For @whump-advent-calendar‘s day 4-6, Burn/Candles
CW: Referenced medical whump and dehumanization, light burn (accidental), captivity, muzzling, drugging reference, reluctant whumper turned caretaker
Introduction | Siren Song | Cries | Here | Not Sure | Draw Blood | Fish | Signs
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BAHRAM’S NOTES
NOTE TO SELF - SAVE IN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. DO NOT LET DR. L SEE.
October 22nd, 20XX
3:45 am
Mer in Residence: 19 Days
It’s time to admit I’m more or less keeping a diary at this point as I get to understanding him. So far I’ve written separate notes to myself… for ten or so straight days of the nineteen we’ve had him here, and it’s getting harder to write the official transcriptions the way Dr. L wants me to.
Dr. Lachlan insists I call the mer ‘it’, that it’s to help me distance myself emotionally since it’s such a good mimic of humanity, but I don’t think it’s a damn mimic, I think it’s just… human.
I mean, obviously it’s not HUMAN, but… Miah spelled it out for me, we had an argument about this when he first got here. She gets so angry that he’s getting hurt and you know, I guess I believed Dr. L - mer aren’t my specialty field, I’m a snake man really, I don’t know the first bloody thing about fucking cetaceans.
Anyway, I said to her at the time, “It’s not human.”
She told me, “Maybe not H-U-M-A-N, but P-E-R-S-O-N,” just like jabbing me in the chest afterward. Also, Miah can fingerspell in a way that really makes you feel like a six year old getting yelled at by your mother, for the record. I can’t describe it any other way. I was ready to just melt away from personal embarrassment before she even finished signing “person.”
That’s not the point of this.
I didn’t start a diary just to tell myself how right Miah is about all of this, but hey, here we are.
I need some days off so badly.
Miah wasn’t around today, it’s really just been me and the mer - I’m off for four days coming up here, after 20 days of work, and she’s going to come in and do 24-hour watch until I’m back. It’s not so bad - I don’t really know anyone here, and the bed’s comfortable enough. Dr. L’s paying rent on my apartment so I won’t lose it while I’m working, anyway.
I still feel like some low-level henchman, though. Like any moment some asshole in a tank top is going to show up with guns and I’ll just be a faceless evil stepping stone before the boss fight with Dr. L.
I mean, we all know that Dr. L’s going to be the boss fight, right? Anders would just like lay down or throw Miah in front of himself or something.
No, that’s not fair, he really does love her.
Bahram this is all hypotheticals about a video game. Get back on track, man.
So Miah must have gone shopping or something. She came back with a bag full of these candles from this bookstore she really likes. I mean she came back with an insane amount of books, too, but she had this candle she pulled out and put down on my desk.
She set down the candle - it’s this really nice deep blue and has some kind of like ocean scene painted on the label, like, isn’t that thematic - and smiled at me. “This one reminded me of what we’re doing,” She told me, and her signs were… softer. Her expressions were softer alongside them.
Does that mean… anything? I don’t know. She just put it on my desk and then wandered off. I thanked her but I had to take her shoulder and get her to look at me, first. Maybe her face was a little red.
Maybe not.
We keep the tank room pretty warm, I’m sort of cold-natured and the mer seems more active when we keep the lights really warm, so…
I don’t get why she bought me a candle and why she looked away before I could thank her for it. I don’t get it, and I feel like I should, but I don’t. Is she not looking because it wasn’t a big deal, or because it was a big deal, or… what?
I really WOULD sink into the floor if Dr. L or Miah ever saw that I wrote this. Get it together, Bahram. You are not writing a diary about Miah fucking Kirsse.
It’s been just me and the mer, all day. Dr. L was gone, too, meeting with whoever’s funding this whole thing. She’ll be gone until next week, so there’s no real work getting done, for now. Just blood draws.
She’s showing them its claws she took off. I don’t know why. Honestly, I have such a bad feeling about this, but I needed the cash and nowhere else was hiring for a job that would give me room and board and still time to work on my own research. Not that I’ve done a bit of THAT in a week.
I get too distracted by the mer.
He swims in circles. He stares at nothing, or pokes the plastic coral and ferns we got him, or hides in his cave. I can switch the screens over to watch the camera feed from inside the cave, but he doesn’t do much in there, either. I caught him picking at his scales, and I need to ask Dr. L about that. She took three scales off his tail, which for the record I had nothing to do with (whose record? I’m writing this to myself, and what the fuck does it matter about scales when I’m the one sticking the damn needle in his elbow twice a week), and I caught him sort of whistling sadly and picking at the empty spaces.
