TW: Mentions of Child Sexual Abuse

Amber

~~

That sound, of those square toed dress shoes, walking down the hall.

A sound that makes me stiffen as I hear it coming. I'm breathing heavy, the fear coming up to choke me.

The smell of the cigarettes and booze soon follow as that door creaks open.

I feel like I can't move, can't breathe. I can't bring that scent into my lungs, I can't take it inside me because it's killing me, even now.

A finger wrapping around a lock of my hair and tugging gently, almost teasingly before a rasp of a voice sounds.

'Good girl.'

I woke up with a sharp inhale my chest tight, my breathing laboured and my heart pounding so hard that was all I could hear. I blinked at the darkness of my room, the dream clinging to me so hard that bile rose up in my throat. I wanted to bolt, wanted to hide but I could understand what was happening. I was safe in my room, Andrew was sleeping beside me, his face pressed mostly into his pillow but turned towards me slightly. My chest squeezed tighter and I closed my eyes tightly and try to breathe through it,

A panic attack.

I wondered for a moment what set it off before I brushed the thought away. My wolf has her hackles up, a deep and feral growl rattling her chest and I knew I couldn't expend the focus to calm her. I needed to deal with the panic attack. I focused on my breathing, taking big and slow breaths, in and out, in and out. I counted down inside my head, backwards from ten and then from twenty and then from thirty but it didn't go away.

I swallowed against the tightness in my throat and slowly shifted on the bed. "Kay?" Andrew's voice was sleepy and mumbled and I nodded before bending over and kissing his cheek to reassure him.

"Bathroom." I forced the word out, trying to keep my voice from shaking to prevent him from worrying. I loved my male, with everything inside me, but he couldn't help me with this.

I got off the bed and moved to the en suite bathroom. I made sure the door was closed behind me before I turned on the light. It was nearly blinding at first and I blinked rapidly before I moved to the sink. My hands shook violently and my breathing came out in wheezes. I knew I was having a panic attack, a result from that nightmare, but even knowing what it was wouldn't simply stop it. I simply had to ride it out and try to mitigate the symptoms as best as I could.

I turned on the water, letting it run until it was cold enough to sting before I grabbed a face cloth, trying to focus and not let the panic drag me down into a spiral. I got the cloth wet and wrung it out before I closed the toilet lid and sat down on it as I draped the cold cloth on the back of my neck and hung my head forward. The iciness was a shock to my system and I could feel everything freeze for a moment, a brief moment, but it was enough to have me leaning forward, resting my elbows on my knees and start my breathing all over again.

In and out, deep and slow as I counted backwards inside my head. First from ten, then from twenty, then from thirty. I breathed in on the even, exhaled on the odd. My body started to shake as the cloying panic receded but I repressed the urge to fight against the shaking, letting my body work out the adrenaline as safely as it could.

What had caused it?

The question formed in my head and I let it bounce around for a moment. It wasn't uncommon to get panic attacks but it was for me to wake up with them, to have that nightmare inside my head. Something triggered it. I continued to breathe in and out, deep and slow as I mulled the question over and over in my brain like it was a well worn coin I was flipping over and over and over again.

What had caused it?

I closed my eyes leaned forward more as I clasped my hands together, resting my chin on them. Something had triggered it, I just needed to know what it wa-

Mabel.

It was a singular thought in my head but I tensed slightly at it. I had therapy with Mabel earlier in the day and she had described an incident to me where she had been assaulted, sexually, by one of the pack members of her old pack when she had been young, too young. Her voice had shook and she had barely been able to get it out past the tears and the sobbing breaths but she had. I had known something had happened, she had been acting cagey around the males of the pack and I knew something had resurfaced. So she had told me and I gave her the best help I could to process it. I knew there would be more sessions and that meant more nights just like this.

I swallowed hard and moved my head, tilting it down to pressed my head to my clasped hands as I breathed. That tight feeling was coming up again. Not as strong as it would have been years and years ago but it was there. I might have been given the tools and the training to deal with my own trauma but that didn't stop my brain from reacting to it. It would always be there, I just had to learn to live with it.

That was a harsh and horrible lesson to learn and one I hated having to teach to the timid and scared shifters who walked into my office. I hated having to look at them after months of therapy and tell them that the process to becoming better, to becoming functional, was learning to live with the pain of what was done to them. That pain didn't go away. Ever. All it did was get easier to bear. We simply had to work on how much they could bear before we stopped and gave them time to learn to live with it.

