-:-

Chapter 45

Fahrenheit

"If you ever cared about me, shut the fuck up!"

-:-

Here we go
Does it hurt
Say goodbye
to this world
I will not
Be undone
Come to life
It gets worse

All in all
You're no good
You don't cry
Like you should
I'll be gone
when you fall
Your sad life
Says it all.

"What Lies Beneath" – Breaking Benjamin

-:-

His eyes were vacant as they watched his father's body leaving that house on a cold metal stretcher in a solid black plastic bag, his face not once stirred by a single, visible emotion. The detective on scene would always remember that young, dark haired man as someone who looked as if he had never been touched by light, love or kindness. The veteran of the Esthar City Police force was all too familiar with this address, although it was located in a quiet, unsuspecting upper-class neighborhood; he had responded to multiple 911 calls in reference to the late owner of the residence in the recent past, usually related to the man's frequent drunken escapades. The man had been a widower for over a decade, and his only son was in his early twenties, a law student at a local university, classically good-looking and empty-eyed as he stood there in the doorway, casting a shadow onto the snowed-in front porch.

The detective had met him a time or two, often wondering how much the young man had suffered at the hands of his alcoholic father during his childhood, yet he had never once asked, because some questions he hadn't truly wanted to hear the answers to.

"I'm very sorry for your loss," the detective offered his well-practiced sympathies with a polite bow of his head, but the deceased's son simply stared at him, entirely unmoved.

"Don't be."

The chill in the other male's voice had startled him. He had attributed it to grief, reminding himself that everyone dealt with death in a completely personal kind of manner, and yet, deep down, he had known that this was different.

Those weren't the eyes, expression and tone of a person in mourning.

This was a human being who had stopped caring about anything or anyone a long time ago.

No one would ever know the reasons why, nor the full, horrific extent of the damage wrought upon that quiet, dark haired law student, because the man who had ruined him had taken his secrets to his grave.

There would, however, be a boy – not even yet born on that fateful day when Nicolas Kearan had asphyxiated on his own vomit of nothing but cheap liquor and microwaved ramen noodles – a boy who would be forced to experience the same irrational hatred and twisted, depraved desire that Kato's father had once felt for his own son. He, too, would endure it for many painful years to come, never once telling anyone of the soul-rending trauma he was subjected to every single day. And neither Kato Kearan nor Squall Leonhart would ever know that there was one old detective sitting alone somewhere in his recliner, day after passing day, well into his retirement, wondering if he would have made a difference in one young man's life if only he had asked.

"Rough night?"

Flinching, Squall looked up, startled by the pleasant and yet suggestive tone of his cab driver that had interrupted his predictably dark train of thought. Every time he moved too quickly, he felt an uncomfortable, airy lightness in his head and belly, making it challenging for him to focus. The man, who looked to be in his late forties, was smiling at him kindly from the rear-view mirror with twinkling light green eyes that caused an unexpected warmth to spread across the teenager's cheeks as his gaze was dragging a quick path along the cabbie's reflection. The man's question seemed oddly familiar to him, like something he'd been asked not that long ago, but he couldn't remember when and he was too tired to hold the thought. Everything seemed distant and unimportant to him, because there was no space in his mind for anything but his concern for Seifer.

Breathing deeply against the persistent nausea and the intangible fuzz in his brain, Squall finally forced just the quickest of nods and dropped his eyes once more, muttering an offhand, "Something like that."

"Did you get into a fight?" the driver asked curiously, obviously ignoring the fact that his young customer seemed in no mood to hold a conversation with him. It wasn't unusual for the man to transport people who didn't want to engage in small talk, but this kid had sparked too much of his interest to simply let the subject go.

"No," Squall responded brusquely, furrowing his brows as he stubbornly continued to stare at his own legs.

'A fight? It wasn't a fucking fight. Not today. Not ever. I've always let him win. Every. Single. Goddamn. Time. Even when I cut him I was doing nothing but running away. I'm a fucking coward, in the end.'

"I see," the older male said, seemingly contemplating the boy's answer, before his expression softened. After all, he knew well enough where he had picked the boy up, and his bandages only left so much room for interpretation. "You know, I have a daughter about your age. Very pretty girl. Such a headstrong young woman, too, and so independent, let me tell you. Probably a bit too much so for her age – she's definitely got that from her mother. Anyway, I'm sure you think I'm rambling, but… that look on your face, I've seen it before."

Squall's head shot up and his brows drew into a scowl, unsure and unnerved by the thought of where the man was going with this, but the driver continued before he'd had a chance to say anything in response. "My daughter came home hurt one time, in a way that she had never been hurt before, and it broke my heart to see her like that. I'm her father. I'm supposed to protect her, you know? It killed me that I couldn't. I can tell you've been through a lot, just like her, and I guess I'm just wondering if there's anything I can do to help. "

The brunette's eyes met the cabbie's questioning gaze in the perfectly polished mirror, and he could feel a sudden, overwhelming ache in his chest when his thoughts drifted to his own mother, and even his father, if only for one second. He knew that they were in the hospital right now, looking for him, probably sick with worry over his abrupt disappearance. It was his fault, of course, just like everything had always been his fault, because he felt like he could do absolutely nothing right.

None of this helped to make him feel any better.

"I…" the seventeen year old started hesitantly, not entirely sure what he was even trying to say, when his attention was suddenly caught by his driver's picture ID badge that was displayed quite openly on the taxi's dashboard. He hadn't paid it any thought until now, too consumed with the constant noise inside his own head, but when his blue-grey eyes studied and processed the man's name for the first time, he let out a small sound of surprise.

"Wait a minute. You're Selphie's father," he blurted out before he could have even thought better of it, looking upon the dark blond man named Arthur Tilmitt in genuine bewilderment. He felt stupid now, not seeing the obvious physical resemblance, nor the fact that both Selphie and her father loved to talk and clearly had a knack for getting way too personal.

"Why yes, I am, you're correct," the driver replied jovially as he navigated the streets of Deling City with great care. "How do you know my daughter, if I may ask?"

