being clever meant learning the game of how to survive within a system that didn't want orphans like him to thrive. he made allies with the bigger kids who could physically protect him, and he studied the parents of each group home he was shuffled to (there were many), molding himself to be whatever it was they were looking for in a child. sometimes that meant obediently complying with what was surely forced labor, and other times it simply meant being a listening ear for an adult who was just as lonely as he was. in the worst of situations, it meant being the courier for a drug exchange for his addicted foster mother, or being the physical outlet for his foster father's anger so he didn't look to the even younger ones. cas was mistrustful, and was mostly out to keep himself safe. but as he grew older, he began to act as a protector to the kids who were new to the system, or who hadn't yet been broken. he taught them what he had learned, and grew as attached to some as if they were his own brothers and sisters.

it was an incident when he was almost twelve years old in a group home in santa monica that cas broke his own rule (don't be a snitch, he'd decided early on: that only got you hit) and told the visiting social worker of the neglectful treatment of a young toddler, sophia, by the foster mother of the house. has anything else happened? the social worker asked him carefully, and cas grew briefly quiet. he had been in this home since he was ten, and the mother was considering adoption. he had certainly worked to remain on her good side, and she fed him, kept him clothed, and her chores were reasonable. he was doing well in school, and had even impressed some of his teachers. it could benefit him to remain in those good graces to see how far it could carry him into his teenaged years. but that woman wasn't a mother. she collected children to enhance her profit, and she played favorites - one of which he currently was. but for little sophia, for all the other kids, cas told the social worker everything. he told her how many times he had found sophia crying with a soiled diaper or just needing a bottle. he told her about the drug runs, about the mother's clear preferences that had worked to his advantage but to the detriment of others.

he paid for it. his foster mother found out about the meeting with the social worker, and the ensuing battle that followed was nasty. she accused him of every misbehavior possible to put her own actions in a better light, but in the end they both lost. cas was moved away from the stable life he almost had, and the foster mother lost custody of every single one of her children. he could at least find satisfaction in that - and it almost made up for the rocky transfers that followed. almost.

he was sent out of california - first to a rural town in the midwest where he wrinkled his nose through manure shoveling and milking the cows. his foster parents there were elderly but wanted to do right by him, but that couldn't be said for the next home on the east coast he landed in after his social worker supposedly found a better fit for him. if cas thought the house back in santa monica was bad, that didn't touch what he found in chesapeake, virginia. on the surface, the walker family were model americans: religious, blue collar, heavily involved in the church and the community. though his social worker promised he would just love the walkers, cas found them as disturbing as all fuck. he had good instincts, and the alarm bells were going off as the family - a mother, father, two daughters - welcomed him inside that first day. despite the room he had of his own, despite the impeccable decor of their home and the generosity of their offers to buy him just about anything he would need, cas sensed a sinister undercurrent in it all, and he patiently began to wait for the other shoe to drop.

he didn't have to wait long.

cas' first polite refusal to join them at church service was met with an exaggerated - and stiff - understanding. of course, honey, jessica walker effused, i'm sure you're exhausted after all you've been through to get here. maybe next time? no, not next time, cas remembers privately thinking to himself. with a middle name deriving from a latvian god and a birth mother who had leaned far more into mythology and spirituality rather than the worship of any monotheistic deity, he was immoveable on his stance on religion. his family had been among the 'old believers' in latvia, or so austra had told him when she tucked him into bed at night. those memories were important to him, and as was honoring his mother and his roots. the walkers saw things much differently.

at nearly thirteen years old now, cas had yet to hit his growth spurt (if he ever would, he wondered), and he was physically vulnerable - particularly to the patriarch of the walker family, who disciplined his daughters in a similar manner. he could treat cas no different, the man claimed, and as yet another foster placement of his turned sour, all cas could think was here we go again. the walker family made a mission to make a convert out of him. it was cultish, in a way, and later cas would be certain that the baptist church the walkers attended was indeed a cult. he was locked in his room and denied basic privileges on the weeks where he refused to attend church, and he was proclaimed a sinner. the worst part was the pity the walkers had for him. it was a moral kind of concern of the falsest kind, their quest to 'save' him. they prayed for him, begging for god to see him into his grace, to drain the devil from his soul. he refused to comply like he used to; he was done trying to make himself be who he wasn't. between the fanaticism and abuse, cas knew he was being pushed to every one of his limits. he had been strong all of these years, but now he was about to break.

