Doing It Right by Dan Kirk

Chapter 15

by Dan Kirk

The capital city of Poland was a lot prettier, and a lot dirtier than I had imagined it being. Somehow, with over a hundred years of memories in my head, I had none of ever visiting this place. Certainly for most of my several lives it was behind the Iron Curtain, but there had still been plenty of opportunities to go, yet I’d never gone. If I hadn’t been required to be here for work I most certainly would not have gone in this lifetime.

“I still believe you are a brave man traveling with no security.” Ahmed, my contact here said with a frown. We were in one of the city’s many sidewalk café’s, sipping on coffee and nibbling at some pastry confection I didn’t really taste. I was quite certain there were at least two other foreign agencies taking pictures right now, and normally I wouldn’t have risked one of my contacts like this, but Ahmed was a well-known information broker, not really a clandestine contact.

“Security would only limit me.” I replied with a shrug as I took another sip of the too-strong coffee.

“You made Saddam a very angry man when you called him an impotent tiger more interested in pretending to have weapons, no matter the cost to his own people and doing the right thing for them.” Ahmed quoted me from three years ago with a chuckle. He slipped a small CD-ROM across the table to me and I slipped it into a pocket of the blue suit I was wearing.

“I speak the truth far too often for the comfort of many people.” I reminded Ahmed.

“It is a good thing you no longer wear your country’s uniform so you can speak more loudly.” Ahmed pointed out and I agreed. My six-year term as part of the Navy’s JAG program had ended two months ago and I had not reenlisted. Brian had also resigned his commission, although he wasn’t with me on this trip. He was now a staff attorney to the United States Senate’s Armed Forces committee. After six years with the U.N., four of those associated with the Weapon’s Inspection Program, we could have done a lot of things, but the changes in Washington had shut a lot of doors for us.

Both of us had worked hard on the Gore campaign last year. In the second timeline, I’d been able to change things so that it was clear he’d won Florida, and the Presidency. This timeline, was different though. I had both far more power and influence, and at the same time less in certain circles, and that had made what I believed to be a disastrous difference. Florida had been another clusterfuck, just like in the first timeline. The final vote there was close, so damn close that almost everyone had wanted another recount, except for George W. Bush, and the US Supreme Court. Unlike the original timeline, Bush wasn’t treated as nicely as before, and far more people believed he’d stolen this election, but he was now the President of the United States.

What scared me more than that, and why I was here in this country instead of safely at home with Brian, where I had a job as staff attorney for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was that September 11^th was only two weeks away. Sean and I had all the information we needed to point to each of the hijackers, and point law enforcement right to them. We’d started off with anonymous letters on January 1^st, but those had resulted in nothing.

In March, we’d drafted our father into this, revealing to him the horrors that were ahead for our country. When he’d recovered from his fit of anger, he’d agreed to help, but agreed we should not go and ‘spill the beans’ about our knowledge of the future. Sean was a successful businessman now, designing and manufacturing some of the most advanced hi-resolution MRI scanners in the world. All of our family had invested in his business from the day he graduated MIT, and now he and Brandon had made all of us very, very rich. Certainly Brian and I didn’t need to work anymore, thanks to them. Instead, we worked to be able to have influence on things, which was why, when the U.N. was told not-so-subtly to get rid of us, we’d taken the jobs my father had arranged for us with the Senate.

It had been my father who took the information we’d gathered, and then combined it with information we might possibly have access to, and put it all together into a letter to the director of the FBI and to the CIA director as well. In my years with the U.N., I had built up a fairly extensive network of contacts that I used to funnel information to the CIA, and for which they paid fairly well. I wasn’t a James Bond or anything like that. Mostly I dealt with social or economic type information, and ‘word on the street’ type stuff. Only four times had I actually gone in to do a ‘pick-up’ of anything. Normally I just got a fax, a phone call, or an e-mail from someone. This disk was a little different though. On it was the information we could use to guarantee the intelligence and law enforcement agencies seized the hijackers as they entered the various airports on 9/11.

I needed the information on this disk, because the White House had shut down the investigations started by my father’s letter.

The Republicans who now controlled the White House and the House of Representatives (the Senate, thanks to a defection by a certain Vermont Senator, was Democrat by a one-vote margin again) and the White House had long memories, and they hated my father. They did everything they could to undermine Tom Daschle’s right-hand man, who had once again helped deny them the control of the Senate and two complete branches of Government. Now, as the deadline grew closer, my father was as desperate as Sean and I to stop the upcoming horror.

