The Hyenas {Dreamnotfound AU}

16. White Rim

George's POV

It's been the longest week of my life. When I still lived within the safe border, I never experienced someone dying. I had seen grief in others, and I sympathized with them, but I didn't understand it to the full extend. My grandparents were still alive, I never even had a pet dying. The feeling was foreign to me. But this week taught me all about it. I learned what it feels like to know you won't ever see someone again. Maybe I still have sixty years ahead of me, and in none of those I'll see Eret again. That's a hard pill to swallow. A lump forms at the back of my throat whenever I think about it.

I also learned that talking about how I feel is crucial. I tried to push it away the first days after it happened. I hoped the things I was feeling would just go away if I didn't mention them, but that's not how it works. Clay was incredibly patient with me those days, one more reason to want him around me.

I wanted to erase my memory of Eret. I wanted to forget our whole friendship, from the moment it started to the moment it had to end. The way we would take turns pushing each other on the swing set when we were little. When we traded our juice boxes, because one of us liked the other's better. The time I fell and he had to carry me home on his back because I sprained my ankle. The way he'd shoo away the wasps at the schoolyard when I got scared of them.

Our friendship took a more serious note as we grew up and became teenagers. Puberty hit us hard, and we were suddenly met with a lot more strange emotions we had not felt before. We sat with each other for hours, talking about our new, unfamiliar feelings. We discovered alcohol, and what it did to us, making our sleepovers even more laughter-filled, and our schooldays hung over. This was also the time Eret started to fantasize about leaving.

We became young adults, and Eret got tired of living in captivity. At least, that's how he viewed it. I didn't feel it quite as strong as he did. His desire to leave kept on growing as he imagined what life outside the wall could be. He wondered if maybe, just maybe, there was some sort of utopia out here, if there even really were blood-thirsty monsters like we had heard. He bought old books that described nature, and he'd paint the pictures he saw of it on his wall. Within three months, his whole wall was filled with compositions of trees, flowers, fields of green and all sorts of bugs.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise when he left, yet it still did.

I was hurt, I felt left behind. But I couldn't blame him. I tried convincing myself that I should hate him, but I just couldn't. He wouldn't want to live the rest of his life within the walls if they were suffocating him. He needed to go. And I couldn't blame him.

Some people say you can have multiple soulmates, but all on different levels. If that was the truth, Eret was one of them. Sometimes I wondered if he could read my mind, the way we were in sync with each other. We never had romantic feelings towards one another, but we had an unbreakable bond. A connection stronger than the gravitational pull of the Earth. And I didn't want a life within the walls either if it was without him. So I went after him.

I don't know what overcame me when I sat on top of the wall. It was already pretty late at night, and I knew I would have little time to find shelter if I went right at that time. But an invisible force prevented me from turning around and just going to bed, hoping that the next day would feel better. Maybe it was the sense that I knew it wasn't going to get better the next day. I'd wake up just as miserable as the days before that. So I jumped off the wall into the new unknown territory.

I knew the risks, I knew what could happen if the rumors turned out to be true, but I went. And if Clay hadn't pulled me from the street right then, I would have been dead. I wouldn't be here, inside a bunker with a snoring man next to me in bed. I give him a gentle poke after which he snorts, and resumes his snores, but a little softer.