he started to act out in every single way, meticulously planning his outbursts beforehand like they were assignments for class. he stole alcohol from the corner store, and made sure he was caught with drugs bartered with some older kids at the high school. and this time when christopher walker raised a hand against him, cas raised one back. of course he didn't get far, but the lashing out on cas' part - which was, for once, less a calculated move and more out of sheer desperation - was enough for the walkers to want cas out of the house. he told his new case workers everything, but of course they didn't believe him. christopher and jessica walker put on a convincing act of being shocked and appalled by his behavior, and yet it didn't matter to cas that he wasn't listened to, that they all thought him to be a typical problem child. he was leaving. they didn't want him anymore, and he'd never been more grateful for anything in his life.

cas became a foster child with a 'caution' warning, and he found it difficult to be anything but outwardly sullen and wary of anything and anyone. no one was clamoring to foster a newly teenaged kid with reported behavioral problems, and cas was juggled between group homes - one in maryland and the other in new jersey. and then one day, he was told to pack his bag and be ready to leave in an hour. he had been placed with a foster parent again; this time in new york city, under the care of a woman named maria arden. maria was a british-caribbean woman in her 40's, and had two other foster children: a five year old named benny, and a ten year old named alina. maria didn't want the easy ones. she was a licensed child psychologist who had recently retired her practice and moved into a renovated firehouse in brooklyn, placing her full focus on community activism, art, and on the foster children she was determined to help build new lives for.

after everything he'd been through, cas was naturally withdrawn when he arrived in the city for the first time. but even he couldn't ignore the spark that ignited within him the second he saw the skyline on the horizon - the streets were packed and busy, teeming with conversation and culture. he arrived on maria's doorstep with only a backpack, assessing and searching out flaws or dangers from the second he laid eyes on the woman. there had to be a catch here; there always was. he had his own room, and it was a nice one: a little small and cramped maybe, but he had clean sheets. he had a window overlooking the city, and a window-seat, a bookshelf, and the bathroom he shared with the other kids was well-stocked and clean. and most importantly, to him, there was no lock on the outside of the door. as maria gave him the tour of the apartment and even her art studio, she was observing him as much as he was watching her. he was suspicious, but she didn't seem to be. she gave him a welcoming gift to unwrap - a stack of books ranging from fantasy to nonfiction - and left him to get washed up for dinner.

yet again, cas waited for the other shoe to drop. he looked for signs in his new foster siblings - signs of abuse, of neglect, or just plain unhappiness - but save for alina being a little quiet like him, they were a strangely synergetic group. that first night, maria didn't prod him to tell them all about himself (like he'd been asked to too many times), but instead led a conversation about everyone's favorite movies. cas offered up only a tiny bit to the conversation, feeling too stiff and tense to say much, but it was hard not to crack even the smallest of smiles when benny chattered on about his love for thomas and the tank engine. his reluctance to get involved in the conversation wasn't mentioned, and he wasn't chided even once. maria only asked him to help her wash dishes after, asking him about his food preferences while he dried the plates and silverware. cas headed to bed that night and in the weeks that followed, he wondered what he was missing. he wondered if this peaceful behavior from the new family was all a test, and if he was failing it.

as he had with his other foster parents, cas examined maria closely to figure out what it was she wanted in a child. a month into his stay after he had decided to show an interest in painting - because that was what she liked - she snorted and took one look at him, shaking her head. baby, that's not what you care about, she said, laughing at the look of surprise on his face. let's see what speaks to your soul. not mine. cas was startled that she'd caught him on his chameleon-like behavior, but maria was more than a match for the walls he had put up around himself. slowly but surely and with more patience than a saint, maria coaxed cas' truer self out of him - and what she found was a boy who had been waiting all these years just to be accepted for who he was. he was a writer, and a good one, and she inspired that passion of his by enrolling him in creative writing classes outside of school. so subtly so that he hardly even noticed, she used the tactics of writing therapy on him, encouraging him to use his notebooks for anything he'd like to express. it took a while, but cas soon found that writing was his biggest comfort. whether he was scrawling about imaginary people and places or his own faraway memories of latvia, he liked it. he had control over his own stories. he could give the characters in them happy endings, and he could make the villains pay. it was the one thing that made him feel safe.

