This story was inspired by a beautiful drawing by a certain ~Deserea-Q on deviantART, entitled Make Believe. I would link to if I could. As it stands now, I hope you send her art plenty of love, and I hope you enjoy yourself here.
Make Believe
It is a masterpiece.
Four and thirteen. Six and twelve. Colors and symbols. Black and white, or black and red, or maybe even blue and red, depending on who you ask and what you're asking. Hate and love. Timelines twisting and warping back in on themselves, loose ends tying neatly together with every page. Ideas that curl out and back in, in and back out, always coming back to the center and locking neatly into place.
Everything has a place. Every last thing has a purpose for existing. You may not know what that purpose is yet, but the inevitability of it belonging somewhere is enough for you. You will know what it is and where it goes when you get there. You already have an idea, but the opportunity to consolidate that idea into reality has not yet revealed itself to you. So you will wait, and you will keep working, keep hoping, keep trusting, because that is all you can do.
Someone is calling you. You ignore them, scribbling furiously away at the papers laid out before you. This call is much louder, much more insistent than the other, and you are loathe to disregard it.
Things keep happening that you don't quite expect, but you know how to make them right again. Some of them you planned. Some of them depend on the seeds of the past, those things you left behind that you did not understand at the time, but now they come back to you in a blaze of light and you tie them deftly together in one perfect little package. This is what gives you faith, gives you strength to leave some things alone, to strike out into new territory and leave some things hanging, because you know that, just like always, you will be able to reach back and gather everything together again the way it needs to be gathered.
Sometimes you can plan things. Sometimes you plant a seed on purpose, knowing exactly when and where and how it will sprout. And sometimes it actually happens the way you expected it would. Sometimes it doesn't. But even when it doesn't, it still works, and you love it, and you love all the seeds that have come to fruition, both those you have sewn yourself and those that you have scattered to the winds, to fall where they will and do as they like, as you built this world from the ground up.
The voice is calling again. You continue to ignore it. There is still so much left to do.
It has been four years since you began dreaming. Four long years since you began planning and drawing, and the story has grown deeper and darker and wider and more beautifully intricate with every passing week. Some of it scares you, when you think about it too long. Some of it makes you sad, because you have done some terrible things to some very good people who didn't deserve it, and some very good things to some terrible people who might not deserve it quite yet. But that's okay, you tell yourself, because everything has its purpose. Everything has its place. You just have to keep waiting and watching for everything to fall in line.
The door opens, and a draft of air scatters your papers across the room. You push yourself up from your stomach in a panic, colored pencils rolling across the carpet as you scramble to catch them. Then of course you have to scramble for the pencils, too, which means losing the papers all over again.
Your father sighs, shakes his head, and smiles.
He tells you that dinner is ready, and that you should head downstairs. You tell him that you will as soon as you finish this one little thing. He smiles again, and says that one thing means one thing. Not like last time, when you said only one thing and didn't come downstairs until the food had long since gone cold. And then you both had to reheat everything, because he hadn't eaten either—which he didn't actually tell you, but you know for a fact that he had been waiting for you.
You laugh, and so does he.
You promise that you'll be downstairs quicker than he can fill his pipe. He asks if that's a challenge, and both of you laugh again. He closes the door, and you listen to his footsteps all the way down the stairs until you can't hear them any more.
You haven't told him the story. Some of it, yes, but not all of it. You know he worries about you, because you spend so much time in here alone, and the least you can do to make up for it is to tell him a little bit about what you've actually been doing. He knows the basic concept of what's going on, at least. But trying to explain the finer points of paradox space and stable time loops tends to leave him very confused. And besides, there are a lot of things that happen or will happen that you don't really feel comfortable telling him about.
There's a lot of confusion, after all. And a lot of people die.
Most of them don't stay dead. Some of them do. Some of them just haven't found their growing plot seeds yet and blossomed into their true potential. But some of them, some of the most important ones, might not ever be coming back—not the way you knew them before, at least. And there is no way you're going to tell him about them.
He's one of them, after all.
You sit down in the middle of the floor and look around. Your papers and pencils are still scattered about in a state of disarray, but that's alright. In your mind you know where everything goes. Every single page is filed in precise order, both chronologically and in the order that the story is actually told. Every page has its place on the chart hanging from your wall, an interwoven web of red lines and blue that has now grown and spread to take up one entire wall and part of the second. Some things are written in with the same colors of red and blue, but some of them are written in bright, iridescent green, and some are in black or grey, and several are written in different colors of the rainbow. And even those are complicated enough without the delicate netting of pencil lines, connecting events that seem to happen in no sensible order when you looked at them from the standpoint of only one timeline, because, after all, the two were temporally split from one another, and the only way to really understand was to step outside of time and see both parallel universes running in tandem, entirely separate and yet inextricably bound together in their own terrible, beautiful mosaic of color and life.
A second chart hangs from the opposite wall, the one right beside your bed. This one is full of arrows and smaller symbols that represent the different kinds of relationships any set of people could have, connecting larger symbols that represent people. There are all sorts of connections to be found up there—relationships built on hate, relationships built on pity, relationships built on love. And relationships built on friendship, of course, which is either an emotion or a disease, or neither, or maybe even both, depending on who you happen to ask. It's all very colorful and very complicated, and even now you're very glad you have the charts to aid you in keeping track of it all. You saved up your allowance for months and bought one of those giant rolls of paper, solely for the purpose of creating these charts.
It was important to you.
It still is important to you.
Nothing is more important to you than this.
You draw your knees up below your chin. There is nothing else. There is you, and there is your father, and there is the internet on the occasion that you feel like doing something other than writing, drawing, dreaming. But the internet is really a fickle mistress, and you don't spend much time with her. Sometimes you find interesting things to read and do. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you find a new forum or social website to join for a little while. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you find kind, intelligent, interesting people to talk to. Sometimes you don't.
Usually you don't.
It is winter break, but the break is coming inexorably to a close, and you dread returning to the real world when it is finally over. Out there were monsters. The kinds of monsters that shove you up against walls or catch your ankles with their feet as they pass you in the hallways, and snigger as you try your hardest to keep a hold on your books and binders while simultaneously not falling on your face. The kinds of monsters who always laugh the hardest and try to look innocent when your glasses mysteriously disappear from your desk in the middle of class. The kinds of monsters that roll their eyes and whisper and laugh every time you pass by, and you can never quite hear what they are saying, but you don't need to, because you already know every possible combination of words that could possibly be said about you whenever they don't think you're looking.
In your world, all you have to do is make a better weapon, rack up a few more experience points, and the monsters are toast. No matter how tough and nasty they are, you always have the ability to get tougher and nastier. No matter how strong they are, you always have the potential to be stronger.
It's not that easy in the real world.
The sun is sinking outside your window, and you are sitting in the middle of four blocks of light cut crosswise through the middle. Your room is cold. Your papers and pencils are still scattered all over your room, twisting and spinning in a kind of chaotic order that you and only you will ever be able to really understand.
But then, you're the only one who needs to understand. You're the only one that matters. You're the only one who cares.
You rest your chin in your palm, staring at the chart of characters—and in particular, at the four symbols drawn in the center. A green ghost. A purple squid. A black record. A blue dog.
It's crazy, the kinds of stuff you come up with when you're all alone.