(no subject)
Title: All You've Done
Author: lethalpompadour
Characters: T-Bag, Seth, OC
Pairing: T-Bag/minor (implied), T-Bag/Seth (barely)
Category: Gen
Rating: Strong R for some language and allusions to immoral and illegal activities
Summary: For all his bravado, sometimes all T-Bag needs is a little absolution.
Disclaimer: Prison Break isn't mine, though if it was I'd be a rich man. The actors aren't mine either, they belong to themselves. Nicole Bagwell is a figment of my imagination but I'll erase her as soon as I'm done, promise. Basically: No harm, no foul, no lawsuits.
Author's Notes: This is my first time writing fiction since The X-Files showed new every week and I've never touched the PB fandom before, but don't be gentle; I dig criticism. New poster also (hell, new to livejournal entirely), so hey to you all.
---
The first one never left him.
Theodore Bagwell, awake into the night, looking through the bars at the walkway and listening for anything out of the ordinary. His mind digging obsessively through the folders of his worst trespasses to find the darkhaired girl with the bright eyes, seven, as old as he had been when his father had started to come for him when the street was silent and his mother asleep. He could hear the new kid, Seth, breathing in the bunk below, the whisperscratch of moving sheets as he turned in his sleep, and his own hands came up to smooth away the worst of the worrylines on his forehead. His eyes had been rimmed in red when the lights went out and every time T-Bag turned his head, dizziness blackened the corners of his vision, made the world unsteady for a few minutes.
To distract himself from the inevitable, he counted back from fifty, started mouthing the nine times tables, splaying his hands out on his thighs and folding fingers down in mimicry of how he'd taught the trick to Susan's children. Susan Iscariot, as T-Bag privately thought of her, with the boy and girl he had never touched because he'd steeled himself against that particular urge from the moment she first passed pictures of them across the slick Formica surface of the diner's corner table. He had dug his fork a little too hard into his mashed potatoes and stared at their faces, smiling out at the camera in their school photographs, and he'd felt his stomach twist unpleasantly, copper fire winding its way through his veins, up his neck, to end in the pool of spit under his tongue. She hadn't noticed how hard he'd had to swallow, how his hands shook when he picked up the corners of the pictures and slid them back over the tabletop, for want of even a minute to trace the curve of the little girl's throat, the slope of the boy's nose.
He didn't realize his memory was tripping him up until the wet-eyed face flashed across the forefront of his mind with a noise like silverware scraping too hard on a plate. His teeth set on edge and his nostrils flared against the dank scent of fear. She had reeked of it; he could smell her a yard away, and he at once hated and respected the way she shied away from him at the annual reunion barbecue. Most he passed noticed nothing wrong with him, disarmed by his crooked smile and his charm, cunningly passed off as casual. But Nicole Bagwell, his seven year old second cousin, pushed her sticky palms against his shoulders when he scooped her into a hug; her stare had been shiny, tearful, and she'd kept behind her closer family until it was time for dessert, when she weaved an unsteady, dehydrated path into the house. T-Bag saw her go and followed, an excuse prepared in case anyone asked. Nobody did.
He caught her a few steps away from the refrigerator and though instinct was telling him that he'd made a mistake in choosing one so close to home, and what of his mind was still rational and human was telling him that he didn't have to, that the bathroom was not twenty feet away and he could jerk off and go get the watermelon like he was pretending to do, he didn't listen. His eyes moved over her, from the coltish legs, too grown and long to belong to a proper child, and her hair swept into a ponytail at the back of her neck, secured with an elastic band. T-Bag folded his fingers over the elastic and turned her around by the hair. Nicole's mouth dropped open into a doll-like look of nervous surprise, the tremulous few seconds before an oncoming shriek and he got her between the legs, lifted her up, the palm of that hand hitting bone. I'm not gonna hurt you, pretty, he told her, voice dropping to a growl that was anything but convincing, and her face folded into the hollow above his collarbones, arms winding around his neck to support herself, already clammy. I just want to be your friend, Nicky, like your friends at school, we're just gonna play together, so keep that little mouth closed and let Teddy tell you the rules.
