#normalsauce

“If need be.” Mary Crawley’s eyes grow colder. Sometimes when she looks at him, Matthew likes to pretend that there’s a warmth behind that gaze that is only for him, but that warmth is gone, and probably never existed in the first place. Just as well. He’s an Enforcer; it was always going to be a bachelor’s calling. “Who are you, really?”

“Matthew Crawley,” Matthew says, and her eyes narrow. This time he does chuckle, which doesn’t help his case: Mary’s fingers tighten fractionally around the gun hilt.

“Don’t lie to me,” Mary says. “What’s your real name?”

“I swear to God, I’m actually Matthew Crawley.” Matthew wants to go for his cane so that he can rise to his feet, as that feels like more of a fair fight, but he knows better. He knows exactly how proficient Mary is with that gun. If the Historic Preservation Division is right, there are at least three unsolved murders to her name. The Falcon has struck all over time, after all, though God knows, the HPD’s been wrong time and again. “But perhaps not, as you can see, Matthew Crawley, heir to Downton Abbey.”

“He doesn’t exist.”

“No, but I do.”

Mary frowns. “Get up.”

Slowly, Matthew complies, keeping his hands in her sight. If even half of what he knows of the Falcon is true about Mary Crawley, as she calls herself now, he’s in for a world of trouble unless he thinks quickly.

But something’s not right. From what he knows of her file, the Falcon would have already killed him by now. And certainly, Mary Crawley’s hand isn’t shaking, though holding the gun up like that has to be weighing on her, but Matthew is also not dead. He finally manages to climb to his feet, which hurts because of the damned severed spine that he’d barely managed to get to the twenty-second century to fix—good thing the country doctor in Downton Village is a bit of an idiot and can provide medical blustering to cover for Matthew’s “miraculous” recovery—and it’s late and he’s so tired. As he rises to his full height, he sees something flicker across Mary’s face, which has always been so remarkably cool and composed.

“Matthew Crawley,” he says, holding out his hand in introduction. Mary gives it an incredulous look. “Born 2013, recruited by my great-great-great-grand-nephew. When do you hail from?”

“What do you know?” Mary asks instead of giving him the handshake he desires.

“I know your head housemaid’s wanted in four countries and six decades,” Matthew says.

It’s precisely the wrong thing to say, he realizes just a second too late. “Son of a bitch,” Mary says, and he realizes later that he’s lucky she doesn’t shoot him point blank in the chest. Instead, she does something worse: she lashes out, so fast and so furious that he doesn’t even think to block, and she clamps four fingers onto his wrist. And just like that, they’re jumping; Matthew’s clothes buzz with electricity for a split second and then they land. His legs immediately give out on him; he falls to the pavement, startled and shouting.

It’s the twenty-first century. He can tell that at a glance as it’s home to him, but he doesn’t get much more than a glimpse as he’s suddenly too busy fighting Mary Crawley off. She scratches long gouges in his wrist as she scrambles for his time-unit. She means to strand him, Matthew realizes immediately, and he can’t let her do that. He can’t be the Enforcer that got shot in the trenches of the Great War and let the Falcon get away. He’s enough of a joke at the water cooler as it is—

But Mary Crawley is stronger than she looks. She wrenches the unit away from Matthew and all but leaps backward, jumping as she does so. Matthew’s left with the taste of ozone and the knowledge that he’s definitely, profoundly screwed the pooch. There are failsafes for this sort of thing. He just has to get to a check-in station and leave a message for Requisitions, but the Retrieval Team always takes a couple of days out of sheer spite, and Matthew is coming to realize he’s standing in the middle of Tottenham Court Road dressed like a dandy from 1919.

Oh, hell.

He climbs gingerly and painfully to his feet and sighs. There’s no way Mary Crawley is going back to Downton Abbey now. He could jump back in her timeline, but he’s pretty sure the Crawleys and Crew deliberately stayed for long stretches of time to prevent him from creating a paradox. Which means he’s going to have to nab her going forward.

First, though, he needs a bloody cane and some bandages for his wrist. Mary Crawley has nails like the bird of prey whose name she uses.

“Excuse me?” a voice behind him asks, and Matthew turns, surprised. There’s a young woman, no more than seventeen or eighteen, standing there. Her clothing is typical for the time and she’s not wearing a wrist-unit, so probably not a jumper. She’s holding a cane—one he recognizes because even though it’s aged quite a bit, it’s the same one he had in 1919—and a small box. “Are you Matthew Crawley?”

