AUTHORS NOTE: Hi, guys! For those of you that indeed, did not fan me, you're probably wondering why it took so long for me to update. Truth was, I didn't know where I was going with this story. Another truth: I am 100% winging it. The beginning of this chapter has something that has to do with what happened to me in real life just a couple days ago. A few of my friends know what happened, but you all dont. I lost a storage unit with all of my belongings in it - and the aforementioned things in this story - the cards, arron's dad's cards? Same for me. All the things aaron lost in this chapter, I lost as well in real life, except for the house. So, inspiration for this chapter came pretty bittersweet. I figured you all have had to wait for so long, you're probably gonna want more than this. Trust me, tomorrow I'll begin writing the next chapter of this story. This is chapter friggin' 18! I'm kind of psyched to hit the big twenty - but of course, that's two chapters away. LETS HOPE I GET THERE FOLKS! Intermission over!
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
There’s something extra painful about losing everything you’ve ever known. I’ve lost everything – twice.
This time would make the third.
For the most part, after I’d woken up, the shock and the pain had kept me from realizing how exactly big this was. A few more payments and I would’ve owned it. Just a few couple thousand away from having a place where no one could hurt me. Having a home. A place where I could be safe.
I had my whole life in there. Everything I ever cared about or owned.
The few toys I had been given as a kid, packed up because I could no longer look at them but I couldn’t throw them away, either. My dad’s old collection of cards that were probably worth more than four grand. My personal box of cards that I cherished. All the furniture I had worked to pay for. My old Nintendo I got a long time ago from a charitable woman who had been my foster mom. It had been a welcome home gift, my first day as their child, really. She’d let me keep it even after she returned me only a month later, after finding out her husband was a closet child molester. My grandparent’s anniversary music box my mom had given me as an infant to listen to. I loved falling asleep to that thing. My dad’s jewelry box; the dog tag he always wore that mom had gotten him, one I never remember him taking off. My Dvd’s. My books. The biggest kicker and yet the smallest is…the last present my parents had ever given me was in there. Everything that made up ME. All of it.
Gone.
It kills me to know I can’t do anything about it. Though I don’t hold it against Alex – he saved all of our lives doing that one ingenious thing – it still feels as if everything I worked for, everything I collected and loved, was stolen from me.
I felt violated in the most intimate, note-worthy way, and the sad thing is I knew this feeling. Knew it like a brother knows a brother. I was no stranger to being violated, to having things broken and being taken from me. I should have known. Should have known it would happen again.
I know these things are just material possessions. But these material possessions – they hold sentiment you can’t buy. Memories you can’t get back. They HELP me remember. And I don’t want to forget. The scariest thing I’ve ever realized is that I don’t remember my parent’s faces.
Which leads me to here, where I curled myself up against a wall, my legs pulled up to my chest, my chin resting on my knees, letting the tears fall because it was between classes and no one would see. No one would see how much it hurt me.
Alex had been sticking almost annoyingly close to me after the rogue attack. Tense and ready for a fight, even though he knew there would be none. His warmth was ever present on my right side, and…I didn’t hate it. It was a reassuring heat, different from Allie, because I knew that this heat could protect me – not that I needed it, anyway. It was just nice to know someone had your back no matter what. And I knew, that even if he found his real mate, Alex would still have my back. That’s the thing about childhood friends – a side of you will always remember, even if you forget.
But right now he wasn’t here, and I was okay with that. We had different schedules, and even with our wounds, school couldn’t wait. Somewhere around third period I had slipped away. I welcomed this feeling of being alone – it’s not like it was a stranger, and besides, I needed time to think. I may be an emotional wreck lately, but that doesn’t mean I like people seeing that side of me.
I heard scuffling feet walking towards me – a whole group of people, and assumed it was just your normal group of hippies ditching class, but I was wrong.
“You?”
I looked up, wiping the tears from my face, before I froze. Standing before me were a couple of the people I’d seen raping Jeremy. One – his nose would never look the same. Whereas before, when his looks were passable as good, now after our fight, he had the mug of a friggin’ hellhound. The other’s arm was still in a heavy cast, and there was scrawl written across it in sharpie, signatures of his friends, probably. The next looked semi-ok, crooked nose swelling under a bandage. But they all had one similar feature – a shit eating grin.
Because here I was, wounded, with my arm in a sling, already on the floor in a vulnerable position, where one kick could send me sprawling and a few more would send me to the ER.
