Answerability

/ˌansərəˈbilədē/

noun

responsibility for explaining or justifying one's actions

I was pacing around when Luke's plane finally landed. While he had been one of the first to arrive back, he had to wait for the others to return before he could get out of his plane due to safety precautions. Despite this wrench being thrown into my plan of yelling at Luke, I felt my body slowly begin to let go of its anger, happy to be able to see Luke since the trip back had taken at least thirty minutes.

When Luke was finally allowed out of his plane, he made a beeline for me, throwing his arms around my body and holding me tight to him. Even though I had forgiven him for all that he had done in the past few hours to bombard me with ill feelings toward him, I was still in shock from his lanky frame being so connected to me.

"I am so sorry for how everything sounded," he said into my ear as our bodies rocked back and forth in a very corny, romantic type way. I rolled my eyes at him, knowing that he was trying to avoid a fight that would normally be inevitable; however, with all that had happened within the past year of losing people, I thought that I could move past this and be happy with this time I received with Luke.

"I didn't disconnect my radio babe," he promised, never once moving his head out of the crook of my neck as though he were scared to take it out. My eyebrows furrowed at this, not expecting Luke to react in such a way after a raid.

As I tried to pull back, I felt his arms clutch tighter to me, murmurs of 'please don't leave me' being left against my skin. That was when I put together that this raid had not been like most raids on any account. While I had been aware of that, I never expected Luke, the commander of our army, to be shaken up by something of this magnitude.

In spite of this mission not being an exact duplication of all of his simulated raids, I thought that this raid was a bit less stressful in the idea that he wasn't in immediate danger. How wrong could I have been? For someone who was petrified of him going into the air, I had never considered what he thought of being within the confines of air during a raid as opposed to having soil under his feet.

"You were scared?" I asked him, keeping my voice soft enough that none of the soldiers gathered around us could hear my shocked words. The men surrounding us most likely thought I was whispering that I loved Luke into his ear, little did they know that it was Luke who was saying those words as though they were a religious prayer.

The notion that Luke of all people had been scared on that raid set off red alerts within my mind as to how safe those planes were and how safe the colony as a whole was. Although I didn't want to cause a disturbance, I felt as though standing in the middle of the hangar with a shocked Luke wasn't helping the colony's morale.

"Let's get you home," I whispered, tugging him a bit further into me as I walked backward toward our room, never allowing him to detach from me and making the whole ordeal seem as though I missed him too much to bear the thought of not holding him. Despite knowing that Luke may not have needed me to protect his reputation, I felt the need to hold his needs before mine due to his immense love for me and willingness to show it.

As we walked through the halls, I began to feel Luke detach from me and make his way down halls at a faster pace than I could. By the time I was to the room, Luke had already changed out of his clothes and thrown his backpack into the closet for the next raid.

I shut the door upon my entry and sat next to him on the bed, finding that he wasn't as apt to be physically affectionate as he was before the raid. My throat felt raw as I took in the look of panic that was still plastered upon his face. It was as if he saw a person be completely obliterated in front of him.

"What happened out there?" I asked him, wanting to hear all about the raid and how he felt about it; however, he just sat on the bed with a blank look consuming his facial features. He stared intently at the wall, not saying a word and scaring me half to death.

"It wasn't the raid," he finally told me, looking down at his hands once before once again meeting my eyes, which were now holding mass amounts of confusion. "It's just that I've been-" He paused, his eyebrows furrowing as he thought about what he was going to say, almost as though he were determining if his words were too much for me to bear.

"I've been thinking about the night that I killed my father," he told me, his eyes dropping contact with mine as he sniffled lightly and tears formed within his blue eyes. I looked at him with care and adoration, two things that I knew he needed in that moment.

"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked him, wishing that he would open up to me, or anyone for that matter, but he remained stoic. I stared at his profile, hoping that he would turn his face and break down, but he never did.

Instead, he just took to blandly recounting the murder and found the least descriptive things to explain the way he approached the whole thing. Something within me died as I thought of how much he must have been leaving out of the story, but I couldn't dwell upon that because I knew that he needed to recover slowly just as I had to.

"Blood," he finally said, his word slicing through the silence in a jagged way as I stared at him with wide eyes, finally hearing a word that came to my mind when I thought of a murder. "It wouldn't stop," he explained as he looked down at his hands again. My eyebrows furrowed at his action, but I stayed in place, wanting him to figure out how to work past this.

"I got his blood on my shirt," he finally said in his broken voice that reminded me of all of those stories he used to tell me of his teenage years before coming to the colony at the young age of fourteen. "I didn't mean to," he began to cry, trying to convince me that he had never meant to get a piece of his father's deoxyribonucleic acid upon himself.

