Work Text:
It had taken a lot of hemming and hawing and paperwork, but finally, after years of planning, Daisy had finally gotten access to the University of Cool's time travel machine.
"And what exactly are you planning to use time travel for?" the security guard standing at the door asks as a final check.
"We will be using it to travel back in time to kill Tom Buchanan," Daisy says confidently.
The security guard raises a single eyebrow.
"Rest assured," Jordan tells him, "Tom Buchanan is already dead."
"Well," the security guard says, sufficiently appeased, "then, by all means, go right on ahead."
"Thank you very much," Daisy says.
The doors part before them, and the four of them, Daisy, Jordan, Nick, and Jay, all step into the time travel room. An operator sits at the control panel, pushing buttons professionally.
They say, "I have the date and place here. November 25, 2021, New York City. Is that correct?"
"That is correct," Daisy says.
"Wow!" they reply, pressing a few buttons and the lights around the time travel transporter begin to flash in all the colors of the rainbow. "One century ago exactly. What a coincidence! When you are ready, step onto the transporter pads and let us begin!"
The control panel sinks into the ground, and a large pedestal with a giant red button on it rises up from the ground. Once the four travelers are suitably in place, they slam both hands down on it and it makes a satisfying pshhhh snick!.
The last thing Daisy hears before her consciousness is transported into the body of her former self is a very satisfied, "Man, I love my job."
When Daisy awakes, it's in the body of her former self. She stands up, pushing the sheets off from on top of her, and enjoying the way her joints don't pop when she steps out of bed. She catches her reflection in the mirror, a little jarred to see her hair longer and the wrinkles gone from her face. It's strange to see herself so much younger, but she shakes herself and looks back at the bed, satisfied to see that Tom has already left for the day. Time to get her plan in action.
She finds a phone and punches in Jordan's phone number by heart.
"Jordan," she says brightly when Jordan picks up, "looks like I made the trip back safely. How about you? No complications, I hope?"
"I wasn't aware you'd gone anywhere," Jordan replies, her soft, low voice that Daisy loves dearly coming through confused, "or that I had gone anywhere, for that matter."
"Oh, silly me, I must have forgotten to tell you," Daisy says in a rush.
"Nah," Jordan says, breaking into a laugh. "Relax, I'm just fucking with you."
“Well fuck you too,” Daisy laughs. "I take it this means you're all in one piece?”
“Unfortunately for you, my dear Daisy, yes, yes I am. Not sure about Nick or Jay though.”
"I'll call them up next," Daisy says, but just as the words leave her mouth, her phone lights up with a call from an unknown number.
"Ugh," she says. "Spam call. I forgot the 21st century had those." She dismisses it with a flick of her thumb.
"Hate those," Jordan says. "Ugh, wait, I think I'm getting one too. Give me a second."
The call disconnects, and Daisy's halfway through putting in Nick's number when her phone rings again with another call from Jordan.
“What’s up?” Daisy asks.
"Answer the spam call," Jordan says.
Daisy blinks. "What?"
"Answer the spam call," Jordan repeats simply and then hangs up again.
As if by magic, her phone rings again, the same spam number from before popping up on her screen. Sighing, she swipes up, accepting the call.
"Hello?" Daisy asks, exasperated.
"Daisy, don't hang up, it's me, Nick," Nick says. The quality of the call is horrible, and she can barely hear him through the static.
"Nick?" she asks.
"Yeah," he says. "Don't have time to explain. I don't have many more of these collectors' quarters and this payphone is asking for more. I've got Jay with me, just tell me where to meet up."
Daisy sighs and blows her bangs out of her eyes. "Meet me and Jordan at the Hooters on West 33rd Street."
"The Hooters," Nick repeats, sounding less than enthused.
"It's my mission," Daisy says.
The call disconnects without so much as a goodbye.
"Cool," Daisy says and goes to call Jordan to let her know about the meeting place.
"Ok, explain," Daisy says as she slides into her seat at the table Nick and Jay had grabbed. They were both looking very firmly down at the table and not making eye contact with anyone.
