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It’s been 7 years, 6 months, and 25 days since Lu Guang’s last dive, yet the room looks as it did on that day, and on the days and decades preceding it. A darkened lamp hangs solitary from the ceiling. It gives off no light. There is no need to. The moonlight casts a silver haze over the space, blurring the dust in the air into a film-like lining that everything has become suspended inside. In this, the only thing that moves is the clock on the wall. It continues to march forward, counting down the seconds to midnight.
Qiaoling sits on the bottom bunk. Her hands trace the wrinkles of the sheets as she stares ahead. Today is an unusually cold day. Even inside, her breath lingers in the air and the bed barely moves with her weight. Yet there’s a warmth lingering here that she can’t describe.
It was warm on that day too, too much so, when she found Lu Guang after his first dive.
***
“Where were you?” Qiaoling never yells at Lu Guang, but this time she screamed until the late summer air scraped sandpaper in her throat. The white haired man stood with his back to her, facing the desk. She had an outrageous urge to pull him around and shake him hard. Shake him until Cheng Xiaoshi came back to them. Shake him hard enough he could come up with a reason - any reason - that he didn’t attend his best friend’s funeral. Didn’t lay flowers at the grave of the man who gave his life for him.
As if he could hear her unspoken accusations, his arm stiffened at his sides, and the last of Qiaoling’s anger fizzled away.
“I just- where were you?” She crumpled to the floor, her black suit uncharacteristically large on her. The collar and cuffs was damp against her skin, sweat and tears mixed together. “He would have wanted you there.”
When he made no move to respond, she continued, “You have to know that. You can’t tell me honestly that during all these years you haven’t known how he-”
“I do know.”
Lu Guang had turned around. The window was open and the summer light drew a harsh outline of his frame. He still couldn’t meet her eyes, but he brought a hand forward instead, releasing something held tight in his fist.
The photograph fluttered to the ground in front of Qiaoling.
It was the three of them just two weeks ago, Cheng Xiaoshi front and center with the same wide grin plastered across his face as he looped his arms around them. They were taking a photo to commemorate closing their most recent case. Normally, Cheng Xiaoshi would fuss over the composition, swatting anyone else away from the shutter. But this time-
Lu Guang had been the photographer.
Qiao Ling looked up, hope inseparable from horror. “His power. You didn’t.”
“I went back.”
Those three words seemed to have frozen the air between them. Every word that followed was deafeningly clear. Like the stilled surface of a lake on a windless day, the depths beneath were terrifyingly visible.
“How many times have I told him? Do not try to change the past. Death is immutable. No matter how many times we roll the stone up the hill, it will only roll back down. And it can only roll back down. It must roll back down.”
He finally met her eyes, and she found herself wishing for a breeze.
“Qiaoling-jie, I’m sorry. I should know this better than anyone. But I cannot accept a past where I attend his funeral. Any photographs you may have, I will take them.”
***
Above Qiaoling, the clock silently strikes ten o’clock and continues on.
She makes a mental note to dust the photos on the wall. Though the originals are kept elsewhere, she still cares for these as if they were the same.
The one in the top left corner was the second dive. It had been 26 days, 2 hours, 40 minutes, and 12 seconds before his death. Lu Guang left on a Sunday. They’d had a light dinner with just the two of them, Qiaoling had handed him the photo, and then she’d given him his privacy. It wasn’t too different from their normal routine, except Cheng Xiaoshi had never dived past twelve hours before.
***
“What happens after the time is up?”
Qiaoling stirred her bowl of noodles, thickening it. They hadn’t talked much about his first dive.The captain had already grilled him nonstop, forgetting his own lessons. He used to say you had to know when to talk and when to listen, and when to sit in the silence. What mattered and what didn’t.
“Didn’t you always used to say that it ended at twelve hours?” She knew Lu Guang well. There must have been a reason. “If that’s not the case, then why?”
Cheng Xiaoshi used to never let up on the question. Ever the dramatic, he could think up all sorts of horrible, terrifying, and downright catastrophic things that could happen. Getting stuck in the past, ending up in a time loop, losing his ability. He had never gotten the answer out of the other man.
But Lu Guang’s reply came easier than she expected. “It’s me,” he said. “It isn’t Cheng Xiaoshi whose power has a time limit, it’s mine. I cannot see past twelve hours from when the photo is taken.” His eyes closed for a second. When he opened them, the pale pink creases beneath had deepened. “Past that, I cannot guide him.”
