Book 3: Saving Scars {BoyxBoy}

Chapter 22

Waking up in a pool of blood was not Jacob's ideal morning routine, and remembering how he'd gotten there just made everything worse. He was on his stomach, his right cheek pressed against the concrete floor, his arms at his sides, and blood slowly, so very slowly pooling around him, staining his face, his hair, his clothes, everything.

His vision was blurry, and kept slipping in and out of tunneling into unconsciousness, but he focused on a blurry object in front of him, black and shiny, but hard to see, and he didn't know why. After lying for a long time, his vision finally steadied enough to make out the object on the floor, a little over arms length away from him.

It was his gun. All but one of the bullets had been shot out, but just his luck, nothing had hit its mark. One could Jacob possibly do with one bullet? Probably nothing. He considered letting himself pass out as he lay there, fighting the shadowy blurs that skirted the edges of his vision, but he couldn't, not when so much was happening.

Lying on the hard floor, Jacob could feel how cold his body was, not even the blood surrounding him was warm enough to fight the chill. He felt numb, but as he forced his left arm to move, the numbness faded. Just scraping his arm across the floor a few milometers sent unbelievable pain spiking through him from multiple wounds that had his vision blacking out. With the pain came a flash of memories that had him jolting on the ground, choking on blood that filled his mouth, eyes wide in horror and pain.

Had that really been his life? But... no, impossible. Things like that didn't happen in real life. Foster homes, adoption, it wasn't like that! Even so, as each memory shuddered down his spine, he felt the horrible realization that what he was seeing was indeed the truth. Abandoned at birth, sent to an orphanage in the middle of a run down town. No one knew it was there, not even the government cared about the kids that would shuffle across the courtyard and beg for a good home.

The food was stale, the bed's were hard, the older children were bitter and cruel, and that's how Jacob had grown up for half of his life. Pushed around by just about everyone because of his size, he would cry himself to sleep and wake up to the headmistress hitting him with a metal ruler. He had been frail and weak, skin on bones, until he became fed up and decided to run away.

Two others had come with him, but Jacob couldn't remember their names. He could barely remember their faces. A boy and his little baby sister, who toddled around in a faded sun dress and diapers. How Jacob ever assumed they could survive on their own, he'd never understand, but on a winter night, he and the two siblings had left the orphanage. Jacob could vaguely remember hiding out in sewer pipes, watching as the boy gave his baby sister all his food, despite he himself withering away.

They traveled for days, maybe weeks, maybe even months, until they were one day picked up by the cops and sent to completely different foster homes. Jacob never saw those two after being sent here, but after a few weeks with his new family, he easily forgot them. The backbreaking work they put him through, the punishments meant to make him stronger, all should have placed the family in jail for child abuse.

Jacob could still feel the tight binding around his wrists, the yelling and screaming, that little dark room where he was hit and punched until he couldn't move, all of it came back to him, filling him with pure, blinding rage. After all of that, losing his best friend, joining the police force, making friends, forgetting his past completely, now he'd been betrayed, and was dying slowly alone on the floor of the empty hall that led to the holding cells.

Shot and stabbed, blood drained from his body like a faucet left on high, and he could feel himself slowly slipping into darkness. Lying there, he thought of Peter, of why he had been drawn to the strange boy in the first place, that day of the farmer's market, seeing him holding Wolfgang's little hand and leading him between the people that towered above like giants.