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Sharing the Henry and Brenner dabble before I format it and slap it on my RP blog.

The mirror before them is a bright, clear contrast in the dim room around them, where a single fluorescent bulb is rooted into the roof above. It isn't bright the way sunlight is bright ━ warm, golden and alive ━ it's glaring; a hard, cruel gleam, the world mercilessly reflected back at him. His skin appears pale, almost waxy, and his eyes are glassy and strange, but so blue. Always so blue.

He looks at himself. Stares as if he's trying to focus through a pane of water, slow and dull, his every thought feeling to arrive just a moment too late. He couldn't say how old he is now, or how long it has been since the day he, for one shining, glorious moment, had seen outside of the lab.

He couldn't remember what went wrong. He sees himself now, the same as he was, and yet changed in subtle, uneasy ways. Ways he should have been ready for ━ ways he wasn't. The chair is angled toward the mirror as though this is something ordinary. As though this really were a son being taught by his father how to become a man, but his head feels packed with wool, and his limbs do not feel to fully belong to him anymore. Fitting, almost.

He wasn't becoming a man. Not entirely. In body, perhaps, but in fact? Hardly.

He was many things outside of a man. A pet. A doll, a shell, forced inside of himself, smothered under layers of sedatives. He sits now often quietly, his responses almost robotic. Yes Papa. No Papa. The nod of a head. Silence. Answers decided for him when he could form none.

The leather straps crossing his waist, wrists and ankles are not tight enough to hurt, but he can feel them anyway. He can feel everything anyway, and yet despite all of this, today is a good day. He can hold his head up, he can focus well enough on his reflection in front of him to make the connection between now and then, between the boy he knew himself as, and the man he was, almost unwillingly, becoming, and of course, on Papa, who stands behind him.

Papa, who is always there. Brushing his hair, trimming it when it grows long, adjusting his clothing, and changing it when it becomes stale. Talking to him, reading to him, sometimes, assuring him that everything would be okay. Papa has always been such a terrible and wonderful liar.

His mouth is dry. There is no gag today, which is almost its own kind of occasion. He rolls his tongue against the inside of his cheek and tastes the bitter ghost of whatever was in his mouth an hour ago. Or two. Or three. Time doesn't have a presence anymore, only a vague shape, best seen in his reflection, the days having become rooms, rooms having become procedures and the procedures... They don't seem to have an end.

Behind him, Brenner adjusts the towel he has draped over his shoulders, fastened in the front with careful, competent hands. "There," he says, his voice, as always, has that infuriating softness to it, that precise, educated calm Henry has known for so long now that it sometimes feels as if it is all he has ever known. "Comfortable?"

He says nothing, but for a moment, there is a minute narrowing of his eyes ━ a certain sharpness. A quiet intelligence sparking underneath, a desperate, unextinguished pride. A movement accompanies it, a rise of his arms, or, at least, the half-hearted attempt, knowing that they do not go far, strapped at his wrists to the arms of the wheelchair. It's a movement and a movement only.

What do you think, Martin? He asks with no voice. It's absurd, though he doesn't respond otherwise. He could say a great many things, but he knows none of them would matter. He has learned that, too.

He knows Papa sees that silver of his discomfort, but he is, as always, largely unmoved, though it is also almost as if the two shared some kind of telepathy, even when Henry's powers had been dulled to nearly nothing.

He could see the returned look in Papa's eyes in the reflection, the brief, subtle glint, the message that he should be grateful for this... For this terrible, possessive kindness.

It was kindness, after all. Papa alone was kind to him. Papa alone had never left him. Papa alone fought for him. Papa alone always wanted him.

And then, more than anything, Brenner appears... Content... In the way he always does when conducting himself through some small domestic ritual that pretends it is not entirely what it is. His hand settles lightly at Henry's jaw, thumb pressing against his chin so he can tip his face up, and Henry hates how even now he obeys almost automatically.

He hates that some buried, ruined part of him will always know how.

"There's a good boy", Brenner murmurs, as if Henry were twelve again. As if he does not sit, strapped to a chair, his veins drained on routine, small wads of cotton still stuck with medical tape running up and down both of his arms; evidence of the crime.

His blood had filled jars. Dozens upon dozens of them. He had been lucid enough for some of it. Lucid enough to understand they were using him to make more. New little lives seeded from what they had stolen from him.

Henry's stomach twists.

Three, at least. Maybe more now.

Papa talks about them from time to time. New little miracles, new little monsters, new little pets to steal and to keep and to train. He tries not to think about it ━ he focuses his mind on other things, away from the violation. He had told himself, at first, that it might mean less attention on him: that perhaps if Brenner had other children now, useful children, stable children, he might finally let him go. It had been a pathetic sort of hope, thin and embarrassed and childish, but he had held it anyway simply because there had been nothing else to hold.

Brenner dips the razor in the water. The noise strikes him, the gentle, wet jingle in the steel basin as Henry watches the movement in the mirror ━ watches the older man prepare him as though for something special. "You're getting older," Brenner says conversationally. "It is important to know how to care for yourself."

Care for yourself. The words sparkle among the thick of his thoughts, not like a light but like a flame.

As though there will come a day when his hands are not strapped down. As though there will come a day when he stands before a sink alone, half-awake in the morning, deciding whether to shave before breakfast.

As though there is any future in which this mundane knowledge belongs to him.

