earlgreytea68 | How Fortuna Saved the Universe (7/24)

Title - How Fortuna Saved the Universe (7/24)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - OCs
Spoilers - Through "A Christmas Carol," just to be safe.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids, they're all mine.)
Summary - Fortuna gets her story. And it's pretty timey-wimey.
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin, chicklet73 , and lorelaisquared , who all talked through plot points and gave early drafts once-overs. And, last but not least, everlasting thanks to chicklet73   for beta-ing, with flair.

The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck   for my birthday.

Thanks for all the input on my poll yesterday, everyone. We decided to go tomorrow night. Tickets are purchased. I will let you know how it is!

Prologue - Ch. 1 - Ch. 2 - Ch. 3 - Ch. 4 - Ch. 5

Chapter Six

The Board of Trustees dining room was on the ground floor of the school’s building, where all the grandest of the rooms were, and Fortuna carefully carried her escargot downstairs and into the dining room and then stopped dead, looking around her.

The room was decked for Christmas, complete with a huge, twinkling Christmas tree. Had she skipped ahead in time? When Athena had experienced time skips, they had been minutes, maybe hours. What did it mean that she had unknowingly skipped ahead several months?

Sylvain had moved past her and was setting the escargot into place on the serving table. Fortuna followed him automatically, putting the escargot down without ceremony and turning to him urgently, laying a hand on his forearm in her concern. “Sylvain,” she murmured, keeping her voice low. “Is it Christmas?”

He looked from her hand on his arm up to her. “No. Don’t be silly.” He looked confused. “It’s September.” And then, “Oh. I forgot to tell you. Yeah, it’s traditional that the first Board of the Trustees dinner be decorated to look like it’s Christmastime. Something about how it used to take place at Christmastime, or something. Sorry. I should have told you, it completely slipped my mind.” He looked rueful.

Fortuna closed her eyes briefly in relief. “So it’s still September?”

“Of course it’s still September. What, did you think we’d just skipped forward in time? Silly.” He reached out and tugged on a strand of her newly blonder hair, and then winked at her. “You’ve gone all pale again, are you alright?”

“Yes.” She shook it off. “I’m British, pale is just how it works for me.”

“Not all the time. Sometimes your cheeks are most delightfully pink.”

Because he mentioned it, she felt herself blush.

“Ah, like now,” he said, and his index finger touched her cheek very lightly and very briefly. “Go and be triumphant with your escargot,” he said, before she could say anything, and he stepped away from her smoothly, and she found herself answering questions about her recipe.

The escargot were a huge hit, and it was easy to answer questions about them, since she kept it deliberately vague to respect the secrecy of Sylvain’s family recipe. But even as she was busy accepting praise—even from the reluctant Madame Richaud—she kept trying to keep track of where Sylvain was in the room. He kept mostly to the background, but once or twice she caught him in conversation with one of the trustees. Actually, it looked more like the trustee kept trapping Sylvain in conversation, because Sylvain always looked intensely unhappy during the conversation.

Was he related to one of the trustees somehow? Was that why he attended the school but didn’t bother to go to class? Could it all have something to do with the father who’d abandoned his family?

And what about the fact that time had…blinked after Sylvain had kissed her? Not her timeline, that had stayed strong, just as her father had said, but everything around her had…broken and then fixed itself, as her father had described it that morning. Had she imagined that, from the power of suggestion? Because she’d certainly never experienced anything like that before. Had it just been that she’d been thrown off by Sylvain’s kiss? Had Sylvain’s kiss been connected in any way to that? Had she changed her future by kissing him? Ensured it? Done nothing at all to it, since it had been everyone else’s timelines who had seemed to be affected by it?

“Mistletoe,” he said to her.

She looked up at him, surprised to see him standing in front of her, because she’d been so caught up in her own thoughts about him that she’d lost track of where the actual him was in the room.

“You’re standing under the mistletoe. It’s terribly tempting.”

“Huh?” she said, blankly. Oh, great, Fortuna, very smooth, she told herself, sarcastically, but, truthfully, she had no idea what he was talking about.

He leaned down and brushed his lips very lightly over her cheek, and then she remembered. Early twenty-first-century Earth, Christmas, mistletoe, kissing.

She gazed up at him.

“Your escargot was a hit,” he said.

“It was your escargot,” she told him.

He shrugged.

“Really, I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.”

He shrugged again.

“I couldn’t have done it without your mother,” she finished.

He looked embarrassed then, and cleared his throat. “Well, I think that your position at the school is now mostly secure. Even if Madame Richaud still is not entirely convinced that your forged letter is genuine—”

“Sylvain,” huffed Fortuna, complainingly.

“—the trustees are all a-flutter over you. I can’t say that I blame them.”

Fortuna opened her mouth. She was about to tell him that he was such an incorrigible flirt, and did he even realize it, or did it happen automatically, the smooth lines that he spouted to her. But instead what happened was the top of the Christmas tree exploded.

The sound of it reverberated through the marble of the dining room, making the whole room shake, and shards of broken ornaments started flying through the air, and Fortuna was inexcusably slow to react, given her background and expertise. But the truth was she had relaxed around Sylvain, and now, running-for-your-life circumstances seemed out of place, caught her by surprise.

They did not catch Sylvain by surprise. He immediately pushed her to the ground, stretching out on top of her with an ease that Fortuna recognized, even through her haze of surprise, could only have been born of experience.

“What—” she began, and wriggled a bit to try to get him to move off her.

“Shhh,” he said, which was a silly thing to say, since pandemonium had broken out in the dining room.

“What’s going on?” she demanded, her instincts finally kicking in. “Get off of me.”

“Stay down,” he said, and then clambered to his feet.