They’ll grow back, Dr. L says. She’s not worried.
I am.
A little.
I’m starting to think Dr. L is lying about a lot of things, and I’m not sure what to do about that. If anything. This is a job, and I get paid better than I’ve ever been paid in my life. So… what do I do?
I could call the hotline and report him. It’s anonymous.
She’d know I did it.
I don’t know why, but… I don’t want her to know it was me. Cowardice, I guess. Pure bloody cowardice.
But Miah hasn’t emailed the hotline, either. We can’t both be cowards, right?
Anyway.
Tonight was tank cleaning, which is a bloody fucking chore. Anders was around long enough to help me get the mer tranq’d and into the lift and then the rolling tank where he can just sit until I get my work done. Poor thing just lolls around when he’s tranq’d up. Barely blinks.
Doesn’t stop its fucking crying, though.
We took a lot of blood from him today, too, so he was very weak. Barely moved, just curled himself up small so he was totally in the water and watched me work after Anders left. We’ve got a scrubber machine that does the hard work, I just have to hose some things down and then make sure its filter is still operating correctly. Watch the scrubber. Whole process takes about three hours from start to tank totally refilled, as long as I do it weekly. It’ll take much longer if I let it slide.
Double-checked the camera in the cave, and when I walked out of it I saw the mer’s head was up, watching everything I was doing. He dropped right back down under the water when he saw me looking at him. The muzzle looks so monstrous on him, but more than that, it makes him look like a monster.
Maybe Dr. L doesn’t muzzle him to keep us safe, but to keep me from seeing his expressions while I’m here with him all day.
No, that’s stupid. She doesn’t even think he’s sentient, right?
I finished up, and when I came to roll him back to the lift, I saw he’d popped his head up out of the rolling tank and was looking around the room itself. He hasn’t really looked around at all before this, and he was still tranq’d but maybe I fucked up the dosage? Because he was pretty alert, kind of whistling to himself and giving little chirps and clicks. He sounds like some weird mix of killer whale and fucking otters or something. When he saw me, he flinched back down under the water, but I had this idea.
Dr. L took his claws, and he’s still muzzled except when he’s on the table or when he eats, so like, it’s not like he can hurt me, right?
His eyes had gone to my desk, looking at… I guess all my books and papers and my laptop and everything. Maybe the candle. I waved my hand around until I saw that he was watching me again. With those big eyes it’s hard to tell exactly what he’s looking at, but when I clapped my hands he blinked at me, so I know he can hear it, can see me.
Then - and I swear I’m not lying - he moved himself up out of the water, and put his palms together. His earfins twitched out and back against his scalp, and his white hair dripped water all down his shoulders.
He cocked his head at me. Then he put his hands together, harder this time. He clapped, and then… he clicked.
I KNEW it. I KNEW clicks were questions. Dr. L said their brains don’t work that way, but I bet they do. Who’s even considered how their brains work? Maybe they’re just like us. All the studying I’ve been doing shows that the scans we’ve done of dead ones are pretty similar in overall size and placement of their center of language. They’ve shown that mer populations have their own dialects if they don’t interact with each other, like the Atlantic transients sound totally different than the Pacific transients, which sound different than the residents that stick close to the coastlines up by Alaska...
Making my own head hurt. I don’t even care about fucking mammals, but I guess I do now.
“That’s right,” I said when he clapped, not like he can understand but still. I said it, and I clapped again, and he clapped back. “Can you give me your head? I’ll take your muzzle off, yeah? If you don’t bite.”
Dumbest fucking idea ever, but hey.
I think maybe he knows the word muzzle, because he whistled and shrunk down again, lowering his hands. His ear flaps flattened again. I saw the deep red marks around his neck, from how we have to use the catch-pole to get him out, and I just. I just felt like shit, you know?
I’m shit, that’s what I am, we’re torturing a child, more or less, who hasn’t done a thing to anyone but be by himself because he lost his bloody fucking family. I can’t keep telling myself I’m not the bad guy, you know?
I’m going to jail if I report him, aren’t I? I helped bring him in, after all. There’s my whole career down the drain.
