Hope

Ezra’s already waiting for me, this time. He doesn’t look well. He’s sitting on a piece of cardboard he must’ve brought and he doesn’t even look up when I approach.

I sit next to him. It’s amazing how much more awake I am now, how much more alive I feel compared to last night.

The wonders of a proper round of sleep.

He doesn’t look like he slept at all, which doesn’t surprise me, but still makes my stomach clench.

“Hi,” I say gently, leaning forward to get a good look at his face.

“Something happen?”

He looks up at me with bloodshot eyes and I can’t help but tense a little. Fuck, he looks bad. Then he looks away again.

“How do you not hate me?”

This time, I actually flinch. His words hit me like a kick to the gut. The good, nicely aimed, full-force Karate kind.

It’s confusing, most of all. Because just this morning, I’d told him I’d stand with him and held his hand. And now this?

“What happened?” I want to touch him, put my hand on his shoulder, hug him, hold him. But I don’t. I don’t know why.

“There were these men at our camp, earlier. Gangsters. Wanted to work with us….” He’s staring at the line where cardboard meets snow. His breath is a little heavy.

“And?”

“They attacked us when I told Noah that I didn’t want to work with them. It was only that one guy, but I killed all of them for it. Every single one.”

I cock my head. “But… wouldn’t the rest of them have attacked you too?” He’s killed before, I know that. I don’t think he liked it, but he was at least able to live with it and in this situation, it wasn’t even plain murder in cold blood. “They’re gangsters! If anybody deserves to die, it’s probably them!”

“What about me, then?” It comes out a defiant whisper and when my brain has finally processed his words, I can’t breathe for a second.

“See?” he says with a light chuckle after I haven’t said anything for a few seconds because I was just unable to.

“No,” I blurt after finally having kicked my thoughts free. “That’s different.” My thoughts are going a mile a second, running into walls, falling, scrambling back up to dash onwards. “You have to kill, that’s not your choice. So if you have to kill somebody….” But doesn’t the same equation apply to killing an entire skyscraper full of Atlas employees? They have done terrible things, too.

I shake my head, try to untangle this wild mess of thoughts and explanations, but Ezra doesn’t even seem to have noticed my conflict.

“You don’t get it! I liked it! Killing twenty people at the same time, I felt the best I’ve felt in months. Physically, anyway. How am I any better than them?”

“Did you forget how you started out?” I say aggressively. I want to yell, but I don’t dare. Somebody might hear. “Did you forget how long it took for the pain to get to, to….” What did the pain even do? Win him over? Make him turn? No matter. I made my point. “They never had that! They didn’t suffer the pain. To them it was just about money, maybe about life and death, but not the literally worst torture imaginable!”

“So where do you draw the line?” He’s looking at me now, his face blank. “How bad does it have to be so it’s okay to kill somebody?”

“How am I supposed to know?” My heart’s racing. It’s hard to think. “I’m as new to this as you are. Just because I’m not selling you out doesn’t mean I think what you – what we’re doing is morally sound.” I grow quieter, calmer as my thoughts finally untangle. “It’s a trade, way I see it. We want to survive and since doing bad things seems to achieve that…. Just a question of how far we’re willing to go to get out of this, and obviously, you’re willing to go a lot further than me.”

Now, there’s a long moment of silence where we just breathe and I try to calm my heart. He’s looking at the snow again.

“They’re not the first ones I killed, you know?”

I nod slowly. “Figured.”

He doesn’t seem surprised. “Did you also know that I killed my parents?”

Another kick to the gut. I don’t move, though. The only difference to before is that I breathe a little deeper.

“Well. Fuck,” I say after a moment.

He nods. “They were the first ones I killed in cold blood. Before, I’d just gone around town, hoping for somebody to attack me and….” He halts. “It’s not even like they did anything to deserve it. They were just… idiots. And I hated them for it and then I killed them… and the worst part is that I don’t even miss them.”

Because how could you miss somebody you never talked to?

I think back to the way I shouted at Dad when he came to look for me last night and I want to vomit.

