Chapter Text
The police station is hardly noticeable at first. It blends in with the rest of the buildings in the dim light of night, illuminated by cool streetlamps and the wavering slice of the moon in the sky. It only catches his eyes because he’s searching for it, knows by heart the road names and the intersection it lays on because he only had one opportunity and couldn’t squander it. It’s softly lit, the fluorescent lights inside spilling out from the smudge-ridden windows and door and highlighting the pocketed concrete and worn brick walls. There’s a police badge painted on the brick to the left of the door, faded and light though it is.
Tommy’s feet pound lightly against the concrete as he jogs over, legs straining with the effort. His feet, bare, slap against the dry concrete, slightly cool to the touch. It’s a relief, to some extent. The coolness of the ground in the thick of the night provides a balm to the cuts and scrapes he’s acquired. The forest was the worst of it, covered in thin branches and winding thorns that scraped along his bare skin and peeled away the flesh, leaving bleeding wounds all across his lower legs.
He treads over to the police station door, throwing a glance backward. He sees nothing but the shifting darkness and the flickering of one of the streetlamps. He pulls the door open by its metal handlebar, slipping inside.
The walls are all brick. Not the red brick of the exterior walls but a painted over white bricks with visible and uniform divots between each brick. They’re stained a subtle yellow with the occasional splotch of brown. The floors are carpet, short and firm and light brown. There’s a feeling about the place, quiet with the buzz of some machine working in the background, that discomfits Tommy. He continues onward anyway, approaching a wooden desk, where an officer leans forward in her chair, focus fully on whatever she’s typing into the computer in front of her.
Tommy shifts side to side in front of the desk, a shuffle of his feet. He can feel the blood beginning to pool beneath him in a small enough amount to smear across the carpet easily without soaking it through. When the officer still doesn’t look away from her computer, Tommy taps the top of the desk.
He nearly flinches when the officer snaps her head in his direction, gaze catching onto his. She’s a young lady with sandy blonde hair all tied down and slicked back into a tight bun. Her eyes, a light honey color, are wide and open.
“Oh, sorry, honey,” she says, voice light and bouncy. “Did you need anything? We’ve got some water and snacks in the back if you want them.”
“No,” Tommy says, quite shortly. He focuses on what he practiced, the lines he needs to say. It’s his one shot, his one chance. He throws a glance back towards the door, glass panes not obscuring his view into the dark night, but there is nothing still. “I need help.”
Tommy can see how her posture shifts, a straightening of the spine but a softening of her expression. Tommy holds himself still to her examination when she glances over the whole of him. He knows how he looks, stained shirt and thin limbs. She won’t see his bleeding legs from her perspective, but he can feel the blood trickling down his calves.
“What kind of help? Are you in danger?”
Tommy nods and finds his throat tight and clogged. He tries to clear it. Tries again when he feels just as choked as a moment before.
“It’s alright,” the officer soothes, leaning closer. Tommy keeps his distance. “Why don’t you come around here to the couches and we’ll make sure you’re safe.”
Tommy follows the officer to the couch, a stiff plastic-y thing with dulled marks where many have sat before him. The officer gives him a bottle of water, unopened. Tommy doesn’t drink it, just twists the cap until it pops unsealed, spinning it back and forth, tightening and loosening. The officer stops around the bend of the corner leading further into the rest of the station. She’s still in sight, but her back is turned to him, open and vulnerable.
“...yeah.” Tommy can only catch snippets of what she’s saying. “... no, yeah… can you…”
The officer turns back around, smiling at Tommy. Her badge, a soft gold, reads “Officer Nihachu”. She wanders back over, sitting down next to Tommy on the other end of the couch. “Don’t worry. Nothing will hurt you while were here, alright?”
Tommy nods even as he throws a glance back out the glass door. There’s still nothing out there. Officer Nihachu smiles warmly. She does that a lot. The action sets a strange twist to Tommy’s stomach.
Another officer steps around the corner, dressed in a pressed clean uniform. He’s a taller man, still on the younger side, with sandy blonde hair, a little lighter than Officer Nihachu’s hair. His eyes, a stormy blue, are sharp when he looks at Tommy. His badge, an identical gold as Officer Nihachu’s, reads “Officer Punz”.
“I know this kid,” the new officer says. Tommy’s sure he’s never seen this man in his life. “One of my friend’s foster kids.”
Tommy’s limbs lock up. Dread sinks hard and fast into the bottom of his stomach.
“Really?” Officer Nihachu says, looking at her fellow officer. She turns to Tommy. “What’s making you feel not safe, bud?”
Tommy cringes. “That’s not- That’s not true.”
