Three Years Too Early...: Protect or Regret

Naomi refused to leave the orange room until she had the chance to speak with Tom, the teacher wasn’t interested in letting her speak to Tom, instead his only desire was to remove her from the room. Tom meanwhile removed the note from his piece of paper, turned it over and suddenly began drawing again, this time a building on fire with a much smaller variation of the face he had drawn before taking the place of the sun.

In the moment it took for Naomi to finally give up with her argument with Hankins and just turn to talk to Tom without any level of secrecy, the door was blown off of it’s hinges, across the room and out of the window at the back on the room.

Time to make a choice, Tom thought to himself. Lose what you searched for, for years and keep your new life, or embrace your old one. “Stay and regret, move and protect,” he whispered to himself causing his friends to turn and look at him weirdly. “Protect,” he added with a smile before utilising his superspeed to speed across, forming two swords of temporal energy as he moved before finally finishing with his swords crossed above his head, his body placed between Naomi and his father, Geoff; whose swords had come down at full force and collided with Tom’s.

            “What!?” Geoff exclaimed, startled by the sudden change in luck.

            “Why can’t you ever stay in the hole I put you in,” Tom snarled before pushing back at his father, effectively throwing him backwards across the room and into the room. “You should really pick your targets better,” he smirked.

            “So is this ignore Naomi day. Is it?” Naomi sneered from behind him.

            “No. It’s ignore my past day. Or two years,” Tom stated simply. “Basically I was trying to avoid anything to do with my past. I almost didn’t move then; I was so engrained in my self-pity, and in my hatred for humanity. That I just wanted to let them burn when the aliens invaded. I didn’t want to save them. I still don’t.”

            “What broke you?” Naomi asked.

            “The wars, the bloodshed. Everything they do to each other,” Tom explained. “They broke me by doing what I was made to do to other species..

“Anyway. You,” Tom smiled. “What to do with you?”

            “Die at my hands this time. That would be nice. You know, rather than setting off an explosion then trying to cut my eye out like last time,” Geoff sneered.

            “You know that I was trying to stab through your eye and into your brain. You got lucky,” Tom stated, his smile creeping his classmates out. “My life. My rules. And one of those is that you can’t be in it father.”

            “Why use that like that,” he called. “She’ll kill me if I don’t kill you this time.”

            “No she won’t. I kill you first,” Tom snarled before jumping at his father at neck-breaking speeds, only coming to a halt when his father pushed him aside.

Quickly, Geoff takes his chance and throws Tom flying across the room and out of the window. Much to the dismay of Naomi who jumps up onto the table and chases after them. Emma meanwhile rushes out of her classroom in opposite to Tom’s and goes into full sprint to help rescue her father, Tom, from her grandfather.

Suddenly, a mini-explosion initiates, blasting Tom, Emma and Geoff in separate directions as their temporal energy all meets simultaneously…