To Learn To Fall (Sequel to the Other Side)

Chapter Five

"Go," I hissed, hoping they could understand me. "Go before someone else kills you."

I don't know if they knew what I was saying or if they were acting based on pure instinct alone, but the creature obliged happily. Before they retreated into the forest, they stopped for a moment, lowering their head.

Seconds later, they disappeared into the brush, the only sign that they had ever been there in the first place a quivering branch. I sighed, shoulders slumping in defeat, and reached down to pick up my sword.

"Thomas, what is wrong with you!?" Lafayette demanded suddenly.

I glanced up, horror and embarrassment shooting through my body. He was staring at me in utter disbelief. They all were.

The field was littered with the dead bodies of the Tenebrie, the pack of the one I had just spared.

"I—" I began, but what could I say? How could I explain why it took me so much trouble to do something that typically came easy to me? "I don't know. I just—I couldn't do it."

"It was right in front of you," Hercules said carefully, a little more doubtful than Lafayette was. "You had—"

"No," I interrupted after a minute, truly having a newfound difficulty with finding my voice. "I mean—look, I really don't know—I just—I don't—okay, I—"

"Thomas? What is wrong with you?" Lafayette asked.

I doubt that he meant it to come off the way it did. Lafayette was never a harsh, rude person, and his words were not necessarily mean, and his tone was questioning and confused. There was no way that he was purposefully intending to hurt.

But it still did, regardless of intent.

"I don't know, okay?" I said finally, finding myself choking and suffocating underneath their strict stares and judgmental looks. "I just—"

"Aaron, Eliza, go after it," Washington ordered, cutting me off.

The two did as instructed, following it into the brambles despite my lamentations.

"No!" I yelled, horrified. I couldn't have spared their life for nothing. "No, leave them alone!"

"Thomas!"

"They deserve to live just as much as any of us do! What makes their life any less valuable than ours?!"

"They? Thomas, that thing would have killed you if given the chance," James dismissed, cleaning his dagger and putting it away. "It doesn't deserve your pity."

"Guys? Just drop it, okay?" Angelica hissed softly, perhaps the most unsure of herself and her opinion I've ever seen her. "Let's move on. We have more important things to worry about than just that one mon—Tenebrie."

Although she fixed her mistake rather quickly, the word she had begun to call them still cut close to my core.

I looked to Alexander, hoping somehow that he would help me with this. "Alexander, you have to agree with me." Even as I said it, I heard the doubt in my voice and saw the doubt in his gaze. "Remember how wrong it was for the king to chain up that dragon? How is this any different?"

"And you killed the dragon," Alexander said rather carefully, as if he was tiptoeing through a maze of broken glass. "I don't understand where this is coming from."

"They are not just a monster!" I hissed, feeling the back of my throat begin to burn. For the first time since I was a child, the threat of crying out of pure frustration loomed quite close.