ray’s wife. It is most definitely a higher ‘society’ appearance than Liz usually bothers with, with her silky green top tucked into the gray slacks and her blonde hair loose but smoothly styled. When the door to the conference room space opens – a different one than she met with Michelle in – the smile that appears is weary but the blue eyes are bright with welcome. “Hey, you,” she greets mildly. “Figured since I was in town, I’d check up on you in person.” Now that Ames is home with her mother and safe, Elisabeth is hoping that Wright has managed to get some sleep. Her gaze is sharp as she takes in the other woman’s demeanor. “Starting to finally calm down?” she asks sympathetically.
“Oh yeah,” Wright says, waving the other woman into her enclosure. “I'm good. Did Kenneth give you any trouble? He's been grumpy since I told him I'm trying to get a pinball machine in here.” Nothing about what she says seems particularly serious. The agent whose full-time job is to make sure she doesn't do any treason is actually fairly easy to get along with. She only pretends that they're feuding in order to give him something to do.
The room, a repurposed conference room, is much nicer than the one she had been shoved into at Fort Jay. She hadn't slept for the entire week she was stationed there, but her nights are generally easier now. With the minotaur suspiciously silent, it hasn't been hard to get a solid eight hours. Whatever is keeping it occupied is its own worry. This space is more her own, with piles of movies, books, makeup, and technical manuals lining the table instead of old, forgotten SESA files.
She rolls a barbell across the floor toward the wall with her foot. It joins a loose collection of exercise supplies small enough to appropriate from the office gym without meaningfully hurting the supply for anyone else.
"Nah, no trouble with Kenneth," Elisabeth laughs quietly. Glancing around she looks thoughtful. "Not a bad little space, I guess. Getting paid to be on-call seems to be mostly agreeing with you." She's teasing. "I figured since I'm here – I needed to check up on Michelle and Ria anyway, and they suck at calling home – I'd stop in and see how you're doing. I'm trying to make a point of talking to Marthe every couple or few days, just to check on her and Ames both. I've been giving some thought to putting a security guy on Ames, if you both agree… just in case." Elisabeth grimaces. "I'm probably paranoid to hell and gone, but I don't think my heart could take another mess like that one." The peacekeeper is going to have weeks of nightmares of metal monsters coming straight at her very young cops. Again.
Sheepishly, she adds, "Maybe… leave a message for my husband that I miss him? You know, things like that."
Wright nods, trying not to dwell too much on the remnant existential dread of her parents having kidnapped her daughter for a terrorist summer camp. She focuses on the fact that Ames is out of harm’s way, probably still sleeping in because she deserves it. Crossing the room, she gestures at two rolling office chairs beside the conference table.
“Always happy to chat,” she says convincingly as she claims her own chair. I'll tell your husband whenever I see him again is going to be a whole conversation that she's both unprepared for and unsure she should even have. She's fairly certain that the sheetrock around the room is fifty percent listening device.
“Been keeping busy in incredibly boring ways,” she says. “Lots of movies to watch, books to read. Baby to admonish via video chat.”
“Not for having been kidnapped,” she clarifies. “She's just always doing something commendably inappropriate. Since encouraging her bad behavior is apparently frowned upon, I gotta do the admonishment.” Marthe seems reluctant to do it herself, owing to the decision that ended up with their child unexpectedly attending Camp Pure Earth. Wright won't fault her for that, though. She understands guilt.
“How about you?” she asks. “How's things? How's Michelle? She's been hiding from me since I implied she's a lackluster maternal figure.”
"Oooooh," Elisabeth winces at that. "Yikes. Well, you still have all your skin, so she didn't flay you alive with words…" she observes mildly. "Ames doesn't seem too much the worse for wear, though I suspect she's going to need that counselor for a little while." Her tone is gentle. "She'll come out of it all right, though. I gave Marthe the name of the counselor who worked with Aura so well when we first got home. She's great with kids."
She makes her way to one of the rolling chairs and lowers herself into it tiredly. "I'm doing mostly okay. Honestly, kind of exhausted – and now that Ames is home and the fires are under control, I'm taking just a little time for myself. Going to head for Detroit to see the kids for a couple of days." Dragging a hand through her hair, she admits, "They're getting concerned about Richard being gone so long. Until all this happened, he'd pretty much settled into being a businessman and at home most nights, so I need to do a little damage control, you know?"
She grimaces a little bit, making a point of glancing around the room seeking cameras. "I don't suppose your Keepers will let me have a private conversation with him – although, hey, yaknow, if they get off on voyeurism, that might be fun." She winks at Wright teasingly. "But… think could you tell me how he's doing, at least?" Yes, she's well aware that anything that gets said is going to be monitored, and no, she's not going to get Wright into any kind of mess by trying to obscure their monitoring in here.
Wright wishes her terrible baby was here, so she could manage the little goblin’s path of destruction better. Knowing she's okay now doesn't stop the spikes of anxiety regarding the fact that she was kidnapped at all, but remembering what it felt like to murder Wright's father takes the edge off.
She smiles slyly at the recognition of all the surveillance devices in her hamster cage. “Elliot's riding in a different vehicle,” she laments, “but Richard was looking okay last I saw him through the stream. Anything you want Elliot to tell him later?” She's been so good at lying and obscuring the truth for so long that her body language betrays nothing about the fact that nobody has seen Richard in over a week.
There's a wistful smile as Elisabeth shakes her head. "Nah," she says softly. "Nothing he doesn't already know – just… that I stopped in, we're all thinking about him, that kind of thing. You could make him laugh and tell him I'm listening to our radio station a lot." She shrugs and rolls her eyes, her smile soft. "Apparently it was really good for morale back during the war. The DJ these days isn't so bad when she's on the air. But as much as I want to tell him about Kaylee and the others, this is just not the time or place to tell him shit like that. I don't want him to worry about anything, so… ya know, keep it light. Tell him I love his stupid butt. I don't want to do anything to get you into trouble or anything, so I won't ask for details from their end. I appreciate just knowing he's okay and they're still on the move," she admits.
