The Fate We Share, 4: Desperation
27 Feb 2022Meowers
A couple of days after I arrived home and checked into the Komotae Mental Health Centre, Jacqueline called again. There was desperation in her voice as she explained Ryan had been caught kissing the other boy, Daniel, and they had both been arrested and taken for conversion therapy. Then, she suddenly said she had to go and cut the call off.
I felt helpless. I was so worried, but there was nothing I could do until I got my licence back in another 5 days. I hate being unable to help, to resolve the situation, having to sit here with my pilot licence suspended, that was just..irritating the hell out of me.
But to get out of here I had to pass the assessments, which meant dozens of hours of those talks, after which the head feels like it was turned inside out and the tongue is like falling apart. And, speaking about tongue things, hah. Doctors and nurses here at Bluford were completely okay when they got to know that I completely swung that way. I mean, my sexual preferences. Even told them a bit about my exes, as a part of my past. But, knowing what kind of hell is going on at Bennett's Landing, I was..worried.
A few days later I had passed the evaluation and was discharged, and my pilot's licence was returned to me, so I immediately left the facility, boarded Marshmallow, and returned to HIP 116158 as fast as I could.
Jacqueline was at the medical centre and she grabbed me and dragged me into an empty examination room as soon as she saw me. Then she pleaded for me to help her. And she was scared as hell. She said she needed to get out of there and escape the colony. She said that after the boys had been taken for conversion therapy the security forces had taken her for interrogation to find out if she knew about the boys sexuality. She'd told them she had no idea, but the interrogator didn't seem to believe her. He said that if they ever found out she was lying that she would be imprisoned.
I told Jacqueline that we could leave in Marshmallow right away if she wanted, but she said there was something else first. The boys had both run away and gone missing after the first day of the conversion therapy. Somehow they managed to escape, but that luck won't last long. She said she thought she knew where Daniel was hiding, and that she could go and get him before we left, but she didn’t know where Ryan was. She had received letters from him over the last few days, but she had hidden them. She didn’t want them to be discovered, and had been too scared to read them herself. She asked if I could go to her quarters, retrieve the letters from where she had hidden them, and see if I could track the boy down.
In the meantime she would finish her shift so that no one suspected anything was wrong, and then she would go and get Daniel. Then we would all meet at her quarters and head to the hangars. I agreed with her plan and headed immediately to her place and found the letters where she said they would be. Then I sat, and read them...