All the Time in the World. Theoretically.

To kick-start their new working relationship – as he calls it – Arata suggests ice cream, something horrendously suitable for the winter’s day, and only a tiny dip into their (Kira’s) pool of funds. A handful of crumpled notes. She stared at the gap they’d occupied between her fingers, now a clear shot of the sidewalk.

“Too many bodies in line. One bump and you’ll blow the place up.”

It is the 30th of December. The billboard across the road displays so. The date has only ever progressed in the same way that a caterpillar only enters a chrysalis, unless an outside force breaks it from the branch. Nestles a blade against the contained. Popular belief claims the caterpillar melts into a soup of proteins and viscera in preparation for the transformation, that it can be supped from the womb like raw egg instead of found, solid, comforted down to nothing under the tongue while the moon mocks from on high.

Stripped and drying, the truth went down a bitter pill. The dubiety – the witches living within – were silenced.

Shaking on the periphery caught broke Kira’s focus. Looking back up she found Arata holding out a cup to her cheek, another in the opposite hand for himself.

“This isn’t what I’d asked for,” she said, sniffing the cup piled high with mottled ice cream the color of bruises. “I said I'd wanted strawberry.”

“Parlor was out, unfortunately. Berry was the next best option.” Two colored straws stuck out V-shaped. Peace, peace. Kira took it with a sigh.

She held out her hand. “Did you at least bring me my change?” Coins jingled onto her palm, the total weighing too light to not arouse suspicion but too heavily to be worth a fight over. Arata took the bench’s other half to eat his mound of stomach-turning chocolate-dipped chocolate dotted in sprinkles. Kira again sighed, and punched another hole in her mental ticket. Two more times and she’d be eligible for a free one.

I was shown the ritual to control time itself.

She’d given her assessment of the notion with laughter loud and haughty and abrasive on the throat while Arata kicked his feet up and waited for it to subside. A little pile of snow had gathered on the toe of his shoe by the end.

The idea was ludicrous in the extreme. Wielders had been tampering with the natural laws for years by feat of existing, sure, but one would assume mastery over less all-encompassing parameters first. Like the weather. The lost art of converting lead into gold, perhaps. Pulling a person in a rabbit suit out the iconic top hat.

But jumping straight to time manipulation?

Children were not produced by the act of kissing. There were steps, urges, considerations, and a drink or three before the golden egg popped from the metaphorical golden goose.

Yet there Arata was, calm and collected, reeking of surety, and he dangled a golden ticket pulled from a witch’s soup of uncertainty. It was a hard sell. In the face of doubt he’d remained out of the clutches of turbulent rage unlike his display in the Don’s hideout to prove himself correct.

Temper had always been integral to him, yet there it was absent. The incongruity only added another dash of fresh variables to the mix. More possibilities. Options for change never considered, change he’d normally be averse to.

“I’ll take your ice cream if you’re not going to eat it,” he said. Sighing, Kira slid it over.

“Is it so easy to do…” She cast eyes to the passersby enjoying the park she’d waited for him at. “What you said. Can you turn back the clock today?”

“Today? No. The process is a ritual and not a spell. There are conditions to fulfill beforehand, though I’ve collected most of the supplies already.” Arata unslung his backpack and placed it down between his feet. “Couple pounds of chalk, metals shavings from the rail tracks, boiled phosphorus, copper, precious metals from all those earbuds, a few grams of gold…”

The grocery list went on. At times it sounded like he was listing ingredients off an off-brand shampoo bottle that was one internet search from a petition demanding its inventors be drawn and quartered.

“… and finely crushed emerald.” Now it was his turn to sigh. “Still need amber for the accelerant and one diamond whose size I’m certain couldn’t be found outside a bank vault. I’ve got the first, but it’s at home where I know for a fact eyes are on twenty-four-seven Arata-watching duty.”

“The Don has a diamond necklace,” she said. “We could kill him and take it.”

For a moment there was silence. “Oh. Yeah, right, he does have that.” Arata tapped his finger against the backpack, his brow furrowing. “How did you intend to deliver me to him again?”

“Don wanted me to drag you back to his lair.”

“So… he thinks your magic is mind control?”

Kira shrugged.

“Well, that’s one advantage we have – him being wrong. I’m sure we can use it somewhere.” Leaning back in his seat, Arata scratched at his wrist. An odd pattern matting his skin caught the light: a collection of straight lines, burned loops around a sequence of evenly spaced brown dots that may have once been freckles. “At any rate, let’s not push a confrontation until we’re certain we can make off successfully. Without proper tools I can only scrounge up so many supplies. Got a few fuel sticks for the master key, but those’ll burn up quick. We’ll get his ass last.”

Kira touched the Don’s talon in her pocket, more accidental than out of any unconscious desire to ill Arata. The cold was getting worse, her clothing poor for environments outside a climate-neutral office building, pockets the safest space for digits she was rapidly losing sensation in.

Snow thick upon the ground now had snapped up the attention of a small child all bundled in the appearance of a black, waddling marshmallow a short distance from their parents. They started rolling the snow into a ball, the crystals sticking to their gloves as the base for a snowman came into being.

“I have amber at my house. Lots of it,” Kira said. Arata’s head jumped to her. “So long as you don’t mind a few bugs trapped inside,” she added. “With the Don gone it should be safe, and I could use some better clothes.”

She didn’t need look to know a smile was growing. The sound of wet lips parting was evidence enough.

“Have I ever told you how beautiful you are?”

“No, but my skin itches hearing you say that, so please don’t say it again.”

Arata leapt to his feet swinging his stolen pack back on. “Heard. Don’t stay out too long though. I can make good process on drawing the ritual while you’re away, but I’d prefer my back watched.”

Kira frowned. She’d had little experience with rituals and their specifics. “Do you mean that in the literal sense?” At his bobbing nod, she considered the sheer amount of chalk he’d acquired. “Drawing it where?”

“Around the site of the most important heist in wielder history. Where else?”