Disclaimers: Not mine, save for the ones I don't want.

Spoilers: None

Ratings Note: NC-17, with imagery some may find disturbing.

Summary: Ethan remembers.

Feedback: Please. teland793@sbcglobal.net

With love to the rest of my brain...

*

Once upon a time Ethan believed. Believed so strongly that his
whole life seemed to fall into place, one puzzle piece after another.
In his worship he had seen blood and love, and sweet in the wrong,
and riots for peace.

But the love... the love was the most important. The love was the
cornerstone of the belief, and it was what pulled him through the
stretch in Juvenile Correction, trapped in with the older boys on
their way to adult prison, and the younger children who stank
of their shame, and guilt.

And the only way to live was to victimize, but there came a time
when that didn't work, either. When being beautiful earned him more
than an afterthought of a punch, and there was a great grey wall. He
still sees it, even today. A great grey wall against which he'd laid his
cheek and felt himself opened,

More desperate than brutal, and Ethan had cried, and begged, but it
meant nothing. And there had been others, waiting. But even then... it
had already been foretold. He was a child of chaos, and chaos bestowed
gifts. And he knew that there would be love, more powerful than
anything else, forever and ever, no escape.

And he could see the lover in his mind, a shadow with hands that were
maybe, sometimes, as desperate as the boy's behind him. Who slammed
into him with that force, that intensity because he *had* to. Had to
because... because Ethan was beautiful.

Ethan took it, and took them all. And the last one had been wide-eyed,
taking him face-to-face. And his eyes were changeable green and Ethan
*knew*.

Another piece.

His lover had desperate hands, and a driving cock, and changeable
green eyes that would sometimes go wide at the sight of Ethan in
extremis, hurting and needing and so *hard*. For him, and only him.

And they'd left him like that, to crawl to the infirmary,
and dream himself loved on painkillers, knowing that somewhere, his
lover had felt Ethan's pain, and his love, and his need.

And wanted, too.