Against Us

I was restless. Anytime I tried to sleep, I started thinking about how stupid the whole thing might have seemed. We couldn't go home. Not anymore. They'd kill us. Or they'd separate us. I'd rather die than be separate from Jax and Zeth. Instead of trying to sleep, I walked over to the boat, noticing Jax sitting on the ground and crying into his arms. 

I was never great with emotions. I didn’t like crying and it wasn’t like Jax was crying all the time either. I bet that it was about Zayden and I had no idea how to help with that. I wasn’t in a great situation with Adria either. I had no idea how I was supposed to make him feel better. 

It wasn’t like I could tell him any lies to make him feel better. He knew the full truth just the way that I did. Keturah and Zayden had been dating for at least a year and they’d never said anything about it. I had been trying to push past that Keturah had lied about that too. 

At first, I tried to think about how it hadn’t been that long, but then thinking about a year, that was a long time. I had thought about asking Keturah some more questions about it, but she didn’t seem super okay with her relationship with Zayden either, so I didn’t want to push her for any of it. 

The only thing worse than one person crying was two people crying. I wasn’t going to put myself in the situation. But now that I had seen Jax, I couldn’t just leave him crying alone. I had done a lot of harsh stuff today, but not helping my brother out would have crossed a line. 

“Are you alright?” I asked, lifting myself on. 

Jax lifted his head from his arms. He looked awful. HIs eyes were red and puffy with his tears. His hair was all messed up and matted—all of us were in the same situation with hair—and his sleeves were rolled back, partly soaked with his tears. He sniffled and wiped his nose on his shoulder. 

“I feel pathetic.” He whispered as I scooted to sit next to him. “I thought that Zayden liked me. I... I didn’t even know that he liked girls and much less Keturah.” 

I tried to think of something better to say than neither did I or I’m sorry. I was sorry, but that didn’t change what had happened. Sometimes I could get annoyed by people that said sorry too much. I get it and I knew they were only trying to be nice, but seriously? They have nothing to be sorry for.  

If you spend your whole life making sure that everybody else is happy, when are you going to get the chance to make yourself happy? 

I could just tell him that I felt stupid with Adria too, but that wasn’t going to make him feel better and it would only make me feel worse, so that option seemed out of the picture. “I mean, did he ever even like me?” Jax looked over at me, wiping his tears with his sleeves. “The only reason that we met was because of Enrique. He stayed because of that. How can I even trust if he liked me?” 

I was in the exact same position with Adria. Maybe she had only kissed me because she knew that I liked her. I was not the type of person that admitted the way I was feeling often. And one kiss was nothing. Maybe she had known that it was going to end soon. That soon enough, she and Zayden would both give up and she wouldn’t have to pretend with me anymore. 

I squeezed my eyes shut. But then she had helped us. She had helped us getaway. She didn’t have to help push the boat. She or Zayden could have fought us, but even if they had made a fire, it could have been hours before anybody noticed the smoke. 

“It’s okay. You can say something.” Jax said. “I know that you probably want to.” 

Sure, I wanted to say something, but I had no clue what I was supposed to say. What would anybody had said? Hey, I know that it’s been a rough patch with our parents being murdered, escaping prison, traveling on boats with little food and three wounded buffoons that you can’t do anything to help, and two lying people that we’d thought were our friends but it would get better. 

That sounded like the stupidest thing in the world. It would get better. With how bad things were right now, I didn’t think that there was any possible way they could get worse. So by default, the only thing that could happen was for it to get better. 

But what if things never got better? What if they stayed the same, or they just got worse? We were alive, so that was a good thing. And we were together. But we could die. We might never find anything out here. We might die from drinking the ocean water because we didn’t have anything else, or from running out of food. Or from drowning or the boat dying, if that was even possible. 

The odds were stacked against us, but then again, they had always been against us. We were never really going to get the chance to win. So we just had to make do with what we had. 

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” I said after a while. “I could tell you that Zayden is an asshole or a liar, but that wouldn’t make you feel better. I could say that like eight years is a long time to fake feelings and that he probably felt something for you, but I’d be lying.” 

Jax wiped the tears that were on his cheeks with his sleeves and rested his chin on his arms. I sucked on a breath. “I don’t know what Zayden felt or what Adria felt for me and I’d have no way of ever knowing what they really felt.” I said, moving my good arm around his shoulders. “But I don’t think that any of that matters anymore.” 

“Really?” Jax whispered. “Why?” 

“Because we have each other.” I said. “You, me, and Zeth. We have each other and we know the truth. Or part of the truth, but that’s more than what we knew before. And for as long as we live, even if that’s a week, we’ll have each other. So... I’m here for you if you ever need me.” 

Jax sniffled again and leaned against me. “I love you, Az.” He said. “You can be a good brother when you want to be.” 

“I love you too.” I said, squeezing his shoulder. “You can be a pretty good brother too.” 

Jax laughed a little and then we went into silence. We just sat. In any other scenario, I might have thought that just sitting and doing nothing was pointless. But something that I had come to notice in the past few weeks or days or however long we had been out here was that it’s just the little moments that matter. 

It felt a little silly to admit, but all that mattered to me right now was Jax and Zeth. And Keturah, I guess, but she had to know that I cared a little bit more about my brothers than I did about her. I didn’t mean that to be rude, but I wouldn’t have done all of this if it wasn’t for them. 

