{20} Butterflies

                                    

                                              
"Do you think he'll be alright?"
                          
Bella glanced up quickly at the concerned voice. Tina had come silently to sit beside her on the ground, backs leaned up against the warehouse. The air inside had been suffocating Bella, heavy with grief and regret. She had to get some fresh air, away from all of the sorrow.
                          
Tina nudged her in the side lightly. "Hey, I asked you something."

                          
"Oh, yeah, sorry," Bella apologized with a shake of her head, as if that could lift the weight on her mind. "What was the question?"
                          
"Do you think Julian will be alright?" the blonde repeated.
                          
Bella sighed heavily, staring out across the tops of her knees into the vast forest. The autumn leaves which had once shimmered in shades of gold now only appeared as a dull brown. The sun was hiding that day, and Bella felt like it was some sort of sick joke. The world had taken away the sun, right when they needed it the most. On the other hand, she mused absently, maybe the sun had gone to be with its child and would come back in a few days with a smile and maybe a postcard.
                          
"I don't know," she answered honestly after a moment of sad silence. "I have faith that he will, Julian is strong, stronger than anyone I've ever met before. I'm not quite sure what happened to him before he came here, but he was hurting. This will hurt him too, for a long while, but he'll manage to duct-tape his heart back together again eventually."
                          
"I hope so. We need him right now. We're all breaking too, and we need him to be our strength, but maybe he just doesn't have it in him anymore." Tina confessed, "I'm worried about him."
                          
"You don't need to worry."
                          
"You haven't been here for the rest of it, Bella. This isn't the first time we've lost someone to Morpheus. Where do you think he gets his army from?"
                          
Bella stared at her, aghast. "You mean all of his soldiers were kids once?"
                          
Tina nodded solemnly. "I have no idea what he does to them when he gets his hands on them, some sort of weird science shit, but they never come back. The next time we see them, poof, they're all grown up and pointing guns at our heads, brainwashed adults. You don't know how many people we've seen turn on us."
                          
"Does Morpheus kill them all?" Bella asked quietly.
                          
Tina shook her head. "No, and we never kill them either. Julian would never let us even if we wanted to. He's lost so much before, he doesn't even want to go through the death of an enemy at this point. Any life lost is a tragedy to him."
                          
Bella looked back over her knees, but then right back to Tina. The smaller girl was staring down at her crossed lap, but Bella could still see puffy bags under her red-rimmed eyes. "Are you going to be okay?"
                          
Tina looked startled that she asked, but after a few minutes of searching her face for signs of insincerity, she pressed her mouth into a tight line, eyes welling up with what couldn't have been the first bout of tears. "I don't know."
                          
Bella pulled Tina closer until her head was on her shoulder. There they sat, broken-hearted girls crying over a grown-up eight year old and a lost sun.
                          
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
                          
Tootles approached Julian carefully, as one would approach a snarling lion starved for three days. His feet padded gently across the warehouse floor. Julian didn't even look up as his friend approached, red-rimmed gaze fixated on a crack in the far wall, as if staring at it long and hard enough would push the concrete back into one piece and stitch up all the loose edges. The others watched Tootles quietly from where they had congregated in a deformed circle around the center of the room, save for Tina and Bella... and Curtis. There had still been an empty void between Tootles and Nick, as if the little boy had just gone out to chase a butterfly for a moment and would be back shortly.