Chapter 69

[The following chapter contains strong language. Reader caution is advised.]

Tuesday 29th February 2000

Sorry, sorry, it’s been a while… I wish I could say things have been so crazy and exciting that I simply haven’t found the time to jot anything down, but it’s actually mostly been uneventful.

Which is kind of bizarre, I know. I’m the guy who wields a super-powered blue sword against abstract monsters with his friends while waiting to see what our nemesis does next… but I’m also a Sixth Form student. And even though we had a half-term holiday, Dakota insisted we spend time each day revising for the exams that loomed in the not-too-distant future. We didn’t get up to much out of the ordinary… Kendal was still quite shaken up by the Valentine’s Day incident, and her usual go-getting proactive streak was buried beneath an acute (if unique) sense of mortality.

There was Bao’s 18th birthday, though. Half of us are legal adults now and it still boggles my mind. Since his actual birthday was a weekday, he threw a party on the Saturday before, and like last year’s, I wound up dividing my time between conversation and alcohol with increasing imbalance until I apparently started trying to tickle everybody and then attempted to instigate a cushion-fight. My memories get hazy at some point before all of that, so I’m only trusting the word of my friends and pitting it against my embarrassment…

The actual day of his birthday, meanwhile, was pretty much just another school day, save for cake and celebrating, and even then we had homework to do (Dakota at least let us slack off of revising for one day).

And so, that rare occasion emerged, a leap day. If we weren’t already aware of what that actually means – an extra day to account for the Earth’s orbit around the Sun actually taking a handful of hours longer than 365 days, for those unaware – then Bao elaborating upon it at length certainly kept us informed. Nothing particularly special for anything other than its rarity.

Or so I thought.

The first moments of the day were ordinary enough. Waking up in my bed, in my room, in my house, as anyone would expect on an ordinary day. And, as I attuned to the waking world, the sound of Lucy rushing about and making noise. Ordinary for me, anyway.

My bedroom door swung open with the abruptness of a Jack-in-the-box, and Lucy raced in at top speed, leaping onto my bed within two seconds.
“Wakey-wakey, rise and shine, come on bro, it’s Lucy time!” she sang loudly while jumping up and down, carelessly landing down on my leg.

“Ow!” I cried out… only my voice didn’t sound quite right. A little higher-pitched, perhaps, though my brain was still getting into gear so I couldn’t give it the amount of consideration I would have liked.

“Sorry!” my sister bleated half-heartedly, and then scurried out of the room again, and as she did I noticed that she seemed shorter than usual… and was wearing an old set of pyjamas… and her hair was longer…

And more than that. My room seemed off in general. While I couldn’t quite place it at that moment, I had an inherent sense that something wasn’t right about the room. My mind leapt to an intruder having snuck in at night – you hear people talk about knowing, sensing, when someone’s been in their house – but then it didn’t come across that way.

“Come on Alex, time to get up.”
Mum, now, poking her head around the doorway. Like Lucy, her hair was different, a style she hadn’t worn in a few years… nor had she come to make sure I was getting out of bed in a long while.

“Alright, getting up…” I replied with my voice definitely sounding slightly different, and then as she headed back down stairs and I forced myself out of bed, my feet had to stretch just a little further to reach the floor and a bizarre thought hit me.

Time-travel. Psychic time-travel. My mind had travelled back into my younger self’s body.

Like… it seemed that I’d gotten younger, but so had Lucy, and Mum, and the room had changed too, so it wasn’t just like I’d somehow de-aged. The idea crashed together in my mind all at once and made so much sense, or at least as much sense as psychic time-travel could possibly make even in my topsy-turvy life.

There. My wall-mounted shelf. No Beast Wars figures, just some books and a handful of Transformers: Generation 2 figures instead (not something I was big into, but I got a few of the 80s characters that had come and gone when I was a kid… aaand scene on the nerd stuff). So… couldn’t be any later than 1997. Beast Wars began in 1996 in the US but took a long while to come out here… … and definitely done now, sorry. The main point being, unless this was some very surreal and thorough prank, I had most definitely travelled back in time.

