The thing about time travel fixit AUs

[conuly]

is that they generally leave open one very interesting question: If you've gone back in time to inhabit the body of your younger self, what happens to the person who was already there? Or maybe none of them realize that this even is a question to address.

The obvious answer is that you're possessing them, same as any other form of possession, and either you'll have to time share it somehow or they'll be fighting from the inside - but for some reason nobody ever seems to actually write this. Which is a pity, because it'd certainly be a new and interesting angle.

(Alternatively, they go forward in time to the future you're hoping to abolish. Good luck fixing things when your adult body is inhabited by an eleven year old child! A child you've just up and abandoned, stranded alone and lost in the bad future. I wonder if there's any way to go back and rescue them once you've devoted yourself to bringing about the good future, the happier timeline. It's all a little irresponsible to do this on purpose, really.)

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Comments

[hudebnik]

Deborah Harkness addresses this problem, somewhat hand-wavily and unsatisfactorily, in A Discovery of Witches.

In one episode Diana and Matthew time-walk back a few months to a night when they were dancing together, taking over their previous bodies to dance again. No paradoxes because they're doing the exact same thing, albeit with different emotional overtones because their relationship has developed during those months. Diana is a little troubled by it, but lets it slide; "this is just how time-walking works".

Then throughout the second book, The Shadow of Night, they time-walk back hundreds of years to Elizabethan London, a time when he was alive and active but "away on business in Scotland", with the implication that there are two of him alive at the same time, just not encountering one another. In London they meet his friends and acquaintances, and tell a few of them about the time-travel and their relationship, but it's left unclear what happens when a guy whose job was largely killing witches marries one for several months, then new-Matthew returns to the 21st century and old-Matthew returns from Scotland.

An episode of the Star Trek animated series "Lower Decks" doesn't technically involve time travel, but Rutherford's memory-wiped former self returns from the dead and the two fight over control of the one body.

[conuly]

Man, I gotta freaking watch Lower Decks. I've just been too lazy to find a free uploaded stream - also, google's been making it harder to find those lately, or maybe the studios have been cracking down on them harder, which seems possible too I guess.

[frandroid]

That sounds like a recipe for psychosis...

[conuly]

Possession. It's totally different - although you might want to hide it if you think other people will try to forcibly treat the psychosis you don't have. That treatment won't work, not if your problem is possession, and then you'll have a whole new set of problems as well.

[moon_custafer]

There was a one-season series called Tru Calling in which the heroine was a morgue attendant and sometimes a corpse would cry out to her for help, at which point her day would rewind twelve hours and she’d have to figure out how to find that person and prevent their death. However, due to the short time-frame involved, it was ambiguous as to whether or not this was actually time-travel, or a form of precognition.

[silveradept]

The Zero Time Dilemma series eventually answers this question to some degree, by revealing that certain psychic abilities allow someone to shift between various realities and eventually time travel, but they find out that the reality-shifting comes with a cost - whomever is in the target reality swaps places with the people doing the shifting at the point of the shift. Which means that every time the protagonists shift out of a reality where they're doomed to die, they instead drop an alternate version of themselves into that situation, with no preparation or time to meet the situation they have just been put into.

(The actual timeline plot of that game, since it's a many worlds universe, is that a particular character manages to engineer a situation in which the bad future they come from comes to pass in one of the doomed endings, so they can send themselves and others back in time to prevent the bad future in another reality. The two tracks continue on their own timelines, for the most part, because the mastermind character needs the bad future to exist and the good future for everyone else to exist.

In the first game of the series, a character is able to project their mind into the good future so as to gain the solution to a problem they were able to solve in the past to keep their existence alive with help from the future. It's a bit of a bootstrap paradox, but when the true nature of reality shifting is revealed, it's that all of the timelines where the character is unable to solve the puzzle in the past coincidentally line up with the bad timelines in the future that result in a TPK, because that character's survival in the past is important to everyone's survival in the future.

[schneefink]

I have seen it a few times in fic; I think the most jarring example was a Star Wars time travel fic where young Obi-Wan sees some of the memories of future!Obi-Wan, immediately comes to the conclusion that clearly it is for the Greater Good that future him came back to Fix Things, and basically commits suicide.

[conuly]

Jarring is hardly the word I'd use for that.

[melannen]

I've read at least one where it turned out on examination that they weren't possessing their past self, they had just dumped all of their future memories and skills onto their past self in one go, who had dealt with the resulting identity crisis by deciding they were their future self come back. Which is an interesting way to handle it I think, though not much less cruel.

But I think generally the assumption is that your past self is a write-off, just like all the people in the no-longer-in existence Bad Future whose lives you're deliberately erasing.

Or, if this is a branching-timelines version, well, you didn't kill your past self then! They still exist in the original timeline! You just created a new timeline that they're not in.

Time travel ethics are weird.

[hilarita]

Or, by going back in time, are you erasing the future, and completely overwriting past-you with future-you?

