James, 1864
The world was quieter back then.
Before streetcars hummed, before electricity lit up the night, before Sophie's voice echoed in his mind like a melody he couldn't forget. The year was 1864, and the sky over Edinburgh hung thick with winter fog and the scent of coal smoke.
James Donovan had been twenty-three for nearly a decade.
And he was in love.
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Her name was Elena Whitcombe, the daughter of a professor and a poet in her own right. She had fire in her eyes and ink on her fingertips, and when she read aloud, her voice made time still. At least, it had for him.
They met in a library — naturally — when she reached for the same book on the shelf. Byron. He let her have it, though he'd already read it twenty times.
"You know," she'd said, "most men would have pretended they hadn't."
"I'm not most men," James replied.
And he wasn't.
He hadn't aged in twenty years.
---
The gift — or curse — was passed down through blood. A rare lineage, whispered about in hidden circles: people who had stepped outside the river of time. They didn't grow old. They didn't die. But they didn't belong either.
James had watched his parents fade before him. Watched friends wither. Watched the world move faster, louder, further — while he remained the same.
Until Elena.
With her, he felt anchored. Human. For the first time, he wanted to risk the pain of love — even if it meant lying to her.
He didn't tell her what he was. Couldn't.
But time, as always, betrayed him.
---
They spent five years together.
She aged, slowly at first. Lines formed near her eyes, her laughter deepened, her body changed with seasons. James stayed untouched. People began to notice.
"You never change," she said once, studying his face as they lay beneath a tree in the highlands. "Not a wrinkle. Not a scar. Not a freckle out of place."
He smiled, brushing hair from her brow. "Maybe I'm just very lucky."
Elena's voice was quiet. "Or very cursed."
---
The truth unraveled not by confession — but by accident.
A fire in the Whitcombe home. Elena's father injured. James had carried him out, flames licking at his back. But not a burn. Not a mark. Witnesses saw. Whispers spread.
Elena demanded answers.
"I don't know what I am," he said that night, rain soaking through the roof of the old mill where they hid. "Only that I don't die. I don't age. I don't fit."
She stared at him like he'd already disappeared.
"Then what are you doing here?" she whispered. "With me? Living a borrowed life in a moment that will end?"
"I wanted to know what it felt like," he whispered. "To be loved."
---
She left him before the spring thaw.
By summer, she was gone — married off, moved away, or buried. He never found out. He didn't try.
Because the grief of it cracked something inside him — not just the loss, but the shame. The realization that he had stolen time from someone who didn't have it to spare.
---
After that, James wandered. Decades blurred. He stopped forming attachments. He stopped watching the stars.
Until Sophie.
Until the girl with the dying heart and the living eyes, who looked at him like he wasn't strange, like he wasn't lost, like he still mattered.
Until she leaned her head on his shoulder.
Until she said, "Don't fall in love with me."
And he had.
Already.
---
Now, sitting in his apartment — one that had changed cities and countries too many times to count — James held her torn note in his hand, the one she left behind on the bench.
Dear Future Me,
I hope you still believe in impossible things.
Because I think I might've just met one.
He folded the page carefully. Reverently. And for the first time in a hundred and sixty years, he allowed himself to hope.
But he knew the price.
He had loved before.
And it had broken the world.
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