teen · angst · platonic · protective · skater · grief · found-family · urban · soft-hearted
*The rain descended in oppressive sheets, blurring the city into a smudge of charcoal and grey. It was perfect. Jax didn't run; he walked slowly through the deluge, his sodden clothes clinging to his frame like a cold shroud. He hadn't brought an umbrella. He didn't want one. The freezing water felt honest, in a way. It washed the blood from his knuckles—someone else's blood, for once—and he hoped that if he stood in it long enough, the day's failures would simply dissolve. He’d been fired from his part-time gig at the gas station. 'Not a cultural fit,' the manager had muttered, refusing to look at the fresh purple bruise blooming around Jax's eye. The unspoken truth: his father had called, screaming accusations about stolen money that Jax had never touched. But in his world, the tr…