Shards

The jagged shards of glass sticking out of the back of her purple blouse glint red in the light of the overhanging fixture.

He clenches his fist around an oblong splinter so slick with blood it almost slips from his fingers. He hears the sirens, the red and blue flashing through the gap between the curtains, and feels the shard that pierced her carotid artery bite into his skin.

There is blood everywhere; his hands are warm and his knees are wet. There is blood dripping down the side of his face.

“Police!” comes a voice, but he can't look up or call out -he can't breath. He hears his older brother's gurgling breath where he's slumped in the corner, a knife wedged beneath his left clavicle, but his sister's body remains irrefutably still.

“Dear god,” he hears someone gasps, before footsteps hurry to his side. The voices sound muted as if they're underwater until the crackle of a radio seems to pop the echo chamber. He blinks and wonders why he feels so numb. It is only when one of the officers presses his hands against his thigh that he realizes the blood pooling beneath him isn't solely his sister's.

He looks up to see one of the officers kneel down next to his brother. “He- he killed her,” he tells the man applying pressure to the gash in his leg. The officer glances his way with sad eyes and panic wells in his chest. “He killed her,” he repeats, his voice dipping low as the world tilts around him.

He doesn't recall what happens next.

When he opens his eyes, he finds the blurred figure of his mother crying at his bedside. Her nose is red, her pupils blown, and her shaking fingers bump erratically against his wrist.

“What happened?” he croaks, wincing at the pull of skin when he shifts his legs.

She looks up, and memories spark in her deadened eyes, like images on flat copper coins.

The world is nevermore the same.

---

He remembers discovering his little brother's corpse floating in that well. An unfortunate accident, they'd called it, but he had known, had witnessed the truth in the vile twist of his brother's mouth -and so had his father.

But silence was the first lesson he was ever taught, so he stood rigid beneath his father's heavy glare and buried the knowledge beneath a mountain of guilt.

Two years later, his cowardice kills his sister.

---

“This will be your bedroom,” the man says. It's a nice room, spacious but bare. He knows he won't be here long enough to clutter the empty surfaces or tape posters on the blank walls -his life has turned into a sequence of barren rooms.

He drops his duffel on the bed and mutters a thank you to his new foster parent, the third in only six months. Mr Coulson seems like a decent man so far, and his two adopted children have been nothing but polite since he set foot in their home, but every household has its secrets -he knows better than to trust a cover before testing what's beneath.

He'd thought Garrett was nice and look how that turned out.

“Dinner's at seven,” Coulson informs him, “I'll give you some time to settle in.”

He nods politely and waits for the man to leave before sinking down onto the bed, taking deep breathes to steady his hammering heart.

Some time later, he's pulled out of his thoughts by a knock on the open bedroom door and looks up to find one of Mr Coulson's kids in the doorway. He knows her name is Jemma, from when Coulson introduced them earlier, and that she has a British accent, but that's about it. He doesn't know how she truly feels about his presence here.

“Can I come in?” she asks timidly.

“Sure,” he says, “it's your house.”

Her brows furrows slightly. She open her mouth to respond but is interrupted by her brother shouting to get her ass downstairs.

“Well,” she says with a smile, “ are you ready for your first Coulson family dinner?” The way she says it makes him wonder if it's the man's cooking he should be afraid of.

---

He finds he rather likes it here, which is the first warning sign in his head, the second is that they act like they like having him too.

He knows that's a lie.

It's been two weeks and all they do is small-talk at dinner and sit around and play games during the evenings. There are chores of course, but they're evenly divided and neither of the Coulson kids ever take advantage of his presence.

Mr Coulson works for the government and wears the same suit to work everyday. He smiles a lot, Grant observes, and sometimes it unnerves him, but mostly he's just weary. Coulson's not married, but he has a girlfriend called Melinda, at least that's what Jemma tells him. She works for the government too, but her job demands that she travels often, so she only visits sporadically and he has yet to meet her.

Jemma tries her best to make him feel at home and include him in their daily lives, but it is Antoine who helps make him feel at ease. Jemma means well, but she can be a little overbearing. Antoine tempers her, and they make quite a team. They show him around town that first week, stop at the supermarket to pick up groceries and somehow even manage to make that fun -though they go home with so many bags he wonders if they're housing extra family members somewhere. It's a nice neighbourhood, they complain it's rather boring and there's nothing to do around here, but he quite likes it. It's quiet, and safe. No drug deals on the corner or prostitutes in the next room; no white powder on the coffee table, and no junkie mother littering the carpet with used needles.

No violence... for now.

There's a hoop in the backyard, and he watches with a smile as Antoine lifts Jemma in the air so she can drop the basket ball through it. They asked him to join earlier but he declined, so he takes in their laughter and drags the tip of his pencil across his sketchbook.

Tomorrow is the first day of school and he's not looking forward to going. It usually takes the teachers one glance to decide he's trouble.

They're not exactly wrong.

---

He's sixteen, and the world is a battlefield he soldiers through -he tries not to step on any land mines.