Chapter 2: Aaron & Jason & The Dissolution of Last Names
A/N: Here we go! We'll meet Derek next. Reviews make me smile ;)
WARNING: Descriptions of child abuse. Also, I don't own CM.
It could be said that Aaron and Jason got off to a volatile start.
"What do you mean, the Funhouse?" Aaron practically spat, rocketing out of the bottom bunk and charging at Jason, who was still reading rather nonchalantly—Aaron balked at his indifference—atop the twin bed pressed to the far wall. Completely disregarding the intense mental fog and full-body soreness that he felt surging him, Aaron funneled all of his attention down towards his balled fists. Blinding rage simmered in his chest.
For one brief instant, he completely understood the animalistic look that sometimes flashed across his foster father's eyes. That sense of unmitigated, uncontrollable anger.
Aaron grabbed the collar of Jason's dirtied tee with both hands, nearly raising the boy up into the air.
"Where are we?" he growled. "What is this? You kidnapped me."
Jason remained unbothered. Utterly expressionless. His blithe demeanor only maddened Aaron further.
"I didn't kidnap you, hothead," the other boy sighed. "Now for God's sake, will you let me go?"
Aaron made no move to release his collar. "Where the fuck are we?"
"A basement," Jason said dryly, giving a broad gesture towards their run-down surroundings. Other than the beds, there was only an archaic wooden dresser to furnish the room, and even that looked as though it could crumble under the slightest touch. Alphabet-themed wallpaper was plastered to the sides of the stuffy bedroom, and a small rug in the shape of a cartoon frog had been lamely strewn across the floor. Underneath was cold, blemished concrete. At the foot of Aaron's bed lay a smiling teddy bear. He found the innocent feel of the room's decor unnerving as hell; it was like putting lipstick on a boogeyman.
There was, indeed, a door. Aaron released Jason to investigate. Positioned right between the bunk bed and the twin bed, the door was painted a chipping sky blue. Upon further inspection—after rattling it for all he was worth—Aaron found that it was locked tight. He continued to jostle the knob for a few moments before finally giving up and dropping down beside Jason on the twin bed. He huffed one great, frustrated sigh.
"Done with your bitching, cowboy?"
Aaron shot a hateful glare at his partner in entrapment. "Tell me what the hell is going on or I'll knock the dog shit out of you."
Jason only chuckled, raising both hands in mock-surrender. "Easy, tiger. We get beat up on enough down here."
At this, Aaron paled a little. His breathing hitched, then began to quicken right alongside the thrumming of his heart.
"What do you mean?" he asked, even knowing exactly what Jason meant.
Jason stared soberly at him for a moment before finally, carefully shutting his book. He maneuvered himself so that he was sitting right beside Aaron, both of their legs hanging against baby blue bed sheets. It's the same blue as the door, Aaron mused. And my sheets are that color too.
"Look," Jason said, staring at his hands. "I'll tell you what I know, but it isn't a whole lot."
The older boy paused for a moment and looked up, tilting his head to the side like a pensive bird.
"Did they do that to your face?"
Aaron's hand reflexively went to his black eye. "No."
"Then who did?"
"Doesn't matter."
Jason sighed and leaned back against the mildewy concrete. Aaron followed suit. The stone was cool against his tee-shirt, and it was as though the sensation awoke something in him—he'd only just then realized how altogether chilled the basement air was. Goosebumps spread up his bare arms like contagion. Someone had taken his sweatshirt.
"Cold, right?" Jason said, like he could see right through Aaron. "I was wearing my favorite tweed jacket when they snatched me. Fucking lady must've stolen it."
Aaron couldn't help but shudder. "Who are they? What do they want with us?"
Jason looked up at the lackluster ceiling light and shrugged. "I dunno. They nabbed me about a month ago. I'm only allowed to call 'em Mr. and Mrs. Roycewood. They've been saying I'm too old for a while, though—apparently seventeen is damn near ancient in their world. They wanted a younger one."
