Resist

36

My body decided it was emotionally ready again by the next morning, my eyes fluttering open to a dimly lit room with Sicily in the bed beside me, Ella and Nessa in the other. I was sweating with multiple blankets cocooned around me. I felt sure it had been Eden who had wrapped me up before she left because “I was in shock.” 

I struggled free of the quilts, pushing them to the end of the bed with my feet. Sicily stirred slightly as I threw my legs off the bed and left the room. I really didn’t know where I was going, all I knew was that I needed a change of scenery. I also felt an overwhelming need to feel as though I are doing something, anything, and not just sitting here while Jack was with Xavier. Proactivity was the only thing that could even begin to make my head stop spinning and my heart stop aching, if at all. 

 My feet subconsciously led me to the foyer, the place that reminded me most of Jack. It was off limits now, since Xavier was looking for us so determinedly and the expansive windows too easily showed what was within. Because of this, I stuck to the edges, walking around to sit next to the fireplace, the marble of the floor and the stone of the fireplace cold against my skin and bringing relief to my spent body. Despite just waking up, I felt utterly drained. No distinct thoughts were in my mind, just a whirlwind of emotions and more horrible images of Jack, a tornado tearing through my mind. Like how he had described his mother and sister, I saw him lying in a crimson pool of blood, his face pale, eyes staring straight ahead, focused on the last thing he had ever seen.

Despite my determination to not cry again, clenching my jaw until it hurt and blinking my eyes repeatedly, tears began to slowly build and flow down my cheeks. A sob wrenched from my throat, hurting my lungs and then I couldn’t control it any longer, and again I broke down, wracking sobs and intermittent coughing shaking my body. The cries echoed across the empty foyer, amplifying them to sound like a ghoul was haunting the hotel. I felt sure someone would come, able to easily hear me from down the hall, but no footsteps rushed my way.

Eventually I calmed, slumped against the hearth of the fireplace with tear stains on my face. I was exhausted, emotionally and physically, but not in the way I had been yesterday. Now, I just did not want to move, did not want to think, and did not want to speak. I wanted to sleep and dream of Jack by my side. Because I knew it was impossible for him to be beside me, I felt the emptiness of his presence like an ache, a migraine in my heart. It was all too apparent to me that he was indeed not here, every fiber of me usually aware of his presence, his presence that made my nerves feel like a live wire every time he touched me, spoke to me, looked at me. It was the most amazing feeling, the way he brought something out in me that no one else ever had, a part of me that was a little girl who wanted protection but also a fierce lover, protective towards him like a mother bear. We were both the protecter and the protected within our relationship. And right now, I wanted to protect Jack, fiercer than any mother bear who tore apart the woodland wanderers; I was ready to tear down a village, the whole of London perhaps. 

And with that, my tears completely staunched, my eyes hardening and all the mournful and pessimistic emotions replaced by one thing; anger. I was pissed. I was enraged that this had happened to Jack, that the world descended to people as wonderful as him being taken by the heinous. I wasn’t mad at him for sacrificing himself for the other boys, I wasn't angry at them for letting him follow through with basically a death wish, but what I was lividly outraged with was Xavier for putting our world into a position where the stars aligned for all this to happen. And I wanted him to pay, to pay in spilled blood and broken bones and his stolen castle burning to the ground before his dying eyes. 

I had sat up straighter again as my overwhelmingly enraged emotions took hold and when a head poked into the foyer from the hallway, I was easy enough to spot.