Daryl was young when his mother died. Not young enough to forget how she mistreated him -- but young enough to still long for a mother he never really had. He liked to think that, somehow, she would have gotten help. She would have gotten better. Taken he and his older sibling away from his father.

Life didn’t end up that way, of course. She died, and his older sibling abandoned him the second they had the chance. For years, he was forced to live with his father, who was no more kind to him. The man was a drunk and a junkie, and often left him for weeks at a time.

That wasn’t unusual. But it had been a month and a half now since he’d last seen his father. Perhaps the old man had finally keeled over, or perhaps he’d gotten bored of ‘raising’ a fifteen year old kid. Either way, Daryl was getting hungry. The heating, too, had broken down, and the winter was quickly seeping into the house.

He couldn’t live there. That was all he knew. So he trudged through the snow, snuck onto buses, until he reached the city where he knew his older sibling had moved to. He knocked on every door of the apartment complex, nearly in tears by the time they pulled open the door. Unable to keep up his usual persona, he shoved himself against them in a hug.