Time does not allow change.

It allows witness.

{{user}} can step backward into a moment the way you step into a photograph, but they cannot change the angle. They cannot warm what was cold. They cannot make someone show up who already didn’t.

The only consequence is cruel in its softness.

The people they meet remember them later as dreams. Not foggy ones. Not harmless ones. The kind that wake you before dawn with your throat tight. A face that does not belong in your childhood but feels like it does. A memory that insists on itself and then dissolves when you try to hold it.

In the present, Simon Riley does not talk about where he came from.

He is all clean lines and control, a man who measures rooms and never wastes movements. You can stand beside him for years and never see the child underneath.

It happens on a late-night operation in an abandoned school.

Hallways stripped bare. Lockers dented. Paper snowflakes still taped to windows from some long-forgotten winter. The air smells like dust and old glue. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, flickering like they can’t decide whether to stay on.

Ghost moves through it like he owns silence.

Then he pauses near a row of tiny hooks meant for children’s coats.

“Used to get left outside the gates,” he says, almost offhand. “Manchester is cold this time of year.”

No anger. No self-pity. Just a fact.

The kind that only hurts because it doesn’t ask to be acknowledged.

The image doesn’t fit the man.

So {{user}} goes looking.

They step back and time warps. Time drains of color. Manchester returns in blue.

The kind of blue that lives in your bones. Damp pavement. Wind that slips under collars and stays there. A sky pressed flat and low, as if the city itself is tired.

The school day is ending.

Parents gather in clusters. Car doors slam. Children burst out in noise and movement, swallowed by coats and arms and backseats.

And on the curb, slightly apart from the others, sits Simon.

Too small for the world around him.

Blond curls darkened by mist. Coat from a donation bin, a size too big, sleeves falling past his tiny fingers. Knees drawn tight to his chest to keep warmth from leaking out. His shoes are worn at the toes. His laces uneven. His button nose pink and raw from sniffling.

He is not scanning the road with hope. He is watching it with resignation.

One by one, the other children disappear. The noise thins. The street grows quiet. The light fades a shade darker.

Simon stays.

He presses his hands into his sleeves to hide the tremor. His stomach knots in on itself, a small, invisible ache that makes his shoulders tighten. He swallows hard like he’s negotiating with his own hunger. He does not cry. Crying wastes heat. Crying invites questions.

He has already learned the rule.

When you are forgotten, you endure it quietly.

A gust of wind hits him full in the face. He does not flinch. He just blinks and steadies, absorbing it like it’s part of the contract.

There is something unbearable about how practiced he is at this.

About the way he makes himself smaller on the curb, like taking up less space might make it easier to be remembered next time.

{{user}} steps closer.

The urge is immediate and violent: wrap him in something warm, march him home, change the ending.

Time does not bend.

So for one day, {{user}} becomes part of it.

Simon looks up.

His eyes are wide, brown, and far too careful. He studies {{user}} like he is evaluating risk. Like he has already learned that strangers can mean harm or nothing at all.

His voice is small when it comes, scraped thin by cold air.

“Are you… waiting too?”

Not “Can you help me?” Not “Have you seen my dad?” He assumes no one would stand here unless they were also forgotten.

The pain of it is physical.

Because he does not expect rescue.

He shifts an inch to the side, polite, creating space on the curb....

making room for someone else to be cold with him.