Is this how it felt when everyone was being shit to monkeys in the 70′s and calling it psychology? Did some of them just go along with it because they thought they had to?
This is not helpful, Bahram.
I sat down at my desk and tried to figure it out. His eyes were on me the whole time. I looked over at Miah’s candle, and looked at the label. Like I said, ocean scene. Fronds and ferns and…
I turned the label to face the mer, and tapped on the image with my finger. “Fish,” I said, feeling dumb as hell. I told myself, it’s a bloody animal, Dr. L would roll around laughing at you for this.
But he came back up out of the water. There was a long moment, and I heard him click, and then a soft, “Sssshhhhhh,” sound came from behind his muzzle. They have lips like ours, although their way of communicating is basically whalesong and relies heavily on underwater acoustics. He’s louder in the tank than out of it, although I guess fear might make him quiet, too.
The recordings I found on youtube they get in the ocean are deafening loud. Their voices travel so well underwater, it’s amazing. People sell fucking CDs with mersong over piano to fall asleep to.
I poked at the ocean scene on the label again. “Fish,” I said firmly. “Do you want fish?”
He knows fish.
I KNOW he knows fish because he sat up, held out his right arm, and tapped his elbow with a blunt-edged, broken-off claw before he looked back at me, trembling with fear. He clicked again, twice.
I can’t even tell you how shit I feel, realizing he was asking if I was going to take his blood first. That’s what he meant, it has to be. He poked at the exact spot where he’s bruised up from the needle.
But it makes sense, right?
He’s been here twenty days, more or less. Every couple of days, when he’s hungry enough, we bribe him with fish to get the pole on him, take blood or whatever else, and then he eats.
No, WE don’t take his blood. I take his blood.
He thinks - and he’s fucking thinking, I know he is - that he only eats if we stick a needle in him.
I’m hurting a child.
I’m teaching a child to be hurt.
I’m not religious but this feels like the sort of thing you ask for forgiveness for, doesn’t it? I should call Maman and ask her who I could talk to. I’m going to call Maman or Baba tomorrow.
No I’m not.
What would I tell them I need to speak to someone about?
What if whoever I speak to calls and reports him, and Dr. L knows it was because of me?
I need to stop thinking about this.
“No, NOT draw blood,” I said, and he whimpered again, held out his arm further, closer to me, tapped his elbow again. I knew he could still hurt me - their strength is prodigious, the first time we got him out of the tank he nearly pulled Dr. L down into the water with him - but I decided it was worth the risk.
I kept thinking, he’s more scared of me than I am of him, but you know, of course he is. He’s the one with bruises.
I stretched my own arm out and showed it to him. He flinched back a little, and then leaned forward again, sitting in the little rolling tank that’s barely big enough to hold him. His blunt claws touched my arm, delicate as a feather, clicking as he poked at the sleeve of my sweater.
“No draw blood,” I said. “Just fish. Eat.” I mimed chewing.
He looked at me and clicked twice, cocking his head, then looked at my candle from Miah, pointing at the ocean scene. “Ffff-sshhhh,” he said, muffled.
“No, that’s a candle, it just has fish painted on it. Candle. Fire. Yes?”
Blank stare.
Then, repeated, “Ffff-sssshhh.”
I sighed and pulled out my little lighter. I don’t smoke or anything, but I hate the way matches smell, so I have a lighter on me basically all the time. Plus, having lighters was a pretty good way to make friends back in undergrad when I gave a fuck about that.
I flicked on the lighter, and the mer chirped, curiously.
Has it never seen fire before?
Why would it, it lives in the ocean. Don’t be a dumbshit, Bahram.
“Fire,” I said, and held it out a little for a closer look. “Fire.” I tilted it and lit the candle, and the mer leaned forward, rapt, as the wick sparked up to flame and I blew the smaller flame on the lighter out.
“FFfffff,” The mer said, barely audible. It clicked and held out its hand, and I wasn’t fast enough.
“No, wait stop-”
The mer’s fingertips touched the flame and it let out a deafening loud cry of pain and jerked its hand back down into the water, whimpering at the new kind of hurt, looking at me like it was MY fault, and maybe it was. Eyebrows furrowed, little crease in its forehead, big sad eyes.
The big sad eyes are wrecking me.
“Well, don’t touch fire and you won’t burn,” I said, shaking my head. “No touch fire. Fire bad. Fire burn.”
