Glass Breaks Too Easily. (Eyeless Jack x Reader Book 2)

Chapter Nine.

"There was nothing we could have done, Tim. We didn't know-"

He ripped himself out from under the reassuring grip of my hand upon his shoulder to turn to me with a fiery scowl that threatened to be extinguished at any moment from the tears bordering on falling from his clouded eyes.

His hands gripped his phone with a tremor; I knew full well what he had just witnessed as I held my own phone in my free hand, letting it dangle out of my sight by my side.

"Nothing we could have done? Nothing?"

His voice was undoubtedly angry, but the twinge of desperation and utter devastation behind it wasn't unheard; this was crushing.

I couldn't let my emotions get the better of me, not when even more lives were at stake.

Not when Tim's life was at stake. I could deal with the death of Ben later when the embers of the situation had dulled. I could let my tears fall freely, fatly and loudly when I knew that we were all safe; I couldn't lose Tim too and expect to maintain that same composure when I barely could grasp any sense of composure as it was.

"We're gonna let our associates die and say there was 'nothing we could have done'? That's what kind of leaders we are now?"

I shook my head immediately, trying to quell him.

The truth of the matter was that it the rules we had obliged by for so long were void; we had not been prepared for this type of situation. There was no rulebook to guide us, no log of past survivors we could look back on for advice, no playbook we could base our actions upon.

And, for once, there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do. 

"Tim, we need to get away from here,"

He slammed his hand down upon the table in the middle of the Conversation Room where we had just been planning on how to defend ourselves against this clown.

The irony was thick and bitter; defense plans wouldn't ever have worked when we were already under attack.

"He said we had more time! That fucking video, you said- you told me we had more time!"

Voice shaky and resolve broken, Tim let his tears fall down his face.

His features were scrunched up in anger, but his tears were composed of nothing but pure grief and fear.

And there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do, to make that better for him.

I grabbed his arm tightly, my grip undisputable; I wouldn't allow him to fight me on this. Not this time, not when his life was at stake.

"Let fucking go of me, Brian!"

I shook my head as he used his other hand to try and claw at my own, desperately trying to free himself from me.

It wasn't going to work. He wasn't going to die with this ship; he hadn't entered it willingly and he hadn't built it; all of us, every single one, had been a simple pawn in a game much more complex to compare it to chess. We had lived in fear for long enough; if The Operator wasn't going to save us this time, or ever again, we had to save ourselves.

Maybe he let us taste humanity with (Name) as a warning, an implication of what was coming.

Maybe he wanted to test our resolves; whoever disobeyed him had some sort of fucking chance at surviving this.

As I mulled it over, I let a bitter laugh out, still dragging Tim behind me as our feet passed the threshold of the front door for the very last time; we would never come back to this forsaken place if it killed me, which it very well may.