Resolution
~ "It doesn't even hurt anymore." Alex said after the waves of pain and shock had ebbed out of his dying body.
"I… I think I'm okay." he breathed and slowly ran a hand over his chest. Feeling for the bullet wounds.
There was no pain. Not even the sensation of cold from the snow around him.
With renewed energy, he quickly got to his feet, looking around at the odd surroundings. Norman was laying beside him. Huddled in the fetal position, crying and whimpering like a dog that had been kicked. His face swollen and bloodied.
Alex stooped down with concern over the young man who looked half in and out of consciousness. He couldn't remember what had happened to him. How any of this had happened.
"Alex." Came a soft throaty voice he remembered all to well.
Alex sensed the voice was close and its' owner felt far more real than anything around him. Yet, he couldn't see through the darkness.
"Norma?" he called out to the empty void that only reflected shadows. This place was so lonely that no even the dead would stay here.
"Alex, come with me." her voice called softly from the tree line.
He saw her then. Saw his wife slipping through the winter trees dressed in nothing more than a pale blue summer dress. It's thin fabric reminded him of butterfly wings the way it fluttered around her. The air around him was deathly still, yet she had a strange and magnetic movement all her own.
"It's too cold out here. You're going to freeze to death wearing that." Alex said. A smile spreading across his face as he saw her bathed in a sharp ray of sunlight. The intense beam striking only her and reflecting the warm glow of her yellow hair and seeming to keep her in a perpetual state of summer.
She turned and looked at him, for a moment, he was scared her eyes would be dead, sightless things. Yet, she was as warm and alive as ever. Her eyes as beautiful and rich with life as he always dreamed they would be.
"Alex, come with me." she nodded playfully. A smile coming easily to her and Alex felt himself being pulled to her.
He stopped suddenly. Turning around to look behind him. He wasn't sure why. Nothing was behind him except death and horror.
He saw Norman, the poor boy weak and muttering on the snow. Blood dripping over his face as he cried. His eyes open but not seeing the world around him.
He saw Norma's body to. Buried in the snow like a tragic princess from a fairytale. Alex felt himself growing heavy when he saw her buried in the snow like that. Left out in the cold. As if no one cared for her.
He barely glanced at his own body. He had no use or care for it now. It was little more than a shell. He had no more love for it at this moment than for a pair of worn out gym shoes.
"Alex." Norma called.
He turned back to her hopefully. Happy to see she was still waiting. The winter forest seeming to melt away and become a place where winter would never touch them. Where all the beautiful and happy things lived forever.
"What about him?" Alex nodded back to the young man muttering in the snow. His swollen face and manic eyes seeing a world that he alone could see.
"It's not his time yet." Norma said calmly. Her smile serine and gentile. She'd moved closer to him and somehow brought summer with her. Her hands touching his and infecting him with radiance that burned him alive.
It didn't hurt exactly, but Alex could feel the change happening. Feel all of the anger, pain and suffering he had held onto wash away from him. He felt his body become clean and whole again. He was without fear. Without hate. Without any of the burdens that had plagued him in life.
Norma's face was still calm and angelic looking.
"Where are we going?" Alex asked. His hands shaking as the last memories of resentment were still tingling in his fingers. His feet still sensing the last sensation of jealousy. All of these quickly vanishing like smoke.
"To a place where we can be happy." Norma said with her radiant smile.
Her hand lacing into his and Alex could feel that whatever body he now had, was different. He was different.
Norma was different to. She was still herself. Still his Norma. Still his wife, with her magnetic beauty that he kept finding himself being drawn to. Yet, she was different here in this place of eternal summer. She was calmer now. More at peace. As if he had unlocked some great mystery and knew all the secrets.
Alex felt the change in his own body that was different from the change that had happened when she first touched him. When she'd erased all the bad things. He felt… good.
As of he were a young man again. Capable of running miles without growing tired. His eyesight working perfectly, his body no longer having the aches and pains of life. He could feel the earth in this place, feel everything around him, but it was as though his body could become anything.
It struck him that, if he wanted to, he could become a bird and fly around the woods. That here, in this world Norma had brought him, they could do anything.
"I feel like… maybe something bad happened. Something bad happened before." Alex started to say but the memories of his old life, the mortal life were fading away. Falling apart like a dream that was never real at all.
He looked at his wife and saw she looked so much younger than he remembered. She couldn't have been more than eighteen right now. Her dress was white and was radiant on her tanned skin. He grinned when he saw the freckles scattered over her nose from being out in the sun for too long.
