Funny Thing (freewrite) (One Last Adventure #3)

This is the third part of the story. Read the first parts here:

Sometime-voices #1

Arc-en-ciel #2

They found themselves quite helpless when they saw the old man had gone and the guards or as they liked to call themselves, the nurses, broke through their spell one by solitary one and realized how silly this all was. They looked out at the people in the garden and at the planet of pills that awaited behind their screen door and saw there was no point to it all. These old people were not helpless, not in the slightest, but they were. They have no power no more and so, the nurses settled on doing one last kind thing (or perhaps it was the very first) and that evening, the nurses began setting all the old people free. They roused them from their weary sleep and rounded them up at once and they sent them on their way.
Of course, they kicked nobody out, and after their elderly residents had packed their bags, they made it known that if there was anyone who hadn't a place to go, they were welcome to stay.
As it turned out, they all had a place to go. So that by nightfall, the home for the old was completely deserted.
And it was at about that time that Andreas reached his destination. Naturally, he had no clue it was his destination since he'd never been there before, hadn't even seen a picture, but he felt it in his bones and in the sounds of his mind that this was where he was meant to be.

It was an old house, rustled and just out of sleep. The bells around this town had quieted down many moons ago, as the trucker who'd brought him up here said, just before they parted. He'd worried for the old man, although after a bit, he forgot he'd ever seen him at all. There had been no one in that truck that day, or at least, no one he could remember.
Remembrance is a funny thing.
Andreas sat on the stoop, in front of the house, knowing all too well he would never step inside. He was not here to step inside, he was here to let go, because that was what the voices in his head were telling him, from afar. To let go, to forget, to kiss the child he never had goodbye and finally move on. But moving on is another of those funny things that sometimes doesn't happen when it should, and then, it doesn't happen at all.
'This is where he would've lived, had our child survived, he would've lived in this very house,' the woman with honey-eyes whispered through the breeze.
But no, that can't be right, can it? Surely, if their child...but they never had a child, they never even met one another, how could their child...

'I don't understand,' he replied, to the wind and the wind told him he didn't have to.
And suddenly, the old man feels weary, he feels the weight of all those years weighing down on him, the monsters he's so far managed to out-run catch up to him now and he does the only thing he can do to escape them one last time. He sleeps, and furthermore, he dreams.
In his dream, Andreas journeys through the eyes of the past and the promises of what never was. He passes by buildings, strange, built of grass and underwaterness and things he can't understand because he's never seen them until now and his brain is fighting him on each one. He walks through a world woven on dreams. He walks by the Post Office, with its door upside-down, but only he knows it's upside down. To everyone else, it is just a door.
And he buys a loaf of breed with coins that disappear soon after he passed them to the seller and then, standing on the corner of Here and Perhaps Tomorrow, he sinks his teeth into the hot, delicious batter and realizes, too late, that you cannot purchase breed, not by the loaf, not by the kilogram, you can't purchase it at all. So he lets it drop to the soft ground and resumes his journeying into the world where he's never been.
And then the voices in his head – who've been quiet up to now – pick up again and being rumbling on the insides of his brain, screaming, thwarting and thrusting at his sanity.

Run, run, run. Go now, little boy, or you'll never go again.

And they yell at him and he yells back, but he picks up the pace and soon enough, he's running fast and doesn't dare to look behind him for he knows what he will see.
He will see fire and ghouls, some from long ago and some from just around the corner. Faces caved in an traced over by deep lines of loss and misunderstandings. So, in his dream, he runs and hides and walks, when he can't run anymore and he stumbles and falls and he knows the ghouls will be upon him. Soon, they will be here and it will all be over.
But until that happens, he will have one last look around. The stoop on which he's fallen is the very same stoop he's fallen asleep on, but in a different universe, in the universe, it was always meant to be in.

Andreas stares up at the door, at the house, which is clearly inhabited, where in his other universe, it was not. And as he looks and wonders, the wooden door opens and from it steps the woman with the honey eyes and long blonde hair.
Only no, it's not the woman with the honey eyes, although he'd like her to be. It's their son and suddenly, he knows him, as clear as day, he remembers the day he was born. He recalls that he drunk too much to celebrate and had a terrible stomach pain the day after so that it felt like he was kind of giving birth himself.
He remembers watching him grow and play. He remembers seeing the boy slip through his fingers as the claws of adulthood wrapped themselves around his throat.
'Dad, where have you been?' the young man chides. He has the same eyes made of liquid honey. 'We've been waiting for you.'
And the door opens once more and this time indeed, it is her. The only her that could ever exist for Andreas.
'I told you we would meet, Andreas,' she says and smiles, but there is such terrible sadness in her honey-eyes. 'You've come to us, finally, we've waited for so long, but you've come so late. Your time in this world is almost over now.'
'But you came to me,' he says. He doesn't understand.
'I suppose I did. Strange, I hoped you'd come sooner, that you'd be younger, more like when I first met you.'
'But I was a child then.'
'And now, you're an old man,' she says, full of heartache.
'Who are you?' Andreas asks although he senses the answer.
'We're your what could've been, what should've been. You see, in each reality, there is a possibility of things being as they should. Sometimes they are and sometimes, they're not and when they're not, the realities that could've been are just left hanging. We don't die, we don't disappear, we just...aren't.'
'But how can he exist if I never met you?' he asks, gesturing towards the young man.
'Oh don't you understand? It doesn't matter if we met or not. The realities that should be are pre-existing, the possibility of them has already been written into the very fabric of the Universe. You may follow it or you may not. You did not, but we're still here, forever watching, waiting, hoping that our time will come. But until you do not take this path, we are left here hanging, existing. And –'
'And you've been calling to me, taking me through all those places so that I could find you so that I could lead the life I was supposed to.'
And suddenly, Andreas understands why, for all his life, things never seemed to be at their fullest, why there was always something lacking.
'But why are you crying?' he asks as he sees her clear white tears stain her cheeks. 'I'm here now.'
'But it's too late, you didn't live this life, you didn't get drunk and you didn't watch him slip away. And we'll still be here, forever, until the time is right for you to maybe walk our path again.'
The woman with the honey-eyes kisses Andreas on the forehead for the first and last time and drifts away. And Andreas too drifts away, and as he leaves the world, as he leaves all worlds, he's filled with a feeling that's deeply unsatisfactory.

The END

Today's prompt word was 'helpless' and I admit I went over 5 minutes, but I wanted to see where the story went. Check out @mariannewest to join our amazing freewriting community!

Thank you for reading,