It came in flashes.
Their relationship in reverse — the proposal, the honeymoon, the pranks, the idle movie marathons — then further back, his college friends getting younger, the world winding backward, and then school corridors and chalk smell and wooden floors and black out.
It is life seen from a reverse perspective. It gives you a different view of people, of things, of changes — until you no longer recognise the person you were at the start.
Then there was a classroom full of children having some spirited discussion about life goals. One boy was asleep at his desk.
"Richard! Richard!"
He opened his eyes. The smell of wooden floors. Laughter and finger-pointing. An older man looking at him with impatience. He checked the date on the chalkboard, looked at his own small hands, and understood — he was back in secondary school.
He examined the man in front of him and recognised Professor Alec, homeroom teacher, a genuinely good lecturer whose classes Richard had spent a remarkable percentage of time sleeping through. The professor had never quite understood how it kept happening.
"How is our dozer doing — see for yourself," Alec said to the class, gesturing at Richard with weary amusement. The laughter came from all directions. "Richard. We're asking every student about their ambitions. Tell me yours, assuming it's something other than horizontal rest."
Richard sat up straight. His voice came out younger than he expected, and certain.
"I want to invent medicine," he said.
The class dissolved into laughter. Professor Alec looked briefly amused, noted Richard's complete indifference to the reaction, and moved on to the next student.
Richard sat at his desk and felt his mind activating — not all at once, but steadily, like something warming up. Fifty years of memories in a child's skull, every piece of knowledge he had ever absorbed pressing forward, available. He looked at his young hands again.
I have work to do.
He cleared the school library within a week.
Chemistry first, then biology, then the spaces between them where the real understanding lived. Concepts imprinted themselves with the clarity of things being encountered not for the first time but recognised — each definition slotting into place in a mental library that seemed to have been waiting for exactly this. He read with the speed of someone who knows what they're looking for.
The school librarian and the night watchman escorted him out at closing time. His parents found him arriving home with armfuls of books and exchanged the look of people who don't entirely understand what has happened to their child but have decided to be grateful for it. When the pattern kept repeating — the late nights, the borrowed books, the focused silence replacing whatever their son had been before — their eyes went wet with quiet joy.
When the school library ran out, he moved to the public library and started on university-level texts.
During a study marathon one night, exhausted and half-asleep over an open textbook, a memory surfaced: Jessica in her hospital bed, her voice low and pleading — "You should leave me, Richard. Have a life, for me please." He jolted awake and kept going.
His parents and friends suggested he take a break, find someone to date, live a little. They worried about him. Some speculated. He thanked them for their concern, dismissed it, and returned to his work. Time was the one thing he had less of than he appeared to, and trivialities had no place in it. His soul revolted at every rational suggestion to move on. Jessica was the beacon. That didn't change.
The ideas needed money to become reality, so he ran operations.
The casinos first. He applied complex probability analysis to their systems — studying win rates, error rates, adjusting his win-to-loss ratio carefully enough to avoid immediate detection. He moved between cities. By the time the casinos cross-referenced their losses and identified his pattern, he was already gone with fifty million dollars.
Then the speculation and stock markets. Knowing which companies would rise, which would collapse and when, he turned millions into hundreds of millions and then into something requiring different accounting entirely. The money went straight into the private biological laboratory he was building — a constant, necessary drain.
The laboratory needed people as dedicated and ambitious as he was. He thought back through the future he remembered and found the name he was looking for: Rocky Simmons. Renowned biochemist and pharmaceutical developer — but not yet. Right now, Rocky was a young lab assistant doing grunt work, spending his nights mixing chemicals in a converted space, finding in the precision of it the same peace that other people found in less useful things.
"Hi, Rocky," Richard said.
Rocky turned. Those eyes — containing, Richard had always thought, more wisdom than the rest of him had caught up to yet.
Richard handed him a thick notebook. Rocky skimmed it — a half-prepared cure hypothesis, working treatment plans for a rare disease rarely prioritised by major pharmaceutical companies. The methods were unconventional. They were also interesting in a way Rocky couldn't entirely dismiss. He agreed to the partnership.
Richard applied for accelerated graduation, moved through top universities extracting what he needed from each, declined the salary packages and royalty offers from pharmaceutical giants, and kept his focus entirely on the research.
Eight years passed.
Richard was twenty, standing on the balcony of his New York penthouse, checking his Rolex. The city spread below him like a circuit board — all that organised complexity, all those lives running their parallel programmes. Their research had generated enormous income from incidental cures and procedure patents. He had effectively unlimited funding.
He was alone.
He went inside to the living room, where Jessica's portrait hung on the wall — a sketch he had made with his own hands from memory, from the precise recollection that the deals had sharpened into something almost painful. He worked sixteen hours a day most days. His colleagues went home to families and partners. He stayed in the lab, and when he finally came back to the apartment, he stood with a drink and talked to the portrait.
He told her about the research. About Rocky. About how close they were getting. He told her, some nights, about the loneliness — which he hadn't expected to be quite this specific, quite this heavy. He had assumed the work would fill the space. The work had instead made the space more visible.
Her memories had become his companions and his ghosts.
"You look great in a black suit," she had said once, fixing his tie before he left for work. "You've got my touch. Just go score, babe."
He stood at the window, watching the second hand of the clock on the wall.
"You're going to be alive and well this time," he said to the portrait.
Jessica was still in her teens somewhere in this city. They would meet in a few years. She would begin to die in six. The cure was close — days away from completion — and then trials, then FDA approval, then distribution.
He needed to hold on for six more years.
Rocky came in without knocking.
He never knocked. He arrived with his glasses askew and his coat inside out and the expression of someone who has just confirmed something they have spent a decade working toward.
"We just did it."
Richard put down his chalk.