"So you remember how time travel is supposed to project you back into your body if you were alive at the time in order to avoid destroying the entire universe?" Nick says.
"Of course."
"Well," Nick continues, "Jay's and my bodies were not...technically alive at the time. If you remember, you and Jordan were young enough to have your bodies frozen and your current age when Science figured out how to achieve immortality, but Jay and I are like 10 years older than you, so we had to clone ourselves and transfer our consciousness into those clones."
"Oh!" Daisy says, clapping her hands together. "Yes, that makes sense. But that presents a wrinkle in our plan. You and Jay are supposed to take the place of Nick and Jay here since you're less suspicious. That was the entire point of bringing you along."
“Well…” Jay trailed off.
“What?" Daisy asked.
“We could switch places with them,” he finished.
“What?!” yelped Nick.
“What?” Jay shrugged, “They’ll—"
"What," Jordan interrupts. When everyone looks up at her expectantly, she says. "What, everyone was saying "what", I just wanted my turn."
"Anyway," Jay continues. "They'll be fine, they’re us. We just have to get them alone, hide them somewhere, take their places, and let them out when everything’s said and done with. They’ll be fine as long as we leave them some snacks.”
“And where are you going to hide them? A closet?” asked Jordan, raising one of her eyebrows.
Jay laughed, somewhat nervously, staring at the table even harder, “Haha, why would we do that?”
"Wouldn't that mess with the timeline if we did that, though?" Nick asks.
"We're literally here to mess with the timeline," Daisy points out.
"Fair enough," Nick replies.
Tom Buchanan, son of Tom Buchanan, who in turn was the son of some Tom Buchanan, who was in turn the son of some other Tom Buchanan, was the glistening CEO of Tom Buchanan's Super Sexy and Not Suspicious At All Most Effective Supplement Pill Business. C.O.O.L. A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. for short. Unfortunately, the supplement pills he sold were not sexy, were very suspicious, and not very effective at all.
They left in their wake a shocking number of deaths, but Tom Buchanan never faced a single consequence, being as rich as he was. His pills were in fact made from all sorts of suspicious materials sources from all sorts of suspicious places. They had weird things in them like asbestos, mercury, super arm strengthening vibes, and, even, most shockingly, dihydrogen monoxide.
He was also an utterly abysmal husband.
Long story short, history had grown past the need for Tom Buchanan.
Of course, he was dead now. He eventually died peacefully of natural causes before Science had achieved immortality, but that kind of death was too late in the making to help any of his victims and too good for that son-of-a-bitch and it was up to them to remedy that.
Who better to take out the infamous Tom Buchanan than his ex-wife? That is, with the help of a few accomplices.
It took a bit of finagling, but Daisy managed to hack into the present day Jay's appointment calendar and switched out his standing lunch reservation with Nick at the nice and respectable Olive Garden with a reservation at the much cooler Big Honker Badonkeroos Extra Large Extra Large Extra Large 4Play Strip Club. The strip club was a place that Tom was known to frequent when meeting with his clients, and if they were going to get the dirt on him that they needed, this was going to be the place.
Right on cue, the present day Nick and Jay show up at said strip club, right on time for their reservation, scratching their heads. The bouncer, however, takes one look at Jay and lets him in, a perk from his hey-days as stock photo model.
Daisy sneaks her Nick and Jay in through the back through the employee entrance, planting bugs on the both of them, and supplying them both with an ample supply of chloroform and towels.
Through the booming pop music, Daisy can hear past-Nick say, "Are you sure we've got the right place?"
"Google Calendar wouldn't lie to me..." past-Jay says, but he sounds equally uncomfortable.
There's silence for a few seconds (not including the pop music), and then a, "Hey! What are you—" before the sound from the bug erupts into a flurry of movement and fabric brushing up against the mic. It stops, and there's the sound of two bodies hitting the floor. Then, dragging, the sound of a door opening, more dragging, and the sound of a door closing.
A few more seconds pass before her Nick speaks up. "Jordan," he says very seriously. "Do not laugh."
He pauses and then continues. "I can't hear you, but I'll know if you do." He pauses again, hesitantly.
