Triple Crown

[sweetymia]

hi

[Sonmi-451]

You know, W o l f e h, your comment just gave me an idea for a new poll. Based off your comment, I'm not sure you'll like it very much though. xD More added.

As soon as the helicopter’s stopped rocking enough for me to be able to walk without losing my balance, I pull away from Luke and run out of the door of his room to find Max running down the hallway towards me.
I call out to him, “What happened?”, while taking note of the grim, worried expression on his face and his hands clenched into fists.
“We’ve been hit,” Max replies as he comes closer, practically falling over from exhaustion and wheezing so hard that it sounds like his lungs are about to give. I guess he’s been running up and down the helicopter telling people that.
“El Nieve missile?” I ask him, to have him nod his head grimly and wordlessly in confirmation.
After a moment of trying to catch his breath, he elaborates, “The only reason we weren’t shot out of the sky is that the missile wasn’t one of their full-power ones.”
My eyes shoot open wide as I realize what this means, and I think aloud, “So we’re about to be shot out of the sky then,” to have Max nod his head in confirmation again.
Even though Max, Jackson and I can’t die in this crash – well, I suppose Max could if the whole helicopter burst into flames and burned him alive, but, considering that he can control fire, that’s very unlikely – all of the other humans on the helicopter, including Luke, certainly can. However, I can’t let Luke die on me like that – like I said, I wouldn’t really have a reason to live if I lost him – and I don’t really intend to let El Nieve shoot us down like that, so I turn to Max and ask him, “Have you ever gone skydiving?”
Max’s eyes shoot open wide in shock and horror at what I’m suggesting, and he tells me in a warning tone, “Lizzie, no.”
He then opens his mouth, most likely to add something about how it’s too dangerous, even for us, to have me cut him off, “Well, now’s a good time to learn.” When I see Max give me a dubious look, I add, “Max, what do we have to lose? We might be able to save a couple other people in the process anyways.”
Max is about to say something in reply when another blast rocks the helicopter, and the whole thing tilts forward, sending me tumbling into Max and sending Luke, who had just come out of his room after gathering up his stuff – I guess Luke realized what was happening too – tumbling into me and all of us tumbling down the hallway.
When we stop rolling, I clamber carefully off of Max and out from under Luke to help Max to his feet – Luke got to his feet by himself – and tell him, “Well, I guess it’s too late to go skydiving now.”
Max laughs at that, his voice nervous and high-pitched, which surprises me some. I mean, even though there is a possibility that he could die in this crash, that possibility is very low; maybe he’s just worried about the other people on here that could die in the crash... like – oh, right – Luke.
Turning to Luke, I give him a small smile and intertwine my fingers in his to have him tell me quietly, his eyes locked on mine, “Well, I guess this is it.”
“Yeah, this really is crunch time,” I agree quietly, and a small smile spreads across Luke’s face. As opposed to Max, he seems unusually calm for someone who’s about to die, but I guess that’s because he gets to die with me.
We then just stand there in silence for a few moments longer, looking each other in the eye and communicating more emotion than any words ever could, as the helicopter – and us – plummet ever closer to destruction. In fact, we probably would have died in silence too, if it weren’t for Luke murmuring, a moment before the elevation measurement tool in Max’s hand says we’re going to hit the ground, “Always.”
“Always,” I echo quietly, my eyes locked on his, and then, in the spirit of what all the other Triple Crown couples who were about to die did, lean up to kiss Luke passionately. After all, if Luke’s going to die, he should at least have a good last memory of me, not one in which I’m breaking his heart or lying to him.
I close my eyes, waiting for impact... to find, after a few seconds, that we haven’t crashed. Opening my eyes, I look around in shock to find that the helicopter is level again, and we’re not plummeting to our deaths anymore. Suddenly it occurs to me that Max is gone – he probably has been gone for a while now, with me not having eyes for anyone except for Luke for the last few minutes – and my eyes shoot open in surprise as I realize where he must have gone: he must have gone out onto the hit section and used his fire-controlling powers to keep the blaze from melting any more of the helicopter. He also must have fused the rotors back together and made them partially functional, for us to have not crashed yet.
This theory is proved when I hear a banging on the helicopter and Max bursts through a newly-made hole in the metal of the side to our left.
“Well, that was fun,” he exclaims, and I have a feeling that, if he had any hair, it would all be blown back by the force of the wind he just came out of. However, I don’t get a chance to ask him any questions about what happened, as he takes off running down the hallway towards the control room of the helicopter as soon as he’s gained his bearings enough to do so.
“Well, it looks like Max just saved our lives – again,” Luke murmurs, looking down the hallway after Max, and I nod my head in agreement.
