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Javi thought Shauna would've been a good mother.
Maybe that was unfounded. But Shauna had served as a surrogate mother for him since the crash. He'd followed her to and fro, constantly at her beck and call, even offering to help with draining the bear, but he wasn't strong enough to string it up. He'd withdrawn, almost completely. Shauna was sweet on him, those doe-eyes, the smile whenever he did something she deemed, correspondingly, 'sweet.' There was a warmth, a tenderness, something, something that was hopeless to describe, a matronly, maternal bond. Soon, it became that Shauna was the only family he had out there.
Well, besides Travis.
He didn't count much though. No, he couldn't. Not anymore. They hadn't spoken beyond brief, monosyllabic sentences in months. Why did matters change so much? It made him sad to think about. There he'd be, hours past midnight, prodding the fire with a short stick, thinking, watching the fire pirouette then and again, back and forth, remembering the times before, pale moonlight pooling. Crying to himself at night, flashes of nightmares, dark, demons and fire and monsters, men with overstretched limbs, and Travis would stumble into the room, biting the flesh of his lip and whisper to him that it was just a dream, that they couldn't hurt him now. Javi would babble, and Travis would shush him, and sit there, by his side, like a stringently loyal hunting dog, dark eyes darting about, as if searching for those monsters.
Shauna had only once held him like Travis had. He'd thought too much, at his usual outpost of sorts at the campfire, and couldn't help himself. The world began to spin, and spin, and shatter before him—a thin sheet torn, and now all was seemingly terrible, and wrong, the very ground drawing out from underneath him. His breath emerged in low pants, a song of sighs and whimpers among the chorus of the wilderness. Shauna had found him, and with guilt sparkling in her eyes, held him close, held him warm, and apologized again and again for something that she hadn't done.
It felt nice to be held, but something within him screamed, something deep within him screamed, and raged against the light, begged to be let go. His father, reclined at the dinner table, squinting at Javi as he sat, his eyes boring into him, pin-black, pools of a malevolent, angry black. His father would sip his beer, and stare, his thoughts inscrutable.
What are you, a queer?
Javi had been taught boyhood through scars. Through split lips, split knuckles, through choked blood and thinned, white scars, spidery and ignominious. He didn't have Travis' excuse of surgery, he was merely broken, broken under the hands of his father, broken under Travis'.
He didn't blame Travis for it. He was sure that his father treated Travis just the same, perhaps worse, and he'd witnessed it a few times, Bill's calloused and wrinkled hands, flaring forwards, a slap so hard that Travis' face moved. But just as many times, it was Travis too. Javi didn't even quite know what he had done wrong, Travis would simply arrive home from the bus, clutching the strap of his backpack so firmly his knuckles went white. Maybe, Javi would say something that Travis deemed annoying, and he'd lash out. Hands flashing just as quickly, a wadded fist meeting his stomach, forcing his breath out, like the windy murmur of a ghost.
Travis would feel awful afterward, not that it mattered much. Javi would mentally retreat, complete the set-along line of the routine, and very little else. And that was fine. What else did he need?
That was what he'd done in the wilderness. Withdrawn, to everybody but Shauna. Natalie was sweet on him at times, offering her strip of venison, that Javi felt sorry to accept, but did so with very little thought. She was more stony however, inscrutable to most people, her eyes weren't doe like Shauna's, more like a fox, an old, wounded fox, who wished never to be wounded again. Curse-filled arguments, filthy floating through the dense, wintry air that had begun to stalk the autumn.
Maybe, that slight tenderness was the reason he chose to save her.
The lake, frozen over in gloomy, white sheets, rare light and shrewd figures moving across the ice, yipping and screaming, almost impossibly loud, savage noises that Javi had not known humans to make. Like animals, they rushed and stampeded, begging to the Wilderness to kill, to feel Natalie's blood slick under their fingers, to spoil the pale flesh and to consume her. Just as they'd done Jackie.
Javi surged out across the ice, grabbing Natalie's wrist. He paused to glance down at the strange, sunstruck version of himself in the ice. Then, the terrifying, unfirm and wet sound of the ice breaking beneath him, and the nervy shock that came with falling into the water, followed by an absolute biting numb, his eyes shut tight, a dull pale of the sun falling in through his eyelids as he fought, raged against the light, calling out Natalie's name, stretching out his arms to be lifted. The auroras of light slowly disappeared, panic falling away into numb, sensation falling away from his fingertips.
Why isn't she helping me? What did I do?
The last thing he thought of was Shauna's face. The firm flesh at her cheeks when she smiled, her eyes, a pool of brown in a lake of white, the face slowly melting into his mothers, the face disappearing, and black, black. Going, going, gone.