Qiaoling smiled dryly. “No wonder you never told him.”
He looked away.
***
Their time passed in parallel after that.
Qiaoling tried to keep the photo studio running at first. She could man the front desk solo, and she had picked up the basics of printing and processing from the other two. It gave her something to do other than think about where in time Lu Guang was. But Xu Shanshan came by, took one look at her, and ordered her to take the next week off.
She protested, but when Shanshan started enlisting the others in her tactics, Qiaoling figured it’d be better to surrender early. They both knew she’d find some other way to work.
In her involuntary free time, Qiaoling resolved to become the world’s expert on how to save Cheng Xiaoshi. And by association, its third-most expert on time travel.
***
Unlike the captain whose notes were strewn across his office, photos and files and rolls of surveillance tape covering every inch, Qiaoling kept her research contained within one heavily worn notebook.
“Death - shot at intersection of 1st & 4th”
“Perpetrator - J.D, 30s, male, convict recently released”
“Motive - revenge”
No pictures, only text. Qiaoling didn’t need pictures to remember the case they closed for the police department last year, not when she had already replayed it endlessly in her mind, looking for how they could have known.
Still no luck. The special police force that was created to counteract space-time abilities had never been announced to the public, and their cases were kept strictly confidential. This one had been fairly touch and go, a woman was disappeared in broad daylight and the captain wanted to know whether certain abilities were involved.
Cheng Xiaoshi had entered a photo taken by a bystander, as a girl advertising for a restaurant nearby. They were able to catch the perpetrator directly, no powers used. The man never even saw him.
But somehow he knew.
“This is for last September,” he had grinned, blood smeared over his teeth, before blowing his own brains out.
The captain was convinced it was the work of another powers user. Qiaoling wasn’t so sure. Another user would have known about Lu Guang and her as well. Either way, they never found someone else.
What they had was only what had happened. The small nodes in time - taking a trip home, celebrating a case, a long overdue letter - and the big one - death. They could change the small nodes, that much they already knew. Qiaoling was compiling a list of all such changes from past cases, analyzing the butterfly effect, seeing how far one text or one basketball game could ripple. But they have never been able to change death.
If they did, what would happen to the present?
***
Lu Guang would be back 3 hours after midnight on a Friday if he failed.
He returned at 4.
***
“What happened?”
“I preserved the location and changed the actions. The captain disrupted the initial shooting like we planned, but the man escaped police custody half an hour after.”
And Cheng Xiaoshi died again.
Lu Guang sat with his hands clasped, eyes fixed on his watch band as he finished recounting the dive to Qiaoling. Though the events he was retelling were only half an hour away, his voice was composed. Even now he was thoughtful, cutting to what changed, leaving the rest unsaid. Only the faint reddish stain that wouldn’t wash off his hands gave him away.
She took the bowl of noodles from him wordlessly and set the microwave to the keep warm setting. The dinner she prepared had gone cold in front of him long ago. She didn’t push it. By the sink, a second bowl sat untouched.
They sat there in silence for a minute, the clock keeping time above them.
She was startled at the concreteness of her own voice when she spoke. “Good work. It’s still progress. You proved the time of death can be shifted.”
Lu Guang nodded, “The next question is how far.” This was the third time he had lived the last month of his life but even in the dead of night, he looked more awake than ever.
“Please pass me the noodles, Qiaoling-jie. I’m going back in.”
***
The third was 28 days, 4 hours, 16 minutes, and 57 seconds before his death.
***
“The time reverted. The method is not fixed.”
From a shooting to a poisoning, of the infinitely many methods that existed, how many could he prevent?
***
“There is an element of logical feasibility.”
***
“A link must exist.”
***
The mechanism backing this cruel art form is like a camera. Aperture, shutter speed, light sensitivity - a photographer might adjust the settings to expose for certain tones, or fix a depth of field, or create blur through long exposure, but the photo subject is itself unchanged by the shutter release. It exists on its own, it’s simply captured in a still image. In the wheels of fate, it’s method, time, location. When one or the other is constrained, a different experience may be produced, but always of the same outcome: death.
When Lu Guang told her his theory, his gaze was sharp, fixed somewhere he could see but Qiaoling could not.
“These photos will not work. I need to return to last year, to that case.”
***
September 13, 15 minutes past midnight. That was the original time of death.