“Yeah, he seems to be pretty good at that,” I say, and turn to the hole in the side of helicopter to see, with a start, that we’re actually flying in between pure-white buildings right now, no more than ten feet off the ground. I then hear something fly off of the top of the helicopter, and, a fraction of a second later, we plummet to the ground, both Luke and I being thrown up into the air by the immediate drop and then tossed around by the force of the impact.
I just lay there with my eyes closed for a second, focusing on the pain that’s quickly going away as my body mends all of my injuries. Once I seem to be only slightly battered – which is probably better than everyone else on the helicopter right now – I rise to my feet unsteadily and look around to find Luke lying next to me, a bloody cut on his forehead.
Bending down over him, I touch the wound and channel some of my energy into it to have it immediately heal, and then bend down over him to murmur in his ear, “Luke, we have to go. It’s war time.”
Luke immediately starts at my words, his eyes popping open in surprise and confusion as he stares up at me. After a half-second, everything that just happened seems to come flooding back into his mind – I guess the force of the impact gave him short-term amnesia – and he quickly pulls himself up to glance out at the streets – upon which whole regiments of Protectors are beginning to assemble – and sigh.
I note the Protectors too, and know that we’re undoubtedly going to have to fight them, so I take advantge of this moment of inaction to pull my lightning bolt out of my pocket and have it transform to cover my whole body in the supersuit. After all, while I could wipe them out either way, I don’t really intend to fight the Protectors with just my bare hands.
He murmurs, his eyes locked on the Protectors waiting to meet us as we get off the helicopter, “We’re fighting again.”
“At least we’re fighting the enemy this time,” I remind him quietly, and he turns to look down at me for a few moments before responding.
“Yeah, I guess we are,” he agrees, and then pulls a pen from his pocket, clicks a miniscule button on the side, and stands back to watch as it becomes a fully-automatic M-16.
I look at the weapon questioningly – I never really saw Luke as the kind of person who would use a gun; to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really see him as the kind of person who would use weapons at all until I actually saw him use them, but I especially didn't see him as a gun person – and Luke notices this and tells me, a sheepish smile on his face, “I was inspired after seeing your lightning bolt, so I had Max get me one of these.”
“Are you prepared to use it?” I ask him critically, and here he falters, stumbling over a few sounds that aren’t words before finally falling silent to think about a response.
It takes him a half-second to reply simply, “I don’t know,” his gaze locked on mine the whole time.
“Fair enough,” I say quietly with a shrug and a small smile, a sentiment that Luke echoes, although the smile he gives me seems far sadder than the smile I gave him.
We then stand in silence for a moment, and we probably would have stood in silence for a while longer, neither one of us really knowing what to do, if it weren’t for Luke saying, as he gives me a genuine smile, “If I die, at least I get to die with you.”
His saying ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ reminds me that I still haven’t told him about the fact that I’m not completely immortal, and, as I reach a hand forward to grab his arm and stop him from running off into the battle, I tell him, “Luke, I’m not completely immortal.”
This brings his attention back to me immediately, and he asks, his eyes locked on mine curiously, “What do you mean?”
“I can die by ‘normal’ weapons, like spears and swords and arrows and stuff like that. Those are the only things that can kill me.” I see a look of relief shoot across his face at the fact that I didn’t say I can die by guns, as that’s what all of the Protectors have. However, I know that Rush has probably ordered that they all have some form of normal weapon, like a dagger or shortsword or a short spear, to deal with me and some sort of fire grenade, even though fire is the element least likely to kill him, to deal with Max.
Suddenly Luke seems to remember that the Triple Crown committee abducted me for my immortality as well my assassin skills, and he questions, his expression serious, “Does Rush know this?”
I nod my head wordlessly in confirmation, and he sighs slightly, all of his momentary happiness thrown out the window by that. “So you aren’t safe then,” he murmurs quietly, and I nod my head wordlessly again.
A half-second goes by in silence before Luke looks up and tells me, “Well, at least if we die, we get to die together. That’s all I could ever want.” He gives me a genuine smile, and then intertwines the fingers of his free hand with mine.
“And that’s all I could ever want,” I echo, returning his smile, and, at that moment, I couldn’t think of a better way to go out: with Luke, in defiance of the tyranny of El Nieve and the oligarchical you-do-the-work-we-get-the-rewards government of El Tiempo.
“Always,” he murmurs again, his eyes locked on mine, and I nod my head in agreement and then echo too, “Always.”
“Alright then,” I say after a moment, tearing my gaze away from his and mentally ordering the suit to cover my face as well. “Let’s go kick some El Nieve ass.” I then run out of the hole in the side of the helicopter without waiting for Luke to follow, determined to win and show El Nieve that they don’t own me and that they will never own me.

