The investigator, whose name I learned was Kenji, listened to my story with an unnerving calm. He didn't dismiss me, didn't call me crazy. Perhaps the old man who raised him – my future, or alternate, self – had prepared him for such impossibilities. We talked for hours in a quiet, out-of-the-way noodle shop, the steam from our bowls fogging the air. I told him the date, the time, the street. My plan was brutally simple, born of eleven years of festering grief and singular focus: I would be there. I would put myself between Rina and the bullet. No complex machinations, no intricate plots to find the gunman beforehand – I didn't have the resources or the time for that. My only weapon was foreknowledge and a desperate willingness to sacrifice myself.
Kenji, despite his initial acceptance, tried to gently probe for more details, for a better plan. "Are you sure you can't identify him beforehand? Warn her? Take her somewhere else?"
"There's no time," I insisted, my voice tight. "And changing too much… I don't know what that would do. I just need to stop that moment." He saw the unyielding resolve in my eyes, the frantic edge of a man clinging to his last hope. He eventually relented, promising to be nearby, discreetly, though I wasn't sure what a lone detective could do against a predetermined fate.
The next five days were an agony of waiting. I stayed in a cheap motel, venturing out only for necessities, the vibrant, oblivious city a constant, painful reminder of what was at stake. Every laughing young couple I saw was a twist of the knife. The world felt sharp, unnaturally clear, yet dreamlike. Familiar streets, shops, even the scent of the summer air – it was all exactly as I remembered from my youth, but now overlaid with a suffocating sense of dread. This wasn't the fuzzy, half-ignored background of my first experience; this was a stage, meticulously set for a tragedy I was desperate to rewrite.
On the last day of the third week of July, the sun beat down with the same cheerful indifference it had eleven years ago. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I dressed in inconspicuous clothing, my senses screamingly alert. I found the street, the exact spot. I saw the cafe Rina and I were heading towards. Each mundane detail – a child chasing a pigeon, an old woman watering her potted plants, the melody drifting from a storefront – was a nail in the coffin of my composure.
Then I saw them. My younger self, nineteen and carefree, his arm around Rina. Her laughter, clear and bright, drifted towards me, a sound I hadn't truly heard in over a decade. It was beautiful. It was unbearable. They were walking, talking, oblivious.
I positioned myself across the street, slightly ahead of where I knew the gunman would appear, my gaze sweeping the crowd, my muscles coiled tight. My preparations felt laughably inadequate – I had no weapon, only my body and a desperate hope. The world seemed to slow, the sounds around me fading into a dull roar, just like before, but this time I was an unwilling participant in the director's cut, not just a horrified spectator.
There.
The same nondescript man, looks old, stepping out from the flow of pedestrians. His face was a blank, his eyes empty. He raised his arm. The glint of metal.
This time, I didn't hesitate. There was no black rage, only a cold, calculated desperation.
"RINA!" I roared, my voice ripping through the afternoon calm, louder than I intended.
I launched myself off the curb, shoving through startled pedestrians, my eyes locked on the barrel of the gun. Younger Kaito and Rina turned, their faces masks of confusion at my shout. I saw the moment the gunman's gaze flickered, momentarily distracted by my sudden appearance.
It wasn't enough.
He fired.
I dove, a desperate, sprawling leap, aiming to intercept the bullet, to shield Rina with my own body. I felt a searing pain tear through my shoulder, a fiery agony that stole my breath. I crashed onto the pavement, the impact jarring through my bones.
But I was too slow. Or perhaps, too late from the start.
Even as I fell, even through the haze of pain, I saw it. Rina flinched. The dark stain, impossibly red, blossomed on her light blue shirt, just as it had in my unending nightmares. Her eyes widened, not with the laughter of moments before, but with that same terrible shock, that same dawning horror.
She crumpled. Again.
"No!" The sound tore from my throat, a raw, animalistic cry of pure anguish.
My younger self was frozen, his face a mask of utter devastation, just as mine had been. The scene played out with horrifying fidelity. The screams from the crowd. The gunman, looking down, his expression still chillingly blank before his eyes darted towards me, the new, unexpected element in his deadly equation.
I had seen everything. I had known everything. And it had made no difference. The script was immutable. My intervention, my pain, my sacrifice – it was all just another verse in the same tragic song. The despair that crashed over me was a thousand times heavier than the first time. Then, it was shock and rage. Now, it was the crushing weight of inevitability, the bitter taste of a universe that simply would not yield. Hopelessness, cold and absolute, began to seep into the very marrow of my bones.