Sin stares at the room, familiar voices coming from beyond its door. “Doesn’t coming here so often make you want to become a doctor!?”

A child’s voice responds angrily to the question. “No!”

A sad look fills his face, Sin hasn’t  heard that voice in years. “Dad…”

He slowly walks toward the room, the sound of his dad’s voice continues as he speaks softly to his son. That soft tone, even when mad his father would still somehow hold that soft tone in his voice, it always frustrated Sin, he would always feel bad about getting mad at his dad because of it, even when his dad did things to make him livid. “Doctors help people in so many ways, they change the lives of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people in their lifetime!”

Sin stares into the room, his father is seated at a patient’s bedside, he as a young boy is seated next to him. His father continues to go on and try to convince him of his future. “To be able to help those that need it, to give a second chance to those who may lose their lives. To have those skills, isn’t that much better than being a singer?”

Andrew is also standing in the room, staring at his younger self. “I remember this… I used to do it all the time… I would ditch school and take the bus here… Dad would always have to come and get me… and not once was he ever mad about it.” He looks to the woman laying down in the bed. Despite her young age, the woman is very weak and sickly, but acts as if she were in no pain at all with her two visitors around. “He was never mad because he knew I just wanted to see her.”

His younger self lets out a high pitched whine. “Momum!! Dad’s trying to convince me to be a doctor again! He doesn’t want me to be a singer.”

His mother lets out a small laugh. “Oh is he?” She looks to her husband. “Donald, you know better, you’re the one that’s always complaining about how your parents were always projecting on you. You shouldn’t do the same.”

His father seems a little hurt with the accusation, comparisons to his parents not welcome. “I’m not projecting… I just want him to stick to a goal that’s more obtainable.”

“More obtainable? A doctor?”

“Compared to a singer? Obviously.”

Andrew’s mother looks away from her husband and back to her very cross son. “Well you can be whatever you want to be honey. Don’t let your father tell you otherwise.”

Young Andrew nods his head in agreement. “That’s what I tell him every time!”

“Good, now how about you sing your momum a song, you know how much I love hearing your voice.”

The little boy looks away from her stubbornly. “No. I only sing when I’m happy. Dad made me mad.”

His mom laughs as his reaction, she starts up a song, an easy one that most kids would know. “The itsy-bitsy spider.” She gently pokes at her son to get his attention. “Climbed up the waterspout.”

The little boy starts singing with her, apparently not as mad as he thought and happily joining her. “Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun and dried up all the rain and the itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.”

Sin watches the scene, things were so much simpler back then… sad… but simple… He looks over to Andrew, who seems to be feeling the same thing as he is while staring at this scene from the past. “I know how important you think this is… but I couldn’t do it… at least not how I wanted… dreaming is not going to get you anywhere in life.”

“If there was one decision you could make to change your life… what do you think it would be?”

Andrew thinks back to his dream, he’s once again on stage before his thousands of screaming and adoring fans. A young and oddly dressed boy on the stage is with him, having just asked him that strange question. Andrew seems perplexed, not sure of what to make of what was being asked. “Decision…? What do you mean?”

The young boy smiles at him while beginning to explain. “Well, you know, as you live you make decisions that will affect your life as well as the lives of people around you. Of all the decisions that you could make in your life, which one do you think would be the most important?”

Andrew doesn’t hesitate, the answer’s obvious for him. “That would be my decision to be a world famous singer!”

The boy seems a little impressed with his ambition. “Well, that sounds like a tall order that’ll be a lot of hard work. But you know, if you’re up to it.” He holds his hand out to the screaming crowds that have gathered to watch Andrew perform. “It might just be possible.”

Andrew stops thinking back to the dream and turns back to Sin, his future self. “You’re right… dreaming isn’t going to get me anywhere… it’s what made you have to get a job as a fry cook after all.”

“Unfortunately… yes…”

Andrew seems set, it is now clear what he has to do, regardless of if he likes it or not. “I’ve made up my mind then. It’s time to stop dreaming.”

Sin is relieved, glad to have gotten through to his younger self, enthusiastically agreeing with him. “Yes!”

Andrew points to the old scene with him and his parents, where the younger version of himself sang with his mother while paying her an unscheduled visit. “What flashback Dad said is true, doctors have the abilities to affect the lives of hundreds! But—”

He speaks with bravado and confidence, sure that he has not made the wrong choice. “Musicians are able to touch the lives of millions!”

His future self is less than impressed. “You little shit!”

