He's running barefoot through the rain. He doesn t' know where they hid his shoes and if he didn't get home on time, there'd be hell to pay. That was the end of it. At least at home he had another pair and could wear those till he found the other ones or found those responsible, but for now he'd have to deal with the gravel digging into his feet and the mud soaking and staining his pant legs. And the cold; His feet had gone so numb that it added even more to the hurt rather than offering some mercy. But it was better than being late. All he had to do was get into the door without anyone seeing him. All he had to do was get there in five minutes, and no one would be waiting for him because this was all perfectly normal; 3:36. He had four more minutes.

At the doorstep he spared a moment to catch his breathe and then opened the door. Better not to try and sneak in, he thought. He still had another minute.

"Katsuya-kun!"

He stopped.

"Yeah?"

"Come give your dad a hug."

He cringed. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but at least he was inside now and the missing shoes didn't have to be a part of it. He rubbed his already raw feet onto the doormat to get rid of the mud and made his way into the room.

"Okay."

Enveloped sloppily in the massive arms of his father, he was instead thinking of his mother and how lovely she smelled. Especially in the spring, after working out in the garden, she smelt the prettiest then. She would smell of earth and flowers from the garden she liked to keep; not the mud and alcohol scent that he was currently experiencing. Better me than Shizuka, he thought, holding his breath. The stench still filled his nostrils, sour, bitter. His arms hardly embraced his father back, held awkwardly in a conflict of revulsion and love that he knew, even as a child, that he was supposed to feel but could never trust.

Through every second of it he was begging for it to end; the simple gesture that should have meant love meaning nothing more than an entrapment. His teeth were bare against his fathers skin, though he was certain he d clamped his mouth shut. The man had a habit of swaying precariously, was the problem.

Finally, his father let go, and he was able to leave. However, before he could take even two steps though, he heard the familiar anger break into his fathers voice like a trapped river from a dam.

"What the fuck happened, boy? Why the hell are your feet bleeding! It's all over the floor!"

Of all the times he'd been hit before, he remembered this one the most. It wasn t much different from any other time, wasn t any harder and wasn t any more than one good point of impact, but it was enough. It was just the one he d remembered the most. Maybe because of what happened after. If he was going to get hit, he wanted it to be for something that actually was his fault. He'd have to be tougher. He'd have to be someone he didn't want to be. Maybe it was pride, or maybe it was fear, but either way, within the month he'd joined a gang of ruffians he was sure his father would be proud of.

The alarm went off, piercing the silence violently. Katsuya wasn't much for laying around in the morning, not like he was in high school. He had a reason to wake up. Somehow, his whole life had been converted into one of those self-help books where almost every moment of his life was committed to facing the day, taking on challenges and making your self a better person in all aspects of life and all with a grin too, just to top it off. What frightened him was that he really meant it. He honestly thought that life was pretty damn grand right now. What was scary about /that/ was the thought that maybe he was forgetting something. After all, he was some punk from the shabbiest part of Domino, and for things to be going so well; well, it wasn t something he felt comfortable putting his trust in. That kid of from the streets was who he was at heart, that s where he s learned everything he d needed to know, even if he hadn t learned it in the most conventional of ways. For better or worst, he d started off feeling like a no one.

There was always that nagging feeling that he d never become anything more than that no one.

On his skin though, there was something different and he knew it; he even liked it. But there were people who could ruin it all, and that made the surface fragile. All it would take would be to see anyone from the old gang, anyone he d done something too and was out for revenge, any one of his fathers friends who d been around when he was growing up; if he saw his father, everything he'd worked for and achieved would mean nothing. Seeing any of those people would prove that he was still the little piece of shit back from an apartment complex ghetto. But none of that, against all odds, had happened in seven years.

Until today, naturally. It s always when it s least expected, because it doesn t care much to be forgotten. Whatever the hell it was.

It wasn't so much seeing really so much as a chain of events that would lead to the inevitable face-to-face meeting. First, it was a call from his sister. It wasn't during any of their usual times to make calls to one another, so he knew immediately that there must have been something wrong. He was relieved when it wasn't his mother, though she wasn't doing so great either these days and was glad to hear that it wasn t the kids either.

