-1A.N Apologies, this chapter took longer to write than I thought, still, I think it has to be my favourite so far.

Thank you for the kind reviews

Chapter 7

Heavy with the exhaustion of a solid, 10 hour shift, Jien stepped down from the raised porch of the bar with his neck craned to the sky, rinsed by the icy drops of the mid-morning rain. Cold for the time of year, the wind was harsh and persistent; the rain mingled with the beads of sweat gathering by his hairline and dripped down his nose with satisfying freshness.

He had spent the last half hour of the morning with 'friends' from his current job; men not unlike himself who worked more hours of the week than they slept. After his late night shift and the realisation that he would soon have to return home to check on his mother, the easy going laughter that permeated the walls of the bar was a much-needed release. He lit a cigarette, inhaled long and deep, then shoved his remaining hand into his jacket pocket, stepping with a splash into the muddy street.

As he left, the men he had been drinking with had begun to discuss him warily. If they had been asked what they thought about Sha Jien the response would have been mostly good. Friendly enough, seems a good guy, can enjoy a good joke, can handle his beer. But yet, when they think long and hard, there seems to be something terribly wrong with the teenager that works these long, desperate hours, who never seems to want to go home. When the evening comes, shovel still in hand, he lingers, he is always last to leave, a pale unreflecting figure on the shimmering landscape.

At 18 years old, Jien worked 7 days a week, the hours varied, he took whatever he could manage to get.

As far as he was concerned, as long as the money was good, there was little he wouldn't end up doing. This philosophy led him to offers for work that were less than scrupulous. The highlights so far consisted of a two week skint transporting of illegal weaponry from a dealer in the nearest port north, to a collector passing through on his escape from the country. A job that required more muscle that it advertised; the first exhilarating rush of real criminal activity had a sixteen year old Jien thirsty for another taste. Once or twice, he had been hired for the packing and distribution of bootleg porn (a personal favourite that had more perks than one would expect.) Now and again, he dabbled in light burglary, which was distinctly less rewarding as the citizens populating the town were already dirt-poor and had nothing worth stealing anyhow.

These though were the more exciting and rare opportunities, it was much more likely that for weeks on end the loading and un-loading of crates for transportation occupied his time. Building work, demolition, landscaping. Hard physical labour. Although in truth, he rarely struggled.

Boredom proved to be the main problem. It was often lonely work, the shit reception the town received meant that the crackly buzz of a FM radio was poor company. With little to occupy his mind, he threw himself into his work, doing the equivalent of men with twice his size and experience. His was valuable to those he worked for, still he couldn't help but feel as if he was wasted here.

At least it kept him out of the house

As with most of the young men he had grown up alongside, the only real work that he found he was suited to was the manual kind; he had been educated to the maximum the town provided, but with no real academic ambition the skills he had acquired in the classroom were almost solely the practical kind. Despite this, he didn't find the work unbearable; with little physical limitation he rarely struggled with heavy lifting or long hours. A tiny glimmer of the proficiency and strength that will develop in the next five years can be seen now, a level of endurance that will only truly real itself when his survival solely depends on it. But these years of wanderings are too far in the future for the teenager to contemplate. He doesn't know it but, rather than a long term career these years are nothing more than training.

But for the meanwhile, it keeps him out of the house.

Since his father's death, Jien had the responsibility of caring and providing for both his half-brother and his mother, who, before Goyjo's birth had never had an paying occupation and now hadn't the ability to undertake one. The pay was shit, his mother's sake was expensive. It proved a problem.

Though don't feel too sorry for Sha Jien. He works hard, but he plays hard too. When he isn't working he's drinking, he drinks with the same reckless abandon that his father did and the same reckless abandon that Goyjo will soon do. He has frequent and passionate sex with his many lady friends, one of whom he loves, in his own strange way. Home throws the only dark shadow over Jien's life, he can't quite be happy, but who is? He still has some time till it gets truly bad with his mother, the worst it will ever be. The point the point where his hands slide down his mother's tautened stomach and caress her small puckered breasts and holds her trembling…

He's not there yet. But he isn't far off.

To put the pathos of the area into perspective, while not particularly large, it was incredibly condensed; packed between impassable crags and valleys on one side and the lush expanse of thick woodland on the other. There were three ways out of the city; one leading inland, an eight hour walk to the capital; the opposite following a canal route to the westerly port, too far to reach by foot, the way spotted with provincial villages of meagre size. Every other road was a vast tangle of rural footpaths, leading far into the valley basin and soon becoming tracks only passable by experienced travellers. The town was once a vital trade passage, a route that lead straight from the capital to the most lucrative port. It shows.

