So I didn't get to see the finale as it aired as I was on vacation out of the country. But holy damn. I WAS SO CLOSE TO THE TRUTH ABOUT SEBASTIAN AND ALISTAIR BLACK IT ISN'T EVEN FUNNY. I was only a generation off with the thief relative. Anyway, I know a lot of people want to jump on the "Hate Johnny" bandwagon, but I really don't think he's as mad as he makes out to be when he punches him. I think he's mad, sure. But I also have a long dissertation about why I think Johnny has a long game planned that doesn't end well for MW - and I think he sticks Cameron temporarily in prison to give himself a running start in trying to beat her at her own game. Anyway. This is a stand alone (possibly a chapter 2 with Johnny's point of view, or he's going to get his own stand alone - we'll see). I still love both the boys, but this is the longest piece I've written for Cam's point of view, and for Kay. Kay is ungodly difficult for me for some reason. Anyway. ONWARDS!
They hadn't believed him.
Surprise, surprise, right?
Johnny made a very believable him – he'd done it most of his life, after all. At this point, it was probably more reflexive to pretend to be Cameron than it was to be Johnny.
He hadn't made much of an effort to convince the guards – he needed a phone to persuade anybody that mattered that Johnny has taken his place outside the bars, but Johnny had already used up his one phone call when Cameron had called him earlier.
Besides. The more he tried to convince them that he was Cameron and not Jonathan, the crazier he looked. The crazier he sounded. And he already felt like was standing at the very edge of a very high cliff, staring into the abyss as the ground started to crumble beneath him.
And now he had no safety net to catch him.
He wasn't sure he wanted to be saved.
He allowed the guards to maneuver and steer him back to gen pop. The route was familiar enough – he knew every inch of this prison. Inside. Outside. Beneath. The upgrades and ruins. Between the walls and underneath the floor. He'd studied every inch. Every aspect. Every single. Microscopic. Detail. Down to the type of concrete and what could be used to erode it the quickest. The quietest. The space between Johnny's cell and the outside of the prison. The types of bars. The alarms. The codes. The people. The time it took from one guard to make his rounds, how long the other stopped for coffee.
No matter what he'd told his brother, breaking him out was always an option. Because life on the run with his brother was really no different than life in the shadows on the road. And Cameron had made sure that if – when – the FBI let him down, he would be able to save his brother.
He couldn't even be upset that Jonathan left him here. Wasn't this where bad people were supposed to be?
It was actually his original plan. He'd pitched it to Johnny his first night in jail, with bruises still fresh on his brother's face, his own eyes bleary from the red eye he'd caught from Vegas. Johnny said no.
Escape, yes.
Switching places? No.
But Cameron pushed – pushed until his brother had punched the dividing glass between them in the visitation room hard enough to fracture his knuckles, yelling at him to stop saying it until the guards dragged him away.
It hadn't occurred to him until Dina pointed it out that Cameron was just offering that their act be switched permanently – that he was asking Johnny to keep up the act of Cameron forever.
That hadn't been at all what Cameron was thinking about. He was thinking he could pretend to be Johnny just this once, when it really mattered. That desperate times called for desperate measures, and a life as someone else – even him – was better than a life still stuck in a cage for something he didn't do.
Because Johnny didn't deserve to be behind bars. No when he hadn't done anything wrong. Other than let Sebastian bully him into staying with Cameron, even when he didn't want to. When Sebastian died, Cameron should've just given up the idea of the Disappearing Boy (Man, at this point in their life, he supposed) and stuck with other illusions. Making planes and box cars disappear. Walking through the Wall of China. Flying over the crowd of Times Square.
But he'd been selfish. He didn't know how to exist without Johnny. He didn't trust anyone besides Johnny. Johnny was the one who kept him grounded. He was Daedalus to his Icarus. Whenever Cameron started to feel like he was coming unglued – like a single push of air would make him shatter into a thousand little pieces, when he was too tired to keep running at the breakneck speed of always needing more because if he stood still, all his nightmares would catch up to him and reality would crush him as surely as their father tried to crush them both – Johnny was the one who caught him. Johnny helped him fly.
And the wings he'd given Cam would never break from something so benign as the heat of the sun.
"Yo, Black. I need to discuss something with you."
The voice was unfamiliar. But loud, and too close for comfort.
Cameron blinked, realizing he was standing in the yard, and no longer in the corridor being escorted on either arm.
He didn't even know how long he'd been standing there.
