Hiding in the Shadows

Worries

Sorry it has taken so long to update but I was on vacation and the middle of the ocean isn't the place for reliable internet access. This is a shorter chapter but I will have another up in a few days, end of the week at most. Thank you for reading.

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Niall doesn't have a single memory of his mum; never actually met the woman and his dad didn't have any pictures. Niall could smack right into her and never know who she was. He met his brother Greg a total of three times in his life, the man had gotten some scholarship to a fancy private school when Niall was only a year or so and Greg had never looked back – didn't want to be associated with his lower class family. The first was when he was four and he'd come home for summer holiday – that lasted all of three days before Greg ran back to school as fast as he could. The next was when he was thirteen at Greg's graduation from school. The last time Niall had ever seen Greg was ten days after the graduation; Greg had come by the shack to say goodbye to their father, he'd not even looked at Niall. Niall's father was the only person who'd stuck around although Niall was fairly certain that had more to do with having no where else to go and no desire to do anything but smoke and drink with the occasional bit of drugs mixed in.

That was Niall's family, the only one he'd ever known. A mother who abandoned him before he was a month old, a brother who'd left not long after and a father who was too drunk to realize that there was someone else in the house. No one cared if Niall went to school or if he had food to eat or clothes to wear, no one cared about Niall at all. Still though, Niall managed – it was his one skill, surviving.

When Niall was really little, four or five, his father used to actually get up and go somewhere other than to the local pub or liquor store. The man would get up most mornings and head out and when he came home drunk he also tended to have a small bit of money in his pockets. Niall learned quickly that if he wanted to have food to eat or a shirt to wear then he would have to wait for his father to pass out and then lift a few dollars out of the man's pocket. It had taken a while for Niall to master this task for while his father would never wake up if Niall wasn't careful enough he would jostle the man's clothing and be backhanded. Niall's father never knew what he was doing, the man was either unconscious or completely out of it the entire time, and Niall was fairly certain that his father would never hit him if he were sober but still. It didn't take too long before Niall was a master at picking pockets.

When Niall was about five and a half his father stopped getting up most mornings, then he stopped getting up more than one morning a week, pretty soon he didn't get up at all. It didn't take long after that for the money to dry up. With his father no longer bringing in an income Niall had no way of getting a bit of money for the things he needed so he had to find a different way. At first Niall stuck to the skill he knew – picking pockets. He would wash his best clothes and then walk the four miles to the nicer part of town where he would spend the afternoon in a park 'accidentally' running into people or tripping ladies with fancy purses. For a while his plan worked.

By the time Niall was seven he was gaining a decent bit of attention. While he'd always been small for his age he could no longer pass as someone young enough to not be in school yet. He had been walking to through the park and had come across a group of richer children who were ditching. He knew one of the boys in the group, the kid lived just a few doors down the hall from Niall's apartment (if that's what one could call a line of shacks with wooden doors). Niall had been about to go over to them to see if the other boy would like to walk home with him – safety in numbers and all – when a couple of cops had grabbed the boys. Niall had dived into the nearby bushes and hid; a rule of the streets, if a cop shows it's every man for themselves. Niall had watched as the cops had grabbed the boys and waited called their parents. About half an hour later said parents started showing up until the only person left was the boy he knew. That boy's parents never showed and after another hour the cops took the boy to their car – Niall never saw that boy again. As Niall had been walking out of the park that evening he'd been stopped by some of the older boys whom the cops had grabbed. Niall limped home that night bruised and bleeding and he'd never gone back to that park. It was safer in his own neighborhood – he didn't stand out as badly.