Sweet Romance16 min read
"I Didn't Ask to Time-Travel — I Asked to Fix the Plot"
ButterPicks14 views
"I told you to help, not to kidnap me."
"I did what you asked." The system's tiny voice sounded like a kid trying to be stern. "And you paid your fees."
I threw my mouse and it clattered against the desk. "Paid my fees? You sold my farmhouse, didn't you?"
"Collateral," the System said. "Also, you asked to be sent into the book. I sent you into the book."
I blinked at the dim light that made the dirt on the old wall look like a map of my ruined life. Rain had left the path slick. My hand smelled of wet soil. I rubbed my face and the skin was warm and real.
"Who even puts a pig in a net and calls it a welcome?" I muttered.
A young man emerged from the trees five steps away. He had short dark hair, a stubborn jaw, and a look like tough bread—rough and honest.
"Get up," he said without smiling. He lifted the net by the rope and the pig stopped thrashing. One hard punch had ended it.
I crawled away and sat with my back to a tree. My heart was pounding like a drum. "Were you the puncher?" I asked.
He looked at me once, calm as stone. "Go home. Your aunt will worry."
"I don't have an aunt," I said. Then I stopped. I had to remember the rules: I was Erin Cook now, a low-role girl in a 1970s village novel. My other life—my laptop, my trolls, my comments—was gone. The seat of that life was empty. But my memory of the book was a map. I could change things.
"System," I whispered. "Is this the book? The stolen book? The one where I get everything stolen from me and then vanish?"
"Correct," the System said. "Title: Reborn in the Seventies, I Take the Heroine's Luck. You insisted on revenge. You wanted me to fix the plot."
"I did not say fix," I told it. "I said make him regret stealing my ending."
"You said revenge," the System said. "I delivered transport."
I pulled my knees up. "Deliver me back, then."
"No return," the System said. "Plot sealed. But I saved your shopping list and left one packet."
"A packet?" I asked.
"A packet of sanitary napkins," it said with dignity. "For practicality."
"I give up," I said, and then I laughed, which sounded like a hiccup. I was in the book. This was real. My options were smaller than before, but I had a system and a memory. That was enough.
"I remember everything," I said. "I can change the small things."
"Small things matter," the System agreed.
The man who had killed the pig walked down the path. He wore patched cloth and the sleeves rolled up. He smelled of river mud and sun. When he moved, the muscles in his arms looked like they had been carved from wood.
"Fabian Cantrell," I whispered. I had made a list of names for the world. For this story, he was Fabian. He had been written as the brooding male lead. He was here. He had set my plot piece into motion without knowing it.
"Don't stare," he said. His voice was low. "I do not want trouble."
"Trouble finds me," I said. "I'm Erin."
"You are not from here," Fabian said. He said it as if it were a fact, like rain or cold.
"I am from wherever things break," I said. "I fix them."
Fabian's mouth twitched. "You have a strange plan."
"That's because I used to write for a living," I said. "I know the plot holes. I know where the author left a cliff unfilled. I have to fill it."
He looked at me for a long time. "Good. Then start by getting home."
"I will," I said, and I heard my voice steady. "But first, can we get to the village? I have a mother who is ill and a niece who needs a warm blanket. I will not let my part in this story end in the ditch."
Fabian nodded once. He picked up the net and slung it over his shoulder. "Then let's go."
We walked down from the hill in a silence that was not empty. The villages breathed: smoke from chimneys, chickens squawking, a woman calling a child. People looked at me like I did not belong. Maybe I didn't. But I belonged enough to change things.
"Who is the girl who keeps being near Fabian?" A thin woman from the next yard sneered as we passed. Her lips were a scissor.
"She's trouble," another woman said. "Remember what happened after old Master died."
I had read the book three times to prove plagiarism. I knew the parts that were cruel. I knew the tiny girl's arc. In the novel, Erin Cook was a minor nuisance who got wrecked by a mean girl. I had never felt so protective of a character I once owned.
"Erin," Fabian said softly as we came into my courtyard. My brother and sister-in-law were there. My sister-in-law set down two bowls and a small cloth packet of rice. My niece, Gracelyn, toddled out like a small sun.
"Little Gracie," I said and she ran to me, burying her head in my skirt.
"Your face is filthy," my sister-in-law Haley scolded. She looked at Fabian and her eyes narrowed. "You were with that lad?"
