#c: andy | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

chasseurdeloup · 1 year ago

Text

Unraveled || Andy and Kaden

LOCATION: The cabin TIMING: Early January PARTIES: @declinlalune and @chasseurdeloup SUMMARY: Andy and Kaden finally confront one another about what happened with the hunter who went after Alex. CONTENT WARNINGS: None

Andy paused outside of the door, not quite sure how to approach who was inside. She knew Leticia was asleep in her room, but Kaden was on the other side of this, too. She took a deep breath and pushed it open, looking towards the kitchen where Kaden was seated at the table. “Hey, sorry– I uh, had to go to the bakery pretty early.” With Jonas out of commission, she had made it a point to return back to her job, and though he had assured her they could have closed it down for a bit, she hadn’t wanted to let him down like she had the past few months. “Has Leti woken up at all?” She looked towards her bedroom door before padding into the kitchen after kicking her boots off. It was odd, feeling this way, especially after she and Kaden had grown closer, but they hadn’t exactly addressed the elephant in the room yet.

When Andy said Leticia was going to be staying in the cabin with them, Kaden had a million questions but wasn’t about to argue. He was glad to have his cousin back even if the tension from before had never been smoothed over. He wasn’t sure what to do about it all, what to say, if she wanted space or if she wanted to ignore things. Kaden had expected to see her later that night months ago, slinking in covered in dirt-covered blood. Only she didn’t show up. The sun rose and Andy wasn’t there. Kaden didn’t know what to do or if he should say anything. And so he said nothing. Unless it had to do with Alex.

The rhythm of the house had shifted after the incident, after the murder, without Andy around. And it had jolted right back when she returned, though it was still a little off-kilter. Kaden’s mug jerked in his hands, coffee splashing along the sides when he heard the door open and Andy called out. Putian, he wasn’t used to it, not yet. “Don’t have to apologize to me,” he said, wiping the drips on the table with his sleeve. “Uh, not that I know of. If she has, she hasn’t left your room.” He twisted his head to glance toward the door to his cousin’s room. “Is she going to be alright?”

Andy looked down at the coffee that had splattered onto the ground, then her gaze lifted back up to meet Kaden’s. He looked a little out of it, but it wasn’t anything abnormal. She moved further into the kitchen, grabbing her own mug before setting it down onto the counter. At his question, she paused. “I’m not really sure.” She’d been in her jaguar form for three months, had been displaced by a hunter, and was now expected to pick everything back up after being gone– would she be okay? Andy didn’t feel right discussing it.

“I hope so.” She offered a small, yet hesitant smile to him before filling her own mug with coffee. She considered retreating to the sofa, but instead took a seat across from him. The tension between them hadn’t yet waned, but there was a newfound sense of understanding. Maybe Andy was imagining it. She couldn’t really be sure, not with everything happening. “I told her she can stay here as long as she needs to. I don’t think she can go back home, and if I’m being honest, I don’t think I want her to.” She took a sip of her coffee, letting the bitterness roll over her tongue.

Kaden didn’t expect his body to tense up when Andy sat across from him. It was brief, but he could still feel it, the uncertainty of everything. He hated feeling like he’d driven her out of her own home she’d worked hard to have with Alex. Sure, it was more complicated than that but it was hard to shake the guilt. It piled up with all the rest he’d collected over the years; a goddamn mountain at this point.

He exhaled, trying to push the tension out with the air from his lungs. There was no need for this, not this early in the morning at least. Things were normal. They should be normal. He could be normal. “What happened to her?” he asked before taking a sip of his coffee, careful not to send it spilling again. “I mean, if you can tell me. Obviously I know it might…” Honestly, he wasn’t sure what he meant or what he was trying to say. Conversations weren’t his strong suit, sure, but they weren’t usually this hard. “Anyway, makes sense for her to stay here all things considered.”

His question made her stomach sink. Could he handle the truth? Especially after what happened with the ranger in that cabin? Would he assume she’d go after him, end him the way she did the one that went after Alex and Alan? He was right to assume as much, especially because Andy hadn’t been able to get the idea from her mind.

