Hello! This idea has been floating around my head for a while, and I finally sat down to write it. It's pretty different from what I've written before, and definitely quite graphic and deals with heavy subjects such as abuse and mistreatment - so if you're sensitive to issues like this, then please keep that in mind. It's rated teen for a reason.

Background knowledge: set around the time of the pilot, although Callie was never sent to juvie and the events leading to her being sent there in the show haven't happened yet (she and Jude are still in their foster father's house). Apart from that, everything we know leading up to the pilot and before the show started is the same.

This will be a multi-chaptered story, and I will still be continuing with my other story 'Redemption'. Enjoy!

She stands at the stove, watching her little brother as he fills in the answers for his math homework, his face pulled into a tight frown. He gnaws on his pencil hungrily, and she chuckles a little, making a passing comment as she ruffles his hair on her way to the fridge. "Don't eat all that pencil, buddy. You won't be hungry for dinner."

He sticks his tongue out at her before turning back to the unsolved problem, groaning when his frustration begins to take over. She knows he's struggling – in fact, struggling is a euphemism, Jude is failing, but she can't bring herself to admit it. On the grand scheme of things, it's not something she really has time to worry about. But she'll make time; she always does.

She's chopping bacon on the counter when she feels his stare. He's been long distracted from his homework, but she hadn't wanted to see the disappointment on his face when she told him he had to continue. But she knows it'll have to be done soon. There's too many things to do tonight, and she knows they won't get much peace when he gets home from work, or the bar, or wherever it is that he spends his afternoons killing his liver with alcohol.

She sighs, looking around at the twelve-year-old boy. He is everything to her. For as long as she can remember, she's cared for him as if he were her own child. She makes sure he's eaten before she does, she bathes him, makes sure his homework is done, but most importantly, she shelters him from the terrible world they live in. She would do anything for her baby brother, and wouldn't hesitate to take a bullet if it came to that – she'd already taken countless beatings and punishments to protect him. The pain didn't bother her so long her younger sibling was safe. "Jude, just try one more and then I'll put the pasta on the stove to simmer and I'll help you. Okay?"

"Okay," he mumbles, turning back to the textbook and resuming his struggle against the trinomial equation.

She rubs her eyes, tired from barely three hours sleep the night before. Lance, their current foster father had stumbled in the front door past 1am, his state less than sober. He'd yelled at her when she said to keep the volume down, afraid Jude would waken; she didn't need him falling asleep in class again like he'd got in trouble for last week.

But her request had granted her more than yelling – the man had thrown the television remote at her, aiming for her head but missing and hitting her in the collarbone. This morning she'd woken to a garish bruise and an aching shoulder, although nothing she couldn't cover with a loose sweater. After all, she had to be thankful – she had been on the later end of Lance's bad temper quite a few times before now, each of which had been significantly worse than this little incident. It was easier, she'd discovered, when he was wasted – he was too buzzed to focus on anything for more than a few moments at a time, meaning it was easy for her to escape his tight grasps and tormenting words.

She places the ingredients for their makeshift dinner in the pan and settles it on the stove whilst making a mental note to ask Lance for money to go grocery shopping – there isn't much in the fridge, and she shudders, recalling a foster home years ago where the mom had 'forgotten' to feed them. The Jacob siblings had, thankfully, been removed by Bill before they'd starved to death, but the memory of her jutting collarbones and the thin skin stretched over her ribs is still something that shakes her to this day.

"Can you help me now?"

She turns to face her brother, shaking herself out of her thoughts and running her hands through her brown hair which hangs loose around her shoulders. "Sure, baby. Which one are you stuck on?"

His pencil hovers over the question, and Callie adverts her eyes to it. Within a passing glance, the answer rolls off her tongue. "Sixteen."

She wanders toward the cutlery drawer, pulling out the necessities as Jude scribbles down the answer. She doesn't miss his sigh of defeat as his sister manages to succumb the answer first time, and her heart softens for the boy.

"And this one?" He asks, pointing back down at the paper just as she's beginning to lay the table.

Shuffling back over to him, Callie takes a moment to register the question, her eyebrows furrowing. "No, you know that. What do you have to do?"

He looks at her, his eyes wide, whether it's because he's embarrassed or just genuinely confused, she doesn't know. "You have to divide it by the 'Y'," she prompts, only to receive another hesitated pause from Jude. Callie sighs. She knows that Jude should be able to get the answer, but her heart breaks for the little boy and she wishes that she could help him make up for the work he'd missed through all the school changes the pair had been through. "It's four. The answer's four," she says reluctantly, pushing his head playfully before setting the final cutlery down. "you should have known that."