[loyal]

[I have a complaint.
"Let’s go kick some El Nieve ass."
Either this quote needs an exclamation point, or a well-placed explosion with slow-motion walkoffs.

Thank you.

(Although "and then I ran out of the hole in the side of the helicopter is pretty epic, it simply needed to be more epic. Got it? Good.)
xP

Also, you can guess who I voted for! c:
Winston!]

[Sonmi-451]

Well, on the first statement, I didn't feel like it needed serious emphasis, because Lizzie, at that point, was calm and collected and basically had accepted the fact that she was going to die but she was going to die fighting, and because I felt like she would get mad at me if I made her undignified by having her shout about going out to fight. xD And I suppose the second statement could have been more intense and epic, but I just didn't really see a way to make it so. If you have any ideas about how to make it more epic, then please tell me, because I would love any advice on improving this that I can get. Anyways, more added.

I shoot down another Protector with a blast of lightning, and turn around just in time to punch one in the face that was sneaking up on me so hard that he’s immediately knocked unconscious, and, best I can tell, dead. I guess my super-strength and super-speed have come out finally, which I’m definitely not complaining about; after all, I’d love to have every advantage possible when fighting Rush and El Nieve, because you know they’re going to play dirty. Speaking of Rush, he actually ordered that the Protectors only go into battle with ‘normal’ weapons, like swords and spears and the like, because apparently he didn’t think that there would be this many rebels to fight and because he wanted to get rid of me really badly.
Suddenly I hear the whirring of helicopters above us, and look up to see two helicopters, emblazoned with the white crown of El Nieve, opening to release two more regiments of Protectors, and I sigh. Just more people I have to kill in order to win.
I am just about to charge the area where the new Protectors have just touched down – it’s best to hit someone while they’re unprepared, and while they don’t have their weapons out – when I hear machine gun fire echo across the square, breaking through the din of the battle, and feel something strike my suit so hard that I fear it might have hit me, too.
Whipping around immediately and scanning the rooftops – El Nieve, in an amazing bit of good planning, actually installed machine guns on all of the rooftops just in case of a scenario like this; unfortunately for them and fortunately for us, there’s no way of locking out unwanted users of these machine guns – I see three Protectors, one of them the Protector who tried to kill Jackson before One-Person Survival, lined up at the machine guns and firing on the crowd. I would have been content to let them shoot and take out their own men – after all, it seems like almost half of the men falling around me are wearing white instead of the mismatched rebel drab – except for the fact that my friends and fellow rebel soldiers are dying as well, and I don’t want to lose half of the rebel force to the Protector’s fire, so I lift my arm, telepathically order the miniature gun that hides in the forearm of my suit to pop out, and shoot the three Protectors down before they can take another shot.
As soon as this is done, and the clearing is safe – well, safe from machine gun fire, that is – I turn back to the battle to summon up tree roots from the ground and strangle three Protectors nearby, and then conjure up a tiny tornado to suck up one of the Protector regiments that just landed and crash that El Nieve helicopter into a nearby row of white buildings. Deciding that I want to take out the other newly-landed Protector regiment myself, I charge them to stick my hands out and electrocute the ten Protectors closest to me before they can even register what’s going on. Smiling viciously, I turn to the rest of the regiment, and, without moving another muscle, get inside each man’s mind and drive him absolutely crazy, so that they think their fellow Protectors are their enemies and the rebels are their friends, and then turn away from them to let them destroy each other.
However, I immediately feel bad for what I’ve done – I mean, there are a lot more humane ways I could have killed the men – and I can’t help but mutter underneath my breath, “Kuro would be proud.” However, I also don’t intend to turn around and undo what I just did to those men, as I don’t really want to see them tearing each other apart and because I would have to kill them in the end anyways, so why not go along with my original plan of letting them kill each other?
A flash of red and orange a little bit above my head next to me catches my eye, and I turn slightly to see Max fighting and downing, his sword moving so fast that even my sharp eyes can barely follow its movement, the group of ten Protectors that were dumb enough to surround him. As I watch, I see that one Protector manages to stick Max with his dagger, but the cut immediately heals back up and Max cuts that Protector down a half-second later. It really was stupid of Rush to send his Protectors into battle with nothing but short swords and spears, considering that pistols could have helped them take the rest of the rebel soldiers out much easier.
However, I can see Rush’s rationale for doing so, because he knows that I am the face of the rebellion and, if he kills me, the Sections might not have the energy to keep fighting, so, if he loads every Protector with weapons that can kill me, then the possibility that he kills me is much higher. Of course, he also loses a lot more Protectors this way, but I guess he figures that killing me is worth it, if my death with turn the tide in El Nieve’s favor.
All of a sudden, a strange humming noise starts above me that’s unlike any noise that I’ve ever heard before, and I glance up to see a huge ship, its whole bottom covered with the El Nieve white crown, hovering above us. I then see, out of the corner of my eye, the storm of blades that was once Max stop immediately, and turn to him to see him staring up at the ship with a look of pure horror on his face.
I don’t like the look on his face, I don’t like it at all, because I know that anything scary enough to give Max that look must be downright frightening. Turning my attention back onto the ship, I see a back portal on it open, and a huge black, smoking thing fall out of that portal. I hear Max immediately gasp in surprise and horror, and, a second before the thing hits the ground, I realize what it is: a bomb of some sort.
It occurs to me, as I run through the battle blindly after mentally ordering my suit to retract – I can’t run as fast in full armor, after all – and putting up an air shield around myself, my only objective finding Luke and covering his body with my own, that it doesn’t make sense for El Nieve to be bombing this square, especially with a good sixty percent of the people in the clearing being Protectors and there being a lot of El Nieve civilians and citizens around in the process of evacuating. However, I don’t get a chance to take this thought further as, as soon as I find Luke, only thirty feet away from me, and begin to sprint towards him for all I’m worth, the bomb hits, the first shockwave completely destroys my air shield, and everything goes black after one huge spasm of incredible pain.

