Disclaimer: Really not mine.

A/N: This started out far, far different than it ended up. It's one of the darkest things I've ever written actually – the kind of fic that makes even me wonder what's going on inside my head. The idea behind it actually started a year ago, while I was writing It Only Hurts When I Breathe, although this isn't a part of the continuity from that fic series. It strikes me that I usually write about how Valon's life pre-Doma was most influenced by his relationship with the kindly nun we see in canon, but the fact remains that he was locked up after he parted from (with?) her, and from the scant flashback images of him going crazy enough to be jimmied into a straightjacket, he seemed to have a pretty poor time of it while he was there. That had to affect him just as much, if not more, than losing her and her church.

Warning: This fic contains some adult and disturbing themes.

Nor Iron Bars a Cage

© Scribbler, March/April 2009.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all. -- Eldridge Cleaver

"Lotta bad stuff happens in juvie … stuff a lady like you shouldn't hear about … I'm not a bad guy, Mai. I'm a thug, and a screw-up, but I'm not a bad guy. Lotta bad stuff … juvie … sickos in places like that …" -- Valon (It Only Hurts When I Breathe)

They say some people are just born evil. Maybe that's true. Maybe it isn't. Who really knows? Everyone has the capacity for evil, even little old ladies and the Boy Scouts helping them across the street. That little old lady may have a flick-knife in her purse, and that Boy Scout might be eyeing the oncoming truck for quite a different reason than you'd think. Weirder things have happened than the corruption of gentle stereotypes.

Like Egyptian pharaohs being locked in ancient puzzles. Like teenagers deciding the fate of mankind with a children's card game. Like evil, mind-controlling space-rocks. Like giant beams of light stealing people's souls. Like friendship being more than a word, more than an idea, more than the loose bond most people think of when they hear it: just an excuse to gossip or get blind drunk on a Friday night and think piddling in your own yard is funny.

But at this time, the time we're talking about, all that weird stuff was in the future. The souls of those who would one day battle to damn and save the world were still being moulded into the people they'd become. At this time there was no ancient puzzle. The teenagers were only children. There was no unbridled friendship. The now we're talking about was a very different place, and it wasn't pleasant for one soul in particular.

Massive understatement.

On the more positive flipside, if everyone has the potential for evil inside them, they also have the potential for good. The first people who contained and rehabilitated criminals instead of just killing them had this in mind. Everyone, they thought, deserves a second chance. Everyone should be afforded the same opportunity to think about their mistakes, repent, and make something of the life they almost ruined. It was all very philanthropic and charitable. Made you feel good to be human, that sort of thing.

Too bad reality hates philanthropy and mugs charity for its chump change.

Juvie is a lot like adult prison. Same barred windows with reinforced glass. Same concrete walls. Same square exercise yard. Same air of discontent. Same ineffective restlessness. Same angry eyes. Same counsellors trying to claw you back from the edge. Same backstabbing and selling-out. Same corruption. Same lines drawn in the sand – nobody knows where they were, but cross them at your peril. Just like in prison, in juvie the best you can do is buddy up to the biggest, meanest, most powerful inmates and hope their rep protects you; preventative medicine instead of curative.

Now let's hear that resounding cry; the one that almost all juvenile delinquents, no matter how tough, say or think to themselves when they get off the bus and see the place they're going to be staying for the foreseeable future: Oh shit.

Valon was determined to be different from the start. His first thought when he arrived was: Meh. I've seen worse. He wasn't even trying to be devil-may-care. He really had. He didn't think 'oh shit' until much later, when his tongue was reflexively poking the hole where his tooth used to be, while he tried to protect his ribs from kicking feet; but we'll get to that part.

He wasn't scrawny, but he was scrawnier than practically everyone else in D-Block. Despite this, he didn't seek out protection. He was too proud for that. At the beginning, when he was first dumped in this Juvenile Correctional Facility (a respectable name for a concrete block with windows poked in the sides like an architect's afterthought), he thought he could take of himself. He was used to taking care of himself, and not even the brief period with Sister Mary Catherine had blunted his skills.

He learned fast, however, that the streets of Edogawa were easy compared to Rose Heart Juvenile Correctional Centre – and he'd be damned if that name wasn't the single most ironic thing in the world. Nothing grew there except contempt, and the only thing a heart was good for was pumping blood. Juvie wasn't just about survival, it was about politics, and Valon had always sucked at that sort of thing. He had no finesse and no instinct when it came to letting things slide even if someone deserved a smack in the mouth. But in juvie, sometimes survival and politics they were one and the same, which was where the real trouble started for him.

Rose Heart was shaped like a giant T, with multiple levels and several wings separated by thick doors in narrow corridors, all designed to make riots and break-outs as difficult as possible. Rose Heart wasn't some pansy minimum security place. Most of the time it was a placeholder; just somewhere to keep the psychos who'd been clumsy and tipped off the authorities early about their problems.

It felt like a cross between a rat run and a sewage system. You often didn't know where you were if you weren't familiar with the layout. All the walls were mint green breezeblock from floor to waist, then sullen grey up to the ceiling, where eyeball-scorching strip-lights beat down all day and all night. There was a constant buzzing from these no matter where you went, which soon became tedious to the point of jamming your own ears full of whatever came to hand – chewed gum; torn up pillows; other guys' hair, scalp optional.

The rooms across the top of the T were where the kids themselves slept. These small single-windowed oblongs weren't called cells, but pods, and rather than the concrete hellholes of popular literature, they were adequately furnished, if minimalist spaces that their occupants were only allowed into at night. Other rooms were reserved for classes, with the idea that just because they were incarcerated didn't mean they should get off going to school. They needed to be fully-functioning future go-getters of society when they got out, after all. It was all part of an initiative by well-meaning legislators to stop institutionalisation and give the inmates hope that they'd one day be free again. Likewise was the practice of splitting known gang members between the pods and moving them around, often without warning, to prevent them stirring up trouble as a group and lengthening their sentences.

Somehow, however, they found ways of getting together anyway, and patrolled like a shoal of piranha. Depending on who they were, even the guards (sorry, Correctional Officers) were wary of them. Just because only a few gangbangers from the same crew had been caught at the same time didn't mean their numbers wouldn't swell once they got inside and started recruiting.

The buzz of new blood made them pick out Valon immediately. He didn't even have to do anything; just being there was enough. People knew what he was in for, but that just made him a curiosity. Several didn't even believe someone so small could take on four grown men and beat them to pulp.

Every so often Valon thought being the small-fry was some kind of cosmic punishment for not giving up the brawling when Sister Mary Catherine asked him to. He'd he would, many times, but never made good on his word. His reasons had seemed so sensible at the time. Now they tasted like ashes in his mouth. Was lying to a nun worse than lying to a regular person? Using his fists was as natural to him as breathing, and he could no more give up one than the other. He wished she could've understood that, but in her world his way of dealing with things was grubby and wrong.

For one brief, shining moment Valon had wanted a place in her world. He'd almost believed he could have it, too. He wasn't one of her orphans; he didn't depend on her to keep a roof over his head, or to feed and clothe him. Even so, she had treated him like one of her own. She'd treated him like he was actually worth something, and that had touched a part of Valon that he had thought was dead. It took him a while to even recognise what made him sneak out of the apartment on Sunday mornings and stand guard outside a church while his schoolmates got wasted behind the bike-sheds.

It was simple: Sister Mary Catherine had given Valon hope. Not clear hope; not hope with a defined goal, but the formless kind that stirred sluggishly, fighting its way through years of neglect and abuse so it could make a person question the assumption they'd always held: that they were destined for a short, brutal life and should be happy with whatever they could grab along the way. Without doing more than just being herself, she had shown him another option.

But reality hates hope, even more than it hates philanthropy and charity – at least as far as Valon could tell. At only fifteen, his life experiences hadn't led him to think much different. Reality stamped on hope the way he'd stamped on one guy's ankle and another's pelvis in the alley behind the church.

At the very least his place on the juvie bottom rung was karma for whaling on those guys. Maddened by rage and grief, Valon had half killed three of them: two-thirds murdered their leader. Smashed the guy's face in with a lead pipe, he remembered, also recalling the sound of breaking molars, the crack of a jawbone coming loose, and the feel of bloody spittle spraying into his own eyes. Valon had grown up in the kind of neighbourhood where even the junkyard dogs carried semi-automatic weapons and kept their heads down. He'd known people with HIV and AIDS who couldn't afford healthcare, and seen the terrible damage they could do, but that hadn't even crossed his mind as he blinked away the blood dripping off his eyelashes.