and soon enough, too, he realized that maria made him feel safe. without having even realized it, he'd begun to live in the apartment like it was a home. he took the subway home from school and sprawled out in maria's art studio, telling her stories from his day. he walked benny to kindergarten, and helped alina with her math homework. his smiles were no longer as rare as a blue moon, and he quickly climbed to the top of his class in school. the kids around him didn't make fun of his lingering accent because the city had so many of them; he didn't stand out as so different when everyone else around him was too. he had his roadblocks - nightmares that he wouldn't accept comfort for, and the occasional physical clash with bullies in school (that he never won and never backed down from either) - but he was in the stablest environment he'd been in since his first adoption. while he never quite settled or had confidence that his luck would last, maria became a mother to him in all but name, and benny and alina his siblings. he fell in love with the boroughs around him - maria introduced him to baltic restaurants in queens, and she also found a meetup group in hell's kitchen consisting of latvian emigrants. cas took some coaxing to attend and was the youngest person there, but maria swore she watched him bloom when they stepped in to hear a swirl of words that were unfamiliar to her, but perfectly clear to him. the second he was spoken to in a perfect native latvian dialect from one of the group members, cas lit up and easily spoke back. all those years of suppression had not dimmed his memory of his mother language in the slightest.

shortly before cas turned seventeen, things - as he'd expected but so desperately hadn't wanted - began to deteriorate. what had for so long been a manageable health condition for maria turned into a full-blown crisis requiring hospitalization and test after test. at first, cas and alina and benny's regularly visiting case worker decided that maria's sister taking over the fostering would suffice for now. the hope was that maria would recover, and would shortly be back up on her feet. cas spent endless hours at the hospital with her, visiting with little benny as soon as they got out of school. he wasn't there for her stroke, but he'll never forget the day he spent with his siblings waiting at home for the news of how her surgery had gone. again he felt that fragility at the edges of his awareness, the urge to shatter and withdraw, to pull his attachment far back from what it was. and yet he couldn't. this time, he had other people to be strong for. benny cried himself to sleep against his shoulder that night, and alina clung to his hand like it was the only thing keeping them both together.

in the morning, there was both good news and bad. maria would make it. she was alive, and could recover. but the bad news was - it would be a long recovery with no guarantee she would attain her former health. she was going to have to relearn motor movements and neurological functions; and that long struggle ahead meant that she could no longer be their foster mother, and neither could she - like she was planning - adopt the three children. as their case worker gently explained that they would begin carefully looking for new placements for all of them, cas felt his dreams (because for once, he'd dared to have them) slowly crumble. one of the most important people in his life was suffering, and his home, he knew, was about to be snatched away. he was powerless to stop it.

benny and alina were almost immediately placed with a trusted co-worker of maria's, but the woman hesitated when faced with the option of taking in cas. she had two other children of her own with limited space in her home, and even with the offered stipend, she wasn't certain about taking in a teenager - particularly one with a case file like cas.

cas didn't take it personally, because it made his decision easier. his siblings would be safe and cared for, and they were where he knew how to find him. but he wasn't going back into the foster system. he refused. it would be another endless cycle of people who didn't want him, and at sixteen years old, he was independent-minded enough to believe he could strike out on his own and survive. and so the night before his social worker was meant to take him to another group home in pennsylvania, far from the city and people he loved so much, cas boxed away the majority of his belongings and carefully left them stacked in maria's closet. he took what he needed in a backpack, and leaving two notes on his siblings' bedside tables, he slipped out in the early morning hours.

disappearing out of the foster system meant he had to disappear from the life he had built. he couldn't go back to school, where he was defying expectations and nearly the valedictorian of his class. he couldn't finish his junior year or complete his senior year - he couldn't finish his application to columbia's journalism program, where maria had excitedly been steering him to with an endless resource of scholarship opportunities. he felt stupid that he'd believed it even possible, but he very quickly - and painfully - swallowed his regrets and did what he'd grown up doing. he repressed every longing, every hope, and he looked ahead of him. what could he control? what could he do?

