A/N: Let me know what you think! Suggestions/ideas/general reactions are always welcome.
Besides the spitting incident, JJ's first week was one of those wonderfully Roycewood-free ones. Trays were left at the top of the stairs surprisingly regularly, and so the children were left to their own devices. In times like these, they could almost pretend that they were normal. It was a rare and precious thing.
The morning after her first run-in with Anita, when the bloodstains on JJ's bright blue tee shirt had faded into rusty blobs, she decided that being afraid of evils that were inevitable (her captors, to name one) was rather pointless. She stared up at the half-rotten planks that shrouded the bunk bed above her, and she swore to herself that no matter how awful her days got, she wouldn't lapse into the kind of emptiness she saw from Jason. She wouldn't provoke the Roycewoods—not if she could help it—but she also wouldn't let them flatten her spirit.
She swung her legs out of the bottom bunk and stood. JJ ignored the bruised girl she saw in the dusty mirror, and instead reached out and traced the crack that she and Aaron had named as Cassiopeia.
"We'll be alright," she said. The girl in the mirror said it back.
"Hey!" a voice from outside the door called. "Hey JJ! We got breakfast!"
When she opened the door, she found a grinning Derek clutching a metal tray out in the hallway.
"Uncrustables, dude!" he said, waving the plastic-packaged snack. "We never get these. Merry fucking Christmas!"
"It's August, Derek," she replied, but she couldn't help but smile back.
The two made their way into the boys' room, where Aaron was looking at his processed sandwich like it was his firstborn child.
JJ raised an eyebrow. "Guess this really is a big event."
"You have no idea," Aaron said through a mouthful of gooey peanut butter.
Jason was still seemingly asleep in the twin bed, facing the wall. Even in just a few days, JJ had already picked up on his profound indifference. A part of her was deeply shaken by how little he appeared to care; it only fueled her drive to never let the cellar numb her in the same way.
She sat down on the floor with Aaron and Derek, grabbing one of the bottles of water from the tray. They ate in satisfied silence, save for the occasional murmur of content. The children licked their fingers clean after they'd finished.
"Is he always like that?" JJ asked, gesturing towards Jason's unmoving form.
"Pretty much," Derek replied. "He sleeps, like, all day most of the time. I swear to god, I've seen him not leave that bed for weeks on end besides to piss."
Aaron nodded. "When I first got here, he was different. We were close back then. Really close. Then he just stopped... I dunno. Stopped giving a shit. Stopped letting himself see the good."
"What he needs is a fistful of antidepressants," Derek remarked. "We all probably do."
"But you guys can?" JJ asked. "See the good, I mean?"
Aaron looked towards Jason, then back to JJ.
"Let's go to the living room," he said. "We'll show you."
"Welcome to Aaron and Derek's Basement Schoolhouse," Aaron said, motioning towards the stacks of textbooks separated into neat categories on the floor.
"How come your name is first?" an indignant Derek asked.
"'Cause I got here first."
"Only by a few months."
"Well I'm older."
"Only by a few months!"
JJ surveyed the peculiar collections of books and journals and crayons strewn about the burgundy rug. It seemed the boys had sectioned the piles off by subject; pieces of lined paper were taped to the top of each heap of supplies. One read Middle School Math; another, High School Chemistry. One was graciously titled Old People Books, while the next read Wars & Bombs & History Bullshit.
"We kept most of the fiction stuff on the shelves," Aaron said. "But these are all the school books. Mr. Roycewood brings down new boxes all the time, so we never really run out."
Derek scowled at the floor. "He's frickin' obsessed with us being smart. He always says,"—Aaron joined in here—"No child of mine will be an unread blithering idiot."
"What does he care if we're smart?" JJ asked, anger prickling in her veins. "It's not like anyone will know. We're locked in a basement."
"They're crazy, JJ," Aaron replied, suddenly sounding very intense. "Like, really, certifiably crazy. The things they do and say don't make sense. The sooner you get that through your head, the easier it is to live down here."
"We think of it kinda like prison," Derek supplied. "'Cause, you know, people live in prisons for years, and most of 'em don't go totally insane. If they can do it, so can we."
"There's a difference," JJ protested. "We haven't done anything wrong."
Aaron's face took on a pensive downturn. He walked over to one of the bookshelves and pulled out a well-loved copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. He flipped through it with a certain assurance, as though he knew exactly what he was looking for.
Finally, he stopped on a page and swallowed hard.