He didn't even know if that guy had survived. If he had, he certainly wasn't a looker anymore. He'd be wearing the reminder of what he'd done to Sister Mary Catherine, her orphans and her church for the rest of his life, unless he could afford a decent plastic surgeon – which Valon strongly doubted. The guy would likely be a freak-show now; someone who stood out in the crowd for all the wrong reasons. Nobody wanted the one who didn't fit in.

Well, unless they'd been in juvie as long as half the boys at Rose Heart.

Juvie really was a lot like prison. Valon had heard grizzled old guys talking about the Big House in the church, on days when he went along to clean candlesticks and sweep floors like some freaking choirboy. Even Kei hadn't done that.

Valon laughed humourlessly to think about it now, when he laughed at all. Had he really gone to such trouble to do extra chores? Some days it had been all he could do to feed himself, make sure his clothes weren't so dirty he couldn't bend his knees or elbows, and remember to pick up black coffee so his father could sober up and make his shift at the button factory. Yet he always took a detour from his apartment, past the pawn shop's window, so he could check his reflection in the glass before he arrived.

He had always been trying to impress Sister Mary Catherine, he realised now. He'd always been trying to make out that his life was better than it actually was, as if she cared about his crummy dad or his absentee mother – neither of whom had come to his trial, or gone to her funeral on his behalf since he hadn't been allowed to attend. Sister Mary Catherine's opinion had actually mattered to Valon.

Maybe that was why he'd lied to her. Was lying to a nun still so bad if you did it to spare her innocence? He remembered the wretched old boozers with red-rimmed eyes, who had mumbled for hours to anybody who'd listen. They had slumped in the pews, baring the scars on their souls from the stuff during their sentences that had ruined them for normal life.

"Fucks you up, kid," one had said repeatedly, shaking his head from side to side in a wide arc like some wounded animal watching for predators. "Human on human cruelty. Really fucks you up. Think you've heard it all, and then someone comes up with a new way to make you wish you was an earthworm. Earthworms got a more decent standard of living than half the poor cretins on the inside. You're a good kid – a godly kid, always in this here church, keeping it nice. I seen you. I seen you here, cleaning up, talking to that nun and the pastor. They like you. You're all right, kid. You stay away from anything that'd land you inside. Y'hear me? Outside, kid. Life's better when you're on the outside."

Valon had chuckled at being called a 'good kid', once he got over his surprise. Him? A good kid? A godly kid? As if. He didn't feel very godly when he was making sure Daddy Dearest didn't swallow his own tongue when he passed out with a whisky bottle in his hand. Neither did he feel it when watching to make sure the clerk was turned away at the only convenience store without security cameras. Godly kids didn't exist on a diet of candy bars and gum because that was all they'd been able to stuff in their pockets. Even so, Valon had thanked the guy, who had enough gin on his breath to make a martini and probably wouldn't remember any of their conversation in a few hours.

The following Sunday he mimicked Sister Mary Catherine's prayer after the guy was found dead in a doorway.

Well, it wasn't what the old boozer meant, but Valon had followed his advice, albeit inadvertently. He was still on the outside, even when he got to juvie; it was just a different kind of outside than before. Valon lived on the periphery. He didn't belong. He didn't have any marks or colours to ally him to a particular crew, which made him fair game for recruiters and anyone bored and frustrated enough to need a punching bag.

Like prison, Juvie had the same jaded guards who'd wanted to be police officers but didn't make the grade. Resentful and feckless, they rarely stepped in if they could help it. Most seemed to think the kids they guarded deserved everything they got. Rose Heart housed the roughest, meanest wastes of space, and the guards habitually turned a blind eye unless the warden was around. Maybe it was all some huge social experiment, Valon thought: put all the crap together, turn up the heat and watch what floated to the surface.

Didn't matter what floated, though. It was still crap, and all crap had to be flushed eventually.

He found himself on the defensive from the moment he stepped off the bus. He was still bubbling from his anger over Sister Mary Catherine, his parents, and everything else that had gone wrong with his life before he was even old enough to buy liquor. Subsequently he shunned all offers from recruiters. Anyone who approached was a chance to vent the poison inside him without being held back. After all, Sister Mary Catherine was dead. What did he care about impressing anyone with his self-control anymore? After the recruiters came the bullies, but he went to work on them, too.

Mistake Number One.

The first boy who tried to beat on him was a skinny sucker, really full of himself, who thought Valon was easy pickings. He went away with a broken nose. It wasn't even an impressive fight; just a simple duck-and-punch that left Valon unsatisfied, but which heralded the way for so much more.

Rose Heart was single-sex, just like regular prison. It had the same soupy atmosphere of testosterone and teenage hormones. Same overcrowding. Same picking of sides. Same drawing of lines. Same protection racket for those who crossed them, inadvertently or not.

Valon fought it. He fought everything and everyone, actually; the whole shebang. He tried to keep himself out of the quagmire, above the hidden hierarchy, but you couldn't stop a single droplet becoming part of a jug of water once it was in. Still, he tried; futile, maybe, but he tried. He was used to fighting his corner, but quickly learned there were some fights you couldn't win with just one set of fists.

In juvie, there were some fights you couldn't win with fists at all.

Later he couldn't believe he'd actually been grateful when his roommate first stepped in and defended him against Broken Nose's gang. Valon had barely spoken to the boy who shared his pod, and the other boy hadn't exactly been chatty in those first livid days. It'd seemed more like he was sizing Valon up; trying to figure out where an angry, independent shrimp like him could possibly fit in a place like Rose Heart. More than once Valon had caught the guy checking his skin for gang tatts when he put on the regulation orange jumpsuit. Valon had plenty of marks from past fights, plus those times as a little boy when Daddy Dearest had gone at him with whatever came to hand, until Valon grew up enough to fight back. No deliberate tattoos, though. Maybe it would've been better if he had.

Maybe. The whole world was a morass of maybes.

He should've left home years ago, except that part of him had always been kind of waiting for his mother to come back. Maybe if he hadn't been in Edogawa none of this would've happened. Maybe if he'd run away before he met Sister Mary Catherine things would've been different – for both of them. Maybe it would've been better if his mother, heavily pregnant and unable to do more than waddle, had lost her baby when she 'tripped' and fell down the stairs. Onto some knuckles.

Maybe, maybe, maybe …

Cheek pillowed in a pool of his own blood, staring at a tooth that had been in his mouth until two minutes ago, Valon lifted his eyes enough to see legs like tree trunks and fists the size of ham hocks standing over him. For a second he thought this was another guy come to get his licks in, but then he realised who it was, and that the boy was actually on his side. He tried to get up, but was too woozy. What he thought he could do with a concussion and a dislocated shoulder was anyone's guess.

"He's new. He doesn't know how to play the game, man," said his roommate.

"Don't mean he don't gotta play by the rules, man," the gang leader replied, obviously put out. It seemed Valon's saviour had clout at least equal to his own – impressive, with a crew that size. Even more so when you realised his roommate didn't lead a crew himself.

A shrug. Amazing, really, how someone could look casual and menacing at the same time. Valon's roommate carried himself with an easy authority, as if he could beat the shit out of anyone he liked if only he could be bothered. Strands of dark hair curled like shiny fishhooks in front of his ears. "So I'll teach him the rules."

"You?"

"You have a problem with that? Is nobody allowed to be a free agent anymore? Everybody has to join with you guys now?" One step forward. That was all it took to make them back off.

"No. We don't got no problem with that, Yukio." The gang leader held up his hands. "I mean Hogosha." Sizzling so much you could fry bacon on his anger, he looked down, met Valon's eyes and hissed, "But you understand something, pipsqueak: this ain't the outside. Things don't work the same around here. Either you get wise, or you get dead. Get it?"

One more step sent them scuttling away. "He got it."

The thing that stuck worst in Valon's craw? It was all bullshit. 'This ain't the outside. Things don't work the same around here' – garbage! Juvie was just like the outside in one crucial way.

Valon should've realised, especially after what happened to Sister Mary Catherine. Power was the one thing the whole world understood, no matter the language, time or place. The powerful ruled the weak, and the weak either crept along trying not to be noticed, or huddled against the powerful, using them as a shield. Those who tried to pretend otherwise died quick. And painfully. Nobody ever did anything for nothing.

Right?

"I could've handled them," Valon slurred as his rescuer held out a hand to help him up. He ignored the hand, slipped, and found himself hauled unceremoniously to his feet by his armpits. He just about screamed with agony.