"No, you should have known that!" he retorts playfully, a grin spreading across his face.

She shakes her head at his humour. "I did know that!"

"No you didn't!"

"Yeah, I did!"

"Na-uh!"

"Yeaaah!" she teases, grabbing Jude around the middle playfully, tickling him despite his protests to stop. "So cheeky!"

"Noooo! Stop!" Jude laughs, his squeals causing Callie to giggle as they roll around the kitchen's workbench.

"You stop!" she charades, fluffing his hair with her hands as she squeezes him close to her.

"What the hell is goin' on in here?"

The voice sends the siblings flying apart from each other, their giggles subdued to pants as they regain their breath. She stands from the bench, glaring at their foster father before wandering back over to the stove. She wasn't expecting him home for hours yet, and his entrance worries her, especially now that her and Jude's fooling around has subsequently soured his already grim mood.

The middle-aged man walks further into the kitchen. "Keep the noise down, alright? I'm sick and tired of hearing you scream like a girl!" he warns, proceeding through to the living room.

"I'm not a girl," Jude mumbles, but not quite quiet enough.

"Jude…" Callie warns, her heartbeat rising as she secretly pleads that Lance didn't hear her brother's comment. Talking back was never a good idea, especially not in this house – Callie had learned and paid for that within the first week of their placement.

But as usual, luck wasn't on her side. The man stops in his tracks, whipping around so fast his beer belly jiggles over his belt-clad jeans. "What did you say?" His eyes flair with anger.

Callie glares at Jude, pleading him not to respond, but the younger boy has a look of determination in his hazel eyes. "I said, 'I'm not a girl'!"

"Well, you sure sounded like one to me. But I don't know…maybe I should see for myself?" His voice is laced with sleazy humour, but to Callie, nothing about this ordeal is funny. The look of determination that once crossed Jude's face has dissipated into one of the scared little boy he represented the majority of their lives, and although the confusion about exactly what Lance was implying is clear in his eyes, the fear radiates off his body as he sits up straight in his seat.

Callie feels sick. She eyes her little brother, taking in his shrunken stance and watering eyes, before looking towards the large, greasy man imposing their safety net of the kitchen table. Callie tried never to let anything hurt her little brother, not in the six years they'd been in foster care, but sometimes a smack on the face or a shove into the wall was inevitable. It always hurt ten times over to see Jude injured rather than herself, in fact, Callie would take a beating every day for the rest of her life knowing her brother would be somewhere safe. But what Callie refused to let happen was for Jude to be violated in ways that no child should be.

She thinks back to the first time it happened, a shiver running up her spine. She had been twelve, no older than Jude is now. The guy had said that if she didn't let him look at her, then he'd beat her and Jude so hard that they'd rather be dead with the pain. She couldn't let that happen. She couldn't bear to see her baby brother hurt. So she let him; she let the man squeeze her tiny, pre-puberty breasts in his coarse-skinned hands. She bit down on her lip hard as he slipped his fingers down her jeans, and she closed her eyes. She thought about her mom, and how she'd dance around in the kitchen to the Beatles as they made biscuits and gravy together on rainy days. She thought about the warm hugs and soft kisses she used to place on Callie's head every night before she fell asleep. And somehow, no matter how morbid, no matter how much she would hate to see her mother's reaction to what she had just allowed to happen, the thought of the woman who had brought her into this world got her through the man's terrible crime. It didn't happen again after that, and she liked to think it was because her mom was protecting her.

She'd given up on that idea when she and Jude were moved into the Olmstead's, though.

Lance lets out a throaty laugh that almost sounds like a growl. "Don't look so scared; if you've got nothin' to hide then there's no need to worry, right?"

It's in that moment that Callie becomes aware of her surroundings again. The thoughts of previous foster homes slip to the corner of her mind, and she looks around. She will not let what happened to her happen to her baby brother.

Lance is standing close to Jude, his stare tormenting the small boy as he tries to keep the tears at bay. Callie is frozen, terrified of what the man's next steps will be. Her usual adrenaline has been slaughtered by the fear of what's about to happen, and despite the fact that her brain is yelling for her to do something, her feet are routed to the sticky linoleum floor.

