“Don’t start that again.”
“It smells bad!”
Damien leaned over, breathing across Hakan’s face. For a few seconds, their lips were inches apart.
“Urgh!” Hakan pushed him away. Damien laughed, putting some distance between them before flopping onto his back.
“Yeah, you’re always on about purified water and organic everything, and then go and eat neon mac ’n cheese. I don’t think so.”
“What the hell? That stuff is good!”
“I’m not saying it’s not good, but it’s filled with preservatives! You can’t pick and choose.”
“Watch me.”
Damien shoved at Hakan, but the werewolf didn’t even budge.
“You’re the worst,” Damien said, sticking out his tongue.
Hakan just laughed.
Damien closed his eyes, but he could still see the afterimage of Hakan’s smile burnt right through the darkness.
*****
Summer burned away. Autumn. Winter. On the Yule run, Hakan sat resignedly for his picture. There was a lot of tinsel involved.
There was school. Weekends with Olive and Koko. Evenings with Hakan. Dee and Lallo seemed to grow by the day. Damien studied at the library with Nova and Mia. He gardened with Cameron.
Damien watched the petals of his life unfold.
**********
There was a group of thirtysomething year old men crowded around one of the machines, filling the arcade with noise. The sound of their cheers and groans, of the bleep, bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep of the game was oddly fitting. It filled the cracked hollows that Olive’s buzzing anger was leaving behind.
Damien didn’t want to think about what Olive had done to get out of her house. There was no doubt she was grounded after being suspended for calling one of the teachers a ‘whiny cunt’. He hadn’t hesitated to accept the invitation to the arcade, however, hiding in one of the booths that lined the walls, tucked beside a small food vendor selling American nostalgia in milkshake form.
Olive was curled defensively in a corner, knees and hoodie up, picking at the polish on her nails. Damien ran a finger through the condensation beading on his coke glass.
“Your foster carers…are they…angry?” Damien asked tentatively. He’d been watchful for any possible sign of abuse. He’d tucked subtle questions between topics of conversation when Olive was in a particularly open mood. He’d even asked Koko about Olive’s scent. There had never been any indication of anything more than an anger and hurt that could not be exorcized from Olive after a few kind words from adults whom, as a species, had shown little but a hand that harmed as easily as it fed.
“Like I give a fuck about what they think!” Olive snapped, glaring at Damien.
Damien managed not to flinch. “Okay.”
“What, you think I do?” Olive sat up, almost getting into Damien’s space. Damien felt the familiar prickle of someone else’s anger on his skin.
He remained silent, not wanting to either lie or anger her further. It didn’t work.
“Fuck you!” Olive’s voice was loud enough that a few people turned to look at them for a few seconds. “Just because you’ve got a fucking boner for your foster carers doesn’t mean I’m gonna get down on my knees every time those idiots tell me what to do,” she snarled.
Damien stared at his coke, at the way the drops changed colour as a nearby game flashed.
“Shit, Damien. Damien. I’m sorry,”
“It’s fine.” The black of the drink was almost translucent if you looked hard enough.
“Hey. D, come on. Don’t do that. I’m sorry.”
Damien turned to look at Olive. His fingers were cold where they had been pressed against the glass. He slid them across the table, damp with condensation.
“Do what?” Damien asked, genuinely confused. Olive watched him for a second. The dark and uninviting forest of her eyes had softened to something more welcoming.
“That thing you do when you, you know.” She made a vague gesture with her hand. Damien frowned. “You know, when you go somewhere else. It’s like suddenly…I don’t know. I don’t like it when you do that.”
Damien blinked, not really sure what she was talking about. “Sorry,” he said nonetheless.
“It’s, I mean, it’s not your fault. I didn’t mean to shout at you.”
“It’s fine. You’re angry.”
“Not at you. We’re…it’s you and me, yeah? Like…we get it. I shouldn’t fucking take it out on you.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, Damien, it’s not fine! That’s the whole fucking point! Sorry. I just…fuck, I’m so…”
Olive folded into herself. Her long limbs bent into a ball. She tucked her head between her chest and raised knees, pulling at the strings of her hoodie so it closed around her face. She clutched at the material over her head, keeping the tangle of her thoughts inside.
Damien watched the tight curve of her spine rise and fall with harsh breaths. Slowly, he slid closer and then wrapped himself around her. His small, bird frame was usually no match for her long, panther spirit, but now their dimensions had changed to fit that awful pain leaking onto the booth, onto the table and the floor, reflecting the neon colours of the ringing arcade.
Damien raised his knees too, resting the side of his folded legs so that her other side was pressed against the purple, acrylic cushion of the booth’s back. He wrapped his thin arms around her, his freckles burrowed in the dark material of the sweatshirt that hid her. He pressed his head against hers. Damien wrapped around her, a shell upon a shell upon a shell.
He could hear her breaths, then. The wet, stuttering pace that she hid.
A moment. Two. Olive slid her hands from her head, down between them for a moment before she stretched them into the world, brushing Damien’s ribcage, and then winding around him.
They didn’t let go.
**********
“But she’s okay?” Koko asked.
