Elly flicked her ears, staring down at her phone where there was a review of a restaurant in town. She'd been looking at new places to try and come across one that served fresh beef, a rarity in Japan. The photos showed delicious slices of meat, charred on the outside and bloody on the inside.
It made her hungry.
It also made her <i>angry<i>.
"Babe?" Hizashi paused his dressing down routine in the bathroom where he had been drying his hair. Nude with only a towel around his waist and one on his head, he popped into the bedroom where he'd heard her growl. "Y'aight?"
"Yes!" She jumped, the phone slipping out of her hands onto her lap. "Yes, I'm okay, go ahead and finish up, sweetie."
"Boo," he called out lightly. "No yer not, I can tell."
She laughed a little. "It's okay, though. Just another stupid memory."
Hizashi sat on the bed and scooted in front of her. "Well, then, you can dry while you talk."
Elly's grin widened and she gently unwrapped the towel, letting his heavy, wet hair fall down. "Comb?" He handed it to her wordlessly and she began working it through his golden locks, making sure it was untangled before using the towel to dry. Then the process with the comb began again, and repeated until the damp, dark locks shone lighter. She did this in silence for awhile, running her fingers through as well and sighing as his warmth and closeness calmed her.
"Mmmn. I was looking at some different places to eat when a picture of some yummy, rare meat triggered me."
"Meat?"
"Uh huh." Elly kissed the top of his head and he hummed with pleasure. "I always loved rare beef. We used to make rare roast beef and I'd take sandwiches into school for lunch. Always did, but around eleventh grade I started kind of getting into <i>Alpha Night</i>, the books about the wolf heroes?"
"Yeah. I never read 'em, but they're popular again."
"Uh huh. I loved the idea of a pack, and drew and wrote a lot of stories about me being one of them. Unfortunately, this, combined with the rare meat I was eating, caused my art teacher and the other kids to start getting on my case."
He frowned, not quite understanding how an innocent love for a book or lifestyle would come back to bite her, so to speak.
But Elly continued, and his eyes widened as he listened. "I got into it." She shrugged. "I wanted to be one of the hero wolves. I mean, no one loved or listened to me, and I needed a place to escape reality before it destroyed my mind. It was an innocent teenager thing, happening later on in my years because I had been repressed as a child."
She stroked his hair, feeling how alive it was under her fingers, silky and beautiful. "Lots of children go through this. It's not dangerous. But kids started telling me that I was unhinged, basically - I couldn't be a werewolf because they didn't exist. I don't know why the little bastards suddenly were interested in my 'well being', since all they did was scorn and hurt me."
Hizashi lifted his sad face up to her. "I think I see where this is going now," he said quietly.
"Yeah. I thought I would go about this in a different way than other problems, and address my mother directly. As an <i>adult</i>, since I was nearly eighteen. I told her there were stories going on in school about me eating raw meat and stuff, and she might get contacted by the staff. I told her not to worry."
"I'll bet that went well." He rolled his eyes.
"She didn't listen to me," she said flatly. "So, yeah. I told my mother they would do this, but she went in anyway when they called her. And then everyone ganged up on me."
"Ganged up..? Everyone?" Hizashi looked confused. "There was more than one teacher there?"
She nodded. "The whole conference table was full. My mother, stepfather, art teacher and several..." She paused, then went on, "school counselors."
"Ohhh." He understood her frustration more than ever. Being a counselor now herself, she likely would have done things differently.
"All other takes is one small, wrong step to fuck up a child for good," she continued firmly. "And they forced me to sit and listen while they <i>lied</i> to my parents and didn't give me a chance to say anything. My art teacher was the worst. When they said I was eating 'raw meat', all they had was a very unreliable source - another student. My teacher saw that and lied, saying she had seen me do it, too."
"Oh, nooo."
Elly's ears laid back in fury and she hissed. "That bitch! She was supposed to nurture creativity! All I wanted was to make believe I had a loving family, like the books I'd been reading. I was trying to survive the only way I knew how and I would have gone farther, discovering who I really was inside, if she hadn't scared me away from that."
He reached up and wrapped his arms around her neck, pulling her down closer to him. "What happened after she lied? Did they ask you for your side of the story?"
"They all looked at me, is all I can remember. No asking, just all adults that were lying and hurting me, staring at me like I was guilty before being proven that I was. So I - I burst into tears and told them that one guy and his friends were bothering me again. They had been, but I never addressed the fact that I wasn't doing anything wrong. I knew at that point they wouldn't believe me. No one ever did."
"My poor baby," he sighed. "So, hey. You wanna go get some kobe beef tonight?"
"It's <i>expensive</i>," she hedged cautiously.
He shrugged. "I think eating some rare cooked beef out in public, where everyone sees it as perfectly normal, would be good for you right now. 'Sides, I'm rollin' in dough. You know, us bein' big shot heroes and all that."
She burst out laughing.
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