Oh, come on, you know someone had to do it! So here's my little story, just my idea of what Amy's fanfiction from episode 8x14 (The Troll Manifestation) would have been in its entirety. A special thank you to my friend Melissa, who dropped everything to proof/beta read this on short notice so that I could post it as soon as possible. But all historical & other errors remain mine alone. Without further ado . . .

Amelia and the Time Traveling Physicist

An AU Little House on the Prairie Fanfiction

It was just past dawn on the prairie, and, like every morning, Amelia prepared to do her chores. Except something about this morning felt different. Maybe it was the first whisper of winter in the air. Or maybe it was the unconscious, handsome man with porcelain skin and curious clothing she was about to discover lying in the field. A man who would open her mind to new possibilities and her body to new feelings.

Amelia was alone that morning and she was determined to do everything perfectly, just the way her father would. She knew how important these few days were, how much her parents were counting on her. They had taken her little brother and left her alone for the first time ever, the entire farmstead, the log cabin, the livestock all in her care. They had left for their annual trip to Kansas City to sell the crops that just been harvested and to buy the supplies needed for the rapidly approaching winter.

Coming out of the back of the barn, she saw smoke over the rise. A cry rose in her throat. Not a prairie fire! Even though the crops were all harvested, it would be impossible for Amelia to sound the alarm, save the livestock, and start battling a fire all by herself. She raced over the hill and almost tripped over him, coming down the other side.

He looked so peaceful, as though he was sleeping. He was long and thin with dark hair and the palest, most beautiful skin she had ever seen. It was even paler than hers, at the end of winter. And certainly paler than it was now, tanned by hours spent working in the sun. Who had such pale skin at the end of harvest? And what was he wearing?

There was some sort of . . . well, it was like a very small train engine . . . behind him, shiny and silver. Smoke was pouring out of a gap in the front, but there did not seem to be any actual fire. Amelia couldn't understand what she was seeing, where this . . . train had come from, even what it was. It made her head spin, and she worried that she, too, might pass out beside the stranger.

The stranger. He looked like a normal person, just like everyone she knew. She would concentrate on him. Amelia looked down at him, wondering how seriously he was injured. She saw nothing obvious. She gently reached out to touch his forehead.

His eyes popped open, and they screamed at each other, the man struggling to sit upright, Amelia struggling to get away.

"Who are you? Where am I?" he yelled, angrily, gripping the front of his unusual red shirt with what appeared to be a spider embroidered on it.

"I should ask you the same! This is my family's property, and you have trespassed here!" Amelia parroted his own tone.

"I'm Cooper, and I am not trespassing!" He looked around him, his head swiveling rapidly side to side. Then he continued, but much softer this time, "But this is not where I intended to be." He looked at his train engine and got up. "Oh, no, no, no! Something has gone wrong!"

He swung back to look at Amelia, who was still sitting on the ground. "The date! What is the date? And where am I?"

Amelia got up and put her hands on her hips. His angry tone had returned, and she was not about to let a stranger, a trespasser, no matter how beautiful his skin was, speak to her that way. "It's November third. You're in Kansas, on my family's farm. My name is Amelia."

"Kansas? What year is this?" He raked his eyes up and down Amelia, and suddenly she felt a blush. There was something about this look. She had never been looked at that way before. "Based on your clothing and hairstyle, I would conjecture the later half of the 19th century. I mean, the 1800s. Perhaps you are not aware of the astronomical year numbering system. Although you should be, as it was in 1740 that the French astronomer Jacques Cassini invented the year zero and -"

"I know what the 19th century means!" Amelia interrupted him. Who did this stranger, this Cooper, think he was, to talk to her like that? On her own farm? "It's 1886. And you have a lot more explaining to do!"

He sighed heavily. "Very well. I see now that I am at your mercy. As I said, my name is Cooper. I'm a physicist and a time traveler. I was attempting to reach Cambridge in 1672. I wanted to ask Isaac Newton a question about optics - Never mind, you wouldn't understand."

"Isaac Newton? The one who wrote laws of motion? That Isaac Newton? He's dead. How would you ask him a question, even if your train could travel over water to Europe?" Amelia felt like she was in that book her parents had given her for Christmas last year, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Cooper cocked his head and stared at her. "You know of Isaac Newton? And Cambridge?"

"Yes, I can read! I've seen a globe!" She tried to raise herself up, to get closer to his height, even though that was impossible. "I won the graduation prize last year. A copy of Shakespeare's folio."

He smiled at her and that changed everything, the angles of his face shifting. Amelia realized how blue his eyes were, how handsome he was.

"Very well," he said. "Yes, Sir Newton is dead. But I am a time traveller. I was traveling through time to meet with him."

"Time travel? I don't understand," said Amelia. His smile had softened her, and her curiosity about the things he was saying outweighed her need to stand up to him.

Cooper stared at her. "Which word don't you understand? Time or travel?"

It stung Amelia when he spoke to her this way. In her little one room schoolhouse she was always the smartest student, regularly besting the boys in her class. But this was no boy in front of her. This was a man.

And this man seemed oblivious to the insult he had just given. Instead, he sat down on the grass next to her and started to speak. He spoke as though he was giving a lecture, as though Amelia was his prize pupil. A man had never spoke to her like this before, like she was his equal, like she could understand everything he was telling her. Cooper told Amelia about all the strange and incredible things the future would hold, like computers and living past thirty. He asked her if she had any questions.

All she longed to ask was if his heart was beating as fast as hers. But she was too afraid to hear the answer. So instead she asked if in the future Montana ever became a state.

Cooper raised his eyebrows. "Why, yes. In 1889. Is that really what you wanted to know most?"

Amelia blushed and shrugged, looking down at the green grass beneath her. It would start to turn brown any day now, she knew. She hated winter.

