promises fade one by one [ ficlet ]
WHO Sefton and a special guest.
WHAT Two days after being abducted by a group of scientists with an unknown agenda, Sefton is visited by his worst nightmare.
WHERE An undisclosed location in the American southeast.
WHEN June 29th, 2043.
WARNINGS Mentions of human experimentation.
WORDS 2,256.
There was a window in the room, but he had no idea how long it had been. Between different tests, darkened rooms, sedatives, falling asleep and waking up, there was no way to tell if it was the same day as before his eyes had closed, or if they had kept him under all night for more experiments. Had it been hours? Days? Weeks? He simply couldn’t keep track.
The room itself was sparse, but not eyesearingly white like he had expected it to be. That was how it went when you were taken in to be poked, prodded and studied like a bug under a microscope, right? No freedom, no rights, no contact with the outside world, nothing to acknowledge he was more than a bunch of statistics and numbers to crunch. No, the walls were a pleasant green, the ceiling a slightly deeper shade, although it was pocked and speckled with lighter bits that he couldn’t entirely identify with his bleary eyes. (He thought he remembered waking once in the night, watching the ceiling glow in fascination, but his thoughts had been elsewhere and he had been too far gone to notice the tug of nostalgia.) Although there was a much more comfortable-looking bed in the corner, he was currently confined to a gurney pressed up against the wall, wrists and ankles shackled by the restraints.
He gave an uncoordinated tug against them and whimpered at the pull of the needle in the crook of his arm. There wasn’t even anything connected to it - it was just a small lead of tubing that they could use to inject whatever they needed without searching for a vein every time. They had made a lot of use of it since he’d arrived. The latest had been something different than the usual, it hadn’t knocked him out, but his thoughts had rapidly twisted into something uglier than normal, spiraling further and further downward, and left him wishing he could simply crawl into the floor and utterly disappear.
The door creaked open, knob rattling slightly under his hand. He had said he was going over to Troy’s to study, even called ahead to make sure Troy and his family knew that, just to give himself a little while longer before anyone noticed. (Troy lived the farthest away, took the most time to reach from his house.) He turned to call out to his mother that he was leaving - his father was still at work, despite it being a Saturday afternoon - and stepped outside. One foot after another, nothing (absolutely everything) to see here, just a boy going to study (run away) like he always (never ever ever) did. He made it down the street, around a corner, away from easy view, before the sob broke through and he began to run as fast as he could down to the bus stop.
By the time anyone had noticed that he had gone missing in transit, he was already two towns over and working on the third, unable to stop his momentum until the next morning.
He didn’t know how long it had been, how long he had stared listlessly into space with the tears welled up in his eyes as he jerked at the restraints, before he heard a familiar voice calling his name. Everything wavered and blurred around him. It must have been a trick of the mind, traitorous thoughts simply renewing their attack stronger than before.
Then he heard it again.
“Sefton?”
One year, ten months and twelve days since Gabriel had seen his son. Every minute not knowing had been torture; every day, every wasted search, another tally mark scraped into his heart. It wasn’t until he was right outside the door that he realized he was shaking with relief. If only he could have gotten here sooner (fifteen hours in the car, since taking a plane would leave too many trails, they’d said), if only he had gone to them earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have taken so long to find his son.
His escort, a tall but mousy Russian woman, gently repositioned her glasses and swiped a few strands of verdant hair behind her ear. “You remember the deal?” The ring of keys dangled from her other hand, poised over the handle to let him in. (It wasn’t hard to guess that no one on base was allowed keycards because of Sefton, despite the extra security they would have provided.)
It was enough to snap Gabriel out of his reverie and he gave an exasperated (impatient) nod in reply. “Of course. He’ll be in your custody until you’re done with your analysis.” The woman quirked a brow, as if waiting to hear more. “Which you are not. I get it. Open. The. Door.”
No sooner was the key twisted inside the lock, Gabriel pushed the woman aside and moved into the room. The joy and relief at seeing his son, seeing Sefton, alive and whole and safe overwhelmed anything else he could have felt at the moment. In that first instant, it didn’t bother him that Sefton was tied to the bed or that he seemed on the verge of crying, because his son was there and within Gabriel’s reach, where he could make everything right again.
“Sefton,” he called out, breathless from excitement. The lack of reaction from his son aside from a hitch in his breathing sent the spike of worry up his spine so strong that it pounded in his ears.
He took a step forward (then another, and another, slowly closer). “Sefton?”