Back then, Qiaoling would have watched each tick of the second hand like the beat of a heart. Time passes equivalently in the photo’s past. Another second gained meant another second that Cheng Xiaoshi breathed somewhere within each 4 in by 6 in picture frame. Those first few dives, she had kept time almost as meticulously as Lu Guang.
The longer clock hand completes another full rotation, and her eyes wander to the desk below the window. The time that had been so loud then passes so quietly now. It has been bare for years. There are no more pages torn out from notebooks, with theories lining the margins and spilling onto the paper below. Their post-dive “debriefs”, as Qiaoling had named them, had run its course. Early on, there were still unknowns: which timeline nodes were major and which were minor? Could a new major node be introduced? How are nodes linked? With each dive, the unknowns had decreased.
And at what cost, Qiaoling thinks.
How many months of Lu Guang’s life has he traded for another minute of Cheng Xiaoshi’s? How many more?
***
Though Lu Guang didn’t believe the photos after the case would work, he still used most of them. Some of them were necessary in order to review major nodes outside of the twelve hour window. Some of them were not.
Those were the happiest and most painful.
***
Sometimes, she was bitterly jealous. He lived in a world she could never return to. In it, laughter filled the photo studio. Other times, she remembered the empty stare he’d had when he disappeared ahead of the funeral, and all she felt was an unliftable sadness.
Eventually, the next photo available was from over a year ago. A year and a month, a year and five, it blends. At first he stays a while in between, telling Qiaoling the details, catching up on her life. She’s found a new job - he prevented them from taking the case. She’s met someone at work - he turned down the special police force. Her father is in the hospital - he confessed. She’s expecting - he told Cheng Xiaoshi about the future. But toward the end, he just wants to go back.
Partway through the fifth year, Qiaoling and him have the talk.
***
“You've moved on.”
Lu Guang says it as a matter of fact.
Qiaoling doesn’t need to speak to respond. While the man in front of her looked the same as in their last photo, a small diamond now rested on her fourth finger and the gray tinge under her eyes could only be characteristic of the sleepless nights that came with being a new parent.
“Do you want to try staying? Longer than a week this time?”
She watched Lu Guang as he thought it through. His eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly, above them no wrinkles to mirror her own.
“I’ll keep the store as it was. We can store the photos so they will always be here if you decide to go back.”
His gaze flickers over the ones on the wall, mostly used already. Birthdays, cases closed, old friends in town, vacations, going out to eat. At the end, there was a new frame continuing the tradition. A not yet sleep-deprived couple beaming next to a toddler curled up in her crib.
“You can meet Lili, teach her some new words.”
As if the baby could hear her name through the wall, she immediately started to cry. Qiaoling sighed fondly, the shadow under her eyes deepening. She called down the stairs, “Dear, the baby’s awake!” A mumble and the sounds of slippers replied. She turned back to Lu Guang with a sheepish smile. “Maybe when she’s a little older.”
A little would be in a few months. The baby would learn to say syllables, then words, then whole sentences. She would grow up into a little girl, then a rambunctious teenager, then a level-headed adult like her mother. His eyes are soft when he apologizes for a second time.
“I’m sorry Qiaoling-jie. I’m no longer of this time.”
***
So she moves out and the store becomes a relic between the two of them. As promised, she ensures it is maintained for when he returns. A humidity control is set up to preserve the photos. The bedroom upstairs is dusted in advance. Even the kitchen is stocked, emptied, and restocked. She always knows when he'll be back, it might not be on the day but it will be within the week or month.
Two years pass this way. Then another two, then another as he uses up his graduation trove. Qiaoling is almost 50 when they talk again. He tells her that he's down to the few early college 5-year trips.
***
“I have not yet discovered the link.” His adamance that there is -there must- be a link remains unsaid. The same words have played on repeat between the two of them too many times to count when Qiaoling was younger.
But this time, Lu Guang does not follow with his usual unshakeable resolve. For the first time, he falters, “ The remaining options are limited. If it truly could be-” He pauses, then restarts, “In the hypothetical case that the link may be our abilities, our meeting-” He stops again, and they sit in silence for a minute before he speaks again. “I don’t know if I can bear to test those.”
***
The next time they meet, she's 70. He stays for half a month this time. They spend the time catching up, slowly and leisurely. She tells him about her husband’s passing several years ago, about her daughter moving away for work, and about her new granddaughter graduating middle school. He tells her he might not be back.