“Thank you for this, Ahmed.” I said softly and he nodded. My thanks weren’t necessary, but the twenty thousand dollars of my personal money that I’d just given him had been necessary. It was one of the reasons I’d always obsessed about having money. You did not have to have money in order to be happy, you did not necessarily need money to make a difference in the world, but it helped. The more money you had, the bigger difference you could make.

Look at my dad, a little bit of money had put him on the path to where he was now, one of the most powerful Senators in Congress.

“May Allah watch over you on your journey.” Ahmed mumbled softly as he stood to leave. I returned his good wishes and rose as well, heading back to the hotel room. My flight left in three hours and I wanted to look at the disk before I flew back home. I trusted Ahmed enough to take the disk without checking it first. Leaving the country, where I couldn’t get my hands on him, was another story entirely.

There really was only one way to fly overseas, and that was in first class on a British Airways plane. I relaxed into the seat/bed as the plane headed out over the Atlantic. Part of me protested that I was too wound up to sleep, but another was ready to rest. The disk had everything needed to prove what was planned for September 11^th, and just one look at it by anyone at the CIA would be more than enough to spur the appropriate agencies into action, arresting the hijackers before they ever boarded a plane. Before leaving, I’d copied the disk onto a secure internet server at Sean’s company.

Just in case.

I did sleep on the flight, and I was glad of it as I waited to go through customs. Most of the time I had to re-enter the country, it was with a diplomatic passport that allowed me to speed through. Not this time though, and I had to wait in customs along with everyone else. Luckily, Washington’s airport security people weren’t totally incompetent and the line was moving fairly quickly when two men in dark suits approached me. For a moment, a tingle of fear went through me, but I forced myself to relax as they stopped at my left shoulder.

“Mr. Jones?” The first one asked unnecessarily.

“Yes?” I replied.

“Sir, we are with the NSA, please come with us.” The first agent said calmly and softly.

“Identification, please.” I requested, knowing they were who they said they were. Nevertheless, I asked and received their identification. “Lead the way.”

They took me down a hallway and into one of the small interrogation rooms the customs officials had here. They shut the door behind us and didn’t even offer a seat at the table before getting down to business. The two of them stood in front of the door and looked at me like they thought I was scum.

“You were seen meeting with a foreign agent in Warsaw.” The second agent spoke for the first time. “He gave you a disk. Please turn that over to us.”

“I will be turning it over the Central Intelligence Agency’s Middle East desk.” I told them firmly and the first one shook his head.

“We have orders to take custody of it immediately.” He stated.

“Show me your orders.” I demanded.

“That is not necessary.” He told me and I shook my head.

“No written order, no disk.” I stated flatly.

“Sir, your baggage has already been checked.” Agent number two stated. “Therefore you have it on your person. Turn it over now or we will take it from you by force.”

“That is a violation of the law…” I started to protest but was interrupted.

“If you don’t turn it over, you will be arrested for meeting with an agent of an enemy of the United States, and we will confiscate the disk.” Agent Number One said with a sneer. “That will get you five to ten years in prison.”

“You need a warrant to arrest me for that.” I shot back. My heart sank when he pulled a warrant out.

“Is that satisfactory?” He asked me and I nodded, reaching into the interior pocket of my suit and bringing out the disk. He snatched it out of my hands and turned to open the door.

“You can get back in line, now, sir.” He said with a sneer and I sighed. It was a good thing I’d uploaded it to Sean’s server. There was no telling what they were going to do with it now. To top it all off, I had to get in the back of the line.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“I’m sorry son, there’s nothing I can do at this point.” My father said with a sympathetic hand on my shoulder.

“It’s okay, dad.” I said with a heavy sigh. The Administration had removed my security clearance, I’d discovered when I got back home. As a result, I could no longer serve on staff for the Select Committee on Intelligence. “At least now I can spend more time with the boys.”

“I’ll continue to pursue things, don’t worry.” My father assured me. We were in his house in Washington, and my mother was currently over at our house with Brian and the boys. Some might think it was odd that we’d bought our house in Washington right next to theirs, and that we’d bought a house next door to the one I grew up in back in Modesto. Brian and I were close to our families, though, and since his parents had moved in to Sean’s old house, we were now living between his parents and my parents. Our two sons were going to grow up spoiled to death.