My pain still beat at me, an old and familiar ache, like a bone that had been set wrong, like phantoms pains from a limb that had been severed. It was there, my oldest companion, and I had grown to live with it. It was my burden to bear.

I hated that I had to. I wished what happened to me, to the others, hadn't. I wished I had answers to the why it happened at all. I would never get them and I couldn't even say if it would help. The possible answers I had inside my head each had their own flavour of pain and I wasn't quite sure which was easier to bear and the Alpha responsible for it all was long since dead and I couldn't get that pain picked out with his answer.

I tried to breathe but tears welled up in my eyes. I knew it was coming but pain that beat at me still hurt. No matter how many times it came up, was brought up, it still hurt. Even after thirty-nine years that pain was crushing at times. It would press down on me until all the tears had been wrung from my body and every single breath was a struggle to pull in. I couldn't fight it though, I had to let it wash over, to let it move through me.

My eyes burned as I looked up and stared at the white wall.

Why?

That was the biggest and most brutal of all the pain that hit me. Why me? Why did it happen? Why did they let it happen? Why did I have to suffer through it? Why. Why. Why. Why.

The sound of footsteps, the smell of cigarettes and alcohol, and a lock of my hair wrapped around a finger and tugged on. And a rasped out, 'Good girl.'.

Why?

Out of everything why did I remember those the most?

I let out a shaky exhale as the tears filled my eyes. I had no answers for the little girl inside me who had been hurt so badly that the trauma lingered and would forever continue to linger. I couldn't comfort her with the words she wanted. I had to live with knowing she was there, inside my chest, and I couldn't give her what she wanted to try and make the pain stop.

It beat at me as surely as it beat at her. I had no answers for why. I knew the logistics, I knew all the definitions, all the possible reasons but it never made the pain lesson. She and I were stuck with that pain because the answers were not something that would bring us closure. They never would and it fucking hurt.

It never got easier to realized there was no fixing what happened to her, to me. We lived with it, day in and day out and we had to let it fade into the background and then simply accept it when it bubbled up so strongly we had to ride it out.

An aching bone, a phantom pain, it was endless.

A sob forced itself up and lodged in my throat, making me want to choke. I was just a little girl. I hadn't deserved what had happened, what I had endured. I should have been playing with toys and talking to imaginary friends but instead I got the sound, the scent, the actions, and the words of my abuser ingrained so fucking deep I couldn't handle any of it to this day. He had taken a little girl, so many of us, and he ruined us.

The memories weren't as sharp as they had first been but they still cut just as deep.

I moved my hands, pressing them to my eyes as I let out a shuddering breath. We hadn't deserved it. Not a single fucking moment of it. There was no 'all part of Mene's plan' because I knew she wouldn't have planned for that, for that torment, for that stain to feel like it ruined us deep down. He embedded a deep shame inside of us so well it still made me feel tainted. So many times I had been told that it had made me stronger but I never should have been strong, I should have been safe.

I was a little girl and I should have been safe. I never should have endured that, the feeling of large hands moving over my skin, the smell of his breath on my face, and those fucking words ringing in my head as he hurt me again and again and again. I should have been safe.

And I wasn't.

No one had saved me, took me away, stopped him. They let him abuse me and the other girls for years. They turned a blind eye, let him bring us to his bedroom and hurt us. They knew, they all fucking knew, and they let him do it anyway. It hurt in a way that could never been soothed, it hurt in a way that was forever damaging and in a way that I would carry until the day I died.

I should have been safe.

I let out a shuddering breath, biting my lip just to have the pain so I wouldn't burst into tears. I mourned the female I could have been. I mourned the part of me that died and that I could never get back. I wondered and agonized and mourned over who I could have been. No one quite prepares you for that raw grief that cracks you down the middle as you have to learn to mourn the parts of you that were lost, mourn the female that died inside that trauma.

She hadn't been given a chance to fully grown before it was torn away and I had been born in the rubble of what could have been and that fucking hurt. The grief of it always left me feel open and raw and bruised. I could have grown up so different and instead I had to grow with a trauma deep inside of me, a stain that never quite came out. An ugly reminder of what had been done that was irreparable and unfixable because a part of you died, a part of you stopped breathing and you had to continue living despite it.

