Chapter Text
The sound of one of the airlock doors clunking closed brought Al to his feet, hindered only by the restraints he fumbled to release.
“He’s here!” Beth reported with relief, looking eagerly from the handlink to the airlock and back.
Al stumbled past her, needing to make sure. A nervous moment passed, and then the inner airlock door slid open with a hiss and Sam stumbled into the cabin, clutching the capsule to his chest.
“Sam! You did it!” Al cried, rushing forward and wishing, not for the first time, that he could hug his friend. And then he remembered that he could, so he did.
“’M okay,” Sam mumbled as Al released him, beaming. “I got it.”
“You sure did!” Al said, the stress of the last few minutes quickly giving way to elation. “That was a close one, huh? Did the ship smack you too hard?”
“There’ll be a bruise,” Sam muttered, reaching up to unlatch and tug off the domed helmet. “I’m just glad I wasn’t sick.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s—” Al began.
“Arriving home,” ZIGI interrupted unexpectedly, and Al glanced over his shoulder just in time to see the blue light streaking past the windshield flare and vanish.
“What, already?” he asked in alarm, looking at Beth.
“I—Ziggy says you’re at Earth,” she said bemusedly, rapidly scanning the handlink. “Maybe some trips are shorter than others?”
Al glanced at Sam and then ran for the cockpit. “ZIGI, did they follow us?”
“If they have, I will detect them as soon as they leave Leap.”
Al reached the chairs and stopped, flabbergasted. A full half of the view through the windshield was filled with the great curving sphere of an immediately recognizable planet, sparkling white clouds swirled over familiar blue and green contours. He had seen it before, surely, on Apollo, but it remained absolutely breathtaking.
Not nearly so beautiful but equally baffling were the hundreds of spaceships of every color and size darting around nearby. Some merged onto great highways pouring down towards the planet below, while others zipped around in low orbit, following invisible roads that led to and from any of the dozen space stations in view.
“Oh, boy,” Sam said from his shoulder.
“Pursuing ship has arrived,” ZIGI said, and a moment later the Starcruiser lurched unpleasantly forward, throwing Al against the seatback.
“They’re still shooting at us?!” Al shouted, swinging around the chair and strapping himself in. Sam did the same, the bulky spacesuit and capsule making the task difficult.
Al sent them into the best zigzag as he could manage, though the controls were so sluggish and unbalanced that he felt lucky to get the ship moving at all.
“There must be somebody around here you can radio for help!” Beth suggested rapidly. “Somebody in charge!”
“Sam, get on the radio!” Al directed, the ship shaking as they took another hit. “Damn, ZIGI, how much longer can this thing hang on? And why haven’t they poked holes in us already?” If the Starcruiser had been virtually any aircraft from their time, Al was certain they would have been dead long ago.
“The cabins of all G&T models are reinforced with a titanium alloy,” ZIGI stated, as if this explained everything.
“Well, great—titanium!” Al exclaimed, weaving them closer to the nearest space station in the hopes of drawing someone’s attention. Several nearby ships had already scattered at their approach.
Sam, meanwhile, must have found a promising channel on the radio, because he said, “Mayday, mayday, we are under attack, ship in distress. We’re in a…” He looked at Al.
“G&T…ah…Starcruiser, I think.”
“In a red G&T Starcruiser,” Sam relayed. “I repeat, we are under fire—” The ship shook again and the faint, ever-present buzzing of the radio abruptly ceased.
“We have lost our radio antennae,” ZIGI stated.
“Perfect!” Al said. “Now what do we do? Signal for help with flags?”
“Look, there!” Beth said suddenly, pointing out the windshield. A small fleet of blue ships was streaking towards them from the nearest space station, flying in what was unmistakably a formation.
“The cavalry!” Al cried in relief, urging the failing ship in their direction. Another two hits pounded them as Al’s evasive maneuvers proved increasingly ineffective, prompting several more warning lights to illuminate on the console.
“Who is it?” Sam asked, squinting at the blue ships as they grew larger, revealing flashing lights affixed to some of them. “Is that…the police?”