"We work together at Ward's Diner," the teen said slowly, promptly realizing that he had never actually talked to the girl about her parents. He remembered her mentioning in passing that her father was a cab driver, but he hadn't exactly shown particular interest in that information at the time. It wasn't the kind of thing he liked to do – exchange private information, ask personal questions, or basically do anything that could make you feel emotionally attached to those around you. Selphie had always gone out of her way to be kind to him, and she had made it a point to ask about his family… yet he had never bothered to find out anything about her's in return.

Suddenly, he was starting to feel like the most gigantic asshole.

After pausing and seemingly deliberating for a moment, Selphie's father smiled warmly once more and declared in a tone that had become disarmingly gentle, "Ah. You must be Squall, then. It's nice to meet you, son."

Looking openly taken aback, the dark haired youth canted his head towards his left shoulder and admitted unsurely, "I… yeah. I am. How did you—?"

"She talks about you quite a bit. You're one of the couple people there that she really cares about and enjoys working with," Arthur explained willingly, before winking at the boy. "She did mention that you're a gentleman of few words."

"She wasn't lying," Squall grumbled, immediately cutting his frosty gaze out of the window as if to prove some kind of juvenile point. Honestly, he'd probably said way too much to the man already anyway, and at the end of the day, he wasn't here to try and fucking chat anyone up.

He just wanted to find Seifer.

"Thank you for being a good friend to my daughter, Squall," the man suddenly continued, his fatherly inflection causing the boy to glance at him warily from the corner of his eyes. "I'm sure you probably already know this, but it was difficult for Selphie to move out here. Thank you for making it easier for her to call this place home. She loves working at Ward's, and your friendship has much to do with that."

Holding his breath, Squall carefully considered his following sentences for several long, uncomfortable moments. He could feel something inside of himself tightening up reflexively at the man's sweet words, like a knot of emptiness and guilt in the center of his chest that had somehow always been there and refused to go away, before he muttered in a small voice colored with regret, "Selphie's… a good person. One of the best I've ever met. She deserves a much better friend than I've ever been, or could be."

Arthur Tilmitt seemed intrigued by that statement, because the man suddenly tilted his gaze over his shoulder, studying the teenager for a distinct while as they were sitting at a red light. "Really, what makes you say that?"

"I'm just… not a good friend. To anyone," the brunette responded hoarsely, and his voice had taken on a gruff, almost rude note as he dropped his head once more. "That's all."

"You're too hard on yourself," the man said gently as the light in front of them turned green and he inched the car forward. "She mentioned that, too."

Sitting there in the cool, creaking leather backseat of Arthur Tilmitt's cab in a pair of bloodied jeans and his father's stolen cardigan, confronted once more with his own sense of inadequacy, Squall could feel a sharp, burning ache in his throat, and he had no idea why. He was struggling to choke down tears – to find some kind of stability in or around himself that had been ripped from him years ago. He didn't understand why the man's words were affecting him so much; why he suddenly felt so helpless, lost, and alone. He assumed that it had to be due to his injured, emotionally vulnerable state, and yet there was probably much more to it than that. He suddenly came to this blinding realization that everything and everyone in his life would have been so much better off without him and his shitty, half-assed efforts of being a friend, son, and brother. He had done so many things wrong in life and hurt so many people. All of that guilt and all of that sadness came snapping back to him like a rubber band, and he felt like he couldn't breathe under the weight of it all. He wanted to jump out of that cab and run as far and fast as his legs would carry him, because right now he felt like he was being suffocated by his own feelings right where he was sitting.

"Hey. Are you okay?"

Squall yanked up his head, his wide eyes meeting those of the man who had come to a halt amongst traffic and was watching him carefully from the driver's seat. He wanted to answer, to rattle off some generic, overused response that would deflect from his destructive, chaotic state of mind, but he knew that if he'd try to talk right now, he would shatter into a ball of tears before he'd ever get a word out.

"Squall...?"

He continued to stare out of eyes that were too bright, breathing too shallow and too fast, hoping for traffic to start moving, knowing full well that he had to look like a complete basket case as he was wringing his sleeves for support and battled a host of frightening, overwhelming emotions that he didn't understand.

"What's wrong? Is there anything I can do?"

Arthur was gazing at him, his expression lined with concern. It wasn't common for the cabbie to transport teenagers by themselves, particularly ones in such horrific shape. Truthfully, the boy was breaking his heart, and even if he hadn't been his daughter's friend, some deeply paternal part of him would have felt like he needed to find out what had happened to this kid - why the brunette was all alone in his current, battered state, and what he could do to keep him from looking as if he was about to fall to pieces.

Squall remained that lost boy with the deer in the headlights look on his beaten face, unable to say anything at all, until he realized that his driver was about to pull over in order to have a proper conversation with him.

'No. No, no, no… I don't have time for this. I can't… I need to find Seifer. This isn't about me. This isn't the time to freak out and lose my fucking shit!'

"I… uh, I… I just… I… L-Look, I just… had a… a really… really long day," the teen forced out, swallowing the lump in his throat somewhere between cracking words and too-shallow breaths.

"I can see that," Arthur said, the response vague in tone.

"I'm fine, I just… I really need to get home," Squall urged, although avoiding eye contact. He could feel his cheeks getting warm and his palms on his thighs becoming sweaty, and he brushed them across his jeans a few times. "It's late. My parents are waiting for me."

"What? They weren't at the hospital with you? While you're looking like this?" the cabbie inquired sternly, catching the small flinch of Squall's shoulders, before the brunette quickly yanked up his walls and shook his head.

"No, they… We're... It's… uh…. It's a long story."

"I have time. 1050 Centennial Boulevard you said, correct? We have a few minutes still."

Screwing up his face, the dark haired youth crossed his arms in front of his chest and huffed in a needlessly defensive tone, "I don't really wanna talk about it."

Nodding slowly, while inspecting every inch of his young customer's bruised face in the rearview mirror with an expression that suggested pity and something else that Squall didn't like, Arthur answered in a calm, and yet suspicious voice, "Right. I can see very well why you wouldn't."

Feeling attacked for no tangible reason at all, the brunette teen cut his flaring gaze towards the man and hissed spitefully, "It's not what you think, okay?"

