The last day of the third week of July. Again. The sun, a relentless, uncaring eye in the sky, beat down on the familiar street. At forty-three, the weight of my accumulated years and failures pressed down on me, heavier than the gun concealed beneath my jacket. My surroundings were a dull, grey canvas; the vibrant life of the city, the laughter, the everyday sounds – they were just muted background noise to the roaring silence in my own head. I was a ghost haunting my own tragedy, forced to watch the same scene for the third, and hopefully final, time.
I scanned the bustling sidewalk, my eyes, weary but sharp, searching for that nondescript face, the harbinger of my doom. Minutes stretched into an eternity. He wasn't there. Where I remembered him appearing, there was just an empty space in the crowd.
A frantic, wild hope, sharp and painful as a shard of glass, pierced through my resignation. Had it worked? Had my mere presence, my altered intention, somehow shifted the currents of time? The thought was a dizzying rush, a sudden gasp of air after drowning.
But just as quickly, a colder, more insidious thought slithered in. If he wasn't here, then what would happen? Would Rina be safe? Or had I merely changed the actor, not the play? My gaze darted around, panic clawing at my throat.
Then I saw him. A man, sitting on a park bench across the street, looking tense, his eyes fixed on the spot where Rina and my younger self would soon appear. He was younger than me, maybe early thirties, but his posture radiated a similar desperate energy. He looked… familiar, in a way that scraped at my memory, but my panic-addled brain couldn't place him. In that fractured moment, my mind, twisted by years of grief and the paranoia of a failed god, leaped to a terrifying conclusion: the event had changed, and this man was the new threat. He was here for Rina.
My hand, slick with sweat, closed around the gun. There was no thought, only a desperate, animalistic urge to protect, to eliminate this new, unforeseen variable.
Younger Kaito and Rina rounded the corner, her laughter echoing, a sound that was both a balm and a torment. The man on the bench tensed, about to rise.
He was going to hurt her. He had to be.
I raised the gun, my arm shaking. I aimed. I fired.
The crack of the shot. A scream. Not from the man on the bench.
Rina.
She stumbled, her hand flying to her chest. That dark, blooming stain. Again. My bullet. My bullet.
The world tilted, colors smearing, sounds warping. The man on the bench – I saw his face clearly now, aghast, horrified. It was me. Me from eleven years ago, the thirty-two-year-old Kaito, here on his desperate mission to save her, the one who had dived to take the bullet.
And I had just shot Rina.
The realization crashed over me with the force of a physical blow. There was no change. There was never going to be a change. I wasn't preventing the tragedy. I was the tragedy. I was the gunman. The man my younger self would kill. The bootstrap paradox wasn't just a theory; it was the cruel, intricate cage of my existence.
A raw, guttural sound escaped me, a sound of utter, soul-shattering despair.
Then, he was there. My twenty-one-year-old self, his face a mask of incandescent rage, launching himself at me, the cheap ballpen clutched in his hand. I saw the flash of it, felt the sickening puncture in my neck. Once. Twice. Warmth spread across my chest. My own blood.
As I crumpled to the pavement, the life ebbing out of me, the pieces clicked into place with horrifying clarity. I built the machine to save Rina because she was killed. She was killed by me, because I built the machine to save her. Round and round, an eternal, self-sustaining nightmare.
The scientist in me, the one who had meticulously pieced together the laws of physics, who had never believed in a higher power, let out a final, silent curse. Not at fate, not at the universe, but at God. If there was a God, He was a cruel, capricious puppeteer, and I was His favorite, tormented toy. This wouldn't have happened if I hadn't built the machine. But the reason I built it… was because of the machine itself. He had played me. He had made me the architect of my own damnation.
The world began to dim. The last thing I saw was Kenji, the investigator, rushing onto the scene. His eyes met mine for a fleeting second, filled with a profound, weary sadness.
Kenji's gaze swept the scene. He saw a figure – the thirty-two-year-old Kaito, clutching his bleeding shoulder where my stray shot must have grazed him – scrambling away, disappearing into the panicked crowd. Kenji knew that haunted, desperate look. He then knelt beside my younger, twenty-one-year-old self, who was now cradling Rina's lifeless body, his face a wasteland of grief. Kenji gently turned the young man's head, his eyes finding the small, familiar mole behind his left ear. The story the other Kaito had told him, the wild tale of time travel, crashed into him with the force of undeniable truth.
Then, Kenji looked at me, the "gunman," dying on the pavement. He checked behind my ear. The same mole.
A heavy sigh escaped him. "I knew it," he whispered, his voice barely audible above the rising sirens. "I knew this would happen."
Images flashed through Kenji's mind: Years ago, in a cluttered apartment, a younger Kaito, wild-eyed and broken, explaining his mad plan to build a time machine. And then, even further back, a kindly, concerned engineer, Mr. Tanaka, trying to dissuade that same Kaito, his words full of warning about paradoxes and the dangers of meddling with time. Mr. Tanaka, with his quiet wisdom, his sad eyes… Kenji, older now, was Mr. Tanaka. He had lived through this loop, tried to stop it from a different angle, and failed. He still had that one unused capsule, hidden away, a relic of a hope he'd once cherished. His friend. He'd tried to save his friend from himself.
From an alleyway across the street, unseen by the chaos, another figure watched. He was older still, fifty-one, his face a roadmap of countless sorrows, each line a testament to a repeated, failed intervention. He, too, bore the mole behind his ear. He watched Kenji, watched his younger selves, watched Rina. A tear traced a path down his weathered cheek.
"I'm sorry, Kaito," the fifty-one-year-old man whispered to the dying echoes of himself. "It was fixed from the very beginning. My oath… to try and find a way… I can't keep it anymore." His gaze drifted upwards, to the indifferent sky. "I want to leave God's Playground." With a quiet finality, he raised a small, self-made device to his temple. A faint click, then silence.
People decide what is the future even though it's already written. If you want a certain future, you should lead it. Even though you know already the results. Try to alter it even if it's unalterable.
The Time Is Fixed. No Matter what interruptions you make, it already happened. The interruptions you make are part of the past.
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Or not.