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Gerard’s in bed—Frank’s bed—when the call comes. He startles awake at the ringtone and, half asleep, gropes towards his pockets, only to realize that he isn’t wearing his pants, because Frank took them off of him. Now, Frank grumbles sleepily when Gerard pulls away to lean over the side of the bed and rummage through his clothes on the floor.
“H’lo?” he manages. He scrubs a hand through his hair to try and wake himself up.
The voice on the other end of the line is a surprise. “Gerard! Excellent. I have- you need to see- You need to get over here right away. As quickly as possible. Now, actually.”
“...Grant?” Gerard pulls the phone away from his ear for a moment and peers at the display, confirming that it is, in fact, his boss calling him at one o’clock in the morning. “You need me... at the workshop? Why?” A thought occurs to him, and his adrenaline levels spike: “Is there something wrong?” Images of explosions, government agents, and rampaging robots all flicker through his mind.
“No, no, nothing like that—look. I need you here, that’s all. Come as quickly as you can? To the lot behind the warehouse. I- well, you’ll see.”
“I’ll- Okay, sure,” Gerard says, because he’s not actually capable of saying no to Grant when he uses that manic tone of voice: never has been.
“Fantastic,” Grant says, and hangs up.
Gerard is still staring at his phone in confusion when Frank mumbles, “Your boss?” and pushes himself up onto an elbow. He looks gorgeous and sleep-rumpled, and Gerard has to, has to lean in and kiss him, bite at his lower lip.
Frank hums in appreciation, and when they pull apart, he’s looking more clear-eyed. “What did he want?”
“He wants me at the workshop,” Gerard says. And that’s when Gerard remembers that he isn’t in his own apartment, a few streets away from the warehouse that Grant has turned into a workshop. He’s two towns away, at Frank’s house, and the buses have long since stopped running. Fuck. “Fuck.”
Frank laughs, because he is an asshole. Then he says, “Your job is fucking nuts, but your boss is awesome. Also, hot. I’ll drive you over,” and Gerard remembers why he keeps Frank around.
---
Twenty minutes later, they’re pulling into the empty lot behind Grant’s warehouse. Grant’s easy to spot: he’s standing under one of the (few) working streetlights, next to a Trans Am that Gerard recognizes immediately from the ‘shop, and he’s holding a long-suffering Einstein in the crook of an arm.
“Excellent!” Grant says, when Frank parks and they both get out of the car. “Oh, and Frank, too. Hello.”
“‘Sup. Nice cat,” says Frank, with a little jerk of his chin. He’s met Grant a few times before, just briefly, and he’d picked up on Gerard’s stupid, hopeless crush in about ten seconds, but the two of them get along fairly well.
The Grant turns to Gerard, and he’s looking a lot like the smuggest motherfucker on the planet. Gerard smiles back—he can’t not—and waits for Grant to explain himself.
Except for all Grant says is, “I thought you’d want to see this. Will you take Einstein for a moment?”
“Uh,” says Gerard, but he walks over and lifts Einstein out of Grant’s arms. He waits some more, but Grant seems preoccupied, picking up one of a pair of old-fashioned clocks from the roof of the Tran Am and fiddling with the handle, still with that smug, barely-suppressed smile on his face. In the harsh glare of the streetlights, he looks more like a mad scientist than ever, and it’s kind of making Gerard’s knees go weak. It’s too early in the morning, and he has not had nearly enough coffee to deal with how fucking gorgeous Grant is when he’s working and excited about something.
Frank walks over and scratches behind Einstein’s ear. Apparently he takes pity on Gerard’s poor, lust-addled brain—he certainly teases Gerard about it enough, Jesus Christ—because he asks, “What’s with the car. Going somewhere?”
“Not yet,” Grant replies. He turns back to Gerard and starts fixing the clock to Einstein’s collar. “Tonight, we’re starting with the small-scale demonstration.”
“What experiment is this?” Gerard asks, finally finding his voice. “The thing with the Tesla coils?”
“No, although success tonight will definitely help move that project along. This is something I’ve been working on for rather longer.” Grant’s hands brush Gerard’s as he finishes with the collar, and he gives Einstein’s chin a quick scratch before pulling away. He looks Gerard in the eye, and Gerard becomes acutely aware of Frank’s warmth pressed up along his left side. “It’s my life’s work, in a sense.”
Holy shit. Gerard draws in a sharp breath. He knows what Grant’s talking about, vaguely—has heard Grant allude to it a few times. Some sort of instantaneous travel, based around a specific mechanism with a name that Gerard can never remember. But he didn’t know that Grant was so close to some kind of breakthrough.
