seven souls seven sins - Chapter 43: Chapter 43

Xavier's pov:
As soon as she walked through that door I turned the opposite direction, towards the back entrance of the school. That's where Xander was. After a fight he usually goes there to smoke to relieve the adrenaline and pain. If anything he was definitely there. He has to be.
I need to talk to him.
I jog through the halls not wanting to waste anymore time. When I arrive, I spot Xander sitting on the steps with a cigarette in his hand. There's nobody around us as they're all in their classes. It's just us two. He doesn't see me yet but he can sense my presence. "You should be in class. " He mentions.
"You should be in class with me." I reply back and walk up to him.
I grab the burning cigarette in his hands and drop it to the floor. I stomp on it with my foot and crush it to dust. "Smoking kills." I say and sit beside him. "Smoking relieves stress." He responds back nonchalantly and reaches into his pocket for more. I swat away the packet from his hand and throw it down the steps.
"You're an ass." He mutters and looks down to the ground.
"The real asshole is Harper." I defend myself with the truth. "True that." He lets out a bitter laugh. "Want to talk about it?" I offer. He looks up to the horizon. "I don't know if I can." He admits with a wobbly voice and looks back down. I scoot closer towards him. We're touching shoulder to shoulder.
I watch him fiddle with his fingers.
His bruised and bloody knuckles look painful to watch. His face has an open wound that needs to be treated quickly or it will get infected. "You need medical attention Xander." I try to persuade. "No I don't." He immediately denies. "Yes you do. We can't have one of our best players be injured before the final next week."
"It's not gonna get infected, relax." He declares again.
"Yes it will. Doing nothing won't help it heal." I confront. "I'm not doing nothing. I'm letting mother nature work her magic." He replies back taking the piss. He's not being serious and I've had enough of it. "You need to take care of yourself man." I finally tell him. "You can't keep destroying yourself like this. It hurts to watch you suffer."
"OH YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT BEING HURT?" He suddenly snaps and rises to his feet.
"HARPER CAN PUNCH ME AS MANY TIMES AS HE EFFING WANTS BUT HE WONT KILL ME. WHAT KILLED ME WAS WHEN SHE LEFT. " He infuriatingly shouts. His hand reaches his nose bridge and rubs it in anger. He sighs and sits back down. "For fucks sake." He murmured to himself.
"Sorry." He apologised with a loud sigh.
I haven't seen Xander show this much emotion since he was 8. "Her leaving broke all of us." I admit and swing one arm over his shoulder. "You're not alone." I add hoping that he'll feel more comfortable. "It feels like it." He confesses. "You're not Xand. Besides, she's back now. You don't have to worry about her leaving ever again."
He's scared that she's going to leave.
"She won't even want to talk to me ever again after that stupid stunt that I pulled." He shamefully said. "I don't even know why I did that. I-I was just so overwhelmed with Nico's taunts and the way he acts with her that I took it out on her. I hated how she took his side." He pauses whilst his lip trembles. "There's something wrong with me and I don't know how to fix it Xav." He looks up to me with watery eyes.
I haven't seen Xander cry since she left, 9 years ago.
"I was talking with Vincent last week about my behaviour towards her. He claimed that I'm treating her like father. Is that true too? Do I act like that cunt with Nat?" His shakily voice asks me. "You did when she first arrived." I admit. His eyes close trying to contain the water from spilling.
He must feel so horrible right now. My heart shatters for him.
"But I've seen you change Xand. Over the past week, you've changed. You're warming up to her it just took a week that's all. I know you love her, we all do. It just took you some time to adjust to her." I try to cheer him up. "THATS NOT GOOD ENOUGH." He snaps again.
"IM NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR HER! SHE DESERVES BETTER!" He lashes out.
Water flows from his tear ducts. "Fuck man. I'm sorry." He immediately apologises. He lets out a frustrated sigh and tilts his head back. "It's just that I feel like such a shitty person for treating her the way that I did. I hate it." He admits. His hands cover his face. "You're not a shitty person Xander." I declare. He needed to know that he wasn't a bad person.
He just made bad decisions.
