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Light spoilers for the entire series!!
There’s no one on the flight. He’s standing between the edge of Tim Horton’s and the gate on the concourse. The flight leaves in twenty minutes, and he can’t even see Toronto proper from here. But its time for to ready for his tour, time for leaving behind friends and slipping into the persona of Kai, star musician. Though maybe at this point in time, it is only wannabe star musician, he’s not entirely sure. These years get fuzzy the more he sees them out of order, having to separate them into before and afters and a complete and utter lack of her.
Unless he’s waiting at the wrong gate, which wouldn't be a surprise. He had rolled out of the airport Sheraton 20 minutes ago, feeling both the lulls and the highs of a late night flight in from New Brunswick. Show at St Thomas University, an entire town set on the hillside, divided by the river, that's about all he gathered in the few hours spent there. And today, he’ll be in New York. Or will be, in a few hours.
He holds the coffee in his right hand, his phone and boarding pass in the other. He’s somewhere between 23 and 35, the older pull of his actual age intruding in this early morning tour warm-up. Far more difficult than it needs to be.
It isn’t her. The dark red hair spills over her shoulders, and she chats on the phone, turning, so he gets a good look of her as she tries to see if the plane is at the gate. It isn’t her.
He spends nearly the entire flight spread out across three seats like a bench, hastily snapped in to one of the seats so he can swat away the flight attendants.
Four hours later he’s miles from La Guardia, listening over lunch to one of his semi-friends, who is discussing the benefits and advantages of music licensing and how he’s angling to get one of Kai’s songs on one of the ritzy high-schooler centric television shows. Kai’s had enough of high school—-he spent a lot of the last three weeks relieving some of the more awkward moments. The ones he would have rather never gone through in the first place, the ones where the dance of correcting mistakes and changing history is more of a reaction and a personal catharsis rather than anything meaningful.
He’s here because last time, he didn’t go to New York. He missed this meeting, he missed three others, and he spent the time until his next set of shows in a haze of alcohol.
Another two hours later he meanders the streets of New York, wondering where exactly this time line has taken him, where he is in relation to her. Because she’s lost to him, in the now in his most obvious, corrected trajectory of his life, but maybe she is here. Maybe this is a goal that was half-realized and half-remembered, something that is ghosting through the timelines and is still something he can find.
Not that this is something he would willingly admit. He’s only edging closer to Central Park. He catches the glint of a reddish brown hair in a moment and his heart thuds. Not her. Or at least the exact her; it never would be. By this point he’s used to the idea of multiple versions of himself, the echoes he leaves behind when he vacates a regret, the drones that carry out the work of taking him to the present.
But it is her. A her. He doesn’t call out to her, doesn’t follow her down the street, because maybe this version of her doesn’t actually know him. After all, it isn’t like every regret takes him back to the same time line. Perhaps this is an Erica untouched by temporal manipulation, though from what he knows of her, achieving this goal would have something she would have attained by regret-intervention. Or maybe that was just him projecting.
He would have liked to think that Erica could have ended up working in New York publishing without having to have her life re-styled, corrected.
He is fading and feeling the tug of waking up early and in another city nearly fifteen days in a row. Not to mention crossing back and forth from his present to back here. But there’s a party to attend, one of the other things on the agenda that is completely and utterly new to him, having missed all of this entirely the first time. Something entirely new, now that’s a surprise. He had been accused of falling back into the past before. But this was uncharted territory.
At half past six, sprawled out in his small hotel room amid the annoying lights of Times Square, Kai is awakened out of his semi-slumber by the buzz of his phone. When he reaches it, he wonders who he expects it to be. Not her. That would be implausible; though seeing her, maybe, here was already stretching the limits of what he would easily believe. It seemed like a trap—no one would have allowed him to come back here, to actually go to New York, if they knew that Erica had ended up here in some time line that he would have access to. Or it was safe—there was no way that this Erica would be interested in him, know of him, even. That was sobering in and of itself—he wanted to think that he was a sort of constant in her life, but maybe that had only been a consequence of his meddling.
But two hours later he’s in a trendy part of the city with at least one future one hit wonder and a rather miserly former star who is railing on the future of music. Something Kai knows enough about, but he keeps his mouth closed and is convinced that he recognizes the woman at the bar. Just maybe.
He tries not to stare, not to sort out exactly how their paths have crossed or may have not crossed before in this particular instant, leading up to this moment, in this iteration of his past. Possibly not. She doesn’t seem to recognize him, and he can’t exactly figure out why she looks so familiar.
But then she appears. Her hair is shorter than he’s used to, which has him absolutely convinced that she is nothing like the one he knows. He stays at his seat, half listening to the conversation about music. She doesn’t approach him, she doesn’t even acknowledge him. She simply doesn’t know him. It would be a like a second change one night stand in a city he doesn’t really know. Would it be fair?
So he lets her approach him, his heart pounding and that quizzical look on her face he’s become used to by now—that, do I know you, maybe, because you feel familiar, one. A consequence of his continual time-displacement, leaving behind imprints and missed connections. And standing before him was the biggest one of them of all. For someone who dwelled too much in the past, often literally, this was both the chance of the year and a potential complete and utter misstep. But would they have let him come here, encouraged him to end up here, if this hadn’t been a possibility?
He asks her a question, offers to buy her a drink, and he has to pretend he knows nothing about her, but really, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe this Erica is completely different. This is years from when he had ever known her, permutations of universes away.
Which is enough to have him stumbling back to his friends, to his life, to working with the crux of the reason why he’s actually here. Career development, boring things, missed opportunities.
He wonders if they do know she’s here, that this is a test, a way to prove he is actually moving on in his therapy. Something he had been neglecting for quite some time.
If leaving the bar and heading out into the night was any indication, he had come quite some way.