Day Twenty-One
So we cried together. I'm not even sure if everything I said to her had made since…I guess she has an idea now of why I am the way I am but she doesn't know all of it. I don't want to talk to any of them about Ben. For as much as Zack had been around the last couple months before he left me, you'd think he would have tried to help us. The more I got into partying and having fun at all costs, testing every drug I could get my hands on before finding the one that could get me the most high the quickest, the more Ben came to realize that the lady had failed us.
Poor Ben…he never did stop believing in her and I never tried to tell him. Not that it would have worked. There was nothing that any of us could have said to him to make him realize that the lady wasn't real…that she was something we had all wanted to believe in because we didn't have hope for anything else. So Ben had his blue lady and I had my cocaine, they were both ways for us to run from a world that we didn't belong in.
We were always running from something…trying to run to something, anything. That was how Ben saved me and I saved him.
San Francisco, CA :: 2016 July 14
Jondy fell to her knees, grabbing a pillar to steady herself, and gasped for air. Genetically empowered or not, there was only so much her body could take before it began to fatigue. She hadn't eaten in days, her clothes were reduced to nothing but rags, and her body was covered in bruises, scratches, and cuts from what he had done to her.
Just as her eyes began to drift shut she heard the footsteps above her. She pulled herself up, every muscle in her body screaming in agony. Her eyes darted around her and she took off in what should have been a sprint but was now only a mild run. She bit her lips not to cry out as the salt of the water began to saturate the cuts and the scratches. Despite the pain she slipped under the waves, the cool water was a welcome release to the rest of her body.
It seemed like hours but only ten minutes later she came up for air and so that she was quite a distance from the boardwalk. She swam towards shore and crawled up to the beach and collapsed. Ben had found her hours later, with her right cheek resting on the sand, her hands grabbing at the sand above her head and her legs lay to the left.
He felt something tug at his heart. She was covered from head to toe in sand. Her clothes were ripped to shreds. Cuts, bruises, and scratches marred her tan skin. He started to pick her up and was surprised when her eyes flew open and she turned on her back and started to fight him away. Ben backed up with his hands held out in surrender.
Jondy got onto her feet and brushed her damp hair back from her face. She stared at him, not really knowing who he was. He reminded her of Zack and his eyes seemed so familiar. She licked her dry and cracked lips. The coppery taste of blood and sand lingered in her mouth before she spoke. "Who are you?"
"Jondy…it's Ben."
Jondy relaxed from her fighting stance and fell to her knees. Tears ran down her face as she sobbed and held her arms out to him. "Ben, help me…please."
He walked forward and wrapped his arms around her small frame, lifting her with ease. She couldn't have weighed more then a hundred and ten pounds. Her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms around his neck. She sobbed into his shoulder as he carried her away.
It was hard to believe that Jondy had been running for days. The two of them had always been close. She had been in his squad and his friend ever since he could remember. He had helped her start a life, found her a nice place to live while she was younger, and made it perfectly clear that he was there if she ever needed him. He wasn't one who asked for help a lot. Even when it came to people he cared about, he would rather help them himself than to bring in other people to help with the aid. Zack, had called to tell him that Lydecker was chasing her, but he was in Seattle, looking for Max. Them catching Jondy had been second on his list of important things to do. Max would always be put first.
Looking down at her, relaxed below him, breathing deeply and peacefully, he wanted to take her into his arms and assure her that everything was going to be ok. He knew what defeat felt like, he knew what it meant to hurt so badly that you couldn't find a direction to get away from it, and he knew what it meant to feel like the world was crumbling down. They were outsiders in a broken world and he was starting to realize that they would never be happy.
But he didn't know much about how to deal with all of it. He relied heavily on his faith in the blue lady, but lately he wondered if she was even listening. There were times in his youth and in his life that he had to help friends out of situations that were dangerous to mental or physical health, and he believed that she had been there to help him.
Even last night, he believed that she had led him to Jondy. He had been pushing people away people that mattered to him for years, but there had always been one person he couldn't push away even if he'd wanted too. Whenever he was feeling like life couldn't get any worse, Jondy would call him, just to talk and she would make him laugh and smile and try to find the bright side to everything, sometimes she did. The lady always brought him back to the one he couldn't push away. She had always brought him the one person who could help him.
And that someone was now resting on his lap, breathing softly, and turning to him for protection and help. If he did nothing, he would never forgive himself. She would never know the depths to which she had saved him. She had not only saved his life, she had saved his very soul. With every smile, every question, every touch, and every moment…she had saved him. There wasn't any way he could explain to her how much that had meant to him; how much it endeared her to him and made him cherish her.
