ELBINA 2

Chapter 20

        Lucas POV
I stood there, watching as Fallen pushed back the sofa. So far it hit the back of the wall opposite the kitchen area.
He then moved the small table in front of it and I just looked at Ella, who readjusted the small rug till it sat right in the middle of the large space.
Once the area was set, Fallen pulled off his jumper. It left him in just a long sleeved navy top, he rolled up the sleeves till they hit above his elbows.
I wanted to do something, but the pain meds were still kicking in. The pain meds we found here, they've helped, but it still hurts. My stomach's the worst though, even worse than the gunshot wound on my leg and arm.
"What's happening?" I butt in.
Shouldn't we be looking around the house? 
Ella's sliding off her jumper as well. My eyes flit to her exposed skin when the t-shirt rides up along with it. I don't look for more than a second before she's pulling her hair back into a tight ponytail. A rubber elastic band to hold it in place, it takes her a little longer with it, but I can't help but watch.
Especially since I'm stuck here, leaning against the kitchen counter like an invalid.
No one answers me, so I repeat myself. "What are you doing?"
"We're training." He says gruffly.
"Training for what?"
"Why do you think?" He says with a roll of his eyes.
My head shakes on instinct, if I know anything from this experience, is that nothing is going to stop them if they have fucking guns.
I know that above anything else, I've seen it. Being able to fight wouldn't have helped me with Dan and Halley. It doesn't matter what training we do; we're still going to be weaker and less experienced then any of those people.
"We aren't fighting anyone, we're here to find whatever it is that they want." I want to step forward to make my point but the stabbing pain through my ribs and abdomen stop me in my tracks.
"And you think there won't come a time that you need to fight? Come on Lucas; don't be naïve. This whole thing. It's far from over." I gulp, he says it so seriously like he needs me to believe him. He doesn't say anything more to me, pushing back his hair when he bends down.
He pulls off his shoes, gesturing for Ella to do the same.
She looks nervous, her hands shake a little when she goes to pull them off.
"Alright, Elbina. It's all about pressure points."
She nods, hands on her hips as she stands in front of him. Taking it all in when he continues, pressing at specific points on her body, forcing her off balance.
"At the end of the day, you're not as physically strong as your opponent." She tries to argue against it, and I smile when he cuts her off.
"You're not."
"So, the answer lies solely in being smart about what you do. There's no point in using brute force, it won't get you anywhere." He goes through each movement slow and steady, getting her to aim for specific parts of the body. It's nothing like boxing training, boxing was just about getting clean shots. Sometimes that included brute force but it was never specifically about hurting your opponent at the end of the day, it was about getting enough points to win at the end of it. No one wants a knockout; especially in the younger classes.
She was great at that, being disciplined, but this was a whole other ball game.
I lean my elbows on the counter behind me again, continuing to watch them until he tells her to get on the ground. My eyebrow quirks, scrunching my hands into fists as the fizzle in my vessels mount. I'm growing more nervous because the other stuff was okay, not much more difficult than the stuff we used to do together, but now as she gets onto her knees and he tells her to lay on her back, she actually looks nervous herself.
Somehow the pain in my gut gets worse, even through the bruising, the twist makes me want to double over.
What is he doing?
"You're safe here, alright?" My teeth grind when he says that to her, I can see her gulp when he lowers down. Getting into position above her until he's sitting on her hips, I sit up watching.
I can't quite believe he's doing this, after what she went through.
Does he not think?
"I know this is hard, but we need to do this." He presses his hand around her throat, and I cringe, she grabs his arm when he does it.
I can see the way his arm dents under the pressure where she puts it on his skin, her chest rising up and down too quick.
"Now show me what you'd do, try to use the pressure points I was talking about." Ella doesn't do anything, her eyes close and her breathing looks erratic.
She's panicking.
I can see it.
But I can't do anything.