Rocky updated him on the FDA timeline — trials complete, approval imminent. He beamed his particular smile, the one that meant he had done something he wasn't entirely sure was possible and was still slightly surprised it had worked. He sat down, arranged his glasses, and was quiet for a moment.
He had questions he'd been carrying for years. Why this specific disease? Why do you live like this? Why alone? He looked at Richard sitting blank and still in his chair, and put them away.
He set a bottle of champagne on the desk instead.
"Make it cheap," Richard said, finally. "Accessible to everyone who needs it. No exclusivity pricing. If we can't get it to all of them, we haven't actually done it."
Rocky nodded as though this had never been in question.
"Take a break," he said. "Date someone. Go somewhere. You've earned it."
"Later," Richard said.
That evening the laboratory held a celebration. Music, champagne, the accumulated relief of a team that had done something genuinely difficult. Richard sat at the bar and watched their joy with the particular feeling of a man who has reached a destination and found he has no idea what to do with arrival. He turned his glass slowly in his hands.
"I have two years of life left," he said, quietly enough that nobody heard.
"One more," he said to the bartender.
He went to see her on a Saturday, after the FDA approval came through.
She had a ritual — a restaurant she visited regularly, crab, a romance novel. He had known about it for years. He stood outside and watched her through the window: healthy, present, reading with that particular quality of attention she brought to things she loved.
Then the door opened and a man walked in — easy, confident, happy — and crossed directly to her table and kissed her.
Richard stood on the pavement.
He had known this was a possible outcome. Knowing it and seeing it were different experiences entirely. He wanted to go in. He understood with complete clarity that going in would accomplish nothing — she didn't know him, she had never known this version of him, the life they had shared existed only in his memory and in contracts whose terms gave him no claim on her present.
He knew something else too. His death, whenever it came, would affect her if she knew him. Her remaining unaware of him was the logical conclusion — the rational, difficult choice that his brain arrived at while his heart burned.
He put his hands in his pockets and walked away.
The traffic light at the end of the street was red. He stopped at it and waited with everyone else for it to change.
One to two years remaining.
He sat at a bar and ordered whisky and drank with the focused indifference of someone who has resolved something difficult and is allowing themselves one evening of not being resolute about it.
"So be it," he said to his glass.
He went home. He threw the alcohol at the portrait — it splattered across the frame, glass scattering like the broken pieces of something he didn't have a word for. He walked through it, his feet bleeding from the shards, and lit his lighter.
He watched the portrait burn. This was his relationship with her — reduced to blackened soot — and he sat quietly in the warmth of his destruction and let it be what it was.
Then he collapsed.
He woke in hospital. Rocky was there, and colleagues, and friends, and his parents — all of them looking at him with the specific dread of people who have arrived and don't know what to say. A colleague started: "We have so many more diseases to cure, you're the torchbearer of—" Rocky stopped him with a look and simply put his hand on Richard's shoulder.
"We're here," Rocky said. "Rest."
Richard closed his eyes.
Months later he was back in the laboratory. He moved his blackboard, took the duster, erased the old cure strategies, and opened his laptop.
If I'm going to die, he thought, let it be doing something worth doing. Jessica would have wanted that.
He started working on the next disease.
Two years passed.
He found himself on the bench outside the hospital one morning, patiently waiting, knowing the wait was nearly over. He had lived longer than he should have and shorter than he wanted, and both of those things were true simultaneously, and he had made his peace with the contradiction.
The street began to fog.
The man in the black coat came through it at a stroll, unhurried, exactly as he had been twelve years ago — or thirty years ago, depending on your counting method. He sat beside Richard without ceremony. He hadn't aged a fraction.
His face remained as punchable as ever.
"Look who we have here," he said. "Quite the celebrity." He went quiet for a moment — genuinely quiet, which was unusual. "Jessica will live. The cure is in distribution. She'll never know she needed it." A pause. "You broke fate to that degree. It's genuinely rare."
"Let's get this over with," Richard said.
"Five minutes remaining," the man replied. "What do you want?"
"One of your cigarettes," Richard said. "I've missed them."
The man produced a cigarette, already lit. Richard took it and inhaled — that familiar nothing-taste, like something from a different world, which it was. He breathed out slowly and watched the smoke disperse.
"Was it worth it?" the man asked. Not mockingly. Something closer to genuine curiosity.
Richard closed his eyes.
He saw Jessica at her desk, her novel open in front of her, a pen in her hand, healthy and present and with decades ahead of her. He saw her smile — not at him, just in general, at something in the middle distance, the way she smiled when she was working on something she believed in.
He opened his eyes.
"Yes," he said.
He smoked until the cigarette was done. The fog thickened around the bench, the street sounds softened, and Richard leaned back and let his hands rest open in his lap, like a man who has put something heavy down and is surprised by how light he feels.
The man in the black suit sat with him until the end. Then he stood, straightened his coat, and walked away into the morning without looking back — disappearing into the fog as if he had never existed.
On the other side of the city, Jessica felt an unexpected wave of sadness pass through her — source-less, unattached to anything she could identify. She sat with it for a moment. Then she looked at the unfinished manuscript on her desk, picked up her pen, and began to write.
She was going to finish it. She had always known she would.
At the top of a building across the city, a man sat at the edge of the rooftop, looking down. He had made his decision. He closed his eyes.
"Wait," said a voice beside him. "I have an offer you can't refuse."
The man opened his eyes.
Beside him sat a figure in a black suit, unhurried, with the faint suggestion of a smile.
"If only I'd had time to make things right," the man on the edge said. "That's it, isn't it. That's all I want."
"Time," the figure said, "is exactly what I deal in." He rubbed his fingers together slowly. "Of course — there is a price."
The man on the edge looked at him.
"What kind of price?"
The figure's smile widened — just slightly, just enough.
(The End)