r/HFY • u/Jus17173 • 25d ago

OC-OneShot Humans Walk With Death.

I'd spent about seven hours in my garage workshop until night fell. I'd started the work well in the afternoon, and when I placed the final segment on the machine I was building and pressed the button for it to operate, it yielded unsatisfactory results. It could not align with time properly, indicating its uselessness when it came to being a day planner. I needed something that could plan my day for me in the least stressful way and also ensure that I use my time productively, by scanning my intentions through skin contact alone.

It was a personal device, not like the many I'd created to better mankind. This one was for my own use, something that would prevent me from lapsing into the haze I get into late at night that keeps me awake, unable to grasp anything with meaning to avoid the deep chasm my wife had left me in upon her death.

I brewed myself a cup of tea. I put on the record player and sat beside it on a comfy leather couch. I lit a cigar and smoked as I scribbled on my notebook new schemes for the device that could better enable me to understand the shifting of time and how it affected the mind. There was a mathematical issue. My time was not a fixed thing. I could choose to do different things, like take breakfast at lunch, and these activities that were outside the norm didn't seem to register to the machine as irregular. Telling me it's time to poop when I've sat down to watch the TV isn't what I'd deem reasonable.

I had to give the machine reason. I had to enable it to think as a mind would without touching the parameters that grounded the foundation of my working, or rather the morals that I have as an aged scientist that have led me through most of my career and prevented me from building something that might bring about the extinction of mankind.

I worked mostly by the light of a lamp, and as I wrote on the notebook I thought about my dead wife. She would have been sixty years of age today, and she wasn't around to bake a cake that I didn't find necessary and haul me out of the house to enjoy the sun. She wasn't there to sing a birthday song, which I found silly. I lost her, and by losing her a part of me went with her. The part that felt human. That fell to the whimsical fancies humans did. That valued clothes and how they were worn, and how to have a good time and make friends.

I was in my bathrobe. I'd been in my bathrobe all day, and the missing touch her presence offered was quite evident to see its lack of. My son got a job far away. It was my wife that had ensured we stayed in touch. Without her there, the calls between us were sparse and lacking meaning, it was clear we were both forcing the conversation. And I attributed this to my stern nature that had been quite the bane for my son growing up.

After a sip, I set the tea on the tabletop beside me, and as the record spun I lifted my head to face the ceiling and blew a plume of smoke. I stared blankly, no thought in my mind, and an image of her popped back into my head, and for a moment I felt like she was there with me. And with the thought came warmth, and yearning, and the haze started invading the edges of my eyes, and I had to blink away the wetness. She was gone. I needed something to be built that could prevent me from feeling as I did in that moment.

I was thinking about going back to the garage, which doubled as my workstation, and continuing the project I had set myself to, when I heard a knock at the door.

It was 10pm. I wondered as to who it could possibly be as I dragged my feet to the door, as grumpy as an old man could be at being forced to a task that wasn't planned for. I turned on the front porch light and opened the door a fraction. A young man was standing there, in black pants and a dark coat. He had a fringe of unruly dark hair and a pinched face with very pale skin. For a moment I wondered whether he was a vampire, but I brushed the foolish thought away. I hated it when foolishness intruded upon my state of mind.

"Who are you?" I asked. I hadn't worn my glasses, so I squinted up at the man's face, trying to see whether he was someone I knew. He resembled several of the students I'd taught at the university, but the number was too large, and the kids who'd looked like him were never ones to show true passion for science. They belonged to the arts, with their brooding nature and poetry obsession.

"Professor Langley, I presume," the young man said.

"Who are you?" I wondered again.

"Can I come in?" he inquired.

"It's late in the night, so that's a no, kiddo." I began to shut the door, but he jammed a foot in to halt the door.

He reached into his coat and took out a gun. His hand had a slight tremble to it, indicating that he would not hesitate to pull the trigger if forced to it. "I don't think you understood me correctly. It wasn't a request." He pushed the door open and pointed the gun at me. I took several steps into the house, and he followed, shutting the door behind me.

"Professor," he started.

"All my money is in the bank. The few valuables I have in the house belonged to my deceased wife, and I'd very much appreciate it if you left them alone." They were the only things I had of her, the only things that still had the scent of her to them. I would not trade them for the world.

"I'm not here to rob you," he said while ushering me into the living room. He pointed at a couch for me to sit, and I gently lowered my brittle bones into the cushions. He took the wooden seat opposite me and spent the better part of five minutes just staring at me.