"'Always the innocent are the first victims," he read, "so it has been for ages, so it is now.'"
All three adolescents went quiet. They looked between each other and let the words sink deep into their skin. It felt closer to scripture than any prayer ever had.
Finally, Derek sat down on the rug and reached for the pile of textbooks labeled, Biology, Plants, and Anatomy Stuff (Warning! Gross-Ass Diagrams!).
"Come on," he said. "Time for school, my fellow innocent felons."
And perhaps it was an inappropriate thing to laugh at, but none of them could stop the dark chuckles that rose from their throats. Together, as one unfortunate squadron, they giggled like children. Real, normal children.
She hadn't been sure exactly how serious Derek and Aaron were about Mr. Roycewood's obsession with smarts until she went to fetch their lunch from the top of the stairs the next day.
Sitting right beside the tray full of waxy-looking turkey sandwiches lay a milk crate stacked high with school supplies. Granted, it all looked used and rather beat-up, but still, the gift was an unspeakably odd thing to JJ. Why, she wondered, were the people holding them captive so invested in their education? What would said education ever be used for, if they were to stay trapped in a godforsaken cellar? JJ had no illusions; she knew that the Roycewoods had no plans of releasing her. Aaron and Jason had been down there for nearly a year, after all. Still, her stuckness was a terrifying thing. Paralyzing, at times. She was already beginning to forget certain aspects of the outside world; the smell of summer air, the particular whistling of the Philadelphia breeze. The lovely feeling of the morning sun on her face. Dewdrops. Clouds. Sunsets. All of it had begun to slip through her fingers. It was too claustrophobic to even think about for too long.
She shook away her lingering questions and headed back to the living room, balancing the tray of sandwiches atop the crate. When she set down her haul, Derek looked up from his worn copy of Flowers for Algernon and whistled.
"Damn," he said. "Roycewood was feeling generous today."
Aaron was glancing back and forth between an Algebra textbook and a notebook, sporadically scribbling down an equation or two.
"Keep reading, Derek," he said without looking up. "I'm gonna make you write an essay on it."
Derek flapped the novel and gave an exaggerated sigh. "Out of all the books you could've chosen from, how come you gave me one? It's depressing as hell. The last thing we need down here is more to be sad about."
"Because," Aaron replied, "it isn't real. It's the kind of sadness that can be tucked away when the book closes."
"I regret ever appointing you my English teacher."
"Says the guy who's making me do fifty math problems."
JJ sat down beside them on the carpet, passing each of the boys a sandwich and taking one for herself.
"So you guys are each other's teachers?" she asked. "How does that work?"
Derek began to scrutinize his lunch for the mold he so often found plaguing the WonderBread. "Well see, at first, when we decided to start doing school down here, neither of us could muster up the motivation to actually do work."
"So we made a pact," Aaron said. "We give each other assignments for each subject, and if the other guy doesn't do it, he gets bathroom cleaning duty for the week." He gestured towards the milk crate. "Start unpacking that, will you JJ?"
Just as she began to unload the pencils and workbooks, a memory from the boys' first night spiel struck her squarely in the chest. Her throat tightened. Dread yanked up the hairs on the back of her neck.
"Isn't today... Isn't it poker night?"
She was expecting to see the same dread on their faces. She was expecting to see that horrible wild-eyed fear she saw when the Roycewoods had first visited the basement.
What she was not expecting was for Aaron and Derek to start laughing.
"Hate to break it to you kid," Derek said, "but tonight's our Tuesday off."
Her face must've exposed how utterly lost she was, because Aaron quickly began to explain that on the previous poker night, they'd heard the men talking about a fishing trip that was to begin on this very day. There would be no Mr. Roycewood in the house for a week, nor Thick-Arms, nor No-Neck, nor Alien-Eyes. The boys sounded downright giddy.
"And you know the evil stepmother won't have the guts to come down here without backup," Derek said, grinning. "My bet is that we get left alone this week."
