Chapter Text
Rudo hadn't always been alone.
There had been a time when he had parents, even if they had burned his hands—scars that ran from his elbows all the way down to his fingertips.
The pain was chronic, hurting him every day. Even the slightest touch could sting against his soft, sensitive skin, which remained red and irritated in places, with some areas badly scarred from the burns. He remembered the fire, even though he had been so young.
He remembered how they had put something into the wounds, some sort of chemical that made the burns even worse, adding chemical damage on top of everything else.
Then, when Rudo was around five months old, a man took him in. It hadn't been too long after the damage was done.
His name was Regto. His dad. Regto was the first safe person Rudo had ever known.
He bandaged his arms so gently, always careful not to hurt him. He wanted nothing more than to give Rudo the love, safety, and care that nobody else ever had.
He taught Rudo things and gave him a special pair of gloves—gloves that helped regulate his pain and made things a little easier. They didn't make the pain disappear completely, but most days, they made it manageable.
Regto was everything a caring father should be. He tended to Rudo, loved him, helped him, and made sure he knew that he mattered.
He worked as a journalist for a news station, usually covering stories that many people weren't interested in. Environmental issues, economics, the way people with money treated those who had less, and other things most people preferred to ignore.
Rudo learned to read partly because he wanted to read his dad's work whenever it was published.
Regto's writing always struck a chord with him. His words were gentle and factual, yet firm when they needed to be. Even when discussing difficult subjects, there was always something kind in the way he wrote.
That was how things were.
Until one day, when Rudo was five.
Regto stumbled upon something he wasn't supposed to find—pieces of information that exposed things someone clearly wanted kept hidden. He delivered what he had discovered to the police, trusting that they would handle it.
But the information was leaked.
So then, one afternoon, Rudo came home after doing some trash hunting.
He heard a bang. Then another.
He found his dad on the floor, injured, bleeding out on the floor and barely conscious, with a masked man standing nearby.
The man had been there to silence Regto—and Rudo had been left as the only remaining witness.
A witness to his father's death, seeing a knife on top of the bullet wounds through Regto's chest.
Sirens sounded in the distance, starting quiet then getting louder. With the masked man fledding.
Rudo rushed to his dad's side, sobbing. It was the first time he had truly allowed himself to cry, letting all those emotions finally break through.
Not even as a baby, the only other time being, when his hands were destroyed with fire and chemicals.
He tried so desperately to help Regto. And his dad even in death tried to comfort him. Tried too sooth his son as the life faded from his eyes.
Even while he was struggling to stay conscious, Regto was still trying to reassure Rudo. Then the soothing words stopped. Regto's hand fell away from the boys face, and didn't get picked back up.
When the police arrived, it was too late, with nothing they could do. Having to forcfully pull away the sobbing boy from his father's lifeless body.
Rudo was furious.
Every lesson Regto had ever taught him about anger management, about not attacking people, not fighting, and never hurting others—it all disappeared from his mind in that moment.
His sadness turned into rage.
It took a lot of struggle to contain the kid, for someone so small he was strong giving the police a lot of trouble. And after a lot of questions and enough interrogation about what the kid a saw, Rudo was transferred into foster care.
And nobody wanted an angry, traumatized, slightly disabled boy. Nobody wanted to handle a child who challenged everything they believed they could manage.
Some people tried to be patient with him. Others didn't give him a second chance. He would be smacked, shoved, hit, mistreated, abused. You name it.
Then there was the relentless bullying at school. Every time he transferred, it was the same.
Students would stare at the bandages around his arms and the far to big gloves covering his hands. They called him names, mocked him for being different, and made comments about how strange he was.
They called him creepy. Gross. A dirty, filthy piece of trash. They mocked him for loving broken things and for caring enough to fix them.
But there was never anywhere that felt safe. School wasn't safe. The houses he stayed in weren't safe. They didn't even feel like homes.
Sure, Rudo had belongings waiting for him for when he turned eighteen—things he was supposed to inherit from Regto.
But none of it was enough. He didn't want things. He wanted his dad.
No matter how much he loved the things Regto had left behind, no matter how much he cared about every item and poured his entire soul into fixing things, what he really wanted was Regto.
He wanted his father back. Instead, he was hurt every day.
He was tossed from one placement to another, never staying anywhere long enough to truly belong. Every school brought the same problems. Every home brought a different kind of cruelty.
It was always the same. Painfully, it was always the same.
His chronic pain became worse without anyone caring for him properly. Eventually, he had to learn how to change his own bandages.
They were bad and sloppy at first, which only made everything hurt more, until he finally taught himself how to do it properly.
He slowly became more malnourished too. Sometimes it was because of his attitude. Sometimes because he refused to eat.
Some days, the pain made it difficult to bring himself to eat at all. Other days, he wanted food but wasn't allowed to have any.
And sometimes, it was simply too hard to look at food that hadn't been made by Regto.
The only time Rudo found any sort of joy was when he was fixing things. Even that happiness was slightly tainted.
He never got to enjoy it for long before someone called him a freak or mocked him for being a "trash lover."
He would fight back. He got into fights constantly, and afterward, he always felt ashamed.
It was the exact thing Regto had taught him not to do. But he couldn't help himself. Not after losing his dad.
The anger had consumed him so completely. Nothing felt like it belonged to him anymore.
The only thing he truly had left were his gloves. Everything else had been lost along the way.
He sold the things he fixed for whatever small amount of money he could get, mostly using it to buy food, bandages, and whatever else he needed for his arms because nobody else bothered taking proper care of them.
And Rudo wouldn't let people touch him. He couldn't.
He had no idea how to accept touch anymore because, after Regto, almost every kind of touch he knew had been painful.
Slaps. Kicks. Punches. Bruises. Being shoved around. Being hurt. Blood. Black eyes. Vomiting.