Well, that or the past however many years had been a dream, or some kind of Matrix simulation, though I doubted that… or at least hoped it wasn’t the case.

Downstairs, breakfast, Lucy running rampant. Everything the same yet a little different. I managed to get a look at the calendar while eating… no year visible on the February page, but there was a February 29th, so putting two and two together…

Thursday 29th February 1996

The apparent ages of Lucy and me, and the state of my bedroom, meant it couldn’t be any other day. Which meant I was 13, in Year 9, and categorically not a Painter.

I had four years’ worth of foreknowledge. As much as I wasn’t in a position to really utilise it, it was tantalising just to have that secret.

The downside was, I was also four years out of habit for how my life worked in 1996. You never tend to think about all the subtle ways things change over time, and being confronted with it while having to act as naturally as possible for the family I couldn’t fathomably explain my situation to proved to be a challenge. Wresting old routine back from my mind on-the-fly had me just a little panicky.

Oh, and as soon as I almost sang a little of Red Alert to myself, I realised that the four years’ worth of foreknowledge was more of a burden than anything, because now I had to be extra careful to not somehow casually bring up a reference to something that hadn’t happened yet.

By the time I got to school (on my bike with gears stiffer than I’m currently used to), I was already exhausted… granted, general teenage tiredness probably didn’t help there. And even then, I had to remind myself that I was in a different form group, in a different part of school, because my instinct was to head straight for Mr Davies’ classroom like some kind of time-confused homing pigeon.

Older form group, older lessons, subjects I no longer studied, topics that had been lost to the sands of my memory… the continued challenges of keeping the pretence of being nothing but average 13-year-old Alex Matthews who just lived February 28th 1996 the previous day and who still had any idea of what had been covered in previous lessons.

“You look tired,” Russell told me tactlessly as we ate crisps during morning break.

“I feel tired…” I whimpered.

“But hey, it’s Friday tomorrow and then it’s the weekend, so as long as you can make it through to then…!”

The groan I let out was probably the wisest response to that. Whether or not I was stuck living in the past permanently, the mere prospect of having to keep on like this for another day and a half had me thinking I’d wind up sleeping my way back to 2000.

… and if I really was here for good, if returning to my personal present as abruptly as I’d travelled back wasn’t on the cards… that meant waiting 16 months to meet Dakota and for all the Painter stuff to begin. Or maybe, now, I had a chance to change things? Over a year to convince Harmony not to do what she intended. Maybe even try and stop Melody from going forward with her plans, too.

No Painters. No making friends with Bao, Kendal and Zahid. Kitty remains in her terrible life. Dakota never meets me…

I wasn’t sure if it was even possible for me to change time without causing some kind of paradox, but… it didn’t really seem like a good idea. Maybe stopping Melody, at least… hell, maybe even accelerate everything? Prompt Harmony to bond with us now? More time spent with my friends, Kitty recovered sooner…

“You’re still free this weekend, right?” Russell asked. “Once you’ve slept in until midday or whatever?”

I looked at him, the friend with whom I’ve wound up growing apart, in no small part because of my own behaviour and actions, and tried to hide any guilt that may have surfaced on my face.
“Yeah, nothing planned,” I assured him. “But I’ll definitely need a lie-in…”

“There you are!”
Kendal’s voice, followed by a hand grabbing my left arm.
“Excuse us a minute!” she addressed Russell while dragging me off at considerable speed, leaving me to watch his confused and startled face steadily move further and further away.

“Uhm… hi…?” I greeted her, not 100% certain that she was experiencing the same thing as me (I mean, this could’ve been 14-year-old Kendal coincidentally grabbing me, y’know…? It wasn’t impossible…).

“Please tell me you got sent back too…?” she asked desperately.

“I did, did all of us…?”

