Page 75 of All That Has Flown Beyond
“Yeah,” Thea nodded. “I just wanted to talk to you away from prying ears.”
“Oh, right. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. I just…Ahmik told me you’d made up,” Thea said, stopping in front of him. Kaiyo shrugged.
“Yeah. I mean, we had a talk about…what happened.”
“Yeah. I just…I guess I wanted to apologize too. I…things were tough back then but…now I just don’t know if we handled it the right way.” She looked sad as she spoke the words.
“Like I told Ahmik, what’s done is done.”
“Yeah, but we’re all still living with the consequences of those actions. Ahmik and I…we weren’t the same. After you left. It was like…we blamed ourselves, but we couldn’t handle that. So we blamed each other.”
Kaiyo sighed. He didn’t know what Thea wanted. Redemption? Forgiveness? Or simply acknowledgment?
“I don’t know what to tell you, Thea. You…” He shook his head. “I’m here now. What I mean by that is, this is who I am now. Did it suck, having to leave the pack? Yes. It’s made me who I am today, and I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing, because I can’t be anybody else now. You had your reasons for that decision. I get that. I do. Was it the right one? I…I used to think being dead would have been better than being so alone.”
Thea’s face crumpled at Kaiyo’s admission. Kaiyo wanted to comfort her, but they needed to know that although they had seen their actions as a solution to a problem, it had ripped Kaiyo apart. It wasn’t exactly that he didn’t forgive them, but he couldn’t simply forget the past.
“Do you think…do you think we could be friends? Again?” Thea asked softly.
Kaiyo looked at her. In a strange way, Thea’s betrayal had been almost worse than Ahmik’s. Ahmik’s actions had felt like the worst break-up in history, but break-ups happen a lot. Being rejected by his best friend? That had been another creature entirely.
Still. Kaiyo had seen a lot in the last ten years. Had seen flourishing packs and dysfunctional ones. Had seen people suffering, fighting, surviving. It was easy to step back and judge someone’s actions as if the world were shaded in black and white. But the truth was, they had been a bunch of kids in a situation completely out of their control. In Kaiyo’s desperation to not let them down, to fulfil his family’s legacy, he had made things worse.
“Yeah, Thea. We can be friends again,” Kaiyo said finally.
Thea’s eyes blinked with the sheen of tears.
“Okay. Friends,” she said wetly, laughing a little. Kaiyo smiled back, swallowing through a lump in his throat.
After a moment, Thea lunged forwards, wrapping Kaiyo in a hug. Kaiyo didn’t hesitate in squeezing her back.
He closed his eyes and felt the pain of being given something he’d been starved of for a long time.
**********
Kaiyo’s body operated on sensory memory. It remembered, suddenly, this land. These people. And what it had felt afterwards, when it was taken away.
It felt like his nerves were overloaded. His mind was a foggy marsh he couldn’t find his way out of. He wanted to escape suddenly, wanted to leave Garrow land and never come back. Never put his soul on the line ever again.
He wanted to sleep. To disappear. Even for just a little while.
“Kaiyo?”
Kaiyo blinked past the darkness.
“Kaiyo?” It was Isla, calling from the other side of the fog.
He dragged himself out of bed, wrapping a robe around his body as he went.
Isla and a gust of cold met him as he opened his front door. Isla looked him up and down, frowning.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
“Kind of. Not really. Come in,” he said. “Want some tea?”
“Okay.” Isla took off her coat and then sat at the kitchen table, watching Kaiyo as he prepared the drinks.
