"Hello this is your captain speaking. I need to inform you that over the German-Netherlands border there will be some turbulence and we request you keep your seat-belts on until the turbulence has passed. The light above your head with the seatbelt symbol will turn off when it is once again safe to stand up. Thank you for your attention." The captain's announcement rang through the plane, but nobody really heard it. Airpods, earphones, noise-cancelling bugs and so on and so forth covered almost every eardrum. The announcement followed in German but failed to gain the interest of more than a handfull of the passengers. Killian Werner-O'Leary was one of the only attentive flyers of Irish Airways, only because he'd firstly, lost his earphones in the airport and secondly, was too excited about his trip to Germany to have focused on the Audiobooks he had downloaded on his phone anyway. His head was aching, as always, but he didn't feel it. He'd been born and raised in Dublin and now, for the first and last time, he was going to set foot in Germany. His grandfather had been a German soldier who'd managed to escape death in World War II by fleeing to Ireland in the year 1939 where he'd met Killian's Irish grandmother, hence his surname "Werner-O'Leary". Surprisingly, they'd always taught their children German, cooked German dishes and tried to educate their children and grandchildren on German culture and history.
The first bump came, jolting O'Leary sideways a little bit. He grabbed the front of the seat in front of him. O'Leary'd been diagnosed with brain cancer at sweet sixteen, a fact that had caused him his girlfriend, his health and many of his friends. By eighteen his health was too weak to continue playing soccer, and, to his parents horror, his memory started to jumble up, his intelligence raced down-hill and he was rejected by all the Universities of Ireland that he'd applied to. The bright future the smart, yet somewhat lazy, young irishman had faced turned into dust. O'Leary was left to spend the rest of his teenage-years and early-twenties in the hospital or his bedroom. Almost friendless, definitely depressed. One friend "Brian" had stayed with him, a left-handed genius who's red-hair and freckles screamed his origin to any passer-by. In spite of his abnormal intelligence Brian had become a bartender in a smallish pub called the Wickety-Wackety-Rickety-Rackety Six. He said the reason for his descision had been a sweet colleen who'd worked there but O'Leary suspected it was due to his alcoholism and due to the fact that his hours allowed him to spend more time with his dying friend.
The plane bounced up and down again, tossing O'Leary up against his seatbelt which he tightened a bit more. Turbulance was terrible for his medical condition. Any kind of sudden movement should be avoided, his doctor had advised, otherwise patients were prone to experience extreme head-aches and puking.
A man about to die is not allowed to travel alone. So a nurse that he'd grown close to, she was almost a friend, had offered to take him to Germany. Her name was Erin and she was beautiful in an irish way; freckled and hearty. He grabbed her hand as the turbulance increased in frequency. He'd never flown before, and his anxiety was through the roof. O'Leary clenched Erin's hand tightly. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe slowly. He suddenly became aware of the headache.
"It's going to be alright, Killy." She whispered to him. But to Killian it wasn't alright. Nothing was alright, really. "I've been on several flights and some have been worse than this one-." Her sentence was cut off by a tremendous jolt as the whole plane seemed to drop by one or two meters. "Okay, nevermind." She said. It had, admittingly, been the worst flight Erin McCathy had been on as well.
"How much longer is the flight going to be?" O'Leary asked, his eyes still pressed tightly shut. He was starting to wish that he hadn't lost his earphones, maybe some music could have relaxed him a little bit even if it would cause his head to hurt more later.
"It's not that much longer, don't worry." She reassured him and squeezed his hands. Sometimes a physical reassurance helps more than a verbal one. "Just think about how great Germany is going to be-." Once again the plane jumped in the air, throwing everyone around in their seats.
A second later the plane dipped to the left. There was a loud sound, almost like an explosion. O'Leary's eyes sprung open in terror. He was seated on the left side of the plane and something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye; he leaned back and looked at the wing where the engine was - where the engine was burning. For a moment he was transfixed by the sight; smoke billowed out, leaving a grey cloud in the sky behind them, the flames licked the wing, dying out quickly on the outside but continuously raging on in the inside of the turbines.
Then the plane dropped. It sped downwards, nose headed straight for the ground at a speed that made the skin press onto your skull, almost popping your eyes out. Erin screamed, some of the other passengers did as well. O'Leary couldn't even yell. In his eyes the flames kept burning. His view was completely shrouded by the smoke. The wailing and shouting of his fellow passengers faded into the background. Was this it? Was he going to die? The thought occured to him that this way to go would be less painfull than cancer, but he'd had years to prepare himself for his death, to accept it. And now he was going to die from something else, something unpredictible and pretty unlikely. God must be fucking with me.
He felt something for a split second; something that could have been impact, but he couldn't have been sure. It was the last thing he felt.
***
For the firefighters who betreaded the plane which had crashed into a farmers field near Köln, it was unexplainable how and why the passenger who'd been seated in seat 33F was missing. There was nobody in the lavratories either. Everyone on the entire flight was dead, they'd all died in an instant, painlessly. So where was 33F? The firefighters reported the missing man to the police, who told them to keep it a secret until further investigated, it must have been a mistake, there was no way that the passenger had disappeared. Maybe Mr. O'Leary-Werner hadn't been on the flight afterall? He was a cancer patient, it was possible something had come up, leaving him unable to cancel the flight on such a short-notice...
But Killian Werner-O'Leary had been on the flight. But he hadn't been on the plane when it'd crashed. A second before impact he'd been whisked away; back in time, and a few kilometers to the east where a smallish German train had fallen off the tracks, leaving passengers in the debris waiting to be rescued by the Wehrmacht.
O'Leary was pulled out of the train, his clothes so torn and dirty that his rescuers couldn't tell they came from a different time, and transported to the nearest military hospital. All of the passengers on the train to Berlin had been recruits of the German Army. He would wake up two days later, with a splitting headache that wasn't due to his cancer but much rather due to the series of unfortunate events he'd been through. For such an unlucky individual, O'Leary was one lucky man.