The remaining photo is both his first photo and his last photo. After this dive, he will have no more chances to return to his past.
***
At least that’s what they say out loud. Unbeknownst to Lu Guang, Qiaoling had been compiling security camera footage meticulously.
It wasn’t exactly the same. When diving into a photo, the diver co-inhabits the photo taker. They coexist. When diving into a photo without a photographer, the diver brings their own body into the picture frame. They could meet themselves in the photo, tangling node lines into a knot, taking who knows who else with them.
But footage could be paused almost infinite times.
Qiaoling didn’t know whether to tell him. Sometimes she wondered if the ability he inherited could be a curse. Was it better to be forced to move on, or to have the ability to go back? Would he choose to stop? If she had had his ability, would she be able to stop?
In the end, she left it up to fate, placing it on the desk. He might see it, he might not.
***
Defiance. That’s the only reason Qiaoling can give for why the clock hand hasn’t yet come to a rest.
2 hours, 10 minutes, and a second late. 2 hours, 10 minutes, and a second longer that Cheng Xiaoshi might be alive in Lu Guang’s time. She no longer counts every second, would lose track even if she did not want to, but she keeps the clocks around, even though they are considered older than antiques in today’s world. Maintaining this one alone has cost her a small fortune over the years. The main wheel is due for another replacement in several years, but there are no more functioning parts on the market and the elderly clockmaker she used to employ has since passed away. Eventually, she will not be able to extend its lifespan.
Slowly, leaning on her walking cane for support, she gets up from the bottom bunk. Even within this room, there are some things that can’t stay the same.
She closes the door behind her.
***
This could be the last time she saw him.
“Lu Guang.” She tilted her head to the left, eyebrows scrunched together lightly. It was getting harder for her to find the right words to say. “Was your hair always so white?”
The man pauses in front of the door, hand over the knob. When he looks back, he is wearing a smile she barely remembered. He never answers.
***
Years after, Lu Guang still has not returned. Qiaoling finally passes the keys to her granddaughter and explains what to do.
It’s a beautiful summer day when she lays flowers at the newly erected tombstone, on the plot that had laid dormant for decades next to Cheng Xiaoshi. She is careful with her creaking joints as she lays beside them, looking up at the blue sky.
“It’s been a while. I’ve brought you two a gift.” She chuckles as she holds the photo out in front of the sun, imagining their voices in response.
Cheng Xiaoshi, always impatient, would be swiping at it the first chance he got. Lu Guang, ever the mature role model, would swat his hand away and lecture him on his manners. And Qiaoling, with a soft spot for the both of them, would laugh from the audience.
The light pierced through the print, at just the right angle to blind her for a second, and she woke her from her dream.
Blinking twice, she places the photo between the tombstones, out of reach.
She remembers now, she had watched them once like that, once and only once.
***
“Lu Guang, give it back!” Laughter pelted through the store as the man that was supposed to be at the front register chased the man that was supposed to be in the dark room up and down the stairs like two kids at a park.
“No, go back to work.”
“C’mon, just a peek! It was a ring, wasn’t it? Hey, where are you going!”
***
It was her gift. When looking into photos, she could see through the photographer's eyes no matter where they were, past or present. She rarely used it; it had always felt too intrusive. But the first time when more than a week had passed since when Lu Guang was set to return, she had dived in once.
She had been relieved, until-
***
“Lu Guang-”
“No, no, don’t talk.” Lu Guang fumbled at the cloth to apply more pressure, trembling hands soaked in blood. “Fuck!”
She watched in horror as Cheng Xiaoshi bled out in Lu Guang’s arms for what likely was the hundredth time and yet it felt like the first time all over.
***
After that, she never looked again. It was too raw, an invisible line that shouldn’t be crossed between the two of them. He did not bring it up, and she did not either.
Years later, the pain long dulled, she looks again at the photo she brought to their tombstones. Hesitating, she sits up. She could see and then she would know. She might see them together, she might see nothing, she might see him die again, but she would at least get closure on the almost century-long case they’ve been trying to solve.
Above her, two birds chirp to each other across a swaying tree branch. The wind rustles through the leaves and one sets off into the sky then the other.
She closes her eyes and stands.
As she walks away, she hopes that in that last photo, he found what he needed. And if the scene within the picture is no longer the exact same as before, well she wouldn’t be able to tell anymore.