“Who’s asking?” Matthew asks.

The girl squints at him, and she seemed somewhat familiar, though Matthew had no idea why. She is petite, blonde and blue-eyed, but nobody he knows. “Are you or aren’t you?” she asks, her chin rising slightly.

“Yes, I’m Matthew Crawley,” he says at long length.

“Good. I’m supposed to give you these.” The girl holds out the box and the cane.

“How did you—”

“Family secret, Mr. Crawley,” the girl tells him, and once he’s reluctantly accepted both cane and box, turns on her heels.

“Wait!” Matthew calls after her. “Who do you work for?”

“No one.”

“Who are you?”

“Bates,” the girl says. “Suri Bates. Toodles.”

Matthew blinks at that, but shrugs. He’s had weirder things happen, which is practically the motto of the everyday Enforcer. He hobbles into an alley to open the box just in case it’s something that doesn’t belong in 2015 or whatever year it is.

The note could come from any time, but the other object definitely doesn’t belong in this year. It’s his time-unit. He knows it’s his because he put that scratch on it in 2345 during the Second Crimean War, and his boss looked askance at him when he said he was rather fond of the piece despite it.

The note simply says, “Doing you a favor. – AB” Whatever the hell that means, though Matthew is grateful beyond words to get his unit back.

It’s pre-programmed for him and everything. Matthew is starting to feel like he’s walked into something vaguely Twilight Zone-ish, but no Enforcer survives without a little curiosity. Tracing Mary through her frequency will be impossible with Anna as her engineer—there’s a reason the woman is wanted in so many places—so why the hell not? He hits the activate button, and jumps through time.

He lands in Downton Abbey, in a room he doesn’t recognize.

“What the hell?” he asks himself as he looks around. It’s a bedroom. He’s stayed over at the Abbey enough to know that, at least. His time unit tells him it’s 1919, but months after his encounter with Mary a few moments ago.

Before he can process that, the door opens and Mary Crawley enters, wearing a red dress he’s also never seen before. “Oh, there you are,” she says before he can even go for his gun, and he’s absolutely floored when she crosses the room in hurried strides, wraps her arms around his neck, and kisses him soundly.

Matthew’s dreamed things like this before, but this is reality and he knows it’s reality because his wrist is still hurting like nothing else and possibly still bleeding, but no, that’s definitely Mary kissing him, and her tongue teasing at the corner of his lips. He doesn’t understand a single bloody thing that’s going on, but Mary Crawley is apparently a better kisser than he even dreamed, and he kisses her back.

She’s the first one to draw back, her eyebrows furrowed. “Matthew,” she says slowly, looking at his face warily. “Matthew, why do you have your cane? You haven’t needed that for—oh, my God. When are you right now?”

Matthew comes back to himself enough to stumble backwards and grab clumsily for his gun. He’s still light-headed from that kiss.

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Instead of quaking in fear in front of the gun, Mary rolls her eyes. “I’m going to kill you.”

“I give you leave to try.”

“Not you-you,” Mary says, exasperated. “Future-you. You never told me about this!”

“I—what?”

“You’d think that this would be an important thing to mention,” Mary says, peevish now. She crosses her arms over her chest. “When are you, Matthew?”

“I—we just—the parlor. You caught me—and we went to the twenty-first century—”

Mary’s scowl deepens. “Oh, that’s just bloody fantastic. You need to go.”

“No. You’re under arrest and—”

“Hear that?” Mary asks, cocking her head toward the door. “Those are definitely your footsteps coming down the hall. Are you trying to cause a time-hole?”

Every Enforcer knows the first rule of jumping: you can never, ever meet yourself. HPD warns against it. He knows if the future version of himself opens the door—oh, mother of God, they’re in Mary Crawley’s bedroom—Containment is going to show up and there will be a hole in time and possibly a crater, taking all three of them with it.

He gives Mary one last desperately confused look and grabs his time unit, hitting the first preset. The last thing he sees before he jumps is the door swinging open and Mary turning that annoyed look on whoever’s coming inside, and his brain finally, finally puts it together:

He’s about to have an affair with the woman he was assigned to track.