The Meeting of Worlds

Lucille noticed the strange square dial on Isao's wrist. Her eyes widened as she discovered the black screen, where the zeros of midnight remained frozen. With an impulsive gesture, she lightly touched the object with her fingertips.

"Is this... magic ?" she asked, hesitant.

Isao shook his head with an amused smile.

"No, it's modern technology. It's a smartwatch. Normally, it shows the time and other information, but since I've been here, it has stayed stuck at midnight."

"A watch ?" Lucille repeated, incredulous.

She found it hard to believe that this black object, with no hands or circular form, could be a watch. To her, a watch had to be delicately crafted, round, adorned with hands, and accompanied by the soft ticking of its mechanism.

"You must have seen it, though, right ? During my photo shoots... or when I showed you pictures of my city," Isao added, a little surprised.

Lucille lowered her gaze, clearly embarrassed. In a barely audible breath, she confessed, shaking her head slightly:

"Through my mirror... I can't see further than a meter or two. And... this world rejects evolution. What I perceive on your side remains blurry, frozen... in black and white."

She timidly looked up at him, as if this confession made her vulnerable. Isao's heart tightened at the sight of her expression, a mix of fragility and silent melancholy.

To make her smile, he took his smartphone out of his pocket. The screen lit up softly, causing Lucille to flinch, stepping back a pace before being drawn into the fascination.
Her face, still marked by sadness, lit up with the surprise of wonder. Her eyes sparkled with the raw gleam of a child discovering a new world.

"It's kind of like a telegraph... but for everything," Isao explained gently.

"Everything ?" she repeated, both frightened and fascinated.

"Messages, images, music..."

He scrolled through a few photos on the screen. In one of them, young people in yukatas posed beneath the cherry blossoms in the Haradani-en garden for hanami. Lucille brought a hand to her mouth.

"Is this your world ? So colorful... so strange... so wonderful."

In another photo, a young couple were having a picnic at a fountain under the cherry blossoms, rocked by the pink snow of the petals. Without further explanation, she suddenly exclaimed:

"The Medici Fountain!" she cried out without any further context.

Before he could react, she pulled him through the bustling streets of Paris, her heart racing.

They walked through the streets until they reached a grand, ornate gate, the entrance to a lavish villa. Was this where Lucille lived ? Isao didn’t have time to think about it: she asked him to wait and disappeared behind the gates. When she reappeared a few minutes later, she was carrying an elegant wicker basket.

The next hour was spent visiting grocery stores, a bakery, and then the market, where she filled her basket with a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese. Throughout their wanderings, Isao observed everything with the eyes of a photographer: this Paris of another century, frozen in forgotten splendor that no longer existed in his time except in history books. The absence of steel towers, the rattling carriages, the period costumes... Everything reminded him of the scale of his journey.

Arriving at the Luxembourg Gardens, they found the Medici Fountain bathed in the golden light of a spring morning.

They sat side by side on a secluded bench. Isao played a Chopin playlist on his smartphone. Their first exchanges were hesitant, marked by a slight awkwardness, almost endearing. How could they talk about trivial things when everything felt extraordinary ?

The silence was broken when Isao took a bite of bread with cheese. He wasn’t used to such strong cheeses and made a grimace so grotesque — squinting, twisting his mouth, and twitching his nose — that Lucille burst into peals of laughter. A clear, liberating laugh that made Isao smile as well.

A new awkwardness settled between them, but this time, it was a gentle, conspiratorial awkwardness. An invisible, warm bubble had formed around them.

To capture this suspended moment between two worlds, Isao stopped the music, opened the camera app, and took a selfie.

When he showed the image to Lucille, she looked at it with a puzzled expression. How could a turntable, a telegraph, maps, and a camera fit into such a small box ?

Isao gently handed her the device.

"It’s digital photography. A sort of evolution of your daguerreotypes and the wet collodion process I use."

He guided her fingers on the screen, showing her how to zoom, frame, and trigger the shutter. When she took her first photo and saw the result instantly, her face lit up with simple joy, pure and soft like a shy sunbeam through a church’s stained-glass window.

"It’s amazing!" she exclaimed, looking at the details of the fountain captured without a darkroom, no waiting, or even irritating fumes. "How is this possible ?"

The afternoon passed in this continuous exchange of discoveries. For every invention Isao described — airplanes, television, the internet — Lucille responded with the wonders of her time: operas, literary salons, masked balls. A deep, almost timeless connection was awakening between these two very different souls.

"How long can you stay ?" she finally asked, as the night began to stretch its embrace over the garden.

"I don’t know… But we should perhaps look for a way to break Adrien’s curse from inside the mirror."

Lucille paled at the mere mention of his name.

"Please... Don’t talk about him. This moment is ours. It’s the only thing he doesn’t possess here..."

She hesitated, her features tense with pain.

"Do you think... that after all this time I haven’t tried to escape ? The only one who knows the secret of my freedom... is him."

The air was thick with palpable tension, as if the city itself was holding its breath. Lucille placed her hand on Isao’s. The first physical contact between them sparked an electric jolt.

The Parisian night had wrapped itself in an opaque shroud, pierced only by the flickering glow of gas lamps. In his pocket, Isao’s smartphone powered down permanently, a harsh reminder that this world rejected any trace of their meeting.

"Lucille," he murmured after a long silence, "through the mirror, our language limited us. But here... we understand each other effortlessly. It’s wonderful!"

"Wonderful," she repeated almost inaudibly. "But it’s him..."

She raised her eyes to Isao, an emotion clouding them.

"This is not Paris from my time. It’s a gilded prison, an illusion. It’s his world. He is its creator, its jailer, its master. He allows us to understand each other, but not out of kindness. He delights in our suffering. Every freedom he grants, he takes back immediately."

A long silence, almost unreal, settled between them.
Lucille, trembling like a leaf in the autumn wind, murmured in a broken voice:

"I can’t take it anymore. Everyone I’ve known and loved is dead, and I can’t die. But I’m not alive either..."

Her shoulders slumped, as if all her courage had just abandoned her. She looked up at Isao, her gaze drowning in tears.

"I am doomed to be his prisoner, his thing, for eternity. Do you know a way to free me... in your world ?"

The formal "vous" had disappeared, left behind somewhere in the tide of her distress. This simple "you" rang out like a desperate call.

Isao felt his own heart falter.

He gently squeezed Lucille’s trembling hand in his, feeling her despair pulse against his skin. He wished he could take her in his arms, protect her, promise her freedom, peace, a world she could finally call her own. But how could he fight against Adrien’s shadow, against a world that was nothing but illusion and trap ? Here, Isao was just a helpless visitor, lost between two realities. Beneath their intertwined fingers, a fragile warmth lingered, a futile barrier against the night and oblivion.

As he searched for the right words, a dull sound shattered the fragile bubble of their intimacy.

Footsteps echoed through the night like a death knell. The gravel crunched ominously under a heavy, authoritative step. Even the street lamps seemed to falter under the weight of this approaching presence. Each step seemed to vibrate in unison with Lucille’s terror.

She jumped up, her face contorted, her features drawn by anxiety. Her short breaths formed little white clouds in the suddenly cold air. Her hands shook uncontrollably.

"He’s here..." she whispered, barely audible.

Her eyes scanned the shifting shadows between the trees, desperately searching for an escape in this now-closed space.

Isao stood up too, muscles tense, ready to follow, ready to fight if necessary. But a visceral fear crept inside him, cold and sharp: they weren’t in his world. Here, everything belonged to Adrien. His hands were as useless as his words.