"Do y'see anything yet, Micky?"

"Nah, not yet, Pete."

The four boys sat looking out at the hill where they'd appeared, the forest to their backs. In the clouded moonlight, they could still see the pieces of the floorboard that they brought with them scattered along the ground - something Micky wanted to try collecting before they went home, just in case it could possibly find a way to survive for millions of years. Leave nothing behind was his motto, and he meant to follow through. Despite this, he was sure they'd left a sleeve or two lying around somewhere, which would possibly bother him for the rest of his life. He wouldn't express his thoughts to the others, but he was also quite worried about never making it home at all - not because he'd miss twentieth century California, but because he worried that if they all grew old and died in the Cretaceous, they'd completely turn science upside-down when their fossils were discovered in some hundred million years.

The only solution? They'd have to throw themselves into a volcano. Excruciatingly painful, but probably pretty effective at preserving the future.

"How d'ya even know this thing Davy saw is even gonna be here?" Mike asked. He worked on breaking apart the sled, occasionally hugging a piece of the guitar to his chest whenever he thought the others weren't looking.

"You mean the apparition of the city? I don't." Micky shrugged, squinting toward the place where the time machine would be. "You remember those two circles I drew? That was my best guess about what we're gonna find."

"Hold on a minute," Mike said. "What do you mean, with the circle thing?"

"That Time is a constant presence. Just because we've moved past a certain point in history doesn't mean it's un-happened. We're existing in two times, and they're overlapping." Micky paused, looking up at the moonlight, before grabbing a splinter off the now-broken sled. He drew a more three-dimensional, cylindrical illustration of the two circles in the dirt, showing them intersecting, their top planes very close to each other. Through these, he drew a cube, and pointed to it. "This is us. We're in two places, and I know that because of what we saw. We literally have to exist in two realities right now, as we speak."

"What makes you so sure of that?" Peter asked.

"I saw something there that told me there was a way to get home. You know. Probably. It's when it all came together." Next to his illustration, he drew a date. "This is the day after I fired up the time machine. I saw it on a newspaper some guy was reading when we followed Davy into that view of the future. Which means we saw one day into the future, which means, in order for us to have seen it, we must exist one day after we left."

The others stared at him blankly.

Micky rolled his eyes. Time was complicated. "Just… Believe me on this one. Right now, we're in a matrix between two time periods. We're just more in this one than that one at the moment, and I think the time machine's binding both together. That means it's gotta be here."

"Matrix sounds like a good name for a movie," Peter mused.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Davy mumbled. The poor boy was much worse for wear at this point. Although conscious and very aware, he was completely worn out and lying on his back in the wet dirt. At least the rain was gone.

Micky glanced at the scattered flooring again before nodding. "Yeah, why?"

Rolling onto his side, Davy gestured into the dark. "That big rock over there. I don't remember it bein' there."

Micky could, indeed, see a big grey lump just past their point of arrival, but they hadn't really been paying attention to their surroundings when the time machine chose to bring them here, because the flying reptile they'd spotted was much more demanding of their attention. "Part of the hill, probably."

"Micky," Davy said.

"Mm-hm?"

"Why's that rock breathin', then?"

They didn't have time to ponder the horrible truth of what a breathing rock meant, because that was the precise point when the first hints of a new day began to light up the sky. Immediately after, a bright, meandering curtain of light began to radiate from the exact point they'd been standing when they first arrived. It snaked all around them, through them, encompassing them in the early morning light of both the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic. The dichotomy startled Micky for a moment as he realized they were staring at their own house in front of them, sunken partway into the hillside. Through its transparent walls, he could see the monstrosity of the time machine, clearer than everything else and shining like a beacon.

"C'mon. We're not gonna have long. Let's do this." Mike got to his feet, helping Davy to do the same. Peter helped, too, taking one of Davy's arms and wrapping it around his shoulder.

Their English friend wasn't as enthused, though. Pointing at the 'rock,' he whispered, "That's the giant, ugly crocodile that tried t'eat us before!"

"Then let's do this quietly," Mike growled.

All they had to do was push a button.

Should be easy.

Micky realized a moment later that the others were waiting for him to take the lead, a prospect which the drummer found most uncomfortable. He wouldn't necessarily call himself a coward, but he generally didn't volunteer himself as a leader in situations with any element of danger involved. Why couldn't the beast have been down in the river, where it belonged? What was it doing up here on the hillside? With his luck, Micky thought, it was probably waiting for them all to return. Even ancient reptiles liked an exciting and exotic culinary tidbit once in awhile.