Andrew turns to himself, not wanting to hear from his own future self the same lecture he has gotten from so many people today. “Even if you couldn’t do it, even if it means changing the future! I’ll become a musician!”

Sin stares at himself, he wants to argue, but he just can't bring himself to do it. His younger self  seems so hopeful, so confident, things he hasn’t felt himself be in years. God how he missed those feelings.

The child with the blond hair that has been by Sin’s side is less than pleased. “Great… if he won’t even listen to himself then how am I supposed to help change his future?”

The second boy with the wild hair approaches him. “There’s more than one way to change the future, you’ll figure that out the longer you keep at this job.” He looks back to the collection of Andrews, one from the future, another from the past, and one his present self. “Sometimes you need to go in a completely different direction, and sometimes, well you just gotta take an alternate path to what you want your destination to be.”

An eerie whisper fills the air as the shadows in the room start to lift from the ground and cover everything around them, the hospital room disappears, leaving only Andrew, Sin, the two mysterious boys, and a towering cloaked figure without a face.

Just as the blond boy had mentioned would happen, a reaper of death who was tasked to whisk Sin to his afterlife has arrived.

Andrew lets out a yelp as he jumps back from the terrifying figure. Sin, on the other hand, stays rooted in spot and stares up at the cloaked spirit staring down at him.

The boy that has been accompanying Sin since he first showed up speaks up. “It’s time for you to go. The rest is up to us.”

The second, purple-haired boy speaks in a much more reassuring tone than the other. “Don’t worry, your past self is in good hands.”

The cloaked figure lifts his arm, reaching out to Sin. The cloak on his hand falls back and reveals a skeletal palm. Sin stares at it for a moment before timidly lifting his own hand.

He speaks up, addressing the uniformed boys one last time before placing his hand within the reaper’s. “Make sure I do it… if it’s possible then make my dreams come true.”

Sin places his hand in the skeletal palm, the whispers grow louder and louder as he and the reaper vanish from sight. Andrew can only stare at where they had once stood, his heart beating quickly. He only snaps himself out of his daze when he looks around him, realising that he is once again in the hall of his school.

He looks back to the two boys, their presence the only thing convincing him that what has just happened had not been a strange hallucination.

The first child seems irritated, though generally, that seems to be the vibe he has been giving off through most of the ordeal, as he is displeased that things have not been going as smoothly as he wanted. “Are we just going to waste our time with this human?”

The other boy laughs at the comment, he seems to be in a much more relaxed mood than the other. “That’s hilarious, do you know how ironic it is for us to waste time?”

“Don’t change the topic on me, this is important.”

The boy with the wild hair shrugs his shoulders, even if it is going to be ‘a waste of time’ it’s not as if the two of them were limited when it came to it. “Humans don’t live very long, and because of Abaddon’s mishap his lifespan is shorter than a normal human’s should be anyway.”

Andrew looks away from them, he needs to focus, those kids are not the problem, at least not right now. His life ending is, ending with him accomplishing nothing and being miserable. Somehow, he has to keep that from happening to himself. “Dreaming will get me nowhere right? It’s what got me in the gutter in the future, so if I don’t do more than I have been to make my dream a reality then it’s never going to happen.”

There was a time limit now, Andrew has to plan out his future much more than he has before, which, if he is being completely honest with himself, really wasn’t much. The future had been such a far off thing, he wasn’t even done with school yet, why would he possibly start worrying about the future now?

Regardless, this is no longer something that can be ignored or gone about casually. Everything he can think of needs to be done, regardless of if he wants to do it or not. “Starting tomorrow I’m doing everything in my power to make my dream a reality. I’ll start by doing the thing I would NEVER, ever, ever in my life, want to do!” Though his mind is set he still seems reluctant, the first idea coming to mind really not something he has ever seen himself doing. “Starting tomorrow, I’m a member of the drama club!”

A woman with short bright red hair and long white robes stands over a pool of water. It is one of many that fill the floor of the cave she is haunting. Red strings fill the area, coming to and from the many pools of water and filling the cave so thickly that it seems hard to navigate without getting tangled with them.

The pool she glowers at reflects the image of Andrew as he reluctantly proclaims his determination to join the drama club. She speaks up, her voice rough and deep despite her thin appearance. “Abaddon, I literally gave you one job… so how is it that you managed to mess up like this?”

She keeps her eyes on the boy, knowing that this incident is just the start of what would become many years of problems. “Fate is not going to be happy about this…”