The teenager (Sefton was a teenager now, not just the awkward not-quite-a-tween that Gabriel had seen last and his heart ached to have missed so much of it) gasped, head shifting to stare at his father while the tears streamed down the side of his face. “… Dad?” he whispered, voice cracked and shrill with relief. It must have been relief, of course, because the panic and fear didn’t make any sense.
“Yes,” he replied, lengthening his stride and setting himself on the edge of the gurney so that he could reach out and cup Sefton’s face. His eyes were beginning to sting and his vision wavered, but he ignored it. His face broke into a wide, almost disbelieving smile. “Yeah, sport, it’s me. It’s Daddy.”
Sefton whimpered and tried to turn his head away. “Dad-Dad, please, y-you’ve gotta-”
“Shhh,” Gabriel soothed. He didn’t know what those scientists had done, but his boy was distressed and Gabriel couldn’t stand to see it. He reached for one of the restraints, undoing it without looking away from Sefton and continuing to shush him, murmuring platitudes quietly. Once that one was off, Sefton’s hand flew to Gabriel’s, the one at his face, gracelessly clasping around his wrist. Gabriel quickly moved on to the next one and soon had his son in his arms.
Sefton had grown; it was apparent as soon as Gabriel tried to shift him into some sort of comfortable position. The angles were all wrong, the restraints still around Sefton’s ankles doing nothing to help either of them. Sefton’s sobs increased in intensity and he had begun to shake like a leaf, tearing Gabriel’s heart apart in the process. He had missed so much, and there was so much pain he would have to help heal. He couldn’t fathom why Sefton had run away, but he knew one thing: he would do everything in his power to make sure Sefton knew he was loved, that his family and friends would be there for him ’til the end of time, that home would never be a place where he wasn’t welcome.
He managed to move them into something resembling a good hold, one hand still cupping Sefton’s face, thumb slowly circling his temple, and the other rubbing his back, slow and soothing. This would work. Now he just needed to calm the teen down…
“Dad,” Sefton sobbed against Gabriel’s chest. His voice was hardly a whisper and Gabriel strained to hear it. He almost wished he hadn’t. “D-Dad, please, g’me outta here…”
Gabriel took a deep breath, his own tears slowly trickling out. He knew Sefton wouldn’t understand his answer (how could he? He was still just a child, he needed his father), but there was no way Gabriel could lie to him about it. “No can do, sport,” he said through his tightening throat, voice soft and hoarse. “Not yet. Not yet, shhhh, no, it’s okay. They just need to finish whatever they’re doing, then they’ll let me take you back home. See? It’s okay. Just calm down… it’s okay, Sefton, it’ll be all right.”
“No!” Sefton jerked, as if the words had been a shout or even a hand raised against him. When had he learned to be so fearful? How much had Gabriel failed at protecting him? Sefton tried to pull away, hands coming up to grasp at Gabriel’s shirt for purchase. Gabriel reached around and took his wrists, pressing them against Sefton’s chest, mindful of the lead in his elbow. The teen didn’t have the strength to pull away. Gabriel could feel Sefton lightly shaking his head against the hand on his cheek; he merely shifted, guided Sefton into a better position, ear pressed to Gabriel’s heart. “Please,” his son pleaded miserably. “Please don’t let ’em do this. Dad, you’ve gotta-you can’t-”
“You can come home,” Gabriel murmured. “Your mother is worried sick. Your friends miss you. Why did you run away…?”
It didn’t make any sense. His son was so special, so amazing, he simply drew everyone toward him like the sun amassed the planets. There was no reason Sefton should have run away, but there must have been, and Gabriel was still kicking himself over and over for not being able to figure out what it was. No matter what it turned out to be, he swore to himself (every day, never missing one out of the six hundred and eighty-one) that he would make sure the phantom that had scared Sefton would never return.
Sefton continued to shake in his arms despite the assurances, sobbing wretchedly. “I’m sorry,” he managed between the difficult breaths. “I’m so sorry, I’m so… so sorry, please let me out…”
“Just come back home. Whatever happened out there, you’ll always have home. You hear me, son?” he asked, briefly squeezing the wrists he still held and ignoring the break in his voice. His son was in so much pain; his helplessness to do anything but be here for Sefton made him want to scream and cry out. “As soon as they’re done, we can go back home and fix things. I swear, everything will be okay.”
“Who?”
