Sorry for the delay - dealing with family emergencies, the storms and the floods hasn't left much time for anything else.

Thanks once again to those who have taken the time to read and review/message.

"No way in hell would Sev run away for no reason!" Rice shook his head adamantly. "He told me not to worry, that he planned on keeping his head down and on straight because he didn't want to risk anything until he was back with his mom."

"When did he tell you that?" Vince asked, leaning forward in his seat in earnest. He'd just broken the news that Kelly had run away from the group home the previous night – according to the carers, the kid had simply had enough and disappeared into the night. Vince's suspicions had immediately come right back to the forefront, but without any evidence to the contrary, he had to take the carers at their word, because no one was saying anything, not even the other kids in the home.

Vince couldn't really blame them – if his gut was right then that group home was a desperately unhappy place, and who would want to risk making things worse for themselves unless they were guaranteed safety? In his many years on the Force, Vince had seen too many victims being shipped straight back to their abusers simply because they lacked sufficient evidence to act upon accusations.

Sometimes it boiled down to a simple case of 'he said, she said', and as it was 'innocent until proven guilty', words were often deemed insufficient evidence – add in a bunch of kids who were all too often written off as little more than troubled attention-seekers, and the value of those words sadly plummeted. Unfortunately, while he absolutely understood their reticence, he was also completely frustrated by it, because unless one of them decided to take the risk then there was no way of finding out what had happened to Kelly Severide, and every cop instinct he possessed and had honed over his many years of service screamed out that something had happened.

"He told me at school, after…" here Scott paused – it was after Kelly had gone off on one with Miss Walker, just before the gym teacher had marched him off towards the principal's office. It was typical of Kelly – he was in a whole world of trouble, his life was in tatters and his future uncertain, but he still took the time to reassure his friend and try to make Scott feel better. However, he wondered if he reminded the cop of Sev's earlier outburst that it would only serve to reinforce the belief that Kelly had disappeared voluntarily.

"After…?" Vince prompted.

"There was an incident at school," April said, looking up and into the homicide detective's eyes with an unwavering stare. She had guessed when the supposed conversation had taken place, given the limited time they had shared that day in school after they had found out about Kelly's mother, a day that seemed months ago now. "He had a pretty heated argument with one of the teachers and he was suspended for it. And no," she shook her head at the question on Vince's lips. "I don't know what the argument was about. But I do agree with Scott, and I promise you that Kelly would not run away just because he didn't like the group home, especially not without calling one of us – there has to be a reason."

From the way Rice was squirming in his chair it was clear that he knew something about the cause of Kelly's confrontation with his teacher, but evidently he didn't want to say anything in front of his other friends. That surprised Vince somewhat – while he knew that the group had plenty of secrets, he didn't think that they kept them from each other, as they always seemed to present a united front to the world.

"Ok," Vince agreed, and he did agree with them but he certainly didn't want to clue the kids in to the true extent of his unease, certain that they would rush in and do what they could to help their friend, regardless of any possible dangers to themselves.

"What's going to happen next?" Mrs Darden asked. "What's being done to find Kelly?"

"I don't really know, missing persons is not my area of expertise, I'm afraid," Vince shrugged, not pointing out that he usually only got involved when the missing turned up dead. "Normally you'd have to wait forty-eight hours before declaring someone as 'missing' but Kelly is a minor, so in theory there will already be a search, people out canvassing the local area around the group home in Logan's Square. I imagine someone will come around and question one or all of you at some point, to see if he's been in touch…"

"What do you mean by 'normally' and 'in theory'?" April interrupted, getting straight to the heart of the matter.

"Kelly is sixteen and a boy, and those two things already feed the stereotype of your average troubled runaway, and runaways, people who go missing voluntarily, are usually lower down on the priority list," Vince admitted sadly. "There are a lot of kids on the streets of Chicago – some of them are there because they don't want to be found and others and there because no one ever bothered to look – the too few available resources tend to be directed towards the more vulnerable, meaning younger and, generally speaking, female."

"But we don't know that he did go missing voluntarily," April pointed out.

"We've got a couple of eyewitnesses that said they saw him running away from the home under his own steam," Vince had told them that already, but Kelly's friends were nothing if not dedicated. "By all accounts, he left of his own free will."

