Sweet Romance16 min read
He Rewound Time, I Held the Knife
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I woke to a scream and sunlight cutting the car like a knife.
"Someone—help!" a stranger's voice screamed from outside, thin and urgent.
I blinked. The back seat felt too small for the panic in my chest. I looked out through the smeared window and saw bodies—people, if you could still call them that—tossed like dolls into the road. Blood patterned the glass in sick dark petals. A man was slumped on the pavement, white eyes rolling in his skull. A woman crawled without legs. A child I couldn't really see had only a jaw left.
"Stop! Stop the car!" I shouted, my voice crackling.
Fionn's hand tightened on the wheel. "Look closely. Are those people?"
I stared. The moving dead were pale, eyes milky, each step a wrong, jerking imitation of life. The car's speed made the scene a blur, but I saw enough: missing limbs, ripped clothing, gray mouths.
"Zombies," I whispered, and my hands flew to my mouth.
Fionn's face was calm in a way that didn't fit the chaos. "Buckle up," he said. "I'm going to speed up."
I stared at him. "You're crazy. Pull over. We should hide."
He laughed once, a short sound with no humor. "Too many people in the city. We're going home—to my parents' place in the countryside. Less people, more chance."
I couldn't believe the words. "You knocked me out and put me in the car. You—"
"You'll thank me when it's safe," he said, like a sentence he'd practiced. He reached to the glovebox and pulled out two knives, sleek and cold. He handed one to me.
My fingers shook when I took it. It felt heavier than it looked.
"Stay here while I clear the truck." His jaw hardened. "Do not be reckless."
"I won't," I lied.
We barreled through a highway of crushed metal and human sound. Fionn used the truck in front of us like a battering ram; we rode its wake. The world became a collage of smashed glass and leaning bodies. He drove like a man with memory and a deadline. He would later tell me—hours later, curled against him in a room that smelled of pine and something softer—that he'd already lived all this once. That the man in the passenger seat had been buried.
"You're saying you—" I tried to make my voice level, but I kept looking at his hands. They were steady.
"Rewound," he said bluntly. "I came back six months, told my parents. That gave us a head start."
He pressed a thumb into my palm, quick and stealthy. "Trust me."
"I trust you," I said, and the words slid out of me. My heart tried to believe him. It also refused to forget the first thing he did—how he'd knocked me out. The fact lived inside my throat like a sour drop.
We didn't talk about why he had to knock me out until later. For now, there were dead things to clear and a village to reach.
"Drive slow through the town," he said when the SUV rolled into his parents' courtyard. "We can't attract attention."
"Will they like me?" I asked, ridiculous and real.
"Yes," he replied. "My mother already said you'll like her soup." He turned only slightly and squeezed my hand, then covered it with both of his. "She'll love you."
His parents were waiting at the gate like a harbor light. Wells, his father, blinked as if seeing us through sleep, and Coraline, his mother, wrapped me in a hug that smelled of lavender and soap. I faltered, grateful and guilty, as if I was taking a free seat on a boat I hadn't earned.
Coraline fussed over my face. "Are you hungry? You look pale, dear."
"I'm fine," I said, the lie smaller than it had been in the car. "So hungry."
"Come inside. We have hot soup and—" she began, and then stopped, eyes on Fionn. "You didn't tell me she was coming so soon."
Fionn's look softened. "I thought it would be nice."
He did not tell them about the courtship of half-living things outside the gate, or about how sometimes he'd woken in a world where he couldn't save me. He told stories about small, silly things instead—about a summer when he'd tripped over a hose and blamed it on the cat. His parents laughed like they'd never known the joke, like some small joy he had offered them anew.
That night, after the house went quiet, I asked him again.
"You said you rewound time." I sat at the edge of his bed, listening to the house breathe. "Why didn't you tell me first? Why the knock-out?"
His face was shadowed. "I couldn't risk you leaving. People don't survive the start. I knew who would panic, who would take the wrong route. I had to make sure—you stayed put. You'll understand when you see what I know."
Later, he would show me his foresight like a map: where the roads would jam, where a truck's body could block a lane and make a perfect shield, when the cold would hit and freeze the dead into statues. I would come to know all the basics of being alive when the world unspooled into something else.
