this is absolutely nothing but pure, undiluted projection fic, and i can't believe i'm even posting it.
warnings for discussion of emotional abuse of a child, frankly referenced past suicidal ideation, self-invalidation, self-worth problems, a vaguely referenced murder in a dream, and a really heavily dealt with conception by an abuse victim that, because what happened wasn't quote unquote bad enough, it doesn't actually count as Real Abuse.
he's wrong, just so we're clear. there is no 'bad enough'. abuse is abuse is abuse.
(tried to keep everyone in character, but there's limited source material and it's an intense situation, so there's only so much you can do)
It was amazing how many people spent their whole lives in places they never intended to stay.
- Terry Pratchett, "The Hogfather"
"So, you should, uh, probably call your parents."
A clatter sounds through the room as Jack's hand slips, knocking the glass over and spilling its contents across the counter. Water surges over and down onto the kitchen floor, liquid splattering on tile in the sudden silence that's fallen over the hide-out apartment's kitchen. After a beat of standing frozen, Jack lurches into action, grabbing the nearest dish towel and swiping at the spill with muttered apologies. There's something almost panicked in the way he's trying to clean up the water, and all Daniel can do is stand in the doorway and watch with one eyebrow quirked up. The dish towel is still in Jack's hand when he turns to look at Daniel, and his knuckles are blanched from clutching it so hard.
"I should- What? What are you talking about, Danny?" Jack asks in a voice that's half breathless and all disbelief, a pitch higher than usual, and Daniel gets the gnawing feeling that something's not alright. Jack's response when Daniel answers only kicks that feeling into overdrive.
"You, uh, your mom and dad, they're on TV, they saw the news about-" Before he finishes his sentence, Jack takes off out of the kitchen, forcing Daniel to call after him, "-about the bridge, they think you're dead." He follows Jack down the hall towards the living room, talking after him as he goes. "I'm sure we can talk to Dylan, get permission for you to call them and explain. Do you think they'll agree to not say anything? I don't know how this got past us, we should have called them before we set up the…"
As he realizes that Jack has reached the living room and hasn't been listening at all, Daniel stops talking. He stands in the living room doorway and watches, arms folded. Jack stands in the center of the room, eyes fixed on the television set. Henley looks up from where she sits on the couch, and Daniel watches her face turn from concern to alarm as she takes in the way Jack's face changes, seeing what's happening on-screen.
"...shocked when we turned on the TV and he was… I just never thought my son would turn out a criminal. He was so smart, so-" The woman on the brightly lit talk show couch breaks off and covers her face with a hand. She's crumpled to the side against her husband, a man Jack is the spitting image of. It's eerie.
Merritt appears at Daniel's elbow in time to see the woman on-screen look up and show her face.
"Shit, is that?" Merritt asks in a low voice, and Daniel nods once, curtly.
"Jack's parents. Yeah." Daniel raises his voice, speaking to the young man in question. "Like I said, I'm sure they'll let you call them, at least let them know you're not-"
"No." The response is so swift and sharp it throws Daniel for a loop. He steps a little further into the room and the look he sees on Jack's face is sobering.
He looks terrified.
In the silence left after Jack's snapped response, the voice of the man on the screen, Jack's father, sounds through the speakers and into the charged air of the room.
"We loved our son very much," Jack's father says, and the choked sound that comes out of Jack's throat makes Daniel's blood run cold, even as the man on the show keeps talking. "We're just so, so grateful that nobody else was hurt."
"Our son was so brilliant." His mother this time, and Daniel can see Jack's hands clench into fists at his sides. "He had such promise, he was so smart, he could have been anything, done anything with his life, and that he chose to throw it away like this is-"
"We loved our son very much," the man says again as Jack starts to talk, shaking his head and turning away from the TV.
"Turn it off." Jack's voice is just a hair too loud, and the cold feeling in Daniel's gut gets even colder. "Turn it off, please." Henley turns the TV off and looks back just in time to see Jack shake his head roughly and jerk into motion, pushing past Merritt to leave the room so fast he almost trips over himself trying to get out.