He met Mike's eyes, and received an almost imperceptible nod in return. Stepping around the others, Micky crept toward the time machine, his eyes never leaving the sleeping dinosaur, which, in the pale morning light, was starting to resolve from a colorless grey lump into the bright green beast they'd seen a couple days prior. It's toothy face would have been perfect for catching fish, but the sharp claws on its forelimbs would have ensured that it could really tear anything apart that it felt like eating. Including four Monkees.

But the creature continued sleeping soundly, even as they neared the machine. Standing only a few meters away, Micky could see every detail of its worn skin, every tiny scale that dotted its hide, and the brighter spots along its side. Sharp teeth poked out of its jaw at every angle. It looked so out of place as it appeared to sleep inside their kitchen, which was superimposed over the mossy prehistoric ground.

"Micky!" Mike hissed.

Tearing his eyes away from the sleeping giant, Micky focused on the writing, painstakingly written on the machine's cardboard casing in pink crayon, that said 'Emergency Use Only.' Really, it wasn't for an emergency at all; instead, the button it labeled would cancel the distortion of time around them and bring them home.

He looked at the others for just a moment. They were all so tired. Mike had the bits and pieces of his poor, destroyed guitar slung over his shoulders, tied together with the guitar strap; Davy was so pale that he almost could have double as a ghost. In contrast, Peter seemed to have suffered the worst sunburn out of all of them, as his face was lobster red. With a weak smile, Micky reached for the button.

And his hand went right through it.

Stunned, he tried again. The machine seemed perfectly solid in front of him, and yet, he couldn't touch it. Nothing he did allowed him to make contact with it.

Taking note of the problem, Mike tried the same thing, with the same result. Then he swore, uttering a word that none of the others had ever heard him say.

So startled was Micky, that he stepped backward. As luck would have it, his heel managed to catch Davy's injured leg, sliding along the injury in just the wrong place. Consequently, Davy let out an involuntary cry of pain, which, of course, rattled the nearby carnivorous terror out of its slumber.

Opening one golden eye, it focused on them.

"We … we gotta get back to the forest!" Mike yelled. With Davy still draped between himself and Peter, it took a moment to get everyone turned around, and by that time, the dinosaur had pushed itself to its feet. Despite not being the largest creature, it still stood taller than Michael by at least a couple feet, and probably weighed a whole lot more, too. In summary, it was the most terrifying thing they'd ever seen, and it wasted no time in pursuing them.

With a grace none of them would have ever believed possible, it stepped past the machine, tail brushing against it instead of through it. The dinosaur could touch it.

"Holy cow, did you see that?!" Micky exclaimed. Mike and Peter looked over their shoulders at the same time, which turned out to be a mistake. Without looking where he was going, Peter missed the rock jutting out of the hill in front of him and tripped, taking Davy down with him.

Before Micky could even register what had happened, the beast was upon them. They could smell its rotten breath, and its teeth couldn't have been more than a foot away. Micky was sure he screamed, and he knew Peter did. Davy, still in pain from the fall, was nearly in hysterical tears.

But somehow in the middle of it all, Mike had managed to regain his balance and sling the broken guitar off his shoulder. With a force that would have been impossible without a good amount of adrenaline, he swung it around and completely splintered it against the dinosaur's face.

Their pursuer stumbled and wavered. Then it roared.

"I think y'made 'im mad, Mike," Davy grunted as Mike tried to help him back up. Frustratingly, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, though, and it took forever to get the shorter boy to his feet. When they were finally moving again, it felt as if they were trying to run through tar or something. The trees were so far away, and with every step they took, the forest seemed to grow more and more distant. The dinosaur was already chasing them again; they'd never make it.

In his peripheral vision, he saw the monster's long snout just inches away. Instinctively, Micky dropped to his knees, covering his head with his arms and waiting for his painful end to come.

But it didn't.

He heard the hooting and screeching first. When he dared to look up, he was greeted with the glorious sight of their entire flock of raptor friends leaping upon the killer crocodile, filing out of the trees one after another to push the beast backward. With the weight of at least a dozen of the smaller creatures on top of it, their adversary struggled to remain standing, its legs eventually giving out under it. As it rolled down the hill toward the river, the deinonychus flock jumped off, hissing and snarling in warning, until it splashed into the water.

It roared again, but the flock was quick to close in. With such a clear and present threat, the larger dinosaur finally decided it was better to sink below the surface to soak its many wounds.

