#kwarrel

Kwarrel had been a violent man in his youth. That was part of why he’d reached out to Kevin in the first place, not just because he’d been causing problems but because he’d reminded him so much of himself. A mass of hurt and anger that’d only had the one way out, the sort that ate away at you until either there was nothing else left or you managed to drop it from your heart and shoulders. He himself had taken decades to hit the tipping point, to look back at all that anger and violence and see how little it had helped him. Another decade and more to unlearn a lifetime of habit, to get his temper under control, choose a better path in life and pave it himself. Only then had he started reaching out, a success story and a promise that others, if they wished, if they worked, could find a better footing. Kevin had been the latest- a young bull overflowing that had been offered, had eventually taken, an offer to become a better, less raging version of himself.

It had taken only a few days at most, once he began mentoring him, to realize that he was just a teen, to have to bite his tongue because what were the people running the place thinking when he was clearly barely old enough for the caravans.

He’d needed slightly longer to realize that he wasn’t even that. That the ‘young bull’ was just a calf, one that should have been off playing with friends, getting schooling, safe and sound and protected by a herd. One that had very clearly, painfully clearly been forced to grow too fast.

And that single fact, more than anything else, fanned the smoldering embers of Kwarrel’s temper. That a kid had ended up in that position at all, the sheer number of people who would have to have failed him for things to get that far. How surprised, confused, Kevin was to be treated like he was so very young. How many people had to fuck up for an eleven-year-old (eleven, he was not a religious man but there had to be some deific hand in him not murdering his way through Incarcecon) to do the things he’d done? Not even mentioning the way some people treated him when they thought Kwarrel wouldn’t know- like he was a target, like he was no more vulnerable than initially assumed, or worse- both. A target they could reason away the blame for, since he was so powerful, since he was ‘maturer’ than he should be, as if he was functionally older than he was. Excuses Kevin was all too young enough to internalize, that he kept having to sit down and unteach him, acid in his belly at how much danger those lies put the calf (his calf) in.