A/N: This is a filler chapter, but I needed to get them to a certain place and introduce an element to the story that was touched upon in Behind Enemy Lines but never really fully put into place. I don't own any of the lyrics in bold, they belong to Nick Jonas (and the Administration), Owl City (those two were big shockers, I know), and Sterling Knight/ "Christopher Wild"/Disney Channel. Or any of the characters in JONAS or WOWP. Which is all of them. Sigh. My OCs are coming :)
chapter three: dreaming, leaving, loving
She cries his name, he hears her.
And yet, he's powerless to help as he tosses and turns in his sleep. He calls out to her as well, but she can't hear him. She doesn't know that he walks the aisles of the hallways in his sleep, staring at the rows of cages upon cages of children. Children not unlike himself.
She's one of them, he knows it. He stops in front of her cage and sticks his fingers through the holes. She's huddled in the corner, crying, alone. She doesn't see him, but she still repeats his name over and over again, as if saying it aloud would make things better. Because she's never felt so lost without him.
He knows it's a dream, and that's what kills him. He knows that he'll wake up, safe and soundly, but he misses her arms around him, and she'll always be here until he comes to save her. But he doesn't know how to do that. All he knows is that he has to figure it out fast.
And as she cries herself to sleep in the corner of the cage, he presses himself up against the wire webbing and cries as well, hating the fact that he's free and she's not. And he's ready to risk it all, to catch her if she falls.
But she's falling, and no matter how fast he runs, he feels like he'll never be able to catch her, never able to save her, never able to even help her.
she hopes that
no one will see
every time she
dries her tears.
It's the middle of the night, and yet, a guard comes and opens the door to the girl's cage. She shies away from him, a single leftover tear trickling down her cheek. The guard's heard about this one, she's crazy, his colleagues have said. She mutters a name, a guy's name, over and over again, they had told him, and as he's taking her to a different room, she's doing just that. "Nick, Nick…"
He doesn't make a comment, in a way, he feels a little bad for the girl. She was pretty, she had long blackish hair and brown eyes, bloodshot and teary. But she was a wizard, devious and out to destroy the world or something like that. He wanted to make the world a better place without them.
He slides his access card across the door sensor, and it slides into the wall as if they were walking onto the bridge of the USS Enterprise. She takes in her surroundings – it was the first time she had been out of her holding cage until now. But the bloodstains on the floor aren't a good sign, nor are the tiny voices she hears in her head.
Without warning to her, the doors slide in and the guard punches her in the face, hard, right below her eye. She's knocked to the floor in surprise, and he puts his foot on her stomach, squeezing the air out of her lungs. She gasps for air, struggling, but her hands are tied and she's helpless.
"Where's your little 'Nick' now?" he growled, and kicked her sharply in the side.
it hurts just
to wake up
whenever you're
wearing thin.
"Nicholas!"
You'd think half the neighborhood had shown up at my bedside. Joe, Kevin, Frankie, Juliet, who had stayed the night, and both of my parents were staring holes into my head. "Go away," I muttered, rolling over so my face was in my pillow.
"You're bleeding," Joe whispered, stunned, and we all watched as cuts began to appear on my hands, oozing red liquid out of them. "Nick, are you okay…?"
"Yes," I whimpered like a six-year-old. "But it hurts." I held back my tears, I wasn't going to cry. But Alex was in danger, somehow I'd seen what they were doing to her. Tease her, hurt her, rape her. It wasn't fair, why did they have her instead of me?
"Come with me," my mom said, and led me into the bathroom. Tenderly, like I was still a little kid, she gave me some painkillers, washed out the cuts and wrapped my arm in a bandage. "I'd put some of our healing stuff on you, but I'm not sure how it would react," she explained softly. "We'll do what we can, Nicky."
"Don't call me that," I muttered through clenched teeth. The pain didn't stop coming, it was in lashes now, stinging and hurting and painful.
"Sorry." She finished wrapping it and moved onto my eye, which I knew would be black in the morning. It was swelling, all puffy and gross-looking. My dad appeared at the doorway and gave me some ice to put on it, which I did gladly.
"Do you have something sharp in your bed, Nick?" he asked curiously.
"No," I mumbled.
Both of them immediately looked concerned. "Then what's hurting you?" my mom asked softly. "Nick, I know this might go a bit over our heads, but we won't yell at you, we won't jump to conclusions."
I didn't want to lie, but I didn't want them to get too concerned. "It's Alex," I said softly. "I think she's being hurt."
"And this affects you how?" my dad asked.
"I don't want to talk about that."
"Nicholas, we want to help you," he pressed on.
"Well, I don't want your help. I'm fine." I brushed past him to go back to bed, where my brothers and Juliet were standing.
"Sure you are," Kevin said softly. Once our parents were gone and they'd brought Frankie back down to bed, the four of us were gathered around my bed in the floor. "So you're feeling better?"
