Tags that apply to this fic: Parent/Child Incest, Child Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Unrequited Lust, Suicidal Thoughts, Objectification, Non Consensual Anything, Unhealthy Relationships, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Emotional Manipulation, Possessive Behavior, Pre-Canon.
A/N: Looking too closely is set in a 'what-if' scenario in which Anderson regularly raped his son from ages nine to eighteen. However, none of the characters we know from the canon storyline (except for Castle and his sneaky informants) have any knowledge of this, because Warner has been repressing those memories in several different ways. In other words, this fic consists of recollections of all those 'forgotten' memories, and how those interactions/memories/moments bring a new understanding of Anderson and Warner's relationship to the table.
The title for this piece was taken from Fink's song Looking too closely, which is amazing by the way. I encourage you to listen to it while reading.
Chapter 1: a song for somebody else
Wordless screams echo across the room, from wall to wall, from polished floors to immaculate windows, from the couch to the rug and to every piece of furniture and- I don't know what to do. My mind is not working as it should, the inner organization of my system, the meticulous process of classifying emotions and reactions from inactions, is not functioning in the slightest. Deprived from the ability to dissect and compartmentalize what I am experiencing, I'm only left with the profound vacuum effect of my failure to accept this world for what it is. I see, hear, taste and feel what any person in a stable mental state should not. This room is screaming accusations at me, to me, and I wish I had the proper responses, the right solutions to share out loud. What does it want from me? Is it demanding answers or admissions of guilt or hints of silent allowance?
I'm unable to remember for how long precisely I've remained here sitting, questioning the remnants of events that have brought me here-minutes pouring out of the clock above my bed like blood from a wound-, waiting for the materialization of things I have learned a long time ago to be nothing but mere fantasies.
I do not dare look down at my body, not for fear of what I might encounter, but out of deeply ingrained shame and embarrassment. Of awareness of… the particular circumstances that have painted the picture of a broken boy, propped brokenly against the headboard of a broken bed.
If I closed my eyes, I would see engraved on the back of my eyelids the entire planes of this wretched cage of flesh that is mine in name only.
I still feel his breathing brushing the nape of my neck, softly, unreal, vastly contrary to the roughness of the act itself. I feel his fingers pressing bruises to my shoulders in order to keep me pliant, to the bow of my neck as he smothered my face in pillows, to the protrusions of my jutting hipbones, marking them purple, to my trembling thighs and my bent knees so he could sneak in between them without resistance. I still feel the burning dryness around the eyes that did not cry then, that have not done so since the first time.
Pain is my sole companion in this empty, lacking room; when I need the numbness that accompanies the quiet pretense of death the most, it reminds me I continue to live and breathe and exist by proving especially hard at my lower back. I rest two sticky fingers on the stinging spot, and I imagine the rotten skin peeling off in poisonous black layers beneath the hesitant touch, I imagine white walls closing in on me and bloody signs defiling their clean surfaces with pleas for help.
Everything hurts, yet the hurt is not strong enough to take me with it to a realm of existence where I can be freed from reality.
In these moments, I like to think about how that reality must unfold for others. I think of a mother holding her little boy's hand. A father buying ice cream for his children, a scenario I once saw depicted on a pamphlet. Kids chasing each other in the school's playground. I think of dirty faces and poverty stricken bodies smiling despite the betrayal this new world order has gifted them. As if they actually possess some form of control over their insignificant, rejected lives. But control is an illusion. No one is really free. Not the poor, not the foot soldier, not the man who lives with his four children and his ill wife on the inside of an overcrowded container, not the siblings playing in the dirt who see themselves as rulers of their fictional kingdom, not even the men and women that claim to stand at the top of the elite are truly, entirely free.
And me? I'm the living proof that it doesn't matter where you are born into; I am fate's chewing toy just as much as anyone else. I am his chewing toy. And again, I would cry if I had any tears left to spare. My reality are his excited pants on the shell of my ear, the hateful words he strung together with aroused dominance and unkind indulgence (This is ownership, son. This is what triumph feels like. This is the feeling of reward for those who conquer), his disgusting lips destroying every semblance of normalcy and wellness that compose the alleged person that is the bearer of the name Aaron.
