To Be Determined

Chapter Twelve: Say it Ain't So

"You know," Asha says, looking over at Iliad, who leans against the wall closest to me. They had moved me into the room where I lay on the floor. He is visibly anxious, squeezing his hands together and releasing them slowly and repetitively. "She'll be okay. I'll watch over her if you want to try to sleep or check on Ben."

Being a spectator, a fly on the wall feels wrong. Especially watching your loved ones sitting next to your disembodied— well, your body. I suppose that I am but a disembodied spirit.

"I can't sleep without her, honestly. She alleviates the nightmares, or so I like to believe. I don't know if it's the magic or just being able to hold onto the only thing that matters to me." He reaches down and tucks a stray piece of hair behind my ear. I feel it and a shiver branches the spot.

"What is she like now? I feel like I've missed so much. Is my sister a good wife?"

"Wife? Oh, she's terrible. I have no control over her or what she does. Sometimes she picks me up and puts me in a corner. She never listens to me and makes me feel like an idiot at certain points. She is far too independent and shatters the stereotypical gender roles of what it means to be wifely." He smiles and shakes his head a little. "A good friend though? She's the best. Despite the confines of her condition she's so free, a smile never leaves her face. She's so contagious in that way. She would love nothing more than to stay at home during her time, but she always follows me on whatever hair-brained adventure I want to spend the weekend doing. She loves all of her students and tells me about them every night. When she gets excited about something her eyes outshine the stars."

Asha smiles, imagining his world with me in it. "I'm glad she turned out better than me."

"I know that you didn't turn out to be that bad of a guy Asha."

"Oh? How do you know that?"

"First off, Lyvia would instantly know. She knows what people are all about from a mile away. Now either you seriously have her fooled with the whole twin thing or you haven't committed any sin bloody enough for her to notice. Secondly, I have seen the worst of the worst and you have zero of their traits."

Asha raises an eyebrow suspiciously. "The worst, huh? Tell me about them. Do you fancy cleaning out the skeletons from your closet?"

Iliad looks down at me and smiles so slightly. "Just look at me for example. I uhh... I wasn't always a good guy if I'll be perfectly honest. I still don't know if I am, but I try... You see I was an orphan. I didn't have anything except school. That was the only place where I knew I would be warm and knew I would be fed. My brothers and sisters and I would go around, pickpocketing, stealing food, blankets, anything that kept us alive. In my teens, I got involved in these underground fighting rings. The wealthy would gamble on us, bet on which kid would be the first one to be knocked out. The wealthy are some of the most abhorrent psychopaths that have ever existed. The winner got a cut of the profit and I needed that to support the other, younger orphans. As I was starting to reach the end of my basic education. I was lost about my future. It was then that my teacher, mentor, and now adopted mother came up to me and offered a scholarship to the university in Lochea. Leaving the kids was the hardest thing I've ever had to face, especially alone. I went for a year and thought that I didn't belong. In all actuality, I didn't, but nobody could tell. I thought about dropping out of my second year. I stopped trying to keep my grades up until this TA that I had been flirting with nearly backhanded me for an assignment that I intentionally failed."

"That's Olive right?"

"That it was. I was still doing the whole fighting thing and she knew it. She would wince the morning after when I walked into the room, probably because of her whole empathy thing. She rescued me after a fight one night and brought me back to her apartment. She made coffee and dinner and when she put her hand on mine it felt so... Kind. Girls that I had been with up until that point had been nightmares, so I thought she was far too good to be true. I knew with that touch though, that I was going to marry her and fight anything that tried to hurt her."