"Yeah. Sure you could. That's why they made you eat your own teeth." His roommate's voice carried a chuckle that cut through the pain.

Valon shoved away from the guy with his good arm. He felt queasy, but pasted on his game face. "I don't need any help. I'm fine on my own."

"Uh-huh. Sure. Say that again in a week." The other boy had waited a moment, and then wrapped one powerful arm around Valon, gripping and shoving upward with his other. Valon's shoulder popped back into place with a revolting noise and a blast of bright lights and sudden, dizzying nausea. "I'm Yukio, by the way. Yukio Hogosha. In for GBH."

Grievous Bodily Harm. That made sense, with the way those other guys had backed off so fast. Valon both replied to this and said thank you for the save by turning away before he threw up.

"I don't need any help," he said when he could, not bothering to give his name or to hint at the crime that had landed him in here. His trial had passed in a blur of grief and anger, and he couldn't be sure exactly which of the charges had stuck.

Yukio shrugged genially. "We'll see." He ambled off, making the kid with the broken nose duck disappear from where he'd been listening to Valon not take the offer.

Valon tried once more to look out for himself. For his trouble he was cornered in the washroom that night – not the whole gang this time, just Broken Nose and two guys who could've been his brothers based on appearance. Most guys in their gang wore a do-rag, so sometimes it was hard to tell them apart.

It was more than just a single week later that Valon finally got out of the hospital wing. The scar on his chest, tracing the indent between two upper ribs like someone had tried to filet him, would be with him for the rest of his life – however long that might actually be in Rose Heart. The doctors had saved him, but 'close call' only just covered it.

Yukio was waiting when the guards brought him back to their pod. "Still think you're fine on your own?" he asked, still genial, like the whole thing amused him.

Valon said nothing. He didn't have much use for words anymore, and apparently his fists were saying all the wrong things – verbose but ineffective, like politicians' promises.

"Funny, but Ren and his gang don't bother me much." Yukio leaned back, watching Valon with a crafty smile. "Anybody would think they were scared of me or something."

Valon looked away, feeling trapped in more ways than one but determined not to show it.

"You ready to take me up on that offer?"

"Why do you even care what happens to me?"

"You're screwed on your own."

"So? Are you some big humanitarian or something?"

Yukio shrugged. "You're also my roommate."

"What does that have to do with it?"

"Same thing it did with my last one, until they switched everyone around and he got moved to a pod with someone else."

"Huh?" Valon's chest hurt like blazes and he was in no mood for puzzles. He'd never had much truck with them anyway. He preferred things to be laid out straight, so you could understand them easily. That was why he preferred fighting to politics: you see who you were up against in a fight. You could see when they fell.

Broken Nose and his pals had made their meaning abundantly clear. They played dirty. Only luck had saved Valon. Next time, he knew, he wouldn't survive the encounter. They didn't want to recruit him anymore.

Yukio watched for his reaction. "It makes you convenient."

That was when Valon started to really understand what the old boozers in the church had meant.

Yukio's reputation was a strong one. Guys kept away from Valon when it became clear who he'd finally made his alliance with. It'd been ridiculous to think he could get through his sentence without allying himself somewhere. He felt the others' hateful glances burning into his back when everyone was brought together for meals. The cafeteria hummed with the broth of inmates' emotions, but there always seemed a large dose reserved especially for him.

He couldn't figure out why he stood out so much on people's radar when all he wanted anymore was to fly beneath it. He no longer sought out fights, but the damage was already done. Maybe it was because he'd had the nerve to survive the washroom attack. Maybe it was because the warden, in a rare bit of proactive bullshit, had insisted on putting his attackers into solitary confinement without meals, and they blamed Valon for their punishment. Valon reminded himself to thank the stupid paper-pushing idiot for that later. That additional punishment had just made a bad situation worse. The warden couldn't have crippled Valon more if he'd tried. Having the biggest gang in the place sore at him made it necessary for Yukio to step in more often than he might've otherwise. It also made it necessary for Valon to pay for that protection.

When I get out of here, he thought as he was pressed so hard into the mattress he could barely breathe, I'm gonna make sure nobody ever gets the better of me again. I'm gonna make sure I never have to be protected again.

He didn't cry out. He never did. He used to, in the beginning when he wasn't used to it and his pride demanded he resist, but that just seemed to encourage instead of deter. Instead he bit down so hard that when Yukio flipped him over there was a little red splotch of blood where his lip had been.

I'm gonna be able to protect myself, Valon silently promised. Gonna make sure I'm stronger than anybody else. And if just punching them doesn't work, I'm gonna make sure I've got tools to … to ... oh God …

He stared up into the other boy's face as his own head rocked back and his heels scraped the underside of the top bunk.

I'm gonna make you pay for this, he thought, not sure if he meant Yukio, the warden, God, or someone else entirely.

He used to pray. He used to know a few parables and the Lord's Prayer, and even some psalms. He wasn't devout or anything. His father was usually too drunk to do anything as active as go to church. His mother was little more than a handful of memories he'd held close until he figured out she wasn't coming back for him. Valon wasn't sure whether she was religious or not. Their tenement block in Edogawa was a hive of different faiths, with enough Catholics to merit a small church he didn't even go near until he was fourteen and realised, with sickening clarity, that he'd never see his mother again.

Mostly he remembered his mother as a mass of unruly blonde hair and wounded but kind eyes that made it difficult to believe she'd run off and left him with his dad the way she had.

He was ten when she went missing. His last memory was of her coming into his room late one night, sitting on his bed and stroking his hair back from his face. He'd looked sleepily up at her, and even then he'd thought it was odd that she wasn't wearing her usual bathrobe and slippers. She looked pretty in jeans, the way some women could, and had tucked a plain black shirt into the waistband to plump out her horribly tiny middle. She'd kissed him softly on his forehead, smelling of soap instead of cigarettes. She'd had a shower. She never had showers. She never dressed up or went out anywhere. Valon had known, in that childish way kids do, that she had no friends, no family, no connections other than him and his father.

"Mom? Wassamatter?"

She'd told him to hush and go back to sleep, then got up and left his room, shutting the door behind her. The next morning she was gone. She hadn't said she loved him, or that she'd come back for him, but Valon had just assumed both for a long, long time.

That particular wake-up call had come when his father's fist connected so squarely that Valon's skull had left a dent in the wall where he ricocheted off. It was like all the neurons had suddenly been jarred loose, crashing together and then spinning away into new patterns that spelled it out in unavoidable terms: If she was coming back for him she'd already have done it by now. If she was setting up a new life for them he would've heard from her already. If she loved him she wouldn't have left him behind.

She wasn't coming back.

Valon had stared sightlessly at the ceiling, as his father cursed and checked to see whether he was still alive.

"Hey, brat, you in there?"

Hardly the most caring thing for a father to say to his only son. Then again, Valon's father had never made caring for him a top priority. Valon had been taking his licks for years, lying through his teeth on those few occasions he ended up in the emergency room. He said he'd been fighting with other kids. It was only a half-lie – he was usually mixed up in some scuffle or other, but necessity had taught him how to get away unhurt most of the time. At home, however, there were only so many tricks he could pull to get out of the firing line. Staring woozily into his father's face, he'd wondered whether he'd only stuck it out because his mother wouldn't have known where to look for him if he hadn't stayed put.

Except she wasn't coming back.

She. Wasn't. Coming. Back.

"Brat?" Apprehension had etched his father's voice. "Ah, shit, I do not need this after the day I've had." The day he'd had was the whole reason Valon was on the floor with tweety-birds flapping around his head, but that hadn't seemed to occur to him.

"M'alive," Valon had muttered.

"You can still see okay? How many fingers am I holding up?"

He'd blinked. "Three?"

"Good enough. Now get your lazy ass off the floor and pull yourself together." Then his father had gone to watch television. Just like that, he'd erased the whole thing from his consciousness and sat, drinking in Wheel of Fortune like nothing was wrong. The saddest part? It wasn't even unusual.

Valon had staggered to his feet, still seeing without truly seeing his surroundings. He'd stumbled out of their apartment, and kept on stumbling until the ringing in his ears got so loud he just lay down and waited for it to go away or kill him – whichever came first.

Neither of his parents had fostered much spirituality in their son. It had taken Sister Mary Catherine finding him, collapsed on her front step, to make him think about religion as more than something other people – other suckers – were into.

