June of Doom Day 1: “You don’t want to do that” (Locked Door / Fear)
CW: 13-year-old whumpee (non-graphic suffering and this is a backstory piece), shutdown in response to trauma, aftermath of murder, moderate fear-of-death thoughts, young whumper, mild and relatively brief description of a past stabbing
Notes: FIRST PIECE ON TUMBLR EVER!!!! Please reblog because I am so so terrified of posting my writing but I am literally so excited to be doing this.
Tag list (one person now, let me know if you want to be added): @lektricwhump
Silence. Dead silence, laying heavy over the house, thick and suffocating, impossible to move through.
Gabriel had practiced this dozens upon dozens of times before in his thirteen years of living. The cue from his parents downstairs to get out followed by quickly prying the window open, his little bony fingers scrabbling to unlock the latch, bracing his feet on the sill for half a second before dropping into a roll against the deck, a story or so below him. He was the only kid in school, as far as he’d ever known, who routinely practiced home invasion responses. And he had gotten good at it, damn it, in his thirteen years of living. No longer did he wince as he hit and spun forward against the often rain-slicked wood below, no longer did he hesitate before making that jump. Never look back, just save yourself. He never thought it would be happening for real.
The gunshots still echo in his ears.
There’s muffled voices downstairs, muttering, scheming. The phrase ‘boy’ passes between voices he can only assume are speaking over his parents’ dead bodies–dead, they’re really dead, they have to be, they can’t be, they are–is he the boy? Are they going to kill him next? He doesn’t have anything for them. He heard the things the man had said before pulling the trigger, something about ‘debts’, something about being done. His parents knew this was coming, they must have. They must have.
Does he have to be the one to pay now?
The front door opens and closes. A sound he’s gotten all too used to. If he shuts his eyes and leans back against the headboard, he can almost imagine it’s his mom leaving to go on another errand. He’s just home alone, he just has to be responsible. He just has to jump out the goddamn window and pray the deck catches him like it always does and he has to run and never stop, never look back for anyone else, not his parents most certainly lying dead at this moment. But he can’t move. He can’t move at all.
Footsteps are moving up the stairs now, slowly. Just one pair if he can tell correctly. He stays as still as possible in bed, barely even moved from his original position of being shocked awake by the sound of shattering glass. If he stays still enough, maybe whoever it is will leave him alone. He doesn’t have anything. Nothing at all, no, they took everything away.
“Little boy?” The voice is smooth but also not, melodic but haunting and rough at the same time, like the sound a bird makes right before it dies. It’s right outside the door. He’s going to die. “Are you in here?” The person outside tries the knob. It doesn’t open. He doesn’t move from the bed. “I know you’re in here, Gabriel. I was told to kill little boys like you.”
The click of the door. Is it… did they unlock it? How? How?
“You don’t want me to kill you, do you?”
And then the door opens, and Gabriel feels it in that instant—that horrifying instant, where his vision is tunneling and his mind is projected out of his body—that he will remember this forever. Forever, especially if this person, this monster, kills him right here in bed, no time to even try to escape. He will remember this forever.
The person steps forward. It’s now, only now, that Gabriel registers what he’s looking at. They can’t be much older than him, definitely not an adult by any means, hair coiled tight and tied back behind them, eyes a shade of the 2AM sky outside and death. And they grin, and in that grin Gabriel sees everything his life has been for. His parents wanted him to live, his parents wanted him to be the one to carry on if they could not. All of this potential, all here, all bundled up inside of the killer in front of him. They’re definitely not the only one, but they were sent for him. He is their purpose.
There’s a frozen moment in time between the two, eyes focused on each other, some mutual promise made in the silence of a home now haunted and abandoned. Gabriel goes to turn his head towards the window—maybe he can make it out in time, maybe he can be brave—but before he can, the killer raises a finger to their lips. Silence.
There is so much silence here.
They pull a knife out from behind their back now. It’s almost iridescent, glittering in the light from the hallway, catching a shine from the killer’s eyes. The parts that aren’t shining are covered in a thick coat of blood.
“Will you miss your mom?” The voice is gentler now. No one else in the world will know of this conversation. The others are surely waiting outside… is he being spared? Is this mercy?
“I want you to remember her.” They hold up the knife, and instantly Gabriel can imagine it being driven through him right here and now, but the killer–the savior?–sets it on the floor in front of their feet instead. “She’s on that blade. You’ll always have her.”
He wants to scream. He wants to scream and run and jump out the window and be brave and fling the knife in his savior’s face, it is his mother’s blood, that much he’s figured out now in the midst of all this shock, and yet. And yet.
The savior holds their finger to their lips again. Their next words are muttered, as deep and haunted as their eyes, as this house. “I will not forget you.”
They shut the door behind them.
Gabriel stands, takes the knife, grabs the windowsill, tumbles down to safety, runs into the woods, carries the weapon of his mother’s death forever.
The rest of the year is a blur.
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