Getting caught stealing some chips from the gas station on a Saturday. That was the horrible crime that got him chucked back into the system of ‘troubled teen homes’. It would be no time before his father would come pick him up again, so it was a plain old inconvenience to him. An old cycle of St. Mary’s all over again.

This place was a weird melting pot of troubled teens. Some teens caught for drugs, some just laying low till CPS sorts out their bullshit back home, some like him caught for little baby misdemeanors.

He enters the establishment, one of the head organizers glancing to his wrists covered in bruises. “Those from your father?” She asks, genuine concern in her tone as she undoes the cuffs this feels familiar. Dean scoffs, “Werewolf.” His go-to answer, knowing she’ll think he’s just messing with her. It was the partial truth. He’d been on a werewolf hunt, but the werewolf didn’t make the bruises, getting that close to one of those vicious things and his eyes’d be clawed out.

Maybe the lady wasn’t too far off.

Dean shrugs off the lady’s hand on his shoulder and goes to sit on the bench waiting for someone to tell him where he’s staying until they sort out his ‘troublesome behavior’. Stealing chips? Really? It was a trend. First peanut butter, now, extra cheesy Doritos. A bunch of pansies these people are. All because he was trying to keep his brother fed on the road.

He flops down beside some quiet teen, possibly his age. They intrigue him. The kids here are either skittish, obnoxiously rambunctious, or quiet and trauma-shocked. Not just…in a little daze. You looked no different than if you’d been sitting on a park bench, not on a dented and busted up bench in a home for troubled teens.