Dropping her head back on a sigh, Elisabeth confesses, "I really wish we could all wake up from this nightmare. I'm tired, Wright. I almost think the lot of you are the lucky ones – at least you're holed up here and everyone here knows the stakes. Keeping my game face on and seeing the people around me who won't be here in a year unless a miracle happens?" She grimaces. "It kinda sucks."
“I'll send your love,” she says, which isn't a lie because she doesn't know that they'll never see Richard again; they are all heading to the same destination after all.
Wright lets it sit for a moment. It is all a lot to deal with. It's worse when you know what Elliot suspects, that no miracle will occur. Their current future is the end of the world, because this isn't the present; it's Glory’s past. The coming year and all its unspeakable tragedies have already occurred. Things are actively changing, but even with the existence of refactoring it's hard to say what Glory’s future knowledge can change. Worse, would changing things for the better now be disadvantageous to them in a refactored future? She needs to find Chel and get a crash course in temporal mechanics.
“My go-to in situations like this is to stay focused on the operation without considering the endgame,” she lies. She can't help but think about it constantly. “Living in the moment and doing the job. It takes the edge off.” That, and the fact that she knows that at the very least, Ames already survived the apocalypse and is four years older than Wright is now. Sure, everyone on the away team is destined to die. She probably won't survive Elliot's death in a meaningful way. But Ames survived what's to come.
“I have hope, though,” she admits, which isn't a lie. Hope keeps the Switchboard locked. “Just need to get through the bad parts first.” She doesn't bother hiding how much the weight of responsibility pushes her down.
Elisabeth slants a faint smile at Wright. Her blue eyes are saddened with the weight of what knowledge she already has. "I have hope," she says quietly. "It wouldn't be the first time my husband has pulled off the impossible. He ate a nuke once, you know." The deadpan is real. She wishes she could laugh at that – if there is anything in the world one should be able to laugh incredulously about, it's the absurd statement that her husband ate a nuke once! Instead, there's a long quiet.
Wright has no idea how to process this information, and looks appropriately baffled.
"We knew when he decided to go that a slim chance was better than no chance at all. We've done these kinds of things too long not to know the odds, Wright. Doesn't mean I'll stop doing the job that's in front of me – raising my kids, getting as many people as we can to safety, making sure they all have faith that things will be okay," Elisabeth says finally. It just means that she's also accepted the probabilities. She would reach out to squeeze Wright's wrist in solidarity because it's hard to face down the end of the world and the probable death of so many, including likely many that they care about. But she doesn't because Wright has avoided touch since the away team left.
"Can I bring you anything to help keep the time from weighing? I know you're seeing Merlyn pretty regularly, so I'm sure she's pampering you with treats," Liz offers with a small smile. Elliott's wife is kind of a godsend in this. "But anything I can get you from Detroit?"
“Do they still have a massive aurora from detonating the Entity there?” Wright asks with convincing sincerity. “I bet that would make a really cool keychain.” The most standard kind of travel souvenir made from the most impossible of materials. “It could say ‘I was exposed to strange energies from the explosion that handed out superpowers and all I got was this lousy keychain’ on it.”
“I'm actually fairly entertained here,” she says with the levity that was missing from her joke. “They let me watch whatever I want on this huge TV. I have things to read. I keep stealing free weights from the gym and then telling them that I thought that's what ‘free’ meant.” She hooks a thumb over her shoulder at the scattered dumbbells. “Anything to fight the crushing existential dread.”
“But feel free to get me presents,” she adds, serious again. “I'm contractually obligated to accept gifts. Maybe a weird hot sauce for Elliot.”
"Well…." Elisabeth grins a bit despite her exhaustion. "I'll bring Elliot a weird hot sauce, or at least send it via Merlyn's next visit up here. Richard hasn't told the nuke story?" She sounds amused. "Maybe it'll help the crushing existential dread. I mean… I'm not even kidding about it." Leaning back in her chair a bit, laying her head back against the wall, the blonde works on telling the story in such a way that it might actually help Wright to believe that it could be possible that a miracle will get pulled out of the away team's ass.
"Let's see… how to begin this. So a lot of Operation Apollo is laid out really well in The Wolves of Valhalla. I mean, the person who wrote that was exceedingly well-informed about a lot of things, although there are parts they didn't know or left out. Three teams were part of Operation Apollo, and it was … such a mess, honestly. The warhead was, as all know, beneath the ice cap."
Elisabeth doesn't even realize that there's a soft hum emanating from her as she talks. For all that it has been more than a decade, and despite all that she has seen and lived and experienced in the meantime… that day is one that haunts her. Memories of the last moments are just as vivid now as they were the day it happened. They vie for pride of place in the treasure trove of 'most horrible things I have ever seen.'
"When we went into the area where the weapon was placed, it was a goatscrew. The description of that fight was pretty spot on. But they left out the part where we were all evacuating to the helo… and Richard realized there was no way to stop the timer." She doesn't give two shits that the information she's about to share is likely to this day as classified as classified gets. "He and Kershner had a failsafe in place." Her blue eyes shift about the room and she says softly, "He took the warhead into the shadows with him. The rest of us were climbing into the helo and it was lifting off when the timer hit zero." The low thrum in the room hits the threshold of human hearing and it's a low bass sound that Elisabeth has to wrestle into submission, getting it back down below that level.
"The mushroom cloud wasn't white, it was black. But there was no ash." Her tone is distant, like she can still see it. Like she's lost there for a long moment. "The blast wave hit us and we spun, but Raith kept us in the air. Claire and I were practically hanging out the door of the helo… when I realized that what was drifting down to the ice pack was tatters of shadow. Solidified." She swallows hard. "Pieces of Richard." Has to stop there a moment to subdue the visceral reaction that still happens so many years later, that low level of buzzing of her audiokinesis out of control. She ruthlessly quells the audible ranges of it and focuses on Wright.
“Jesus!” Wright exclaims, eyes elsewhere in the room as she imagines the logistics of surviving as shadow confetti. What exactly the fuck is Richard’s ability? Was that before or after getting the Conduit? Questions she can't ask without sounding like she's digging for intelligence.
