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How can they let me be in this pack when I did what I did?

And then Tammy, seeing Tammy is fucking awkward.

The thing is with Tammy, I don’t know if they even could have experienced this compersion thing for me, because I don’t know that I did it because I was pursuing pleasure. It was selfish, sure, but I didn’t do it because I wanted to have fun and hurt people. I did it because I felt desperate and trapped and scared. I thought that it would make me feel free.

It didn’t.

But Striker and I have some talks. A lot of talks. When he was a priest, he essentially did a lot of work that might be considered counseling, as if he was a therapist, and while he wasn’t trained in psychology, per se, he did a lot of research into psychology because he wanted to do his job better. That’s Striker for you.

So, some of these talks help me understand things like attachment style. Striker says that when a person is raised in an abusive environment, and he says the Polloi qualifies, it’s likely a person will develop what is called a disorganized attachment style, which means a person will be alternately anxious and trying to nail down loved ones for security and then avoidant, running from intimacy, because it makes a person feel unsafe. When a child doesn’t securely attach to a caregiver, apparently, it makes it really hard to securely attach later in life.

But Striker says the good thing is that a secure relationship later in life can help a person heal. And I want to believe I have that with my mates. I want to believe.

It’s funny how after that thing with Knight nothing really changes and yet everything changes.

Nothing changes, because we’re all still doing our “things.” I’m still going in to Cedar Falls and working with the alphas and omegas. I’m still focused on trying to undo the damage done to them. Arrow and Lotus are still going to visit various Polloi compounds, talking to Kyvelki, and spending a lot of time trying to do work to change inequities in the way thatalphas and omegas are treated in society. Striker is working on his TikTok sermons or whatever. And Knight becomes sort of our house husband. He starts cooking for us and managing the household chores (this doesn’t mean he personally does them, exactly, more that he orders us around and comes up with creative punishments when we don’t obey him, which usually involve his sexual gratification and, um, you know, spanking), and he becomes our anchor, the person who keeps the home and hearth, I guess. Knight likes that, though. He likes, uh, owning us? It’s sort of exactly what I think he’s always wanted, is to have a group of people to command and also to love.

So, it would seem as if we’re all still scattered, but we aren’t. We have each other as a secure foundation, a warm and good place that cradles us as we go out into the world to do whatever it is that we are trying to do. So, in that way, everything changes.

I think what it does is to take the pressure off our exploits. They still matter, but they don’t have to matter as much because we have our pack now, our sense of belonging, and our connection matters more than anything else.

One day, I sort of realize that I’ve come to trust it without noticing that I do. I’ve come to rely on it and to simply believe it will be there. I didn’t make a choice to believe that my mates will always be there for me, but it happened at some point, while I wasn’t paying attention.

While all this has been happening, Lotus’s cycle has started again, which means that she’s going into heat and she’s menstruating, which…

Okay, so a weird thing about my mates? They have athingabout blood.

I’m not squeamish or whatever, so it doesn’t bother me. Anyway, whatever it was Acker did to them, this blood thing is just locked in. I don’t mind, though, and Lotus doesn’t mind and they definitely don’t mind. So, anyway, Lotus having her periodtends to mean they all go into a rut, and considering I’m in the bond with them, I usually have a sympathetic rut and… it’s fun. No complaints.

Unlike beta women, who have a monthly cycle, omegas’ reproductive cycles happen less often. In the Polloi, omegas go into heat usually twice or three times a year. No one knows why this is, but I speculate that our reproductive cycles are more likely to be effective, so there’s no reason for an omega to be fertile twelve times a year, unlike betas, who have a much lower rate of conceiving.

But now that Lotus’s cycle is happening, the prospect of reversing her tubal ligation comes up again, and it turns out that, considering she’s so young, there’s a really good chance it will be successful and that she’ll be able to get pregnant on the other side of it. So, they schedule it, and it’s a laparoscopic surgery, minimally invasive. She doesn’t even have to stay overnight. She comes home within hours after it’s over, and it works.

After which, she promptly goes back on birth control, because she says she’s not ready, but that she’s pretty sure someday, she’s going to be. That’s been two years ago, and she’s still deciding. We’re all okay with that. It’s her body, after all.

Okay, this is not entirely true. Striker, Arrow, and I are all okay with it. Knight is typically a caveman about it and has done things like swapping out Lotus’s birth control for sugar pills. (The amount of effort he put into this is insane. He reproduced the little blister pack so well that she couldn’t tell the difference. It was a commitment. I have to hand it to the guy.) But the thing about birth control is that it suppresses Lotus’s heats, so when she went into heat, we all knew what happened. So, that was a fun heat when we all had to wear condoms.

There were lots of very serious talks after that happened, where Striker was very stern and barked a lot at Knight about how this kind of thing was borderline abusive and Knight wasreally lucky we weren’t just chucking him out of the pack for doing that shit.

Knight sulked for a long time about it. He’s still sulky about it. He claims that he can feel through the bond that Lotus really wants to have babies and that she’s just afraid to do it, and Lotus, for her part, says maybe that’s true.

Maybe that’s why she forgives him.

Why we all forgive him.

It’s hard to draw moral lines in the sand with each other. We’ve all committed murder. We’ve all done very violent things. We’ve all been out of our heads and out of control.

We have eachother, that’s the thing, and that’s our constant. We hold that line, no matter what.

At Cedar Falls, one night, one of the alphas gets loose and goes straight for one of the omegas, a male omega, probably because he’s in heat, I think, since we have been doing some controlled heat experiments (with the option of giving them sex toys and fuzzy stuff instead of orchestrating sex with them).

Anyway, it’s bad.

The alpha is a hound, trained by Acker, and he tries to kill the omega.

But he doesn’t.

Maybe because of heat, and heat short-circuits that training to some degree, I don’t know. Anyway, I get called in around three in the morning and when I get there, we’re all watching this alpha knot this omega six ways from Sunday on the security cameras. Guards went in to try to stop what was happening before I got there, but then the fucking started and the alpha stopped trying to kill the omega.