“Space police? Well, I’ll take it,” Al said.
“Some of them are different,” Beth said, pointing to several darker blue ships flying at the edges of the formation.
A few laser blasts meant for the Starcruiser flashed past them and towards the blue ships, which immediately returned a bevy of warbling white bursts of light.
“Yeah, get him!” Al crowed, slowing them down and gently rotating the ship so they could watch. They were just in time to see the enemy ship, marked by a few scorch marks and dents, swiveling around and attempting to escape before becoming caught in a warbling bubble of white light. The blue ships swarmed to surround it.
Sam let out an audible sigh of relief. “We did it.”
Al looked at him, equally amazed they had survived, and for a moment thought they were going to Leap right then and there. Then the ship trembled and the starfield started sliding away.
“What’s happening?” he asked, searching for answers on the console. “ZIGI?”
“It appears we are being towed, Cassandra.”
“Towed? To a space station, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Al looked at Sam and then Beth. “That’s good, right? I mean, we’d be lucky if I could even get this thing close to a dock with the shape it’s in.”
“This escapade is going to look very bad on your permanent record,” ZIGI said stiffly. “I told you we should have left earlier.”
“Oh, stuff it,” Al said with a smile. “We did it! We got the necklace.” He looked at the capsule, which was still clipped to Sam’s spacesuit and lay awkwardly in his lap. “Didn’t we?”
Sam unclipped the capsule and started turning it over, looking for an opening mechanism. “Let’s find out.” After a moment, he pressed two tabs and successfully unscrewed the end of the capsule.
“It’s there,” Beth said with a certainty Al didn’t feel until Sam reached inside and drew out the necklace. It was as Al remembered it from the observation lounge: plain gold with a single, large red gem pendant.
Sam inspected it for a moment before offering it to Al. “Here you go, Cassandra, your precious necklace. I hope almost dying was worth it.”
“Very funny,” Al said, accepting the necklace and turning it over in his hand so that the gem caught the light. It really was quite pretty, and from a distance it would have been unidentifiable as a crystal microchip. Even close up, the delicate lines etched into the interior of the gem could have been easily mistaken as a bizarre natural phenomenon or an artistic decision. But, whatever information was on it, it was Cassandra’s now.
He looked at Beth. “Did we do it?” he asked. “Does it all work out?”
Beth glanced at the handlink and then up at Al, and she gave him a faint smile. “Ziggy doesn’t know. You’re changing the future, remember. But, based on what I saw in the waiting room, Cassandra is going to be very happy to have that back. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you helped the seller, too. He didn’t seem like such a bad person.”
“What’s she say?” Sam asked after a beat. “Good news?”
Al gave him a wan smile. “Ziggy doesn’t know.”
“I don’t know what?” ZIGI demanded.
“Not you, Ziggy with a ‘y.’”
ZIGI gave a satisfied little “Hmph.”
Sam rubbed at his thigh near where he’d been grazed, the injury hidden beneath the bulky spacesuit. “Al,” he began, “when I was at the bar, the one in the 50s, the bartender said that if I kept Leaping, the Leaps would get harder. And he was right. This was hard—dangerous, and hard.” He looked up and met Al’s gaze. “I couldn’t have done this alone. I never could have flown this ship—not like you did—and there’s no way I could have gotten that capsule on my own.”
“Well, I couldn’t have done a lot of that without Beth,” Al said fairly, glancing at her gratefully. “You think I know how spaceships work? And she had Ziggy running all the flight calculations so I could pick you up in one piece.”
“And I’m grateful to her, too,” Sam said, but his eyes didn’t leave Al. “I just wanted to say…you didn’t have to come after me, not like this, and I know you gave up a lot to do it, but you did and I…I want to thank you.”
Al thought about saying something encouraging, about how Sam could have made it on his own if he’d really needed to, or that Al wouldn’t have done any better on his own either, but that wasn’t what Sam was looking for. So instead he gave Sam a thin-lipped smile, turned to fiddle with some of the dials on the console, and said, “Well, I couldn’t just leave you alone out here, could I?”