Micky took a breath, finally, looking at the others. Much like Davy had been all along, they were all pale at this point, staring wide-eyed at their unlikely saviors, who were returning to them back up the hill.

Mike pushed himself to his feet, legs very obviously unsteady, meeting the crimson female leader of the pack as she neared them. Tentatively, he reached out a hand, and when she didn't react to this, he very gently stroked her neck.

She responded by butting her head against his chest. Mike responded in turn by giving her the most unlikely hug to have ever happened in the history of all of time.

"They musta heard us yelling," Peter said, standing.

At the sound of his voice, one more raptor wandered out of the trees. Already larger than he'd been the last time they saw him, little Fido wasn't yet too big to jump into Peter's arms, nearly knocking the blond right back to the ground. Ecstatic, Peter wrapped the little hatchling in his arms, ruffling his downy feathers.

"Good thing they did," Micky said, unable to suppress a very relieved chuckle. He was hesitant to cut the reunion short, but the day was getting lighter now, and they only had a couple more minutes to get themselves home, at most. If they waited another day, Davy could get sicker. Or, they could be eaten by angry river monsters. "You guys, follow me. Peter, bring Fido with you."

The crimson female and a couple of the other raptors followed them as well, obviously disturbed by the strange combination of the hillside as well as the little portions of Hollywood that surrounded them. Still, they must have formed some kind of trust through the music, because they didn't seem particularly agitated.

Micky took the raptor chick from Peter, cradling it in his arms for a moment, before setting him down on the surface of the machine.

"You say your goodbye, Pete?" he asked.

Wiping a tear away, Peter nodded.

The others stood around him. Michael was practically carrying Davy at this point. Their proximity to the machine was almost perfect.

Meeting Fido's eyes, Micky looked at the button, then mimed pressing it. His hand went right through it, which caused the little dinosaur to tilt its head. After Micky repeated the gesture one more time, it was as if a lightbulb turned on above Fido's head, and very deliberately, he stepped onto the button.

Like before, the transition between one time and another was instantaneous and without any sensation of having traveled at all. One moment they were surrounded by a ghostly image of their home set among the trees, and the next, they were physically there in their own living room.

The stress which had been holding Micky on his feet for the past day finally evaporated, and he sank to his knees, laughing.

—-

Their first order of business was to get Davy to the hospital. They made up a story about him being bitten by a wild boar while they were out hiking and managed to get him treated without too much fuss. He had to stay overnight, but it wasn't long before he could go home with his leg wrapped in clean bandages from his ankle all the way up to his knee. The infection responded quite well to the antibiotics, and Mike even got compliment from the attending doctor on his field dressing skills.

It would leave a nasty scar, but at least the damage wasn't permanent, and, as Davy stated again, at least it wasn't his face.

Despite the fact that they'd ended up leaving pieces of their floor and bits of Mike's guitar in the Cretaceous, Micky couldn't find anything in scientific history which hinted to the fact that things that were supposed to be modern had been carbon dated to the previous era. Likewise, there were no mentions of human footprints dating earlier than when they were supposed to exist.

Micky wondered if the raptors had hidden all evidence of their existence after they left. Maybe they knew. Maybe it was all just lucky.

Life got back to normal. The time machine was disassembled, and with Mike's urging, they threw all pieces of it into a bonfire on the beach one night and burned it. Even though it was probably the greatest scientific discovery of their time, Micky determined that the risks of hopping around in time far outweighed the benefits. Perhaps, he thought, when he was older, he'd revisit his invention in some other form.

It appeared they'd dodged any bullet related to changing the past and affecting their own present.

It wasn't until months later that Micky, who still casually checked various scientific-related periodicals for any inkling of their prehistoric adventure, finally happened upon an article that made his jaw drop.

"Guys, check this out," he said, opening the National Geographic to the middle. The others gathered around him, looking at pictures of some rather interesting fossil imprints. One in particular seemed to be a very thin series of strings - they looked like vines or sinew - stretched out in a very deliberate pattern. It was certainly no guitar, but the intention was clear.

Micky flipped back a couple pages, pointing to the title of the article.

"Dinosaurs Invent Song," Mike read. "Well. Can't say I'm too sorry, Micky."

"Creates a little bit of a paradox," the drummer said, scratching the back of his head. He let slip a half smile. "Mike teaches 'em how to play. They, in turn, create instruments. So what came first, the Nesmith or the Deinonychus?"

Mike shook his head, picking up the magazine, and meandered off to read the article.