"Ella?" I call over to her, but she doesn't respond. She opens her eyes and they're staring blankly above her.
Then her breathing gets worse, shallow until it starts making an odd strangled sound.
"Elbina! Come on, do it!" He shouts at her, seemingly putting more pressure on her throat when he leans forward.
"FALLEN! STOP!" She's frozen under him, he's shouting at her to do it. Her eyes are glazed over, she isn't even seeing him anymore. I know what she's seeing, even from here I can understand it.
"FALLEN!" I stumble forwards, he's still on top of her, hands to her throat. He isn't pressing down; it looks like a firm enough hold but it doesn't hurt her physically. She isn't ready for this.
I finally reach them, pushing into his shoulder so he falls off of her. But she's still choking, even if he didn't have a hold of her, she's choking.
"She needs to do it." I glare up at him, he can be such a fucking idiot. I switch my eyes to her, they're panicked and she grasps at her throat like she expects there to be a hand there.
"Ella. Come on, you're fine. You can breathe." I say each one after the other, repeating myself until she sees me. Until she actually looks at me with those big brown eyes, widened and fearful and sheening with moisture.
Her skin glows under the light, sweat coating her skin. I get her up slowly, rubbing her arm that shakes through the fear.
I glance up at Fallen with more anger.
"You idiot! What were you thinking?" Ella breathes more normal now, she's not choking over shallow breaths. He pushed her too far, it was too much for her.
"I'm sorry Elbina, but you need to know this. You can't go back out there without knowing this, it'll save your life. Do you understand me?" She nods, but it's slow and uncertain.
"Elbina. If you knew this back at the cottage, he wouldn't have gone two seconds without you getting out of it. You got to know that anybody could decide to do this to you, you can't trust people. So you need to be able to protect yourself, you got that?" Her elbow rests on her drawn up knee, she's looking up at him trying to find the willpower to do it.
But she's so scared, so terrified of seeing that man above her again. She needs to dissociate from it.
"How about I do it?" I want to take it back, Fallen switches his look to me. I gesture to Ella, telling him I'll be the one to put my hands on her. Not in the weird sense of it but I think she trusts me more.
His jaw grinds watching me. He doesn't like it.
"Please, Fallen." I'm surprised because it wasn't me speaking, it was Ella. Her eyes tilted up to Fallen who stood above us now, crossed arms and flitting his annoyed expression between the two of us.
"Fine."
She leans back down again, adjusting herself so she lays flat. I have to breathe through the residual pain before climbing on top of her, her breathing increases and she presses the palms of her hands to my legs. I rest a hand over hers, nodding to her, telling her it's okay.
It takes a couple of seconds before she lets the contact fall, enough so I can sit myself down on her hips. My hands run up and down her arms until she slowly nods her head, preparing herself for the next part.
I gulp down the rise of emotion in my throat, it burns when I have to lean forward and touch my hands on her throat. Her hands covering the top of mine when I grasp onto her throat, her chest heaves up and down in panic.
She panics, gripping a hand onto my wrist and pressing but it's faint. I immediately raise my thumb, gliding over her chin, twisting my hand so I can move it along the line of her jaw.
"Just breathe. Slow and deep." I say, she closes her eyes. Focusing on my thumb along her skin and gradually she opens her eyes to me, moving across my face until she finally settles, lowering her hands to the ground again.
I try to remain completely stoic now, unmoving in case anything further would send her back to the beginning again.
She turns her head to Fallen who begins explaining what to do, going through each individual point slowly. She goes through each step, elbows in, wrist grab, bicep hold.
Fallen readjusting her grip each time, removing her thumb from the grasp, rearranging her hand so it just cups around the outside of my wrist. I just keep an eye on her, watching her eyes switch from fear to concentration every few seconds.
But each time, she turns her eyes up to mine and I smile reassuringly down at her.
"Great. Now plant your feet." I can feel her shuffle under me, I gulp.
