Belonging

Follow me home, to where the lonely ones roam

The papers crinkle, their sound alone in the basement. Gerard sits back on the cool flooring, looking up to the ajar door before down to the papers in his hand.

Two are blank, ripped out of a notebook and probably there so their owner could come back to write more. Yet there sits no writing utensil in sight.

Casting aside the blank pages, Gerard finds a thicker and folded paper. It's fairly opaque, but when he presses his fingers against the new folds, the paper below explodes in a trifecta of color.

Muttering to himself, he carefully unfurls the sheet, spreading it flat against the floor. Gerard blinks quickly, taking in the many colors and markings that littered the page.

The paper was about two by two, perfectly square but tattered along the corners from use.

Black, white, and green blotches make up what Gerard recognizes as the pack borders. The McCracken and Way packs are white and uncolored on the paper, outlined in shaky black lines that blotched in random areas. It looked that the person who drew them up was uncertain, hurried, or maybe preoccupied.

'Way' and 'McCracken' were written in scrawl right next to each other on their corresponding blobs of unmarked paper.

Then, they're was the rest of the forest and the Iero property. The big pack was outlined in filled in with black marker that bled outside its borders and into the Ways' designated blotch. 'Iero' was written in the same messy scrawl as the other symbols and words that littered the poor paper. This time, white pen was used, so it was readable over the black ink.

The rest of the paper was littered with badly measured out green clusters, which Gerard assumed to be trees. The lake was there. And so was the clearing where he both met Frank and saved his life. It was all there marked in zigzag lines and dots. There is no map key in sight, leaving the meaning of the random, small circles and symbols unknown.

Then, in the very lower corner, south of the lake and clearing and east of Ways designated spot, in a sea of green dots, sat a thick, red 'X'.

It wasn't a mistake or tear. It wasn't a marker's bled ink. It was distinguished and very, very, purposeful.

Gerard traces it with his finger, the ink soaked paper shedding, rolling up, and pealing into his fingers sticky.

He stays silent, calm. Folding the paper up how it originally was, he places the blank pages and phone back on the seat. Then, Gerard gets up, taking the map and stuffing it under his sweat shirt, its thick fabric hiding the bump.

The stairs creak under his weight. The doors' squeak shut and click of the light switch into the darkness the only indication he was ever there.

*

Bob resides in the ground floor of the McCracken pack house. Away from the prisons that litter the basement, and among the members of the two packs that were cast innocent by Frank upon first glance.

Some children roamed the floor, playing with their pack mates and making havoc in their rooms. They sat with mostly pregnant mothers, which had been placed strictly inside by their mates during the whole ordeal. They didn't even know Gerard had been relocated with Bert, assuming he stayed with Mikey. This would be normal, considering mates usually mated during the moon, and it was rather unorthodox for them to be interlacing their packs seriously until before then.

So Bob sat on house arrest with the oblivious mothers and children, cast to the side for now by Frank. But, not totally off the map and very easily located by a certain omega.