I'll hold you close

Chapter 2

CW: Transphobia

Levi followed the creepy guard down a narrow hallway lined with doorless entryways. Everything felt so sterile: the fluorescent lights, and bright white everywhere you looked.

Glancing inside the rooms, Levi saw each was occupied by two bunk beds, one on each side. Women lay reading in many of them.

"Chambers, you're in here". The guard said, coming to a stop at the last room on the right. He was only half aware that they had stopped walking and bumped into the inmate lined up in front of him.

"Watch it!" she hissed at him.

Levi had not heard the guard. He came to when the guard grabbed his shoulders and shoved him forcefully into the room, causing him to stumble and fall, dropping his bedding on the ground in front of him. Pain shot through his knee as it made contact with the concrete floor, but he tried not to let it register on his face. He stood up, scooping up his bedding as he did. He discreetly tested the injured knee, and put his full weight on it against his better judgement. Two of the inmates already established in the room looked on blankly and one, a woman with messy red hair, stared at him with confusion.

"Are you fucking with me? That's a dude!" She said to the room.

"Mind your business Nichols" the guard scolded. Levi just stood in the middle of the room clutching his bedding.

"But- he" Nicky started gesturing to Levi with one hand, but the guard cut her off.

"Women pretending to be men can't exactly be put in a men's facility."

"See that's fucked up what you just said." Nicky stated flatly.

"That's a shot, Nichols". He replied, leading the other inmates away.

Levi stared at the floor. Nicky focused her gaze on him now, eyes softening a little.

Levi was still frozen, save for his index finger which tapped rapidly against the bundle in his arms. Nicky slid off her bunk, and gently pulled the bedding from his hands, placing it on the bunk below hers. The other women quickly returned to whatever they had been doing before he arrived.

"Let me make your bed, they like it done a specific way". Nicky told him and began putting it together for him.

"Thank you" he muttered, still not moving. Standing on his injured knee was painful but he was frozen to the spot, trying hard to process everything that had just happened.

"Yeah, don't mention it" she replied.

He wondered in the back of his mind why Nicky was being so nice to him.

When she was finished he quietly thanked her again and slid into the bunk where he lay facing the wall.

Nicky watched him for a moment. She felt a pang in her chest, feeling a lot of pity for the boy. She couldn't understand why she was feeling this way. Most people's first day was rough, but his, she supposed, just seemed so much worse.

She hadn't even witnessed all the moments leading up to that final push, the ones that Levi now lay in his bunk replaying over and over, as if they were being projected onto the blank wall in front of him.