A furrow buries its way between Officer Nihachu’s eyebrows. Officer Punz regards Tommy sharply, a critical edge to it that sets Tommy’s every nerve alight. “C’mon, kid. Don’t play this game.”
“It’s- It’s not-” Tommy flounders. “I don’t know you . I’ve been- I’ve been kidnapped-”
Officer Nihachu is looking away from Tommy. She’s staring at Officer Punz. The man rolls his eyes, shoulders shrugging and hands resting at his hips. “Dream says he does this every time. Claims to be abused or kidnapped to stir up drama. At risk kid, you know how they are.”
“That’s not true!” Tommy yells, the words ripping past his tight throat. All that’s ringing in his head is Dream Dream Dream Dream and he has to- He can’t let- He grabs Officer Nihachu’s sleeve. “You have to believe me! I’m not lying.”
There’s this divide in Officer Nihachu’s expression, a rapid switch between glancing at Officer Punz and Tommy. Tommy’s heart sinks down into the pit of his stomach when she says, “Alright, bud. Let me just talk to Officer Punz privately.”
She steps around the corner with Officer Punz, voices low and muffled. Tommy can’t pull his eyes away from where they disappeared from view, can hardly think past the ringing in his ears and the scattered thump-thump-thump of his heart.
He throws a glance back toward the glass door.
The officers come back from around the corner.
Officer Nihachu’s not looking at him, eyes averted elsewhere as she slips back behind her desk.
Tommy nearly stops breathing.
“I’ve called your foster dad, kid. He’s probably worried sick.”
Tommy’s ears are ringing. He looks toward the female officer. “You gotta believe me. Don’t send me back. He’s hurting me. He’s hurting me! I’m not a foster kid!”
Officer Punz sighs. Officer Nihachu looks at him sadly, eyebrows drawn inwards, honey eyes as warm and kind as they were when he came in.
Tommy stands, except Officer Punz hands are on his shoulders, pushing him back down. Tommy thrashes, twists and turns and shrugs to throw off the man’s grip, except it remains steady and demanding.
“Don’t make me handcuff you, kid.”
“I’m not going back!” Tommy screams, voice nearly breaking with the strain. He strains, tugging and pulling against the weight that holds him down against the couch. “I’m not going back!”
“Kid.”
“Let go!”
“Quit it.”
“Let me-”
The door swings open. “Tommy!”
He freezes, voice dying in his throat. A man walks in, messy blonde hair and green eyes, dressed in a green hoodie and a pair of stained jeans. He’s jogging towards them, looking distressed and out of breath.
“There you are,” Officer Punz says, grip tight and unforgiving.
“Yeah, sorry, I’ve been running around everywhere,” Dream half-laughs, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “Here, I’ve got his meds.”
“No-!” Tommy thrashes, tries to buck the grip as Dream approaches, a bottle of clear liquid. Tommy twists and turns. Flails his limbs. Tries to stab at the officer’s eyes. Rakes his nails along the officer’s bare arms.
A hand grabs the underside of his jaw. Fingers bury into the sensitive joints. Tommy buries his nails in the hand at his throat. Plastic touches his lips. Fluid, thick and warm, falls down his throat. He tries to spit it out. A hand plugs his nose. He can’t breathe. He’s choking on it, gagging and gurgling. He has to swallow. It goes down hard. He’s coughing. Hacking into the air as his head is forced to stay upward.
It sets in nearly instantly. A drowsiness to his mind. A heaviness to his limbs. The adrenaline is leaving him, his heart slowing. Tommy tries to resist, jerking his body in weak twitches. His blinks become long and slow. He can’t think. Everything is foggy.
Stay awake. One blink at a time. Blink. Blink. Blin-
Tommy wakes with a gasp.
He knows where he is. He’s intimately familiar with the innards of the isolation room. Every surface is padded, covered in stained white plastic. The only object is a single, limp mattress, notable for its complete lack of interior structure. There is nothing he can hurt himself with. There is nothing he can entertain himself with.
The collar is sitting around his neck, too tight. He can hardly breathe properly, a restricting band that doesn’t quite choke him but cuts into his skin with every proper intake of breath.
Tommy sits up but stays in his corner, sitting on the mattress with all his limbs tucked up close. His gaze darts around the barren room, bouncing from tile to tile, strange stain to strange stain. He’s cataloged everything there is to see before. Nothing is new except his addition in it, again.
The stereo cracks online, a burst of piercing white noise. “How are you, Tommy?”
Tommy presses his lips together, knocks his forehead against his knees so that he’s staring at his feet, bare and festering with cuts and scabs.
Electricity shoots through his neck. His vocal cords spasm and his tight position breaks as his limbs seize. “It’s not nice to not respond.”