We sit there in silence. I don't want to trigger Xander too much. He's been through a lot. "I know you love her, you just need to let her know that." I rub his back as he breaks down. "I'm tr-trying, but every time I try I always seem to mess things up. " He sobbed. It breaks my heart hearing my twin cry like that.
It really does something to a person when you hear your loved ones break down.
Xander's pov:
I feel Xavier's hand rub up and down my spine. He's doing his best to comfort me, and I'm grateful for every second of it. I don't deserve him as a twin. He deserves better, just like Nat. My whole family deserves better. I'm not good enough for them. Everything that I do I always fuck up.
It's too repetitive and I just can't take it anymore.
I lost the one thing that made me feel better about myself. I lost her. I had so much pent up rage and I retaliated using Nat. She probably won't even look at me the same anymore. I wouldn't either if I was in her position. I love her to bits but I can't find a way to express it.
I just can't.
No matter what I try I just can't. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm just a disappointment to everyone. I'm not the co-captain of the football team, Xavier is. He's so good at everything, with sports, school, Nat. He knows how to handle and manage everything to tip top perfection because that's what he is.
He's perfect. He's the golden child.
That's what I don't like about being a twin. We're always compared to one another. When growing up with father, he would always punish one of us if we did worse than the other. Whether that's a test score, a football game or whoever can lift 100kg. It was always a competition between him and I.
I always lost.
Father's logic was that if you lost, then he would beat you until you achieved better. Unfortunately for me, I never got better. Xavier was always the winner. He was faster, better, smarter, stronger than me in everything. I couldn't compete no matter how hard I tried.
The motivation that once helped me had left, she left.
Without Nat, I couldn't even perform basic tasks. It was like I needed her to function. Losing her was like losing myself. But it was worse, because she was out there, I just couldn't get her. At 14 I turned to drinking and smoking as a result of her departure. The combination filled the empty gap in my heart.
It made me feel better.
It helped me cope with her leaving. I knew that it was bad for my body but I couldn't help it. I was still in denial after all those years. I just couldn't move on like everyone else. They didn't understand. The thought of her kept me up at night. It pained me not knowing that one day she could die and I wouldn't even know about it.
It hurt like shit.
I resented my father for it. He was the one who did this. He was the one to blame. He sent Nat and Mother away because he got fed up with having a girl in the house. He claimed that having a daughter made him appear weaker. He was such a prick. He treated all of us like assets instead of children.
Stuff like that really damages a person.
It changes a person.
It changed me. Since Nat's arrival I've been nothing but a cunt towards her. I degraded her with verbal cues and physical violence. What happened to me? When I first heard the news of her arrival I was in denial again. I couldn't cope with it. All the years of endless suffering just for her to return home.
All it took was a change in guardianship for her to return home.
That was all it took. She could've been home years in advance. I could've been with her for all those years. YEARS. I can't explain it but I was furious. I built up all this inner rage and unleashed it on Nat. My darling. I hate myself for it. Each day that I see her is a day that I regret everything rude that I've ever said to her.
I need to make it up to her.
Natasha's pov:
I'm walking down the school stairs trying to find the girl toilets. This school is so freakin' massive and yet it doesn't have any signs. Whoever the architect was for this building, I need to have a chit chat with them because they did a horrible job. As I reach the bottom of the stairs, I spot my locker, with all the dried up blood.
YUCK. I gag at the sight.
In Portuguese class, Flynn helped calm me down and we talked about what happened. Apparently he doesn't trust Nico too. He does agree with me that Xander overreacted a bit but Flynn said that he would've done the same if it were him. It must be a brotherly sense or something.
I don't get it.
I move my attention away from my disgusting locker and towards the back entrance of the school. It just so happens to be my luck that the unisex bathroom is right down the hall beside the back entrance, how convenient. I make my way towards the bathroom opening when I hear someone call out my name.
A familiar male voice calls out my name.
It's echoing from outside, near the back entrance. I do a quick scan through the halls to make sure that I'm not hallucinating and I walk towards the noise. At first I don't spot anything. 'Maybe I'm just paranoid' I think to myself. I hear my name being called again and that's when I decided to look down towards the steps.
The twins.