[literalsunshine]

I love this story! I've been a long-time stalker- I mean reader. Hehe. Anyway, I love Lizzie x Luke. ^_^ Please continue writing!

[loyal]

Ack! I'm late! c: Nice to see someone else reading too, though!

But whywhywhy do writers like to leave cliffhangers? They are the bane of my existence! :c

[Sonmi-451]

Yes, it is nice to see someone else reading! Welcome to this nearly-dead thread (xD), JezSohma!
And W o l f e h, writers leave cliffhangers because they keep you reading. After all, if I didn't have any cliffhangers in this novel, it would be the most boring novel you could ever read. xD Anyways, more added.

I open my eyes some, and immediately they hurt from the light. All other feelings in my body then come flooding in, and everything hurts. It feels like I’ve been thrown off the end of a bus going a hundred miles an hour after having my skin scrubbed with sandpaper and lit on fire. The scariest part is all of that might have actually happened, because I honestly don’t remember.
Screwing up my face against the pain, I can’t stop the groan of agony that rises up in me from escaping my lips, and, all of a sudden, I hear someone stir about five feet to my left. Well, whatever happened to me, my senses don’t seem to have been affected by it.
I hear the person next to me rise to their feet almost warily – maybe they don’t think they heard right; a more likely explanation is that they hope they didn’t hear right – and a very familiar hard, bitter, intense but not bad smell fills my nose.
Jackson.
“Lizzie,” he begins quietly, his voice trembling with emotion. I hear the air stir as he moves towards me again, but thankfulyl he has the common sense not to try to touch me. I wonder vaguely about how bad I must look, considering I feel this terrible, but the thought is quicjly pushed out of my mind by a much more pressing issue: Luke.
I want him to be there next to me and hold my hand and lie to me by telling me that everything’s alright and that I’m perfect. I want him so badly that I can barely breathe, and I don’t know if I will be able to breath much longer without him here.
Distantly, as if he’s a mile away, I hear Jackson call for some pain medication for me, and I finally work up the courage to open my eyes again. It takes a few moments for them to adjust and the pain to go away, and, when I’m finally able to see, I find Jackson standing over me with a worried look on his intensely handsome face.
“Lizzie,” Jackson begins, his expression surprised and relieved at me having my eyes open, but I cut him off.
“Jackson,” I croak, my throat aching so severely that I only manage to keep on talking by visualizing Luke standing in front of me, “where’s Luke?”
Jackson’s face immediately falls, and my mind is only a few nanseconds behind his reaction.
“Is he…?” My voice trails off, and I find it impossible to finish and utter that last, inevitable word.
After a few moments, Jackson bows his head slightly, and a sort of numbness takes me over. A life without Luke…
As realization floods me, I swallow with difficulty to lay there motionlessly, everything gone from my body except unbearable heartache and pain.
My spark has been extinguished. For the first time in my life, I am truly cold.

