Chapter 22:
Aaron was very well aware that he only had a few seconds to save himself.
He could feel Lou behind him, regarding him and probably questioning why he was on the floor and not on the bed where he'd left him. Aaron gripped the key with both hands, but his fingers shook against it and his palms gathered a shallow sheen of sweat. This was his chance; he didn't want to lose the key or get caught.
Aaron turned his torso towards Lou, one hand nervously brandishing the paper for him to see while the other tried pushing the key into the side-pocket of his sweatpants as covertly as possible. But he missed with nervous haste, and instead blindly rammed the sharp edge against his thigh multiple times before finally managing to slip the key in.
"I was looking at your drawing," Aaron explained, his voice barely maintained in a composed pretense. Lou watched, wordless, and the knot in Aaron's stomach loosened slightly when he realized he hadn't noticed the key. "It's really nice but I didn't understand what it means but you're talented."
The statement poured out all at once, not a single pause in between for a proper breath. Lou frowned as he took in how nervous Aaron was—his eyes gave it all out. They were wider than usual, the prominently defined black ring around his irises darker, almost like it was trying to cover up for the chaos in the center. But it failed. "Baby? Are you fine?"
"Um, yeah. I just... I think I..." Aaron's gut squeezed. It took him a second to continue: "I think I ruined your painting. It fell under the bed, and it's all dusty and dirty now. I-I'm sorry."
"Okay, that answers why you're on the floor." Lou shook his head, but he chuckled as he did. Then he approached his baby and took the paper from him, patting the dust off the surface. "There, baby. You didn't ruin it. And even if you did, I wouldn't be mad. I literally can't be mad at my baby boy." Lou leant forwards, one hand supporting the back of Aaron's head as he kissed his forehead. Then, he picked him up from the floor, but just as he was about to put him on the bed, Aaron protested with a quiet no. "What is it, baby? Don't you wanna sleep more?"
"Can I go to the playroom?" Aaron couldn't believe he was saying that, but he had a plan in his head. "I just want to, um—"
"You don't have to explain to me why you want to go there, love."
Lou took him to the playroom, and Aaron thanked God he didn't feel the key in his pocket, possibly because his arm was beneath him, not around. As soon as Aaron was set down on the floor, he carefully looked around for something to hide the key in. Then he found it: the bin filled with toys and stuffed animals. For now, it was good enough. So he scrambled towards it and sat on his knees, but then he hesitated for a moment. Was he allowed to touch these? He looked back at Lou.
"Can I look through?" Aaron asked.
"Of course, baby. Everything here is yours."
Aaron nodded then turned again, giving Lou his back as he shuffled through the bin. He needed a toy with a zipper or a pocket that he could hide the key in, because he surely wouldn't be able to keep it with him safely all the time, especially that the captors were doing everything for him, including changing his clothes.
There was a stuffed dolphin with a long zipper embedded across the length of its stomach. Aaron unzipped it, and he found a thick mass of white soft cotton all gathered inside, which was perfect. With one final cautious look over his shoulder, where he found Lou busy drawing on the table, he pulled the key out from his pocket, his first proper look at it.
Disappointment.
The key was bronze and rusty, slightly tattered and old. It didn't look like it belonged to the front door. The excitement quickly drained away through an expanding hole in Aaron's heart like it hadn't even been there in the first place. Then the disappointment turned into frustration, and he found himself wanting to just slam the key against the wall and scream.
But Aaron didn't, and instead composed himself again. He quickly pushed the key into the cottony insides of the dolphin, then zipped it up and placed it away, safely secluded and hidden beneath the rest of the toys in the bin. He thought it would be suspicious for him to hang onto a toy all of a sudden, all he could do merely falling upon the wish that no one would notice it.
Aaron turned and leant his back against the bin, sighing quietly. A part of him expected childish prodding to attack him, or for melodic giggles to fill his ears. But instead there was nothing, silence hanging over the room save for the quiet scratching of pencil against paper. Leo wasn't there. That was why everything felt so dull.
Lou was entirely focused on drawing, and it sparked curiosity in Aaron. He wanted to know what he was drawing, so he found himself approaching the small table hesitantly, stopping just at a small distance away. Lou noticed. He gestured him to come closer. So Aaron did; he sat cross-legged beside the table and next to Lou, peering at the drawing.
Lou was drawing grey eyes. Aaron's.