Xander and Xavier are sitting beside each other on the steps. Xavier calls out for me to join them and pats a spot next to him for me to sit down. "Ew there's bird poo on the steps, is this a prank?" I ask him with one eyebrow raised. They both let out a laugh at my words.
"Oi! Scoot over." I demand and they move away from eachother which leaves a gap in the middle for little ol' me.
I cautiously walk over towards them and sit down. "How did you know that I was over there?" I curiously ask them. "I can smell you a mile away sweetheart. Your signature scents of berries, sugar and vanilla are unforgettable." Xavier explains.
"I smell like jam?" I raise a brow.
Xander and Xavier let out a chuckle at my puzzled face. "Now that you mention it, you kinda do." Xavier plays along. I whack his arm and he laughs again causing me to smile. "In all seriousness though, if you wanted to sneak up on someone you would have to first annihilate that scent before you do anything. It's a dead giveaway." He elucidated.
Xavier has too much brain power within him.
"Okay well that doesn't matter because I wasn't trying to sneak up on yous anyways. I wanted to use the restroom that's all." I shut down his theory. "It's still useful information Gorgeous." He adds on. "Mhmm sure." I sarcastically glance at him. I then turn to look at the both of them. That's when I notice Xander's face. He had an opened wound on his forehead and his eyes were red and puffy.
Huh. Was Xander crying?
Nahhh, no way. Xander is one of those people that would probably have never cried in their life. The people that act stone cold and don't appear to have emotions or feelings in general. Xander fits in with those types of people for sure. But if he wasn't crying, then why were his eyes like that? I came up with the most reasonable conclusion.
"Did you get stung by a bee?" I ask confusingly and tilt my head.
Xander bursts out laughing and Xavier's mouth drops wide open. "Whattt? There's no way that Xander freakin' Morales was crying so being stung by a bee was the next thing that I had in mind." I defend my reasoning. Xavier's eyes soften and Xander looks down to his feet.
Shit, I made things awkward again.
It's always my loud mouth that ruins conversations. "Sorry." I apologise and rub my arm. "Don't be." Xander speaks up. His groggy voice is so different compared to his usual strong one. A gust of wind hits me like a ton of bricks and my hair flies all over the place. Xander moves majority of the strands out of my face for me.
"Thanks Xand." I gratefully smile at him.
"No problem Nat." He replies back lowly.
His eyes are still red from whatever he was doing earlier but my attention is mainly fixated on the bloody opened would on his forehead. "Your head looks sore to touch." I accidentally murmur out loud, Shit, that was meant to be to myself. He lets out a little sad chuckle.
"It is, but it'll heal soon, don't worry." He assures me.
I lean forward and kiss his temple softly. "Better?" I ask with a smile appearing on my face. "Much better." His eyes soften. I lean back and let my head rest on his shoulder. My eyes wander towards the horizon. The view in London is incomparable to Brazil. Even in school, this country looks magical.
It feels magical too sometimes.
I hear some rustling beside me. I turn to face Xavier and he whips out three starburst sweets from his pocket. He holds them in his palm. "Are those from your pocket?" I ask confused. "Yes ma'am. They've been in there since the start of the school year." He announces proudly.
"Gross!" I make a disgusted face.
"Oi, pass me one ay?" Xander holds out his hand. Xavier places a red starburst in his palm. I watch in horror as Xander opens up the sweet from its packet, AND EATS IT. "Ew ew eww! Get away from me!" I squeal in repellent. I squirm away from the twins and stand up on my feet.
They start to chuckle at my discomfort.
Xavier opens his one and tosses it into his mouth. I gag at the sight. Gosh, boys nauseate me. They both look at each other and smirk. Uh oh, this must be some twin telepathy shit. They both stand up and look at me. I back down the steps unsure of what they're thinking.
It's definitely something mischievous, that's for sure.
I watch Xavier's hand slowly unravel the last starburst to reveal a pink cubed sweet. They lunge towards me and try to put the sweet in my mouth whilst I playfully shout in protest. Xander starts to tickle me to distract me from Xavier. When I started to giggle they did too.
Our laughter consumed the atmosphere.