“Walk with me?” Has Matthew changed? Absolutely. I’m still hesitant to take a leisurely stroll with him. We’ve been allotted a small window of rain-free time, and spending it on him isn’t the most productive use. Excessively wasteful, in my humble opinion.
“You’re probably doubting me,” he starts, “but you can feel the sincerity of my words.”
“Yes to both,” I verify, if for no other reason than a warning not to try and slip anything by me.
“I’ve met many Sumairs, Sheyla,” he reminds me. “Countless people beyond the Rebels. When you’re in a position to help people, they offer you what they can. Mostly, that comes in the way of information. What more could I have asked from them?”
“Well, you could’ve demanded allegiance to the Rebels.”
“I didn’t use the information to benefit the cause. Listening served the purpose of understanding what happened to us. It was a way to pass the time. Listening was all I ever offered them, aside from slowing down their depletion.”
I rub nervous circles with my index fingers and thumbs. “You didn’t offer them any words of encouragement? No hope?”
“You saw how I was before. Was I capable?”
I shrug. “Sometimes, what we’re capable of is pretty surprising.”
“How we choose to act is rarely surprising,” he counters. “Learning what you could do, I was insanely jealous. I saw this bright, spirited girl with the potential for greatness in everything she was, the opposite of myself. I became even more miserable over what I was forced into.”
“Handy you had all those mirrors for reflection, but what changed your mind?”
“Your righteousness where I had only hatred. You were willing to revert me despite your feelings for me,” he explains. “When you’ve done a specific thing for as long as you can remember, behaving a specific way for just as long, change isn’t easy. It’s terrifying, in fact. I needed a minute to process before I was ready to put things right.”
“You turned your back on your family to exonerate yourself? To put things right?”
“I wouldn’t say I defected, exactly. I pledged no loyalties to my father or his army.”
“Yet, you did warn of the danger in expressing opposing views.”
“Of course I did, as any sensible person would do when trying to maintain balance and order.”
I sigh. He’s right. Just being handy doesn’t make him a handler. He saved more people than he even realized. Rebel proximity ensured constant foot traffic, and while he didn’t view his ability in a positive light, that doesn’t change the good he did with it.
Perspective is a powerful thing. It takes something drastic to change the viewpoint of someone so firm in their ways. That something would’ve had to be much larger than a ranting girl calling him down in his hotel, especially when that ranting girl was swooped away from the same hotel not long after the confrontation. If anything, the swooping would’ve validated what he was saying all along.
His change didn’t happen because they took me, but it does get me thinking. How was it for my friends? What did they endure while waiting for news? What happened to Matthew that caused him to retract the views he held onto for centuries? “What happened after I left?”
“I was stuck in the middle of something Mel promised me I wouldn’t have to be,” he complains. “I had to justify what took place when, honestly, I wasn’t sure it was justified. They wanted to use you as their weapon and thought the Solathairs got to you first.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“No one got to me.”
“It got bad. They were in a panic. They needed someone to blame, and your friends had vacated the premises, leaving one option.”
“They blamed Dreyna.”
“She let it roll off her.” He smiles. “She has the most incredible way of seeing things outside herself...like her gift. She tried to be the voice of reason.”
“She stood up to them?”
“She did.”
“I can’t picture it.”
“She stood up for you,” he confirms. “She stood up against them all, and she’d have done it alone. I hadn’t seen that side of her before.”
“She didn’t show it. That’s why you didn’t see it.”
“She showed it when it mattered.”
“She didn’t have to stand up for me.”
“No, she didn’t have to,” he agrees. “I had it all backward. I was so very wrong about you. I had no clue what I’d caused her to be until she showed me what she truly was. I just couldn’t see past my self-pity to what I’d turned her into. I had this ridiculous hatred for what she did to me when what I did to her was far worse. But you brought her out of her inhibited state in the short span you were with her, so I wondered what else you could do. She changed so fast. One moment, she was this pitiful thing. The next…well, you’ve seen her. She’s radiant.”
“She is.”
He frowns. “I’m ashamed I couldn’t see it before.”
“You can’t see the beauty in someone who can’t see it themselves.”
“It was more than that. She was a new person. That was the moment for me. That was my exoneration from the hatred I felt. All of it. It just melted away, and I stood at her side. I helped her talk them down. We worked together to still the waters.
“My sisters were there not long after. They came to us demanding answers. It tore my heart in two watching Dreyna revert. We had a bit of a family quarrel. I’ll call it that, though that’s clearly an understated definition. I told Dreyna she didn’t have to help them anymore. She had no obligation to them. They tried to get my father to force it. He wouldn’t. He knew how important I still was to him. I was a tool for use.
“So, I let her go to her family,” he admits. “The funny thing is, she was only concerned whether or not I forgave her. Can you imagine? She didn’t think for a moment of anything my sisters or I did to her. She only wanted assurance I could forgive her for converting me into a Water Sumair. Her heart was that pure. I was wracked with guilt, as I well deserved, but I’ve spent the time since trying to make it up to her. I got to help them create this. I got to witness the energy transfer beyond blood. I got to see how wrong I was about Solathairs. They allowed me that. They allowed me to join them, even after what I did.
“I suppose I did defect. I departed from my preconceived notions of right and wrong, letting my heart lead me instead of my head. It was a tricky shift. It’s still a tricky shift, but we deal with it and move on. We’ve become a family of our own.”
I feel guilty for what I’ve taken from him. Would I be so gracious if I was standing around idly conversing with the murderer of my father? Doubtful. He hasn’t mentioned it once, but seriously, their family is a tad off in the tree balance division. Branches are falling off all over the place.
Family seems to be a loose term for Solathairs and Sumairs, generally tying more to loyalty than blood. Weird seeing how blood makes their world go round. Did, rather, in the case of the Amazon Coterie. Yay photosynthesis. Anyway, back to family. For example, there’s Connor, who didn’t give a second thought to abandoning his sister. To be fair, she did feel the separation strongly enough for them both. Then, there’s Tayte and his attempted daughter slaying. He wouldn’t have shown any remorse in watching either of them burn.
To me, family means faith, patience, and acceptance. That’s what my father taught me about family. I didn’t feel close to him growing up, but he wasn’t the one putting the wall up. That was me. I built such a strong barrier that he couldn’t breach it. It wasn’t until my sledgehammer ex-boyfriend appeared that things changed. Derry changed my life. He opened me up to possibilities I hadn’t considered before him. I got walloped again, throwing Brody into that electrical force field. He zapped new life right into me. A second chance to do things right. A second chance to screw it all up royally, more like.
Everything’s been wholly turned around on me. What was pulling me has started pushing me, what was pushing me has started pulling me, and it genuinely feels like the car I’m driving is running out of gas. I don’t know how much further I can go, but the sad truth is I’ve barely broken the seal on what I still have yet to do. Exoneration? Laughable. I’ll be lucky just to deliver myself to Fire Supreme without accruing any more debt to Karma. She’s got deep pockets, that one. Too deep for even someone as epically problematic as me to find the bottom.