Page 70 of In This Iron Ground
Life got swallowed by sorting out scholarships and dorms. Mia, Cameron, and Damien almost had their first real fight when Mia and Cameron insisted on paying what the scholarship Damien had obtained didn’t cover. Damien was immediately overwhelmed by the responsibility that would mean, the guilt at taking advantage of them. It had taken a long night of calming Damien down and laying out all the facts to finally convince Damien to accept money for at least the course fees and textbooks. The argument ended with Damien winning custody over dorm and personal expenses, but something told him this was a war the Salgados might not be willing to lose.
The day after his eighteenth birthday, Damien went out with Nicola for one last time. As a legal adult, he was taken out of her care, not that it had been necessary for her to have any real involvement apart from supervisory for the previous few years.
“Thanks for everything, Nicola,” Damien told her, wrapping her in a hug. She hugged him tightly back.
“I’m so proud of you. I’m just…I’m so happy everything worked out, Damien. There’s no person that deserves it more.”
As the school year ended, Damien lay on his bed and watched the landscape of the previous years go past. The changing terrain, from arid sands to lush forests. He watched the spinning reel project over his head. It rattled and got stuck on that day. The empty pill packet, the sweat and nausea of the forest. He’d been desperate, then. There had been nothing else. The future didn’t exist. Not like this. It had been a mirror to the monsters of the past. An endless, repeating pattern that he couldn’t imagine would be broken.
But it had. God, it had.
As much as the film got stuck in that one spot, it always moved past.
Damien closed his eyes and thanked the earth for being forgiving.
**********
The summer dwindled to a close with a celebration. The Salgados held a barbecue outside in the still-warm air as a goodbye party for both Koko, who had gotten into the same college as Nadie, and Damien. It was filled with people Damien was now familiar with. Adults that knew to ask about graphic novels and psychology, who sought him out to share anecdotes and newly gained knowledge about plants. He knew which members avoided each other and who to go to for the family gossip. They spoke to him as if he were going to be part of them forever.Next Christmas…andI have a friend you can shadow in the summer…andWhen you start working…
Mia had been completely and utterly unmovable in the fact that Damien would return to the Salgados’ during holidays. Damien rarely saw that side of her. Something told him that she was more lenient in giving in to him than with others, but the Kephale had been almost agitated at the suggestion that Damien wouldn’t be coming back. It had been that, more than anything, that had Damien capitulating.
Damien was a little overwhelmed with attention when Mia called him into the library at the end of the night. They sat together, two cups of their handmade, nighttime iced tea on the low table in front of them. Mia’s eyes were as soft as gibbous moonlight.
“Before you start, Mia,” Damien said. Mia looked at him attentively. “I wanted to thank you. For…for everything. For so much that, honestly, I don’t even know where to begin. For taking me in and giving me ahome. I hadn’t thought that was possible after my parents died. And it…it’s so much. I owe you such a debt. I owe you so much. If there’s anything…I mean, I know there’s not much I can do, but I feel like I can’t take any more of your kindness without giving something in return,” he said almost formally.
Damien had been thinking of the natural balance of Ousía, and if he was unsettling the peace by taking so much and giving nothing in return.
“Damien, you owe us absolutely nothing!” Mia started, but Damien was already shaking his head.
“I know you think that, but…you’re not going to change my mind on this. I’d do anything for you. I owe you and everybody in this family my life.”
Mia looked at him. She did not look honoured or humbled or glad. She looked sad.
She closed her eyes after a moment, shaking her head lightly. When she opened them, she lifted her hand to rub her thumb on Damien’s cheek.
“One day, you’ll see. You’ll be able to accept what I really can offer,” she said quietly. Damien frowned, but she leaned forwards to kiss him on the forehead. “I just wanted to tell you how proud I am of you, Damien. How very, very proud I am. Not just of what you have achieved, but of who you are. You think you owe us, but it is we who owe you. I hope you see that one day.
“This is your home. It will always be your home. It will always be open to you, whether you believe you deserve it or not. As Kephale, that is my decision to make. So, go out into the world. But come back.”
Damien looked at her. He nodded. He had told her he’d do anything for her after all.
Mia wrapped him up in a hug.
“I love you very much,” she said. Damien closed his eyes. It still rattled him to hear that, but it was becoming difficult to deny.
“Me too.”
**********
Olive and Damien sat together watching the beginning of a sunrise as Gonzalo and Koko joked on the swings some feet behind them. Everybody except Olive had gotten into college, each in a different state. Instead, Olive had gotten a subsidised apartment when she had turned eighteen and was working two jobs.
It had just been Olive and Damien, in the start. Before Koko had really committed to being his friend and Gonzalo had joined the fold. Damien wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t approached her in the cafeteria. Somehow, would they still be friends?
“You’re getting out, huh?” Olive said quietly.
“You could come with me. Live somewhere there, work at—”
“Nah. You shouldn’t take that much baggage to college.”
