Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Healer's Story
Chapter 174: The Truth Of It All

Chapter 174: The Truth Of It All

"Is there anyone in this room not in love with my fiancé?" asked Bai Long Qiang, throwing his hands up in frustration. Whatever happened to the Bro-code?!? He knew it wasn’t an actual thing, but at the same time, most guys followed it.

And one of the most important rules was that your friends didn’t go after your girlfriend or your ex. It was just the way it was. Bros before hoes... not that he would ever put his other half in the second category, but he was working under the assumption that his friends...his teammates were.

Looking around the room, he waited for someone to admit that they weren’t in love with her. His eyes landed on Fan Teng Fei. If there was anyone that was not interested in women or love, it was the Monk.

"Don’t look at me. I know a treasure when I see her. And if you think for even a moment that I would be willing to give that up simply for you, you have another thing coming. The only reason why I didn’t make a move was that she never gave us an opening."

"But it killed her," murmured Rip. The five other men in the room snapped to attention at his words. As if one, they all spun around to look at the Reaver.

"She would talk about all of you, especially in the beginning. She thought it would be a matter of days before you found her and rescued her."

Si Dong turned pale, while Bai Long Qiang felt like he was going to puke.

"Then I had to break it to her that while she thought she had only been in the Camp for a week, it was actually closer to a month. Then, even more time passed. However, she never gave up on you guys. She told me all sorts of stories about all of you. How bad she felt that she was in love with five guys, how much it tore her apart not to be with all of you. But she refused to be disloyal to her fiancé."

Rip stared across the room, not meeting anyone’s eyes. He had sat there, on the other side of her cage, while she cried for each one of these men.

"And when you didn’t arrive by the time the first winter hit, she knew that you must not have made it. That whatever mission they had deployed you on when the EMP hit was enough to kill you."

That was the hardest winter for Rip. He had brought her into his cabin, but she couldn’t remember a single moment of it. It was like she was the walking dead. She did everything that she was told to do, but there was no one behind the wheel.

She still healed, still opened her eyes, still slept, but she had stopped talking.

Rip refused to mention it to her. Whatever had snapped her out brought her back to him, and he wouldn’t bring it up again. He couldn’t.

She stopped talking about her guys and her past. She seemed better, but Rip knew that it couldn’t continue.

"It makes sense," said Ye Yao Zu, and Rip realized that he had been talking out loud. "It was her way of surviving, both mentally and physically. She might have even completely wiped us from her mind until she saw Bai Long Qiang at the Camp."

"Is that possible?" asked Cheng Bo Jing, leaning forward to look at the man beside him.

"Easily. It’s called selective amnesia. Patients suffering from it will only forget some of the events during a certain period of time or only part of a traumatic event," explained Ye Yao Zu.

"But if that was the case, wouldn’t she have forgotten everything after the EMP hit? I mean, what happened then would be a traumatic event," suggested Si Dong as he looked around the room to see if anyone else agreed with him.

"Not necessarily," sighted Ye Yao Zu. "She might have gotten so used to living and surviving in the Camp that it became her new baseline against which to judge everything else. It would also explain why she would only feel safe in her cage. That was her new normal. Anything that happened before that would have been erased. Her brain might not have been able to equate the before and after, so it forgot about the before."

"And then we are back to the main question: what can we do to help her?" asked Cheng Bo Jing.

"I am going to assume that fighting over her like she is a favorite toy wouldn’t be all that beneficial," smirked Fan Teng Fei as he shot a look at Bai Long Qiang.

"Go fuck yourself," replied the other man. It wasn’t like he wasn’t willing to do whatever it was that his Kitten wanted; it was just that she never told him. He had no idea that she liked his teammates as much as she did. Apparently, he had no idea about a lot of things when it came to his other half.

He would need to change that, and fast.

Which would also require him to reign in his temper more than a little.

But it was fine. He could be whatever she needed him to be because she was willing to do the same for him. And she had.

She had all but begged him to stay home on that day, and he put the others before her, thinking that no matter what would happen, he would be able to get back to her.

And, in his defense. He did. But not before she completely shattered.

However, he would spend the rest of his life putting those pieces back together. And it looked like he wouldn’t be the only one.

Between the five of them, she would be the happiest woman in the world... even if they had to kill to make that happen.

"Six," smirked Rip as he studied Bai Long Qiang. He was looking around the room at all of the other men, and his shoulders drooped like he had come to a monumental decision.