And he was right. For the next seven days, JJ and Aaron and Derek immersed themselves in their self-made lessons without catching so much as a glimpse of the Roycewoods. And within the partnership that the two boys had so diligently nurtured throughout the months, they realized that there'd been a piece missing all along. A piece perfectly fitted for the little blonde spitfire who made them cackle like witches with her sharp tongue, and who shocked them with her roll-with-the-punches—quite literally—attitude, and who never once let her stifling new world of concrete crack her resolve. They couldn't help but wonder if maybe she was stronger than both of them. And subsequently, they couldn't help but be made stronger by her grit. She hand-wrote a Chemistry test for Aaron using his textbook, and she assigned Derek the saddest books she could think of just to poke at him. In retaliation, he assigned her the anatomy section of the Biology textbook with the very grossest diagrams. It was astonishing how quickly they became inseparable (not that they could be separated even if they wanted to, besides Jason's strategy of never leaving his bed). It was a trio so natural it was as though the fates themselves had sculpted it. Of course, there was an immense sacrifice made to form such a group—it was doomed to exist within the confines of a nightmare. All three of them, though, had been raised in less-than-ideal households, so they were uniquely equipped to handle this stark-opposite-of-ideal one.
But there were moments when their laughter fizzled out, when they sat in a triangle on that hard cellar floor simply staring at one and other, just listening to the sounds of their collective breaths. Moments when the flecks of childhood gold in their eyes went dark. Moments when they looked at each other and recognized this darkness, and nodded in wordless acknowledgement that time was passing them by. Outrunning them. That they were growing up, and that they were growing up in a cage.
"Maybe," JJ said the next Tuesday, during one of those stretches where the air was thick with unsaid truths, "maybe the world outside ended. Maybe some giant bomb went off and we're the only ones left."
"Maybe zombies are walking the earth," offered Derek.
"Maybe the air turned to poison," said Aaron. "Maybe the Roycewoods accidentally saved us."
Some shadowy part of their psyches hoped that it was true. They hoped that their situation was a twisted version of a miracle, and that they weren't missing anything at all, and that the world wasn't missing them. It was easier to fathom than the thought of people driving to work, and jogging in parks, and putting their children to sleep, and living so mindlessly, so obliviously. Fantasies of global Armageddon were more palatable than the idea that the world above the cellar was totally unaware of their tiresome existence. It was thoughts like those that really proved to them that they'd changed. They scared themselves a little each time they prayed society had imploded.
A few hours later, Jason rose from his bed for the first time all day. He loomed in the living room doorway for minutes before the three children sprawled about the floor even noticed his presence. The sight of them pouring through books, only ever looking up to send a teasing comment at one another, sent a pang of indescribable emotion rippling through him. Some gut-wrenching mixture of pride and pain. They just looked so peaceful. They'd found a way to be peaceful in this wasteland. He wasn't quite sure how they did it.
He cleared his throat. They all looked up from their schoolwork.
"It's Tuesday," Jason said. "They'll be coming for us soon."
It was always the same. The cigars; the booze; the four loathsome men sitting around the poker table. There were too many children now for Anita to effectively control with just her two bony hands, so she'd conjured up some steel lengths of chain to cuff them to. They now stood in the upstairs parlor like a fucked-up version of a daycare class attached to a walking rope.
"Well well well, Rogie boy. A girl, huh?" No-Neck remarked as he dealt the first hand.
"Oh, yes," Roger said absentmindedly, as though just remembering his most recent felony. "Her."
JJ watched Derek's fists curl themselves into tight balls.
"We brought her in to help Anita with the housework. Difficult little thing. Too willful for her own good."
Aaron's eyes were narrow slits. JJ wanted nothing more than to show every single one of those revolting adults just how willful she could be.
"Gotta say, Rog," Thick-Arms said. "I don't fucking get it. Kate and I got three real kids, and I don't like a single one of 'em." All the men laughed heartily at this. None of the children saw any humor in it.
"So why in God's name," the man continued, exhaling a puff of smoke towards the yellowish haze of the ceiling light, "would you go outta your way to wrangle in a few half-breed street mongrels? Are they really worth the trouble?"
Anita gave the line of chains a firm yank, as though she could sense the hostility the men's discussion was igniting in her captives.
"They're good to keep around," Roger said. "They'll pay their dues one of these days." He glanced towards the children and let his gaze linger there, an exceedingly rare poker night occurrence. Typically, their presence wasn't acknowledged unless they were getting hit. The other men followed suit. Four beady pairs of eyes scanned the line of chained youths, sweeping too and fro like laser beams. The four adolescents kept their faces set in unwavering blankness—this was one of the first and most important skills you learned in the cellar—but their insides were churning.
Roger pointed the glowing orange end of his cigar in their direction. His stare never once faltered. "And if they ever prove to be more trouble than they're worth," he said with a ratlike smile, "they know how perfectly disposable they are."
The other men fell into another misplaced fit of raucous laughter. Roger just kept staring.
"Perfectly disposable," he murmured. "Perfectly disposable indeed."