Trigger Warning

Ten

                It had been so long since Jerick had last seen his cousin standing in the halls of her mother's home. He could still see her, sitting on the couch laughing as they played card games or babysat Jason.

Now she wasn't laughing, though. He hadn't hear Jayden laugh in years. Honestly, Jerick was beginning to wonder if she still knew how to laugh. Her gaze was unsettling across the room, not like she was uncomfortable, but more like she was detached.

She looked smaller than she used to. Or, well, as small as a girl that was 5'10" could seem. Jayden had always been skinny, made of dense, compact muscle built for climbing trees or sparring. But now the muscle in her arms were smaller, and the line of her ribcage could be seen through her green shirt, where before it had been her core muscles.

"How long has it been since his last call-in?" she asked, crossing her arms and starting up the stairs to her room.

Jerick thought a moment before answering, "About two and a half weeks. We've had him calling in more often than you."

Jayden dropped her backpack into her old bedroom, and without a second glance, followed her cousin into the room he and Jason shared. She nodded, "I understand why. That gives him two and a half weeks where at any point they could have busted him. He could very well already be dead."

"There's that sense of optimism I'd been missing," Jerick snipped at her. "So they would kill him? If they do find him out?"

"Only if he managed to piss them off enough." She shrugged, "They're not as awful as you'd think. None of them want to kill the other clans."

He stopped and stared at Jayden. Her hair fell around her serious expression in a craze of tangles and knots, and Jerick wondered if she really had gone crazy. "Are you actually defending those bastards? You're an Idalis, Jayden."

"Ide!" she shouted at him, then sighed and sat down on Jason's bed. "Look, I'm just saying I don't know if it's necessary for me to waste my time going in after him."

"You can't just leave your family behind. Blood may not be love, but it is commitment." Jerick told her.

Jayden shook her head and sighed, "Maybe so, but commitment requires love, Jer."

"This is Jason we're talking about," he said, staring at his cousin's bed across the room from him. "You can't blame him for the choices of the rest of us. I'm sorry for whatever the hell we did to piss you off so much, but Jason wasn't a part of this. You can't abandon him. I know you, Jay. You wouldn't."

Jayden sat down on her little brother's bed, where she had laid so many times when she was a teenager, waiting for him to fall asleep, but she found nothing familiar in it. The bed smelled of cologne and soap. Gone was the Spiderman comforter, replaced by a plain dull blue summer blanket. A discarded t-shirt laid at the foot of the bed, way too big to fit what she remembered of her brother. But seven years made a big difference in the growth of who was once an eight year old boy.

She didn't recognize anything about the band posters on the wall beside her. She didn't recognize anything, and Jerick could see her battling to change the image of her brother from a young child to a teenager. He could tell that she knew what the right thing to do was, but seven years was a long time to hold on caring for someone.

It was the first time that he had doubted that Jayden still loved Jason.

Jayden couldn't believe that she was back in that room. She had sworn two years ago that she wouldn't go back. She refused to go back. She couldn't go back. But the past had a funny way of creeping back up on you.

She knew no matter how much you fight, you can't hide from what you once were. She had to go back.

"You can't order me to go back in," Jayden told him harshly. "I'm my own person now."