“See, that’s my point,” he says after another moment. “I’m the villain in this story and at this point I don’t even think it matters that I never chose this.”

Am I a bad person for not hating him right now? How dare I forgive what’s never been mine to forgive?

I scoot forward until I’m sitting on the very edge of the cardboard, then I lie back.

“Can we stop talking about this, please?” I ask, looking up at him. My hair’s fanned out around my head and I’ve hidden my chin in the bulk of scarf around my neck.

“I just want to be here, for a while. With you.”

It’s a bleak feeling that has taken over my stomach region. Bleak and hopeless. They’ll find the bodies of his parents soon, if they haven’t already. They’ll be able to link the other killings to him, too, once they start looking. There’s no way they’ll let him live, not if they have anything to say about it. And they’ll probably send me to prison, right? For helping him?

But we’re fucked anyway, so what does it matter now? We’ll probably both die in battle, now that I think about it.

“Hope?”

“Hm?”

“If you had the choice, would you go back to being a man?”

What a weird question. Like we don’t have bigger problems. And anyway. Hadn’t we established that there was no way?

I shrug. “At this point…. I think I’m happier than before. Or, well, I used to be before this…” I wave my hands vaguely through the air. “Before this whole cluster fuck.” I pause, watch the blinking light of an airplane slowly inch its way across the sky. “And even now, it’s different. Even now, I wouldn’t want to go back.” For so many reasons. Him, mostly. “I’m somebody different now, and this body is such a big part of this new someone.” I pause again, look at him, find his gaze and hold it. “So unless you want it back….”

He shakes his head quickly. “No, don’t worry. I’m… I’m glad you feel this way.”

I grin a little. “And anyway. I can’t really imagine how anyone can not like living in this body.” Lightly, I bump my fist against his shin. “Your body is so freakishly pretty. The only thing that keeps me from getting all the girls or boys I want at this point is my lousy personality.”

He doesn’t grin. “I think you’re perfect the way you are.”

----------------------------

Tearoh

I want to scream and finally, my lips part. It’s hard. Like the world is trying to keep them shut, trying to keep me paralysed. My mouth opens, but when I mean to scream, only a sigh escapes.

And that’s the moment when I finally wake up.

My eyes open with sudden ease and I heave deep breaths, like I narrowly escaped drowning, even though I know I haven’t. My heart is racing even what feels like minutes later. I can still hear the hissing in my ears and have to hold my breath and stop moving to make really sure that it’s not actually there. Neither are the walls of my cell or the cold.

Still, I turn up my body temperature. It doesn’t help much, though. I can’t go back to sleep.

I know Bone is sleeping next to me. His form a hulking shadow by my side.

But I don’t want to wake him. He’d worry and I don’t want him to. Noah told me I’m strong and I want to be strong. And the dream made me feel the exact opposite. I was absolutely helpless and I am still. Because it will come back, won’t it? Isn’t that what bad dreams do? Back in the prison, I barely dreamed. Or, well, I barely remembered it. Probably for the best.

But things have changed now.

I crawl out of my sleeping bag with slow, deliberate movements, trying my very best to be silent. I don’t want to wake the others. Noah and Riekah sleep here, too. We’re in the office. The others are outside. Some are probably still awake, talking quietly amongst themselves.

Nobody stirs as I get up and head for the door. I don’t bother changing out of the pyjamas Bone got for me by breaking a shop window. I won’t be cold outside.

The door only creaks a little when I open it and slip through. My favourite part about being as small as me is that it’s pretty easy, getting around silently.

A few people look up as I emerge from the office, but leave me alone when I show no signs of wanting to join their company.

Instead, I walk past them, through the door and out into the yard. Snow melts under my bare feet. It’s harder than it was the night we broke free. It has gotten warmer, so the snow is growing harder as it melts. I don’t know how that works and I’d like to know, but there’s nobody I could ask right now, and I’ll probably have forgotten by tomorrow. And anyway, I’m not here to be a child. I’m here to protect Noah. Because I’m strong.