"Foot over his leg, then you'll buck your hips but keep his arm steady."
She shakes her head nervously, biting her lip when she glances between me and Fallen. "I'm not strong enough."
"It's not about strength Elbina, it's technique. He won't be able to plant himself, he'll fall as soon as you lift your hips up. Okay?"
She looks uncertain, shifting her hold on my wrist when she switches from Fallen to me. Her lips curve into a slow deep exhale before she suddenly bucks her hips up into me, I try to stop it but I get flipped over. She's over me now, smiling down at me with such relief and breathing so harsh you'd think she'd run a marathon.
Even through the pain, I smile back. Her eyes are lit with so much joy, the kind of joy I haven't seen from her in a while now. Her smile, the warmth of it, it curves through every part of her body that touches mine. My heart swells in a good way, and it doesn't stop even when she gets off me and Fallen makes us do it again and again.
Because this time, each time I have to get in the same position, her fear gets less and less and the confidence she used to have, it's returning, bit by bit.
We try different positions one after the other and thankfully the drugs are working now, so each time she flips me over it doesn't hurt as much anymore. She's sweating by the end of it and so am I, grabbing my hand so I can pull her up from the floor again.
I keep a hold of her and pull her into my chest, wrapping my hands around her so I can whisper into her ear.
"You did so good." She quietly mumbles a thank you in response, it makes my lips quirk at the corner when I hear it. She feels good, her fingers curling through the material of my jumper, so much so that her skin catches mine under it. Her fingers cold but it's welcome, and I involuntarily breathe in through the crook of her neck. I need it, I need this with everything in me and I'm probably doing it too long, but I still squeeze her again.
"Alright. Enough of that." Fallen grumbles beside us, my smile widens. Reluctantly I let her go, she's embarrassed as she readjusts her ponytail.
"How about you try and have a shower?" He pushes her forward when she looks reluctant, but it doesn't take much before she walks away from us, her feet padding along the wooden flooring.
I need to stop looking, Fallen's right there, except I don't stop watching her until she's fully out of sight.
"Fuck." I rub the back of my head, sending a glare at Fallen. He only looks at me with a smug smile across his face after smacking me across the head.
"As if I haven't been hit enough." I mumble, he shakes his head.
"Keep your eyes where they need to be."
"Whatever you say." I huff when he signals me to come over to the centre again, right on top of the carpet.
We work over and over again through different scenarios, terrifying scenarios that I don't want to think too much about. But he still pushes me and he makes it more methodical than emotional, which makes it easier.
My stomach still has a dull ache, throbbing deep inside of me so it's mostly what I'm feeling but thankfully he's not punching me. It's technique and I can cope with that.
"Give me a second." I step back up again, watching him move away from me and to the kitchen units. I don't know what to say so I only stare with narrowed eyes, wiping at my stubble which grates against the palm of my hand.
It creates a quiet fractionated sound, and it relaxes the tension in my jaw a little until I notice exactly what Fallen is doing.
My fist tightens when I see him round the corner of the kitchen unit, sliding open one of the drawers before I hear the sound of metal. It grates along the side of the others, teasing and only making the anxious feeling in my chest reverberate.
"What are you doing?" I want to sound strong, but it only comes out as a wobble.
He doesn't say anything, just comes back around the side of the kitchen counter again. The minute his hand is exposed from the side of the counter, his hand is gripping the handle of a knife. It's a large one, thick and wide, not serrated but I know it's just as sharp as I expect it to be. Maybe my heart jumps a little too hard in my chest because I take an involuntary step back. Even if I thought I trusted Fallen, even after everything that's happened, I still felt nervous of him as he came closer.
"I'm sorry." He looks up at me cautiously, confused by my words.
They came out before I could think why, but the minute they did, I knew. Seeing the knife only reminded me, the way Halley...
Everything that happened, I tried. I tried but maybe if Fallen was there, maybe he'd have been able to save them. If it weren't left up to me, maybe they'd still be alive.
