Chapter Text
“You never learn, do you, gutter rat?”
The voice wasn’t familiar by name — none of them ever were — but Tom knew the tone. That low, bitter drawl cops reserved for kids like him. The kind that didn’t run fast enough.
Andreas had bolted the second the sirens echoed down the alley. One second they were laughing, sharing a smoke under the busted fire escape, and the next, Andreas was gone — a blur of sneakers and instinct vanishing between buildings. Tom hadn't moved fast enough. Or maybe he just hadn't bothered.
A forearm slammed across his shoulders, slamming him into the brick wall. His cheek scraped rough concrete as rain smeared blood and alley grime across the surface like the whole city was leaking.
Classic. Hit first, ask nothing later.
It was always like this in the slums. The rain, the walls, the boot at your back.
This wasn't policing. This was pest control.
Tom had been “randomly selected” since he could fit in handcuffs — walking to school, buying noodles, just existing in the wrong zip code. The slums were a living thing to those who survived them: cracked pavement breathing steam in summer, rusted gates shrieking in winter, walls whispering secrets in spray paint. To these guys? Just target practice.
A hand dug into Tom’s pockets with the kind of violence that never made it onto reports. “Where’s the good shit? Don’t make me find it.”
Tom didn’t blink. He’d stopped flinching at twelve, stopped begging at fourteen. Now, at seventeen, he just checked out. Drifted somewhere behind his eyes while they tore through what little he had.
The cop pulled out a crumpled five and a half-smoked joint like it was proof of a felony.
He snorted. “This is it? What a fucking kingpin.”
Behind him, the second cop — older, broader, with the dull eyes of someone who hadn’t felt human in years — stepped forward. Without a word, he grabbed Tom’s wrist and wrenched it up behind his back until something in his shoulder popped.
Tom's vision whited out. His teeth ground loud enough to drown the groan fighting up his throat.
“Waste of my fucking time,” the older one muttered.
The younger clicked the cuffs tight, too tight — metal biting in like it had something to prove.
“Well,” he said, tone smug, “we’ll take what we can get.”
As they dragged him toward the cruiser, fingers pressed into the side of Tom’s neck — right over the sharp, black 483 inked there. A thumb ground into it, slow and deliberate, like the cop couldn’t decide whether to scrub it off or brand it deeper.
They never said a word about the tattoo.
Didn’t have to.
It was enough.
A reason to shove harder, search rougher.
To treat him like he already belonged in a cell.
By the time they stuffed him into the back seat, the rain had soaked him to the bone. Water streamed from his dreadlocks, dripping onto the cracked vinyl and pooling beneath his knees. The cruiser stank of sweat and bad coffee, humid with old anger. The radio crackled with news of a break-in across town, too distant to matter. Neither cop looked back.
To them, Tom was already a ghost — a smear of ink and noise on a report they wouldn’t remember writing.
Processing took all of four minutes. No charges. No real questions. Just ink-stained fingers pressing his into the card, a flashbulb bleaching his face into a grainy mugshot, and the bored mutter of a desk sergeant: “Same kid as last month.”
Then concrete.
Always fucking concrete. Cold and piss-damp beneath him, like the city had sweated out its disdain. The fluorescents hummed like hornets in a jar, throwing cage-bar shadows that striped his skin. Somewhere down the row, a drunk sobbed into his palms, the sound wet and broken.
Tom slumped against the wall, his shoulder a white-hot brand of pain. They’d tossed him in here like half-rotten garbage — not worth processing, not worth tossing out. Just another stray waiting for the system to spit him back onto the streets.
He’d be out by morning. He always was.
But tonight, he’d fold himself around the hurt, let it thrum through him like a second heartbeat. He’d stretch out on the piss-slick floor, one eye cracked open, shivering in his rain-soaked hoodie, and cling to the one thing they couldn’t take: the pain.
Because pain didn’t lie. Pain didn’t pretend. It was the only proof he was still here, still breathing, still alive in a world that kept trying to erase him.
