So really, the babies didn't kick. Consider it moving or growing flutters or something, but definitely not kicking yet. She's only technically somewhere between 3 and 3 and a half months.
So in other news, this chapter has a lot of seriousness in it and I hope that you will want to give review hugs to Jaron because he really needs them. I tried to post this yesterday but I had to transfer it to a different file type because you know how when you buy a laptop and there is only a free trial of microsoft office and all that stuff because the people that program the laptops are lazy? Well yeah, mine ran out and I couldn't add to it or anything and then I had to download the openoffice thing after I cussed out the laptop :D and now I should stop rambling and get to the disclaimer and chapter because I have to write some stuff down for english class so I can analyize a movie tomorrow. Okay, my gym teacher was absent yesterday and some girl in my class braided my hair really well, shame I had to take it out :D Kay, done.
DISCLAIMER: *Chloe is trying on her pants*
Chloe: They don't fit.
Me: You're pregnant. That's what happens.
Chloe: Can't you make me like one of those girls on that show I didn't know I was pregnant and have me not gain weight?
Me: Wanna have your babies in a toilet too?
Chloe: *GLARES* No. You're just cranky because you own nothing but a fanfiction account and some new furniture.
Me: I know! I got this new bookcase, and wanted this desk but it was all sold out so I have to wait a week...wait...what am I forgetting? Darn. It's always something.
Chloe: THE DISCLAIMER!
Me: Right. Me no owny Darkest Powers or the characters you recognize from Kelley Armstrong's books. They all belong to Kelley Armstrong.
Jaron's Point of View (7 weeks)
"For how much longer do you think that she'll keep herself in her depression?" Melody asked.
"She's not in a depression Mel, she's just sad." I said.
Melody pouted and said, "I don't want her to be sad."
I wrapped an arm around her as she put her head on my shoulder. We were sitting on the bed in my room and Melody was talking about Chloe and ways to get her to feel better. Since Chloe's mom had left last week Chloe had been very sad. Chloe had gained something from the experience, she knew that she could do this, at least better than she did before, but she still missed her mom. It was hard to lose her mom the first time, but to lose her a second time after just getting her back for not even a day, well, Chloe was heartbroken.
"She needs to feel what she needs to." I said, shrugging at the end.
"Can't we just speed it up? She at least got to see her mom again and got to get the talk, a very embarrassing one from what I was told." Melody said.
Melody never was one to know how to be patient.
"Melody, you have to wait for her to be okay. I know you love her like a sister, but sometimes even you can't make her feel better. Maybe if you give her some space and actually spend some time with me and not research baby stuff, I'd feel better too." I said.
"Okay. One day of no baby researching. I pinky promise." Melody said, holding her pinky out.
I gave her an eye roll, but still held out my pinky for her to complete her pinky promise.
I remember the first time she got me to make a pinky promise. I looked at her like she was insane and she looked at me like I was for not agreeing to the pinky promise right away.
***Flashback - A little over a year ago***
I was just staring at her. Had I heard right? Was she serious about a pinky promise? Apparently she was because she was holding a pinky out and looking at me like I should do the same. She wasn't a child anymore so was she really going to make me pinky promise her that I would never put myself in danger like that again?
Earlier today we had to go find a girl named Emy. She had the power to steal the powers of other people, but it didn't always work out well and it didn't always have the ability to be controlled. Emy had accidentally stolen the powers of a fire half-demon that was working for The Edison Group and lit the foster home she was staying at on fire. Emy had gotten out, but I went in to get the other two children out of the house, almost getting myself killed in the process. It was only the result of a quick spell Melody had cast that prevented me from getting killed.
"I did the right thing. I saved the two kids." I said.
"We could have saved them anyway. Using intelligent plans, not that run in and almost get crushed by falling bits of building that you had going for you. I like being crazy as much as the next person, but there's a difference between crazy and stupid. So pinky promise me that you'll never do it again." Melody said.