"What are you apologising for?" He looks genuinely confused, the knife hanging loose at his side now and I look at it. I stare at it so hard so maybe he understands.
So I don't have to tell him why I'm always going to be sorry.
Even if the fact that nothing I say will help it, it won't change what happened. It doesn't matter how much guilt I'm carrying or how I'd never let it happen again, none of that will change Dan and Halley's fate.
It's done. They're done.
Because I didn't know how to save them.
My eyes meet Fallen's when he sighs loudly, crossing his arms so the knife faces downwards.
"There's nothing more you could have done."
I shake my head, dropping away from his stern expression. I'd never felt like such a kid before, I'd always been the adult growing up with Dad so this feeling with Fallen was odd, uncomfortable even. "You don't know that; you weren't there."
"I know you would have tried." I look back up again; he's shrugging and keeping a steady eye on me. He's so strong and always demanding our attention. "That's enough."
"But why doesn't it feel like enough? Why am I –" It's hard to put it into words, so my voice falls short of it. Trailing off into nothing because I couldn't think of how to describe this gnawing emotion on my chest since it happened. Since I let her out of my grip, since I tied her to that chair and since I watched Dan's brain scatter over the floor.
"You witnessed something that no one should. And they shouldn't have died, they shouldn't be dead. But they are... and all we can do is  accept it and move on. Because nothing around us stops for it, even if we just need a moment to breathe." He takes a cautious step forward, seeing how on edge I am. He's trying to get me to listen to him and trying to make me believe him, but it's still difficult. "You have to know that their death... it isn't on you or me or anybody else but that scout. He's the one that killed them."
I shake my head, words raising in volume in my head of all the ways I could have been better.
"I know it's hard to think that, heck, it's hard for me to shift the guilt. And it's not going to magically disappear, trust me. But if you keep telling yourself that it isn't your fault, it gets better. I know it did for me; when it came to Paige."
"Do you still feel it?" He looks at me in confusion. "The guilt?"
He's quiet for a moment, so quiet that I shuffle on my feet uncomfortably. The tension's too much and the context is too serious so I can't seem to get rid of the itch of my skin and that throbbing in my gut just seems to ebb away even more.
He nods eventually. "Definitely. Probably more than I should, but it doesn't hurt as much as it did. I just keep telling myself it's irrational, I didn't mean for it to happen and I know, at least with my logical brain that there wasn't really anything I could have done to stop it. The situation was too complicated, I didn't know anything and I was just a kid myself. The same age as Elbina in fact."
It's like he gets lost in his head for a moment, staring off at the floor. "There wasn't anything more I could have done for her...I wish there was; I wish I could have done something to stop her dying. But there wasn't, I've gone over it countless times before. It just was."
"How did she-" It hung heavy in the air between us and I regret asking it.
"Doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fact." He says in a short manner, cutting off any further questions I might have on it. It doesn't mean I'm not still desperately curious, even if I know I'm not going to get anywhere poking further into it.
So I respond quietly, more to myself than anything. "I guess it doesn't."
And I thought that maybe this conversation was over, that we were going to continue with training, until he suddenly spoke up again.
"And that's not how I want to remember her, she was so much more than how she died. She had a life, she erm, she wanted to go to this stupid park with massive horse heads or something."
"The Kelpies?"
He nods with a tiny puff of air from his nose, "Yeah, the Kelpies."
"She was her own person, her own dreams and ambitions. But she was also my person."
I stand up straighter now, listening to every single word he says with such intent, because I know the way he's speaking... that it's important.
"Not in the sense that I owned her but that she made me happy and calm, in a way that no one could. I mean, if there's a sole person for everyone, a person who distracts you from the world and all the shit that comes with it, who makes going to sleep a little less scary. It would've been her; she'd have been my distraction."
I understood.
Of course I understood, because I knew exactly who mine was.