I was able to convince my dad to take Tyson home and then come back from me, him suddenly appearing to understand that this was something I had to do on my own. Besides, I didn't know what Cecile planned on saying to me and there was always the off chance that it was something my father didn't need to know about the boy he was fully aware I had lost my virginity to.

What was taking her so long? It felt like I had been waiting forever, even though I knew it had likely only been about half an hour. If my dad was back, he was staying in the parking lot and not budding into my business. I had also been able to have a cigarette for the first time in awhile, as smoking wasn't allowed at Tyson's grandpas place, even if I was outside. I needed to full on leave the property if I needed nicotine.

"I apologize greatly for my father." I turned my head, Cecile now sitting on the bench outside of the emergency room next to me. "He has… strong opinions on homosexuality. My mother is more worried about what everyone at her country club will think of her."

"Does your dad know that Wyatt's gay?" I asked, not looking at her as I took another drag of what would hopefully someday kill me.

"It's kind of an open secret. He likes to pretend that he doesn't, but this year wasn't the first time it's become an issue at school. He was bullied pretty badly back when we lived in California and he didn't last long in Aspen, either. My brother isn't afraid of what others think of him… he likes being the center of attention, even if it's not always for good reasons."

"Being sexually open doesn't automatically mean he wants to be the center of attention."

"You misunderstand what I mean. Wyatt is very good at finding other boys who are like him, even if they aren't open about it. There was a point where he was more than willing to use that information to manipulate people."

I thought back at what I had learned about Haru during their freshman year, that they had gotten into a fight and Wyatt had blackmailed him, telling most of the school that they were having sex on a regular basis. Oddly, people only seemed bothered by the sex part, meaning that a large enough amount of students were more than willing to ask him for sexual favors, enough where it wasn't seen as gay to get head from another guy so long as you weren't offering it back to him.

"What happened at his old school?" I asked. He had told me about Blake and I didn't have any reason to think he would lie about it.

"I guess it's easiest to just say he has episodes from time to time. It's like a really positive high, he does stupid things and in the moment thinks that they're great ideas." She sighed slightly, "I guess you could say he lacks self control at times."

"You said he's bipolar."

"That can cause episodes, but it isn't a sole reason for them. There are plenty of people who are bipolar who live perfectly normal lives."

"He never told me..." I looked away when I spoke, "I should have been able to see that he had mental health problems."

Gently, she placed a hand on my shoulder, making me turn her direction shyly. It was true that I wasn't attracted to girls, but as I looked at her it became easy to notice that Cecile was cute. She looked a lot like Wyatt, mostly in facial stricture and hair.

"It isn't your job to protect my baby brother, if he chose not to tell you, that's his decision."

"It's all my fault..." I brought my feet up onto the bench, squeezing myself into a ball and resting my head on my knees. "I'm the one who drove him away, I'm the reason he's been so tense… none of this would have happened if-"

"Unless you've left out significant information, I believe that you did not throw Wyatt off of a bridge yesterday. If you did throw him off a bridge, we have a different problem entirely."

"Of course I didn't."

"Then what happened cannot possibly be your fault."

Her face was crinkled in some sort of mix between annoyance and discomfort. I wasn't sure if she knew much in regards to what had happened… I was honestly a bit surprised that I hadn't been questioned by the police or anything like that, but I suppose all of our reactions to the events came off as genuine and didn't raise any red flags.

"It was that program he got into… they were using him to get to me. They had done it to Tyson too, threatened his friends in order to get what they wanted from him." I paused. "We don't fully understand what they're after."

"I believe your team made the news recently in Japan, correct?"

"We were abducted, there was an alert sent out for us. If any lesson was truly learned it's that we shouldn't get into a car or a bus with strangers. It's still being looked into."

"And you believe those people to be the same ones who manipulated my brother."

"I don't believe, I know. They're aware that Tyson and I are the strongest members of our team. I'm not saying that as a way to brag, it's just the truth… Tyson was easy enough to manipulate, he cares about all of us; he's a good friend. By putting Hillary and Kenny in danger it was easy enough to get the information they needed on him."

"I take the same can't be said about you."

"My team knows how to take care of themselves. Had Tyson not fought, Kenny would have found a way out. He's a smart kid."

"So why do you believe they chose Wyatt to join their program?"

