Fortify

Chapter One

[Small edit: the banner is Russ! Dream cast William Brent as our leading man]

It had been months. I had traveled to my favorite spots in history—the renaissance had probably been the hardest since I was trying desperately to avoid the Plague. That would've been pretty bad if I had picked it up and brought it to a different time...

That was the hardest part of time traveling; making sure I didn't mess anything up. I was merely an observer. While, yes, I would have fascinating conversations with many different people—and even picked up a few languages along the way!—I had to be very careful about not overstaying my welcome. Some places were easier than others. Some were much harder. The Civil War had been one of the hardest places to visit and leave without changing anything.

Of course, I'd been very close to that period before. My first big time travel had happened in 1882, after the war had ended. Sometimes I would pop in on Josie to make sure all was well, but I had to be careful that no one else spotted me. She wouldn't visit home yet. She was too scared. So I would often take letters she wrote to our parents and brother, Zach, back with me when I'd pop back in.

I understood her fear. She had a lot to lose. She had a nice life with Cap. Things were finally starting to settle down on that front, but I knew they were just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It wasn't in their nature to relax. They'd both been through too much to ever really let themselves settle into the peace they were owed.

Me? Sometimes I got confused where I really was. I tried to keep myself grounded and stay home for a while, let my head focus on my true reality, before I went off again.

Especially lately...

My last two trips, one in the early 1900's when the Titanic was being built and the other during the Prohibition, I'd felt myself being watched. I never outright saw anyone trailing me, but it was a distinct feeling. As much as I tried to tell myself I was just being paranoid and overly cautious about not being spotted time traveling, I knew it was bigger than that.

After the Prohibition, and hell maybe I was just being watched by cops, I decided to stay home for longer than usual. It made my mother incredibly happy. It did me too for a while until she started hounding me about applying for colleges.

"Don't you think you're taking this whole life style a bit too far?" she'd say only a couple hundred times a day.

I was usually just waking up when she'd start and be, maybe, two spoonfuls into my breakfast cereal. So, naturally, I wasn't always in the best mood. I knew she was coming from a place of concern for me. For the first few days back home, when she'd wake me up I came up swinging. I know she thought something awful was happening to me, but truthfully I was lucky. There had yet to be any snags in my travels. Truthfully, it was those trips with my sister that still haunted me. That time the McCoys totally turned on me and captured the two of us...they'd been something else. I tried not to dwell on those days, though.

I couldn't assure my mom enough that I was okay, so she had started fixating on me going to college and getting a proper education.

"I mean," she'd say, "you don't expect to do this for the rest of your life, do you? In the meantime, you're wasting your youth on traveling when you could be getting an education for your future."

The future was a weird thing. No one had ever explicitly told me I couldn't travel to my future, but any time I had tried I hadn't been successful. Truthfully, I hadn't been interested until my aunt confessed she had never even thought to do so. It was maddening to me. We had these abilities and didn't go to our future?

But so far it appeared that we could only travel to the past and back to our present. It was a little disappointing and frustrating at points, but I didn't mind all too much. The future was mine to make of it whatever I decided.