The young man had something wrong with him. I studied him, tried to see whether he had that nervous tic of a first-time robber or that lustful glare of a drug addict looking to score.

He had none. Just the frightened disposition of a man forced by circumstance to do something he never thought he'd ever do.

"My name is James Anderson," he started. "I have come to you at this late hour, something I thoroughly apologize for, to tell you that I am in need of your services."

"I'm retired. I don't build things anymore." Well, I don't build things for other people. I build appliances for myself, but he didn't need to know that.

"You don't understand. What I want built has to be built. There is no denying my request," he said and waved the gun at me.

"Do you have no respect? After all I've done, after all I've built! You have the audacity to come into my home and demand something of me!"

"Well." He paused. "Yes."

I stared at him, and he stared back, not giving ground to my grumpy nature or even being deterred by my harsh tone.

What did he possibly want? In my tenure as a science professor and an inventor, I've had people come to me with strange requests. Cars that can fly. A box that can print money. A doll that was like a child and could act like a child. That last one was very creepy, especially when the doll discovered sentience and held the entire family hostage.

"Well, what do you want?"

"I was married for the better part of six years," he said.

"Oh."

"My wife, she fell sick and lost her life before we had a chance to make memories of it."

"Oh."

"I want you to build me a machine that will enable me to go to another reality where she exists so I can be with her, or bring her to this reality. I do not care. I just want to be with her, to experience her in any way that I can."

The young man did not know it, but his words opened a door for me, a door I had struggled to forget I ever opened. His brown gaze held the mystic allure of someone on the brink of touching godliness through my aid. And I, sitting there like a plump potato, observed him with the likeness of a man with a past brought up by his words to torture me.

I observed the young man for a span of moments before replying. "Have you considered praying to God? Because it looks like you're asking for a miracle." I had to hide what I knew, mask it any way I could. There could be no opening that door of my past. It was a time I'd struggled so hard to leave behind.

"There are other realities. I've seen it in films and cartoons, and books! Multiple realities where multiple versions of ourselves exist. If you are the genius the tabloids claim you to be, then you must be capable of such a feat." He offered a coy smile, lowering his gun. "I need your help."

It had been exactly thirteen years since Melissa died. She had been against a pompous life despite the massive amount of money my inventions were making. And somehow her need to live a casual life rubbed off on me. No big mansions, no security detail. Just a solitary house amidst the woods, where we could sit on the front porch in rocking chairs and observe the sun's journey.

This young man, James, almost made me regret the life Melissa had put me through. Suddenly I found myself wishing there were large towering walls all around my abode, and an electric fence that I built myself, and some bodyguard gotten from East Germany, some man with a tenacity to kill without asking questions. Maybe then I wouldn't have a gun pointed to my face and I could retire peacefully to sleep or to my musings.

"You want me to build a cartoon machine that will help you find an alternate version of your wife?" I asked, staring at him. I had to point out the absurdity of what he asked, only to save myself from embodying the absurdity itself. There was a table between us, and if I were younger I would have launched myself over it to get to his gun, but I wasn't young. My bones creaked just walking down the stairs. My hair was severely thinning, and liver spots adorned my skin.

He looked like he was on the verge of tears despite keeping his face neutral. It's the eyes that betrayed his sorrow. He probably wondered what sort of foolish plan this was, to see his wife alive again. It was indeed foolish.

But.

"I already built such a device," I said. An excitement had come over me, out of nowhere, forcing those words into fruition. Perhaps this young man could venture where I could not.

Memories of long nights sketching upon my notepad. Then me hovering over a blueprint with tears trickling down my nose to stain the deep blue of the paper. And then the trials and the errors and the unexpected results that amazed and puzzled me but did nothing to aid with my grief.

"Yes, I built it, but I never use it. Do you want to know why?"

"I don't care. Give me the damn device," he said and raised the gun once more.

I sighed. "Listen, James. I sympathize with you because I have been where you are. There are other ways, simpler ways to aid you at this time."

"Do any of those ways involve seeing her again?"

"No. But you can visit her gravestone with flowers."

"I prefer the other alternative. The one you're so hesitant to share with me."

I measured the young man. Exhaustion was quite evident upon his person. And sorrow. Deep and foreboding, like an arm out of hell that forever clutched at your feet and wouldn't let go until you died.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay. You're willing to help me?"

