Author's Notes: At the end of this chapter, we will have officially crossed into dark and squicky territory. Not that the proceeding chapters were light and fluffy, but I swear I can envision the flames already. This fanfics is really a sign I'm way too into darkfic for my own good, isn't it?

Sorry for the delay between chapters, but if you're familiar with my work, you're probably used to it by now. I'm really bad at sticking to schedules, huh? XD

It occurred to Fillmore that the kids of X didn't really know what abuse was like.

They complained about curfews, about not being allowed to join every single club they wanted or, God forbid, getting into trouble when they failed a class. They thought detention was torture and parents that didn't drop everything to come pick up their precious child when they were obviously faking illness were despised. But none of these kids knew what it was like to really be thoroughly abused. A portion of them had what the media liked to dub parental abandonment – their parents were never home and they were all alone – and some of them had one parent or lived with grandparents. None of them knew what it was like to have a murderer as a father. They'd never seen the mangled and decaying body of their only loving parent thrown away like a piece of trash.

Fillmore tried to picture Aleph Atamaza. He pictured bruises and scratches, a fake smile and blood. He wondered if the teachers had all just been too stupid to identify the marks or if they'd just ignored the signs of abuse. He wondered if maybe the neighbors hadn't seen something and how different, he thought, would it have all gone down had they reported the woman missing? The husband would've been the suspect, Fillmore knew that much from having a cop for a father. Maybe it all could've been salvaged, halted before the situation spiraled out of control if someone had just picked up the phone and called the cops before the woman went missing in the first place. Didn't anyone hear the screams of pain or see the psychological fallout? Didn't any of the other kids ever stop and ask Aleph what was wrong? Didn't anyone ever ask where the bruises and injuries came from?

Didn't anyone care?

Even when he'd been a thug Fillmore would have called someone. He would have told a teacher. He wouldn't have listened to reasoning about the faulty and abusive foster care system. Anything was better than the alternative. He would have been a raging, righteous fury engulfed mess that no one would have been able to stop. However, this was how he'd have been as an eleven year old thug or a ten year old hellion. At seven years old he wouldn't even comprehend what Aleph was enduring. At seven he'd need an explanation of what sex was followed by an explanation of how sex worked between guys. At that age he knew it was something married people did because they loved each other and it was rumored to involve cooties. This, though, went against all loving and caring instincts and didn't have even a pretense of affection or care behind it. It was sadism, pure and simple. Fillmore didn't know how he'd have reacted to it back then since he'd never been in a position to find out. At seven and eight years old his world was all about playing pranks, getting into trouble and playing basketball. No matter how much trouble he got into, though, his father had never raised a hand against him. For all the flaws of the Fillmore family, they were never violent.

He tried to imagine his father hitting him. Or his mother. He couldn't come up with the mental image. Fathers were nagging, advice dispensing creatures that seemed to think everything was better back in the good old days. There was no way he could ever envision his dad hitting anyone unless it was in a fight with some criminal or boxing. It would have to be self defense. His dad could take him in a fight. He just wouldn't out of decency and morality and love. Where was the love in the Atamaza family? Where was that paternal instinct that made biological children so precious to their parents or that bond that made spouses each other's better half? In lieu of that, where the heck were the basic unwritten rules of American combat? Whatever happened to not picking a fight with someone less than half your age and not striking a child unless said child was armed with a weapon? As far as the sex went, whatever happened to consent, to say nothing of the age old half your age plus seven rule? Why hadn't Mrs. Atamaza taken her son and run away? The answer was obvious - there was nowhere to go, no one to run to, no compassionate outreach programs they could rely on. They had been trapped.

He was going to make himself sick if he kept thinking about this. But that was the problem, wasn't it? Ingrid's mind worked faster than anyone else's, always coming up with ideas and processing things at lightning speed. She was trapped in the past in way he couldn't imagine. He was grateful that they had a few hours before their shift officially started. The weight of confession seemed to have taken everything she had, leaving her exhausted and more vulnerable than he'd ever seen her. In the barely present light they watched a curious mouse run up to them and run away every time they so much as twitched, intrigued by the humans yet fearful as to what they could do. Maybe, he thought grimly, animals had a point on that front.

