We Will Rend

by Nicole Thorn

  I stared down at my feet. He had seen the entire show, and while it didn’t make a lot of sense, I wanted to hear his thoughts on everything that happened. Heracles had been so honest with me thus far. Maybe he could help me explain why I felt so strange. Angry but not angry, sad but not sad, anxious but not anxious. All these things warred in my head and I didn’t know what to make of any of them.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You can ask me anything,” Heracles said. “When I heard about the trials, I decided that I’d be here for you guys. I thought that maybe you would need me to counsel you.”

  I smiled at him, then turned to look at the ground again. My mouth felt dry. “What would you do… I mean, how would you feel if you found out that someone you loved or people that you loved had conspired to kill someone else that you…” I didn’t want to say love, because it felt wrong. I had always thought that I loved my father, but that wasn’t the first thing that I thought about when he came to mind. A feeling of profound loneliness washed over me when Dad popped into my head.

  “You want to know how I would have handled this situation?” Heracles asked.

  I nodded, looking up at him.

  “That’s not so simple a question to answer, unfortunately,” Heracles said, rubbing his hands together and staring at them. “Not when the gods are involved.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what Hera did to me,” he said. “You know that she made my life a living hell for a while, all because I was the child of Zeus. It wasn’t my fault what happened, but she still blamed me for it. Just like it’s never the fault of the people he sleeps with. They don’t know he’s Zeus when it happens, and even if they did, if they offended Zeus by refusing him, they would get killed. Yet, Hera still punishes everyone but Zeus for the things that he does. And it’s not just her that does that kind of thing. The gods have always attacked humanity for any perceived slight. They will again if this war goes the way they want it to go.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I hope that you never have to find out,” Heracles said, shaking his head.

  Except two split images started to rise before my eyes. In one, statues and temples dedicated to the Olympians had risen seemingly overnight. People bowed down before these, screaming like they would for a rock star. In the other image, different statues had risen, for different gods. Names flitted through my head too fast for me to catch them. Not only gods but giants and monsters. Humans didn’t bow down in front of these in awe but in fear. Their terror painted the back of my throat like acid. Both worlds smelled like fire and felt like chaos. Erebus would’ve loved it.

  I swallowed the bitter taste down, then looked at Heracles.

  He watched me warily. “Did you see something?”

  “No,” I lied because I didn’t know what I had seen.

  He shrugged, starting to get up. “If you want to know what I would’ve done… I probably would’ve done exactly what you did. You never get used to dealing with betrayal. But you need to figure out what you want to do because the gods are trying to break you.”

  “I thought they wanted to test us, to make sure that we could handle the weapon they want to use.”

  “They do,” Heracles agreed. “And they’re testing you by trying to see how much you can take before you shatter apart.”

  With that, he walked away.

  I stayed on the stairs for another twenty minutes before getting thoroughly sick of myself and getting up. I went back to my room and walked in to find Zander sitting on the edge of the bed, fiddling with something in his hands. He dropped whatever it was the second that he saw me and came rushing forward.

  His arms felt tight and secure around me and I loved that. I had always loved that, no matter what else had happened in our lives. The thought of losing that scared me, too. The thought of waking up one day to find Zander gone and that I’d never see him again, terrified me.

  “We should talk,” I said, pulling away from him.

  “Okay. Let’s talk. We can talk about anything you want to,” he said, his words rushed.

  I looked into his eyes and saw a desperate hope there. He knew that I wouldn’t leave him for this, or that I probably wouldn’t. Which meant that he had probably been thinking that I’d walk out on him the second Juniper announced how Dad had actually died. I felt exhausted all of a sudden.

  I grabbed the table that had been shoved to the corner of the room and dragged it out to the center. I sat down in one of the chairs and Zander took another, so that we faced each other. It felt weird to be looking at each other like that. Like we had a business deal to make and didn’t want to get too cozy.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Zander asked, his hopeful eyes watching me.

  I felt like a weight had been dropped on my chest. All the things, all the problems that we had, they seemed to press me down into the chair, suffocating me. I didn’t know where to start, what to say, how to explain to him without hurting his feelings, what to do if I did hurt his feelings. I didn’t know anything. I swallowed.

  Some of the hope had drained from Zander’s eyes by the time I looked up again. A small bit of guilt tugged on my heart, but I pushed through it. “I want to be with you,” I said. “That hasn’t changed. From almost the second that we met, I’ve liked you, and I’ve been in love with you for almost as long.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay,” he said. “I feel the same way. I love you a lot and I’m not going to let anything get in the way if you want to be with me.”

  “I do,” I said, but even I could hear the small hesitation.

  His eyes looked sad. “Are you sure you want to be with me?”

  “I’m positive, Zander,” I said. “I’m not sure what my life would be like without you in it. And I’m not trying to say that without you, I’d drink, and I’d be dead by now, or anything like that. I like to think that I would have gotten sober even without you. I’m talking about my future. I don’t know what my future would be like without you in it.”