The first day we moved supplies into the house, I watched him work like a man with a list in his head. He moved quickly, precise. He put vacuum-sealed bedding in stacks, labeled every shelf, and installed a freezer with the kind of practical calm that made things seem possible.
"Why so many blankets?" I asked, lugging a bag into a room stuffed with more bags.
"Cold wave," he said. "It will last three months. It's the only chance the living have."
"Three months?" I repeated, feeling the number like a challenge.
"Three months," he echoed. "After that the military will start the push. We just have to hold out."
We learned to share chores. He watched my hands while I chopped vegetables. Once, a bit clumsy, I spilled broth on my sleeve, and without speaking he peeled it off my wrist and draped his jacket over my shoulders.
"You're freezing." He wrapped the jacket tighter than was needed.
"I can manage," I protested. He thumbed the back of my neck, and the protest melted.
"Come here," he said softly, and I let myself shuffle closer. He rested his forehead against mine, a brief, grounding press. "I promised I'd keep you safe."
"You did knock me out, though." I couldn't help smiling into the gravity between us.
"Prefers hands-on methods," he said. "And you were sleeping so prettily."
"I am not sleeping 'prettily' when I get knocked out," I said.
"You're dramatic," he replied, smiling in the dark.
We worked together on practice—on learning how to swing an ax and where to aim. The first time I killed a shambling corpse with my own blade, I tasted iron and felt a strange, small pride. He clapped lightly when I returned to the truck, like a person at the end of a recital.
"Good," he murmured. "You did it. You were brave."
"You always make this sound like a compliment and a rebuke," I said.
"Because it is both." He kissed my temple, soft as a promise.
We went on runs with a small convoy. Nicolas Bryant—Fionn's cousin by long family lines and an engineer in better times—had a drone and a voice like a radio operator. He called coordinates and watched from above, the drone buzzing like a careless fly.
"There's a clear path," Nicolas said on the headset one afternoon. "Two trucks clear. One cluster at gate five."
Fionn answered, "We move on truck two. I take the lead. Annabelle, stay low and keep the radio."
I held the small radio, the button cold under my thumb, and watched them choreograph violence like a practiced dance. He would later explain, gently and matter-of-fact: "I made sure the people who needed to be out were out. The rest I left to luck."
Luck, in his mouth, sounded like a tool.
The grain factory run went wrong in a subtle way. People always said it would be worse if we trusted strangers. We loaded sacks faster than we should have and felt the heat of heavy chest. When the second truck got grief in its engine, people crowded and argued.
"They're greedy," I muttered.
"Keep your voice," Fionn said, calm but cold. "We get what we need."
"Some of those men on the second truck were...bad," Nicolas said later in the yard. "They wouldn't stop talking about selling extra bags. One of them—Dax Greene—kept picking fights."
"Dax Greene," Fionn repeated like a name on a list. "He always had a thin smile."
"Someone should have watched the door," I said, feeling redundant. "I thought they would."
The convoy left with two trucks and an SUV. We dragged our loads like a small victory into the village. That night we sorted; the house hummed with the low, practical sound of survival. In the darkness, I put my hand on his wrist.
"Did you ever sleep? Back then?" I asked. "The first time?"
He closed his eyes. "Not much. Not when I thought about losing you."
"You told them I was important," I said. "You told your parents about me."
"I told them the truth," he said. "You saved me before; you will again."
I believed him then, and I believed him in the days that followed: in how he taught me to hide our smells with flower water, in how he set out solar panels on the roof. He did small things that felt like theaters of care—he fixed the little radio that hummed in the kitchen, he woke before dawn to check the house, he left a spare bowl of soup on my chair so I wouldn't miss meals when I practiced.
There were moments that lit up and stayed. Once, after a long dangerous run, I sat shivering on the kitchen floor, hands cupped around the hot mug he'd put in my lap.
"Drink," he said.
I sipped. "It's sweet."
"I know you like it sweeter." He smiled and stole my spoon. "You always did."
"Is that one of your half-lies?" I asked, half-smiling.
He leaned in and kissed my knuckle. "It's not a lie."
Another moment: in the early cold, when frost etched the windows like tiny feathers and we had wandered up to the roof to check the panels, he took off his glove without thinking and brushed the frost from my hair.
"You get static," he said, more tender than necessary. "It looks like little stars."