Elisabeth takes a quick breath and refocuses on the present. "And somehow … he pulled himself back together. Managed, after weeks, to get me word that he was still alive. But for months … he was trapped in a shattered, tattered, incorporeal shadow form. Eventually he found someone who could heal it." So many emotions, so many things unsaid in the somewhat spare telling of what had to be a devastating time.
"So if you ever have doubt that something can be done? My husband is a walking, talking arbiter of the impossible, Wright. As if pulling me out of a whole other timeline or four wasn't a big enough Impossible Action, he also did that." She smiles just a little bit. "Hope hurts like a motherfucker, but no matter how bleak it looks… I have no choice but to believe in him. Because he's proven he can do things that should not be able to be accomplished."
“He'd mentioned being in Antarctica but kind of buried the lede on his contribution.” Richard is a storied power player, and one of him is responsible for turning Elliot and Wright into the person they became. She's glad that the one she knows is the type to shadow-eat a nuke and not the figure of Elliot's nightmares.
“I heard some vague mentions of other weird shit going down,” she continues, “but this is new to me. I didn't know that you were there either, actually. Good job making the world not like that other place.”
“Do you want anything to drink? Coffee?” she asks, realizing that she's been a bad host up to this point.
She kind of shrugs off her own contributions. "Not sure how much of what I did helped. And I never really forgave Lazarro, that fuck – yeah, the head of Homeland Security Lazarro, before you ask – for drugging me and sending me to Siberia," Elisabeth snorts. The subtle bass still shivers at the edges of Wright's perception, ruffling small hairs and kissing exposed skin like a faint breeze. She figures if they haven't burst in to make a stink at this point, they won't. "I wouldn't mind a cup of tea," she admits. "I suspect if you give me coffee just now, you might have to peel me off the ceiling." Her tone is dry, but there's an undercurrent of truth to it – that tremor of not-sound implies that she is still impacted powerfully.
"There's been plenty of other weird shit," Liz agrees mildly. "But … you know, we have some time to visit and since we're here and you can't tell me what they're doing on the other end much, I can just open the floor to questions or find other lovely tales to tell." She grins a little. "Some of what I can tell you might be useful, I dunno. If nothing else, you'll know me and my husband a little better, yeah?"
“Tea it is,” Wright says, slapping her thighs before standing. She makes her way to the sideboard with all of the confiscated beverage equipment and flips on an electric kettle. “Got a few options here in this basket that's supposed to be in the cafeteria.” She crosses the room as the kettle begins emitting a sigh of activity at odds with the noise filling the bottom range of her hearing.
“We don't have to dive into any of the weird shit if you'd rather not,” she offers along with the tea bag basket for Liz’s perusal. “I'm getting the impression that it's stressing you out.” It's starting to feel a little dubstep in here, which she doesn't mind but isn't a great sign for her friend's well-being.
Laughing quietly, Elisabeth admits, "Talking about Richard turning into a mushroom cloud of living shadow and being stuck incorporeal for life is probably one of a small handful of things that will always stress me out." She shrugs just a little. "It's a sight that there are no words for. But not everything is quite so … visceral, you know? It'll ease off in a few seconds. It's kind of the … barometer of my emotions around certain things, I guess."
She sits up more to look in the basket of tea that should be in the cafeteria, choosing one to hand over with a grin. "I could tell you about the time I got to meet our 20-year old son." The slightly forced facetiousness is another way to cope with and quell the humming. She glances at Wright, impish as she adds, "A whole slew of Ferry-adjacent kids from the future came back to try to stop Humanis First from taking over the government – not sure where in the Ferry you were at that time or how much you knew. Joshua tried to kill Richard. Orrrrr… I could tell you about taking Ben Ryans to Alaska, training him on Horizon armor and having him want to know if there were pockets in the thing." She pauses and her whole face lights up at that memory. "I heard the man full-on belly laugh when he face-planted in the snow. Like, whooping madly."
Wright wishes she could teach Liz how to let the memory bend against her mind and fall away, but she can't. The only reason she knows how to do it is because it's how Elliot dealt with borderline traumatic memories, augmented by what it felt like when Yancy used his telepathic misdirection ability. It's like the brain suppressing a traumatic memory, but it takes practice and you have to do it all of the time. It's almost as effective and just as unhealthy, but they don't make therapists for what's wrong with them.
“I can't remember the last time I owned clothing that didn't include pockets,” she admits with a laugh, giving remembering an honest try. “I don't even permit women's clothing that has fake pockets. Forbidden.” She doesn't remember the last time she felt particularly feminine in any meaningful way. Hopefully she can work up the nerve to run some things past Seren tonight when they visit.
“I'd love to hear about your future-past adult-baby, though,” she says. It's important because it hopefully keeps things a little less drum and bass while simultaneously teaching her more about time travel. She really needs to talk to World's Smartest Mom about how to get away with stealing information from the OEI. “That must have been a trip.”
She's honestly curious how much classified material she can get out of Liz before Kenneth ruins the party. She really needs to develop that asset sooner rather than later; he'd be much more manageable if he was on their side.
"Hmmm, let's see." Elisabeth pauses and slants a look at the ceiling, perhaps pondering what to say and then deciding what the fuck. "Once upon a time, there was a man who called himself Richard that we all knew as Zeke. We won't go into all the bullshit he pulled, I don't need to tell you about that mess. But among the children of those born into the time he came from, there was someone like Hiro Nakamura. A time-traveling power. The children of the original Ferry and Lighthouse thought they could change the war that happened between Evos and Humanis First. The one we were heading toward. They came back in time to attempt to stop it all."
Pulling in a breath that she lets out slowly, Elisabeth considers. "One of the major divergence points between us and that Wasteland timeline is that Edward Ray had my name on a list of people who needed to be killed… and Zeke believed in Edward Ray fanatically. Zeke killed his Elisabeth." Somehow this doesn't hurt her nearly as much as it still to this day hurts Richard. "He used a man who had a time-rewinding ability to resurrect her several years later. This, by the way, is something my Richard categorically refused to do when the time came. So far as I'm aware, that was not enough for a timeline split… but I'm pretty sure there was an actual timeline split of the Wasteland in 2012 at the same time that I disappeared. In the Wasteland where I landed in 2017, Richard tried to redeem himself and died in 2012. But I suppose that's not relevant to this part so much."
