In retrospect, leading with it was probably a mistake.

“You—wait, what?”

“Never mind,” Scott says. “Never mind, it—you're back now, everything is fixed, it's fine. Everything's fine. There's just… some stuff I need to talk to you about.”

“You had a thing? With an FBI agent?” Hope looks like she can't work out whether she's angrier that Scott maybe-sort-of-cheated on her—does it count as cheating when one of them’s nothing but a pile of ash, Scott's not clear on the ethical parameters there—or whether it's just that he kind of fell into bed with the long arm of the law.

“Jae’s not—well, he is, but—look, it's complicated. It just sort of, it happened, okay? It was a weird time for everyone.”

“Yeah, so I hear.” Hope takes a deep breath, pinches the bridge of her nose. “Okay. Fine. Tell me how you managed to sleep with Agent Woo, and we’ll go from there.”

“Yeah,” Scott says. “Okay,” and wonders where, exactly, to start.

The Bennet sisters had a lot to write about in the two years after they married, including some quite unexpected news from their parents.

Guinevere and Joe go to breakfast.

Maybe this time, Loretta will get everything she ever dreamed of. Or at least a bigger piece of it.

“So, do I need to be worried about you getting with a murderer too, or can I reserve that particular worry for Charles and Charles alone?”

Or, everyone seems to know before they do.

Roy, searching for role models as he trains Jamie, finds himself thinking of Keeley…

His fucking traitor of a brain summons an image of her there on the pitch, between them. Giving Roy that look, the one that used to make him want to drop to his terrible aching knees. Fuck the pain.

Roy wonders, suddenly, if she ever used that look on Jamie. If she ever told him what good boy he was...

(Or: Keeley gently doms Jamie, via Roy.)

The multiverse lives just behind her eyelids now, humming at the edge of her periphery. Her mind feels like a swirling sea of possibilities — possibilities that Evelyn no longer yearns for but that are still within her reach, if she should choose to reach out and grab them.

She doesn’t. She has no use for them anymore. She knows now that she never did.

“Oh, I think I’m going to enjoy talking to you,” Bonnet’s wife says, laughing. “From you I’ll get the unvarnished truth, won’t I, Mr. Hands?”

Gracefully scooping up the tea tray, she winks.

“Yeah,” Izzy at last grinds out. “No varnish on me.”

Theo is trying to teach Mabel ASL. Mabel gets distracted.

When Emma follows Jane Fairfax after the strawberry outing, she walks into a scene she had never expected to witness. In the aftermath, more than one secret is revealed.

Janine’s got a secret. And unfortunately, if she wants to keep paying the bills, she has to keep it.

The Dashwood ladies are mixed race. Some things change, but others do not.

3rd April, 1815 HMS Constant, At Sea

Dearest Lady Russell,

At last, I have a moment to take up my pen to acquaint you with our current circumstances and whereabouts.

Snapshots from a coronation.

The Agricultural Show is in less than a month—and the three-time champion rabbit has just gone missing.

Janine decided to ignore this and addressed the newcomer to the staff room. “Can I talk to you in private, Gregory?”

“Um, seeing as I missed the beginning of this—okay.” He followed Janine out as she pulled on his sweater.

“I’m late!”

Gregory spat out his coffee onto the floor next to them. “Excuse me?”

Distantly, she hears footsteps approaching, and looks up in hope, praying that it’s the paramedics arriving–but it’s just Higgins, shockingly normal in his suit and tie, asking, “Rebecca, someone heard shouting–” and then he sees Rebecca crouched over Ted’s prone body and gasps, the file folder in his hand fluttering to the floor.

“Leslie,” Rebecca chokes out, “Ted’s collapsed, I need you to go downstairs and wait for the ambulance.”

“Yes, yes,” Higgins stutters, “But–”

“Go,” Rebecca orders, and Higgins stumbles over his own feet, rushing out of her office.

(Futurefic, set seven years after s1.)

The first time Danni meets Steve McGarrett is when EMTs haul him into her ER under extreme duress, having just driven a police cruiser onto a ship.

1. Spend a night in the smuggling compartments of the Millennium Falcon
2. Learn to fire a blaster without closing your eyes
3. Get drunk and go to bed with an unsuitable man
4. Yell at people who ask if you’re okay
5. Go to bed with an unsuitable man even when you’re sober

“Don’t flirt with my sister,” Sam had said. Bucky had let out half a laugh before he’d swallowed the rest of it, shaken his head.

Sam should have known then.

There’d been a lot of other shit going on though, so he figured he could be forgiven for not following up on it the way he’d meant to. And it wasn’t like Bucky would be back, anyways. Not to Sam’s town, not to his sister’s couch. They’d sort out this shit with the Flag Smashers and Bucky’d go back to ignoring his texts and calls, doing whatever he did in New York when he wasn’t following Sam around like a particularly menacing shadow with anger issues. Not worth worrying about.

Except it turned it out that none of that had been true. And it very much had been worth worrying about.