Chapter 2 - Time flies, isn't it?

David moved through the strange station, each step heavier than the last, as if the air itself was thickening. The hallway had disappeared, and in its place, this strange concourse had taken its place. His eyes scanned the crowd, and something gnawed at him—a feeling that he was no longer where he had been, yet something about it all felt so... familiar.

The people around him—they were ordinary, in some way, but in another, they were very much out of place. Their clothes, the way they carried themselves—everything screamed 1960s. Bell-bottoms, wide collars, thick sunglasses—they were dressed like characters out of a world David had only seen in old photos, in books. Their faces were modern, but their manner was old. It was as if time had reversed itself, but only in parts.

He moved along, trying to ignore the unsettling pull of it all. That was when he heard it—a conversation, coming from a group standing near a newsstand. It was low, the words muffled by the din of the crowd, but not enough to ignore. David slowed his pace, trying to blend in.

"... Dhalai," the man was saying, his voice barely audible. "They should've seen it coming, you know? The way they moved through, like they knew what was coming. I never thought I'd see the day."

Another voice, softer, like a woman's, interrupted. "They were too quick. And after everything, the way the army stepped in..." She trailed off, her words more fragile now, like she wasn't entirely sure of what she had just said. "I thought it was all over when the air dropped. But... still."

David felt his throat tighten, but he didn't move. The words bounced off each other, a casual mention of events that felt completely out of place. He had heard the term Battle of Dhalai before, but here it was, being discussed as if it was something that had just happened. 1971. It didn't belong.

"You think they'll talk about it on the news?" another man's voice cut through the quiet. His tone was flat, detached, as if he was waiting for the world to respond to him.

"I think they're already talking about it," the first voice responded, a tired sigh escaping him. "Some things you can't hide."

David tried to process it, but it didn't make sense. The events they were discussing, the Battle of Dhalai, the rising political tensions—it was all rooted in the past. Real, undeniable history. But they spoke as though it had just happened.

The words drifted away as he turned, unable to shake the unease crawling up his spine. They didn't look at him, none of them did. They didn't seem to notice him, standing there, listening to their strange words.

The more he thought about it, the more unsettling it became—how were they speaking about it, with such certainty, with such familiarity? It was as if the world around him was locked in a moment long ago, like someone had thrown him into a memory that wasn't his own.

David looked around again, his eyes tracing the people who moved past him, lost in their quiet world. No one was in a hurry. There was no sense of urgency, no impatience—the kind of natural rhythm you'd find in any bustling place. But here, it felt like time had taken a pause. Like everything had been suspended. A frozen calm, the kind that only came from a world that hadn't moved in decades.

He blinked.

And for a moment, he wondered—Could it really be the 1970s? Was he standing in some odd, twisted corner of reality, a figment of his mind playing tricks on him? Had he somehow slipped into a past that was never supposed to happen?

He could feel it. The quiet pressure building in his chest, the air around him growing thick, as if even the world had decided to stop its relentless turning.

The exit. He needed to find the exit.

His feet moved almost without his consent, his legs carrying him through the bizarre station, each step more mechanical than the last. It was like he was walking through an empty dream, a place that didn't belong to him yet still somehow felt like his own.

David found himself standing at the threshold of the main hallway. The buzz of fluorescent lights overhead reverberated in his ears, the hum of time itself. The walls, the floors—they were all the same as before. Or were they? He had never stopped to really notice. It was a place he knew, a place he walked through every day. But something was off. The patterns on the floor, the tiles on the walls, the smell of old coffee and damp newspapers—it all felt too... still.

He shook his head, trying to clear the fog gathering in his thoughts. Was it really possible? Had he truly stumbled into the past, or was this just some hallucination, some side effect of the strange staircase, of whatever had pulled him into this place? Was he losing his mind?

A couple passed by, the woman wearing a thick coat with large buttons, the man in a tweed jacket and a fedora—like something straight out of an old movie. They didn't look at him, didn't acknowledge his presence at all. Their faces were empty of expression, like they were actors playing a role in a scene he didn't understand.

He stopped and closed his eyes for a moment. The moment stretched longer than it should have. The world around him seemed to pulse, each sound, each movement, somehow a beat out of sync.

His breath caught in his throat.

The feeling hit him again—this wasn't right. It was too much, too real and yet so incredibly wrong. The ordinary conversations, the clothes, the faces—they belonged to a time long past, a time that he had never lived through, a time that shouldn't have been here.