She pauses, then finishes given the context of Joshua and his arrival. "Zeke tried to work inside the system to bring them down. I think he thought he could stop the worst of Humanis First's anti-evo depredations. But he was having to make too many compromises. When Zeke's Elisabeth, the resurrected one, found out she was pregnant, she was terrified that THEY would find out. She fled into the Ferry before her pregnancy became common knowledge, raised Joshua in the resistance. Very Sarah Connor of her," she says, tongue only somewhat in cheek, "except that he wasn't destined to be the guy who brought down Skynet." She pauses and smiles faintly. "Doesn't mean he didn't try."
Wright listens to the story with honest interest as she walks the teabag back over to the purloined beverage station. The kettle is burbling in a lower state of excitement as she drops the bag into a clean coffee mug. Is it clean? She double-checks, relieved to see that it is.
“Weirdly specific question about all that,” she says distractedly. “You said Richard died in the timeline when you got there. Was that a divergent branch off of the Wasteland timeline where he didn’t die in twenty-twelve, or was it a revision of events from there forward?”
Oh…. well, that is a good question. And Elisabeth is thoughtful, considering her answer even as she distractedly corrects, "He was dead five years before I ever got there." Thinking about the ins and outs of time travel always gives her a headache. And she suspects that the people the eavesdroppers report to will be interested in her answer here.
"Uhm… So to make a long convoluted answer less long… I suspect that the Wasteland I landed in was an offshoot of the Wasteland that Zeke came from for several reasons. The first… In Zeke's timeline, Elisabeth fled when she was just starting to show in her pregnancy, and Zeke never even knew the boy. Joshua and friends came here from Zeke's timeline stop him – Joshua with the intent to kill him to save his mother. During an overlay while I was sitting in the Flood world, I saw – presumably – the Wasteland that I landed in. Richard was there when his son was born because he tried to change everything and she didn't run. When Natazhat exploded, the hole that ripped through timelines allowed a piece of the Natazhat security footage from the battle here in 2011 to land in that Wasteland. When that Richard saw what Zeke had become, saw my Richard fighting him tooth and nail… he died trying to change all the things he'd started that led to him becoming Zeke in the first place." So two different Richards from a Wasteland timeline, split circa 2012.
"The second reason I'm pretty sure it's an offshoot is that I know the Wasteland the children came from still existed during my travels, unchanged at least as of around 2014. A couple of the kids went back to their 2040. And the one with the talent to time travel tried to come back here yet again but he took a left turn at Albuquerque and found himself in the Flooded world several years before I landed there. We found one another there in the Flood and he told me about their trip and what they'd learned." The flash of sadness in her eyes is quickly hidden. "Joshua never really understood that killing my Richard wouldn't have done a damn thing to help his mother."
She pauses. "God, I fucking hate time travel," Elisabeth admits on a laugh. "I'm not entirely sure how it actually twists things among the timelines either."
“Interesting,” Wright says, clicking off the kettle before it gets annoying and filling the mug with near-boiling water. Why didn’t the Wasteland get refactored? What is the origin of the refactoring effect? What’s the scope and range?
Their running theory had been that Zeke’s shenanigans in 2011 had altered time in a way that caused the refactoring effect, but wouldn’t that have spread to the branches of the timeline affected by the appearance of pieces of the Mallett Device? Or would refactoring exist in the Mallett Wasteland—where Richard died five years before Liz’s arrival—and not in the OG Wasteland, where Zeke got progressively more the worst and then went back in time to make it everybody else’s problem?
Those are the questions that are important to them, but probably not as important to Liz, as she has never heard of refactoring. “It must be strange to think that there are versions of you who have a son that you didn’t have,” she muses as she carries the hot tea back to the chairs to hand over. “Due to the fact that I didn’t meet Marthe until after the start of the war and therefore in the current branch of the timeline as far as anyone is aware, I’m the only Wright who has a Tiny Baby Ames.”
Elisabeth reaches up to take the tea and she says quietly, "Two sons that I didn't have, actually. Three if you count both Wastelands as separate. I'm the only one of us who had a girl." She breathes in the steam from the tea. "In the Wasteland, there was Joshua – both of the Joshuas. In the Pinehearst world, Elisabeth had a boy she called Cameron."
She clenches her jaw and admits quietly, "I suspect there's an offshoot branch of that one out there as well, given the fact that when some of the Ferry bounced forward from 2009 to 2019 into that world, Elisabeth there was alive and well… and her son's father was a man named Norton Trask – or at least, that's what Norton was told. In the one I landed in, the boy's father was Felix Ivanov. But while Magnes and I were there in 2014, Samson Gray disguised as Arthur Petrelli murdered that Elisabeth, so she could never have met the 2019 travelers."
She sips her tea. She's used to the strangeness that is her life. "Cameron went to live with his father after she was killed. And presumably they are all doing well. I admit I… hope that they've made the cut for whatever preparations our partners are making in their world for the incoming catastrophe." A glance up at the cameras. Yes, guys, she knows where the OEI is based. "I tried really hard not to damage things and failed spectacularly, as you can tell," she sighs, turning her attention back.
"But…it's definitely strange," she admits quietly. "The adult Joshua came to see me, and it was… awkward and adorable and I really wanted nothing more than to hug him. He showed me what his ability was. It seemed very comparable to my mother's. Subsonics, it felt like. Knowing that, I have to admit that I wonder what Aura will have. No one's really figured out the inheritance aspects or anything."
“Auroras do produce sound,” Wright says as she scoops coffee grounds into a reusable plastic filter basket. The beans aren't as good as what they'd prefer, but it's better than most of the shit back in the SZ. They don't want to annoy Reeves by asking for a quick trip to where the good stuff is produced. “Most people can't hear it though.”
