***
“Tell me.”
We had walked, wary, dehydrated, shaking, hungry, and yet somehow alert, into the greenery of the jungle forest, away from the crystal-clear blue water that had been reflecting the dark blue sky overhead and the sprawling white sands. We had found an old house, standing tall in the trees and yet still not tall enough to even come close to the canopy, a three-story fortress that reminded me so strongly of the house-nest of the trebestia into which I had stumbled all those years earlier after Eli had pushed me into the woods. As a result of that blood-chilling resemblance, I insisted on accompanying James, Adam, Rael, and Tony to make sure that it was not, in fact, a trebestia nest. But no, it was simply an old wooden house, full of furniture covered in faded white sheets, pictures on the wall covered so thickly in dust that even scraping through with my fingernail did not reveal the glass beneath, and a kitchen full of food so mummified by the years that it did not even smell badly anymore.
We had led our group inside, and Janna, Grace, Tony, and Rael had set about making it inhabitable while I had slunk away to check out the upstairs. That is what I had said I was doing, but really, I had been feeling the beginning flutters of what I hoped would merely be a small anxiety attack but that I knew had the power to explode into a full-fledged panic. Adam had given me my space, keeping a close monitor of my heart from downstairs, and when I thought again of how he would leave, and my heart gave a start, he had come to me.
“Tell me what you saw, my love.” He urged me, as his gentle hands came up and grasped my shoulders.
With a very concentrated effort, I managed to keep my voice steady, emotionless, absent of any signs of the tightening in my throat that preceded tears.
“I can’t.”
“You must.” He kissed the back of my head, “You want to tell me.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“You are trying to make me think that I want to tell you by telling me that I want to tell you, and it is not going to work.”
“Brynna.” Gently, he turned me to him, and once I was facing him, he kissed my lips quickly, “I can feel the fear in you. Please just tell me, and together, we will decide how best to confront whatever it is.”
“I don’t want to confront it. I want to run from it, Adam.”
“Do you see any possibility for it to change?”
“No,” I said, even though I had wanted to keep it from him. Whenever he gently urged me to tell him something, or whenever he offered me his comfort, I immediately turned to mush in his arms. I stood on my tiptoes, threw my arms around his neck, and let him hold me as I tried to decide exactly what I wanted to tell him, and what I wanted to omit.
“I have been seeing the first part of it for a long time, so that part is irrelevant. But the second part is the one that I think concerns you, and I will not share it with you in detail. All I will do is ask that you don’t leave, okay? No matter what happens. No matter who we lose, or where we go. No matter what you think I want. No matter what you think is best for me. I don’t want you to leave. No matter what, I want you to stay here with me. Okay? Promise me.”
“Brynna…” He started to pull me away from him.
“No, don’t say anything else. Just promise me, Adam.”
Instead of trying to get me to look at him, he held me tighter and kissed my head.
“I promise, my love.” He whispered, “I promise. Of course I promise.”
“I just want it to go away. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know. But I do know, and I just want the course to change.”
“It could change, sweetheart. You know that the smallest choice, the slightest deviation from what was originally engraved can re-write the entire story of our lives. You say you will not tell me, so I will not ask you to tell me, though I do wish that you would confide this in me…”
“It is not a matter of confiding, Adam. I just can’t say it out loud yet. I will tell you soon. I promise. When I can see it without wanting to throw up, I will tell you. You know I will tell you when I am ready.”
“I do know.” He kissed my forehead, “I know, Brynna. So not only do I promise that I will not go anywhere, I promise that you and I will do everything in our power to re-write this. I promise you that.”
“I know. I know.” I stood even higher on my tiptoes and clawed my hands up him to get a better grip on his shoulders, “God, you are so tall that my arm muscles will never recover from this embrace.”
Without a word, he reached down under my butt and lifted me so I could wrap my legs around his mid-section and my arms around his neck with ease. My forehead nuzzled against his, and my hands came around to rest on his face as my lips gently moved against his.
“Better?” He asked.
“Much, thank you.”
As we were kissing, we did not hear the rapidly banging footsteps. We did not know they were coming until Penny and Idan had come barging into the room.
“Ew!” Penny exclaimed, “Mommy, why are you always kissing people?!”
“You don’t mind when I kiss you!” I told her, and after Adam put me down, I scooped her into my arms and kissed her all over her face.
“Ah! Mom! I’m too old for kisses!”
“Oh, are you? I know that you are twenty-something literally, but physically, you are still my little baby.”
“Not for long.” She told me as we began to walk downstairs, “I can feel things changing. I won’t be here like this for long.”