He held out his hand to show me. “Ffff-rrrrr.” It was a plaintive little breath of air, not quite a real sound.
The ends of two fingers were a little dark, that’s all. I could explain that by saying he’d hurt himself in the tank, maybe. I shook my head and pointed at the water, and it put its hand back in there, huffing a little breath of relief, I think. The water probably helped with the sting.
“Right. Fire bad. No fire.”
“Ffff-rrr... buh-ddd.”
“Right. Fire bad.” I stood up and walked over behind him, and he tried to turn and watch me but I shook my head and pointed back at the candle and he sort of huffed again and looked away. I felt him tense when my fingers touched the back of his head, but he sat still.
Probably because if he struggles when she goes to take the muzzle off or gets her fingers near his mouth, Dr. L has this electricity stick thing…
I’m not supposed to mention that in the transcripts.
I’m not supposed to mention how he screams, and he doesn’t sound like a whale or an otter, then. He doesn’t sound like an animal.
He sounds like a child.
He IS a child
He’s just
I’m a fucking
No. I need to focus. This is stuff I can’t tell Dr. L, I need to write it down here where it’s safe.
The muzzle is easy to get off, you just need to be looking right at it, and I unbuckled and pulled it free, feeling a little resistance from how well it stuck to his face. Without it on, there are deep red lines along his cheeks and jaw, not open or bleeding, just irritated.
He didn't grab at me, or bite. Just watched me with his big eyes as I laid it down on my desk. For a second we were both just quiet, looking at each other.
Then he pointed at the candle again. “Ffff-sssshh.”
“No,” I said. “Candle. Fire.”
The mer’s eyebrows furrowed and he shook his head, echoing what I did earlier. His hair slapped around. His teeth look like shark’s teeth up close, only there’s a lot less of them. “Nnnn-nnnuh,” He tried, shaking his head again.” Nnn-uh. Ffff-sssshhh.” Then he pointed at his mouth, opening wide, showing me the tongue behind his teeth. “Fffff-sssshhh. Ffff-ssshhh.”
I laughed, covering my mouth - he seems to be scared when we show too much teeth, probably in the ocean it’s a threat and they don’t smile like we do. Which, why would they?
But, see, I realized that he wasn’t pointing at the candle at all, but at the fish painted on it. Then he moved to look at the bucket of fish he gets as a reward for obedience, and pointed at that, then looked back at me to see if I was paying attention.
Of course I was. I was barely fucking breathing. This is signs of abstract thought process, recognizing that the image of a thing isn’t the thing itself. That he can point at it to represent what he wants. “You want fish? Is that it? You’re hungry? Want to eat some fish?”
The mer blinked and made a sound like a chirp, clapped his hands together. “Rrrrr. Fff-sssshhh.” He pointed at his mouth again. “Ffff-ssshhh. Buh-rrrrmm. Ffffsshh.”
“What did you say?” I whispered. My heart went cold. I can’t describe it any other way.
“Buh-rrrrmmmm. Ffff-sssshh, Buh-rrrmm.”
The bloody thing knows my fucking name.
He knows we have names and he knows mine and that means-... that means he has one, doesn’t it? If he has a name, if he has
I’m his fucking nightmare aren’t I
I’m the worst fucking thing that could happen to him, me and Miah and Dr. L and Anders and this is a job but it’s the worst thing that’s happened to him and it’s only
It’s going to get worse for him.
He’s going to die here and he’ll know all our names when he does.
Anyway, so... you know... I brought him a bucket of fish.
What else was I supposed to do?
He knows my name!
He let me put the muzzle on him again without fighting after he finished, and I got him back in the tank once the water was refreshed, and he’s sleeping off his meal now. I can see him on the feed, curled up inside the cave.
But I’m wide awake, so I thought I’d write this, because…
15 or 20 for petrus if you’re still taking poem prompts?
That gentle voice has power to soothe when troublous thoughts arise like secret foes to mar our peace, and dim life’s sunniest skies.
CW: Pet whump, institutionalized whump, Pet!Connor AU, noncon touching, drugging. Ferrick (referenced) belongs to @moose-teeth . Giovanni Rossi (mentioned) belongs to @slaintetowhump
"Oh, I like you way better this way."