Again, the detail was what brought it so close to Aaron's eyes specifically, especially that this time he'd used colored pencils. The defined black rim around the grey irises and the reflective white spots, then the golden flecks surrounding the dark pupils in the center like spots of molten gold. The painting made his eyes look special, but Aaron was sure that they weren't that cool in reality. He remembered the time some boys at school made sure he knew his eyes weren't appealing.
"I've been working on this for a while. Your eyes are so beautiful, baby. And I like to draw beautiful things," Lou said when he noticed Aaron's staring at the paper.
"They used to tell me they're awful." Aaron sighed, then looked down at his lap, his lashes veiling his eyes and casting shadows over his cheekbones. Lou opened his mouth to offer a comforting word, but Aaron had already continued on his own, words absently rolling off his tongue and missing the red lights in his brain. He didn't really realize how much the tension would dip with Mommy and Daddy's absence, how his own body would instinctively relax. "But I used to ignore them. I mean, I'd be a bit sarcastic. Then I'd leave. I was too tired to deal with them."
Lou's face crumpled. He hated thinking that Aaron'd had to tolerate that crap, cruel people physically stronger than him trying to dominate because that was all they were good at. Cruel people. Like those who'd lost their morals to money and power and let a child—
Lou found his brain drifting off to other topics, remembrances, but he quickly focused again on his baby. Aaron was all that was important to him. "They're just jealous," he told Aaron. "We all know that your eyes are prettier than these idiots can ever be. If they're trying to attack your confidence, then they're aware you're special or at least better than them."
Empty words, Aaron thought. Some people just didn't have charisma and he was one of them and he knew it. Accepted it. He'd always been and was going to stay the failure, the outcast whom no one ever would want to put up with.
"You don't wanna believe me, huh?" Lou sighed then pulled himself to his feet and picked Aaron up as he straightened. "You must be hungry, baby. But I can't cook to save my life and Mommy's still sleeping. Let's go get a cookie or something quick?"
Lou didn't wait for an answer and went on his own guess to the kitchen. There, he placed Aaron on the table and turned to the cabinets hanging above the sink and counters, briefly opening each and checking for cookies. "There," he mumbled to himself as he reached for a jar, but as he did he knocked off a cup and sent it falling down the entire distance from the top to the polished concrete. It shattered on the floor and emitted an obnoxiously loud noise along. "Okay, shit."
Aaron clucked his tongue. "You said a bad word."
"Alright, alright," Lou said, sighing. "I have a potty mouth and I can't help it. It's bad, so please just don't repeat it after me. And let's not tell Mommy and Daddy."
"Lou? What was that— Oh my God." Mommy stood at the threshold with her mouth wide open and her eyes trained on the broken shards spread across the floor. She sighed, shaking her head. "You could've called me, Lou."
"I thought you were sleeping."
"Just forget it. Aaron's barefoot. Get him socks while I clean this mess."
Lou nodded, and he received a playful swat on his head as he passed by her. Mommy fetched a broom and swept off the mess. It took Lou a minute, more or less, to return with a pair of socks clenched in his fist. He held Aaron's ankle and was about to pull the fabric over his foot, but then he paused, grinning so devilishly that it made the plans in his head way too clear for Aaron to read. Tickling.
"Don't." Aaron quickly jerked his foot away, bending his knee up to his chest. "You're gonna tickle my foot. I know. Please don't. I hate it."
Lou shrugged nonchalantly, a harmless challenging look on his face. "That's what you get for laughing at me."
"If you do, I'm gonna tell her that you said a bad word in front of me," Aaron said. If Lou liked playful behavior, then he'd give him that. Plus this way he'd figure out if Lou was scared of Mommy or not as well.
Lou raised his eyebrows at his baby's blackmailing, but he wasn't angry—he found it funny, how his baby could become so defensive so easily. Sometimes he thought Aaron needed to chill, but he kinda liked that about him.
When the offended expression on Lou's brows persisted, Aaron realized he'd possibly pissed him off instead. So now was time to cajole: Aaron clasped his hands together in his lap, and tilted his head as he looked at Lou through his eyelashes, innocent and all. "But I wouldn't do that, Uncle Lou," he said, voice low and soft. "Because you're nice to me."
It worked. Lou stood there as he took in how adorable his baby could be: one second a devil and the other an angel. He shook his head, leaning forwards to peck Aaron's temple. "I've always wondered what an innocent devil would look like," he whispered. "And now I know."
