To ruin an Omega novel Chapter 307

Chapter 307: What we carry forward

FIA

My mother was quiet for a moment.

"Like I said, every time that we falter," she said carefully, "the same thing happens. You find us. You tell me mostly to be strong and I do. I am strong. I try to be. You tell me. The cycle will be broken..." She stopped and then she started again. "But.. it feels like we will carry this damage into the next life and the next one. I can never get far enough away. I don’t think I can ever get far enough ahead."

I thought of my mother’s silence. All those years of it. The way she never talked about her pack, her family, where she was from. The way some questions made her go somewhere behind her eyes and come back slightly emptier than she had left.

But... she was wrong. She had gotten out. She had not have gotten away in every sense. Not entirely. Not from the inside of it. But she did get far enough. She got far ahead.

"It will be fine," I said. "You will live. It will all be fine at the end of the day. Your mother will live—"

"She won’t." She cut in, shaking her head. "You do not need to lie to me. I see glimpses of a grim future for us. Nothing for myself. But plenty for her. She dies in a pool of her own blood. I cannot even bring myself to tell her and I just have a feeling that it will be all because of—"

"Because of you?" I probed.

"Yes."

I looked at her across the room. The woman who had carried my mother through the worst thing possible and had paid for it by making herself into a reason to stay.

For a moment I could not answer her. The words sat heavy in my throat, tangled with a thought I did not want to examine too closely. I looked at the woman again, at the stillness that clung to her like a second skin, and something cold slipped into the space behind my ribs.

I had always believed survival was the victory. That staying alive, no matter how broken the shape of that life became, was the part that mattered most. It was the ending every story clawed toward.

But as I watched her sit there, unmoving and unreachable, the certainty I had clung to began to loosen.

What if staying had not been mercy?

What if it had been another kind of sentence.

The idea made my stomach twist, sharp and guilty, like I was betraying her just by letting it exist. She had fought so hard to remain. She had forced herself to breathe through years that never gave anything back. She had made herself into the reason my mother kept going.

Yet the thought kept creeping in anyway, quiet and unwanted.

What if death had once looked like rest to her. Not failure, not escape, just the end of the constant fight.

I hated myself for thinking it, even as I could not stop.

But the fact was the fact. Athena did not exist in our present and currently, Athena and my mother were each other’s cages.

"You get out," I finally heard myself say.

Mother looked at me in surprise. "What?"

"You get out," I repeated. "She needs to know that you get out. That whatever happens to her, you will make it."

My mother inhaled slowly.

"Fia—"

"She’s staying to protect you." I looked back at her. "If she knew you will be safe she wouldn’t have a reason to torture herself. It’s the only thing keeping her here. Her fear for you." I felt the truth of it settle into something certain and clear. "It’s the only thing keeping you here too. That’s what the cycle is. She stays for you, you stay for her. Something happens to her and then it becomes your burden. The shoe fits when passed around. And then one day it would become mine. The same thing. Perhaps with a different name. But the same nonetheless."

The silence that followed felt vast.

I could feel the tonic working at the edges of my consciousness. This dream was getting less solid. The torchlight was starting to blur at the periphery. I was running out of time in this place.

"Tell me I’m wrong," I said.

My mother did not tell me I was wrong.

"She’s already gone, Mom."

The words came out quietly. I had not planned them. They arrived already finished.

"Athena... Whatever happened to her, it already happened. I’m standing here. Which means you made it out. The future is not set in stone. Maybe your vision does happen. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe she runs too. Maybe she is found, or something shifts. But look at her, she’s already gone from this place. I know it. You know it too."

My mother’s breath came out unsteady. She pressed her lips together. The grief on her face was real and I hated being the one to put it there but I had run out of time for doing this gently.

"She doesn’t know that," my mother said quietly.

"No," I agreed. "She doesn’t."

We looked at each other.

I was fading. I could feel it. The stone under my feet was going less solid. The edges of the room were softening into something less defined.

"I don’t know how to make her hear me," I said. "But you do. You’ve been reaching her your whole life." I held my mother’s gaze. "Tell her. Tell her you make it. Tell her it’s done. Tell her she is allowed to go."

My mother looked at Athena against the wall. Long and searching, the look of someone reading a page they have read so many times the words have stopped being words and become something else, texture and weight and the smell of a specific kind of paper.

Then she walked into the room.

She crossed to the wall. She crouched down the way I had. She reached out and placed her hand over Athena’s, and this time there was no membrane, no resistance. Her hand covered her mother’s completely.

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