Reaper

“No,” I breathed heavily, holding up my hands in surrender as I backed away as quickly as I could.

Sawyer didn’t listen. He continued to walk towards me, eyes glowing fiercely, with his hands balled at his sides. His eyes were watching me but they weren’t seeing me – they were hollow, narrowed…

Predatory.

I felt my back against a wall. I looked frantically from side to side. I was in an alley with no other way out except up, and that wasn’t even an option. “Sawyer, please!” I shouted, putting my arms out in front of me. “Please, it’s me! It’s Charlie!”

He kept walking forward. I had seen that look in his eyes before but never like this. He wasn’t going to stop, he was going to try to kill me. I knew that I should be immune to it, but the look in his eyes was one of murder, and I didn’t think it mattered whether he used his powers or not, I wasn’t going to make it out of this alive.

“Please,” I pleaded, finally drawing my hands up to cover my face.

Sawyer didn’t seem to hear me. Or, if he did, he ignored me. He raised his hand slowly, painfully slowly, up to my forehead.

All I could see was a blinding white light. I felt my head being torn apart from the inside out. And all I could hear was the sound of my own screams as I plunged into oblivion.

“Charlie!” a voice was calling. A pair of hands was shaking me awake, gently. “Charlie, you’re dreaming, wake up!”

I was still screaming as I was jolted awake. Once I realized that I was listening to my own screaming, I stopped, but I was still breathing heavily from the effort. My throat was sore – how long had I been doing that? I’d seriously slept through that?

It took me a few moments for my head to stop spinning enough for me to get a grip. Jesse was staring at me, worried, bracing my shoulders. His blue eyes were searching my face, looking for some sign that I was going insane, I’m sure. He looked pale, and like he hadn’t slept in a few days.

“Jesse,” I breathed, “Oh, it’s you.”

A look of hurt flashed across his face before he went back to looking concerned. “Are you alright?”

That word. Alright. It hit me like a slap in the face. There was no way Jesse could have known what went down with Sawyer, what we had argued about, but it didn’t ease the sting behind the word. I flinched, relaxing back onto my bed. “I don’t know. Bad dream, I guess,” I admitted, suddenly feeling confused and disoriented. Why was I in the hospital room? “What… what happened to me?”

Jesse sat back, giving me some space. The look on his face was grim, and he ran his hand nervously through his sandy blonde hair. I knew it couldn’t be good. “Sawyer found you… bleeding… I don’t think I’m the best person to explain…” He sounded tired. I suddenly felt my chest tighten.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I didn’t remember the bleeding. I remembered – pain? I thought it was coming from my stomach, or something like that, but I didn’t remember the bleeding. If that was true, and Sawyer found me like that, then he must have caused a scene trying to get someone to take care of me. I suddenly felt guilty that they had been so worried about me.

“Where is everyone?” I said quietly, scanning the room and realizing that I was alone with Jesse. Not that I minded – it was just unusual for me to not be surrounded by my brothers and Sawyer.

Yawning, Jesse glanced at his watch and rubbed his eyes. “Probably asleep. It’s four a-m.”

What? “Four in the morning? How long have I been asleep?”

“About… a day and a half, I think,” he told me, counting on his fingers. “Two days, almost.”

“What?!” I launched myself up, clawing my way out of the mass of sheets and pillows. “Two days? What – how – ow,” I muttered, clutching my lower stomach as the pain shot like lightning from it. It was a sharp pain that dulled once I stopped trying to move, but it was so unexpected that my head was reeling. It was like I’d been stabbed.

Jesse settled me back down the best he could, remarkably quickly given how exhausted he looked. “Don’t do that.”

I sat back, frustrated and in pain and feeling utterly spent. There was a question nagging at the back of my mind that I was too afraid to ask, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to know the answer, but it was too difficult to just sit back and wonder about it.

“Jesse?”

“Mmm?”

“Where’s Sawyer?” I asked softly, pulling the sheets up to my chin like I was going to be able to hide myself from what I knew was coming.

Jesse’s expression told me everything. He looked sad, like he was about to tell a child that their dog died – like you wished with all your heart you didn’t have to be the one to tell them what you knew to be the truth. He ran a shaky hand through his hair and sighed deeply.

I don’t know what I expected, to be honest. I remembered the fight I’d had with Sawyer, how I’d basically shoved his confession back into his face – I remembered feeling terrible about hurting him, but in that moment, I felt… Well, I wasn’t sure what I felt. I felt the taste of power surging through my veins, and I was too far gone with anger to care about whether or not I hurt his feelings. I remember, for the first time that I can recall, wanting to be able to be on my own for once. To be my own knight in shining armor.

But that had all come crashing down when I woke up.

Part of me still held onto that idea of being able to fix everything myself, without Sawyer’s help. Maybe there was a way to do that with Sawyer still in the picture, but at the moment, I wasn’t sure how to do that. How could I be my own person and still rely so heavily on him for my life?

Knowing that he had left while I was asleep hit me like a bullet to the chest. I didn’t expect it to hurt as much as it did. He.. He told me he loved me, that he’d die for me. How could he just leave? That was so unlike him, so against everything I knew about him, to leave while I was in danger. What happened? Did that mean… I had never felt so abandoned.

Jesse cupped my face. I realized then that the tears were streaming down my cheek before I could stop them, and I was hiccupping with choked sobs that I hadn’t felt. “He told me to tell you… that he changed his mind,” he said softly, searching my face for some sort of reaction.