Gabriel almost laughed, breathy and surprised at the question interspersed in Sefton’s painful mutterings. “They helped me find you,” he explained. It wasn’t the real answer, but it would protect Sefton. If Gabriel could help it, they would never speak with anyone involved with this again once it was over; he was paying the price for their help upfront, after all. “What you can do… they want to know how you do it, that’s all, okay? When they figure it out, then we can go home.”
“You can’t,” Sefton retorted, trying to pull away almost violently. Gabriely held him in place firmly, gentle as he could possibly be. “You can’t… can’t let them, please Dad.”
Gabriel merely shook his head. His son was confused right now, that much was obvious, confused and hurt and all of those horrible things that Gabriel couldn’t shield him from. Even if his own heart didn’t recover from the pain of failing Sefton so much, he wouldn’t let it scar his son. He refused.
Perhaps thankfully, Sefton began to lose steam. Gabriel held him, whispering promises of returning home and pretending that every refusal or plea didn’t drive another knife underneath his skin. By the time Sefton nodded off, the sun had begun to set and Gabriel turned his gaze upward to the stickers up on the ceiling. They lit up dimly in the receding dusk, sending a wave of hope and relief through him. Soon he would take Sefton back to Vermont, to his family, his friends, his room with all of the posters and the stickers he had placed himself. Soon this would all be a closed chapter of their lives, locked away and forgotten, to move on from and not dare look back.
The door handle rattled and Gabriel twisted to watch as a man and a woman, unfamiliar to him, bustled inside. The woman from before stood in the doorway with an expectant look on her face. “Sir, it’s time for you to leave.”
Gabriel swallowed hard, nodded, then turned down to drop a kiss to the top of Sefton’s head. He would be back. Gently setting the sleeping boy down, he allowed the aides to secure the restraints and moved into the hallway, softly closing the door behind him. “When can I get him out of here?” he demanded.
“You can see him again next week,” answered the woman. She fiddled with her hair, even less tidy in its bun than before, and began to walk with an extremely pointed look.
Gabriel matched her pace, his expression hard despite the puffy eyes he knew he must have been sporting. He recognized her answer as a deflection, but there was little he could say against it. “I’ll be here on the dot,” he swore. No matter how long they intended to keep Sefton for their tests, Gabriel would be there for him every step of the way until the healing could begin. Failing his son for a second time was absolutely not an option.
WHAT Two days after being abducted by a group of scientists with an unknown agenda, Sefton is visited by his worst nightmare.
WHERE An undisclosed location in the American southeast.
WHEN June 29th, 2043.
WARNINGS Mentions of human experimentation.
WORDS 2,256.
There was a window in the room, but he had no idea how long it had been. Between different tests, darkened rooms, sedatives, falling asleep and waking up, there was no way to tell if it was the same day as before his eyes had closed, or if they had kept him under all night for more experiments. Had it been hours? Days? Weeks? He simply couldn’t keep track.
The room itself was sparse, but not eyesearingly white like he had expected it to be. That was how it went when you were taken in to be poked, prodded and studied like a bug under a microscope, right? No freedom, no rights, no contact with the outside world, nothing to acknowledge he was more than a bunch of statistics and numbers to crunch. No, the walls were a pleasant green, the ceiling a slightly deeper shade, although it was pocked and speckled with lighter bits that he couldn’t entirely identify with his bleary eyes. (He thought he remembered waking once in the night, watching the ceiling glow in fascination, but his thoughts had been elsewhere and he had been too far gone to notice the tug of nostalgia.) Although there was a much more comfortable-looking bed in the corner, he was currently confined to a gurney pressed up against the wall, wrists and ankles shackled by the restraints.
He gave an uncoordinated tug against them and whimpered at the pull of the needle in the crook of his arm. There wasn’t even anything connected to it - it was just a small lead of tubing that they could use to inject whatever they needed without searching for a vein every time. They had made a lot of use of it since he’d arrived. The latest had been something different than the usual, it hadn’t knocked him out, but his thoughts had rapidly twisted into something uglier than normal, spiraling further and further downward, and left him wishing he could simply crawl into the floor and utterly disappear.
The door creaked open, knob rattling slightly under his hand. He had said he was going over to Troy’s to study, even called ahead to make sure Troy and his family knew that, just to give himself a little while longer before anyone noticed. (Troy lived the farthest away, took the most time to reach from his house.) He turned to call out to his mother that he was leaving - his father was still at work, despite it being a Saturday afternoon - and stepped outside. One foot after another, nothing (absolutely everything) to see here, just a boy going to study (run away) like he always (never ever ever) did. He made it down the street, around a corner, away from easy view, before the sob broke through and he began to run as fast as he could down to the bus stop.
