Four and Counting: New Life

The new recruit had been staring into space for the last half an hour, and the team were now watching him uneasily as their boss, Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, approached him to try and get his attention.

            ‘Hey, hey!’ he called snapping his fingers in front of his face. He repeated until Tom finally responded.

            ‘Sorry, wh…’ Tom started until his eyes focused on his face. ‘What can I help you with?’

            ‘Just wondering what you were thinking about,’ Gibbs responded. ‘You’ve been staring into space for the last half an hour.’

            ‘Probably because I wasn’t here,’ Tom stated simply.

‘Then where were you?’ Angee asked.

‘I was watching people die, people I didn’t even know existed,’ Tom explained. ‘But you did.’

‘What?’ Angee questioned. ‘Are you on some kind of drug?’

‘Jeremy,’ Tom stated sadly. ‘He was vaporised when you destroyed the Zoombian ship.’

‘What do you know about that,’ she snarled.

‘I know that in my version of events, that never happened. As a matter of fact, you, Jeremy and Damien don’t even exist in my history,’ Tom expanded. ‘You are the anomaly that ripped a hole in time.’

‘Okay, you are definitely on drugs,’ Gibbs decided.

‘No, he really isn’t,’ Angee stated, siding with Tom. ‘You saw what happened during the car accident.’

‘You travelled forwards in time a few seconds after letting out the same temporal blast that vaporised Jeremy,’ Tom nodded in agreement.

‘So, why do you have my memories?’

‘You’re mission that cost Jeremy his life didn’t happen in my timeline. You didn’t exist in my timeline, so I think that maybe one of us coming back in time created a new timeline, which the other existed in, and because of the way timelines work, they mirrored each other as closely as possible,’ Tom explained.

‘So?’ Gibbs asked.

‘So, I think that me having her memories means that we are mirrors of each other, one from each timeline, and being in the same time period and being aware of each other is causing the Universe to try and merge us into one person, because, for all intents and purposes, we are the same person, just from different timelines.’

‘Anyway, what do you need me to do boss?’ Tom asked, turning the attention of the squadroom away from his and Angee’s weirdly intertwined past and back to their jobs.

Across the room, in the second squad’s rectangle, Special Agent EJ Barret stood and addressed her team. ‘Lets go, we’ve got another lead on P2P.’

            ‘You won’t catch him,’ Tom called. ‘Felix only gets caught when he wants to get caught.’

            ‘We don’t even know his name, how the hell do you?’ Barret asked.

            ‘Because, he was my best-friend before he jumped off the deep end,’ Tom shrugged. ‘Everything he does is planned out, if you think it is collateral damage or a slip up, then you are wrong. He does nothing by accident, everything he does has a reason and the consequences are either desirable to him, or he finds a way to control them.’

            ‘Would you protect him if it came down to it?’ Barret asked.

            ‘No, I would not. I would fix him if it came down to it,’ Tom replied. ‘I made the mistake that sent him insane, so if I could fix that, then I would.’

            ‘Then will you help us find him,’ EJ asked.

            ‘I won’t lead you into a slaughter,’ Tom decided. ‘There are three of you, there are three of them. You won’t last five seconds in there.’

            ‘Who are the other two?’

            ‘Penny Chambers and Faye Watts. Felix’s last name in this time is McKyle.’

            ‘Thank you,’ she replied sweetly before leading her team off to investigate the lead that they had been given.