Turn back the clock.

Prologue

Tiana glanced at her husband as she got out of bed, world blurry until she felt around on the night table and found her glasses. As everything came into focus, she smiled softly, for a while, a young woman instead of a famous scientist. She liked these small hours, when she could be herself instead of hiding within a lab coat, when she could wear her hair free. Without turning on the lights, she padded quietly out to the bathroom, shutting the door, and finally flicking the stitch. A familiar sight greeted her in the mirror. Long, dark hair, chunky glasses, which were annoying, because she only needed them a little, and her most distinctive feature. The eyes. One green, one blue, the doctors had thought she may be blind in one the first time she opened them, but they were purely cosmetic. Knowing she wouldn't be able to get back to sleep, she glanced at the clock. Only half an hour until the alarm went anyway, and she wanted to be a little early to work today, to run a few final tests. Before long, she had her hair pulled back from her face, and was out in the kitchen, making the one thing she could. The smell of frying french toast permeated the air as the insistent blaring of the alarm started, and she grinned as John stumbled out from their bedroom.
"Sleep well love?" Even his grumbling in return couldn't destroy her good mood, confident that today would go well. It was another breakthrough day for her, with the first testing on a human going ahead. If it worked, her new machine would be able to physically take the age off a person, regrowing and regenerating cells. It would make people live longer, and healthier. John would be breaking the story, exclusively, tonight, and the paper had been leading up to this all week. As Tiana ate her breakfast, she remembered the first time she had made a breakthrough, a discovery. There had been nowhere near this hype at first, in fact, she had only used it on John, and a friend had convinced her to go public. That cure, the cure to diabetes, had made her famous, and since, she had been making leaps and bounds in the scientific area. 

Before too long, they were at the lab, final checks done, final tests complete. The machine was humming quietly as Tiana, her lab partner and friend since their teenage years, Sai, and John, eagerly awaited the test subject, which, keeping with her tradition of using friends and family as guinea pigs, was Tiana's mother. FInally she arrived, and it was all systems go. There was no time to talk about trivial things, but cameras were started to record this for posterity. Everything was in place, and Julie laying on the bench. With a shared look, Sai and Tiana flicked the dual switches that were the trigger to start. There was a louder hum, then a crash. A white flash, then everything went black.