The Time Traveler

Writing prompt:

You look over to your infant child sleeping, then back to the emaciated, battle-scarred time traveler and ask “ my kid caused all that?”

[Warning: Dark ending.]

I still have a look of disbelief on my face as I look back at my infant baby boy sleeping peacefully in his crib.

The claim that he will grow up into the type of person who could rip countries apart and convince millions of people to commit horrific war crimes in his name still echoes in my mind.

‘Not my little William’ I say to myself. There’s just no way that he could grow up like that. I wouldn’t let him because a monster like that would have to be totally devoid of all hint of love and I have loved him from the first instant that I knew he existed in my womb. And for all nine months he grew there, he felt the love I had for him with every beat of my heart.

The scarred time traveler who had appeared through a glowing crack in the wall filled with the darkness of the void between time, just looked back at me once again as I stood between him and my infant son.

He didn’t have any expression on his face at all as he sat there and looked at William. Not even when he spent 35 minutes telling and proving to me exactly what my boy would do when he grew up. Hell even when he used his wrist computer to show me the next 37 years worth of his history, there was no expression on his face. Though his eyes were leaking tears all the time he spoke.

I can’t believe that William could be capable of doing something like that with a loving mother who raised him. And there is no way that this guy from the future could be right.

“How could it happen? For William to grow up to be a monster like that, something would have had to happen to warp him from birth and there is nothing. He’s just a normal little baby.”

“Yeah about that”, the traveler drawled, “I made sure that I came to the right time and space location where it all started because I wanted to make sure that nothing changed.”

“What do you mean you didn’t want to change anything? Aren’t you here to try and prevent the future from happening?”

“No. Far from it. What William will do is going to propel us to the stars even if it costs us 1/3 of the human population. War has always been the birthplace of rapid advances in technology for the military and the civilians alike. And this war is going to put us into space and the stars that are out there.”

“But if you kill him then none of that will happen. So you can’t do it, you can’t kill him.”

“I know. I know exactly what I have to do and I am the only one who can do it. I am not here to kill him, I am here to make sure he does what he has to do.”

As I watched him in disbelief, he drew a weapon from behind his back and aimed it at me. Not my son William, but me.

As I saw his finger start to tighten on the trigger, I knew exactly what caused my son to be warped into the monster he will become. A tear fell from my eye as William pulled the trigger.