Moon Bound

Chapter 36-Scents of Her History

TW: topics including anxiety, death, past trauma, and self-harm

It had been a long time since I'd experienced a panic attack. They'd been a regular occurrence after my parents died, but eventually, I learned to control them.

Maybe control wasn't the right word. It wasn't something that could be controlled per se. There was no way to know what would trigger them either. What I did know, was the first thirteen years of my life, I never knew anything but happiness and joy. I was raised in a loving family, with a doting father and mother and a much older brother who adored me. My childhood was happy and safe. That is the world I knew. But in just one day, I became intimately acquainted with terror and loss when I witnessed my parents' violent murders.

And after that, I never felt truly safe again.

That is until Codrin.

Despite the danger he claimed he posed to me, he had made me feel physically safe for the first time in a long time.

But he also made me feel a lot of other feelings...

Blanca said I ran away from things. She was right, I did. I avoided things that made me feel too much.

And Codrin... he made me feel too much.

So maybe avoid was a better word. I had learned to avoid the panic attacks.

I'd taught myself to bury my memories, bury my feelings, and when I learned to shift and developed impulses and instincts that felt foreign and feral... I learned to bury those, too, right along with my wolf.

How else do you avoid yourself?

You can't.

But you can bury pieces of yourself so deep you never have to take them out and look at them.

As the stone walls of the bathroom began to close in around me, I realized this wouldn't be one of my finer moments.

I slipped down to the floor as the buzzing in my head began to make me feel dizzy. I was sucking in air, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't fill my lungs. The tears I'd been holding back spilled over into two hot trails down my face. I was desperate for that delicate balance between my human half and wolf half that would allow me to regulate all my feelings and instincts. In wolf form, I could numb the human emotions for a bit and let my instincts take over.

I pressed my hands into the cool stone of the floor, trying to ground myself with a physical sensation as a manic laugh left my lips. The irony that I had locked up the part of myself that could give me some relief from these torturous feelings hadn't escaped me. I had to find a way to be whole again. Ina had lost the protection of her wolf and succumbed to the dark side of her human nature.

I had a dark side, too.

When I was younger, before I learned to shift, I would cut myself to make the feelings stop, to try and numb the emotional pain with physical pain. I'll admit, the urge to avoid my current state was strong.

Somewhere, the rational doctor side of my brain was telling me I shouldn't feel so hurt over Codrin's love for Ina. It was almost a thousand years ago, and he was just a boy at the time. I tried to remind myself that I was at the beginning of an imitative heat cycle, and hormones were beginning to flood my body, making me all kinds of crazy.

Human PMS has nothing on a heat cycle.

And... I'd just given myself over to him completely, that was huge. It was wonderful. He had been amazing. It's not completely unusual to feel a surge of big emotions after something so momentous. Some people even cried after sex, for goddess sake.