I debated how much I should tell her, unsure if bringing someone else in on what had been happening throughout the past year was safe. Without knowing the full context, it was hard to understand what I knew to be the truth… that I had been the one they were after that day.

"They went after the one person they knew I wouldn't fight."

Cecile took a moment to take in the things I was saying, although it was hard to tell if she fully believed the story that I had just told her. The danger we had been put in last year had been brushed under the rug, and it was hard to talk about when I'm the one who had once been in Wyatt's shoes. I understood why he would believe the things they told him.

"Kai," She asked after a moment, sighing gently. "Do you love my brother…?"

I deep blush filled my face. I had been under the impression that she knew Wyatt and I had been in a relationship, but now that I thought about it, we only used the term in front of each other. We had never publicly declared it. Even when I came out to my team, I was pretty sure that the word 'boyfriend' had never actually been used.

"Wyatt means the absolute world to me."

"Were you involved in the battle that send him off the edge of the boardwalk?"

"No, I refused to fight him."

"Then you have done nothing that can cause you to be the person to blame for what happened."

I understood where she was coming from, but she didn't understand the context… it was easy to say that I can't blame myself when you're blind to the reality that had been the past year. She didn't understand that I had known all along how dangerous being a part of my life could be. She didn't understand how hard I had tried to prevent this from happening, or how much we had been fighting beforehand.

Had I not been such a coward, he wouldn't have left me. I could have warned him about Team PsyKick and what they were capable of but now it's too late. All of it could have been stopped but it wasn't.

I had run out of time.

"It isn't something that you can understand." I explained. "Only Wyatt and I really can."

We both allowed everything to sink in for a moment, not speaking and just letting the noises of the outdoors take over.

I had been an idiot for letting my guard down the way that I had. I wasn't a person who was meant to fall in love with somebody, I wasn't supposed to let anyone in the way that I had. The only person who I could ever fully trust was myself.

I had fucked everything up beyond any form of repair.

"What do you know about my brothers past?" Cecile asked, crossing her ankles and resting her hands daintily in her lap. The sadness on her face had become more obvious for reasons I was unsure of.

"I know he had trouble with other kids at school. He said that's why he transferred and made the decision to board in different country."

"Anything else?"

Of course I knew things, he had been relatively open with me since the beginning, but what exactly was she referring to? It really wasn't appropriate to discuss his sexual history behind his back, especially with his sister who likely didn't need or want to know any of that information.

"I mean," I began. "It's not really my place to talk about his past, not without him here at least, it feels too much like gossip."

"Our lives weren't terrible for the most part. We were born well off, there was always food on the table and we were accustomed to nice things since we were no more than young children. During new school years it wasn't uncommon for us to completely get rid of wardrobes and start anew, we always had credit cards we mostly had free range of, money was absolutely never an issue."

"I knew the both of you came from wealth, he was open about that."

"Material things often took the place of love when we were small. If we had whatever we wanted, our mother and father didn't have to actually pay us any attention and could focus on their work. Our father rarely acknowledged our existence until we were old enough to be assets for our families company. There was no having a normal conversation with him. If our father spoke to us, it normally meant that we were in trouble in a way that our mother or nanny couldn't handle."

"Yeah, he seems to have some anger issues."

"The corporate punishment was never too intense. He liked to mess with our minds more than he liked to cause physical harm. Sometimes it was kneeling on rice for a few hours, sometimes it involved being locked in a closet without access to food. It was never to a point where you could tell by looking at us that anything was wrong." I didn't say anything as she spoke, instead allowing myself to listen fully to what she was telling me. "When Wyatt was caught being intimate with another boy, our father beat the shit out of him."

I thought about what had happened when I found him at the hotel, bruises coating a part of his arm. He had explained that an argument had simply gotten out of hand, it had seemed like a one time situation that wasn't ever intended to happen.

"When he was in junior high?" I asked, "Before he came here?"

Was that the real reason he had left the states and came to study in Japan? To be far away from his father?

"He was eleven." She closed her eyes gently, biting at her lip as to calm herself, not allowing any tears to fall so long as we spoke. "Not many people within our family and friends believe in it. They all thought that there was something mentally wrong with him."

"Did you believe him?"

"Not at first. I'm not too proud to admit my arrogance. Lydia and I used to talk about him at school and when we got together at each others houses. We started actually researching it. He was my brother, after all. I loved him, even if I believed him to be broken. Besides, broken things can always be fixed."