Sam looked like he wanted to say something else, but then he just reached out and put his hand on Al’s arm.
Al looked at him for a moment and then remembered. “Oh, yeah. Leaping.” He put his hand over Sam’s and fell silent, waiting for the feeling to overtake him. He wondered if, having Leaped through space, it would feel different now to Leap through time.
“Think of home,” Sam said so quietly Al almost missed it. “The bartender said you just have to want it. Want to be home.”
Sam closed his eyes, but Al turned to look at Beth, who’d quietly watched their exchange and now gave him a sad smile. Take me back to her, he thought. Please, god or time or fate or whatever…take me home.
A full ten seconds passed with no change, and when Al finally gave up and looked back out the windshield, the Starcruiser was drawing up to the docking bay of the nearest space station.
Beth looked between both of them expectantly. “Maybe you need to figure out what’s on the microchip,” she suggested. “Maybe there’s something else you need to do with it.”
Al shrugged and lifted his hand from Sam’s. “Beth thinks we should read the microchip.”
Sam opened his eyes, looking a little disappointed they were still there.
“ZIGI, can you read this?” Al asked, holding up the necklace.
“I have a crystal microchip reader,” ZIGI said. “Dusty but operational. To your left.”
Al located the slot and tipped the pendant inside. The space filled with a web of tiny lasers, the lines of light refracting around the crystal’s interior. A moment later, a large block of holographic text appeared above the center of the console.
Al, Sam, and Beth all leaned forward to read it.
Al recognized it immediately as computer code, but, as it wasn’t helpfully labeled, his expertise ended there. He looked at Beth, who looked confused, and then at Sam, whose mouth had dropped open.
Sam reached out a finger and prodded at the code. It obligingly scrolled up a few lines. He hastily scrolled further down.
“What?” Al asked, a little alarmed. “Sam, what is it?”
Distantly, he registered the ship lurching slightly as it docked with the space station.
Sam scrolled further and stopped, his eyes flashing across the code as easily as reading a book. Then he looked up at Al, the disappointment of a moment before completely replaced by excitement.
“Al…this is the retrieval program.”
Al stared at him. “What?”
Beth started jabbing at the handlink and then gave up and shouted, “Gooshie, Tina, get in here right now!”
“The retrieval program!” Sam repeated excitedly, scrolling through it again. “It’s all there, look. It’s our code, Al. The Project’s code.”
“But…” Al didn’t understand. Finding the retrieval program in a crystal microchip in the year 2035 was certainly bizarre, but it wasn’t exactly cause for celebration. “So what? It never worked anyway. We tried it lots of times.”
“That was the original code,” Sam stressed, his eyes alight. “This has been modified. Updated.” He turned back to the code and scrolled to the part he’d been reading a moment ago. “Look at this, Al! Someone’s completely rewritten this part!” He looked at Al. “It’s better,” he said, a tenuous hope flooding his voice. “Al, this could get us home.”
Al looked back at the block of floating, holographic code. “But…how can this help us?” he asked, bemused. “That code’s got to be a thousand lines long, and it would need to be run back at the Project, our Project, in 2000—”
The airlock door slid open with a hiss and Al, still baffled, turned to see two men wearing Navy uniforms enter and stand at attention. Then an admiral walked in.
“Cassandra Alyssa Rossini-Calavicci, do you have any idea how much—” The admiral stopped dead. Her eyes widened in shock. “Sam?”
Al’s mouth dropped open. It was Beth. Much, much older, and looking resplendent in dress whites, but…it was Beth.
A second woman, middle-aged with long dark hair, strode past the admiral. She was wearing civvies and a stormy expression, and Al recognized her with a start as well: Kathleen—little Katie—his third daughter. God, he felt like he had never seen her before, and yet like he had reprimanded her only yesterday for staying out too late.
“Young lady, your father and I are very disappointed in you,” Kathleen said scathingly, and it took Al several moments to realize she was talking to him. Then her scowling gaze moved to Sam, no doubt to berate him for daring to be alone with her daughter, and she froze, similarly stunned.