[Sonmi-451]

Well, I don't know if anyone is reading this now, but I guess I'll just continue posting for my own vindication.
More added.

Max is the first person brave enough to come visit me, considering I nearly killed two attendants by getting so angry that a miniature tornado started whipping IV needles around the hospital room, and even he gives it three days to come and talk to me to let me cool down and get a grip on myself.
“How you feeling?” Max asks me as he sits down in the chair along the wall next to my bed, and scoots the chair closer to my bed so that he can look me directly in the eye without much effort on either of our parts.
“Terrible. Like I want to die myself,” I answer truthfully. My voice is no more than a rasp, and it hurts to talk; just another side effect of being burned alive so badly that I shouldn’t even be alive in the bomb blast.
Max nods his head in understanding, and our pitiful conversation lapses into silence.
However, I can’t keep my bitter curiosity in check for very long, and I soon find myself turning my head so that I can look at him and asking, “Max, why’d they do it? Why’d they bomb the square?”
“Probably in an effort to kill you,” Max replies, his facial expression and voice cool but some emotion – nervousness, perhaps? – hiding in his eyes. The answer he gave was completely false, and he should know that – with him being a fellow immortal and knowing my conditional immortality – but my throat hurts too much for me to bother with pointing this out. However, I can’t help but wonder what he isn’t telling me, and what the real reason is for El Nieve bombing the square.
“Have you captured Rush yet?” I question after giving my throat a few seconds to rest, and Max shakes his head no.
“He’s holed up in his mansion at the center of the city with all of the remaining Protectors surrounding it, and we’d lose too many people if we tried to attack them directly, so we’re just letting them sit for now,” Max elaborates, and I nod my head wordlessly in understanding.
Suddenly a wave of anger washes at the fact that Rush is the reason Luke is dead – I mean, no one else would be ruthless enough to order something like that, and he probably even did it with the intention to kill Luke (undoubtedly he had someone reporting to him how the battle was going until that person got blown up, so he would know Luke was in the square) and break me in the process – and I shift myself, with more pain than I care to feel, into a sitting position, to turn my head in Max’s direction again and tell him, “I want to be the one to kill Rush. I don’t care what King says; I’ve won this chess game against Rush, and it’s time for me to checkmate him.”
“Done,” Max immediately replies, without any further questions, and I can’t help but smile. I will be the one to kill Rush and avenge all of the people he’s killed, like Luke and Marshall and Abby; it’s an honor actually. Besides, I’m sure Max will love it for the symbolism: the spark runs into El Nieve and strikes its leader down to end the war. You couldn’t get more symbolic than that.
Oh, wait, I’m not really the spark anymore, am I? The pain from Luke being gone is too intense, and I just don’t want to live anymore, so if I don’t even have the will or the energy to keep myself alive, how I can feed the flames of a rebellion too? It’s just not possible; suicidal people just don’t have the will the lead thousands of others potentially to their deaths storming a palace.
“Lizzie,” Max begins, interrupting my thoughts, and I look up to meet his fiery gaze, “Luke would want you to keep on living, and not let his death get to you. He would want you to finish what you’ve started, and truly be devoted to this cause to the end.”
Max is obviously trying to use the ploy of ‘it’s what Luke would want!’ to manipulate me into doing what he wants me to do, and, if I were in one of my sad, depressed moods – for the last three days, I have switched back and forth between rage-filled and sad moods – it might actually be working for him and he might actually be manipulating me to go on and do what he wants right now. However, I’m not in a sad mood, I’m in an angry mood, and this obvious attempt of his to get inside of my head and screw with my emotions by bringing Luke into the picture does nothing but make me even angrier, and I let Max hear about it too.
“Don’t pull that ‘it’s what Luke would want’ bullcrap card on me,” I snarl, my eyes locked fiercely on his. “Luke is dead, so he can’t tell us what he wants, so don’t even try to pass your personal agenda off as his, because I know what he wouldn’t want: you using his memory and name to manipulate me into doing something I don’t really want to do.” After a half-second of me boring holes into his brain with my gaze, Max finally has the decency to look away, and I look at him for a moment longer before turning away and sighing myself.
Even though I don’t really want to be the spark anymore, when it feels like there’s nothing left inside of me, I know that I’ll probably end up doing it anyways, for the same reason that Max listed: to finish what I’ve started. I’ve gotten the people of the Sections this far, and I can’t just abandon them now, when the rebellion is almost done and just needs one last push to be truly successful. Besides, I’d hate to go off and leave the Sections with no one to lead the rebellion but King, because I definitely don’t trust her leadership skills – or her, for that matter – and have some sneaking suspicions that she might be inclined to make herself the next Rush – in other words, a dictator, no better than the one that was just overthrown – if she were allowed to run free.
Suddenly it occurs to me that Max should have been burned alive like I was, and I meet his gaze to ask him, “Why weren’t you burned in the bombing?”
“I reacted fast enough to channel the fire and stop it from reaching me,” Max answers, and I nod my head in understanding. I guess he would have time to channel the fire of the bomb, considering that he wasn’t trying to save someone else when it hit.
“He died a hero, you know,” Max says after a long silence, and I look up at him in surprise. I mean, I didn’t think that either one of us would be brave enough to break the silence like he just did.
“I know,” I answer quietly, my eyes on the white wall in front of me as I fight against the anguish threatening to overtake me. “It doesn’t make it any less painful.”
“I know,” Max ends softly, his voice trailing off as he stops talking, and I can’t help but wonder if this is how he felt when the girl he loved died as a champion. I think it’s probably hurting me more than it ever hurt him though, because Luke and I were so much closer than he and that girl were when she died.
“Lizzie,” Max begins after a few more moments pass in silence, and I look over at him to meet his gaze, “I’m sorry.” His tone is so full of empathy and sorrow that it almost sounds like he himself killed Luke, and I manage to give him a smile as I force myself not to break down and cry in front of him, because I would never hear the end of it.
“You didn’t kill him, Max,” I remind him quietly, and he drops his gaze to the ground in admittance. “Rush killed him, and I’ll kill Rush in the end, so you have nothing to be sorry for.”
Max, however, in the spirit of being a stubborn immortal – it seems like all of us are so headstrong and stuck in our ways that nothing could change our minds – just shakes his head wordlessly and rises to his feet after another second has passed in silence, and, on his way out, he murmurs something so quietly that not even my incredible ears can pick up all of it. However, what I do hear sounds an awful lot like, “I wish you were right, Lizzie.”