Fabian nodded once. "He was lost in the mountain. I helped."
"Helped with what?" Haley demanded.
"Got a pig," Fabian said. "Fought it."
"Did he charm you?" Haley shot a look at Fabian.
"Not at all," Fabian said. He met my eyes and there was something in them that made my heart do a small, clumsy flip. "If you want to accuse me of charm, at least get the right card."
The household loudmouth, Irma Davis, sauntered over and poked her finger into our business. "What did you find up there? A lover?"
"She's a nervous child," Irma said loud enough for the yard to hear. "Went up and came down with a man. Say no more, people. We know how it goes."
I felt my chest get tight. The rumor reminded me of the book. In the book, a woman—Maxine Emerson—plotted to ruin me with lies. That woman's mouth had made my life a trap. I had to stop it.
"Erin," I heard my niece say, small voice in the chitter of women. "Don't be afraid. Mama is here."
Maybe that was the reason I had been placed here. I couldn't just rage at the author. I had to heal the parts that hurt. The first thing I needed was medicine. My mother had earlier been written sick with a lung disease. She needed medicine only the System could help with. And the System had closed its wallet.
"System," I said into the dark of my mind later, when the house was quiet and Gracelyn slept curled like a comma. "You promised me a week of medical permissions for one price."
"Three times," the System replied. "You agreed."
"I did," I said. "But I do not have enough points. I will find them."
"Find them quickly," the System said. "Three days."
Three days. In the book, my mother died in three weeks. If I moved faster, maybe I could keep her alive.
The next morning I set the plan into motion. I would sell what the system would buy. Food, eggs, wild things. Sell them, convert to points, buy medicine.
"Where will you get the goods?" Haley asked when she saw me packing a small basket of jars.
"From the river. The marsh. The mountain," I said. "I will trade."
"I do not want you to go alone," Haley said. Her tone was softer than her face.
"Then come," I said. "Bring Gracie. We will make a day of it."
She did not. Instead the house filled with a different kind of plan. Irma Davis stood at the gate and told anyone who would listen how my family had been strange since my father died.
"She goes up the mountain, she goes with the young man," Irma said. "You will see. The family will be the talk of the town."
Last time this gossip had caused my mother's room to empty. I would not let it happen again. I needed to fix two things at once: the medicine and my reputation.
I found Fabian at the river. He was alone, skin dark from sun, hands steady as he gutted a fish. When he saw me, he wiped his hands with a small rag and offered me a smile that was half surprised.
"You are working," I said.
"I feed my family," he said. "Why are you back so early?"
"My mother needs medicine. The System will buy eggs and dried mushrooms. I must raise points."
Fabian's face went quiet. "You will come late and come in the dark," he said. "We can walk together."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because," he said, "I do not like the look of Irma. And because you are not a liar."
"You're a quick judge," I said.
"It is not judgment," he said. "It is practice."
He followed me to the marsh. He did not touch my hand, and yet his presence was like a warm blanket in a cold room. When a snake startled us, he stepped forward, quiet and fierce, and did the same thing he did to the pig—fast, efficient, necessary. I watched him and realized the book had cut the scenes too short. The hero there was flatter. Here, he breathed.
We gathered eggs in groups of the field: tiny ones, duck-green ones, three broken ones. We found a rabbit that had died in the rain and were able to salvage some meat. We wrapped our finds and headed back to the space manager—the System's way of making my treasure into points.
"You are good with animals," Fabian said as we walked. "Why are you so sad sometimes?"
"I write stories," I said. "Sometimes those stories make people cruel. I wrote one into existence and it hurt people."
"Then write a new one," he said.
"I cannot write the world from within," I said. "I can only act in it."
"But acting is writing with living things," Fabian said. "You are writing now."
The marsh sold for five points. It was not enough. The System ate half the profit, as usual. I used the points to buy a single bottle of medicine. When I went to the hospital, the nurse frowned.
"Who paid for this?" she asked.
"I did," I said. "It is urgent."
She scanned the tablet. "We will give this to her. But the course is ten bottles. This is only step one."
"Then we must get more," I said.
Fabian did not leave my side. He waited in the hospital courtyard while I fed my mother the squeezed medicine and held her hand. She coughed less that day. Her laugh returned in small doses. I felt like a cunning thief who had stolen back a life with a tiny pilfered coin.
