A/N: Sorry it's been a while. I started a new job and have been sick. Not to mention ffic has been throwing fits. :p But I finally got this out. Beware for the usual angstiness. It's rather a heavy chapter I think. Extra warning for blood and stuff.

Christian lay close to me in the dark, his thin frame curled up, his rough hands clasped under his cheek like an extra pillow. In the midnight quiet I could hear him breathing, the simple action made a little noisy and wheezy to my ears because of the amount of cigarettes he smoked. He's like a chimney, and since he'd been going through withdrawal from his favorite drink, he's been like five chimneys. As I lay awake next to him, I stroke my fingers against his cheek, just like I used to when we were children and he and Adam crawled into bed with me, only his cheek wasn't so smooth anymore. It was dirty with stubble and I could feel damp spots against my fingertips, where he'd cried quietly as he'd drifted to sleep. It's hard for him, but he's doing a good job and I make sure to remind him of that.

He had a new monitor on his ankle, and luckily he wasn't damned to any hard time. I think the judge took pity on him, he looked horrible in court, his sobs pleading. My brother wasn't any kind of criminal, just a broken man whose misery drove him to some very poor choices. I stroked soft circles against his bare back, soothing, when I heard him whimper a little.

"Sshh." I whispered against his ear, and inhaled the scent of tobacco that clinged to his skin. He moved a little, one of his feet twitched against my leg, he turned his face into the pillow, and then was quiet again.

The day after he'd made his decision to get help for his problem, he also told me something else. He wanted me to not let him go back into that room. By "that room" I mean the room where Adam had died. The pain in his eyes when he asked me the question was bare and raw, his emotions seemed to war behind those blue depths. I could tell he wanted only to crawl into the empty dent in Adams' bed and live there forever, just remembering his scent and feel, even if it reeked of sickness and death. Yet finally, a small sliver of something else was alive in him, that something told him at last what he needed to do, even if he felt too weak to do it. He had finally admitted to himself that he was going to have to break away from the hold Adam's death had on him. I went to him and gave his shoulder a squeeze, and I hugged him.

Later that day I found him standing in the hallway staring at that door, and running the tips of his fingers over the wood grain in the boards, and lightly touching the heads of the nails I'd used to secure them there. Now it was impossible for him to open that portal, at least physically. I'm sure he still opened it again and again in his mind, of that even I am guilty of.

As summer slips away to autumn, I have began to think of school, teaching music class, the small, shining faces that fill the chairs in the room, but right now I've taken some much needed time off. I'm glad I can do it, my little house is paid off, and I have some savings backed away for the proverbial rainy day, which I think I am very well in the midst of. Hell, I know I am. It's dark, and the drops that fall are cold, making me shiver to the bone. I always get down around this time of the year, even though it's been so many years. It doesn't seem like time has passed at all though. See, it was mid-fall when that awful thing happened, and left Matt bloody in my arms. Fuck, it wasn't just mid-fall. I know the exact date, it's forever stamped into my mind, forever tattooed on my heart with long, biting, needles that still prickle and bite from time to time.

Like right now, as I laid sleepless in the dark, with my thoughts running away from me, I feel the thorny prickles. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arm around Christian. He was shaking and his naked chest was cold and sweaty. He did this a lot, it was just his body having fits from lack of alcohol, I guess. You know, withdrawals or whatever. Sometimes I wake up at night like that, clammy and shivery, after a vivid dream—the haunting past—has molested my sleep. I guess I have withdrawals too, from my best friend.

Maybe I should stick boards across that door, drive in a few nails, and stop letting my hand touch that knob, and turn it. I can almost hear a tiny creak inside my head as a finger of light peeks from around the edges of that mental entryway. At first it's a warm, bright, ray that makes me think of a hot summer day, riding our bikes down to the river edge. We used to wade in the shallows, the cuffs of our jeans rolled to our knees, and do stupid boy stuff like catch frogs. Matt and I were lucky we never got lock-jaw from as many times as we drew our feet out of the water, with muffled curses, only to find a rusted nail or some such fun thing wedged under the skin. Hell, forget lock-jaw. There's probably toxic waste in that damn thing. But then again, we also used to go swimming in the pool at the park, and that was never much better.

