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Akio

THE GROUND was cold underneath him. It was hard, too, but it was the cold that seeped into him. Into his skin and bones. It was the cold that made him shake, eyes barely opening to see the bars in front of him, around him. The cage felt smaller each time he woke up in it. The air felt colder.

The footsteps were loud, the slight heel on the shiny black dress shoes making a click-clack as his father crossed the basement. He closed his eyes, swallowing back a sob. He knew it would only make things worse for him.

“Pathetic.”

He looked up and flinched. It wasn’t his father standing before him. It was a mirror image of himself. Who he might have become had his father been successful in breaking him. In molding him into the son he so desperately wanted. The son who’d gotten away.

But it wasn’t his brother who stared down at him with dead eyes. It wasn’t his brother in that expensive suit, a dark red splotch spreading on the left side of that white shirt. He was looking at his worst nightmare; the man he could have become. Darkness tainted the very air around him. That bullet wound in the exact place he’d shot his father.

He hadn’t done it to be heroic. To save the others.

He’d done it for himself.

To survive. To escape the darkness he might become himself.

The other him stepped closer, the red now dripping onto the floor. He crouched down, an ugly grin on his face as their eyes met.

“Pathetic,” he spat again.

He raised his right hand, a gun in it, and then he smiled. The wickedness burned through him when that gun fired and the only good part of him died.

∞ ∞ ∞

Akio woke with a startled breath, body shaking as his heart hammered in his chest. He gasped for air, squeezing his eyes closed as he clutched the sheets. A nightmare. It was only a nightmare.

He blinked, slowly orienting himself. He was in his bed. His room. His door was slightly ajar, which was not how he’d left it. His brother had probably left it like that when he’d checked on him after he’d fallen asleep.

There were no lights on, no footsteps on the hardwood. He was relieved to know that he hadn’t screamed this time. If he had, his sister would be crawling into his bed to hold him while his brother would be pacing the room looking guilty, his husband trying to calm everyone.

They’d done that particular song and dance many times since he’d been saved from his father. He and Diesel’s father. Diesel hadn’t been good at hiding his guilt. Especially in the beginning. That guilt wasn’t his to bear, though. They both knew it was their father’s. Diesel had escaped because his mother had taken him with her. Akio hadn’t even been born when they’d run. Diesel couldn’t have saved him then, and when he found out that they were brothers, he had already saved him.

Diesel and Chris had given him a home. A family. Love. Things he’d never truly had before. He was good. He was happy. He shouldn’t be having nightmares about the past and those dreaded what-ifs. In fact, he hadn’t had that nightmare for months. He wasn’t sure why it was back now. Stress from the last finals approaching? Or perhaps the uncertainty that came with graduating because he didn’t know what came next?

He’d lie awake for hours, trying to find a reason, knowing he wouldn’t find one.