Unleash Me (a Shatter Me fanfiction)

World Against Us - Warner's P.O.V.

When I walked into the training facilities this morning - somehow, they had become an impromptu war planning room - Juliette and the rest of the crew were already there. She hasn't quite noticed me yet, so I take the opportunity to watch her, admiring the easy luminescence she acquires as she laughs at something Kenji has said, the clear care in her eyes as she looks at the friends gathered around her, the wit in her expression as she responds with a lithe grace not seen in many people. I smile, feeling it creep across my face more easily then I had ever thought possible.

Then, she turns to me, and her eyes light up, their mesmerizing blue-green so beautiful and familiar yet still so startlingly unexpected. She stands with a smile as I cross the room to her.

"Good morning," she tells me, grasping my free hand and tugging on it playfully. "Sorry I wasn't there when you woke up. I was actually surprised that I had woken up before you did."

"That is unusual. Especially since it isn't very late in the morning, and I should have felt you leave," I gazed at her, trying to read through the openness in her expression to the worry hidden just underneath. My best guess is that she hadn't slept very well at all last night, and I was only just beginning to see the effects of her restlessness. "Are you okay, love?" I murmured in concern, keeping my voice low to prevent the others from hearing.

"To be honest," she sighed in a voice just as low, turning her head to look at something across the room. "I don't think so. It's been three days now since I've officially taken over, yet there have been no obvious threats or any clear signs of retaliation from the other sectors. It worries me, but I don't want the others to think that something is wrong."

I gently turned her face toward me, and she looked up in surprise. "Trust me, we'll figure this out. If anything, it could mean that the civilians are doing our work for us in those sectors. And I'm more than sure that the Reestablishment's silence is calculated; they're probably planning some kind of counterattack and don't want to let us in on their plans." Even though my smile had all but disappeared, I still winked at her conspiratorially. "You'll be all right, sweetheart. I know you can do it."

"All right, enough with the secretiveness," Kenji blurted out from just behind Juliette. "Just tell the rest of us what you're whispering about. I mean, it can't be so confidential that you feel it's okay to talk about right in front of us even though you're trying not to let us hear you. Trust me, guys, we're not deaf."

With one eyebrow raised, I averted my attention from Juliette to stare at him. "Obviously. Now, we have some business to attend to here, in case you have forgotten, and in all honesty, our personal lives do not matter while we are in this room. We need to make sure we are all on the same page with our next move, and there is no time for dallying. Our world is at stake."

"Damn, man, it was a joke. Have you no humor in your sad life?" Kenji mumbled, but I paid no mind to him as I moved to sit down at the table in the middle of the room and set a thick folder on top of it. Juliette pulled up a chair next to me as everyone else sat down and eyed the folder as I opened it, revealing a pile of documents.

Castle leaned forward in interest and pointed at the paper on the top of the pile. It was marked CLASSIFIED in red ink across the top of the page. "Might I ask what that is?"

I nodded, and spread out the stack so the edges of each page was at least visible. "These are pieces of information that my father didn't know that I had taken," I began, choosing one of the papers and setting it on top of the others. "This piece, for example, is the design for a new, more efficient tank that can withstand most forms of ammunition. Currently, the tanks that we have are mainly scare tactics, used for surveillance and troop transport more than as weapons. They would be akin to useless on a real battlefield, but luckily for us, this is the only known copy of the design."