And just like that — he was back. The simplicity of science, the undeniable fact of existence. There he was, standing in his laboratory, a pulse of light, a shockwave carried with him from sixty four years prior, enough like an earthquake tremor to leave Reed gasping, shaking in reverberation, but despite it all, here. Or better put — now. He could almost cry. Maybe someone else would have rested, closed themselves off from the world to process and adjust and care for themselves in the aftermath of an experience so strange that by the time it had left his line of sight Reed could hardly believe it really happened. But not him. In the past, he'd felt exhausted running through the final checks to make the machine work, strung out and at his wit's end, heavy with the pressure of so many other people's expectations. In the present now, Reed was re-energized, full of hope.
And there were always things to do. Strange, as he found his phone, picked away at the computer, checked on all the things he'd left behind — nothing seemed as far in the past as it should have. Like somewhere in his mind he'd stored away everything from the present he'd been dragged away from, left it ready and waiting for his return. The feeling of double-vision was disorienting, but nothing about the emails and messages waiting in his inboxes were. A few necessary checks on the people he'd been stranded with, quick texts and calls from a survivor's mindset, and then he was able to return to everything he'd left behind, the top of his inbox, Stella.
In the car on his way to her house, for a moment Reed didn't know what he was doing. Surely this had to be stranger than anything they'd encountered together thus far, more unbelievable and more burdensome, but she'd invited him to her home with seemingly no second thought, and although Reed had always thought of himself as an independent person, time travel had taught him the value of a team. He didn't want to leave those lessons behind. He wanted support, comfort, family — Reed knew it deeply as he knocked at her door, finally arriving. Why not start here.
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