Your responsibility - Masterminds #1, Chapter 8
Nya was relieved that Heila was still alive. Yet she couldn't forgive herself for not being able to help at such a critical moment... How long would it be until she finally took control of her powers?
The nightmares had stopped a few years after Nya had settled down with Heila at the penthouse.
But the memories of her past were still vivid in her mind.
That day, they had all come flooding back to her the moment Heila had dropped onto the floor. Her limp body had appeared out of thin air at dinner time, drowning in a pool of blood.
Fortunately, Dany had acted fast.
Dany… He was a nerdy-looking guy who had somehow moved in with them the day right after Nya had moved in. That guy who claimed he was Heila’s lifelong boyfriend and now, the penthouse’s official Mastermind trainer.
He had felt so clingy, almost desperate.
She couldn’t ignore the tension in the room whenever she and he would be by themselves. His mismatched brown and purple eyes would stare at her from behind his thick glasses and that glare… would pierce through her skin.
He was the Mastermind of Planets.
All she knew about his abilities were that things would start floating and flying around him whenever he needed them. At the core, he remained a mystery.
And at this critical moment, as Heila was on the brink of death, at least so it seemed, a mere gesture of his hand was enough to bring over a clean towel, their first aid kit and even a change of clothes from their bedroom.
“Nya, take the towel and spread it over the couch, I’ll carry her there.”
It had all happened in a flash. By the time Heila had been cleaned off and bandaged, Judy had arrived and taken over the situation.
Watching everything from the sidelines, she had felt so useless.
Now, there she was, sitting in the dark next to Heila’s bed, letting her tears roll down her cheeks, quietly, suffocating.
Dany was sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms. Judy had suggested that Heila should take over their bedroom entirely until she recovered. Besides, she was planning to bring a Witch-doctor the next day and she anticipated the room to smell like medicine and sickness for the next week at least.
Nya stared at Heila, her body dimly lit by the moonlight, through tears and black strands of hair. Her bangs needed a long overdue cut. They tickled her eyes a bit too often.
Heila had told her she meant to cut them once she came back. After a long bath. After having combed her hair. No matter how late she would be. It was the weekend after all.
Well, what a weekend it has been so far…
Her gaze fell onto Heila’s wrists, which were bandaged. She could see the dark spot of drying blood...
They had been lucky to have stopped the bleeding just in time.
Blood…
There had been so much of it… everywhere on the floor…
Nya shuddered. The last time she had seen so much blood was…
That day…
“Stop it, stay away from me.”
“But mommy, I want a hug.”
Nya had spread her arms wide open towards the tall woman in white. That woman had been taking care of her ever since her real mother abandoned her the day she was born.
“I’m not your mother.”
She couldn’t understand what she meant, but the woman’s face suddenly changed. It became distorted. Like a grimace.
Disgust.
“I know. But you’re my second mommy.”
That day… something hadn’t felt right.
She had just turned ten. And yet it didn’t seem like she had changed much.
Until she saw herself in the mirror.
Her eyes were pitch-black, like a bottomless void. Not even an ounce of white, no irises. Just pure black.
She looked around the room she had stayed in from the day she was brought there.
The white plain walls. The mattress on the floor where she slept. A small table, with a tray of her finished lunch. The toys… endless amount of toys scattered all over the floor. That was how she never got bored.
It all suddenly felt… suffocating. She felt trapped.
Except when she stared back into the mirror, into her own eyes… They were calling her somehow…
She was being pulled towards her reflection…
“Nya, dearie, what are you doing?” The woman’s voice had turned soft, but it was trembling.
As soon as her fingers met those from the mirror, her powers were unleashed.
And Chaos ensued.
She couldn’t clearly remember what had happened at the time, but she knew she had killed them all… all of those people in white coats who would come to check on her like she was their lab rat.
She had somehow destroyed the entire research base of The Oracles, brick by brick, causing as much harm as possible. Lead by the will of Chaos inside of her.
In the end, when Heila had come to fetch her, she had been standing in a pool of blood that didn’t seem to end, as if she had been walking in the middle of a red ocean…
She clasped her hand against her mouth as a series of sobs came out of her.
