All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 3: Yin Yang ~ Willow Polson

Music - "Save the World" by Skyrocket Love

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David's POV

I did it. I really goddamn this is real holy crap did it.

I don't know how long I looked at my hand, then looked at Emma, then looked at my hand, then looked at Emma then looked at my hand again, but it was so long that she finally stopped staring at me and sat back down.

"I did it!" I finally blurted out triumphantly. She only nodded. "But this is..."

"Shut up, I know what it is," she snapped at me.

I went to sit back down, but forgot that I'd knocked the chair over and ended up in a tangle of me and chair on her kitchen floor, a metal leg jabbing me painfully in the ribs. Emma stared at me for a second with a look that could either be annoyance or pity (probably both) and then came over and helped me up. I don't know who thinks I'm more pathetic, me or her. I'm blowing it!!

"So yes," I said bravely, trying to seem like I knew what I was doing. "I made it through."

"So I see. Look, this isn't somewhere you want to be, David."

"Are you crazy? This is exactly where I want to be!" I grinned at her like a kid on Christmas morning. My grin slid when she didn't grin back.

"I know you probably think so, but..."

"I found you, Emma. It's destiny. Fate."

"I have no fate!" she yelled in my face, then flounced into the other room so fast that whatever papers were on the kitchen table scattered on the floor. I followed her. Maybe it wasn't the brightest move, but she was the entire reason I was here in the first place.

I was quiet for a while, not knowing what to say to that, exactly. It was kind of a crazy thing to yell in somebody's face. Who doesn't have a destiny? It's like saying you have no future. Like saying you don't exist.

"Emma," I finally managed, my voice quiet, "Maybe you think that, but I believe my fate is to be with... to stay connected to you somehow. I don't even know why, but I just feel it to my bones. It's just..."

As I spoke, my gaze wandered to the shelf full of crystals and stones, and I spotted something that made the rest of my words die in my throat. I picked up the prism and held it out in my hand.

"Like this," I continued, getting it into the light so that it threw a rainbow onto the wall. "I'm glad you still have it here. Maybe each of those colors represents a world, one stacked next to the other. Do you think I'm in the red world, or the blue one, or..."

"The black one," she whispered, staring at the colors on the wall.

"Uh... Emma?" I said, squinting one eye at her. "There's no black in a..."

She took the prism from my hand, killing the rainbow. The look in her eyes was like nothing I'd ever seen before, except maybe in pictures of people who had been in wars. Haunted. Eyes that had seen way too much, too many horrors.

"But the people out there seem so happy," I said, nodding at the window. "Wars are ending, violence is down..."

"All a facade," she murmured, her face going back to the way it was before, behind a guarded mask. But her eyes... they kept changing from pity to worry to haunted to something else I couldn't read. Windows to the soul and all that. They really are.

What's behind the facade, Emma? What have you seen?

Then another thought came to me. "What about me? What was I doing this whole time? The girl who gave me your address said something happened a month ago, and you thought I was dead."