“Any new word from Sean?” I asked and he shook his head. That was another frustrating thing. The files weren’t on Sean’s computer network. They should have been there, but they were gone. Brandon was looking into it, to see if someone hacked in and deleted the files, or if something else had happened, but we didn’t know yet. All I knew was that the files I needed were no longer under my control.

“Not yet, but he’ll call as soon as he has something.” My father assured me. “Now, I need to get back to work. I’m going to send a couple of letters today. I’ve left drafts in my office here if you want to look them over.”

“Thanks, dad.” I said with a sad smile. He just nodded and turned to leave. I took a printout of his letters with me back to the house, reading them as I went. They were really good, strongly worded, and very direct. They all but set the date of the impending attack. He even gave me some ‘cover’ by stating he’d sent me overseas to collect the last bit of data, now in the possession of the NSA. The letter demanded the FBI look over the disk confiscated by the NSA, and that arrests be made immediately before the terrorists got away or carried out their attack.

That was the kicker, because despite the data we accumulated, we could not point to a specific date as being the day of the attack. Even without the disk, we had eight of the hijackers names, we had them attending flight schools in the U.S., and we had them associated with al-Quaeda. Further, we had the terrorist organization planning to send planes into buildings. There was no set ‘date’ of everything happening, but it was easy to look at the evidence and realize that something was going to happen soon. My father, as a Senator, could send these letters to the FBI directly, and they’d act on it, which was a good thing. It would have been better to have the disk to, but they could still get it from NSA.

“Daadddyyyy!” A very young voice screamed as I walked into our house. I looked up to see my mother, her brown hair beginning to go slightly gray, holding one of her grandsons, who was now reaching out towards me with both hands.

“Hey there, Kevin.” I said with a smile, and a softening of my voice. I set my father’s papers down on the table and went to pick up one of my sons while Brian came into the entryway from the living room, holding Richard who was also squirming to get into his other Daddy’s arms. When I had them both in my arms, they were hugging me and kissing me and every other concern in the world drifted away.

Brian and I had talked about having children one day ever since we were teenagers, but we’d kept on putting it off for better time. Certainly when we were spending months in Iraq, or in Belgium or France, or other places, having young children would have been very inconvenient. We wanted to at least be able to come home every night and see them, we wanted them to know us, and we wanted to watch them grow up. Finally, after our 30^th birthdays in 1999, we realized we would forever be putting it off if we didn’t just decide to go ahead and do it. It had taken a while to find the right woman to donate the eggs (we’d wanted eggs from the same woman, so that there was a ‘blood’ connection between the children). Then we’d chosen two women to be surrogate mothers, paying them a hefty fee in the process of making sure they would not seek any maternal rights. All three women involved in this were what you could call ‘cold bitches’ who wanted nothing to do with children, but who could stand to make eighty thousand dollars for 9 months of ‘work’. While we’d secretly hoped for a boy and a girl, we’d gotten two sons, born on the same day, within hours of each other.

“Where’d you go Daddy?” Richard asked. The two boys looked almost like twins, and many people assumed they were. Their ‘biological’ mother had been blond haired, blue eyed, and extremely intelligent. She’d agreed to participate mostly because she thought it would be good for society if her genes were carried on, but the idea of being a mother was repugnant to her. She hated children and only agreed to donate her eggs if we swore, and signed a contract, guaranteeing her that she’d never have to deal with the children that resulted.

“Did you bring us somethin’?” Kevin asked.

“I went to Poland.” I answered Richard. “And yes I brought you some things.”

“Show me where Poland is!” Richard demanded and I took them into the living room where there was a globe in a corner. The globe had been Papa’s, something he’d kept in his living room, and a gift from him before his Alzheimer’s got really bad. Thankfully, he was getting better now with the new treatments that had been started thanks to advances in MRI technology. Those advances had been made possible by Sean’s use of certain aspects of time-travel technology, making the scanning machine back into an advanced version of the MRI. It had made us rich as a family, and it had helped a lot of people.