Mommy didn't hear everything, but she did catch Aaron whispering Uncle Lou. She smiled at them. "He finally called you Uncle Lou, huh? He called me Mommy yesterday." There was a hint of playful teasing in her tone, but Lou didn't look like he'd taken offense, or like it had bothered him at all.
"He called me Lou way before, actually," Lou absently corrected and his declaration had Mommy's shoulders slumping. She frowned. How could her own baby could call his uncle by his name before her? Another sharp strike to her heart.
It was when the sudden silence soaked the air for long enough that Lou realized he'd sounded like he was taunting her, and he hurried to fix the mistake: "I mean, he called me just Lou the first time, and it was because I was tickling him and he wanted me to stop. So technically, this is my official first time."
Mommy didn't feel better.
Aaron's eyes skipped between the captors uncertainly. There was a sudden awkwardness to the atmosphere, but then he got distracted when he remembered that Lou hadn't gotten mad at how he'd threatened him.
And now that he thought about it, Lou never really got angry over anything.
Mommy and Daddy were so dominant and aggressive that Aaron would find himself too cautious about his every word and move, because he knew that anything could possibly trigger them. But Lou was so... chill in comparison to his title as a captor. A psychopath. He was the complete opposite of the other two in terms of attitude and behavior, and that subconsciously loosened the tight restrictions they'd put around Aaron, enough relief for him to relax away from threats and touchy creepiness.
This hadn't been the first time he'd spill out a sentence that he probably shouldn't say to a captor, whether intentionally or accidentally, but then again the oddity of the situation was that Lou never seemed bothered by that—quite the opposite taking in his reactions. Lou looked like he was okay with Aaron's slip ups or interactions with him. Hell, he looked like he like that stuff. Maybe it amused him.
And then Aaron realized something.
This was how he could gain Lou's trust, unlike Mommy and Daddy who wouldn't be pleased that way. It was like a pattern: each captor needed a specific way to be kept content. Daddy wanted complete submissive obedience, Mommy cute acting, and Lou interaction. Which meant he needed to maintain this behavior with Lou.
A wandering thought cut through the previous chain, and Aaron found himself suddenly wondering where Leo was. "Wait, where's Leo? He's still sleeping?"
"Yes, baby. Look at our little baby being a thoughtful big brother," Mommy said as she stroked Aaron's cheek with the tip of her finger, a gentle scratch against his delicate skin that he found annoying and pointless. "It's a miracle he's still sleeping, really. He's usually awake before everyone, literally just jumping and trying to wake us all up."
"Except you, Aaron." Lou nodded at Aaron, and he smiled as if the words in his mind reflected on his face. "He wakes us all up except you, because apparently: Aar always looks tired, he needs to sleep."
Aaron laughed. "Oh, Leo."
Lou set Aaron in his high chair, and Mommy then fixed something for breakfast. Leo was still soundly asleep, and all agreed that they'd rather let him sleep after the night outburst he'd underwent.
Aaron felt ringing in his ears when he remembered that: the way Leo had been so frightened, the way his cries were loud, but not as loud as the volume of the pain they carried, not as pitched as the sharp slope of the grief within each sound wave.
And so breakfast passed by, then Aaron found himself with Daddy—possibly the least person he wanted to see right then. He strolled with him around the living room a little, then settled on the couch, turning him so that they were chest to chest. Aaron strained not to let the proximity bother him too much, trying to maintain a neutral face.
"My baby," Daddy mumbled, looking into his baby's beautiful large eyes like he'd never seen them before. He couldn't live without Leo and Aaron, without his little babies. He'd die without them. Of course he would.
Aaron fidgeted slightly, but then quickly covered it up with a forced smile, which had Daddy beaming. The captor remained dwelling in the innocence of Aaron's smile for a while, then his face dropped, the edges of his mouth curling down into a somber frown again. "You still don't need to have a wee baby? I hope you're not trying to hold it in, baby. That would make me angry."
Not again.
It took the majority of Aaron's power to repress a prolonged groan. He, in fact, needed to have a wee at this point, and to Daddy's probable dismay, had been holding it in and even trying to forget about it all together. But like he'd expected, stalling had only postponed the process, never actually making in disappear.
Somewhere deep in his heart where some of his shattered dignity still hung on for dear life, Aaron wanted to protest and yell at Daddy how a teenager didn't need a pull-up or a kids' toilet, but then the part of him persistent on completing the act till the very end kept him quiet.
