Prompt: "He's at home, scared, terrified, and just wishing that it would stop."
Characters: Sebastian (World: Independent Living)
Words: 612
Date: July 25, 2012
"Don't you need to be getting to work?" His mother's words were slow and deliberate, slurred through the haze of alcohol. He stared out the window. The sun was setting on the Trocadéro and the sick heaviness in the center of his soul began to settle. His mother was right. If he didn't get to Pigalle soon, he'd be in huge trouble. But he stood frozen instead.
It had been a year now since his father was locked away in the dark despair of La Santé prison. His gaze fell back on his mother who tilted the flask back onto her lips. An elixir of denial. The house was far from clean. The refrigerator was near empty. If Sebastian didn't work the streets well tonight they'd spend another week hungry.
He wished for a red light for life that could just make it all stop. He needed it to stop. He needed his parents back. When they'd locked away his father, his mother had been trapped in her own prison of despair and if Sebastian wanted them to survive, he had to sell the only thing left that they owned. His body.
The government had frozen all their assets, allowing them only to keep the house. In the first year they had sold everything in the estate that was worth anything. The staff was let go. Alone and afraid his mother had started drinking. Fall from grace was an understatement.
He withdrew from the prestigious private school and was placed in a state school for his first year of sixth form college. He was referred to a group for kids whose parents were incarcerated. It was supposed to be a place where he could talk about his feelings and get support. Instead he was drawn into a world of drugs and prostitution.
He tried everything he could to get through the nights without the evil substances he knew would ruin his family. That meant though that he remembered every dirty, disgusting detail of his dangerous liaisons with men old enough to be his father. In the beginning he couldn't understand how the men could continue as the tears fell from his eyes. Now, the tears didn't fall anymore. His mind went elsewhere, to better times in the past, to a different world in the future. He imagined a boy, beautiful and caring, who would love him more than life itself. A boy who would never let him sell his body again. A boy who would save him from the hell inside of him.
But first he had to get out of this hell. He went to the kitchen and ripped a piece of bread off the loaf he'd bought yesterday on his walk home. The street sellers were out at dawn and they knew Sebastian well. A charming smile and kisses on a pretty girl's cheeks sometimes got him an extra loaf for his euro. He took a bite to settle the terror in his stomach. It did little good, but it was enough to bring him back to his senses. If he didn't go tonight, there would be no bread at all.
He did good business. Dressed to the nines in the designer clothing he had not yet outgrown, Sebastian's youth and good looks made him well known and desired. He took nothing with him, it would be stolen anyway, and without a backwards glance to his mother passed out on the couch, he headed out the door. There would be no stopping this evening. He had bills to pay and food to buy. The only red light he'd be seeing tonight were the lights of the Red Light District.