I laughed, breath fogging, and he laughed too. The laugh made me feel less raw.
"Promise me one thing," I said, half in jest, because I could not ask for big promises anymore.
"Anything," he answered, and I felt the air ricochet in my chest.
"Don't ever go where I can't follow," I said.
He kissed me then, longer and softer, like sealing a contract with mouth and warm breath. "I won't," he said. "Not this time."
Sweetness threaded through survival. But sweet and loss are lovers; one returns to remind the other its worth. The convoy's luck cracked like glass on the road home.
We watched from the SUV when the second truck that had been slow to leave burst into violence. Voices in the headset sharpened, degrees of panic rising.
"Someone's screwed a crate," Nicolas said. "They're arguing."
The radio swallowed a scream. Fionn swore and floored the SUV. We saw a person thrown from a truck. "No!" I shouted.
On the radio, the static peeled into a man's voice bursting with blame. "Dax—Dax didn't check! He pushed Tiger out! He—"
"Who?" Fionn barked.
"His name's Dax Greene," Nicolas answered. "He—"
The rest was a sound like something breaking. A crash followed by screams and the dull, far-off sound of bodies hitting metal. People who had hunted with us were gone. The second truck had apparently become a coffin.
That night, the yard was quiet. Someone had taped a piece of torn fabric to a post in the center of the village, a scrap still smelling of smoke. No one slept properly.
"Who kicked them out?" I demanded. "Who would—"
"People can be monsters when everyone is frightened," Fionn said. He did not raise his voice. "We will not become monsters."
I watched him train, how he kept his face careful when he spoke to others. But inside he was a storm. He would later tell me that in his first life, he had arranged for some men to be out when things started. He had let luck—and more than luck—decide people's fates. It was a confession he said with a small smile and no apology.
"Why?" I asked him later, raw. "Why would you—"
"For you," he said simply.
"For you." The words were a small blade between us. "I don't want the cost to be people's lives."
"Sometimes the world asks for terrible choices." He looked at me hard. "I did what it took to make sure you slept inside a house and not outside in the cold."
I bit the inside of my cheek and tasted metal. "Does that make it okay?"
"No," he said, immediate and honest. "But in the calculus of two lives, I chose the one I could save."
I didn't know how to answer. The village was alive with small resentments that had nowhere to go. When we traded grain and worked the fields, there were quiet stares. People had lists they kept to themselves.
And then, months later, something happened that demanded a kind of punishment that couldn't be private.
The world thawed, and with thaw came convoys and a new order. The military's presence made people bolder. Soldiers set up a command tent in the field outside the village. When patrols found recordings of the convoy's final minutes—footage that the drone had taken and that Nicolas had saved—those recordings found their way to the tent.
"There are men who abandoned people," a soldier told us during a meeting. "This is not a small matter."
A public assembly formed under a gray sky. Word spread like wildfire; the entire village came—people holding babies wrapped in quilt, an old woman hobbling on a cane, teenagers with worried faces, the ones who had survived debts and hunger and still had the courage to stand in the cold and hear a name read aloud. The square filled. Fionn stood at my side, hand in my back, anchoring me like a rope.
"Today we are going to address an act of egregious cowardice," the commander said into a microphone. "We have video. We will show it."
The drone footage played on a rough screen hung between two poles. The scene was grainy but readable. A truck shook; a man's voice rose, angry and desperate. Two figures pushed others, a flap of movement. One of them—Dax Greene—kicked an open door. Another—Edric Cordova—stood by, eyes like coin-slits, counting profits in his head.
A woman in the crowd sobbed. "That's my brother," she said. She pointed at the screen. "That's my hush. They—"
"Silence," the commander said. He didn't raise his voice but the command cut clean.
The footage cut to footage taken by Nicolas earlier, where a hand shoved a man into the road. The screen showed him fall into the clutching mouths of the dead. People gasped. A child's cry broke the air.
Dax stood before us with body still and puffy. He had not expected this. "It wasn't like that," he blurted.
From the crowd, a voice replied, "It was! You were laughing!"
"Edric, you said you'd keep an eye," someone shouted.
