It was supposed to be easy: Seduce and dump a lonely scientist with lacking social skills and enough self-doubt to power the greatest scientific revolution since the creation of the steam engine. It had started off fine, the Tachyon Inversion Device has gone dark when I reached the correct time-space coordinates, but that was to be expected, time travel to a time period before the invention of time travel was exceedingly difficult.

It meant I lost contact with headquarters but that wasn’t unexpected and the connection would reestablish itself by the time the professor got his prototype working. Making contact with him had also been a breeze, he’d been immediately smitten by my golden hair and silky smooth skin, all courtesy of personal beauty products created by the Tachyon technology he would soon lay the foundation of.

No seducing him hadn’t been a problem, and as he lay sleeping on my chest after our third month together I knew it was the prime moment to strike. I didn’t even have to say anything, just walk out the door, refuse to answer his calls and leave every message on read. But neither the textfiles in school or the mission briefings had prepared me for the simple undeniable fact that the father of time travel had been so damn cute.

The way he nervously chuckled when he wasn’t quite sure if my comment was a joke or not, how he claimed to hate dancing but never seemed able to stop himself when the music came on, and how he sung for me when we were alone so beautifully earnestly and so terribly out of tune.

I wrapped my arms around his sleeping form and pulled him closer to me, he was funny too, but it took time to understand and spot his humor. It usually came in the form of him recognizing the absurdity of everyday life, he would just suddenly start chuckling to himself and I’d follow his eye line to whatever he was looking at and try to reverse engineer his thought process to figure out his private joke.

I held him close to me and wondered how in the world this wonderful man had been shunned and ignored for so long. His chosen study was of course a factor, not many people took time travel seriously as a practical field of study. He really came to life whenever he talked about it though, explaining his ideas in ways he hoped would help me grasp the concept, and I played along, asking the right questions at the right times to keep his explanations going. I could hardly tell him that every cadet at the agency had the 18 essential formula memorized and could recreate the 92 essential components of the Tachyon Inversion Drive with the technology of at least 8 different centuries.

He would work on the device every day as I kept up my cover job as a firefighter. It was a rewarding job in many more ways than I had expected, saving lives was of course the highlight but I got to use my body in ways never expected of people in my era. It took a toll on my body, the flawlessness of my skin faded as my muscles grew instead and the shine of my golden hair was lost when a faulty helmet caused most of it to go up in flames.

Despite my new short haircut and my dull skin I managed to get into a calendar shoot as Mr March, an achievement we celebrated together on one of our last dates together.

It was a beautiful cold Saturday in February and we were sitting at a small cafe eating breakfast when he told me it wasn’t going to work out between us. That I was wonderful but that he couldn’t spend his life with someone who wasn’t willing to be honest with him. He told me that he knew about the lies, he knew about the half-truths, and he knew I loved him.

He knew so much about who I wasn’t, but he didn’t know me. He gave me a chance, begged me to just be open and honest with him so we could build the life together we clearly both wanted.

I couldn’t.

He picked up the bill and left me staring into my half eaten bacon and eggs.

One of my firefighting colleagues picked up my things from his place, soon after I quit the job, didn’t even make it to my month in the calendar. I spent my days preparing my Tachyon Inversion Device for takeoff and in late Juli the machine finally connected with the greater timestream.

He’d done it, just like the history files said he would.

I cried for 2 days before I left.

I never saw his real smiling face with the glint in his eye again, only the sad smile he wore in the history files.