Bird Box (Oc x reader)

Chapter 14

"Listen to the clicks." You click two rocks together, walking in a garden with a blindfold. "Listen to the sounds, if they're softer or louder. Listen to this."

Olympia, a five year old girl now, named after her birth mother, walk around in the garden with her own blindfold covering her eyes. She listens to the clicks you make, as she clicks the pair of stones in her own hands.

"If they're louder, you're in an open space. Do you hear that, O? And if they're softer, something is very close."

Your daughter clicks her stones as she walks blindly around in the garden with you. Inside the house, Ethan is trying the radio again.

"Hello? Is anyone out there?" He doesn't get an answer, like always, but he doesn't give up.

...

It is Ethan's turn to stay behind with Olympia, while you go on a run. He's working on some tools while O play with the toys that was left at this house when you came. She holds the a small row boat toy when he looks over at her.

"When I was little, we had a boat just like that. Well, it was a little bigger than that one." He chuckles.

She smiles and takes it to him. Ethan pulls his daughter up on her lap and looks at the toy with her.

"Every summer, we would take it to the lake.. You and Mom would have loved it there. They had trees and beautiful flowers. The water was warm, the clouds were in the sky. We'd play in the water. All the kids, all the children. We would run up and down the shore."

"There were other children in the world?" O asks him and he looks at her sadly.

"Yeah, just like you. Just like you." He pokes her belly.

She giggles and try to cover herself from her father's tickle attack and he smiles lovingly at her.

"One day we saw this really, really big oak tree. It was bigger than this house." He says and she looks in awe of the story. "It was so big and old, I couldn't see the top of it. Guess what we did?"

"Climbed it?"

"Yes, we climbed it. We climbed it until we got to the top. I saw a nest at the top of the three?.. With three birds, sitting on the top branch.. A family, like us."

She looks at her father in so much love that it takes his breath away and she hugs him, he hugs her back before letting her go to play some more.

Ethan looks at her, feeling sorry for his daughter who might not meet another child. The house in the forest you had been at for a while now was safe for now. But he hoped that he could get his family somewhere safe and with more people, there had to be other survivors left out there, that's why you tried the radio every day and was often on the move to hopefully get closer to someone you might learn to trust, he was still cautious, as were you after a few mistrust incidents over the years, only barely making it out of alive. A place with more children would be wishful thinking, but you couldn't help but hope. And you both wanted O to have something to believe in. The two of you did everything you could to give O the best chance of survival, but also gave her the best kind of childhood you could give a child under the circumstances.

At first you were both unsure of how to go about this, raising a child in this world, if it was a bad idea to give her hope for something better. But life is more than just what is. It's about what could be. What you could make it. And she was already good at making the best out of her situation herself too, just looking at her make a toy out of the old broken ones and finding happiness in that even though she has had better toys before.

You decided that you needed to promise her dreams that may never come true. You needed to love her and each other, knowing that you may lose each other at any second. O deserves dreams, deserves to be loved, deserves to hope, she deserves parents that will take care of her and raise her to become the best possible version of herself. And the two of you vowed to do that.