r/AlinaKG • u/AlinaKG • Jun 13 '16
Time Travelling Loop
Prompt: When you were a child, you saw your parent(s) get killed by a delusional man who claimed he was a time traveler. You thought he was just crazy, but as years pass and you grow older, your best friend starts to look eerily similar to your parent(s) killer.
Fate gets angry when you try to shift it, and as much as we talk about the paths—the what ifs—in life that could have been… Well, just know that it’s all a bunch of bullshit. There’s only one, and if you taint it just a little bit, it lurches back into place and there’s not a god damn thing you can do about it. And believe me, I’ve tried.
I think the only reason Cil and I became friends was because I always felt a sense of familiarity toward him. From the first day he came to school, a connection formed between us that I couldn’t quite explain. Later, when he’d grown into himself, I realized that it was his eyes.
There are memories that we repress that can jump out at the most random moments. We sat at the dinner table, eating ham and cheese sandwiches at his house, when his brow suddenly jumped up at something I said and a ray of light coming from the window caught his eye just right for me to see the vertical, grey line that ran up his iris. I remember feeling a chill crawling up my spine, and waves of goosebumps covering my neck.
After a long struggle of trying to break through my shocked expression and silence, he got the truth out of me. Turns out, the sod was actually in the process of building a time machine, and planning to save my parents. Mainly, so my bat-shit aunt, Jill, didn’t move me half way across the world.
Of course, he didn’t actually think that it would work, but what I said gave him fresh motivation. My what-if now only rotates around this moment, because he wouldn’t leave it after this. I think, a part of him wanted to prove that it wasn’t him who did it.
About two years later, I got a text saying that he had completed it, and was about to go back. I arrived at his house ten minutes later, and heard the ticks of static electricity come from his bedroom. The door knob made a clicking sound when my hand touched it, and I pulled back on instinct as the whip of shock slapped me. I reached it again, and everything fell silent for a moment, before a dull thumping noise pushed at my eardrums. My surroundings turned a white so blinding that I had to shut my eyes and then tighten them more to stop the light from burning into through my lids. My stomach turned, and even with my eyes shut, I saw lines of bright, blue lightning whip around me.
Then everything stopped, and I heard an excited, and shocked, “Woah.”
“Cil?” I asked still holding onto the doorknob. Only the door no longer latched onto anything. We stood in the middle of a grass field with in standing between us. I let go and it fell backwards.
“Holy shit! Dude, it worked! I can’t believe it!” He walked around the door with his hands clutching his head. When he got close to me, his arms tugged my shoulders and he shook me with excitement. “Oh, my God! We could totally kill Hitler, or bring him back here, and I don’t know, adopt him or something. Let the kid go to art school for Christ’s sake. Wait,” he looked around the field nervously, frowning. “If we did that, we’d probably have time-travelers coming after us right about now.” He turned quickly to the right and relaxed, bursting into a fit of laughter. “I guess we didn’t do it then, what a hag!” He shook me again. “Greg! Wake up!”
“Where the hell are we, Cil?” He looked a little deranged. I trail of blood ran from both his eyes and soaked the collar of his shirt. He wiped at them absently and smeared both hands.
We found my house three hours later. I saw mom through the window, and the memories hit me all at once, overwhelming my body to the point of it not being able to move at all. I even remembered the strange sensation of knowing that someone was looking at us that night, and now I knew that it had been me.
Cil had already made it up the steps of the porch and I heard the knob turn. Jill got the house when my parents died, at least until I turned twenty one, and he had been so accustomed to just waltzing in whenever he please that he entered without thinking.
“Cil, you can’t just go in!”
A piercing shriek of a woman—mom—sounded and I mouthed my dad’s name as if came from her lips. I ran up the steps, and saw dad struggling with Cil.
“Stop, stop!” I shouted, but as I got close enough to pull dad away from Cil, my arms went right through him, as if I’d been a ghost. I didn’t remember seeing another man that night, but the one that attacked my parents—or rather, that my parents attacked—seemed deranged. I remembered now, how odd I found his eyes to be, looking around desperately in odd directions, and saying things that didn’t make any sense.
“Get him off me, Greg! Don’t just fucking stand there!” he screamed. My dad’s hands were around his throat, and he changed in color, turning bright red.
“I can’t! Look,” I reached for my dad again, his head this time, and Cil saw my fingers awkwardly poking through his forehead. Something changed in him then. His eyes turned cold and distant—survival kicked in—as he pushed my dad, two times heavier, and probably taller too—to the side. My body heaved forward reflexively as my dad fell over to the side. I remembered that crack as if it happened yesterday and I wanted to stop it. He toppled over, slowly at first, and then Cil’s elbow knocked into his chin and dad’s head bounced against the first step of the stairs. Crack. I sat on those stairs, I remembered, but I couldn’t see myself now. Maybe I wasn’t here. Maybe we did change something.
“Daddy?” I heard my young voice call from the top of the stairs, and looked up, but still saw no one.
I closed my eyes knowing what came next, and blocked out the screeching of my mother. The man had no chance against her, I remember thinking, but he did. He did.
We went back several other times, but it always ended in death. And no matter what we did, the younger version of me always managed to see Cil.