He'd come to in an ambulance, a woman in a weird outfit holding his hand and murmuring about some mother called Mary Hale. Or something. For one bleary second he'd thought he must've died and joined his own mother – her being dead was a nicer prospect than her just forgetting she had a kid. Then he'd snapped back to reality and had to be held down by the paramedic – one who'd patched him up several times before, when he got into street fights, and whose testimony later ensured the words 'challenging behaviour', 'violent tendencies' and 'problems with authority' were written on his case file.

"Hush now," the weirdly dressed woman had murmured, stroking his hair back from his forehead and doing what the paramedic's heavy-handedness couldn't.

Her touch was light and cool. Valon had frozen, staring up at her but remembering someone else touching him like that. It had still been too raw, that wound. It had paralysed him from the brain stem down.

"You're safe. Nobody's going to hurt you." She'd smiled, though there wasn't much to smile about. In that moment Valon was sunk, pulled under by the riptide of her kindness at a moment he'd thought there was none left for him in the world. Unfamiliar emotion had swamped him, and he'd done what any fourteen-year-old with a chip on his shoulder would've done.

He'd panicked.

Confused and still aching, he'd waited until the paramedic was occupied with talking to her, and then bolted. The ambulance had been parked, so Valon just launched himself off the gurney, blew out through the doors and hit the ground running.

"Hey, you little – come back here!" the paramedic had bellowed. "Fuck's sake. Stupid little – you little idiot!"

Valon hadn't looked back.

He came back, though. Later, when the ambulance was gone, he'd lingered on the corner and slowly edged his way back towards the church. The building attached to it was austere, but the windows were full of light, which streaked out when the front door suddenly opened. For a second he froze like a rabbit in headlights, until he heard the woman's voice.

"Please, don't run off again. Would you like something to eat?" She'd stood in the doorway, still smiling, but with a smidge of uncertainty this time. She'd been worried he'd bolt again. Even so, she'd been waiting for him. She'd been watching for him, as if she'd hoped he would come back.

"Me?" Confused by her concern – she didn't even know him – Valon had shaken his head, backing away. "I … I got parents!" It hadn't been what he wanted to say. He wasn't sure what he meant by it, but the words had spewed out of his mouth unbidden. He hadn't added 'they'll be waiting for me' or 'they know where I am'. He hadn't been sure he could sound convincing enough, or that he even wanted to defend his mother anymore. His father could go fuck himself. He wasn't worth defending. The only reason Valon had done so before, when faced with authority figures, was because he wanted to stick around in case his mother turned up again.

But she wasn't coming back.

The knowledge had thrummed through him like a second heartbeat.

The woman in the doorway had nodded. "All right. You needn't stay if you don't want to, or if you have somewhere else you're supposed to be. But we have plenty to spare, if you're hungry."

"I don't have any money."

"You don't need to pay. This isn't that sort of place."

A small face had poked around the door beside her. "Sister, is that the kid you found before? The one you called the amblee-ance for?"

"Stupid." A second face had appeared, slightly older than the first. "It's ambulance. And look at his bandages. Of course it's the same kid. You think he's playing Attack of the Mummy?"

"I don't like that movie. You always pick the scary movies, Kei."

"Do not."

"Do too!"

"Hush now, both of you."

To Valon's surprise, the boy and girl had parted without another word. The woman hadn't had to raise a hand to either of them, or even yell; they'd just … done what she said.

He'd frozen again, uncertain. Against his better judgement, he'd met her eyes. They were clear blue, striking a pang in his memory.

"Hush now. Go back to sleep."

He'd taken a hesitant step forward. "What's in it for you?"

"The fate of my immortal soul." She'd laughed at his expression. "Never mind. My name is Sister Mary Catherine. This is St. Joseph's. We look after those who need it because they need it, and that's what we get out of it."

Valon had stared at her, trying to wring the truth out of her expression. Warily, he found nothing in her eyes that wasn't already obvious in her smile. "I'm Valon."

"Nice to meet you, Valon."

And just like that, the most important person ever was in his life.

In the months that had followed, her compassion had made him seriously wonder whether he had a soul, and what colour it was if he did. Sister Mary Catherine had been that rare thing: a genuinely selfless person. She didn't do things for the buzz of self-satisfaction. She helped because people needed helping, and worked herself ragged doing what she could to facilitate them. If Valon had only heard about her from someone else he would've scoffed that she was too good to be true; but she was true, and he knew her goodness firsthand. She tried to change the world in increments, one needy soul at a time, and rarely let anything get her down. Even when some big businessman bought up the surrounding area and tried to force the closure of the church, and the protection racket put pressure on her to try and squeeze out the tiny orphanage when the businessman failed, she kept her smile and kept on helping people. Thugs were knocking at her door every damn day, but she still stuck to her beliefs and her values like a pit-bull with lockjaw and a rosary around its neck.

"Why don't you move in with us, Valon?" Mimi, the little girl who'd peered at him that first night, once asked. They'd been sitting on the floor of the Rec Room – a threadbare space the orphanage kids went to unwind after they'd finished their homework, because they actually did it, and as soon as they got home from school, too. Mimi had challenged Valon to a game of cards, since he'd taught her how to play poker, and he was trying his hardest to lose without making it too obvious. "You're here all the time anyway."

"Don't be dumb, Mimi," Kei had sniped from the armchair. "He still has family to look after him." The bitterness in his voice had been unmistakable. Before Valon came along, Kei had been the oldest boy and had seen himself as something of a champion. Valon was grittier; more willing to get down to brass tacks and wade into protecting the church with fists windmilling. Kei couldn't compete with that, and seemed to take perverse pleasure whenever Sister Mary Catherine rebuked Valon for fighting.

"Violence only begets more violence. I would've thought you, Valon, of all people, would understand that."

Valon had winced whenever she said stuff like that. He'd liked to fool himself that she didn't suspect half the stuff his father did when he was pissed, pissed off, or both.

But Valon just couldn't let it go whenever someone insulted the church, or did something against the place. He once chased down a guy who put a stone through a window. They'd gone fro three streets before Valon had bulldozed into him. He'd knocked out the guy's front teeth with a single punch, even though the guy had twenty pounds on him, most of it height. Valon never did get the hang of turning the other cheek, like Sister Mary Catherine did.

"Oh yeah," Mimi had said, looking over the top of her hand as if seeing Valon differently. Her eyes had turned sad and he'd squirmed.

And that was the rub of it: Valon couldn't have become a resident because he wasn't an orphan. Even if his father finally had drunk himself to death, and his mother couldn't be found, there were other relatives who would've had to take him in. Valon knew they existed somewhere in Kyoto, even though he'd never met them. So he'd looked out for his father, making sure the stupid asshole didn't die or wreck himself so badly that Valon would be taken into care. He'd wanted to stay in Edogawa. He'd wanted to stay near the church.

Funny how life turned out.

Yeah, a real barrel of laughs.

Valon used to have faith; enough to believe in the Big Guy and that fabled Master Plan of His. But he'd since learned that God was as much a crock of shit as everything else. That Master Plan was as believable as the kindness in his mother's gaze. Had God saved Mimi, or Kei? Had He put out the flames that burned their beds while they were still in them? Had He protected Sister Mary Catherine? She'd been one of His own, but she'd still died screaming, all her compassion and soft words burned up along with Valon's budding thoughts that maybe, just maybe, violence wasn't the best way after all.

Maybe it wasn't, but it was the only way he understood; the only way anyone seemed to understand. If you weren't willing to fight, you weren't willing to survive.

Yukio got it. That was why he could meet the eyes of Ren, the gang leader who'd warned Valon to wise up. That was why Ren's crew instinctively backed off whenever Yukio was near. Power and knowing how to wield it: that was what counted in the end.

Right?

Yukio grunted and shuddered above him. He was heavy. Valon found it hard to breathe with the hand planted in the centre of his chest. He wanted to knock it away, but knew he couldn't. His injury, healed into a livid purple scar now, still twinged when Yukio slumped down on top of him. The angle compressed Valon's lower spine so he was bent almost double.

He shut his eyes against the memories. Not here, not now; he couldn't think about the people's he'd lost at a time like this. How the hell had he been reduced to this? He hadn't exactly started from a prime spot on the ladder, but now he wasn't even clinging onto the bottom rung.

The humiliation was as bad as the actual pain; much less than a beating but still enough that he couldn't ignore it. That used to be worse in the beginning, too, despite the lube Yukio somehow bargained for from unknown sources. Yukio had power and influence amongst the inmates. He could make stuff happen that others couldn't. Valon was appalled that he was actually growing used to the discomfort when he walked each following morning.