He changed his mind. About what? About wanting to be there for me? Apparently, if he was gone. About caring about me? There was no way for me to be sure. As more and more questions plagued my brain, all I felt was an overwhelming sense of loneliness that crept back from the time I’d spent apart from Sawyer before. Only that hadn’t been because he’d chosen to leave. The reality of it stung.

I didn’t know I was crying as hard as I was until Jesse pulled me into him, wrapping his big arms around me and sheltering me in his warmth. He spoke softly into my hair, about how he was sorry, and about how I should let it out, and that everything was going to be okay. I didn’t think I believed him – but the gesture helped ease the feeling of being left alone.

I wanted so badly to be stronger than this.

I’m not sure how long I cried – hours, it seemed – but after a time, the sobbing eased. The pain was still very much there – both the pain in my abdomen and the pain in my heart – but either I was dehydrated or too tired to keep crying.

Jesse stood up from his chair, rubbing his eyes sleepily. I wondered how long he’d been by my side, watching over me.

A long time, I realized. Since the beginning of this whole adventure.

As he told me goodnight, get some sleep, something came over me. Loneliness, probably, but something made me reach out and grab his hand as he stood up to leave. “Jess, stay, please,” I begged, my voice hoarse.

He looked torn. “I’m exhausted, Red, I don’t know-“

“Please.” My voice cracked and I sounded pathetic, even to my own ears.

He paused, looking at me for a moment with those big blue eyes. He looked like he was at war with himself, but he finally sighed and crawled into the big bed next to me. He was extremely careful not to hurt me as he made room for himself, sliding in easily on my left and wrapping his arm under my neck. I curled into him, wincing at the pain it caused, but the comfort I got from his embrace was worth it. “Careful,” he murmured, using his other arm to steady me.

I looked up at Jesse’s pale, exhausted face, and suddenly all the times he’d stuck by me began to haunt my thoughts. He didn’t deserve to be toted around with someone like me – he didn’t. Another thing that was my fault.

“Jesse?” I said again, hardly above a whisper.

He opened one eye sleepily.

I took a moment to search for the words. “Do you hate me?”

About fifteen emotions flashed across his face. He blinked a few times like he was trying to wake himself up, and he shifted so that he was facing me. “Hate you? For what, almost dying? … Because actually, yeah, I do hate you for that. That shit scared me. Don’t do that again.”

I found the energy to give him a half-hearted smile. “I’ll do my best,” I said dryly. “You know what I mean. You hate me for… Sawyer?”

Jesse’s face fell a little. He thought for a few moments, his blue eyes tight with nerves. “I couldn’t hate you for that, Charlie,” he said quietly. He brought his hand up to my face and placed it gently on my cheek. “You don't like me that way, I respect you too much to hold that against you. You two seemed… destined for each other, I guess. I’ll admit, I wished things could be different – but I’m still your friend, and it’ll take more than that to shake me off.” He gave me a little smirk.

“But you almost died. Like, multiple times.”

“I’m trying to make you feel better, okay?”

I sighed, frustrated. “Jesse, why are you still here? Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

“Well, for one, I’m dead to the rest of the world,” he said sadly, and a wave of guilt washed over me. “Which is directly related to these events, yes, but that is not your fault, that’s Isis’ doing. Plus, the only person that would notice I was gone would be my landlord and Troy – my parents died in a car crash when I was 16, I was homeless for a few years before I got my act together.”

I gaped at him. How had I not known that about him? I’d always… I’d just assumed he’d grown up with a happy family, with lots of people around him. How else could he be so selfless?

He sighed. “Please don’t look at me like that, Red, I don’t want a pity party.”

“But-“

He raised his hand up to the side of my face again, this time to comb my hair behind my ear. It was such an intimate gesture that I cut myself off, staring up at him in surprise. “I’m here because I care about you, Charlie, okay? Platonically or not – it’s up to you to decide but – I’m here because you’re the most important thing to me, honest. You have this tendency to not believe people when they tell you that.”

The wave of guilt turned into a tsunami. I never wanted Jesse to care about me like that – it was dangerous for him to be so involved, even if initially he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t deserve to have to risk his life every day against the Reapers and god knows what else would be out to get us. I hadn’t thought about how all of this would affect him much. He always seemed so willing to go wherever that it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d lost everything to stay with me.

His blue eyes were wide in the dark, his pupils fully dilated. I could see a sprinkle of freckles across his nose and one dark one on the center of his bottom lip, which was parted slightly. His blonde hair flopped clumsily onto his forehead and I was struck full-force that this man had also fallen for me – but unlike Sawyer, he had forced to the back of my mind, underappreciated when he had been so selfless.

I’m not sure what was happening in my head. My body was telling me that Sawyer and I were made to be together. All of my being wanted to be with him, to be claimed by him, to belong to him body and soul. But my heart – my heart was telling me that maybe that wasn’t the end of my story. Maybe I wasn’t going to be given only one shot at love.

Maybe this shot was staring me right in the face.

“Get some sleep, Charlie,” he said softly, pulling me close to him. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I felt the familiarity in that conversation. It struck me like a knife to the heart.

Jesse slowly leaned forward and placed a chaste kiss on my forehead. I shivered – the warmth from his lips spread through me like wildfire. Even though my body and my heart were at war, I drifted off to sleep in his arms peacefully, lulled by the gentle beating of his heart.