When we got older, frogs didn't seem quite as interesting as they once had. We'd sneak beer before either of us was old enough and hang out under the dock, and lean on the thick supports. When it hadn't rained a lot it was shallow enough to do that. At night we'd sit up on the deserted dock, our shoes patiently waiting for reclaim on the bank. I could feel the fish nibbling at my toes under the dark water, testing them out to see if they might make a good bed-time snack, and I usually had Matt in my lap. I'd just hold him and we'd watch as the stars came out and winkled in the inky sky, the pale, bright moon, flashed us a smile and danced its beams like diamonds from the ripples against the cool water.

Against the next bank the shadows of the hairy looking tree-line could be faintly distinguished, slender ebony fingers against a sleepy, celestial backdrop. Most times we'd just watch, and listen to the sounds of the water lapping at the beams beneath us, the croak of frog song, the rill of humming crickets. Sometimes the forlorn sound of a train horn would chime in, reminding us that we really weren't out in the middle of the country, miles from anyone, although when we were together we could always seem to slip away from the things around us, and feel like we were the only ones on the earth.

Sometimes Matt would whisper into my ear, of how he loved me, of how much I meant to him, and I'd lay kisses to his face and pour out my heart to him. Other times, his whisperings would be steamy and naughty, the tone to his voice enough alone to send luscious shivers through me, and start me to twitching and breathing quicker. Those nights, he seemed to me like a beautiful siren, and I loved when he seduced me, only stopping him with my mouth and my hands and our bodies pressed hotly together. After we'd lay there next to each other, the need to put our clothes back on not a pressing one, and we would say nothing at all. We'd just stay there, watching one another, and feeling too perfect for it all to really last.

The light seeping from that door in my mind changed over to blue and red pulsars, and the frogs and crickets an lapping water was usurped by the despondent wail of sirens against the night, and the emptiness of my own sobbing, as I realized the muddy river water against my hands had changed to crimson.

I jerked awake, completely sitting up in bed. At first I was a little disoriented, I expected to feel wooden slats beneath me, and the scent of the river, and Matt, but of course that was a long time ago. It was a long time ago but I could still feel sticky, matted, hair clinging to my arms, and wet, thick, clots of blood sliding between my fingers as they moved him away from me. What I'd eaten for diner wanted to get away from that strong, all-to-real, vision just about as much as I did. It was crawling up my throat and I left Christian and just barely made it to the bathroom and collapsed to my knees.

I was down there for a good five minutes, struggling to purge that one awful memory, knowing it would forever be there. I pressed my forehead against the toilet seat, breathing shallowly, the shakes coursing through me. It had been a really long time since it had gotten to me this badly, but I think being home, being back here, was making it all so much worse. I really wanted to go home, to leave this fucking shell of a dead home behind, rotting away in this shit-hole neighborhood. But my brother was here, and I refused to leave him to decay along with our childhood home. He needed me, he needed me to be strong for him. That set my nerves and stomach back to rights. I got to my feet and splashed a little cold water against my face, wiped it against a towel, and smiled a bit. Things really never change.

When I was a kid, it was Christian, Adam, Nattie, Tyson, and Maryse who I thought of to numb the pain of one of Jims' beatings, it was them who kept me from crying when our mother was shut away in her room, scraping at her skin which she thought was crawling, they helped me to swallow down my fears, to do everything that needed done, and not lose my mind doing it. Because of them I took on the responsibilities I had to, I became a man at a young age, but I would do it all over, without hesitation. For Christian—for any of them if need be—I would stay strong as I could against anything, even if it terrified me deeply. I wish I could have been there that night with Matt, I would have tried to protect him too. Sometimes I can't wrap my mind around the fact that for once, I couldn't protect a person I loved, that I wasn't there. I started to gag again, standing over the sink, but there wasn't anything left in me but a few tears. A few fucking tears, and they didn't make up for a damn thing.

