The Elite

Twenty-Seven

Tass

I was lying strapped to a cot, a bandage tightly wrapped around my injured right leg. Strangely enough, I couldn't remember how I'd gotten there or who injured me. All I remembered was hating Julian and attacking him for it, then suddenly waking up there with an injured leg.

I absorbed my bindings and sat up, finding myself in what appeared to a room in the Lagos Elite Medical Facility. Only one other bed in the small ward was occupied. Julian lay there, curled in a fetal position, a piece of metal lodged in his forehead as he slowly self-healed, his chest reassuringly rising and falling.

Dashing over to him, I also absorbed his bindings, distantly wondering if I now had an unlimited storage space now that I was a Class 6, but I was more focused on Julian. He was clearly alive, but he clearly didn't seem to be fine, which was bad. Julian was the one member of the squad who was always perfectly in control. It just felt wrong when he showed he was just as flawed as the rest of us.

I sat there for a couple minutes, feeling a strange urge to watch over him, observing as he healed. Strangely, I found it quite fascinating. The kids at the orphanage would call me weird for it, but I didn't care about them anymore. The piece of metal slowly was pushed out of Julian's forehead in a strange way that didn't look natural but somehow seemed right.

When Julian was fully healed — the metal falling off onto the floor — he opened his eyes. Those brown eyes looked onto mine instantly, a smile curled up on his lips.

"Hi, Tass," he said sleepily. "Your eyes are back to normal."

"They weren't normal?" I questioned.

"What weren't normal?" he asked.

"What?"

We stared confusedly at each other. I could have sworn we were having a conversation, but I couldn't remember what. Then, suddenly, the confusion disappeared.

"What happened?" Julian asked, his first words upon waking up.

"I attacked you," I admittedly honestly.

"Because I attacked Leon," Julian said sadly.

Once again, I was struck with the certainty that Julian should not be acting like this. He was supposed to be the one that was mentally stable. He was supposed to be comforting me, not the other way around. Julian was calm and collected, while I was crazy. He was supposed to be eternally happy and optimistic.

"Are you okay?" I asked awkwardly.

"I want my parents," Julian admitted. "They'd make everything okay."

I wasn't sure exactly what to say to that. Parents were never a thing for me, so I didn't know what Julian was feeling. Part of me wanted to help him, but I didn't know how. I had to idea what parents were supposed to do, so I didn't know what to do or to say. So, rather than say anything, I decided to just give Julian a hug, hoping it would tell him the things I couldn't say. Hopefully he would be his perceptive self and understand.

Despite everything, I wanted to be Julian's friend for whatever reason. He was just so smart and so fun and so compassionate and so friendly, and maybe beyond that there was something within him that was so much like me, though I wasn't sure either of us was acknowledging. He hurt Leon and was the son of Black Queen and Nefarious, but that said he was just as complex as me, and so he'd understand me. Being friends with him sounded like a good thing to risk.

However, part of me was still skeptical, trying to insist that everything was going to go badly. Leon had turned out to have made bad mistakes, signifying that he was a bad person. Then Julian had hurt Leon, and so maybe he was like that too. Maybe I'd find myself as disappointed in his friendship as I now was with Leon.