My stomach plummeted. Still, when I thought of her aging, my stomach sickened. Adam felt the change in my heart and grasped my shoulder. Unlike Janna and me, he was all for the kids growing up. He believed it was time, and that halted aging was unnatural and unfair to the children. They needed to live their lives, and though it was not the result of mine and Janna’s wishing that our children had remained young, Adam still tried to gently remind us that we had to let go of them. They could not be our babies forever.
Put aside the fact that I was used to my little girl being a little girl, and think about it practically: Who is in more danger? The adult daughter of the queen who, if harm befell Adam and I, and then harm befell Idan, would become the First Queen, or the fiery yet ultimately cherubic child with a gift she barely uses let alone can harness as a weapon to be used against our enemies? Janna and I had talked many times about how our children were safer if they were young, while Adam believed that the cards would simply fall where they would fall regardless of their ages. We would face the danger when the danger presented itself, and no matter what, we would protect our children. If they were young or older, we would protect them.
“You are pale.” Janna told me once we were back in the living room of the old house. Her hand cupped under my chin. “You are positively ghostly, my love. You must eat and then you must sleep.”
“I am perfectly well, sweetheart.” I replied breezily, as I always did, “I am not hungry in the slightest, nor am I tired.”
“Brynna.” She said, her voice urging, and her expression stern, “You ate nothing yesterday, and I did not nag you about it. But I am going to nag you now.”
“I will eat in a little bit. I just can’t right now.”
“Just let her drink some water, baby.” James said to her, “Will you drink some water, my minxy mule?”
“Oh, when you ask like that…” I replied sarcastically as I sat down with my back against the wall and pulled my knees to my chest. “I’ll drink some later. I just want to sit here.”
Thank God Grace, Rohanna, Rael, Tony, Penny, and Idan were distracted. Because Adam, Janna, and James were staring at me, all silent, all trying to mask their looks of concern. Instead of comforting me, as perhaps it should have, it made me livid.
“Boyfriend… Husband… Girlfriend.” I said, “I know better than any of you that what happened to me was tragic and sick and awful. I am not hungry right now, and though that may be related to what happened, it is more than likely the resul
t of the fact that I still feel like the ground is the ocean rocking beneath me. I will eat when I feel hungry. I will drink water when I feel thirsty. After all we have survived, I will not allow myself to perish from starvation or dehydration now. So if you would all please stop treating me like I am an invalid teetering perilously close with each passing minute to the moment of my death, I would greatly appreciate it.” I laid my head on my knees, and then lifted it immediately again to say, “Thank you so much.” Then, I laid my head back down again, waiting until I could not feel their eyes on me anymore.
“Please stop staring at me.” I said after several minutes had passed, and they still had not looked away, “And please stop thinking in unison. It’s annoying.”
“You are both thinking that you do not know what to say?” Janna asked them.
“Precisely.” Adam replied, “And this is new for me.”
“And for me.” James agreed.
“Then I have an idea.” I said as I threw myself onto my feet, “It is a good one, are you ready? Don’t say anything. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about me. Don’t worry about me. I am fine. I’m fine, but you all clearly aren’t fine. You think I am this fragile little bird that is about to break, but I am not. I cannot stand that you all feel this guilt. I cannot stand that you are blaming yourselves, and thinking I’m weak, and thinking I need to be coddled like a three-year-old. God, when you look at me, all the three of you think is how it’s your fault, and you wish you had been the ones to kill him, and… Your guilt is fucking driving me insane! If you didn’t have to look at me, you wouldn’t feel it. I can’t deal with your feelings on the matter and my feelings on the matter. So… stop fucking looking at me! Or look at me and think of something else! Goddamn it! Jesus Christ!”
I started to walk outside, but James grasped my hand.
“Baby, you can’t go storming off on your own…”
“Let go of me! It’s on me, don’t you see that?! It’s who I am now. I’m the Girl Who Got Raped By Gideon Leviathanson, Warden and Lord of War. I’m the Former Warrior Queen who is now the Fragile Little Bird. Don’t touch me. Don’t look at me! Stop thinking. All of you! Stop fucking thinking!”
I broke my hand out of his grasp and stormed outside into the night. Before any of them could follow me, I zoomed off, into the trees, going back the way we had come until I had reached the beach. Before we had left, the boys had pushed the boat away from the shore, and having nothing to sink it, had just let the tides take it back to sea. There were no signs of us onboard. Anyone who found it would think that whomever was onboard had abandoned ship into the water or onto land. I thought that I could see it, far out in the darkness of the horizon, but I figured that it was my imagination. When I threw myself down on the sand, I ordered myself not to cry. I would not cry now. I would not shed tears for him. He was dead. I had won. I had taken back my power by taking his life. No man on a battlefield ever cried after killing one of his greatest enemies. So I would not cry for him.
And why would I cry when we were free? I had so rarely cried on the ship. We were free, and I would not cry, because as it stood now (barring the prophecy), I had very little about which I could complain or worry. But wasn’t the prophecy enough? God or Gods, it would be enough to make the strongest person weep.
