Icy Inferno (Troyler AU)

⋙ Chapter Fourty

But does it feel like you're already dead?
And do you feel like your brain stopped delivering?
Yeah break my finger, shoot out my black eyes
What does it matter if everyone dies?
Kemosabe ~ Everything Everything

Troye

Too much was happening.

Number One: I found out I was a test subject unwillingly

Number Two: Korey was Khanye-Knot's son

Number Three: Grace had died before my very eyes.

And Number Four: I watched the love of my life get shot in the head.

Everything in my mind was affright - a befuddling mess that screamed me into hysteria internally. I couldn't make sense of anything around me with all the noise in my head. The screams intensified along with my pounding heart as I looked on at the remains of Number Four on that list. On and on it went. I thought it eould never end. That this purgatory would be eternal.

I closed my eyes. Breathed. Relaxed as much as I could in that state. In and out. Deep lung-fulls of air. The screams lessened - echoing on and on, but no longer prominent in my grey mind. I had to begin to make sense of it all. Starting with number one - the one I'd got to term with first: the truth behind my powers.

I was horrified to start with, grappling the back of my neck as if to swat an insect. I'd had the truth with me the whole time, as clear as day, buried underneath my hair. Falsehood had enriched my life for years - lies I'd never thought to question: the prolonged hospital experience with an odd feeling in my veins for months to come; the moving from country with little contemplation; the bond that so readily formed between a fire and I; that crazy chemistry between us that I had pinned to soulmates rather than science. Knowing there was more than meets the eye had me believing I'd been blinded until that point. It was a horrifying thought and yet that's exactly how it was.

Opening my eyes for the first time with knowledge of my powers, I saw rain. A drizzle of qualm. A hurricane of factuality. I felt as if I had been kept inside a house, closed off from reality until the moment they'd found the barcode. Now I was alive, in reality, and wishing I was cosy and warm within the house of naivety once more.

All of what had been said made sense... I just wished it hadn't.

Next there was the Korey situation. That was... unexpected, to say the least. The fact that Khanye-Knot was idiotic enough to hate the very group her son was apart of was amusing, in a dark sort of way. In wake of that, there was also Connor's double treachery, that surely turn heads. No one had expected it. Especially not Korey. In my numbness I was acutely aware that something deeper had torn between the two of them... Whatever it was, it had been neatly wrapped by the president, to stop our prying eyes.

Then there was Grace.

Fuck Grace.

What a treacherously snake she turned out to be. We'd trusted her. After our first conversation, I placed my confidence in her. If she had a place in Hannah's heart, I saw it fit that she had one in mine. But her innate loyalty flourished in her own heart. It'd been blooming into something no other love could erase. Ultimately, it was that love that meant more to her. And she'd been killed for it.

With time to reflect upon the events, I would've seen that she would've been killed regardless. Had she stayed by Hannah, she'd have been destroyed. No doubt about it. Phil would have shot the gun and that would've been that. She might've died a martyr, but woule have wanted that? So many others were martyrs in this place, she'd just have been a name in plaque in years to come, forgotten by all. And even then, we might have grown to loathe her. Thought her death just one to end her own suffering and prolong our own. Wondered what she could've done if she'd sided with the president, even just as pretense. Perhaps that's what it had been - that she was being disloyal as a trick... Perhaps.