Broken Souls Collide

Chapter 41- Broken Amends

WESLEY

Red.

Everywhere I looked all I could see was red.

No matter where I turned I was suffocating.

It was all a hazy blur of thick grey smoke and crackling flames. There was a scorching heat that kept licking away at the surface of my skin; it was what I imagined hell to feel like. If I didn't know any better I'd think death was after me, but I've endured this nightmare enough times to know it was just that–a nightmare. Nothing could compare to what I really felt that horrid night, because unlike this current figment of my imagination, it was actually real.

"Wesley! Wesley where are you!?"

My mother's voice had been alarmingly distant from where I stood, yet I could hear the panic and agony in her words so clearly.

"Mom! I'm here Mom!"

"Wesley get out of the house quickly!"

"No! No I'm not leaving you!"

I had been stubborn, paying little mind to the flames that had begun to close in on me, more afraid of leaving behind the woman who birthed and raised me. I knew the reality of leaving that house without her, and that was a reality I didn't want to face.

"Baby you have to go! I can't get out from here!"

"No mom! I won't!"

"I'm sorry Wesley, I love you!"

Those had been the last words I had picked up on before a pair of arms—which had undoubtedly belonged to a male—had gathered me in their embrace. I had been slipping away from the world at that point—the thick smoke gathering in my lungs and hindering my ability to stay conscious for much longer—though I briefly remember resisting the person trying to save me in one last pathetic attempt at closing the growing distance between my mother and I.

"Relax kid, I'll come back for her, I promise."

There was something oddly soothing about the man's reassurance, and even though I had never met him before, I somehow believed his promise enough to allow full unconsciousness to consume me. If I could go back, I'd use the little energy I had left and begged he'd take back his words, that way, at least one of them could have survived that night.

Though it had been awhile since I last dreamt this reoccurring nightmare, there hadn't been much of a reaction when I finally awoke to reality, nothing besides the dull ache in my chest at the reminder that my mother was no longer physically here. It was a drastic improvement, much preferred over the short panic attacks and incessant tears when I was still struggling to decipher what was real and what wasn't, although I guess it was real in a way, because the nightmares were actually just memories my brain wouldn't stop reliving.

Shitty memories, but memories nonetheless.

There was a rapid knocking coming from somewhere below me as the last shroud of sleep had begun to release from my body, it was what I assumed had awoken me to begin with. Blindly reaching out for my phone I had left on my nightstand, I let a yawn escape me as I blinked at the time on my lock screen, letting my eyebrows raise in surprise when I read it was just past noon. The knocking came again in the middle of my morning stretch, seeming a little more impatient than the last.