Once more, anger bubbled in Aaron's gut. "Why'd you grab me, then? You could've run!"
Jason's smile was horribly sad. The type that empties something in your heart.
"They'd have caught me. I either would've ended up dead, or wishing I was dead."
Aaron's emotions were existing in a strange and painful cycle; sadness, anger, and mind-numbing fear weaved themselves into inextricable knots in his mind.
"What are they gonna do to us?" he asked, unable to keep the tremble out of his voice.
"Sometimes they leave me alone," Jason said. His eyes went dark and distant. "Like, alone alone. They'll unlock the bedroom door and let me free in the basement, and kinda just disappear for a few days. There are other rooms down here. Another bedroom, a bathroom, a sort of broken-down living area. But other times…"
Jason trailed off and closed his eyes as though remembering something he'd rather forget. Aaron's heart pounded.
"Other times, what?"
Jason kept his eyes screwed shut. "Other times I'm not so lucky."
Jason became even more reticent after that, opening his book again and refusing to say any more on the matter. Aaron paced about the dank-smelling room for what must've been hours, pausing only to intermittently bang on the door and demand he be let out. It was no use—he was pleading with paneled wood.
Throughout his many laps around the four walls, he came to notice a few subtleties about their cell that he'd missed upon first glance. Stacked in piles on the floor near the foot Jason's bed lay heaps and heaps of books; hundreds of them. Some looked to be academic textbooks, while others were leather-bound novels—the expensive kind.
His second discovery was the little blue clock perched underneath the lamp on the dusty dresser. For reasons he didn't exactly understand, the notion of having a means by which to track time comforted Aaron. At the very least, he could categorize this nightmare into neat chunks.
Lastly, his eyes came to rest on the plain, unornamented blue calendar that'd been taped to the side of the bureau. A black ballpoint pen sat on the floor underneath it. Aaron flipped back and found the first day that'd been marked off; December 2nd. One month and fifteen days ago.
An aching thought suddenly hit him. He looked back at Jason.
"You were here for Christmas?"
Without looking up from his book, Jason sighed and said, "Christmas doesn't exist down here. The rest of the world—the normal world, with holidays and school and families—is gone now. You've got to forget it all."
Dread tugged at Aaron's chest. Even Lou, his son-of-a-bitch foster father, had put up a tree and bought his three charges a few gifts. How cruel must these Roycewoods be if they made a man as awful as Lou seem like a saint?
By the time Aaron finally tired of his incessant pacing, the clock read 8:30 pm. Jason hadn't moved from his spot once in the hours they'd been together. Aaron plopped down onto the bottom bunk and pulled the thin blue covers up over him. He needed the reassuring contact they provided just as much as the warmth.
"Do they give us dinner?" he asked Jason miserably.
"Sometimes," the older boy said, shrugging. He reached underneath his bed and fumbled around until his hand eventually emerged with a plastic water bottle. He tossed it to Aaron, who greedily unscrewed the cap—his throat had never been so dry in his life.
"Don't drink it all at once," Jason warned. "If they don't come tonight, we won't be able to get to the bathroom 'till morning."
Lo and behold; no one came that night. Aaron fell asleep wishing for the quiet consistency of the foster home. Nevermind the beatings—at least then he could be outside. He'd give anything to feel the sun kiss the apples of his cheeks again, and to breathe in that perfectly suburban smell of freshly mowed grass, and to watch the wind softly whisper through tree branches.
Down here, it was practically airless. There was only concrete, and mustiness, and a terrible, nagging feeling that this was it. This was his future.
He dreamed about watching the stars. He'd always loved staying out late at night to gaze up at the indigo sky and count as many stars as time would allow for. Now, the memories of incandescent spots spattering a rich night sky were only that—memories. But his subconscious was a wonderful thing, and it painted the cosmos for him just as intricately and beautifully as he remembered it being in those moonlit moments when he'd lay on the lawn, staring upwards. In sleep, at least, Aaron was boundless.