Raising a brow, Arthur asked without conflict in his tone, "What is it that I'm thinking?"

Frowning, his tired grey eyes sparking with some kind of volatile emotion that he didn't really know how to feel, the brunette growled, "You're making some sort of weird fucking dig at my parents. This isn't about them, okay? They didn't do anything wrong! Watch what the fuck you say!"

Arthur noticed how his young customer was breathing even faster now, picked up on the abruptly aggressive, paranoid undertone to his voice, and he chose to say nothing in response. Whatever had happened to this kid had caused all of his defenses to go into senseless overdrive, and he was sitting there with a brightly lit fuse that was only waiting to be sparked by the smallest of triggers. He'd seen this kind of behavior before, on his very own daughter, and it pained him to watch a young person in that kind of raw agony.

The last thing this boy needed was any kind of confrontation.

"I'm sorry," the older male eventually said gently as he maneuvered them down the road at a much slower speed than before, or so it felt to Squall, anyway. "I can see you've had a difficult day. I'm certainly not trying to make it worse."

Opening his mouth, Squall wanted to snap something rude that would make him feel better, but at the end of the day, he understood that it wasn't Arthur who was to blame for his dumpster fire of fucked up feelings. The man seemed kind and caring, and on any other given day, the boy might have been able to summon some appreciation for his cabbie's concern, but today, it just put him into an irrational state of anger.

Therefore, the brunette teen simply closed his mouth again and started staring at the back of the seat in front of him, his expression unreadable.

"I'm sorry for what happened to you," Arthur said quietly from the front of the taxi. "I truly am."

The dark haired boy's eyebrows twitched in response, but he didn't lift his head. He wanted this ride to be over with; he didn't want to be forced to reflect on the trauma he had gone through, nor did he want to discuss his messy parental situation with anyone at all, preferably ever. He wanted to hold it all inside and go on with his life, just like he had done for all these years. Of course, anyone who wasn't blind and stupid could tell that there was a world of pain the young brunette in the back of Arthur's cab clearly hadn't dealt with, but at this point, none of that even mattered to Squall. He wasn't even truly trying to fake that he was fine anymore; he was simply trying to stay alive and save his friend.

"… We're here."

Whipping his head up, openly cringing at the nauseating blurriness that instantly fogged up his gaze, Squall realized that they had come to a halt in the parking lot of Seifer's apartment complex. The snow was drifting in aimless flurries all around them, disturbed only by the haze coming out of the taxi's exhaust pipe. He couldn't see Seifer's truck from their current position, but that didn't put a dent in his determination.

Shuddering in anticipation of seeing the blond again, Squall quickly reached for his father's wallet while unbuckling his seatbelt.

"Thanks. How much do I owe you?"

The light haired man had turned around in his seat and placed an arm on the bench between them, shaking his head now as his eyes tracked the boy's every motion.

"I don't want your money," Arthur replied, demonstratively turning off his taxi meter before Squall could even take a close look at the amount on the bright red display. "I just want you to take care of yourself, Squall. My daughter would be devastated if anything were to happen to you, you understand that?"

Helplessly gesturing with the wallet still in his hand, Squall stammered, "But—"

"You don't owe me anything, kid. I mean it."

The brunette seemed dumbfounded, unsurely glancing from the blank meter to Arthur's face. "Are you sure?" he asked skeptically, biting the corner of his bottom lip. "That was a long ride, and I —"

"And I'm glad I got to take you," Arthur interrupted him, smiling gently. "I just want you to get home safe to your parents."

For a painful moment, Squall considered the fact that he was nowhere close to home and his parents were somewhere else worried shitless about him, but he realized that he didn't have time to waste arguing with Selphie's father. Finally, he stuffed Laguna's wallet back into his pocket and forced a grateful half-smile in his driver's direction.

"Thank you. I really appreciate it."

"Don't mention it. Do you need help getting to your apartment? I don't want you to fall out there. The ground is slippery."

"No, I'm fine," the dark haired teen reassured the man quickly. As he opened the cab door, he took a deep breath of icy cold air that felt like a punch in his chest and said, "It was good meeting you. Thanks again."

"You too, kid. If you ever need anything, call Selphie's number, alright?"

"Y-yeah. I will. Thanks."

"Take care, Squall."

Already pushing himself onto his feet and out into the snowed in parking lot, Squall grunted a hasty "You, too" before throwing the passenger door shut behind himself. He shuddered instinctively against the startling wind chill and buried his bare hands in his pockets, painfully reminded that he wasn't exactly dressed for this unforgiving kind of weather. As he carefully paced towards one of the apartment buildings, pretending to go home only so that Selphie's father would leave without questioning him any further, he scanned the parking lot for any sign of Seifer's pick-up truck. The blond's usual spot was empty, however, and he couldn't find the vehicle parked anywhere else, either.

'Where the fuck is he?'

As he had stepped onto the curb by the snow blown staircase of Seifer's building, nearly losing his footing on the crunchy ice that lined the concrete, he watched the tail lights of Arthur Tilmitt's cab finally disappearing from his sight. For a moment, he considered walking up to the blond's apartment and ringing the doorbell, but at this point, he figured it would be nothing but a waste of time.

Seifer wasn't here.

'I got here too late. He already left, or maybe he was never here to begin with. What the hell should I do now?'

Shivering miserably as he stood there, contemplating his options despite the fact that he was cold, light-headed and in pain, he tried to understand what Seifer's thought process must have been when he had left his hospital room seemingly ages ago. Clearly, the blond's ultimate goal was to find Kato, but Seifer really knew little to nothing about his stepfather and, therefore, the man's possible whereabouts. Seifer did, however, know one thing…

'… He knows where we live.'

Turning on his heel almost instantly, Squall proceeded back out into the parking lot to where he had left his mother's car earlier in the day. Right now, all of it felt like a lifetime ago, back when everything had been easier and yet so much more complicated. He had never imagined that his life would take such a drastic turn in the matter of one short afternoon, and yet here he was, his secrets unraveling one by one, and he had no idea how to stop any of it.

'This should have never happened.'