"I'm gonna use it," Aaron whispered, cringing at the thought of what he was about to do to himself. He took a small inconspicuous breath, a tiny fuel to maintain him alive for his next to few words, which included one he hated the most. "I promise, Daddy."
"Good boy." Daddy ruffled Aaron's hair and leant forward to kiss the side of his head. "Daddy's so happy you're behaving, baby."
Aaron's brain pounded when he thought of what he was about to put himself through, and he subconsciously lost energy, the strength in his neck and shoulders keeping him in position demolishing until he rested his his on Daddy's shoulder.
Aaron didn't allow Daddy to see it, but he was frowning worriedly as he wondered if the act and the possibility of escape were worth shattering any remnants of his dignity. Then he settled on a positive answer, desperately reminding himself that it was all he had to hang onto, regardless of the certainty of the outcomes.
Better than doing nothing to escape.
Aaron sighed: a small preparation. Then, he did it: "Daddy, I gotta use the bathroom now."
*_*_*_*_*_*
The humiliation corner.
Aaron considered the corner of the playpen as the humiliation corner. The same space he'd folded himself in the last time he'd had to use the bathroom with a psychopath beside him. The same symptoms were present: rosy hue across his cheeks, this flaring burn in his chest, almost like he was inhaling fire into his lungs instead of air. Except that this time he couldn't show the trauma too much, because he had to appear like was adapting and becoming acceptant of the situation.
Mommy passed by Aaron, and she propped her elbows against the railing of the playpen. "Everything's alright, baby?" she asked.
Aaron brought up a tiny smile to his lips, a wordless yet delusional assurance to her question. It was as if that fueled her confidence, and she then progressed to reach for his hand and raise it her lips, pecking his palm. She held it for a while, just staring at his skin without uttering a word, like she was far too immersed in apprehension over how lucky she was to have her baby with her, yet saddened to be distanced from him just because she couldn't carry him.
Or maybe because Lou and Daddy are taking him away most of the time, she thought.
With a blink, she snapped out of her trance and focused on her baby again. She held a pacifier and neared it to his lips. "Use it, Baby." Minorly, she expected him to put up a fight against it, but to her surprise, he latched his lips around the teat without a word of protest, then started suckling slowly. This was slightly surprising but seeing her baby being so adorable blinded her, and all she could see next was how peaceful he looked. "Goodness, baby. How can you be so cute?"
Aaron forced himself to remain composed, but he found his fingers clenching on their own, each muscle tense with hatred. To act like he was content was far worse than being forced to alone. He hid his hand behind his back as it insisted on doling out the emotions through a tight fist, and he fought for it to relax back. His teeth dug hard into the rubber, finding it a convenient substitution to biting his inner cheek—which he knew his bite would've been strong enough to draw blood from.
Aaron was frustrated, yet he had to keep looking content. Which was basically how his life had been except on a deranged, psychotic scale now.
A sudden rattling sound echoed, and Aaron firstly remembered the dreaded rattle. But then he realized it sounded more like the clattering and grating of metal against metal, which had him peeking over his shoulder, only for his eyes to fall upon Daddy with keys dangling down his hand.
Aaron didn't even realize how he was staring at the metallic keys with longing in his eyes, longing that soon turned into disappointment. If those keys were for the front door, then surely the one he found wasn't. And if so, what was it for?
Daddy noticed how his baby was staring, so he walked towards the playpen, then shook the keys before his face. Aaron's eyes followed the keys as they swayed in the air and clattered against each other. He looked back at Daddy, quickly masking the look he'd had on.
"What are you looking at, baby? The keys?" Daddy asked. He gently brought Aaron's hand out and placed the keys in his palm, his smooth voice completely calm and stable as he spoke, "You can have them, love." His large, strong hand held the side of Aaron's head and pulled it closer to him, his lips connecting with his temple for a peck. But soon, he turned closer to his earlobe, every breath carrying menacing heat as it pierced Aaron's skin like sharp thorns. "Oh, baby. Trust me, even if I keep the door open, the furthest you can get is to the gates, then I'll bring you back from there."
Daddy slowly backed away. A pounding numbness ignited in Aaron's entire hand, fingers trembling until the keys dropped from his palm where they'd been placed. They clattered against the ground, but the sound wasn't strong enough to pierce through Aaron's trance.
Plan A: failure established.
Immediate transfer to plan B.
*_*_*_*_*_*
Do you think plan B will work?
Tysm for reading/voting/commenting, it means a lotttt <33