He never heard so much as a stirring, but sure enough, when Aaron awoke the next morning, the bedroom door was slightly ajar. He looked across the room to find Jason curled in a ball underneath his bedsheets, still out cold. Even in sleep, the older boy's brow never seemed to completely unfurrow.
Aaron slipped out of bed and through the door, quick and silent as a raindrop. The hallway he found himself in was just as poorly-lit as the bedroom; dim and gloomy, a street-lamp yellow. The ambience, too, was the same; the rank smell of old concrete hung heavy in the air. The walls were stained by what looked to be a nasty combination of mold and water damage, and exposed pipes snaked rather precariously across the ceiling. Just as Jason had said, the hall was home to three other doors. The one straight across from the bedroom was wide open, revealing a grubby bathroom that looked as though it belonged in some sort of abandoned, apocalyptic prison. Aaron relieved himself, noting the rust and grime covering all of the water fixtures with no shortage of disgust.
The second door, a dingy imitation of mahogany, was also unlocked. The room it led into was far bigger than the bedroom, but it still had the same stone-jailhouse feel to it. There were two worn-down maroon couches pressed to the opposing far walls, both smelling of mothballs and bad perfume. A matching armchair sat in another corner, right beside two large shelves that were teeming with books. An antique rug the color of burnished clay was spread across most of the floor. The entire room felt like it belonged in the home of a 1900s old money family that'd recently fallen from grace.
Aaron snuck back into the hallway—the living room gave him the shivers, and not just because of the chill that sat in the air.
He somehow knew the third door would be locked before even trying to open it. Just the sight of it, though, shook him to his very core. The implication of that color…
The door was painted a pastel pink. The exact opposite cliche of his and Jason's. Bile nipped at the back of Aaron's throat. He returned to the bedroom and buried himself underneath the covers, locking his hands over his ears so as to quell the pounding of his thoughts.
It was night by the time she came for them. Aaron hadn't gotten up from his bed that day except to use the bathroom, and to refill the plastic bottle with dubiously-tinged sink water, and to take a copy of Tom Sawyer from the pile of books. The latter was mostly a means to distract himself from the knot of hunger that was wrenching at his stomach.
Jason had slept until the little blue clock read 2pm, and even after his awakening, he'd said very, very little. Instead, he resorted to bunkering down in the living room with his precious Faulkner novel. Aaron was fine with this—his fellow captive wasn't exactly the most soothing of presences.
But at nightfall—not that either of them had any way of differentiating day from night besides the numbers on the clock—Jason slunk back into the bedroom, looking jittery. Aaron was surprised when the older boy sat down beside him on the bottom bunk and gently took the book from his hands.
"It's Tuesday," Jason said, his eyes glazed over with grimness.
Aaron shot him a blank look. "So what?"
"So, it's poker night."
"Is that supposed to mean something to me?"
Jason dropped his head into his hands and gave an exasperated sigh. "Every Tuesday, Mr. Roycewood has a few of his buddies over for poker night."
Aaron waited a beat for further explanation. When none came, he threw his hands up and snorted derisively.
"Great," he deadpanned. "Now I understand perfectly. Real helpful, as always."
The older boy's expression remained hauntingly solemn. Aaron's fear quickly came to outweigh his irritation, and he exchanged the sarcastic lull for a tone that sounded almost pleading. The very notion unsettled him—Aaron Hotchner had crossed his fair share of lines in his twelve short years, but he didn't plead. He wasn't the type.
And yet, here he was, saying, "Please, Jason. You're the only person—hell, the only thing—I've got down here. What happens on poker night? What are they gonna do to us?"
With one shuddering inhale, Jason launched into an explanation.
Anita Roycewood had conditioned Jason well enough at that point that she didn't need to cuff him, but the new boy certainly seemed as though he had the potential to be explosive, so when she descended the cellar stairs that night, she held a needle in one hand and a set of rusty handcuffs in the other.