"You still haven't told me about yourself," Cooper said, softly.

"There isn't much to tell."

"I doubt that." Something in the way he spoke made Amelia look up at him. He was looking at her, no, staring at her, and the sight of his interest made the blood rush through Amelia's ears. He was no longer at her mercy, she was at his. "All I know about you is that this is your family's farm, and you're the smartest girl here, wherever here is. But what about your family? And where are they? Shouldn't your . . . husband? . . . be around?"

Amelia blushed deeper at the question. "I'm not married. I live with my parents and my younger brother."

"Isn't that unusual for this time? How old are you?"

"I'm nineteen." Amelia felt nervous. She could not explain it, given how unusual this whole situation was, but she did not want this stranger to think there was something wrong with her. She took a deep breath. "I was to be married last autumn. His name was John. He was our neighbor. We grew up together. He was two years older than me."

"Was?"

"He died a month before the wedding. He was kicked by a horse." Amelia sighed. She had not talked about this to anyone yet, not really. "He wanted to wait to marry until the first harvest on the homestead. He was being kind. The first summer of crops is always the most difficult."

"Did you love him?"

The wind suddenly picked up and whipped around them. Amelia noticed the smoke was almost gone from the machine. In all the times she had thought about marrying John, in all the plans that were made, in all the sorrows and disappointments that came at the end, no one, not even John, had asked her that.

"I don't think so," she whispered. Shouldn't love be like Romeo and Juliet? An ache deep in one's soul, a craving, a need? Here, in Kansas, she knew, it often wasn't. It was a pact, a necessary pairing, one to take care of the land, one to take care of the house, a meeting in the middle to create children, more hands to help till and sow and milk and slaughter.

Amelia looked out of the corner of her eye at Cooper. He was staring straight in front of him. What was love like in his time? Was it also practical? Or was it a desire?

All of her life, her father had teased her, telling her to get her head out of the clouds, to stop believing everything she read. It was teasing - he gave her a book every year for Christmas, and far younger girls than she had been taken out of school to work the farm - but she knew it was also laced with truth. After John had died, in the midst of her sleepless nights, she had overheard her parents talking one night.

"I worry about Amelia," her father had said. "John was a good man, he would have been gentle with her. But how else will she find a husband now? She always was a dreamer, not a worker. Everyone here knows that. All we can hope is someone new comes along. I'll miss her, but what Amelia needs is someone to take her away."

"Cooper?" she asked suddenly. "Are you going to repair your machine? Are you going . . . back to the future?"

He looked at her and laughed. It was the first time he had laughed, and it was a different laugh: catchy and sharp. But pleasant.

"What's so funny?"

"Back to the Future! It's the name of a movie!"

"What's a movie?"

Cooper smiled. "I'll tell you later. While I work. Yes, I'm going to repair my machine. And, yes, I have no choice but to go back to the future. I don't belong here. I could never fit in, I could never hide my knowledge from the world. I would forever alter the timeline." He frowned. "I've probably already told you too much."

"Then why did you?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. You seemed like a dreamer."

Amelia turned her head away. She couldn't tell if the feeling in her stomach was longing or hunger. She realized how much time she had wasted, sitting on the hillside, listening to this magical man tell her unbelievable things. The sun was high in the sky. "Come on," she said, standing. "Let's go. I'll make you lunch. How do flap jacks sound? Since we didn't eat breakfast?"

"Oh, goody! With chocolate chips?" Cooper stood and started to walk toward the house with her.

She laughed at his childish glee. "What are chocolate chips?"

After a lunch of flap jacks, Amelia returned with Cooper to the machine. She had stopped to get her father's tool box from the barn, but as soon as Cooper lifted the shiny metal skin from the machine she knew they would be useless. It wasn't like a train engine at all or even the thrasher. The insides were green, with tiny ribbons of silver running through them, this way and that way, intersecting, some running in parallel, all the angles sharp right turns.

"Oh, what do you call these? They're beautiful," she asked.

"Circuit boards," Cooper answered. He smiled at her. "It's rare to find someone else who appreciates the intrinsic beauty of electronics. Here, help me, and I'll explain them to you."

Amelia helped, touching everything gently, afraid she might break it. She liked listening him talk, how sure he sounded, all the things he was telling her. Unable to understand at least half of it, she remained mostly silent, content to let Cooper explain everything to her. She looked at his hands as they worked. They were such beautiful hands, not at all like the hands of all the men she knew. They are so clean and there were no calluses that she could see. Curious, she purposely brushed against one. Cooper stopped what he was saying and looked up at her. She felt her heart start pounding under his gaze again.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I just . . ."

Cooper held out his hand. "Were you trying to feel it?"

Blushing, she nodded. "It's just that they look so different from what I'm used to."

"Different? Homo sapiens have been around for at least 200,000 years. With the same opposable thumbs."

"Cleaner. And softer, I'd imagine."

He smiled. "There's only one way to find out. Think of it as a scientific experiment. You're testing a hypothesis."

Then he brushed his hand against hers. For the first time in her life, Amelia felt a shiver from someone else's touch. After they had agreed to marry, John would sometimes touch her hand or hold her elbow when he came over to lunch every Sunday. But never once had she shivered. Unable to help herself, Amelia took Cooper's hand in both of hers, tracing its contours with her fingertips. It was even softer than she had imagined. She turned his hand over and slowly rubbed her palm against his. She felt another shiver. She pulled her hand back, resting her fingertips against the pads of his. It felt like what she thought electricity would feel like, like all of those silver wires, running through her, coursing, turning, racing. She and Cooper, two beings of silver electricity, intersecting on the green of the prairie.

To be continued . . .

Thank you in advance for your reviews!