I was working long hours that day, and then after I clocked out at work I had a night class to top that off. It was Music History with Dr. Perdue. I can remember ever single detail so clearly, just like I'm back in that time of my life again. There was a girl next to me in that class who always smelled bad and breathed loudly through her mouth—sounded like god damn Darth Vader in my ear—and it was all I could do some evenings to tune her out. To the other side was a foreign kid with shimmering dark eyes that made me uncomfortable, because I knew he was looking me over just about every five minutes. I could tell from the tone of his voice when he was trying to flirt with me, which was a lot, but his accent was thick and most of the time I had no idea what he was trying to say, and really didn't care to find out either.

Dr. Perdue was short, chubby, and his head was laid over with scant red hair. He looked like the kind of guy who would easily be pushed around by his wife, and just smile at her sweetly. He knew everything there was to know about music history, which to a lot of people in the class made for long boring lectures, although I happened to enjoy it. There was a huge green chalk board at the front of the room that reminded me of a huge fly eye, and when he wrote on it with chalk his writing was always too small and too light even if you weren't sitting in the very back row, and I was sure I would go blind trying to make out his ghostly scribbles.

The night it happened, Dr. Perdue was talking about the blues. He had a tape player too, and he was playing some old, poorly recorded, blues ballads. The mouth breathing annoyance beside me was crunching up her nose, and she wrote in her notebook and showed it to me. Two letters 'ew'. I happened to disagree with her, and she was obviously unappreciative of what Dr. Perdue had just explained to us—the roots of where these songs came from, the times and struggles that bent them and molded them and their singers into what they were—maybe she had just been lucky enough in her young life to experience very few troubles of her own. Me, well I knew a lot about trouble, and maybe I would have made a good bluesman. I just ignored her, and listened to the raw, real, quality of those voices and the unique sounds of the guitars they played with the neck of a broken bottle hooked on a finger, as a slide up and down the neck. The voices warbled, the quality rough, plaintive, painful, almost thick with tears sometimes. I guess the mouth breather, and a lot of others, don't really understand. Music isn't about the twitter of angel voices, it's about the feeling you put behind it no matter what genre you go for, and sometimes the song you have to sing, is just not very heavenly at all.

Anyway, I was sitting in that class, and towards the end of it must have been when Matt left his house to hunt down Kevin and his posse. He'd told me a time or two just what he'd like to do to Kevin and the others, and of course I had talked him out of it or got him to cool down. See, Kevin and the others—Booker, Angle, Steiner, and the one they called Sting—were all a bunch of thugs and perverts. Matt had absolutely no business messing with them, they were all a lot older, bigger, and nastier than Matt could ever hope to be at age 17. Even I wouldn't have messed with that group. Hell, the police didn't even fuck with them, that was the kind of reputation they had. They also had a reputation for plucking up young, pretty, guys, and passing them around their group like a joint around a circle of stoners. I remember a few times seeing pictures of pretty, teenaged, boys pasted on the t.v. screen, reported in voices of news anchors that seemed eerily cheery, that the poor kid had been found raped and murdered, and that police were investigating. In the back of my mind, I thought of Kevin and his storied group, and shivered. I knew I wasn't the only one who had such thoughts, and sooner or later there would be a lot of whisperings and stories about just what had happened to so-and-so at the hands of that group, although to the cops nothing ever seemed to come of it. Maybe they just didn't care. Anyway, what's one more poor, worthless, fag boy dead off the streets?

Well, one of their members had been sniffing out new territory, which was just a little too close to home. During the spring of Jeffs' freshman year of high school, his grades had plummeted, and he'd started having more frequent visits to the dean's office. Jeff was never a straight arrow anyway, he liked his pranks and mischief, and sometimes he shot his mouth off to the wrong person at the wrong time, but that spring everything really went downhill, fast. Matt and I spent a lot of our time talking about it, because it upset Matt so much. He was certain their Dad—who had gotten bored with Matt some time ago—had moved on to Jeff. As many times as Matt confronted Jeff over it, he always hotly denied it, and lashed out at Matt. A couple times Matt had even went after the old man about it, and the cops had been called, but nothing came of it except Matt and Gil both sporting bruises from their fighting.