Seeing the other boys, however, and thinking they must suspect … that Valon would never get used to. He felt like he'd failed somehow; the same sick feeling that had settled like a coating of lead over his heart when he'd heard the scream of fire engines from his bedroom, and bolted from his apartment to find the church burning. Even the shrewd eyes of the guards were too much. Yukio was never overt when he wasn't stepping in on Valon's behalf, but Valon still viewed everyone with suspicion, wondering if they'd guessed what he'd had to sacrifice just to stay alive in here.

Is it really worth it? whispered a voice in his mind. Is your life really worth all this sacrifice?

Yes, he always replied, but not because he actually believed he had much worth living for anymore.

The bare facts? He was afraid of dying. It was his deepest, most closely guarded secret. He was scared of death, especially after hearing Sister Mary Catherine screaming behind the locked doors of the orphanage – padlocked from the outside by the men who'd set the fires. That was the only reason thoughts of killing himself, of saying 'to hell with everything' and getting it over with, were buried as soon as they appeared. Valon was a survivor. He always had been, and always would be. That was too bone-deep to change. In the dead of night, the air heavy with sweat and other scents, when he questioned himself: What was there left for him now, really? But still, that fear bit deep, and he kept going because the alternative made all the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

He wondered whether he got his survival instinct from his mother; a woman who was willing to abandon her child to ensure her own escape from a life not worth living.

"A guy's got needs," Yukio said when they were alone, shrugging. "Not my fault there aren't any girls around. You expect me to strain my hand from now until I'm eighteen?" Then he'd patted Valon's arm, making him flinch. "Trust me; it's not because of your pretty blue eyes. If there was a nice girl around, no way would I need you. I'm no faggot. The problem is there aren't any girls. It's just us, and I'm not going to deny myself one of the few pleasures I've got left just because you want to welch on our bargain."

Valon tried to tell himself he didn't care, but even he didn't believe himself. He was a shitty liar. How the hell Sister Mary Catherine had ever believed him when he said he'd stop fighting was a miracle.

"You're very honest," said a counsellor who was brought in to examine all the boys for a new therapy programme. He was an outsider, and seemed out of place in Rose Heart. "Loyal to those whom you feel deserve it. Something of a protection complex regarding women. Quite a high moral code, but it doesn't really match modern ethics, which would account for how you ended up in your current predicament. Ethics inform the law. You're more of an 'eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth' fellow."

"Like in the Bible." The words came out before Valon could stop them.

The counsellor blinked at him from behind glass. He wore a monocle, which Valon thought was affected and stupid, especially since the guy was also balding and bearded. He looked like a butler in a badly fitting suit. "Er, yes." He consulted his notes from the various assessments, appraisals, reviews and tests Valon had gone through. He was flummoxed. Valon was pleased. "Quite."

They'd been a weird collection, those tests; conducted on everyone over a period of time. Valon couldn't work out any rhyme or reason to them: identifying blobs on pieces of card, figuring out Math problems in under eighteen seconds, talking to a shrink about what had landed them in juvie and how they felt about their crimes now, and entering a pitch-dark room and then being directed to climb a ladder to see whether or not he'd do it, amongst other things.

"Would prayer help ease your mind now?" the shrink had asked when Valon admitted about the burning church – no point denying it since it was all down in his files anyhow. "Rose Heart has a chapel, with services every Sunday. You could attend one."

Valon had said no, but then on impulse asked to be taken to the chapel after he left the guy's office. He didn't go in, though. He just stood outside the door, staring at it, and then told the guard he wanted to go back to his pod. He didn't feel anything; no compulsion to go in and get down on his knees. It hadn't been religion that tempted him into church before.

One day, not long after the end of the tests, Valon was summoned by a guard carrying a message. It was Visiting Hour, and at first Valon thought his father had finally come to see him. They hadn't been able to track down his mother to tell her where he was. However, instead what he found was the TV room, empty except for himself. Their time in there was severely limited and strictly controlled, included on their 'curriculum' mainly to appease appeal groups. Valon got to stay there for the entire afternoon, finally returning to his pod in the evening, after the others had all completed their chores.

"Why me?" he asked the guard, who stood outside the door to make sure he didn't try to leave. "Why am I getting special treatment?"

"Beats me. Something to do with that therapy programme y'all tried out for."

"Therapy that gets me extra TV privileges?" Valon eyed the TV like it might explode. "Seems pretty bizarre."

"I ain't no therapist, kid. I'm just paid to make sure you watch the damn thing and don't go nowhere."

If the windfall was meant to make Valon feel better about his situation, it failed. Badly. All it really did was stir up more antipathy towards him. The other boys whispered amongst themselves that he must be doing something for the higher-ups in order to get special treatment. Someone made the suggestion he was selling their secrets to the warden – ridiculous, since he didn't know any secrets worth telling, but the idea took hold and spread like wildfire.

Their hostility drove into him like cactus needles whenever he got too near. All conversations stopped when he went by. Even though he wasn't one, everyone began to think of him as a spy, and treated him accordingly. The rarefied atmosphere of juvie bred suspicion and distrust like mould on damp bread. If it hadn't been for Yukio, Valon probably would have found all his troubles ended by a shiv in the jostling lunch line, or a smuggled-in cheese-wire around his neck in the showers, but Yukio's help brought its own set of problems.

A few days after this, a scraggy boy with sunken eyes and a small scar on his chin approached Yukio in the exercise yard. Valon hadn't seen him before, but since a few of the pods had been mixed up recently, and their occupants swapped around, that wasn't surprising. The boy obviously knew Yukio, though his pace faltered when he saw Valon.

"H-Hey, Yukio." He didn't call him Hogosha, like most boys did. Valon had thought only he was allowed to call Yukio by his first name.

Yukio glanced at the newcomer and then glanced away again, uninterested.

"Yukio?"

"What do you want, Eijiki?"

The boy flinched at his irritated tone. "How've you, um, been?"

"You seriously asking that?"

"Um – um …"

Yukio levelled a look at him that Valon had seen him use on Ren many times: What are you doing in my airspace? The boy evidently recognised it too. He flinched, one foot scooting backwards as though it was verging on flight and just waiting for his brain to catch up. He had a nervy air, his eyes constantly darting around. Everything about him screamed 'victim'. More than that, it screamed 'prey', and there were plenty of predators roaming Rose Heart.

Yukio sighed between his teeth. "Look, Eijiki, whatever you're thinking, you know our deal's void now, right?"

"B-But -"

"You're not my problem anymore."

The boy flinched again. Panic entered his face, widening his eyes. "Please, Yukio …"

"You can't reimburse me anymore, since you got moved to a different pod. It's basic economics: you can't have what you can't pay for."

"But I didn't choose to move!"

"I've got a new roommate now."

"Please, Yukio, they'll kill me. The others … Ren's guys … I heard them talking. They've got it in for me." He didn't add the last part of the sentence: Because I allied myself with you and Ren hates your guts.

Valon watched Yukio's reaction closely. Yukio sniffed, doing something with his shoulders that could've been a shrug, but could just as easily be rolling them to get the kinks out of his back. "My condolences."

The boy let out a noise like a bird hitting the windshield of an oncoming car. Valon saw Broken Nose watching them as he fled. He sneered when he caught Valon's eye and melted into the crowd.

The next morning Valon was taken back to the TV room for more unwanted downtime. Along the way he heard two guards talking about how some kid who'd been transferred across from A-Block had been found hanging from the ceiling of his cell. He'd torn up his own sheets, knotted them together and threaded them through the pipes, then jumped off the toilet.

"Poor schmuck," one guard said. He was to sympathy what napalm was to face cream. "Some of them just can't cut it in this place. It drives them loopy."

"I heard that," his companion replied.

So did Valon. All too clearly.

He stood in the TV room, engulfed by an emotion he didn't usually feel. He had to think hard to recognise it.

Loneliness. It startled him. He hadn't felt lonely since … since Sister Mary Catherine died.

Back then he'd been so full of rage nothing else could get through. He hadn't actually grieved for her. Now, alone and with nothing to do but reflect, that grief wormed its way through the mesh of his anger like molasses dripping through several layers of steel wire netting; thick, black and impossible to completely scrape away. Suddenly Valon was so desperately lonely that it froze him up. Even the day he realised his mother wasn't coming for him hadn't been as potent.

Was this really what his life had become? He was a giant cliché – a kid from a broken home in a poor neighbourhood, raised by a combination of violent and absent parents, who'd ended up in jail. He was just lucky he hadn't gone the whole hog and become a drug addict as well. Where was it written that his destiny was to always end up on the bottom of the heap? Who had decided his fate?

Whoever it was, Valon wanted a second opinion.