After a moment, Andy finally said, “a hunter went after her.” She looked up at him, expression neutral despite the anger she felt over the situation. “She shifted to get away, or fight back– I don’t know. And then she spent the last three months as a jaguar.” Her voice was surprisingly steady, and she was grateful for the years of lying and sneaking that’d led her to this moment. “But yeah, I figured this might be the safest place for her. She can’t go back home yet.” Andy wasn’t sure what home would look like to Leticia once she finally went back. Regardless, she knew she’d make the space for Leti no matter what.

Kaden nodded, eyes pinned to the brown liquid swirling in his mug. Seemed safer to look at the coffee than over at his cousin. Not yet, at least. There was too much unsaid, too much uncertainty. Meanwhile, the coffee was just coffee. Simple. “Of course it was.” He knew better than most how often hunters hunted, how often they killed, how they operated. He was one. Even if he wasn’t functioning quite like them anymore, not like the typical ranger at least, he knew better than to assume others weren’t out there, that they weren’t targeting people he knew.

The memory of the light fading from that ranger’s eyes as Andy stabbed him to death swirled in the steam from his coffee.

Kaden’s gaze darted back up to meet Andy’s. He didn’t want to search for indication of any anger or vengeance lingering there. So he didn’t. “Three months?” He tried to process how long that had been, all the things he’d done in the past three months, while Leticia had been a jaguar. It was impossible to imagine. “That’s a long damn time. Glad she didn’t get hurt in the meantime.” Well, alright, he didn’t know if she’d been alright at that time. “I mean, assuming that she didn’t. You know.”

His hand reached back to rub the nap of his neck, trying to calm some of the anxiety before he looked over to his cousin. He didn’t want to go there. But he had to. “You’re not…. I mean, the hunter. Are you going to, uh… look for them?” He wasn’t sure what he wanted the answer to be. If he wanted one at all.

“We don’t know what she went through yet, so it’s hard to say what.. you know, happened.” Andy wasn’t sure how much of Leticia’s story she’d want spoken, so she refrained from going into further detail– of the scars that were present on her skin, of the wild look in her eyes when Andy had found her on the trail. “It was just lucky I found her.” Because that was the truth, and it seemed that would always be the truth.

The question that came next was one that Andy expected, and even though she knew it would spring between them like overgrown weeds asking to be ripped out, she still felt a certain guilt at it. “I’m making sure she’s safe right now. If you’re asking, am I going to go and kill them? The answer is no.” Not right now, at least. “I don’t want to put Leti in more danger, so I’m going to do what she asks me to do, and she hasn’t asked for help with that, yet. But I can’t let them come back after her, you understand that, right? If they do, I’m not going to let them hurt her.” She felt iron scrape over her tongue, thick like a sludge that was hard to get rid of.

“She’s my friend, just like Nicole is, and after… Kaden, I just can’t sit here and do nothing, not when I could do something. I know it’s hard– it’s hard for me, too, but I’m not going to let anyone get hurt, not again, not like Alex, not like Leti. I can’t.”

The tightness in his chest fell away, but Kaden didn’t feel much better than he had a second ago. He was relieved to hear she didn’t plan on killing anyone, but something still didn’t settle where it was supposed to. He couldn’t put his finger on it, so he tapped it against the side of his mug, instead.

“I’m not suggesting you do nothing,” he said, voice steady. “I’m just suggesting to not let anyone get hurt again.” He emphasized the word. Anyone. That hunter, he was anyone. He was someone. Maybe a piece of shit someone, but someone nonetheless. Kaden wasn’t any better once. There was nothing about him that was more special than that ranger. The only thing that had changed was his perspective. And it didn’t happen overnight. But he was given the chance. He was given grace. Maybe that grace was given by pure luck more than anything else but that didn’t matter.

