The Journal of the Time-Lost Joshua Donovan

The morning sun is breaking through Joshua's windows, reflecting even more off of the five feet of snow that's starting to melt in the June heat.

Inside, Joshua is snuggled up to the woman beside him, sleeping with a smile on his face.

Joshua leads Claudia into his (admittedly messy) apartment, kicking some dirty shirts out of the way. "Um, don't mind the mess. Sorry. I didn't know I was going to have company."

There's something about the room that is so typically Joshua.

Once Joshua woke up on Saturday, he decided, a bit worriedly, that he should probably be responsible and see if he even had a job. When he left the bar and went back to his apartment, he hooked up his computer, which immediately popped up a window asking if he wanted to correct the day and time. Confused, Joshua let his computer do whatever it wanted, and he checked out some of his Youtube subscriptions. Nothing new. Checking a few things, Joshua realized that he hadn't lost any time by being in the bar.

Feeling a bit like Scrooge on Christmas morning, he went for a long, very silent, very calm walk through the streets of Geneva. After dinner at his favourite fondue place, he came home, much calmer than he had been in ages. The rest of the evening was devoted to his dissertation.

Sunday, he decided to make and upload another Youtube video (the fine art of mousetrap vehicles, this time, and why they mostly don't work) and spend a bit of time poking at Shinji's desk thingy.

The rest of the week went by fairly normally, work, dissertation, and a bit of research on what he was increasingly certain was an Artifact. Shinji was still conspicuously absent, so he couldn't ask (well, tell really) about keeping the whatever-it-actually-was.

Slowly, however, he started being a bit worried, as Claud wasn't answering her Skype. Finally, Sunday afternoon, he pulled up Expedia to get a ticket to South Dakota. If they wouldn't tell him what was wrong, he'd figure it out himself. Before he actually got the ticket, however, he got up to go to the living room to grab his wallet, and... found Milliways. Oops.

In some ways, it all came back to Claudia. It was to make her a better life than South Dakota that he eventually decided on the teleportation anyway. Joshua was so certain that when (he never deals in if, science is all about when) his research finally came to fruition, that he'd get a job at a prestigious research college, and only then would he uproot Claudia. The schools were better out east anyway, and there would be less questions about a young man raising a ten-year-old (even though she never did understand being ten).

Her screams haunted him while he was in that place. It was the last thing he heard before the oppressive silence, and the last thing he even wanted to hear. He'd promised her that he'd make it alright, that she wouldn't have to be afraid anymore, but those screams were the personification of his broken promise. As time passed, he poked and prodded at that damn compass, but nothing seemed to work.

However, finally, he felt a pull, something almost tearing at his soul, and he couldn't help but follow it. There he was, hovering above his old lab somehow etherially, but before he could process that, there was Claudia, fussing with some of the minerals he'd left on the table. But that wasn't his ten-year-old Claudia, this was a... not even a girl anymore, but an older, perhaps wiser, but no less determined woman. He tried to reach out, but the closer he tried to get, the more she seemed to fade.

... shit. Once the lab and Claudia were gone, he just stood for a long moment and stared at the yellow shiny nothing. He could see her, he could be a part of things, but he was hurting her. More time passed, this time almost painfully slowly. Each time that he was pulled through to the lab, he could tell that he was hurting her more.

He was pulled to the lab more and more often, until finally one time he saw Professor Nielsen there. He pleaded with him to get Claudia to stop this nonsense, to stop killing herself for him. And it worked. Or he thought it did until they both ended up in the space with him. Damnit.

But there she was, his sister, his now much less little sister and she was fine. He could tell that she'd been broken, but he could fix that. He could make her better, he could finally keep his promise to her. Eventually, they got out of the space (Of course he missed the human element of it. Stupid mistake, really.) and he ended up at CERN.

There was still a hole, though, that hole that burned every so often that he missed so many of his sister's growing up years. As much as he could, he chatted with her on Skype, called her, and sent her all the things he could. It really did all come back to her, though. He wanted to make her a life that wasn't South Dakota, to take her away from everything that had happened. However, as time passed, as he really got to know his sister, his real sister, not the one he had in his head, he realized that she'd found a family and found her own happiness. Most days, he wished that it included more of him, but he was content. Claudia was happy and that was what mattered.