One crouched in front of me and I had to fight the urge to attack him. No one looked down on me like that without getting a one-way ticket to hell. That would’ve been a bad idea, though.
Something told me if I tried to stand now, the fighting would begin way earlier, and while being under wolf paralysis, I was at a disadvantage, and even though they were wounded as well, they looked daunting and huge from my position. Suddenly I felt a submissive instinct rise inside me, wanting me to cower and take the lesser of two evils – allow them to do whatever they want and hopefully leave me still mobile.
He knotted his grimy fingers in my hair and made me look at him – at this, I growled, gritting my teeth. “You did some bad damage to us, man. It’s only courteous of us to return it, eh?”
His friends laughed. “Get up,” he snarled at me and yanked my hair upwards. I had no choice but to follow his instructions. If looks could kill this guy would be doing the salsa with Satan, because my glare was up to full power.
“A pretty little thing like you,” He grinned mischievously, and not in that cute, ‘I’m going to tickle you to death’ way. No, he was looking at me like I was a particularly juicy steak that he couldn’t wait to cut into. “Should’ve picked you instead of that scrawny kid last time. You would’ve made a nice fuck…”
“Jerome, man, we ain’t come here to do that,” One of his cronies spoke up with a disgusted expression. ‘Jerome’ turned to him sharply with a glare. “What do you suppose I do then?”
“Fuck him up. We don’t need to rape him. Just beat him till he’ll be too scared to tell anyone.”
“But that ain’t fun,” Jerome growled slowly, as if speaking to a child. “If I wanna fuck this little shit, then I’m gonna. Problems? Or do I need to do the same to ‘you’?”
These people were disgusting. I fucking hated gang members. Sure, a few of them were okay, but a lot of them got roped into doing what they did. Some of them just wanted to be bad ass and do shit like this – thought that being in a gang gave you rights to every piece of ass in town.
I had to think fast if I was gonna get out of this. I could head-butt him and then make a run for it, that would hurt like a bitch for his nose. But his cronies looked like fast little fuckers. I don’t know if I could outrun them, ‘specially with all the bruising on my body.
Still, it was my only chance. So to loosen his death grip in my hair, I kicked him in the crotch. Well, shit, Jaba was out of the hut. I REPEAT! Jaba was out of the fucking hut!
Regardless of his surprise boner, he gasped raggedly and held his midsection tenderly, his face going red from the pain.
And then I smashed my forehead into his already broken nose, breaking it further. He damn-near howled in pain before straight out fainting, falling to the ground in a heap. One of his friends yelled out a clipped version of a battle-cry and then came at me, the other cursing all the way. I dodged a kick but one punch was coming my way and with my momentum I’d end up right in front of it. So I could only squint and wait for the oncoming blow to the face, praying to god it wouldn’t break my nose.
It never hit.
Now, this isn’t one of those stupid fics where the prince comes to the rescue; well, maybe it was, but he damn well wasn’t riding on a white horse. It was Alex, and I’d never been more thankful to see him. He countered the punch by grabbing the guy’s wrist and only with sheer strength did he break it simply by twisting it in the wrong direction. The guy screamed and backed away, his friend retreating as well.
“Fuck you!” The man snarled –albeit he sounded really nasally – while holding his injured arm. His friend took a threatening step towards us, but this time Alex pulled me behind him, his eyes flashing golden as he stared down at his quarry, his warm hand in a vice-like grip on my upper arm. Hiding behind a stone wall didn’t detour me though; I was in a bad mood and stress shortened the fuse on an already notoriously hot temper. I sneered at the guy from under Alex’s arm, wrinkling my nose. “Don’t beg, that’s tacky.”
“You’re such a pussy, hiding behind someone else,” His friend countered, spitting at us, but the spittle flying only came back at him cause the wind was on our side.
“You are what you eat, guess that makes you a dick,” I rebounded easily, a victorious smirk forming on my lips when they both sputtered indignantly.
“Leave.” Alex demanded, and I could feel the command through my whole body down to my bones. My entire frame vibrated with the order of unspoken authority. His voice wasn’t just threatening – no. It was deadly, with a promise of retribution if not obeyed. I must have felt it more intensely than them, because one: I was a werewolf, and two: I had listened closer, and three: They were still standing there. “Now,” He emphasized when the two hesitated, and one of them said “Ya’ll fuckin’ monsters,” Before they both picked up their fallen comrade and made a mad dash for the nurse’s office.