his saved allowance allowed him to stay in a hostel for a few weeks and feed himself, but the money soon stretched thin. he looked for under the table work, and found a few gigs - dog walking, cashiering at farmer's market stands in the summer, cleaning. they weren't enough. he was either sleeping on the street and eating, or he was sleeping in a hostel room and he was starving. he couldn't make ends meet, and he was beginning to look like it on the surface. his clothes were worn out and dirty, and he grew thinner. he visited benny and alina on their walks home from school every chance he could, keeping the visits secreted between the three of them so he could remain updated on their lives and maria's, but soon even he put distance there. they were worried about him, and the more worried they got, the more likely they'd be to tell their case worker where to find him. he needed an answer to the money problem, and quick. he was very, very aware that he could end up in a bad place if he didn't - he'd been on the streets long enough to see that homelessness didn't always ensure a long life span.

he found what he was looking for one night outside of an abandoned housing complex he was squatting at when he walked into an alleyway in the middle of a drug exchange. he knew the young woman pocketing the money, too. ava was a little older than him, and primarily couch surfed with her friends in college - he'd met her months ago while hanging outside of the library, where she'd approached him after guessing they were in similar situations. she'd come to new york with acting dreams without anyone back home to support her, but her risk taking hadn't panned out. cas hung around until the skittish man with her scurried off with a considerable new bulge in his pocket, and he and ava got talking. she was selling drugs, she confessed, and it was her most profitable position she'd had in the city yet. she bought in bulk from a source she knew, and then sold that product for at least twice of what she'd paid for. it was dangerous, sure, ava said, but in just a few short months, she'd made nearly enough to put towards rent at some places she was looking at.

having himself seen first-hand what drugs had done to several of his foster parents, cas had never been particularly interested in taking them. but he was immediately interested in the prospect of selling them. ava liked him enough to show him the ropes, to connect him with her buyer, to show him the best exchange spots, and once cas started, it was hard to stop. he was good at it. he knew how to manage the financial aspect, and correctly calculated how to attract buyers. he earned enough to eat - but he didn't earn enough to move much beyond the homeless shelter or empty housing complexes. he didn't earn enough to chase out the trauma that was built upon by the day, either.

it all weighed on cas far more than he would ever admit to himself. the loss of a home, the loss of maria and his siblings as steady figures in his life, his lifestyle now. homelessness meant that he often witnessed violence and was subjected to it more than once. he was surrounded by pain, and he was pained himself. so it was all too tempting to try a bit of what he was selling - it'd take his edge off, ava told him with a sad smile. and he had far too many edges.

as it turned out, she was right. he started with oxy and subsequently puked - he couldn't see the appeal. but the second time, it hit where it needed to. the dark cloud hanging over his head that had been there since he was five years old finally, finally eased. the longing and grief in him went quiet. he felt an even sort of contentment in a way he never had, and he spent the whole day in a productive buzz, running errands and cautiously expanding his selling circle beyond the limited amount of buyers he was trusting. as the high faded, he thought himself too clever to get addicted; he was too smart, too aware of himself and his failings to get sucked into a needless habit that had ruined so many people he'd known. but as the days wore on, the challenges thrown his way were faced a lot easier when he crushed and snorted a pill that morning. and when he discovered that shooting up gave him a far more efficient high - his money earned from drugs started to be spent on his own personal stash. but he could handle it, he told himself over and over again. he was in utter control. maybe this was the one thing he could control. that's how cas saw it, and yet he was quickly becoming like the population he sold to: addicted and craving any kind of hit that would take him back to the feeling he'd gotten when he first reached that high.

he turned eighteen, and what should've been a milestone - reaching adulthood and therefore phasing out of the foster system - was barely noticed in the haze of painkillers. he saw his foster siblings less and less, and their new foster parents forbid that they see him anyway; it only took one encounter with the foster mother at a bodega for her to grasp what cas was becoming. maria's heart would break to see you like this, she told cas, but cas didn't care. maria wasn't well enough to care, either, or so he told himself - because he had caught glimpses when he hung around her rehab center when the evening nurse pitied him enough to let him in, and maria had yet to recognize him. addicted as he was, he didn't think of the future. he didn't think of maria's potential recovery, and what she might think of him in the future. he only thought of his pain, now, and the itch, now. it didn't matter what tomorrow brought as long as he could get his hands on some pills, as long as he could chase out the hollow ache in him that only grew and grew.

months passed. nearly a year. cas had squandered his savings, and was still skulking about half-finished apartment buildings, or roughing it out on the streets. the self-possession he'd carefully cultivated as he'd grown had cracked, and was crumbling. he hardly knew himself, and others hardly knew him either. his only true friend was ava, who had decided to move out of the scene down south, where the living would be cheaper and easier. she tried to coax cas into joining her, afraid of what would happen to him if she wasn't around to steer him away from danger, but he refused. his siblings were here. his whole shattered life was here - or what was left of it. the city was the closest thing he'd get to the old world in this country, and he was unwilling to leave it. but he'd visit, he told ava with a wan smile. he'd try.

