AN from xxxBlack-Opalxxx: you will DIE reading this chapter D: like [ladylily101] did writing it D: nuuuuuuu
AN from ladylily101: I wrote all of this – all 4 and a half pages of it. ;) Hope you like! And yes, this is relevant to the story, kay? It might not seem like it at first, but it is.
CHAPTER 4: Foster Parents
The boy is silent as his mother sets him down in the chair and goes to talk with the lady at the desk.
He hopes it's not a doctor's appointment, and so he listens, ready to have a fit if need be. As he catches little snippets of the conversation, it doesn't really sound like it's an appointment.
"We just can't afford to keep..." he hears his mother say.
Keep what? the boy wonders. Perhaps it is the goldfish they got a few months ago, maybe this is a place that takes care of goldfish; after all, there is a large fish tank over in the corner.
Swinging his pudgy legs a little, the toddler decides to go and look at the fish, and stops trying to listen to his parents as he is entranced by the bright colors.
Pressing his nose against the glass, he whispers, "Goldy is going to live with you I think. Goldy is a nice fish."
The boy barely notices as his parents come over and pick him up. When he looks at them, taking his eyes away from the fish, he notices his mother is crying.
"Mommy, why you crying?" he asks her.
At this, fresh tears spring to his mother's eyes.
Kissing the top of the boy's head, she says, "Remember that we'll always love you, okay? Mommy and Daddy love you very very much."
"I love you too," the boy replies, but all that he wants to do is get back to the fish, so he squirms out of his mother's arms.
"Bye sweetie," his father says, as his mother rushes out, sobbing, "We love you."
"Bye?" the boy asks, confused. Why isn't he coming with his parents?
"Yes, we have to go," the man says.
Trying to come up with an answer, the boy frowns. "To go get Goldy to bring here?"
His father crouches down to look at his son. "Get Goldy?" he asks, just as confused as the boy.
"Mommy told the lady we couldn't afford Goldy, so we going to put Goldy here with the other fishies, right? So you and Mommy are getting Goldy to give to the lady," the boy says with certainty.
"Y-yes," chokes out his father, "we're getting Goldy. Now, the lady at the desk's name is Carol, you can go ask her if you need anything."
The boy nods, turning his head back to the fish.
"Bye Daddy!" he waves as his father walks off.
"Bye," comes the response, and the boy thinks he hears his father beginning to cry as the door shuts.
Why are they crying? the boy thinks. They hadn't ever shown that much interest in Goldy, and his father had always said that he'd rather have a dog if they weren't in the city.
The boy shrugs, and smiles as he watches the fish chase each other around the tank. But after a while, he wonders why his parents aren't back yet, surely it hadn't taken this long to come here.
Though he had always been told not to talk to strangers, his father had told him to ask the lady if he needed anything, so the boy walks over to the woman.
Glancing up, she smiles at him. "Yes?"
"Where are Mommy and Daddy?" he asks her.
"Oh," she says, and her smile fades, "They didn't tell you?"
The 5 year old frowns. "They said they were getting Goldy to bring to put in the tank with the other fishies," he points at the object in question, then continues, "Why aren't they back yet?"
The woman sighs, and smiles sadly at the boy. "They're not coming back," she explains.
"What do you mean?" the boy's voice is quivering, he is on the verge of tears. "Daddy said they'd come back with Goldy! He said!"
The woman stands up and comes around to the front of the desk. "Shh, it's all right, you're just going to have different people taking care of you, that's all."
Sobbing, the boy looks up. "But I want my Mommy back!" he wails, "I don't want a new Mommy or Daddy!"
"Shh, it'll be all right, come with me," the woman says, reaching for his hand.
She leads him to a room behind her desk and puts him onto a couch. Rummaging around in some cabinets, she fishes out some chocolate chip cookies, that, though stale, are still edible, and the boy calms down as he eats them.
"Your new parents will be here soon," she tells him as she hands him a couple more cookies and a few picture books, "I'll just be at my desk, you can see me through the door. Tell me if you need anything."
The boy nods, and grabs a book, flipping through it just to look at the pictures; he doesn't feel like reading if his parents aren't there to help with unknown words.
As he moves on to the next book, he hears the door at the front open, and a couple, who looked to be in their late 20s or early 30s walk in. They are both tall, the man very muscular, and the woman very pretty and wearing a lot of make up.
The couple walk up to the lady at the desk, and the man speaks to her in a deep voice.
"We're here to pick up the boy," he says.
Meanwhile, the woman has been looking around, and now she spots the little boy in the back room.
"Oh! Is that him?" she asks excitedly.
The lady turns around in her swivel chair and smiles at the boy. "Yes, that's him."
"You're so adorable!" the woman exclaims as she rushes back towards him. She extends out her hand as if to shake, "I'm your new mother!"
The boy frowns. "You're not my mother!"