His father was in the hospital, had a heart attack. Katsuya was surprised that it wasn't his liver, considering that mileage that thing had on it, but by the sounds of it that wasn't far off either. The withdrawals were making their imprint on the wasted body, it sounded like.

"And what am I supposed to do? I have work," he asked irritably, tossing a hand up behind his neck and sliding it roughly into his hair. He knew it was a poor excuse, work, but it was the first thing that tumbled out of his mouth. It just as quickly gave a pang of guilt along with the question of why he had to be such a knee-jerk reaction asshole. The guy was his father after all, whatever that amounted to. Around him, his small apartment was sprouting cracks from the floor and the windows threatened to shatter; at least in his mind. The fragile skin overtop his own didn t crack or shatter though; it just started to melt.

"Katsuya-kun, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to see him, you don't even have to call him, but you have to know," Shizuka pacified from the other end. "He's been asking for you."

Asking for him? For what? What did he want? I have nothing to give him.

"I'm sorry. Thanks for calling, I have to go or I'll miss the train. I love you; tell mom and the kids that I love them too. He was brushing Shizuka off, he knew, but he'd done it politely and he knew that she would understand. She always understood.

Still felt like abusive neglect though. Something someone like his father would have done.

So he went to work. He stewed over the notion of going to see the old bastard all day. The worst part was that he didn't hate him. How could he? Everything the man had done, good and bad, and though they weren't equal in their parts, had played some part in shaping the person he was. It taught him the bad parts of himself, and encouraged him to cultivate the good. Sure he had a streak of aggression, but thinking of his father had (almost) always kept that in check once he d realized where it d come from. He finished school by some small miracle (something to do with the threat of expulsion if he didn t put as much time into his studies as he did into Duel Monsters) and got into trades, got an apprenticeship; a real job. He'd gotten out of that life he feared; but if he went and saw his father, he risked getting into it all over again. He didn't have the faith enough that he could keep out of it, that's not how those lives work. Its small things, you make one concession after another until you're drowning in all the acquaintances that want something from you and will hurt you one way or another to get it. The closer he got to his father, the more likely all the people he wished that he d never met have a chance to see him, find him, and call up old exchanges.

"Fuck. Just fuck."

He'd go see him. He knew he would. He could deny the old man, but what good would that do? Calling his boss he asked for the following day off; no problem, family first. He called Honda, bitched for a couple of hours about it and then he went to bed. Honda understood, having his own family problems. But that's all they could really do, contrast and compare and still both come to the conclusion that he should go and see the old man. What if this was the last chance he had to see his father? What if it didn't go as badly as either imagined it would? All questions to be answered only by taking action. They could speculate all night, but they both preferred to cut to the chase and go to sleep and face it in the morning.

He thought about bringing flowers, but it didn't seem like the sort of thing that his father would appreciate. Besides, there wasn't anything he wanted to do as a sign of good will because it would probably be twisted into a invitation for something further. It's all about making concessions; he vowed to make none. But then, he was making one by showing up, wasn't he? He held his fist over the door for a moment and then knocked lightly beside the label for the room number the nurse had given him downstairs before turning the handle.

"Dad? You awake?"

He was of course and Katsuya walked in to find that the man was a shell. It was a disgusting shell, an old and wrinkled shell, missing more teeth than it had in his smile, kept clean only by the hospital staff. He thought about leaving, but asides from his appearance, there was nothing of the old man to fear, no reason he could find feasible other than old history. He liked to leave the past in the past; age and self inflicted abuse had rendered his father harmless. Maybe he should have come sooner.

"Come give your old man a hug," the thin voice said, a gnarled hand beckoning him closer with yellowed cigarette stains.

"Okay."

He smelt of the sterility of the hospital and a tired old man who hadn t done much with his life. From his own clothes he smelt the woods he worked with during the day and the soap he bought from a stand down the street. He liked to think that he d grown to smell more like his mother than his father.

"I've missed you, kid," his father said, muffled. Katsuya didn t answer, pretending that he hadn t heard as he withdrew and sunk into the chair beside the bed. The sun shone through the glazed window as best it could.