“But—” She sat up, but Sylvain had taken off at a dashing run, wheeling out of the dining room.

Fortuna frowned, then got to her feet as well, taking off at her own run. Did he really think he could outrun her? She’d been born at a run.

Sylvain was a good runner, she had to admit, but she was able to keep him in sight as she tore after him. She followed him through the courtyard and out onto the main street, where he bobbed and weaved around the staring pedestrians like a pro. He was clearly chasing after someone, there could be no other reason for the odd, unexpected twists and turns of the path he was taking.

She lost him in the train yard, bursting through a gap in a chain-link fence to find herself standing on a stretch of railroad, surrounded by trains, both abandoned and still in use, and no sign of Sylvain or even whoever he had been pursuing, who she had never seen. It was silent, compellingly, terrifyingly silent. She could hear, dimly, vaguely, the sounds of the city beyond the railway yard, but it felt very distant, in the background. All around her was the silence of foreboding.

She drew to a halt and turned in a circle, looking warily around her. There was the sound of a scuffle to her left, and she turned immediately in that direction, but there was nothing to be seen. She didn’t call for Sylvain, for fear of giving away her position—or his position—to whoever he was chasing.

And it occurred to her then that whoever they were pursuing had the advantage. And not just the advantage of being able to disappear among the trains, because, after all, Sylvain could systematically search among the trains, and it was quiet enough that anyone trying to make a dash for it could be heard.

“It’s a trap,” she realized, in a whisper, and then did another full turn, eyes searching the trains, trying to figure out how it was a trap.

There was nothing for it. It was a trap, and Sylvain had walked right into it, and she reached into her jumper pocket and pulled out her sonic screwdriver and fiddled with the setting. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but, judging by the Christmas tree, she guessed an explosive. Some sort of low-level, clever explosive, and she walked carefully with the sonic, holding it up and hoping it would catch any reading at all.

It buzzed at her, when she held it over her head and slightly to the left, and she headed in that direction. It buzzed again, so urgent that it vibrated in her hand and she had to hold it with both hands to keep it from falling entirely to the ground. She studied the readings, startled by how crazily it was responding, but the readings were all over the place. Fortuna turned it off and then back on in annoyance. You’d think she was holding it right next to a black hole, for all the good it was doing her.

She stopped walking, frowning and shaking her sonic screwdriver, safe in the cover of being between two train cars. Which was where she was when Sylvain shouted, “Valentin!”

Fortuna looked up, as the shout bounced along the trains around her.

“Valentin, I know this is a trap, I’m not an idiot. What good does it do you, really, to kill me? If you don’t kill me, we can still work out a deal.” Sylvain had walked into her view. He was turning in circles, scanning and looking frustrated. “Valentin!” he shouted again.

Fortuna absently placed a hand against the train next to her, leaning forward a bit as Sylvain walked back out of her view. And then, with a sharp intake of breath, she drew her hand back, looking at the burn welling up on her skin. The train was scorching hot to the touch. And it was vibrating, minutely.

The idea of it made no sense to her, she couldn’t even comprehend it, but whatever was in that train car was terrifying. And it was probably about to go off.

She stumbled away from it, her haste making her sloppy. Sylvain, hearing her, turned to her immediately, and then his eyes widened in surprise.

“Fortuna—”

“No time,” she said, grabbing his hand as she passed him and tugging him after him. “Run.”

“No, I know, you don’t understand, I’ve got to—” He was resisting, pressing away from her.

“Bloody hell, Sylvain, we have to run.” She looked toward the train car.

“By all means, yes, you shouldn’t even be here, but I’ve got to—”

“I’m not leaving you, come on,” she said, eyes still on the train car.

He followed her gaze. “What…”

“If I told you I think it’s a black hole, would you believe me?”

He stared at her incredulously. “No,” he drawled.

“Didn’t think so. Run.”

He stood for a moment, looking torn, and then it seemed to sink into him. They took off together, at a mad dash, and Fortuna hesitated only a second, when she caught sight of a figure out of the corner of her eye, watching them. She glanced at Sylvain, who was ahead of her, and quickly aimed the sonic screwdriver, hoping. Her gamble was right. He had been holding a device, which threw out a series of sparks in reaction to her sonic blast. The figure dropped the device, and immediately a silent rush of gravity slapped over the world, pressing her and Sylvain to the ground in an oxygen-less gasp before it faded immediately, drawing back in on itself, leaving her flat on her back blinking up at the sky.

She sat up quickly, ignoring the swimming blurriness of her head, and looked at the train car that had been scorching hot and trembling. It had entirely disappeared. As had the section of track it had been on. Before and after the space the car had occupied, the iron of the railroad had melted into the ground.

“What the hell was that?” panted Sylvain next to her, holding his head, because she knew it felt like it was about to fall off.

She knew exactly what it had been. A gravity wave. A small one, because she had caused whatever had been in the train car—and she suspected that somehow it had been some kind of small black hole—to collapse in on itself. The energy could have been much worse. They could all have been destroyed by it, never to be seen again. One of the cleaner ways to murder someone she could think of.

She looked back to where the figure had been, but he was no longer there.

“Fortuna.” Sylvain crawled over to where she was. He looked pale, underneath the Mediterranean shade of his skin, and his pupils were dilated, but he was holding it together better than most people would have if subjected to a similar event. “I need you to do me a favor, and I need you to do it without asking questions and without arguing with me, can you do that?”

Looking well or not, post-gravity-wave was not the time to try to communicate, thought Fortuna. “You really shouldn’t try to talk just yet,” she told him.

He shook his head impatiently, and then winced. “I mean this. Go. Go now. Right now.”

There was something about the way he said it that made her believe it was truly important, not an ill-advised lark.

She nodded, stood up, adjusted her argyle socks, and then ran.

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