Midnight Voyage

Megara wanted the conversation with interest. She had no idea what anyone was saying, but she didn't show that on her face, nor did she chip in anything to prove her lack of knowledge on the subject.

So they were all from different times, but the same place. The same world. That little brat at the university was right, apparently. Marciella's experiments would be successful if she wasn't a moron. Unfortunately, she was.

Jack didn't even think of the implications of telling Alex an answer - he just gave a mute nod. Kirux was still crying beside him. Bo was vacantly chugging his orange juice. Megara and Winter weren't saying anything.

"Why are we here?" Jack finally said. "Looking different is one thing, but coming from different times is another thing! This just doesn't make any sense..."

He glanced over at Kirux.

He looked like he was trying to stop crying, but he wasn't getting that far. He was writing down something on his notebook; it didn't seem like he was planning on sharing this note. But Jack couldn't help but see some of the words - how it was titled "don't forget" and how the name Winnie came up a couple of times.

He couldn't help but notice when Kirux flipped the page called "find out!" and started adding to the list - eyes still brimming with tears, and body still shaking with silent sobs. "Time" was added to the list, but so was "eye" and "clothes".

Bo waited until he was done with his orange juice before plopping it down and staring at Jack.

"Look, man. If I knew, I'd tell you. But I don't. But we'll wake up from this dream eventually, so I think it's okay for us to just eat and not freak out."

Before either Alex or Sarah could respond, Margaret returned to the table and politely informed them that breakfast would be wrapping soon.

"Don't worry," Margaret said. "We'll open again for lunch. In the meantime, there's plenty to do on the train itself. We have an observation room that has a beautiful view of the outside. And there's games... and, if you want to read, well, we have books too."

"Where are we going?" Sarah asked.

Margaret simply smiled. "Can I get you anything else?"

"I'll have more tea," Alex said. Something about Margaret that she couldn't quite put her finger on made her uncomfortable. It was the sense that she'd seen her before, but didn't know how or where they ever could have met.

"Why'd you do that?" Sarah asked Alex. "She can't answer a simple question like where we're going?"

Alex shrugged. "I don't know, but this is about the nicest place I've ever been, so we may as well enjoy it while it lasts."

Just then, another waiter came to clean up their food.

"I'm excited to check out the observation room," she added.

"You think they have an exercise room?" Bo asked, trying to wrap an egg sandwich in a napkin to keep in his pocket for later. "Or maybe they have a map of where we're going. Like, in one of those... brochure things. I don't know what they're called."

"Personally, I'd love to meet whoever's in charge of this whole thing," Megara said nonchalantly. A good little heir would have gathered more information first. Checked for safe exits - they were moving rather quickly, after all - maybe gathered up some information about what kind of terrain they were going through, figured out who these people were, something. But she was not daddy's little perfect spy today. He wasn't here to supervise, after all, and perfection was Briar's thing. If he wanted perfect, he could send her, if he wanted quick, he sent Megara.

So, she would see if the ringleader of this circus was taking visitors.



Winter stood abruptly and without a word turned to leave. Summer was far, far away if Winter could not hear her, and that wasn't good. Summer and Winter had to stay together, always. That was how it was.

If they were together, Winter could absorb Summer's heat so things wouldn't burn, and Summer could warm Winter's cold so the path she left behind would not be filled with dead and frost-coated everything.

Without Summer, how was Winter to make things warm without freezing herself?

So she had to leave. There was a place where she could view the outside would. Perhaps she could ask them to stop the...whatever this was. If not, Winter could always jump. They were not moving too fast for it to be impossible, and Winter knew how to fall. This was not so different.

Jack nodded in agreement.

"I want to meet whoever is setting this up, too," he agreed. He rubbed the back of his neck. "It's definitely nice here, but I want to know how I can get home and back to normal. My girlfriend has to be worried about me, and I already miss her..."


Kirux - still upset and desperately trying to remember everything - popped his head up when he heard Winter get up. He wasn't sure where she was going, but she looked lonely. He gave everyone at the table one last glance before getting to his feet, too.

He went over to her side.

He quickly wrote down a message on a sheet of paper in his notebook and held it up in front of her.

"Can I come with you?" the paper read.

Bo looked between Jack and Meg. “You think the person who brought us here is the conductor? We could always try going to the front of the train first.”

"I don't know if that's a good idea," Alex said. "He's probably focused on the train, we shouldn't bother him."

Just then, Margaret came back to start cleaning up their dishes. Alex was still unnerved by her, but she couldn't quite put her finger on why.

"I'm going to go to the observation room," Alex announced, standing up.

Sarah thought that was a good idea. "I'll go with you, Alex," she said.

Alex pursed her lip, as she'd actually thought about going back alone, but whatever, if Sarah wanted to come, she supposed that was fine.

They walked to the observation room in silence. The train was relatively busy. It was a nice train, like the one in North by Northwest, Sarah thought. Just as they were about to enter the room, Alex ran smack into someone.

It was the man from dining car. Still handsome as ever.

"Oh, sorry..." Alex's face fell.

"That's all right," said the man. Just then, he and Sarah locked eyes.

"Jay?" Sarah said. "What are you doing here?"

"Hello, my love," he said. He brought Sarah in close and kissed her. Alex suddenly felt invisible. "I have to go. Later."

"Jay..." Before she could say anything else, the man called Jay disappeared down the way Alex and Sarah had come. Before Alex could say anything, Sarah ran after him.

Great. Alex gave the door a weak push, and ended up in the observation room. The views were nice. She collapsed into a chair and tried not to cry.

Winter gingerly took the paper the boy handed her and read it. She nodded to him and continued walking toward the observation deck.