"They're saying we stole supplies—" Edric's voice tried to build defense. "We took what was ours. You can't prove—"
"You can look at this," the commander said. He gestured for the drone's audio. The recording played over the crowd: muffled curses, a voice raising as if to shove, then a scream and the swish of the wind. "You left people to die to save your own skins," the commander said. "This council will not allow it."
Dax's face started bright and thin, then it flushed as energy left him. He tried to smile, a half-breed grin for the cameras of his own making. "We had to," he said to a man near him, as if asking for evidence that would not come.
"They had families," someone called from the crowd. "They had small children."
Fionn moved forward then, his voice low but reaching. "They were out for the group," he said. "They didn't deserve that." His eyes on mine were flat as metal. "We will not let murder walk in our village."
Dax's chest rose. "You weren't there. You can't judge—"
"You were filmed," said the soldier, flat. "We have images."
The punishment the council designed was public and humiliation wrapped inside it. The village wanted two things: a record of shame and a way to make sure this behavior could never again be profitable. They discussed many options: exile alone into the wild, shackles, forced labor, a public confession. They chose a combination.
First, they took Dax and Edric out into the square and had them stand on a raised pallet. People crowded in a ring. The commander read each charge—abandonment, theft, attempted murder—each one simple and heavy. He asked if they had anything to say.
Dax tried to joke. His attempt at levity died under the crowd's eyes. "I didn't—" he started.
"You did," said a woman whose son had been shoved from that truck. She stepped forward and spat—an act small and everyday that made Dax reel more than any soldier's hand could have. "You left him there."
"Edric, did you know they were in the road?" someone demanded.
Edric's mouth creased. "No. I didn't—"
The village would not let them finish. A boy, maybe fifteen, stepped into the circle with his phone bright as if to make the world watch. He said, "We will record this. So if you ever try this again, people will know."
Then the commander ordered the humiliation. The men had to kneel on cold stone while the town spoke names of those they had wronged, each name like a pebble flung into their faces. People came up one by one and told a memory—how a sister had cried, how a mother had been left to freeze. Their voices were plain and steady, not a howl of revenge but an accumulation of hurt.
Dax's face tried to harden. He shifted, throat bobbing. Edric's shoulders went from careful to slack. The crowd's reaction was a tide: some hissed, some wept, some simply stared and turned their eyes away.
Then came the labor sentence. The men were tasked with repairing every house they had looted from, mend fences, carry water, stack hay, under the eyes of those they had betrayed. They would do this for months, and their names would be written on a board outside the square for everyone to see. The commander declared that each day they failed to return on time would cost them a public marking. "You will earn back trust," the commander said. "Not money—trust."
Dax's voice finally broke when the woman whose brother had died came forward and touched the back of his head. "Tell me his name," she said in a broken whisper. "Say it now."
He couldn't. Tears came, bulky and hot. He tried to say, "I'm sorry," but the apology had no weight enough. The crowd's silence swallowed the words.
We watched as they repaired the fence of the house they'd looted. The men bent their backs without complaint, but the change we all needed was not work alone. The punishment had to be seen and felt by the whole village. They needed to show that cruelty could not be profitable and that a public reckoning made the place safer.
People took pictures; some clapped coldly when the men arrived at work each day; some turned away. The men themselves changed, not magically but in slow stages—believing that the world might still insist on human decency. At first Dax looked hollow, eyes darting and trying to find a way out. Then he began to answer the names called to him with a small nod, a motion like a man learning to hold his mouth shut against a needle.
Edric, who had kept his hands clean of the heaviest crimes but still had been complicit, showed a different arc. He grew gaunter, a man learning guilt by manual labor. One day, after weeks, he approached the mother of a child he had helped abandon. He knelt and began to help her repair the roof, his hands clumsy and earnest. She did not accept his apology. She only watched and then walked away. The public punishment had not allowed immediate reconciliation, and perhaps that was right.
The point of the spectacle was not to make them suffer for the pleasure of others. It was to make an example, and to test whether human communities would rather have justice or swift forgetting. We watched, and we learned. We did not lynch them; we made them visible and accountable. That was the village's verdict.
"What about prison?" someone asked later.
"Prisons are for times with full courts and laws," Nicolas told us. "Here we have people. We make decisions that repair us."
Fionn stood close to me then and murmured, "This is the closest we're going to get to justice without becoming them."