Before it's significance the town had barely had village status, a poor, secluded farming community living off the land with barely enough success to feed the small population. Relatively untouched, all useable land was flooded into rice paddies, farm houses and warehouses dominated the landscape with little in between. It was a simple place, until an unpredicted earthquake brought a landslide that blocked all usual trade passages from the capital to the port. It was then, two hundred and fifty years ago that this tiny community suddenly became the rest stop for hundreds of thousands of merchants and travellers, tourists and trade.

With importance, so did all the vices of the large cities. A thriving gambling and bootlegging trade, items of variable legality and rarity flowed into the heart of the naïve, farming village; soon came prostitution, forced labour and, unsurprisingly, the wealth of tourism. Hotels sprang up, immigration and wages boomed.

They prospered for a short while.

Like parasites these invaders, through time, they infected and worked their way into the spirit of an untouched way of life until their host shunned the simple way of living that had once sustained them. The small village grew large and profitable, nourished by the milk of the desire and demand that it's importance required.

As the steam engine established itself irrevocably across the horizon, the flow of wealth was suddenly and irrevocably, was called to a halt. Like a waterlogged stream stopped mid-flow, the corruption and vice was left to fester and stagnate in the streets. The infection was too severe and the poverty that was left behind revealed an intrinsically damaged world. One that did not remember how it survived before its period of glory and could only now get by on the leftovers of its trade.

It was a poor place to raise children and a poor place for a child to grow up in.

There were over 70 places a man could get a beer, yet one grossly overcrowded school served children of all ages. Gambling dens with sliding degrees of legality filled basements and rooftops, the rate of murders, rapes, violent crimes had reached a plateaux of alarming regularity, yet the police force was barely mentionable. The medical centre was primitive, doctors visited in a rota, rarely more than three were available to treat the ailments of a booming population. Youkai healers were the most common source of help available, more numerous and of more effective than the visiting human medical professionals. But they charged and telling a good price from a rip-off and an expert from a novice was a lottery, that some went away chronically more worse off than they had arrived in the first place.

With little exception, most of the residential housing was stacked one on top of the other, one or two rooms that served for families of three or four, narrow alleyways separating the blocks by only two or three feet, packed with trash that would never be collected, the sleeping homeless that would probably not awake. In the worst segments, corrugated iron replaced a roof or a wall, in the best, drug lord and import/export businessmen lived in relative luxury, televisions, house help, a spare room, wrought iron gates by the front door. Larger, but poorer single storied houses, that latched onto the town with only dirt footpaths, stood only a couple of hundred yards from the urban centre. They were old farmhouses that had been abandoned when the towns big boom had driven the paddy workers into a new more profitable business. Goyjo grew up in one of these. While containing 3 or four rooms and lightly separated from the nightlife, they were structurally unsound and quite literally falling to pieces. Only half a dozen remained but whether they would still do so when the next earthquake hit was unlikely. They stood as crumbling evidence that the town had once been a simpler place with less worldly residents, more innocent ideals.

A small stone temple sat at the head of the main street, a modest statue of Buddha sat serene at it's helm, damp and neglected. But even this was mostly for show, it backed a serene woodland landscape but contained no monastic order. Empty of life, it was swept for religious holidays and little else.

The walk home was a good 40 minutes, but he could easily double that if he took a "shortcut" through the shrub and rubble that separated the town's main strip from his own small home. It happened to be a diversion that he often found himself taking. A minor earthquake had hit a couple of summers ago damaging most of the farm houses that littered the outskirts of the town, the debris had been weathered by time but had never been shifted. Almost in mourning, the remains, now picked clean, still stood, cupped by a long strip of woodland that stood out from the forest and cut into the south end of town. Yet, during springtime, it wasn't an unpleasant walk especially with the soft, easy sensation of early morning sake in his belly and the cool drops of rain on his bare shoulders.

The sounds of children nearby from the schoolyard cut into his thoughts quite suddenly. He thought briefly about Goyjo and wondered if he had stayed in school today. Making him attend was getting harder by the day, to the point where just this morning Jien had chased, tackled and physically thrown Goyjo into the school grounds with great difficulty and a great deal more of cursing. His teacher had resumed the struggle and forced the boy into the classroom with the kind of heavy headedness that, Jien realised with some resignation, was the only thing that the young boy would behave for.