he didn't, of course. he only spiraled downward, even more-so after she left. there was more pills. there was blurry nights where he'd end up with some stranger - a college girl jittery on her own high, or an older man looking to channel his own vice in a much younger man like him. sex became it's own high, and even better if the person had a couch he could crash on or enough drugs to share. life was a blur, and one bad decision after another. he became used to waking up in places he didn't recognize, with people he didn't know, or alone in his own sweat and piss. to anyone who encountered him, it would've come as no surprise that cas was headed towards an overdose. the signs were all there: he was careless with his dosage, and he didn't think twice about mixing with alcohol - or taking drugs that were clearly laced with something else. when it happened, he was in a nearly empty subway car, rattling out of brooklyn and into queens. he'd missed his stop, but he didn't feel like getting up. he was tired, and the world was blurry around the edges. he heard and felt his own breathing getting slower, and was barely aware when slumped down against the seating, thinking only that it made a better pillow than he would've thought. goodnight my little bird, he'd later swear he heard his mother telling him, tucking a blanket over him just as she did when he was small. rest well.

sitting across from cas was twenty-one year old lucas faye. an expat himself in his youth from belgium, he'd lived in the city with his grandmother since the age of ten and had learned to support himself in a unique way following her passing shortly after he graduated high school. he was a junior at hunter college, majoring in studio art, and he kept company with several addicts and former addicts - which made it easy to recognize all the signs in the kid growing listless right in front of him. they were in the only two in the car, and lucas was on his feet the second cas passed out. he crouched down and was already rummaging in his bag, knowing what he'd need if the boy didn't respond to any efforts to wake him up. his breathing was shallow, hardly there, and his skin took on a grey-ish pallor almost touching blue. the subway screeched forward as lucas injected cas in the thigh with a vial of narcan - and he waited.

the first thing cas saw when he came to was a pair of the greenest eyes he'd ever seen anxiously looking down at him. the subway car was groaning around a corner, the lighting wavering in and out in the tunnel, but the man bending over him nearly glowed in contrast to their grimy surroundings. cas would later learn the visual irregularity was the high leaving him as the drug pumped through his veins and did its job, but the analogy of lucas as an angel was no less true. he stayed with cas for a half hour until he felt like he could stand, and then he guided him off the train at a stop in queens. lucas parked the two of them at a bench in a corridor that rarely saw traffic, and he administered another dose of the narcan when cas began nodding off again. he was badly off, and even more-so when he came back to a fuller awareness. cas felt the lack of the opioids immediately, and the itch. he refused lucas' coaxing for a hospital, and he begged him instead for a hit of something, anything. it hurt, he told the man who'd just saved his life. in the empty station, cas heard the echo of his own pleading mirrored back to him - and in withdrawal for the first time in months thanks to the narcan, it hit him in the face. he was addicted. he could die. he would've died if not for the good samaritan next to him. everything had unraveled. he started sobbing uncontrollably, and lucas leaned in close and said the words he'd been wanting to hear all along.

'i'll help you'

he didn't ask for cas' permission, and he didn't need it. lucas tucked his arm around his shoulders and helped him up above-ground and into a taxi that took them both to his apartment building in queens. he set cas up in his own bedroom, listening as he began to panic and crave. cas was terrified of withdrawal, since he had felt the beginnings of it too many times to count - and the shakes and the nausea had always been enough to steer him right back to the addiction. but here in lucas' apartment, fourteen floors up in an area he was unfamiliar with, he was all but trapped. he was trapped with a stranger, although that stranger didn't seem to be too phased by him or his near hysteria. he'd been through the same thing, lucas told him calmly, and so had many of his friends, not all of who had made it. it's not like you're not a prisoner here, lucas told cas while setting up the room with supplies - bins for vomiting, washcloths for the sweating that would come, water and a clear path to the toilet, but if you won't let me take you to a hospital, you're not going to last anywhere else.