"I still hate the idea of public shaming," I said. "It feels like the same violence."
"It's a balance," he said, and he was quiet. "I know."
The punishment lasted weeks. The crowd's reaction shifted subtly: shock turned to murmured approval when men mended the very doors they had broken. Dax, once almost laughing when he pushed a man out of a truck, learned to hold a plank steady. He was not forgiven. He was required to be visible and useful and human in the place he'd tried to dehumanize others.
The most painful moment came the afternoon when Dax stood in the square and had to listen to a woman calmly read the name of the brother he'd sent into the road. He tried to flinch away but could not. His composure cracked in stages—first denial, then anger, then a raw, uncomposed pleading. He fell to his knees and begged, "Please—please forgive me," and then he sobbed like someone who had been pretending his whole life.
The crowd's reaction changed, too. A few in the front muttered, "He has to pay." Others trembled, not in triumph but because they had glimpsed the rawness of remorse. Some clapped; a few walked away. But no one lifted a hand. The act of public punishment had turned fury into something that could be watched without turning the watchers into monsters.
It did not undo what was done. But when a child—small and bright-eyed—ran up and threw a handful of seed into the men's hands, Dax caught them and looked like a man who had been given a tool to plant instead of bury. "You plant," the child said. "Watch it grow." That was the closest thing to grace that day.
After the punishment, life continued. Food was rationed and shared, the solar panels hummed, and the cold came and went. Fionn and I kept each other close. He taught me more than how to swing a knife—he taught me how to sit with fear and not let it be the decision-maker. He taught me to clean blades carefully, to patch bandages with slow hands, and to listen to the people at the table.
Three months after the freezing temperatures were supposed to end, the radio finally carried a voice that sounded like government and not like rumor. An organized unit came into the area. Soldiers replaced some of our guard. Unmanned planes flew more often and less like stray moths. The world did not flip back suddenly, but it moved inch by good inch.
The day the rescue came and the cold finally lessened, Fionn looked at me as if he had seen a future he was afraid to keep. "How did you die last time?" I asked, curious and warmed by the idea of fate undone.
He shook his head. "Later," he said. "For now—"
"For now," I echoed. He kissed me sideways, in the place where the headache starts. "For now we'll keep living."
He told me a story then, under a sky that had warmed, about the last time. In his first life, we had been cold and he had failed. He had come back to try to fix it. He had made choices I didn't always understand. He had kept me inside and built a fortress out of blankets and habits. But he had also been cruel in the name of saving me; he had gambled with other people's lives to make one thing certain.
"I don't regret saving you," he said that night, voice low. "But I regret the price. I will carry it."
"I don't want you to carry it alone," I answered. "Let me help."
He looked at me with a softness that made my knees forget how to be steady. "You do that already."
Epilogue — Fionn's Perspective
Sometimes I wake with the smell of cold in my nose and Annabelle asleep under my arm, humming as if the future were a lullaby. The memory of her dead face when I first found her in the last life is a furnace that never goes out. It pushed me to do what I did. I lied to get the time I needed. I lied to build whatever fortress could keep her warm.
I do not pretend I was a good man. I was a man who broke some others to keep one safe. That is not a thing to be proud of. It is a toothache.
But she is alive. She kisses the light out of morning. She makes tea sweeter than I deserve. She calls me ridiculous for knocking over a stack of cans. She is mine in a way no one else is.
Sometimes I wake and think of the men I set into motion that first time—how they were at wrong places, how the dice fell. I think of the public day when the village made them measurable, when the shame was meted out and the men had to be human. That was not revenge. It was something pragmatic: people needed to trust living people again.
Annabelle sleeps beside me. Our house holds the smell of soup and the soft hum of a solar panel. Our friends have names and faces and small axes we sharpen before dawn. The world is messy and terrible. It will always be.
She stirs and opens one eye. "Promise?" she says, half-asleep.
"Promise what?" I answer, and her hand finds mine.
She squeezes. "Promise you'll stay where I can see you."
"I promise," I say, and mean it in the only way I know how.
We have a long list of things to do—fix the roof, plant the seeds Dax eventually helped carry, teach the children how to swing a harmless stick. But for now, the house is warm. The patched mulberry tea waits on the counter, still sweet. We live. We make small promises and keep them. That is all we can do.
The End
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