"If he ran away from that place just because he was unhappy then he would have come to one of us!" Andy insisted. "Something must have happened!"

"I don't doubt you there, kid," Vince stated firmly. "But until we get some evidence, some hint as to what happened, then we don't even know where we should begin looking."

"You just said that no one would even be looking," Scott said, throwing his hands in the air in frustration.

"No, what I said was that the full weight of the department's resources would unlikely be thrown behind the search," Vince contradicted the young man. "The police are looking, and they're investigating matters at the group home and they're canvassing the local area and looking into Kelly's private life in an effort to ascertain where he might have gone…"

"He'll hate that," Andy said quietly, thinking of how much his deeply private friend would resent the intrusion into his personal matters.

"People are looking for him…" Vince continued. "But you need to be prepared for the fact that the search may well be a fruitless one and one that will be shelved if there are no results soon. If Kelly is able, then we just have to hope that he'll come back to us when he's good and ready."

"'If Kelly is able'…" Elizabeth Darden repeated in a broken whisper, as those words took her to every dark corner of Chicago.

Andy, who had been furious at his mother's refusal to give Kelly a home even temporarily, saw the unshed tears and heard the distress in her voice and silently cursed himself for not realising just how much she was hurting – he knew she cared for Kelly, but his own anger and frustration at the situation had rendered him blind to the true extent of her compassion. He knelt down in front of her and gently took her hands into his own, giving them a gentle squeeze.

"He'll be ok, mom," Andy promised. "Kelly's been looking out for himself for years already – he's strong enough to get through this and anything else." He didn't really believe his own words, thinking that his friend had been through too much already and whatever else may have happened to him could have finally tipped the balance of scales away from Kelly, but he hoped that there was enough conviction in his voice to offer his mother some support, some hope.

"Last week of school before summer break starts tomorrow," Scott said somewhat absent-mindedly. "It won't feel right without Sev there." He, like Andy, knew that Kelly was a fighter, that he had faced down problem after problem and had always come out on top, if a little battered and bruised, in the end, but during those times he'd always had a friend by his side. Now, Kelly had no one and no one even seemed to know where he was, and Scott could do nothing about the leaden feeling in his gut that told him wherever Kelly was, he needed his friends now more than ever.

Kelly was freezing. Summer had arrived and while the milder weather was welcome, Chicago was not called the Windy City for nothing – the breeze coming in off Lake Michigan as well as the lingering tendrils of Spring and the cloudy night sky were enough to chill him through to the bones, especially without shoes and a jacket.

He'd left Logan's Square at a run, escaping the threatening voices and even more threatening consequences of remaining behind. He'd run and run until he could no longer draw in a single breath and then he'd ducked down into a shopfront's doorway out of the wind, hands on his knees as he sucked in as much air as he could, his whole body shaking with exertion while the panic was still working its way through his system, his nerves shot completely to hell. Once his breathing was back under control, he sat down as close to the door as possible in an effort to cut out most of the draught and hugged his knees close to try and keep himself somewhat warm.

His first thought had been to get back home, to his own neighbourhood and his own friends to a place he knew and trusted. His home had its rough patches, but the local mobster, old-school gangster Patrick "Paddy" O'Byrne, had strict rules and number one on the list was that no one inside the neighbourhood was to be touched – it gave the kids relative safety on the streets and rival gangs knew they faced serious reprisals if they did anything beyond driving straight through the area.

However, no matter how much of a safe haven if may be from the surrounding gang violence, Kelly knew that if he went back, he risked proving Anderson correct – he risked being shipped straight back to that hell of a group home and suffering through the consequences of his actions before his frantic escape.

He knew that he was seen by many as a problem child, knew that they tended to view him with a mixture of pity and suspicion, knew that all that was likely to be exacerbated since his mother's latest episode. Because of that, Kelly had a nasty feeling that Anderson was right, that the authorities would believe the carers over the troubled kid with a history of mental health problems running in the family.