An 8 year old Goyjo was a difficult thing to handle. He hated school with a passion that had not gone unnoticed by his brother. He avoided it whenever possible, concentrated little and learnt less. The teacher felt no obligation to force any participation from Goyjo but his presence, his ignorance had been established painfully early. He couldn't write, could hardly read.

On the subject of Goyjo, Jien would be particularly quiet. He doubted whether anyone but his closest friends would have been aware that he had a half-brother and he had no desire to advertise the fact around town. Goyjo's presence was uneasily acknowledged by the population, but never accepted.

Goyjo, at 8 years old was a hard thing to describe.

At school he rose hell. He fought, he swore, he ran off whenever the opportunity arose. Often he was physically forced to attend. However, on the rare mornings when Sumire would crawl out of her room before midday, she would blink irritably at the boy and, clutching a handful of blood red hair, shake him hard and demand to know why he wasn't out of the house and in school. When she told him to go, he always went. Clutching a book he couldn't read, he would leave the house and tell himself that he would be real good in school that day, make mom proud of him. But as the long day dragged on, he found himself squinting uselessly at characters he simply couldn't understand, rudimentary arithmetic that made no sense. The 3 years he attended school were always a struggle, he always felt stupid. A feeling, in his adulthood, that never quite left him.

At home Goyjo was quiet.

Though Goyjo rarely ventured into town during the day on his own, for obvious reasons, he roamed the surrounding woodland, wasteland and empty buildings with reckless abandon. When the night loomed in and the shimmer of red that screamed his birthright dimmed out of recognition, he ran through the empty alleys and passageways like a ghostly spirit. He climbed and conquered the twisted, condemned fire escapes, lay on the sooty recline of half tiled roofs, climbed trees in the dark squares, screamed until the dawn went misty with tears and raced like an animal through dying streets.

Then as the sun rose and the brought to light the crimson that lay glistening in his tear-soaked eyes, he lost his courage in the light drenched world and began to pad the long walk home. A trek as strange and inevitable as his nightly escape.

He always went back home.

Jien frowned and ran a hand through his soaking wet hair, he looked to the sky; the cloud had set in more heavily that before, above him it hung grey and oppressive, despite that it was now mid-springtime. Exceptionally strange weather for this time of year. He sighed. The curling, grey plumes predicted a storm within the hour; he subconsciously quickened his pace to where the trees started to provide cover from the downpour, a little deeper into the forest's foliage. Jien noticed with some sadness that the saplings by his feet were getting battered by the force of the gale. As their huge parents stood firm, they held on with the same grit and determination, their under-sized roots desperately clinging to sodden ground where the thick mud meant there was precious little for the tiny plants to hold on to. Despite their flexibility and small size, a few had already been felled, young green branches were tossed and scattered in the wind to be trodden under his iron capped boots. Cut down so young, they stood, inverted in the thick mud, unrecognisable in their deaths. Spindly roots reaching up towards the sky in desperation, grasping for the soil that they had once sat so firmly in.

It wasn't fair, it wasn't fair that the bad weather should come so late in the year. The seasons should have provided mild warmth and gentle tepid rains, good conditions before the humidity and scorching heat of the summer, the wet icy coldness of the winter months. The young plants probably would have survived and by the time the rains came again, be just strong enough to brave the onslaught. A young, green branch gave and snapped under his foot. They had just been unlucky.

By now Jien was half way home, he began to slow his pace.

Jien ground his teeth and fumbled in his pockets for his missing cigarettes. He had decided early on that there seemed to be so much potential in Goyjo but the response from his teacher when they had met briefly, in no less words, was that Goyjo was as thick as shit. But he himself had little interest in his studies at his brother's age and tried not to put too much stock in this prediction; besides, the teachers were over worked, under paid and had more kids running around than they were trained to deal with. Goyjo just needed a little extra help. He resolved to help the kid out if there was something that he couldn't understand at school, if they even gave homework, it wouldn't kill him to sit him down and try and teach him a thing or two.

It was a nice thought.