“Is that…me?” the Beth next to Al whispered.
Al looked automatically to her and then back to the Beth in an admiral’s uniform, still in shock.
Sam took a limping step towards the flabbergasted welcoming party, an enormous grin spreading across his face. Then he turned back to Al. “You’re a Calavicci!” he crowed.
Al shifted his disbelieving stare to him. “What?” he croaked. “Of course I am!”
“No, no, Al, Cassandra is a Calavicci—your granddaughter! You Leaped into your own granddaughter!”
“Al?” the newly arrived Beth whispered, and Al turned back to see her taking a few tentative steps towards him. She no longer seemed much of an admiral at all, not the force of personality who had commanded the room a moment ago. Her gaze moved to Sam. “Sam? Is it really you? Is it…?” She looked back at Al.
And, suddenly, Al understood. He remembered perfectly that day in 1975 when he had returned from the war, the moment when his gaze had first lit upon Beth’s face, eager and hopeful and yet so hesitant, so fearful to be proven wrong. She was wearing the same look now, and of course she was; in this timeline, he and Sam had never Leaped home. He was MIA for the second time. She had lost him again.
Again, but no longer.
“It’s me, Beth,” Al said, feeling a burning in his sinuses. He moved around Sam, past the still-gawking holographic Beth, and into the arms of his wife.
He hadn’t grown old with her, and he didn’t know what the last thirty-five years had been like for her, but that didn’t matter. She was Beth, and he loved her.
“We…we found you,” Kathleen said in disbelief, stepping closer to Sam. “Beth always said we would, that it was only a matter of time before we ran into each other. But you hardly look different at all.”
Al turned his head, searching for the lips he desperately longed to kiss, and Beth had to gently rebuff him. “Al, honey—Al, you look like Cassandra.”
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
She laughed softly. “Well, it matters to me.” She put a little space between them, though she kept her hands on his arms, and Al refused to let go of her as well. There were tear tracks down her cheeks, but she was smiling.
Then she drew a breath and looked past Al to Sam, including him as well. “How long has it been for you two? How many Leaps since Al’s Place in 1953? Do you even remember that?”
Al tore his gaze from Beth long enough to glance back at Sam and then at the holographic Beth, wondering if this was some sort of trick question.
“Just one,” Sam answered. “I was at the bar, I Leaped…elsewhere…and then I Leaped here, and Al did, too.”
Beth’s hands tightened slightly on Al’s arms and she smiled, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks. “Just one,” she whispered. “Oh, Al.”
“What? Why does it matter?” Al asked, a little alarmed. “Beth, sweetie, don’t cry.” He reached to caress her cheek, hoping to wipe away the tears, but she captured his hand in her own.
“It matters more than anything,” she whispered, squeezing his hand. “That is the best thing you could have possibly told me.”
Al had no idea what that meant, but she was clearly happy, and that made him happy. “Okay,” he said with a little laugh.
Beth drew herself together, gave Al one last radiant smile, and turned to Sam. “Sam, I’m sorry Donna isn’t here. She’s home, in New Mexico. We didn’t know. But…” She drew a steadying breath. “We think we can get you home.” She looked back at Al. “Honey, give me just one more piece of good news. Tell me you have an observer. Tell me I’m here.”
Al blinked in surprise and nodded. He tore his gaze from her so he could transfer it to the holographic Beth, who was standing where he had left her, watching them with a complicated expression on her face. “She’s there,” he said, nodding in her direction and suddenly feeling a little bad about having abandoned her so swiftly. “Beth, you…uh, you want to talk to you.”
“Not talk,” the admiral said. “Better.” She looked back at Sam. “We’re going to bring you home. Both of you.”
“But…what do you mean?” Al asked, perplexed. “Sam—you said New Mexico—”
Beth shook her head sadly. “Not here, and not now. Of course I’d love to have you, but…” Her gaze moved in the direction of the holographic Beth. “He’s yours,” she said. “I’m giving him back to you.”