Unfortunately he didn't know what to do to solve that particular problem. His mother was obviously still out of the picture and he didn't even know where his father was living these days. He could go to his friends, but he didn't really want to confess as to what had happened back in Logan's Square, in fact he didn't even want to think about it, and besides, there was nothing they could do – they could cheer him up and let him vent and give him a whole hell of a lot of sympathy, but they couldn't stop him from being shipped back to the group home by DCFS.

He could go to Paddy, knew that the old man's sense of obligation to his fellow residents and his own unique brand of justice would see Anderson taking a long nap in a shallow grave, but he also knew that there would be a cost to that and it would be far more than he was willing to pay for a little vengeance and some peace of mind.

He couldn't stay on the streets – one night and he was already so cold and hungry that a longer duration seemed like a death sentence. With morning just around the corner, he didn't know where to go and what to do, but food and drink and somewhere warm was surely the first step, and he was limited as to where he could find any of that without being turned over to the cops, handed back to DCFS and shipped back to Logan Square.

"Hey man, get the hell out of my doorway!" came an angry shout.

Kelly looked up from the stoop he was huddled in to see an old Hispanic man scowling fiercely at him. He looked out past him towards the dawning day, the grey clouds heavy with rain and completely uninviting. At the same time, his arm was stiff and his ribs ached, he was cold and hungry and unbelievably exhausted and he possessed absolutely no will to get into another confrontation.

He sighed heavily and carefully manoeuvred himself up, trying to use only the one arm and unable to hide the wince as the movement pulled on his injuries. The old man's scowling face was replaced by narrowed, assessing eyes as he took in the stranger's movements, his fierce façade softening slightly as Kelly moved out of the shadows and his bruises, as well as his youth, were accentuated by the early morning light.

"Ah, dammit, kid!" the man muttered, reaching out a hand to steady the shaky youth, only to see him flinch violently away from him. The old man lifted his hands, palms up to show that he meant no harm. "I ain't aiming to hurt you," he said gently. "Come inside and we'll get you warmed up and you can tell me what the hell happened to you."

"No cops?" Kelly asked tentatively. He wasn't in trouble, he had done nothing wrong, he told himself firmly, but he didn't want to risk being sent back before he was at least in a position to defend himself.

The man narrowed his eyes slightly at the question, but shook his head all the same. "No cops, kid – hell, no more questions if you don't want to answer them, but you best get your ass inside before you can't feel it anymore."

"Already can't feel it," Kelly muttered more to himself than to his new companion. It was true, the cold had long since numbed his body on the outside, but the pain insisted on flaring through him with each and every movement that aggravated his injuries.

The shop had a small front room, and as Kelly looked around he could see that it was a computer repair shop – the front of house was mainly just a couple of chairs, a low table and the counter, but Kelly could make out old laptops, broken motherboards, dusty hard drives and many more components he couldn't identify.

"So…are you going to tell me anything?" the old man asked as he locked the door behind him out of habit, only to quickly unlock it once he noticed the way the kid stiffened up at the thought of being locked inside with a stranger. He moved away so that there was nothing between the kid and escape, hoping that would help to put the boy at ease.

"I thought you said no questions?" Kelly asked, sounding a lot less impudent than he could have done due to the tremble in his voice and the way his whole body curled in on itself as he tried to get the words out.

"You might be better off for answering them, though," the man said not unkindly. "I'm Cesar," he offered his hand, holding it at a safe distance so as not to intimidate the kid.

"Kelly," he returned the handshake after a moment of staring at the open hand, weighing up the risks. He desperately tried not to take too much pleasure in the way the warm hand melted through the icy feeling in his own fingers.

"Christ, kid, you're colder than a pair of yak's balls!" Cesar exclaimed, before looking around him. "One second, Kelly." He disappeared behind the counter and through a door, returning a moment later with an armful of clothes. "Put this on first," Cesar said, handing him a ratty old hoody from the University of Chicago, a flaming phoenix still just visible amongst the fading pattern.

Kelly almost dived into the piece of clothing. It was clearly a well-loved item, and most of the fleecy lining had long since worn away to next to nothing, but for Kelly it was like slipping in between two heating blankets.

"You'd best put this on, too," Cesar said, handing him a black leather jacket. It looked relatively new and although it was quite a short jacket, the added layer helped start to thaw Kelly somewhat. "I don't have any spare shoes or socks here, but when Stacie opens up next door, I'll go and see if she's got anything laying around."