Luke smiles, walking into the training room to find Manning fucking strung up like he deserved to be. A fine sheen of sweat pulled the light over his muscles, and Luke took his time - walking in a slow circle around the former handler on his hands and knees on the floor.
"At least your fucking mouth is shut for once. Although Ferrick was pretty good at keeping your mouth too busy to sass, as I recall from those videos everyone has seen..."
He dragged a finger over Connor's spine, arched, a lovely curve that he would learn to hold for hours, just like he'd once taught trainees to.
Connor's teeth ground against the plastic bit they'd shoved in his mouth, the leather straps sticking to the side of his head, wrapped under his jaw, cutting into the delicate skin.
Luke smiled, ruffling his hair. "You know what I heard, today? About your buyer?"
Connor grunted, and his dark eyes were settled on some far off place beyond the cream-colored walls.
Luke moved away to pick up the syringe, pulling purple liquid and yellow - pain and pleasure, his favorite combination - and listening to the way Connor's breathing sped up behind him.
He couldn't pull away when Luke slipped the needle into his skin, only shudder at the flush of ice cold that would soon give way to a terrible heat.
"I heard you're going to be a very, very good kitty for a very rich man."
Luke slipped a headband on over Connor's head, and smirked at the two felt ears that stood tall, the same black as his hair.
"So let's make sure being kitty feels very, very good for you, hm? Mr. Rossi wants a checkup next week and I want you to be humping his leg the second I put these bad boys back on."
Connor spat around his gag, and Luke laughed in return at the fury in those dark eyes already starting to haze over into lust. When he scratched behind Connor actual ear, he felt the way the other man fought not to lean into the touch.
"Good kitty," He cooed. "Let's make sure Mr. Rossi gets everything he paid for, hm?"
The first unwilling moan was music to Luke's ears.
was chris on adhd medication during his time at the facility / with sir or did the other drugs take care of that
TW: DRUGGING
Oliver gave him a purposeful overdose of a common ADHD medication, as well as occasional sedatives, although he never told Baldur which he was getting at any given time or day.
His usual was too much of an ADHD med - Chris's description of the fog, his thoughts struggling to coalesce, but being able to sit still and be silent and good is a description of my own partner's experiences being routinely given too high a dosage for years as a child.
However, you'll see a piece where Chris mentions lethargy or exhaustion and that would be sedatives. Oliver thought it was funny to give him sedatives and then try to get him to run around or do things when his body was literally too weighed down to do anything at all.
In WRU, he received the same as everyone else, low level consistent sedation, the wipes, etc. wRU was aware of his diagnoses. They did not care.
Jake having to hold Chris down and force him to take a pill :sobs: maybe antibiotics or something
CW: Negative stims (rocking, chewing on lip - just if you're not in the right headspace for it, just an fyi!), referenced isolation and captivity, referenced/discussed drugging
TIMELINE: Shortly after Chris arrives, post-sickness and him introducing himself with his new name to the household.
"Chris, listen to me, it's not-... It's not like that-"
Chris can't hear him, or doesn't want to. It's hard to tell with the awful low hoarse sounds he's making, something like a mix between a whine and a moan, low and constant as he rocks back and forth, curled up against the wall with his hands over his mouth muffling them.
He didn’t do any of this when he first came, did he? Maybe he did, maybe that was why he’d spent all his time this past first week or so trying to hide in dark spaces or under and behind the bed. Maybe he’d just been rocking under there all the time, hoping nobody would notice.
He’d only started spending most of the day following Jake or Nat around a couple of days ago, and now... now here he is, terrified of them, cringing away from Jake.
Or, rather, cringing away from the pills he has in one palm and the little pill bottle in the other hand.
Natalie stands behind where Jake is crouching, her hands on her hips with an air of resigned compassion, the attitude she carries with her everywhere she goes. “Well, if we didn’t know he was drugged before, we sure know now,” She says, a little wearily. “I guess we should see it as a good sign, though.”
“A good sign? He won’t-... he lost his shit the second he saw the pill bottle, Nat!”
Jake turns and cranes his head back to look up at her, and she only shrugs down at him, giving him a slight, tired smile. “It is a good sign, Jake. It’s a sign that he feels safe enough here to tell us no.”
“This isn’t telling us anything.”
“Isn’t it?” Nat sighed and plucked the little orange-brown bottle with a faded printed label on the side out of Jake’s hand. “I suspected as much, you know. This definitely confirms it.”
