Raymond

When Claire stepped out of the bathroom -- in a plush robe wrapped over the much more transparent one she liked to wear for her husband -- she avoided Raymond's eyes, keeping the maximum distance between them every step of her escape route. Even with him in the door frame, she managed not to touch him. He stood still, there was no point in scaring her.

Once downstairs, Claire darted to the drinks cabinet. Raymond followed her, thinking of ways to convince her without lying when the truth was inconceivable.

"What are you talking about?" she insisted. A comically large bottle threatened to fall out of her hand, as the other hand trembled on the glass that hit the table.

"You quit drinking... seven days ago," Raymond said, and Claire's eyes closed at the memory, only to widen in fear at the precision of his guess.

"How... how do you know that?"

"Just like I know that if I hadn't appeared, you would've never seriously considered drinking again."

Claire had no reaction, but at least the red cap was still attached to the clear bottle.

"Please don't start because of me," he made her let go of it.

"Who... who are you?"

Blue eyes cut through Raymond, examining all the ways he was different from Tony. He hoped her assessment would be in his favor.

"My name is Raymond Reyes. I'm from the future."

"From... the... future..."

Claire's mouth, usually a thin line, turned into a dot. She sat down on an immaculate armchair, shinning even in the dark. Neither of them had turned on the lights coming down so they depended on the ones upstairs. It was too much for Raymond as it was but Claire was not as fortunate. She probably barely saw him.

"What year?" she surprised him.

"It's not exactly explainable... Please let's just get back into bed and I'll answer all your questions." Raymond saw the scoff she was about to utter before she confirmed it.

"Please do try to explain. And fast, since you're in a hurry."

"We don't measure time as you do anymore. It's an equation -- it has parameters. But let's say a thousand years from where we are now."

Claire shook her head. "Tony, you finally went crazy enough to make me crazy. I always knew you would, I just didn't know how."

"You never drink again. Not once," Raymond underlined. In spite of everything else he had said, he thought it was the information she found most difficult to believe. There were no logical arguments, he still went with anything he could think of. "The Evaluators couldn't reach a definitive conclusion as to why, but I personally think it's because you wanted to spite your husband."

Raymond watched Claire as she drew small breaths as if trying to keep herself alive by playing dead.

"He never notices," he continued. "Decades together, he never says anything to you about it. He just waits for you to fail."

"And I don't?" Claire was impressed with herself.

"Not once. Not even accidentally. You stay sober for the rest of your life."

Getting up, not in much of a hurry, Claire tightened the pink belt around her waist.

"I need to lie down."

Claire

The stranger was even calmer now that Claire went to bed with him. He had directed her to assume the same position she and Tony used to sleep through the night in: back to back, as close to their respective sides as possible, each in their own covers. Never touching unless they had a reason to.

Tony had never spent a night awake just to answer Claire's questions.

"Ask," Raymond said. "I'll tell you anything you want to know."

His voice was deeper than Tony's, less used to court acrobatics that required pathos.

"Why Tony?" Claire hated the way her voice showed fear. "Why me?"

He took a moment before replying as if not expecting the question.

"I kept seeing you," he said. "Whenever the Timekeepers discussed new ways to refactor history." So many words, so little meaning to Claire. "You are one of the last remaining leaves of your time," he said gravely.

Faced with the window, where a half-moon silhouette was drawn in light on the somber curtains, she did not want to know.

"What's a leaf?"

"A leaf is a person who leaves no traces in history. You remove them, and everything else remains the same. No major influence on anyone else's life. No parents. No children. Not a lot of people asking questions."

The truth of how little she mattered hurt Claire, maybe because she had always thought it.

"You mean, my life is worthless?"

"That is not what I was saying," the stranger was quick to ease Claire, making her even more suspicious. "It's just the reason Leaves are important: they can help agents in sensitive missions that stretch over years."

Because no one would notice.

"What kind of missions?"

"You see, far in the future, we no longer have the problems you have, here. Now. We are happy, our world is safe. So... the social responsibility we have is to fix the past. All our greatest minds -- working for that very purpose -- found multiple ways to travel back in time to fix injustice. To stop it. To help humanity progress the same, but with less pain and suffering."

Raymond The Wise explained, "My government is a peaceful and accepting one. We are happy and rebellions are rare, usually born out of a necessity to do more good, faster. All we want as a society is to reach the same technological highs, same historical checkpoints, but with less cost to the well-being of the humans, at an individual level. Less pain, less suffering does not mean -- as implied by all who defend war -- less innovation. It does not matter to us where we could be as long as we reach the same point. It's a great time to be alive, my time."

Because Claire had nothing more to ask, overwhelmed, the man from the future continued.

"We have architects planning such missions, usually they span centuries. AIs calculating scenarios, all with the same goal. To make the world better, no matter what time you look at, in the History Logs. To avoid the Black Plague, we had to redesign Europe for half a millennium. At the end of it, it didn't happen, and humanity had progressed the same. The humans who were saved were given ways to evolve into their own family trees, interwoven with the existing ones. Everything was planned so that they all influenced historical progress as little as possible. An 1890 factory of 100 workers is now one of 200. A classroom of 25 in 1990 now has 26 students. Small tweaks to let more people live more, over-all happier.

"Because of the way we live, in my time, there is nothing being taken from someone, just because they stopped existing in a timeline, even if unique in their fields. Their skills can be harbored in others, for the greater good. It does not matter who invented something, or who fathered whom. A country can reach the same heights even when led by someone else than its historical heroes. What matters is that they have the same purpose.

"So the issue becomes whether we want to leave all that suffering behind, to repeat itself in every new instance of an unlucky human's life. It's not an issue for humanity if a certain person isn't born, but it becomes one if a person would always be tortured, every timeline. Why, if humanity progresses the same?"

"... The black plague?" Claire tried to remember where she had heard that before.