Have I ever told you the definition of insanity? It's doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.

It was kind of ironic that the accident- that terrible, fatal accident- happened when it did. Groundhog Day. For some, part of a tradition. For others, the title of a great movie about said tradition.
For me, it was the day I couldn't escape.

It had been a sudden end, they said, and she hadn't been in any pain. I'd asked them, begged them for more details, but nobody had told me a thing. Nobody had wanted to, for that matter, avoiding my eyes whenever I looked at them, their gaze slipping to the scar on my temple, the bandage over my ruined eye, the cast on my arm.

But I'd wiggled the details out of them regardless; they'd tried asking me what I knew in return, but I couldn't remember anything. Not a thing. The last thing I remembered was getting into the car with her, and then....and then....

...and then waking up in the hospital, half-blind, shattered in pieces, scrabbling desperately to remember, to recall, to find out what had happened.

There'd been an accident, they told me. We'd been cresting a hill in the middle of a forest, and judging by the tire tracks, we'd swerved to avoid something, gone off the road, and ploughed into the trees. We'd rolled, hit a tree, and...I'd been thrown from the car.

She'd been less lucky. Nobody would tell me how, but I didn't need to know how.

I recovered quickly enough, and once they were satisfied, they discharged me, sent me home.

Home.

No.

Without her, it was just a house.

It was colder. Emptier. There was no life there without her, no feeling of anyone there.

When I was young, my father had told me, after swearing me to secrecy, that there was something special about our family, that we had a special ability, passed from father to son, that nobody else had. He wasn't sure how we'd come to have it, or how it really worked; just that it was ours, and only ours, and nobody else had ever, ever managed to do it too.

We could, he'd told me, travel through time. But with certain conditions.

You could only travel within your own timeline, to younger versions of yourself. You could go from 16 to 20, say, but only by coming back to present day you in between. You couldn't mess with the timeline too much, but you could affect things in major ways, with only the most minor of changes.

I'd used it sparingly in my youth, for important things only; making sure I aced a test, or won a competition. I'd only properly exploited it once, on my eighteenth birthday; I'd cheated at the lottery, making sure I won the jackpot. Nothing huge, just enough to set me up.

But now. Now I could use it to fix things. To get her back. To be with her again.

I'd always thought myself lucky that I'd loved her most of my life, and known almost everything about her life before me, but now, well, now I was luckier than I'd ever thought possible. I just had to decide where to go back to. Maybe when she was eighteen, and she'd gone on a hiking trip across Europe, and we'd missed each other by a matter of miles, and a matter of hours. Maybe when I'd first met her, when she'd been twenty and I'd been twenty-three, and we'd met at a party where neither of us had known anyone, but we'd been dragged along anyway.
Maybe sometime after I'd met her; our first date, our first kiss, our first night together. Maybe when we'd moved in. Maybe when she'd told me she was pregnant. Maybe...maybe the day of the accident.

I wasn't sure.

I narrowed it down to two possiblities.

I flipped a coin.

I closed my eyes.

I concentrated.

I opened my eyes.

I saw her.

So this is a little depressing, and I apologise for that. Think of this as a cross between About Time, *The Time-Traveler's Wife' and 'The First Time We Met', with a little more flesh on its bones and fucking in its backstory.

This is, as most of my prompts are, predominantly vanilla, and heavily story-and-character-driven. If you're looking for just pure smut, I don't think you're going to find it here.

We'll talk limits and whatever as and when, otherwise....come say hi. Give me feedback. Give me comments. Give me someone to actually do this with because I am dying for a good partner.

As usual, if this is up, I'm looking.