"I... I don't understand," Baker whispered. "I thought something, anything would surely –"

Nobody else dared to speak or make a move.

Leon had expected she would collapse or scream in pain - he had imagined the process would hurt, even if it didn't work, or rather, especially if it didn't work. One of his major concerns about the design of the device had been the crystal nodes, and their efficiency at charging up. They had to translate her matter into energy fast enough, or she would have been boiled alive before anything had happened.

Alyssa turned her head slowly to face each and everyone in the crowd for a moment, the same way she had done just moments ago. And then, equally slowly, she pushed up the visor of her headgear. Her lilac eyes looked glassy, her gaze was distant and almost feverish as it swept across the room.

But otherwise, she seemed alright. Leon was about to breathe a sigh of relief but in the next moment, he noticed splatters of blood on her suit, barely visible against the black fabric. Yet they did not match any injury. And they were dry.

"It worked," Leon muttered. "I... I believe it really worked!"

He stepped forward, and shrugged off Rosie's hand on his arm. Taking two steps at a time, he climbed up to the platform and came to a halt right in front of Ally.

"What are you all doing here?" she whispered, looking past him at the other scientists with a look of growing discomfort on her face. "What happened? Why did nothing happen?

"Ally... Ally, it worked, didn't it? You jumped back there... and then back here?"

She stared at him blankly, her gaze fixed on something in the general vicinity of his face but infinitely far away. She nodded slowly.

"But... but this is... the bunker city. How..."

"So did it work?" Rosie asked from somewhere behind him.

"Why did nothing change?" Ally asked, raising her voice "Why are you all here?"

She took a step back, precariously close to the edge of the platform, and looked around frantically, as if she saw not the scientists, but a bunch of ghosts. Her posture was defensive, and she had the look of a cornered wild beast. Leon's gaze fell to the gun in the holster at her thigh, and his initial joy was tinged with unease. She was not alright.

"Out. Everyone out," Leon ordered, and behind him, the others began to stir.

"It's alright Ally." He spoke softly and raised his hands in a placatory gesture as he took another step towards her. "You're alright. Nothing bad happened, right? Are you hurt? Did the jump hurt?"

"No... yes! I mean... yes, but... that doesn't matter," she mumbled. "It didn't matter..."

She turned around in a circle, slowly taking in every corner of the room. Her gaze lingered on the floor beneath the platform, before she whirled around again and fixed him with a confused look, her lilac eyes now swimming in tears.

"None of it mattered," she said hoarsely. "None of what I did back there mattered! It didn't work!"

Her last word gave way to a desperate, confused cry that she muffled by covering her mouth with her hands.

"Ally. Ally, listen to me." Leon gently took her shoulders. "Calm down."

"Why? Why did it not work?"

He had no eyes or ears for the others in the room any longer. He didn't care what they would say or think about this. All that mattered to him in this moment was her. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly against his chest as she continued to ask why, over and over again, sobbing like a child.

They hadn't considered this one consequence of their experiment. He had thought that attempting to send someone back in time with that fantastical and mad technology was ethically highly questionable at best already. He hadn't realized that the truly appalling aspect about all of this was to give a person with nothing to lose something to hope for – a false hope.

The others had left by now, and they were alone. Once she had stopped sobbing, the quiet hum of the ventilation system was the only noise that filled the room. There were many things he wanted to say to fill the silence between them but he didn't dare to. It wasn't the time. And it wasn't his right, after he had put her through this.

"You should go home," Leon suggested softly. "Get some rest. Tomorrow we can discuss what happened and... perhaps come up with something else. Another plan. Hm?"

She freed herself from his embrace and looked up at him for a moment. Her eyes were amethysts submerged in water, her cheeks flushed and streaked with tears. It broke his heart to see her like that. The strongest woman he had ever known, reduced to tears, and it was his fault.

"I... I can't go home," she whispered feebly. "I gave my key to that man, and he- I was- I should have never come back. I should have died back there. I should have just died..."

"Please don't say that. Please."

He gave in to his urges, and once more pulled her into an embrace. This time, to console himself perhaps even more than her. He held her tightly, as if to make sure that she was really back and wouldn't just dissolve into subatomic particles under his touch all of a sudden.

"I'm glad that you came back, Ally," he whispered.

He could feel her body stiffen under his touch, her muscles tensing underneath the fabric of her black suit, but only for a moment. She exhaled with a sigh, and then leaned into his embrace.

"But I can't go home," she muttered against his chest. "I have nowhere to go."

"Of course you do," he said. "Come on. Let's go."