He felt like he wasn't there at all.
"Hey – you listenin' man?" the same voice questioned. It belonged to a man easily twice his size. Broader at the shoulders than any man had a right to be. He seemed…angry? Cameron always did have problems judging other peoples' emotions.
He could rarely name his own.
He didn't answer, and the man seemed to take it as an invitation that Cameron was listening.
He wasn't.
But the man spoke anyway.
Bits and pieces filtered through the numbing haze. Something about helping out another inmate. Helping him…do something he probably shouldn't be doing.
Like 'he'd done with that other guy'.
Things started to click into place. They thought he was Johnny. They wanted Johnny to help another inmate escape. Because if Johnny didn't, he was going back to the infirmary with something worse than just a broken rib.
Broken ribs and black eyes and a hollow "I'm fine" flashed through Cameron's memory.
Johnny had lied.
Cameron's hands clenched into fists at his sides as he listened to the man make demands of his brother. The words started to blur and fade as Cameron stared at the other inmate.
"Stop eyeballing me, boy," the man threatened.
And suddenly he wasn't looking at a nameless inmate.
He was looking at Sebastian Black.
The man who made their lives a living hell and still made Cameron fight with all he had for just a single word of approval. A nod of respect. A good job or well done. The man who made him believe that what he was forcing his sons to do wasn't monstrous. Wasn't cruel.
The man who convinced him that what he made them do was fun.
"I said –"
The inmate didn't get any further.
Cameron kicked, as hard and as violently as he possibly could at the man's private area because Sebastian Black's sons didn't fight fair and he wasn't trying to defend himself. He was defending Johnny. Because Johnny is who he was behind these bars.
He wanted to hurt something. Someone. To make them bleed. To make them suffer.
Because he didn't know how to do it alone.
The man went down in an instant, too stunned and in enough pain he was trying to suck in air that wasn't coming, and Cameron didn't give it a chance to.
He was sick of being a negotiator. He was tired of trying to keep peace in a war. He was done with being pushed, with being pulled, with being forced to dance at the end of a string like a puppet with no will of his own.
And he was done with letting people try and bully Johnny into doing their dirty work.
Even if it was himself.
There are no strings on me.
He hadn't realized he'd shouted it out loud until days later when Kay watched the security tapes with him. He hadn't even heard the hoots and hollers and jeers from the rest of the inmates as they circled up for a fight.
He'd only heard the crack of bones beneath his hands. The squelch of blood on mashed and ruined skin. The audible pop of a broken tooth, the wet gasps between blood stained lips that split and tore beneath his fists as he rained down blow after blow with twenty years of pent up rage behind them.
Sebastian Black was dead an in the ground several years gone – but that didn't stop the surge of vindictive wrath that washed away everything else in Cameron's soul, filling the horrible, aching hollowness Johnny had left behind. The anger he'd kept at bay for his entire life came surging forwards like a flood, surrounding him, dragging him down with it until there was nothing else.
Blood pounded in his ears, washed his vision in red. Strong hands gripped him on either side as they yanked him backwards off of the ruin of a man beneath his fists.
He dimly heard someone say that it was a week in isolation for that. Maybe longer, if they were feeling unkind. He didn't argue when they dragged him along, but he didn't help either. His brain was already disconnecting from reality, like a child letting go of a balloon. He wasn't here. There was nothing here.
The door slammed shut behind him, leaving him alone in the darkness. He didn't even bother to stand. He laid where they dropped him, staring unblinking up at the ceiling.
His attention skipped. His mind checked out. He was untethered to the world, and there was nothing to bring him back down.
Be careful, Icarus, a voice not his own whispered in his head. You're soaring too high.
He held his hand up in the darkness, staring through his bloodied fingers to the ceiling until they started to blur.
There's no sun in here to burn my wings. How do I get back down?
A drop of blood dripped from his hand, spattering on his cheek.
You clip them yourself.
He let his hand drop against the concrete floor, the pain distant and not his own.
He hit it again. Harder. This time it felt real. Like it was his own.
He hit the floor again, harder, and felt something give way as his vision filled with a kaleidoscope of colors as he hit it again.
And again and again and again and again.
He kicked at the metal frame of the bed until it bent. He rocked his head back until his hair started to stick and his vision began to dull.
And when his body betrayed him and refused to move he screamed into the darkness.
It took them 36 hours to realize it wasn't Cameron who said good-bye at the Archive.