I sit on one of the large blocks of cement that are just standing around the yard out here without any obvious purpose. My pyjama pants grow wet and for a second it’s uncomfortable, but then I turn up my body temperature even further and the water goes away.

The air does a great job calming me down. It’s weird, how that small room made me feel so uncomfortable and the quiet vastness of the night sky makes me calm and content. I used to be scared of the dark, before they took me away. What a child I used to be. I used to be afraid of monsters underneath my bed, but now I’ve met the real monsters. Now I know what really to be afraid of.

The sound of steps from behind me makes me turn. It’s Noah who’s come through the door and is now leisurely walking towards me.

He gives me a nod as he comes closer. Like it’s a pleasant surprise to him, meeting me out here.

Finally, he sits next to me. He’s wearing his coat so he doesn’t have to worry about getting his pants wet. Riekah and him don’t change their clothes to sleep. I didn’t want to ask why. I’m sure they have their reasons.

“Can’t sleep either?” he asks with a smile that looks different to the smile he usually has on his face. Kinder, somehow. Maybe a little pained?

I nod. “Bad dream.”

He nods slowly. “I wish I could tell you it’ll all go away as you get older and… maybe it does.” He shrugs. “But I haven’t gotten there yet.”

“Did you have a bad dream, too?” He never seemed like the type of person to have bad dreams. He’s so much stronger than I am.

He nods again.

“Of something that actually happened to you?”

“For thirty years now, almost every night.” Thirty years. That’s a long time. So much longer than I’ve even been alive for. “It’s been joined by others. They have gone away, sometimes. And this one did, too, but it always came back. At this point I barely know what it’s like to sleep without nightmares.”

Wow. I feel sorry for him, which is… strange?

“What happened?”

He blinks suddenly, like I’ve startled him, then he gives me a vague smile, a lot more like his usual ones.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

I nod, eager to prove my ability to act grown-up. “Of course.”

And for a while we sit in silence.

Then he says, “I was still a child when it happened, you know?” He pauses. “Older than you, but….”

“Do I remind you of yourself when you were younger?” I ask suddenly, without knowing exactly why myself.

And he nods energetically, even laughs a little. “Yes, I suppose you do.” He winks at me. “That’s why I know you’re strong. That’s why we’ll be such a great team when we finally face down our demons.”

I don’t understand completely what he means by that, but it makes me feel good anyway. He said that we’re similar, which is good, right?

“Do you want to see something cool?” he asks into the silence while I’m still enjoying that warmth in my stomach that has nothing to do with my powers.

I nod.

He leans over, closes his hand into a fist and shows it to me. Then, slowly, he opens it. In the palm of his hand, moss is growing. I can only barely make it out, but then it begins to glow in a beautiful and dark green. As my eyes grow wide, it continues to grow, thicker and thicker and then it stops and thin, green stems emerge from it, grow up until they're almost as long as my fingers and form cusps that soon open into beautiful, blue flowers that begin to glow, too. The two colours look so pretty together. And then I lean in to smell the flowers and they smell like… like… a memory from happier days, when we’d go out to the forest to play. It takes me several seconds to realise that the flowers smell like rain in a forest.

“Like the smell?” Noah asks from above and I look up and nod.

“It’s so… nice. You’ve got such a beautiful power.”

There’s a flicker of something on his face. I can’t tell what it is.

“It’s so different to the way you used it to fight those gangsters earlier.”

Again, that flicker of something else. “It’s… the beautiful and the ugly can sometimes be frighteningly close together, you know?”

No, I don’t, but I nod anyway and lean in again to smell the flowers once more.

SeptemberMorgan

Does this change anything about the way you perceive Noah?
A little update: I'm making great progress on the later chapters. Not to brag or anything, but I'm currently 11 chapters ahead of even Patreon when there was a time in semester break when I almost fell behind :) I can pretty confidently say that the story's going to end up at 53-55 chapters, depending on how long certain scenes turn out.
Have a great week!