The next moment, Grant’s off again, this time towards a make-shift table piled with tools and miscellaneous wires a few yards away. As Grant searches for something amidst the circuitry, Frank leans forward and whispers, “No wonder you’ve got such a boner for him, if this is what he’s like when he’s up to something. Because fuck.” And Gerard makes an undignified squawking sound.
Luckily, before Gerard can respond properly, Grant is striding back with one of his gadgets in hand, picking up the other clock. With a flourish, he holds it up beside the one on Einstein’s collar. “Observe: the times match exactly.”
Grant waits until both Gerard and Frank nod their agreement. Then he gestures to the front seat of the Trans Am. “Gerard, if you wouldn’t mind?”
The front seat, now that Gerard looks, has been retrofitted with a criss-cross of straps and buckles. Thankfully, Frank asks, “Is that a cat seatbelt?” before Gerard can get too far wondering if he’s supposed to be the one getting in the car.
“Indeed,” Grant says. He’s gone around the other side of the Trans Am and is fiddling with a digital display on the dashboard. Gerard settles Einstein into the front seat—the old cat bears the indignity in the same way he normally does, with a tolerant glower—and looks at the display. There are a lot of numbers. “Are those... dates?”
“They are,” Grant nods. “And times. The current time, according to Einstein’s collar, if you would?”
Gerard checks. “One fifteen.”
Grant hums and keys in the time, along with today’s date. “We’ll begin with a simple test. Two minutes should do the trick.” On the lower half of the screen, he keys in 1:22.
Gerard feels the bottom beginning to drop out of his stomach. “Grant, is this-”
“Just wait,” Grant tells him. His eyes are dancing with that same smugness from before, but Gerard can see honest excitement there, too, as well as something he can’t identify. “You’ll see.”
They get out of the car, and Gerard goes back over to Frank, who’s standing with his arms crossed, frowning. “Okay. What are you doing to the cat?”
“Einstein,” Grant corrects, absently. He’s picked up what looks to be a remote control, and when he presses a button, the car starts.
“The cat’s name is Einstein,” Gerard explains. “And he’ll be fine: Grant wouldn’t do anything that could hurt him.”
Frank nods, but he doesn’t uncross his arms. Any other time, Gerard would be trying harder to reassure him—he loves how much Frank cares about shit like this, and he’s still totally blown away that Frank’s decided for some reason to extend that care to Gerard—but tonight, he’s distracted, staring at the car.
If, that is, the Tran Am still is a car. Somehow, Gerard is starting to doubt it.
It surprises him, then, when Grant looks at Frank directly and says, “I promise you: no harm will come to him.” That seems to mollify Frank, at least a little: he nods again, uncrosses his arms and grabs Gerard’s hand instead, squeezing tight. Gerard squeezes back.
He remembers the first time he’d seen one of Grant’s insane experiments in action, how he’d come into the lab one day to drop off the groceries and feed Einstein, like usual, and found Grant half-transformed into a Borg. It had been a brief foray into cybernetics: Grant had constructed a terrifyingly-detailed miniature robotic skeleton, and was figuring out how to control it via brainwaves, or something equally mad and involving cranial implants. When Gerard had expressed horror, not only that Grant was sticking wires into his brain in the name of Science, but that he had apparently done it to himself, Grant had laughed and asked Gerard to fix him a pot of tea. The Borg implants were gone a week later, because he’d decided that the metals he’d used for the skeleton needed to be further refined, and so he’d turned his energy to that.
After a while, Gerard had gotten used to the bizarre places that Grant’s amazing mind went every day. But this was Frank’s first time experiencing it full-on. He understood Frank’s anxiety.
Grant hands the second clock to Gerard. “In order for the experiment to succeed, I’ll need to get the Trans Am up to a certain speed—one hundred and forty-one kilometers per hour, to be precise. But the moment that clock reads one twenty, tell me.”
“Alright,” says Gerard. Grant presses forward on one of the joysticks, and the Trans Am growls into motion. Frank makes a quietly delighted noise under his breath. Gerard bets that Frank was the kind of kid who had RC cars.
The empty lot is fairly large, and Grant has clearly done something to the car’s engine, because it’s coming up to speed really quickly. By the time the clock ticks over to one nineteen and forty five seconds, it’s made the circuit round the lot and is coming back towards them.
“Ten seconds,” he tells Grant, who nods. “Five. Four. Three.”
Grant nods again, his face focused, eyes sharp, and the moment Gerard says, “One,” Grant’s pushing the accelerator as far forward as it will go. The Trans Am roars towards them.