Left in the living room with a deafening silence in the air where Jack's parents' voices had been before, the remaining three Horsemen look at one another. The question is there on all their faces, but none of them are willing to ask it. Besides, they all already know the answer. With that kind of reaction to seeing them… it's pretty clear what sort of relationship Jack most likely had with his mother and father.
"Should we…" Merritt indicates down the hall with his chin, to the door Jack disappeared behind.
"He shouldn't be alone," answers Daniel. "Nobody should have to deal with family alone."
Something about the way he says the word 'family' strikes Henley cold and she starts moving, walking between Merritt and Daniel to Jack's door. It hangs open, so she doesn't bother to knock, just calls his name softly to let him know she's there and steps in. She walks over to where he's sitting on his bed, staring down at a deck of cards, and sits down next to him. Daniel and Merritt follow shortly after, unconsciously mirroring their earlier positioning in the living room, Daniel leaning against the wall near the bed and Merritt still hanging out vaguely uncomfortably in the doorway.
"What was that about?" Henley asks quietly. "Are you alright?"
Jack keeps his eyes down on the cards he's flipping through his fingers. His eyes have a vacant quality about them, like he's not entirely there. It scares Henley, a little, makes her want to reach out and shake him, bring him back to the room and ground him there. A few feet away, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, Daniel speaks up, asking the question outright.
"Did they do something to you?"
In the middle of shuffling the cards, Jack's finger slips, sending them spilling over the duvet in front of him. He laughs a little, sounding nervous and thready. He can feel his breath catch in his throat. The room feels cold and hot at the same time, and he has no idea how to answer Daniel's question. It's something he's been dreading being asked, ever since he realized something was happening that people might ask about.
'They were abusive' would be the easy answer, but it isn't- can't be that easy. Because then the question changes from 'did they do something to you' to 'what did they do to you', which is something Jack can't explain. The things that happened to him, what they did that left him standing in the living room looking like he'd seen a ghost, they aren't simple or clear or easy to put into words. But the question Jack has been afraid of for so long is here, and now he has to try. He can't just let them think he's the kind of person who would let his parents think he's dead without a reason to.
"They never hit me," Jack says. It feels important that they understand that. He doesn't want them to see his face, his shaking hands, his fear, hear him say 'they hurt me', and assume it was something horrific (it was horrific, but it shouldn't have been, wouldn't have been if he'd been better, if he'd been stronger) when it wasn't. He makes a face, remembering something. "My mother threatened to, once." Sort of. "It was a joke though," Jack is quick to add, leaving out how it hadn't felt like a joke when the threat came, how he wasn't sure her raised fist would come down across his cheek or not until she dropped the mock rage from her face and laughed.
Looking around at his teammates, noticing the expressions they wear, Jack feels further panic growing in his mind. He can't tell what any of the looks mean, from a stony impassiveness and a locked jaw (Merritt), to quiet, cold anger (Daniel), to a tumultuous, disgusted nausea (Henley). Born of the degree to which seeing his parents and hearing their voices again has thrown his world off kilter, his fear of where those looks might be directed, and the sudden realization that these people's opinions of him, what they think about why he wants to continue to let his mother and father think he's dead matters, Jack starts talking again.
"I know how that sounds, but I can't…" Jack trails off, trying to find some way, any way to make them understand, to talk about this in a way that doesn't sound petty, like an overreaction. "I can't see them again. You don't know what they were like, I was- I was something that belonged to them, I…" He swallows and tries to make sense of this in his own head. "As long as I was in that house, I wasn't a person, and there were all these lines in the sand and I didn't know when I would cross them or what would happen if I did, it-" By this time, Jack is well aware that he is rambling, his breathing too fast and still speaking up. He can feel his hands shake around the deck of cards in his lap. Looking up, he gives one last plea. "Please, don't tell them about me."