The words “fuck yourself” rest on his lips, tantalizing. He swallows it down.
Electricity pierces his neck, the ache more fierce the second time around. “Tommy.”
Shut up , he thinks. Shut up shut up shut up shut up-
The voltage is stronger the third time. His body shakes apart as it courses through him.
“That’s fine,” Dream says sweetly. “You’ll learn eventually. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
The shocks are predictable and predictably random. Tommy is shocked when he doesn’t respond but sometimes it will end after a few shocks and sometimes it won’t stop until he breaks. The pain continues racketing up until it hits a crest, slowly numbing. It’s worse with too many breaks in between, when his mind and nerves have time to recover and the uncontrollable shakes have time to subside.
The worst of it is the sleep.
Tommy doesn’t know if they always have someone watching him or if there’s some program that recognizes when Tommy closes his eyes, but everytime his eyelids stay closed for more than a second a shock pulses through the collar. Not one, either, a steady stream until he opens them again.
There’s nothing to do but sleep and then there’s not even that. He doesn’t know where the camera is, or he’d try to cover it. Every surface seems smooth and unbroken. He doesn’t know where they could have hid it. Somewhere in the padding? Somewhere in the cracks of the pads? Somewhere in his very blood?
It itches, the uncertainty. Makes him claw at his arms until they bleed red, large welts and lines where his blunted nails dug into the flesh and ripped up the fragile layer there. There’s nothing there, no matter how much pain he weathers, nor how much blood he spills over the white padding and dingy mattress. He drifts off, blinks for two long, and then electricity is rocketing through his spasming limbs.
“I’m sorry,” he says sometimes into the blinding fluorescent of the room, ever unchanging. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I’m sorry.”
No one ever responds.
There is Tommy and himself in the room. Dream talks, occasionally. Angry reprimands and gentle, soothing assurances in turns. Tommy likes it when Dream is kind. It relieves some of the pained aches of his heart and his raw skin and stressed muscles. Kind Dream is much better than Angry Dream, who is always so disappointed in Tommy, because Tommy is a disappointment. He always gets so caught up in these delusions of grandeur and doesn’t think about the bigger picture.
Tommy can be good, but sometimes he’s bad. Tommy needs to stop doing that. He has to take the punishment to prove he can be good again. He’ll prove it. He’s really sorry. He’ll prove he can be good.
“I know, sweetheart,” Dream comforts from the speakers, voice fritzed and tinny. “It’s just a little longer.”
It’s just a little longer. That’s all Tommy needs to know. He can stay awake and not scream and scream when he’s told to. Because he can be good. He can be good. He needs to prove he can be good. Tommy’s following the rules. He can be good.
He doesn’t get much food, either. Tommy doesn’t get food when he’s bad. He needs some food, though. When they bring him some, it’s raw and bleeding meat. It smells like copper and tastes like metals and slime. They bring him minced meat and they bring him fingers, with little crunchy bits of fingernails, and they bring him a whole arm one time. The arm is thin and dainty and has a trailing scar that looks exactly like the scar one of his long-ago friends from the streets had. Tommy eats it anyway, gross and metallic, because he can be good. Because he’s lucky he gets food at all.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Dream says as Tommy’s gagging through a handful of raw, squishy flesh. The man runs a hand through his hair. “It’s good for you. Just eat it. It’s alright, just eat it.”
Tommy does, because he is good. He doesn’t sleep, because he is good. He always responds, because he is good.
Everything aches, worse and worse. His muscles pulse and throb at every movement. He feels as if his innards are torn. His legs feel as if they can’t support him, trembling and shaking and collapsing beneath him. His back is fire, a burning hot ember pressed tight against his flesh. It is pain, but Tommy doesn’t complain, because he is good.
And then he sits up at some point, time meaningless and incomprehensible in this place, and something snaps .
He’s screaming, because he knows nothing else. It is pain, raw and piercing. It is fire, a hot brand against his skin. He shivers and shakes and even that is too much, every twitch of muscle alighting his nerves. Every nerve, at all times.
He screams until his vocal cords collapse too, breaking in his throat, raw with agony. He shakes and trembles and shouts silently, and there is no comfort for him, because he must prove he can be good. His mind is jumbled, a ball of nothing but base emotions and pain. And he must prove he must be good.
He vomits. Often and everywhere, until he’s gagging and dry heaving around the air. They bring him no food, no meat, no raw and slimy flesh. He heaves nothing and then more. He spits out bile that burns trails down his ruined throat and gags so hard his innards feel as if they dislodge themselves and nearly tumble out of his mouth.