[literalsunshine]

Aww! Luke died!
Aside from Winston, he was my favorite character! And he and Lizzie were so amazing...
Revenge! Luke must be avenged!
Keep writing please!

[Sonmi-451]

More added.

“Lizzie, you have to eat. I’m not going to let you starve on me,” Jackson tells me emphatically, but I shake my head wordlessly again. I don’t want to eat, because I don’t want to keep on living, and I certainly don’t want to be fed by my best friend, as that’s just too demeaning and too big a hit on my already-crumbling pride.
“Lizzie, please,” Jackson almost begs of me, meeting my gaze and putting every bit of pleading he can muster into his eyes. Even though he does end up looking rather in pain – me willfully wasting away can’t be very easy for him to watch, after all – it doesn’t sway my resolve at all, and I shake my head no again. After all, if Max couldn’t persuade me with the ‘it’s what Luke would want’ card, then Jackson has no hope of persuading me at all.
“Lizzie, I will force-feed you if I have to,” Jackson says, his voice taking on a warning tone here, and I meet his gaze again to see the steely determination in his eyes and realize that he really is prepared to hold me down and shove the spoonful of soup down my throat. I guess his want to see me healthy is overruling his want not to use force against me to get his way.
“And I’ll run away from you if I have to,” I answer evenly, my eyes locked on his, and I scoot towards the edge of the hospital bed to emphasize this point, even though I don’t think I have the strength or the willpower to run away from Jackson. After all, Marshall and Luke are both dead now, so if I run away from Jackson, all of my broken boys will be gone.
“You don’t have the energy to, Lizzie,” Jackson tells me confidently, and I can’t help but sigh. This would be so much easier if he would just hold my hand and let me die so I can maybe have the always with Luke Luke promised me instead of Jackson trying to keep me alive against my will.
“Please eat, Lizzie,” Jackson begs again, to add at the end, “I don’t want to see you shrivel up and die in front of me.”
That last part really gets to me – after all, now that I know truly how badly that would hurt Jackson, I don’t want to make him feel that – and, after sighing deeply once more, I open my mouth and allow Jackson to feed me the soup.