"Leave me alone!" Jude growls with as much force as his trembling body can muster. "Stay away from me, you asshole!"

Normally Callie would reprimand Jude of his cursing, but in this moment, something that's almost like pride formulates in her as she watches Jude stand up for himself. Although really, this isn't the kind of situation she'd wished to feel pride for, in fact, she'd rather he were standing up to the boys who bully him at school for wearing the same shirt three times a week.

She's almost too wrapped up on how on earth she can feel something as ridiculous as proud in this terrifying situation that she doesn't see Lance's fist grasp the neck of Jude's shirt. The sound of the wooden bench scraping back on the floor is what alerts her to what's happening around her. This time, though, she's able to snap out of her frozen state, and she crosses the room in four agile strides, just in time to hear Jude cry out as the man shoves a pointed finger in his chest.

"What did you just call me?!" he roars, his face close to Jude's, who has tears running down his face now. "WHAT ON EARTH GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO SPEAK TO ME LIKE THAT?"

If it had been any other time, Callie would be struggling to supress a laugh at the complete irony of his comment. Of course the man who had been verbally, and often physically, abusing her and her brother would question the morality of said foster children.

But right now, Callie wasn't sure if she'd ever be able to laugh again.

"Get off of him!" She launches herself in between Jude and her foster father, pushing her brother behind her back, shielding him of the negative force towering over them.

She backs up to the wall, Jude still behind her as the man encroaches toward them. She doesn't think about what's going to come, she doesn't think about anything other than getting Jude out of the room right now before Lance begins to get really angry.

He's not stupid, though, much to Callie's dismay. He knows what she's trying to do when she slides her and Jude's conjoined unit farther along the wall to the back door. And he takes the time to enjoy watching her struggle to get Jude to safety before he comes around behind them, grabbing Jude by the arm and pulling him from behind Callie's human shield.

"You need to learn that it's not OK to talk to people like that!" Lance's voice is hard and unforgiving as he smacks Jude hard across the face. His yelp makes Callie's knees go weak, and her head snaps around to face her brother as he reaches to clutch his swollen cheek. Lance lets out a snort, "See, screams just like a girl!"

"Stay away from him!" Callie yells. Her blood boiling in her veins with hate for the man before her, she acts on adrenaline and launches herself towards him, pushing his shoulders with all her strength. But the action doesn't grant the outcome she'd desired – Lance barely loses his footing – and instead brings out more rage from the depths of Lance's monstrous heart.

"Is that all you've got?" he says, laughing incredulously.

"Callie," Jude wails from behind, causing her to shift her attention to the trembling boy. His eyes are wide with fear and his face is red from tears and Callie wants nothing more than to wrap him in her arms and whisper soothing words of comfort into his ears.

Instead, Callie forces a smile and whispers, "Jude, baby. Go upstairs. I'll be up in a sec, okay?"

He looks reluctant to leave, and Callie finds his eyes with hers, pleading him to go. She needs to make sure he's safe – she will not let him get hurt again.

Before she can see if her brother follows her request, she feels a hand grab a fistful of her hair and her head is yanked around to face Lance's sneering grin. "Hey, I'm talking to you!"

"You're hurting me," she says sharply as she tries to pull out of his grasp, but it only makes his hold on her tighten.

"Oh yeah? Well it's going to hurt a lot more if you don't start showin' me some respect, alright? You kids are nothin' but trouble around here, especially that fag of a brother of yours."

She doesn't know why, but the comment angers her. Deep down, she knows Jude is different. She knows he is sensitive and emotionally intuitive, and that's what makes him special. She'll love him no matter what – he's her baby brother, after all. She'd do anything for him. But to insult his sexuality – something she knew Jude had become curious about now that he was surrounded by older kids in a middle school environment – was something she was most definitely not okay with.

"Don't you ever speak about him like that," Callie growls, finally pulling herself free of Lance's grasp a fistful of hair lighter and a new tender spot on her head. But she barely feels the pain as she sees the look that crosses over Lance's face, a look that say's he didn't quite expect her to react.

He raises his sausage like finger and wiggles it in front of Callie's face as he leans in close to her. She almost gags when she smells the whiskey on his breath as spit flies out his mouth with his clipped words. "You've got a lot of cheek tellin' me how to speak, girl."

She stands ridged, looking firmly into Lance's eyes as she mutters, "Well, you won't have to worry about that for much longer."

"What you gonna do, huh?" he scoffs, gripping Callie's chin between his thumb and forefinger roughly. "run away?"

