noxaecor 🤍 starter for the AU we were yappin' about.
Henry remembered the way the fluorescent lights had reflected off the polished floor as Papa walked him out of the building, unpanicked, composed and as sure of himself as he always was. Henry was seventeen now, taller than he had been at only twelve, tall enough that beside Papa he was no longer small, and yet, somehow, he still felt minuscule beside him, as if the man still towered over him.
And perhaps he did — not necessarily in height but in all the ways that mattered: in control, experience, understanding, cunning. After all, this entire thing was just a ploy, a ruse, devised to keep him, Papa's most precious subject, alive.
Henry had listened to the word through the hush of adult voices: Termination. That was his fate.
The Government, the men who allowed Dr Brenner to keep him imprisoned and "studied" had grown tired — become impatient; it had been five whole years, and what progress had Papa made with his project? What could he tell them now that he couldn't tell them five years prior? Many things, Henry thought, but then he knew that what knowledge Papa held and what knowledge Papa divulged were two very different things.
And Henry — a child, a prisoner — a subject, a number as he was, was hardly in any position to argue for his own legitimacy or survival. He was a boy who, according to all records, had died five years ago at the hands of his own father, a man who had simply gone mad and slayed his entire family.
Another lie. Another of Papa's deceptions. But officially, he was not alive to kill, and so killing him now would not be a crime; it would merely be a correction to a problem the powerful, wealthy, intelligent men of the world had created with their insatiable thirst for knowledge and control.
There was a certain sense of irony in the fact that two of Papa's traits that he despised the most — his inability to accept no for an answer and his refusal to back down in the face of a challenge — had become the very things that had saved his life.
The lodge sits somewhere far outside of any town, though Henry couldn't say exactly where. It was nestled in the wilderness, a place of privacy and luxury. Certainly not a place intended to hide a teenage boy, but a place that, when needed, could serve that purpose rather well.
When he first left the car — the long black Ford Galaxie Papa insisted on driving himself — the cold struck his skin like a revelation — pain and delight colliding into one solid emotion of elation.
He had not been outside since he was twelve. He had spent the last five years of his life confined to sterile, white linoleum floors, reinforced observation rooms, and a structured routine — suffering as a curriculum and silence as a companion, and now there was air, trees, day-light and sky. The sight of the outside, the living world so mundane to everyone else, had so taken him — the smell of the pine and the free air around him, that he hadn't noticed the building in front of him until Papa had ushered him toward it: the lodge itself was expensive without being ostentatious. Heavy timber beams, stone fireplace, windows large enough to swallow the forest whole. It felt less like a prison and more like a secret.
Though the doors locked from the outside and the collar remained, this new cage inspired a strange sense of hope… And maybe that was cruller than the total despair of the lab before it.
Now, for the last week, he'd slept in a real bed and spent most of those days in the sitting room near the fire, sketchbook balanced against his knees. The pencils Papa brought for him are always high-quality, expensive graphite, smooth and obedient. Art has always been the one thing no one ever needed to extract from him by force. It comes easily, a raw talent he'd possessed for as long as he could remember. He sketches the forest in obsessive detail, each branch of the towering pines rendered with near-photographic precision.
He had even drawn Dr Brenner from memory — seated in the armchair near the window, glasses low on his nose, reviewing documents of some kind that he'd never be privy to, an image he tucks away sheepishly at the back of his sketchbook.
Papa often asked him if he could draw him. Henry could. But he hadn't then. In the lab, he drew things he'd seen in his mind, things far away, things he could render as if he stood in front of them countless times over when he never had, and, if fate were kind to him, he never would.
But fate had never been kind to him.
He had drawn Patty once. Papa didn't like that one. Sometimes he wondered what she looked like now — if she had changed much at all — and where she was, if she was singing somewhere with her mother… He'd like to hear her sing one day. He wondered if she would remember him.
The question of escape lingers at the edge of his thoughts, the way the forest surrounds the edges of the lodge. He'd taken a shot at calculating distance by the slope of the terrain and the density of the trees; he remembered when he was a Cub Scout learning about knots and navigation by the stars. He's sure that if he found an opportunity to slip away, he could survive for a while. But then what?
He would reach a town eventually, maybe. Then what would he do? What would he tell anyone? "Hello, my name is Henry Creel. I was kidnapped, and experimented on by the United States government for the past five years. They want to kill me. Will you help me?" He'd almost laughed at the absurdity of the thought, the fingers of his free hand finding the serious, intimating band of metal, polyester and nylon around his neck.
It was evidence, worn as though he were a dog, missing only a tag with his name hanging from it — no, that was tattooed into his wrist — not his real name, of course, just the number: 001.
Would anyone believe him, or would they call the same number Papa once did and ask them to come retrieve the delusional boy with the strange stare? He knows how easily people dismiss what frightens them. He learned that lesson at eight, and he knew the lengths people would go to destroy something they didn't understand; that was a lesson he was still learning.
So even if someone believed him… Even if he could prove it, that would mean an investigation, but drawing an investigation would mean drawing the men who served the very same system that had put the collar around his neck and decided he'd be euthanised like a bad dog in the first place. It would do him no good. He wasn't a normal child. He wasn't always sure why. He never seemed to arouse those instincts in anyone, the ones that being a child should have guaranteed, the fond ones, the protective ones, the joyful ones, the right ones.
All he knew was that he was tall, gangly and awkward and that even his mother hated him. When your mother hates you, when the sole person who was supposed to love you unconditionally finds you defective, it seemed like it made sense that he would never be right to anyone else either.
His fingers had absentmindedly found their way underneath the collar. He could feel the cool metal that usually pressed against his neck; the conductive plates that could deliver an electric current of Papa's liking and render him helpless in seconds. The thought brings memories Henry does not like to dwell on — the straps. The table, the chairs, the pain, fear and humiliation delivered in equal measure, all in the name of progress, research, and an understanding that never seemed to come, with Papa standing behind the glass, observing it all.
But there are other memories too. They rush to him with the haste and the urgency of a drowning thing gasping for air. A hand on his shoulder after a particularly violent episode, the caress that wiped tears from his cheek, a new book left on his bedside table without comment, his pencils, his sketchbook, the quiet pride in Papa's voice when Henry did as he was told, when he'd demonstrated the exact right amount of force or control, when he'd reached in precisely the right direction.
If he were only ever data to Papa, why then had Papa risked everything to save him? Why was he here now, far away from Hawkins Lab in a sweater and a flannel jacket, jeans and socks, with a sketch book on his lap?
Not dead, not… Terminated and… Disposed of, however it was that the Government vanished its failed projects, but very much alive — alive and warm and safe. Safer and warmer than he had ever been in the last five years.
The door to the lodge clicks open and he snaps his attention toward it, his fingers leaving the underside of the collar with a speed that could have suggested they'd been burnt. He realises he'd been staring off into the distant forest. His attention now returns to the drawing in his lap, as he pulls it along with his knees up closer to him almost defensively; the image was the same tree line before him, rendered as masterfully as a boy of seventeen with an arsenal of pencil and graphite was capable of.
The bark trunks, lined by the dozens looked a lot like bars, and the warden of his warm new jail is the man who had saved him from annihilation, and the only soul on earth he could say with any confidence has ever loved him.