"Thanks, but...I can't ask you to do that. I…I can't pay for anything," Kelly tried to explain, his voice choking up with emotion as the act of kindness seemed to exacerbate the vicious cruelty he had faced not twelve hours before.

"You didn't ask, I offered, and she runs a thrift store so it's not like I'll need to take out a second mortgage to put something on those ice-blocks you call feet," the old man shrugged off Kelly's unease. "Now, do you want to tell me what got you into this state?" Cesar asked kindly, laying a gentle hand on Kelly's shoulder, ignoring the slight flinch as he steered the kid towards the back room and a tattered but comfy armchair. He then moved to the sideboard and put the kettle on, thinking the kid looked like he needed to be defrosted from the inside and that a cup of coffee would do the trick.

"Not really," Kelly shook his head as he sat down. "Bad week, I guess."

"My car is in the shop and likely on her last legs, my dog ate rat poison and is still at vets at vast expense and my lousy son-in-law lost his job, again, and is asking me for money, again – that is a bad week. From the looks of things, you hit bad first thing Monday morning…hell, the way you look, bad doesn't even come close!"

"Thanks," Kelly laughed, Cesar's frank manner and blunt observations doing a lot to ease his frazzled nerves. "My mom's…she's in the hospital…a long term kind of deal," Kelly finally said, not wanting to explain why she was in the hospital.

"And your dad?" Cesar asked as he handed over the warm mug and started looking for some food, only to find a couple of Pop Tarts.

"Out of the picture, mostly," Kelly shrugged, trying to pretend that he didn't care – truth be told, his father's casual indifference was worse than anything his bat-shit crazy mother or sadistic carers could throw at him.

Cesar lifted an eyebrow at 'mostly, easily picking up on more than a little tension there. He felt sorry for the kid

"There anywhere else you can go?"

"DCFS put me in a group home, but I can't go back there," Kelly said subconsciously bringing his injured arms up across his battered ribs at the reminder of what his stay there had already cost him. "I won't go back there."

"No, I can see that might not be such a great idea," Cesar replied, a deep frown marring his features as he took in the bruised and battered figure in front of him and read between the lines at just where, exactly, that damage had come from. "There no place else you can go?"

"Not really," Kelly shook his head.

"No friends?" Cesar probed, trying to get the reticent kid to give him something to work with.

"What can they do?" Kelly asked with a mirthless laugh, genuinely interested in the answer because as far as he could see, there was nothing to be gained from going down that avenue. "I can't stay with them – they've got problems of their own," he said, thinking of the Darden's and their constant struggle since losing the family patriarch, and the Rice family, still trying to pick up the pieces of the damage caused by drink-induced violence. "I can go to them and I can bitch and moan and I can let off some steam, sure, but at the end of the day, I'll still have nowhere to go but back to DCFS, and I won't do that! I won't go near those sadistic, perverted assholes!"

"What the hell did they do to you, kid?" Cesar demanded a little more forcefully than he had intended, his concern peaking at the word 'perverted' and all the dreadful connotations those nine letters evoked.

"They didn't…not…" Kelly struggled to find the right words. He hadn't meant to say anything about what had happened back in Logan Square, too uncomfortable with the very idea of it all, but his anguish had brought it all out in a rush before he'd truly had time to gather the right words together. He could tell that Cesar was genuinely concerned – in fact, the guy looked like he wanted to hurt someone and Kelly gratefully got the feeling that ire was not directed his way.

"Kelly, you can talk to me," Cesar tried to encourage the kid who looked damn near to breaking point.

"One of them…he tried," Kelly offered tentatively, quickly looking up at the older man in an effort to gauge his reaction, relieved to see that no disgust or pity crossed his features. "But I got away."

Cesar finally nodded once he sensed that he wasn't going to get any more on the matter, not just yet, anyway. He tried desperately to keep his emotions in check, knowing just how jittery the kid must be feeling.

His own daughter had suffered through a similar experience, but unfortunately for her, she had not been able to escape – eighteen and half drugged out of her mind, she hadn't manage any form of effective resistance and the aftereffects of that night were still felt even years later.

