Sweet Child of Mine || Self-Para
Tagging: Blaine Anderson, Bruce Anderson (with mentions of Sebastian Smythe)
Time Frame: 9PM, Sunday February 7th
Location: Unknown Underground Imprisonment
Notes: Blaine and Bruce have a...heart to heart, so to speak.
It seemed to be that once things felt like they were starting to normalize again, that another curveball was thrown their way. Blaine had his engagement ring situated comfortably on his hand, Sebastian on his own, and yet, things were starting to fall to pieces again. They couldn’t have peace. They couldn’t just be together and live their lives. It had taken a disaster to make them both realize that they needed each other to survive, and then when Sebastian finally return to the waking world, they drifted back apart as the secrets that stretched between the two of them grew and made it impossible for them to hold onto each other between the mountain of lies. He saw it on the news, witnessed Sebastian killing Jimmy Corden on TV. He knew even behind that mask when Sebastian was lying, when he expressed remorse that the metahuman he fought had tragically succumbed to injuries in their battle, when in actuality, his voice couldn’t have been any more flaccid...so uncaring, blood staining the fingertips of his red suit and he talked briefly tot he reporter.
Blaine felt sick. But laid before him, throughout the week following the murder Sebastian committed, Blaine had become fixated on his research, his proof that his father was behind this. It was almost impossible to do when he couldn’t get close to him at the lab, but after doing some asking around, researching, he finally managed to get a lead. Bruce worked the latest at the lab, a dedicated worker as Caitlin had deemed it. Wanting to ensure Sebastian’s utmost safety at all times, he’d been told. But Blaine had his suspicions, after seeing a white van that was parked around the back of the building, marked by a small blue dent in the right passenger door. He had seen the van coming in and out of the building almost every night until it returned around dawn. And tonight...tonight Blaine was following it.
Though he’d promised Sebastian no more midnight charades as NightBird...desperate times calling for desperate measures, and he opened his chest, donned his black costume and weapons, and took to the streets to follow the van that he saw his father getting into. He knew the route it took every night by memory now, but it was getting inside the old looking building with Quarantine signs all over it that would pose difficulty. The van stopped just along the shoreline to the harbor, and Bruce got out with the assistance of a ramp, rolling himself inside of the building and shutting the door behind him. Blaine hopped down onto the ground, attempting the first obvious entrance at the front. One tug, but the miscolored old doors were surprisingly shut tight. He circled the building, looking for his entrance, when he spotted a broken board. He tugged the board off the wall after some effort and slipped inside, pulling the plank back in place.
The old factory looked surprisingly normal. Bruce was nowhere in sight, but the building was just a dilapidated production line. The machines looked as though they had been offline for decades. He knew only a bit of information about the place. Knew that the building used to produce hub caps for cars and other various steel car parts. He also knew that it got shut down due to the proximity to the harbor. The company got caught dumping their garbage and sewage into the harbor, and the EPA shut it down. Blaine kept his weapons tightly clenched in his hands, examining the machinery, the rusted out pipes and conveyer belts. But there didn’t seem to be anything suspicious about the place.
At least, not until he heard a second door opening. Behind one of the compression machines parted a portion of the wall, and Bruce began to wheel himself out. Blaine had enough practice in being stealthy to slip out of sight and use the darkness to his advantage, sliding into the room before the door could shut behind him. The hallway was wide enough that Bruce could easily navigate his chair down the staircase, empty save for the ramp that led down beneath the ground. Hanging a left once he reached the underground, Blaine could feel droplets of water dripping from the ceiling and soaking into his shirt. Was this constructed underneath the harbor? He walked for a bit longer, blind, using the wall as his only guide. His feet squished and squelched under the soft earth beneath his shoes, and finally as he ventured further, he could hear voices.
His arm fell through the wall he’d been using as support and he hit the ground with a hard ‘oof’. Voices immediately went “shh” and he felt something lock onto his arm. He quickly jerked it free from what he now realized was a row of metal bars, and staggered back until his back his another set. He fumbled to his feet and reached into his pocket, digging out a small flashlight and shining it through the room. There were hundreds of prisons down here...that seemed to stretch on so far even the light of his flashlight couldn’t continue to follow. Each set of imprisonment was crafted to house the metahuman that was locked behind it. He recognized almost every face as ones that Sebastian had fought as the Flash.