And because I was by no means the strongest person, I did begin to weep. My heart was fluttering with absolute terror, as I thought about losing James, as I thought about Adam leaving me, as I remembered the Warden as he thrust so hard into me that he was gritting his teeth with the effort… I cried because for some sick reason, I was remembering the times he had been kind to me, when he had doted upon me, when he had asked me to trust him, and in return, he had said he would trust me. I had hated him all along, but even in my hatred, I was not impervious to his moments of kindness. I was not immune to him, whatever that means.
God, you are so twisted.
If it was a judgmental voice, it had to be Maura’s. Strangely, our voices were beginning to sound identical, except for the thick accent.
The same way that you think about the moments when Michael brought you toys and clothes and jewelry, you think about the times that other man showed you kindness. ‘Sorry for fucking you, how about a nice pair of new shoes?’
“Go away.” I muttered, covering my ears, “Go away! Go away!”
“Nope. Not a chance. I gave you a few minutes of space, but that’s it.” James’s voice said behind me, and I jumped, sniffled, and wiped at my eyes and nose.
“I wasn’t even talking to you!” I yelled, as he sat down beside me on the sand and reached out to pull me towards him, “Don’t touch me! I can’t stand to hear any more of your stupid thoughts tonight!”
“Well, luckily for you, I am really good at not thinking. You know that. It’s part of the reason why you love me.” He said gently, as he reached out for me again.
“Stop acting like I’m so unreasonable! Stop acting like I’m crazy, James! Or that I’m unstable! I’m not unstable! I am perfectly fine! You all are making me think that I’m unstable, and that I’m not fine, and I am.”
“Baby…” He reached out, and I flinched away from his hand. “Baby.” He said again, even more softly, even more gently. “Come here. Please, baby. Just come here.”
“You all think I am so weak, and I am not.” I continued, but I was letting him pull me to him now.
“We know that, sweetheart.” He whispered, “God, how could we not know that after what we saw you do? We don’t think you’re weak. We don’t think you’re fragile. We could never think that now. We never have thought it.”
“Don’t you understand, though?” I asked, as I pulled away from him and wiped at my eyes, “When I see how guilty you all feel, it hurts me. I don’t want you to feel guilty. More importantly, I don’t want that to be what you think when you look at me. You all are picturing it. You are seeing what you think he must have done, and I do not want any of you to see me that way. I don’t want you to think about it at all. I just want it to go away, James.”
“I know, baby.” He leaned forward and kissed my forehead softly. His lips held there for a long time, and then, they broke away only so they could move down to my cheek. “We’re all going to make an effort to push this away, because this isn’t about us. We just want to be here for you, baby. We don’t want to hover over you, but you have to understand, too, that sometimes you don’t do what you need to do to keep yourself going.”
“I can take care of myself, James.”
“We know that, Brynn. Believe me, we know that. We just want to make sure you’re taking care of yourself. That’s all.”
“I’ve been having stupid thoughts, James.” I told him, somewhat randomly, “I’ve been thinking about so many things. That’s why I can’t settle down. It never stops, James. I just keep thinking about things that are so stupid.”
“Like what? Tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
“It’s just… Why am I thinking about when he was kind to me? After what he did, after the horrible things that he did to me, to you, to the kids… How can I be thinking about when he got me my bracelet back, or when he told me how fond he was of me? Why do I sometimes think about how Michael would try to appease the situation by buying me things? How fucking sick is that, James? I am certainly not sympathizing. I certainly don’t love them or like them or feel any sense of fondness for them. But intermixed with the utter hatred I feel, with the memories of their cruelty, I am remembering their random spurts of kindness. Is that not the most fucked up thing you’ve ever heard?”
He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then, he shook his head.
“No. Definitely not the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard. In fact, I think it might just prove that you’re normal. They were evil. They were sick. We know that. You hate them, but in the typical way that that weird and awesome brain of yours works, you can’t cop out when it comes to the real
ity of it and demonize them as complete monsters, because you know that that’s not the whole story. It would be a cop out. It would be easy. And since when have you ever taken the easy way out, Brynna Olivier?”
“It feels so wrong to me, to remember those things, and to think…”
“What, baby?”
I sighed heavily and rolled my eyes, trying to stop the tears, but I could not.
