Guilt (A Zero Spin-Off)

Twenty - Kyle

My heart broke for her.

Huh. I had heard that before. Those words. People made that claim all the time. When someone was hurt or sick or grieving, people would always say their heart broke for another person.

I had never said it before. I had my heart broken for different reasons. I'd felt bad for people, of course. I had some sense of compassion. But the gut twisting, aching pain in my chest that felt like my heart was being ripped into a thousand pieces wasn't something I was accustomed to. But looking at Ella... yeah, my heart broke for her.

I didn't know how to fix this. Hell, I didn't think this could be fixed.

We found the room for clinical studies and as promised a dozen or so hospital beds were set up, complete with pillows and sheets. Miles raided the vending machines for a lunch of junk food and we had all waited. And waited. No one had really slept in well over twenty four hours and we were all damn close to the living dead at that point with how well our brains were functioning. But no one went to sleep.

We all had waited for Ella to join.

None of us knew if she'd gone to get H-26 or if she just wanted to be alone, but after an hour, she was still missing.

"We should go find her, right?" Miles asked Hunter. "What happened, Hunter? Just how worried do we need to be?"

Hunter stayed quiet for a long minute and then glanced at Zero. Whatever it was wasn't something he wanted to discuss with her in earshot. His reluctance to say anything was answer enough. What they'd gone through was more than we saw and worse than we were imagining.

"She seemed like she wanted to be alone," Joel said frowning. He didn't know what to do anymore than the rest of us.

"She probably shouldn't be alone," Hunter confirmed the words that he never said.

And when I found her, right where we left her, all I wanted to do was pick her up and hold her until all the demons were gone. But she'd reacted so strongly to being held earlier, I resisted the instinct and instead said her name. I knew she heard me by the way she stiffened, but she didn't look up or say anything. She didn't tell me to go away either, so I sat down.

I'd gotten a few words out of her before we sat in the quiet. She stared off into space, occasionally blinking heavy lids, but not letting herself fall asleep. She didn't try to talk or even really acknowledge that I was still there, but she had asked me to stay. If it was the only thing I could do, I would do it.

"I'm so tired," she said so quietly I wasn't sure she actually spoke.

"Do you want to go upstairs?"

She was quiet for so long after that I wasn't sure she was hearing me.

When she finally spoke, I had to once again resist the urge to pull her to me.

"What if this is a dream? I go to sleep here and wake up there."

And just what the hell was I supposed to say to that? How did you convince someone they were safe— as safe as they could possibly be? Someone else, Miles or Hunter, maybe even Zero would have been better at this. They would have known the right thing to say or do. I shifted and moved across the floor until I was sitting next to her instead of across the hall. Reaching out, I took her hand in mine. It wasn't much. Shit. It wasn't anything. Ella's fingers squeezed around mine.

"It's not a dream." It was lame, but it was all I could come up with to say. Maybe that was all she wanted, someone to simply remind her it was real.