Page 52 of In This Iron Ground
“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 atyou. 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 justtrust 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.
