Work Text:
Senator Carmichael stares into the painted eyes of his long-dead father. Eyes that shone with pride and affection. Eyes that were shrewd and sharp and mysterious—the eyes of his good, noble father— a fine man with high principles, the kind no one cultivates in their children anymore. The world is poorer without him. But Russell’s words won’t leave his thoughts. They burn into his brain—they make too much sense, as ludicrous as the story would seem to anyone else.
And yet, what of it? Even now, who would believe he wasn’t the genuine article? And what did it matter? Hadn’t he done good?
Sure, he’d had his mistresses, though he could only count them on one hand. He’d taken bribes and told little white lies, though no more than any other man of his position— and in that company, he had done more good than most.
The fire consumes the old mansion. He can see it now—wood turning to ashes in the infernal blaze. He’d been there once, decades ago. Even then, the doors and stairs creaked with ghosts. The senator ascends the stairs—part of him still doesn’t want to know anything, but the truth won’t be denied…
Why should he be made the villain? Hadn’t he suffered too? Hadn’t he ghosts of his own, separated from the Carmichael name? To a young boy, forgotten and unwanted, surrounded by the dreary walls of a rundown orphanage, the doctor emerged as a savior, like a wizard or fairy godmother in an old tale. He was given everything God denied him—rich food, clothes that would not wear out, a fine education. Most of all, there was the sense that he was important to someone, meant something to someone. The doctor’s smiles and warm comments about his intelligence and drive, his fine posture and robust health. He wasn’t another impoverished statistic, another unwanted child. He was someone. Why should he feel guilty? Why should he hope to have been denied that?
A child’s room… fire… the doctor holding the boy’s useless legs, his eyes coldly scrutinizing the frenzied thrashing beneath the lukewarm water… The water sloshing over the edge of the tub submerges the senator’s feet. For a moment, he thinks it’s blood, hot and spurting from an open wound, but its’ not.
His chest burning with pain, the senator looks into the corpse’s wide eyes. The boy moves no more beneath the water’s glassy surface, and yet he’s still very much present, part of him unwilling to die. Silent, white-hot hate emanates from this presence and strikes the old man to his very core. This is more than grief or resentment or envy—it’s something primal and dark, something not easily appeased.
“Father… don’t… help…”
The senator cannot see through his tears. The pitiful cries, reminding him so much of his own lonely nights in the orphanage, move him to his very soul. He blindly tries to reach out with what compassion he can muster in this moment of sheer terror.
“Boy, I didn’t kill you—I was innocent. I knew nothing—nothing at all!”
But that was a lie too, wasn’t it? He had always known there was something. The sudden adoption. His new father’s demand that he forget his old name and take on a new one. The way his first years at the orphanage became a taboo subject. Of course, he had never thought there was another child. Had he? Or if the notion crossed his mind even once, he’d laughed it off as bad pulp fiction, not worthy of being printed, let alone spoken aloud.
“As far as we are concerned, you have only ever been Joseph Carmichael. You’ve never been anyone else.”
“Yes, Dr. Carm—I mean, yes father.”
As long as he played along, he was denied nothing. As long as he played along, he was loved. Even poor Cinderella would have agreed to those terms if the fairy godmother claimed she would be forced to go back to her ash bed by the hearth.
The ghost does not empathize. The senator can tell. The hatred is unyielding and cannot be smoothed away with apologies seventy years too late. It’s festered too long and there is no writing a check to escape it. From the smoke comes a message, unspoken but clear.
Someone has to pay. Innocence be damned.