42.
“Shin’ichi,” I said quietly as I entered the room. He didn’t turn, but I saw him stiffen as he watched the scene unfold again, his wife screaming in pain. I must have missed this part before, but it was an agonizing cry, the sound of labor, or maybe labor gone terribly wrong. It was a wrenching note, and I wanted to cringe away from it.
But I couldn’t. Not any more than he could.
“I won’t let go,” Akiyama said, still on his knees. He was watching from a few feet away, staring at the event—the scene—like it was the last thing on earth that he cared about. Because it kind of was.
I came up behind him slowly. “I know,” I said. The screaming had stopped, and she’d gone limp on the table. Her stomach bulged, and the doctor started to talk furiously, yelling at one of the nurses.
“I have lived here for so long,” he said, as I slipped down to sit next to him. “I cannot imagine a life without … her.” He had a single tear tracing its way down his cheek. “I lived as a god before I met her, and I gave it all up to be here, with her, after but a chance look.” He glanced at me. “I saw her in a line after the bombing. The country was a smoking ruin … but when I saw, her, I saw … beauty amid the ashes, like a cherry blossom on a lifeless tree.” He turned his gaze toward her again as the scene snapped back to the beginning. “We were together for over a decade, but … it was longer, of course. I would relive the good moments, over and over. My life with her was …” His voice trailed off, breaking, before he composed himself, “… perfect.”
“I wouldn’t know what a perfect life feels like,” I said, the hard floor biting into my ass as I sat patiently and listened to the doctor give commands in Japanese. “But I know what life feels like—and it’s not supposed be just the same moments on repeat, forever.” I looked at him, he looked at me. “Once upon a time, I might have thought you were fortunate to have the power you do, cuz … control of time, it’s a pretty cool one. But this …” I shook my head at the spectacle before, the reheated torment that Akiyama consumed every day like a poison that would never actually kill him, only make him wish for death. “I don’t think the reason you have this power is so you can torture yourself until you break time.”
“What do you know about power and the reasons for it?” Akiyama threw at me, anger burning through his tone.
“I know that when we have these time flashes, it always seems to be critical moments from our lives and not just a random Tuesday where you’re clipping your toenails,” I said, thinking of the village in Scotland. “Now maybe that’s just the default setting for a cold and indifferent universe that doesn’t give a damn about us, but … to me, it seems like the sort of thing that’s … not so much random.”
“What does that matter?” Akiyama asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing,” I said with a shrug. “Everything, maybe. But I guess it doesn’t do much for you at the moment.” I looked right at him. “I can’t let you wreck time.”
His gaze hardened. “You can’t make me leave.”
“I don’t want to make you do anything,” I said, taking a deep breath as I stared into his dark eyes. Now I could see it, now that he was so close to the edge. “I want to help you. Time … may not be able to heal this wound of yours, but only because you won’t let it.” I put a hand on his shoulder, gently, and he started to flinch away, but controlled himself, staring at it suspiciously.
“I know time better than anyone,” Akiyama said, tearing his gaze from my hand on his shoulder to look at me, directly. “The idea that it, on its own, has some magical healing property—is laughable. Time does not heal anything; your pain only diminishes the further you get from its infliction. It fades, at best, a remedy of the forgetful.” He looked at the scene as again, his wife let out the last shriek and passed out as the doctor began to panic in earnest. “I don’t wish to forget. Ever.”
“I know, Shin’ichi,” I said, raising my hand from his shoulder … to the side of his neck. “And that’s the problem.”
He turned his head, slowly, to look at me, baffled at my placid agreement. I let my fingers stay on the side of his neck, kneading into the muscles. He looked at my hand briefly and said, a little tautly, “I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, but it won’t—”
The first strains of my power must have hit him just then, because his face fell, and I could see the wheels turn as he tried to assess where the dull burn was coming from.
“I’m sorry,” I said, moving to clamp my other hand on his cheek, holding him tight so he couldn’t wriggle free, not that he had much strength left to do so at this point. “But this is the only way.” I looked him in the eyes and saw panic rising, the fear, as the pain grew where my skin touched his. “Your pain is so great, you’d stop the world in its tracks to keep drinking deep of your own torment. These memories are like poison, Shin’ichi, but they won’t just kill you—they’ll ruin everything and everyone.”
I stared down at him, and he started to jerk, feebly, in my grip. “So … I need them. At least … some of them.”
My power propelled me into his mind, and I tried to decide how deep I needed to excise. Performing memory surgery was something I’d done more than a time or two, and while I’d never exactly relished it …
Now? After what Rose had done to me?
I hated it more than ever before.
“This isn’t about taking your past,” I murmured, the words squeezing out into the real world as I existed in the blue flashes of Akiyama’s memories. “It’s about making sure that you—and everyone else—has a future.”
To that end, I locked onto a certain point in time, in his memory, and entered the very moment when everything had gone wrong for the first time.
Akiyama stood at the side of the scene. The doctor had shouted, and Akiyama had burst into the room from the waiting room, hearing it through his meta hearing.
“This,” I whispered, seeing Akiyama’s face frozen in fury, in anguish. “This is the moment.”
And I took it, as I always did when viewing someone’s memories from within them.
There were a few more, all from after that point. Moments of high emotion, all of which tied back to this one, where he made the decision to lock his powers on a single space of time, and never let go.
I could feel the threads of his will slipping away as he let go, the emotional ties to keeping up his nigh-eternal war against its passage in this room, in this place unbound one by one by my removal of the memories that bound him here.
With a last gasp, I pulled my hands from him and fell over, the heat of my power burning through my flesh like fire in my blood, a little too titillating to make me feel good about experiencing it in semi-public. I thudded to my back, staring at the ceiling, which was black with the decay of time.
“I am sorry, my—” And here Akiyama said something in Japanese, something I hadn’t absorbed through the memories I’d taken. He was sitting there, that tear still streaking its way down his cheek.
But his wife … and the doctor … and the nurses …
And the baby, the one that had never drawn so much as a breath …
Were all gone.
In their place was a broken wall, a trauma room ravaged by time and ruin, and a sky that looked out on the setting sun over the empty sea.
“I’m sorry, too, Shin’ichi,” I said, but he did not move, did not look at me, did not even acknowledge my presence, “but it had to be done.”