Notes: It was revealed in Overload in Season 2 that Nick Stokes was abused at age nine by a last minute babysitter. This piece supposes that the abuse continued after that, that the last minute babysitter became a permanent fixture.
Nick has a secret.
It crawls around inside his skin and makes him clumsy. It whispers in his ear at night and banishes sleep. It's with him always, no matter what he's doing.
It bruises him, because it's not him who needs to hit the wall until his knuckles bleed. It's the secret, trying to get out through split and broken skin.
He can't let it out though. He doesn't know what would happen if it ever managed to slip past his lips but he knows it would be bad.
Bad enough, maybe, to end up with him being sent away, sent to one of those homes they show in the 'Movies of the Week' the housekeeper watches while his mother is at work and she's supposed to be cleaning.
His mother is always at work, and that's another secret he won't be telling, because Rosa lets him sit beside her and watch with her. Rosa demands nothing from him, doesn't talk to him, doesn't even look at him when he leans against her solid warmth and breathes in the scent of her talcum powder.
Rosa asks him for nothing, and when he's with Rosa he doesn't have to give anything. Doesn't have to do anything.
Not like when he's with her.
But Rosa is day and she is night, when his parents have another social function to go to and his older sisters don't want to babysit. Can't be persuaded to babysit, no matter what he offers them. His allowance doesn't stretch far enough to pay them and his father doesn't think a ten year old needs the kind of cash they want.
What could a child who wants for nothing possibly want to buy?
One of these days, the words trembling on the end of his tongue will escape and he will tell them.
What could a child want to buy at age ten?
Safety.
If not that, maybe a time machine, so he could go back to last year, when he was nine and before she looked after him for the first time. Change the past so he wouldn't know what she looked like with no clothes on, not to know what her skin feels like when she forces him to touch her.
To not know what her fingers feel like on him.
For the last year not to have happened. For what's going to happen tonight not to happen. For him not to know the bitter taste of forbidden fruit. For him not to know what that means, not to understand the sins that Father Maguire preaches against. Not to understand, intimately, the sin that Eve committed.
Not to be ashamed.
Nick has a secret, and it's eating him up inside.