HONOKA

The machine was almost completed, Honoka observed, as she ran another simulation on her laptop in the basement of the Science building. The meteor's luminous essence had been refined into fuel for the temporal collider. Technically, Honoka knew she could begin the first stage of the… leap. But Honoka wanted to run the final experiments before the plunge, if only to validate to herself that she'd done this, actually built this machine off of a few notes she'd taken in a coffee shop talking to her other self, she'd created this formula and she'd done the work herself.

She sipped at a mug of cold peppermint tea. The grey ceramic edge was cracked, from pushing some binders off the desk and accidentally sending the mug with it. The edges were not filled with any precious materials, it had not become more beautiful for breaking. Like her.

Honoka didn't want to make the jump into the next… she could barely bring herself to think of it. (It was so wrong. Reality wasn't supposed to be this fragile.) The next world. Honoka didn't want to go. She didn't want to find out what terrible things would happen the next time, find out how the pulled strings of their lives were braided together in the next miserable pattern.

It was Honoka's fault this had happened, she felt in the deepest part of her soul. Maki's broken hands, Umi's bureaucratic coldness, Eli's… whatever it was that Eli did. (Her other self had spoken only in hushed, vague tones, when she'd told Honoka what had happened to Eli, what she assumed Eli was doing in this timeline.) Honoka knew this feeling wasn't fair to herself, she could not control what Umi did or Eli did or a glowing space rock did to the local environment. But if only she'd been better. If only she hadn't met with her past self, fascinated and curious, she wouldn't have pushed Umi and Kotori away. If only she'd been able to keep Maki safe. She hadn't been enough, for Umi and Kotori. She'd been too much for Maki. Resetting everything was the only way she could redeem herself.

She'd seen Maki that evening, who'd barely spoken a word to her, barely said anything about the surgeon's visit. Maki had seemed almost surprised to see her, and on the rare occasion that she spoke, she was sharp and full of uncharacteristic innuendo.

(And yet, Honoka had the strangest sense of deja vu. Perhaps it was an old memory, from an old life.)

Honoka knew, deep down, that Maki cared for her. But Honoka couldn't tell her anything real, couldn't tell her the full weight she carried. Maki liked Honoka, the cute bright girl from high school who did science projects with her. She didn't know the Honoka who held infinite secrets clinging to her heart. And.. if Maki knew how her hands were broken…

This wasn't fair to herself. Honoka did not control meteors, she did not have the ability to prevent the temporal incidents from happening any more than she could have summoned the meteor to earth. Honoka could not control where her friends went or what her friends did.

Unless…

Honoka knew she shouldn't consider it, but she reset the simulation with new parameters all the same.

At the coffee shop in New York, her other self had told Honoka that many things had changed, not just the events after she'd spoken to Honoka the first time. In the first timeline, Umi's mother had run the dojo and her father had run the dance classes, Otonokizaka had been an all-gender school, she'd had a brief fling with Tsubasa before getting with someone else (she'd refused to say who.) She'd wondered out loud how much would have changed if she'd done more, besides tell Honoka she shouldn't go major with muse.

Honoka had asked why she'd told her not to go major, but her other self had only said it had ended in tragedy, and collapsed into a dull silence, unwilling to say more.

If Honoka made the leap herself when she reset, she could make things right. With everyone. Eli, Umi, Kotori… even Maki. If Umi hadn't been so suspicious of her. If Kotori had gotten more support from everyone. If only Maki had gotten to a bigger, safer school, away from the corrupted landscape… she didn't know exactly what to do with Eli. If Honoka did everything perfectly that time, maybe things would end without tragedy.

Her eyes blurred with hot tears. This was never what she wanted. Even now, she would prefer to stay in this doomed world, to wait for the end, to live on in her next life's subconscious.

Honoka watched the simulation play out. It would work, with a purer compound of the meteor. She could go back further than her past self had. She'd done it. She would have to do it.