For a while, I’d had my self-convinced that we were going down towards the prison to look for our parents and that was what we originally were trying to do. But when Jax and I had discovered Zeth, the new goal was to just stay together. 

That was the whole reason that we had stayed in that tiny little room together. People had been looking for us and if Enrique calling Adria and Zayden to find us had meant anything, he knew that the three of us missing had meant that we’d met and we knew something was up. For 16 years, the moment that we had met Zeth was the closest that we had ever been to figuring out what was happening. 

And I had to hand it to Enrique, he had done a good job of hiding it. He’d done a little too much to hide it though. I knew that it was easier to lie when the lie was close to the actual truth, but keeping just two of us together was his biggest mistake and telling the two of us about it was another. 

If just Zeth had known, he might not have caught on. If we thought that our real parents had been Ace and Kyra, he would have had a hard time convincing two instead of just one. And to even think that we should get to know where our parents had lived had been a mistake.  

In all fairness, he hadn’t known about the tiny little room or the scrolls because if he had, then we never would have found them. But to let us remember a place that felt familiar every time we were there was wrong. It was a place scattered with old memories and three rooms for three kids. 

Enrique could have kept the lie going for years before we had figured it out. More years than he had already gotten away with. If he had really wanted to, he could have separated all three of us. He could have sent one of us to a different island. He could have even killed one of us if he had wanted to. I got the sick feeling that was what was going to happen if we went back or got caught.

He could have only told one of us the truth. Admittedly, if two of us knew that there was a third missing, the other two would start looking for the other and probably piece together a few clues, but it felt like the version that we had gotten stuck with could have been a lot worse than it was. 

It made me realize that I hadn’t gotten the worst option. Even with the situation that had happened, I had Jax and I’d always had Jax. I knew a small part of the truth, plus Ace and Kyra had told us a little bit of it. Zeth hadn’t had anybody. He hadn’t had Jax or I with him. He hadn’t known any of the truth because nobody had ever told him. 

I had to think about what would have happened if we would have gotten caught too. If our plan to get away hadn’t worked, would they had killed us? If we hadn’t even tried to break out, would they just have separated us three like the plan I had been thinking of? 

They would have had to wipe our memories, but Jax and I had been together all of our lives. To get rid of 16 years of memories didn’t sound like something that they could do. We had grown up together around Ace and Kyra. To really separate us, they’d have to make one of us think that Ace and Kyra hadn’t been our parents. 

Or maybe they’d kill one of us, probably me out of Jax and I, and send the other two back up. That sounded like an easier way, but there was still the problem of getting rid of Jax’s memories of me. 

Thinking about being with Ace and Kyra really made me wish that we could see them again. Even little Hazel. I’d found her annoying most of the time. She was tiny and clueless and way too happy all the time. But I guess that being happy all the time was a good thing, not a problem. 

I guess that I hadn’t been so unlucky. Given, I was unlucky, but it could have been a lot worse than it was. Zeth had had it worse than Jax and I did. He hadn’t even known anything about dark and light magic. 

That still made me wonder. Why was my magic light and not dark? I was pretty sure that it had been light and I wasn’t dreaming. I thought about mentioning it to Jax, but after the moment we shared, I thought that it would have been a little stupid to ask about that. It could wait until morning. 

Even if I was waiting till morning, I still wondered if they had mixed the three of us up. Maybe I was who Zeth was supposed to be, but they’d always thought that I was Aziel. It would have been impossible to mix Jax up. He’d always had this little scar on his forearm. That was the only thing that we used to think came from our so-called alcoholics parents, but it made us question why he had a scar and I didn’t. 

Looking back on all the lies that we had been told almost made me laugh and think that it was stupid we hadn’t figured it out. Everything was stacked against us and that was just the problem. Everything was against us. When everything is too perfect, it’s because it was set to be that way and usually there’s something wrong. 

Turns out there was a lot wrong with our version. There were a billion things that were off. That’s what it had always felt like. It was great to live in a perfect world where we really were away from danger, but they’d been targeting the wrong danger. 

Enrique thought that getting rid of our parents would have gotten rid of the danger. No parents meant that we couldn’t learn our magic. But as it turns out, we were more dangerous together than our parents had ever been to us. 

It was a tiny bit hurtful to think that we were dangerous just because of a little different magic. But when people are anything more than the normal, they’re dangerous. Anything less than normal is just worthless. That’s what I had been. I didn’t have magic, so I was less than normal and therefore couldn’t pose a threat. 

That hadn’t meant that Enrique wouldn’t take precautions. He knew that I was a threat even when I hadn’t known it. He was my enemy. Adria was too. I just didn’t know it because I was too absorbed with the way that she made me feel. I felt a tiny bit like a jackass for not realizing it sooner.  

There were so many questions that we had and we hadn’t gotten the chance to think them all through. We had to be more consumed with the present rather than the past. 

“Let’s go back.” I said. “Try to get some sleep.” I can’t believe that I was the one that suggested sleep, but I had no clue what I was supposed to say to Jax. If he wanted to talk, then we could talk in the morning. Maybe Zeth could give some input too. I guess that Keturah might have better advice. Zeth hadn’t known Adria or Zayden before. 

I stood up and reached my hand to help Jax up. He grabbed it and got to his feet, hugging me before he let go of my hand. I hadn’t really realized how much I needed a hug. I usually hated them, but it felt nice to know what somebody was there for once. 

Jax pulled back and blew out a breath. “Thanks Az.” He said. “I think that I really just needed that.” 

I nodded. “Me too.”