~ ~ ~

On the lowest level of the research station, Leon led her to a room. It was about twice as big as Alyssa's entire apartment, and it didn't even include the kitchen and bathroom. There was ample space left to walk between a bed, and a desk and chair, as well as a couch that looked well-used but comfortable. Just like most parts of the research station, the walls were coated in pristine white panels and the floor was smooth and grey. It reminded her of a hotel room, and looked almost untouched compared to her own, cluttered and tiny apartment.

But as her gaze wandered through the room, Alyssa spotted unmistakable signs that it was inhabited. A bunch of clothes hung over the armrest of the couch, and Leon quickly moved past her to grab them and put them away. Stacks of papers were scattered on the desk, with a few of them pinned against the wall behind it. The walls were windowless of course, but on two sides lined by large screens that were probably once set to display some scenery to mimic the world above. One was broken, a large crack running diagonally across the smooth, black surface, and the other displayed a multitude of open program windows with calculations, figures and text in a print too small to be legible from a distance.

"Please, have a seat." Leon gestured to the couch as he moved back past her once more and stepped up to one of the walls not covered by a screen.

He pushed against it, and she watched as the wall panel slid to the side and revealed a small kitchen counter behind it. She was still standing by the door when Leon turned back to her, pushed a cup of something hot into her hands and softly took her arm to lead her to the couch to sit down. After placing a plate with a few more lemon cookies on the coffee table, he sat down next to her.

She kept her gaze on the cup in her hands, but she could sense that he was looking at her.

"Will you tell me what happened?" Leon asked softly. "Only if you feel comfortable talking about it of course..."

The clear, dark green liquid he had served her smelled like tea. It was scalding hot, but she held on to the cup tightly. The heat that seeped into her hands was the only thing she felt in that moment. Everything else was just numb, the world around her seemed drained of any color, and the air seemed heavy, as if the oxygen had been replaced with misery.

"I jumped," she began hesitantly. "And when I arrived, I realized it wouldn't suffice to kill Espira. He hadn't made all of those decisions. It was somebody else pulling the strings during his presidency."

"What? The databanks had no info on any of this?"

She shook her head. "Not really. And that wasn't even the weirdest thing..."

"Who was it?"

"My own grandmother."

He let out a quiet gasp of surprise. Undoubtedly he realized already what that meant, after all, he had been the one to explain to her pretty much everything there was to know about time travel.

"I knew that she was a politician but I never met her... Anyway. I had to kill her," she went on. "About nine months before my mother would even be born. Kinda funny that it's called the grandfather paradox, if it had been my grandfather in her stead, it might not have even mattered. She might have already been pregnant at the time."

She fell quiet for a moment, staring off into the distance. She had no idea who her grandfather had been, her mother had never met her own father. Now, she shuddered at the thought that it might have been Frederic Espira.

"Well, nothing mattered in the end anyway. I guess I should have known that nothing had really changed when I didn't just stop existing. Apparently, nothing I did had any effect whatsoever..."

"Ally..."

The tone in Leon's low voice caused her to look up to meet his gaze. His dark eyes were filled with compassion, but beyond that, so much genuine pain that she had the sudden urge to console him, even though she didn't quite know on what.

"There is something I need to tell you," he began. "Something important. I really, really hope you will understand, and most importantly, I hope you will forgive me for dragging you into this."

He paused for a moment, and a furrow appeared on his brow while he was searching for the right words to continue.

"In all honesty, we always thought the likeliest outcome would be that you simply create another reality... somewhere. A parallel universe if you will. Remember what we said? Time travel has never before been achieved so nobody knew what would happen, we only had theories."

She clenched the cup in her hands tightly at his words. She knew that they hadn't told her everything, if only because she wouldn't have understood it all. She wondered if knowing this beforehand would have made a difference to her

"I think that you split the timeline at the point of your intervention, and created a new future that exists independent from this one. But apparently, you could only return to this timeline, because, well, it is yours. Your personal, subjective timeline that your existence is bound to, in the past, present and future. Just like the crystals are bound to their anchor. It was just one theory among several, and when we recruited you the others suggested we... omit a mention of this possibility."

"This is bullshit," she raised her voice in anger and slammed down her cup of tea on the table with a loud thud.

He stared at her, startled by her sudden change in mood.

"You have no way of knowing if this worked," she continued, "No way of proving any of it. You don't even know if any other timeline exists! All of this... is bullshit. What kind of scientist are you? Your experiment didn't even have a verifiable result!"