“To think maybe they were sorry, at least a little bit. Hell of a lot of good their apologies do me, right? But was it there? Was there something in there that felt remorse, and that is why they showed me kindness? They don’t deserve my sympathy, so they do not have it. They do not deserve my forgiveness, so they will not have it. Not ever. But you are right. I am looking for depth in these men when they deserve for me to see them only in their two-dimensional, shallow forms. I feel no fond feelings for any of them. In fact, them showing me kindness makes me hate them more, because I cannot just properly hate them outright. I cannot just keep them as two-dimensional figures in my mind. I hate them because they were sick, and they were evil, but I hate them because they showed me that they can be good, James. The Warden and Michael both said something along the same lines. Michael told Maura one time, through his ‘tears of remorse,’ that he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t fight it. It wasn’t his choice. The Warden told me that though he wished he could give me what I wanted—to see Penny, to keep you out of harm’s way, to allow me to rule the prison the way I did—without me having to sleep with him, he could not fight the desire that he felt for me.”
“But they could help it, Brynna. They made their choice. They chose to hurt you. You did nothing to deserve it. You did nothing to provoke them. It was their choice. Think about it this way, and I hope this isn’t going to…” He stopped, “I don’t want this to come out wrong, so I’m going to tread carefully here. You tell me all the time that you want me constantly, and that’s how I feel about you, too. You know I’m game anywhere, anytime. But there have been days and nights where I’ve felt a little off, but you still felt on, and there have been days and nights where you felt a little off, but I still felt on. Neither of us forced the other down, even if we felt ‘desire’ for each other, like what the Warden and Michael said they felt for you. We had a choice.”
“Yes, and it was an easy choice!” I said with a slight laugh.
“Exactly! It is an easy choice. It’s as simple as ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ Brynn. ‘I want to,’ ‘I don’t want to.’ It shouldn’t be ‘I don’t want to, but James does,’ and it definitely shouldn’t be ‘I don’t want to, but the Warden says he’ll hurt the people I love if I don’t.’ It is ‘I want to,’ or ‘I don’t want to,’ and whoever you say those words to had better understand that they are all that needs to be said. When you said, ‘I don’t want to,’ they said they didn’t care, because they ‘couldn’t help it.’ But they could help it. They chose to hurt you anyway.”
“I know.” I said, “Believe me, I know. I hate that they tried to justify it by saying that they were slaves to their impulses. And, going back to where this all began, I suppose I just cannot believe that their kindness hurts to me as severely as their cruelty. That is just one of the things I have been thinking about, though. There are others.”
“Like what, baby?”
“I don’t know…” I sighed again, “Like I can never give you children. Remember all those years ago, back in Shadow Village, when we talked about Penny getting older, and we both said we were sad about it, and you said that if we really couldn’t handle it, we would have our own someday? And you didn’t know it then, but I’ve never been able to, and I didn’t know how to tell you, and I didn’t think I would ever have to tell you, because we had agreed that we were alright with just Penny and Violet, but now, Violet is far from us, and Penny is already starting to age, and what if we do want kids? What if you decide you want a baby? I mean, I guess you will just have one with Janna, and God, that child will be physically flawless, so perhaps it will all work out for the best…”
“Hey.” He reached out, placed his finger under my chin, and raised my head. Once I was looking at him, he kissed me. “Sweetheart, if I were going to have kids with anyone, it would be with you. And even though…” He stopped, unsure of what to say, “Even though you never told me what the doctors on Earth had said, I always… I always suspected, baby. I mean, when you told me we didn’t have to use protection. When you didn’t get pregnant even when we were having sex every day. Believe me, I was scared shitless for the whole first year, thinking you might have been a little bit wrong about whether you could or couldn’t get pregnant, and one day, you were going to tell me your monthly thing had stopped, and I would have cried out of sheer terror, and you probably would have punched me, and it would have been an epic disaster, but I was always prepared to be a dad. I was always ready for it, even though I would have been scared. When you didn’t get pregnant, I started to get it. You didn’t have to tell me why. I understood. But there are other ways to have kids, baby. Look how good you are at mothering lost little birds. Do you remember that? What Allie and Violet used to say?”
I nodded, and the tears rushed even more quickly down my cheeks at the mention of them, and of how they had called us the Mama and Daddy Bird, and how they had called themselves baby birds.
“If we want kids down the road, we can adopt. If we don’t want kids, we can order Penny and Grace to come home every weekend and eat dinner with us.” I laughed, “We can send them off to school in one of Adam’s cities, and then we can chase around a little baby in a diaper, if that’s what we want.” I laughed again at the image of it, because I loved picturing him with a little baby. I knew how much he would love being a father to a little baby, and how a little baby would love having him as a father. The tears fell even more as I leaned in, rested my forehead against his, and kissed him.
“You will have everything you want, Brynna. If you want another baby, we’ll have another baby. If you don’t, we’ll spend our lives harassing Penny and Grace, and travelling with Adam and Janna, being the weirdest polyamorous harem in existence.”
I laughed again, and rubbed my nose against his before kissing him again.
“I love you.” He told me, “And I am going to make everything alright. Together, we’ll make everything alright. So no worries. Not one, you got it?”
I nodded.
“Got it.”