He watched his past-future self not look up as Sana sat down across from him. She said something. He didn’t hear it—the audio was muffled, canteen noise drowning everything out. But his younger self pulled out one earbud, smiled a small, closed-mouth smile, and nodded.
The recording skipped. Suddenly it was lunchtime. The canteen. Leo saw himself— himself , sitting at the far table with his earbuds in, scrolling through something on his phone. He was wearing the grey hoodie with the torn cuff. The same one he had on right now, in his bedroom, at 2:30 AM.
Leo stared at the frozen last frame for a long time. Then he opened his messages. Scrolled past the group chats, past the spam from the sixth-form college he’d applied to, past the three-year-old thread with Sana’s name at the top. Year 10 -2024- 720p WEBRip-LAMA
Instead, he opened his calendar. October 9th, 2024. That was next week. He didn’t have a camera. He didn’t have a time machine. He didn’t have a user named to thank or blame.
He deleted the file. Then he set an alarm for 8:30 AM, October 9th. And for the first time in a very long time, he went to sleep before 3 AM, wondering if some versions of a story only exist so you can make sure the next one ends differently. He watched his past-future self not look up
When it finished, he opened it.
The file landed in Leo’s downloads folder at 2:17 AM on a Tuesday. He hadn’t been looking for it. He’d been looking for a half-decent stream of an old Doctor Who special, something to fill the hollow hours between his mum’s night shift and his own dawn patrol of homework he wouldn’t do. Instead, the magnet link had blinked at him from a forgotten forum, posted by a user named who hadn’t logged in since 2015. But his younger self pulled out one earbud,
Then a girl walked into frame. Sana. Year 10 Sana, with her too-large blazer and the fringe she’d cut herself two weeks into term. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at someone off-screen, laughing at something Leo couldn’t hear. She looked happy. She looked alive.