“Kinda feel bad I was technically retired during most of that,” she says, tipping the kettle to slowly fill a second mug with coffee. She doesn't ask if Liz ever met a version of Wright or Elliot in her travels, because the other woman likely would have mentioned it and Wright doesn't like drawing attention to how much she's changed. “Not that I'm really in the same league as Gray and Petrelli. Actually, no, yeah, I'm glad I was home with the tiny baby.”
She doesn't rush the pour and her hand is steady the whole time. Eventually she's satisfied and the electric kettle is returned to its stand. “You ever able to contact any of them since?” she asks.
Holding the tea mug in her hands, Elisabeth sips it slowly. Her smile is amused. "I'm definitely aware of the sounds of an aurora," she admits on a laugh. "Both kinds of them." She rolls her eyes, because Aurora has very not-quiet days – and Elisabeth loves them because it's a sign that her child is not in siege mentality.
Leaning back in her chair, though, she observes softly, "I'm glad you were home with the Tiny Tornado too, honestly." Wright, Elliot, and Marthe deserved the relative peace of that. "And no… I met the child Joshua once, and Aura and I knew Cameron well. Aura grew up with him as her 'cousin', after his mother died. There's no way, that I'm aware of, to get in touch—" Although now that she's said that, she actually knows there might be a way to at least let Bright Felix know that she and Aura made it home safe. Even if she can tell him nothing else, she can ease his mind on that front.
But back to the present. "I found out about a year after I got back that the elder Joshua died in the war. I would have … liked to have gotten to know him, but even had I been here, I don't know if that would have gone well. Too much cognitive dissonance for him, I would think, and I have no idea if he and Richard could have ever managed to get to the point of letting bygones be bygones, you know?" She grimaces and then smiles sadly. "He had a shit life in both of those worlds."
Wright considers telling Liz about Nova, but that seems invasive. Not, she realizes, as invasive as the possibility of developing the adorable, parallel-bodied woman as a plerosymbiotic prospect, but still. She can play that card if it ever comes to hand rather than make promises she can't fulfill. Having eyes in every timeline would be pretty incredible though. What an interesting and useful ability.
She adds a packet of sugar to her coffee and stirs it in, wishing it was honey instead. “I'm sorry to hear that,” she says honestly, unable to think of a way to be helpful in this strange situation. “What was Cameron's world like? I know very little about that one, I'm assuming you were there for a while though?”
"It was about 5 years. That's actually where Aura was born," Elisabeth agrees, sipping her tea again. She seems to feel better – the low-level hum has disappeared. "We landed there in 2012, grateful beyond belief to have escaped the Virus world." A pang of remembered horror is hidden as soon as it appears in her expression, carefully pushed down. "Some friends of ours – familiar faces across all the timelines," she says with a small smile, "caught us as we landed. Got us identity papers, places to live, things like that. Helped us blend in." She believes that their 'partners' in this crosstime caper are from that world, but she doesn't say that for now and just in case, she won't expose more names than Felix's… because she suspects if they take a run at Felix in their world, they're going to be very fucking sorry. He has a whole hell of a lot of information to burn all their asses with.
"We were all in pretty rough shape when we rolled in – starving refugees, literally. We tried to keep a low profile, for the most part. The world was actually quite lovely. Arthur Petrelli was kind of the king snake in the grass who kept all the others from being a bigger threat. They built the beautiful world on human rights violations out the ass, but I suppose that's really how civilizations are built, isn't it?" Elisabeth sounds … deceptively neutral about that.
"SLC-Expressives have full rights in society, registration is not mandatory except if you're using them in your career. They test children at birth and they have training centers and teachers who can help with manifestations. People still disappear – abilities they consider 'dangerous' or people the Powers That Be want disappeared. Not so different from here. But Aura and I had a pretty good life mostly. I couldn't go back to being a cop – it wasn't my world and it would have brought too much scrutiny anyway. So I waited tables, and did some singing." She smiles a little bit. "I helped that world's Eve with a couple of songs that we co-wrote. Even sang back-up for her in the recording studio. She's a big music hit there, very stable. She knew who and what I was, obviously. She was pissed that I wouldn't allow her to credit me on the album she released. I think it went platinum." Her tone is wistful.
“That sounds like a lovely place so long as you don't think too long about it being founded on catacombs,” Wright says with a mildly distressed chuckle. She settles into her favorite chair, also not native to this conference room. “But it sounds like quite a vacation compared to the Virus timeline. Good to have a little stability during the formative years for the little one. And having a local friend support group is a bonus, especially if they’re more stable than… usual.” She should ask Nova to ask Nova to listen to the album for the novelty.
“Yeah… if you weren’t the people on the bad side of the guy in charge, it was kind of … the way I always hoped this one would turn out,” Elisabeth admits. “Not a perfect world, but certainly for most people out there, it was a reasonable place. Had any one of several things gone differently, Aura and I might have stayed.” If their Elisabeth hadn’t been murdered by Samson Gray, if Gabriel hadn’t died, if Eileen hadn’t kidnapped Manuel and Addie… “We could have been happy there.” Those years, despite the bad things that happened, are good memories for the blonde peacekeeper, and it’s evident in the small smile that quirks her lips. “I had time to put a lot of old ghosts to rest when we lived there. Just in time to create new nightmares for myself, but… yaknow. At least I’m still functional and sane. By most definitions of those words,” she quips.
Wright wonders if there's a living Elliot or Wright in what the OEI called the Bright timeline. It seems like they'd have the best chance of doing so there of all the timelines she's aware of. What would those people be like? Wright only met Elliot in this timeline because their work for the Ferrymen intersected at the Brick House. Would that Wright have ridden the patriotism school to armed forces pipeline the whole way? She was already binge drinking in her teens. Would Elliot have survived the roof of the group home with no news of the Bomb being delivered just in time? Maybe those two are both dead, actually.
“What was…” she starts and stops. “Feel free to not satisfy my curiosity, I get that this wasn't a great time for you. I'm just curious, did the Ferrymen exist in the Wasteland? Or, at least, heading up to the getting wasted part?” Squeaks has remained steadfast in her desire to not talk about the Bad Place, and Elliot respects that. But it would be good to know where other Elliots are in case Nova can hypothetically be tasked with finding them. For whatever reason, Zero stopped killing people at Elliot, so it's possible that his alternate are likewise immune to the effects of its parasitosis. It isn't perfect, but an obligate mutualistic xenosymbiont is certainly a step up from having your consciousness painfully shredded and consumed.
