The Other Side - A Jamilton Fanfiction

Chapter Twenty Four

"Thomas?" I somehow managed to choke out.

His eyes were unfocused, glazed over as if he wasn't really there. It was unsettling, especially the suddenness of when his gaze snapped up to meet mine. I stared into his eyes, looking for something, but it felt wrong. Just pure wrong. His gaze was perfect, absolutely flawless, and that's what made it all so wrong in ways I couldn't explain.

There was a horrid tugging at my mind, begging me to stop. To turn and to run away. But as much as I wanted to escape this maze, I couldn't leave Thomas alone.

"Thomas?" I asked, forcing myself to find my voice. I brushed past Philip and strode up to where he was sitting, fixed in a trance. "Thomas, what's wrong?"

Something told me I didn't want to know.

He didn't respond right away, and with each passing second of resolute silence, it got more and more disturbing in a way I could not put into words. His shaky deep breath tore through the air so suddenly. "They're dead, Alexander. All of them." His eyes were glittering with tears, bringing me to the realization that I had never seem him cry before.

The noise that left my mouth didn't seem human as I staggered away from him, his words hitting me like a sudden blow to the face. "Wha-what?"

"Dead. Every last one of them. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw him kill them all," he spat out the words with so much more poison than I had ever heard from him before.

"How?" Philip demanded, half-hidden fear coursing through his voice. "Thomas, how?"

Thomas didn't even spare him a glance as he stared up at me. He shifted so that he was sitting on his knees. His eyes, usually filled with warmth, were pleading and emotional in a way I had never seen from him.

"We have to get out of here Alexander," he breathed, urgency in his tone and terror in his eyes. He looked hopeless, defenseless. His voice rose an octave. "We have to get out of here now before it's too late."

"Thomas—"

He surged forwards, as quick as wind cutting through the sky, and grabbed my shirt sleeve. "Please."

My stomach fell at the crack in his voice. I couldn't tear my gaze away from the look in his eyes, the pleading, horrible look in his tear-stricken eyes.

"We need to get out of here. We need to go somewhere where it can just be you and me. And we won't have to worry about all of this." His tongue swept across his lips as he glanced elsewhere for a moment before returning his eyes to mine. He attempted a smile. "We can be free. Free from the king. From this place. From this stupid bloody war that kills like a ruthless monster. We can be free from everything. We have to leave this behind."

"Alexander," Philip began, tone urgent. "Alexander, don't trust him. I don't really think that's..." But his words seemed far away and muffled, as if he was calling out to me from the bank of a river as I fell through the water. The only thing I could see was the desperation in Thomas's eyes. The only thing I could hear was his pleading, his begging for me. 

He was the only thing I could focus on.

"Please Alexander," he murmured. I didn't notice in the moment how his words didn't seem completely genuine, like lines being read off of a script by a pretty good actor, but an actor nonetheless.

We, as mortals, see what we want to see and even then interpret it only to what fits into our narrow minded beliefs and selfish desires, and I am absolutely no exception to that rule. So maybe that's why I fell so hard for the deception, because I was seeing exactly what I wanted to see and I was hearing exactly what I wanted to hear, and the surprise of that realization hit me like a bullet to the chest.