"I don't think I know the name Lydia." I mentioned. "That's not one of your sisters, is it?"

"She was my best friend."

Her lip quivered rapidly, a tear managing to make it's way down the corner of her eye, running down her cheek in a small, damp line.

My heart had sunk into my stomach as the reality of what she was trying to tell me set in.

"She was the one who-"

"I don't like discussing it." She interrupted. "I mean, I know that I have to, especially now, I know that you have to understand. Wyatt's mental illness has little to do with the person he's grown up to be. He's been hurt and betrayed badly." A soft sob escaped her. "Do you have any idea what it feels like to know that you were the one who brought a predator into your home?"

"She thought it would fix him." I concluded, something that Wyatt had never mentioned.

"Believe it or not, forcing my preteen brother to perform oral sex on her did not change who he was. He never needed fixing, he was never broken."

"How did you find out?"

"We didn't learn until later, when Wyatt was ready to tell us what was happening. Our father was livid with him."

"Your father was angry at him for being raped?"

"He was angry at him for stopping it. He wondered if it had kept going if the pleasure of sex could change him, like reverse psychology. When he learned the reality of what had been happening, though… that she had been taking him into the bad part of the city, that my best friend had talked my baby brother into performing oral sex on fully grown men who then paid her for it..."

"None of that was his fault, he had been groomed."

"I genuinely thought he was going to kill him that night. He called him every cruel name you could possibly think of. He was a slut, a whore, a faggot… he had planned to send him off to conversion therapy, to disown him completely. Instead, it was decided that he would attend a boarding school away from our family. My father no longer wanted him."

"Then why is he still in such denial that he's gay? He clearly knows."

"It's the only choice he feels that he has. Wyatt is not yet old enough for him to legally disown. There had been a plan for him to come back during the winter holiday and my father wouldn't allow it. He convinced our mother to come up with an excuse as to why he had to stay, that it would make our family look bad to clients if they had him home."

I had never realized how little of his story I truly knew… I had decided that he would never understand my own trauma, using it as an excuse to leave him time and time again while expecting him to take me back because in my mind I was damaged and couldn't help it.

I had never bothered to question the true tragedy that was his life.

"He had told me parts of what happened..." I mumbled. "I never bothered to ask for more information. I was never there for him the way he had been there for me. That's why we broke up… he got sick of me… he had a right to be sick of me. I never deserved him."

"You're both still very young." Cecile went on. "You'll get there someday, but that will never happen if you can never forgive yourself. It is not your fault Wyatt is in the hospital."

"If I had just-"

"Kai," I stopped speaking as she said my name. "We cannot live life based on 'if'. Wyatt is in the hospital because of the people who took advantage of him, he is in the hospital because of his own stubbornness. They should have known the battle would put him in danger, that's exactly why there are regulations when it comes to beybattles. He should have known better than to seek you out, he should have seen what they were doing."

"He broke up with me because I'm a toxic person. He opened up to me and I failed him."

"Do you believe that it's my fault my brother was raped when he was young?"

I paused, unsure what she was getting at.

"Of course not, it was Lydia's fault, she was older; she knew better."

"Yet by your own logic, I should be the one to blame."

"That's not-"

"I blamed myself for years. I should have seen that she was grooming him, I should have questioned the times I woke up at night and she was no longer in my room. I didn't though. My 'should' is the same as your 'if'. If you truly believe that it's your fault what happened to him yesterday, then it is without a doubt my fault what happened five years ago."

I had run out of anything to say back to her, accepting that she was the one who ran the conversation. She would not accept my reasoning without forcing me to blame her for his past. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

"I'm sorry." I said.

"You drive Wyatt crazy sometimes, Kai." She gave the tiniest hint of a sad smile as she spoke. "He's head over heels for you, though. You helped my brother learn to accept his past and his flaws. He might not ever love himself, or have high self esteem, but I was proud of him for breaking up with you."

I raised an eyebrow at her.

"What do you mean?"

"You taught my brother that he's worth more than what he was getting from you. I will always be grateful for you because of that."

Standing up, Cecile brushed out the wrinkle in her skirt that had formed from sitting. She motioned for me to stand as well, taking a moment to wrap her arms around my shoulders as I did so.

Unsure what else to do, I hugged her back.