It was as if the universe itself had shifted on its axis, and now, here he was—trapped between moments, caught in the friction of time that had somehow slipped free of its grip.

But there was one thing David knew: whatever had happened here, whatever had twisted this place into something it wasn't, it had to be connected to that stairwell, that hallway that had disappeared.

Find the exit. Get out.

He glanced down the hallway again. And yet, even as he moved, something inside him whispered that there was no exit. Not here. Not now.

He took a step forward. The world didn't move, but he did.

He approached the far end of the station, where the light dimmed just enough to distort the edges of things. His hand brushed against the flaking edge of a rusted sign that read EXIT, though the letters seemed... off. Like they hadn't been painted, but carved into clay and left to dry in the sun, then forgotten. Each letter curled like it was trying to escape the surface.

David hesitated, then stepped through.

The air on the other side was different—impossibly so. Warmer. Denser. Sweet, even. The kind of air that had a flavor. Cicadas sang somewhere in the distance, their rhythm slow and patient, like they'd been waiting a long time for someone to come through that door.

A street opened up before him. Brickwork. Narrow sidewalks. Telephone poles with looping wires that swayed gently in a wind he couldn't feel. The cars parked nearby were boxy, chrome-edged ghosts. None newer than the 1970s, he thought vaguely.

David turned slowly, like waking from a dream he hadn't realized he was in.

This wasn't his city.

Not quite.

It was smaller. Softer around the edges. Storefronts hadn't been modernized. There were no billboards shouting in neon or fluorescent convenience stores screaming open twenty-four-seven.

But he knew it. That corner store with the green awning, the cracked pavement by the public library, even the bench beneath the rusted stop sign—it had a dent on the left side from a bicycle crash when he was twelve.

His chest tightened. This was home. His real home. The city he grew up in. Only it wasn't now. It couldn't be.

The faces that passed him looked younger, as if time had taken a breath and reversed its own memory. Fashion was off. The people wore shirts tucked too high, skirts with outdated patterns, cigarettes dangling from too many mouths.

A woman passed him with a newspaper tucked under her arm. He caught a glimpse of the date before she vanished down the block.

June 23, 1971.

He stared. Swallowed.

His brain fumbled for logic. Drugs? A dream? Some side effect of a stroke?

Or time travel.

He felt the word stretch out in his mind, absurd and solid all at once. Time travel.

But why?

And how?

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the train ticket, still damp from the rain of another timeline. The ink was already fading.

And just like that, the cicadas stopped.

He stood there for a moment longer, the station's strange gravity behind him and the quiet hum of a life long gone ahead.

The thought of being late to the office—that email he was supposed to send, the coffee meeting with someone whose name he barely remembered—it drifted away like cigarette smoke. Weightless. Laughable. He could almost see it dissolve in the summer air. What was an office now, in a place where time curled inward like the edge of a burnt photograph?

He thought of home.

Not the apartment he paid too much for. The real one. The one with peeling yellow paint and a front porch that always smelled faintly of rain.

His feet moved without instruction.

Down the familiar roads, past the fence where Mrs. Callahan's dog used to bark at every passing soul, past the record store with a cracked window they never fixed, past the ice cream parlor where he had once kissed Ellie Monroe under a string of faulty lights. They flickered then, too. That hadn't changed.

And with each step, the world around him grew heavier with memory.

There was the corner where he crashed his bike trying to race the summer wind.

The alley where he and Paul used to smoke stolen cigarettes, pretending they were already men.

A tree carved with his initials, and someone else's, now grown over but not erased.

He passed the old cinema, boarded up even back then, but its marquis still half-spelled something:

"BRINGING BACK THE PAST…"

David smiled. Bitterly. Ironically. What else was he doing?

By the time he reached the street where he once lived, the air smelled of cut grass and warm dust. Everything looked just right. The right color of dusk. The right shape of sidewalk cracks. The right ache in his chest.

Then he saw it—his old house.

Still standing. Still leaning a little to the left.

And in the window—movement. A shape. Slender, pacing. A young man.

Him.

Nineteen, maybe twenty. Hair a little longer. Shoulders tense with a thousand invisible burdens only a young man believes he must carry alone. That version of himself hadn't yet been hurt the right way. Hadn't yet been shaped by silence and repetition and missing people.

David stood on the other side of the street, hidden just behind a telephone pole, not yet ready to cross. Not yet sure what he'd even say.

Somewhere in the distance, the cicadas began to hum again.

And the world, for a moment, felt like a memory being remembered by someone else.