I just wanted to write this. A bit depressing, but please REVIEW!
Full Chapter Title; I may be out of the darkness, but I lost a part of me along the way.
Stuff was meant to get better once they'd won, but for the Garde, stuff actually goes wrong. For one of them, it feels like she's hollow inside. There's an emptiness in Five's heart and she hates it.
Things are better now, but they still aren't what they used to be.
For instance, all the Garde survived the war, stopped being hunted, and decided to settle down on Earth. The Mogodorians aren't hunting them anymore, the government trusts them and they don't have to hide all the time.
But, good as Earth is, it's not Lorien. They can't go home because their ship was destroyed in the final battle by Setrakus Ra. They can't live the way they used to, and all their families and Cepan are dead.
She's lost and confused without Juanna, who was so dear to her. She's been like that ever since her mother-figure died, but it's been so much lately, when she knows that the others are gone too and none of them can even remember most of their native language.
Don't get her wrong, Earth is good, but it's not really her home. It's alien – full of people without powers that are slowly killing their planet. Humans are loud and sweaty and intolerable and just so impure. But this isn't their fault – it's Five's for judging them so harshly.
After all, Lorien was like that once.
But that was different and Five knows it. The Loric never had the greed the human race does, the need for violence, the blood-lust. Earth isn't the ideal world for her, but they're stuck there now.
Thing is, the war, it changed her. Being taken to the brink of death so many times, accepting that it's her time to go, only to be jolted back from the calm and the quiet to hear screaming and feel pain and see John or Marina smiling down at her, as if they've just done a good thing.
Sometimes she can swear she was already gone, and that they tore her soul from the afterlife and left part of her behind.
Because, really, she was brought up by Juanna to believe that, in the battlefield, emotions get you killed. She was always allowed to have them, but not make an emotional attachment to anyone. She hasn't felt for years, and now that she can without being killed, it's almost as if she isn't able to.
She knows that she can feel some things. She feels something for Nine, even though she's not entirely sure what it is. Something inside of her clicked when she first met him, and she gets a strange feeling in her stomach whenever he's around. Or at least, she used to, before the battle. She's read about this – humans call it love, she remembers that Loric called it Adorai. Either way, she doesn't like it. It was nice when she could feel it, but the feeling's gone now. It's as if it was never there.
Some of the few emotions she can feel are the negative ones; jealously, bitterness, depression…all the ones she doesn't exactly want to feel.
Things are better than they were before, but at least then they knew why they stayed together. But now, none of them really know what to do.
This…uncertainty is knawing at her from the pit of her stomach. She doesn't know what she's meant to do. It hangs in the air between all them, always an unsaid question that no one has the answer to. The Elders obviously never thought about this – what they were supposed to do once they've won.
Or maybe the Elders just didn't think that they would win.
Maybe things aren't better, after all.
Before, at least, they knew that they had to get along to be a proper army, albeit a small one. They had to learn each other's fighting styles, and trust each other with their rough pasts and dodgy legacies. But now it's different. Now that they don't need to trust each other, they don't. It makes her wary, that they know all her secrets but she doesn't want them to. And, besides, they might know people's pasts, but they don't really know each other's personalities.
Like, Eight seems like a very happy-go-lucky kind of person, but after the battle he was different, quieter. He's more cautious about things, and tries to pull his weight more. He speaks to them, but his eyes are clouded over with some indistinguishable emotion. He's changed. Or maybe, the happy him was an act the whole time.
Marina and Eight get along with each other, but they're basically the only ones in the whole big house that do.
Six and John argue more often than they laugh, snapping at each other once before it turns into a full-scale shouting match. They scream at each other for hours on end before one of them run out the house. One enters a room, the other leaves. It's like they can't stand the sight of each other anymore. Even a compliment turns into a hundred insults directed at their weak points.
Ella is the worst, in a way. Her childlike innocence is gone. It died with the Mogodorians she had to slaughter. Five notices that her drawings of birds have turned into drawings of death.
Ella yells at them a lot, all of them. First it was because they were all too caught up in each other to notice her, then because they argued too much, then because she said that she wasn't welcome there, then because they treated her like a baby, then because she was only ever needed for communication.
Marina snapped at that. She'd yelled back that she had cared for once, before she became a selfish brat. Then they'd all started arguing of what they were to each other. Marina said she was just a failsafe for if they got hurt. Nine said he was just a soldier. Six had turned on John, claiming she was only ever a replacement for Sarah. They'd started screaming at each other until Ella ran over and slapped them both, before running out and slamming the door behind her.
She was gone all night. Five couldn't bring herself to care.
Nine gets drunk most nights, coming back wasted and puking in the toilet.
"This isn't right," he slurs almost every time. "It's not meant to be this way. Stuff was meant to get better, not worse."
Whenever Ella sees him drunk, she yells profanities at him for hours on end. Ella despises them all now, even Marina and Eight, who she often says should have died instead of Crayton.
It's not really Ella's fault. She saw far too much far too young.
They all live in the same house, but they're all worlds away. Only Marina and Eight share a room, because only Marina and Eight get along. Five is jealous of their easy relationship, of the fact that they can find happiness when the rest of them are stuck in some sort of…aftermath that never seems to end.
Five feels disconnected, like this life doesn't really belong to her. Happiness is like an unknown emotion to her now, something she can't remember the feel of. She knows she's bitter, and doesn't really care.
They always thought about how to win the war, and not how to live afterwards.
Nine finds life pointless, she can tell. So does Six. They've both spent their whole lives training for the fight, and now that it's over, they don't know what to do with themselves. Their whole purpose has been destroyed now. They still have to reproduce, but most of them hate each other now. Only Marina and Eight would be able to, and their kids would somehow have to breed with their siblings. Not exactly an appealing thought.
She can't stand it. She can't stand it that their lives never get better.
None of them get jobs. They're not allowed to, or go to school. It was part of the agreement they had to make with the government to be able to stay on Earth. In fact, one of the agreements was not to leave the city of Manhattan without alerting them and getting permission. Otherwise they'd all be locked away in a prison for months.
They'd thought that would be alright, living together, but now they know differently. They hate each other, they despise each other. How are they meant to spend the rest of their lives together?
The Elders really couldn't have picked less compatible people.
Five feels lost. She feels like half of her was left on Lorien, or half of her was lost when Setrakus Ra destroyed their only way home.
Maybe, if things had been different, if the others had survived or if they had gotten back to Lorien, they'd get on and manage to resurrect their planet. But now that's just a wish, a dream in her mind that will never come true.
So, please tell me what you think, and should I write something else?