She glowered at him, irritated by the fact that a brilliant mind such as his seemed incapable of seeing the fatal flaw in their little experiment, and even more irritated by the concerned and sad look he gave her.

"You're right," he said quietly. "It wasn't very scientific. Perhaps that's why we called ourselves Last Hope and not... Ultima Ratio. But in the end, at least one aspect of the experiment did work. You jumped. And you came back. In a multiverse with truly infinite possibilities, there could also have been infinite variations of events leading up to this point in time, this particular... constellation of circumstances, if you will. But when you jumped back to 2157, you arrived in the same timeline again, the one in which you were before the jump. The one that the specific time crystals in your body are anchored to. The one with a familiar past."

"The one with no future," she said glumly.

The furrow on his brow deepened at her words. "I'm... sorry. But your actions have saved the world, I'm certain of it. Just not this one. This one was beyond saving..."

"You have no way of verifying anything of what I said, either," she growled, "For all you know, I could have just bullshitted you all."

"I believe you. Because I can see it."

His voice had dropped to a low whisper, and he slowly reached out to gingerly rub a thumb over her cheek. It came away red with traces of dried blood. Alyssa turned away from his touch, frowning. She could feel a hot blush creep up on her face. She blamed the tea.

"But even if I couldn't see the proof I'd believe you."

She snorted at his words. "That doesn't sound like the Doctor Leon Bellamy I know. Because he is a smart man, a scientist, who doesn't just believe or guess. He knows things. Maybe I ended up in a wrong timeline after all."

He dropped his gaze and stared at his hands on his lap. "I've been told that's what being in love does to people," he said quietly. "It makes them stupid..."

She stared at him blankly as his words slowly registered with her. "You're... in... love?"

"Considering the severity of my stupidity... I'd say fatally so."

"But... who...?"

"Seriously?" He cracked a bittersweet smile at her question that should perhaps have been answer enough. "As if there could be anyone else but you..."

Maybe it was silly of her to ask.

But ever since the jump back, she was filled with a sense of unease and emptiness that she had never felt before. She felt lost in some sort of limbo that not even the anti-time crystal anchor could bring her back from. She had been out of hope for a while before she had joined the project, but it had been easy to live with that. It had just drained away slowly over time, trickling by like sand in an hourglass. Then the scientists had given her a new purpose, a chance to save the world. But that new hope had been torn away from her in the blink of an eye, the moment she had re-materialized on the jump spot in 2157. And now she felt empty. Exhausted. Confused.

And the way Leon was looking at her now really didn't help with the confusion. Yet it reminded her of one thing: he had been the reason she had wanted to make the jump back in the first place. But now that he sat here, right next to her, she couldn't overcome that feeling of numbness that clouded her mind.

She sighed heavily and closed her eyes, burying her face in one palm. Next to her, she could hear him shift on the couch. He reached out, and hesitantly placed his hand on hers.

"Are you okay?"

"Just... thinking."

"About?"

"What to do now."

She leaned back again, and after a brief moment of hesitation rested her head against his shoulder. She didn't know what to say any more than she could understand what she was feeling, aside from immeasurable regret that she was so terrible at expressing herself.

For a long while, they just sat there like this in silence while Leon was drawing abstract patterns against the back of her hand with his thumb. From where his skin touched hers, warmth spread through her entire body in a way that the scalding hot tea could have never achieved, and strangely that warmth made her shudder.

Her gaze fell on the cookies on the coffee table, and a smile tugged at her lips.

"You really made quite a lot of these..." she said.

"I was hoping you'd come back and I'd get to share the rest of them with you."

She turned to look at him, taking in his face and his conflicted expression. He had just confessed his feelings, so she wondered what he was still so worried about. Perhaps it was because she hadn't said anything in return?

Suddenly, her heart was hammering, and whatever emptiness she had felt before was flooded with a tingling sense of anticipation and anxiety, mixed with a longing for more of the warmth she saw in his chestnut colored eyes.

"Would you like one?" he asked.

With her tongue tied into a knot she just nodded slowly, but didn't move. Leon reached out to grab a cookie and then moved closer to her again. He lifted it up to her lips so she could nip it from his fingers, just like she had done for him before the jump. But this time, she finally realized the significance of the moment, and what all those strange things she felt in his presence really meant.

His gaze was fixed on her mouth, and the look in his eyes caused something to flutter in her stomach. She realized that it wasn't lemon flavor she was craving so badly.

She pulled his hand away from her face, and instead leaned in to taste his lips.

____
Word Count: 3034
Total: 20536