"Thank you," my sister said that night when my mother slept and the house smelled faintly of broth. "You have been different."
"Because I used to be an author," I said. "I learned to notice how much time is left on the clock."
The village began to turn. People saw me differently. Irma Davis still whispered, but others looked at me like a woman who could fight. The book's old ending was slipping under new pages.
"Erin," Haley said one afternoon, "Fabian was asking about you."
"He asked if I needed help," I said. "He helped me up the mountain."
"I like him," Haley said, cheeks warm. "He is quiet, but he does solid work."
"I have to be careful," I said. "If I let emotions cloud me, I will lose the map."
"Maybe trusted people can be the map," she said.
The days were quick. I traded mushrooms and dried fish. I sold a jar of home brine that this town's people liked. The System took the excuses and gave me points. In three days I had enough to buy the second bottle. On the third day my mother sat up more and ate a piece of steamed bread. The nurse smiled and said, "Miracle or medicine, it is working."
But the book's villain, Maxine Emerson, was still near. She had long hair and a smile that smiled with knives. She wanted the boy—Evelyn—and she wanted to cover anyone who could stand between her and Favors. She spread rumor and stacked proof like kindling.
One morning she glided into the market with Evelyn at her side, and she wore a white scarf like a banner. Evelyn's face was clear as a lake. She was the heroine in the book—untouchable and poised. Maxine's smile was an echo of a thousand things.
"Erin!" Maxine called like a polite bell. "You are looking well."
"Thank you," I said.
"Are you not the one who accused my friend of things?" she asked, voice velvet. "What happened to her reputation? You begged for compensation, right? Ten eggs?"
I laughed out loud. "You want to make this small? Make it ten eggs and a pound of meat? Fine. Give it. Or apologize."
The whole market went quiet. Evelyn looked at Maxine with something like surprise that could crack walls.
"Maxine, if you did that, say so," Evelyn said.
Maxine's face went a little white. "I—no, I never said—"
"You gave eggs to that gossip to get them to say she had been on the hill with a man," I said. "You paid to move the pieces. You used my mistake to make your game buzz. You stitched my shame into town talk. Apologize."
A line of people shifted. Some remembered the talk. One by one the others said, "We did see you." "We heard it." The market agreed like a tide. Maxine's voice became a small weather.
"I—" Maxine's hands trembled. "I did not mean—"
"You did," Evelyn said. "And for what? To throw us off? To benefit?"
Maxine tried to twist the truth. Her mouth formed the lies. I watched the way people took in her words. They were done with patterns. The town was small, but its good and bad had weight.
Fabian came up in that moment. He stood beside me. "If you have proof you will pay," he said. "If you do not—"
"I will pay," Maxine said, eyes on Fabian like a viper that suddenly found the wrong prey. "Take it, then."
"Ten eggs and a pound of meat," I said. "And apologize to my mother in the town square tomorrow."
She had to choose. The insults had stacked, but public apology is heavy. She would not like it.
"Apology," Maxine said, too fast. "I will apologize."
The crowd watched as she bowed her head. The sound of her words was thin. She had to give the eggs. She had to give them to my niece Gracelyn who stood there like a tiny judge. The town watched the show and the rumor dissipated like smoke blown away.
After that victory, I felt both small and large. Small because the whole thing had been petty. Large because I had forced an author to close a loop I had known about. To push herself from the page into the world and back. It felt strange.
Fabian's quiet presence kept being steady. He would appear when I went to the market. He would help fend off gossip. He would stand and not speak and that silence was not empty; it was shield.
"Fabian," I said one evening as we walked home down a lane where the moon painted our shadows long in front of us. "Why have you been helping me?"
"Because your fight looks like mine," he said. "You are small but brave. You do not let people crush you."
"Are you brave because you have to be or because you choose to be?"
He stopped and looked at me. "I choose for those I love," he said. "And I love my home. And maybe you asked for fire and got it instead."
He smiled, warm and quick. I felt a small stupid joy.
"You could have been written different," I said. "In the book, you were flat. Here you are—alive."
"You wrote me better," he said. "You change things. That means I change too."
I realized then that changing the story wasn't only about protecting my family. It was about claiming a hand on other people's lives. About not letting a name on a page decide the whole arc. About making a man stop being a label and start being someone who tossed the pig net for kindness rather than a scene cue.
