Timeloop

Richard has chugged ten thousand liters of beer at a humble izakaya today and is still not drunk.

In fact, not only is he not drunk, but he’s also had so many drinks from their seasonal spring stock that the taste now has equal appeal to drinking the sweaty juices squeezed out of a pair of his father’s socks.

“I’m an idiot,” he says under his breath in Japanese. “This is what I get for not following protocol.”

The bartender looks at him in surprise, as if he didn’t expect a foreigner to be speaking Japanese. Well, of course he wouldn’t. He didn’t know that they were both stuck in a time loop.

Before he came to Japan, he could barely get by with a few phrases. “Bathroom” and “train station” were pretty much the limit of his vocabulary.

Now, though? Well, a second career as a Japanese language teacher back home had suddenly become an option.

Whether it was listening to Shizuka-chan ranting about her tyrant of a boss, Akihiko-kun gushing about the newest game he’s been playing, or Tanaka-san grumbling about the state of politics in Japan, gabbing with the other patrons through endless happy hours had done wonders for his language skills.

It’s a dumb and useless accomplishment considering his current predicament, but at least he can say he’s been making the most of it.

He’d tasted all the finest drinks on the shelf, wandered to every corner of the area surrounding Kumamoto Castle, and what did it matter how much it cost? Every transaction would be wiped anyways.

Still, his optimism isn’t nearly enough to remedy the feeling of dread in his gut every time the loop resets. Unlike the cherry blossom trees that presently flower eternally, every time he thinks he’s grown a connection between himself and the city, it all withers and disappears in a fleeting heartbeat.

As a time travel agent, he knows that there’s always a risk of running into snags in the space-time continuum, but he’s never encountered such an impenetrable time loop as this.

He’s tried everything in the handbook at this point—and it’s a chunky piece of office literature, to say the least.

His first attempt at fixing the time loop had been punching a random fellow entering the izakaya for a fresh round of beer.

Violent acts like this usually triggered an alternate timeline and it should have landed him straight in jail like a game of Monopoly, but it turns out this man happened to be too drunk to care and didn’t bother reporting him.

He’d also gone through the entire emotional process of romancing a woman with nose hair just a bit too lustrous. Despite the scandalous secrets shyly shared between them, such as, “I only shower during the week,” and “I wish my father was dead,” the kiss they indulged in afterwards just reset the time loop again.

His last resort, falling and hitting his head as many different ways as he could fathom existed, was both painful and stupid, and yet it was the only guidance left in the handbook he hadn’t tried.

And still, what did he get, you ask? WHAT DID HE GET? Nothing.

At this point, he has nothing better to do but curse out whoever the God of Time is and hope that someone will come rescue him from this—if that’s even possible to begin with.

Of course, if his superior were here, she’d tell him that he truly had no one to blame but himself.

All he’d wanted was a break. Moving between different countries and eras at the whim of his agency, even with the support of his friends and family, could be a disorienting and difficult job, especially when there was no control over where his missions would take him.

And so, with months and months of enduring under his belt, he’d received special permission to use the time travel equipment for a personal vacation to any time and place he liked.

That place, for him, happened to be Kumamoto Castle.

As a massive history buff, he’s always been fascinated by the progress of the world—and also its inevitable, simultaneous decay. In this sense, Kumamoto Castle, having partly been burned down during the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, represented his combined interests perfectly.

Preservation is difficult; impossible, even. So, to witness with all his five senses everything as it was originally built and intended to be, well—that appealed to him deeply.

And truly, feeling the temperate climate of centuries past and absorbing life in that period felt almost sacred to him.

The castle had been formidable and elegant, a centerpiece of the region, and seeing it being inhabited and speculating on the lives and personalities of the people living within it was entertainment unto itself.

He had been truly enamored—by the grandeur of the castle; by the period clothing he’d only seen in dramas; by the way he could count so many more stars in the sky.

It felt like a divine blessing, a reminder of why he had become a time travel agent in the first place—and now, he could only wish that he’d been just slightly less enraptured by it all. If he’d only been paying just a little more attention to the time, he wouldn’t have missed his return window.

All it took was a nanosecond, and he’d inevitably sealed his fate. While the time travel equipment brought him back to present-day Kumamoto, it’d ruined his chances of ever leaving it, either.

Richard sighs. While he tries very hard not to get in his head so much, it’s a battle he can’t seem to win a lot lately.

He stands from the counter, leaves some crisp bills for the good bartender, and strikes out on his own for the rest of the night.

The walk back to his hotel is as natural to him as breathing at this point, so he’s not too concerned about being aware of his surroundings. He’d even tried walking it blind once and had succeeded so handily it was frightening.

He looks up at the sky—a much less vibrant one thanks to light pollution, he notes with an ache—and the moon is just a sleepy crescent in the cradle of the indigo blue.

He gazes at it longingly through the branches of the cherry blossoms lining the sidewalk, and wonders if there’s anything else that can compare to his solitude in this moment.

“Finally! There you are!”

Richard whirls around.

“Reina,” Richard whispers. Tears well in his eyes. “You came.”

She rushes him like a bull and crushes him between her arms. “We were so worried when we saw the signals go haywire,” she says, her voice wet with tears. “I’m so sorry it took us so long to rescue you.”

He hugs her back hesitantly, his whole psyche in disbelief. “It’s okay,” he reassures her, voice distant. “I’m okay.”

“…I…I can’t imagine what you’ve been going through. I promise we’ll get you out of here soon. Time should start moving again now that I’ve broken through the distortion, so we can go back as soon as the next portal opens.”

“When…when will that be?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. Can you hold out until then, partner?”

He laughs, and the relief is so great it takes him a while to stop. Reina watches him with a forced neutral expression. Eventually, he regathers himself and sobers. “Sure,” he says, a smile on his face.

He looks up at the cherry blossoms again, over her shoulder, and there’s a twinge in his chest knowing that the petals would finally fall, and yet—despite all he had gained, all he had lost, he’s still able to look up at them and say, “I want to see what the tomorrow of Japan is like, too.”