She started to weep, silently, thighs scissoring against T-Bag's wrist in protest, and he heard the screen door bang open just in time to duck out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, backing up against the doorknob and dropping his hand from her hair to thumb the lock down behind him. Her eyelashes were wet on his chest and he spun to lean against the sink, awkward then, fumbling with the button and zipper on his pants while trying to hold her, too. Later, he would have a routine, a set and easy path from the grab to the end, but his first time was clumsy. She wouldn't quit her crying and a panicked bubble rose in his chest; he wanted to hit her but couldn't bring himself to. Instead, he cradled her against him, folding the back of her neck in the bend of his elbow.
His father had been careless. He had used too much fingernail to start and T-Bag would forever remember seeing his thumbs in the blueish glow of the bedroom TV set and thinking he'd lose his eyes that night for whatever transgression had made the man ditch the usual belt and resort to far more painful consequences. Whenever he took a child, in the moment right before he pulled the smaller body down against his, he thought of the way his father had covered him, weight hitting him wrong and making his neck bend terribly, making his stomach hurt and his knees feel like every tendon was curling backward against itself. He thought of how he'd wanted to yell but he hadn't had enough air. If he followed in those footsteps, all of it would be useless, and the staticky white noise behind his eyelids wouldn't stop the way he needed it to. Instead of silence, his thoughts would scream the way the children never did, the way he hadn't been able. In his mind, the agony of innocence split at those particular seams was inevitable, but he could help. He could be gentle, and their death could be fast.
When T-Bag let her go, breath was hitching in the back of her throat and she was clinging to him out of a sense of misguided gratitude -- he had made the pain stop and that alone was enough to make her forget, for only a few seconds, that he had caused it, too. He bent his head to her and peppered kisses over her sticky cheeks, tongue snaking out past his teeth and cleaning her tears that way. He tasted the same fear he had smelled and it made his heartbeat quicken all over again. No, she said, barely a word at all. Just a little too late, he said, kneeling to set her down on the floor, letting her curl her legs underneath herself, letting her get an arm over the edge of the tub. She didn't look at him, and he tucked himself away, doing up his jeans and reaching for the door, twisting the knob, feeling the lock give. I'm sorry, Nicky, he said. You won't believe me, but I'm so sorry. I just wanted to be your friend.
In his cell in Fox River, T-Bag wiped an arm over his eyes, checking for wetness. Somewhere along the line he had lost the warning signs of tears and now noticed them only when they crept past his jawline and ran, hot, over his neck. If even then. There was nothing, there hadn't been in a long time, and he squirmed, drawing his legs up to his chest and resting his chin on his knees. Most of the time, he was unapologetic. There wasn't any sense in being sorry for something he didn't usually consider wrong. Urges were urges, needs were needs, and his ran just a little different than most. He found nothing immoral about the thrill in the pit of his stomach, not even when it became harder and harder to feel that good. He'd moved from petty theft to standing over the limp and matted body of the neighbor's tomcat, turning its torso with his shoe so he could see its twisted throat gape where he'd cut it, from ear to ear. He'd taken pleasure in the way women's eyes, terrified, reflected his face in miniature when his hand came down against their cheekbones, closed fist, other hand palming their thighs apart, wedging his forearm between them, elbow on one and palm on another.
But he never forgot his first child, and it was her face that derailed him for nights at a time, when he allowed himself to think about what would be waiting for him when he died. He imagined that everyone he'd ever hurt, from the flies he'd torn the wings from when he was four, to the six children he'd murdered in Alabama as a grown man, would be standing beside Peter at the gates. He would be lashed to a cross like Christ and every last person would kill him in turn, bringing him back when they were done for the next in line. And when the last death had come and gone, there would be nothing. No Hell, just a glimpse of paradise and then emptiness. The idea of not existing at all scared T-Bag more than dying itself.
A sweat had broken out across his shoulders, perspiration gleaming at his hairline, and a noise from below jolted him out of his thoughts. Without turning his head, he took note of the rest of the cell from the corner of his eyes; the new kid was standing at the toilet. T-Bag cleared his throat, and the boy lifted his chin, looked back over at the bed. A wary glance, questioning without words.