“Yeah! Bao and I were or I guess are right now in the same form and we just found Zahid too!”
I’d forgotten what Kendal looked like back in Year 9 – barely knew her, in fact, since we were on opposite sides of the school (each year group was split in two until we started studying for GCSEs in Year 10) – and it was kind of jarring to see her younger, smaller, with shorter hair, all while still being the Kendal I knew.

“That’s great then!” I blurted, getting swept up in her enthusiasm.

In what seemed like no time at all, Kendal had led me right around the school, to the little space behind the sports hall where the big bins were stored, and I was greeted by the sight of 14-year-old versions of Bao and Zahid. Not too different from four years down the line, save for Bao being shorter than Kendal and Zahid showing the faintest signs of facial hair beginning to sprout.

“Hey Alex, this is weird, huh?” Bao smiled at me. Zahid said nothing, looking out-of-sorts in his younger self’s body.

“And then some…” I nodded back.

“Okay, I’m gonna go find Harmony!” Kendal informed us, hopping from one foot to the other like she was winding up her internal dynamo.

“There’s five minutes left before third period…” Zahid pointed out (his voice was almost the same, just a little less gruff).

“Oh, true…”
She wound down, slowing to a halt, and then took a deep breath.
“HARMONYYYYYYYY!”

Birds flew out of a nearby tree in a flurry of frightened feathers.

“Are we certain she’ll even know anything about this?” Bao asked. “Even if Harmony-2000 is the one who sent us back in time, Harmony-1996 wouldn’t know about it…”

“Well we’ll ask her and see!” Kendal insisted. “Whenever she shows up…”

I ate another crisp from my nearly-empty packet while we waited.

It took a fair number of seconds before Harmony turned the corner and joined us, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever.
“I was in the middle of a conversation, I had to excuse myself…”

“What’s happened to us?!” Kendal immediately probed her with great urgency.

“Or better than that, can you just undo it?” Zahid added.

“What do you mean…?”
The confusion on Harmony’s face felt like a punch to the gut. Even putting aside the feeling of embarrassment on Kendal and Zahid’s behalf – confusing Harmony with what would look, to her, like weird (and suspicious) behaviour – it indicated that we had no direct connection with our Harmony, and no idea how to return ourselves to our time…
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” she laughed suddenly. “Your faces are an absolute picture!”

“Jeez, don’t do that…!” Bao groaned, clutching his chest.

“I’m glad you all took the initiative to find each-other, at least,” she continued. “To answer Kendal’s question first… well, it’s a leap day! On an objective scale, that kind of acts like an eclipse or a celestial alignment where years line up and I have a clear path forwards and backwards through time… I’ve always wanted to try this…!”

“What?” Zahid grunted. “A leap day is just an extra day to keep the calendar year from sliding… there’s nothing special about it. That doesn’t make sense…”

He was right, of course, but Harmony simply kept on:
“I’m capable of sending minds back and forth across those four-year spans. Only for the day itself, and don’t worry, this just creates an alternate version of events alongside the one you originally lived. You’ll even have a “normal” leap day 2000 that you’ll remember when you go back-”

“So this definitely isn’t permanent?” I double-checked with her.

“I’ll put you back once you fall asleep tonight,” she confirmed with a proud smile. “Just thought you’d enjoy a little leap day time-travel!”

“But it- it doesn’t make sense!” Zahid repeated in frustration. “Even if time travel’s a thing, leap days-!”

“This is really cool…!” Bao grinned. “We’re the first time-travellers! And we get to do whatever we want!”

“Actually…”
That wasn’t a word I’d hoped to hear…
“There’s something that I didn’t quite account for… there are these Anachronisms…”

“I already thought about that,” I spoke up. “As long as we try not to, like, sing newer songs or mention… Princess Diana dying or whatever, we should be okay…”

“No, not that kind of anachronism,” Harmony continued. “I think time might be… protesting, against us having travelled back. As I said, we’re creating an alternate version of this day, and that’s not how time’s meant to go… if you see anything weird, it’s not my doing, it’s time creating these Anachronisms to try and… iron out the wrinkles.”
She seemed to finish there, only to add one final clarification:
“By which I mean you.”