“I just can’t–” His teeth slid against themselves, jaw grinding them into one another. How to find the words? He didn’t know. They didn’t come to him when he met her eyes again. He wasn’t sure any words would ever be right. Might as well try and see what the hell came out. “You killed someone. He’s dead. And it’s not like I think the world was better off with him breathing but… Killing doesn’t stop… this,” he said, throwing his hand out in front of him, gesturing towards whatever nebulous thing he was referring to, as if he could will it to exist physically. As if it could make what he was trying to say any more concrete. “It just doesn’t stop. We can’t–”

For a second, Kaden swore he saw blonde hair instead of red, saw harsh eyes instead of bright ones. He swore that he saw his sister and not Andy. He turned away, didn’t want to equate them. Ever. Even if the look in her eyes that night reminded him of Keira more than he ever thought was possible.

“You know what they see when they look at us.” He didn’t know if she would follow, if she would know that he was referring to them as shifters and us as hunters; if she had talked this way in years now. “You know they only see monsters. We can’t become that. We can’t start killing, to try and rebalance whatever fucked up shit. Even if it’s other hunters. Taking a life is still taking a life. We can’t just decide who lives and dies. We can’t. You can’t. You’re better than that. You’re so much better than this shit, than this violence. Than–” Than me. He looked back at her, no lingering visions of Keira left. Only Andy. His cousin who had run away from it all and saw the flaws in the system before he could even spot a crack. His cousin who had to grow up too soon. His cousin who deserved a better fucking hand dealt to her. Much better than what she got.

She thought that maybe a part of Kaden had begun to understand what she meant when she said she needed to protect Leti, especially because he’d lost somebody important to him by the hand of his own sister, but it was obvious he was still stuck on the fact that she’d taken a life. Andy felt her stomach roll, felt the iron peel over through to the back of her mouth, swore it was filling every part of her.

“I would rather nobody else get hurt. I’m not…” Hunting people for sport– something that was clearly being done to Leticia, had been done to Alex. Could Kaden not see the implications of what all of that meant? She’d sat with the fact that she had taken somebody’s life, and she was okay with it. It was clear that Kaden still wasn’t.

“I did what I needed to do to protect my sister.” It was said simply, voice hardened by the implications that she would kill just anyone. “I think it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to just stop, and I couldn’t take the chance that he…” She shook her head, “Kaden, I had to do that. There was no other way.” There could have been, and she had tried to give him an out, but it was obvious that the ranger had no intentions of stopping. “You don’t think I recognize that? You think I wanted to kill him?” Andy let out a harsh laugh, smoothing her hands over her face, rubbing away the exhaustion. “I only did it so that Alex wouldn’t die, so that we wouldn’t die. He would have killed us, too. I made a choice. A hard one, but one all the same, and I don’t regret it.” As she spoke, she maintained eye contact with him, “I know violence is still violence, despite who it’s being done to, but I couldn’t take the chance that anything else could happen to them.”

Kaden knew that what she was saying was the truth of the matter, that someone was going to end up dead in that scenario. He knew how their world worked. He knew that the odds were that there would only be more bodies added to the count if Andy hadn’t acted when she did. Some part of him deep down knew that, knew he couldn’t argue.

But there was still something nagging at him, nipping at his heels and irritating him about it all. It still didn’t sit right. He couldn’t flatten it out, smooth it over and accept everything she said as much as he wanted to. He met her eye contact, remained silent a she soaked in her words. He believed that she wanted to avoid violence, that she wasn’t making this a habit. He had to.

So then what was it causing the creased that he couldn’t iron flat? If that wasn’t it?

Kaden let the silence linger for a moment as he tried to find the words to explain his thoughts. He glanced down at his fingers as he drummed them against the mug’s handle. “Look,” he said, eyes meeting hers again, “I get that this wasn't– That maybe you had to–” No, not the words he wanted. When he found the ones he did, he wasn’t sure he wanted to speak them into existence.

