The Little Crow

Chapter Thirty Nine - [Cold]

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It had been an incredibly long day.

From Niall's rejection in the morning, to seeing Rue all beaten and bloodied, to snapping at Adrien, to getting assaulted by Rivier and finally, to having to tag along with Julian to their secret contact in the press to 'leak' what had happened... Thea was exhausted.

And even now, as she sat at the bar in Mayra's, she continued to wrack her brain out on the work she had done with Julian. She had written up an entire statement detailing what had happened before Julian reviewed it and Thea couldn't stop thinking about whether or not she had said the right thing.

Sure, she had Julian's approval... but whatever came out of having details from her statement published... she couldn't help but feel that that would be on her.

What was Niall expecting to happen when what happened to Rue, and Rivier's other outbursts, goes public? Would people really even care?

Julian seemed hopeful, though he had said that this wouldn't be published immediately. He said that they'd wait a few days and in the meantime, do a controlled leak of the information in Achlis and outside as well. He said they would wait for the news to begin to simmer and for people to be curious, and once people were wondering, they'd release the article detailing what had happened.

And people would apparently react.

Though Thea knew quite well that this was how the government worked with the press, that this kind of process was so normal that she shouldn't have been surprised, she still felt... icky.

A controlled leak to try and put pressure on the President to have Rivier fired... sure, Thea wanted more than anything for Rivier to be gone, but this still felt strange.

She sighed loudly.

Maybe it felt strange because, though deep down she knew that this was how the Aiverian State functioned... through manipulation and secrets and scandals and what not... she had always hoped it wasn't the case.

Before coming to Achlis, she was a normal citizen afterall. She read the newspaper and listened to the radio, nearly every day actually, and all that time she had hoped that whatever it was that was being told to her was completely and utterly true, with the sole intention of keeping the public aware of the happenings in Aiveria.

Now she knew more than ever that this was certainly not the case.

If Niall didn't decide to leak this story, what happened to Rue would have been swept under the rug... just like thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands, of stories of other Elorian people who were suffering at the hands of the State.

She sighed again.

It was incredibly late and she had still not had a proper night's sleep since well before her meeting with the higher ups at Achlis... and now with all of this, she knew she wouldn't be sleeping well for the next few days too. She wondered how she was going to focus... how she was going to be able to function.