“So you dragged us back in time and now our lives are in danger?” Kendal summarised with a disapproving shake of the head.

“You can summon the weapons, if you need to. I’m here with you so our bonds are active. Just make sure you send them back where they’re hidden – I can help with that, since I guess you don’t know where Neil put them.”

“What about Dakota and Kitty?” I asked, concerned. “I mean, Kitty doesn’t even have a weapon right now, how is she going to defend herself…?”

(Not to mention, she’d be in the form of a 9-year-old right now. It was hard to picture her putting up a good fight like that.)

“I can turn her into Nightmare if she needs it,” Harmony winked. “And I’ve explained everything to her and Dakota. Just remember, everything has to be back to normal at the end of the day, so it can meld back with the normal timeline and carry on with the normal March 1st. Even one uncorrected change will spawn a whole second timeline and that’ll create serious chaos… so good luck!”

And with that, she disappeared in a brief rainbow haze.

“That’s still the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Zahid concluded, just before the bell rang out to signal the end of break and the start of third period.

“Let’s meet up again after school…” I proposed, “maybe down Dakota’s street? As in, where Neil’s house is…”

“4 o’clock, on the dot,” Kendal concurred with a thumbs-up.

We dispersed, heading for our classes. I had Maths next, and Russell was in the same class as me, so I at least got to apologise for being dragged off so suddenly.

“What even was that? Did she ask you out or something?”

“No,” I told him while thinking about just how far off the mark he was on so many levels, “she’d heard I play piano and wanted me to show a friend how to play…”

“Oh… weird…” Russell muttered. I was so glad he bought that excuse; it was the best I could come up with on the journey from the secret meeting-place to the classroom…

The rest of the school day continued on with the same tiring efforts to act like the Year 9 student I was supposed to be, rather than the Year 13 time-traveller I actually was. Yes, you may think a 17-year-old taking a Maths lesson for 13- and 14-year-olds would have an easy time, but this was stuff that my memory had already grown fuzzy on and I was expected to know it like I’d learnt it last week.

I shared most of my classes with Melody, too. Younger Melody Hill, before selecting the Painters, before engineering her “monster” rebellion, just a near-ordinary schoolgirl with Lokonessence for a twin sister. I’m sure she caught me looking once or twice (and I was definitely trying to be discreet and not stare). The desire to go over to her and try my hardest to convince her not to take the path she does burnt fiercely deep in me, but I knew that I couldn’t… I wasn’t here to try and change anything, and any attempt to do so would just mess with time even more.

The end of the school day came, and my ride home was less than comfortable… I had the sense of being followed, and strange flashes kept catching my attention from the corners of my vision. What had felt like a background noise of peculiarity was now rising up steadily, becoming more and more palpable. It felt like a bad omen. In more than one sense, time wasn’t on my side.

At home, I quickly changed out of my uniform, quietly celebrated not having to do my homework immediately, and then waited until shortly before 4pm to head back out. Kendal was already waiting, and Zahid arrived as I did.

“Either of you noticing weird things happening…?” I asked as we aggregated at one of the lampposts.

“Like the blips in your vision when you have a migraine?” Zahid clarified. “Yeah, especially since just before school ended.”

“Same,” Kendal whimpered while rubbing her temples. “And Bao better be on-time…”

“Unless the Anachronisms already got to him…”
Kendal and I both looked right at Zahid after he said that.
“Look, I’m not saying I hope it’s happened or anything. It’s a possibility.”

“We have maybe six more hours until we go to sleep, so if this is to do with the Anachronisms – and it keeps getting worse as the day keeps going – then it’ll get to a point when we’re going to have to fight them…” I reasoned aloud.

“Okay, how do you fight time, exactly?” Zahid asked with a bitterly rhetorical tone. “This isn’t some monster Harmony made for us, it’s not going to just try and kill us in some way we can heal from. We’re talking about getting erased from existence. That crazy bitch just put a big red target on our backs-”

“I’m sorry but it’s so hard to take you seriously with that little moustache you’re growing…” Kendal interrupted him, struggling not to smile.