“Damn it, that was the last good door. Max is going to have my head for that,” I mutter quietly as I turn away from the three inches of solid steel that I just punched a hole through in a rage against Rush and how he took Luke from me. I then look down and see the top four fingers of my left hand twitching, from the permanent nerve damage I inflicted upon myself with that stunt with the sword at the end of Team Survival that Lars wasn’t able to repair, and I forcefully close my hand with a sigh.
It’s been a week since I first found the will to live again after that fateful conversation with Jackson over soup, and, with the help of special supersteroids that returned me to about half of my full strength and health in only two days, I’ve been running and lifting and making myself strong enough for battle again, so that I will be prepared to avenge Luke’s death when the time to kill Rush comes. My anger has been driving me, and has called out the worst in me too: my most animalistic nature and the best of my survivalist instincts.
I don’t plan or think ahead or really even think about anything but killing Rush anymore; I just survive, eating and drinking and going to the bathroom when I have to and bathing occasionally. After all, Rush’s ingenious plan to bomb the square where we were all fighting killed Luke, so therefore planning must be bad and I won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole anymore.
“Max just ordered fifty new doors, to replace all of the ones I punched through when you were out, so we can just blame it on me if you want,” comes a voice from behind me, and I whip around to find Jackson watching me with a deeply worried look on his face.
I see his eyes trace the outline of my bared torso, which my ribs stick almost grotesquely out of – I’ve dropped ten pounds in the last week, with only eating as much as will let me live to the next meal – and I quickly answer, “Whatever. Doesn’t matter to me,” so I can turn back around before Jackson can say something about my weight.
A few moments pass in silence without either one of us saying anything and Jackson not leaving, until he tells me quietly, “Lizzie, I will always be here for you.”
I turn around to find him watching me with a sad look on his face, and, after meeting my gaze for a moment, he turns and leaves without another word. I stare at him for about a half-second, contemplating what he said, before calling out to him, “Jackson, wait!”
He immediately stops and turns back around – he’s about twenty feet away from me – to affix me with a curious and expectant look to have me throw myself into his arms, my lips finding his after a moment of confusion.
His arms immediately lock around me and hold me to him, and he kisses me back passionately, almost desperately for a few seconds. In those few seconds, I feel happiness, the first real happiness I’ve felt since I first woke up that first day after Luke died, which is an emotion so alien to me that I have a hard time recognizing it when I first feel it. However, after a few moments, I have no problem at all knowing what is, and am almost sad when Jackson pulls back to catch his breath and stare down at me with wonder on his face.
He just looks down at me and I just look up at him, noting the shock and happiness in his eyes and the huge bags under his eyes – I guess he hasn’t been sleeping too well lately, with me making offhand suicidal comments and obviously trying to starve myself – for a few moments before he finally breaks the silence by murmuring, “I may not be Luke, but I will try my best to give you your always, Lizzie.”
“Jackson,” I begin quietly, my eyes locked on his, “I don’t need an always. I just need somebody.” I then lean up and kiss him again, and, after a few long moments of that alien feeling of happiness, I pull back, somehow feeling that this is wrong, like I’m betraying Luke somehow, even though I know for a fact that Luke would want me to be with Jackson as opposed to being lonely.
“Somebody is better than nobody,” I mentally tell myself, and turn my gaze back onto Jackson to find him watching me expectantly with more than a hint of concern in his expression. He’s probably worrying about my mental health, and whether I’m in my right mind now or not.
“Jackson, I’m tired,” I tell him, as a wave of exhaustion washes over me and threatens to knock me over. I haven’t slept in almost three days, with all of the working out and pure surviving that I’ve been doing, and I hadn’t realized how much of a toll that had taken on me until now.
“Come sleep then,” he bids, and, before I can say anything in response, he scoops me up into his arms and begins to carry me down the long steel hallway of the Protector barrack that we rebels have set ourselves up in.
“You’re warm,” I murmur into his shirt as I curl up against him, letting the heat radiating off of his body come into me and warm me from the outside in. In fact, he’s so warm that he might even be able to melt my heart.
“And you need to eat,” he replies, shifting me slightly in his arms to get a better gauge of my weight. “You’ve dropped at least ten pounds since I last carried you. That’s not good, Lizzie.”
“’Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane world,’” I quote, and I feel Jackson’s chest vibrate slightly as he laughs halfheartedly. What I said really wasn’t funny, since I’m basically justifying my efforts to starve and kill myself, but I guess Jackson would rather laugh at the truth than face it, and I can’t really blame him for that.
“This world is only insane if you make it so, Lizzie,” Jackson tells me, and immediately, despite my exhaustion and the calm that overtaken us and told me to stay in Jackson’s arms and let him care for me, I roll out of his arms to hit the cold steel floor with a thud and leap to my feet, my eyes blazing. How dare he insist that this world is only insane if I make it so, when this world is the one that took Luke from me!