Right then, as Callie looks into the man's bloodshot eyes – yellow from years of drinking and probably undiagnosed diabetes – she doesn't have a definitive answer. She knows that she could survive out on the streets; she'd encountered plenty girls her age in similar situations, but with Jude, that option could never stand. She wouldn't really consider submitting her baby brother into a life of extreme poverty, crime and danger, would she? The thought of having Jude out on the street, freezing and almost starving to death, had once made her shudder, but now she doesn't scold herself for contemplating the idea at all – in fact, right in this moment, unknowing of what could come, with this large, blusterous man swinging his fist tauntingly around her face, running away to the streets with Jude did seem like the better option. She'd do anything to get them out of the grasp of this beastly man. But as she drags her eyes away from Lance's reddening face and flicks them to where Jude stands with his hands clamped over his ears, in her heart, she knows that she would never be able to keep them both alive out on the streets. She knows that Jude needs to stay in school so he can go to college one day and become a successful doctor or businessman or whatever he dreams to be. If she made the decision to run away, she wouldn't ever be able to give him that. The foster system sucks ass, but at least it provides them with a roof over their heads and demands they be in some form of education – on the streets, these were the things they would lack, and unfortunately, the things they really need the most.

"You're lucky you're even still in this house, darlin'." She shivers at the pet name in disgust. She'd never be anybody's darlin', and she certainly didn't want to be his. "Now, say you're sorry for disrespecting me."

She looks at the man before her in confusion, not quite believing that he was going to let her go so easy. She hadn't been the one showing disrespect, of course, but she'd take this any day over a beating. Besides, who is she to question his command when he could have already taken a swing at her face by now had he wanted to? "I'm…uhh…I'm sorry," she mumbles, the words lumpy in her mouth.

He's quiet for a moment, and she lets her muscles relax slightly, recognising this as an ending to the heated encounter. Usually, after a run in with Lance, the man would offer a stare down before hauling himself in front of the TV for the rest of the evening, leaving Callie to tend to whichever bumps or bruises he had given to her.

But of course, she was foolish to believe things could be made right with such little reprimands. "What was that?" he challenges, voice again laced with sarcasm, causing her to inwardly groan.

She tenses her stature, readying herself from what's about to come. She won't speak – she won't let him make her apologise for his wrongdoings when he's most likely going to hit her anyway. At least now the hits are meaningful; he won't get the satisfaction of thinking he's lured her into a false sense of security this way.

She can sense it coming before the heel of his hand cracks against her cheekbone, but she doesn't bother wasting her vigour to duck out of his way this time; she'd need that energy later on if he began to target her in more vulnerable areas, or if he, god forbid, decided to go after Jude again.

She eyes Lance carefully as he bellows on about how she's 'nothing but a piece of no-good filth' and that his money would be 'better off feeding a pack of dogs' than her, waiting for just the right moment to provoke him so Jude could slip up the stairs unnoticed. As he blusters on, holding her against the wall by her shirt, Callie takes the opportunity to divert her eyes to Jude. His body trembles as he watches the scene unfold before him, and the sight sickens Callie.

"You're not even listening to me, are you?"

At the voice, she whips her head back around and restates her focus back on the lumbering man before her, just as he begins to shake her by the shoulders. "I thought I told you to listen to me!"

"Jude, go upstairs!" she shouts, her head rattling on her shoulders as Lance's grip tightens on her forearms. But her request isn't met. Jude stands frozen, his mouth forming a distinct O shape as beads of salt water begin to roll down his face.

"Obviously, I didn't make it clear enough," Lance growls, loosening his grip on her arms, only to bring his hands around her neck.

But where Callie should feel fear, fear for the fact that he could end her life by snapping her neck in just seconds, she see's the fact that his hands are occupied, and her stature is relatively stilled, as an opportunity that she'll never have again.

As the man barks insult after insult at her, she bends her knee and brings it up hard into his groin, forcefully hitting him in his private areas. She hopes that it'll teach him not to torment little boys about showing their gentiles, and lets out a gleeful smile as the man releases his grip from her neck and clutches his crotch in pain.

