Eddies in Stone

Not sure if I like this or not, might expand it at some point. It definitely ties into this setting that's developing itself against my better judgement... Oh well.

“'ello.” the voice was light and friendly and emanated from a blue and white mini cooper, last years model, but, as it was well after midnight, I managed to regard it with suspicion.
“What do you want?” I glanced sideways but kept walking, the fingers of my right hand weaving themselves through my keys.
“I's not what I want,” cockney, that was the accent, “I's what you want.”
“And what is it, pray tell, that I want?” I was already annoyed, coming off a serving shift that was far too long for a Tuesday, and not commensurately profitable, what's more I hadn't bothered to change clothes before striking out for home and the early fall wind cut at my exposed skin and toyed with the short hem of my skirt.
“You want a ride.”
“No, no I don't, I want to go home, alone, and eat something that isn't Thai food for the first time this week. I'm flattered, but, goodbye.” I stopped looking at him and walked more quickly, hoping that was the end of it.
“I'm sorry,” he said, pacing me in his car, “I'm terrible with tenses, what I meant was that you will want a ride.”
“I'm sorry, what?” I rounded on him, outraged.
“In about fourteen seconds, as a matter of fact.” his voice lost much of its accent as he dropped it an octave and spoke more quickly. “Actually, as, at that time, you won't be able to ask, rest assured, I'm offering.” he reached across and opened the passenger side door.
I realized that he was driving on the wrong side of the road at about the same time that the first explosion tore a whole in the side of the office building behind me, raining glass and steel down about me. Without thinking I slid across the hood of the car as two more buildings became briefly, catastrophically, convex. “I don't know who you are, or how you knew what was going to happen,” I exhaled, landing in the passengers seat and clawing for the seat belt, “and I don't care, just drive.” he was already accelerating.
As I looked over my absurd rescuer I was disturbed to see him grinning like a mad man, swerving around falling rubble and screaming pedestrians. Beyond the expression he was largely unremarkable, medium sized nose in a pleasantly round face, sharp, intelligent eyes of unobjectionable blue, fractal dark hair. He was well dressed, though not stylishly, in a dark blue suit with a red silk shirt, no tie or vest. The only things notable about him were his hands, long and thin like the rest of him, but taken to an abnormal extent, heavily calloused and grease stained, the hands of a mechanic on the body of an intellectual.
Noticing my examination he chuckled, took one hand off the wheel and with it rolled back his other sleeve, about that wrist was fixed a brass circlet and below his palm there was a blank glass face over something cloudy, white, and shifting. With one finger he traced a pattern onto the face, spiraling from one corner to another in an intricate manner that clearly had meaning for him. The face began to glow, brighter and brighter, before it suddenly stopped.
The car slowed, and my heart leaped into my throat in the moments that it took me to realize that I could no longer hear screaming. “I mostly affect the accent because it seems to have a calming effect on people,” he said, after a long pause, “Cockney is good, down to earth. It's a hard working sort of dialect.”
“You do this often?” I was recovering enough to see that we were stopped in a narrow country lane between two high hedges. I assumed there were sheep at pasture behind them. I also noted with some alarm that it was mid-day and the sky was a bright, cloudless blue.
“From time to time,” he smiled at some private joke, “I'll get a contract, or I feel like it, or I find a fate cut short that I would like to see extended.”
“And what was I?”
“You were the best kind,” I quirked an eyebrow, not amused, “both, of course.
“You see, I'm a courier, not of people, not of things, but of futures. If I hadn't arrived when I did you would have died, and things would have turned out rather less... interestingly than they will with you involved. And my employer on this job likes nothing better than an interesting time.”
I looked at him, unblinking. He did seem to be entirely serious, and we had traveled half way around the world in the blink of an eye, or so it appeared, and I was therefore rather more willing than usual to accept what he had to say at face value. “So you're a time traveler?”
“No. Well, sort of.” he waived one hand as though dismissing the point as unimportant, “Technicalities, really.”
“What sort of techni... You know what, no. I'm done bullshitting, what the hell are you, what is going on, and who do I have to pay back for getting you to save my skin?”
“What sort of technicalities?” he said, ignoring me, “Well, there are only five real time travelers for starters, and if I were one of them I wouldn't waist my time with this shit, I'd be at the Moment, sipping wine with Death.”
“So what are you than?”
“Getting there, getting there, I'm a slipstream. I fell out of conventional time one lazy Sunday afternoon in eighteen-twelve.” he grinned a little ruefully and gestured at the scene around us, as though to prove it to me.
“That's not possible.”
“And yet...” he shrugged, “It doesn't matter if you believe me, that's the lovely thing about reality. I ride the currents, more or less, orient around the low points, where time seems to stand still save for the chirp of crickets, they're hard to find unless you know where they are, not like on of the apocalypses, but they're easy to slip out of.
“This thing helps of course,” he held out his wrist, “silly looking, I know, but a couple of retro-futurists decided to give it to me and, well, it makes life easier even if all it does is help me concentrate on not concentrating on floating...” he trailed off, “Look, it's all rather complicated if you can't do it yourself, and I have to be getting you back to your time line. I'm sorry about the apocalypse, but you really can't help them, even if they are something of a bother.”
“But what am I...” he was already fiddling with the device at his wrist again.
“Can't tell you,” he said, “Don't know, just exist, I think. Do whatever it was that you would have done. My employer loves to through rocks into still water, and watch the eddies form.” the landscape around us shifted and blurred, “though this time I wonder if she isn't throwing water onto rock instead.”
Uninspired by his last murmurs I am almost comforted by the smell of melting plastic and the sounds of screams. I'm used to a disordered hell, after all, I work in a restaurant. “Out you go.” I slid out of the car and stand, unsure of what to do next. He's gone before I can thank him.
A firefighter runs towards me out of the smoke, “Are you hurt?” he calls over the wail of sirens and the muffled thuds of yet more explosions, further off.
“No,” I say, “I don't think so.”
“Can you walk? How many fingers?”
I respond yes, and three, respectively, and he shoves me in the general direction of the evacuation zone. When I get there I'm pressed into service with a handful of ribbons in green, yellow, red, and black, and a clipboard with a checklist. All I can think of, as I triage the burned and the bleeding, is of a sluggish pond on a still summers day, and the rock skipping across its surface, and the ripples it leaves in its wake.
I tie a black ribbon around the ankle of a man, and wonder what eddies he would have made.