He lies on his stomach in a pile of his own fluids, everything outside that should be in. His back aches fiercely, a fire not dancing on the skin but in it. He feels liquid, pus or blood or both, dribbled down his back, sliding against every inch of sweat soaked skin. He feels raw and sticky, more concept than whole. Undeveloped flesh festering in a pile, leftovers from a scrap of a human that has already been made. He is pain and he is agony and he is fire.
And he must be good.
It subsides, this all consuming agony. Barely, more of a fraction of a fraction. But it is a relief when pain is all he knows. He dares not move, dares not twitch. Stays perfectly in place and allows his the flame to numb, to burn away every last nerve ending until he is nothing but a floating something that exists in the loosest of terms.
And then, when he feels he can move without the all consuming agony of everything all at once, he rolls over.
And there is something on his back.
The agony erupts again. He rolls and whatever it is bends and folds awkwardly beneath him, feeling as if it were and exposed strip of muscle and bone where the flesh has been stripped away. He cannot scream, just shake violently in place as he flips himself back over. Tears have long since dried away and there is nothing left inside to replace it. Only a crippling, horrible pain.
It fades, as it had once before.
There is something on his back.
There is something on his back and he can move it.
The door opens, the sound loud and resounding in the stillness of the room. Tommy flinches roughly, a shiver that wracks the whole of him. He tries to make noise, let them know he is more than the pile of festering flesh he must appear to be, but he can’t. He twitches again, a burning flutter of muscles.
There’s words, too loud too fast too much, and then there’s a pinch in his neck. It’s nearly painless, not worth a twitch if not for the suddenness of it.
Fear grips him as he feels the heaviness set into his limbs, a weight on his eyelids. He can’t take much more. The pain is too much. He’s sorry. He’s sorry.
He’s sorry.
He’s sorry.
He’s sorry.
He’s sorr-
There’s a hand running through his hair.
“-manifested late. Though he was human.”
“Can never be too sure with those street kids. Lucky for us, anyway.”
Tommy whines. He wants flock, and nest, and Caretaker and he has none of it. His back aches, fierce as an open wound. The hands continue to run through his hair, light scratches of his scalp with too-blunt nails.
“Avian hybrids are so rare,” someone says, voice light and familiar. “I’m sure you’ll make good use of it.”
“Assuredly.”
When Tommy looks up, eyes cracking open, green eyes stare down at him.
Dream smiles, the corner of his eyes crinkling. “Very good.”
Something pinches his neck again and Tommy is pulled underneath the waves of his unconsciousness.
“-waking up.”
Tommy’s on fire again. He’s sticky and fuzzy and fire. There’s something rustling around in him, shifting his organs and innards with prods of a finger. Tommy screams, except he can’t, throat seizing around nothing.
“-should have lasted-”
He can’t twitch. He’s stuck and there is something moving in him. There are things on his back and he is unsafe. He is not safe and he has been good and he is being punished anyway. He did everything right. He didn’t mean to.
He didn’t mean to. He’s been good. He didn’t mean to. He’s sorry. He can fix it.
“-him under-”
Tommy shuts down again, brain quiet and empty.
Tommy wakes up slowly, laid flat on his stomach. Everything aches, any twitch of muscles sets a fire that burns up in him. His brain is sluggish, thoughts filtering in and out at a snail's pace. He can hardly piece together his surroundings even though he’s sure he’s been here before. It’s familiar in this vague way, akin to deja vu.
There’s someone he recognizes sitting by him in a folding metal chair. He knows this man and he fears this man and he loves this man. It tumbles around in his stomach, churning in the depths of his gut.
The man is looking at another, standing by the doorway of this place. He knows this other man too, distantly. He likes him, a little.
“-did you do, Dream?”
“We tested him,” the man says. He runs a hand through his hair, light and blonde. “It’s nearly a miracle. Kids don’t just spontaneously manifest. It might be the breakthrough in our research. I’m still waiting on the lab results.”
“This- This isn’t right,” the other man says, expression turned sour and dark hair falling into his eyes. “Tommy’s just a kid. I saw the footage from the isolation room. He was going crazy. At that point it’s just- It’s just torture.”
The man’s expression darkens. “You didn’t have problems with the others.”
The other man looks away. Bites his lip. “I did.”
“Oh, so you say something now with this brat?” The man sneers. “Have you gone soft, Sapnap? Grown some sort of moral conscience somewhere along the way? You’re just as guilty as the rest of us. We’re doing this for the greater good. Soon enough, we’ll be able to cure hybridism.”
“Whatever, Dream,” the other man says. He strides through the doorway, turning out of sight.