Norma only laughed at him. Kissed him daringly on the lips and ran away into the forest.
Alex having no choice but to race after her. The two of them laughing and screaming until dusk fell and fireflies illuminated the night.
~ Then, in an odd way, but one that made compete sense, they were children again. Norma and Alex were no more than six and filled with the innocence and freedom of youth as they played in a meadow at daybreak with other children.
Alex remembered thinking that he knew these other kids, but as adults. He knew their names, he must have, but he couldn't remember how he knew them. Their lives before this place were just as vague as his own life was.
~ "I just want to stay with you." Alex confessed when he and Norma ran away from the other kids after hours of playing. They were hungry and she'd grown tired of the never ending games of chasing each other.
"Let's go see your mom." Norma suggested brightly. The six year old version of his wife had woven a flower crown for herself and looked very regal even with her grass stained dress.
"My mom is here?" Alex asked curiously.
"Everyone you've ever lost is here." Norma grinned with a delightful gap of missing baby teeth.
~ With childlike enthusiasm, the two children ran across the forest and into a meadow where flowers bloomed in a well tended garden.
Alex recognized his mother right away. In this place, he could only remember his mother as being a young a beautiful creature, and that's what she was.
A young woman, no more than thirty, her long dark hair pinned back as she baked pie in an old fashioned kitchen. Norma and Alex helping her to cut the fruit and carefully roll the crust out.
His mother smelling like sugar and clean things. Her feet were bare as she worked in her cozy little kitchen making sure that the two children were fed. Afterwards, Norma and Alex ran outside to play in the evenings twilight.
The nights feeling safe and warm with no need to find shelter.
"Time is different here." Norma said as they slipped into their mid twenties together and found a secluded place between the trees. Alex hardly able to keep his hands off of her waist for even a second. She was pulling him towards her with such raw, savage beauty. The feeling of romantic and sexual love had thankfully not deserted him when he came here.
His wife teasing him as she pretended to escape among the trees. Allowing him to only catch ahold of her dress and giggling when he finally caught her and kissed him passionately.
"We can make the days and nights last as long as we want." she whispered as he was pushing her dress down.
"As long as I'm with you, I don't care about time." he confessed honestly. In truth, he had no idea how long he'd been here. It could have been one day, it could have been a century. He'd already felt as though he and Norma had been childhood sweethearts and nothing could convince him otherwise.
Hadn't they played together as children earlier that morning?
~ Then, Alex found Norma was in grown up form hugging a little boy. The child's body was transformed as well all the bad things had been removed. Everything that was apart of the mortal world, had been left behind and there was only this small innocent thing left.
"Norman?" Alex said in surprise.
He wasn't sure how to react to seeing the little boy here. Somehow, some very distant memory told him that there was something bad concerning Norman. That it was a dangerous thing to be around him.
However, those were fears that didn't exist here. Alex hadn't felt fear, or hate or anything other that joy and love since Norma had brought him out of that awful winter.
"He finally came home." Norma said with a bright smile. Her white coat made her look even more angelic than usual.
Alex felt himself smile to at seeing the little boy. The child no more dangerous than anything else here.
"I'm glad." Alex nodded and took the child's other hand. The three of them walking together through the woods as a family.
~ Norman, never changed. Where Alex and Norma could transform themselves into children, teenagers and adults, Norman remained an eternal child. One who never spoke and seemed perpetually innocent and content.
He was just as happy playing alone with his mother as he was with the hundreds of other children here. Norma and Alex often becoming children themselves so they could keep him company. Yet, Norman was content to be alone.
"He's a new soul." Alex's mother explained to them one evening as she knitted by the fire.
Norma was in grown up form and rocking her eternal child to sleep.
Alex, taking on whatever age complimented his wife, sat across from them in his Sheriff's uniform.
"What does that mean?" he asked innocently.
"He's a new soul. He came here very young and innocent. He can't or won't be able to transform. You and Norma are old souls." His mother explained with a shrug. "You've both been through here and chosen to go back."
"Go back?" Norma asked.
"Become mortal again." his mother explained. "Be born, have bodies."
"How many times?" Alex asked.
"Who knows?" his mother laughed. "I only know that the two of you have been here many times before."
"Always together?" Norma asked curiously.