Jason had heard the creaking upstairs, and in preparation, he'd promptly tugged Aaron out into the hallway.
"Keep quiet," he'd whispered to the younger boy as the basement door screeched open. "And do what they say. Trust me."
Anita sauntered towards them, a smile on her face and a particular breed of wickedness in her eyes. Both boys stood still and straight as toy soldiers, their hands plastered to their sides. The bleary fluorescence only served to accentuate the pallor of their cheeks.
The woman extended one gaunt finger out and motioned the boys towards her. Jason instantly began to walk forwards, his head low, but Aaron stayed rooted in place. His expression was just as stubborn as it was frightened.
Anita opened her palm to flash him a glimpse of the needle. "Don't make this difficult, dear. Come now."
He reluctantly trudged to the base of the stairs. Before he could so much as blink, she'd grabbed both of his hands and cuffed them tight behind his back. Aaron made a strangled sound as the cold metal dug into his wrists. He shot a desperate glance at Jason.
The older boy's eyes were dead set on Anita. His expression was as vacant as an empty grave.
"Let's not leave our guests waiting," Anita crowed. "Upstairs we go."
The living room they eventually arrived in was styled like a Victorian parlor; crimson settees, a grandfather clock, vintage floral curtains… the works. Four men, each with his own fat cigar trailing pale puffs towards the ancient-looking chandelier, sat languidly around a green felt poker table. Aaron was nauseated by the heinous mingling of smells. Booze, sweat, and smoke, he concluded, may as well be the holy trinity of foulness.
Anita pulled both boys towards the table by their arms. Her grip strength felt like it should've belonged to a person far more burly than she—Aaron could swear his circulation was going to be cut off. Jason stood silent on the woman's other side, as rigid as ever.
Anita cleared her throat once, and all four men stopped their drunken babbling to look at the trio.
"Good evening, boys," the man Aaron identified at Mr. Roycewood said. He absentmindedly fiddled with the cards clasped in his meaty hands, smiling like a satisfied weasel.
One of the other men—who was so fat Aaron saw no visible divide between his jaw and his neck—playfully punched Mr. Roycewood in the arm. "I didn't realize you got a new one, Rog."
Roger waved dismissively. "We've been wanting to go younger for some time now."
After that, the men simply returned to their poker game, barely sending another look back at the boys. Anita continued to hold both of them in place beside the table, her grip never once loosening. Aaron was sure he was going to have a hand-shaped bruise on his arm the next day.
Many cigars and even more liquor later, one of the men (this one was tall and skinny, with eyes so huge that he looked like an alien) smiled and slapped the table.
"Alright," Alien-Eyes said. "Time for a good old-fashioned slugger's round."
The other men whooped in assent. Aaron leaned over slightly, hoping to catch Jason's reaction to this foreign phrase. He only locked eyes with the older boy for a moment before Anita yanked him back into position, but Aaron still saw how colorless Jason's cheeks had gone.
This round of Texas Hold 'Em was far rowdier than any of the previous ones. The four men argued and contested almost every draw, each making rather audacious bets, expressing their discontent loudly if the cards didn't go their way. Their newfound rambunctiousness puzzled Aaron—what was it that they wanted so badly to win?
In the end, it was the fourth man who came out on top. He was the brawniest of them all, with broad arms and a beard like a rotten bird's nest. He cheered loudly, slamming his deck on the table and pumping a thick fist. The other men whined and griped like schoolchildren.
"Which one are ya gonna choose, Jimmy?" No-Neck asked. Thick-Arms stood from the table, swaying a bit in his inebriation. He grinned.
"Let's see how tough the new one is. Someone already fucked up his eye. I bet he can take more hits than the short one."
Jason visibly stiffened. Anita shoved Aaron towards Thick-Arms. He staggered forwards, both arms still cinched tight behind his back.