Al looked between them. The holographic Beth seemed to have realized something, because she put her hands over her mouth and let out a little, “Oh.”
“What? I—I don’t want to leave you again.” Al decided to address his plea to the older Beth. “I never meant to leave you again.”
“But that’s the beauty of it—you won’t,” Sam said, stepping closer. “That’s your plan, isn’t it? You fixed the retrieval program—you rewrote it when neither of us came back. And if you give it to the other Beth now—the one in the imaging chamber—she can run it in 2000 and bring us back only a day after Al left.”
The admiral nodded, tears glimmering in her eyes. She looked back at Al, who had switched to staring at Sam. “None of this will have happened,” she said gently. “You won’t be missing. Sam will come home after five years away, but you after only a day.”
“But…” There had to be a catch somewhere. “What about you?”
Beth smiled softly. “I’ll be different,” she said. “I’ll be me, but with you. I’m certain it can only be an improvement.” The corner of her smile twitched. “Think of it, you can meet Cassandra the normal way.”
“Cassandra,” Sam said suddenly. “She was going after the microchip—she knew the retrieval program was on it! But why would anyone steal it? And who was shooting at us? What’s going on?”
Beth nodded to Kathleen, who began, “When Al Leaped, we couldn’t get a lock on him—on either of you. We tried to keep the Project going, but the government shut it down after six months. But some of us weren’t ready to give up. Gooshie and Tina were convinced the theory behind the retrieval program was sound—that it should have worked—but it wasn’t until years later that Donna figured out why. She was the one who rewrote the program—well, her and Cassandra.
“Then we needed to run the code at the Project—we needed the control room, Ziggy, the accelerator, everything. But the facility had been taken over by the government, and at that point it had been converted for use with the Star Leap project—combining Star Bright and Quantum Leap. Gooshie and Tina stayed on to work on Star Leap, and when the tech went public, they founded their own private company, G&T. They made a fortune, and, when they could, they bought the Quantum Leap facility. Gooshie wanted to turn it into a museum, but Tina knew we were still trying to get you back, so she brought it back online for us.”
Kathleen took a breath. “We were so close. But we were still configuring the systems and running safety checks when G&T had a hostile takeover. It came out of nowhere. The first thing the new company, ELC, did, was seize the Quantum Leap facility. Before they kicked us out, we were able to wipe Ziggy’s memory and write the retrieval program to a crystal format—we hoped they might miss it when they searched us on our way out, and they did.
“After that, ELC locked the place down. I even tried to sneak in once and nearly got myself shot. They’re running some sort of program in there, whether it’s Quantum Leap or something else, I don’t know. But it looked like they’d completely reprogrammed Ziggy, given her a new name and everything.”
“Lothos,” Sam said. Al glanced at him, perplexed.
“That was it,” Kathleen agreed in surprise.
Sam looked at Al. “Alia,” he said. “The other Leaper, remember? Being sent around in time to put wrong what we put right? She said their computer was named Lothos. I didn’t realize…” He stopped. “She was from our future. She was using our own technology—our very own facility!”
Kathleen and Beth exchanged a look.
“Then that’s something else you can fix,” Beth said. “Once we realized we couldn’t get into the facility, we switched to Plan B—try to find you. Al said you were Leaping into the future, and that meant there was a chance we could run into you. We took turns wearing the necklace, Donna and Katie and Cassandra and I. We always hoped one of us would run into you during a Leap. Because the retrieval program needs to be run at the Project, and we don’t have the Project anymore. But you do.” She gazed off in the general direction of the holographic Beth. “Beth from 2000,” she said, “are you still here?”
Al glanced over.
“I’m here,” she said. “What do I need to do?”
“She’s here,” Al confirmed.
“You need to run this code,” Beth said, pointing at the floating holographic display. “Find Gooshie and tell him you need a holographic imaging setup in the imaging chamber right away, one hooked directly into Ziggy. You can’t take photographs of neural holograms in the imaging chamber, but Ziggy’s already in the system, so if you crank up the power you should be able to get an image.”