That summer Jeff sank into depression. He skipped out of summer school, started cutting his arms, and Matt found some pot and a stamp of acid in his room. He spent the last part of summer and his 14th birthday in juvie. There were a lot of nights when Matt cried about it, and blamed himself for not being able to watch over him, for failing him as brother. When Matt finally found out what was going on, and who was responsible, he was ready to take Gils' gun and blow some fuckers away. I couldn't blame him for wanting to, he was in such a rage over the treatment of his brother, by those idiots and their gang. Most likely I would have flipped out too. But Matt understood more than I did, he knew how it felt to be violated in such a way first hand, and to think that was going on with his little brother was more than enough to put irrational notions in his head.

He'd finally got it out of Jeff that one of Nash's group, Sting, had taken a liking to him. It had been just him at first, Sting, with that greasy hair and freaky facial ink. Pretty soon, however, they were all passing Jeff around. It makes me feel sick to think of two or three of those big guys restraining Jeff, as the others just took him and no doubt violently. Mayhem was all that group ever knew, how to take, how to destroy—some people view the world through spatters of blood, and listen to it through jagged screams—and enjoy it with deviant, rotted, smiles.

As I sat in the end of Dr. Perdue's blues lecture, none of this was in my mind. I was thinking of going home, seeing Matt, maybe taking him for a late movie where we childishly would throw popcorn at one another, the buttery morsels logging in hair, as we both laughed softly, and my fingers found his ticklish spots. We would forget about the movie, and end up doing more kissing than watching. Those were the thoughts going through my mind.

I got home. The little kids were out playing in the falling darkness, which made me aggravated at Christian and Adam who were doing it on the damn kitchen table when I walked in. In our neighborhood you don't let children out after dark, hell, it's really not a good idea to let them out at all. The blond with his back against the table blushed darkly, the other one spat curses at me in a voice that was touched by beer, and I shook my head and let them go on about their business. I planned to go look for the little kids before they became carrion in the claws of some vulture, but Jeff stopped me from ever searching.

He ran across the street, and hoped up onto the steps as I was bent tying my shoe and trying to keep my long hair out of my face. I straightened up and saw the wild look in his emerald eyes. He was panting, sweat coating his pale skin, his hair and clothes were in a mess, and my first thought was that he'd taken something and was tripping out. I opened my mouth to say his name, but a jumble of words tumbled out of his mouth first.

"Matt, have you seen Matt? Oh God! Chris do you know where he is? Please tell me he's with you…is he in the house?" He stepped towards the door. I stopped him with a hand softly falling on his shoulder.

"Matt's not here. What's going on?" I looked into his eyes. "Jeff, are you okay?"

He cried, and dragged his fingers through his hair and came away with various colored strands between his knuckles.

"Jeff! What's going on!" I shook his shoulders a little.

"He-he's gone. I-I-I told him n-not to, oh fuck, oh God! Fuck!"

He melted away from my grip and sank down against the siding, crying into his hands.

"Jeff, fucking tell me where he is!"

He turned his face up at mine, hot tears streaking his cheeks. He sniffled. He bit his nails.

"I-I think he-he went to The Alley."

My world spun around me for a moment, as that registered in my mind. I looked back at Jeff, and now noticed that he really was pale, not his normal pale, but a sick looking white. The fly of his paint splattered jeans was undone, and paint wasn't the only thing coloring them. They'd been at him again. His small arms, laced with new cuts and healing ones, curled around his midsection as he wept, his words no longer distinguishable. I picked him up like a tiny, injured, bride and took him home. I laid him in his bed and he cried and begged me to make it stop hurting. He was hysterical, and I knew better than to leave him alone with his history. I glanced at the clock near his bead, and each moment that ticked away, my heart pounded harder and harder with the fear of Matt hunting down Kevin, Scott, Booker, Kurt, and Sting on their home turf 'The Alley'.

I left Jeff long enough to run back to my house and pull Adam and Christian apart. I sent them over to look after Jeff until Gil came home, and fumbled with the keys in my car. I sped down the dusky streets, ignoring signs and lights, just hoping I made it there in one piece and that Matt too was still in one piece when I got to him. I was going to squeeze him in a hug until he couldn't breathe, drag him to my car, and then rip him a new asshole for even thinking of doing such a stupid thing, let alone actually doing it!

