Camp Alpha (BoyxBoy)

{26}

They were sitting on the most uncomfortable bench seat known to man. Well, man or wolf. The wooden bench was pushed up against the hallway wall in a large corridor, with intimidatingly large paintings covering every available inch of the wall space. They were quite cliché paintings of boats and ships sailing in the open seas and portraits of people that Nate’s father would have chastised him for not knowing the name of on the spot.

They were sitting outside the council chambers, the one room in the entirety of the camp which was designed specifically to house the meetings of the country’s finest. Nate had never been inside the room which was only a few feet from them, he had walked past once or twice, but you were only allowed in if you were a council member or specifically invited by the council, and they were the latter.

Nate and Brody had turned up just before the scheduled time and told to wait there, the receptionist had told them to take a seat on what had turned out to be the most uncomfortable seat that Nate had ever had the displeasure of sitting on.

He looked over at Brody then, seeing the practically terrified expression on his mate’s face. Nate thread his fingers through Brody’s, squeezing gently. The warm feeling of Brody’s hand pressed up against his was then the only thing anchoring him to the ground, his mind would have wondered off if not.

Brody relaxed visually beside him, turning to look at Nate. ‘Do you think they are already in there?’ he asked, glancing at the door.

Nate gently rubbed his thumb over the warm skin of Brody’s hand, ‘I don’t know,’ he then replied.

They hadn’t been able to hear anything from the hallway, and it was possible that they had all arrived early, or more likely that they were yet to arrive. The only entrance to the room was past them, and Nate felt uncomfortable imagining the entirety of the council walking past them with criticizing glares, or something just as malicious before they had even heard their case.

Nate told himself to calm down, that these were calm, rational people who were going to listen with open minds but he wasn’t sure how much of him truly believed it.   

‘You’re going to talk, right?’ Brody asked, looking over at him. ‘You are much better at all this than I am.’

Nate nodded, ‘Okay, but they will probably ask you questions too, be prepared for that.’

‘I know,’ Brody agreed. ‘What are they going to ask me thought? Your father would have told them our situation, so other than a solution, what can they really want to know from us?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nate admitted. ‘I guess they must have questions for us before they decide.’

‘You remember what to say when they ask about what we want to do, right?’

Nate looked at his mate, he remembered. Man, did he remember. They had rehearsed the main points just before they had come here, and yet Nate wished that wasn’t what he had to say. He was supposed to say about the other pack, the one with the two Alpha mates, and that was fine, that was important, but then there was the requested solution.

Merging the packs.

Merging the packs meant committing to even more responsibility, adding more nameless faces to the masses of people in his home pack. He didn’t want that responsibility, he didn’t want to have to make decisions for even more people, be accountable for every aspect of their lives. He imagined the meetings he would have to sit through just for running a pack of that size, and then throwing in the council member’s responsibility, his brain almost exploded.

When he blinked all that he imagined was Brody. Brody at their pack house, surrounded by people that he didn’t know, staring out of a window high up in one of the giant buildings as he waited patiently for Nate to return from another meeting, another trip, another phone call that would last hours. He saw the loneliness on his mate’s face and the tears that would surely fill his eyes and in that moment Nate would have become his father.