Thick-Arms cracked his knuckles, smiling like a madman. Aaron had seen the wild look in the man's eyes all too many times before.
The first blow sent him flying backwards onto the musty carpet. The second let loose a spout of scarlet from his nose. Not long after the kicking started, Aaron passed out.
He spent most of the next week sprawled limply in bed, trying not to move. Judging by the strange manner in which time and noise ebbed around him like vapor, Aaron was pretty sure he was heavily concussed. The eye that'd previously been bruised was now swollen shut. His sides were painted in all the richest colors of contusion. His nose still throbbed like a ticking time bomb.
Jason was his only comfort. He fed Aaron the bland food that was sporadically left on metal trays at the top of the cellar stairs. He practically carried the younger boy (impressive, given that Aaron was quite a bit taller) to the bathroom, modesty be damned. He read Faulkner out loud by Aaron's bedside. He even turned a blind eye to the tears that fell steadily from Aaron's eyes each night, silent and mournful, running in glistening channels across the bruises on his face. That was, perhaps, the gesture that Aaron was most grateful for; Jason's mock-ignorance was a kinder thing that he probably even knew. Outward displays of weakness were not Aaron Hotchner's strong suit.
He only saw the Roycewoods again after six more X's had been scratched off the calendar. This time, both Anita and Roger came downstairs. Aaron was still sore, but now, at least, he could move without wanting to drop dead.
Aaron said nothing as the husband-wife duo dragged him from his bed, into the cellar living room. Jason couldn't even look at the scene—instead, he feigned sleep.
Aaron tried not to wince when the Roycewoods pushed him down onto one of the shabby maroon couches. He kept his eyes narrow and his jaw locked; this time, he wouldn't give them the satisfaction of blind obedience. He was far too angry for that.
The couple stood over him with matching expressions of happy depravity. Mrs. Roycewood withdrew a long metal ruler from the pocket of her apron.
"Now Aaron," she said. "It's time you learn what it means to be our son."
He only glared up at her.
"Lose the sour face, boy," Mr. Roycewood said. "Manners are important in this household. You start causing mischief, and the consequences will be a helluva lot worse than a few lousy punches from Jimmy."
Aaron wished he could say that Roycewood was bluffing, but the malice drawn into the man's face told him that this was entirely the truth. Suddenly, Anita grabbed one of Aaron's hands.
"It's time for your first lesson in respect," Roger said, crossing his arms over his chest. "What's your name, boy?"
Aaron ground his teeth together and remained silent as a ghost. His scowl only faltered when the ruler struck him squarely across the knuckles.
"I said, what's your name?"
Again, he stayed quiet. The ruler came down once more.
Anita glowered. "You won't win this game, son. What's your name?"
"Aaron," he muttered.
"First and last."
"Aaron Hotchner."
The ruler smacked his hand. "Wrong!" the woman spat. "Your name has and always will be Aaron Roycewood. I'll ask you again; what's your name?"
Tears of pain stung his eyes, but he refused to let them fall. Aaron remembered the gentle voice of his late mother saying, "Your name was the only good thing your daddy ever gave you." He'd never known his father—the man had left when he was a toddler—but he had known his mother, and he'd loved her more than anyone else. When she died, a part of him did too. It was his mission, his duty to honor her with every ounce of will he possessed.
"My name is Aaron Hotchner."
It must've gone on for hours. The ruler was stained red with blood from his swollen knuckles when he'd finally had enough. Still, Aaron hadn't cried.
"I'll ask you one more time, and then I'm getting Jason in here to get his hands struck raw too," Anita said, her voice void of any sympathy at all. Aaron felt a pang in his chest—he couldn't subject his fellow captive to the pain he felt coursing through his hand like fire ants. He just couldn't.
She brought her face close to his. Her breath smelled of cigarettes poorly disguised with mint. "What's your name, boy?"
He's all I've got down here. He's my friend.
"Aaron Roycewood."