“That could have been me.” It felt like pulling the pin out of a grenade, just a second away from launching it and watching the explosion. “That hunter. The one who…” He paused and took a deep breath to try and stay on track. “It wasn’t that long ago that I hunted. Really hunted. And I–” He pinched his eyes shut as if it could erase how many families he’d surely broken in the past. The ones he didn’t think about in the moment. The ones just like Andy and Alex and even himself. He wasn’t any better than that piece of shit lying there on the floor of that farmhouse. “If he had to die, if he– A few years ago and that would have been me.” Kaden was afraid to learn what was waiting for him when he looked back at her and made eye contact, but he dared to look all the same.

If she really wanted to, Andy felt as though she could fall into the silence. It would be easy to turn her back on this conversation and leave, but she couldn’t do that. That wasn’t like her, and it wouldn’t do her’s and Kaden’s relationship any good if she decided to disappear when hard questions were raised.

He began to speak, words contorted by what he actually wanted to say. Andy watched her cousin carefully, searching for something that would tell her why he couldn’t seem to understand her plight.

And then there it was, the admission of guilt, though dredged up from a history of what they were, of who they were. Andy couldn’t identify with Kaden on this, for she’d rejected hunting in its entirety, but a part of her could, still– could put herself in his shoes, could see through his eyes. She knew what it had meant when she killed the hunter, and it was clear what it meant to him; that it could’ve been the knife put through his chest had it been another time, another place– another wolf.

As she let his words truly sink in, she thought of what to say. It took her a few seconds, maybe a minute, before her voice cut through the silence that warped around them like an uncomfortable elastic.

“But that was years ago. You are who you are now, and you already feel like shit for it, why are you going to make yourself feel worse?” True, she didn’t agree with her cousin’s past, but wasn’t the point that he’d outgrown it? “Do I love that you used to… do that? No, but that was how we were raised.” She flexed her fingers through the air, looking down at them. “But the point is, we outran it. We got out, Kaden. That’s what we have to focus on now. Not how that could’ve been us, because that was my dad, that was my mom.” That was your father. In a different manner of speaking, but wasn’t it the same? Defense, no matter what it looked like– for an unjust cruelty spun out by purpose among other bullshit.

God, Andy hated it all.

“You’re better than that ranger who hurt Alex, Kaden. Maybe not… then, but you are now. You have to believe that, or this’ll eat you alive.”

It was hard to absorb her words, to let it replace the stains of shame seeped deep in himself. “I don’t feel better. Not really.” He kept his eyes on the wood grain of the table, following the lines as if he was going to find an answer somewhere in the patterns there. “All that shit still… I mean, I can’t take it back. For all I know, my body count is higher than his ever was.” Kaden felt like everything he said left him more raw and vulnerable. He trusted Andy wouldn’t rub salt in the wounds he laid bare and open but that didn’t make any of this less painful.

“I only outran it because I got the chance to. I had a chance to–” To what? Realize how much he’d fucked up? See the horrors up close and personal? Start to care once it affected him, affected someone he loved? “I don’t know how to do this.”

After a beat, Kaden realized he wasn’t making any damn sense and he dared to look back at Andy’s kind eyes. Too kind, too understanding somehow. “I mean, I got a chance to be better. And I don’t know if he–” The words choked him again. “You might not have been wrong.” He sighed at himself. Why the fuck couldn’t he just admit that she might have made the right call? No, he knew why. “How do we know when someone’s had a chance or not? How do we make that fucking call? When? Why the fuck did I get lucky and didn’t cross the wrong person at the wrong time? I was just like him. I was the same. I did the same thing.” The thoughts just kept repeating, swirling and Kaden was once again imagining himself in the place of that hunter, Andy pinning him down and ready to tear him apart.

You’re better.

He tried to hold onto those words while he was in the other ranger’s shoes. Even at his worst, would have had persisted the way this man had? Played games with the shifters in town? He’d be lying if he said he’d never have come close. But when he thought about it, he would only do that while he was with other hunters, when he was pressured. Usually he just did his job and didn’t get into shit like that guy had. If family had stood up for someone like they did, would he have held his ground? Or ran?