"No, I feel like shit," I muttered. Another wave of pain came, the punches and kicks this time. I tried very hard not to gasp for air awkwardly. "Goodnight." I shoved my face into the pillow and pretended to go to sleep. Whoever was beating on Alex had stopped, and I found myself wondering in the absence of pain why I could feel that and not hear her.
Joe rolled me over and pulled me up to a sitting position, using my bad arm to do so. I nearly cried out with the pain that came with the pressure he applied to the cuts. "Dude, seriously. We're here for you."
"Well, I don't want you 'here'. I want you to go away."
Kevin opened his mouth to say something, but Juliet cut him off before he could start. "Leave him alone," she said. "If your brother wants to suffer in silence, let him do that."
There's nothing like a girl to get your brothers to leave you alone. Even if she's a vampire.
see it turning
red, like a bullet
through the chest.
"So those Lucas boys aren't as innocent as they want the world to think they are," I heard someone whisper. It was my last day of school for what could be forever and all everyone could talk about was my black eye, my injuries, my everything. So maybe I had a girlfriend who was being tortured by the US Government and I was magically bonded to her in such a way that all of her injuries showed up on my body. Why did they really have to hold that against me?
Because they didn't know, and they would never know. That was why.
"Oh my gosh. Nicholas Jerry Lucas, what the hell did you get into last night?" Stella demanded, scanning me over.
"His bed," Joe said, grinning, as if I didn't look like shit and feel like shit and it wasn't a problem that the world as we knew it was going to end. Nope. Not a problem if you're Joe Lucas, if your girlfriend is alive and unthreatened. But if you're Kevin, Nick, or Juliet, I think the fact that our own girlfriends/boyfriend were in mortal danger (and were being hurt, as was so unhappily proved by moi) proved that it was, in fact, a problem.
"Death by pillow," I muttered. "And unknown imaginary sharp objects."
"You look like hell," she replied to that. "You okay?"
"Yeah, fine, I just spent half the night bleeding, that's all."
She looked horrified. "Oh my gosh, really? Did you get any bloodstains on your clothes?"
Yeah, glad to know you care, Stella. "Not that I know of," I replied. "I don't know, let me ask them."
"Something's wrong," Stella remarked softly to Joe when I turned my back to get to class. "And may I ask why you two aren't even trying to help? I mean, did you see the cuts? Is he cutting himself?"
"Nick? Of course not," Kevin snorted.
"Well, I'm worried about him," she replied. "I want to find out what's wrong."
"Get in line," Joe muttered, but they knew. They knew that everything was wrong.
i feel rather
depressed and
out of place.
The vanilla twilight came quickly that night, and as I stood on my front porch for what could be the last time, I realized that when I thought of her, I didn't feel so alone. I realized that I was ready to give up my everything and more for her, for her brother, for my friend. For wizard and Angel alike, for werewolves and vampires and anyone in danger. I wouldn't give up. I'd be unstoppable.
But mainly, I doing it for Alex. For everything I'd promised her, the forever and always and fairy-tale endings. For the happiness, for the highs and lows, for everything in between. For us. I did this for us.
"You ready, bro?" Kevin asked softly, coming to my side. "You have everything? Insulin?" That was Kevin; goofy, silly, musically talented, but caring and watchful for you. My brother.
"Yeah." I looked to the evening stars, their light dimmed by the street lights and light pollution. "I'm all set." I rubbed my arm tenderly; the scratches that hadn't been bandaged ran up and down my arms and legs like cutter's marks. Just five minutes ago, we'd finished disguising ourselves so we wouldn't be recognized – the last thing we wanted was to be seen by the paparazzi while we were trying to stay hidden. I pushed my new long, blonde, and yes, straight bangs off to the side and clutched the handle of my guitar case harder, dreading the moment where we would have to leave, but knowing that it was the only way to save Alex. And somehow I knew that having to straighten my beloved curls was not going to be the hardest part.
Juliet walked out of the firehouse and closed the door behind her, shiny brown ringlets bouncing as she did so. It looked so unnatural, but Kevin had believed it the only way and we let him do whatever he wanted. "Let's go," she said softly. Kevin took the guitar from me as I took out my wand.
"We might never come back," my older brother whispered. "We might never see Joe again. Frankie. Mom, Dad. Stella."
"My parents," Juliet echoed.
"But we have to be okay with it." I looked back one last time at the place I once had called home. "We have to be okay with giving up everything to save someone else." And I was okay with that. In reality, my life was meaningless, something I could and was willing to sacrifice to save others. I hoped Alex was okay with that.
Kevin put his hand on my shoulder and nodded. Juliet squeezed my hand, a light, friendly touch. And with my free hand, I held my wand even tighter and incanted softly, "Three loved ones of ours have been condemned, take us to where we could find them."
The world around us disappeared with a flash of light, and then everything was dark.
if you're the
one for me,
like gravity,
i'll be unstoppable.