"Fillmore?"

"Hm?"

"Why aren't you mad at me? I did the worst thing a human being is capable of doing." She managed to sound tired and angry at herself at the same time.

"Because… you're like my sister. I think it was wrong, but if you didn't have trouble getting over it you'd be a sociopath. You gotta realize that you were just a kid. You didn't think it through."

"Stop making excuses for me!" She snapped, eyes flashing in annoyance. "I swear, you and Aleph would've gotten along just great. Rationalizing everything so that I'm never to blame was something he was fantastic at, too. You could at least have the decency to be upset, you know."

"Fine!" Fillmore threw up his hands, exasperated. "You messed up! You killed someone! You did a bunch of things that make me feel sick and it's all your fault! Is that what you want to hear? Do you wanna be yelled at and blamed for everything? I'll do whatever you need, Ingrid. Whatever it takes to get you through this, I can roll with. But until you tell me what you want I'm stumped. What do you want from me?"

"I don't know anymore," Ingrid replied, dejected. "I don't know. It's all too much to bear. And it's not the despair I can't take – the despair I can live with. It's the hope I can't stand."

"Is that another literary reference we lowly peons are incapable of getting?"

"Consider it payback for all the Bone Thugs In Harmony references you and Sonny have made ever since he reformed. It's like you're speaking Catalan around the rest of us." She smiled weakly at his attempt to lighten the mood. "Thanks for putting up with me, Cornelius. I think I just needed someone to listen to me. Maybe one day life will stop feeling like a nonstop atonement run."

"You just gotta take it one day at a time. I'm here for you, you know what I mean? No matter how after school special it seems, you aren't alone." He rubbed the back of his neck, nervously. "Not saying I can make it all magically better, but at least give honesty a shot. Consider me your prepaid therapist."

"I can sit on your bed and you can sit in a little chair with a notebook, asking, 'how does that make you feel?' ad nauseaum." She leaned her head on his shoulder. "Our dates are so romantic."

"Between that and the time we went to the all weekend long Movie Horrorthon? I'm like a black Romeo." He smiled faintly, then frowned suddenly. "Wait, hold up. How did Jitters know to call the cops on you if it wasn't premeditated murder? If he was just randomly sending cops after you, the odds of it happening at just that moment are slim to none." He inhaled sharply, a theory he didn't particularly care for dawning on him. "He was turning you two in for something else, wasn't he?"

Yes. "What makes you so sure he wasn't turning in Aleph's dad?"

"He'd have done that before if he was gonna. No reason to go behind your backs to do it." Fillmore's eyes were locked onto her face, studying her every twitch. "There's something else, isn't there? Your dad wouldn't have gotten all tense over the maturity reference for murder. Ingrid, what really happened?"

"Everything I told you. I didn't lie, I just didn't tell the whole truth," she admitted, growing increasingly anxious. "It's… complicated. And messed up. As you've gathered from what I've told you, nothing in Aleph's life was normal or sane or good. I tried to be there for him, but I guess I wasn't enough to keep everything from going wrong. I tried, though. I just wanted my best friend to be happy and I couldn't even do that. Some genius I turned out to be."

"Ingrid, what-"

"You can't figure it out?" she asked, self hatred and vitriol in her voice. "It's not obvious? Good lord, I just wish someone would put the pieces together and realize the truth for once. I wish someone would just sit me down and tell me it's obvious that I'm messed up and give me the reasons why and tell me how to fix myself. I wish that I could just go back and get a do-over so things would be okay. I never should've kissed Aleph in the first place."

"Never should have- oh," Fillmore said, making the connection in his head. "Oh."

"Yeah." She looked over at him grimly. "I'm waiting for the 'he was a pervert and he tricked you' spiel followed by the inevitable suggestion for therapy."