“Can you at least try, when I’m talking about us getting wiped away by time?”

“Guuuuuys!” Bao’s voice called out from down the road. He was hurrying towards us, not quite running but certainly moving at some pace, as… see, something was following after him, more than one thing, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what they were. It’s like they defied my vision or my perception, reading only as weird out-of-focus areas, slightly-shadowed.
“I think the Anachronisms are here!”

“Looks that way, yeah!” Zahid yelled back.

“We should get somewhere private, or else people might see this!” I suggested, and Kendal, Zahid and I began sprinting off down the road.

“Aaah, wait!” Bao yelped. A quick glance back told me that he’d accelerated too, rushing after us and trying desperately to close the distance. I couldn’t make out what the Anachronisms were doing in response to our hurried departure, but it dawned on me that it didn’t necessarily matter.

They were aspects of time itself. They could probably pop up ahead of us faster than the speed of light. They could probably even wait for us at our destination, knowing where we would be in a minute’s time. We had no idea what laws the Anachronisms were bound to.

Down one street, then the next, the route from Dakota’s place to school, and into the alley we always used. More Anachronisms were hovering in mid-air at the far end.

“Aaaand we’re surrounded, of course,” Zahid snarled in frustration.

“They were gonna surround us wherever we went,” Kendal argued. “At least nobody else is gonna see us.”

“Unless they come down the alley but forget I said that…”
Knew I shouldn’t have the moment I did…

The Anachronisms shimmered and sizzled in mid-air, slowly becoming more perceptible as black shapes that looked like crumpled sheets of paper, steadily revolving and folding in on themselves over and over.

“Huh.”
Whatever panic Bao previously had seemed to transform as fully as the Anachronisms.
“They look like Calabi-Yau manifolds.”

“Is that some kind of Pokémon or something…?” Zahid asked.

“No… quantum mechanics? Supersymmetry? Have I not mentioned them before?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell…” I told him as the Anachronisms floated closer.

“Alright, I’ll tell you about them tomorrow four years from now,” he decided.

“Are we gonna summon our weapons…?” Kendal checked with the rest of us, clearly on-edge.

I swallowed in unease.
“What else can we do?”
I wiggled my fingers, preparing myself, and then urged for the Lokon sword to spring forth, into my grasp. It took perhaps a little longer than usual, but the weapon materialised in my hand and I brought it before me. My costume blasted itself on, sized to match my younger body, as Bao, Kendal and Zahid did the same with their weapons.

The four of us stood with our backs to each other, facing the Anachronisms as they advanced upon us.

It really did seem like a hopeless battle lay ahead of us. There was no guarantee our weapons – Lokonessence – would have any impact on these things. And we’d potentially have to fight them for the rest of the day, which would surely have enough of an impact for our families to mention our lengthy absences tomorrow.

These Anachronisms could really have been the end of us.

We all launched an explosion of colour at the same time, flooding the area with blue, yellow, pink, red, dousing the abstract enemies. When my vision cleared, the Anachronisms had stopped moving, still folding but now drawing our coloured splatters into themselves.

Suddenly, I realised our advantage: time was natural, but Lokonessence was preternatural. We were flouting the laws of time, sure, but we had something that regularly spat in the face of reason on our side.

At once, each and every Anachronism tilted a little, like a puppy trying to make sense of something (or look cute).

“Are we good…?” Kendal questioned quietly.

The Anachronisms began flying around wildly, almost in a frenzy, trapping us amidst a buzzing swarm.

“Okay that’s a clear answer!” my pink-adorned friend squealed loudly, ducking low as the rest of us did the same.

I raised my sword up and brought forth a canopy of blue to shield us, though the Anachronisms slamming against it made it a struggle to keep it in-place.