***Flashback Over***
In the end I caved in and made the pinky promise, which was a first of many future pinky promises I would have had to make. If I had known what giving in to one pinky promise would have meant I would have ran away and hid until Melody forgot.
"See. Now I'm all yours for the day. See why we do this?" Melody said with the brightest smile on her face that I couldn't help but smile myself and say, "Sure Melody."
Melody went to check on everybody quickly and told Andrew and Silas that we would be gone for a while. Melody and I went into the city and to a movie theatre, we watched a movie called Letters To Juliet. It was Melody's choice and it wasn't a bad movie, but it wasn't that great either. It just felt good to get out of the house though, no matter what we were doing.
We got back to the house sometime around seven and usually I went to sleep later but I was hoping that with the good mood I was in right now I could get some sleep in without having nightmares so I told Melody that I was going to get some sleep. Everyone else found my sleeping habits strange, but Melody knew so she didn't find anything strange about it.
I got to my room and undressed until I was just in my jeans and I laid down and waited for sleep.
There was a little seven year old boy in the corner of the room. The little boy had dark brown eyes, black hair, pale skin, and he was so terrified that he was shaking. He listened to the screaming of his parents and didn't understand why they stayed together if they hated each other so much. Wouldn't it just be so much easier for them and him if they got a divorce?
"Why don't you just get off your lazy ass and get to work! Huh? Oh right. You don't have a job!" The boy's mother shouted at her husband. The boy could clearly hear what his mother was saying through the walls because the walls in the apartment were so thin that he could hear everything even when they thought he couldn't, not that they'd care if he heard.
"I don't care! Why would I work to support you and your son!" The boy's father shouted in retort to what the mother had said.
The boy began to cry as he continued to hear more and more of what his parents were arguing about. It was usually about money, alcohol, or about the fact that the boy's 'father' wasn't really his father. He learned this when he was about four and he asked his father to buy him something at the store and his father told him that he should go and ask his real father because he wasn't his real father. The boy had gone and asked his mother the next day, "Who's my real daddy? Dad told me he wasn't mine." The boy's mother then had slapped him across the face so hard that the boy fell to the floor in tears. She told him never to ask that question ever again.
He wanted to go to sleep, but knew that he couldn't with all the noise and knew that he wasn't allowed to ask for them to stop yelling or to quiet down or they'd hit him some more.
At one in the morning they still hadn't stopped yelling at each other. At any other place, in any other neighbourhood, someone would have called the police when they heard the parents screaming or when they heard the boy screaming out in pain, but that wasn't how it worked in this neighbourhood. Nobody gave a damn who screamed in this neighbourhood.
The boy was now laying in bed waiting for them to stop. He heard glass crashing into a wall followed by more shouts and screams, but he thought nothing of it, they threw things all the time. A loud smash, a bang, a scream, and the sound of someone falling was heard. Shortly later, the sound of someone rushing about the apartment to pack things was heard. It wasn't the person rushing around to take things and leave him that the boy was scared about, his parents left him home alone all the time, it was the fact that he only heard one person moving around that scared him.
When he was sure that the person had left, he crept out of his room carefully and went to his parents' room.
He looked at the scene before him and felt tears welling up in his eyes because right in front of him was a body. His mom's body, but she wasn't in it anymore. Her eyes were frozen open and there was a pool of blood beneath her head. There were broken objects all over the room, but he saw his baseball bat that his 'father' had taken away from him when he tried to defend himself with it, covered in blood.
He fell to the ground crying. He wasn't sure why he did, his mother was just as bad as his father, but at least she had an obligation by blood to take care of him. He knew that his father wasn't coming back, not now, not ever and he also knew that his real father wouldn't magically appear either now that his mother was dead. He was truly all alone.
I woke up in a panic and then the nightmare flooded back to me. It always took a minute or two for the nightmare to come back to me. I don't know why I even cared to find out if it was the same nightmare or not, but I did. If only to be able to say for just one night that I didn't have the same nightmare.
