Blasphemy - Minchan

17// Am I not worth saving?

The council wouldn't do anything for Minho. Technically speaking, he had a house. Even when he explained the people in that house had sent him away to 'boarding school', they said they couldn't give him somewhere to live because he wasn't at risk of violence. At least, they didn't believe he was and his word deemed pointless in proving otherwise.

Chan wasn't much different. His uncle who had sent him away apparently passed away last year so they were willing to do something for him until they realised he had also been living in a boarding school for the past few years.

Both Minho and Chan told the police about the cult again but nobody seemed willing to help them. The next city they ran away to told them it was out of their county. Both of them knew nobody believed them. Neither of them were willing to go back to that place though.

Chan and Minho settled for the streets. They slept in the doorways of shops, freezing. Chan kept himself going by reminding himself it wasn't as bad as the basement. Minho wasn't doing so good though.

All of their money was gone and Minho hardly slept anymore. He watched over Chan every night, paranoid someone was going to take him away from him if he even closed his eyes. He became quiet too. Too quiet. Quieter than Chan. After watching him suffering, shaking and starving for two weeks, Chan couldn't take it anymore.

One night, a couple of weeks after they ran away from his father's house, Minho had managed to fall asleep. He and Chan had found somewhere better than usual to spent the night. Even so, it wasn't the best of places, only a little shop that had been abandoned for the past couple of years with broken windows and graffitied walls.

The two of them climbed through one of the ground floor windows at nightfall and found a mattress in the corner of the room. It wasn't pleasant, but they didn't have any better options. They placed down a t-shirt over the mattress and tried to get some sleep. Only Minho managed to. He'd eventually run out of energy after torturing himself with sleep deprivation and as soon as he did, Chan was walking back towards the window they'd entered through.

His eyes flickered back to Minho once his hand touched the windowsill, broken glass littered around his fingers. He couldn't just leave him there with no explanation...

Chan rushed back to the bag that Minho had dropped beside the mattress and rummaged inside. A lot of their stuff had gone missing over the past few days, either stolen or lost. Luckily, Chan found the pen he was searching for. He couldn't find any paper though. Had they used it? Chan didn't think they had. Luckily, Minho was still fast asleep, so Chan reached for his hand and wrote something on his palm.

"Chan?" Minho mumbled, eyes opening a crack.

"Shh, it's ok, baby. Go back to sleep," Chan whispered, brushing a hand over Minho's messy hair and pressing a kiss to his forehead.

Minho's eyes fell closed again. He buried his face against the Nirvana t-shirt he lay on and Chan's heart swelled. He couldn't let Minho go on like this anymore. He'd been too scared at first, too afraid of not being believed again, but Minho needed him to do this, even if he wouldn't admit it.

Without wasting any more time, Chan left through the shop window. He was doing it for Minho more than himself, but his head still swirled with guilt as he left him all alone. Minho wouldn't let him do this if he was awake though. He'd grown so used to people not believing them that he buried their past as if it had never happened and it was something they had to forget about.

Chan didn't think Minho was going to survive very long if he continued doing that. He did the only thing he could think of to help him. He just prayed this time he would be believed.

-

"This is the third time you've reported this abuse and nobody has looked into it?" The police officer asked Chan, sitting across from him in the interrogation room. She tried to make eye contact with him but he was staring at the edge of the table, legs bouncing up and down.