The only thing that had raised him out of his cliché was Sister Mary Catherine, and he hadn't been allowed to keep her.

"I …" he said huskily to the empty room. He cleared his throat, feeling stupid but unable to stop. His voice was scratchy from disuse and his tongue felt like it was made from cotton wool. "I miss you."

There was no reply.

When the guard opened the door he found Valon exactly where he'd left him. The man blinked, then shook his head, muttering, "Everything about you kids confuses the hell outta me, I swear it."

More privileges followed, though the therapy programme itself never materialised. Valon tried to refuse, but the guards always bundled him off to whatever benefit he'd been assigned. He was given extra food at dinner, though he lost his appetite. He was often excused from chores, and while the other boys were herded into the exercise yard he went to the TV room and lounged around, antsy and frustrated.

None of it made him feel better, if that was what it was for. He couldn't understand why it was happening; couldn't enjoy the benefits when he felt like he was living on borrowed time until one of Ren's crew got to him away from Yukio. Well, let them try. Yukio may look out for him, but that didn't mean Valon was totally helpless. He remembered the four guys in the alley, the feel of metal pipe caving cheekbone, and his fists tightened. He wasn't half as pathetic as they seemed to think.

He kicked in the TV. It was all he could think to do, to make the higher-ups understand that he didn't want to be rewarded. When he came back the next day he found the TV replaced but unplugged, and a deck of cards on the table.

Valon picked them up gingerly. They were emblazoned with pictures of monsters and things. He vaguely remembered them as Duel Monsters, though he'd never actually played before. Kei used to have some. He would lay them out reverently on the Rec Room floor while Valon played poker with Mimi, or one of the other little kids, and would try to tempt Valon's opponent over by saying Duel Monsters was so much cooler than regular card games.

Those cards probably turned to ash as Kei's flesh melted off his bones. Or maybe he'd suffocated before he could burn to death. Valon imagined him, trying to get Mimi and the others out, because that was the sort of thing Kei would do. Valon knew, because it was the sort of thing he would do in the same situation probably bundling them along roughly, not caring whether they were even fully awake yet. He imagined Kei picking up Mimi and carrying her, only to find the doors locked. He saw them with his mind's eye, scrabbling at the handle and yelling, always yelling, until they slumped, overcome by smoke and heat …

His fist tightened around the deck.

He knew poker and stuff like that from his dad. His father's buddies used to say Valon was a better player than his old man could ever be, which usually got Valon a beating for embarrassing him after they all went home. Poker was a man's game, but Duel Monsters was kids' stuff. Valon had never really considered himself a kid. Even less of one now. Still, the memories of Kei made him not toss this deck aside. Ridiculously, he felt closer to his old life just by holding them.

Next to the deck was a rule book. There was nothing else on the table, though it was clear he was being given something new to do rather than just sit twiddling his thumbs. Trying to distract himself from his own thoughts, and the murderous look Ren had thrown his way earlier, Valon started to read.

It wasn't such an easy game after all, he learned. The basic concept concealed a litany of complications that distracted him until the guards came back and he was returned to his pod. Kei must have been a closet genius to master this stuff. It must really have galled him, how Valon just walked in and took over as self-appointed protector of the church and orphanage. Did Sister Mary Catherine ever notice that? If she had, she'd never said; but then again she wouldn't, would she?

The next time he was taken to the TV room, the deck was still there. Valon found himself picking up individual cards and rearranging them, using them to block out the venom and bitterness that were his constant companions the other twenty-something hours of the day. Each card Valon examined and placed down again seemed like an apology.

"Polymerisation," he muttered. "Scapegoat. Holy Barrier Mirror Force." He paused, staring at the last one before putting it down. His breath caught for a second at the next. "Resurrection of the Dead …"

Life wasn't a stupid card game.

He threw the deck away from him.

But that night, as Yukio panted above him, Valon found himself going back to that room in his memory, rearranging the deck and imagining he was there instead of in his own bed. He could see each one he'd touched, clear as if they were in front of him: Polymerisation, Scapegoat, Holy Barrier Mirror Force, and Resurrection of the Dead, which seemed to mock him even when it was just a memory. He thought about the monsters on the other cards, and even though it was dumb, he envisioned them magically coming to life when the exercise yard was full: Cyber Commander would shoot anyone who tried to escape, while Blast Sphere blew the whole place to smithereens. It barely worked, but it was better than nothing – better than facing the reality he'd been reduced to, or the events that had led up to it. Over time he used this method more and more, and eventually he even stopped feeling the twinge of shame that he could grieve for people he'd lost to fire and hatred while imagining the same destruction for someone else.

However much he hated what he had become, Valon thought it couldn't get much worse. He believed Yukio's reputation was watertight, and that thought, at least, let him glare back at the boys who didn't get extra food, extra TV, or who absorbed his workload when he was let off chores. It never occurred to him that Yukio might have to remind people why they should leave him alone – without getting himself put in solitary confinement in the process.

"Hey, Yukio!" Ren sniped one night when they were all in the showers, cleaning up after 'gym class' – another woeful initiative to make this seem like school instead of prison.

"Buzz off, Ren," Yukio replied in a bored voice, standing under the neighbouring showerhead but not even raising his eyes. He'd heard the over-familiar use of his name, all right, but had chosen not to react. "I'm too tired to deal with your shit today."

"I hear you're too tired to deal with anybody's shit anymore, man."

"I said buzz off."

"I hear," said Ren, "you're too busy making yourself tired by doing other things."

"What part of 'get out of my face' are you having trouble with?"

Ren looked around at the other boys. "I hear you've gone all pally-pally with that teacher. What's her name again: Miss Suki?" He sniggered, as if getting a crush on a teacher was shameful "I hear how you stay behind after class all the time to ask her questions about quadratic equations and how to do your multiplication tables. Do you clean the room for her, too? The big bad Yukio is a proper little teacher's pet." He put on a childish voice, though nobody sniggered the way they might have if Yukio wasn't right there.

Valon saw the muscles in Yukio's back become rigid at Ren's words. He knew that Yukio had, indeed, been hanging around the school wing to help out Miss Suki, a newly transferred Maths teacher who was nervous about working in a correctional facility as part of an outreach programme run by the local university. Yukio had taken an immediate shine to her; something Ren had apparently noticed too, and wanted to use to show him up. Far too many of his crew thought he was too soft for not challenging Yukio outright, but Valon knew Yukio would smash Ren to pieces in a straight-up fight. Ren knew it too. Consequently, he'd been waiting for an opportunity like this to get back at the bigger boy for making him look bad in front of his crew. It may not have seemed like much, but in their microcosmic world every little slip was treated bigger than it would be on the outside.

"Do you bring her an apple each day?" Ren asked sweetly. "Or do you settle for just banging her over her desk when we're out of sight?"

Several of the boys did snicker at this, but soon shut up at Yukio's expression.

Yukio's eyes were like blazing pieces of coal. His tiredness had vanished. He took a swing at Ren, but somehow Ren managed to dance away, laughing at him some more. Valon sensed the mood of the onlookers shifting in Ren's direction.

"Too slow, Yukio," Ren sing-songed. "I guess you really are tired from all that time with Miss Suki. Teacher's pet. You let her pet you? I'll bet you do. I'll bet you go 'woof woof' and sit up and beg for her."

"You shut up about her," Yukio said in a rough voice that gave Valon pause.

Abruptly he remembered a time in Group Counselling, when they'd all been forced to talk about their families. Valon had muttered about the nights his dad got drunk and how his mom ran away, which mirrored a lot of the stories and didn't make him feel one jot better. Yukio, on the other hand, had grudgingly recounted how his mother was gunned down in her job as a Teaching Assistant at the local public school, when a kid who'd stopped taking the medication for his schizophrenia brought his uncle's rifle to school.

Several boys at Rose Heart were on meds. At least one had to be regularly held down to take them.

Miss Suki was a very nervous woman, with fluttery hands and a habit of clearing her throat when she got panicked. She was always clearing her throat a lot in front of their class. Her large brown eyes got even larger when she sensed things slipping and the boys getting out of control. She was young and inexperienced, and shouldn't really have been part of the outreach at all. She wasn't built for this kind of place. More than once Yukio had turned and glared at the others, or said something that silenced them and made her look at him with pathetic gratitude.

It was suddenly apparent than maybe what Yukio was nursing for her wasn't a crush at all.

Whether or not Ren remembered that counselling session was debateable. If he did, it was only in the context of how he could use it to knock Yukio down a peg and raise himself up. He'd found a way to wrest back the power he felt Yukio had taken from him, and he was determined to use it.

