So.
I turned around to see Callum looking at me, eyebrows raised.
This is it.
"Yep. What else can we do? We're done. There's nothing we can do now."
I am sure if we can get our vitals together, we should be able to keep it together. The bleeding will not affect us too much if I just push a little bit into the body.
"Then, when we wake up, I'll be overwhelmed without you and just pass out again."
Perhaps. We do not have many better options.
"We do. We can just give up and stop."
And why would we do that? We can still have a future together.
"And what about what we did in the past? All those people we killed. All of those kids, adults, all the terrible things we did. We lived a monstrous life. We screwed up so many happy lives, so many good relationships. We've done so much bad, the only good thing now would be to go."
Look, if you are giving up, at least hold on for me. I need you to sustain me, Brandon. If you're not around, I'll go with you.
"That's true, huh? Very well then. I release you from your duties."
Wait, no, no no! I did not mean it like-"
And with that, he was gone. I sighed and turned to the monitor, only to find that it had disappeared. I looked around. There was no equipment left anywhere in the mindscape, just me.
And a small movie player.
I sighed and turned it on. I'd heard about lives flashing before your eyes, but this was a little more bland than what I had envisioned.
It started with the memories from when everything was simple. I was playing in the yard of our old house in California while my mom planted flowers. I waved to my dad, who was watching from the distance, disguised as the mailman. Only I could really see through his disguises.
We moved to New York. My mom was trying to protect me from the monsters by keeping me close to the gods. It didn't work. I got in with Linus's gang. I got the Eye after a few months. I was brainwashed into becoming a perfect servant.
I got to watch myself kill my mother again. I was surprisingly numb to it; I'd seen it too many times already. I ran to Linus and told him. He comforted me. He didn't tell me it was his fault that I was this way.
I spent the next few years training to be a super soldier, not through my arms, through my legs. I trained my legs every day, dawn to dusk, until they felt like they would fall off. I kept going and going and going...
Until my father told me the truth about Linus, and convinced me to go to camp.
It took me some time to find it, but eventually I got to Camp Half-Blood. I spent the next few months happy for the first time in a while.
I got to watch myself fall in love with Ashley. At this, I frowned. I watched as we laughed and hung out and bugged one another, sneaking food around and playing Capture-The-Flag together. There was a stirring sensation in my stomach telling me that I needed to fight to stay awake, but I tossed it aside and continued.
I watched the quest from start to finish. I got to see the fun we had, the part where she left me, the many lives I took, the suffering. It was so much to take in at once. I checked the time. It was nearly over, only a couple of minutes left.
I looked back at the screen and froze. The last image was of Ashley bent over my body, crying as I lay motionless. She whispered, "Please, Brandon. I need you here." I felt a chill slowly inch down my spine as the projector shut down.
I was dying, and she was just now showing her love for me. Better late than never, i suppose, but this was crazy. I loved her, and I wanted to be there for her, but I couldn't keep going. I was in too deep. I couldn't escape Thanatos now.
Then, a song began to play. A small twinkling song from a random area of my mind. A song that filled my eyes with tears for no good reason.
A voice began to sing along to the melody. My mother's voice. I thought of how she would sing the lullaby for me when I cried or when I was sad or discouraged. It was a song about staying adamant and not giving up.
It was the song I needed. I began to try and restore myself. I concentrated as hard as I could on getting back together. I was suddenly well aware of the pain that I was in immediately after the song stopped. Good. that meant I was already becoming aware of the outside. I struggled to gather up my equipment again, locating every single bit of information that I could to somehow save myself. Eventually, I was able to regulate my heart rate again and push myself.
I opened my eyes and coughed.Ashley looked into my eyes with concern. "Brandon?"
I blinked.
She cried out in joy and caught me in a huge hug. I awkwardly patted her on the back.
"Uh...hey. I'm back."
"I can't believe it. You made it back." She sobbed into my shoulder. "You came back."
I gulped, preparing my next words carefully.
"I came back for you."
She seemed to cry even harder than before. I got extremely worried. Was this what girls did when they got the wrong message from a guy, or when they were incredibly happy? Would she like me later or hate me later? What was she thinking right now? Being a guy, it was hard to tell what exactly was going on inside her mind.
"Brandon, I love you."
The words came out in quick succession of one another. I shifted to look at her face, now flushed red.
We stayed there for a bit, just looking at one another.
________________________________________________________________________________
End of Part 3
The boy born of darkness and light,
The savaging man in the field,
Killing the young and the lost,
All victims would fall to his blade.