He slung himself down from the top bunk, landing easy on his feet. Rolling his shoulders back, spine curving til it popped, tension flooding from his spine. That movement alone required a moment or two of recovery -- it was his second night without sleep, and though he supposed he could wait it out, spending any more time awake would only trip him up in the yard. Hard to stay on your game when you couldn't stand up straight, and this would help. Seth turned back toward the wall, finished his piss and reached to flush. T-Bag reached, too, pulling his sheet down from the bed and twisting it quickly. Thick in the middle, smaller on the ends, easier to hold. Hearing shuffling behind him, the kid straightened up, and then the twist was around his neck, pulled tight so he'd stumble back a pace or two.
T-Bag caught the boy against him, shoulderblades colliding with his chest, twisting the sheet until he held it in his fist, out to the side.
"Don't do this," Seth whispered, though there wasn't much actual plea left in the words, more resignation than anything else. He knew the routine and his feet slid apart to brace himself, reaching back, fingers worming between them and batting T-Bag's hand away to grab him through the sleep pants. "Don't," he tried again, but the word sounded foreign, as quiet as it was.
"Now see, I don't think you really did mean that," T-Bag purred, voice all honey and silk. This was routine, too. He knew he'd get in at the end but he liked to pretend there might be cause for a struggle, even as he tightened his hand on the sheets and let Seth touch him, pressing his hips closer to the fingers that slipped over his waistband, getting the buttons undone and drawing his cock out through the gap in the fabric. He spun, back against the wall. Movement from across the walkway stirred in T-Bag's peripheral vision; he probably had some audience by now. It didn't bother him. Even the thought that a badge might come to break it up didn't worry him, either. It was less about the fucking and more about what came before it.
Seth almost forgot what happened first, working his own pants down with his free hand until T-Bag stopped him with a yank on the makeshift leash.
"Arentcha missing something?"
A resigned sigh, and T-Bag felt the boy lean forward, caught his face in the slivers of lights through the bars. He whispered something too low to be acceptable.
"You'll have to say that again, bit hard of hearing."
"I forgive you," Seth said, voice shaking but not very close to a break.
"For what?" T-Bag asked, eyes sliding half-closed, teeth working their way into his lower lip. Sagging a bit, because he knew what was coming, and he knew that when he was done, he might finally sleep.
"All you've done," Seth said, and he had just enough innocence left that T-Bag could believe him.
Author: lethalpompadour
Characters: T-Bag, Seth, OC
Pairing: T-Bag/minor (implied), T-Bag/Seth (barely)
Category: Gen
Rating: Strong R for some language and allusions to immoral and illegal activities
Summary: For all his bravado, sometimes all T-Bag needs is a little absolution.
Disclaimer: Prison Break isn't mine, though if it was I'd be a rich man. The actors aren't mine either, they belong to themselves. Nicole Bagwell is a figment of my imagination but I'll erase her as soon as I'm done, promise. Basically: No harm, no foul, no lawsuits.
Author's Notes: This is my first time writing fiction since The X-Files showed new every week and I've never touched the PB fandom before, but don't be gentle; I dig criticism. New poster also (hell, new to livejournal entirely), so hey to you all.
---
The first one never left him.
Theodore Bagwell, awake into the night, looking through the bars at the walkway and listening for anything out of the ordinary. His mind digging obsessively through the folders of his worst trespasses to find the darkhaired girl with the bright eyes, seven, as old as he had been when his father had started to come for him when the street was silent and his mother asleep. He could hear the new kid, Seth, breathing in the bunk below, the whisperscratch of moving sheets as he turned in his sleep, and his own hands came up to smooth away the worst of the worrylines on his forehead. His eyes had been rimmed in red when the lights went out and every time T-Bag turned his head, dizziness blackened the corners of his vision, made the world unsteady for a few minutes.
To distract himself from the inevitable, he counted back from fifty, started mouthing the nine times tables, splaying his hands out on his thighs and folding fingers down in mimicry of how he'd taught the trick to Susan's children. Susan Iscariot, as T-Bag privately thought of her, with the boy and girl he had never touched because he'd steeled himself against that particular urge from the moment she first passed pictures of them across the slick Formica surface of the diner's corner table. He had dug his fork a little too hard into his mashed potatoes and stared at their faces, smiling out at the camera in their school photographs, and he'd felt his stomach twist unpleasantly, copper fire winding its way through his veins, up his neck, to end in the pool of spit under his tongue. She hadn't noticed how hard he'd had to swallow, how his hands shook when he picked up the corners of the pictures and slid them back over the tabletop, for want of even a minute to trace the curve of the little girl's throat, the slope of the boy's nose.