“Gooshie, get a holographic imaging setup,” Beth repeated at regular volume, looking to her immediate right, and Al realized he must already be in the imaging chamber with her.
“She’s doing it,” Al said, for Sam’s and the older Beth’s benefit.
“On-ship ZIGI, display that code as a high-density matrix, as big as you can make it,” Beth directed.
The projected code didn’t waver.
“ZIGI, are you listening to me?” Beth barked.
“Always, Admiral,” ZIGI sulked.
“Do as I say.”
“I don’t want to work with…the other ZIGY.”
Beth drew a bracing breath. “ZIGI, this other computer is as much your mother as Tina is, and you will work with her and show her some respect. And speaking of Tina, she and Gooshie are with the other Ziggy right now, and they need this code. So you will ready it for transmission to them, do you understand me?”
There was a pause, and then the block of code abruptly reconfigured itself into a large, dense square of letters, numbers, and symbols.
“That’s more like it.”
The holographic Beth relayed, “Gooshie’s getting the imaging equipment, but our Ziggy doesn’t want to play nicely, either.” She listened to something and then snapped, “Get over yourself, Ziggy, do you want Sam back or not?”
Something must have shown on Al’s face, because Sam asked, “Our Ziggy being a pain, too?”
“You bet.”
Sam thought for a moment. “Tell her—tell her once I’m back, I’ll do a complete system deep clean, reconfigure all the microchips and restart her subprocesses.”
“What’s that, a spa day for a computer?”
“More like a spa month,” Sam said. “Just tell her.”
Al shrugged. Beth was already relaying the message.
“It’ll be a minute,” she said.
Al turned back to the others. “She’s working on it. But you didn’t finish telling us what happened. You said you had the necklace, so how did what’s-his-face get it?”
“He stole it,” Kathleen answered sourly. “Broke into my house in the middle of the night. I was furious. He didn’t take anything else, so we realized he must have been sent by ELC. We guessed then that they must be running Quantum Leap or something like it, because why else would they want the retrieval program? And, from what you said, it sounds like that’s exactly what they’re doing.”
“Maybe they just want to bring their own Leapers home,” Sam suggested.
“Donna customized the code to lock it onto you and Al,” Kathleen countered. “They could have adapted it for their Leapers, sure, but it would have been damn hard without a top-rate programmer.”
“So if they ran it as-is…we would have Leaped back to them?” Al guessed. “With Lothos, in the future?”
He exchanged a look with Sam. He didn’t fully remember Alia, but he knew that the very idea of the other Leapers spooked him, and he didn’t like the sound of Leaping directly into their clutches. He imagined it wouldn’t have been much of a homecoming.
“But now you won’t,” Kathleen insisted. “We have the program, and if you Leap home now, you can stop any of this from happening. With you back, they might not shut the Project down in the first place, and even if they do, you can stop the corporate takeover of G&T. You can keep Quantum Leap technology in the right hands.”
Sam seemed to consider that. “One last wrong to put right?” he mused quietly.
“So Cassandra found out that this ELC stole the necklace and went after it?” Al prompted.
“Yes,” Kathleen sighed. “Cassandra…she’s a programmer, she had her heart set on working for G&T before the takeover. To her, I think, the retrieval program was like a puzzle she was determined to solve.”
“And she learned about you,” Beth added, looking from Al to Sam. “Gooshie, Tina, Verbena—all the old Project folks—we’d tell her bedtime stories about your Leaps, Sam. And then she wanted to get you back as badly as the rest of us.”
“Maybe too badly,” Kathleen admitted. “We knew ELC was dangerous and that they wouldn’t pull their punches, even for someone as young as Cassandra. I told her to forget about the necklace, but she always was stubborn.” She looked at Sam. “I suppose, this time, that stubbornness paid off.”
“Al, we’re ready,” the holographic Beth interrupted, looking past the projected code at something Al couldn’t see. “Bit more to the left, Gooshie. There.” She looked back at Al.
“Beth says they’re ready to go,” Al said.