"Just say it," Jay says.
"I don't want to," Nick replies. "You say it."
"Fine," Jay says. "Fine. Fuck. Fine. Ok. Ugh. Fine. Fine. Fine—"
"We stashed them in the janitor's closet," Nick interrupts.
Jordan bursts into laughter at Daisy's side, giving Daisy a wink that sets her off as well.
"Jordan," Nick sighs, disappointed. "You know what? Forget it. The sooner we do this, the sooner we can get out of here."
The conversation between Nick and Jay goes back to business as they flag down a waiter and get a table conveniently close to Tom's official Super Sexy Business Table (S.E.X.Y. for short).
"Nick Carraway!" Tom booms when, Daisy assumes, he sees them. "Fancy seeing you here!"
"Oh, you know," Nick says. "Jay and I, we're trying something new."
"Haha, yeah, I bet you are," Tom says, and Daisy can just picture him winking. It’s disgusting. "Well. Have a good time while you're here. Feel free or order anything off the menu, if you know what I mean. It's on me."
"Uhhhhh, yeah sure," Nick says. There's the sound of clothes rustling as Nick and Jay take their seats, and then Tom resumes the conversation he was having with his clients.
"Anyway," Tom says, "as I was saying, I think we could speed up Global Warming and convince more people to buy my Super Sexy Cooling Pills (M.I.L.F. for short) if we could fund a few more fracking operations. I've got a few people in the White House who are already working to give more subsidies to fracking companies and are actively spreading misinformation about windmills."
"As a man who owns a fracking company, I support this message," his client says.
"We also are working on bringing Elon Musk over to our side. Since we're trying to bring up the timetable for when we will reach the point of no return, we will personally need him to invent that Mars Colony a little faster. So anyway about those asbestos fields..."
"This is better than I ever could have hoped for," Daisy says.
"Big agree," Jordan agrees.
They storm into the Big Honker Badonkeroos Extra Large Extra Large Extra Large 4Play Strip Club, Daisy wielding the recorder with Tom's very incriminating words contained within.
"Um," she hears another person in the strip club say, "What the hell is that lady carrying. It looks like it's some sort of weird future device." Daisy ignores them.
"Daisy?" Tom asks, extremely surprised. "What are you doing here?"
"I've come to take you down," Daisy says dramatically and then presses a button on her recording device, causing the entire conversation to play back (right after she hastily speeds through the part where Nick and Jay chloroformed themselves).
"What the hell is going on," Tom says, sounding more confused than scared, which isn't quite what Daisy wants so she gives away the game.
"See, Tom, I'm from the future, and I've traveled back in time to put a stop to your evil empire, C.O.O.L. A.C.R.O.N.Y.M!" Daisy declares. Tom's client makes a move to stand up, but Daisy puts a hand on their shoulder and pushes them back down into their seat.
"Daisy, baby, what's going on?" Tom asks.
"What's going on is that I know all about the ins and outs of your evil business, and if I didn't know that you were going to die in 20 years in my timeline, then you would've taken the entire world down with you. Even though you didn't quite manage to kill everyone, your evil little supplement pills there still managed to kill or hospitalize tens to hundreds of thousands of people," Daisy says. "You may be able to get away with your asbestos pills, but the Mega Council Of People Who Hate People Who Exacerbate Climate Change (or...M.C.O.P.W.H.P.W.E.C.C for short) will have your head for this!"
"Oh, shit," said Tom Buchanan, because he knew all about the M.C.O.P.W.H.P.W.E.C.C.
"Oh shit is right," said Jordan.
"Ok, ok, ok, ok," Tom says, "well actually. They can't have my head for this because I've had my scientists working on supplement pills that actually work, and these ones right here are going to make me immortal and invincible!"
"Um," Daisy says.
"I'm going to live forever," Tom says and opens his maw and a bottle of Super Cool Very Not Suspicious Immortality Pills (B.I.G. D.I.C.K. E.N.E.R.G.Y for short) and pours all the pills down his throat. He knocks them back with a big ol' swig of beer. "Ha ha ha."