“Help...” The voice behind the bars he’d initially fallen through pleaded. It was the shapeshifter..the one who had kidnapped Blaine and held him hostage. Alan. Blaine frowned and quickly shined the flashlight. Alan was gaunt, weak looking. His cheekbones sunken into his face, hands pale as death, trembling as they reached outwards, begging for assistance. “Please...please help me...” Other voices echoed Alan’s plea, and Blaine swallowed the knot in his throat. What the hell was this place? What the hell had his father been doing to these metahumans. Did Sebastian know about this? Did he know the conditions that these metas were in? These were not good people, good metahumans by any stretch, but this was barbaric. Knots of anxiety and fear tightened in his chest and he struggled to breathe, backing out of the cave. There was nothing he could do for these people right now, but if he could just get Cisco or Caitlin, maybe they could help free them.
Whirling around, Blaine ran smack into his father, letting out a startled yelp as he fell to the floor after tripping over the wheelchair. A long, pole-shaped object struck him across the back and he hissed under his breath to keep himself from screaming again as he scrambled to his feet and drew his weapons again.
“What the hell is this place?” He barked breathlessly. “What have you done to them?”
“They’re criminals, Blaine. This is the only place that we can keep them safely under lock and key.”
“Under the ocean? Starved and tortured? This is inhumane!”
“They’re not even human. Not anymore, anyways. You shouldn’t have followed me here.”
Blaine tugged off his mask so he could see his father more clearly. Bruce’s face no longer bore the damage of their last confrontation, which only puzzled Blaine further. He had last heard that he was going to need plastic surgery. But now he looked almost good as new. Slowly, ever so slowly, all the pieces were falling together. His father’s condition, the wheelchair, the healing, this place. Blaine took a small step back.
“What are you?”
Bruce simply stared at Blaine, observing him like you would a rat in a maze. His head was tilted to the side as he awaited Blaine’s actions.
“You’re my father. Why? Why would you do something like this?”
Deep down, Blaine already knew all the answers. Or at least he thought he did. The ones that mattered were falling into place: his mother’s death, the interest in Sebastian, Sebastian’s new behavior, everything. He swallowed hard and tried to take another step back, but in the blink of an eye, Bruce was behind Blaine, out of his chair, a hand clasped around his neck and gripping his throat, a sharp weapon of some sort pressed against his spinal column.
“Dad...please...”
Bruce jerked Blaine’s head up so they could meet, and the hues of his once blue irises flashed a dangerous, threatening yellow. For once in what felt like forever, fear gripped Blaine in it’s deadly vice and crushed the very air from his lungs. Whatever bad person his father had been before had been amplified tenfold, replaced by a power hungry bloodlust creature that would slaughter his child without a second thought. He hadn’t been his father in years.
Blaine tried to push the fear away, honing in on his training and throwing Bruce to the ground over his shoulders, delivering a sharp blow to his throat with the heel of his boot before he broke off into a sprint. But Bruce caught up almost instantly, knocking Blaine back with one swift blow from his arm. He hit the wall so hard he could hear it give a little under his back and he let out a groan of pain, forcing himself to get upright again, only to have a hand back at his throat once more.
“How could you possibly begin to understand, Blaine? You have far too much of your mother in you. This...pig-headed ignorance. I am powerful. I’m more powerful than you could even fathom. And with your little boyfriend at my side, doing my bidding, under my control and my orders, I’ll have enough power to get anything and everything I’ve ever wanted. I could even alter time, could you imagine?” Bruce applied pressure to Blaine’s throat and his air was cut off. “He’s the son I should have had in you. If you had just listened. If you had made any chance to understand, I could have unlocked so much potential in you.”
He released Blaine from the wall and launched him clear across the hallway. Blaine’s back hit the guardrail to the ramp, causing him to see stars as he coughed to regain air to his lungs and Bruce returned in front of him, gripping the front of Blaine’s shirt.
“Tell anyone of this place, return here, or try to even hint this to Sebastian, and I’ll kill him in front of you. I’ll cut that boy’s heart out and serve it to you on a sliver platter. It’ll delay my plans not to have him alive, but it won’t make them impossible. So choose wisely, Blaine.”
In that next moment, before he could even muster a retort, Blaine’s world went dark.