I left my car bumped up on the curb and the keys still in it, the door wide open into the street. My feet slipped on trash, splashed in puddles of dirt and filth, over loose gravel. I rounded a squat, green, dumpster hunkered against a graffitied brick wall, the sweet sickly smell of rotted garbage was overwhelming. Somewhere up above in the dilapidated brick apartment building, a baby wailed plaintively. The sounds of a man and woman fighting and screaming came from somewhere else, yowling dogs, a far of siren cry. I scanned the alley, and at first saw nothing with the way the shadows were falling. I went further, my feet taking me as fast as they could, and then my heart stopped. Towards the end of the alley where a chain link, razor wire fence, cut it to a dead end, lay what looked like a discarded back of trash.

No, no, NO!

I knew it wasn't a split black bag, even though I couldn't make it out as a human form. I sprinted towards the crumpled form and collapsed to my knees in the filth, the dirty water puddles, swirling with blood. I rolled him over, I pulled him close, as I hitched with sobs and could barely find enough air to breathe. I could do nothing but hold him and cry, and tremble, my body felt like nothing but quivering water.

"Ch-Chri-is?" He coughed my name, he choked on it. Blood bubbled up over his teeth and painted his lips like a morbid cosmetic. A streak ran slowly down his chin. His young, handsome, face was battered, the skin marred purple and black, swollen in places as if stones had bumped up under his flesh. One of his eyebrows was split and leaking, his nose was no more than a smashed lump, his soft hair was fucking dripping with blood, and it didn't even look like hair but just a great clotted mass.

I kept telling him it would be okay, I kept telling him, promising him that he would be okay through my tears. They'd beaten him fucking horribly, but I told him again and again that he would be okay, he had to! His hand griped my wrist.

"Took…my gu-gun a-a-away…"

He closed his eyes a little. They were starting to look dull. I moved him again, I was trying to get him into my arms so I could do something—I don't know what I was thinking of—I could barely think at all. He yelled out when I moved him, the strangled, pain in his shriek seemed inhuman. I laid him gently, and for the first time I noticed his shirt. There were holes in his shirt, dark, crimson-black holes that seemed like horrible, gapping smiles, and they weren't holes in fabric at all—they were wounds from the repetitive bite of a knife, maybe many knives. It came crashing down onto me that my best friend was not just beaten but much, much worse, and that he was dying. That word, it's such a horrible fucking word to see real and naked before you, pinned upon the chest of your world.

I scrambled to my feet and ran again, time not needed to waste. I came out of the alley, and realized that darkness had crept over the world now. I glanced around my eyes searching for help. At the end of the block, under a circle of light from the streetlamp, stood a blue and white phone booth, tagged and beat up looking. I bolted for it, the yellowy light growing closer and closer, until I was under it and falling inside the small compartment. I dug around my pockets for change, dropped the fucking quarter, and cursed it. I got it again between my quaking fingers, and then after I slipped it in the slot I remembered you didn't have to pay to call 911. I pressed those three numbers and made my voice to the operator as steady as I could manage, which wasn't very much. She told me to stay on the line until help arrived, but fuck that. I slammed the black phone into the cradle and booked it back to my Matt. His eyes were still open, dimly watching the black sky through hooded lids. He was still breathing, but barely.

"Chr-is…hold me." The words whispered from his lips, like verbal ghosts. My tears started over again, some water main inside of me had split open, and I could do nothing to quell the flood. As gently as I could I held him in my arms, against my chest. His blood still slowly seeped from him and stained my clothes, sickeningly warming the my skin.

"Matt! Matt!" My voice sounded foreign to me, not even a voice, just a gaspy wail. "Stay with me it's going to be okay, please, Matt please just hold on!"

I was on my knees, rocking, holding him, pleading with him, begging God, assurances and promises falling out of my mouth and raining over him as his chest hitched and his breath rattled like dried leaves against brittle branches. He started to cough, to sputter, and a spray of blood smeared my face. Tiny crimson beads clung to his eyelashes as he blinked, his vibrant, earthy, eyes dulling even more.

