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Axel’s POV

Seth was staring at me. I glanced around the office, trying to ignore his eyes on me. His office looked the same as last time. The overhead lights were off and the warm lighted lamps were brightly lighting up the room. 

It smelled like peppermint and that was nice but it didn’t distract me from the therapist staring at me.

“What,” I asked as I glared at Seth. He was startled at the sudden question but recovered quickly.

“What do you mean ‘what’,” he asked as he played with a pen on his desk.

“Why are you just staring at me like that? It’s annoying.”

“I was waiting for you to decide if you wanted to talk or not,” he said with a small shrug. “That was the deal remember? This is your time. If you don’t want to talk then we don’t have to.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to stare at me,” I said with a scoff.

“What would you prefer that I do?”

“I don’t know,” I scoffed again. “Do other work or get on your phone or something. I don’t like that you’re just staring at me. It’s freaking me out!” He only nodded as he picked up the pen he had been playing with and flipped to a clean sheet of paper in a beat-up notebook. To my surprise he didn’t start writing; instead, he began to doodle around the page.

“Do you want a page,” Seth asked after a minute of me now staring at him. I sighed. 

“Yes.” He said nothing as he ripped a page out of the book and handed it to me along with a pen.

The two of us said nothing for a while, nothing but the sound of pens scratching paper filled the room and the smell of ink mixed with peppermint. It was nice and for once I didn’t mind being here.

“Did Callum tell you,” I asked after a while. Our session was already almost over so at least I would be able to leave soon if things got too bad.

“About what?”

“About school the other day?” And the conversation we had after.

“He didn’t. I try not to talk to talk to guardians unless it’s absolutely necessary like someone is currently being hurt. I don’t like that could hurt the trust I have with my clients. Do you want to talk about it?” I shrugged and he nodded, still not looking up from his paper.

“It was stupid. Weylyn and I switched classes because I didn’t want to go to mine. We’ve done it before and we can usually keep it up for a few months before new teachers catch on.”

“What happened this time? Something out of the ordinary must have happened to make this time different.” I frowned at the thought of that teacher.

“That woman was being a bitch,” I said, his eyes went wide but he didn’t correct the language. “She got up at the beginning of class and introduced me as Weylyn. She told me to tell the class a bit about myself and since I was pretending to be Weylyn I told her I liked reading and she looked like she didn’t believe me. She looked over at what I could only assume were our grades that our old school sent over and wrinkled her nose. Then she was all like ‘Usually kids that like reading have really good grades, at least in English, but you’re grades don’t reflect that’. Just in front of everyone! No care in the fucking world!” Seth’s frown depended but he still didn’t look up from his page. 

“Well, that’s incredibly rude,” he said with a scoff of his own.

“I know! And so uncalled for! Like there was no reason to say that at all let alone in front of the entire class. So I may have told her as such and she may have not liked that.”

“Did you use those exact words?”

“I may have been a bit more passionate at the moment. The words ‘fucking whore’ may have left my mouth more than once and she might not have liked that.”

“Then what happened?”

“She demanded I leave the room. I told her to go suck a dick. She tried to grab me and pull me out of the room I threw a book at her before she had a chance to touch me. I missed her and since that was my only book I didn’t have any backups and she was already mad, she grabbed me by the arm and dragged me from the class and to the office. The whole way there was talking about detention and suspension and I wasn’t going to let Wey take the fall for it so I admitted we switched classes and the principal called Callum.”

“That seems rather eventful,” he said with a low sigh. “What happened after that? Callum doesn’t seem like the kind to just let that kind of thing go.”

“He grounded us. No books or legos for a month. It sucks but he didn’t hit us so I’ll take it.”

“Were you expecting him to hit you?”

“A little. He was hitting the punching bag before he came to talk to us so I thought he was just warming up before the actual thing.”

“Has he ever hit you before?”

“No. He used to just scream at us for a while until we knew it wasn’t allowed anymore but he seems more mad these days and it’s been a while since he’s had to do this. I thought maybe he changed.”

“Have people hit you in the past as a punishment?”

With that one question, my gut churned. I felt nauseous as I turned back to the page that had barely any ink on it. My mouth felt dry and my eyes drifted over to the clock on the desk. Our time was almost up and I wasn’t going to answer that question. 

Weylyn’s POV

I played with the panic button that rolled around in my hands while Andrew stared at me with a frown. We had been sitting in silence for several minutes and I could just somehow tell I was about to get my second lecture about the same incident.

“Can you just get it over with,” I asked with a sigh.

“Get what over with?”

“I assume Callum told you about what happened at school. Get it over with. Lay it on me. You want to say that it was irresponsible? That I should have known better and not gone along with what Axel wanted. That I’m supposed to be the good kid? I already know all of it so I figure we could just save both of us time and get it over with now and actually have time for the rest of the session before it gets too late.”

Andrew frowned at me. I frowned back. 

“I wasn’t going to say that at all,” he said with a small smile that seemed a little too forced. I held the panic button tighter.

“Then what were you going to say?”

“I was going to ask how the discipline was going. I know no one is fond of the consequences of their poor actions but from what I was told it could have been worse.” I shrugged. 