Cesar himself hadn't found out the truth about that night for almost four years. Her silence was not from fear for the return of her tormentor or even the consequences of his actions, although the knock-on effect of that had kept her away from guys for a while and left her far more wary in general. No, her real anxiety was from wondering about what others, and especially her parents, would think of her should the events of that terrible night come to light.

She hadn't worried about what her father might do to the arsehole that had spiked her drink and forced himself upon her – it hadn't even crossed her mind that he would literally tear the neighbourhood apart in an effort to get to the one who had hurt his little angel. No, what she had been most scared about was finding out that should her father discover the truth, he would be angry or feel ashamed of her, perhaps even pity her, or, worst of all, feel disgusted by her.

Years after the event and all he could think about was the many ways in which he had failed her – at the time, he hadn't known that what she was hiding from him was more than the typical teenage escapades and rebellious acts, was, in fact, a much darker secret. He had done a lot of reflection, tried to pinpoint what he had missed, how he had failed her so monumentally that she would not even go to him in the first place in her hour of need.

Once Caterina had found out what depressing thoughts were preoccupying him, she had done her best to comfort him, as strange as that was given the circumstances – she'd told him that she had felt ashamed that she'd let herself get into such a position, that she had known the guy was suspect but had ignored the warning signs and then been unable to fight the guy off and protect herself. By the age of fifteen she'd lost her virginity and by eighteen she had a string of ex-boyfriends to her name, each one more troublesome than the last – when she left school, she had felt sure that she knew all there was to know about guys and their desires. She told her father that she had felt beyond stupid once her naivety was exposed in the cruellest of ways.

Cesar had spent years trying to reassure her that he had never held her at fault, even after finding out that she'd been drinking that night, something that she had somehow interpreted as meaning she 'deserved it'. He'd tried to impress upon her the fact that the only person to blame was the arsehole who'd spiked her drink and raped her. He tried to convince her that he was proud of the way she had overcome the trauma and that he was not embarrassed or ashamed or angry or disgusted, or any one of the long list of negative adjectives she had conjured up in her own mind.

For the most part, he believed that his daughter had reconciled with the events that occurred all those years ago. She was still affected by them, some days more than others, but she was no longer twisted up inside with self-disgust and self-recrimination, and that was more than he had ever dared to hope for when the whole affair had first come to light.

He didn't know if Kelly was telling the truth, if nothing had actually happened to him or if he was simply denying it because he didn't want to talk about what had truly occurred that night, but there were certain mannerisms that reminded him of Caterina all those years ago when she'd insisted that she was 'fine' after a bad night out with friends – the way he shied away from physical contact or even the possibility of it, the frequent glances around the room to check that his path to the exit was still free and clear, even the manner in which he tried to avoid eye contact for too long. If his aggressor had gone no further than threats, Kelly was still very visibly affected by the attack.

"There any place you can go, somewhere you feel safe, a sanctuary of sorts?" Cesar asked, desperately trying to find somewhere the kid could go to that didn't risk him being sent back to further abuse.

Kelly sat up straight at the word 'sanctuary' as one place came straight to mind. His father was intangibly linked with the place, and for that Kelly felt a deep well of resentment rise up in him, but he had always felt safe there, protected by the men and women that made the place special, made that brotherhood a large part of his dreams for the future.

He knew that there was just as much chance of being sent back to DCFS if he went there than anywhere else but from everything he had seen during his time at the house he thought it was unlikely they would hand him over without a fight, without trying to at least protect him first – he felt that they would listen to him, believe him, even, and do what they could to help him out of his god-awful circumstances.

"There's one place I could maybe go to," Kelly offered tentatively. He could always go, and if he was wrong and things went sour, well…then he would just have to run again. He was fast running out of options and he couldn't rely upon the kindness of strangers to help him out until his mother was out of the hospital.

"Name it, and I'll take you there," Cesar promised, feeling a little hope that there was perhaps someone who could help the poor kid, and ashamedly relieved that the burden of the kid's well-being would no longer be on his shoulders as he weighted up his options.

"Firehouse 51," Kelly stated firmly. "You can take me to Firehouse 51."

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