THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM

TIMELINE 3, 7 MARCH, SUNDAY, AFTERNOON.

Allow me to recap the timeline so far:

We left our Original Timeline on a Sunday afternoon, went back more than 20 years to Incident 0, messed up our mission to fix Jude, and returned to our right point in time in the changed future aka our Alternate Timeline - which we played like a which-way book, the real-life edition, where I played the role of Kayla Kingsley who attended the Lorent Girl's School, hero-worshipped her big brother Kev-Jude, had a crush on Wolfgang on first sight, and then fell in love with her soulmate, Kaius the Fluffy.

If that wasn't mortifying enough, I also flashed my pink Rockstar Barbie undies at pretty much all my betas and said crush and soulmate.

Might I just take a moment at this point to say, "It wasn't me." I blame it all on that silly girl Lala - although I'm sure she'd blame Sam for not changing out of Rockstar Barbie.

But if you asked Wolfgang, he would certainly deny seeing anything. I never wanted to believe in a lie so much. Wait, why was I even remembering this? I blame it on PTSD.

It turned out that flashing pink Rockstar Barbie undies was far more traumatizing than anything else that happened in that timeline, because while the other feelings had faded as if I had woken from a bad dream, this trauma lingered.

It was unnerving that every moment there made me feel like my reality was shifting further and further away from our Original Timeline, making the things of my Original Timeline seem like a passing dream. Luckily we didn't stay long. We stayed at our Alternate Timeline till Monday night. This moved us forward in time by approximately 34 hours.

Wolfgang would be able to furnish you with the time zone calculations for traveling across timelines. I think he was working it out with Perry in one of their discussions, but I wasn't paying attention because I had to pick between time gates. Like, I'll do the magic, they can do the math.

The fact was, we still hadn't figured out all the mechanisms of how time traveling affected our wolves, much less universal time - How should we account for the time spent in the passageways? How was it we could gain the memories of the new timeline, but not lose our old ones? How were our wolves affected in some ways but not in others?

There were a lot of unexplained inconsistencies that I'm sure Prof Chimay or some genius in our group would write research on, but if you asked me, I'd just say the goddess was just inconsistent like that. I even lost Boo somewhere along the way… which I wasn't even going to try to explain. I wasn't the inconsistent goddess. It wasn't my job to make excuses for her sorely obvious lack of professionalism. I mean, you wouldn't see Harvey running the universe with so many loose ends flying around.

Maybe what the goddess needed was a beta to help her organize things, like her cat collection. Did she even realize she had four cats still wandering the earth and opening time gates nilly willy for whoever knew their names? Granted that they all owned ridiculous and long names, even I knew not to use my full name as my all-access password.

Anyway, what happened after that would depend on interpretation. It could have been a last-ditch attempt at saving Kev-Jude, or a test, or a trap… I guess it depended on whether Dad was a genius mastermind manipulating the political chessboard across timelines, or if he was just Dad.

I thought I had an amazing plan for our Alternative Timeline - not that we fleshed very much of it out, but as with all my bright ideas, I had a very good feeling about this one. But now that I looked back at it, I wondered if any of it was actually feasible.

We honestly wouldn't know if we didn't try, but I had to suddenly have my first shift - which according to Dad and Beta Lucas would not be to my blue alpha wolf, Boo. So in a panic, before any "permanent damage" was done, my wolves abandoned whatever trap/test/task we thought we were dealing with and rushed back to Incident Zero to stop ourselves. I probably died in mid-shift like an omega at that point.

This trapped me in a dream or a prayer or whatever it was… and while alone there without anything to define me, not even Boo… I wished very hard for Bell… and Future Bell did eventually appear and walked me back, all the while telling me stories about our children, our grandpups, and the story of Dan Lion… and it wasn't anything in particular about those stories but I just… I think I realized that it was Bell that I loved.

Just this particular Bell, who happened to live through this particular timeline and was shaped by this particular set of circumstances to become the wolf who was my soulmate.

I just liked his company - when we weren't arguing. I firmly believe that Bell's singular flaw was his anger, specifically at me. (He's cute when he's angry at other people.) Even if we were just walking through nowhere, being with him was a happiness I couldn't quantify. Now that I had met Grandpa Bell, I was even more certain, that this was the wolf I wanted to grow old with.

