ALPHA DAMIEN

Adeline's POV

The lake breathed cool against my face, a soft, indifferent wind that pried loose the day’s noise and left only the steady, honest sounds of night — the whisper of leaves, the occasional kiss of water against the shore, the small, private chorus of insects. I sat on the bench, the wood cold through my jeans, and let the sky take me. Billions of stars fretted and hammered the darkness into silver; they were so far away and yet so fierce, as if they knew how to burn without needing anyone to watch them. I traced shapes with my finger on the air above the water, making constellations of things I wanted to be, a map I could reach for when the rest of me felt untethered.

At eighteen, the world had already learned to be heavy. I didn’t come from money, or from influence. I didn’t have a crowd of friends whose laughter blocked out the small cruelties of the day. I wasn’t loved back in the way that would soften the raw edges. I was in a private school that weighed me down with exams and expectations while life at home taught me a different kind of curriculum: how to be small when someone else wanted to be large, how to swallow the word “why” until it burnt less.

When you live with other people there is no such thing as pure privacy. Even secrets can be overheard, even silence can be interrupted. You try to make your sorrow a private thing and the house keeps smelling of other people’s habits: someone else’s cigarettes, someone else’s anger, someone else’s indifference. So you learn to tuck things away where they won’t be found but pain is an inventory that never stays hidden for long.

A sudden noise sliced the night like a snapped string. “Sccccrrreeettch!!” Wood cracked in the dark and my stomach climbed. I had been floating in thought; the sound tipped me back into sharpness. I didn’t move. Footsteps slid closer across the gravel. I turned and saw him. Not a stranger, but a face I knew: his hair black, his eyes grey, the kind of good looks a camera would love. Up close, the anonymity of the woods yielded to the small, ordinary shape of home. Noah. My little brother.

Relief was a physical thing. It unknotted me, made my shoulders fall. He handed me his sweater with that exasperated tenderness that only siblings can afford each other, half scolding, half protection. We’d grown up under the same roof of other people’s decisions, the same uncle’s watchful eye. There were things we couldn’t fix, but there was always the promise that we would not be shattered apart.

“Adel,” he said, voice trying to shepherd my truth into the light. “Why so quiet?”

It’s easier to look at the sky than at one another when things are messy. “I can’t sleep,” I said. That was the least dishonest thing I could think of.

He sat and started skipping pebbles into the lake, a nervous rhythm he’d learned to ride. “We’re always here,” he whispered after a while, as if the stars were eavesdropping. “Never forget that.”

I wanted to believe him so badly that the wanting tasted like a prayer. We thumbed our pinkies together and made a childish vow. A small rebellion against the way the world had taught us to be alone. Noah’s eyes were earnest in the way that grief sometimes is, he tried to make future-bright promises because he had to. A small brotherhood oath to keep the pieces held together.

He joked later about skipping class and about crushes. We laughed because it was easier than the quieter edgier topics. For a moment, everything was normal: the kind of normal that has teeth in it but still allows for a night walk, a sibling’s warmth across the bench. The world could be cruel outside the bubble of those pebbled ripples. But we walked home together anyway, side by side, pretending my insides were not a storm.

And then my uncle was there on the porch, his silhouette made bigger by the smoke curling from his cigarette. The atmosphere changed the way air does before rain. Heavy, charged, inevitable. He called us over and his voice had the dry, brittle edge of someone who used words like weapons.

Without warning, without the softness of a question, he poured the glass of water over our heads. Glass shattered. Water ran down our backs and the coldness seemed to slide right into the bones. His words that followed cut deeper than the glass.

“How many times must I tell you? You lot have no brains. No sense. You want to get eaten by wolves like your mother.” The sentence was meant to wound. It found a place to rest.

My throat tightened. I could feel my brother’s fist clench beside me, the tremor of him trying to turn the anger outward. I felt flames bloom in my chest. Not the cinematic, noble kind of anger but the small, hot, humiliating kind that steals your air and changes the shape of everything. I opened my mouth and the words came out, raw and unpracticed. I defended the absent. I defended the pieces of our mother that the world had tried to crush into nothing. I told him, as carefully as I could, that people deserved more than to be named by someone else’s contempt. He called us morons. I felt every syllable land like a stone.

We retreated into ourselves and then into the shower when we got home, a futile attempt to wash away cold and shame. Under the stream, the water did not wash the insult out. It only magnified the hurt that had been gathering for years. The kind of grief that had nowhere safe to go pooled at the base of my skull and made my hands shake. The other house noises like the clink of a spoon, the dull thud of a TV went on like prop props on a stage that refused to acknowledge the real scene unfolding inside me.

I lay there, naked to the water and to the truth. No one was coming to change things. No miraculous rescue was waiting in the wings. The world had been practical and small with us: it offered coldness, it offered scorn, it offered lessons in how to make yourself less visible so you might survive. And yet, in the spaces between the cruelty, there were also the small shining things, Noah’s hand in mine, the stubborn vow of pinkies, the stars overhead that never asked for anything and simply burned.

It is strange to hold two truths at once that the world can be cruel and that there is also a pocket of warmth you refuse to give up. I had learned to be both fragile and fierce in the same afternoon. I had learned to harbor hope not because it changed everything, but because it changed me. It just made me capable of carrying on when carrying on was the only honest thing left to do.

So I dressed. I dried my face with a towel that took the shape of my hands and the weight of my breath. Noah slept like a child with a bookmark between his fingers; I listened to the rise and fall of him and felt something like gratitude anchored in the center of my chest. We were still here. We were still together. That had to be enough for now.

Later, when the exams pressed their face against the small window of my life, when the school corridors felt too narrow and the future felt like a list of boxes to be checked, I would often return to that bench by the lake in my mind. I would go there when my courage thinned and redraw the constellations with my finger, not as escape routes but as maps of things I could try to be. The stars didn’t promise riches or fame. They were only there, brilliant and patient, showing how brightness could exist even when everything around you wanted to swallow it.

This is not a neat ending. It is not a clean victory. It is a long, clumsy promise to myself: to keep looking up, to keep holding Noah’s hand, to keep refusing politely, stubbornly, to allow someone else’s cruelty to define the sum of my days. If hope is small, I will make it stubborn. If loneliness is loud, I will learn to answer in quieter ways. Maybe that is all any of us can do: be a light for one another, a small and faithful warmth against a world that so often tries to prove us unworthy.