And more than that… every time one of them came close, I suddenly got… the faintest, briefest flashes. Some of them were my past, I think, tiny glimpses of moments I’ve already lived… some could only have been my future. They were transient, like instant dreams lost no sooner than they appeared, but frequent enough in succession to somewhat disorient me. I pushed myself to keep the sword aloft and the canopy together, but it was proving harder and harder.

None of the others were talking, or making any effort to fend the Anachronisms off. They must have been going through the same thing as me.

The idea to expand the canopy and force our attackers away popped into my head, and without the focus to think about it, I simply followed through with it. The glowing blue shield stretched out, rose up, momentarily pushing the tie-dye-coloured shapes away.

“Holy crap, that was weird…” Bao whined, squinting as he tried to reorient himself.

“We should brace for round two,” Zahid noted. The Anachronisms were pinballing about in the air, not yet recovered.

Kendal began firing upon some of them, with only reasonable levels of success.
“The bow’s bigger, it feels weird…!”

“Actually, you’re smaller,” I reminded her, following her lead and trying to snipe our opponents with bolts of blue. To Kendal’s credit, she was boasting a better success-rate than me.

“Still, there’s that plus they’re moving about too much!”

“Need a hand?”

I knew that voice. I’d never not recognise that voice.

Green arrowheads flew through the air, half of them smacking into passing Anachronisms.

I turned, and there stood 13-year-old Dakota in her Painter gear, smiling brightly. I’d seen photos of her, but oh man… she was so cute. Obviously not in quite the same way as the one I knew, but I just wanted to squeeze her cheeks and tickle her!

… wait, that sounds incriminating after my drunken antics…

She smiled more when she saw me, and I smiled back.

“It doesn’t work if there’s not at least five of us,” she claimed.

“Dakota! How the hell did you get here?!” Bao asked her at full volume, trying to launch shots of yellow from both Lokon blades all the while.

“I tried really hard to do Melody’s teleport trick. I’ll have to teach you tomorrow!”
She continued firing up too, and with Zahid managing to shoot red boomerang-like strikes out, all of us worked together to fend off our impending doom as some of the shapes began descending in their chaotic paths.

We fought on for a couple of tense minutes, launching hit after hit and managing to make contact with the Anachronisms fairly often as their numbers inexplicably began dwindling. Before long, there were only a few left, targets we now had to focus on. No more scattershot approach.

“Let’s do one big combo blast!” Kendal offered up. “Like we did against the floor-mouth-thing!”

“Worth a shot!” Dakota agreed. “Let’s turn to face each other on three! One… two… three!”

We all span around, and placed our weapons together as quickly as we could. Almost instantaneously, a rainbow blast erupted from where the five weapons met, and utterly consumed the area. As it faded, no signs of the Anachronisms remained: no Calabi-Yau manifolds, no migraine patches.

I could barely register anything else before Dakota grabbed me into a hug.
“Aaah look at you, you’re so cute!” she giggled lovingly.

“You can talk…” I cooed, hugging back. So surreal to be embracing her in these younger forms.

“Was that it…?” Zahid asked, looking around. “That easily?”

“Let’s hope so,” Kendal replied. “Maybe time’s got the message now?”

“I wish we could check on Kitty, too…” Dakota pouted.

“She’ll be fine…” I told her even though I had no way of knowing for sure.

“Harmony’s on her side, she’ll go Nightmare-mode and kick all their non-existent temporal arses!” Bao declared.

And, well… that was the end of it, more or less. We spent a little more time together – and did our best to send the weapons back to where they were hidden (save for Dakota, who would naturally take hers back with her to Ireland… and needed it to teleport back there, too) – before returning back home. Then dinner, and Mum watching EastEnders, and homework, all normalcy with a 1996 filter.

I finally settled to bed, relieved and exhausted, wondering what memories I’d discover from February 29th 2000 when I awoke on March 1st… wondering if, maybe, some other version of me had travelled back to that date.

Me in 2004… or 2020… what would become of me?

What were those flashes of my future I glimpsed…? What was my career? Did I have children…?

I drifted off as my imagination painted pictures of my future in my mind.