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Time goes on, linearly. It feels strange to Thaniel now, this experience of everything marching forward in a straight line. It had not occurred to him how he had learned to brace for everything to change at any moment. Realities branching and looping had been the norm; time did about-turns regularly, and Thaniel'd come to learn to swirl along the resultant eddies of what Keita did or did not do as a matter of course. Life'd been evolution sped up to a fever pitch; Keita the agent of natural selection.
Now time simply moves forward metronomically. Thaniel does not know if Keita is simply out of hidden versions of himself to suddenly draw out or if the whole deck has been revealed at last. In the receding wake of Keita's lost clairvoyance, it seems that the watchmaker and the baron have collapsed together into something stable.
Thaniel imagines some of the politically minded boffins over at Whitehall and elsewhere would think of this as a net loss. From inside the protective shell of their home on Filigree St., however, it is more a relief from a burden Keita'd carried for entire repeated lifetimes. When Keita wakes up in the morning, he does not open his eyes to an inbox full of memories of futures past. He simply goes downstairs, occasionally stubbing his toe, and puts on the tea. When the mail does come, it's physical and mostly ignored.
It's hard to know what this final Keita is composed from, though Thaniel sometimes speculates. They don't speak of what happened in Japan, in part because Keita's memory of it is unreliable and because Thaniel has no way of expressing in words what Keita's mad way of charging about changing the world on his own had done to his heart. Instead, they sit together at the piano most mornings before Six gets up, the colour of music rising like a soft, enveloping mist from the keys beneath Thaniel's fingers. Keita, never a man of many words, usually just hums along, his harmony a natural few beats behind the melody these days. When he does speak, he of course still has his Japanese, mellifluous and perfect. His English is northern, like Thaniel's own. Whatever had happened to his other Englishes and his menagerie of foreign languages was not for any of them to know. More now-unnecessary weight shed, really. It's as if Keita had been composed entirely of helium in order to better buoy up all of the things he'd held in his head. His feet had barely touched the ground; you had the sensation he might have floated away at any time. Now he has gravity on his side.
In any case, it is delightful to be able to surprise Keita with his music and not have him always second-guess that he's somehow manipulated Thaniel into accommodating his tastes. There's a symphony Thaniel is composing in secret with Sullivan that he is equal parts embarrassed by and horrifically obsessed with. He's glad no one will be able to see the wild portrait of Keita's aura of burnished gold the thing is going to be, especially since it will be dashed out using the full palette of an entire orchestra come summer.
But that's for the future (singular). Today, which has neatly followed along behind yesterday, the three of them are having a breakfast of rice and fish with cups of hot green tea to ward off the cold. Six, who is growing at an incredible rate, has fussed less at food lately, presumably because she realises that she needs all the fuel she can get. She gulps down another mouthful of rice, then declares to the table: 'I shan't get lost in any future, so neither of you need to throw a fit if I am not around.'
'What do you mean?' Thaniel asks.
'I can see the ether when I try,' Six says, as if to a very slow pupil. 'So I will always know how to find you. It gives me headaches, so I don't try often. But it will have been useful.'
Will have been. The future perfect tense.
Thaniel looks sharply over at Keita, who lifts his shoulders in a shrug. 'Don't look at me; I don't remember. But it seems like something I'd have done.'
Would have done. The conditional perfect; unrealised hypotheticals in balance against completed future states. Thaniel puts down his chopsticks and rubs the bridge of his nose.
'Statistically speaking, my family can't have been the only clairvoyants,' Keita continues, unbothered. 'Perhaps the degree to which we could look forward was extreme, but it seems unscientific to think it was singular, as opposed to merely rare.'
'What would you have been doing looking for Six?' Thaniel asks, which seems a very forward question except that they've all gone through quite a bit of hell recently based on Keita thinking he wasn't valued for anything past his money, and English reticence must sometimes cede to common damned sense, especially when it comes to their kid.
Keita shrugs. It's helpless, not dismissive. 'I wish I knew. Companionship, perhaps. Or mentorship. Or maybe she's the one who was doing the engineering, this time.'
Six frowns. 'You are talking over my head again. Stop it.'
She's right. Thaniel turns to her, haunted by ghosts of the future again. 'When did this start, petal?'
'Two days ago,' is Six's prompt and exact response.
Two days! 'Why didn't you tell us?' Thaniel demands, hearing his own voice rise in the way panicked parents stop being able to talk reasonably to their children who have scared them. 'How far ahead can you–'
'Stop it,' Six repeats herself, cross now. 'Your hypothesis is wrongheaded. I'm not seeing forward. I see backwards. It's the ether. I don't need to sprinkle flour to see it. I will know where I came from from the outlines. I won't need... breadcrumbs.'
Hazily, through a waterfall of relief, Thaniel recalls how Six had found Hansel and Gretel excruciatingly stupid. 'It will be,' he corrects her grammar. 'Not will have been.' She must have picked it up from Keita's old patterns.
'It will be,' Six repeats, or simply agrees.
Yes, it will be; the simple future.