“It’s fine I guess. I’m used to not being able to have books and Axel is used to not having Legos. It just feels normal to us at this point. We weren’t really expecting to get more anyway so I think we got off way too easy, to be honest, but I’m not complaining. I’m glad Callum didn’t yell at us.”

“He’s been working on that for quite some time so I’m not surprised but I am proud of him nonetheless. Callum did tell me one thing that was concerning and I wanted to ask you about it. If it makes you uncomfortable we don’t have to talk about it and we can find something else to do instead but I would like to give you the option to address it.”
I nodded but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like where this was going.

“I would also like to say that I will not tell Callum or his boyfriends anything that we talk about during your time unless someone is actively being hurt. Do you understand that?” I nod again, my stomach suddenly feeling queasy. “Callum told me that Axel asked if he was going to hit the two of you. Is there a reason for that question or was it just asked out of nerves?”

My heart stopped for a second. I’m sure the panic was clear on my face and to a trained therapist it was probably a clear enough answer but I forced myself to look away from him.

My eyes were glued to the white little button in my hands. It was nothing special but it kept me from looking at Andrew so it was good enough for now.

“I don’t think Axel would like me to answer that,” I said barely above a whisper when I realized Andrew wasn’t going to move on without some sort of answer.

“Axel’s not here,” he said gently, his tone too warm and soft considering what he had just asked. “If you want to talk about it then we can but if you would rather change the subject we can do that too.”

I thought it over for a second.

This topic was more for Axel than for me. He kept me out of it as much as he could and I was grateful for it but I still saw it. I still dealt with the aftermath and got my own punishments when Axel wasn’t there to defend me. It was my hurt too in a way. 

“You promise you won’t tell Axel or Callum that I told you,” I asked as I locked eyes with him, needing to see any lie he may be getting ready to tell.

“I swear,” he said gently but his eyes held no lie.

“Lily’s boyfriend used to hit us as punishment sometimes. Not a lot,” I lied because he didn’t need to know everything. “But if we did something really bad he would.”

“And would what happened at school be considered ‘bad enough’?” I nod because my throat feels tight. I could only imagine what Rowan would have done if he had heard about it. He nodded with a new frown.

“How often did these punishments take place?” All the time. Almost daily. 

“He didn’t do it a lot. Maybe every two months or so.” Andrew still didn’t seem to like the lie.

“How did he hit you? Was it like a slap or a punch or something else?”

“He didn’t really hit me,” I said honestly because he always did worse to me. “Axel took most of it. It would always start with a backhand and Axel would fight back because that’s who he is. Then it turned into more of a fight than anything else.”

“What did you do when this happened?”

“Axel would make me go to our room. He didn’t want me to see it happen. We had a rule that any time Rowan came over in a fighting mood I was supposed to run to our room and lock the door. I wasn’t allowed to open it until Axel came back and if it went on for too long I was supposed to call the cops. I took care of him after it was over.”

“That sounds like it was hard for you. To have to just sit there and wait for it to be over while your brother was in pain.”

“I didn’t like doing it. I wanted to be there with him. If I was there too then he would be distracted by both of us and maybe Axel could get off a bit easier but he never let me. He said his job was to keep me safe because he was older and my job was to help bandage him up after everything because he was always too tired to do it himself.”

“How did that make you feel?”

“Useful I guess,” I said with a shrug. “I hated that he got hurt and wouldn’t let me help but at the very least I could help him after it was all over.”

“You said that the punishments were more like fights, how bad did these fights usually get?” I frowned.

“Bad. They always started out fine. Axel’s good at fighting but Rowan was bigger than us. Axel always got several good hits in but after a while, it just became a beatdown. He’d come to our room after it was done sometimes barely being able to breathe, other times he would just have a bruise or two. It depended on how drunk Rowan was or how mad he was.”

“And your sister knew about this,” Andrew asked with a concerned frown. I nodded as I played with the device in my hands.

“Lily saw herself as a replacement mom I think so that kind of made Rowan our dad in her eyes. She would complain to him about all the things we had been doing and he would say he’d take care of it. He mostly did it when she was gone but the few times she was there he went easier on us or she made him stop. I think she thought it was justified somehow. Or maybe she was just letting him do it to us so he wouldn’t hit her. I don’t know Lily has always been like that. She doesn’t really care about anyone but herself.”

“Do you resent her for it?” I shrugged. 

“I don’t know. It would depend on her reason I guess. If she let him do it because she didn’t care what happened to us then yes. I’d hate her and would never forgive her. But if it was because she didn’t want to be the one getting hit and couldn’t find a way out of the situation then I think I could forgive her one day. If that was her reasoning then she and I aren’t really that different; both of us letting our brother get hurt to save ourselves. She tried to make it up to us when she could. After the really bad ones, she would leave books or small Lego sets on our bed.” Andrew nodded as he wrote something down in my folder.

“So it seems like Axel took more of the physical punishments but were there ever times when Rowan did something to you specifically?” I tensed and I could tell Andrew saw it. My heart was beating out of my chest.

I didn’t want to talk about that. Not now, not ever.

I could feel the tears building up in my eyes as my breathing began to pick up. The panic was setting in and I couldn’t stop it. Andrew was speaking to me but I barely heard it let alone acknowledged what he was saying. 

Then there was movement. Andrew moved towards me and through my blurred vision all I saw was Rowan and the hand angled in my direction.

I pressed the button in my hands.