AN: Another one of those strange stream of conciousness fics. This is set during the end of season 7's Homecoming, with reference to Prophecy. Jonas Quinn is having a "Stop the world" moment.

DOMINO EFFECT

You couldn't rightly say, Jonas thought, that everything was a free choice. You think what you do is an act of free will, but with so many outside influences, how can you make totally free decisions?

Of course, granted, you could if didn't want to be a "good" person, but then, he supposed, you'd be bound by choosing the "bad" options.

Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point was that every time you make a (non) choice it inevitably led to another (non) choice, because you set yourself on this path, and you end up following it through because there is no time to stop and think. To take a breath. To deviate. Instead it was a constant click, click, click of small decisions. Each toppling into the next. And if you ever had more than a second to look back all you would see would be a landscape of flattened thought processes.

Sure, you could go back, and spend time picking them up, but while you were doing that the constant clicking continues. Not just yours, but everyone else's, and then you would find yourself somewhere you definitely haven't chosen.

He pulled his bag out of the closet. Pinning it to the desk so he could unzip it one handed.

Sam said the future wasn't pre-determined, because the more we looked at it, the more we changed it. But you'd have to be able to see it first, not just hear it moving away from you.

And, really, was it true? Thinking about it, weren't his reactions to seeing the future, and his actions stemming from those visions, already decided in order to complete a different prophecy? The future he saw was not the future, but a future needed for him to carry out the choice of action which would lead to the already determined future. The future he experienced was an accurate probable future which would never be possible, because the future had already been pre-seen in somebody else's past.

What?!

He thought too much, he really did.

Still, if everything he thought was a choice - the ones he did on the spur of the moment, the ones he agonised over - was not a choice, but the next falling block then what was the point? Like how there was no point taking his fish, because the difference in the two planets' water means they would all die pretty instantaneously. So, why not just ask someone else to deal it?

Why not just ask someone else to deal it?

Because when things are in motion it becomes difficult to stop. The only way to deal with it was to get ahead of it, and pull out some of the tiles. He paused. It wasn't about keeping pace by filling the space with the next decision, it was about making enough space for you to look carefully at the path ahead. Where you could stand studying the dots on each end. Three or four. One or one hundred million.

At least then, even with everyone watching, he only had to choose whether to push that next domino.