#dashli

Darlin’ hung back. A ghost on the wall that always managed to disappear. Never heard, rarely seen. Overlooked.

They enjoyed it that way. Forming limited connections meant less heartbreak further down the road when they decided to leave. People always left.

Watching the two people you were hopelessly in love fawn all over the other made it a little less easy to not care. Apathy was something Darlin’ had spent their whole life in the company of.

Through their parents, their friends, Quinn. None of it had ever really mattered, just adding complexity to their grey life.

However watching David and Asher be David and Asher, now that created reds and blues. It caused dark greens and pale yellows. It wasn’t fair. Why had these two had such an affect on their life that no one had managed to before? Why the two mates who were so sickeningly in love, that it was apparent to everyone?

The Alpha and the Beta were every happy-ending given true form. They’d survived Gabe’s passing, Quinn, the inversion, and come out all the better for it.

Those events… they’d simply chipped further and further away at Darlin’s humanity. Left them scarred, broken, shattered. They would never recover from any of those moments in time. That was the simple truth of it all.

Milo had once begged them to tell his best friends about their secretly harboured feelings. That was met with a resounding no and a promise of violence if he ever told anyone.

So there they were, glued to the back wall like a parasite. They didn’t move, didn’t speak, as David gave his speech to his pack. All of whom were watching with great awe. David certainly wasn’t his father, but Darlin’ thought that might’ve just been a good thing. He bought so much more that Gabe (Bless his soul) had ever been able to.

After Liliana’s passing, Gabe had been broken. He’d attempted to keep the peace with his pack and himself, but Darlin’ saw. Kindred spirits and all that.

There was something familiar, even to their adolescent mind, in the way Gabe’s cracks seeped through into his everyday life. Maybe that’s why they’d felt such a close bond with the former Alpha.

Fiddling with their ring, they kept their gaze firmly on their mutilated hands while their ears remained tracked to every word that fell from between those sweet lips.

At one point they glanced up, feeling a gaze on them. Asher. Even from behind their sunglasses, they were positive he caught the way their eyes widened.

‘David’s speaking, why is he looking at me?’ They questioned silently, internally panicking at every out-of-place area on their body. 13. That’s how many they counted just with a quick mental scan.

Fuck.

‘Wait after. Please?’ Asher signed discreetly, nodding in their direction to confirm that he was speaking to them. Limbs paralysed and anxiety crippling their every survival instinct, they nodded and moved their unseeing gaze back to the Alpha.

In their peripheral, they watched as Asher kept looking at them for a few moments before turning back to his mate.

Sweat welled up along their hairline, a physical manifestation of their rapidly-increasing anxiety. Leaving now would draw too much suspicion, as well as alerting their friend Beta. The doors were far too loud to be moved without gathering unwanted attention.

They remained frozen, heart galloping in their chest for the duration of the pack meeting. Pack meeting. Honestly they weren’t even sure why they’d shown up; they certainly weren’t ‘pack’. Others had made that abundantly clear.

Oh god. A lightbulb flicked in their mind. David and Asher were kicking them out. They’d spotted Chrissy whispering to Ash not moments before the meeting began.

Fuck.

They were being kicked out. A loner. A rouge. Granted, majority of the time they felt like that anyway; but at least they still had the layer of being a Shaw on their back.

After this they’d be naked. Vulnerable. Totally alone.

Shit.

Noise finally penetrated their ears, seeping in around the buzzing. Clapping. The meeting had adjourned.

With the confirmation of their impending doom in their mind, Darlin’ did the one thing they knew their boys… their Alpha and Beta would hate the most.