"Or you'll do what?" Ren asked with a smile. "You wanna hit me and get put in solitary? Wanna leave poor Miss Suki all alone with the rest of the class? Nice of you to think of sharing her with us like that, but I bet she's loose as an old lady after so many times with you -"

"Shut. The fuck. Up!" Yukio punctuated his words with jabs at Ren, but he seemed abnormally distracted. The laid-back ease with which he usually carried himself evaporated.

Ren ducked away again, relying on speed instead of strength. "You ain't trying to tell us you've never banged her, are you? Like we're gonna believe that? And those lazy guards, they never stick around once we're in class. A lot can happen in that time it'd take for them to finish their doughnuts and drag their fat asses along the corridor to open the door. A do-rag in the mouth and they may not even realise. And what can anybody do? Throw the book at us?" He laughed raucously. "Even solitary would be a piece of cake with the right memories to see you through."

"Don't you fucking touch her," Yukio growled.

"Why not? You have."

"I haven't!"

"Liar. Share and share alike, Hogosha. Yukio. Buddy." Ren's teeth seemed to glitter through the steam. So did his eyes. "You gonna deny everybody a piece of free ass when they been making it with their right hands for months? And if Miss Suki is willing to go with her students, why shouldn't the rest of us get a shot at her? We're just as good as you. We're worth just as much. Or you trying to say we ain't?"

It was faint, but the murmuring of the other boys definitely leaned more towards Ren's reasoning. In actuality his argument cut about as much ice as a soap hacksaw, but they were getting caught up in the moment. Some of those Yukio had previously menaced elbowed others, stirring the feeling against him. He was only one guy, after all, and they were many. Maybe he'd ruled the roost for too long. Maybe he was slipping, and they could push if hey banded together under Ren …

Yukio's eyes darted around. He sensed the precarious position he was in. Nobody much liked Miss Suki. They thought she was pathetic. Fighting on her behalf hadn't endeared him to them, and Ren had played on that. To lose his reputation was to lose everything. Something was going to have to give on this one if Yukio was to keep it – or at least most of it. He was cornered and outnumbered, and Ren hadn't had to lift a finger.

"You stay away from Miss Suki," Yukio gritted stubbornly. "She's not some whore, like your mother. I've never slept with her. She's not like that."

Ren's eyes glittered dangerously. "I don't believe you. Why else would you spend so much time there after class? You trying to say you got a free pass to that ass and you're still making it with your right hand?"

"Maybe it's with his left hand," called someone who'd been made bold by the way this confrontation was going – Broken Nose, Valon saw, his nose now healed but crooked, like an uneven iron bar in the centre of his face.

"You been making it with someone, Yukio," said Ren. "We all noticed it. You're too damn relaxed all the time to just be jerking off. And what about that lube Hanbaisha brokered that fat guard with the goatee to smuggle in? I know it was for you, Yukio." Ren's voice dropped to a low, hazardous tenor. "What else you need it for 'cept screwing that frigid bitch? She probably wouldn't get wet if she lay on her back and spread her legs in a rainstorm."

Valon knew what was coming. He saw Yukio's eyes go to him, and Ren's following them. He burned with shame, hands clenching into fists by his sides. But what could he do?

Ren laughed. "You serious?"

Valon thought savagely, Are you? Ren wasn't stupid. He had to have already figured it out. So what was all this in aid of?

Yukio grunted.

"Liar." Ren squared up to him.

"Piss off, Ren."

"Prove it."

The gauntlet was thrown.

Sudden cold swept through Valon. Yukio had never said he wanted to keep their deal secret, but he'd assumed that was a tacit agreement. You didn't emasculate yourself in a place as dangerous as this. Aberration was weakness, and juvie was about as masculine as you could get without injecting a hypodermic of pure testosterone into your femoral artery.

Yukio stared at Ren for a long moment. The tension was like an electric buzz jumping from person to person. If he didn't make good on his claim, he'd be humiliated and Ren would have struck a huge blow against him. If he did prove it, he'd be followed by this from now until when he was released. Neither option was a good one. Ren had not only backed him into a corner, but strung him from the coat peg thee, and Yukio knew it – just like he knew Ren was vindictive and sneaky enough to go after Miss Suki just to prove a point.

Yukio was eighteen in a month. Only four weeks until he was no longer classed as a juvenile. Miss Suki's tenure ended in three. Teachers never stayed long, and rarely asked for extensions on their time there. It was unthinkable that she'd be the exception.

Yukio turned towards Valon. His eyes were flat and hard.

Valon tried to get away. Part of him knew it was useless, but he still sidestepped and tried to get past the boys under the showerheads next to his. They wouldn't let him. His feet skidded as they pushed him back.

When Valon held up his fists, Yukio's eyes flashed. He knocked them away easily and spun Valon around so he was pressed flat against the grimy tiled wall.

"No!" It was the first thing Valon had said in almost a week. He rarely spoke these days; a consequence of everyone thinking he sold them out to the warden if ever he opened his mouth. This wasn't part of the deal. This wasn't –

"Shut up," Yukio said curtly.

"No!"

"Shut up."

He reached down for a minute, keeping his left hand between Valon's shoulder blades to pin him in place. Valon felt movement somewhere near the small of his back as Yukio made himself hard. He struggled, but froze when Yukio entered him, roughly and without lube.

Anyone who'd ever said water made good lubricant was lying. A gasp worked its way up his throat. The angle was all wrong; Yukio was too tall, too agitated. Valon's whole spine felt like it was being shoved into the back of his throat, pausing along the way to clamp his stomach and send a wave of nausea wracking through him.

However much it burned, however, the humiliation burned hotter. Whoops and catcalls echoed around them.

Nobody called for it to stop. The word 'faggot', usually whispered as the ultimate insult, didn't appear once. These guys could forgive anything if it meant seeing Valon, the higher-ups' favourite, the mole, the sell-out, finally being humiliated. Rather than criticism, Yukio was regarded as something of a hero. The whoops turned to chanting, the catcalls to a steady handclap that should have brought the guards running, but didn't.

"Hogosha! Hogosha! Hogosha! Hogosha!"

"Nail him, man!"

"Fuckin' spy."

"Go, Hogosha!"

"Make him hurt! Give him what's coming to him!"

"Payback time!"

It sounded like thunder inside Valon's head, and echoed long after it was over, and they'd finally stopped shouting.

The display cost Yukio, but it cost Ren more. Though he hadn't meant to, by forcing Yukio's hand the way he had, he'd actually increased Yukio's standing with the other boys instead of destroying it. After Yukio made his triumphant exit (or as triumphant as he could, since retaining the iron core of his reputation had meant openly boning another guy), Ren lingered behind the others.

He watched Valon prise himself up, back into the shower's flow. Ren looked down at the pinkish-red water heading for the plughole in the centre of the floor.

"Huh," he said contemptuously, looking for a new target on which to vent his freshly wounded pride. "Just like a bitch to be on the rag when her man wants her."

Valon watched him go with hatred like nothing he'd ever felt before. He couldn't decide who he hated more at that moment: Ren, Yukio, the other boys, right back to his own father for planting the baby seeds that grew him, his mother for running away and not taking him with her, Sister Mary Catherine for also abandoning him, and God for making the whole world in the first place and thereby setting in motion that means for him, Valon, the small-fry who just couldn't catch a break, to be standing in this empty shower room with blood and semen running down his legs and teeth gritted so hard he actually cracked one of his molars.

Yukio didn't say anything as they all returned to their pods. Later, Valon lay in bed, straight-backed as a corpse laid out for viewing, if corpses lay on their bellies. He heard the top bunk creak, but no head appeared over the side to peer down at him.

"It wasn't anything personal. It was for Miss Suki."

Valon didn't reply.

"Besides, if I'd let Ren win, no way could I protect you anymore."

Winning and losing. Power politics. Power warfare. And every war had its casualties. Collateral damage. It was to be expected.

Right?

Still Valon didn't reply.

"Valon?"

Protection? Was that what he called it? Valon shut his eyes. "Yeah. Sure. Whatever."

He didn't sleep at all that night. Partly it was pain, and the remnants of nausea that crashed against him whenever he moved, but partly it was something else. Around three o' clock he shifted too fast to relieve the pins and needles in one leg, bit down on a sharp intake of breath, and had to hobble to the tiny bathroom – really just an anteroom with a toilet and a basin – to wipe up the blood. When he returned, Yukio gave no sign of having woken. His face was to the wall, so Valon could only see the resolute lump of his back. Valon eased himself down and spent the hours until wake-up call staring into the darkness like he was trying to carve holes in it.

