Here is Home • The Pack

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

Mitch wakes up hungry in the middle of the night. It's dark, and Jerome's snoring a little, lying spread eagle on his stomach, his arm heavy where it's draped over Mitch's back. Mitch debates whether he should risk waking him, but knows he won't be able to go back to sleep until he gets some food, so he shifts out from under Jerome's arm carefully and pads down the stairs to the kitchen, careful to avoid the squeaky step. Jerome only got in from work a couple of hours before, he needs the rest. When Mitch gets down the stairs, he's distracted before he even reaches the fridge.

Ruby is curled up in the laundry basket by the kitchen table, rooting around like she's trying to burrow down into the fabric, which would be funny if it weren't for the tears staining her face. She must have had a nightmare.

Mitch glances to the fridge, thinking of the sandwich in there he'd been heading for, and then back at Ruby, crying and alone in the middle of the night.

"Hey, kid," he says, making his decision, approaching Ruby slowly and scooping her up. "Come on, let's get you back to bed."

Ruby, still shaking from her nightmare, goes clingy as a limpet once she's perched on Mitch's hip. Sniffling, she clenches her little fists in the collar of Mitch's t shirt – or Jerome's t shirt, he should say, he rarely sleeps in his own anymore – and buries her wet face in Mitch's neck.

"Monsters," she mumbles, and Mitch's hardly ever heard Ruby speak, she seems content to sit back and watch the craziness around her most of the time, is actually really damn calm for a toddler. So when she speaks, it seems important, would seem important even if it weren't for the fear that so obviously clouds her quiet voice.

Mitch doesn't quite know what to do. He feels awkward, holding Ruby – has never been around kids before, really, let alone comforted them, he doesn't know how to go about it, is afraid he'll just make things worse. People have said a lot of things about him, but never has anyone said that he was a particularly calming person. He's not really qualified to make someone less afraid.

But it's not like he can just put Ruby down or anything, and the kid protests when Mitch tries to head up the stairs with her, obviously scared of whatever she thinks is up there. Mitch wonders what her nightmares are about. If the monsters are under her bed, or something scarier, if there are, to her, monsters lurking inside the other people in her room. Mitch remembers being young and scared. Mitch remembers his whole fucking life being scared. But he had a reason to be; there were monsters in his house that didn't bother to hide, that took the shape plain of his father. Ruby doesn't have that. Ruby has a good family, but she's only three, so maybe she doesn't know that yet.

So Mitch stays downstairs with her. He paces around the kitchen, because the walking seems to soothe Ruby, until Ruby's stopped crying and is just snuffling gently into Mitch's neck. Then he tries to head up the stairs again, but that sets off Ruby crying and kicking, and Mitch has to walk around the kitchen for another ten minutes before the kid finally quiets down.

Mitch knows he could just think fuck it, dump Ruby back in the laundry basket, go wake up Lachlan and tell her to deal with it, he's the fucking dad here. But Ruby is small and feels frail in Mitch's arms, except her hands gripping at Mitch are strong, and Mitch doesn't have the fucking heart to leave her.

Mitch really knows being scared.

So he just keeps walking around the kitchen and the living room, bouncing Ruby up and down a little, talking to her in a low, quiet voice. Mitch doesn't know how to keep the monsters away but he knows what's always made him feel better, so he tries that, he tells Ruby stories and tries to distract her, tries to make the world feel a little bit safer. He tells Ruby about a wonderful knight who's tall and strong with hair like sand and lives secretly in the house, fights off any monsters that might be out there with his fists and his words and a carefully concealed butterfly knife which he keeps in his boots. Mitch tries not to think about how fucking sappy it is that as soon as he thinks hero, he starts talking about Lachlan, but Ruby isn't old enough to understand the veiled descriptions, and it seems to calm him down a little. Weird how Lachlan has that effect. Even in his current job, which scares Mitch more every day, he's still Lachlan, he's still a solace in a world fucked beyond repair.