Until now, she couldn’t control Her. She couldn’t stop Chaos.
Back then, she knew she had let it happen, while deep in her subconscious, her powerless self had been crouching in the corner.
Yet, at the same time, she had seen and felt everything.
And she was ashamed of how good it had felt.
I hate myself so much.
“...Nya?”
She almost fell off her chair. She hadn’t noticed Heila turning around in her bed in the dark.
With her eyes wide open, Heila was now staring at her.
“...don’t… cry…”
Her throat was dry.
Nya quickly wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and grabbed the glass of water Judy had placed by her side to hand it over to her. Heila tried to sit up, but the sudden pressure on her wrists made her wince. Nya stood up to help her.
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” she said softly.
Heila gulped down more than half of the water, holding the glass with both hands.
Then, she shook her head.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve slept enough for today.” She looked out of the window. “Besides, what time is it? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“How could you worry about bedtime when you’re hurt? It’s past midnight but tomorrow’s Sunday so I don’t have to be up early.”
“Oh? What about training?”
Her weekend was usually packed with training sessions with Dany… and often, training would start as early as six in the morning. She knew the reason he was always so hard on her, even harder than when he worked with Ash and Ray… and she often wondered if he was that strict with his university students. An astrophysics professor in the human world and a Mastermind trainer at the penthouse…
“Dany has agreed to push our training to a bit later. As an exception for… all that’s happened.”
“Lucky you.”
“You’re the lucky one. I can’t believe you’re alive.”
Heila smiled. As if to say: don’t worry, killing me is harder than you think.
Nya couldn’t help but smile back. She noticed that Heila’s hair was gleaming like silver in the moonlight, falling all the way down past her shoulders and over her chest, all dishevelled…
“Do you remember when you fell from that tree and had a concussion? And it took months for you to heal?”
“Yes. That’s hard to forget. Why?”
“It just occurred to me that this feels similar… except the roles are reversed.”
Nya felt her cheeks getting warm.
“I’m sorry I was so much trouble back then.”
Heila laughed and shook her head.
“No one should ever apologise for being young.”
“But even after I got better, you kept worrying about me.”
She never told her about it, but she had even overheard Dany scolding her about how she was checking in on her too often and that, in his own words, she wasn’t a baby anymore.
But of course, Heila always did whatever she wanted to do.
“Well, I couldn’t just ignore the chronic nightmare episodes you had after that.”
In the first few years after Heila had taken her in, Nya had kept dreaming about the horrible white room where she had been imprisoned. And the killings…
So she would often end up waking up next to a sleepy Heila, either slouched on a chair by her bed or lying down next to her.
“I’m glad the nightmares stopped. I could barely get a proper night’s sleep.”
But I miss waking up with you by my side.
“I think Ash’s arrival helped. It was a good call to turn this penthouse into an entire ‘Academy’ for Masterminds so to speak.”
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
She suddenly heard a growl.
Heila looked down. It was her stomach.
She grinned. “Oops.”
Nya stifled a laugh. “Are you hungry? There’s some leftover chicken soup in the kitchen. I can bring some up.”
“Yes, please.”
She went down to the kitchen.
The lights were already on. She could smell the chicken soup being heated up on the stove. Dany appeared by the counter. He was holding a bowl filled with steaming white rice.
“Hey,” he said.
“What are you doing down here? I thought you were already asleep.”
“I heard your voices as I was going to the bathroom, so I figured I might as well bring some food upstairs. Heila has been out since afternoon, so she’s probably starving.”
“Oh.”
Nya didn’t hide her disappointment. After so many years of living with him, she realised that he could read her like an open book, even when she didn’t want to.
Even if he never admitted it, she could just feel it… through his piercing cold eyes, dissecting her like an insect…
Yet he never told her what he truly thought of her.
“I think you should go to sleep, Nya. I’ll take it from here.”
She didn’t want to. She wanted to be the one to bring Heila food. She wanted to stay by her side and talk the entire night, just the two of them like they used to when she suffered from those endless nightmares.
But she didn’t say anything and instead went back to her room.
D. K. Waye