Adult Content Warning
This work could have adult content. If you continue, you have agreed that you are willing to see such content.
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Summary
It started when he was younger, a passing thing he had done in the first foster home he could remember being in. He would close his eyes tightly, squeezing to the point he could make out sparks of color underneath his eyelids, and would take one last gasp for air before holding it just as tightly in his lungs. Then, he would wait.
The first time, he heard nothing but the sound of a porch swing creaking in the wind outside of his bedroom window. Cars passing by on the street outside. The gentle groans of a house eight times as old as him. No footsteps. Nobody coming running out of a divine sense that the little boy had stopped breathing. The world kept spinning and his lungs soon ached for the rapidly depleting oxygen. Nobody came.
The place changed, his lung capacity even changed, but the one universal constant was that nobody ever came through the door.
Maybe that's why Leon, drunk out of his mind on a motel floor, hadn't even heard the first knock.