He didn't realize his memory was tripping him up until the wet-eyed face flashed across the forefront of his mind with a noise like silverware scraping too hard on a plate. His teeth set on edge and his nostrils flared against the dank scent of fear. She had reeked of it; he could smell her a yard away, and he at once hated and respected the way she shied away from him at the annual reunion barbecue. Most he passed noticed nothing wrong with him, disarmed by his crooked smile and his charm, cunningly passed off as casual. But Nicole Bagwell, his seven year old second cousin, pushed her sticky palms against his shoulders when he scooped her into a hug; her stare had been shiny, tearful, and she'd kept behind her closer family until it was time for dessert, when she weaved an unsteady, dehydrated path into the house. T-Bag saw her go and followed, an excuse prepared in case anyone asked. Nobody did.
He caught her a few steps away from the refrigerator and though instinct was telling him that he'd made a mistake in choosing one so close to home, and what of his mind was still rational and human was telling him that he didn't have to, that the bathroom was not twenty feet away and he could jerk off and go get the watermelon like he was pretending to do, he didn't listen. His eyes moved over her, from the coltish legs, too grown and long to belong to a proper child, and her hair swept into a ponytail at the back of her neck, secured with an elastic band. T-Bag folded his fingers over the elastic and turned her around by the hair. Nicole's mouth dropped open into a doll-like look of nervous surprise, the tremulous few seconds before an oncoming shriek and he got her between the legs, lifted her up, the palm of that hand hitting bone. I'm not gonna hurt you, pretty, he told her, voice dropping to a growl that was anything but convincing, and her face folded into the hollow above his collarbones, arms winding around his neck to support herself, already clammy. I just want to be your friend, Nicky, like your friends at school, we're just gonna play together, so keep that little mouth closed and let Teddy tell you the rules.
She started to weep, silently, thighs scissoring against T-Bag's wrist in protest, and he heard the screen door bang open just in time to duck out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, backing up against the doorknob and dropping his hand from her hair to thumb the lock down behind him. Her eyelashes were wet on his chest and he spun to lean against the sink, awkward then, fumbling with the button and zipper on his pants while trying to hold her, too. Later, he would have a routine, a set and easy path from the grab to the end, but his first time was clumsy. She wouldn't quit her crying and a panicked bubble rose in his chest; he wanted to hit her but couldn't bring himself to. Instead, he cradled her against him, folding the back of her neck in the bend of his elbow.
His father had been careless. He had used too much fingernail to start and T-Bag would forever remember seeing his thumbs in the blueish glow of the bedroom TV set and thinking he'd lose his eyes that night for whatever transgression had made the man ditch the usual belt and resort to far more painful consequences. Whenever he took a child, in the moment right before he pulled the smaller body down against his, he thought of the way his father had covered him, weight hitting him wrong and making his neck bend terribly, making his stomach hurt and his knees feel like every tendon was curling backward against itself. He thought of how he'd wanted to yell but he hadn't had enough air. If he followed in those footsteps, all of it would be useless, and the staticky white noise behind his eyelids wouldn't stop the way he needed it to. Instead of silence, his thoughts would scream the way the children never did, the way he hadn't been able. In his mind, the agony of innocence split at those particular seams was inevitable, but he could help. He could be gentle, and their death could be fast.
When T-Bag let her go, breath was hitching in the back of her throat and she was clinging to him out of a sense of misguided gratitude -- he had made the pain stop and that alone was enough to make her forget, for only a few seconds, that he had caused it, too. He bent his head to her and peppered kisses over her sticky cheeks, tongue snaking out past his teeth and cleaning her tears that way. He tasted the same fear he had smelled and it made his heartbeat quicken all over again. No, she said, barely a word at all. Just a little too late, he said, kneeling to set her down on the floor, letting her curl her legs underneath herself, letting her get an arm over the edge of the tub. She didn't look at him, and he tucked himself away, doing up his jeans and reaching for the door, twisting the knob, feeling the lock give. I'm sorry, Nicky, he said. You won't believe me, but I'm so sorry. I just wanted to be your friend.