That was the rule no one bothered to teach you, but you learned anyway once you slipped far enough through the cracks.
Gutter rats didn’t heal.
Gutter rats didn’t rest.
They just survived.
He didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep. Just that when he came to, the lights still buzzed overhead, and his soaked hoodie clung to him like a second skin — damp, cold, and stinking of piss and concrete.
Every muscle throbbed. His shoulder pulsed with each shallow breath, the joint swollen and hot where they’d wrenched it too far.
A day and too many hours without food made the pain sharper. His stomach had given up hours ago, curling into itself like it knew it wasn’t getting anything. Hunger amplified everything: the chemical stench of industrial cleaner became corrosive, the flickering fluorescents stabbed at his vision like strobe lights, his skin alternately burning and freezing.
Maybe he was sick. Or maybe this was just what happened when your own flesh started eating itself alive.
Time dragged like broken glass beneath his skin. No one came. No one spoke. Just the background noise of the forgotten: hacking coughs, whispered prayers, the wet retch of someone throwing up in a nearby cell.
Snatches of conversation drifted past the bars:
“...whole crew got erased…”
“...like hogs in a chute…”
“...not even the kids left breathing…”
The facility had erupted overnight — boots pounding concrete, radios screeching, the occasional gunshot echoing through the block. Whatever massacre had occurred outside these walls was apparently more interesting than processing some half-dead street kid.
When the cell door finally groaned open, the light from the corridor stabbed at his light-starved eyes.
“Get up.”
The voice wasn’t the same, but the tone always was. Sharp. Bored. Mean.
Through the fog of his fever, Tom squinted at the officer. He slowly pulled himself up, shaking like a puppet with missing strings. He didn't bother asking for the time or why they’d ignored him; he already knew they simply didn’t care enough to remember he was there.
The officer didn't wait. He entered the humming cell, grabbed Tom by the arm, and yanked him to his feet. Tom's shoulder screamed in pain, but he bit down on it and kept his head lowered.
The hallway lights hit like a fist to the eyes after hours in the buzzing tank. Concrete crackled underfoot, tile walls slick with condensation. When they passed a branching corridor, the cop’s calloused fingers dug deeper into Tom’s bicep.
Tom shifted. Maybe too fast. Maybe his hoodie slipped, exposing the ink on his neck — because the officer’s hand shot out, shoved his head forward, fingers lingering like a threat.
“Lucky little shit, aren't you?”
The words hung in the air, sour and pointless. Lucky? Tom’s knuckles ached from where they’d cracked against concrete during the arrest. His ribs were a live wire of pain. There was nothing lucky about the last 24 hours — just the usual cycle of grab, shove, and silence. The cop’s grip on his neck tightened, as if waiting for a reaction Tom didn’t have the energy to give.
Then the door crashed open, and the shove came hard enough to send him stumbling into the next room.
“Try not to end up in a body bag next time.”
At the desk, another officer tossed a plastic bag at him like it was contaminated — soggy five-dollar bill, busted lighter, the pathetic remains of his pockets. No charges. No questions. Just paperwork stamped blind.
The cop who’d dragged him in clapped a hand to his back, mock-friendly. “You’re free to go.”
Then he leaned in, breath sour with coffee and smoke.
“If there’s anything left out there for you to go back to.”
Tom didn’t flinch, barely processing it. Just more cop bullshit.
He grabbed the bag and walked out into daylight that bit like teeth.
Behind him, laughter unspooled through the precinct doors — sharp as shattered glass. It clung to his spine even after the doors hissed shut, something between amusement and a warning he was too empty to parse.
The bodega’s flickering neon bled into the rain as Tom shoved the damp five across the counter. The clerk didn’t look up. He tore into the stale cheese stick with his teeth, grease coating his fingers, and ate under the awning until his hands stopped shaking.
That’s when the cop’s words crawled back:
“If there’s anything left out there for you to go back to.”
They lodged in his skull like a rusted nail.
So he rose and walked. Past the pawn shops and liquor stores, past the silence where the streets should’ve roared with curses and basslines. Only distant sirens haunted the empty corners, fading like ghosts.
