Time Travelers Don’t Fall in Love

It was carved in steel on the wall of the Time Council chamber, etched into every handbook, and whispered like gospel among junior agents.

Alaric used to scoff at the idea that anyone would be stupid enough to break it. He’d been an agent for nine years, a model of discipline. But that was before 1897. Before Evelyn Moreau.

It was supposed to be a simple calibration mission—observe a temporal anomaly in Paris and report back. No interaction. No involvement. Standard cloak protocols. In and out.

But Evelyn… Evelyn was the kind of woman who broke through centuries with nothing more than a glance. A novelist, a philosopher, and unknowingly, the anchor point of the anomaly he was meant to study. His orders were clear: monitor her from a distance. Never interfere.

He lasted three days.

On the fourth, she saw him.

“You're either terribly lost, monsieur, or terribly shy.”

He could’ve erased that moment. He could’ve reset the timeline. But instead, he smiled.

“Maybe both,” he said.

He returned every day after that. She called him Julien, a name he pulled from a book in her sitting room. They walked by the Seine, debated the future of France, and read poetry in candlelit cafés. Each moment stitched itself into his bones, into places no Time Agent training could touch.

Back in the future, alarms were sounding.

Chrono-Integrity had begun to fracture. Probability strands collapsed like dying stars. But Alaric wasn’t there to see the reports or decode the warnings.

He was in love.

It took the Time Council six weeks to locate him. Another two days to breach the temporal barrier he'd unknowingly triggered around 1897 Paris. They didn’t knock. They never did.

Alaric was in Evelyn’s apartment when they came.

He saw them the way she did—three men in grey suits, their eyes empty like they’d forgotten how to be human. The Council always sent enforcers. They weren’t trained to ask questions. Only to clean up mistakes.

Evelyn stood behind Alaric, confused, still holding her teacup.

“Julien… who are they?”

Alaric’s mouth opened. Closed. He turned to her.

“I’m not who you think I am,” he said.

“You’re not Julien?” Her voice trembled. “Are you even real?”

He stepped toward her, but she backed away.

“I’m real. But I don’t belong here.”

The lead enforcer raised his chrono-stunner. “Alaric Solen, in violation of Temporal Law 1A. Stand down and prepare for extraction.”

Alaric didn't move. “She’s not just some fixed point or timeline variable. She’s—”

“She’s already dead in the original timeline,” the enforcer snapped. “You’ve resurrected a ghost.”

“No,” Alaric said. “I saved her.”

They fired.

The blast wasn't lethal—Time Council stunners fractured the nervous system, rendering agents unconscious without temporal contamination. Alaric collapsed, eyes still on Evelyn, his last breath in that century drawn with her name on his lips.


---

When he woke, he was in a holding cell deep inside the Citadel—a floating fortress tethered between centuries.

Evelyn was gone.

The Council reviewed his actions. Every infraction was noted. Every moment of emotion dissected like a crime scene. They showed him the alternate timelines his presence created—wars that never happened, people who never died, revolutions that never began. All because he loved someone meant to fade into history.

“Time isn’t a canvas you get to paint,” said Councilor Drayven. “It’s a structure you maintain.”

“What if the structure is broken?” Alaric whispered. “What if love is the only thing that made sense?”

The Council voted to erase Evelyn’s memory from the timeline. Not just remove her death—but every trace of her existence. A full Chrono-Nullification.

But erasing her from history wouldn't erase her from him.

That was his punishment.


---

Years passed. Alaric was released under strict supervision. No fieldwork. No solo travel. His chronosuit deactivated. He walked the Citadel corridors like a ghost himself now.

And yet, every so often, a poem would appear in his quarters. Folded parchment. Inked by hand.

One read:

"Even if the stars forget me,
Even if time swallows my name—
I’ll remember the man who called me 'light'
In a world that only knew shadow."

There was no record of Evelyn in any century. No trace in the archives. But the notes kept coming.

Alaric suspected what had happened.

In the final seconds before the Council fired their stunners, Evelyn must have grabbed the pocket chrono he carried—the emergency device that could launch someone anywhere in time… once.

She had escaped the erasure.

Somehow, she had survived outside of time.

She was writing back.


---

Alaric now lives for those letters.

They arrive at random—tucked inside history books, slipped under doors, encoded in ancient texts.

Every one is a rebellion.

A love story scribbled between centuries.

A reminder that even Time can’t control the human heart.


---

Time Travelers Don’t Fall in Love.

That’s the rule.

But some rules were made to be broken.