The black Mercedes was sitting peacefully in the same spot he had backed it into, covered in intricate webs of crystallized ice and heavy clumps of snow. The leather seats were uncomfortably cold and stiff against his skin, the motor sluggish when he cranked the key. He could see his breath fogging up the cabin, and as his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel he knew that he should scrape at least some kind of marginal hole into the frosty sheet covering his windshield, but he didn't figure that he had that kind of time. Blasting cold engine air against the windows as he stepped onto the gas and inched forward in the parking spot, he finally narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brows as he was forced to acknowledge that he couldn't see a goddamn thing.

'What in the fresh fuck are you doing? You're going to get yourself or someone else killed, you fucking dumbass.'

Teeth chattering, Squall turned around and grabbed the ice scraper from the back seat as he grudgingly put the car into park once more. Then, he spent a few long minutes out in the cold, attacking the frozen windshield with his plastic ice scraper until his fingers went numb. When he finally got back into the car, his hands had turned white and he could barely feel anything he touched, but that wasn't going to stop him as he finally proceeded out of the parking lot and onto the highway.

'I can't waste any more time. Seifer's been gone for a while… who knows what the fuck Kato did to him if he found him. I have to get there before that bastard does something crazy.'

Squall was neither reckless nor stupid, and on any other given day, he probably would have realized that driving halfway across town through the snow in his current condition was nothing short of both. Today, however, he didn't have the time or levelheadedness to truly wage the extent of his options, so he did what any dumb teenager would do when faced with a particularly dangerous and complicated situation – pretend he was invincible and wing the fuck out of it.

The drive to his house had never seemed so long, and his eyes had never felt so tired in his life. He constantly found himself blinking and rubbing his face with the palm of his hand, fooling himself into thinking that this would somehow help his blistering headache and steadily worsening vision. His body felt oddly heavy in the driver's seat, each movement requiring more energy than it normally would. He knew that he wasn't okay, but he tried not to examine that thought too closely, just like he tried not to think about the fact that he was about to confront his stepfather after everything the cruel man had already put him through. Every nauseated, tortured part of him wanted to stop that car and never see Kato's face ever again, but his instinct to protect Seifer was much more powerful than his fear of his stepfather ever could be.

'I don't care what the fuck happens tonight, I am not going to let him hurt anyone ever again.'

With his stomach a cold, twisting pit of hurt, fear and quiet rage, Squall finally pulled up at the curb outside his family's house. His heart skipped a few excited beats when he noted Seifer's truck only a few feet away, parked alongside their driveway. The vehicle was shut off, and no one appeared to be inside.

'So he's here. But where is he, and where's Kato? Are they in the house?'

Digging his nails into the leather wrapped steering wheel, Squall turned off the engine and parked his mother's car. He felt goosebumps on his forearms and his neck as he made the transition from the heated Mercedes to the frigid temperatures outside, but he was too focused to even process the cold. As he got out and stalked through the snow past the black cast iron gate and trees bending in the winter weather towards the white stucco home's front door, he found that everything around him was far too quiet. There was a strange, high-pitched noise in his left ear, but he could hear nothing else, and that concerned him. His dark, wet Converse shoes seemed to make no sound on the snow-covered ground, and his breath was silent as it hung as thick, cold fog in the air. He felt a suffocating pressure in his chest that he couldn't or didn't want to explain, but he was aware that it could mean nothing good.

'Something's not right.'

He knew. Every fiber of his wounded body could tell that something was horribly wrong, and yet he stepped right up to that heavy, cherry wood front door anyway, staring at it with a blanked gaze for only a second as he held his breath and attempted to gather his courage like armor around himself.

'I have to do this. Not Laguna. Not my mother. No one else. This is my responsibility.'

He knew better than to set foot inside that house, and yet that's exactly what he did as his cold, unsteady fingers turned the key in the lock and finally pushed the door ajar with a slight creak. His heart was racing against his sternum as he slowly squeezed inside, trying to make as little noise as possible. Every footstep, every sound he made felt like gunfire to his ears, and he cringed as he maneuvered around the entranceway. He registered the fact that the foyer was dark and otherwise soundless around him, the ominous silence only interrupted by the old grandfather's clock. His eyes flitted around the large, pitch-black room, noting nothing out of order, which should have alarmed him more than it did. He pushed the door shut, finally daring to breathe, if only to let out a startled gasp when he saw the tall shadow that had been leaning against the wall behind him all along.

"You're as dumb as you look."

Before Squall had a chance to process that condescending voice as his stepfather's or really do much of anything at all, a long, dark object came careening into the edge of his vision only a second before impacting with his temple. His knees hit the marble tiles below him almost instantly, sending a jolt of pain through his spine that resonated with the sudden, blinding pressure in his head. Groaning, he reeled to stay conscious and fought the intense surge of nausea hammering into his throat as his world spun violently around him and his hearing faded into white noise.

'Oh my God, what—'

Collapsing onto all fours, Squall dry-heaved multiple times, his mind brushing the edge of unconsciousness for a fleeting, teasing moment before he was ripped back to reality by a rough pair of hands yanking him upwards and brutally dragging him across the floor. He tried to collect his breath into some tangible array of words, but instead he simply found himself stuttering helplessly as his flailing limbs slid over cold marble and up the wooden staircase.

"Ngh… n-no… d-don't… ungh…"

His stepfather didn't say a single thing as he dragged him up to the second floor of the house, easily ignoring the wounded boy's uncoordinated efforts to resist. Squall's hands were reaching for the walls, the railings, never fully making contact with any of them as Kato eventually shoved the boy into his upstairs office where he let the teen simply crumple onto his knees.

Squall could hear the man taking a few languid steps past him, and there were other muffled, indistinguishable sounds of commotion that his brain couldn't process at the moment. He knew he had taken too many hits to the head today, and his scalp felt like it was much too tight for his skull, throbbing like everything inside could crack and burst out at any given moment. He was holding his temple with his right hand, attempting to ease the bounding pressure as he groaned quietly against gritted teeth. Every time he tried to open his eyes and lifted his gaze to take a look around, he thought he was going to violently hurl onto the floor, so he discarded that idea for the moment being and simply wallowed in the sheer fucking agony that had ignited in his body.