I was breathing heavily and I felt Melody creep into my room and sit on my bed and then ask if I was okay.
"Yeah," I breathed out, "was I screaming too loud?"
"No. Derek told me that you were tossing, turning, and whimpering in your sleep and that you were going to wake up soon." Melody said.
Derek's superhuman hearing was a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the time. Right now it was a good thing. Derek knew I had nightmares but he kept the knowledge to himself and didn't try to find out what they were about because that was my business and I had a right to my secrets as long as they didn't have the potential to harm us all.
"Was it the same dream?" Melody asked as she moved my sweat plastered hair out of my eyes.
"Yeah." I mumbled.
Melody frowned, slipped under the covers next to me and put her head on my chest.
I naturally moved my arms around her and asked, "What time is it?"
"A little after eleven at night." Melody answered.
"About four hours of sleep before a nightmare. Progress." I mumbled.
"It'll get better." Melody said, trying to reassure me.
I wasn't sure if it would. It had been over ten years and I was still having nightmares. I was the little boy in my dreams. My mom was a human that had worked for The Edison Group and cheated on her husband with some sorcerer who was my real father. Her husband obviously didn't like the fact that I wasn't his, but I was sure that things had started going downhill between them before I was born, because if they hadn't I doubted that she would have cheated on him and gotten pregnant with me. She thought that the sorcerer loved her when he really didn't and I think that my father did love her, but when she had me and it turned out that I wasn't his, well...I think he stopped and she just became his obsession and possession to abuse and soon after she just stopped and gave in to the anger he made her feel. He killed her and took off. He was found when I was ten years old, he has a child of his own out there, so I guess his daughter is like my sister of sorts, but not by blood. She's probably about 9 or 10 by now.
"Maybe." I said, really not believing it.
After my mom was murdered I was put in foster care. A few of the families got me to see a few therapists about my dreams and they tried to talk me to death. Here's my opinion on the mental medical people, the lowest on the food chain are therapists, they don't prescribe anything and they make you talk to the point where you get a sore throat, if it ever is a requirement that a person needs to see one I recommend that they bring water. The people above the therapists are the psychiatrists, they still talk to you but they're pill poppers and will give the patient every pill on the rainbow, water is still recommended to swallow the pills. Above the psychiatrists are the psychologists and they're usually more expensive, but that's just because they have the potential to actually help. I've learned that this stereotype is actually quite accurate, about 93% accurate to be honest. How did I get that percentage? I made it up.
"It will." Melody said. She couldn't really say much more because Derek could hear and I didn't really want people to know how I grew up. I wasn't ashamed of my past really, I just didn't want the sympathy of people. More people seemed to show sympathy at the fact that from the age of seven to the age of sixteen I was in foster care. Those people probably weren't ever in foster care so they wouldn't know, but really, most of the homes aren't that bad. The last home I was at before I came to the safehouse was a great home, my sort of foster mother or foster grandmother was an eighty-three year old woman named Agatha. She was funny and acted like the perfect grandmother. She had been raising foster children since she was forty because she couldn't have had children herself and she loved to bake. When I came into my powers at fifteen she was the first person I told and showed. I'll never forget her reaction because it was shocking. She smiled, hugged me and said, "I keep telling you that you're special. Now will you believe it?"
She died four months after my sixteenth birthday. The funeral turnout was shocking. Forty-three years of raising foster children added up. Every single living foster child showed up. Some of them even had to miss work and fly in but they did it in an instant for her.
I grumbled something as Melody and I just held each other. I didn't regret the choice I made to come to the safehouse and fight against The Edison Group when Andrew contacted me. I knew what was right and what was wrong, and I wanted to help. Something Agatha always thought that I should do with my powers. Help people.
A few minutes passed and I felt Melody's body relax into sleep. She really did look like an angel when she slept. I told her this once and she laughed and said, "So I'm a Devil by day, an Angel by night and you're an Angel by day, a Devil by night. True opposites come together."
Heck if that weren't the truth.