A choked sob escaped and covered my mouth to catch the rest that followed. I ached for who I could have been and the part of me that had died. I mourned for the life that had been taken and the memories that had been tainted. I mourned and mourned and mourned because living with the pain meant living with the grief of the life and person you could have been that was now gone.

You had to live with the whys and the painful what ifs. You had to live in a body you couldn't replace. You couldn't just have a new one because your old one ached with the wounds that had been done to it. You had to slap on a repair and keep moving and at times it was exhausting and above all it was painful. And it never. Stopped. Hurting.

And there were no answers for the whys because no matter what the answer could have been, it would still hurt, they just carried different sort of pain. The possible answers whirling through my head made me want to curl up and cry harder.

Why? Because there was something wrong inside of him and he couldn't help himself.

Why? Because you tempted him and it caused him to snap.

Why? Because he wanted to get off.

I cried harder into my hand, trying to stop the answers from bouncing inside of my head but each type of pain they caused wasn't something I could fight against. Each answer could be boiled down into that pain, into words that made them clear and I couldn't tell what hurt most.

I was a randomly targeted simply for my age and nothing I could have done would have changed the outcome.

It was my fault. I tempted him and that meant I brought it down on myself.

He ruined my life for his own pleasure, I was an object, a tool, to be be used and then discarded. I wasn't a person to him, I was a means to an end.

Each one caused it's own lash of pain and I felt like I couldn't breathe. I was raw and broken and filled with pain because the whys didn't truly matter. They were a false and cold comfort, something that could give me a way to mentally file my trauma. It didn't matter in the end. All that mattered it what happened and what happened was brutal and horrible and I would live with it for my entire life. It was inescapable and unending.

He got what he wanted and I was forced to carry the trauma of it for the rest of my life. A deep and painful scar that never stopped aching, no matter how gently I tried to handle it. Nothing a person did could ever remove that pain. You had to decide if you would live with it or buckle under it.

I wiped at my eyes and swallowed my sobs. I had to live with it, I had to work through it and fight to get it back to that familiar ache rather than this brutal pain. However I allowed myself to mourn for a moment more. I knew I would have been a happy child who would have grown into a happier adult. I would have been able to freely touch others without anxiety. I would have been able to hear dress shoes on hardwood without panicking, would have been able to smell cigarettes and alcohol without gagging. I would have been able to run my fingers through my little Lula's hair and tell her she was a good girl without wanting to fall to the floor and wail.

I could have been so much more than I was now and he had ruined it, they all had. And it hurt, above all, the pain rocked me like a familiar friend and it always would because who I could have been was dead. She was dead from the first moment that Alpha had grabbed my small hand in his and took me to his bedroom.

How I mourned her, how I mourned me.

The door opened as I wiped at my eyes letting out shuddering breaths. "Amber, are you okay?" Andrew's voice was a hush of worry as he quickly came over, getting to his knees as he held me, looking up into my eyes. I gave him a sad smile as I shook my head slowly. "What can I do, love? What can I do to fix it?" He looked so earnest and I knew he would fight the very moon for me but this wasn't something one could fix.

"I'm mourning, Andrew." I said it softly and he wrapped his arms around my back and kissed my sternum. I slowly wrapped my arms around him as my eyes welled up with more tears. I hadn't ever told him what happened, I didn't like talking about it with people. There were so many questions they asked that had no good answers but I loved him and sometimes it was okay to let others shoulder the burden. "I was six years old when the Alpha of my pack came to get me." My stomach clenched and I felt sick. I hesitated before closing my eyes, letting the tears fall. He needed to know. "And then he hurt me."

The story came out of me with tears and sobs and with a pain in my chest that didn't stop and only grew worse when Andrew stiffened as he knelt there but this male of mine, held me tight, and listened. At the end I clung to him tightly, crying because I could do nothing but. I cried for everything that hurt inside of me, for the things that were broken and couldn't be fixed how they had been before. I cried for the angry, aching wound on my soul.

"Let me mourn with you." Andrew's voice was soft in my ear, his voice thick with tears. "Let's mourn together, my love, because this hurts." His voice was soft and it cracked and I held him tighter pressing my face into his shoulder as we cried for the little girl I had been and the female I could have been that died in a dark bedroom when I was six years old.