lucas was right, because cas was barely able to hold on in the safe and enclosed walls of his apartment building. he shook his way through four nights of hallucinations, vomiting, convulsions and delirium, in the absolute worst physical and mental state of his life. but no matter how awful things got, no matter how much he soiled himself or the bedsheets, lucas was there to patiently clean him up, taking his weak aggression and anger and grief with only gentle comfort in response. when the severe symptoms began to ebb, lucas warned cas that his struggle was just beginning. and yet again, he correctly predicted things. cas didn't dare to leave the apartment for weeks after that - he spent sleepless nights obsessing over the thought of how just one hit would make him feel better. just one. but every time he lurched over to the door while lucas was either in class or asleep, he stopped himself. he thought of the withdrawals, he thought about what it was like living out on the streets. lucas had made it clear in no uncertain terms that he wouldn't be allowed back in if he went out to get his desperate hands on some opioids, and cas...didn't want to leave. he didn't want to fall back into that life-destroying cycle of chasing high after high - he wanted to see his siblings again without scaring them. he wanted to visit maria. he wanted to never, ever sleep shivering out in the open ever again. and though he was reluctant to admit this, he wanted lucas. as a friend, as whatever he wanted to be. maybe cas viewed him with too much of a hero complex, but the young man had done more than saved his life; he'd saved his mind, his heart, and his soul. now cas had to work harder than he ever had to keep it.

lucas' smile was brighter than the sun when cas finally verbalized all of this (carefully leaving the bit about his crush out), and he came up with a deal: if cas stayed clean, he could stay in his spare room for six months. and at the end of that half year mark, he could continue living here if he looked for a job and started paying rent. it was an arrangement cas agreed to. up against the waves of craving, he began to take small steps forward. he went to narcotics anonymous meetings on a weekly basis, and he found resources to free recovery clinics where the therapy appointments were without charge. he was all too reluctant at first, recalling his youth and how terrifying those doctors had seemed at six years old, but his sessions soon became a lifeline. he didn't always talk much during them, but it helped to know someone was listening. it helped, too, when the psychologist affirmed that everything he'd been through since entering the foster system - the things he was willing to tell, at least - was not acceptable, and nor was it what he deserved. he was strong, she told him. he was strong, and stronger still for wanting to look to a future where he wasn't defined by addiction or trauma.

it was difficult for him to decide just what that future would involve. he had his writing itch, but that was next to impossible for the moment - he'd never finished high school, and he had to his name only what lucas loaned. under the advice of his therapist, he took things slow, using up every day of those six months lucas gave him. he began visiting maria again, finding that much had changed in the year he'd spent under the fog of drugs and recovery. she was moving on her own again, speaking some. she recognized him - he could tell. he sought out benny and alina's foster mother, and agreed to undergo drug testing before each supervised visit he had with his foster siblings. he made routines out of these visits, and tried to integrate himself back into the idea of job hunting. he renewed his id papers at the city hall and also put in paperwork to change his legal last name to arden - maria's - to read fully as cassius auseklis nikolajeves arden. the association to the mother he had left was important to him, and he wanted to mark this new step forward with a sign of commitment to his family. he was both a nikolajeves and an arden; and that meant honoring who he had been and who he would be.

despite his determination to move forward, the fear of relapsing loomed over him always, hanging over his head everywhere he went. the itch was overwhelming - bad on some days and plain worse on others. lucas was his rock throughout it at all. he seemed to read his mood without effort, and always knew when he needed a distraction, whether it was a walk in the park or making dinner together, or watching films, sometimes in lucas' native french or cas' native latvian. inevitably, their distraction turned to each other too. cas felt all the heat rush to his face when lucas first kissed him when they sat up on the rooftop one night. his heart began to pound, and felt it: an itch, but of a wholly different kind. lucas held his face in his hands and confessed that he just wanted to have some fun with someone he trusted; and cas was beautiful, he told him. this didn't have to be anything they didn't want it to be.

but the problem was that cas wanted it to be more. he couldn't say it when he read lucas' intentions plainly enough. he didn't want commitment - lucas had talked about his personal preference often, saying that he never wanted to be tied down by anyone because there was simply too much to experience. he wanted to travel, and he wanted to meet other people. a relationship was out of the question. cas found the old shards of his once cautiously kept self-possession when he was with lucas. he loved him - he knew that - but he had to keep that quiet to protect himself. and it could work, couldn't it? he'd pretend not to be bothered when lucas had flings with others. he'd pretend anything as long as it meant they could snatch more moments with each other. intimacy with lucas soon became a drug all on its own, and it kept him both tethered to the particular kind of misery that came with unrequited love (though lucas loved him, he knew, just not like that) and it motivated him, too, to be what lucas needed him to be: a friend above all else.