When he looks over at them, the first person he sees is Henley. She looks like she's trying to decide how to respond, like she's about to be sick. Jack's cheeks burn and he bows his head. The silence weighs heavily down on him, and he swallows against the lump stuck in his throat.
"Please don't call them," he says quietly. The air seems to have turned suffocating in the room, the pressure of their eyes on him immense. It's Daniel's voice that answers and never has Jack been so grateful for the strength of his conviction, the way Daniel says things like they're immutably true, and the whole weight of his considerable resolve is behind them.
"Nobody is calling them or telling them anything."
Jack takes one hand away from the deck of cards, the other clenched around it so tight he can feel the edges biting into his skin, and presses a palm over his mouth. When he feels like he can open it again without any manner of embarrassing sounds coming out without his permission, he takes the hand away and pulls in one excruciating, shuddering breath.
"I'm sorry," he says, and he can feel his ears burn with the same humiliation heating his cheeks. "You were never supposed to know about them, about- I'm sorry. The whole thing is so- I'm sorry."
"Jack," Henley says softly, and he stops talking, mouth snapping shut. She sits down next to him, and he can feel the mattress tilt to the side as her weight settles into it. "You can talk to us, you know." She looks back at the others. Daniel is nodding his agreement, something fierce in his eyes, and Merritt… Merritt is just standing in the doorway still, face completely impassive, but the way he isn't making light of the situation, the way his position leaning against the doorframe is something like a sentry watch, it makes it clear he agrees with her too. "If you want to talk about this, if you want someone to listen to you, we're here. We aren't going anywhere. We believe you."
Her voice has gotten somehow impossibly gentler, and part of Jack hates it. He hates the kindness in Henley's face and the fact that she's sitting close enough that he can feel the warmth of her presence. There's something in her eyes like love, and it joins the anger in Daniel's and the protectiveness in Merritt's, the combined force of the emotions directed towards him right now, and it feels like sandpaper against an open wound.
Jack knows he shouldn't take Henley up on his offer. He shouldn't even want to, shouldn't want to bare everything that happened for them to see, shouldn't want to point out every time his parents made him feel like he didn't deserve to be alive just so that someone would finally know what he went through. What he survived, how hard it was to survive it when it's impossible to explain how it managed to nearly kill him when they hardly even touched him to pat him on the shoulder, much less beat him.
"They didn't hit me or tell me I was worthless or throw things at me," Jack finds himself saying, squeezing his eyes shut against the burning in them. "It wasn't anything obvious like that it was… It was a thousand things every day that just piled up and up until-" He chokes on the words and opens his eyes, looking down at the cards he still holds onto. The one on the bottom of the deck is an Ace of Spades. He picks at the edge of it while he talks, trying to focus on anything but the fact that he's allowing himself to say any of this at all. "It was always that I was wasting my life, not trying hard enough, not doing well enough in school, getting too upset about what they said, costing them too much money. It was that and everything else they could think of and it…" He laughs a little, short and breathy and not at all amused. "You know, I can't remember the last time either of them told me they loved me. And then I walked into the living room and there they were on TV, telling the world they loved me so much."
The movement out of the corner of his eye tells Jack it's coming before Henley's hand touches his. She closes her fingers around his left hand, which is still clenched to the cards, and squeezes. It's brief and hard and enough that Jack has to take several deep, measured breaths to keep from crying for real. His parents never touched him like that. All his life, the idea of touch being a source of comfort was something at the same time infinitely foreign and something to be shamefully coveted. And now here are these confusing, maddening people, Henley with a squeeze of his hand here and there, Daniel patting him on the shoulder or back in passing, Merritt ruffling his hair while teasing him, and suddenly he has that.
Being a fugitive and internationally known magician wasn't the most difficult adjustment Jack has had to make as part of the Horsemen, it turns out.
Henley is still watching him with that expectant look and patient silence, and something about that combined with the phantom feel of her palm on top of his compels Jack to keep talking.
