paxton flowers | d9

It had taken a long time for him to understand what his father had meant back when she'd told him, "Pax, to grow up is to be lonely." He hadn't gotten it because at the time yeah, he had no mother and his dad was gone a lot on jobs but that'd been okay because he'd had a lot of uncles and aunts. How could he ever be lonely?

His early childhood was spent running around the lower floors of various warehouses, always something to keep him busy. There weren't any other kids at the time and if other members of the gang had them, they left them at home so Paxton was mainly left to his own devices. Sure his dad always tried to set him up in his office but he'd always find a way to wiggle away. There was a lot to see out there in the inner workings and Pax wanted all of it, he always had, the gang was like his family and he could see no other life for himself.

He was eight when he held a gun for the first time, hefted it in small hands and pointed it at the wall. "Bang, bang," he'd said and imaginary smoke had slipped out of the barrel to dissipate in the air above his head. Uncle Henry thought it was a good prank to let him hold it but his dad had been so mad that he'd punched him in the chin and then everyone had laughed.

Three weeks after that, his dad had died, punctured lung on a job.

People did that around Pax a lot but he'd never expected it'd be his dad. He couldn't understand it well at first, how his dad could leave in the morning and then just not come back like that like he didn't have his son waiting for him to come home.

After that, things were different. Uncles and aunts would come to his place daily to check on him, bring him groceries and stuff. They'd sleepover, started sending him off to school but it wasn't long until Pax realized he could just pretend. All he had to do was walk like that's where he was headed and then keep walking until he had passed the school altogether.

Then he just needed to find the warehouse district and he was good to go. Sometimes they'd bother to walk him back to school, but for the most part, they let him be. A kid like Pax was handy for running stuff across the district anyway, no one would dare hurt a kid. They started packing his school bag with large packages and sending him out into the world, a knife in his pocket.

That's how Pax got good at fighting.

He'd started scrapping since young of course, his dad was trained to fight and he'd wanted his son to be safe too. His dad was always worried about that, it's why he brought Pax to the warehouse in the first place, he'd always been too protective to send him to school. So when the gang sent him out onto the streets with goods, he wasn't scared. Other kids would run in packs and sometimes he'd get ganged up on, but Pax never gave in. Even if he arrived at the drop with a black eye and a split lip, he always arrived on time.

So they stopped pretending to try and send him to school and Pax started to earn a place for himself. It felt good to be back, to feel like he had a family again. They let him have his father's old office and he started sleeping there out of habit, his home always feeling too big for just him. The warehouse had always felt more like home anyway.

He was eleven when Amos first showed up and they gave him to Paxton, told him to teach him the ropes. At first, it'd annoyed Pax, he didn't want to look after another kid, not when he'd had to work so hard to ear his place, but something about him made him unable to just leave him alone either. He was weak, couldn't really put up much of a fight and Pax found himself fighting his battles too often.

Soon enough, he stopped sending him off alone, wasn't worth the effort of following him to make sure he made his drops safely. Amos was a liability, it was easier to just take his half of the work and send him to his house to keep him safe. But Amos would always find a way to get in trouble anyway and Pax would always have to save him and that's just the way it was.

As they grew, Pax got more responsibilities within the gang and got an aunty to help him sell his childhood home, it was always a fairytale. His parents had bought it in one of Nine's safer neighbourhoods when his mom had been pregnant with him, with the plan of leaving the gang behind and raising him right. He bought an apartment instead closer to work and gave Amos a key, just in case he needed somewhere safe to be and Pax wasn't around.

No one could argue that Pax wasn't good. It'd been a couple of years since he'd last run goods, he was getting too old for it. No, he was running with crews at fifteen, proving himself easily as his father's son. Still always found time to save Amos' ass on the regular. It was if he walked into traffic just to see if Pax would come running, he didn't get how one person could get himself in so much trouble.

Pax had grown tall and strong in just a few short years, an asset to the gang. The first time he faced death, he was sixteen and had managed to catch a bullet in his side. It put him out of commission for a few weeks. The first thing he saw when he woke up from surgery was Amos, sleeping beside him in the bed in his apartment, where he stayed the whole time he was healing. It was always Amos.

Even when he was well enough to take care of himself, Amos didn't leave.

Pax never asked him to go either.

Things were just like that with them.