Till 21

Throughout my birthday, and the three weeks that followed, the pack and I worked to clean up our home. It was our tradition to cremate the bodies of our kin when they died to give them an easy passage to the afterlife, and so we spent that day gathering up their bodies and bathing them, so they could be wrapped respectfully in cloth. 

I had helped to pick up the bodies of every other family, but I just couldn't do it for mine. I couldn't look at my father, or what was left of him, and even worse, I couldn't deal with the idea that my mother, who had hugged me, and held me, and loved me so powerfully to her last breath was dead. 

Liam was my strong tower in all of it. He helped me carry out my duties, picking up broken up floorboards, picking off wood from the floors on the homes we visited, and having my back, throughout. 

When I fell ill from the sheer stress and exhaustion, he didn't force me to be strong, or tell me any of the motivational bullshit that everyone was used to feeding other people. He cried with me when I needed to, he let me be my own person. He had also lost his parents in the attack, and I asked if he needed support, but he assured me that their deaths was all the same to him, seeing as they had disowned him while they were alive. 

I understood, and tried my best to bear my cross quietly, after some time. We carried the dead together and burnt them with sage and other herbs, so their passages through the afterlife would be swift and easy. 

Then came the hard part; rebuilding. 

The entire pack had been built on a solid foundation, but the bodies of these homes had been gutted by the wolves, leaving behind only shrapnel and wood. Mercifully, since the night of the attack, it had not rained, and we had all been sleeping at the mercy of the elements, under the sky. Some homes looked like they were intact, but there was so much death and destruction within them that living in them seemed impossible. 

So all of us in the pack, all the survivors had to build a new home, one that suited the new needs that had arisen. 

We had children who had no parents anymore, no guardians aside from the ones assigned to their wellbeing, and we realized we would need to build at least three huge homes to serve as hostels for the children alone.

The only building which had only suffered superficial damage was the pack store, something we were grateful for. 

After we had a long day of being strong and having our heads together, Liam and I would lay down on the same blanket, with another one draped over our figures, and I would talk to him, try to get hints of what our futures were about to look like, without any of the elders to guide us.

“Liam. What are we going to do? How are we going to navigate this? Will we be okay?”

Like clockwork, each time this anxiety crept into my brain, he would give me a tender kiss at the crown of my head. 

“Yes baby,” he would say.

 “We will be okay. It's okay. We will sort it out… we will make a new way of life for ourselves. We're all we've got now. It will be okay.”

“Promise me nothing will happen to you. That you'll stick with me. Please.”

“I promise,” he says, and honestly? I think that he meant it at that moment. 

Over the next year, we did create a new normal, and Liam and I lived together in our own home, taking care of the pack together. He would go out in the morning and do his best, and I would care for our neighbors, who were mostly little kids so had lost their parents. I would teach them the things I thought were essential for them to know. 

I served as a teacher while Liam served as anything else they needed, and soon we were permanently Olivia and Liam. The older generation of wolves had taught us how to take care of ourselves, and we made sure that we did, and did it well too.

We knew that we would need a new leader soon, someone who we could give the responsibility of our wellbeing to. I would vote Liam in a heartbeat. From the way that he took care of me alone, I already knew that he would be a great leader, but then that was the exact same way that he was with the little children of the pack, making sure that they were always well fed and comfortable. 

So many of the pack members had come to me privately to convince him to run for the post, and I had passed along the message with due diligence, telling him that the people of the pack would want him to be their Alpha. 

At first, he would deflect and instead ask me how I would feel about it. He would begin like, “Babe, how would you feel about it? You know you would have to share me, right? If I became the Alpha, I will no longer be just for you. I will be for every woman, every man, every single person that is in this pack.”

I would happily respond, “yeah, I know. I'm okay with that. The people need a leader, and you are the exact person they need. So selfless, so responsible, able to keep his head straight on his neck in a crisis. You would be perfect.”

He would brush off my response, and then it became a thing that we did every other day. “Why don't you accept, Liam? They need you. We need you, I need you.”

“I think I'm too young,” he finally admitted. “I shouldn't be allowed to get in power when I'm just 20.” I nodded, finally understanding. My 19th birthday had come and gone, but he didn't turn 21, the acceptable age for a few months, and he had always told me that one of his biggest fears was not achieving his dreams fast enough. 

“I get that. I think everyone would get that. We forget so easily because well- you're so good at managing us. But I trust your discretion. If you think that you are too young for it now, then you are. We have survived this long without leadership, we will be okay.”

“Till I turn 21.”

“Till you turn 21,” I echoed.