The kid in front of me smiled. Innocent, wide eyes that gleam just that little bit. Frizzly, amber hair that seems just a tad roughened up. A speck of mud on the right cheek from a tackle during soccer. And the wide smile that trumps it all.
How the fuck did he turn into me?
Of course, even though I can't help but ask myself at times, that's all rhetoric. I know my past too well. Everything that happened. The stupid bullets my genius Dad designed that supposedly awaken the potential within a person. The stigma. The raid. Imbeciles and harbingers of doom, the crowds screamed, milling outside the house. The ringing gunshot, how slowly the bullet flowed in the air in and out of Dad's cranium, twice through Mom's, through my sis and bro's. The fear in the gunman's eyes after the bullet grazed through my hair, and the next shot was a click. How he fumbles around and looks desperately for another bullet. Anything.
He sees it. Next thing I'm unconscious. I wake up to a bloodied mess - the gunman's limbs scattered around the room. Mom's head away from the rest of the body, Dad's guts straddled across the wooden floor, my sis and bro beyond recognition. There's blood on my hands and a hole through my head. Somewhere near the left there's a crushed bullet that looks like the one Dad was working on. Damn you, Dad.
I know that in every universe, somewhere around this time I go mad. It's one of the few constants of my life. Every other timeline of my life deviates far from each other from this point on. I know because I've been to every single one of them. In each universe I went to my powers were different.
One of me ended up with superhuman capabilities and went on a crusade- a universal genocide that would wipe majority of the human race in just under a decade. Another learnt teleportation and went about a similar journey of meting justice to the rest of the world. A third could create more of himself by thinking about it - created an entire empire overnight and began to conquer from there.
All deranged beings, all out to kill the world. The path taken is immensely different, but the general path stays similar: going mad, killing everyone, and in the depths of solitary eternity regaining sanity. And the end of each path stays the same: Suicide.
I'm the only one that's different. I gained the most mysterious power of the lot: The power to travel to any point of time in any universe. I've witnessed the death of countless mes. I've killed the entire world overnight and murdered everyone on Earth simultaneously. You could say I was the perfect one amongst them all.
For that same reason I've been stuck in eternity that slight bit longer than every other Me, and got a bit more time to think about stuff. I believe in a God. I believe in salvation for people who live good lives and a tenth layer of hell dedicated to me alone. It's queer, but it's probably the first thing I think about every time I regain sanity. I think about how to get this salvation. Almost every other me gives up and commits suicide, resigned to this fate. Of course they would - they can't change the mistakes they made. Only I can.
I think about killing the gunman before he manages to kill anyone in my family, then perish the thought. Another me tried that - he could go back in time within his own universe. He killed the gunman two days before. Someone else filled his place. Went back and killed him too. Another. Killed. Another. Killed. Another. He killed the next gunman just before he took Dad's bullet and shot it through the kid's head. The kid went mad and took the gun and shot himself in the head. Same shit, different way. Ended up suiciding too.
But there's one thing I thought about that he didn't. I thought about killing myself. And that's where I am now - 5 years before any incident occurred.
The kid's smiling. It's the kind of smile that gets to me and gets me thinking about how the fuck this kid here could end up killing the world. It's a ridiculous thought. An equally ridiculous thought is that if I killed him I could save the human race in every alternate universe out there. I know it will - my early years deviated so little that the pathways never strayed from this single path of life. Every future starts from here, and every future where the world dies dies with this child here.
Maybe this alone could bring salvation to every single me out there; letting them rest in peace rather than forcing them to kill themselves in such a terrible fashion.
"Kid, if I told you that you were capable of saving the world right now, would you?" his toothy grin shines that little bit brighter. He'll never know that I asked the same question to his father an hour ago and shot him through the head.
"Sure I would! Don't you wanna save the world too, mister?" It's all I need. We think alike. 'course we would.
"Of course I do." Bang. Bang.
The blood flows slowly down the pavement. The two of us probably look angelic to everyone around.
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What a random story lol I just needed to get that out of my head
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