Ingrid remembered she really was the one who started it, no matter what anybody said. She was the one who had been more affectionate towards her newfound friend than her own family, the one who'd spent whole nights whispering away on walkie talkies and the one who'd gotten him in the habit of sharing food off the same plate. The entire relationship was founded out of some kind of need she had to have someone who didn't treat her like an idiot and his need not to be so utterly alone anymore. Aleph wouldn't have ever spoken to her, though. He was silent, sullen, an angry kid lashing out at the world, acting tough yet dying deep down underneath it all. She was the one who'd shown the tiniest ounce of compassion for the town's resident outcast and moody teenager. Ingrid had been the more verbal one, the strong one, in a way, someone he could lean on and confide in as if there wasn't any age difference at all between them. She was smarter than many of the girls in his own grade, in both book smarts and in that indescribable way, that ability to understand and feel empathy that most kids there seemed to lack.

She was the one who'd kissed him first, after gathering up all the courage she could muster. He'd been startled into silence, frozen, eyes wide. For a moment he looked conflicted, hesitantly leaning away, hands curling into fists reflexively. But she was gentle and soft. It didn't hurt like with his father. Closing his eyes he slowly moved forward to try it, feeling his heart hammering in his chest all the while, waiting for something to go wrong. When seconds ticked by and the world didn't erupt into chaos and violence, he uncurled his fists slowly and opened his eyes. Ingrid smiled lovingly at him as she wrapped her arms around him, snuggling up to him. For a second on that couch Aleph felt a spark of hope in him. Somebody wanted him, cared about him, and there was someone out there who didn't think he was filthy after what his father had done. He'd made the mistake of telling a few girls before and the rejections had left him feeling like he was tainted and dirty. Maybe, though, that wasn't true, or maybe it was and Ingrid had just looked past it. Either way, he smiled down at her and ran a hand through her hair, wondering if all kisses were supposed to be gentle like that. Everything was so different, so warm and perfect…

Admittedly, in retrospect the whole thing was rather dysfunctional. Not that either of them had much frame of reference for comparison. Ingrid knew that normal boyfriends weren't supposed to freak out over certain things, certain touches and certain places. Then again, normal boyfriends hadn't gone through what he had. It was okay. Everybody had problems. She loved him anyway. Aleph was beautiful, kind, patient, soft spoken and smart like she was. Nobody understood either of them, yet they understood each other perfectly from the day they met. Ingrid remembered all those wonderful moments where they weren't doing anything, just laying together watching TV or going swimming. Back then she'd thought that it would last forever, that everything would be golden like this until they grew up and got out of here. They'd move somewhere his father couldn't hurt him and have a house and a dog. She'd keep him safe. He was hers and she was his. They'd be okay.

"Okay, um, Ingrid?" Fillmore sounded uncertain. "You are aware that dating older guys at our age has a phenomenally high failure rate, right? Everybody who does that ends up breaking up."

"Since when has logic been part of my life?" she asked, and, sounding a tad bitter, added, "I thought I was smart enough that we would make it work somehow. I was the idealistic one in that particular pairing, even if that seems weird for me now. Things were different then. I really believed I could keep things from going wrong. But Aleph… after he found his mother's body… he was too broken by it. Something snapped, Fillmore, and I couldn't bring him out of it."

His eyes went wide. "Are you crying?" He swore under his breath and dove for a tissue in his pockets, handing her one. "Ingrid, it's not your fault." The white girl snorted at that, so he pressed on, "I mean it. Some people just can't take all of that overload. And I… I think I figured it out. Jitters turned Aleph in and lied to the police, didn't he? To make it look like he was some sick pedophile or something. Because he knew no one would ever come to Aleph's defense other than you." There was a note of bitterness in Fillmore's voice, then. "A poor person who's part of a minority is pretty much guilty until proven innocent to some cops…"

"That's close to what happened," the black haired girl nodded. "I wouldn't call it racism so much as the great American pedophile media witch hunt, but that's… almost entirely accurate." At the look Fillmore gave her, she took a deep breath. "Don't hate me for saying this, Fillmore, try to understand, it was my idea in the first place and I thought I was helping. I'd read all these psychology books and I thought I knew what I was doing-"

The black boy cut her off by holding up a hand to silence her. "You're telling me that you two had sex?" His incredulous voice begged her for a 'no'.

But when he saw her sad smile, he knew the answer was yes.