The days slid by. We sold the dried mushrooms, the eggs, the tin of sugar. The System took its fees like a cold landlord. Still, the medicine was bought. My mother grew stronger. The hospital gave the first big test: she'd survive the month. The doctor's smile felt like an honest coin.
"How did you do it?" my mother asked when I put the last steaming bun in her hand. She looked less like a patient and more like a woman who had kept a secret.
"I found a way," I said. "I had help."
"I saw Fabian in the yard," she said. "I like him. He reminds me of good bread."
My cheeks heated. I had to protect the thread that connected me to Fabian. It was sweet and dangerous.
Maxine did not give up. She tried to push Evelyn and me apart by spreading tales that Evelyn had tried to buy favor with Fabian. But Evelyn was not the sort to fall for petty traps. And people had started to see the truth. The market had memory; it kept gossip but it also kept favors.
One afternoon Maxine cornered me.
"You think you can steal my story?" she hissed. "You think you can change what is written?"
"I think," I said, "that when a person writes a story and sends people inside of it, they owe the people in that story a better ending."
She laughed, ugly and quick. "You didn't write me. You made me a mirror. And I like the shape."
"Then choose to be kind," I said. "Try on a new story."
She stared at me like I had asked her to mend a broken bone with sugar.
"Or I can," I said, "paint your own apology here in the market."
The thought was like a small spark. It wasn't revenge so much as accountability. The next morning Maxine stood in the square with a basket of eggs and meat and made the apology I had asked. She said the words with no warmth. But the net worked. People nodded. The rumor slowed.
The turning point came in late summer. The space in my chest that had been carved out by loss filled with small, careful things: my mother's laugh at the window; Gracelyn's small hand in mine; the way Fabian picked up my basket without asking. I traded with the System, planted on the tiny plot it allowed me, and watched a small harvest sprout from plastic soil like stubborn hope.
"How soon will you leave?" Haley asked one night. "Now that your mother is better, will you try to go back?"
"I don't know how," I told her. "Maybe the System took my return when it took the money. Maybe the only way back is to finish this story."
"Finish it how?" she asked.
"With people alive," I said. "With no one pushed over for a chapter. With my niece safe. With me choosing a path."
Fabian stood in the doorway like he had taken the shape of light. "If your path needs a hand," he said, "I will walk beside you."
"That's a bold promise," I said.
"It is not a promise I make lightly," he said. "But I mean it."
The town got quieter in small ways. Maxine stopped plotting and started handing out jars of pickles to older women. People would sometimes joke that she had gone soft. Maybe she had. Or maybe the market had patience and a way of curbing storms.
One evening when the harvest had come in—wheat and small sacks of mushrooms and a basket of eggs—I took Fabian to the hill where we had first met. The sky was the color of old cloth. I had a small red headscarf in my hand, the one I had stolen from a chest in the farmhouse before leaving for town. I had kept it because in the book a ribbon was the last thing I had, and I did not want to lose the image.
"I want to thank you," I said when we were alone and the lights of the village were small blinks. "You could have walked away. You didn't."
Fabian looked at the scarf. "Is that the one you used in your story?" he asked.
"It is," I said. "It represents a lot of silly ideas. But I have made different ones now."
He took the scarf from my hand and tied it around his wrist. "Now it marks the days we'll keep," he said.
"Fabian—"
He leaned close. "Yes?"
I closed my eyes. I did not let the magic of the book make me wait. I kissed him. It was not a long, fevered thing. It was simple and honest, like bread and soup after a hard day. He tasted like sun and river mud. He smelled like safety and hands that could carry more than wood.
When we pulled away, he smiled. "We have a plot now," he said.
"Plot?" I asked.
"Yes. A simple one. Keep your village alive. Keep your family safe. Make meat out of mushrooms. Grow the stubbornest wheat."
I laughed. "That is not a bad plot."
He brushed a speck of dirt from my cheek. "You saved me from being a footnote," he said. "I will save you from being a masochist."
Our laughter made the moon warm.
The months changed. The harvest grew. My mother's cough vanished like a stubborn smell. Gracelyn learned to run and to call me by my nickname. Haley worried less. Irma Davis still talked, because that is her duty. The System hummed along and occasionally offered me a deal: plant more, sell more, earn points. I learned the rhythm. I learned how to barter without losing myself. I learned which things the System ignored and which it valued. I learned to make a market out of necessity.
