Always Late with Your Kisses | The Darkest Minds Fanfic

Sheena

The first thing I felt was pain.

    I found it sad that all I could remember was pain and grief. Not even anger, just endless sorrow. Anne is dead, my parents are so far away, Mr. and Mrs. Sanders... I'll probably never see them again. How many kids died since I got to Leda Corp? I watched them come and go, and I could not follow where they'd gone, no matter how much I wished I could.

    Until he showed up. I remembered thinking, the moment the cold white fluorescent light shone into his eyes, and the blue felt like it could pierce my soul—it was home. The color of sea water, warm under the blazing sun. That was my home.

    Then, with the prick of a needle, we both hurt, and we both knew what it meant.

    I was out of Leda Corp that very night. But he wasn't with me.

    I didn't even know his name.

Then I started to get to know him, by reputation.

    I don't understand why fate would have him be my soulmate. Soulmates should be two halves of the same thing, fit perfectly together, but from all that I heard, I don't think we have anything in common. He's a hotshot top secret agent, best of the best, and I couldn't even fight my captor off.

    The League is a brutal place, and I don't doubt that he grew stronger under this pressure to become the person that lives up to his reputation. But while he thrived, I felt like I waned away. One week goes by, then two, then three, then more. While his shape grew sharper in the center in my mind, mine faded and blurred like watercolor paint bleeding out on wet cotton paper.

    I tried to keep up. Oh, god, did I try to keep up. Close combat, tactics, target shooting, more close combat, physical... I endured them, though the gun felt too big and too cold in my hands, the blood that flew out of my training partner's mouth tasted too bitter in the air... Oh, how hard I try. But the smell, the light, the rhythm...all of it just felt like another prison. Another Leda Corp. And this time, he's not here to get me out.

    I don't even know how it could've happened—how could I miss someone that I haven't even talk to, never even heard him say his name? But I do. Somehow, I feel a gaping hole inside me that festers like yearning, and it is in the shape of him.

I hadn't realized it until I left Leda Corp, but now I see—my life seems to be in a state of perpetual waiting. When in school, I was waiting to grow up; then, when IAAN epidemic started, I was waiting for something to happen to me. Later, when in running, waiting for someone to catch me. In Leda Corp, waiting for someone to kill me.

    And now, I'm waiting for him to come back. For the first in a very long time, I wasn't waiting for death. Or least I thought.

    The day I was told he was to be extracted, I stayed up all night, just to have Cate told me that he was captured. If you're caught, you're disavowed. He's not coming back, and I'll suffer anything he suffers.

    But even before the bad news came to me, I knew—through the searing pain on my ankle as if it was broken, the dull pain on my shoulders like my arms were wrenched backwards, through the bruise that bloom on my right cheek bone—that something had gone horribly wrong. I healed them all, but the real punch in the gut—both literally and figuratively—came when I dragged myself to the close combat training the next morning, and I choked out a mouthful of blood before my partner even touched me.

    "Go to the infirmary!" Coach Johnson shot.

    I ran out of the room, and straight to the shower. Another few hits landed on me in invisible blows, and I staggered as I numbed my own pain, hoping it'd carry over to him. I have to heal this. If he is being torture, I'll have to make sure we stay alive.

    I hid in the stalls, taking all the hits, all the cuts, all the whips, in complete utter silence. I realized, soon enough, that I can't heal all of them. At least, not immediately. Someone would notice if all of his wounds heal in an instance like he was Wolverine, and they'd either know his soulmate is me, or assume that he himself possessed this power.

    Cate knew she had to step in. The League was no more friendly or trust worthy with this little secret of ours. She excused me from all the training indefinitely, and let me stayed in his room to weather through this storm.

    His room smells of bonfire, pinewood, and gunpowder. It felt familiar, comfortable.

    I struggled to walk the thin line between not getting him in trouble and protecting him from the torture all day. I sped up the healing process a little when I noticed the torture had ceased for a while. Despite all the hard works and exhaustion, sleep didn't come easy, but it was easily taken away. That night, I was woken up by another searing pain, this time on my arm.

    I opened my eyes, and saw a straight cut across my left arm. A shallow one. Then, a curve, intersecting with the line—a "D". I held my breath, waiting for the message of blood to complete itself.

    Don't.

    I stared at it for a solid minute, and brushed over those words to heal them away.