crossover_chick | Happy Leap Day!

Here's the drabbles88 leap year fic:

29. Passing
Clara looked up as the familiar triple sonic boom sounded over the house. Emmett and Marty must be back from that little trip they took, she thought, finishing up the darning job she was doing on Jules’s sock. That didn’t take long. I wonder what it was all about – they seemed quite puzzled by something when they left. She set aside the freshly mended item and got up. Well, only one way to find out. She headed for the garage.
Doc and Marty were getting out of the DeLorean when she arrived. Clara noted with some concern they looked rather shaken. “Emmett? Marty? Are you all right? You’re quite pale.”
“We just had a very – unusual experience,” Doc said, leaning against the DeLorean.
Clara didn’t like the sound of that. “Unusual” generally meant nasty things like time paradoxes and the end of the world. “What do you mean?”
“There’s some crazy shit in the universe,” Marty said, sitting down by Doc’s workbench. “Jesus. . . .”
“Marty and I were attempting to settle an argument,” Doc explained to his wife. “About what would happen if I tried to travel to a date that didn’t exist in the calendar – say, February 29th in a common year. I thought the car would give us an error and refuse to complete the transit. Marty thought we would go to the next available date, like March 1st. So we tried it.”
“What happened?”
“Crazy stuff,” Marty said succinctly.
“We’re not quite sure,” Doc admitted. “The DeLorean apparently tried to make the transit, but since I programmed it for the calendar year and not the solar year. . . . Did you know that, given the way the Gregorian calendar is set up, it differs from a regular solar year by 27 seconds on average?”
“No. Why is that important?”
“Because that’s how long we got stuck in fourth-dimensional space.”
Clara blinked a few times. “Pardon?”
“We got stuck outside of the normal flow of time for 27 seconds. Literally caught in the space-time continuum.” Doc shook his head. “We’re lucky that it was only for 27 seconds. The human body isn’t built to directly perceive the fourth dimension.”
“You ain’t kidding, Doc. Swear to God, Clara, it was freaky,” Marty said. “I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like you could smell colors and taste gravity and stuff.”
“All our senses became unmoored,” Doc nodded. “Bit of a shock to the system.”
Clara put her arms around him. “Are you all right?” she asked, worried. “Should I call a doctor? Or bundle you both up in the train and get one in the future?”
“No, I think we’re okay – the flow of sensory information seems to have stabilized. We’ll just have to take it easy for a bit.” Doc smirked at Marty. “Too bad we don’t know who won the bet, though.”
Clara rolled her eyes. “If you can be that flip about getting stuck in the space-time continuum, we’ve had that time machine for too long.”

-D: STUCK OUTSIDE THE NORMAL FLOW OF TIME?! That could potentially be fatal!-
-MHG: Especially if this Stephen King person is right and there are Langoliers lurking about.-
LoL, no Langoliers here. I just thought it would make for an interesting fic. No permanent ill effects, I assure you. Though I'm sure it was a wild ride for those 27 seconds.
-J: Yeah, but -- shouldn't they have been caught there for six hours? I thought the whole point of leap years is that we lose time every year.-
Yeah, true, but a) I didn't want to torture the boys too much and b) I was going by the Gregorian calendar as a whole. When you factor in the addition of leap years, the calendar is off by only 27 seconds. According to my various sources, anyway.-
-M: Why screw with our senses, though?-
There's just something neat about being able to hear smells and stuff like that. I'm probably a bit influenced by Discworld -- from some of the description, magic smells of color. He's mentioned something "smells like blue" at any rate.
Anyway, enjoy, and don't worry about the trilogy guys -- they're fine.

Okay, I believe I shall sneak in some Alice before dinner.