Damien nodded and shrugged. They were hidden away in Koko’s room, away from sensitive werewolf ears. “I mean…yeah. You know Olive.”
“Yeah, that’s why I ask.”
Damien shrugged again. “I think…I think Olive is…I think she’s going to get better. But, probably not while she’s in foster care. Not ’cause the carers are crappy, you know, I don’t think. But…she doesn’t trust adults, right? I mean…”
“Yeah, I think it’s safe to say she doesn’t like or give a fuck about adults.” Koko snorted.
“Yeah. I mean, maybe. I think…maybe not so much that. I think she just doesn’t trust them. And right now, she’s kind of forced to? By like…I mean, she has to do what the adults in school say, and she has to do what her foster carers say, and live at their house and eat their food and just trust them, that they’re going to, you know, take care of her. And she’s just…she can’t do it. Like, the adults, it’s like they don’t get it. It’s like they think they can…what, fix her? By being nice to her or something, or giving her food and a house when her actual parents were a bunch of…well, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“So, as long as she’s under eighteen and has to depend on adults, I don’t think she’s going to…you know, I don’t think the anger is going to go away. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. That’s what she’s got to cling onto. Anger. It’s that, or fear.”
“Yeah. And anger is better. At least, it feels a whole lot safer.”
“Yeah.” Silence settled softly on their bodies where they lay, side-by-side on the bed.
“I wish…” Koko started. “I don’t even know. I just wish you guys had…a good pack, right from the start.”
Damien whispered a laugh that disintegrated almost as soon as it hit the air.
“Yeah. But, we’ve got a pack, in a way. We’re each other’s pack.”
Koko turned to look at him. Damien looked back. “Me too?” she asked.
Damien’s laugh was solid this time. “Yeah, dummy. You too.”
He felt lighter, somehow, as they made their way down before dinner. He was worried for Olive, but he had so much faith in her. In who she was and what she was capable of.
He sat next to Koko on the couch and they giggled over YouTube videos, snatching the phone from each other to pick the next one.
“Kids! Dinner’s almost done, come set the table.”
“That means there’s another twenty minutes until dinner,” Koko grumbled, and then rolled her eyes as her mother obviously responded. “I’m going,” she said, getting up. Damien followed with a smile.
As they ate dinner, amidst the noise and the laughter, Damien looked around. At these people whose house he was living in. Whose life he had been invited to. Not to join the pack but almost, almost the family.
It hit Damien then, a jolt of faith. Of belief. Things had gotten better.
And maybe. Maybe. They would stay that way.
*****
Damien lounged on Hakan’s bed after dinner as Hakan finished up some homework on the desk. It was amazing how comfortable Damien felt in occupying Hakan’s space without constantly feeling like he was infringing where he wasn’t wanted.
It took a while for Damien to notice that Hakan had stopped typing and was simply looking at him.
“Creep alert,” Damien joked. Hakan’s face twitched in mild annoyance, but he didn’t look away. Damien tensed.
“You seem happy,” Hakan said.
Damien frowned. “Uh…yeah? Why wouldn’t I be?”
Hakan let the silence collect for a few moments. Damien sat up, crossing his legs on the bed.
“What?” he asked a little defensively.
“Nothing. It’s…I just meant, your scent has changed.”
“Changed how? When?”
“Since you came here, kind of. Slowly. It’s…clearer. Like, more of you and less…muddled. Like a river you can see the bottom of.”
“Okay…well that sounds good, right?”
“Yeah. I mean, you like it here, yeah?”
“Um. Yeah, man,” Damien said, confused as to what point Hakan was trying to make.
“The McKenzies…” Hakan started and there it was. Damien immediately tensed. “You don’t have to talk about it. I just…I just want to make sure that we’re not doing anything that reminds you of them,” Hakan said quietly.
Damien snorted. “Don’t tie me down and we’re set,” Damien scoffed before he could think about it. His mouth clicked shut with instant regret. He curled a little further into himself.
“Is that what they used to do to you?” Hakan asked after a pause.
Damien sighed. “Yeah. I’m, well you know me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I can’t keep still sometimes.”
“Neither can Dee. Should we tie her down?”
“No!” Damien’s voice burst out sudden and loud. “Don’t even joke about that,” he said, agitated.
“I’m not joking, I’m trying to make a point. What they did was sick.”
“You don’t even know what they did.”
“I know how they made you feel. I fucking hate myself for not pressing sooner.”
“I wouldn’t have talked, Hakan. And it wasn’t your business!”
“Not my business? Not my business? How can you say that?”
“What I meant is that it wasn’t your responsibility.”
“You’re my friend, how does that not make it my responsibility?” Hakan asked, almost leaning out of his chair as he bent towards him. Damien ignored the jolt that went through him at the word ‘friend’.
“I can take care of myself,” Damien said, but his voice was weak without the pulp of conviction.
“Nobody takes care of themselves alone, Damien! I don’t know what I would do without my family. I’d fucking…I wouldn’t cope. I just think that…I just hate them. The McKenzies. I hate them.”
“So do I.” The words surprised Damien as they came out of his mouth. It was the first time that he had ever admitted it. Whether what they did was wrong or right, whether he deserved it or not…he hated them.