"Yes, they existed in… very similar form to here." There's a long moment of pause and Elisabeth sips her tea while she tries to figure out how to answer that. "In all the timelines that I've experienced except Flood, I know for a fact the Ferry existed in close to the same way with most of the same people… in Flood, it may have existed in a far more low-key way. It seems to be that in Flood, some of the key players were not there or didn't react in the same ways for some reason, so… what was happening behind the scenes is a lot harder to determine because there weren't really people to ask, you know? For some context, though….? Again with the longest story in existence being told as succinctly as I can manage – and bear in mind that some of this is inferential information." Trying to find a short short version is next to impossible.
"As best we can figure…The Virus line, the Bright line, and the Wasteland all have divergence points very close together, well after the creation of the Ferry – though to be fair, I don't know exactly when it was created. I do know that it was well before 2008. The fork in the road in 2008 between what we call Prime because we live in it and the Virus line happened when the truck of viral vectors was stopped in Nevada and Ethan Holden was killed. DHS opened the truck full of human vectors, which is how it got loose in that timeline. Here, that didn't happen; Holden made it here to New York. I don't know why except that perhaps she was terrified of what the virus would cause, but as I understand it, Eileen Ruskin leaked the intel about the truck." She was told that by Edward in the Virus world and never asked where Eileen's intel came from… could it have been a precog or even a time traveler? Shit…. She clears her throat. "We obliterated the truck with thermite." With the human vectors still inside.
"Here… everyone's identities were hidden, in part because we had the Commissioner of Police in the loop on what we were doing. In the Bright world, that didn't happen… the members of Phoenix were considered terrorists and jailed in Moab Federal. Bright diverged in 2009 for us because of a whole hell of a big mess involving time travel shenanigans around events that took place at Moab Penitentiary—a group from 2019 using a time traveler's ability came back to try to free their counterparts from the prison. Moab here was basically broken into by several members of Phoenix and others, whose time-related powers all interacted and blew the place to hell… parts of Moab landed in various timelines, as I understand it. One of those parts landed in Wasteland and informed Ezekiel's shenanigans. Sort of–" She holds up one finger.
"Although there are layers to that because Wasteland's divergence was probably technically Mount Natazhat in 2011, but there are some complicating factors to that because Zeke was accidentally thrown back in time from somewhere around 2040-ish due to, you guessed it – time travel ability! – to the 1960s, as I understand from what he told me when we met. And he was killed by Samson Gray in the 1970s or something, and then his brain kept in a jar and re-embodied by Simon Broome." Elisabeth waits a beat, staring at Wright, the epiphany hitting her that… she's known all along about time travel happening, but until she laid it out for Wright, she didn't see those potential connections. And now she wonders… is Zeke's travel at the hands of young-adult Walter Trafford the entire reason for the differences between Prime and Flood…? A circular knot, an ouroboros, of time travel paradox?
Very very drily, she comments, "I cannot make this shit up."
Wright feels Elliot's rapt attention as he compares Liz's information to what he's learned along the way through hearsay and mission briefs. If he was in the townhouse, she's sure he'd be writing it all down on the wall they destroyed and replaced to ward against contact post-cognition.
For her part, she's obviously fascinated. Maybe her Bright counterpart didn't die in the army due to alcohol consumption. The biggest fear at this point is whether or not the Institute existed in a manner that allowed for the existence of Project Zero, and whether another Elliot got pulled into it. Is there more than one Zero? It seems unlikely, it would have probably been famous for being an unstoppable mind-eating monster.
“Damn,” she says. “I was practically a kid when most of that shit was going down. Just too old to be a Lighthouse kid, so I ended up being the slightly older cousin who had to round the kids up for the Lighthouse.” She laughs without bitterness, those were good kids and somebody needed to kill people to keep them safe. May as well have been her.
“I was still in Patriotism High when the Expressives were outed,” she explains. “Opinions on people with abilities were expectedly negative among my classmates. Didn't go into the Ferry directly, but my work in private security after graduating got me there anyway. Did I ever tell you that's how I met back up with Elliot after years of boarding school? I brought a kid to the Brick House for transport and he was running the logistics.” She seems lost in thought about it, remembering two lives she doesn't consider hers anymore. She's just the person that Elliot and Wright became. So is he. They? Singular they, multiple bodies. That could get confusing if she ever lets herself think about pronouns all the way through.
Listening to Wright's experiences, Elisabeth gives every indication of being very interested. "You did not go into quite that much detail, no – just that you ran into one another in the Ferry. You both did a lot of good in that network, from what I understand, although Elliot paid a high price for that." She grimaces a little bit.
Tipping her head, Elisabeth considers and says, "I honestly can't imagine the hells that you and Elliot have been through. What led you from a household and school that was very anti-Evo to becoming an advocate of the Ferry?" She offers a brief smile, "Obviously just rebelling against the horrible parents would be plenty, but… genuinely curious what pushed you to be not one of the quietly supportive friends but a full-on fighter."
Wright raises her eyebrows and nods in grim agreement over Elliot's experiences. She doesn't like remembering that part of his life, it was bad enough having been Wright on the outside, spiraling further into despair and hiding it well. When she was Elliot, alone on the inside until he met the others he could have become, even the moments of light were shrouded in darkness.
“I already had rebellion in me,” she explains. “From the group home days before I got adopted. The parents tried to make me a worse person, but it turns out that a childhood spent constantly fighting bullies to protect the good kids kinda sticks with you. Graced with rage, the old man would say.”
“It's generally pretty easy to see who's operating in bad faith,” she continues. “Who benefits from oppression and who's actually oppressed. I'm not the sort to tolerate that shit, and I had a hell of a skill set due to going to a school that teaches you how to use guns. I have kind of a compulsion to protect traumatized teenagers, guns, and a bad attitude.” She gives a self-aware but sly grin. Some of that compulsion is Wright’s, but Elliot brought most of it out of the Ark when he couldn't keep his promise to free Bastian. Some of it comes from wishing they hadn't been left in a group home by whoever their parents were, forced to fend for themselves.