She knows better than to laugh, but she can't help but revel at Lance's exposure to her world of hurt. She takes a moment then to look at Jude, hoping he will share the same sense of fulfilment that she finally managed to get him back. But Jude's face doesn't hold even a trace of a smile, in fact, his tears seem to have dried up and his skin is sheet white. For a fleeting moment, she wonders if maybe Jude is hurt more than she anticipated – maybe his head hit the wall in the collision with Lance and he has some kind of weird concussion thing? What if there is a bleed in his brain, couldn't people die from that? Just as she's about to rush over to her brother, he lets out a tentative whisper, his eyes wide as they look past her shrinking form. "Callie…"

Before she can register Jude's warning, there is a fist in her hair and her head is yanked back harshly, and a hand plummeting its way towards her face. The hot pain sends white stars into her vision, and just as she's beginning to stand up, the fist is back, hitting her over and over.

She bites down on her tongue, trying hard not to let the screams of excruciating pain escape her lips as to not scare Jude, but when she feels her head smack off the hardwood floor and a foot in her stomach, the air escapes her lungs in a throaty wail. She shakily rolls onto her stomach in a feeble attempt to defend herself before Lance moves onto the next round of kicking, and raises her head weakly to scan the room for Jude. Through her blurry, darkening vision, her little brother is nowhere to be seen, but instead of the usual panic she'd feel when Jude is out of her line of sight, she feels relief. He'll have gone upstairs, just like she told him to. He'll be safe up there.

With the immediate sense of security that Jude is safe, and the thumping ache residing in her head and much of her body, it doesn't quite hit Callie that the next round of kicks hasn't come yet. Instead, she relishes the quiet, and almost allows for the blackness to pull her under – until she hears the distinct click, metal against metal, of a revolver.

Her body is numb now and she can almost hear the blood rushing around in her head. Somehow, she has to find the energy to run, to get away from this man and his gun – and if all else fails, at least stand over Jude. She hadn't been lying when she'd said she'd take a bullet for him – she just never really thought that it would actually come to that. Callie wonders if this is what it is like to wake up living a nightmare, just as in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, a text she had been studying in English class. She hasn't finished the novella yet, but somehow, she hopes that things get better for the protagonist, Gregor. It strikes her now that Gregor's character is almost a little like herself; closed off and seen only as a burden. She hopes that he found someone who understood him – if she were part of such a fictional universe, she would definitely take the time to get to know the creature he had become. That's all anyone really needs; to be understood. And it's something that Callie has never been given any experience of.

What she didn't know, though, is that things didn't get better for Gregor. And by the looks of things, Callie was following in his footsteps.

She doesn't hear anything for a while, and this scares her. What if Lance has gone upstairs to get Jude? Here she is, lying sprawled out on the floor pondering the ending of some stupid book, when she should be upstairs protecting her baby brother from that man. He has a freaking gun!

Just the thought of Jude being in close proximity to Lance without her being there to protect him sends adrenaline rushing through Callie's veins. She heaves herself to her feet, putting the hot, sharp pain to the back of her mind as she focuses on the task ahead of her. Her vision is clouded with black spots, and her hearing is muffled from the pulsing throb in her head, but that doesn't stop the devastating crack of the gun penetrating her eardrums.

"Jude!" she screams, limbs trembling with fear as she forces herself forward. After pathetically stumbling around the room, she reaches the staircase, mentally kicking herself for letting her guard down. How did she not know he had a gun? How could she have just let herself be defeated like this and leave Jude practically helpless at the hands of a monster like Lance?

But the questions go unanswered as she is stopped in her formidable excursion upstairs by a hollow knock on the front door. She doesn't know who it could possibly be, Lance only keeps a few friends as far as she has observed, but if it did happen to be one of his drinking buddies, then she couldn't be more thankful.

The knocking starts again after a moment of silence, and Callie wonders if she should use her small amount energy to get the door, or if she should try and diffuse the situation upstairs. The noise from the gunshot still rings in her ears, and the decision to be with Jude sends her struggling up the stairs, but before she can even master the first step, Lance's heaving footsteps vibrate against the wood and he appears on the landing.

"You," he says, locking eyes with Callie and lunging for her. He grabs her roughly by the arm and drags her callously round the corner. "Stay in here." She is shoved into the cupboard under the stairs, and before she has the chance to respond, the door is shut promptly in her face, a blanket of darkness enveloping her.

She listens as he trudges away, her head beginning to pound again and her bones screaming in pain. She is no longer numb here in the dark, unknowing to where her brother is or what Lance will do to them next. Here, in the dark, she is living a nightmare. And, much like Gregor Samsa, she is afraid that she will never wake up.

Thanks for reading - please review. - K :)