The man turns to Tommy, runs a hand through Tommy’s hair. Tommy flinches back, alighting all the nerves in his body, a coursing fire. “Don’t worry, kid. You’re really helping us out.”
Tommy closes his eyes. He knew he could be good.
Noise wakes him. Shouting and banging and the wail of a siren. He’s alone, in the room. His room, he realizes. The floor is large, white tiles and the walls are smooth sheetrock, similarly stark white. The furniture, a bolted down toilet and the metal slab of a bed he lays on, are made of sleek silver. His door is closed, a sealed metal slab with the faint outline of scratch marks where he spent hours clawing desperately at the surface. There’s no window, so he can’t see whatever is beyond it, but the room isn’t soundproof. It’s never this loud, never this chaotic. Whatever is happening is unprecedented. Dangerous.
Tommy is in pain. It radiates everywhere. When he tries to shift, the aches flare into stabbing hurt. There’s something wrong with him now. Different. He has to hide, wants to desperately, but he can hardly move. He wants to be protected. He wants to see no one ever again.
Something twitches on his back. A tear slips down his cheek. There’s banging around his door.
“-fucking hell.”
“You’re tellin’ me.”
His door is hit. It rattles, just a little, but stays firm. There’s cursing, movement against it. It creaks open. Tommy stares, frozen in place firmly on his bed.
There’s two men at the door entrance. One is a huge, hulking hybrid with dusty pink fur and a distinctly pig-like face. He’s dressed in soft blacks and deep reds. The second man is dressed in a bright yellow jacket, appearing mostly human with its brown, curly hair and brown eyes except for the grey-ish tint to his skin and the points of his ears.
“Fuck,” the brown-haired one says. They’re both staring at Tommy.
The furred one hums, low and throaty. “This is bad. Phil’s gonna flip.”
“Worse than he already has.” The brown-haired one steps closer. Tommy tries to scooch closer to the wall except the movement alights pain. A whine tears free from his throat, high and pitchy. The brown-haired one frowns. “What happened to you, little one?”
Tommy stares. His throat flexes, sore and aching.
“His wings…” The brown-haired one looks at the furred one. The furred one nods, eyes locked on Tommy’s back. Something moves there. It hurts. Another whine.
“We should keep Phil out,” the furred one says. “It won’t go over well. Last thing we need is problems ‘cause Phil went into his instincts.”
“Keep me out from where, mates?”
The brown-haired one swears, kneeling next to Tommy. The furred one turns around. There’s someone new standing in the doorway but Tommy can’t see them, view blocked by the two other men.
“Here. You don’t want to see this.”
“This whole place is fucked up. Don’t see how this room can be much worse.”
“Trust me,” the furred one says. “It is.”
“Now, c’mon, Tech-”
“Phil-”
Tommy locks eyes with the new man. He’s got sandy blonde hair, like- like someone he met recently. He can’t remember who. The new man’s eyes are blue, bright and shining. He’s wearing all dark grey clothing, a flowy jacket over a plain shirt and loose pants. There are large, black wings at his back, shifting with movement, Tommy imagines they might be soft, comfortable to hide under. When the new man takes Tommy in, eyes roving over him, the man’s pupils expand, nearly consuming the blue of his eyes.
The brown-haired one stands, blocking Tommy’s view of the new man, the avian . “Phil-”
“That’s-”
“We know-”
The avian hisses. A whine breaks past Tommy’s aching throat. The hissing stops abruptly. Replacing it is a low, warm noise that signs through the air.
Tommy’s muscles loosen all at once, the radiating pain ebbing away. Safe-safe-safe, it tells him, even when all Tommy feels is danger-scared-unsafe.
“Phil, seriously-”
“His wings .”
The furred man and brown-haired man are blocking Tommy’s view of the avian. Tommy whines again, throat straining with the noise. He wants the avian. He’d like to feel his wings, hide under them. The avian would protect him. The avian would make Tommy feel safe.
The low crooning noise responds in turn.
“Shit-”
The avian breaks past the other two men, shoving past them. They try to stop the avian, but only half-heartedly. The avian approaches Tommy, lowering himself next to him. His wings expand out, feathers large, dark, and faintly shining. They lift, cover Tommy’s exposed back, encase them both in a warm cocoon. The avian croons, low and slow, rubbing a hand through Tommy’s hair.
Tommy’s exhales, a soft sigh. His muscles relax further, easing the pains there. The avian’s wings are softer than Tommy imagined, a large blanket of protection. Tommy is safe. Protected by Caretaker. Tommy makes a sound, high and pitchy. Fingers scratch at his scalp, nails sharp and pointed.
“Sleep, little one,” the avian says.
And Tommy does, protected.