— UN LUGAR PARA MI —
Introduction
Koda felt the strange gaze on him without open his eyes. On the road between sleep and wakefulness, that did not seem strange to him, he did not feel it as a threatening presence, but as a warm and overwhelming one. It reminded him of when he was a cub and his mother checked out to see if he really was asleep. Now he wasn't, at least he believed that. Strange the world of dreams, where everything was possible, nothing was questionable, not even that your mother put on a night to see that you didn't skip your sleep hours, even years after her death.
He waited patiently for the presence to leave, but it did not do it for what seemed like too much time. Finally, the teenager bear surrendered to the feeling of love that seized him and smiled. He knew that whoever was watching him was smiling too, in a playful way of "I caught you". Even without opening his eyes, he only knew. Finally he opened them to face it, but instead he was hit with the reality of the walls of the cave.
He was conscious, his brain had reconnected and he seemed to laugh at his own self, at his innocent illusion that his mother might be alive. However, the feeling of love did not leave his chest. Life without his mother wasn't bad. He had Kenai, Nita and, now also, Beku. He settled his head between his paws, trying to get back to sleep, when a little ball of trembling love clung to him as if he were his only salvation.
"Uncle Koda", whispered the little cub. "Are you awake?"
"Good morning" he said jokingly then, with a yawn, but all happiness left his body when he saw the little cub directly. "Beku..."
He had been crying.
"I had a nightmare," said the light-haired bear cub, a color inherited from his mother. "You were leaving, the men were taking you..."
Koda felt a chill run through all his body. Despite his multiple complaints, insinuations and jokes with double meaning, the couple refused to let their cub know the truth... that in reality he was son of humans. Koda didn't agree with them. Hide the truth from that little spark of light that looked at him directly with such tender eyes was killing him from within, as if he was betrayed him with each day of silence. But in his position he couldn't do anything but be at the couple's side. He was not inside a body that did not belong to him, he couldn't know...
"I was very scared" his little brown eyes were crystallized again. "Don't go..."
The teenager passed a paw around him and sheltered him against himself.
"I'm here", he said, "I'm not going anywhere".
Beku turned at his uncle's warmth and wept silently beside him until he fell asleep.
It was when he felt Nita's sleepy look on him. Her sister-in-law always woke up when she did not feel Beku's warmth at her side. Mother's instinc. He returned her gaze and shook his head with a smile, there was no need for her to push the cub away from him.
Nita nodded and went back to sleep. She knew she could trust Koda, in things about Beku, he was even more protective than her. He had a gift for bear cubs, most were looking for his funny stories and he, of course, was happy by telling them.
"The bear girl that could haunts you in love will take the big prize" Nita used to make fun on him, but the one who was most punished was her husband. She knew he didn't like the fact that his little brother was growing up, and when he caught some girl looking at him for a suspicious while, he frightened her. Oh, but she well knew that Kenai was not the only culprit, she could perfectly point at Bucky, sir "Koda is just my friend", too. Their denial, was really funny.
"He's too young for girls," Kenai usually said, putting himself down a little, because deep down he knew it wasn't true. He released "man's tears" every time Koda or Beku grow up another bit. In fact, when Koda's voice changed, the attack of "man's tears" lasted a whole week every time the bear cub-not-so-cub opened his mouth, that being Koda, there were not few times, and in his innocence he came to believe that his older brother was sick. It seemed impossible to believe that they weren't biological brothers, they were equally clueless.
With those memories, she allowed herself to be lulled by the silence of the night and slept next to her husband with a smile on her lips, unaware that this wouldn't be the last time her son would dream about humans, neither the last night Koda has ghosts visitors.