Carolina Wren

A Report #5

Owen's POV

 

Order, clarity, and routine are vital components of my life. When expectations are clear, there is little room for confusion. Confusion can turn something that should be routine into a life or death situation. When I'm not aware of all the details, important things are more likely to be missed and I can't guide my team to a decision based on my best judgement. It is simpler to discern when a person is acting outside of their norm when there is a pattern that I can refer back to. I can determine if I need to intervene, for the safety of my family or for those around them.

My early childhood could have easily been chaos but even in the midst of the horrors she suffered, my mother made sure that I had a routine. That I felt secure in my relationship to her and that I knew how to show respect for others in turn. When Sean and I teamed up, my first mission was to reign him in. Bring structure, and therefore stability, to his life and by extension our team.

Looking back, it's fair of me to admit that I was coming on too strong and there were hard lessons learned. My actions weren't out of an act of love but from a place of desiring control. When we began to work together and I began to think with both of our best interests in mind, it became more natural. Eventually, this translated into helping us when the boys came into our lives in a sea of turmoil, nearly churning out of control. We showed them respect and they learned how to show it in return.

We helped them achieve stability and in doing so, we formed a bond and a structure that allowed us to easily notice when something was off. When something needed to be fixed. When a father was taking his criticism too far or a mother was working too hard. It was far easier to discern when strife was working its way back into their worlds when they weren't living in a constant state of stress. By building their trust in us, more often than not they now come to us on their own when something is troubling them in their outside life.

This sort of connection is a marathon, not a race. It's not built in a day or in a week. It's formed over time through consistency and habitually showing that you're going to follow through with your word. By learning who someone is beneath the layers of their defenses so you can recognize when those walls are fighting to be rebuilt.

Perhaps that's why I missed that there was something worse going on in Miss Nelson's personal life. How can I determine that something has gone horrifically wrong if every moment of every day is based around survival? There is no shift when you know nothing else. As strongly as some of us may feel towards her, any bond that has been built is tentative at best. It has not withstood the test of time. It hasn't been proven to her in any capacity.

We know that any promise we make to her is true and that if it can't be carried through, we will hold ourselves accountable for it. But Miss Nelson has no way of knowing this. Trust isn't built on words alone; it is forged through actions. She doesn't yet understand the comfort that the Academy offers in always being there to support her and she doesn't have the benefits that the boys had when they joined. The first five boys had each other-- even if Sean and I betrayed them in some way, they could turn to each other. Silas and North had each other but they took longer to trust us because, quite frankly, there were more of us than there were of them.

Wren Nelson has spent far too many years where it was only herself against the world. The boys had each other from a young age, even if they didn't have all of the tools they needed to help each other. She has passed the point of being a girl; she is a young woman who has been making choices that determine the survival of herself and three small humans. She is not only familiar with the game of keeping others away, she is an expert at it. The clever girl gave us just enough details about her life for us to write things off. The bare minimum of information that didn't make us look further, press harder. The boys had been good at hiding their struggles, but Wren Nelson was nearing master status.