“No, Jackson, this world is insane,” I shoot back emphatically, my eyes locked on his as I almost dare him to deny that. “It’s not just my point of view that makes it that way. After all, what world, after allowing them to live through so many other life-threatening situations and making them fall in love and believe that maybe they actually could have an always, kills one of them and leaves the other one to fend for herself? No sane world, that’s for sure!”
“Lizzie,” Jackson begins, but I don’t let him speak, and bulldoze over his interruption like he hadn’t said anything at all.
“And what world covers the girl in burn scars so that she can’t look down without being reminded of the moment the boy died? Only a sadistic world, a world that God has forsaken and evil has taken!” I meet his gaze fiercely, daring him to deny this, and, after a few long seconds, he looks down and sighs.
“Lizzie,” he finally begins, after organzing his thoughts and formulating a response for a couple silent seconds, “the scars might not go away, and you might never be able to forget anything that happened in the arena, but it will get better. Time will heal your heart, even if only minimally, and some sense of normalcy will return to your life, because nothing ever likes to be changed permanently.”
“Jackson, how can my heart heal if it’s completely gone?” I ask him quietly, my voice shaking with emotion. When he doesn’t respond, I continue, “Luke dying isn’t one of those cliche ‘Oh my God my heart’s broken I’m never going to be able to function again’ because Luke and I have gone through too much for anything about our relationship to be cliche, and because it doesn’t feel like my heart’s been broken. It feels like it’s been completely removed from my body.” I meet his gaze for a long moment before continuing, “When you kissed me, and I felt happy, that happiness almost felt alien, like it doesn’t belong with the heartbreak and anguish that has completely taken over my emotions as of late. Can you believe that: happiness feels alien?!” I exclaim bitterly, turning away from him and shaking my head. Luke wasn’t the only thing that died when the bomb hit apparently. After a few moments of staring at the floor in an attempt to regain control of my emotions, I look back up at Jackson and end, “Time won’t help me here, because there’s nothing for time to heal, only a hole for time to make seem even hollower.”
“Lizzie, you still feel, therefore you must still have heart,” Jackson tells me, and adds quickly, when he sees me open my mouth to protest, “Things will get better, Lizzie. You might not ever really move on from Luke, but things will get better. The pain will get less intense as your memories fade some, and, a thousand years from now, you might be able to love another person again, and, when you do, I will be there waiting for you. I would wait a thousand years for you, Lizzie, and even more if I had to.” Jackson’s eyes lock powerfully on mine, and, when I don’t say anything in response, he ends emphatically, “It will get better, Lizzie.” However, this little spiel of his has done nothing to improve my mood or assure me of anything except for the fact that Jackson likes to lie to me if he thinks I’ll like the lie better than the truth, and I shake my head bitterly. Has Jackson not listened to me at all these last few minutes?
“Jackson, time cannot heal my wounds, because I’m so emotionally shredded and fed up with life that there’s nothing left to heal. You telling me that everything will get better, and that I’ll eventually heal, is like telling an amputee that their leg will heal right up with some time: it just won’t happen, Jackson.” He opens his mouth to respond, but I, being a millisecond ahead of him, hold up my hand, read his mind and add, “And before you say that I’m condemning myself to eternal pain, you have to realize how much Luke and I really went through, and how much I needed him and still do need him for survival. Jackson, this last week has been like hell without Luke, because he is like my air, or my water, or my protein: I can function for a little while without him, but, in the end, something will give, and I think I’m approaching that breaking point right now. I can’t live this half-life, this hell on earth, much longer without Luke to hold my hand and tell me I’m perfect and be everything I ever wanted, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. I am Cinderella, Jackson, and my Prince Charming has just died and left me alone and empty in a world I don’t really want to be in.” I meet his gaze imploringly, and, when I see that I’m not really making any progress in changing his mind, let my temper get the best of me and exclaim angrily, “What do you want me to do, Jackson: just pretend like everything’s fine and dandy and that I wasn’t irreparably damaged by what’s happened here, and just go on living a lie the rest of my life? Is that your brilliant solution for me: just cover up the pain and put a fake smile on every day?” I ask incredulously, my eyes burning holes into his mind. “I won’t accept that solution, Jackson, because the life I would lead if I did that is no life at all.”
“Lizzie,” Jackson begins, his tone more than a bit desperate, but I immediately shake my head and brush past him.
“No, Jackson,” I tell him, staring him down. “I don’t want to have you lie to me anymore, because I don’t like the lies that you tell.” I meet his gaze one last time, searching his eyes and finding only a want to explain, before walking past him down the hallway and leaving him standing by himself.