The only person who had ever touched him gently was his dad. And his dad was gone.
His longest placement lasted around three months. They really did try. He would give the mother that much.
The father, however, was different. He made Rudo fix every broken thing in the house. He wouldn't even let Rudo near his children.
When his wife wasn't around, the man could be cruel, hurting Rudo whenever he was displeased. If Rudo broke something or made a mistake, the punishment was never kind.
Eventually, Rudo was transferred again. By then, he was getting dangerously close to his breaking point.
He had been trapped in this cycle over and over for two years. Abandoned. Taken in by another family.
Hurt in some way—emotionally or physically, it didn't matter. Bullied at school. Then abandoned again.
One placement had been even worse. He had once been locked in a basement for three days simply because he had shown frustration.
His last placement wasn't the worst he'd experienced. But it certainly wasn't kind. The house was cold and empty, with barely any warmth.
Rudo wasn't allowed to eat until he had finished cleaning, completed his chores, and done all of his homework. If he didn't do something correctly, he would be sent to sleep in the basement.
He wasn't locked down there, and the punishment usually only lasted a night, but that didn't make it any less miserable.
It wasn't the worst house he had ever been in.
That was until the adult in the home began behaving in ways that made Rudo deeply uncomfortable and crossed boundaries that should never have been crossed. Being touched in ways he should never be touched in by an adult.
That was it. That was the breaking point for the seven-year-old boy.
One night, while the man was asleep, Rudo grabbed the smallest bag he could find without being noticed.
He packed it full of food, took nothing else, and left with only the clothes on his back. Then he ran. And ran. And ran.
He kept going until his lungs couldn't take it anymore and he collapsed in an alleyway.
After catching his breath, he forced himself back onto his feet.
And he ran again. He didn't look back. He just kept going. He was angry. He was hurt. He was scared. He was traumatized. And underneath all of it, he was so incredibly sad.
He missed his dad. He wanted his dad. It had been two years, but he still couldn't get over it.
His grief had been buried beneath everything else for so long that he had never truly gotten the chance to mourn. He had been too busy surviving—being moved from place to place, being hurt, being bullied, and constantly trying to protect himself.
Now, with nowhere left to go, all that grief came rushing back. It had been suffocating him for two years. Drowning him.
And for the first time, Rudo was finally running away from everything that had hurt him. And he was alone. He was alone for several months.
It wasn't too bad, considering the circumstances. The change in environment wasn't all that different from how he had been treated in his previous foster homes.
Except, perhaps, for the lack of warmth and how rarely he could find proper shelter.
But Rudo made it work.
He fixed whatever he could find, made it look nice, and sold it for enough money to buy food.
It wasn't much. But it was something. Though he still got into trouble.
He got into fights, of course. Most of them were with adults who pitied him enough not to take things too far, but still beat him badly enough to leave him unable to move right and struggling for days afterward.
It angered him to no end. How disrespectful. How cruel. He didn't want pity. He wanted to be looked at properly, to be treated like a person.
If someone was going to look down on him, then he'd rather they just say it to his face.
He couldn't find it in himself to care about much anymore.
After all, people were never good. People were never kind. Not after Regto died. He had no one, and no one would ever be kind to him again.
At least, that's what Rudo believed.
After losing his father, the idea of kindness felt impossible to the boy.
Some days, his hands and chronic pain became so bad that he would find somewhere to hide and spend days there, barely moving.
Other days, he would scavenge whatever he could and do whatever was necessary to survive.
He wasn't living. He was surviving.
Surviving long enough to eventually uncover the truth about the man who had killed his father.
And after that?
He didn't know. For now, there was only tomorrow.
Insomnia had become both an enemy and a constant companion.
Sleep had become nothing more than a way to regain enough energy to make it through another day. But after everything that had happened, Rudo had trouble letting himself relax enough to sleep.
The only thing that gave him any sort of relief during his worst moments was finding an old article written by his dad.
He would read it. It always brought more pain, but there was something comforting about it too.
A little piece of his dad was still there. Still in the world. Proof that Regto hadn't simply been something Rudo imagined.
Then winter came. The cold was frigid, and Rudo barely had enough clothes to keep himself warm.
He had been on his own for a little over a year now, he thought. And it was so, so cold.
He was curled up in an alleyway as snow slowly fell around him. He was almost impossible to see, his white hair blending into the snow rather well. If it weren't for the gray at the tips of his hair and his dirty clothes, someone might have walked right past him without ever realizing he was there.
He was freezing. But the more layers of snow covered him, the more insulated he became.
Even if he didn't wake up in the morning, at least he could rest somewhere quiet.
Somewhere peaceful. Eventually, exhaustion began to take over. Rudo stopped fighting it.
Then he had the strangest dream.
Strong arms lifted him up, scooping him up gently before wrapping him in something warm. He was carried against a warm chest, held carefully as though he were something precious.
Like a baby. He wasn't a baby, but somehow, and for once, he didn't mind.
The person holding him reminded him of his dad. But their arms were too strong. Too big. Too muscular. Yet they were warm. Soft, despite how strong they were.
It was an interesting dream. One that Rudo didn't mind having.
Before long, he drifted deeper into sleep, expecting nothing more than a few hours of rest before another difficult day. Or, if he did, he expected to still be buried beneath the snow in that freezing alleyway, starving and shivering, with his body screaming at him through another unbearable flare-up.
One of the worst he had experienced since his father's passing. He accepted it as it was. at least, that's what he thought.
Because for the first time in a very long time, Rudo's dreams weren't filled with fire, shouting, foster homes, or cold empty rooms.
They were warm. Quiet. Safe. And he hoped that his sleep would bring him something he hadn't felt in a very long time. Peace.
A mercy from the painful, miserable life he had been forced to live.