"I knew you'd come for him. You've always been so pathetically predictable, Squall. All I had to do was sit here and wait for you to come prancing right through the front door. Now, I'll admit, I'm surprised you're even able to walk around at this point, but hey, I'm not gonna complain that I get to play with you for a bit longer. If you're seriously dumb enough to come back here after you just got put back together in the hospital, I will gladly use you for everything you're worth."

The ridicule in his stepfather's cold, self-indulgent voice was purposefully wounding, but it wasn't what ultimately caught Squall's attention. As he struggled through the spinning in his head that threatened to rob him of both his stomach contents and his consciousness, a sudden, striking clarity flooded his mind as a single word in Kato's statement struck a chord with him at last.

Him.

Squall cocked up his chin, now fully taking in the constant dull, shuffling noises echoing through the office as he strained his vision to steady. The room in front of him was swaying uncomfortably, but he could finally distinguish the shape of a person, sitting on the ground against the large wooden pillar that supported the ceiling of his stepfather's office. With a horrified sound on his lips, Squall realized that the person's arms were drawn backwards around the pillar in a painful, unnatural angle, their right shoulder and chest marked by a massive, dark shadowing of blood that stood out like a fucking beacon against the light grey fabric of the male's shirt. It wasn't the only blood that Squall could see on the blond haired teenager's body, and yet it was the only stain that looked fresh. He didn't know why he kept staring at it – why he kept remembering clinging on to that exact same shirt, that chest, those shoulders, afraid to ever let go.

'… No.'

He knew precisely who he was looking at. He'd never not known, and yet he still winced with every fiber of his being when his gaze finally met with bright green eyes that were so frightened and wide he could see all the white around the irises. The left side of the blond's face was bruised and swollen, his tousled bangs and forehead presenting a long swathe of barely dried, crusted blood that looked like his head had been smashed into something. Seifer was desperately trying to speak, but his mouth was stuffed with a washcloth that stifled all his sounds as he writhed around on the floor.

"Seifer!"

Squall's left palm immediately hit the ground and he attempted to shove himself upwards onto his feet to dart to the blond's side, until he heard a strange, metallic clicking sound and the voice of his stepfather barking an order the very moment he managed to hoist his legs underneath himself.

"Stay down."

His dark gaze cut to the right, seething with blistering spite, but he froze and a shudder raced across his skin when his eyes flashed towards the barrel of a handgun pointed unambiguously at his face.

"What the…"

An eerie, satisfied chuckle dripped from the man's mouth as it curved into a humorless smirk. Kato clearly delighted in his current position as he leaned idly against his desk, legs crossed ever so casually as he was soaking in the undiluted shock on his stepson's battered face. The brunette wasn't moving a single muscle and merely stared back at him, his dilated pupils fixed on the gun in Kato's right hand in alarm.

"Ah, yes," the lawyer drawled cheerfully, cocking his head now as his grey eyes shifted across Squall's paralyzed features with delight. "I figured you might like my early Christmas present from me to myself."

Squall remained motionless, glaring at the man as if gauging his willingness to pull the trigger right then and there. For what it was worth, the brunette knew that his stepfather hadn't gathered them in that office simply to shoot them – or at least not quite yet. Nevertheless, he wasn't naïve enough to assume that Kato wasn't planning on doing at least some sort of significant damage, and the sudden presence of a gun could mean nothing good. He remembered the man's threats and previous efforts to end his life only too clearly, and yet, he could tell that this was about so much more than that.

If Kato simply wanted him dead, he could have killed him a long time ago.

"What do you want?" the dark haired teen finally asked, before briefly sweeping his gaze towards his captured friend, suppressing a cringe. "What the hell have you done to him?"

"Nothing I haven't done to you before," Kato answered with a bored shrug, causing another surge of nausea in the back of Squall's throat and a gush of garbled expletives from Seifer's mouth. "Except for the gunshot wound, perhaps, but don't worry, sweetheart, we've got plenty of time to rectify that."

"Let him go," Squall demanded, his voice firmer than he had expected it to be.

Another dry, spine tingling laugh rang through the room as Kato Kearan shook his head, looking amused.

"Yeah, I don't think so," the man denied, his eyes disturbingly bright. "After all, why would I rob myself of this most excellent opportunity to show your stupid little friend just how much he fucked up by coming to my house tonight?"

"He was just trying to help me. This is between you and me, it has nothing to do with him! You can do whatever the fuck you want to me, just let him go," the brunette bartered, ignoring the blond's muffled protests that followed his suggestion.

"On the contrary, this has everything to do with him," Kato declared dryly, before his lips lifted into an unsettling smirk. "Besides, what makes you think anything will stop me from doing whatever I want to you, anyway?"

Squall's body stiffened visibly in response to the man's threatening remark, but he said nothing. He knew that his position was anything but favorable, and yet the only person he was truly worried about right now was the one sitting tied to a pole merely a few feet away from him.

"… Get up."

Squall slowly twisted his gaze upwards, studying Kato silently for a moment. He considered disobeying the man's order, but while Kato had his finger cocked around the trigger of a loaded gun, even the ornery brunette wasn't willing to gamble. Out of the corner of his eyes, he surveyed the dark, wet sheen of blood that was still spreading across the right upper side of Seifer's torso, and he blew out a strained breath as his panic went soaring once more.

'He shot him. He actually fucking shot him. Jesus fucking Christ. I need to get him to the hospital before he bleeds the hell out! But how the fuck are we supposed to get out of here?'

Gradually, considering each of his movements with deliberate care, Squall arranged his limbs in a somewhat coordinated fashion and levered himself onto his feet. His balance was as sketchy as it had been, and he could feel himself tilting sideways dangerously, until a pair of hands suddenly seized the back of his collar and tossed him carelessly into a nearby leather office chair.

"Pathetic."

Before he could have reacted appropriately, Squall could feel the man grabbing his wrists, which were still covered by bandages but hurt no less than they had mere hours ago. Then, something tightened around them with a dull mechanical noise, and with a stunned grimace, the brunette noted the rigid set of metal handcuffs that had snapped around both of his lower arms.