“Suspected what?” Jake frowns, slipping the pills into the pocket of his blue jeans, watching the hint of tearful green eyes he can see behind Chris’s fingers watch the movement with absolute focus even as his breath hitches and he curls up a little tighter.
“I suspected they were drugging him,” Nat says carefully, stashing the pill bottle in the deeper pockets of the light jacket she’s wearing. “It’s not... uncommon, even after they’re out of...” Nat’s nose wrinkles. “Training.”
“Why’d you suspect drugging?”
“Well, how else would you keep a teenager stuck in a single hallway all day, Jake?”
Honestly, it’s a relief to hear her say it out loud, what they’d all known the second they got a look at him, that very first night. There’s no way this kid’s an adult. It feels like a release of some kind of tension, every time he hears him called what he is out loud.
Teenager.
Jake could happily burn everything about WRU to the ground.
“Tell me, when you were his age, could your parents have kept you stuck in a single set of three or four rooms all day, every day, forever?”
Jake snorts. “No.”
“Yeah, well. That’s how you keep someone in if they’d otherwise want to get... out...” Nat’s voice trailed off in thought, her eyes moving across the room to look out the window. “Wait. I know how we do this.”
She turned around, her braid swinging and slapping against her back again, and crouched down next to Jake, cocking her head to the side to catch the boy’s shimmery eyes. “Hey, Chris... what if we go outside, huh? You haven’t been out yet, have you?”
Had he seriously not? Jake closes his eyes and thinks, but no-... no, the kid hasn’t gone outside since he got here, he’s been hiding in all the dark spaces but Jake knows he’s caught him looking through the window, too. All longing, like he can’t stand being in here, but he’s never asked to go out...
The odd little sound coming from Chris’s throat stops, and his hands have started to lower a little. Jake watches those wide green eyes jump from window to Nat’s face and back, as if...
As if he think she’s lying, teasing him, playing some kind of fucked-up game. Trying to figure out the catch.
Jake swallows his thoughts, forces them down, and gives an encouraging smile and nod. The boy looks over at him, too - giver of Popeye’s chicken, watcher of so many handstands, man who swept up the glass bits when Chris accidentally kicked over a lamp. You can trust me, Jake wants to say - but his own life and his interactions with rescues have always made it clear that you don’t tell someone they can trust you, you prove it.
“But-...” The sound from the boy’s throat is little more than a hoarse whisper. “But it’s... day. There... are... people out, outside.”
“I know, honey,” Nat says, gently. “That’s just fine by me. The neighbors aren’t bad, I swear. Do you want to go see our little garden out back? I don’t have much, just some tomato plants and herbs, but... I guess a few flowers and a hummingbird feeder...”
Chris nods, gnawing on his lower lip, eyes wide.
“Perfect. I just have to ask one thing.” Nat holds up one finger, giving the boy a slightly playful smile that fades back to earnestness when the boy reacts to her expression by flinching back and away from it. “You have to take that medicine. You’re still a little sick and those are going to help make sure you don’t get sick again. You’ll have to take two a day for ten days. They’re just antibiotics, okay?”
The boy’s eyes move from her to the window again, back and forth, like a pendulum, a metronome of suspicion and need, torn in two. Finally, he uncurls his knees from his chest and swallows, hard. “Yes... ma’am,” He says, and holds out his hand. “If you... promise.”
Jake feels a sick lurch of guilt and a kind of rage twist him up inside. This boy doesn’t trust that the pills are good for him, he doesn’t believe her, not really - he just wants to go outside so badly he’s still willing to make the trade. Willing to take whatever awful thing he thinks he’s really being given.
Jake digs them back out of his pocket and hands them over, picking a little cup of water from the floor next to him and handing that over, too. The boy takes the pills with the air of a man stepping up willingly to the gallows, swallowing them with a wince but without difficulty.
Then Jake stands, and helps the boy stand up, too. He allows himself to be moved, obediently enough, walking next to Jake and with Nat just behind them. It’s not until they’re all the way back downstairs and at the back door that Jake sees the moment the boy actually believes that he’ll get his half of the bargain upheld.
“Really?” Chris breathes, as Jake turns the doorknob to the rickety old backdoor, the wood that doesn’t quite fit the frame, the little crack of sun that shows through at the bottom and sometimes results in the occasional visit by tiny black ants after a long rain.