After a lifetime consisting of regret and musings stretched to their limits and vacant irises creating imaginary holes on skin, the door to my room opens. Waves of emotions that do not belong to me hit me like a sledgehammer to the teeth. Fear, sadness, brief rage, even more fear. I scramble to my feet, but my legs are as consistent as water and I end up sprawled on top of the disarrayed sheets, sinking in the nest of sin I have been forced into. The sheets utter whispers, retellings about the smell of musky sweat and sex that clings to them, and my nose wrinkles in repulsion. It takes whatever part of me left intact not to hurl the contents of my stomach all over the bed.
Fighting nausea, I look up to the man standing at my door. It's Delalieu, looking ashen, the whites of his eyes bursting with engrossed veins, and his mouth frozen in a sad-seeming grimace. He looks infinitely older than he is, shaken eyes roving over my naked figure, deep age lines marring his features. The sight of him would usually have me turning my face away in a gesture of pure disgust, appalled and annoyed at his passive meekness, but right now I couldn't possibly be happier to see him. I don't even care that I'm allowing him to see me in such a vulnerable state.
I struggle to a sitting position for the second time, trying to get back on my feet, and this time, I do manage to climb out of the bed, and I'm rising on uneven limbs, bare and covered in filth and so ashamed I wish I could tear my eyes out of my skull. At the same time I do this, something slick slides out of me producing a sonorous, liquid sound that ricochets in the silence, I feel the wet trail dripping down my thighs, and Delalieu looks perturbed to his very bones, looks like he might sob, come undone in tears and vomit in my stead.
His dark emotions overwhelm me. However, all I do in the face of his thundering feelings is smile and extend my finger-tainted black and blue arms to him, the same way I might have done in another lifetime, in a world where we could have been grandson and grandfather.
I smile, dimples flaring, and say, "Kill me. Please, kill me."
How I sound, it astounds. The highs and lows as I speak, the mild lack of oxygen as I plead, the calm, deceitful nature of the request that does its best to hide how earnestly desperate I am for this one last reprieve. For the first time in my life I let the six year old boy in me to articulate the fervent petition he has kept buried inside for the past ten years, afraid of the punishment he would have received had his father heard a fragment of that desire. I dislodge it out of the scalding walls of my throat, and Delalieu is the one quivering, gazing upon me as if he has not ever seen me before.
I take one careful step. Tremors shoot the entire way to the beginnings of my waist, "Kill me. I can't stand this anymore. I—I-I can't take this anymore."
He recoils, hands in the air and shaking his head in terrified denial.
Moving my other useless leg, I mumble "He can't keep getting away with this." And Delalieu has become a frightened animal, scared of my joyful mouth, my joyless sentences, and the dead film covering my glassy vision. Truth is staring back at him, exorbitant and monstrous and nearing on wobbly knees, and he cannot bear to confront it. Or understand it.
Another step forwards.
"End this, I beg you. KILL ME PLEASE, GODDAMMIT-"
The door closes with the resounding whimper of a child's ultimate hope as it shatters. He leaves me on my own, half concocted supplications for death lying on my tongue, waiting to be given voice.
In the morning, when light reveals all that was hidden by the cloak of night, its secrets, its crimes and its cries, I'll be a different man. I won't be the boy that was shattered yesterday. I will stand anew, reborn from the bruises, the broken skin, the defiled vessel of flesh, and the imprint of teeth in pillow casings, and I will forget the ways in which I was used. I won't remember yesterday and what happened when I was cornered by that man in my room. I won't remember the aftermath or the overbearing death wish, the only thought that I could make sense of.
With a blank mind, I will walk the halls of the devil's house, posture deceivingly proud, immune to the rumors spreading from mocking mouths and unresponsive to the looks thrown my way just to catch a hint of markings on a wrist, of bleeding bites on collarbones, of a wounded nape, or of a limping stance as I move.
Memories will crash, they will evolve and transform into alien experiences, moments that took place in the time of others. And when my deformed reflection glares accusingly at me through reflective glass, I won't remember at all: why there is a vacancy inside of me that grows greater each day that goes by.
A/N: REVIEWS ARE ALWAYS APPRECIATED, EVEN IF YOU JUST WANT THROW FLAMES AT ME OR TO TELL ME I'M AN AWFUL HUMAN BEING FOR WRITING THIS.