𝐎𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐁𝐥𝐮𝐞 [𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐫 - 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭]

11 | A Chance,

And so... it truly begins.
Plus my favourites being a little not PG13.

Also go read the chapter titled PART ONE at the start of the story if you missed it! It's  only recently published so you might've not seen it yet but go do that before reading this!

— THE ROOFTOP WAS THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS, RAIN BE DAMNED. This was where Tobias Eton found himself fleeing to once he'd clamoured away from the clumsy hands of his inebriated father. Clumsy, but deceptively strong. And sometimes, like this time, it hadn't been just hands, hands everywhere, brutal and callous and so, so cruel that Tobias could hardly fathom that this man was still his father. This time, for the first time, it had been a belt, too.

His hands trembled against the gravel roof, skinny frame flinching a foot in the air every time a sluggish, groaning thud resonated against the trapdoor hidden amongst the gravel, the one he sat right overtop of just to keep his father out. Or really, it was just Marcus, now. But still, every progressively tired shove jostled his body. And yet he clung, refused to maybe make a run for it and jump to the neighbouring flat-top roof. If he got anyone else involved, even for a second, then the next day would only be more painful. And that simply wasn't an option anymore.

As the choosing ceremony inched a year closer, he couldn't let it get more painful. It had already been so trying, just getting through the last ten or so years. He could make it, he really thought he could, just as long as it didn't get any worse.

"I'm just trying to help you be better," Marcus murmured from the upstairs hallway, cruel hand thumping the door twice like he was comforting him in the same way he'd pat Tobias' shoulder in that stiff, falsely paternal manner he did whenever he was forced bring his son to council meetings. Tobias flinched again, cringed as the two welts struck across his back tore a little, not quite shallow enough to halt its bleeding for a good long while yet.

He'd been lucky, really, that his screaming instincts had been enough to make him sprint for the stairs the second he begrudgingly got back from school, briefly through the living room where his— where Marcus waited for the chase, grappling the neck of his shirt, yanking it up enough to get two hits in before Tobias had wrenched himself away and sprinted, mind gone far enough to not even acknowledge the dead end of the hallway upstairs and the fact that he was near enough to the closet beside his bedroom to be forced in, scared and startled and frenzied enough that he toppled the linen cupboard and scrambled on top, popped open the ceiling hatch and slammed it shut right on Marcus' fingers.

There could be nothing more horrible, Tobias' murky, fourteen-year-old brain supplied, than having a father so twisted he hurts his own child.