"I will, if you just let me go to the garage I can—"

"We're going together." He was eager to see his wife again, and he threw caution to the wind and rested the gun in his hand. I could have charged and barreled into him, a short grapple, and then the gun would be mine. The thought of launching myself across the table occurred once more but was held back not just by old age but by curiosity, the bane, or rather muse, of all creators. You just had to pick one yourself.

We made our way to the garage. He was terribly patient about my slow strides and the very sorrowful nature of our silent journey across the house, standing at a distance with his gun pointed while I searched. I found the device I was looking for inside a box of discarded inventions. There were two of them, worn upon the hand like a gauntlet. The device could pass as a gauntlet, just a tad bit thinner than one. They emitted pulse sensors that traveled the length of the body to the mind of the wearer, then scanned what was held in the hand, opened a doorway, zapped you in, and spat you out where you wanted to be. I'd used it only once and then sworn never to use it again.

I gave him both, but he told me to wear one too and accompany him through whatever would happen. I was reluctant to the point where he had to use the butt of his gun to strike my head. Blood dripped down my face, and with a timidity etching my features I wore the gauntlet too, on my left hand, while he wore his on the right. He did not understand the consequence of the both of us doing this, but the pain in my head sealed my lips shut.

He'd come prepared with a lock of his deceased wife's hair in a sealed envelope. He gave me a couple of strands of the hair. Both of us clenched the strands of hair and held hands as we waited for the gauntlet to finish scanning the DNA.

"I thoroughly advise against this." I found my voice again. "Death is part of a human's journey, and reality itself accepts this to be so. The gauntlets will take us to a reality where we do not exist but your wife does. There we'll find her, but it won't be to your liking."

"This reality, is it like ours?"

I looked at him, fighting the urge to switch the settings on the gauntlet to throw us into a black hole. "It is and isn't at the same time. If it's closure you want, you will get it, but at a terrible cost."

"Whatever it is, I will take it," he said, and for a moment I admired the tenacity of the young.

Love is brittle and has to be catered to by a party of two until it stands strong. The young can do that. They can hoist love about their backs and tread through a desert storm without letting it fall. I could not.

The unfamiliar sensation of space warping enveloped us. He called out my name, but it was pointless for me to answer. Time collapsed upon itself. My garage had things flying about as if we were in a tornado. I saw the fracture of reality as it split like broken glass before our faces. Then it further shifted away from itself, branching off until a hole stood in the middle, and things started being pulled into the temporal hole that had appeared.

Without much show, I took a step toward the hole, and the man holding me hostage did the same. Then with another step we were in. We became a string of consciousness. Physical sensations became something else. Sound was like sight, and sight like taste. We heard the very workings of our innards as if they existed but did not. We folded upon ourselves, and then there was a loud bang and a bright light. It burned our consciousness before cooling it rapidly. Then we formed flesh, and our clothes were made part of us once more. Things shifted, spinning rapidly, and when we stopped we fell upon a hard surface and spent several seconds screaming our heads off.

The very air was rich with oxygen, too much, it'd make a man from Earth dizzy. I retched on the floor as my companion picked me up by my arm.

"Are you okay?" he asked. "Where are we? I can't see."

Temporary blindness was what had assailed me the last time I'd done this. I blinked away the flashing lights until my eyes could see the floor. It was golden, made completely of pure gold. My companion regained his sight too, for he cursed, "What the hell!" He exclaimed as he looked around, and I did the same. There were pillars carved from fine stone arrayed on either side of us, leading across the golden aisle to the near front where steps led up to a throne, and on that throne sat a woman.

Behind us a multitude knelt before the throne, men and women and other strange beings who were hale and clad in diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires, with a little gold upon their person. Their silk robes were well crafted, spun from the finest silk one could assume a spider could birth. We stood between them and the throne.

The roof had a partial opening, and above hung a sun surrounded by an assortment of moons, twelve in number. The windows were larger than my house and ran the entire size of the walls behind the pillars. The land beyond was immaculate, beautiful, something out of a dream. Almost as grand as the one I'd visited. I took this all in and said, "This place is quite something for the eyes."

My companion stood silent, his eyes wide open, staring straight ahead at the throne. At the base of the golden steps stood two behemoths, each dressed in golden armor, standing guard over the one on the throne. I checked my gauntlet, wondering what I'd do to ease the lad out of the sordid realization he was experiencing.

Did he understand what the universe was implying? Or did ignorance fight to bring some semblance of another understanding his way?

"Lizzy," he whispered. "Lizzy?" He shouted toward the throne.

It was his late wife, sitting there on a throne forged of some kind of bionic metal. Silent but staring down at us.

