Permission to love - The Rogue Pack

Chapter 1 - Tayanita

I've never been one for friends. I never seemed to fit in with the crowd, never felt comfortable in my own skin. No one around me seemed to understand when I told them that I didn't feel like the person they kept saying that I was. They didn't understand when I told them that I didn't want to wear the clothes they said I had to wear. My parents wouldn't listen when I tried to explain, brushed it off as a childhood fantasy. Blindly ignoring my discomfort and silent pleas for help.

By secondary school, I finally had a couple of friends. People who tried to accept who I was, and who listened when I spoke. Yet if anything their presence only served to make me feel even more different. Even my closest friends didn't fully understand who I was, and I honestly didn't always feel comfortable trying to explain it to them. I felt like an outsider within my own skin, my own home, my own family. Even amongst my friends. I felt like I didn't belong. 

I felt like my voice was silenced when I tried to speak. That MY preferences and MY thoughts were put after society's thoughts and preferences. I felt like I had to conform.

But then everything changed. It all changed. And it only took one bad decision, one fateful night, and I was suddenly someone different. Before no one listened to me, no one recognised me. But now they outright rejected me. I was a nobody. I was mocked and shunned. Bullied by my so-called friends, misunderstood and rejected by my parents who eventually kicked me out of the house. 

I was so alone. I could have handled the hatred if only I'd had someone by my side. But I didn't. And the worst was that I couldn't tell anyone about what had happened. If I did they wouldn't understand, wouldn't believe me. Or worst of all they would blame me for that night, assume that it was all my fault. And honestly, I sometimes wondered whether they would have been right. Maybe it was my fault? Maybe I could have done something to stop it?

At first, my mind couldn't comprehend what had happened. After that night, I felt so foreign, so strange. As if I wasn't the same person as I'd been before. I felt weak and vulnerable. So alone in a new, and foreign world. Even more alone than I'd been before.

And then, when I was at my most depressed, most vulnerable, they came for me. Goddess knows how they'd heard about me. I'd kept a low profile after I'd been forced to move out of my parents' house, using large cities to remain unnoticed. An invisible shadow that blended into the background. A nobody that could be forgotten in an instant. They came in the dead of night, I was bound and gagged before I could even open my eyes. That's when I truly became a nobody. I'd thought I was alone before. But I was wrong. You didn't know loneliness until you were nothing more than a number in the DIR's system.

After two days I felt desperate. I yearned to be free, to breathe the outdoor air, to feel a breeze on my face. The air where I was kept stifled me, made me feel repressed. As if I was a captive in my own skin. After a week, all I wanted to do was scream. My skin crawled and itched. I was covered in a layer of grime and filth and felt imprisoned by my thoughts. I never saw a single soul. Meals, or whatever it was they chose to call the grey sludge that was pushed into my room twice a day, were given to me through a slit in the door. I didn't see another soul in that cell, for a whole month. I'd never realised how much I'd relied on the hustle and bustle of the people around me, on the constant presence of warm bodies and kind souls to surround myself with.

After a month, the experimentation started. So when I finally did see someone, their face quickly came to haunt my nightmares, waking and sleeping. Yet as unbearable as the experimentations were, as much as the chemicals they injected me with burned, as much as the devices cut my skin, the worst torture of all was the sense of self-hatred that permeated my entire being. 

I hated myself for my weakness, for my inability to fight back and defend myself. I felt revolting and disgusting. I knew that no one would ever come for me, no one would ever know that I was here, no one would ever care about me. There was a sense of hopelessness in every day, and eventually, I stopped caring. I still flinched away from their steely gazes, harsh words, and harsher fists, curling myself into the back of my cell into the shadows. Hoping that if I stayed unnoticed, they would forget me, leave me to die. 

I was desperate for death. I refused their meals, growing steadily weaker and thinner until the day that they started force-feeding me, needing to keep their experimental subjects alive. I felt like cattle, as food was forced into my mouth, spilling down my chin as they shoved greasy spoons of grey sludge into my sealed lips. I could see no way out. No welcoming sharp edge I could use to end my misery, no darkness I could succumb to.

I felt on the brink of death, yet unable to die. Destined to endless suffering. Without hope for any future. 

That's when she arrived. I smelt her before I saw her, her intoxicating scent of seawater and warm bread, a scent filled with a sense of danger and adventure but also homely and safe. After a scuffle, she advanced slowly down the row of cells. I couldn't help but peer out from the shadows as she approached, desperate to see the face that accompanied that glorious scent. 

Her honeyed eyes were hard, a steely determination set in her irises. Her cute button nose was scattered with freckles and her ginger hair curled in waves like a halo around her head. She stood tall and strong, there was a force inside her, a strength that I had never seen before. And I knew that I could never part from her. I knew, almost intuitively, that she would be my saviour. That she would save me from this prison, that she would bring me out of the shell that I had built around myself. I knew without a doubt that she was my mate.

Yet she didn't fixate me in the same way that I was fixating on her. Her eyes kept flicking to the side and then back again, a strange expression etched on her face. She seemed confused, and if I wasn't mistaken, almost scared. I could sense that she just wanted to retreat back into her shell, she seemed to almost wish that the ground would swallow her up.

Finally, I was able to tear my eyes away from her long enough to notice the other new presence in the room. He was standing near the guard's post, so I couldn't quite make out his features but his scent is what struck me. He smelled of vanilla and cinnamon, an intoxicating scent. Yet it wasn't the same as the girl's. Where I felt an innate, unbearable pull towards her. A sense of need to be near her, with him I felt comradery, a friendly intimacy. But it was still a pull that felt foreign to me, I had never felt any sort of connection with any person. 

I knew that I had found two people that I felt that I would never be able to leave again. Two people that I knew I couldn't survive without.