"Um," Daisy says.
"Agreed," Jordan agrees.
Tom stares at them triumphantly and then drops to the ground, dead.
"Huh," Daisy says.
"Agreed," Jordan agrees.
"Can I go now?" the client asks.
"Not on your life," Jordan says. She turns to Daisy. "I'll handle this guy. You go deal with Nick and Jay."
"You got it," Daisy replies. She walks the short distance it takes to get to Nick and Jay's table and excitedly asks them, "Hey, did you guys see that? That was so cool!"
"What?" Nick asks.
"What?" Jay asks.
"What?" Jordan calls from where she's busy with the client. And then, "What, I didn't want to be last this time."
"Tom is dead," Daisy says. "I confronted him and everything. It was really cool."
"Oh, that's good," Nick says faintly. "That's the mission, right. That's good. We've achieved the mission."
"Yeah," Daisy says. "Are you guys ok? You look really red."
"We're. Uh—" Slowly, Nick raises his left hand, and Daisy sees a shiny, gold band on his ring finger.
"Huh," she says. She leans forward and looks at Jay's left hand which bears a matching band on the same ring finger. "Huh."
"We, uh, we changed the timeline," Nick says.
"I got to hold Nick's hand," Jay whispers reverently.
"What did it?" Daisy asks.
"Closet," Nick says and then flushes redder.
"Ok," Daisy says.
"Also Jordan's in love with you," Nick says. "She asked me to keep it a secret, but at this point...you know."
"Um," Daisy says.
"Yeah," Jay says. "I can confirm."
"I have to go," Daisy says.
"Yep," Nick says.
Jordan, as it turned out, had called in the M.C.O.P.W.H.P.W.E.C.C. to take away the client, which was convenient because that means that she no longer had anyone to deal with by the time that Daisy had finished talking to Nick and Jay.
"Hey, Jordan," Daisy says, and Jordan turns to look at her, completely undistracted.
"Hey, Daisy," Jordan says.
"Can I kiss you?" Daisy asks.
"What?" Jordan yelps, "I mean, yes, of course, always."
"Like the whole lips to lips kinda deal," Daisy says.
"Yeah, of course," Jordan replies. "What, uh, what brought this on?"
"Well," Daisy says, "I'm deeply in love with you and have been for well over a century, and Nick just said that you were also in love with me, so I figured it would be best for the both of us."
"Can't argue with you there," Jordan says and pulls Daisy in for the best kiss that they've ever had ever in their entire lives, made extra good by the power of the entire century of pining that they've had between them.
"Cool," Daisy says, starstruck.
"Also," Jordan says, and turns away, "Fuck you, Nick Carraway, you promised not to tell." She flips him off.
He doesn't reply.
"Hey, let's get married," Daisy says, "when we get back to our time."
"That, my dear Daisy, is an excellent idea." Jordan agrees. "Let me just brain wipe the memories of everyone here first and we can get back."
"Do you, Daisy Holmes, take Jordan Watson to be your lawfully wedded wife?" the officiant asks.
"I do," Daisy says.
"And do you, Jordan Watson, take Daisy Holmes to be your lawfully wedded wife?" the officiant asks.
"Of fucking course," Jordan says.
"Great, you're married now," the officiant says, "or well you were two days ago when you submitted the paperwork to City Hall but no matter, I now pronounce you wife and wife. You are free to perform whatever act of lasting love you feel is most suitable for your eternal partnership."
"Awesome," Jordan says, and kisses Daisy firmly on the mouth.
Jay, in his seat at the wedding, turns to Nick and asks, "Wait... Holmes and Watson? Like the great...Holmes and Watson?"
"The very two themselves," Nick confirms.
"Wow," Jay says and almost whistles in amazement before remembering that he's at a wedding. "But I thought...?"
"So," Nick says, "you know how you're trans and I'm also trans?"
"Yes," Jay says.
"Well," Nick replies. "You know."
"Oh," Jay says. "Very cool. That explains why they're so good at solving mysteries."
"Yep," Nick says.
"Trans rights," Jay says.
"Trans rights," Nick agrees.