“Really,” Nat says firmly, and Jake opens the door.
At first, the boy doesn’t move. Jake wants to kind of nudge him but he glances back at Nat and there’s a look in her eyes that tells him not to push, to let the boy move on his own, at his own pace. For a moment, the little redhead just stares out at the fenced-in backyard, a quarter-acre or so with a couple of trees and a big stone patio set with what feels like a dozen planters. Even though it’s winter, here, the winters are mild in this climate and there are still herbs growing bright green and cheerful in most of the clay-colored planters.
The boy’s eyes trace over the lawn, looking at the grass, drinking it in.
Jake’s never felt so lucky for the shit hand he was given in life, when he sees someone else look absolutely awestruck by the sight of fucking grass.
The boy takes one step forward and then two, laying his feet carefully flat down on the two stone steps it takes to go from back door to the patio, the sun-warmed stone there making his toes wiggle just a bit. The sun flashes off unnaturally pale skin, turning it white, making the hint of freckles there stand out.
Sun glints off strawberry-blond hair, turning it to the bright flash of copper, penny-colored.
The boy stops, down on the patio, and turns back, uncertainty written unhidden across his face. “Are... are you going to, to... to come... with me?” He asks, looking between the two of them. He hunches his shoulders over, hands worrying at each other, at the hem of his shirt, picking at his fingernails and then scratching at his own skin, a constant movement even as he bounces a little on the balls of his feet.
“Go on, Jake,” Nat says. Her voice is low, and amused. “You’ve got the rapport going with him. You go out there.”
“Nat, I’m in way over my head,” Jake murmurs, turning his head all the way so the boy won’t hear, maybe won’t try to read his lips.
“So is he,” Nat points out, giving Jake the teasing smile that had made Chris flinch back just a minute before. “Go on. Meet them where they are, Jake. Open hearts by creating safe places for hurting minds.”
“I hate your stupid catchphrases,” Jake says, but he doesn’t mean it, and he’s smiling too much for it to even be remotely believable.
“Just wait ‘til I write my book and make millions,” Nat says, and steps back inside, leaving Jake on the steps with Chris just to the other end of the patio, waiting for him. Waiting for permission, maybe, waiting to be told just standing in a yard is okay, because he won’t know unless he’s given the order, the command.
“Hey, so... you did, like... handstands and stuff in your room the other day,” Jake starts, feeling awkward, uncomfortable. “Do you... want to try doing them out here? In the yard?”
The boy’s eyes widen - his expression is stricken, one of absolute shock. “... can I?” He asks, in a harsh whisper. “Can, can, can can can can... can I do that out here? People might-might... might... they might see.”
“So?”
Chris blinks at him, as though he’s never considered that before. “Are, are, are you-you... going to watch, watch me?”
“Do you not want me to? I can’t go back inside-”
“No! No, um, no-no... don’t do that, please. Please don’t do, do that.” There’s a pause and then Chris smiles at him, hesitantly, but the sun is shining on his face and he’s got it tipped up slightly to catch the light even more. “I, um, I want you to-... to to watch me.”
“Well, go on, then.” Jake waves one hand. “I’m watching. Show me.”
He takes off, moving like he’s afraid if he stops, Jake will change his mind or call him back or force him back into the kitchen against his will.
The air is a little chilly but the sun is warm on his back and in his blond hair as Jake watches Chris do cartwheels across the back yard, run at one of the trees and bounce off of it with his feet, pull himself into a slow but seemingly effortless handstand. His long, thin fingers dig into the dirt, into the grass, and then Chris is laughing when blades of grass tickle at his nose and face, his hair a pool beneath his head as he lingers upside down, feet pointed straight up in the air.
“Who the fuck would lock you up?” Jake wonders to himself, leaning back against the siding of the house, watching Chris lower himself back down and then immediately move into some kind of yoga pose with his legs out at angles and his arms straight out on either side, turning at his hips, eyes closed now but with a small serene smile on his face.
Chris changes position, balancing easily on one foot with the other pressed flat against the inside of his thigh, hands palm-to-palm in front of his chest. He raises them, slowly, up above his head towards the sky.
It occurs to Jake that it’s the only time he’s seen Chris stand still where it didn’t look like something that physically pained him to do.
“Who would keep you so shut up you were that goddamn desperate to go outside, but you didn’t even know you could?”