"I was just frozen and the blood just splattered everywhere when the bullet ricocheted," he said, looking into my eyes further, tears still coming out of his eyes at a rapid pace that I couldn't keep up with. Although I knew how messed up family could get, I had never experienced anything to this level, which is why I sat and allowed him to speak to me as he would anyone else.

Silence filled the room and echoed off of the walls as we sat next to each other, not knowing how to accept the fact that Luke, the precious blue eyed, blonde haired boy I had loved for three years was beating himself up for a crime that was not his exact fault. What he had done, killing his father, needed to be done.

And to think, I had been the person that had been accusing him only weeks ago when he returned home of having a God complex. I shook my head, not wanting to think of all the horrible things I had said to him that night. My mind didn't want to recall anything of what I said to him in fear that he would remember them and leave, but then again, he knew and remembered every last insult that I had hurled at him that night.

I had no answer for him in that moment. That was all Luke was looking for, he wanted an answer as to if he was still a good person. The boy sitting before me only wanted to know if he would be damned for the rest of his life for an action that he had no choice but to do in order to protect more people.

"He was involved with the government," Luke finally spoke, taking me by surprise as my head, which had previously been imbedded into my hands and between my knees, poked up and I sat up straight. Attentive to his words, I leaned closer to him and brought his hands toward me, rubbing his knuckles in a desperate attempt to erase his pain.

"That's the only reason they knew I was in charge," he whispered as his head shook in the same way it would if he were in shock. However, this wasn't shock, this was acceptance. Luke, somehow, knew that his father was involved with the government on some type of level that allowed them to have constant knowledge of where he was.

"Luke," I began, moving even closer as I tried to make my words sound as nurturing as possible. "Could he have-" my words stopped as I thought of the question, wanting to know so bad if he could have been like her, but also not wanting to push him into a deep abyss that I couldn't salvage him from.

"Could he have been like Janice?" he asked suddenly as if reading my mind. I didn't speak, my silence saying all of the words that I was too weak to say, but Luke's sigh told me all that I needed to know as I watched him run his hands through his hair in an anxious movement.

So that was what he was worried about.

"Luke," I tried to grasp his attention but all I could see were his baby blue eyes turning to a deep shade of blue that was almost the same color as mine. They were unrecognizable on the pale face of Luke as I tried to keep my emotions at bay as opposed to setting him off by saying the wrong thing.

"Luke, you are grieving right now," I told him softly, holding his hand tighter in mine. Before long, he turned toward me, no words leaving his mouth as he tried to communicate to me without them. His eyes were the most gut wrenching portion of this experience because all they seemed to be screaming was his guilt instead of his innocence.

"But what if I do have a God complex," he asked me, his tears falling down without control as I felt a piece of my heart break at his words, recognizing them all too well. My stomach turned into a ball of knots as I tried to convince myself that this wasn't happening, but it was. The words I had spoken without thinking of were coming back to haunt me as I stared at the broken man before me.

"What if I killed him to satisfy my ego or to try and prove that I am something I'm not," he asked me, losing all self control as he placed his head into my shoulder once again. I shook my head at his thoughts, regretting ever opening my mouth about the subject and realizing how horrible I was to him.

"Luke, listen to me," I instructed him, tilting his face so he would look at me. "You are good and kind," I reassured him, forcing him to keep eye contact by cupping his chin and holding it in place while I spoke. "And this is not your fault," I told him, hoping that he would accept that as reason enough.

"But-" I cut him off though, too afraid of the look in his eyes that shined with defeat and guilt. All I could think of was my actions and what I had done to ruin this beautiful man before me.

"Luke, you are truly one of the best people in this world," I whispered, my face coming close to his as I felt tears begin to fall down my face as well. "No one in this world has ever deserved you," I told him with unwavering feelings.

He paused, looking into my eyes for a few moments before actually accepting my statement and allowing himself to believe anything that I had said. Before long, he came back with his last question of the day.

"Will you still have me?" he asked as my heart broke into a thousand pieces. Never in my life would I understand how or why I was so blessed with this man in my life, but I decided that if he was happy, then I had no reason to complain with his decision to remain with me.

"Luke, I will always have you," I told him, rubbing my thumb against the fresh stubble growing on his cheek from his refusal to shave. "The question really is if you will have me." With those words, his eyes shimmered their original shade of blue and brought a peace to my soul that I thought was never to be found again.

His words though- his words made my soul shimmer and glow as he revealed one of the most genuine truths that I had ever been exposed to.

"I will always have you Melissa," he told me in his deep and raspy tone that signalled his body was aching for sleep. In the moments following, I felt my entire being blaze to life despite Luke and I's obvious tired frames.

As I fell asleep in the blonde boy's arms, I realized just how lucky I was to have a man willing to accept all of my obvious flaws for what they were and not complain. Maybe that was why it took so long for us to finally get together. It was with that thought, that I started thinking that maybe it was because we were so perfect for each other that some twist in fate wanted to extended our singleness since it knew we would never be returning to it again.