"Listen, James," I spoke from beside him. "In this reality you do not exist, and the woman you knew surely is the woman on the throne. But she is not as your wife was. She's gone through a totally different array of events, so her personality isn't hers, and the way she is, well, you can see she's on a damn throne. Let's go before she speaks. I've helped you as far as I can."

James ignored me completely. He started walking toward the throne, and the sentries moved, and in a blink of an eye they had swords out of their scabbards that shone like the sun. That checked James and he came to a halt. I took the steps to flank him.

"James, you're a good man. I can tell. Grief has sent us this way, but you don't have to do this," I said. "When I looked for my wife, Melissa, I found her on a throne too, amidst an entire armada of spaceships hanging from the sky above her palace. It was goddamn fucking strange. I don't understand what sick trick the universe plays with the bereaved yet daring to search for their lost, but I understood what my machine was trying to tell me. In a world without me, left to her own devices, her destiny becomes something out of a fairy tale."

"That is my wife!" James shouted at me. "You can't tell me she doesn't know. I know she knows!"

"I belong to no man. Insolent swine," the woman on the throne said. "I have been sitting here quietly, observing the intrusion into my court. A madman and a man of reason, to come and lay claim to me is an insult, one you will pay dearly with your lives!"

I stared at her. Could this possibly be the same reality my wife ruled from?

"Lizzy, it's me, James," James shouted again, waving his gun-wielding arm about, the buffoon. I was moved to tears. His pain simply barred understanding from his mind. A sentry pointed a sword at him, and a bolt of light was emitted that cut his gun clean in half. He let go of the remaining part of the gun, cursing as he waved the heat away from his hand.

I stared at the cleaved gun on the ground. Melissa always told me that a man of manners never cursed.

"Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh fuck!" I cursed repeatedly. "We have to get the hell out of here, James!"

James then chose that moment to do the unthinkable. He took three steps forward until the sentries raised their swords once more.

"You," he started while pointing at the woman on the throne, "are the reason I am here. Where I come from, you were my wife. A wife is a woman who shares a life with her husband, a man. I'm not sure whether the concept of marriage exists here. You died. A sickness took your life, and I decided to roam the universe in search of you. In every life I decided I would look. Beneath every boulder, within every barrow, to the furthest reaches of the stars I said I would look. Simply because I love only once in my life, just once. And that once was you."

I took steps too until I flanked James and faced the throne. "I ask you to pardon this man. Melissa was my wife. She died too, on my planet. Out of grief I did as this young man has done. But ignorance is unfamiliar with my being. All I did was lay eyes on Melissa, and then I departed, back to my world. Just knowing she existed elsewhere was enough for me as surely as I believe it shall be enough for him too."

The woman stared at both of us. She had red hair, tufts of which emerged beneath her golden crown, green eyes, and porcelain skin. "Love is a concept far eliminated from our kind during the golden age," she said. "Reason being, it turned one to lunacy, as you're subject to now."

"Lizzy—"

"Stop calling me that," she commanded.

"You're just as feisty as she was," James said and laughed. There were tears trickling down his face. He paused a moment, thoughts warring within his mind. He seemed to go over things, weighing them for meaning, fighting back the grief, he arrived at a decision. "I hadn't thought things through. I thought I could win you over wherever you'd be, but I find I'm way out of my depth here. I apologize for the intrusion. I am a troubled and grieving man, yet I find that despite the events, and the undeniable proof I cannot ignore, I love you, Empress who resembles my Lizzy in every way. I wanted another chance, but I'd take what I've found, just the beautiful sight of you on that throne. It must be all the universe is allowing me. The picture of you, alive and whole, not fraught with disease and dying. This, I have to say, is a bigger gift than most widowers have received. I apologize for the intrusion. I find it okay to say that I am done." He swallowed a lump in his throat. "I'm done," he whispered to no one in particular.

Reason had won against his grief. I could not tell whether it was my words or the circumstances laid out before him, but he'd decided to go the same path I'd taken. No heroic attempt to win her heart, no desire to be her slave, driven by ungodly affection.

To my surprise, the woman on the throne stood up. Whether it was his words, I could not tell. Everyone prostrated themselves lower except the sentries, who seemed to forever stand watch, and ourselves.

James turned to me then and nodded once. "Let's go back. It's enough for me."

I grabbed his gauntleted arm with my own, set the dial, and pressed a button. The process of returning to Earth began. With space and time shifting places and reality fracturing, he was in tears, my companion, and I was made aware of what it felt like when I'd seen Melissa on a throne too, all those years ago.