Elisabeth nods slightly, her smile knowing though a little sad. "I can relate," she agrees softly. "I went back to the police because the Vanguard blew up the high school where I was teaching in 2008. And then The 36 was my case when I was still an officer in the first iteration of SCOUT. That incident," one of the most horrific cases of traumatized teenagers that ever hit the airwaves, "is what drove me hardest. The utter despair at the senseless loss of so many kids. It's also what set Richard on the path he's on now. We both vowed that kind of thing would never happen again." Wright and Elliot have more in common with the shadowmorph than perhaps they ever realized.
There's a grimace, though. "Honestly, it feels weird to say that to you after all that Elliot suffered at Zeke's hands. It sounds disingenuous, to say Richard was horrified by the 36 – that's what drove him to become more than a thief – and yet some version of him lost his damn mind and did what he did – to Elliot, to people who were his friends, to kids of his friends." Elisabeth just shakes her head. The ends will never justify those means, even in Richard's own eyes. And Zeke in the second version of Wasteland also came to the same conclusion and tried to reverse course, so at least there's that. "I cannot tell you how grateful I am that Elliot could see the differences. That he's there and they're protecting one another."
“Fuck,” Wright says. “Forgot about the thirty-six. What a nightmare.” She sighs, reflecting solemnly. It helps to avoid addressing the fact that nobody knows where Richard is.
“Elliot had difficulty separating the Richards at first, honestly,” she says. “They had a chat. And the more we learn about temporal divergence, the clearer it is that alternates really are different people with different life experiences. All we ever do is change. Zeke had decades of additional life experiences shaping him. Plus he was a brain in a pickle jar for a while, apparently; that can't be great for the integrity of neural pathways. I mean, fuck that guy to pieces, but it's honestly difficult to equate the two in any meaningful way at this point. Plus yours killed the other guy, which is a hell of a statement.”
There's also the fact that Elliot's one memory of a memory of the guy has the wrong voice. Not that she spends a lot of time remembering it, the Hammer is deep in the superstructure of the Palace.
Elisabeth snorts out a soft laugh at the brain in a pickle jar, though the sadness doesn't quite leave her eyes. "I'm glad that Richard and Elliot came to terms. Richard doesn't believe me, but I genuinely believe the Zeke that wore Tyler's face went mad somewhere in there," she admits quietly. She would like to believe at the very end of it all Zeke understood how wrong he'd been, but… "He's the only one who has ever gone to those lengths that I know of. Even the younger Wasteland version… he saw what he would become and died trying to turn it around. My Richard ate a nuke and nearly became – should have become, by all rights – that tattered shadow haunting a corporeal world. Richard's counterpart in the Virus world pulled Kazimir Volken into the shadows with him … condemning himself to forever walking a dead world alone. The Bright version learned what he would do with the Institute via a precog vision and trapped himself in shadowform on purpose to avoid that outcome."
She doesn't divulge the secret that Richard doesn't age in that form – it occurs to her that she's honestly not even sure her husband is aware of that. She should have probably asked him at some point… She pulls her attention back to Wright and shrugs a little. "As far as I know, the Institute never came to pass in Bright because of that – if it had, Samson Gray probably would have gone after that knowledge. He was desperate to get out of that world to a world where his wife and son still lived." There's a pause. "I met a couple of versions of Hiro Nakamura – I'm not sure how many of them, honestly. But I remember thinking he looked ancient, carrying a weariness in him that made me wonder how many times he'd gone back and forth trying to change things. That always stuck with me, especially when I met Zeke … I always wondered the same about him. He told Richard at Natazhat he'd 'get it right next time.'" The horrors of that thought. She shakes it off a bit and just shakes her head.
"As a species, we are barely evolved enough to have self-awareness. Fucking around with time and space is the epitome of stupidity," Elisabeth opines quietly. "I once told young Hiro in the Bright world that same thing… I think he heard me. But… I don't really know for sure and likely never will."
Wright feels bad that Richard’s guilt would drive him to such extremes, though he seems an all-in kind of guy. She wonders if the disproportionate guilt is due to the orphanage nuns. It seems likely – orphanage nuns are, historically, the worst about that.
She already feels new loci opening up to her in the traditional memory palace they've been developing for all this information in lieu of writing it down. She suppresses a snicker when something gets indexed to the Kit Kat Clock in the House in Tulsa. The more they learn about time travel, the less sense the layout of the House in Tulsa makes. They're used to that, at least the rooms don't coexist in the same observed spaces yet. She taps a complex rhythm on her legs, her other body is amused. I — Elliot — am amused. Are amused?
“Stupitome,” she agrees, though she hasn't really learned enough about temporal mechanics to justify her agreement in good faith. She has no proof that time travel is actively making things worse, though apparently the Looking Glass that they used to put her other body in an alternate timeline does. No proof of that yet, either.
If there was no Institute as she remembers it in the Bright timeline, that means there shouldn't be a Project Zero. Where is Zero in that timeline? Does it actually only exist in her perspective branch? What about divergence or recursion would cause such a being to appear in this branch but not others? The Entity is only in this one too, she thinks with mild dread. If Elliot's theory that it came from the Aquifer is true, the thinking of the barriers between worlds could be at fault.
“That Samson Gray is a real horsefucker, I've been told,” she says as Elliot puts more comments about him in the Pickle Jars on the counter. “Not the kind of guy you want gobbling up the ability to time travel. He can't, can he?” She isn't sure why, but she feels uncomfortable talking about him, as though he might be listening. She's grateful not to have an ability worth getting pickle-jarred over.