A shadow seems to pass over the woman's face, but it goes away so quickly the boy might have been imagining it.
"Come along, then," she says brusquely, most of the cheer gone from her voice.
"Everything's in order, so you can just take him," says the lady at the desk to the man as the woman and boy walk back out to the main area.
Turning her gaze to the little boy, she says, "Bye, my dear, good luck," and gives him a quick hug.
The three of them - man, woman, and child - walk out of the foster agency, and the little boy takes one last glance at the lady at the desk, at the fish, at the chair his mother, his real mother, set him down on only a few hours ago.
It was a quiet, but long, car ride to the couple's house - they had to get out of the main city, into the suburbs, where there were actually houses, not just apartment blocks.
When they got into the house, the boy was surprised to hear the woman speak; they had gone so long in silence that it was odd to hear any voice at all.
"Now, we must make some things clear. First, you will not tell anyone what goes on in this house. Second, we are your new parents. Third, because we're your parents, you will love us whatever we do."
"You're not my parents!" the boy exclaims adamantly.
"We ARE your parents," says the woman venomously, crouching down.
"No you're-" the boy begins, but the woman slaps him across the face.
"Lydia, remember, no marks on the face, or else the police notices," says the man.
The pain suddenly reaches the boy, who had been momentarily too shocked to do anything, and he starts to cry.
The shadow that is now over the woman's face is no longer in the boy's imagination. "Shut up, you brat!"
The boy whimpers, but cannot stop crying.
"You're not my Mommy!" he screams, and is somewhat surprised when he doesn't get the expected slap. Instead, the woman is waiting for the man to come back from the kitchen.
When he comes in, the man is carrying a rolling pin, and the woman crouches back down next to the boy as she takes the rolling pin from the man.
"So, tell me, are we your parents?" she asks menacingly, brandishing the pin in one hand.
Not realizing the implications of the new object, the boy continues to sob and shakes his head. "No!"
The woman breathes in sharply, and then brings the rolling pin down hard on the boy's back so that he falls over.
"We! Are!" the woman screams, beating the boy in between each word, "Your! Parents!"
This time the boy doesn't say no, just continues to cry.
"And shut up!"
But once started, it is hard to stop crying, and so the boy cannot obey immediately. When kicking him does nothing but make him cry harder, the woman drags him, literally, up the stairs to a small room with only tatty mattress on the floor with no pillow and a blanket that has lots of holes in it.
"You will sleep in here," she says angrily as she pushes him in, "And no more crying, or else!"
The boy takes a few deep breaths to try to stop crying, and turns around when he hears the door's lock click.
He shivers - the high-up window has no glass in it, and the night is a cold one. Trying to use the warn blanket to warm up a little, he curls up on the mattress and cries quietly to himself so the woman and the man won't hear.
"Mommy...Daddy...I miss you..." he whispers as he drifts off to sleep.
The next few years pass in a similar routine - he gets home from school and tries to make as little noise as possible so he won't provoke the couple, because once they find something to criticize him about, they don't stop beating him until he is locked in his room at 8:30 with some bread and cheese. This is especially hard in the winter, when he has no light to see to try to do his homework by.
He wouldn't do his homework if it weren't for the fact that the couple beats him when he gets bad grades, they are worried that someone at school might start asking questions.
But the years pass, and the boy learns to never cry, to never show any emotion when he can help it. Either way the couple beats him - they hate when he reacts to their beatings, but also hate when he doesn't.
One day, the boy comes home with a different attitude then usual. Though he knows it will probably end up with him getting hit more than the couple normally does, the boy feels like trying to fight back. It's his 9th birthday, and he has been with the couple for four years.
"How was your day?" asks the woman sweetly. The boy knows to think nothing of this, no matter how nice the couple seems at first each day, they still hurt him.
"Fine, Lydia," he says the last word cuttingly. The boy hasn't dared to call them anything but Mom and Dad since that first night, until now.
The woman tenses. "What did you say?"
"I said my day was fine," says the boy, trying not to push his luck too much.
"No, what did you call me?" her voice is soft, the danger lurking in her tone.
The boy mutters quietly to himself, "Lydia."
Glaring, the woman stands up. "What was that?"
"I called you Lydia!" the boy says, his voice strong.
"You are not to call your mother by her first name!" she says, walking over to him, readying herself to slap the boy.
"You're not my mother!" the boy shouts, the first time he has said these words to her face in four years. "You're not! You're-"
At this, the woman slaps him, harder than it seems she ever has.
"Don't touch me!" exclaims the boy, jumping back.
The woman is surprised for a moment, this has never happened before; but she quickly recovers.
"You little-" she begins, launching herself at the boy, but he jumps out of the way and she falls to the floor.
The boy breathes heavily, and turning his head for a moment to watch the man's car pulling up in the driveway, he doesn't notice as the woman creeps into the kitchen to get a knife, only notices as she screams and runs towards him, the knife in her outstretched hand.