Putain.

Kaden put his head in his hands, trying to make it all make sense as he dragged his palms across his face. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, not even sure who the apology was for or what anymore. Everything, maybe.

Andy knew that it would take a lot more than their current conversation to run Kaden through the motions of forgiving himself. It would take a lot longer than a few months of separating himself from his mom’s expectations. At his comment about his body count possibly being higher, Andy shrugged. “We don’t know that. You can’t theorize that.” It’d run him in circles— both of them in circles. Andy had done what she’d done because she needed to, because she saw no other way out from beneath the ranger’s thumb, especially for Alex’s sake. It needed to be done, and she’d done it. There was no other way of looking at it.

“You don’t know if he would’ve had the chance to become a better person?” Andy had considered that— had wondered if maybe a little more probing to let go of his current hunt would’ve put the ranger in a different direction, but the look in his eyes— it was a violent thing that she knew he would never let go of. She didn’t see that in Kaden, not by a long shot. “I can’t answer that for you, Kaden. There isn’t some… higher power, deciding it. This is life, this is what happens.” She had done enough groveling over the years to a higher power that didn’t exist to fully turn her back on it. “He knew who I was, and he decided that he would come for the people I cared about regardless. Somewhere, deep down, he must have known that…” Andy took a deep breath, “that would happen— that I’d come for him.” Maybe it had been a ploy to end his time on this earth, or maybe he really thought he would have won.

Kaden looked as though he were on the brink of a breakdown, and Andy did feel for him. She felt a certain kind of guilt she hadn’t felt since leaving her parents in those woods— as if she were leaving something behind by admitting she wasn’t sorry for killing the ranger. But her sister, her friends— they mattered more than her feelings here, and they were safe for the time being, up until some other monster decided to put an end to them. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Kaden.” She’d been angry before, had watched him turn his back and had regretted the moment she asked for his help, but looking at him now, she understood what it had taken from him— to see her drive the knife into the heart of somebody who was like him. “I should’ve been more understanding… I shouldn’t have gotten angry, either.”

All Kaden could do was try to hold onto the words she gave him, try to make sure they didn’t slip away. If nothing else, he had to trust her. Hell, he did trust her. At the end of the day, he couldn’t imagine not trusting Andy. So he was going to have to trust her now. Trust that what she was saying about the ranger was true, that she’d weighed her options and came to the best conclusion she could. He’d assumed her decision to take the other hunter’s life was bred from emotion, from impulse, from years and years of training and indoctrination finally bubbling up to the surface. Maybe that was part of it, sure, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t given it any thought.

It wasn’t a reaction as much as a decision. And he had to trust her and trust that she made the right decision. Or how else were they supposed to carry on?

“I believe you,” he said, softly but sincerely. The small part of him nagging his mind with “what-ifs” hadn’t been entirely silenced, he wasn’t sure it ever would be, but he did believe her and her assessment of the situation.

On the other hand, he wasn’t sure if he believed her when she said he had nothing to apologize for. He sighed and looked back at her with a forlorn smile. “Not sure that’s true, though.” He may not have owed her any apologies but that didn’t mean he had nothing to apologize for, not according to his books. “I could say the same,” he said with a shrug. It wasn’t like he’d reached out to her sooner, tried to mend the bridge first or anything. Then again, neither of them grew up with any exemplary role models for good communication. It was hard to blame themselves too much at the end of the day.

“Look, you let me crash here with barely any questions. You trusted me. I should have trusted you.” He paused and made sure he had eye contact with her before continuing. “I do trust you. And I trust you made the best decision that was available.” He threw back the last of his coffee and stood to stretch, letting the weight of the recent conversation fall from his shoulders. “Now if it’s alright with you, I planned on making crepes for Alex so make your demands now if you want anything specific.” He flashed her a smile and paused before he got to work. “Glad you’re back, by the way.”

#writing #wickedswriting #para #c: andy #declinlalune #unraveled

3 notes · View notes