the six months ran out, and by the end of it cas had a job as a busboy at a baltic restaurant. he had the added bonus of being fluent in latvian for the occasional customer who came through from his home country, and cas was soon motivated to learn other languages he encountered in his circles in the city: estonian and polish to start. his knack for picking up foreign dialects kept him busy even when the stress of his meager paychecks got to him. lucas didn't mind picking up some of his rent, but cas was stubborn - he wanted to pull his weight, and he wanted to stand as lucas' equal. but for a nineteen year old with very little to show on his resume, it was next to impossible to find any decently paying gig that would allow him a living wage in the city. he didn't want to depend on lucas when he always privately feared that he could waltz out of his life at any moment like so many others had, and the question was how.

the answer came one day when cas was grumbling over his envy of lucas' work - a position that he had always called web design that seemed to keep odd hours overnight at times, but paid him very, very well. lucas flushed, looked over at him, and confessed that it wasn't exactly web design. it was a little more complicated than that.

he had cas' attention and curiosity at once, and lucas ended up telling him the truth of it. he was an escort. someone that others paid for sex services. it wasn't exactly legal, but that wasn't ethical, was it? sex work was just like any other work, lucas explained with a shrug. he was good at it, had fun with it, and he got to be very choosy with his clients. if he played his cards right, he could both pay his living expenses for a while here and have enough to backpack across europe for a year or more. several things came into focus for cas. of course lucas wasn't looking for a steady relationship if this was his occupation - and it made cas feel a little more secure about what they had, because lucas had chosen him and cas had chosen him. there was no exchange of money involved like lucas was so used to. cas was a little bothered by the secret keeping, but the more lucas explained, the more he understood. and the more, honestly, the idea of it all appealed.

cas weighed it over for a couple days before bringing it up with lucas. he wasn't especially eager to get into another technically illegal activity, but just the thought of making enough to be his own man made him hungry for something, anything that would allow him to stand on his own two feet. and after feeling powerless for so long, this was an opportunity to take some control back for himself. his therapist had cautioned him to keep healthy and safe sexual relationships after he had hesitantly shared a handful of unhappy memories, but he was good at compartmentalizing his emotions. he could bury his trauma down deep, and he could let it out when he chose. he could show himself that he could put his body to profitable use while claiming the autonomy he'd lost.

he was certain that his way of thinking would be met with horror by any therapist, but the lure of financial stability was too strong for cas to turn away from it. so the next time he and lucas made dinner together, he asked him if it was at all possible that he could refer him to whoever arranged his escort meetings. cas was interested to see that at first lucas was taken aback - and maybe a little against the prospect. there was an intriguing glimmer of covetedness that cas had never seen before in lucas, but the more they spoke about it, the more lucas' defenses began to lower some. he saw cas' urge to take care of himself, to make the money he never really had, and he reluctantly agreed to set him up with his manager. but only, lucas warned, if he could have a say in who he made appointments with. he wasn't going to have cas set up with just anyone in a line of work that could sometimes be dangerous. though cas didn't say it aloud, though he wanted to, he quietly appreciated lucas' urge to keep him safe.

as it turned out, cas already knew the people behind the escorting agency that lucas worked for. they were lucas' college friends that cas had met several times at different dinner parties he'd tagged along to, and they had constructed a business that strove to be as ethical and secure as possible. their mission statement was to provide high quality services for their clients, but to place their worker's comfort above all else. if there was a single complaint about a client, they were put on the blacklist (that was then often circulated among the sex work community) and banned from scheduling anything again. they arranged background checks and did thorough investigative work into their clients before clearing appointments. theirs was a startup company that operated under the radar, and everyone employed was of a like age and determined to do business with equality and safety for all parties in mind. cas' scheduler, forrest, began screening clients - with plenty of lucas' input.