By the time anyone had noticed that he had gone missing in transit, he was already two towns over and working on the third, unable to stop his momentum until the next morning.
He didn’t know how long it had been, how long he had stared listlessly into space with the tears welled up in his eyes as he jerked at the restraints, before he heard a familiar voice calling his name. Everything wavered and blurred around him. It must have been a trick of the mind, traitorous thoughts simply renewing their attack stronger than before.
Then he heard it again.
“Sefton?”
One year, ten months and twelve days since Gabriel had seen his son. Every minute not knowing had been torture; every day, every wasted search, another tally mark scraped into his heart. It wasn’t until he was right outside the door that he realized he was shaking with relief. If only he could have gotten here sooner (fifteen hours in the car, since taking a plane would leave too many trails, they’d said), if only he had gone to them earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have taken so long to find his son.
His escort, a tall but mousy Russian woman, gently repositioned her glasses and swiped a few strands of verdant hair behind her ear. “You remember the deal?” The ring of keys dangled from her other hand, poised over the handle to let him in. (It wasn’t hard to guess that no one on base was allowed keycards because of Sefton, despite the extra security they would have provided.)
It was enough to snap Gabriel out of his reverie and he gave an exasperated (impatient) nod in reply. “Of course. He’ll be in your custody until you’re done with your analysis.” The woman quirked a brow, as if waiting to hear more. “Which you are not. I get it. Open. The. Door.”
No sooner was the key twisted inside the lock, Gabriel pushed the woman aside and moved into the room. The joy and relief at seeing his son, seeing Sefton, alive and whole and safe overwhelmed anything else he could have felt at the moment. In that first instant, it didn’t bother him that Sefton was tied to the bed or that he seemed on the verge of crying, because his son was there and within Gabriel’s reach, where he could make everything right again.
“Sefton,” he called out, breathless from excitement. The lack of reaction from his son aside from a hitch in his breathing sent the spike of worry up his spine so strong that it pounded in his ears.
He took a step forward (then another, and another, slowly closer). “Sefton?”
The teenager (Sefton was a teenager now, not just the awkward not-quite-a-tween that Gabriel had seen last and his heart ached to have missed so much of it) gasped, head shifting to stare at his father while the tears streamed down the side of his face. “… Dad?” he whispered, voice cracked and shrill with relief. It must have been relief, of course, because the panic and fear didn’t make any sense.
“Yes,” he replied, lengthening his stride and setting himself on the edge of the gurney so that he could reach out and cup Sefton’s face. His eyes were beginning to sting and his vision wavered, but he ignored it. His face broke into a wide, almost disbelieving smile. “Yeah, sport, it’s me. It’s Daddy.”
Sefton whimpered and tried to turn his head away. “Dad-Dad, please, y-you’ve gotta-”
“Shhh,” Gabriel soothed. He didn’t know what those scientists had done, but his boy was distressed and Gabriel couldn’t stand to see it. He reached for one of the restraints, undoing it without looking away from Sefton and continuing to shush him, murmuring platitudes quietly. Once that one was off, Sefton’s hand flew to Gabriel’s, the one at his face, gracelessly clasping around his wrist. Gabriel quickly moved on to the next one and soon had his son in his arms.
Sefton had grown; it was apparent as soon as Gabriel tried to shift him into some sort of comfortable position. The angles were all wrong, the restraints still around Sefton’s ankles doing nothing to help either of them. Sefton’s sobs increased in intensity and he had begun to shake like a leaf, tearing Gabriel’s heart apart in the process. He had missed so much, and there was so much pain he would have to help heal. He couldn’t fathom why Sefton had run away, but he knew one thing: he would do everything in his power to make sure Sefton knew he was loved, that his family and friends would be there for him ’til the end of time, that home would never be a place where he wasn’t welcome.
He managed to move them into something resembling a good hold, one hand still cupping Sefton’s face, thumb slowly circling his temple, and the other rubbing his back, slow and soothing. This would work. Now he just needed to calm the teen down…
“Dad,” Sefton sobbed against Gabriel’s chest. His voice was hardly a whisper and Gabriel strained to hear it. He almost wished he hadn’t. “D-Dad, please, g’me outta here…”
Gabriel took a deep breath, his own tears slowly trickling out. He knew Sefton wouldn’t understand his answer (how could he? He was still just a child, he needed his father), but there was no way Gabriel could lie to him about it. “No can do, sport,” he said through his tightening throat, voice soft and hoarse. “Not yet. Not yet, shhhh, no, it’s okay. They just need to finish whatever they’re doing, then they’ll let me take you back home. See? It’s okay. Just calm down… it’s okay, Sefton, it’ll be all right.”
