And we don't want to go outside tonight

And in a pipe we fly to the Motherland

Or sell love to another man.

It's too cold outside

For angels to fly…

The A Team (Ed Sheeran)

Then one night, she didn't turn up outside the window. Or the next. Or the one after.

By the third evening I was terrified, and I could see in the Doctor's pale face and single-word responses that he felt just the same. We had no means of contacting her to find out what had happened to our Gabi, and it was killing us, slowly.

It was reckless, what he ended up doing. He didn't tell me what he was planning- I doubt he even had planned it- but the Doctor vanished for several hours that evening. I later found out that he'd gone to one of the middle class sectors, commandeered a car and driven to her estates under the pretence of being a rented driver. The maid who'd answered the door had merely said that "Miss was feeling a little under the weather, did not expect visitors and most certainly did not order a car." My brother could do nothing more than nod respectively and drive off after that, and pray that the maid was a recent addition and didn't recognise him as the same boy her master had forbidden his daughter more than a decade ago to see.

It took another week of anxiety and angry fist fights between us before she finally appeared. The night before I saw her, we had very nearly killed each other- both of us feeling the desperation in the other's silent blows- and were covered in bruises. I can still remember the pain in my brother's eyes as he'd thrown me against the wall and hit me until my ears rang; my own equally tortured gaze reflected in the black of his pupils as I hit him back. We'd needed to do something, anything, to distract ourselves from worrying about her; so we'd took it out on each other to the extent that the Doctor was dragged off me by our terrified neighbours. Our father had been called and he'd taken us inside and just looked at my brother without saying anything as we stood in the hall, shaking and bleeding and gasping with exertion.

The Doctor was taller than our father, and the two had stared levelly at each other, not speaking for an age until, without saying anything, our father had drawn back his hand and smacked my brother across the face so hard he'd lost his balance. That was the only time I'd ever seen the Doctor thrown to the floor during a fight. At the time I had been frozen with shock as I watched my father look down at his eldest son, kick him once in the stomach- hard enough to make the Doctor suck in breath- and then move away, turning back once to spit at him, before walking away and leaving him on the floor. He hadn't so much as glanced at me once. I don't think he even registered me as being there.

()()()()()

The following night was the first time I saw Gabi cry.

At first I hadn't dared believe that the tiny stone hitting my window was anything but hopeful imagination, but when it happened again I knew. I don't think I ever moved faster in my life.

It was early November by then and had been raining for hours- Gabi was soaked through and shivering as we got her into the room. Her face was damp, and at the time I'd thought it was just rain. But then I saw the look on her face and my happiness drained away. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the expression on the Doctor's face darkened as he too realised that she looked different. She looked… pale and hollow. Exhausted. As if she hadn't slept or eaten in a week. Maybe she hadn't.

I'd asked her what was wrong, but the words choked her as she tried to answer. I remember feeling at such a loss as I watched her -the friend I knew better than anyone else in the world- fall apart in front of me.

At that point the Doctor had put his hand on her face, and she'd flinched but tried to cover it. He'd slowly turned her face to the side, and in the moonlight the purple patches on her cheeks, the finger marks on her throat, were horribly clear.

"What did he do to you?"

At first I'd thought my brother's question was odd, but he was older than me. I guess he knew what the difference in Gabi's body meant straight away, whilst it took me a good while longer to realise.

She hadn't answered him, but I'd watched her fragile composure crumble under the weight of whatever it was she was carrying unsaid, and once the tears started she didn't seem to be able to stop them. He'd taken her into his arms on the floor, and I'd felt the first pangs of jealousy that this was something the two of them were sharing whilst I watched, at a loss over what to do. I knew he could be there for her when I couldn't, and I hated it.

I was only later, when Gabi's hand slipped into mine and held it tightly, as if it were the only thing keeping her here, and I pulled her close- revelling in the smell of her skin and coldness of her fingers in mine- that I began to realise that there was something about that wasn't just missing- it had been broken, destroyed beyond repair. It was only then that realisation came to me and I felt nausea and anguish all at once.

I don't think I'd really, truly hated her father until that point.

()()()()()

The days that followed were timid and silent. The Doctor and I were careful around Gabi, treating her like an injured bird that needed to heal. She never said a word again about what had happened but we knew her so well she didn't need to. To an outsider she was back to her normal, slightly cocky self when she returned to us the following night. She called us "her boys" as she stole our crisps, beat us both at chess and laughed at our jokes like any other night. But there was something hanging unspoken between us, and we were tiptoeing around it because we didn't know how to fix it. I didn't know how I could help her, as Gabi had never seemed to need our help- but it was clear that a part of her needed our help, but she couldn't ask and we couldn't give, so we did what any kids of sixteen, seventeen and eighteen would've done-we pretended it didn't exist.

But something important in Gabi broke in that week that she disappeared, and she changed afterwards. She seemed to crave something that couldn't be found in the confines of our bedroom so we, older and more courageous than before, began to venture outside to explore to hidden delights of the Citadel nightlife; trying to satisfy whatever masochistic urges Gabi seemed unable to free herself from. It was there that the Doctor showed me his third option for forgetting everything he didn't want to remember besides sex and fighting- alcohol.

Given that I was as confident a person as mouse is brave, the option of losing myself between a girls legs didn't really apply as it did to him- well, not for a while, anyways, it took almost a year before that began- and neither did channelling it all into rage and letting it lose on some guy's face… but swallow down glass after glass of vodka and inject myself with needles of whatever I could find was something I could do. Deep in a drunken stupor, or high on something I couldn't even pronounce sober, I managed to find an inner peace I'd only ever experienced when Gabi was lying next to me; just me and her in the dark beside a sleeping Doctor, not speaking but not needing to. Back then it didn't even matter that it was fake and everyone knew it. Only in this pathetic state could I cope with watching some bastard sliding his hand up Gabi skirt, planting sloppy kisses on her neck as he greedily tried to get her to go into some sleazy corner with him. Most of the time she obliged; she seemed to be trying to bury what had happened to her under layers of meaningless sex with grubby men- as if destroying her dignity was the only way to pretend she was happy.

Meanwhile, the Doctor would be entirely focused on the sound of the girl he had his hands in at that point, screaming for the third or fourth time and I, invigorated by drink and drugs would have my tongue down the throat of some girl in another corner, jeered at by the other drinkers at whatever bar we happened to have found ourselves in, and not even caring; I was just determined to lose this incessant ache inside my chest that I got whenever I saw a stranger with his grubby hands all over my Gabi, eagerly thrusting into her down a dirty back alley whilst she closed her eyes and waited for it to be over. I'd seen it happen so many times to her; seen the same blank, hopeless look on her face that I didn't know how I could take feeling like I was being stabbed repeatedly every time and still recover. The three of us were completely lost, united in the fact that we drowning but continuing to push ourselves further away from the other two regardless.

It was on such a night I lost my virginity to a barmaid who must've been at least twice my age; I fucked her in the empty kitchens and afterwards she just looked at me sadly and told me that I was too nice and too young for this sort of thing. I said it depended on why you did it and how you felt about yourself for doing it. She then asked me if I felt good about myself knowing what kind of path I was on. I couldn't answer her.

None of us were happy in those days.