Perhaps this might be considered a near-death epiphany, but it struck me how incredibly lucky I was that my wolf and his wolf would become just the right wolves for each other, at just the right time, in just the right timeline, to meet the way we did (and also come out of it alive). Maybe that was the meaning of soulmates.

And I should treasure him more because there wouldn't be another timeline where he would be as perfectly mine as the one we were in.

Meanwhile, outside my epiphany-inducing experience, Dad, Beta Lucas, and my wolves decided to give our past selves some "guidance" instead of undoing the mess we made like we were supposed to. I blamed this solely on having Fluffy in our midst.

But they claimed that it had worked because when they carried me back to our Original Timeline, we found everything as it should be. I have yet to check it, so I had to just take their word for it.

Admittedly, I'm skeptical since I had seen how a little deviation in the past could mess up the future… if they had indeed successfully taken care of Baby Jude at Incident Zero, it was technically impossible for us to be back at our Original Timeline - even if it was what they were calling it.

Suddenly, I understood what Wolfgang was trying to warn us earlier - we would never be able to return to the Original Timeline, even with the Undo Point. At best, we would only be able to return to a new timeline that was nearly indistinguishable from our Original one. Let's call our current timeline, Timeline 3. That's the one we're stuck with now. (Well, they do say the third time's the charm, right?)

This was personally regrettable because I only just realized how perfect Bell was for me in our Original Timeline. It was also worrying because no matter how I tried, I couldn't remember anything about Jude becoming a traitor in our current timeline. Honestly, I had no memories of Jude in Timeline 3… which was probably the most alarming thing, but MAYBE, just maybe I just needed more time to process it.

I guess when they said everything was "as it should be", it didn't necessarily mean everything was exactly as it was. I had no chance to carefully shift through the differences of my newly merged memories though, because when I finally woke up, we had traveled back in time again - this time just back to Sunday afternoon of Timeline 3, just a little after we first left to Incident 0.

This little excursion was Beta Lucas' brainchild.

Our purpose here was twofold:

First, to stop Bell from Chi-ka-booming on our Packhouse front lawn because the curse mark was huge and Beta Lucas didn't want to have to cure it with blue flame because that would burn for days and also leave an ugly mark that would take the grass weeks to cover. Beta Lucas was sure - once he accidentally detonated Ben's Lego science experiment in his back yard (don't ask) and it took more than two weeks before the grass grew back completely.

"Prevention is better than cure." Beta Lucas quoted proudly.

As reported earlier, this first part had been taken care of, and our front lawn was saved from Bell's wrath. My betas, Wolfgang, and Fluffy's fate was still on the balance until they report to Bell on Tuesday morning to explain my unconscious state, but as far as Beta Lucas was concerned, the grass was safe - mission accomplished.

Second, we were here to make up for lost time.

"It's like we're subbing for ourselves." Ben explained without really explaining.

Ideally, we'd substitute for our own absence for the lost 34 hours, or until our past selves returned from Incident zero, whichever came first. 

"Yah man, no one would even notice we were gone." Beta Lucas was very proud of his plan.

Somebody would have to attend the meetings and make the preparations and everything else to the lead up to the Night Forest Trip on Tuesday morning. #betalife.

I couldn't help but notice Wolfgang hanging back, his hand on his chin, and his arms crossed… because as far as he could understand, we were probably doing something crazy stupid again. He was probably right too. We were definitely not learning our lesson here.

"It's good you're up, Sam." Beta Lucas informed me, "We were just about to head over to the Princess Town to inspect the Underground Army's new base."

"And somebody wanted to leave Sam behind." Ben scoffed.

"She was passed out!" Beta Lucas was immediately defensive, "I just thought she'd be more comfortable at home."

Luckily Ben knew better. He was very sure that I would chi-ka-boom if I woke up and found them gone. That was why instead of leaving me safe in the care of Mum and Ki, they lugged my unconscious body through the Time Gates with them.

But what if Bell chi-ka-boomed again? I really didn't think we were learning our lesson. Had we really always been this way? Why had I not noticed it before?

"There's just one more thing." Dad said.

Naturally, everyone stopped to hear out the alpha.

"Kaius." Dad looked straight at Fluffy, who responded by pointing to himself, "Me, Alpha?"

Dad nodded and cleared his throat. Before he spoke again, three hands shot up.

Dad paused at the show of hands, and because he was a wise alpha, he asked, "What is it?"