Chapter Text
And all I remember is your back
Walking towards the airport, leaving us all in your past
Zane had been a kid when his parents had left him there on that bench in the train station, on his seventh birthday. That day, they had been on holiday in a different city, they had told him to wait on a bench - the frozen metal burned his skin in the way that only really cold metal benches could - and that they would be back in half an hour. That time came around, they weren’t back, then double and there still was no sight of them.
The next year was one of the worst of his entire life. Although it started okay, he spent just over a week with a group of older kids who didn’t have parents. Then they had abandoned him, leaving him with a man (who he later learnt had a record for doing some rather...unpleasant things to kids) in exchange for food. It was then that it got really bad for months . It was with that man that he learnt what real pain felt like. But then, on that night with the biting wind that froze him down to his bones, the same night as his escape from the man’s apartment, he met Julien (or rather, Julien found him on his way home from work).
I travelled fifteen hundred miles to see you
Begged you to want me, but you didn't want to
There was one time, months after he had started living with Julien (before he had started calling the man Dad), that he had seen his parents. He had been walking out of the grocery store with Julien when he caught sight of them and had gone tearing after them. He had managed to get ahold of his mother’s coat.
They had pretended to not know who he was, looking anywhere but at him until Julien caught up, looking apologetic. His mother’s comment of “Never seen this kid before, in my life,” felt like someone had taken a knife to his heart and made ribbons out of it.
But piece by piece, he collected me up
Off the ground, where you abandoned things, yeah
Piece by piece, he filled the holes that you burned in me
At six years old and you know
He never walks away
He never asks for money
He takes care of me
He loves me
Piece by piece, he restored my faith
That a man can be kind and a father could stay
Living with Julian, at first, had been amazing ; Despite the fact that the man had a demanding job and a blood son of his own, he somehow always found time for him, a little boy who he had come across one evening on his way home from work and didn’t need to help (but he did ). It was there that he finally got to experience what having a parent, a father was like.
But like anything that he’s involved with or in, it didn’t last forever. Although, it did last much longer than other things had in the past, almost eight years. It happened gradually, Julien (he had been calling the man ‘Dad’ for a while by now) had started working longer hours, coming home later. Having to go in early and on his days off. Eventually, Julian was just always at work, all the time.
He remembered the argument that Julian and Echo had had the first night that the former had gone to work early in the morning and hadn’t come home until the next morning . Echo had been helping him with his literature homework when their father had returned, clothes rumpled and going over his notes, still working even as he walked in the door . It hadn’t started off bad, Echo had asked Julian where he was; but then it snowballed from there, to the point where the two were full-on screaming at each other and he was stuffed into the corner of his room, trying not to remember bad memories from years ago.