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It's late May, 1912, and the warmth of Spring takes none of the sting from the look on his face when he tightly says 'you could have warned me' in the doorway of the Sanctuary where she stands and makes a light apology for the length of time it had taken her past self to send a telegram from New York to tell him she was alive after the ship sank. His hands are warm as they embrace her, and she lets it chase away some of the bleak loneliness that has begun to seep into her bones. Even as she knows it is relief for a different, earlier version of her.
She stays two days before making an excuse to leave. Like the perfect ghost he is, he makes no comment on the fact that she's lying, only kissing her cheek before she leaves, and no one but her hears her own traitorous internal voice saying she's wasting a second chance.
It's 1945, a fortnight after the war ends, and it's raining when she knocks on the door just after midnight. There's a shadow of burning blame on his face before he catches himself and it feels like an indictment even if they both know she couldn't have warned him or changed what had happened. Maybe it's worse that he doesn't say anything. They sit in silence for over an hour, but he doesn't turn her away when she leans her forehead against his shoulder in bed later, and cards his fingers through her dyed black hair without any of the blame.
She's gone by dawn. He doesn't mention it in his next letter.
It's 1961 and a relationship longer than most people ever get to have is over with a flimsy premise of setting up a new Sanctuary in America. Nearly eighty years into this rerun of time and a plate of glass cracked out in spiderwebs somewhere in her ribcage, into the shape of the word 'mistake'. It's the first time in a long time that he raises his voice at her and turns her away, and not an inch of her blames him.
He writes six months later, and she writes back, and they pretend nothing is wrong. That he isn't devastated, that she doesn't know somewhere deep in her very coding that it was the biggest mistake of her life.
It's 1975 and Nigel is dead. She doesn't risk attending the funeral again, but she's waiting in the library when James returns from New Orleans; knowing he would be alone because right at that moment the contemporary version of herself was trying to keep Nikola from falling apart entirely. For a moment, they look at each other, like a silent innate knowledge that something terrible has started with the death of one of them, shared. Like a death of hubris she is vicariously reliving.
If he recognizes the part of her that relives it for him one day, he doesn't mention it. Instead, they spend a week together, in a hollow echo of decades ago when they were invincible and without a hundred years of baggage.
It's 2008 and James will be dead in a week. She comes on a sunny afternoon, too bright. And in the passing second that his eyes narrow on her, she knows that he knows. He knows that she's there for the same reason as she always is, because she aches. And he knows this time will be the last, even if it's never said out loud, her undercurrent is enough of a tell. He knows her far too well.
When she leaves in the morning, the touch to his hand lasts too long and he kisses her back like he has the same ache at wasting too much time that she has in her chest.
It's two days until the tremors of grief stop bringing her finally to tears, like a self punishment at never crying for him last time.
It's 2023 and it's the first time she's brought herself to visit the headstone with his name etched on it since the funeral. December snow lays thick on the ground as she stands, hands in coat pockets for a long while, in comfortable silence. Maybe next time-- if there was one-- she would do things differently.
Third time lucky.