Elisabeth shudders. "Yes he is. And fuck… I hope we never, in any timeline, have reason to find out if he can do that," she replies. The very idea makes her feel sick to her stomach, actually. Her hands around the warm mug of tea tighten slightly as she considers that question, one that she's never really thought to worry about before it was asked. "Bright's version is dead. We killed his ass. I assume Virus's is. I have no idea what happened to Wasteland's, although… it's likely similar to our own version, who I understand from Richard is damn near dead of cancer. So… Let's not put that question out into the universe and invite her to bend us over a table with an answer we do not want, hmm?" she asks, trying to be facetiously cheerful even as she forces herself not to hum with anxiety. "We're already far enough up Shit Creek with no paddle and a leaking boat." Bad enough they're dealing with either an ancient Evo or an actual unknowable entity, no need to add gasoline to that fucking fire.
As she takes the moment to sip from the tea, Elisabeth lets out a soft sigh. "Never really had to – or even wanted to, if I'm honest – talk to anyone about all this mess. Doesn't always feel quite real, you know? For a while, I was pretty convinced this is the elongated last second of my life in the event horizon of the black hole Magnes became… But if that's the case, this is my eternity. And that kinda sucked, so I decided I didn't like that answer. Then I decided that maybe it's all a coma dream and I never woke up after being shot in the head. But I figure if that were the case, I'd get all the happy evers I want, right? Aura, Richard, no ancient bitch pitching a temper tantrum to end the world?" She grins wryly. "So… when all reasonable explanations have been exhausted, the answer that remains, however improbable, must be the real one… this dumpster fire is just life. But… I do get tired of the ridiculous improbabilities sometimes."
“Some of what I've learned certainly seems to strain credulity,” Wright agrees, taking a long sip of the coffee now that it's a drinkable temperature. At least she doesn't have to worry about Samson Gray sneaking up on her. Oh, shit, she thinks, I'm out of protein powder.
“I'm glad you're not deep in a solipsistic crisis anymore,” she says. “Those aren't fun. Happy to inform you that, by all appearances, I am conscious and have free will, and your near death experience is not fabricating my actions to render a convincing experience for you. Assuming time travel doesn't rule out free will, anyway. That's the worst kind of time travel, according to Elliot. But I'm not in your head, at least.” Nobody should want her in their head because she shouldn't be trusted.
Elisabeth cannot help the grin. "Well… I've done the time travel gig. It does not appear to rule out free will," she agrees. "Timeline travel either. So there's that." She sips from the tea mug and points out, "And if we were in the Matrix or some such virtual reality, well… we certainly wouldn't be facing world-wide extermination. So that's out." She offers a slow shrug. "And don't take this wrong, but I'm always grateful there's no one in my head but me – no one needs my nightmares. Everyone has enough of their own in this day and age."
Letting out a long breath, she savors the tea from the mug and just relaxes for a long few moments in silence. When she looks up at Wright, she observes mildly, "You asked about the adult son and we kinda got derailed because I offered context. Joshua was… a very angry young man. He watched his mother die of the effects of her resurrection. And he blamed his father, rightfully enough. He grew up in a fucking Terminator movie. But there was still a softness to him. He baked me a pie when he came to meet me in person." The memory of that makes her eyes light up with a soft smile.
"He asked me how I chose his name, but… I couldn't tell him that answer. Not then." She thinks she might know the answer now, though it does no one any good. "I would have liked to know him better, to have seen him have a chance in this world to become less angry," Elisabeth says wistfully. "But somehow, I think he died doing exactly what his mother taught him – protecting as many of those who couldn't protect themselves as he could." She's proud of him for that.
“He sounds like a good man,” she surmises, “all things considered. I’m sorry he didn’t have more time.” She wonders what her daughter was like in the future. What did she become without her there? Did Marthe have to raise her on her own? Glory only mentioned their daughter, not her other mother. She tries not to wonder too hard on whether or not her wife ever made it to the bunker.
“I respect protecting people who can’t do that on their own, obviously,” she says, gesturing vaguely at what she must consider to be the circumstances of her life. Ferry, Wolfhound, Elliot in the group home. “We need more people willing to be their best selves despite the cost.” The grim reality of there always being a fire to put out.
"I'd like to think so," Elisabeth agrees with the 'good man' part. She wonders absently if he would have told her he wasn't a good man… it would have amused the hell out of her, actually. Richard always said the same thing, but actions speak louder than words. "I used to think if you gave most people a chance to be their best selves, they would…" The sad reality of what she's seen is that she no longer believes most people will, and her doubt is reflected in her tone. "Not as sure of that as I used to be," she confesses quietly.
She takes a long sip of her tea and looks up at Wright. "I hope you know how much I appreciate you passing messages," Elisabeth offers with a small smile. The simple texts that she's sent to be passed along have been mundane – just brief updates on things like the fire getting under control, kids doing well, and the like. "I thought about sending an actual love letter that Elliot would have to read aloud but I figure Richard might have a heart attack," she grins with a wicked twinkle.
Wright ponders the Idea of people being their best selves when given the opportunity. She strives to be her best self, but the phrase means something different to her. Her best self might require incalculable wrongs being perpetrated against other people who don't deserve it. Her best self might just be a building block in some new person's best self.
She laughs delightedly at the idea of reading a love letter to Richard, she can pretty clearly imagine his discomfort in the presence of her body that isn't in this room or even in this timeline. Her body that remembers the time she died before it turned out that she didn't instead. The body that will always know if Eve’s parasitic aunty alters the events of her life whether for good or evil.
“Don't make it too salacious,” she warns in jest. “Elliot might make sweeping editorial passes to keep from dying of embarrassment.”
"Oh Gawd," Elisabeth huffs out a laugh. "You know… just for the looks on both their faces, it might be worth doing." Her giggles light up her features as she thinks about how that would actually look when it happened, taking away some of the strain and exhaustion. "I won't inflict that on either of them," she finally says amid slowing giggles. Perhaps a little more somber as she finishes her tea and sets the cup down. "Just… tell him I'm holding him to that promise. And that I'm working hard, okay? I don't want him to worry about anything but their mission. I've got my part of all of this under control."
There's a pause and she looks at Wright. "Just knowing they're doing okay is a huge help. I'll be keeping a close eye on your wife and kidling from here out, making sure they're fine." At least as fine as it gets. She rolls her eyes theatrically. "Although I'm gonna chip your offspring, I swear to God. Between her and Ricky, I'm gonna be white-haired instead of blonde."