Unhappily Ever After

Chapter 37 - Question and Answer

Dedication to @ayeitsjustellie who's been here for a long damn time. Thank you for sticking around and every vote and comment. She has some stories of her own if you want to check them out :)

"So ... I suppose you all know how pups are made?" I asked uncertainly the next afternoon.

It had been Eira's idea originally — a joke blown out of proportion and taken far too seriously.

But now I had thirty-odd boys between the ages of eight and seventeen in one of the back rooms. Eira was holding court next door with as many girls, and the easy tones of their conversation were drifting through the wall, punctuated by occasional friendly laughter. It was a stark contrast to the awkwardness in my room. Lee was leaning against the doorway behind me, occasionally breaking out in fits of sniggering, which wasn't helping matters.

"You need a guy and a girl," some twelve-year-old began, and he went on to explain the whole process better than I could have managed, albeit with a few unnecessary details thrown in there. He finished with, "And then the girl starts hurling all over the place and a few months later you got yourself a pup."

"Okay, that's a good start," I said and grinned at the kid. "Mort, do you wanna explain how birth control works?"

He ground his teeth together and glowered at me, but the whole room was staring at him expectantly.

"You gotta take them beforehand, see," Mort said shortly, "else they don't work."

A chorus of muttering broke out amongst the boys, most of it disbelieving.

"Girls can take it after!" one of them protested.

"Yeah, that ain't fair," another added.

"Bullshit," the twelve-year-old bellowed.

They started a minor riot in the next few minutes — throwing things at each other and jeering and swearing. I had to let my wolf out to get them all to shut up, and we had to backtrack to the baby-making process and review it until they believed me. The girls next door had gone very quiet; they were probably listening in and pissing themselves laughing.

"If you don't want to wait for the pill, there are plenty of other options," I pointed out. That branch of conversation took us into STDs and from there puberty, and after a full hour we had covered everything, answered every painful question and thoroughly educated the room. It was obvious they had learned everything they knew from each other, and most of the facts had got twisted on the way, like a gigantic game of Chinese whispers that no one realised they were playing.

I let them go off and have their dinner. Eira's lot were dismissed a few minutes later, and she spent the rest of the evening winding me up about the things she'd overheard. But, the next afternoon, the packs of children started hanging around the backs rooms. I wasn't sure what to do with them all, and they just kept arriving, until Eira had the idea of organising a baseball game out on the field.

They came back the next day, and the day after that. If the sun was shining, we played any sport from full-contact rugby to bowls. If it was tipping it down with rain, there were games of musical chairs or sleeping lions in the canteen.

By the end of the first week, I had invested in a projector, so we could just put on a movie and leave them to it. That only worked if they were already exhausted, however, or the movie theatre descended into chaos within the first few minutes. Someone would get pissed at someone else, and the two individuals would fight in the middle of the room while the other children lined the walls and cheered.

Between Ebony and my sixty-odd new children, raiding and training, chores and socialising, I didn't get much time to myself. There were some days when I didn't get to sit down between dawn and dusk. But when Wednesday rolled around, I dropped everything to spend the day at the valley.