Despite his loud mouth and blazing dumb courage, Squall couldn't hide the fear that suddenly lit up in his eyes. Having his wrists touched and bound by the man caused far too many agonizing memories to push their ugly way to the surface and slowly unraveled his already unstable psyche. His heart was beating a rapid cadence into his chest, and as he fought to control his breathing, he noted the odd interest that had lit up in his stepfather's eyes as they screened him from head to toe. He unconsciously acknowledged the minor cut to the man's cheek, neat and almost too precise in nature as it was, until his stepfather suddenly leaned forward, his left palm pushing against the back of the chair, effectively forcing it to recline and Squall along with it. His empty grey gaze continued to consume every detail of the brunette boy's body from only inches away, always ignoring the hysterical, muffled grunting that sounded from somewhere behind him. Squall tilted his face upwards with difficulty, struggling against the man's stench and his invasive presence as he forced himself to hold his stepfather's lightless stare.

"Squall," Kato said quietly, pausing over the name with a perversely long intake of breath as he studied his stepson's handsome face. The boy didn't respond with anything other than a shift in his brows and a tightening in the set of his shoulder blades as his eyes burnt with hate.

The lawyer smiled.

"This is a good look for you," he suddenly declared with a calm, appreciative note to his voice, his piercing eyes referencing first the handcuffs around the boy's wrists, then the numerous wounds dug into his pale skin while he dragged the tip of his gun against the inside of the kid's thigh, letting it linger there just as long as he had to in order to get his point across. "I've used these cuffs on your mother before, you know. She loved it, little whore that she is. I can see where you get it from."

With fury abruptly flushing his cheeks, Squall practically jumped out of his seat as he roared a raw growl into the man's face and spat, "Fuck you! Don't talk about my mother, you deranged fucking sack of shit!"

"Of course, ever the hotheaded little protector of mommy's honor," the lawyer snorted sarcastically, before his features set dangerously and he shot the teenager a diamond hard glare as his voice became cold. "Sit the fuck down, Squall."

"Go to fucking hell! You're a psycho, pathetic piece of fucking shit, and I will never-"

Kato had noticed the obstinate boy supporting himself in a semi-upright position by holding on to the left hand rest of the chair. With an exasperate sigh, the lawyer drove the heel of his gun into the crook of Squall's elbow, causing the kid's last sentence to die in a strangled gush of breath as he let go and fell backwards into the seat cushions once more.

"Stay put, Squall. I'll get to you in a moment."

Kato saw the blinding resentment in Squall's face abruptly be swapped for panic, and he wasn't sure whether the kid worried about his own fate or that of his friend, nor did it make any kind of difference, really. He thoroughly enjoyed that look of terror on Squall's stupidly good-looking features – it ultimately confirmed his position of power, the absolute control and dominance he'd had over the stubborn boy all these years. If there was anything Kato cared about in life, it was controlling others; everything was going to happen exactly the way he wanted it to, when he wanted it to.

These boys were going to learn that before the day was done.

"You know," the lawyer mused in an indistinct voice as his cold eyes grazed the brunette teen's alarmed face. "You were never good for much of anything, Squall, but you do look so damn pretty when you're scared."

Growling a furious, fired up "Fuck yourself!" Squall deliberated getting up once more, but he ultimately reconsidered when he saw the gun in his stepfather's hand.

Kato merely chuckled in response to that overused remark, only further entertained by his blond guest consistently cussing and struggling against his own handcuffs on the pillar behind them. Rolling his eyes, the lawyer finally clicked his tongue and turned his attention momentarily towards the older of the two teenagers.

"Right, and then there's you."

With an upturn of the corner of his mouth, looking every bit the sadist that he was, Kato took a half step into the direction of the wounded blond, not expecting his brunette stepson to suddenly leap forward and yell an utterly freaked out "Wait, no!"

The kid's efforts were laughable, at best. His balance was that of a newborn calf, and the moment he attempted to lunge out of the chair, Kato simply slapped him across the face and shoved him back into his seat with one hand.

"Sit the fuck down, you noisy little fucker, unless you want me to end him right here and now."

The brunette's grey-blue eyes were colored with boundless hatred, but despite his unstable temper and over-boiling emotions, Squall very slowly sank back into the office chair. With a strangling tightness in his chest, he watched how Kato slowly walked up to Seifer and suddenly yanked the washcloth out of the blond's mouth.

Seifer didn't even waste time taking a full breath before attempting to spit in the lawyer's face and screaming, "You dirty ass motherfucking coward bitch, don't you dare touch him, I will rip your fucking skull out through your asshole, do you hear me?! Don't even fucking think about—"

With a bored expression, Kato simply raised his right arm and smoothly pointed the barrel of his gun at Seifer's forehead, saying nothing whatsoever as his finger tightened across the trigger.

"NO! No, wait! Please! WAIT!"

With complete disregard for his own safety, Squall had practically launched himself out of the chair once more and towards his stepfather. He had raised his handcuffed arms as he now consciously placed himself between the armed man and his captured boyfriend, trying desperately not to shrink away. His face was utterly terrified, his voice scaling a level of fright he had never once reached before as he pleaded with the heartless man before him.

"Please don't," Squall begged, his body now shielding the blond's face from view and presenting an entirely new target as Kato continued to hold them at gun point. "Please! I swear I will do whatever you want. Anything! Anything whatsoever! Just leave him alone, please! Please, I'm fucking begging you!"

"Squall, don't, you can't—"

"Shut up," the brunette hissed, his voice razor sharp and heightened with anxiety as he cut off his friend's desperate attempt to speak.

"You'd do well listening to him, you know," Kato advised with a smirk and an odd, fascinated drawl to his voice as he watched his stepson groveling before him in the same manner others would watch an entertaining television show.

"I won't let you—"

Swinging around, Squall cut the blond a crippling stare and snapped, "If you ever cared about me, shut the fuck up!"

Seifer's breath caught in his throat as he choked back whatever else he had planned to say. The brunette was being a goddamn righteous idiot, and Seifer wasn't willing to allow him to place himself in harm's way – on the other hand, of course, the blond knew that he wasn't precisely in any kind of position to make demands, give orders or lose his shit. If he wanted Squall to be safe, he had to stay calm and carefully consider their next steps. Arguing with the brunette while Kato had a loaded fucking gun pointed at them seemed like the stupidest idea at this point, so he reluctantly remained silent.

