Stay With Me

27

As his eyes closed, he inhaled deeply, still catching the faint scent of her as if she were beside him. Extending his fingers out, he tried to reach for her but grasped nothing but air. His mouth fell open as he struggled to breathe, his lungs suddenly burning inside him as he cried out in agony. His hands grasped his head and covered his eyes, desperate to wake up from the hellish nightmare he was living. From outside the room, Dead could faintly hear his mother calling him, asking what was wrong. The strength to stand had left him completely as he cried out again, hoping for the quick release of death.

~

Vanessa pressed her head against the window of the train, her eyes closed in frustration as Euronymous continued to press her further about where she had come from and how she had managed something that, to him, seemed so far-fetched.

"This really isn't as hard as you're making it out to be," she snapped.

Hellhammer shook his head. "Maybe not for you, but to us this is just insane. Try seeing it from our eyes."

"I guess you're right."

Euronymous stared her down, thinking of what to say next. "How is this so easy for you? You act like this shit is normal."

"Because where I'm from it is normal. Time travel isn't something I came up with on my own. I work for a company that's been using time travel for almost thirty years. There was a woman whose husband was murdered by a close friend of theirs. From what we all heard she wasn't the same afterwards and was determined to figure out how to bring him back. Turns out it really wasn't as hard as people made it out to be. It helps when you have a degree in a scientific areas though. But, once she figured it out, i think she was in her fifties at that point, not only did it work, but she made the information public so that people who wanted to learn from it could."

Necro scoffed. "So this woman pretty much gave up her secrets for nothing? I have a hard time believing that bullshit."

"She didn't see it that way. All she wanted was her partner back. To her, everything else was secondary. She didn't want the money or even the Nobel Prize they gave her, it didn't mean anything to her because she had something money and fame couldn't replace."

"That's touching and all but that still doesn't tell me why you came back for Dead. The lady you just told us about went for her husband, someone she knew for a long time. You didn't even know Dead, so why?"

Vanessa looked down at her hands, twisting her fingers nervously. "I wanted to give him a happier ending. To try and show him that someone cared for him enough to try and save him. I heard his story through Necrobutcher's book and from documentaries and things like that, but something about him just called to me. When I started working on my machine I really wasn't sure if I would go through with it. My bosses were trying to figure out new ways of making machines more profitable, more stylish so they could be sold to anyone who could afford it. Mine was what they wanted but it needed to be tested. The only problem with that was if they tested it, they would take it so I'd never be able to use it."

"What about Dead's dreams? He was obsessed with some woman in his dreams before you came along and then he just stopped talking about her. People don't just forget about things that fast."

"That's because the woman he was seeing was finally more than just a dream. The dreams he was having and the nightmares I had before I came were the same dream. A vision of what could be if I failed to save him. It was always the same dream every night after I started building the machine, they became more vivid as time went on but I didn't know that he would be having them too. I didn't know he did until we talked about it. I don't really know why we had the same dreams, it's something I haven't been able to figure out."