Thirty six hours to realize that the man the prison held in isolation wasn't Jonathan.
If Kay hadn't been so upset, she would've realized sooner. She would've seen the differences between them.
Cameron would never be that calm – not after the manic display of energy at the office when she'd seen him freak out at the marshals coming to escort Jonathan back to prison. Cameron would never walk away like that. Not from Jonathan. Not from everything and everyone.
Kay still wasn't so sure Jonathan had either. Joining forces with the woman he'd tried to kill on multiple occasions, who'd tried to get him to kill his brother (perhaps not purposely, but incidentally with the vault) seemed like too much of a leap.
She kept her eye out on the news for unidentified female bodies in the Hudson.
Dina had called her when the prison called her, unable to reach Cameron as medical proxy for Jonathan.
It hadn't taken long to realize what happened. At least…at bare minimum. She wasn't sure if Cameron bit off more than he could chew and swapped places with Jonathan, or if Jonathan had pulled the bait and switch on his own.
"We're not sure when it happened – or how," the guard was trying to explain as he lead them down the snaking corridors towards the isolation unit. "I mean, obviously last time Cameron came to check in with him, but we still don't know how anyone didn't catch it. Jonathan had been acting strange as soon as the marshals dropped him back off, but…"
"It doesn't matter," Kay interrupted. "We're taking him with us."
"Of course, of course, I mean…yeah, that's probably best…"
Kay fought the urge to snarl ya think? But remained tenuously professional.
"Um, so, I gotta warn you. He doesn't look so great. But he wouldn't let us take him to medical for treatment either, which is why we were calling Cameron – Jonathan, I guess – for medical proxy permission to treat."
Kay felt her stomach drop a little more, and Mike put a comforting hand on her arm.
"He'll be fine," he whispered. "It's Cameron, right?"
Except she'd seen how quickly Cameron could spiral.
When the door opened, she couldn't help putting her hand to her mouth.
…that was a lot of blood.
Spattered everywhere. On the floor. On the walls. On the back of the door.
All over Cameron.
It took her a minute to even find him in the small cell. The bed frame was smashed and dented, the mattress ripped apart and flung to the far corner. There was a dent in the holding tank of the toilet. And in the corner where the cot used to attach to the wall was Cameron's 6 and a half foot frame, folded up tighter than any grown man should be able to.
"We'll take it from here," she heard Mike say, and she was eternally grateful for him stepping up because she was already inside the cell, crouching next him and trying not to think about how he had yet to look up.
Or move.
His hands were ruined. Those once flawless fingers were going to be horrifically scarred. She could see the bones of his knuckles through the loose flaps of flesh barely hanging on. There was dried blood down either side of his neck, and she could see where his hair matted and stuck at the back. That explained the largest pool of blood in the middle of the floor with bits of hair. She shuddered to think how hard he must have hit it, or how long he must have lain there for the blood to congeal enough that it pulled out bits of hair when he moved.
"Cameron?" she whispered, and carefully touched his knee where he was propping his elbows up. He hardly twitched.
"Cam?" she tried again. She wasn't sure if he was catatonic or out and out unconscious from shock and blood loss. Neither would surprise her. She carefully touched her fingers to his chin, lifting his head up to see if his eyes were even open and was startled to find they were.
Open, but unseeing. He looked straight past her, unblinking and unregistering, staring a thousand miles away.
"Cameron…it's me," she said quietly. "It's Kay. Kay and Mike. We've come to take you home."
That got a reaction, and his gaze flicked to hers, confusion clouding the once brilliant grey.
"Cameron?"
He took a shuddering breath, and held his mangled hands out to her, palms down as if trying to show her the damage he'd done – as if she could've missed it.
"I'm…" he began, voice rough and raw. Kay remembered what the guards had mentioned about him screaming himself hoarse after he'd worn himself out thrashing the walls and everything else he could reach.
"I'm not good without Johnny…"
So thanks to the Cocky Undead/Buckky on Tumblr for letting me spit ball plot lines for this. I really like the idea of Cameron being neuro atypical, but in this I'm just going with shock, recrimination, and depressive episode. I like the idea that Sebastian was enough of a dick to make Jonathan stick around by using his brother as blackmail and I like him training Cameron to be so reliant on Johnny that he can't function without him (because I have a thing for jackass dad tropes). It's also pretty interesting psychological warfare. Anyway - let me know what you think! Feel like chatting about Deception, feel free to come find me on Tumblr as disappearinginq!