Trails (PP 1) [Complete]

14

14 - From Uh Huh To Uh Oh

~ Robyn ~

* 1 day later (May 2018) *

As Ethan gets in from patrol at 6:20am, I am stood in front of the oven, baking a banana loaf for today and prepping for a full English breakfast, minus the black pudding for us both, no bacon for me and no sausages for Ethan. I still always find that ironic.

"Good morning," Ethan says, leaning his weight on the kitchen door frame.

"Morning," I reply not looking round as I continue cutting up the mushrooms.

"Did you sleep okay?"

My actions pause very briefly before I continue like I hadn't stopped. "Kind of. Ended up cuddling the spare pillow."

"The one Niall used?" My face falls but Ethan can't see it. He sighs before shifting his weight slightly. "How did you feel last night?"

"Scared about how you shut us all out, I've never seen you so guarded." However, I know he wasn't talking about that.

"Robin Williams said I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it's like to feel absolutely worthless and they don't want anyone else to feel like that. However, you and Niall handle it differently as with the masks you both wear you're both dying inside."

"I'm already dead inside."

"You aren't. However, Niall is. He witnessed his mum's scarring death twice, had her mind-link him from the dead, had his third most trusted person betray him and mauled him to death. Has a dad who beat him but suddenly has done a complete turn-around. Lost his fourth most trusted person to this pack. Trust me, he's numb and all he can have the capability of feeling hurt. That is dead inside. Did you know that he just wants to wake up one day and not have any memory of his beatings, his mum, Stephen, me, most importantly you."

The knife gets lodged into the chopping board after I use too much power. "No one willingly wants amnesia," I grit out.

"Niall does so I think I settled the case of he's definitely dead inside." Ethan ignores my angry slicing of the mushrooms as he sits at the kitchen island. "He's not coming in today and apparently the others aren't comfortable going round when he looks after the pups so he asked me to drop his work off after school. Cian will be taking me round."

"Why are you two so friendly these days?"

"I had suspicions that Niall wasn't always completely with it when he flipped. I'm not really surprised as he's an Alpha wolf that was being beaten so I thought he was just displacing that anger, a reasonable theory honestly. However, I started to notice after Halloween it began to wear thin, he wasn't snapping as much as usual after he nearly ended up throwing Darre out the window in the gym. Like his wolf started going against the Alpha command due to something making his wolf realise it was wrong to do what he was doing so he started snapping less. Obviously, the January incident was when he really got hit with what happened so I'm guessing he tried to drinking to forget his sorrows."