"Hmm… 'Anything,' he says," the lawyer recited Squall's bargain with a sarcastic sneer while continuing to hold up his weapon, however he had obviously shifted his interest back to the battered looking dark haired teen now standing protectively in front of the blond.

"Yes," Squall confirmed, ignoring the lump in his throat. "I meant that. Just don't hurt him. Please. That's all I ask."

"Oh, I'm going to hurt him," Kato denied, causing his stepson's face to fall, "But he'll live, for now, as long as you do what I say."

"Okay," the boy agreed, attempting to flatten his tone. "Okay. I will."

All in all, Squall had no idea what he was even trying to accomplish or bargaining for. He knew that his stepfather had completely gone off the deep end, and that there was likely no way that the man was going to let either one of them live, but for now, he needed to buy them as much time as possible. He had accepted the fact that he would pay a substantial price in return, but the longer they managed to stay alive, the greater the chance was that someone would come and find them.

'My parents were looking for me at the hospital. Maybe they called the police. Maybe they'll come over here. Maybe…'

"Come with me, Squall."

Confused, the dark haired teen followed his stepfather with his eyes, watching the man slowly walking past him towards the open door of his office. The brunette exchanged a quick glance with Seifer, who was still sitting helplessly on the ground, fighting to somehow regain the use of his arms and get back on his feet. The bullet wound in his right chest was actively bleeding, and judging by the awkward turn of his shoulders, Squall estimated that they were both dislocated. Nevertheless, the blond was firmly shaking his head at him, opening his mouth to protest, so the younger male sucked in a quick breath and turned away from him towards his stepfather.

"… Alright."

Seifer, of course, wouldn't idly sit by and immediately commenced to yell at him in protest.

"Squall, wait, please, you can't —"

"Don't."

Flashing the blond a warning glare across his shoulder and cutting him off with a single word that was sharper than the blade of a scalpel, Squall finally stepped up next to Kato, ignoring his every instinct to back away. He kept his bound arms angled in front of his torso, prepared to strike the lawyer with the metal handcuffs, if all else failed. To his surprise, his stepfather suddenly placed a small, hard item in his right hand, while giving him a decisive shove out of the door into the hallway, grunting at him to get a move on.

"What is…"

The moment Squall realized he was holding a chrome lighter, he saw the numerous piles of picture frames, sketchbooks, crumpled up photographs, books and clothes that were littering the ground along the walls of the hallway and staircase. Every piece of his art and each family picture that had once graced the residence were lying scattered and broken by his feet, and for a moment, his brain had difficulties processing the sight. Meanwhile, he could hear Seifer shouting some kind of warning from the office, but he could barely understand him. His focus had turned entirely to the unremarkable thing he was still holding in his hand, and as understanding finally flooded his mind, the boy snapped his gaze to his stepfather in horror.

"No! No, I can't, this is—"

"Do it, or your little sidekick over there won't be breathing much longer, Squall."

"If I do this, the whole fucking house is going to burn down!" Squall bit back, his voice trembling with the effort of attempting to keep his emotions in check.

"That's the plan," Kato replied with unnerving satisfaction.

"Why would you do that? This is crazy, I—"

"You really think I give a single fuck about anyone or anything in this house, kid? You can't be that fucking stupid," the lawyer snorted. "I never cared about any of this, least of all this pointless, wasteful shit of yours that your mother has been plastering on the walls for years. God, I fucking hate it. I've hated everything about this house. Always. So I am going to burn this whole place to the ground, Squall. Your actions decide whether you'll be inside when it happens."

"If you hate it so much, why don't you just fuck off outta here, then?" Squall asked brazenly, realizing immediately that he had made a mistake when the man's cold, dead eyes met with his own. He couldn't help but stun backwards against the wall when Kato wrapped his free hand around his jaw and tightened his grasp so much that the boy's bottom teeth started to hurt.

"You've always had a smart mouth," Kato noted, cocking his own lips into a half-grin when he saw the kid's features curling with disdain as he held his dark, intense gaze. "I'd break your jaw for being such a wise fuck, but I'll need it later."

Squall froze, understanding the underlying suggestion of that statement only too well, and his stepfather appreciated the fact that his threat had caused the boy's breath to quicken with fright. The lawyer exhaled a harsh laugh before he released Squall's face and motioned back towards the piled up items by their feet.

"Let's go," he said. "It's not gonna light itself."

The boy's eyes darted across the floor, his hand clenched around the lighter as he struggled to find a way out of this situation. He knew that Kato's patience was trivial, and the more he'd try to argue, the more this was going to hurt either Seifer or himself in the end.

'But if I set this shit on fire, we might all die in here. He's fucking crazy. We're on the second floor, and Seifer's handcuffed to the pillar. I don't know how to get him out of here. Who knows what the hell Kato did with the keys to the handcuffs. What if we don't make it down in time? What the fuck am I supposed to do?'

"Please just let us go," Squall tried as he came to realize that he had absolutely no idea what to do, and his voice was trembling with resignation as he attempted to hold his sanity together. "I don't care what you burn down, but please leave us out of it. Please."

"Don't you get it?" Kato cooed, brushing his palm across the side of Squall's head as he drew closer once more. He watched how the boy in front of him winced and closed his eyes in horrified anticipation, every touch on Squall's skin burning as he tried to turn inwards. "I can't leave you out of it, because this is all about you. This is your fault, Squall. All of it. You could have had anything you ever wanted from me, but instead, you went and ruined everything."

"I never wanted anything from you," Squall hissed through gritted teeth, his face twisting agonizingly as his gaze met Kato's from negligible inches away. His eyes, which had this strange color that everyone always seemed to have difficulties describing, were glowering at the man from between thick bands of narrowed black lashes and furrowed brows. "I just wanted you to be good to my mother and my sister. That's all I ever wanted. My mother fucking loved you, you asshole!"