"I don't think they ever actually loved me, cared about me at all." It hurts to say, like admitting it makes it real, like maybe they'll leave when they find out not even his own family could find it in themselves to love him. "I think they loved this fake version of me they made up in their heads, this son that belonged to them and was everything they hoped he would be. I… wasn't that son. Every time I showed signs that I wasn't him, they tried to… Humiliate, gaslight, threaten, and yell at me until I was him. I tried, for a while, I tried so hard to be who they wanted, but it didn't work. All it did was make it clear to me that I was nothing to them but a really expensive missed opportunity. They just kept trying harder and harder, got angrier and angrier, I… I had to leave."
Before he can get to the next sentence, Jack stops. He takes a deep breath and tries to stop his hands from trembling. What he's about to say isn't anything he's ever said out loud before, and it's petrifying.
"I think, if I'd stayed, I might've killed myself. So I left."
"When did you leave?" Henely asks him, even as she feels her heart freeze in her chest at the words. Her ribcage is cold and her hands are numb but she keeps it together, focuses on Jack.
"Little after I turned eighteen." He doesn't explain how long ago that was and trying to figure out just how recently this had still been happening only makes the sick feeling in Henley's stomach get stronger. "I told them I got a job in the next city over, and as soon as I was out, I got on a bus and never looked back. I haven't talked to them since." He winces a little, thumb sliding over the corner of the deck of cards. "I know how awful that sounds. Lying and just disappearing like that. But I had to. It was the only way I ever would have gotten away from them."
"Did something happen? That made you actually leave?" They aren't questions Henley wants to ask, but she gets the feeling that Jack's never talked about this before, that maybe he might need to now.
"No, not really. Just got to the point where more days than not, I would find myself thinking maybe being dead would be a better option than living like that. Guess I decided to go before… Before it got to that." Looking over at the others, Jack catches sight of the identical looks of horror that have overtaken all three of their faces, even Merritt's. He cringes, shifting uncomfortably and trying to downplay things. "It wasn't that bad, though. Like I said, they didn't hit me, and there was almost always enough food to eat, so. It's not like they a- like they abused me." His voice catches on the world like he has trouble making himself say it.
Henley looks at him with equal parts anger and dismay. Anger that her friend's parents could have done this to their own son. Dismay that it seems to have worked.
She wants to say just seeing those bastards on the tv turned you into a shaking, frightened mess, she wants to say you just told us you considered killing yourself at the idea of being trapped in that house much longer. She wants to say they didn't hit you or tell you outright you were worthless but they sure managed to convince you that you were, that you had to earn the right to have people give a damn about you, and if you ask me that's positively criminal. But since she can't imagine how any of that would go over, she says the only thing she can think of with all the conviction she can force into her voice. All the conviction she feels.
"It sounds to me like that's exactly what they did to you."
And every fear Jack ever had about the question, about trying to explain what his parents had done and how deeply it had hurt him, comes crashing down. Oh it's far from over, and he's sure that by that night the voice in his head will come creeping back, telling him to grow up and move on and stop being such a child about things, but for now at least, the voice is quiet.
It was never a word Jack felt like he was permitted to use. 'Abuse.' Abuse wasn't a word you just got to throw around. Abuse was a word that meant something, meant something awful and cruel, something more than 'my parents had high expectations and were never very nice to me'. Except Henley is here now, saying with complete sincerity that it was that bad. That it did count.
And somehow, maybe just because he can't bear not to, Jack believes her.
It's not much later that Daniel and Merritt stand in the hallway by the living room, only a couple dozen feet away from the television set that started it all. They look at each other wordlessly for a while, anger in both their brows.
"If they ever find out. If they even think about coming near him," Merritt says, voice soft and deadly and nothing like his usual brash drawl, "if they say a word to him-"
"They won't," Daniel answers firmly. His hands are balled into fists, stuffed into his pockets, and his shoulders are set in determination. "Not while I'm still breathing. Not ever again."