Richard was the inquisitive one, and I sometimes had dreams he’d be a geologist or a geographer or something like that with his fascination for countries and foreign places. Maybe he’d be a diplomat. Brian, who watched us from afar, told me I shouldn’t worry about things like that yet. They weren’t even out of diapers yet and I was planning their future. Brian suggested we just let them enjoy their childhood. This was all new to me. I’d never been a parent before, and until our sons were born, I don’t think I really understood what it was like. The profound awe that came over me every time one of my sons looked up at me, smiled, and said “Daddy” melted my heart all over again.

“What do you want to do now?” Brian asked me several hours later after Mom went home and the boys were lying down for a nap. Brian had taken the day off from work to be with me, and I appreciated it a lot. No longer having a job was frustrating, almost as frustrating as standing around waiting for other people to stop the bad guys.

“I don’t know.” I admitted with a huff. “It’s not like I’m going to be able to get too many good jobs here now. Those guys play rough, you know.”

“I know.” Brian assured me, leaning in to kiss me. He had a gentle smile on his face. “We could always go back to California and start up a business out there. Hell, it doesn’t even have to make money. We could do something on international gay rights. It’s something we’ve both talked about doing, and we don’t have to be in Washington for that.”

“But your job…” I protested and he shrugged.

“It’s nice, but it’s not what I really want to be doing.” Brian admitted. “It was a safe place to land after the Administration got us kicked out of the U.N.”

“You sure?” I asked him and he smiled.

“Your mom will probably start spending more time at home now, you know.” He said with a waggle of his eyebrows. “You know ever since she retired she hasn’t wanted to be out here as much and with everyone grown she hates being in that house by herself.”

“I know.” I agreed with him and he smiled, leaning in for another kiss. “Okay, you win.”

“I always win.” Brian muttered with a smug smile as he deepened the kiss and began running his hands up and down my chest. Right on cue, Kevin cried out “Daddy!” from the bedroom where he’d been taking a nap. We both collapsed into giggles. “Okay, they always win.”

“Yeah, they do.” I murmured to Brian as he got up to go get our son. We were both “Daddy” but each boy had a slightly different way of saying the word that told us which they meant. Brian was right, we’d been in the Washington/New York scene long enough, and it was time to go back home to Modesto. In a few years, the boys would be starting school, and we should spend more time with them before that happened. California had passed statewide Domestic Partnership last year, and we were among the first to sign up forit. It had helped with co-adopting both of our children and settling their estate if anything had happened to one or both of us.

For a little while this morning, my mind had been diverted from the looming disaster, and I only thought about it long enough to put the draft copies of my father’s letters into the wall safe of my office. Then I joined Brian in the bedroom, getting two very wet boys changed, and then dressed for the afternoon. It was a beautiful day, and we agreed taking them for a walk would be good. We all loved the outdoors, and it was good exercise for all four of us.

It was almost funny how every time we took the boys for a walk, usually with them in their double stroller, everyone assumed they were twins. Sure, genetically they had the same mother, but one had been fertilized in vitro from Brian, and other from me. We still didn’t know which of us had fertilized which egg, mostly because we didn’t want to know. With any luck, we’d never have to know. Unless they needed blood, bone marrow, or something like that, we’d told our doctors we wanted to have no clue about it.

Mom was convinced Kevin was mine, and Richard was Brian’s but that was probably just because I’d chosen Kevin’s first name while Brian had chosen Richard’s. Then I’d chosen Richard’s middle name (which was David) while Brian had chosen Kevin’s middle name (which was Sean). When they were born, Brian and I had also legally changed our names so we were now the Breckenridge-Jones family.

My sister had teased me for a month after that.

She’d married her boyfriend from the Air Force Academy. He was now stationed in California as an administrative officer while she flew fighters with a squadron currently deployed in the Persian Gulf. She was the executive officer of a squadron of F-15 E strike fighters, and had actually dropped a few bombs on Iraq over the years of flying patrols in the no-fly zones. Somehow she’d managed to find time to have a daughter, my niece Hope, who was now three years old and lived with her father in Tracy, California.

All these domestic thoughts filled my mind for a few hours, distracting me from the thoughts going through my head. Even back in the original timeline, there had been plenty of warnings, prior to 9/11. If someone had wanted to, they could have conducted an investigation into the various warnings, and they would have struck paydirt. Now, this close to the event, they would have to have something extremely direct. The disk I’d prepared did most of that, but it didn’t point out specifically what flights were going to be hijacked, or their ultimate objectives. It just listed the hijackers and that they were being deployed to a mission to attack targets inside the United States. That should have been enough to get the men picked up, but so far nothing had happened and despite my father’s warnings, I knew something else had to be done.