[conuly]

Oh, that's what all these fics seem to settle on without really thinking about it - other than the ones people have mentioned in the comments, I mean - but, really, isn't that a sort of murder?

[conuly]

I don't suppose you happen to remember what one that was you read?

[hilarita]

Ah, but is it justified by [insert plot here]? Surely murdering your 10-year-old self in order to kill Hitler is totally, entirely, completely justified!!!

[melannen]

It was MDZS/Untamed and it was very long and I'm pretty sure it was WWX who travelled back to Cloud Recesses training! I might have also read at least one where it was NHS with a similar mechanic? (Also there's at least one where NHS comes back as an actual ghost who just haunts his baby self rather than possessing him.)

Unfortunately I have read a lot of MDZS time travel AUs at this point and they all kind of blur together.

[alexseanchai]

some of them explicitly have the older version overwrite or merge with the younger version; the Harry Potter one I'm thinking of, Harry becomes a bit of a medical curiosity because he has two magical cores, or some such thing, when the usual numbers are one or zero

the younger the younger version is, the more likely it seems to get that the older version's memories of events overwrite the younger version's, and sometimes the muscle memory is the older version's but usually the physicality of the younger version is what they're stuck with, at least at first

I know one where he swaps with himself often enough he's figured out that his older self isn't anywhere really while his younger self is in his own future, but that's time travel in the other direction than usual for a fixit; I also know one where the younger selves wake up very baffled by the evidence of the older selves' lives, but (1) it wasn't a bad end, that's part of why it's baffling, neither could have imagined himself as happy as their futute selves obviously are, and (2) tragically there's only the one chapter so far and it's Been A While since the series got updated; in neither of these cases did anyone travel on purpose, though:


Seven Years and Twenty-Four Hours (38995 words) by Glaucus_Atlanticus
Chapters: 15/15
Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Characters: Katsuki Yuuri, Victor Nikiforov, Phichit Chulanont, Yuri Plisetsky
Additional Tags: Time Travel, Alternate Universe, Anxiety, POV Katsuki Yuuri, canon-typical nudity, Angst and Humor, Angst with a Happy Ending
Summary:

A time-traveling shower transports 18 year old Yuuri into the body of his future self—and into the arms of his idol, Victor Nikiforov. Now Yuuri must pretend to be his older self until he can return to his own era. Which would be a lot easier if Victor weren't so attentive. Or so affectionate.

But as time goes on, Yuuri finds himself torn between his old life, and a new one that would hand him everything he ever wanted...but at the cost of his real identity.


Fast Forward, Start Again (2659 words) by SeptemberMorningBell
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Characters: Katsuki Yuuri, Victor Nikiforov, More to come - Character
Additional Tags: Humor, Angst with a Happy Ending, Time Travel, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Anxious Katsuki Yuuri, Depressed Victor Nikiforov, It's okay they help each other, Developing Relationship, Fluff, lots of fluff because I have no self control
Series: Part 1 of Out of Place, Out of Time
Summary:

The other side of the story from Stop, Rewind, Restart! Yuuri and Viktor from before Sochi find themselves five years in the future, multiple time world champions on the cusp of retirement--and married. Yurio, fifteen, confused, and very angry, wakes up twenty years old, still confused, and very, very angry.

[conuly]

Every time people bring up killing Hitler, I'm reminded of this story.

[kengr]

eztv.re works, but not as well as it used to.

Limetorrents is better.

Either way, use a decent VPN before accessing them.

[hudebnik]

We watched several series of SNW and Lower Decks on a Paramount Plus free-sample subscription before it expired and we didn't choose to pay for it. And now we're waiting for DVD's to come out....

[mindstalk]

I think I've only seen 'overwrite'

Othar in his Girl Genius Twitter.

Yvonne currently in _Please Bully Me_, though presumably the time travel will eventually end and she'll bounce back to her older body, leaving her younger self with a memory gap during her (undisputed) possession.

Re: Zero, though I don't even know if 'time travel' is the official metaphysics there.

Probably others? Don't think I've seen that kind of time travel very often, really.

The hip new dilemma is isekai stories, where someone is "reincarnated" in another world; how and when do the memories integrate? That varies. In MagiRevo, Anis seemed to have a memory cascade at 5 or 7, but the Earth memories were kind of a hazy add-on. "Sanitize" has dodged the details, though Yui clearly had Earth-doctor medical knowledge as a kid; later chapters suggest she doesn't remember much now _other_ than the medicine and vague memories of a more peaceful world. At the other end, in I Favor the Villainess, Rae seems a total overwrite, with other characters commenting on the abrupt change of personality. Though given that she does go home to her 'parents', I hope she got _some_ local memories to help out. But the Earth-mind is at least overwhelmingly dominant.

Of course, in isekai it usually just happens out of the blue, so you can't accuse the 'traveler' of murder.