A maze of emotions (1)

1.1K 22 5
                                    


"What's your name?" Athena spoke to the small boy who was holding a machine gun to her stomach. She was holding her own gun to his forehead in response despite her hesitation to hold a gun to a child whose mother she had just seen get murdered.

He didn't respond.

"I just want to help you, I can't help you if you shoot me in the stomach-" she paused and almost buckled over from the sight of shadows down the hallway.

"Fuck it" she dropped her gun, taking a risk and kicking the machine gun from the child's hands before he could shoot. She swiftly grabbed him and dragged him behind a crate, covering his mouth so he couldn't alert the guards to them.

He didn't say anything, he didn't even fight back or try to stop her. She paused feeling his weak body. He couldn't be more than 7 years old, he was small and scrawny with a dark complexion and shaved head like all of the kids she had seen in the cult there. His mixed matched eyes were what caught her attention, one was a deep brown and one was a piercing blue in his big oval eyes. He had a small locket around his neck that had flicked open and Athena could see a portrait of the small boy and his mother laughing. Something else caught her attention more though, blood. Blood dripped slightly on the locket, he had blood dripping from his nose and out of his mouth. She paused, holding him close to her as the men who with huge guns passed them and exited the area that they were in.

She let go of the boy but he didn't move. She flicked on her lighter and stared in horror at the blood covering her body, his blood. He had been stabbed in his side from the explosion days ago, a shard of metal lodged into his skin and looked like it was getting infected.

Athena couldn't think of the mission in that moment, she couldn't think of escaping, she could only think of saving this small child who had just tried to kill her.

She picked his limp body up in her arms, attempting to carry him to somewhere slightly safer for her to patch him up. Her body was weak from the explosion and running for days herself but she had to help him. If she didn't get the metal out, he would surely die. She wasn't medically trained by any means and wasn't sure given his state that he would survive even if she did get it out but she had to try.

The boy awoke a few hours later in an abandoned dark metal storage unit by a metal bucket that had burning wood in it to keep him warm. In the corner he saw her, the small pregnant woman who's throat he had tried to kill, the woman he saw kill 5 guards within a matter of seconds to escape. The woman who sat in the cell opposite him and his mother usually with a terrifyingly blank expression and emptiness to her voice that told him she had been through hell like him. The woman he saw see nothing but red when the guard killed one of the prisoners. The woman who killed 5 guards because one of them killed his mother was sat in the corner wetting a cloth.

He looked down at his side where he expected to see the metal that had lay there for days slowly killing him, waiting to feel the pain of it but it wasn't there. Instead, a line of clean stitches and bruised flesh lay under a handmade bandage made from the scraps of the woman's overshirt lay across his torso.

She spotted him and gave a small smile, the most emotion he had ever seen on her. She walked over and handed a cup of fresh water she had managed to find to him, the only water either of them had seen in days. She gave it all to him and used the remainder to finish cleaning the cuts on his arms and face, keeping her distance as not to upset him since she saw his body tensing in defence from being close to her, he saw her body reacting the same, an understanding of what they had both been through.

"You're all clean kid, keep washing that gash for a few days or the infection will grow- I think, I'm not too sure really, I'm not a doctor" she stood up and walked over to the corner, pouring the bloodied water out onto the floor.

Cruel - Criminal minds enemies to loversWhere stories live. Discover now