It started with a question.
Too simple. Too sharp.
"What did he do to you?"
Christian hadn't meant to ask it. It just slipped out—half instinct, half projection. Eli had come in late, eyes shadowed, jaw tight. Something was different. Wilder. Like he'd scraped up against the world again and barely made it back.
Christian saw the bruises under his hoodie. Fresh ones.
Eli froze, one foot still near the door.
"What?"
Christian exhaled. "You don't have to tell me. I just—" He paused. "I'm worried."
Wrong move.
Eli's eyes went cold. "You don't know me."
"I'm trying to," Christian said quietly.
Eli laughed—dry and bitter. "Because you care?"
"Yes."
"Bullshit."
Christian flinched.
Eli's voice rose, sharp and cruel. "You sit there in your nice office, with your perfect words and your framed diplomas, and you think you get to care? You think you get to save me?"
"No," Christian said, too fast. Too raw. "I don't want to save you—"
"Then why the fuck do you keep looking at me like that?"
Silence thundered.
Christian didn't answer right away. Because in that moment, the room changed. It wasn't Eli standing there anymore—it was Steve, bleeding. It was Joe, holding him at gunpoint. It was his mother, sobbing behind a locked door. It was the sound of bones breaking in a cage he had once called home.
He couldn't breathe.
"Because you remind me," Christian finally said, "of who I used to be. And it terrifies me."
Eli stared at him. For a long, long time.
Then, without a word, he turned and left.
The door slammed so hard it rattled the glass.
Christian sat in the silence afterward, shaking.
He hadn't cried in months.
But that night, he did.
Alone, in the dark, curled on the floor of his office. Because no matter how far he'd come, some parts of him were still trapped in the cage. Some ghosts never left.
And some questions had no answers.
Only echoes.