To Daniel, it feels as if learning about the tragedy Jack somehow things he should be ashamed of has left some new responsibility, settled onto his back. None of them really have other family, for a variety of reasons nobody really talks much about, that much had been clear from the start. But something feels different now. Jack was the youngest, which meant that sure, some measure of obligation towards him had always been there at the back of Daniel's mind, but he'd always seemed jovial, capable and happy. Never before had Jack felt like someone Daniel needed this badly to protect.
He's still capable of course, still the resourceful kid who once grinned knowingly and said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, 'nothing's ever locked'. Nothing about the events of the day make Daniel feel like Jack is less able to do his job, less able to carry his weight and look after himself. Maybe it's seeing elements of himself in the younger man, the man who was hardly more than a boy. Maybe it was the fact that clearly nobody had ever protected Jack before and dammit, someone aught to.
It's this newfound sense of responsibility that sees Daniel sitting up in the living room last night with the unsettling feeling that there's something he should be doing keeping him from falling asleep. He's there when, in the darkest, stillest hours of the early, early morning, Jack comes stumbling in. The thief is wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt rumpled from sleep, scrubbing at his face with his hands and breathing far too raggedly.
"Jack," Daniel calls in a low voice, chest constricting at the violent flinch following the word that nearly sends the person in question stumbling over the coffee table. He gets up, hands held non threateningly at his sides. He knows the aftermath of nightmares when he sees them, knows that calm and reassurance are what's needed right now.
Daniel waits until he's right in front of Jack, where his movements can be clearly seen, before he reaches out and touches Jack's shoulder, guiding him over to the couch and gently pushing him down onto it. His hand slides across to the Jack's other shoulder, arm going around him smoothly. Not making a big deal out of it seems like the best way to get Jack to accept the comfort, and it works.
As he sits there, holding his shaking friend tightly, Daniel thinks about that New York Times article he read once, the one about how in order to be healthy a person needs eight positive moments of contact a day. He remembers the reaction to what Henley had done earlier, the way the youngest Horseman had leant into Merritt's hand gently grasping the side of his neck in departure from the room, and wonders if Jack has ever, once in his life, reached that benchmark.
After what is probably a few minutes, if Daniel could see the clock on the wall from his current vantage point, Jack shifts slightly away, swiping at his face with his wrist and seeming to have gotten his breathing mostly under control. Daniel doesn't ask, just keeps his arm where it is, anchored around Jack's shoulders like some kind of a message. Like you're safe here, it's okay. Like I've got you.
"It's always the same dream," Jack says, barely above a whisper. "The staircase at home, and my mom is there with me, and she's got a knife, and she-" He chokes, swallows, keeps going. "All she says is 'I have to do this, it's for your own good'. She's crying and she won't say anything but 'it's for your own good'. I've had that dream for years but still, every time…"
Daniel's thumb only pauses briefly in its pattern, rubbing across the crest of Jack's shoulder. It's not a nice thing to hear, but it isn't surprising either. The judgement of what to say in response is so long, Daniel almost worries Jack's fallen asleep in the interim.
"I've been where you are," he says, laying bare part of himself in response to the piece he was just given. "It hurts, and I'm sorry you're there too. I'm sorry for what happened to you. You didn't deserve it."
"Danny…" If there's a hitch in Jack's chest when he says it, a jerk in his shoulders to be felt in the palm still laid there, Daniel says nothing.
"It's not something anyone deserves. I get it, is all I'm saying, and if you ever want to talk…" Daniel shrugs, keeping his voice light. "I'm around."
"Thanks Danny," Jack answers, leaning a little more heavily to the side and hoping selfishly that Daniel won't get up, that they can just stay here like this for a little while.
He doesn't get up, and Jack falls asleep there beside him. No more dreams come.
It's in this way that Merritt finds them the next morning, walking into the living room to see Jack passed out cold, Daniel staring out the window with the fiercest expression Merritt has ever seen him wear. They make eye contact over Jack's head. A few moments pass where they look at one another and neither speaks. Then, Merritt gives one short, approving nod, and disappears into the kitchen. Daniel stays there, one arm draped around Jack's shoulders, and hopes this day will be easier than the last.