‘please don’t take it away’ for river or felix
from this ask game
tw: institutionalized slavery, referenced human experimentation, light med whump, whumper pov
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“Please don’t take it–” Felix starts, fumbling over his words as he yanks his hand away from Jake’s. “Please don’t take it away from me.” He casts his eyes low, and Jake is suddenly torn. Felix shakes his head, backing himself into the corner, but he won’t look at Jake. His eyes are glued to his fist, and to the item inside of it, which moments earlier, Jake found under his pillow.
The item in question? A crumpled up dandelion. Jake cocks his head to the side as he regards Felix.
“It’s trash,” Jake starts, holding out his palm like he’s requesting a forbidden item from a defiant child. “And not only that,” he continues, “but it’s contraband, too.”
Felix peeks up at him through his eyelashes, a practiced move that is no doubt meant to activate the softer side of Jake, and hell, maybe it does. “Felix,” he says, keeping the firmness in his voice that Felix responds well to. He kneels down to Felix’s level, nudging his fisted hand with his own. “What the fuck.”
Felix is shaking from how tightly he grips the thing, but they both know the battle is lost, and it’s only a matter of time now.
“Hand it over,” he says. “I will let you pick a new one after you finish up this afternoon.” That, he thinks, is kind of him. He smiles warmly, as tears flood Felix’s eyes, threatening to spill over.
His fingers open slowly, one by one, until the crumpled, dying weed is exposed, lying in his palm. They both stare at it.
“Please don’t kill it,” Felix whispers, meeting his eyes. “Please,” he says again, as Jake takes it from him.
He sets it on the counter, holding out a hand to help Felix off the floor. He gets Felix showered and changed into a gown, and deposits him into the prepped exam room for his procedure. There’s a kind of melancholy in every one of the kid’s movements, but there are no more mentions of the dandelion, and no more acts of defiance along with it.
As Jake goes about his day, though, he can’t completely shake this thing that nags at him. Whatever the feeling is, he doesn’t enjoy it, and by the time his shift ends, he’s wound up tighter than he can ever remember being. He doesn’t know why he does it, but after he clocks out for the day, he finds the unit nurse, and then, surprising even himself, he asks her if Felix did okay, and if he's back in his room.
The nurse tells him Felix did do okay, and that he is back in his room, but he’s sleeping, and that they should let him sleep. She says it with a specific type of tone and a look, and Jake smiles and says ‘thanks’, even though that just gets him even more wound up, because he wasn’t planning to wake him up, and the implication pisses him off.
“Ward,” the nurse says as Jake turns away, and he turns back a moment later. There’s a pause, while they square up, and then she says, “Go easy on him.”
Instead of acknowledging that, he turns and heads toward Felix’s room. All is quiet in Belleview at this hour. Everyone is tucked in for the night, and apart from one handler, one nurse, and a floor supervisor, the unit will be locked down once he leaves.
He taps his key card on Felix’s lock, and pushes the door open. The hallway light illuminates the sleeping boy well enough. He’s soft, with short, white-blonde hair, and an innocence about him, especially as he sleeps. He has an IV running into his arm, bruises forming around his wrists and around his neck, one hand fisted into his sheets, and the other into his t-shirt.
This is the boy that makes River go wild, he thinks, running his eyes down his sleeping frame. This is the boy that has River picking fucking weeds when he thinks no one is looking. But Jake is always looking. He smiles at the thought of River doing this thing, and he takes a breath. He'll unpack what to do with this information another day. Tonight, though, he has unfinished business.
As he approaches Felix, he pauses. He’s never given Felix much thought, outside of how he can be leveraged against River. Here, now, under the soft glow of the hallway lights, he sees the appeal.
He takes a breath, and then he covers Felix’s hand with his own and pries open his fingers. Felix stirs, every muscle tensing momentarily, and Jake whispers, “easy,” as he flips his hand over. Jake reaches into his back pocket for the flower, presses it into Felix’s palm, and closes his fingers back over it.
“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” he says then. He isn’t sure if it’s Felix making him soft, or River, and he isn’t sure if he likes it or not, and he isn’t sure if any of those things matter, but it’s done.