In his cell in Fox River, T-Bag wiped an arm over his eyes, checking for wetness. Somewhere along the line he had lost the warning signs of tears and now noticed them only when they crept past his jawline and ran, hot, over his neck. If even then. There was nothing, there hadn't been in a long time, and he squirmed, drawing his legs up to his chest and resting his chin on his knees. Most of the time, he was unapologetic. There wasn't any sense in being sorry for something he didn't usually consider wrong. Urges were urges, needs were needs, and his ran just a little different than most. He found nothing immoral about the thrill in the pit of his stomach, not even when it became harder and harder to feel that good. He'd moved from petty theft to standing over the limp and matted body of the neighbor's tomcat, turning its torso with his shoe so he could see its twisted throat gape where he'd cut it, from ear to ear. He'd taken pleasure in the way women's eyes, terrified, reflected his face in miniature when his hand came down against their cheekbones, closed fist, other hand palming their thighs apart, wedging his forearm between them, elbow on one and palm on another.
But he never forgot his first child, and it was her face that derailed him for nights at a time, when he allowed himself to think about what would be waiting for him when he died. He imagined that everyone he'd ever hurt, from the flies he'd torn the wings from when he was four, to the six children he'd murdered in Alabama as a grown man, would be standing beside Peter at the gates. He would be lashed to a cross like Christ and every last person would kill him in turn, bringing him back when they were done for the next in line. And when the last death had come and gone, there would be nothing. No Hell, just a glimpse of paradise and then emptiness. The idea of not existing at all scared T-Bag more than dying itself.
A sweat had broken out across his shoulders, perspiration gleaming at his hairline, and a noise from below jolted him out of his thoughts. Without turning his head, he took note of the rest of the cell from the corner of his eyes; the new kid was standing at the toilet. T-Bag cleared his throat, and the boy lifted his chin, looked back over at the bed. A wary glance, questioning without words.
He slung himself down from the top bunk, landing easy on his feet. Rolling his shoulders back, spine curving til it popped, tension flooding from his spine. That movement alone required a moment or two of recovery -- it was his second night without sleep, and though he supposed he could wait it out, spending any more time awake would only trip him up in the yard. Hard to stay on your game when you couldn't stand up straight, and this would help. Seth turned back toward the wall, finished his piss and reached to flush. T-Bag reached, too, pulling his sheet down from the bed and twisting it quickly. Thick in the middle, smaller on the ends, easier to hold. Hearing shuffling behind him, the kid straightened up, and then the twist was around his neck, pulled tight so he'd stumble back a pace or two.
T-Bag caught the boy against him, shoulderblades colliding with his chest, twisting the sheet until he held it in his fist, out to the side.
"Don't do this," Seth whispered, though there wasn't much actual plea left in the words, more resignation than anything else. He knew the routine and his feet slid apart to brace himself, reaching back, fingers worming between them and batting T-Bag's hand away to grab him through the sleep pants. "Don't," he tried again, but the word sounded foreign, as quiet as it was.
"Now see, I don't think you really did mean that," T-Bag purred, voice all honey and silk. This was routine, too. He knew he'd get in at the end but he liked to pretend there might be cause for a struggle, even as he tightened his hand on the sheets and let Seth touch him, pressing his hips closer to the fingers that slipped over his waistband, getting the buttons undone and drawing his cock out through the gap in the fabric. He spun, back against the wall. Movement from across the walkway stirred in T-Bag's peripheral vision; he probably had some audience by now. It didn't bother him. Even the thought that a badge might come to break it up didn't worry him, either. It was less about the fucking and more about what came before it.
Seth almost forgot what happened first, working his own pants down with his free hand until T-Bag stopped him with a yank on the makeshift leash.
"Arentcha missing something?"
A resigned sigh, and T-Bag felt the boy lean forward, caught his face in the slivers of lights through the bars. He whispered something too low to be acceptable.
"You'll have to say that again, bit hard of hearing."
"I forgive you," Seth said, voice shaking but not very close to a break.
"For what?" T-Bag asked, eyes sliding half-closed, teeth working their way into his lower lip. Sagging a bit, because he knew what was coming, and he knew that when he was done, he might finally sleep.
"All you've done," Seth said, and he had just enough innocence left that T-Bag could believe him.