“No!” Sefton jerked, as if the words had been a shout or even a hand raised against him. When had he learned to be so fearful? How much had Gabriel failed at protecting him? Sefton tried to pull away, hands coming up to grasp at Gabriel’s shirt for purchase. Gabriel reached around and took his wrists, pressing them against Sefton’s chest, mindful of the lead in his elbow. The teen didn’t have the strength to pull away. Gabriel could feel Sefton lightly shaking his head against the hand on his cheek; he merely shifted, guided Sefton into a better position, ear pressed to Gabriel’s heart. “Please,” his son pleaded miserably. “Please don’t let ’em do this. Dad, you’ve gotta-you can’t-”
“You can come home,” Gabriel murmured. “Your mother is worried sick. Your friends miss you. Why did you run away…?”
It didn’t make any sense. His son was so special, so amazing, he simply drew everyone toward him like the sun amassed the planets. There was no reason Sefton should have run away, but there must have been, and Gabriel was still kicking himself over and over for not being able to figure out what it was. No matter what it turned out to be, he swore to himself (every day, never missing one out of the six hundred and eighty-one) that he would make sure the phantom that had scared Sefton would never return.
Sefton continued to shake in his arms despite the assurances, sobbing wretchedly. “I’m sorry,” he managed between the difficult breaths. “I’m so sorry, I’m so… so sorry, please let me out…”
“Just come back home. Whatever happened out there, you’ll always have home. You hear me, son?” he asked, briefly squeezing the wrists he still held and ignoring the break in his voice. His son was in so much pain; his helplessness to do anything but be here for Sefton made him want to scream and cry out. “As soon as they’re done, we can go back home and fix things. I swear, everything will be okay.”
“Who?”
Gabriel almost laughed, breathy and surprised at the question interspersed in Sefton’s painful mutterings. “They helped me find you,” he explained. It wasn’t the real answer, but it would protect Sefton. If Gabriel could help it, they would never speak with anyone involved with this again once it was over; he was paying the price for their help upfront, after all. “What you can do… they want to know how you do it, that’s all, okay? When they figure it out, then we can go home.”
“You can’t,” Sefton retorted, trying to pull away almost violently. Gabriely held him in place firmly, gentle as he could possibly be. “You can’t… can’t let them, please Dad.”
Gabriel merely shook his head. His son was confused right now, that much was obvious, confused and hurt and all of those horrible things that Gabriel couldn’t shield him from. Even if his own heart didn’t recover from the pain of failing Sefton so much, he wouldn’t let it scar his son. He refused.
Perhaps thankfully, Sefton began to lose steam. Gabriel held him, whispering promises of returning home and pretending that every refusal or plea didn’t drive another knife underneath his skin. By the time Sefton nodded off, the sun had begun to set and Gabriel turned his gaze upward to the stickers up on the ceiling. They lit up dimly in the receding dusk, sending a wave of hope and relief through him. Soon he would take Sefton back to Vermont, to his family, his friends, his room with all of the posters and the stickers he had placed himself. Soon this would all be a closed chapter of their lives, locked away and forgotten, to move on from and not dare look back.
The door handle rattled and Gabriel twisted to watch as a man and a woman, unfamiliar to him, bustled inside. The woman from before stood in the doorway with an expectant look on her face. “Sir, it’s time for you to leave.”
Gabriel swallowed hard, nodded, then turned down to drop a kiss to the top of Sefton’s head. He would be back. Gently setting the sleeping boy down, he allowed the aides to secure the restraints and moved into the hallway, softly closing the door behind him. “When can I get him out of here?” he demanded.
“You can see him again next week,” answered the woman. She fiddled with her hair, even less tidy in its bun than before, and began to walk with an extremely pointed look.
Gabriel matched her pace, his expression hard despite the puffy eyes he knew he must have been sporting. He recognized her answer as a deflection, but there was little he could say against it. “I’ll be here on the dot,” he swore. No matter how long they intended to keep Sefton for their tests, Gabriel would be there for him every step of the way until the healing could begin. Failing his son for a second time was absolutely not an option.