My Alien Soulmate

44

"What happened when you were younger? Yara tried to tell me but Kordin stopped her. It's one of the reasons you left, isn't it?"

Kai sat back down, nodding his head as his tears began to fall.

I fought my instincts to go over and comfort him, sitting quietly so that he could speak.

"You really want to know what I am? What I'm capable of?" He sniffed.

"You need to tell me something." I breathed.

Kai took a moment to collect himself, wiping away his tears and clearing his throat.

"When we're young, around twelve years old, we are put through training. It's intense, but all zaviours do it in order to protect ourselves in the event of war. I was one of the best, outperforming all of my peers across the board. I was disciplined, strong, fast.. Whatever they threw at me, I could do it. Then on one of the training days, we were paired male with female. The males had to resist an onslaught of attacks from their female pairs, and we were told that the abuse gene would kick in if we had it, but we had to resist our instincts to fight back."

He paused for a moment to look up at me but I remained quiet, allowing him to continue.

"When we first started the exercise, I was absolute fine. My built in force field activated and I stood there, easily able to handle everything thrown at me. After a while, the commander at the time didn't like the fact that I found it so easy, so he forced me to disable my force field and take the attack without it."

My breath caught in my throat, applaud at the thought of a twelve year old boy being forced to take a beating without any form of protection.

"At first, I managed to take several blows to the torso, along with an accidental blow to the head, but again, my commander thought I had it easy. Eventually, he started screaming in my face, stopping the rest of my peers so that they too could try and rile me up. He instructed another female to join the attack and that's when I began struggling. I was forced to take on two attacks while everyone else was screaming at me. They were calling me names and making fun of me, and eventually, I had had enough."

I had to hold back my tears as Kai continued his story.

"I told the commander that I wanted to stop but he wouldn't listen. Instead, he called me a baby, laughing at me while the two females made fun of me. I held it together for as long as I could, enduring the pain but it was just too much. I ended up grabbing one of the females, slamming her head into the floor and then attacking the other one. I felt so ashamed because it was a conscious decision, I knew what I was doing but I didn't hold back. One of the girls spent three weeks at the medical centre, inches from death and the other sustained rib fractures and a broken arm."

Kai sucked in a breath, glancing up through glossy eyes and my heart broke for the twelve year old version of him.

"I was lucky that I was a child when it happened and I got away with just a beating from the commander. He was eventually stripped of his title but I was hounded for years, told that I had the abusive gene and that no matter what I did, it would eventually resurface, and they were right."

Wiping a tear from my cheek, I felt the need to be close to Kai, to comfort him and make him see that the so called gene he thought he had, wasn't real.

I made my way over to him, sitting on his lap as I wrapped him up in my arms.

"That wasn't the result of a gene. You were a young boy, pushed to your limits while a grown man tried to belittle you. He forced an attack on you, physically and mentally and you retaliated in a way that most people would. It was self defence, it wasn't your fault. If your commander was stripped of his title, then surly you can see that it was because he was to blame? He orchastrated the whole thing. You're a victim." I spoke softly in his ear.