"Love means nothing to me," the dark haired man said, sounding nearly bored as he carelessly played with a few locks of the brunette's soft, tousled hair. His fingertips brushed across staples and stitches embedded in the boy's skin, but he never even registered the damage his brutality had caused. Squall noticed an odd blankness in his stepfather's face that he had never seen before, and at this point, it only added to his anxiety. "Love is a pointless feeling that stopped having meaning to me the day my own father drove away the only person in my life I ever cared about. It stopped having meaning when that person was replaced with daily beatings and this… bizarre concept that fondling me was somehow going to cure my homosexuality."

Squall sucked in a quick breath and stared at the man in alarm, unexpectedly confronted with these obscure, horrifying parts of Kato's past he had never known anything about.

"What?" he asked in a hollow tone, not wanting or able to understand.

Kato grinned at him in return, some perverse, unsettling version of a smile that never reflected in his dead eyes as he leaned into Squall and crowded him against the wall.

"I told you," he lilted, the words hard and cold in Squall's ear as the boy felt Kato's heated breath ghosting his skin, and the smooth metal of his gun was a violent threat against his throat. "I was good to you, Squall. You never had to experience the shit I did. I've never locked you in a closet or beat you with an extension cord. I never made you sit naked in your own excrements for days only to teach you a lesson you didn't need to learn. You're lucky because you know nothing of those things. You could've had a good life, if only you had done what I asked you to."

"Fuck you!" Seifer's rage-filled voice suddenly came bellowing from the open office next to them. "You raped him for three years, you psychotic piece of fucking shit! You don't know the first thing about being good to anyone! Fuck yourself! FUCK YOU!"

Squall flinched, noting the annoyance and disturbing amusement in Kato's face as the man rolled his eyes. For the moment being, the lawyer seemed willing to ignore Seifer's cussing and raving, but it was only a matter of time before his patience would eventually run out.

"Please, just let him go," Squall pleaded more desperately now while clenching his fist tightly around the lighter in his hand, feeling it dig into his palm. "I promise I'll do whatever you want."

"You've said that," Kato mused, his tone now sarcastic. "And yet here we are."

"I'll burn down whatever the hell you want, just let him leave," the boy urged in a helpless voice, motioning towards the office. "He's injured. He isn't a threat to you."

"That boy took a bullet for you," the teen's stepfather advised, enjoying the naïve guilt that showed so obviously on the kid's face. With a crooked grin, Kato traced his thumb across Squall's bottom lip, touching the patch of scab that was etched into the corner of the boy's mouth. "He may be dumber than a box of rocks, but I know a threat when I see one. He's not going anywhere. And neither are you, sweetheart."

"Please, I—"

"As much as I enjoy seeing you beg, kid, you're wasting your time – and mine. Now listen to your father and do as you're told, for once."

"You're not my father," Squall snarled reflexively.

"Right. But the man that your dear mother has been whoring around with these past few days, you think he is?" Kato asked suggestively, noting the shocked gleam that lit up Squall's eyes and the way his skin paled even more than it already had. "What? You thought I didn't know? I know everything, Squall. Nobody is going to take you away from me, especially not some little fairy fuck of a reporter from Esthar."

Chuckling, Kato swiped the barrel of his gun across his stepson's cheek, watching how the brunette's breath flattened and his gaze remained fixed on some static point in front of him.

"Tell me, how does that feel?" Kato asked, dragging the tip of the gun through the boy's hair while his left hand had found Squall's waist and slipped under his shirt. He could feel the boy shaking savagely over his invasive presence, his posture stiff as granite as he backed himself against the wall. "Do you like that? Are you imagining all the other places I could put this? Because I am."

"Don't touch him, you rotten pedophile fuck!" Seifer roared from the office once more, and they could hear him kicking his feet on the floor in seething rage.

Snorting a bone-chilling laugh, the lawyer answered in a loud, taunting inflection, "You stupid twat. What do you think I've been doing these past few years? I've touched every tiny, sweet little inch of that pretty body of his, and I'm not about to stop now."

"What's the fucking matter with you, you deranged motherfucker?" Seifer screamed in return, his voice escalating new, hysterical levels of fury. "Can you only get it up when you're raping a child? He's seventeen, you impotent, mindfucked, psycho dick fuck!"

Squall's stomach dropped with the gravity of a metric ton of rocks when he saw Kato's face changing. Whatever Seifer had said had obviously struck a nerve, and the lawyer suddenly stepped away from him and towards the office.

"No, wait! Please! Hold on!" the brunette boy urged in a panicked tone, immediately holding up the lighter and flicking it several times in a row, too nervous and uncoordinated in his efforts to actually cause a spark. "I'll do it! I'll do it, okay? Please! Please wait!"

Kato stopped in the doorway, regarding Squall with an annoyed look from over his shoulder.

"Here," Squall said, his inflection oddly persuasive as he motioned towards his belongings on the ground. "Look!"

As the lawyer slowly turned towards him once more, Squall desperately continued to thumb the small metal wheel of the lighter until he finally managed to produce a flame. He didn't even pause to consider his next step before he lowered the flickering, seemingly insignificant object to one of his sketch books and set it on fire without hesitation. He proceeded to do the same with one of his t-shirts and a pile of crumpled up photographs, and only when he saw the blaze scattering and creeping across the edges of the wall did he throw the lighter aside.

"See? I did what you asked," Squall said, standing in the hallway, still handcuffed, looking lost and scared as he gestured towards his stepfather. "Please, just leave him alone!"

He hated the satisfied look on Kato's face, and yet it was exactly what he had wanted to achieve. To his left, he could feel the heat of the spreading fire against his skin, but he tried to ignore it, because he knew he would lose every ounce of his shit if he fully processed what he had just done.

"Very well," the dark haired lawyer agreed, the words smooth and full of eerie pleasure as he approached Squall with a few casual, and yet foreboding steps. "... As you wish."

My apologies for my long absence and for having to end the chapter here. It's been difficult to find the time and motivation to work on WS, but I still plan to complete it. I'm honestly dumbfounded by how long this story has been around at this point. I thank each and every one of you for reading, especially with such ridiculous breaks in between chapters. Everything is slowly drawing to a close, and I do hope it's been worth your time :)