Zone 4. Building 83.
A block of cracked concrete wedged between neglect and ruin. Windows webbed with cracks, stairwell reeking of mildew and rot. Home — or the closest thing he’d ever had to one.
His sneakers hit the steps with a hollow thud. The dented metal door loomed, paint flaking like old skin, the faded tag above it still screaming ownership.
But something was wrong.
No smoke curled from the windows. No voices bantering over half-stolen meals. Just silence, heavy and suffocating, like the breath held before a fall.
The door creaked open too easily.
No lock. No chains. No lookout watching from behind the curtain.
Tom stepped inside — and the silence slammed into his ribs like a fist.
No laughter. No music. No familiar creak of floorboards under the weight of those he’d called family. Just a hollow, suffocating quiet that didn’t belong here.
Police tape fluttered from a splintered doorframe, limp as a surrender flag. On the floor, evidence tags lay scattered — small yellow triangles, each one a quiet, brutal declaration: someone died here.
At first, it was just shapes on the ground. Just markers.
But then it hit him.
These were the places where they had fallen.
His body went rigid, muscles locking like live wire was running under his skin.
Tom’s brain refused the math. He counted the triangles again. And again. As if maybe the number would change.
But it didn’t.
A weight settled in his chest, slow and crushing.
This wasn’t just a crime scene.
It was their grave.
His throat tightened. Air wouldn’t come. His lungs felt crushed under some invisible weight. He tried to swallow, tried to draw a breath, but his body had forgotten how.
Home.
The word twisted in his gut this time, spoiled and sour.
This wasn’t home.
Not anymore.
His feet moved before he could stop them. Sneakers peeled from the sticky floor with wet, reluctant sounds. Every step revealed another rust-dark stain, another mark of what had happened here.
The metallic sting curled in his nostrils, thick enough to taste.
The stairwell stretched ahead, lined with numbered markers. Some overlapped, bleeding into each other until the line between one life ending and the next was lost.
He didn’t look into the bedrooms. Couldn’t. He knew exactly whose laughter had bounced behind those doors. Whose shirts still hung there, stolen and forgotten. Those memories were knives, twisting deep.
The main room was a slaughterhouse.
Overturned furniture. A table split down the middle. The couch — his couch, the one he’d claimed as a bed — gutted, its stuffing strewn like viscera. Bullet holes pocked the walls. Blood arced across the surfaces in frantic sprays, smeared handprints marking desperate attempts to crawl, to survive.
And then, there it was.
On the far arm of the couch lay Andreas’ snapback, soaked deep and dark with blood. The same hat he never took off. The same one he'd been wearing the night the cops slammed Tom against the wall, while Andreas vanished over the fence in a blur of denim and adrenaline.
Now, it sat silent, soaked in something that no amount of words could ever wash away.
His knees gave way.
He didn’t feel the rough wood planks biting into his cheek or the fire in his dislocated shoulder. The physical pain dissolved into white noise beneath the weight of what was gone.
The laughter. The bickering. The music. The smell of cheap weed and burnt noodles — everything vanished. The voices that filled this place, his place, silenced as if they’d never existed.
He crawled forward, hands shaking, and grabbed the snapback. It was stiff with dried blood, soaked halfway through. Pressing it to his chest, he searched for warmth, for meaning, like maybe holding it tight enough could rewind time, undo the horror.
But the blood didn’t fade.
And neither did the silence.
A sound tore from his throat. Low. Guttural. Animal.
Not loud — just broken, like something inside him had cracked open and couldn’t stop leaking.
They were gone.
All of them.
The proof was everywhere — in the numbered tags, the heavy silence, the blood seeping through the sweatband where Andreas’ forehead had been.
And Tom?
He was still breathing.
Kneeling in their blood.
Still here.
The realization slithered through him, venomous and cold:
Maybe the cop had been right.
Maybe he was a gutter rat — wired to keep breathing, to keep dragging himself through the wreckage when better things had died.