The admiral smiled. “Then do it.”
Al looked back at Beth, who told Gooshie, “Go.”
For a moment, the holographic Beth flickered, and Al took an instinctive step towards her, moving so that he was only holding the older Beth’s hands. Then the image stabilized. “Power levels normalizing. Double-check that we got it, Gooshie.”
“It…I think it worked,” Al said, astonished.
The older Beth squeezed Al’s hands before releasing them and walking to Kathleen to embrace her. Then she moved to Sam and gave him a hug as well. “Donna will be so pleased to see you,” she told him.
Sam seemed less certain. “After all those years? Five years, you said?”
“I guarantee it.”
The holographic Beth was busy, striding back and forth and passing through the spaceship’s chairs and cabinets without even noticing. “Gooshie, have Ziggy convert that back into code and run it as soon as you can.” She paused to listen to something. “I don’t care, Ziggy, black out all of New Mexico if you have to!”
Al watched her, still hardly daring to believe what was happening. The Project had the code. He might be on his way home in just moments.
The admiral returned to Al and took his hands, drawing his attention back to her. The simple action reminded him suddenly of what he had to lose if the retrieval program failed. There was no guarantee that it would work, and if it didn’t, he and Sam would still be lost forever, Leaping through time. At least here he had a version of Beth he could touch.
“I don’t want to say good-bye,” he said.
“Al, Ziggy’s got the code running,” the holographic Beth said urgently. “You’d better grab Sam, just in case.”
Al pulled one hand from Beth’s so he could vaguely wave Sam over, but his eyes never left Beth. “Sam, time to go.”
“It won’t be a good-bye, for me or for you,” Beth said kindly as Sam came over and took Al’s free hand. “For any of us, really.” She smiled faintly. “It’ll be a hello.”
Then blue light flared around the edges of Al’s vision, and he Leaped.
Beth’s hand slipped from his but he could still feel Sam hanging on tight. Wherever they were going, they were going together.
The moment felt like both an eternity and an instant, and Al filled it with thoughts of Beth. Of home, whenever and wherever that was. Of wherever Beth wanted it to be.
As the blue light faded away, the first thing Al saw was the faintly glowing white and blue panels of the Quantum Leap accelerator room.
He staggered, catching himself from tipping off the edge of the raised white disc set in the center of the floor. He could still feel Sam’s hand in his, and when he looked over, there he was: careworn and windswept and wearing an unflattering white jumpsuit identical to Al’s, but unmistakably there. Unmistakably home.
For a moment they just looked at each other, the distant hum of equipment filling the room.
“We made it.” Sam didn’t entirely sound like he believed it. He looked down at himself, feeling the material of the jumpsuit, gazed around the room as if for imperfections, and then looked back at Al. He gave a short laugh. “We made it!” he exclaimed, and pulled Al into a hug.
The door to the accelerator room slid open to reveal an eclectically dressed group buzzing with excitement. Al and Sam broke apart as Donna and Beth rushed in, Gooshie, Tina, and Verbena a half-step behind.
“Sam!” Donna cried, sprinting over and enveloping her long-lost husband in an enormous hug.
But Al had eyes only for Beth. He vividly remembered her wishing him good luck from the exact same spot she stood in now—only yesterday, he knew—but he also knew that, only a few days before that, she had been lost to him forever. To her, no time had passed at all, but to him…he had seen his life without her, and he didn’t want to ever see it again. The older Beth had been right, at least about his point of view: this was a beginning, a glorious one, and he was going to make the most of it.
“You made it back!” Beth said in relief as Al jumped down from the white disc and rushed to meet her halfway. “And Sam, too! Oh, I can’t believe it worked!”
Al reached her and, smiling broadly, swept her up into his arms, spinning her around in a circle like they were teenagers.
“We blacked out most of—woah!” Beth exclaimed as Al set her down as gently as he could, his back protesting the exuberant greeting. She made a show of straightening her blouse even as a smile of delight crept across her face. “What was that about?”
His smile joined hers. “Hello,” he said, and kissed her.