Instinctively, the boy covers his face, but the rush of adrenaline feels different this time, some sort of energy is being pushed into his arms, and there is a brief flash. The woman has no time to react and runs strait into the blade of the axe that the boy's arm has just turned into.
The boy looks up, surprised by both the nonexistent blow, his transformed arm, and the fact that the woman is now on the floor, blood pouring from her stomach.
She makes an odd gurgling noise as the woman coughs up some blood, and then her eyes roll back and she is dead.
The boy stands there in shock, until the front door opens and the man walks in.
"I'm hom-" The man stares, the boy's shock mirrored on his face, at his now dead wife and the boy with an axe for an arm. An axe with blood on it.
He rushes over to the phone, never really having been the one to initiate the beating of the boy, only aiding his wife after she had started, and now that the woman was dead he wasn't going to try anything. But when he picks up the receiver, there is no tone; the boy has beaten him over and cut the phone's cord.
"You will never hurt me again," says the boy, his tone similar to the wife's when she was preparing to hit the boy, and this scares the man more than the axe. He knows he is going to die.
And he does, quickly, as the boy makes a quick cut to the man's neck, and another to the stomach.
This time, the blood does not turn his stomach, and the boy surprises himself by grinning at the couple, dead on the living room floor. He walks up the stairs to the couple's room, and by the time he sits down on their bed, a comfortable bed with real blankets and sheets, his arm is back to normal. Resolving to tell the police in the morning that he found them down there, dead, he falls asleep quickly.
The next day he walks over to the police station and reports, calmly, that when he came downstairs that morning, he found his foster parents dead on the floor. The police seem a bit skeptical at first, but he finally convinces one officer to come over, and then the whole squadron seems to be at his house; they hadn't had a double murder in years.
Arrangements are quickly made with the same agency to get a new set of foster parents, and a few days later the boy is at a new couple's house.
This couple also looks nice, but the boy now knows not to trust people based on appearances. Everything goes smoothly for a couple days, and the boy thinks that perhaps only the one couple was bad, perhaps they had better checks now and are able to rule out the dangerous people as foster parents.
However, this is not so.
On the fourth day, the couple takes him to a back room and tells him to strip. When he refuses, they begin to threaten him, and the man even forces off his pants.
They are both dead within minutes.
This cycle seems to continue, couple after couple; one pair of foster parents abuse him physically, the next, sexually. After a while, the agency begins to suspect a pattern in the deaths of all the boy's foster parents, so they send him overseas, no longer wanting to deal with all the paperwork that came after such incidents.
But things are not good in the new country either - if possible, they are worse. The boy gets into a routine of waiting to make sure the parents aren't evil, and then killing them promptly when they are, of course, evil.
Finally, a couple arrives that does nothing abusive to the boy for days, then weeks, then a month passes without anything occurring, and the boy begins to think that perhaps he has finally found the only couple in the world that a) don't have their own children, and so feel the need to adopt; and b) aren't evil.
One evening, however, he is having problems with his homework, and so goes to find the couple. After searching all over the house, he decides that they are in the basement. While he has never strictly been forbidden to go down to the basement, he has also never been cordially invited down and given a tour.
The boy knocks twice to alert them of his presence, and then opens the door and stomps down the stairs. The sight he sees is not in any way, shape, or form what he was expecting; his foster parents are drenched in blood and the head of the girl the had over for dinner is in the man's arms.
Gasping, the boy rushes back up the stairs and out of the house as quickly as he can, ignoring their shouts of, "Come back!" and "This isn't what it looks like!"
But the boy runs on, not stopping until he reaches the edge of the town, where he falls over, exhausted.
As the night cold sets in, he curls up into a ball and falls into a nightmarish sleep.
The first set of foster parents walks up to him, evil grins on their faces.
"No! This isn't possible! I killed you!"
The woman says nothing, merely taking out a rolling pin from behind her back, and the boy shrinks back in fear.
"Don't hurt me, please, don't hurt me!" he screams, crying for the first time in years.
"Damian!" the couple says, "DAMIAN! WAKE UP!"
"Don't hurt me!" screamed Damian, lurching out of his bed and fending off the hands trying to hold him down.
"Damian! DAMIAN!"
Damian opened his eyes to see Alexia standing there in her nightgown, looking quizzically at him. "Damian, what's wrong? You were screaming in your sleep, 'Don't hurt me, please!' Are you okay?"
Damian sighed, sitting back down on his bed. "Alexia?"
"Yeah?" she came to sit next to him, the worry in her eyes sincere.
"There's something I have to tell you..."
AN from xxxBlack-Opalxxx: yes, that is actually what happened to damian D:
AN from ladylily101: SOBSOBSOB!! D: Dramatic ending, eh? And the next chapter won't have anything to do with this, yay! You can dream up the rest of Damian's sucky childhood if you want, but more random blurbs will probably appear later. ;)