The more realistic diagnosis was that Goyjo was just dumb, perhaps he had been whacked too many times over the back of the head, Jien thought grimly, and literally had had the sense knocked out of him. He wouldn't have been surprised. He had only been home once or twice this week for as long as he could stand, yet he could tell that the situation was only getting worse.

How soon would it be before it was unmanageable?

Through the loosely scattered trees a noise carried. Jien tensed for a moment, almost alarmed. A cry resounded through the wind, it sounded young, high pitched. It was probably just little kids playing in the undergrowth but he dismissed this when he considered that it was not only pouring with rain but also that, at 10:00 in the morning all the children would probably be in school. He picked up his step but paused again as the crying became louder and more erratic, it was closer to screaming. Jien felt a twinge of panic in his gut, assaults were not uncommon in the woodland outskirts, it was very possible someone was being robbed or worse. A detour seemed an attractive prospect even if it was a false alarm. He veered off to the left, sharp youkai ears straining to pick up the direction of the cries amongst the pouring rain.

The damage to the kid's face was pretty bad, not helped by the caked mud smeared over his features. But even in a glance Jien could tell that his nose had definitely been broken, it sat too high on his face, swollen up to gruesome proportions. It bled too, badly. His eyes were wide and fearful on Jien's approach, red and swollen with tears, he seemed to be far past the point of hysterics. He was hiccoughing madly and his breath came out spluttered and irregular.

Only one thing differed from the familiar picture of violence. This time, it wasn't Goyjo.

Jien's arrival scared the boy shitless, with great difficultly he attempted to scramble away. He scuttled backwards, one wrist painfully cradled to his chest. With a twinge of recognition he tried to conjure a picture of who the child could be, but came up blank. It occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to the kid home somehow or get hold of a parent or….

Jien was relived of this responsibility however, for, with more speed than Jien expected, the kid bolted and stumbled clumsily through the sparely scattered trees back towards the general direction of the schoolyard. Despite the heavy sobs and obvious injury, he decided not to follow, it seemed that he would have enough to deal with already.

He turned to Goyjo. The boy had already picked himself out of the underground which Jien had roughly tossed him into and his crimson locks, mixed with mud and blood hung matted across his eyes, he didn't budge. His arms by his sides, his tiny fists were clenched and his sharp intakes of breath were audible even over the pounding rain, he spat on the ground, a thin layer of blood stained his front teeth.

He looked inhuman. Which in truth, was exactly what he was.

The with a start as if he had just been awoken from a trance, Goyjo blinked, looked-up, stared at his brother and broke into a run. Goyjo was a little faster than Jien had expected, his spindly legs pumping for all they were worth he dodged through the trees with surprising dexterity. But even so he was limping and was no match for the adult that was so quickly on his tail. Even with the morning's drinks resting heavily on his stomach, Jien was after his half-brother in an instant. The rain water distorted his vision but the fleeing, red spirit was firm within his sights. Within 30 seconds Jien struck, grabbing the strap of Goyjo's vest and shifting his weight forward, he wrapped the other arm around the smaller rib cage and in a heavy tackle brought his struggling brother firmly down to the sodden earth.

"Jien, get off. Let go. Jien, fuck off!" The struggle continued. "You bastard, let go!"

Goyjo squirmed frantically, clods of dirt mingling with strands of blood red hair as he struggled for release.

"What the hell Goyjo? Look at me." Jien clasped the kid's shoulders and flipped him over so they sat face to face. "Why aren't you in school? Why did you run huh? Look at me. Did you see what you did to that kid's face? That's messed up Goyjo. Will you stop fucking moving?"

Grabbing the bare forearms, he pulled Goyjo up from the floor. The smaller boy seemed to calm but looked away from Jien's gaze in fierce defiance.

Jien gave his shoulder blades a firm shake.

"Don't fucking touch me!" With what could only be described as a shriek, Goyjo spat straight into Jien's face. A globule of spit and blood hitting the older boy's cheek.

Goyjo's eyes widened but he had no time to move. A sickening thwap resounded through the clearing and Goyjo hit the mud. He lay motionless for a moment, quite shocked, not by the force of the blow, it was not much harder than he was used to, but gormless in sheer surprise. He coughed and dumbly got to his knees and with equally muddy hands tried to wipe the dirt from his face with little success, only managing to worsen the mess.

It was this simple act of childish stupidity that infuriated Jien. And he exploded.