  He started nodding before I even finished talking. “I feel the same way. But I get the feeling you’re about to say something that… maybe neither of us want to hear.”

  I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “We’ve got problems,” I said. “You know that.”

  His jaw worked, but he nodded again.

  I returned his nod. “We’ve got a lot of problems. Watching Kizzy and Jasper… I don’t know how they manage to spend that much time together, tell each other everything, and never seem to need a break. Maybe they’re just a different couple than we are, but I feel like… I feel like we hurt each other a lot more than they do.”

  Zander stared down at the table. “It doesn’t feel the same. I’ll be honest with you.”

  “I’m not going to leave you,” I said, straight out. “I’m not. It might sound insane, it might sound stupid, but I’m never going to walk out that door and not come back. I refuse to do that.”

  “I’d probably follow you,” Zander admitted, shrugging a shoulder. “I know it’s unhealthy and not right and… all these other things, but I wouldn’t know what else to do.”

  At least we agreed on that. We’d be stupid and suffer rather than letting the other one go. That thought should have scared me more than it did, but I honestly didn’t know what I’d do with myself without the wooing contests and the battles over small things that brought us joy. I thought my life wouldn’t feel real anymore. “So, if we’re not going to leave, then we need to figure out how to stop… hurting each other.”

  Zander frowned at me, shifting in his chair. “Do you want to just start again?”

  “I don’t think that’ll work,” I said. “I think from the beginning, we’ve had these problems and we pretended they didn’t exist. If we start fresh, we’re going to find ourselves right back here in six months.” I glanced around the hotel room. “Well, hopefully not right back here.”

  He smirked bitterly. “I
f the gods ask us to go through another set of trials, I’m going to take the consequences and say no.”

  “Yeah,” I laughed. “And it’s terrifying too because we don’t know what’s a trial and what isn’t anymore.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “Okay, if you don’t want to start over, then what do you want to do?”

  I licked my lips. “I think we should lay it all out there. Again, it might sound like the dumbest thing ever, but we should say everything that bothers us and go from there. I won’t get upset with anything that you have to say, Zander. It can’t be worse than the things in my head.”

  “Okay, let’s do it,” Zander said. I knew that he was grasping at straws to fix what we had broken, but I wanted to make sure that he understood what this meant.

  “You can’t get upset either,” I told him. “No matter what I say.”

  Zander shifted around. “I’ll try not to, but…” He shrugged.

  I sighed, looking down at the table. I knew that was the best we’d get. “Do you want me to go first, or do you want to go first?”

  “You go,” he said like I knew he would.

  “The first thing I want to talk about is—”

  “My overprotectiveness?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “We’ll get to that in a second, but the first thing I want to talk about is how you take the blame for everything.”

  He looked startled by what I had to say.

  My mouth opened, but it took me a second to figure out where I wanted to go with that. “I know that you don’t do it on purpose and that there are good reasons that you take the blame for everything, but it drives me up the wall. It drives all of us up the wall because we can’t do anything without you coming in and—”

  Zander shifted. “Getting in the way?”

  “I guess so?” I said. “I feel like I can’t fuck up because I’m not just fucking up for me. I’m fucking up for both of us. I’m a mess, and I know that I’m a mess, but I’ve literally never felt like I could show it. When I was little, my father would always go on about how I had to cheer everyone up because Jasper and Juniper could never find a smile, and now I have to keep doing that, because if I screw up, then it’s your fault. And it puts a lot of pressure on me and on everyone else not to screw up around you, because if we do, then you’re going to only make us feel worse.”

  He looked like I’d slapped him. “I make it worse.”

  I closed my eyes. “Yes.”

  He rubbed his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that I made you feel like shit all the time.”

  “I didn’t say it was all the time,” I corrected immediately. “I said that I feel like I can’t fuck up, and I’m the kind of person who is going to fuck up. I know it.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not taking the blame for everything,” Zander said. “There are a lot of things that are my fault.”

  “No, there aren’t,” I argued. “The decisions that other people make are not your fault. The only things you can be held accountable for are the things that you do. The decisions that you make.”

  “But sometimes I make a decision that affects other people. Like when I walked away, and you got drunk.”

  “Zander, I had been thinking of drinking for four days at that point.”

  Zander

  T he worry hit me first. If it had been days, then it opened up this whole new thing where I had to wonder how many times Jasmine had been thinking about falling off the wagon. I knew recovery was more complicated than I could ever comprehend but still, I’d missed it all. I’d been at her side, and I’d totally missed her struggle. Yet she sat there and told me it wasn’t my fault.

  “You didn’t tell me,” I said.

  Jasmine shrugged. “What was I supposed to say? You would have freaked out. Either you would have thought it was you, or you would have started hanging over me constantly. That would have only made me want it more. I thought I could get through it on my own.”

  “Can you not do that anymore then?” I asked. “If you’re tempted or you’re struggling, I want you to tell me.”