after filtering through hundreds of requests, lucas and forrest both settled on farrah mirza. farrah was a wealthy heiress who had a very simple request: good sex and friendly company. cas thumbed through her photos and knew it would be an easy job - she was beautiful, was an accomplished data scientist, and had been through a handful of other escorts who only had glowingly positive things to say about her. she kept careful boundaries and, a common thread in all her feedback, wanted the person she was paying to enjoy themselves too. but even then, he was full of the unfamiliar sensation of nerves the night he met her at one of new york's most elite restaurants. lucas had chosen his outfit - a tailored suit with a casual open jacket - and he'd made his hair look stylishly tousled instead of its usual fluffy mess. he felt like an imposter, but no one would know that from looking at him from the outside. he remembered what he had done as a foster child, and figured those years would be applied well here: all he had to do was be who the other person wanted him to be. as he was guided to farrah's table, she looked him top to bottom and smiled against her wine glass. so you're the one i've been waiting for, she said.

and in a way, she was who he had been waiting for too. they did no more than dine together that night, farrah delighting over ordering dishes cas had never even heard of. and when the night was over, when she directed her chauffeur to drop cas off wherever he chose, he was surprised to be given an envelope of cash. it was only when he was walking up the apartment stairs later on that he opened it - and his eyes widened like saucers. there was twenty crisp hundred dollar bills in there; two thousand for four hours of his time. and he'd done nothing but fall into an easy conversation and have a gourmet dinner that was fully paid for - it was too good to be true, wasn't it? lucas laughed at him when he came into the apartment stuttering over his fortune. you see? you get it now? lucas asked him, and he did. becoming someone else for a few hours to make a ridiculous net gain suddenly didn't seem too daunting a task at all.

he ran into roadblocks those first couple months - the itch to buy himself some painkillers to have just in case was one, but lucas recognized that in him right away and steered him from the cravings by fulfilling his hunger in other ways. the second barrier was less dangerous than his addiction hovering over his head, but no less difficult to overcome: his hesitance to again have sex with strangers. he was lucky that his first experience was with farrah. after weeks of evenings where he was paid to either be a dinner date or a lofty party guest, she requested sex. she was comfortable with him, and she hoped he was comfortable with her. cas accepted, and yet she spied his unease the second he had his shirt off in her bedroom. she wasn't lucas, as much as he liked and respected her. she was new, and there was always a danger in that. farrah wasn't oblivious to his discomfort, and so she amended her request: no sex tonight, but she wanted intimacy. and he could choose the manner of it.

having control over the situation immediately helped. he felt a little awkward at first with her dark eyes tracing his every move like he was someone worth watching, but he followed what he wanted: and he wanted to kiss her. and so he did, pressing her down gently against her luxurious sheets and letting the feeling take him away. this is my first time doing this, he confessed to her, being paid for this, i mean. farrah knew - she was turned on by it, in fact - but as they lay together that night, she told him she wanted to help him. it would be sexually thrilling for her to be the training space for a new escort: and she had more than enough money to be very, very willing to pay for someone she desired in the first place. and so cas learned how to free himself with her: they went through various scenarios and sexually explored one another fully. all it took was easing in for cas to realize that he had the power here. he only had to agree to what he wanted to do, and who he wanted to see. no one could make him do anything he was uncomfortable with.

farrah remained his main client - and the boundaries began blurring between them as they became friends - but he began cautiously accepting others. he was soon sitting very comfortably on over thirty thousand dollars in his bank account, and it only kept on growing. he fine-tuned the abilities that had kept him surviving in his youth, learning yet again how to put on a mask of someone else. he began to feel more like himself again; stronger and in full possession of his impulses. the more he worked, the less he wanted the drugs. the drugs had made him homeless; it had taken his family away from him, and isolated him in a pit of misery and despair. but his sex work elevated him: for the first time in his life, he was financially stable, and he had the drive and motivation to better himself. he began lightly exercising, and placed his focus on building a wardrobe that would fit a more elegant vision. he paid his rent, and after also using the explanation of web design to their foster mother, started to foot costs of benny and alina's that weren't fully covered. he visited maria regularly, and sat in on her physical therapy and took careful walks with her through the rehab center's garden. she was speaking again, and every month saw small improvements.

things were, unbelievably, looking up for him. he had his family back, and a sturdy network of friends who looked after him as much as he did them. he was holding steady with his drug recovery, and on the hard days, lucas was there to hold him at night. but despite the sun shining on the horizon - promising a future far brighter than his past - cas still couldn't shake the feeling of an impending something. he kept his guard up high, and he soon found that he was right to. his youth had taught him that the world was a cruel, dark place, and it was about to get crueler and darker than he ever could have imagined.