And then, fuck, then the air around the car is crackling with fucking lightning, arcs of blue and white sparking everywhere. Frank is grabbing at Gerard as if to pull him out of the way. But Grant, Grant is just standing there, right in the path of the oncoming car, and Gerard goes to shout a warning, having to yell over the sound of the buzz of the electricity—
And then the air is completely, perfectly silent. And the Trans Am is gone.
There’s a set of flaming tire tracks at the spot where it vanished—about five feet from where Grant is standing, because Grant is a crazy motherfucker. A crazy motherfucker who just made a car disappear. Who, if Gerard is right, just did a lot more than that.
Gerard is still stunned: Frank is, predictably, not. He’s pulling away from Gerard and striding, angrily, over to Grant. “Motherfucker! What the fuck, you said nothing was going to happen! You just vaporized your fucking cat, you dick!” He looks a little bit horrified and a lot furious. “I ought to punch you in your fucking smug face!”
Before Gerard can react, Grant is holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “Frank, I swear to you, I did nothing of the sort. I wouldn’t. Just wait one minute, and if Einstein isn’t back, in perfect health, I will stand still and gladly accept whatever harm you wish to do me.”
“Frank,” Gerard says, grabbing for Frank’s hand, but Frank shakes him away. He’s still staring hard at Grant’s face.
“One twenty two,” Grant says, gesturing at Gerard’s clock. They stare at each other for another few seconds.
“Fuck,” says Frank. “Fuck, fuck, what the fuck,” and he’s storming a few paces away, angrily reaching into a pocket and pulling out a cigarette.
Gerard looks at Grant, but can’t read his expression: it’s closed off now in a way that it wasn’t before. So Gerard goes over to Frank, who’s holding the unlit cigarette between two fingers, breathing hard.
“Don’t,” says Frank, when Gerard goes to speak. Gerard pulls back, a little stung, but then Frank looks up at him and Gerard sees that it’s mostly worry, there, and not the same anger as before. “Let’s just... wait to see what happens.”
“Okay,” Gerard says. He looks at the clock—thirty seconds to go.
“We should move away,” Grant says, matter-of-factly. He takes a dozen steps towards the warehouse: Frank and Gerard follow. Ten seconds.
The air around them starts to feel charged, like the air before a summer thunderstorm. Little sparks of the same blue lightning as before start to appear. And then the clock hits one twenty-two, and the Trans Am screams back into the lot from out of thin air.
They all take of running after it immediately. It makes it about thirty feet before Grant manages to bring it to a complete stop. Frank gets there first, and he ignores Grant’s shout of warning to grab at the door handle and yank it open. He’s hissing immediately, pulling his hand back and shaking it around like it’s burned—as Gerard gets closer, he can feel the heat coming off of the car, so probably it is. But the door is open anyway, revealing Einstein, still held securely in his little tangle of Grant-made belts and looking, as ever, bored with the world.
“You see?” Grant says, quietly. “Not a hair out of place.”
Grant is making an effort to sound and look as cool and collected as ever, but he’s not actually succeeding very well. There’s a big, beaming grin on his face, like a school-boy, that he’s only successfully tamping down on every few seconds. It’s like getting hit in the face with spotlight of sheer fucking joy, and the feeling is combining with the adrenaline kick-drum in Gerard’s belly in very interesting ways.
Frank succeeds in getting Einstein unbuckled and pulls him out of the seat. They all crowd around him, and Grant unhooks the clock from around his neck. “Gerard?”
Gerard holds the second clock up beside the first. Gerard’s clock reads 1:22. Einstein’s clock reads 1:20.
“Einstein has just helpfully served as the first living subject of my greatest experiment,” Grant explains, giddy. “As you can see, he’s shown that there was, indeed, a temporal displacement between the Trans Am’s disappearance and it’s return: two minutes, exactly what I had specified. Which proves that the first full trial was an unqualified success.”
“Holy fuck,” Gerard says. “Grant, that’s fucking unbelievable. You’re fucking unbelievable!” He flails his hands around, because he has no idea what to do with them, because what do you do with your hands when your boss has just invented—
“Wait, hang on,” says Frank, who is looking slightly crazy around the eyes. “I still don’t- what happened? Where the fuck did the car go?”
“Not where, Frank,” says Grant, grinning. “When. That is, now. It came to now. And,” he adds, with an expansive gesture that manages to highlight everything about this mad, brilliant night: the still-smoking concrete and the sodium lights, Einstein’s bored yawning and the ticking of the twin clocks, and the fact that Gerard is completely, stupidly and love with both of the men standing beside him. “It isn’t really a car.”
“It’s a time machine."