Suddenly, the floodgates opened.
“They were so…hateful. It was just hate, all the time. That’s why you guys could never be like them. Not really. It’s like…it’s like it was in their Ousía. Like theirs was corrupted. Out of balance. But you guys, you’re in balance,” Damien tried to explain.
“So are you.” Hakan’s voice was quiet but filled with force.
Damien sighed. “Just, stop.”
“No. Okay, I get that it upsets you, but I’m not gonna stop telling you the truth. You could never be like them either. You’re so much better it shouldn’t even be a comparison,” Hakan said forcefully.
Damien shrank a little further. “Okay. Okay, okay, just drop it right now, alright?” Damien pleaded. There was a moment of silence.
“Fine. But my point stands,” Hakan said finally.
“Noted.”
The silence paced around the room. Slowly, Damien uncurled from himself. He looked up at Hakan.
“Thanks,” Damien said quietly. Hakan smiled.
Sometimes it was nice to hear things even if he didn’t quite believe them.
**********
As Damien’s sixteenth birthday ticked past, so did Hakan’s eighteenth. With it approached another lumbering creature.
Hakan was off to university at the end of the coming summer.
Damien watched with pride tightening a knot in his chest as Hakan applied to universities. Damien would flip through the brochures, looking at all the students in neatly diversified skin colours smile from the pages.
“This is the one I wanna go to,” Damien said, pointing to Eketon University. Hakan looked down at the glossy pages.
“What do you want to major in?”
“Um…psychology,” Damien admitted. It was the first time he’d told anybody. Hakan blinked at him.
“I thought you were gonna say graphic design or biology or botany or something but…you would make a great psychologist,” Hakan said. Damien ignored the praise even as it swam through his chest.
“I wanna specialize in art therapy. Work with kids, maybe, you know…looked-after children. Foster kids and that stuff. I don’t know.”
“Damien, that sounds fucking amazing,” Hakan burst out.
Damien looked up at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah!”
Damien smiled. “Thanks.”
Damien already knew what Hakan wanted to do. English literature. There was an old and established publishing house in their town that Hakan wanted to come back and work at. Damien couldn’t imagine him leaving the pack for long, and an editing job suited him. He was careful with detail and meticulous when it came to his work. He had always been a listener, an observer, and this was an extension of that.
“You excited about college?” Damien asked, changing the subject.
Hakan shrugged. “Yeah, I mean…I’m gonna miss you guys.”
Damien smiled. “So will we,” he said, tamping down the aching truth of the words. “But we’re not going anywhere. A few miles between us…it’s nothing. Not between you and pack.”
Hakan looked at him quietly.
“Yeah. You’re right.”
**********
Damien’s feelings for Hakan seem to rise with the summer heat. They gained force, becoming so tangible that he could almost touch the shape of them, sharp and soft in turns.
Damien hung out with Koko and Olive, with Lallo and Dee, with the family. But there were days and days and days of just him and Hakan.
Hakan had hit and surpassed puberty a long time ago. He was a head taller than Damien, his broad shoulders and square jaw gaining dimension in comparison to Damien’s still-slight frame.
Damien remained bird-bones and freckles. The pale skin under his eyes would bruise sometime with lack of sleep, but the energy of his smiles and moving limbs had changed in the past years. They had become freer,
venturing into the surrounding space instead of hiding in a tucked corner inside him.
The sun deepened and multiplied his freckles even as it tanned his skin. Hakan’s already darker skin would deepen with the passage of summer. Damien watched him. He couldn’t help it. Hakan was like a flickering flame in the dark. Damien’s moth spirit was enchanted, circling and circling, until his bravery turned blind.
What if? it started to say. What if?
What if whatever Damien was feeling was reciprocated? What if all of Damien’s fears that he was too worthless for Hakan were just lies? What if Damien’s cowardice was the one in control once again?
What if. What if. What if.
Damien would think about it at night. Images that slipped in and out of dreams. The smiles, and the phantom touches, and the want. The affection. The warmth.
The what if.
There was a buzzing inside of Damien on the night of Hakan’s goodbye party. It had arrived out of the mirage of the summer heat. One moment they were celebrating Hakan’s acceptance into Eketon University, and the next they were at the edge of his departure.
Damien was used to time weaving its thread unevenly through the coarse material of his life.
The whole extended pack was there. They spilled onto one side of the house, where chairs and tables had been spread across the grass.
It was the night before the full moon and opportunity streamed like moonlight through the air.
There was a foreign feeling inside Damien. It felt like hope.
Damien watched Hakan make the rounds. He watched as Hakan was asked questions about his major, about his accommodations, about his feelings about the future. He saw his cup of overstimulation fill until it was almost ready to spill over.
“Wanna take a break?” Damien asked, sidling up to him.
Hakan threw him a grateful smile. “Yes.”
They snuck behind the house, nearing the edge of the forest. There was a stone bench there, free from moss due to the protective runes etches into it. In compensation, the boulders on either side were rich with moss, a pattern of brown and green across the blue stone. They looked like two worlds hanging in space.
In This Iron Ground (Natural Magic) Page 15