And yet —

Why teach me, if I will never do it myself?

...

Brenner draws the razor down one side of his face in a slow, practised stroke. Henry flinches at the scrape of it, but not because it hurts, because it is so horribly intimate, so horribly strange and new — the drag of the sharp metal against his skin, the hand steadying his throat, Papa's breath near his temple.

That spark he'd felt inside ignites his previously foggy thoughts like a match hitting methane, and he feels the anger rise, hot and sudden, the nauseating flush beneath the chemical drag in his veins. For a moment, he imagines jerking his head hard enough to cut himself open on the blade at his cheek just to spoil this moment, just to make the towel stain red and ruin Brenner's neat little lesson.

But the drugs in his system weigh against him as the chip sits cold and deadening in his neck, and the anger, as always, has nowhere to go. It gathers in his chest and burns there uselessly, so instead he turns rigid, his gaze leaving his reflection, eyes instead pinning somewhere away, to the cold, grey wall.

He can't feel the thing in his mind: the ugly black spur that prowled alive inside him; instead, he feels it, or maybe something else, deeper this time, as though it sat among the hot, crackling feeling in his ribs, a storm raging quietly in spiteful agreement.

Brenner wipes Henry's jaw with a cloth. "Still with me?" he asks, and Henry?

The laugh it draws from him comes out wrong ━ sudden, thin and hoarse from disuse. He almost doesn't recognise his own voice, teaming with poison as it is. "Am I meant to have a choice?"

In the mirror, he sees Papa's pause. Only for a second, of course. A small, unreadable expression settles over his face, something not quite displeasure, not quite pity. Perhaps a faint annoyance?

"You have more choices than you think."

Henry's brows knit together. He only stares at him in the mirror, pupils blurred wide from sedation, face half clean. More choices than you think?

Tied to a chair. Drugged. Bled. Filed down against himself. Taught to shave by the same hands that tightened the straps around his wrists and poked the needles into his arms to suck the blood from his veins. There is no logic, no correlation between any of these things and yet, at one and desperate in the absurdity of it, his voice came again, trembling with feeling. "Then let me go."

Brenner's gaze flickers. There and gone. Something almost like weariness or perhaps consideration passes through it, or perhaps Henry, in his sudden, confused desperation, only wanted it to.

"Where will you go, Henry?"

Home

He wants to answer, he wants to name the place with the ghost of the confidence he previously felt, somewhere he would go if he could somehow get up and walk out right now ━ but he knows ━ he knows suddenly that he doesn't have anywhere. There was no home, not anymore; there was no mother, no father, no sister....

There was only Papa...

Henry's answer, or rather lack thereof, speaks volumes to this truth, a feeling that brings to him the familiar, sobering sting of shame.

Or maybe his mind just wasn't clear enough to think where right now. Anywhere... Anywhere was better than here.

"It isn't that simple, now, is it? And your behaviour still leaves much to be desired."

Henry remains quiet, his gaze freezing and then thawing again in the span of just a moment, that certain, embarrassing helplessness dousing the indignant fury he'd felt.

Brenner resumes, shaving the line of Henry's jaw as though they are discussing the weather. Henry remains still, a misty haze welling in his eyes. He focuses his attention on the swell of sadness, on snuffing it out and replacing it with that one, humiliating, weak ember. If Papa is teaching him this, if Papa is speaking to him like this, if Papa is allowing him lucidity enough to understand —

Maybe. Maybe, once he has proven whatever it is he still needs to prove to the big, important men in charge.

Maybe then.

It is a child's hope, something utterly ridiculous, and Henry knows it even as he feels it. But hope does not stop being hope just because it is pathetic, and when hope was all you had, all you were allowed, it had a way of swallowing all else, of growing its own kind of teeth.

Brenner rinses the razor and smooths a hand briefly over Henry's cheek to check his work. The gesture is almost absurdly tender. Henry hates it in its contradiction. "There," Brenner says again, with quiet satisfaction. "Much better."

In the mirror, a young man's face peers back at him, emptied out around the eyes, glassy, made strange by sedation and sadness and rage and hope. Clean-shaven now. Civilised and presentable. As if the removal of stubble might somehow make him more human in this place, or perhaps it simply mocks him — a hollow, cruel illusion of what he would never be allowed to be.

Brenner unfastens the towel from his shoulders and folds it neatly.

"One day," he says, almost absentmindedly, "you may thank me for teaching you these things."

Henry remains quiet, unblinking. He stares into the reflection in the mirror, the image of careful hands, of a neat, clean suit, of the soft mouth that can say unspeakable things in such a gentle tone and the dulling of his slicked back hair that had once been so brown now more of a honeyed colour. The picture of the man who has kept him alive and yet made his life unliveable.

And because he is nineteen, or twenty, or too drugged to be certain, and because that warped, not fully withered part of him deep down inside still wants to believe there is a door at the end of all this, he says nothing.

#henry creel #001 #vecna #martin brenner #Eminem throw #i dont do a lot of solo stuff these days BUT when I do. why not share it.

The Marshal gets a job

I, the Forgotten One by John Louis

This is my way of saying I remastered my Marshal Eminem Throw meme

#if game #fanart #interactive fiction #hosted games #mc #meme #itfo #i the forgotten one #marshal #darin #kresnik #eminem throw #whatever it takes #art