  “Can I tell you without you going overboard on the self-blame or the protectiveness? Because sometimes even a talk could get me out of it. I need you to be my boyfriend. Not a parent. Not a guard. My boyfriend.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m going to need help with that. Since I literally had no idea that blaming myself hurt you, I need you to tell me when I’m doing something problematic. And I don’t know the first thing about not taking the blame when it feels like my fault.”

  “I can do that. But I think it starts with you realizing that the whole world isn’t on your shoulders. Our lives aren’t on your shoulders. The things that happen around you aren’t your fault, just because in theory, something you could have done might possibly have changed the outcome. That doesn’t make it your fault. It’s a tiny chance in a world of a billion possibilities. It will only make you crazy if you take all that on. If you decide that no matter what happens, you could have fixed it if only you knew the exact right choice in the billion there are and made that choice in the exact right time. It’s literally not possible.”

  “If I’d been better, then maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to drink.”

  Jasmine sighed, staying calm. “That’s not how this works. You could have been any form of yourself, and it wouldn’t have changed a thing. I was going to find a reason to do it. Maybe I would have been really happy and wanted to celebrate, or stressed, or sad. You need to accept that.”

  Again, I didn’t know how, but I had to try and figure it out. “There’s going to be a lot of fuck-ups,” I said. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  Jasmine smiled. “Neither do I, so I guess that makes us even. Next, we should talk about your overprotectiveness. I guess it goes with the blame, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe. I grew up in a house full of foster kids, and some of them were pretty messed up. They liked to screw with Kizzy, and she didn’t want to hurt any of them. I lived in big brother mode for most of my life.”

  Jasmine nodded in understanding. “I get it, but it comes across like you think the rest of us are incapable of keeping ourselves safe.”

  “I don’t feel that way. Not at all.”

  “I know that, but it still feels that way. I understand that if anything happens to us, you feel like it’s your fault for not stopping it. As much as it worries you, you have to accept that we’re gods now. We’re stronger than you, and we can hold our own.”

  In my head, I knew that. It didn’t make it easier to watch my family going off and attacking monsters. I’d only ever known the seers to be humans, and it would take a long time to get used to the fact that any one of them could kill me with little effort. That was a good thing. I liked that they were strong. It just did nothing for my fear.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “It’s a little hard to relax when I’d found your dead body. I can’t explain to you what that day was for us, Jasmine. I’d never been so afraid.”

  She touched my hand, her fingers squeezing mine. “I have no idea what that feels like. I was dead before I even knew what was happening. All I can do is promise that it’s not going to happen again. Things are different now.”

  I nodded. “I’ll work on the problems I have, but I know it’s going to be hard. I think the best thing we can do is when something happens, we tell the other one. Secrets aren’t worth it. Keeping our feelings to ourselves doesn’t spare anyone in the end. That’s not what Juniper and Verin do, and it’s not what Kizzy and Jasper do. They’re honest, and it helps them.”

  I didn’t realize that it hurt me as much as it made me happy to see Kizzy with her husband. It was literally everything I’d wanted for her. Kizzy had started healing, and with the exact kind of person I would have handpicked for her if I could have. Jasper was patient with her, kind, and the exact opposite of me or Verin. He took care of my sister in all the ways she needed it, while still letting her take care of herself.
They had something I wanted. They didn’t lie to each other, they didn’t have any issues in the relationship. They were so solid that they could get married as fast as they had. If we managed to survive the war, they would probably also start their own family soon. They were miles ahead of me and Jasmine, and I shouldn’t have been so jealous. But I was, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

  “You’re right,” Jasmine said.

  All the problems she had with me had been laid out plain for me to see. This would be the hard part, being honest with Jasmine about the things she did that caused me pain or worry. She was so fragile right now that I wanted to pretend that nothing she did bothered me. Work on my stuff and let her be. But that was the problem with us, and it would only make things worse.

  I took a deep breath, laying my free hand out on the table. “I think you already know the problems I’ve been having with the two of us. You’re reckless and it terrifies me. I know that you’re a god now, but that doesn’t mean you’re unkillable. You run out into danger, and you think it’s fun. You don’t seem to have any regard for my feelings about it.”

  She watched me, constructing what she would say. “I care about how you feel.”

  “Okay, but it feels like you think it’s stupid that I worry so much. Like you’re untouchable, and that means you should get to go off and do anything you want. There are some things that are beyond even you, and you have to accept that. It hurts that you can be so callous with your safety when you know how scared I am that I’ll lose you again.”

  Jasmine gave a nod. “I’m sorry I’ve done that. I guess I was excited to finally be strong. I saw you and Kizzy, and then Verin, all going off and being the heroes. Then I got a shot to do hero stuff, keep everyone safe, and it went right to my head.”

  I understood that. “I think the best thing we can do is approach threats like a team now. No one of us should try and go off and do something, and all our plans need to be formed together. It’s all of us or none of us.”

  “That’s probably the smartest thing to do. I’m going to try not to get in over my head. I don’t want to do something that’ll give you another reason to worry about me. I swear I’ll avoid running into any danger on my own.”