Outside, it'd started to rain.

It was still raining at breakfast. The noise was like bags of pebbles being thrown against a corrugated iron roof. The guards thought it was the weather making everyone antsy. Nobody would get out into the exercise yard today, so their excess energy would stew inside them, looking for other outlets.

Valon knew better. He could feel the gazes on him as soon as he stepped inside. Still, it took another ten minutes for him to lose it. The weight pressing down on him needed only a few grams more to either crush him or make him throw everything off.

Valon refused to be crushed that way. He was a survivor.

The thing about true survivors is that their breaking point is different than other people's. They can endure more before it all gets too much, but when they do explode, the light show is even more spectacular. True survivors never go out with a whimper.

Valon had thought nothing could make his situation worse. He'd thought nothing could send him any lower. He'd had all the big thoughts: escape, suicide, bargains with devils. He'd compromised everything about himself. He'd gone back on everything he'd ever learned. He'd questioned and thrown out practically everything he ever believed in. He'd betrayed the memories of Sister Mary Catherine and what she'd wanted for him. He had lessened himself just to stay alive; and still, what little he'd had left had been taken from him. Not given, not asked for, but taken, just like everything else: his loved ones, his sense of security, his dreams and hopes and everything he could've been in a different life.

So what did you do when you literally had nothing left?

Simple: You went ape-shit on the first thing that wandered into you sightline.

He went crazy in the cafeteria when two guys sniggered as they went by. They didn't say anything. They didn't need to. The snapping sound was almost audible, even though Valon was pretty sure it came from deep inside him. One second he was holding his food tray and staring at the bench he knew he couldn't sit on, the next he had launched himself at them, in full view of the guards.

The tray made a satisfying 'whop' as it connected with flesh and bone. There was only flimsy plastic cutlery and paper plates, to deprive inmates of weapons, but the tray itself cracked into two sharp halves. Valon kept hold of both, working entirely on instinct, and his instincts were after blood. He'd jammed the first makeshift shiv through one boy's hand, between the tendons, and jabbed the second into the other boy's thigh before anyone managed to pull him off. The guards ran forward, but Valon just fought harder, landing a fist in something softer, and a foot in something softer. A guard howled, clutching between his legs. Valon heard the click of a nightstick being removed from a belt, but he didn't heed it. A red mist had descended, just as it had in the alley behind the church, and his common sense shrivelled away like burned up paper.

Unsurprisingly, he ended up battered and locked in the dreaded solitary confinement. They bound him and sealed him away, where he paced and seethed, repeating the mantra that had sprung up as he turned off the shower the night before. Gonna make you all pay. Don't know how, but gonna make you all pay. Gonna make you pay. Gonna make you all –

The room was tiny. He was in there for many long hours, his wounds untreated, his belly unfed. He wasn't allowed any water, either. A headache started up, pushing against the backs of his eyes. Eventually he had to take his weight off his feet, and slid into an awkward half-crouch, back pressed against the wall so he could see the door and not be snuck up on. He leaned the crown of his head against the metal, but it wasn't very cold and didn't ease his pounding skull. The headache was part of something deeper than mere concussion.

He was on something like his hundred-thousandth recitation when the door opened and the warden appeared.

Valon was shocked that the man had deigned to visit him. He had never seen the warden up close before. It struck him how the expression he'd always assumed to be a sneer was actually a knowing little smile, as though the warden was in on some great joke nobody else knew about. Yet.

"I think," he said in a remarkably genteel voice for someone who spent his days running a day-care centre for society's young scum, "I may have an offer in which you might be interested, young man."

Valon just stared blankly at him. This had to be another piece of bullshit, and he was tired of it all. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Possibly for his eyeballs to explode.

But the warden didn't leave him alone. Instead, he came forward, hiked up the legs of his trousers, and crouched in front of Valon as though he was a small child that needed to be coaxed from behind its mother's skirt. "Come along now," he said. "I understand you've run into a spot of bother amongst the other detainees here."

Valon's cold stare could have stripped chrome from steel.

"How would you like to pay them all back?"

Power was the only thing the world really understood. It was the international lexicon. Those who didn't speak the language died quick, and died painfully, with no hope of punishing the assholes who held and used it.

"How would you like to get out of this facility entirely?"

The warden was the most powerful person in juvie. His glasses tipped so they didn't reflect the light from the naked bulb and Valon could see his eyes properly. His clear gaze told Valon that whatever else he may be, right this second he was on the level.

Slowly, Valon nodded. It felt like pieces of broken glass were skittering around inside his head.

The warden beamed. "Good show." He gestured to the guards behind him. "Bring him up to my office. We have much to discuss."

When, days later, he was finally released onto an island with an Oricalchos card and a primed Duel Disk, Valon knew exactly who he was going after first.

The odd-eyed man who met him on the beach afterwards just proved the point Valon had come to accept as gospel: Power was the key. Become powerful and nobody could keep you down. Any route to power was acceptable compared to the alternative you faced if you didn't have it.

The warden seemed surprised when Valon reappeared in his office in very different clothes than an orange jumpsuit.

"You're back?" He regarded the outfit. "And you've gone up in the world."

"You have no idea how much."

As the years went by Valon would add more and more bits of superfluous armour, not so much to protect him from harm as from prying eyes. He hated his scars, especially the ones on his chest: the fillet-slice from Broken Nose, the purple knot where his father once smashed him with a ceramic lampshade, the old cuts from fights that blended together in his memory. Each one was a sign of some past weakness, so he buried them under thick fabric and metal plating.

The warden was even more surprised when Valon turned the Oricalchos on him. His fierce little smile faded when it quickly became apparent that, despite their differing levels of experience, Valon was the superior duellist. He had raw talent and a burning desire to win that made him like a force of nature – everything went into the way he duelled. He kept nothing back. The warden's smile was completely gone by the time he was on his knees, begging for his life.

"You knew," Valon said stonily. "You knew everything that was happening, but you didn't do anything."

"But I -"

"You set me up. It was all part of some sick power-game for you, wasn't it?" The Seal on his forehead had granted him more clarity than he'd felt in a long time. Suddenly a lot of things made sense. "You liked playing with my life and watching what happened to me. You thought it was fun. How many times had you done it before? How many other kids did you set up so you could watch them get screwed over?"

"No, you're wrong! I was only fol-"

The power of the Oricalchos surged through Valon: Do it. Do it now. Silence him. Punish him. Cleanse the world of his presence. Valon narrowed his eyes and attacked, driving Buster Knuckle at the warden's face in one last punch. Finally, with help from Dartz and the Oricalchos, his fists were speaking the right language again. Finally, things were starting to make sense again.

He was going to clean up the world. He was going to help purify it by getting rid of all the scumbags and twisted sickos who made it a living hell for the weak and unlucky – those with no power. He was going to set things right, once and for all, and if achieving that greater good meant sacrificing a few souls, well then that's what he'd do. There would be no more burning churches, no more lead pipes in alleyways, no more Yukios or Rens, and no more wardens in Dartz's new world.

They say some people are just born evil. Some people, on the other hand, learn to be evil out of circumstance and temptation. And some, ultimately, have evil thrust upon them, and take it because that's the only way to survive in this shitty thing we call life.

Right?

Fin.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be. -- Oscar Wilde

"Was it really that bad, what happened to you?" -- Mai (It Only Hurts When I Breathe)

Side-flings, Homages and Downright Rip-offs

"I'm Yukio, by the way. Yukio Hogosha."

-- The name Yukio means 'Gets What He Wants', while Hogosha translates directly as 'Protector'.

He wore a monocle, which Valon thought was affected and stupid, especially since the guy was also balding and bearded. He looked like a butler in a badly fitting suit.

-- Small cameo for Gurimo, the often forgotten fourth of Dartz's 'horsemen', and the first to be defeated in the anime.

"What do you want, Eijiki?"

-- Eijiki translates directly as 'Prey'.

… entering a pitch-dark room and then being directed to climb a ladder to see whether or not he'd do it.

-- This is a very rough-and-ready way that potential officer material (and disruptive elements) used to be rooted out by the British armed forces during ragtag recruitment drives of World War II.

They say some people are just born evil. Some people, on the other hand, learn to be evil out of circumstance and temptation. And some, ultimately, have evil thrust upon them …

-- Homage to Shakespeare's famous speech about greatness, spoken by Malvolio in Twelfth Night: 'Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em' (II, v, 156-159).