A second later and Alex touched me in much the same way lover would touch his beloved; his hands roamed over my face, my neck, my sides and my arms. A surprised yelp left me before I realized what he was doing – he didn’t mean any harm by touching me, and I must still be on guard from what happened earlier because my body was jumping and burning wherever he touched me. Dare I say it? It felt good. He was almost motherly in the way he checked me for injury, and I would have spoken up and said something had it not been for the stern glance he gave me the moment I tried.
After he found my body harm-free to his satisfaction, he looked at me long and hard in the eyes before he slowly brought my slim form into an embrace. His strong arms wrapped around me and he was so warm in that single moment I thought that I could faint.
“I thought they had done something to you,” He said shakily. “We talked about this, remember? They could be after you. You don’t know how worried I was. You didn’t show up in class, and you weren’t answering my texts,”
I looked down guiltily. I had turned off my phone just after school had started because I knew I would ditch today to sort out my emotions alone. I’d done it because I didn’t want to be bothered, but really I’d just made him worry. “I’m sorry,” I murmured while looking away, anywhere but at his beautiful eyes, and I heard the smile more than I saw it when he chuckled and pressed his lips against my forehead. A reassuring gesture, but was it more for me or for him? I didn’t know. “It’s okay. As long as they didn’t hurt you…It’s fine.”
He looked down at me and gently directing my chin up, he surveyed my face, memorizing the features he found there, before he seemed to notice something and made eye contact with me again.
“You were crying,” He tilted his head. “You’ve got tear lines and I can smell it on you.” Something dawned on him and horror splashed across his expression. “T-they…didn’t, did they?”
“No, no,” I said this quietly, stepping out of his arms no matter how much I wanted to stay in them. Sure, they felt safe now, but they wouldn’t be, and the more I came to depend on them the more I would hurt later. I tried desperately to ignore his disappointed look. “I was just…” Remembering made my throat tighten. No, I wasn’t quite crying yet, but I could feel the tears burning my eyes. “I… In that fire, I lost…everything, Alex. Everything I ever loved was in that house.” I got a little chocked up at this part. “The last mementos of my childhood were there. I was so close to having my own life, to owning that house, Alex…all those memories…gone.”
Alex’s hands that had never really left my arms slid down to entangle with my hands, resting there comfortably. They fit like a puzzle piece. “I’m so sorry Aaron,” He breathed, grief-stricken. “I should’ve thought it through before I did what I did…it never occurred to me…”
“At the time, we were being chased by werewolves, Alex. You did what you had to do to save us. I’m glad you did.”
This would be the first time I touched him of my own accord. The first real time I had initiated skin-on-skin contact. But he was holding an expression I didn’t like to see – especially on him. I combed my left hand through his bangs and let it rest on the side of his face, stroking there with my thumb. He looked so happy in that one moment he rivaled a small sun, or a star of the same caliber.
“Come on,” He grabbed my hand then, tugging me towards him gently. “I want to show you something.”
******
“….Alex,” I croaked, staring down at it. “You kept this…?”
“Of course I did,” Alex said with a small grin on his face, his fingers stroking reverently across the page. “It was the first real thing you and I ever made together. You remember?”
“Yes,” And a grin bloomed on my face then. “Inspired by captain underpants. We only really read those comics because they gave us easy points for school,” I laughed quietly, as he turned a page, reading through our childish scrawl, some sticky substance on the page that reminded me of the peanut butter ‘n jelly we had that day for lunch oh so long ago.
I looked back down at the box Alex had dragged out of his closet. Inside were artifacts from our childhood together, our favorite ball – a soccer ball – and things we drew at school, favorite toys we shared that had long since stopped smelling of us and started smelling of dust and old plastic. Nostalgic things that opened a floodgate of memories I’d repressed a life ago. Memories that I was ashamed to have forgotten. I noticed one thing in the far right corner of the box; a small cassette tape our fifth grade teacher had bought us. It had... ACDC written on it, worn and over-used. I smiled warmly at it, remembering the outraged shouts of pack members to 'turn that loud crap off', and how we just turned it up louder.
Sighing from the memory, I tore my eyes away from it, and they promptly locked on a picture of Alex's dad, two frozen talapia fillets held to either side of his neck. I broke out laughing. Alex looked at what I saw, and began chuckling too.