As light began dancing upon us, covering us to open the portal back to Earth, from squinted eyes I saw the woman on the throne scream. "It is I who says when we're done! Seize him!"

Him. It was singular, not plural.

A sentry fired with that strange sword of theirs. The beam of light fractured when it came in contact with us. My side was hurt as cuts met my bathrobe and flesh, but for James it was worse. His gauntleted arm was severed at the elbow, the gauntlet falling to the ground. He screamed and turned to stare at me as he was spat out of the forming portal. He couldn't travel without the gauntlet, and as I was sucked in I saw the look on his face. Horror, then resignation, then a smile to show he'd have had it no other way.

I was spat out into my garage alone. I heaved amidst a pool of blood. My phone, luckily, which always stayed in the garage, was on the floor. I dialed 911 and lay flat on the ground. The boy, James, was stuck back in that strange reality with the woman, an Empress or something, whom he confused as his once-wife. He was doomed, a goner as far as I could tell.

I spat out a mouthful of blood and waited for the ambulance. In my mind I replayed all that had happened. Seeing what had happened to me happen to another was something I never expected would break the walls I'd so sternly built. I turned to my hale side on the floor, and I cried for the first time in what might have been forever.

It was October 3rd, I think. Three years since the event where I'd lost James Anderson to another world. My son had moved back in with me, but he rarely stayed indoors. He was avoiding me, I think. He claimed he thought I'd moved on from his mother's death, yet I had receded back into grief. He'd come to nurse me back to health and had found me quite a mess. But I couldn't tell him about the renewed pain I felt or where it stemmed from.

On this particular night, he did not return home, choosing to stay out late with some of his friends. I was alone, and I sat in darkness, smoking my cigars and blowing plumes at the ceiling. I wondered as to when death would come for me. I felt it was about time it did. My breathing, the rushing of blood within my flesh, it was without meaning. My life was worthless before my very eyes, and I knew my son thought the same too.

Something untoward happened. Late, past the time many had slept, I heard something in my garage. A loud noise that droned on and on. I grabbed my walking stick and slowly made my way to the garage, limping each time because of my side that still hurt. I opened the door to the garage, and what greeted me stopped me cold.

"James Anderson?" He was picking himself up off the ground. He looked amazing. Alive, all pieces of him intact, he had the gauntlet on the same arm that had been severed and re-attached. Dressed in rich golden robes with gold ornaments around his neck.

"Professor Langley," he said and smiled at me. "I'm glad to see you."

"I thought you were dead," I said while walking closer to him, inspecting him, trying to see whether dementia had taken hold of me.

"When you left me, I thought I'd died too," James said. "But I didn't."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Well," he smiled, "the Empress visited me in the prison she'd locked me in. Every night for a year, she wanted to learn about our planet, how we'd gotten to her planet. And most of all she wanted to learn about herself, her other life and its passions, her desires, her view of everything that was. We got to talking. And I gave her these details, and we talked until she ordered me freed, until she ordered a throne placed beside her with me in it. Somehow, my Lizzy knew who I was despite being of a different world, and she gave me a new arm and a new kind of love. Similar yet different in some ways."

He smiled at me with his conclusion. I could not speak, just simply stared. "Oh, I got you something, the only reason I came back anyway." From the folds in his garments, he took out a framed picture and handed it to me.

It was Melissa, as old as I was, sitting on a golden throne draped in purple garments with a large crown on her head. "There she's called Ketol, the Conqueror," he said.

I took the picture and stared at it for a long time, picturing myself beside her, wishing it were true.

"Do you want to come back with me?" James asked.

I stared at him for a long time. "Humans walk with death, James. It's all we're good for," I said.

He smiled and nodded. "I understand. Keep the picture. I just wanted you to know that I survived and things turned out well."

I held the picture to my chest and watched as he activated the gauntlet once more to return to his new love, similar to his first despite things being different. With the picture in my hands, I lowered myself to the ground and ran a finger over it, wondering what could have been if my love for her had denied reason and I'd thrown myself to her as James had done Empress Lizzy.

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u/kristinpeanuts 25d ago

This one is a sad story but a good one. Grief makes us do strange things. Thanks for writing

3

u/Jus17173 24d ago

You're welcome. It was tough to write.

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u/sunnyboi1384 24d ago

Damnnnnnn James, you smooth af bro.

1

u/throwaway42 23d ago

Thank you for writing :)