Mikael was not a very cheerful person in spite of all superficial appearances to the contrary. In fact, he spent a lot of his time trying to convince himself that he was actually in a good mood and that everything in the world was a delight to him, the reality was anything but. He had been alone for a long time, friendly with a few people but aware more and more that he was in actuality an inconvenience to them in a lot of ways, entertained mostly out of pity rather than a genuine engagement. He wasn’t too surprised really, his personality and how he presented himself was inherently off-putting, people wanted to care for helpless children but they didn’t want to be their friends.

And so he had none.

It had been this way for two years, two whole years cut off from his mother and from his peers. He missed school and missed his normal life, making up for it with painting regularly, spending his wages on canvasses and materials which he took outside and used to practice his landscapes, ending up with a large number of hostile looking open skies dotted with far away figures and sometimes, very rarely a single solitary wolf.

Even living in a house, he still felt apart from it all. Rodney treated him like a person but the man’s timidity was unsettling to a boy who was used to being dealt with firmly and confidently, when he dealt with him it felt like there was a space left between them where he was expected to place his emotions and this commitment was too great when he spent so long trying to hide how little of them he had. Melvin was complex but essentially Mik knew he considered him beneath him, rather stupid and of no real consequence, wholly consumed by his commitment to his father. Whenever he spoke to Melvin he felt that the impatience of the other man was obvious and that he was very much encouraged to go away.

When it came to his father, his relationship with the other man was deeply complicated, a tangled web of emotion and long harboured hurts. Sometimes they’d snub one another and then other times they would get some time alone. On these occaisions they would sit and talk into the small hours of the morning, both lapsing back into Swedish, a safeguard for the confidences they placed in one another. They understood each other in a way few other people truly could. Lawrence had tried to explain what had happened with Maja, filling in a side of the story that Mikael had never really known, though of course he took all of it with a large pinch of salt. Lawrence was a liar and always had been, with a propensity to spin things in his favour, but he knew this, he understood it now, and in some ways the longer he was alone, the more he understood why he did it. People treated you differently depending on who you were and he was learning that childish vulnerability had its place and that that place was less and less useful to him in his day to day life. Sometimes he explained his loneliness to Lawrence who also understood but who told him that he would need to make his own ultimate decisions about how to deal with it. The man was cold and distant, void of true love or affection, but at least it was the truth, at least it was honest compared to the lies he’d been used to as a child. He no longer expected love from his father and knew that it didn’t matter to the other man if he didn’t love him either. It was a reconcilement of sorts, he didn’t trust Lawrence, he didn’t even like him as a person, but he saw a mirror of himself in the other man and listened for those reasons, he was older and had been dealing with this for so long that he had insights that were valuable. Lawrence’s criticisms made him stronger and he listened only when he saw validity in what was said.

Melody he didn’t understand, to him the girl was strange and hard to comprehend and he wasn’t sure why she was there if she didn’t want to sleep with Lawrence. He had to assume it was simply out of a similar loneliness to what he often felt and a desire to be in the midst of life and activity even if not wholly a part of it. He felt like it was difficult to get to know her for the same reason it was probably difficult to get to know him, that front of placatory eagerness drowning out all solid opinions. She felt malleable and eager to please and it left him wondering who she really was underneath it all, a constantly shifting target. She didn’t push against his own eager to please front and was easy company, even if they didn’t relate all that strongly.

And so in the whole house there was no one he could truly confide in, no one he could relate to as an equal. People looked down on him and that was the way he had set it up and couldn’t really move away from. He’d built a cage of safety around himself and now he was trapped.

His weapon was his only companion in the situation he found himself in and this had its own effect. Fenrir was in his own way lonely too, but he embraced it, considering himself one of the only ones of his kind – he couldn’t remember if this was actually true at all – and behaving accordingly. He was strict and critical with Mikael and over the many months had begun to have an impact on the young man, both in encouraging him to appreciate the outdoors and to appreciate his own solitude. He was lonely, he told him, but he was lonely because he was special, because he was better than everyone else. In the end, it had to be true, Mik reckoned. He was better than other people and that was why they avoided him, why they treated him like there was something strange about him, even when he did his best to make friends.

He had learned to exist, but not happily, missing the social connections he yearned for, and this was why - in a fit of decisiveness and uncharacteristic action - he put up the posters all over the island with a phone number and the words.

LOOKING FOR CUTE BOYFRIEND OR GIRLFRIEND FOR CUTE TIMES.

Because if he had one of those, he'd surely never be truly alone again.