The pain in my shoulder was a throbbing, insistent reminder of my failure. Kenji found me in the chaotic aftermath, his face grim. He helped me get away before more official attention focused on the bleeding man who'd mysteriously appeared and thrown himself into the line of fire. He patched me up in his small, cluttered apartment, his silence more telling than any words of pity.
The world had reset, but my grief had only deepened, now compounded by the bitter tang of impotence. Rina was gone. Again. My younger self was now set on that same dark path of vengeance and obsession that I had walked. I had seen it in his eyes – the raw, consuming fury that had driven me for eleven years.
There was a horrifying, circular logic to it all. My attempt to save her had failed, and in doing so, I had likely only cemented the events that led to my own creation of the time machine. Was this the bootstrap paradox Mr. Tanaka had warned me about? Or was time truly fixed, each action, no matter how rebellious, merely a cog in its unyielding mechanism?
The thought of simply giving up, of letting this new, hopeless reality swallow me, was seductive. But then I'd see Rina's laughing face, hear her voice. And I'd remember the shimmering figures in the 5th dimension, the alien civilizations. If time travel was possible, if others had navigated these currents, then perhaps there was another way, a different approach I hadn't considered.
I couldn't face my younger self directly. What could I say? "I'm you from the future, and I failed spectacularly"? No. But I could still guide him. I could ensure he had the tools, the knowledge, to build the machine, perhaps even faster, more efficiently than I had the first time.
It took some doing, some forged documents and a carefully constructed backstory, but I managed to get a job as a janitor at the small, independent research facility where I knew my younger self would eventually secure funding and space to build his machine. It was a humbling, surreal experience. Mopping floors, emptying trash cans, a ghost in the periphery of my own past life. The world, this third time around, felt… flat. The vibrant details I'd noticed on my second trip, the sharp focus brought on by desperation, had dulled into a resigned acceptance. The outcome felt predetermined, yet I was compelled to play my part.
I saw him sometimes – younger Kaito, his face etched with a grief that was a mirror of my own, his eyes burning with that familiar, obsessive fire. He was already throwing himself into Rina's notes, the spark of her "Temporal Displacement Musings" igniting his broken spirit.
My work as a janitor gave me access. Late at night, when the facility was quiet, I would slip into his lab. It was a strange feeling, being an intruder in what was once my sanctuary. I'd leave notes – solutions to complex equations that I knew had stumped me for months, diagrams for more efficient energy conduits (including refined versions of the trumpet-hose design), warnings about material tolerances he wouldn't discover until after costly failures. Sometimes, I'd write them in a hurried scrawl; other times, I'd try to mimic Rina's neat script, a painful tribute.
I watched, from the shadows, as he found them. I saw the initial confusion, then the dawning understanding, the way his pace quickened, his progress accelerating beyond my own first timeline. He probably thought he was a genius, or perhaps that Rina's spirit was guiding him. Let him think that. The source didn't matter, only the result.
Years passed in this strange, clandestine dance. I aged, my hair greying at the temples, the lines on my face deepening, no longer the 32-year-old who first stepped into the capsule, but a man worn down by time and repeated tragedy. Younger Kaito, fueled by his grief and the "mysterious" assistance, made rapid progress. He was approaching the point of completion, much faster than I had.
He built his capsules, fewer this time, learning from the "notes" that detailed my earlier, numerous failures. Soon, he would be ready. And so would I.
I had my own hidden corner in the facility's sprawling, disused basement storage. Using salvaged parts, knowledge gleaned from two timelines of obsessive work, and a quiet desperation, I was building another machine. Not from scratch, thankfully. I still had the core components from my original capsule, which I'd managed to discreetly retrieve and hide after my failed attempt to save Rina. It was Mark 73, battered and scarred, but functional.
This would be my second journey into the fifth dimension. The first time, I was driven by a singular, naive hope. This time, I was armed with a bitter understanding of time's inflexibility, but also a refusal to surrender to it. If I couldn't change the past directly, perhaps I could influence it differently. Perhaps there was another point of intervention, another way to approach this.
The day younger Kaito prepared for his first launch, I was preparing for my second. The familiar hum of charging capacitors, the crackle of immense energy building – it was a sound both dreaded and welcomed. I looked at Rina's photo, now worn and creased from years of being carried. My resolve was harder this time, colder. I wasn't trying to be a hero. I was just a man trying to find a crack in the seemingly unbreakable wall of fate. If the future was already written, then I would become the pen, even if the ink was my own pain.