When the boys were put back in bed for their afternoon naps, and Brian decided to head to the grocery store for shopping, I sat down in our home office, staring at my laptop for a while. The words finally started coming through, and I pulled up my word processor to start typing. By the time Brian had returned home, and called for me to help him with the groceries, I was done and sent it off via encrypted e-mail.

“What did you do?” Brian asked as I helped him put the food away into the fridge. He had a slightly miffed look on his face.

“I sent an e-mail.” I said with a smug grin that melted off of my face as soon as I saw the expression on his face. We’d never been the shouting type, but all it took was a tightening of his eyebrows, and firmness to his jawline, along with the glint in his blue eyes to tell me he was extremely upset. Ever since the boys had been borne, whenever we were mad at each other, our voiced would drop to a whisper. Neither of us ever wanted our boys to grow up in a household where people yelled at each other.

“To whom?” Brian demanded in a hoarse whisper.

“Ali Khalizad.” I responded in a troubled whisper. I still had a gallon of milk in my hands and moved to put it away, mostly so I wouldn’t be forced to meet those steely eyes of his.

“Why?” Brian murmured so softly I could barely hear him.

“I ordered a gold watch.” I said with a shrug. “He should be replying that it’ll take a week or less to get here.”

“Then what are you going to do?” Brian asked, knowing me far too well. Khalizad was a merchant contact we had in Pakistan. He’d occasionally gotten good information, especially since Musharref had taken control of that country in 1999. Sure, he was ‘President’ now, but once he’d used his position as a General to depose the elected Prime Minister, our merchant contact had actually become a fairly reliable source of information on certain things. I’d passed several bits of information along to the CIA from him before. Brian shook his head, probably remembering all those things even as he asked the question. “Forget that, I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to take that return e-mail and send it to one of our Agency contacts and tell them the attack is happening within a week according to that source. Are you insane?”

“What do you mean?” I asked as my eyes widened at the look of pure anger on his face.

“David Ray Jones, you told me fifteen years ago you weren’t responsible for every bad thing that happened in this world just because you know certain things are going to happen.” Brian’s voice was actually raised now, bordering on shouting. “What about 1989?”

“What about 1989?” I asked angrily. Brian and I rarely fought, or even got this angry together. That it was happening now, of all times only pissed me off more.

“The earthquake.” Brian explained with his voice dropping slightly. “How many people died?”

“A lot.” I answered. “Not as many as will die in a few days, though.”

“Sixty-two people, and almost four thousand were seriously injured.” Brian stated. “What about Northridge?”

“I don’t know.” I said, slamming the refrigerator door shut and turning away from him to stare at the kitchen wall. Mom’s decorative taste was all over our house with the wicker frame baskets hung there.

“Fifty-seven people died, and over nine thousand were injured.” Brian counted off in a normal tone, and I could feel him moving to stand behind me. His arms reached around my waist and he rested his head on my shoulder. I stiffened at his touch at first, but relaxed against him while tears filled my eyes. “You could have warned people, given them time to escape the danger areas.”

“And then I would have lived the rest of my life locked away somewhere giving the government all the information they wanted on future events.” I muttered as the anger bled out of me.

“You know what will happen, even if they take your bluff and arrest those people.” Brian pointed out softly and I nodded.

“They’ll interrogate Khalizad.” I admitted. “He’ll reveal he was just responding to my order for a watch, nothing more and then they’ll have more questions for me. But Brian, you don’t understand. This attack, it changes our country. It makes us… a different people, willing to tolerate things we’d never tolerate now.”

“That was a different timeline.” Brian murmured into my ear and I let out a sigh.

“Not that different.” I argued. “They’re going to milk this thing for every scrap of power they can get out of it. Cheney’s always wanted a much stronger executive branch, and he’ll get that with this as justification. They’ll use every act passed by Congress, every little loophole in every bit of the language of the bills passed to milk more and more power.”

“Who were the Senators from California during that original timeline?” Brian asked softly and I leaned back further into his embrace.

“Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.” I admitted. “I know Dad’s there, and he’ll listen to me and maybe he’ll be able to change some things but that’s not enough.”

“You can make it enough, if you try hard enough.” Brian countered. “They’ve had enough warnings about the upcoming attack, you know. When people find out about that, when they find out they had the names of all the hijackers and their locations before the attack happened, people are going to be angry.”