"You'll have to ask someone else." his mother sighed. A sad look crossing her pretty face. It was the first look of sadness Alex had ever seen here in this place. The first touch of cold that ever entered this world.
"I'm a new soul to. Norman and I are both very frail creatures. We belong here. We can never leave." she said dreamily.
~ Alex couldn't be sure how much time had passed in the woods of eternal summer. Time held no meaning here. Days were long and lazy and slipped away without being counted. Norman would wander away to play with other children that were always happy to have a new playmate. Alex never wanting to stray very far from Norma, even when they transformed into birds and flew.
Norma, ever the watchful mother, refused to leave her eternal child alone for too long. Even in a forest where nothing bad would ever happen. Where children played in meadows, barefoot mothers baked bread and summer never ended.
~ Alex had lost track of Norma one day, and when he found her in the forest, saw she wasn't alone. That she was with a lovely couple, newly touched and transformed. The there of them laughing as if telling funny stories.
"Alex!" Norma cried when she saw him. "Emma and Dylan came home! I thought they would never get here!"
Alex couldn't remember the couple with the glowing skin at first. Then he saw them radiate and knew what his mother meant by old souls. He could see that Emma and Dylan had worn many lives.
With the perfect trust he'd been given here, he embraced them. Remembering, with difficulty, that Dylan was Norma's other son. That he'd been attached to the mortal world recently and the mortal world had been painful for him.
"I'm glad you're here." Alex said softly.
"Norman's here?" Emma whispered. Her large eyes growing wide.
"He's a new soul. He's going to stay here as a child forever." Norma told them quickly.
~ Where his mother hadn't been able to explain Norman's eternal childhood, Emma and Dylan seemed much more capable. Unlike Alex and Norman, they had held onto some of their memories of the lives beyond the woods.
~ "New souls are fragile things." Emma said as she and Alex went back and forth on the swing set. The two of them children together and enjoying the recklessness of youth.
"Sometimes, they break and when they come here, they can't ever leave. They need to be looked after." she said.
"How did Norman break?" Alex asked.
Emma shook her head.
"Badly." she said. Her child form was wise under the innocent facade. "I only remember that it was very bad."
"Norma and I…" Alex nodded to his wife. She was in adult form as she played with Dylan and Norman as children. The two boys, her two boys laughing and running with her as their mother were happy.
"You've always been together." Emma smiled knowingly. "You've always been some kind of protector. A knight, a soldier, a police man… a sheriff. She's always been a warrior. A rebel. A mother. Someone you feel the need to be a guardian of. Someone you have to keep safe."
"You?" Alex nodded to the child version of Emma.
"All our lives are intertwined." Emma explained. "We're like a jumble of vines. I can't remember it all, but we've been fated to be together. Just like we'll go back again."
"No." Alex shook his head. "Not again."
"Why?" Emma asked.
"Norman can't leave this place." Alex nodded to the eternal child. "He's broken. Like you said. Norma can't leave him here."
He sighed and turned to the little girl with the old soul.
"I can't leave Norma." he admitted.
"I understand." Emma said with a little smile. "I don't think you ever could."
"So you'll leave?" Alex asked. "Why not stay? This is heaven after all."
"Time has no meaning here." Emma said. "I'll stay for a long time. Be gone for a short time. It's the mortal world that's short."
"The mortal world is painful." Alex said. Somehow he remembered a trace of bitterness. Something left inside of him that he forgot.
"Yes, but it's always an adventure." Emma said. "I always fall in love."
She nodded to Dylan who was now a grown man and giving Norman a piggy back ride. Emma and Alex found themselves transformed into grownups again to and left the swings to play in the meadows with Dylan and Norma. Little Norman running ahead of the grown ups. The eternal child happy and innocent of a world of winter.
THERE! I fixed it!
The fact that they left Alex out in the cold, LITERALLY, really pisses me off! What was so fucking hard about having a nice Normero reunion? Oh No! They had to have a happy reunion with the asshole who fucking killed her! Norman gets the happy ending? Really? Norman gets the happy ending? Alex gets nothing? He doesn't even get to be buried next to his wife! After everything Norman did to his mother, he's buried next to her. People are saying this last ep was so great and that Season 5 was the best season ever. WRONG! WORST SEASON EVER!
Don't worry. I will fix it! Fix it like I fixed the shitty ending to season five.
We have our resolution. Alex in the afterlife with Norma. Kisses to all of you who are feeling my pain. I feel it with you. We all go a little mad sometimes.