"I'm fucking sick of this. I'm sick of chasing you around and trying to get you into school every day of the week. You don't wanna go? Don't fucking go." He pointed an angry finger in the face of the startled boy, who had never known Jien so mad. " I don't give a shit anymore. If you wanna grow up knowing fuck all, that is fine with me." Then he couldn't stop himself and it all came pouring out. His voice cut through the battering wind, broken by what could have been tears in his tired, yellow eyes. "I work my ass off for you, I work 7 days a week for fuck-all. You think I wanted this. That I wanted all this shit. I never wanted his, I never wanted you." His face closed the gap between him and his half-brother. "You do what you fucking well want from now on."

He turned and marched towards the house, leaving Goyjo's lone figure crouching in the clearing. Now his brother had gone, the small boy couldn't hold back the tears, they mingled with the raindrops that pattered on his bruised and battered face. He sat there quiet for a moment, holding himself in a one-man hug, rocking gently on his haunches. His small chest heaved with anuish, his heart throbbed painfully in his chest, a pain more intense and lasting than the streak of red that had marked his face.

"I'm sorry Jien. Please Jian, I'm really sorry." Slowly and with some difficulty, Goyjo had trotted up to his older brother. He struggled to keep up to Jien's strides as the undergrowth thickened.

There was no reply. Jien kept the same pace, Goyjo fell into a small run.

"But it's dead hard and you said I'd make friends and I can't, I don't know what to do when I'm there. Please Jien. They chased me again, they were, they were saying all kinds of stuff and I got real angry and said all kinds of stuff right back and when they went for me I just grabbed hold of…I didn't know he was so young." His voice trailed off and he looked up hopefully at Jien's face, so torn yet firm that it didn't budge.

Goyjo swallowed and walked silently for a moment, twisting and pulling a long red length of hair in front of his face, his chest still heaving with sobs. Then with a very small and careful voice he grabbed firm hold of Jiens jacket sleeve, too firmly to shrug off again.

"She's gonna be so mad Jien. I didn't mean to do anything. Shes gonna…I didn't mean to do it….but she'll be so….she'll be really mad Jien. Please. "

He couldn't say it. Jien acknowledged. He couldn't say that his mom would probably beat the living daylights out of him when he came into the front room. But he knew it, he understood it.

"You can't cry Goyjo. Please, just stop crying." Goyjo looked up into Jien's face, the red mark where he had been hit throbbing. Both brothers stared into the other's eyes.

Then it was suddenly very hard for Jien to say anything else because a surge of emotion had begun to rise up in his gut and seemed so unfair that this should be his responsibility, that this should be his life. He couldn't help but know that if Goyjo hadn't been born, his father wouldn't have died caring for him, so he wouldn't have had support the household, work so often, his mother wouldn't have drank herself crazy and got so fucked up and he wouldn't have had to…. It seemed the longer Goyjo lived the worse things came and It wasn't fair and he didn't want it. He resented it, he simply and tragically couldn't help hating him.

Something passed between the brothers, something in Jien's face that communicated his grief, a weariness that Goyjo could only recognise as his burden. More than ever the young boy felt unwanted and in truth, he wasn't far wrong.

This feeling, with time, it will fade, wax and wane.

Goyjo let go of his brother's sleeve and they began the slow walk up to the house. They walked in silence, there wasn't really much to say.

It was at this point that Jien realised that a change was needed so desperately; something had to give. How would Goyjo turn out if this continued? He didn't like it, but Jien knew that Goyjo was already damaged, now, probably long beyond repair. As he had witnessed the savage beating of the younger boy, a lifetime of rage had flooded out of Goyjo, a rage so intense, so raw that it streamed out from the blood of his eyes, radiated like a beacon from his tiny form. Jien knew that he had to intervene, help the boy, he so desperately needed help. Take him into town and show him something of a normal childhood, do something to stem the flow of violence within the house. Take responsibility. Do something. He had to do more for Goyjo, even if it meant he would have spend more time in the house, more time with his mother. Even though he would suffer for it.

He placed a tentative arm on his brother's shoulder who did nothing to remove it. The tattered shirt that covered him had been ripped down the side seam, even underneath the loose fit of his own hand-me-downs he could see a child who treaded the fine line of near-starvation. He didn't look 8 years old, he looked ageless, a child without the privilege of childhood. Goyjo bit his lip nervously and looked up to his half-brother who smiled back weakly.

Things from then on did change. And Jien did suffer, of course.