“They’ll cover it up.” I muttered and he tightened his grip on me.

“We won’t let them.” Brian argued back and I let out a sigh of defeat.

“Okay.” I said softly. “No more.”

“You’re not going to try to force any more warnings?” Brian asked in a soft but firm tone. “No more thinking about getting on a flight yourself?”

“How did you know?” I asked him in surprise, turning around to look at him. He hadn’t been to the computer yet, and he couldn’t have seen that I’d been looking up buying tickets on the flight. How to get him and others of our friends and family to get on the other flights had been my back up plan. Brian’s face was filled with a warm smile, but his eyes held the glint of a warning in them.

“I know you, Davey.” He replied softly and leaned in to kiss me gently on the lips. The kiss turned deep, passionate as I felt a need for him build in my chest. The pain of not being able to stop the upcoming events faded as I felt Brian’s excitement growing against me, matching my own. Even after all these years, all it took was a kiss and tight embrace to remind me of why I loved him. When he brushed things aside on the counter before picking me up and putting me there, pulling my pants off of me with long practice, all thoughts of planes and hijackings were far from my mind.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Brian and I woke up early for our regular morning jog. Last night had been a big family dinner, with many of our family and friends flying in from all over. We all knew why they were here, and the dinner had been a quiet one except for the sounds of all the young children. Trevor had flown in with his wife, Jennifer. Their three children, Derek who was seven, Heather who had just turned five, and little Misha who was just two weeks older than our boys had all gotten along with our kids, although their older children quickly got bored with the toddlers. The X-Box on the living room television at Dad’s had kept them occupied after that.

Sean and Brandon had flown in as well. Jenny couldn’t make it because she was still overseas, flying her fighter jets. Her husband had declined the journey, mostly because he couldn’t get leave time for the trip. Still, he had not been told the real reason for the get-together, but we wanted all of our family that could be here on this day. Mom had long ago figured things out, and it was her who had pointed out to Dad that Sean was also a time traveler before they confronted us back in 1996. Sean and I had sat together long into the night, sipping on drinks as we quietly recounted for each other our memories of the original 9/11.

I had been driving to work in Arizona, listening to the radio and thought it was a very unfunny skit on the morning show. When I’d gotten to work and found the television station showing the burning towers, I’d sat down with a thump. No work had gotten done that day.

Sean had been applying for a job, and was on an interview when the attacks were going on. When he came out of the interview at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, he and the scientist interviewing him had seen news reports of the attacks happening. He hadn’t believed the scientist’s mad scheme would work, but in that moment he’d thought that it was worth a shot to change the past, and keep those planes from flying.

“You ready?” Brian asked me as I finished zipping up my sweatshirt. I nodded to him and we went into the boys’ room. They were already awake, and quietly waiting for us to come get them. Surprisingly, both of them were dry, but then we’d changed them at two in the morning when they’d woken us up with their squalling. It was chilly outside, so we dressed them warmly for the morning run. Brian and I refused to leave them at home when we exercised, and had bought harnesses that let us keep them close to our chests as we ran. This morning I had Richard, and he kept playing with the zipper on my sweatshirt as Brian and I did our stretches.

When eight a.m. hit, we went outside to find Brandon, Sean, and Trevor coming out of my parents’ house. They were ready, Trevor already bouncing slightly. He was probably the one of us in best shape, but we all jogged regularly so while the pace was a little more than we normally ran, it wasn’t that bad.

“Dudes, don’t ever let Jennifer see those damn harnesses.” Trevor said after we’d reached the two-mile mark. He was looking at Richard and Kevin, both of them gurgling happily as they bounced with our running. Richard had gotten hungry so I’d pulled a bottle out of Brian’s backpack, without breaking stride. It was still warm thanks to the warm towel it had been wrapped in, and when Kevin saw his brother eating while we ran, he demanded his bottle, which Brian got out of my backpack.

“Doesn’t it make you want a kid of our own?” Sean teased Brandon as we continued the run and got a dirty look back.

“Fine, we’ll get started on it tomorrow.” Brandon said after a long glare at Sean, who just smirked.

