So. Hi. Surprise! I'm alive.
(wee bit of darkness ahead, be warned)
Also—thank you. Seriously, your support via the favs, follows, and reviews (even though it's been a hot minute) has kept me fighting to get these chapters out. You guys are the life force.
*unedited
Chapter Four
He'd seen some shit.
Growing up with an absent dead-beat sperm donor and a single mother who was never home because she was working to provide allowed a snot-nosed kid a lot of freedom.
Aka freedom to do fuck-all.
He had to learn the hard way what responsibility was and what being accountable for your actions meant. But nothing ever hit as hard as learning that you're a part of a supernatural race born to protect your people against the scum of humanity.
Oh, and you're supposed to be the boss. How's that for responsibility and accountability?
He didn't take it well at first.
Understatement.
He spent two weeks trying and failing to get drunk so he didn't have to feel his joints cracking and fusing back together like tiny pockets of fucking magma. By the third day of sweating through his clothes and his sheets he stripped everything down and walked around naked only to pass out on the floor. Cold showers didn't help and the one ice machine on the Rez was out-of-order more often than it was working so no ice bath—not that he had the patience or the will to walk two miles to get it.
The night he screamed into the darkness was the worst. He cursed his people, his name, his piece of shit father as the last swig of cheap whiskey dried up in his throat. His nails were short, chewed until they bled but they still marked his skin as he tore at his flesh, his voice raw from screaming as it healed in seconds.
It wasn't until the pain stopped that he truly felt the rage.
And it wasn't until he damned himself that he realized he was saved.
After that, it took him less time to get right than it did to get wrong. When kids younger than him started to go through the same shit he did he knew this wasn't just some fucked up karmic bullshit. He took charge in a way he didn't think he could. And it became personal.
He was the one Paul came to when his dad used him as an outlet for his anger.
He was the one Jacob came to when memories of his mom overwhelmed him and he didn't know whether to laugh or cry or punch something.
He was the one who walked Quil through his imprint and did his best to get him completely shit-faced because how the fuck does the universe think it's okay to tie your soul to a two year old.
And he was the one that threatened to bitch slap the Elders when they tried to put restrictions on Leah because she was a woman.
Disregarding the fact that she could chew them up and spit them out.
His pack was his family. Even with all their fuck-ups, they were his.
And that meant he would do anything, be anything for them.
But fuck if that meant he knew what to do right now because he definitely didn't.
He just got his rights read according to the idiot speech that was just given by some ginger haired fuck who had frozen him in place.
There was a woman—aka one tiny ass lady—standing in between his pack and the wall of leeches across the meadow and what the fuck was she going to do?
And the number one Least Desirable Cullen was now a rabbit (he refused to call it a bunny).
He was willing to put up with a lot of shit but this was an entirely new level of twilight zone fuckery—
—and then his world erupted in heat and screams.