"Iloveyou, Iloveyou, Iloveyou!" I said over and over again. "Please Matty, please! Please!"

His fingers scrabbled lightly against my chest, weakly. My lungs were nothing but tight, painful, knots, which refused to breathe properly.

"Chris." He croaked out, his voice liquidy.

"What baby? I'm right here."

I stroked his face, his poor, broken face.

"Chris…I-I'm always going to…be…with you." He wheezed, his fingers flexed softly against my chest. "In-in your…h-heart."

"No, Matt! No! Don't Matty, don't!" I screamed, and choked on my own snot and tears.

"I love you…the most." He added, a small smile curved his beautiful lips, and the glimmer in his eyes disappeared. All those nasty things that happen to people when they die, when their body releases, happened, and I refused to believe it. I went cold all over, and held him tighter, rocking, telling him even still that it was going to be okay, it had to be, it was going to be okay. I buried my face in his hair, distraught that I could no longer feel its softness, just hot, wet, sopping tangles. He couldn't die, he was seventeen, just a fucking kid, not even starting his life--and god, I loved him! I loved him so much...

Blue and red flashed, the wail of help filtered down the alley way, and then stopped. People were around us, pulling Matt out of my arms, as clots of blood slid between my fingers and down my arms. People were pulling me away, phantoms of the night, dragging me from the one I loved, forever. It seemed like I could still feel them, tugging at my elbow—

"Chris? Chris?"

The voice saying my name confused me at first, then I recognized it, and remembered I was in the bathroom of my childhood home.

"Chris?"

"Uh…yeah?" I turned away from the mirror above the sink, not wanting to see my reflection, the creases of painful memories making it look too-old, or the raw pink of my eyes. The hand at my arm didn't belong to a cop or an EMT but to my brother. He looked me up and down, concern awakening his sleepy face.

"You okay man?"

"Fine." I said probably too quickly. He squinted at me, but didn't press. I think he knew.

"Wanna cig?" He took my hand, and put one against my palm. I can say I was really glad for it.

We wandered out to the kitchen, he stopped briefly by the boarded door in the hallway, stared at it for a few moments. His fingers twitched, as though he wanted to touch it. After a moment, he turned his eyes to me, and left the door unmolested. It made me proud of him, and a little sad about myself, that I was in the bathroom moments ago throwing up because of flashbacks that were decades old.

Once we were in the kitchen, I leaned against the counter and thoughtfully puffed my cigarette. Christian poked his head into the refrigerator and came out with a 'damn it'. He'd made a habit of doing this, just once in a while peeking into the fridge, hoping that magically a can of beer might appear in there on the shelf, back in the back. Then he'd jokingly cuss out the appliance when of course no such thing happened.

"You fucking whore!" He waved his shaky fist at the closed fridge. He climbed up onto the counter across from me—the counter was set up in a horseshoe shape—and laid down on it, his back flat against the chipped formica top. "Being sober really fucking sucks, you know that Chris?" He blew a spout of smoke up at the ceiling.

"It'll get better." I said hollowly. All of my promises seemed worthless, at the moment at least...and maybe always. I kept hearing the one I'd made to Matt float around in my head, and then his voice, dying, fading, as he said to me the words I'd spoke to him one night when he'd cried to me, not knowing for the life of him, how to tell his little brother their mother was dying. Chris, I'm always going to be with you, in your heart. I love you the most. I tried to forget it, at least for now. I repeated the words I had tried to assure Christian with, in what I hoped was a more positive, stronger, sounding voice. "It'll get better, Chris—Christian."

The two of us stayed silent, smoking up the small kitchen. I kind of wish he might have came to me and hugged me, or something, just so I could feel a little better. But my brother wasn't the comforting type, well, Adam being the exception to that rule. Christian stuck another cigarette between his middle and ring finger so he was pulling on two at the same time, and he made a morbid crack about lung cancer, which was his attempt at humor. It really didn't register with me too much. I was just wondering if I'd repeated those words for him, or for myself.