The Child of Scraps

Chapter 19

When Noah found out that the two kids had left, she immediately ran out of the house.

It wasn't that what they had done was bad, really. Noah knew that they weren't abandoning her or anything.

But the thing is, she always felt out of the loop. Always excluded, always outside the group, always never the one the other would talk to. She just felt like she was staying there even though no one really wanted her to.

So when she found out that they were excluding her once more, she immediately went back to the place where she'd feel like she wasn't supposed to be there: her home.

She pushed the door open, and found everything almost exactly as how it was. If anything, the place was a little dustier than usual, because its occupants were elsewhere. She also noted that their TV had been taken by thieves, but she didn't care much for that.

She jumped onto the mattress, feeling the old and rusty springs dig into her flesh. She hugged the pillow as she leaned onto the wall. Yes, it felt like she was just at home and that she was just bored at home, waiting for Dominiko to come home.

Dominiko...

She started crying. She was trying hard not to miss him. She was trying really hard to pretend that she was okay and that she still didn't need him, but really, who was she kidding? She just felt lonely, incomplete. Dominiko had left an empty space in her home, in her arms, in her heart. She had no one in the city that actually cared about her, and it's not like Dominiko could help with her situation. There was no closure, and she was never getting any closure.

She wondered, if there would be a time in the future, that she'd end up forgetting about Dominiko. If she could find a life happy without him, and then what would happen to her love for him? Did that mean that she had stopped loving him? And what if she were to die? If she went to Heaven and Dominiko was there, would he remember her? Would she remember him?

She thought of Elias, the boy without a family, who was taken in by Aguirre. Would she end up like that? She thought of his cold gestures, averted glances, the way he'd put up a proud front to hide the rest of him. Did she have to shield her own heart too?

But she thought of her emotions, and felt an empty soul, and she thought, did she even have a heart?

No, she shouldn't go any further than she should.

She stayed there, just hugging the pillow, pretending that Dominiko would come home sometime soon. She lost track of the hours that went by in that position, she lost track of the light that was slowly dimming, she had lost track of what she was thinking, she lost track of nearly everything. All that mattered to her was in the pillow, and pretending that Dominiko was coming home.

She only looked up when she noticed the slow movement of the door being pushed open. A flash of red hair confirmed that it was Avery who was entering, quickly followed by Leandro.

Avery went up to the weeping girl, concern in those blue eyes of hers. Noah, who had never seen blue eyes in her life, had always been transfixed by Avery's pairs. There was something about them that seemed to burn bright with emotion almost all the time, reflecting the fiery girl's own soul. But now, she noticed the way Avery's mouth was hanging a little open, the way her slender body was curving towards Noah's own, and possibly most strikingly, the way her eyebrows furrowed and made the eyes look like they were tame and gentle, like what the girl was trying to be then.

And Noah, she felt a little bit of Avery's own flame slip into her own soul, trying to light her up with kindness. And Noah, happy for the first time that Avery had shown her care for the deaf girl, slowly smiled. Avery embraced the girl, and Noah could feel her jaw moving, trying to say something but forgetting that Noah couldn't hear, like always. But Noah was fairly sure that Avery was trying to say something around the lines of, "It's going to be alright." In fact, she didn't need to hear the girl say them at all.

Because they didn't need words to communicate.