"I remember that day," Alex murmured, his eyes dimmed, a far-away look on his face, reliving a memory. "The AC had crapped out and it was one of the hottest days that year had seen. Dad had just gotten back from a run, expecting a nice cool home to come to, but the house was even hotter than outside. Dad got so frantic and heated up, he just said 'fuck it', and dug through the freezer for something cold to cool him off. To bad we hadn't gone shopping yet. He smelled like fish for days after that."
"This was the surprise shot we got of him?" I questioned with a smile, and Alex nodded softly, reaching out and flipping the photo over. Written there on the back was; To Daddy, from Aaron and Alex. We love you! Happy Father's day!
I picked up a picture drawn by Alex, and it was for his mother on mother’s day, though this was after she died. With practiced ease I read his scrawl that my old self would have found so familiar and welcoming.
It read; Can you hear me, momma?
I miss your voice
Thank you for cooking warm food for me
And thank you for sleeping with me when it is stormy outside
I just want to tell you not to worry
Because daddy and I are fine
But we miss you
And you’re the best mother ever
I love you
Happy mother’s day, mommy
Tears sprang to my eyes and I covered my mouth as I read it. I remembered that night. I had woke up to Alex crying and thunder outside, and I remember climbing into his bed. He felt so warm bundled up, but he was sobbing harshly, and I remember listening to him as he cried out ‘Mommy!’ over and over again, and I remember we held each other that night, because his crying had been enough to make me cry, too. We both had lost our mothers. But we still had each other.
With that single, scary thought, I suddenly realized how hard it must have been for Alex after his father told him I passed away. For so long we had been each other’s best friend. We did everything together, and we found comfort in each other, not the adults or his father. I knew all too well I’d been the one to break him out of his shell. We…relied on each other. It was like a base instinct that never went away, and we indulged in it. I looked up at Alex to see him watching me, and I finally let the tears fall.
“Why did you keep all of this?” I asked without restraint, and he extended a hand to wipe away my tears. I let him.
“Things were…” He wore a pained expression. “Different, after you left. Not the same. Even when you left, everyone kept fighting. The pack…they were so heartbroken. I had to hide these things to keep people from finding them,” Alex smiled sadly then. “I…”
“What happened to you, Alex?” I asked then, and he looked at me straight in the eye, before shakily replying, “I…died. I kept all of this because…this was the last of you I could keep. You weren’t there to help me anymore. The growing was tough without you. Without you, I just…I nearly wasted away.” He wiped at his eyes even though they were dry. “I had wanted to hear your voice, see your face…your eyes…for so long. And to find out I’d been looking into them without even knowing it? It was a hard blow. I had forgotten what you looked like,” He whispered, searching over my features with famished hunger.
“I’m so sorry,” I murmured, repeating it like a mantra. “I’m really so sorry…I should have come back, I should have found a way.”
He cupped my face in his palms and pecked a chaste kiss to my lips, looking at me with so much love it overwhelmed me, and I tried to make a move, to take his hands away from my face, but my hand instead settled on top of his, curling over it protectively. He smiled at me. “I showed you this because I wanted to let you know that you did not lose everything. This place was once your home, and you are always welcome here. You’ve got Allie…you have me. All of me. As much as you want, or care to take.”
“Alex…I – “
He looked at me sadly. “It’s okay. I know. I understand how much pain you must have gone through with this curse. But…I love you, so much it hurts, and I can’t control it sometimes.”
“How?” I asked, my voice just a soft tenor. “How can you know it’s real?”
He searched my eyes for a second, sifting through my soul, it seemed. “I…loved you even back then, Aaron.”
He kissed me, then. Soft and sure. His lips were bittersweet and they tasted like peppermint. He delved inside my mouth and our tongues did the dance of ages, and this time I could tell he was truly giving a part of himself to me. Shock hit me so hard I literally jolted. It felt like being plunged into a bathtub full of ice. It felt like being stabbed with a needle when you least expect it.
I kissed him back. I wrapped my arms tightly around his neck and nipped hungrily at his bottom lip, and he moaned in response. He pushed forward and I fell backwards from my kneeling position, and he ended up on top of me, his hands combing down my sides and up my shirt – and then he felt it.
The large scar on my side. The bite mark of an alpha werewolf.
And I knew he understood – in that single moment, he knew how I’d gotten it. He could feel his father’s aura in that scar.
When you’re bitten by an alpha, it marks the soul.
Alex’s eyes flashed pure gold, and I had a sinking feeling of dread in my chest.