It wasn't quiet. There was a loud sound that somehow managed to lurk in the background of all that was happening, like an enormous beast, slinking through the shadows. Surely, if the sound were a creature, it would have to be feline. Nothing without the grace of a large, predator cat could hide so well that it could only be found if you knew to look for it.

The sound was rhythmic. A rush of air and a metallic clank, over and over backed by a sound like stone rolling over smooth stone. It was in time with the vibrating of the floor, the walls, everything. Just vibrating. It was awfully strange.

Two of the girls from the table passed them, Winter noticed. She didn't speak to them. They seemed preoccupied with one of the passengers who hadn't joined them for breakfast. Winter slipped past, nearly forgetting the very quiet boy was following her before she turned to see him.

Finally, they reached the deck.

One of the girls who passed them was there, and she looked very upset.

Winter put her goal on hold and sat next to the girl, taking up a spot on the floor next to her chair.

"Are you alright?" Winter was not looking at the girl. Instead, her eyes scanned the views that passed by so quickly out the window. Sometimes people did not like to be seen when they were sad.

Alex shook her head.

Her instinct was to tell the girl to go away, but maybe it would help to talk. Not to shut everyone out, not to be so rude, so closed off, like Marcia always liked to remind her that she was. The truth was that she didn't even know what. was wrong, not fully, why she'd been so upset that Sarah ran after the man. It's not like some variation of the same thing hadn't happened a million times before.

"I don't know," she replied. "Is it bad that I'm not even wondering why we're here?"


Sarah followed Jay down the hall. She had to know why he was here, why they'd both ended up on this train but had woken up a part, why he was wearing an outfit that he would never in a million years wear. He wasn't acting like himself.

He stopped outside the dining car and started to kiss her again. She leapt to his arms and kept kissing him. It had been so long since he was like this. Since he actually wanted her.

"Jay..." she said, once he'd given her an opportunity to catch her breath.

"Who's your friend?" He asked. "The blonde."

"I don't know. Just some girl. Who cares." She kept kissing him.

"Where's your room?" He said. Sarah smiled took his hand in response. Something about this wasn't right and yet, she pushed it down. She and Jay hadn't been like this since before Adam was born.

Sarah led him to her room and as they made love, she thought it had to be real. Maybe it was all some odd fever dream, and when she woke up she'd be beside her husband again.

As they lay in bed, the sunlight flooded through their windows. But Jay was already getting up and getting dressed when she started eying her ring.

"When did you get me such a nice ring?" She asked.

"I didn't. Ed did."

"Who's Ed?"

Jay didn't respond. He reached for Sarah's hand and led her far down the hallway, until they reached a door. "This is me," he said. He opened the door. It was only open for a minute, but she could have sworn it looked like a prison cell.

What happened next was only for the briefest second Sarah thought she'd certainly imagined it. Jay seemed ten years older, at least, with greasy hair and a matted beard. He looked terrible. But then he changed, back to the Jay she knew.

Jay saw how she was looking at her. "I love you," he said. Then, he shut the door and locked it. Sarah pounded.

"Jay!"

He didn't answer. Sarah stood dumbfounded in the hallway. What on earth had just happened?

Kirux had followed Winter down to the observation deck, but had gotten distracted from his original plan - coming along and making Winter feel less lonely - when he saw Alex by herself. Alex looked lonely, too.

Maybe the three of them could not be lonely together?

Kirux, not quite sure where the best place to sit was, just kept standing near Winter and Alex.

He tilted his head and studied her for a moment before pulling out his notepad.

"I don't know," he wrote. "I feel like I'm used to things like this, too. Even though I shouldn't be."

He paused, showed her the paper, and then went right back to writing.

"But we'll get through this together."

He hesitated.

Then he pushed aside his worries of what his past, memory-filled self would think, and drew a little smiley face at the end of it.

He held the paper back up, giving her a big, warm grin.


Jack was lost.

He didn't even know how he could be so lost. He had just gotten up to use the bathroom, and instead had ended up in some hallway he had never intended to go in. He nervously glanced around for someone who could point him in the right direction.

It didn't matter that he had been brought here against his will, transformed into Tim Drake, and still didn't trust a single one of the workers here. He had to seriously go. He could suck a little pride and worry if it meant getting to a toilet soon.

But then he saw Sarah in the hallway.

Something about her face looked off. He was still in dire need of the bathroom, but he could wait so he could help her out.

He walked over to her.

"Are you okay?" he asked, worry lacing his still frustrating young voice. "I thought you were going to the observation deck with Alex."

Sarah saw Jack and shook her head.

The truth was she didn't even know where to begin. "It's the strangest thing," she said. "My husband is on this train. But he wasn't acting like himself."

She left it at that, still unsure how to the process the moment where his whole appearance changed and he walked into his room that looked like a prison.

"Nothing about this is right," she added.

Bo was restless, and he didn’t like not knowing where he was. He knew his dad would be worried, and his dad would do anything to find him. Whoever kidnapped them would definitely have to face his father, and that both comforted him and scared him.

The others had run off in different directions, and no one really followed his suggestion to go find the conductor. He felt... out of place. Normally, he was the life of the party. He should’ve been able to befriend them and things would be alright, but he was seriously beginning to question himself.

It probably didn’t help that he gorged himself on food and pretended like nothing weird was happening. It probably didn’t help that he was missing an eye either.

He still wasn’t used to that.

Every time he entered a room he kept running into something. Then, by some foreign reflex he’d correct himself, like he only remembered after the fact how far away things were supposed to be.

It wasn’t any different when he entered the hall. His shoulder bumped into the side of the doorway and he grunted. Disappointed.

But he wasn’t alone. Jack was there with Sarah, and Sarah was explaining how her husband was on board but acting weird. Would that mean his dad was here?

“What about him was weird?” he asked, walking up to them.