Chapter 21 Shared Suffering

Emma Stone - POV

The psychic connection with Cole feels like having my nervous system rewired with live electrical cables. Every thought he has crashes into mine, every memory I access floods into his consciousness. Through our forced bond, I experience his blackouts from the inside—the terrifying slide into unconsciousness, the awakening to blood-stained hands and problems solved in ways his gentle heart never wanted to know.

"The synchronization is accelerating," Ryan reports, his voice tight as he monitors both our vital signs. "Your neural pathways are creating mirror patterns. This level of psychic integration shouldn't be sustainable."

But it's happening anyway. Cole's decades of suppressed violent memories blend with my omniscience, creating a feedback loop of knowledge and trauma that threatens to drown us both. I see every person he hurt during his blackouts, and he sees every possible future where similar violence occurs across infinite realities.

"I'm sorry," Cole says through our connection, his mental voice raw with guilt. "I was trying to save you, not trap you in my darkness."

"Your darkness isn't darker than mine," I reply, letting him feel the weight of omniscient responsibility—knowing every choice that leads to suffering, every path that ends in loss. "At least your violence was unconscious. Mine is deliberate."

Through the original five-person bond that connected us all, I feel ripples of our shared trauma bleeding into the others. Ryan's medical precision wavers as he experiences fragments of Cole's suppressed memories. Blake's psychological defenses crack under exposure to pieces of my omniscience. Kai's synesthesia overloads trying to interpret colors that represent multiversal pain.

"It's affecting them," I realize, watching Ryan's hands shake slightly as he adjusts monitoring equipment. "Our connection is amplifying through the original bond."

Blake moves closer to my energy sphere, his usually perfect composure showing stress fractures. "I can feel echoes of what you're experiencing," he admits. "Fragments of infinite knowledge, pieces of every possible betrayal. It's like having someone else's nightmares bleeding into your dreams."

Kai abandons his easel completely, his latest painting nothing but chaotic black swirls with streaks of red that look disturbingly organic. "The colors are wrong," he mutters, wiping paint-stained hands on his clothes. "They don't exist in normal reality, but I keep seeing them anyway."

Ryan's medical readings show elevated stress responses in all three unconnected men. "The psychic network is distributing trauma fragments across all five bonds," he explains, but his clinical detachment sounds forced. "We're experiencing psychological contamination from your enhanced connection."

That's when I see it—the pattern Kane orchestrated from the beginning.

"This was her plan," I breathe, the truth hitting with multiversal certainty. "She knew that if one of us was forced into shared omniscience, the trauma would bleed through our bonds and affect everyone."

Cole's rage flares through our connection. "She's using our love against us."

Through the original bond, I feel the exact moment each of them begins making desperate calculations. Ryan's medical mind considers sedatives that might sever psychic connections, even though the dosages required could cause permanent brain damage. Blake's psychological training evaluates whether emotional manipulation might convince me to voluntarily suppress the omniscience, regardless of the cost to my sanity. Kai's artistic soul searches for ways to paint the trauma out of existence, even if it means using pigments and techniques that smell like desperation and madness.

"You're all trying to fix this," I say aloud, watching their faces for the micro-expressions Blake taught me to read. "But there is no fix. There's only endurance."

"There's always a solution," Ryan insists, but his voice carries the strain of someone clinging to logic in an illogical situation. "Medical science, psychology, even artistic expression—one of these approaches has to work."

Blake's charm facade cracks completely as he experiences another fragment of omniscient knowledge—every possible way trust can be weaponized across unlimited realities. "What if the solution is simpler than we're making it?" he asks, his tone carrying a dangerous calm I've never heard from him before.

"Meaning?" Cole demands through our connection.

"Meaning maybe the kindest thing we can do is end the suffering before it destroys all of us," Blake replies, his psychological training twisted by trauma into clinical assessment of mercy killing.

Kai looks up from his abandoned painting, his synesthesia showing Blake's words in colors that make him recoil. "You're talking about murder."

"I'm talking about compassion," Blake corrects, but his hand moves unconsciously toward the pocket where I know he keeps various psychological tools—including items that could serve other purposes. "Look at them. Emma and Cole are experiencing infinite trauma simultaneously. The kindest mercy would be—"

"No," Ryan interrupts, his medical ethics warring with his desperate need to end my suffering. "There has to be a medical solution. Induced coma, neural blockers, something that preserves life while severing the connections."

But I can see the calculations behind his eyes, the way his brilliant mind is evaluating drugs that would shut down consciousness permanently rather than temporarily. His love for me is transforming into clinical assessment of quality of life versus mere survival.

Kai's art supplies have been gradually shifting, paintbrushes replaced by implements that could serve darker purposes, pigments mixed with substances that smell like laboratories and desperation. "If we can't paint a way out of this," he says, his voice hollow with artistic defeat, "maybe we can paint a way to end it."

Through our enhanced bond, I feel Cole's horror as he realizes what's happening. The men we love are being driven toward solutions that would save us from suffering by ending our lives, their protective instincts corrupted by fragments of trauma they were never meant to experience.

"They're not going to hurt us because they hate us," Cole says through our connection. "They're going to hurt us because they love us too much to watch us suffer."

The monitoring equipment flashes warning signals as all three men move with subtle but synchronized purpose, each approaching their own version of merciful ending. Blake with his psychological precision, Ryan with medical efficiency, Kai with artistic finality.

"Emma," Cole's mental voice carries the weight of shared omniscience and infinite regret. "Kane didn't just plan our destruction. She planned to make our love the weapon that destroys us."

As I watch the three men I love prepare to save me from suffering through methods that would end my existence, I realize Kane's manipulation reaches deeper than I imagined.

She's not just turning our bonds against us—she's making our deepest compassion into the force that will ultimately consume us all.