One afternoon a man from the county came with a letter. A farmer had found a lost wallet and there was a note in it saying, "To Erin Cook—if found, please return." The man looked at the letter and at us.
"Who is Erin Cook?" he asked. "I found a name."
Everyone turned to me. It felt like someone had called my old name.
"I am Erin Cook," I said.
"You wrote the ledger for the farm," he said. "You used a different name sometimes. It was a good ledger."
I opened the letter. Inside was a piece of paper and a small stack of coins. The writer had written that he found the money in the road and had meant it for the pocket of whoever was brave enough to keep running the place. The coins were nearly two hundred.
It was not the System's kind of currency. It was real, old money. The note said, "For the woman who does not give up."
I cried. I felt a little ridiculous, wiping my face with my sleeve like a schoolgirl. Fabian pulled me close and did not speak. I let him keep my tears in his shirt.
"We will use it to buy seed," I said finally. "And to fix the roof. And maybe, if we are brave, to buy a small cart."
Fabian smiled. "And a clock," he said. "So we can know when the day is done."
I looked at him. The man who in the book had been a brooding shadow was now someone whose quiet had a reason. He had become my ally, not my cue.
Evelyn found a path of her own. She forgave or did not forgive as she chose. Maxine, when she apologized in the square, had to do more than say words; she helped the old women with their baking and became a person people could trust for small things. She still smiled the way knives sometimes do, but the town softened it with daily bread.
One small night, as the cicadas hummed like a river under the stars, the System chirped. "Host, you have done well. Your mother stabilized. Space energy is recovering. You have changed more lines than required."
"Will I ever go back?" I asked. The question was raw. My old life was a laptop and an office and a name I had earned. I did not want to lose it. But I had also found hands that warmed me. I had a plot where people were living.
"Possibly," the System said. "All endings are a form of movement. If you choose to leave, the world will fold. If you choose to stay, you will write forward with your feet."
I looked at Fabian. He was tying the same red scarf at his wrist. I thought of my mother calling my name, of Gracelyn's small fist. I thought of the way a market could save a life slowly, like water through clay.
"I will stay a while," I said. "Long enough to fix what I must. Maybe longer."
Fabian's hand found mine and squeezed like a promise. "Then we will build a life," he said. "And if the world asks for a goodbye later, we will give one that fits."
I smiled. "I will write my endings better than my beginnings."
The village had its minor victories. Maxine's apology had cost her pride. The market had chosen friendship over rumor. My mother had a life that felt as ordinary and miraculous as a bowl of hot soup. I had found a love that was less a swoon and more a shelter. I had a niece who loved marbles and festivals and who would one day ask me to tell the story of how we saved a farm.
The last scene fell into place in a way that belonged only to this story. I walked to the hill one last time with a small box. Inside was my old laptop's last saved file—a story draft—and a red headscarf I had tied at the beginning of my stay. I stood where the pig had died, where Fabian had punched, and where my life had shifted.
"Sometimes endings arrive because you stand up and step into them," I told Fabian. "Sometimes because you bite the corner of a page and tear it open."
He listened like a man who had learned to hold silence as a tool.
I took the scarf from my pocket. I tied it to a small branch and made a knot. "This scarf marks what I have fixed," I said. "It marks what I will still fix."
Fabian took my hand and together we walked down toward our home. Behind us the village hummed, alive in the way of people who have been spared an easy cruelty.
"Promise me something," Fabian said.
"What?"
"Promise me you will not become a ghost of what you wrote," he said. "Promise me you will keep telling new stories."
"I promise," I said, because it was true. I would write forward with my feet, with bread and bread-money and with a stubborn faith that a book's pages could be unstitched and rewoven. I would not run from the book I had once written. I would rewrite it with people, with small mercies, with a man who tied a red scarf at his wrist and smiled when I kissed him.
At night when Gracelyn asked me to read, I would fold the pages and make up endings that fit. I would be careful with my pen.
"I did not ask to time-travel," I told Fabian that night as we sat by a low fire. "I asked for revenge."
"You found something better," he said.
"I did," I said. "I found a life."
He kissed my forehead gently. "Then stay," he said. "Write with us."
The red scarf in the branch fluttered like a small flag. The village slept. The System hummed. My mother slept without coughing. I had a plate of bread and the warmth of small hours. My story was still being written.
The End
— Thank you for reading —