Story Idea - Time Travel

 I have this idea for a story. It borrows from other stories so, we'll see. The details are likely to change.

In the late 40s a boy named Tommy is ten years old and a student at Duling Elementary School in Jackson, MS. His teacher is Miss Becker. She's twenty-three and beautiful. Tommy's father died recently, and he stutters so he's extremely shy and has no friends. Miss Becker befriends him and tries to help him feel better about his situation.

One day, Tommy says "Miss Becker, I don't know what I'd do without you, when I get as old as you I'm going to marry you!" Miss Becker laughs

One night, there's a huge flash of light and Tommy wakes up in a room with glowing white walls and strange figures are around him. The figures are from the future. Their bodies look strange because humans no longer use their physical bodies. They've expanded his mind so he can understand what they say to him.

In the future, humans can travel in time, but they can only observe. They can't make any changes. Time travel is a device for their historians. Their machines can visit any point or place in time, before the date the machine was turned on. As their machines pass through time, their machines pass by unnoticed by the people living the regular time line, but one in a billion will become attached to the machine as it goes by, and Tommy was one in a billion.

They don't have a way to return Tommy to his body so he can live out his life, but they can return his mind to bodies of people who are moments from dying, and he can live our their lives, or a part of their lives.

There's a flash, and Tommy wakes up in the body of a twenty year old. Miss Becker is now seven. Realizing their roles in time have changed, Tommy gets a job at the school as a custodian. He watches Miss Becker grow up, but tries not to ever have her notice him.

When he turns thirty five, there's another flash and Tommy wakes in in 1969, he's a sophomore at Murrah High School, and Miss Becker (Now Mrs Thompson) is the principal. She has a husband and children.

There are a few more flashes, and a few more changes of age and relative ages between them, and one day he's at a facility like St. Catherines. Tommy is eighty-nine with COPD. Miss Becker is 92 and has progressing alzheimers.

Miss Becker can't remember the present, but she can remember the past. She and Tommy become friends. They are in different parts of the facility, but he visits her ever day. Because her mind is disjointed and floats around in time, Tommy is the only one she can really communicate with. Tommy is the only one who knows he's shared all these experiences with Miss Becker, but in different bodies.

One day, Miss Becker says her friend Tommy promised to marry her. It becomes all she can talk about. Her daughter asks Tommy if he actually has asked her to marry him, and he says he hasn't, but another boy named Tommy did, a long time ago.

Miss Becker starts to get upset if anybody tries to tell her she's not going to marry Tommy. She doesnt' recognize Tommy in this new body with a new name. Finally, Tommy says, he can't legally marry Miss Becker because of her illness she can't give consent, but if it will make her calmer and happy to pretend to get married, he'll do it.

The doctors are unsure about this idea, but they know she may not remember it the next day, and even if she did, neither she nor Tommy had very much time left.

The nurses push the wheelchairs together, and they have a pretend wedding with Tommy and Miss Becker holding hands. When she says "I Do", she looks at Tommy, for the first time, and realizes who he is, and how he's always been with her, but she's too weak to talk about it. That night, both Tommy and Miss Becker pass away in their sleep.