“Uh, never mind.” Sean said with a shake of his head as we turned down another path. We had a specific course today, and I looked at my watch, wincing at the time. If it was going to happen, it would be soon. Dad would be going to his office about now, and our mother would be at home with Jennifer. She’d taken the news about Sean and my special knowledge as stoically as she’d taken the news about Trevor’s parents being secret defectors from the Soviet Union. Of all the wives I’d known Trevor to have in different timelines, I liked her best.

“I still don’t understand why you don’t want children.” Trevor said to the two of them.

“We like being able to hop on a plane and spend a week in the Bahamas at the drop of a hat.” Brandon replied with a shrug. Some things were never changed about him. In the original timeline, he’d taken off there with his boyfriend of the time, who had not been Sean. Brandon had made money through an ISP he’d owned, and liked the freedom of being able to take off whenever he wanted.

“Face it, some of us just aren’t meant to be domesticated.” Brian said with a shrug as our little group came within sight of our destination. From here we would have a spectacular view, and I fought down the feeling I felt, so much like the anticipation before the fireworks went off on the Fourth of July, or the excitement of when General Quarters was called a ship and everyone rushed to prepare it for battle.

“Well you’ve certainly domesticated Davey.” Sean chortled as we stopped at the spot we’d picked out. I was playing with Richard, who was laughing at the facial expressions I was making for him. Everyone enjoyed a laugh at that.

“Who would have thought I wouldn’t be the only one with kids?” Trevor laughed at us, and his words took me back to that night in the hot tub, when Brian had first claimed me as his boyfriend. All of us were smiling, but when my gaze met Sean’s the smiles faded from our faces.

“I can’t believe we didn’t…” Sean started to say but Brian interrupted him.

“Don’t.” Brian said sternly. “None of that talk now. You both, all of us, did what we could. You’ve gone too long without revealing yourself, and don’t even try to tell us that revealing yourself now wouldn’t ruin your lives.”

“I can understand Davey, he’s got kids now.” Sean said and Brandon snorted.

“What am I, chopped liver?” Brandon’s voice was sour as he pulled Sean into him and hugged him close. “I love you Sean Jones. I’m not living my life with you locked away somewhere bleeding out information on demand for some power-hungry egomaniacs. If it’s children that keeps your tongue shut, we’ll adopt two or three tomorrow.”

“You’d do that?” Sean looked up at him with a slight smile on his face.

“If it keeps you from doing something stupid, yes.” Brandon said with firmness in his voice. All of us smiled as a flash of movement in the sky drew my attention.

“There.’ I said, raising my arms and pointing. It was just a speck, but it grew even as my friends and loved ones turned to look. Against my chest, Richard dropped his bottle and I caught it without looking away from the speck that was growing fast, too fast. He sensed the somber mood and let out a little gurgle that was his way of recognizing something was wrong.

“Daddy?” His voice piped up and I put a hand on his cap-covered head.

“Shhh, honey.” I said softly as the sound of the jet’s engines could now be heard faintly.

“Oh fucking god.” Trevor murmured as the sound grew louder and the plane grew in size. Brandon was now holding Sean in a tight embrace, and Brian’s hand snaked out to grab mine as he moved to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t take my eyes away from the large plane as it roared low over the ground. It wasn’t quite overhead, but it was close enough that there was a gust of wind as it passed nearby. The boys started crying, and I reached my free hand up to quiet Richard as Brian did the same with Kevin.

The explosion and fireball made all of us jump, and the boys started wailing at the top of their lungs. Their plaintive cries drew my attention away from the Pentagon, and I tried to calm my crying son while Brian did the same with our other child. Trevor was shaking as Brandon and Sean reached out to him, and there were tears in all of our eyes as a lone Pentagon police cruise raced towards the part of the building that was now spouting flame and smoke.

“I think you were right.” Brian whispered softly. “This…I…”

“Let’s get a cab.” I said softly, and all of my friends nodded in silent agreement.

Hundreds of people had just died in front of us, and while I’d seen the death of billions, literally in the last time line, this was more painful. As we searched for cabs, Sean’s eyes met mine and we shared a look. The world had changed again, and not for the better.

Whatever happened to doing it right?

Chapter 1	Chapter 2	Chapter 3 Chapter 3 April Fool	Chapter 4	Chapter 5	Chapter 6
Chapter 7	Chapter 8	Chapter 9	Chapter 10	Chapter 11	Chapter 12
Chapter 13	Chapter 14	Chapter 15	Chapter 16	Chapter 17